Film season at Triskel focuses on director’s trail-blazing 1970s films

Barbet Schroeder once said about his films, “Every time, I try to make something different.” This is not just a statement but a principle that has guided his career.

Born in Iran in the 1940s, the filmmaker spent part of his childhood in Colombia before moving to Paris. His experience of living in different countries from a young age likely exposed him to a variety of cultural influences, helping him become the film-maker he is today.

Cork audiences will get the chance to experience some of Schroeder’s earlier work in the Triskel Cinema from Monday, April 21. 

Chris O’Neill, Head of Cinema at Triskel, tells us about some of the director’s career highlights.

“Barbet Schroeder has had such a fascinating and eclectic career in the film industry. He started out in the 1960s producing movies for French New Wave directors such as Éric Rohmer and Jacques; then, in the 1970s, he started directing his own features, both fictional films and documentaries. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was helming movies in America, including Barfly with Mickey Rourke, the Jeremy Irons picture Reversal Of Fortune, and the massive box office hit Single White Female.”

Schroeder received an Oscar nomination for his work on Reversal Of Fortune. After his time in America, he returned to Europe, where he once again began making smaller-scale fiction and documentary films.

O’Neill says it is difficult to pigeonhole Schroeder’s work, and he is right. The themes range from free love under the influence of drugs to the chilling story of a dictator in the real-life documentary General Idi Amin Ada: A Self Portrait, but O’Neill has decided to highlight the director’s French work from the 1970s for the Triskel season.

He explains: “ More and The Valley, both of which feature music scores by Pink Floyd, are priceless snapshots of the tail end of the hippy movement involving drugs and free love, while Maîtresse is a frank and often amusing look at a romantic relationship between a sex worker and a man she encounters when he tries to rob her apartment.”

More is Schroeder’s directorial debut. The film is a hypnotic, sun-drenched descent into the countercultural dream - and the inevitable disillusionment that comes from the downside of drug-taking.

Set against the hazy backdrop of post-1960s Europe, the film follows a German student, Stefan (Klaus Grünberg), who hitchhikes to Paris and falls for the enigmatic Estelle (Mimsy Farmer). Their romance takes them to Ibiza, a seeming paradise that quickly reveals itself as a crucible for drug addiction, obsession, and moral unravelling.

As O’Neill points out, Pink Floyd wrote the songs specifically for the film. Schroeder was a massive fan of the band and asked them to collaborate with him on the project.

At the time, critics received the film negatively, and the scenes of drug-taking angered the French censors, who demanded that some dialogue be removed from the film. Since then, it has garnered a dedicated fan base, and critical perception has changed, particularly after it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 as part of the festival’s classics programme.

The film was produced by Schroeder’s production company, Les Films du Losange, which he set up in 1962 when he was just 23. He founded the company with the filmmaker Éric Rohmer. The production house, which was pivotal in the development of French New Wave Cinema, is still in operation today and produced this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Dahomey.

The Valley, also known as Obscured by Clouds, was written and directed by Schroeder and released in 1972. Set in Papua New Guinea, it follows the wife of a diplomat stationed in Australia. Fed up with diplomatic soirees, Viviane (Bulle Ogier) s a group of explorers in Papua New Guinea.

They travel to a remote, undocumented valley, where Viviane hopes to find the feathers of a rare bird and the hidden valley, which is said to be concealed by clouds. Instead, she finds a new way of life through the lens of hallucinogenic drugs, which she is introduced to by Olivier (Michael Gothard), one of the adventurers in the group.

The tribespeople of the Mapuga are played by the local indigenous people, which was a progressive move in the 1970s, considering at this time in Hollywood, Indigenous Americans were often portrayed by white actors wearing copious amounts of fake tan.

As with More, Pink Floyd composed the film’s soundtrack, which reached the top 10 in the French and UK Album Charts.

The third film in Triskel’s season is Maîtresse, which focuses on the story of a sex worker.

O’Neill points out that it is an example of Schroeder’s nonjudgmental film-making style.

“Schroeder’s nonjudgmental explorations of these subjects are incredibly immersive with great performances from the actors.”

The film follows Olivier (Gerard Depardieu), a young man from rural who travels to Paris in search of work and adventure. When he finds himself caught up in petty theft, he is brought into the world of sadomasochism when he encounters an alluring dominatrix, Ariane (Bulle Ogier).

Some of the film’s scenes proved highly controversial at the time and, even by today’s standards, push boundaries, yet it is at its heart a love story and a pure example of Shroeder’s ability to show life in all its elements.

The Early Films Of Barbet Schroeder run in Triskel Cinema from April 21, see www.triskelartscentre.ie