Bordeaux and police cinema by Benoît Pénicaud
The book fills a gap in the history of Bordeaux: the representation of the city in detective fiction in the cinema, encompassing, in a wide shot, the entire Gironde. The author does this with all the precision, meticulousness and sense of detail that we know, already at work in his previous monographs. He studied no fewer than 23 films there, shot from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 2000s.
Great directors distinguished themselves there such as Alain Corneau, Yannick Bellon, Robert Enrico, Alain Jessua, Claude Chabrol… We also discover unique works there: a musical thriller (The inspector knows musicJean Josipovici, 1956) filmed in the studios of the Bordeaux king of nanars, Émile Cousinet; an immersion on the drilling sites in the Arcachon basin, (The Mordus Jolivet 1960), an aeronautical heist film (Target 500 million de Schoendoerffer, 1966).
Detective fiction took over Bordeaux later than Marseille and of course Paris. However, it did not lack assets, with places that the cinematographic imagination could work with, the quays, the river, the majestic or more popular neighborhoods. Without doubt its history weighed down by the weight of the commercial bourgeoisie, and particularly that of wine, plays a lot in the stories which give pride of place to the dramas in the wine region: I married a shadow (1983, Robin Davis), Flagrant desire (1986, Faraldo), The Black Angel (1994, Brisseau).
These films almost mask those which take place in Bordeaux, often exploiting the flaws of police characters, by the five directors already mentioned. We could add The fugitives (1986, Francis Veber), certainly filmed in Bordeaux, but the city is only a setting, never mentioned. The book clearly points out a kind of incompleteness in the representation of the city, in short a potentiality which has not been exploited. This is therefore not the least interest of this original work, with its generous iconographic documentation.
• Preface by François Guérif, La Geste éditions, 223 pages, 2024, €35
No enemy like a brother by Frédéric Paulin
The beginning of the book is clear: “O my Christian brother, oh my Druze friend, oh my Sunni or Shiite neighbor, oh my Palestinian host see this country that is yours. » Thus begins the narration of the first eight years of the civil war in Lebanon (1975-83).
The novel combines with vigorous accuracy and as if in an emergency, the history of a country which is sinking into chaos, the bloody struggles of communities which are suddenly torn apart, the Palestinian question and the journey of some protagonists: Michel Nada, from an important Maronite family who left for France to campaign for the RPR, the party of Chirac and Pasqua; Philippe Kellermann, who went from being a political advisor at the French embassy to becoming a Middle East specialist at the Élysée under Mitterrand.
In Lebanon, Zia, a Shiite activist, organizes suicide attacks; Christians and Muslims happily (and together) participate in drug trafficking to fuel their (separate) weapons; while Captain Dixneuf, agent of the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service (Sdece) tries to understand the Lebanese situation.
The author masterfully holds the fatal movement of the story, like a stopwatch moving over the reader’s head. It is at the same time a spy novel, a thriller, an epic and tragic story, all built on impressive documentation, successfully mixing the small and the big story. We are impatiently awaiting the second part of this fresco.
• Éditions Agullo, 457 pages, 2024, €23.50
Return from Barbary by Raymond Guérin
Following the adage no one is a prophet in his own country, the great writer Raymond Guérin (1905-1955) is rather ignored by the people of Bordeaux. However, he spent a large part of his life there. With the exception of time spent, until December 1943, as a prisoner of war; he underwent more than three years of strict internment.
It is the period of return to civilian life that he recounts in these two texts collected here, taken from his war notebooks, judiciously republished by the Bouscataise editions Finitude. The first story describes the shock of amazement at the lifestyle of the Parisian intellectual elite, who adapted very well to the German occupation and made their profits from the black market. However, he finds opportunities to exchange with great literary figures – Albert Camus, Jean Paulhan, Jean-Paul Sartre – and to confront the writer Jacques Chardonne, champion of collaboration. He is certainly indebted to Chardonne for his release but after the first words of thanks, he tells him his four truths…
The second text tells of another shock, that of the Liberation. Enthusiastic the first days, Guérin quickly distanced himself, not mincing his words in the face of the “reign of inside-out jackets”. In addition to a precious literary testimony to this period, these writings outline the figure of a writer, flayed alive, who ends up proclaiming himself far from the world and noise, whose style is the image of his moral rigor, striking and seething with anger.
• preface by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Finitude, 2024, 204 pages, €18
The Master of Ballantrae Robert Stevenson
François Angelier’s precise and rigorous preface gives fullness to a novel entirely dedicated to “romantic Satanism”. We recommend reading the introduction once the book is finished, with your mind still reeling from the shock of this formidable story, written almost 150 years ago.
We know Stevenson, his major theme of good and evil indissolubly linked (The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and that of the fascination of innocence, embodied by a child caught in an adventure story with a fearsomely devious privateer (Treasure Island).
The Master of Ballantrae reshuffles the cards of the adventure novel and the moral and fantastic tale. The evil figure is that of James, the eldest son of a noble Scottish family adorned with all the physical qualities and a spirit as diabolical as it is seductive. Due to the civil war which was then raging in Scotland in the mid-18th centurye century, the family estate fell by default to the youngest, the dull and submissive Henry.
This is how an increasingly irreducible opposition begins between the two men, where the power of hatred contaminates the “good” protagonists, Henry but also the narrator, his faithful steward. A classic, fundamental work, to read and reread, here in a beautiful editorial setting.
• Translated from English by Geneviève Maljean, preface by François Angelier, Illustrations by Donatien Mary, L’Arbre Vengeur, 2024, €29.50
