Living in his dreams: Deceased Artiste Michel Piccoli

In America, A-list performers don’t often challenge themselves — the safest bet is the best bet for them. In Europe and the U.K., perhaps because more actors have a solid grounding in theater and are aware of the other arts in general, A-listers often take on the most peculiar roles or guest star in films that are doomed to fail at the box office, in order to test their skills and take on a more difficult role or work with an odder filmmaker. The late Michel Piccoli was a sublime example of this, as he chose  quality over quantity (read: a big paycheck) and was willing to be unlikeable (something American stars never want to do) if it meant working with a great director.

The list of filmmakers he worked for is a who’s who of European greats. When he worked in English, he either acted for a European director (as with Louis Malle on Atlantic City) or took a part to be directed by a legend — the best example being Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Piccoli worked in the underwhelming Topaz (1969).

Younger Michel (with
last name spelled wrong!)

I would like to focus in on the stranger titles that Piccoli appeared in, but first a short list of the Euro cine-gods and goddesses he worked for, who hailed from Greece (Angelopoulos), Poland (Skolimowski), and Portugal (de Oliviera). He also acted quite a bit for Italian directors — among them Bellochio, Bava, Nanni Moretti, and Marco Ferreri.

But he most often worked in French, for the crème de la crème of French cinema. The auteurs from his homeland that he worked with included: Renoir, Melville, Godard, Varda, Resnais, Demy, Chabrol, Malle, Rivette, Sautet, Lelouch, Claude Miller, Bonello, Blier, Jane Birkin, and Leos Carax.

A little “resume” for Piccoli (no English subs):

Throughout his career Piccoli was very willing to appear in unusual fare. After years of stardom in big-budget features directed by legendary directors he was still willing in the Eighties, Nineties, and even 2000s to play leads in lower-budgeted films made by new, young talents.

In 1986, he starred in Carax’s second feature, Mauvais Sang, where he plays a brutish hoodlum. Carax crafted the film as a kinetic crime picture in the manner of French New Wave, but he also included dialog-less moments that were surely inspired by silent cinema. More recently, Piccoli showed up in a small part in Carax’s amorphous oddball gem, Holy Motors (2012).

Going back to his “golden years,” we need to consult the two books he wrote. The first was an item called Dialogues égoïstes (1976), which contains “various writings, intimate diaries, souvenirs, and memories.” That book isn’t easily found, but his more recent memoir, composed as a series of inquisitive letters from his longtime friend, Giles Jacob (former president of the Cannes Film Festival), is available. In that book he discusses his life, career, and thoughts about acting in an informal but cogent fashion. (Actual correspondence between Jacob and Piccoli is found in the back of the book — Michel’s handwriting is florid and barely readable.)

The Piccoli-Jacob “letters” book is called J'ai vécu dans mes rêves ("I lived in my dreams," Grasset, 2015). In it he does provide some wonderful anecdotes about the directors he was most impressed by. The first one, of course was the master-director whom he became a regular collaborator with — none other than the peerless Don Luis Bunuel. Piccoli acted in six of his films and incarnated the perfect bourgeois for him, looking elegant while often evincing darker undertones.

A famous scene from Belle de Jour (sans English subs, but you don’t need them):

To give a semblance of what it was like working with Bunuel, he provides us with some of the odd on-set badinage he used to have with Don Luis. Hence his account of this discussion. (He doesn’t identify which picture they were making, but includes it among his memories of Death in the Garden.)

One day, I asked him how his wife was. He told me that she was well, and that she had a lover. Is he kidding? I began to laugh and asked him if he knew the lover. “Yeah, it’s a priest.” I laughed more. He told me to stop laughing, that this situation could happen to me. A few days later I asked him how his wife’s lover was doing. “It’s over,” he told me. “My wife is dead.” [pp. 64-65, translations are mine — a few are looser than others]

From Death in the Garden (1956):

A much less fruitful collaboration was his work with Hitchcock on Topaz. He formed a bond with the director — as he seemed to with most of the mega-talented artists he worked with (except for Philippe Noiret, whom he admired but describes as being solitary on the film sets they shared, and Yves Montand, whom he apparently was not fond of at all). Topaz was indeed a dud, but it allowed Piccoli to see that Hitchcock preferred the actors to not ask him “contextualizing” questions about their work:

