{"id":29510,"date":"2018-05-16T20:12:56","date_gmt":"2018-05-17T00:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=29510"},"modified":"2018-05-17T13:44:30","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T17:44:30","slug":"huge-wyler-retrospective-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2018\/05\/huge-wyler-retrospective-in-paris.html","title":{"rendered":"Huge Wyler Retrospective in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the beauties of a William Wyler retrospective as big as the one that the Cinemath\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise has currently mounted in Paris is the chance to see the immense variety of his work. I don’t think as thorough a retrospective (41 films, including some of the silents) has been screened since the 1996 Berlin Film Festival.

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Wyler Retrospective in Paris, at La Cinemath\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise
(April 25 – May 28, 2018)<\/font><\/p><\/div> The Cinemath\u00e8que has also posted a deeply researched web page<\/a> with so many layers you can get lost in them. One pleasure of the site is the rarely seen stills of Wyler with his actors behind the scenes. Another is an oral history<\/a> (much of it, I’m glad to report, credited to this Wyler biography)<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/a>An aspect of Wyler’s personality that runs like a motif through his career was the idea of not repeating himself. Wyler always said to friends from his earliest days, and later to the press, that one of the challenges for a director was to make as many different kinds of pictures as possible. This eclecticism tended to hurt his reputation with purists who preferred to think of artists as obsessed by a single lifelong subject. In their view, the artist\u2019s entire output may be seen as variations on a theme. And anyone whose body of work does not conform to that pattern may be regarded as deficient: lacking depth or purpose or \u2014 the ultimate deficiency \u2014 a true calling.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father was a bit hurt toward the end of his life that the variety of his films was not appreciated,\u201d his daughter Melanie Wyler told me for the biography. \u201cEveryone thought Hitchcock was great because he stuck to the same thing. But my father used to say, \u2018He\u2019s a prisoner of the medium.\u2019 I remember they had a conversation about it. Hitchcock said he was jealous. \u2018You can do any kind of film you want. I can\u2019t. They won\u2019t let me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n