A Companion to François Truffaut 9781405198479, 2012042143

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A Companion to

Edited by

François Truffaut Although the New Wave, one of the most influential aesthetic revolutions in the history of cinema, might not have existed without him, François Truffaut has largely been ignored by film scholars since his death almost thirty years ago. As an innovative theoretician, an influential critic, and a celebrated filmmaker, Truffaut formulated, disseminated, and illustrated the ideals of the New Wave with exceptional energy and distinction. Yet no book in recent years has focused on Truffaut’s value, and his overall contribution to cinema deserves to be redefined not only to reinstate him in his proper place but to let us rethink how cinema developed during his lifetime.

A Companion to

“This exciting collection breaks through the widely held critical view that Truffaut abandoned the iconoclasm of his early work for an academicism he had consistently railed against in his own film criticism. Indeed, if ‘fever’ and ‘fire’ were Truffaut’s most consistent motifs, the essays in this collection live up to his lifelong, burning passion for the cinema. Written by world-famous scholars, the essays exhaustively explore the themes and styles of the films, as well as Truffaut’s relationships to André Bazin, Alfred Hitchcock, and the directors of the New Wave, his ground-breaking and controversial film criticism, and his position in the complex politics of French cultural life from the Popular Front to 1968 and after.” Angelo Restivo, Georgia State University

François Truffaut

Anne Gillain is professor emeritus at Wellesley College, USA. She is known for her work on French cinema, particularly François Truffaut, in books that include Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988), Les 400 Coups (1991), and François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (2013).

“An unprecedented critical tribute to the director who, in France, wound up becoming the most controversial figure of the New Wave he helped found.” Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Andrew and Gillain

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University, USA. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Major Film Theories, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005), What Cinema Is! (2010), and Opening Bazin (2011), which won the SCMS Best Anthology Award for 2011.

W i l e y- B l a c k w e l l C o m pa n i o n s t o f i l m D i r e c t o r s

A Companion to

François Truffaut Edited by

Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain

jkt_9781405198479.indd 1

In this new Companion, thirty-four original essays by leading film scholars offer new readings of individual films and original perspectives on the filmmaker’s background, influences, and consequence. Hugely influential around the globe, Truffaut is assessed by international contributors who delve into the unique quality of his narratives and establish the depth of his distinctively styled work. An extended interview with French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin tracks Truffaut’s controversial stature within French cinema and vividly identifies how he thinks and works as a director, adding an irreplaceable perspective to this essential volume.

22/1/13 07:55:56

A Companion to François Truffaut

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work together constitutes what we refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether on Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergman, Capra or the Coen brothers, each volume comprises 25 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary, and/or controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multidimensional capacity. Individual volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant themes, well-known, worthy, and underrated films; stars, collaborators, and key influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world. Published A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau A Companion to François Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla

A Companion to François Truffaut Edited by

Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2013 © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the ublisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to Francois Truffaut / edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-1-4051-9847-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Truffaut, Francois–Criticism and interpretation. I. Andrew, Dudley, 1945– editor of compilation. II. Gillain, Anne, editor of compilation. PN1998.3.T78C75 2013 791.4302′33092–dc23 2012042143 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Photo of Francois Truffaut © Eva Sereny / Camera Press, London Cover design by Nicki Averill Design and Illustration Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Preface Filmography Part I

La Planète Truffaut

1. Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I: Truffaut and His Position Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew

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2. Truffaut and His “Doubles” Martin Lefebvre

23

3. Aesthetic Affinities: François Truffaut, Patrick Modiano, Douglas Sirk Anne Gillain

71

4. Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part II: Truffaut and His Methods Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew

105

Part II

125

Style and Sensibility

5. Flashes of Happiness Alain Bergala

127

6. Truffaut and the Photographic: Cinema, Fetishism, Death Junji Hori

137

7. The Impasse of Intimacy: Romance and Tragedy in Truffaut’s Cinema John Orr

153

8. A Fine Madness: Digressions on Pathologies in Truffaut’s Films Francis Vanoye

173

9. The Ecstatic Pan Phil Powrie

184

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10. The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance Adrian Martin

