67

When one thinks about the relationship between jazz and cinema, only one film immediately comes to mind — Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957). The collaboration between Louis Malle and Miles Davis in that movie marked the beginning of a brief love affair between film and Afro-American music. Long before jazzmen were acknowledged as real creators in the United States, a few French film directors showed remarkable audacity and clear-headedness : Miles Davis, John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, one after the other, became film musicians. This encounter was the result of hard work : Jean Cocteau, as early as the 1920s, but above all Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, a few years later, had committed themselves to promoting “true jazz,” in particular that of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. After Louis Delluc and his “cinéphilie,” Paris became the birthplace of another passion : jazzophilia. With the Liberation, young Parisians started celebrating jazz in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Jacques Becker’s Rendez-vous de juillet, and some time later the movies directed by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle, evinced an unfailingly good taste regarding the music produced by black Americans. In a much less conspicuous way, the film directors of the “Nouvelle Vague” were in turn influenced by jazz : a new conception of music had nurtured, in a more underground way, a new approach to film making.