Three volumes, sober and elegant covers, universalo-catch-all title, Generics releases, like that, something definitive, thick, junglesque – ultimate testimony of our man in LA, Philippe Garnier, historical collaborator of Release, able for a time to burn whole pages on a movie horse, the making of Doc Martens or a detour in Montana. It will be necessary to take the trouble to return one of the volumes to have a more precise idea of the case, imposing but a bit confusing, too. That is to say that here the texts are not entirely new and do not participate in a great whole either: Generics is an end-to-end of the books that Garnier has written over the last twenty years to accompany DVD releases from the publisher Wild Side, gathered here chronologically and flanked by a rich iconography. We may fear the wobbly anthology, the risky pyramid, we will in fact find something quite logical, rather fluid even, but above all deeply vibrant.
In a spirit not far removed from some of his previous works – Shame who Malibu, maquis or the recent biography of Sterling Hayden –, Garnier engages in a delirious enterprise of excavation carried out to the rhythm of long, dense, thick stories, written in a more arid style, without detour (“less rambunctious” he would say), where each film is attacked in a rabbit hole way, to the end of the end of the last gallery. The opportunity for dives verging on the definitive on the hunter’s night, the Great Blackmail of Alexander Mackendrick, the journey of Richard C. Sarafian, director of Vanishing Point, or Max Ophüls entanglements in Hollywood for the sublime Letter from a stranger. And incredible rediscoveries like the hot street by Edward Dmytryk and his carnivalesque editing, all in multiple screenplay rewrites and shady figures, or the criminally underestimated Failure at organization by John Flynn, carried by a bloodless Robert Duvall and the fascinating Karen Black. At a time when we love nothing so much as explaining, deciphering, dismantling cinema, Garnier continues to tell it. Accurately, just the right amount of fever and an unwavering passion.