The Story of a Three-Day Pass was awarded the critics’ choice award at the 1967 San Francisco International Film Festival, and all of a sudden Melvin Van Peebles found himself in a position that was almost unbelievable. He was a Hollywood darling.
A decade before, when Van Peebles went looking for a job in Hollywood, they told him he could be an elevator operator. He had written a book, The Big Heart, and he’d directed three short films in San Francisco, where they gained no traction. For a lack of opportunity, following the long tradition of Black artists in America, Van Peebles decided to go abroad. He planned on getting a doctorate in astronomy in Holland because that sounded more likely than what he was trying to do here. But Van Peebles, it seems, had no sense of giving up one dream for another, and when passing through New York, he made sure to contact Amos Vogel.
Vogel founded Cinema16 in 1947 to fill a social need, to give independent film a home. By 1959, filmmakers from everywhere sent their work to Vogel in the hopes of getting it shown, but it was a tough room. Vogel had an intense, provocative aesthetic. He described himself as a “total enemy of censorship, full-stop.” The shows he curated were intended to push boundaries, sometimes, to deliberately offend — and Van Peebles caught his attention. Vogel must have sensed both the intense and the provocative, because he chose to show Van Peebles’ short film, Three Pickup Men for Herrick.
Vogel’s real boon was taking Van Peebles’ films along with him to Paris, where he showed them to Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque. The conceit of the Cinematheque was to build a master film archive and to show groundbreaking, new work to the world. Langlois was Vogel’s aesthetic doppelganger, and he took an immediate interest in Van Peebles’ work. What Langlois had, unlike Vogel, was a whole culture of artists surrounding the Cinematheque, a community deeply invested in making the Cinematheque a symbol of the rising New Wave movement.
Van Peebles was already in Holland when he heard that his films were getting attention in France. Almost right away, he dropped out of the astronomy program and went to Paris, where nothing in particular was waiting for him. Langlois — a mentor of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard — encouraged Van Peebles. The Cinematheque was happy to receive him — but what else could they do?
Van Peebles didn’t speak a word of French. He had no prospects. As he describes it, his first break in Paris was a practical joke. A man gave him film, lent him a camera, and told him to make something. I’m not sure what the joke was supposed to be, maybe only to humiliate Van Peebles, who was so down on his luck that he was singing in the street for change. But what this man got from Van Peebles was an award-winning short film, Les cinq cent balles.
Van Peebles felt as though he could have directed shorts forever, but he took a look around and saw that there were only two ways to be a proper director; you needed money, or you needed a name. Well, he didn’t have any money. Over the course of the next seven years, he taught himself French, found work at a newspaper, worked as an editor, wrote four books in French. He won funding from the French government and a director’s card to adapt his novel, La Permission, which is loosely based on events from his own life.
The Story of a Three-Day Pass is ambitious, the work of an outsider artist, a person who was — most of all — interested in what film can do. Under the influence of Langlois and the New Wave movement, Van Peebles made a movie that is highly stylized. He took risks, perhaps, because he felt this was his only chance, and in the moments when his vision meets his ability, the work is stunning.
If it wasn’t for out-and-out aggression, it was a culture of complacency that made success impossible for Van Peebles in the States. But suppose you forget about success, Van Peebles described Paris as the first place he ever felt at home. So, when his film was selected to represent France at the San Francisco International Film Festival, it seemed natural that he would attend as the delegate, as a Frenchman. And after the festival, when Hollywood came calling, it felt equally strange that, suddenly, America wanted him back.
The news across the country was the color of his skin. As quoted, over and over, he was the first Black man to direct a feature-length film. Claire Clouzot interviewed Van Peebles at the time, and she notes that when he spoke French, he was completely French, while the interview, conducted in English, showed a second person — American — nervous, slightly hostile towards his newfound acceptance. It’s possible what Clouzot detected was something else, however — not a hostility towards acceptance, but a struggle with the hypocrisy of success in America. Van Peebles was contending with a question that demanded an answer: What now?
