Blackfilm.com correspondent Ellen J. Wanjiru interviews Mario Van Peebles on the restoration of Melvin Van Peebles’ – ‘The Story of a Three Day Pass,‘ which is the first full-length film by one of cinema’s most important African American directors — his father, Melvin Van Peebles. We discuss the impetus and making of the 1968 French New Wave film, the New 4K restoration by IndieCollect in consultation with Mario Van Peebles, with support from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Melvin Van Peebles — the man, the maverick, plus more!
Janus Films will premiere The Story of a Three Day Pass on May 7 both theatrically and virtually in New York and Los Angeles (in New York @ Film Forum and in LA, @ Laemmle NoHO).
SYNOPSIS: Turner (Harry Baird), an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base by his casually racist commanding officer and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman (Nicole Berger)—but what happens to their love when his furlough is over? Watch a clip from ‘The Story of a Three Day Pass’ below!
Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race that is playful, sarcastic, and stingingly subversive by turns, and that laid the foundation for the scorched-earth cinematic revolution he would unleash just a few years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Melvin Van Peebles not only ushered in the Blaxploitation genre but he single handedly showed the power of an independent black director.
MELVIN VAN PEEBLES ON THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS
The quotations below have been excerpted from Melvin Van Peebles’s DGA career-highlights interview, conducted by his son Mario Van Peebles.
“I went down to Hollywood with those three little films that I made in San Francisco to show my stuff and to look for a job. And they offered me a job, but it was as an elevator operator. ‘No, you guys don’t understand, I want to be around’—I didn’t know the creative process, but I explained myself. They offered me a job as a dancer.”
“I guess my break would be that I got a postcard from the Cinémathèque française in France. And the Cinémathèque invited me to come to France because they had seen my films through a whole series of circumstances. They had seen my first—those three short films—and they thought they were very good and invited me to France. So that’s how I ended up in France.”
“I discovered along the way that there’s a French law that says a French writer can have a temporary director’s card to bring his own work to the screen. So, I became a journalist, and I wrote these novels, I got them published, and then I asked for a director’s card to bring to the screen a novel that I had written called La permission [The Story of a Three Day Pass]. And that’s how I managed to get a director’s card.”
“The French have the [French Cinema Center, which] gives subsidies—grants to help people get along to get their films done. I wrote a story that was flattering to the French psyche about an American GI who comes to France, but he’s still—you know, the GI is in a much freer country—tainted mentally, even though he’s been victimized; he still has the mentality of a victim because the GI is Black [and from] the States. And so, he and the girl, they meet, have trouble in the relationship: in and out, girl-boy, boy-girl–type thing. And that’s the sort of bittersweet love story between the two of them. It was very appealing, very warm, and also quite flattering to the French, and so I got the subsidy.”
“Anyway, my film was one of the films selected to represent France at the 1967 [San Francisco International] Film Festival. I went to San Francisco, which I had been more or less tossed out of ten years earlier, as the French delegate to the San Francisco Film Festival. I remember, I get off the plane, and there’s a little old lady, blue hair on wedges, said, ‘Melvin Van Peebles, le délégation française?’ I said, ‘Lady . . .’ She said, ‘Don’t bother me. Melvin Van Peebles, délégation française.’ I said, ‘I am Melvin Van Peebles,’ so I sort of spun her head. That was all very funny. But I was treated very well.”
“Hollywood was very embarrassed at that juncture because here I was, a Black American, having to work as a Frenchman, and my work was of such quality. So then everybody was saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing over here? What are you doing over there? Why aren’t you over here? What are you doing?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? Last time I asked you guys for a job, you told me to be an elevator operator.”
Mario Van Peebles On The Restoration of Melvin Van Peebles’ – ‘The Story of a Three Day Pass’ Mario Van Peebles On The Restoration of Melvin Van Peebles’ – ‘The Story of a Three Day Pass’
Loading…