I went to see Hitchcock, who described the scene to me. I looked at him and asked him [in English], “OK, yes, but what is the big meaning?” He laughed and said to me [again, in English], “Your motivation is money.” I then laughed. “You won’t explain my character to me?” “Not a chance,” he responded. “You actors, you earn enough money. You even want me to explain your character! Do you think I explained characters to James Stewart? Thank god he never asked that question….” [pp. 66-67]

Jean-Luc Godard, currently the world’s greatest living filmmaker (without question), used him three times. Most viewers are familiar with Piccoli’s lead role in Le Mepris (aka “Contempt,” 1963), but are not aware of his starring role in the gorgeous Passion (1982), and his terrific role as a straight man for Godard in the filmmaker’s salute to the 100th anniversary of the cinema, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (1995).

The last-mentioned was part of the TV series “Century of Cinema,” produced by the BFI and Miramax. Since Miramax had absolutely no interest in letting the films other than the Scorsese epic doc be widely seen by the public, they played briefly in theaters and museums and then disappeared in America – no VHS or DVD release ever. Which is a shame, as Piccoli and Godard function as a sort of deadpan comedy team in this video essay.

MP and JLG.

Piccoli has the status of the “president” of “France’s Century of Cinema,” and so Uncle Jean feels it necessary to pose many questions to him about the history of cinema — and basically how it’s been forgotten by the average Frenchman. Piccoli argues that this history should indeed be celebrated. But, Godard, counters, it’s not actually the centennial of the public showing of the first film that is being celebrated, but instead the first time that someone *paid* to see a film. The short feature is well worth seeing, and not only because Godard takes a verbal swipe at everyone’s favorite “appropriator” of other artists’ ideas, Quentin Tarantino.

In Rêves Piccoli offers his detailed memories of Le Mepris. He notes that he, Bardot, and Fritz Lang all loved doing the film. For his part, Jack Palance was annoyed – which, Piccoli notes, worked very well for his performance.

In the book Piccoli offers lovely little mini-portraits of Godard, Lang, and BB (whom he says possessed “innocence and spontaneity...” and “a formidable energy”). He maintains that, even at this early stage in the game, Godard “had a great authority about him.”

He sometimes gives actors the feeling that they have to fend for themselves. As if there is nothing to do but just do it, without furnishing them with hours of lengthy explanation — the kind of explanations we’re used to from most directors.” [p. 74]

During the shoot, which was “both very pleasant and very serious” Piccoli had “some of the most beautiful moments that I have ever lived through with my director and my fellow performers.” He also, true to form, had at least one memorably colorful conversation with Uncle Jean:

...Godard asked me what I was going do over the weekend, and I told him I was going to stay in Italy and would no doubt visit Pompei. Knowing that I had a woman waiting for me in Paris, he asked me “You prefer dead cities to living women?” [p. 70]

From Godard, a director whose works are poetic but which can usually be deciphered, his discussion of his directors moves on in the book to that master of bizarre allegory, Marco Ferreri. (Whom I interviewed for the Funhouse in 1996, in his only American TV interview.)

“For me, Marco Ferreri has been one of the most important directors and also a very good friend…. He can be contemptible if he thinks you’ve wasted his time, and he’s not wrong. With him, you have to go! ‘We should do it now —What? —What we have to do!’ [pp. 76-77]

He calls Ferreri’s minimalist masterwork Dillinger Is Dead (1969) both “a beautiful film, stunning….” and “a crazy film that one can’t explain….” It also boasts a wonderful score with ample vocalese.

He also discusses the dynamic between the four actors who were the leads of Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973) – Mastroianni, Noiret, Tognazzi, and he – and also veers off into a discussion of the auteur theory.

I was the marionette de Ferreri…. You’re mistaken, Gilles, when you say that film is based on the actor’s art. No, it’s not the actor’s art, it’s that of the auteur, of the director. It’s their art that is most important. I am not alone on the screen because I’m with the director. It’s Ferreri that we see….