205

Part III

219

The Making of a Filmmaker

11. Every Teacher Needs a Truant: Bazin and L’Enfant sauvage Dudley Andrew

221

12. Certain Tendencies of Truffaut’s Film Criticism Richard Neupert

242

13. Truffaut–Hitchcock Jonathan Everett Haynes

265

14. The Paradox of “Familiarity”: Truffaut, Heir of Renoir Ludovic Cortade

283

15. Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut Michel Marie

300

16. Friction, Failure, and Fire: Truffaut as Adaptive Auteur Timothy Corrigan

317

Part IV

Truffaut and His Time

333

17. Growing Up with the French New Wave James Tweedie

335

18. Bad Objects: Truffaut’s Radicalism Sam Di Iorio

356

19. Between Renoir and Hitchcock: The Paradox of Truffaut’s Women Ginette Vincendeau

375

20. Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan Kan Nozaki

388

Part V

401

Films

21. Directing Children: The Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness Angela Dalle Vacche

403

22. Jules et Jim … et Walter Benjamin Dudley Andrew

420

23. Digging Up the Past: Jules et Jim Elizabeth Ezra

434

24. The Elevator and the Telephone: On Urgency in La Peau douce Michel Chion

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25. La Peau douce: A Psychogeography of Silky Cinephilia Tom Conley

454

26. La Peau douce: François Truffaut’s Passionate Object Hilary Radner

469

27. An Unsettling Passage: From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte Carlos Losilla

489

28. The Structural Role of Intervals in L’Argent de poche Alain Bergala

507

29. To Die or to Love: Modern Don Juans in Truffaut and Oliveira Luiza Jatobá

517

30. Film as Literature: or the Truffaldian Malaise (L’Homme qui aimait les femmes) Lúcia Nagib

530

31. The Elegist: François Truffaut inside La Chambre verte Philip Watts

546

32. La Chambre verte and the Beating Heart of Truffaut’s Oeuvre Françoise Zamour

561

33. Le Dernier Métro: An Underground Golden Coach Jean-Michel Frodon

571

34. Disillusionment and Magic in La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro Marc Vernet

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Index

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Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Wellesley College for a grant awarded to Anne Gillain to help cover the translation costs for this volume. At a time of fiscal vigilance, Wellesley College displayed once more its commitment to faculty research and publication. Our sincere appreciation goes to Madeleine Morgenstern who expressed active interest in our work and warmly welcomed us into her home to discuss it. Her support has been a great encouragement. We must single out Arnaud Desplechin for graciously spending two afternoons of his busy professional life to share with us his insights on François Truffaut. It was a privilege to watch segments of the films with him and to be there to catch the fervor as well as the intuitive aptness of his spontaneous reactions. His dedication not just to Truffaut but to a serious, yet never ponderous, idea of cinema ought to inspire young filmmakers and scholars the way it has us. Thanks go to Liam Andrew and especially to Madeline Whittle for assisting with the countless details and versions of so many chapters that have been in production for so many months. Madeline’s care and her quickness of both intelligence and execution kept this multilingual, two-year enterprise on track. In the home stretch we were ably assisted by Jeremi Szaniawski, Michael Cramer, Stephanie Andrew, and especially Dana Benelli. We salute Jayne Fargnoli, cheerful optimist, and our forgiving editor, who has shown herself ready to bend protocol for the health of this particular volume. We hope we to have been worthy of her trust.

Notes on Contributors

Dudley Andrew is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. He began his career with three books commenting on film theory, including the biography of André Bazin, whose thought he explored in the recent What Cinema Is! and the edited volume Opening Bazin. His interest in aesthetics and hermeneutics led to Film in the Aura of Art (1984), and his fascination with French film and culture resulted in Mists of Regret (1995) and the coauthored Popular Front Paris (2005). He is currently completing Encountering World Cinema. Alain Bergala, former editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma, has written articles and  books on filmmakers such as Godard, Rossellini, Kiarostami, and Buñuel. Having taught at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), he served as cinema advisor to the French Ministry of Education from 2000 to 2002. Currently he teaches cinema at La Femis. He has directed numerous films for cinema and television. He has also curated two important expositions: “Correspondances: KiarostamiErice” (CCCB de Barcelone 2006; Beaubourg 2007) and “Brune Blonde” (Cinémathèque française 2011). Michel Chion is a composer of concrete music, a writer, a researcher, and a director of short films and videos. Currently a senior fellow at the IKKM at the University of Bauhaus, he has published some 30 books, several of which have been translated into English: Audio-Vision (1994), Voice in Cinema (1999), Film: a Sound Art (2011), David Lynch, The Films of Jacques Tati, and, for the BFI “modern classic” series, The Thin Red Line. Tom Conley, Professor of French and of Film at Harvard University, has translated Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, and Marc Augé among other French authors. In  addition to several works on Renaissance literature and culture, he has written Cartographic Cinema and Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema.

