The Nouvelle Vague was a period of fierce experimentation, intent on torching the rules of classical cinema. It was a time in which bold new voices rode a wave of international acclaim into the history books. Yet while some led the charge, others were left behind, too marginal or fragile in their sensibilities to grasp the coattails of the zeitgeist. One such filmmaker was Guy Gilles, "younger brother" to the French New Wave, and given the treatment of his work, one of its greatest losses.
Born in Algiers in 1938, Gilles made his first film at just 20 years old. His was a talent that arrived fully formed, his thematic preoccupations—memory, exile, the possibilities of the moment, and uncertainty for the future—apparent from his very first shorts. He's been compared to as disparate a bunch of filmmakers as Agnès Varda, Philippe Garrel, Jean Eustache, and Robert Bresson. If the disillusioned male protagonists—invariably played by his muse Patrick Jouané—of Gilles' films invite comparison to Bresson's The Devil, Probably, the similarities stop there. Gilles is far too romantic a filmmaker for Bresson's distancing effects, his emotions simply too close to the skin. His are films of astonishing surface beauty, radiant with light and the tactile pleasures of objects and bodies. Few filmmakers juxtapose color and black and white photography with such palpability of feeling, inscribing the passing of time or the warmth of nostalgia into the very material of the film itself. So abundant with sentiment are Gilles' compositions, it's as though a given sequence can barely contain them, inciting a fragmentary, elliptical approach to montage in which sensuality and melancholia collide in the cut itself, amplified by the stirring orchestral scores of Jean-Pierre Stora.
Despite the appearance of Gilles' debut Love at Sea (1964) at festivals, a prize at Locarno, and production assistance from Jean-Pierre Melville, it never saw a theatrical release. His second feature, the heart-wrenching Wall Engravings (1967) found a champion in Marguerite Duras, but like most of his work, struggled to find its audience. Gilles' cinema was simply too tender—too beautiful, even—for the didactic radicalism of his time. The naiveté and delicacy that permeates his films ensured their disappearance for more than five decades. Discovering them now, said qualities are what mark them as precious, testifying, 25 years after his death, to the absolute necessity of Guy Gilles' inclusion among the major voices of the French New Wave in history books to come.