Piccoli and Ferreri.

If I get it right, it’s because I have a passion for my metier, for this singular work, and most of all for the director who has offered me the “musical score” for which he has invented this whole miraculous game. I do invent something, but I am certainly not the author or the coauthor. Even if I could think that I succeeded admirably, was I really the one who succeeded? Isn’t it first and foremost the director I’m working for, and whose genius can be seen immediately? [pp. 78-79]

Piccoli’s memorable death scene in La Grande Bouffe:

It’s most pleasing that Piccoli highlights perhaps his strangest film not in the “cinema” chapter but instead in the one on acting. Themroc (1973), directed and written by Claude Faraldo, is a remarkably singular film that one couldn’t *ever* imagine an American actor starring in. (Well, perhaps Nick Nolte in his prime… but, even there, he’d have probably wanted the character to have some dialogue.)

A perfect “Sixties movie” (since the Sixties lasted well into the Seventies), Themroc is a study in personal revolution. The fearless M. Piccoli plays the lead character, a grunting, yelling worker (the whole film is in a made-up language that has a little — but not much — to do with French) who goes mad one day. He is fired from his job, so he goes home, sleeps with his sister, bricks up the door to his room, bashes a hole in the wall leading out to a courtyard, tosses furniture out the newfound hole, repels the cops (even roasting and eating one), and then has a mindblowing orgy (which includes the great Patrick Dewaere in one of his first “adult” roles as an undercover cop).

The film is a brazen act of provocation that defies laws of logic, language, and linearity. It’s truly rebellious and not a little nuts, and is proud to be so. Piccoli rhapsodizes about it, again, in the chapter on acting in Rêves :

… a unique, wordless film that I love a lot, a strange film, strongly anarchic and at the same time heavy and serious, very honest, mocking and elegant at the same time. It’s strange and sad that a filmmaker as unique as Claude Faraldo remains so little known. He had a great authority, a passion for creativity, and a lot of nerve. I love watching Themroc, I have a great passion for that film. [p. 105]

The whole film is currently "tucked away" online. [To watch this video, click the words "Watch on Odnoklassniki."]

J'ai vécu dans mes rêves is quite a moving little tome – it’s not a solid autobiography but, as its conversational structure indicates, it’s intended to sound like two friends speaking to each other. When Piccoli compares himself to a “pen that’s run out of ink” in the final pages, one can only think of the great late-career films he made. These included I’m Going Home (2001) by de Oliviera, We Have a Pope (2011) by Moretti, and the exquisite You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012) by Resnais.

Resnais made several “farewell” movies, but of the bunch, Nothin’ is clearly the best. In it, a group of actors (who use their own names and are essentially playing themselves) gather at the home of their dead director for a memorial service where his final video message to them will be shown. The guests are comprised of two sets of performers, who did two different productions of Eurydice with the director, in two different eras.

In You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (2013),
at the age of 88.

The director asks them to watch a recording of a young theater troupe performing Eurydice and suddenly the lines between the different productions blur, and the actors are both reliving the play and their own past relationships with each other. It’s a masterful final work (which, naturally enough, given Resnais’ boundless energy, was followed by another final work, Life of Riley).

It’s also quite naturally the place to end any tribute to M. Piccoli, since it features him as the “elder statesman” but also as part of an ensemble. And, as distinguished as he became and as distinct as his starring roles were (in films like Rivette's beautiful and timeless La Belle Noiseuse), he always seemed to blend most beautifully into ensemble pieces. One thinks of his memorable moments in The Young Girls of Rochefort, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and La Grande Bouffe, among many others.

Prince Hal Exits the Scene: Deceased Artiste Hal Willner

The New York City free summer concert series are already cancelling their seasons. This isn’t a surprise, given the tenor of the times and the fact that 2020 as a whole will most surely be sunk through the fall (at least) by the pandemic. Even when the world returns to “normal” the summer concerts will never be the same, because a major presence in the programming and production of some of the most memorable of those shows is now gone. His name was Willner (when introducing himself to audiences he tended to leave out the first name) and I had taken to calling him (pardon me, Willie the Shake) “Prince Hal” on this blog.

