Jorge Semprun
That film is now put into an auteurist-based series about Resnais that is presently playing at Film Forum, but lacking the context of Semprun's total film career, which was covered incompletely in the 2018 series. The key film missing in that earlier program: OBJECTIVE: 500 MILLION (1966), a compelling look at the "post-war casualties of war," subtly broadened by Semprun in his collaboration with director Pierre Schoendoerffer to add social/political/psychological layers to what appears initially to be a straightforward heist film.
Marisa Mell & Bruno Cremer in OBJECTIVE 500 MILLION
Given the outsized love for heist films, it is strange that OBJECTIVE: 500 MILLION has fallen through the cracks. Part of the reason may be that director Schoendoerffer, famous for his Indochina-based war film THE 317TH PLATOON (1965), veered sharply to the right with respect to his politics in the years after making this film and OBJECTIVE: 500 MILLION; a certain incongruity seems to be sensed by historians and programmers, who endeavor to maintain a form of "critical narrative" for behind-the-camera folk who get embraced by the left and do not want to have to explain why a film or a portion of that director/writer's work is not conforming sufficiently to their "bracketing."
That seems to be the case with OBJECTIVE 500 MILLION, which was overlooked in Film Forum's 2018 series and has to date only been shown as part of MCP's FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT series (#6, the seventh festival, held in 2019), where it was paired with LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Auteurism is commonly derided by many film programmers, and such negative positioning has escalated in recent years--with the exception of how these same film programmers construct their public presentations. One suspects that they would argue that the approach is so baked into the repertory audience's expectations that they feel compelled to follow the same approach. That shows a lamentable lack of initiative and imagination on their part.
Semprun's contributions to OBJECTIVE 500 MILLION make it a unique work at the tail end of classic film noir as it has been redefined. Our screening of it with LA GUERRE EST FINIE captured Semprun's most direct engagement with the structure of noir as it relates to variations of "closed worlds." He would go on to make more overt political thrillers with Costa-Gavras (Z, THE CONFESSION, SPECIAL SECTION), but OBJECTIVE 500 MILLION is one of the very few foreign noirs that addresses the plight of the entrenched military in the emerging age of "post-colonial proxy wars." It's a shame that it continues to be overlooked, and that its American premiere in 2019 remains its only screening here. One hopes that the 2018 series developed at Film Forum will be re-mounted in the near future with OBJECTIVE 500 MILLION added to the lineup...
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