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Timothy Corrigan is Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and History of Art at the  University of Pennsylvania. His principal books include New German Film: The Displaced Image; The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History; A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam; and The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after  Marker. He has also written several widely used textbooks and serves as a founding editor of the journal Adaptation. Ludovic Cortade, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of French, is the author of Antonin Artaud: La Virtualité Incarnée (2000) and Le Cinéma de l’immobilité: style, politique, réception (2008). His research centers on French film theory and its rapport with literature and the human sciences. Among his essays are contributions to English language anthologies on André Bazin and on Jean Epstein. Angela Dalle Vacche is a professor of Film Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton Univeristy Press, 1992); Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (University of Texas Press, 1996); Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2008). She has edited Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (Rutgers University Press, 2003); and coedited Color: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2006). Her current project deals with André Bazin’s rapport with art, film, and science. Arnaud Desplechin graduated from IDHEC in 1984. He won the Jean-Vigo Prize in 1991 and gained prominence at Cannes in 1994 with Comment je me suis disputé… In 2000, Esther Kahn, filmed in English, was saluted as a homage to Truffaut. Rois et Reine and Un Conte de Noël, with Catherine Deneuve, have been internationally acclaimed. Desplechin speaks publicly about the history and aesthetics of film. He acknowledges the influence on his work of Serge Daney and especially Stanley Cavell. Sam Di Iorio is an associate professor of French at Hunter College. He studies connections between film, literature, philosophy, and politics in twentieth-century France and has published articles on figures such as Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Jacques Rivette. His current research explores the political implications of postwar debates about formalism. Elizabeth Ezra is Professor of Cinema and Culture at the University of Stirling in Scotland. She is the author of The Colonial Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 2000), Georges Méliès (Manchester University Press, 2000), and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (University of Illinois Press, 2008). She has edited European Cinema for Oxford University Press (2004) and coedited Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader for Routledge (2006) and France in Focus (Berg, 2000). She is currently coauthoring a book on biology, consumption, and waste in global cinema.

Notes on Contributors

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Jean-Michel Frodon served as film critic at Le Monde (1990–2003) before becoming Editorial Director of Cahiers du Cinéma (2003–2009). Currently, he teaches cinema at Sciences Po and is Professorial Fellow in Film Studies and Creative Industries at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His major book, Le Cinéma français, de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours has recently been updated; he has also authored La Projection nationale and Horizon cinéma and put together volumes on Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Woody Allen, Robert Bresson, Amos Gitai, and Chinese cinema. He edited Gilles Deleuze et les images and Cinema and the Shoah (SUNY Press, 2010). Anne Gillain is professor emerita at Wellesley College, known principally for her work on French Cinema, particularly the films of François Truffaut, in books that include Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (1988), Les 400 Coups (1991), and her major work, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (Indiana, 2013), the French version of which came out in 1991. Jonathan Everett Haynes is a PhD candidate in Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, “A History of Water: Cinema in the Mid-Atlantic,” focusses on the transferential relationships between French and American artists and critics during the New Wave period. Junji Hori is associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Kansai University. He is the author of “Godard’s Two Historiographies” (in For Ever Godard, 2004) and coeditor of a collection of essays on Histoire(s) du cinéma entitled Godard, Image, History (2001). He has translated several books into Japanese, including Colin MacCabe’s Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy and Jacques Rancière’s Le Destin des images. Luiza Jatobá is a practicing psychoanalyst active in São Paulo, Brazil. She received her  doctorate in Esthetics and Psychoanalysis at the University of São Paulo and has taught art history at Unisantos, the Catholic University of Santos, in São Paulo. Martin Lefebvre is University Research Chair in Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the editor of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry and has published on film theory and semiotics in CiNéMAS, Iconics, Semiotica, The Canadian Journal of  Film Studies, New Literary History, Screen, Protée, and Theory, Culture and Society. His books include Psycho: de la figure au musée imaginaire (L’Harmattan, 1997) and Landscape and Film (Routledge, 2006). Carlos Losilla is a professor of Audiovisual Communication at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). He is on the board of the film quarterly Caimán as well as the multilingual web-journal La Furia Umana. His books include studies of Austrian film and of Hollywood as well as the recent La invención de la modernidad. He has contributed to Joe McElhaney’s Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (2009), and has edited En tránsito: Berlín-París-Hollywood (2009) and François Truffaut: el deseo del cine (2010).