The records that Willner produced will live on, but the simply stunningly wonderful concerts he put on are now just memories – memories and random photos (and yes, some bits of video and audio generated by fans). Great articles like this one and especially this one found his collaborators attesting to the intensity of Willner’s fandom for (and knowledge of) music — from traditional folk and country to rock, pop, and his beloved jazz. His talent for blending artists with material in both a series of tribute albums and tribute concerts was his supreme contribution over the past four decades.

His obits discussed his very well-loved (and well-reviewed) tribute albums. His concerts were discussed, but the sheer *volume* of these shows was left out of most obits, which needed (for audience recognition) to focus on his friendships with certain music legends and his work on “Saturday Night Live.” The latter earned him a solid, stable paycheck and allowed him to do all the other labor of love projects, so it had its purpose, but it was not where Willner’s art lie. That can be found on the albums and most definitely in the array of musicians and performers he recruited for the concerts he produced.

To illustrate, Willner put together sublime rosters of talent for tribute albums dedicated to these musical legends: Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Walt Disney (music for the studio's films), Charles Mingus, Harold Arlen, Leonard Cohen, Harry Smith (from the Anthology of American Folk Music compiled by Smith), and (forthcoming) Marc Bolan/T. Rex. (And let's not forget the spoken-word album where folks such as Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley, and Dr. John read Poe stories and poems!)

The mad scientist in his laboratory.
(Photo by Marc Urselli; the script being read
is from the Basil Rathbone "Co-Star" LP!)

He did live tributes to the names above, but the amazing live concerts he produced also included tributes (over a period of nearly 30 years) to: Tim Buckley, Doc Pomus, Neil Young, Randy Newman, Bill Withers, Joel Dorn (productions), Tuli Kupferberg, Shel Silverstein, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Allan Sherman, Lou Reed, George Martin (productions), and Bob Dylan. And, in the spoken-word arena, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, the Firesign Theater, Arch Oboler, Ken Nordine, Del Close, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Marquis De Sade (!).

Those of us who followed his work tried to see any concert that he had anything to do with — as the years went on some had to be missed for monetary or personal reasons, but the best part of being a Willner fan was that the initial problem was negated in so many sublime cases, since Hal worked in tandem with all three of the main NYC summer festivals at different times, and when it was a labor of love show, the admission fee was ridiculously low (10 or under) for evenings that (no hyperbole) you might well remember for the rest of your life.

I charted my love of Willner’s concerts on these blogs beginning in 2008, but had been trying to catch as many of his shows for the seven years preceding that. (I now know that I was a decade late for the picnic, but that never mattered — there was always something new.) I reviewed a bunch of his shows here because I had been so dazzled by what I saw — but also as a sort of aide-memoire, because Willner liked to put surprises in his shows.

The door to Willner's studio.
(photo by the terrific singer-
songwriter Mary Lee Kortes)

Not the usual ones you find at a concert (“wow, that music legend just came out to join the musical legend we came to see!”), but more sneaky, subtle ones that you would remember even longer and for better reasons — like the fact that a music legend was doing such a beautiful job covering a song, that a duet was occurring that had to be processed before it could even be understood (check out the episodes of Hal’s “Night Music” on YouTube for examples of these sort of musical fusions both weird and miraculous), and the single most sublime mindfuck, the introduction of a new performer who *must* be remembered. I would include among these the first time I heard and saw Antony (now Anohni) perform at a Willner show (the Leonard Cohen tribute) and any number of songs done by the devoted instrumentalists and vocalists who made up his “ensemble” for his live shows.

I didn’t write here about the last two Willner shows I saw because they were reviewed in the New York Times and were in essence more “organized” — although there was still an unpredictable strain in them, best exemplified by Chloe Webb wearing a horse’s head wandering throughout Town Hall in one (a Hunter S. Thompson tribute) and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog doing a cover of a folk standard in another (a salute to Dylan’s 1963 set at Town Hall).

