's work is Jacques Baratier an unknown continent, an archipelago of ten feature films and a score of documentaries, waiting to be explored. Ten years older than the enfants terribles of the New Wave (except Rohmer which is almost contemporary), Jacques Baratier will never favor of Cahiers du cinema. The crowd of actors, poets, writers, musicians, friends of all kinds who participated in his films is matched only by its isolation in the landscape of French cinema after the war. It may be today, past the aesthetic arguments that his films can we finally appear in their singular vitality.
"Cinema of Jacques Baratier is like an inferno," writes Bernadette Lafont in 1978. Unclassifiable, his films are rooted in painting, poetry, surrealism and quirky spirit of Saint-Germain-des-Pres - that of Vian and Cocteau, led by the thirst for freedom and the refusal of seriousness. He films the Quartier Latin and his native Disorder (1948), the Arab world in Goha (1958) or vacant lots and shantytowns on the outskirts of Paris in The Doll (1962) and The Tin City (1975), Jacques Baratier grabs every time through the prism of staging a reality fragile, evanescent, which gives his films a unique value of testimony. Not belong to any genre, based on form of entertainment, his work is striking for its novelty, its daring and its strange beauty. Praise of Folly against the presumptions of the order, she must sometimes endure the censure of conformism.
Sylvain Maestraggi
Images of Culture, No. 25, NCC, 2010
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