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Michel Marie is a professor emeritus at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). Since 1988 he has overseen the “Cinéma et arts visuels” collection for Armand Colin, which recently brought out his Les Films maudits. He is best known in English for French New Wave, an Artistic School, and as coauthor of Aesthetics of Film. He also coauthored L’Analyse des films (1988) and the Dictionnaire critique et théorique du cinéma  (2001). He has written monographs on A bout de souffle and Le Mépris and, in  Portuguese, A Nouvelle Vague e Godard. Cofounder of l’AFECCAV, the French equivalent of SCMS, he has been President of la Cinémathèque universitaire (2001–2004). Adrian Martin is an associate professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University (Melbourne). A film critic since 1979, he is the author six books (Phantasms, Once Upon a Time in America, Raúl Ruiz: sublimes obsesiones, The Mad Max Movies, Qué es el cine moderno? and Last Day Every Day). He is coeditor of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia and of the online film journal LOLA. Lúcia Nagib is Centenary Professor of World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. She has authored in English World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011) and Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007), and in Portuguese, The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima’s Films (1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (1993), and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (1991). She has edited or coedited three anthologies in English: The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), Theorizing World Cinema (2011), and Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009). Richard Neupert is the Charles H. Wheatley Professor of the Arts and a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor in Film Studies at the University of Georgia. His books include French Animation History, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, and The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema, as well translations from French of Aesthetics of Film and The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Kan Nozaki, Professor of French Literature at the University of Tokyo, has published books on literature and on cinema in Japanese. His film books include Jean Renoir: A  Cinema without Frontiers (2001) and Honk Kong, City of Cinema (2005). He is the translator of a forthcoming Japanese edition of Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? John Orr passed away shortly after submitting his chapter to this collection. He had been a professor emeritus at Edinburgh University where he spent his career. Trained at Birmingham in Philosophy and Sociology, he was an early proponent of Cultural Studies. The books he authored on theater and the novel preceded those on cinema in reconciling sociological and aesthetic approaches. In 1993 his Cinema and Modernity put him far in the lead of Anglophone critics dealing with film art. Contemporary Cinema (1998) only strengthened that position.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Phil Powrie is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences and Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Surrey. He has authored French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997), French Cinema: An Introduction (2002), Jean-Jacques Beineix (2001), Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (2007), and Pierre Batcheff and Stardom in 1920s French Cinema (2009). Among his many edited collections are Contemporary French Cinema: Continuity and Difference (1999), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (2004), The Cinema of France (2006), and The Films of Luc Besson: Master of Spectacle (2006). He heads the Association for Studies in French Cinema and is the chief general editor of its journal, Studies in French Cinema. Hilary Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of History and Art History, University of Otago, New Zealand. Her recent publications include Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (2011) as author and New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (2011) and Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Cinema (2011) as coeditor. She is coediting A Companion to French Film for Wiley-Blackwell. James Tweedie is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington. He is author of the forthcoming The Age of New Waves: Youth, Cities, and the Globalization of Art Cinema (Oxford University Press) and coedited Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia. His work on French and Chinese cinema can be found in Public Culture, Cinema Journal, Cultural Critique, Screen, and SubStance, as well as in many anthologies. Francis Vanoye is professor emeritus of cinema studies at the University of Nanterre (Paris X), where he directed the département des Arts du spectacle. Among his books are Récit écrit – Récit filmique, L’emprise du cinéma (2005) and L’Adaptation littéraire au Cinéma (2011). For Nathan’s “Synopsis” series, which he directs, he contributed Le  Règle du jeu  and The Passenger. He coordinated the major reference volume Dictionnaire de l’image reissued in 2008. Marc Vernet is Professor of Cinema at the University Denis Diderot (Paris VII) and has served as advisor for film heritage at the Institut National du Patrimoine. A founding editor of the journals Iris and Cinémathèque, he is the author of Figures de l’absence (1989) and coauthor of Film Aesthetics (Texas, 1992). He served as the founding director of the Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI), for which he acquired the archives, among many others, of François Truffaut. Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College, London, and a regular contributor to Sight and Sound. Focusing on popular French and European cinema, her 2000 book Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (Continuum) is now available in French. She has published Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, and studies of two films, Pépé le Moko and La Haine. She recently completed Brigitte

