DVD of the Week: Rocky Road to Dublin

Soon after the death, in March, of the journalist Peter Lennon, whose one and only film I discuss in this clip, his friend Paul Duane (who made the film “The Making of ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’” that’s featured on the same DVD) alerted me to the existence of Lennon’s autobiography, “Foreign Correspondent,” and it is indeed a juicy read. Lennon was the Paris reporter for the Guardian in the nineteen-sixties and, as such, an eyewitness to the rise of the French New Wave. In the book, he reports on his interview with Jean-Luc Godard during the shoot of “Les Carabiniers” and his brief encounter there with the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whom he calls “equally central” to Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque, in the birth of the movement, citing Coutard’s documentary-based artistry, his simplicity in lighting, his rapidity, his respect for the director’s vision, and his experience as a war cameraman which enabled him “to shoot in the worst conditions.” When, in 1967, Lennon wanted to make a documentary about Ireland, he sought to recruit Coutard to film it, knowing that his producer liked “the idea of applying the swingeing [sic] new wave to jokey, boozy Ireland. Actually I had another kind of film in mind, more politically committed, more agnostically evangelical.” As this clip shows, Lennon actually delivered both—and the film’s two sides coalesced in ways that he might not even have anticipated.