The Willner shows I did write up here were these:

– Two tribute shows: for Joel Dorn, at Lincoln Center and for Bill Withers, Prospect Park, Aug 2008

– The marathon benefit for Tuli Kupferberg at St. Ann’s Feb 2010

– A panel on Andy Kaufman’s musical obsessions (with guest panelist Willner and an assortment of his friends) June 2013

– Four shows from his first residency at the Stone, Sept 2014

– Four shows from his second residency at the Stone, June 2016

– Lou Reed daylong celebration at Lincoln Center, Aug 2016

There are memories I have of other Willner shows, but I think the best way one can find out about Hal’s work is to visit a newly published website that stands as a tribute to his work. Engineer-producer-mixer-sound designer Marc Urselli, who worked side-by-side with Willner for more than a decade, has done great work in putting together people’s memories of the man, plus a discography of the albums he produced (each represented with a Spotify playlist) and a detailed list of the concerts Willner produced. The homepage for the site is here.

Full disclosure: I prepared the concert list, working from a number of sources (including contemporary reviews, the performers’ own websites, the archived records of certain venues, and even the above-mentioned blog entries). I never knew Willner — I had two short conversations with him, in which I simply asked him a few questions and thanked him for all the shows of his that I had seen. (He was nice enough in private Facebook chat to thank me for the blog entries on the Stone shows.)

The assemblage of this list was my concrete thank-you to a producer who didn’t just mount a bunch of really cool concerts — he opened his viewers up to new artists, gave us renewed respect for old ones, and when putting on shows in much smaller venues, got to spread his infectious sense of fandom and his utterly apt knack for mixing talents both young and old with the most amazing material. (From the initial information that has surfaced about it and the debut track by Nick Cave, his last project, the long-gestating tribute double album “AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs Of Marc Bolan and T. Rex,” will continue in this vein. It will be released in September.)

A younger Willner,
with Milla J., Robbie R.,
and Bono. (circa 2000)

The only downside to any of this was that I’ve been curious for years if Willner was recording the live shows he produced for some future release project. The answer is, very sadly, no. There were some concerts recorded – some venues do it as a matter of practice and there were some that were organized with eventual DVDs in mind. In the latter category, we do have the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man and the box set of The Harry Smith Project concerts (and the solo performer shows, like Marianne Faithfull’s Blazing Away and Lou Reed’s Berlin). But for the most part, the copyright issues, possible contractual problems, and even the small sizes of some of the venues made it unfeasible to record the shows.

As a neat bonus to this discussion I point you toward a video clip that was posted after Willner’s passing by videographer Sebastian Sharples. The vid shows how Hal went about figuring out in what order the performers would appear, in this case for the first of the “Harry Smith Project” shows, which took place at the South Bank Centre in London for the July 1999 Meltdown Festival. We see Hal assigning index cards to each act and the song they will do, and then sitting on the floor and moving the cards around until he gets the order he likes. Having seen his shows, I can tell you — he liked changing moods (putting something upbeat after something sad) and also throwing surprises in the middle of shows rather than the obvious place (the end). He did it all masterfully.

We also see him watching footage of the older Harry Smith (an unusually eccentric gent who was an immensely talented filmmaker and archivist) and sitting with the Meltdown guest director for that year, Nick Cave.

And so the shows will remain a memory to those who saw them. And we do have the photos and those bits of audio and video that fans chose to snag. If the list (link below) of the performers who participated in the Willner shows was spelled out (if those hundreds and hundreds of names could even be verified), the resulting roster would testify to the depth and breadth of Willner’s musical knowledge and his many, many enthusiasms. 

Willner with one of the many super-talented folks
he paid tribute to. He's your man...

For the time being, there is this list, which I’m proud to have worked on. If you spot any shows produced by Willner that were left out, write to me at the Funhouse email address (found on the Funhouse site) and I’ll send on the information to Marc. (Please supply particulars of the show— theme/performer. venue, city, and month/year)

The loss of Willner is a very big one to the music community (and fans, for he was a giant one himself, of so many things). But the music he gave us will continue, both in the grooves and in our memories.

Here is the full(est) list of the concerts Willner produced — 33 years of a master-producer’s life.
http://haltribute.com/hal-willner-live-productions-shows-chronology/