Blue Boys: Maurice Pialat, Nicolas Poussin and the Work of Art

Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s critical and aesthetic approaches to filmmaking. While Pialat emphasises the failure of critics and filmmakers to elevate cinema to the level of art, the article more saliently invites us to analyse Pialat’s understanding of cinematic practice as an intricate enfolding of painterly and cinematic concepts. In this article I contend that, through a reading of the theoretical dimensions Pialat introduces in his “elegy” to the Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), along with an analysis of a selection of the director’s films, we not only discover Pialat’s film-philosophy; moreover, we discover new ways to study Pialat’s acute rendering of fraught manhood. Significantly, I argue, Pialat’s wrestling with masculinity (fatherhood, sexual desire, boyhood, and so on) reveals itself through a key element critical to Poussin’s aesthetic palette: the colour blue.