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Bardot,  French Star, International Icon for BFI/Palgrave and coedited A Companion to Jean Renoir for Wiley-Blackwell. Philip Watts is a professor in the Department of French at Columbia University. He is the author of Allegories of the Purge (1999) and coeditor of the volume Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2009). He is currently finishing a book on Roland Barthes and cinema. Françoise Zamour teaches aesthetics and film theory at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm. Her principal publications concern the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut in particular), classic Hollywood (King Vidor, John Ford), and Martin Scorsese. She also works on theater and cinema, including a study of Jean Genet, with ongoing research on melodrama in contemporary cinema.

Preface

To the two of us, this anthology is far more than an academic service, for we both knew François Truffaut and were indelibly marked by his life; indeed we still have trouble accepting his death, realizing that he would have been just turned eighty. We regret the films he would have made; we regret even more the loss of  his encouragement, not just for our efforts (which he invariably provided, often unsolicited) but  for the growth of cinematic culture everywhere. Janine Bazin, who was effectively his foster mother, claimed she felt the temperature of cinephilia drop  precipitously after 1984. His fever for cinema was contagious, radiating beyond Paris, beyond Europe, across the seas as far as Asia, where, as Kan Nozaki documents in his  piece, an acolyte like Koichi Yamada spread not just his fame but his fever. Fièvre (fever) was a word that meant a lot to Truffaut. In 1959 – that blazing year of his sudden international triumph – he commissioned an essay for Cahiers du Cinéma entitled “La Fièvre de Jean Vigo.” A quarter century separates Les 400 Coups from Vigo, who died in 1934; yet this is less than the distance between us and Truffaut’s death. Can we still register and pass on such fever? For that is one of our chief goals, and that is why we feature, right at the outset, our spirited interview with filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin. If cinema is an idea and an ambition, then it can be passed on like an inspiration or a secret: from Vigo to Truffaut to Desplechin … to all of us. It is alarming to realize that inspiration might dissipate, that a secret might be lost. And it is shocking that Truffaut could require the attention and reconsideration signaled by this book, Truffaut whose name for his last twenty-five years was synonymous with cinema’s health. But so much has changed (in the way films are made, the way they look, how they are viewed) that Truffaut is seen as belonging to an earlier age altogether; indeed, there were many in his own day who felt this about him even then. But did they really know him at all? Recall the beautiful elegiac flashback halfway through Tirez sur le pianiste when the impersonal narrator wonders in voice-over, “Who is Charlie Kohler?” This volume raises the mirror question, “Who is François Truffaut?” Who was he back then, and who is he now when we look at any of his films?

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Preface

The fact is that most of those who claim to care about cinema have tucked away a  simplified image of Truffaut, a common image they are comfortable with: that he  squandered the exuberance and brilliance of his youth on undertakings that, while often good and always professional, lacked the flash of those initial New Wave ventures. He has been singled out to exemplify the decline of French cinema and of  the European art film of the 1970s: a prodigy who, after garnering worldwide success and igniting the hopes of the next generation, became increasingly cautious and conventional, someone who seemed glad to be working at his métier but who was no longer driven by the wild genie that had audaciously forged the New Wave. Truffaut had become reliable, it was said. And so what more need is there to say more? A clichéd image of the self-satisfied bourgeois has overshadowed the reality of the  uncomfortable rebel. Recently a scholar expressed to us his dismay at having discovered that Truffaut had signed the Manifeste des 121, a violent leftist pamphlet supporting “insubordination” in response to the Algerian War, a most defiant expression during the tightly controlled De Gaulle years. “I thought he was not political. This was very engagé and extremely dangerous at the time.” Truffaut, who had experienced military prison after he went AWOL during the Indochina War and who understood insubordination like few others, must have felt strongly about this issue. He was the only one at Cahiers du Cinéma to answer the call put out by Marguerite Duras and signed by Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir and other prominent leftists. The aesthetic clichés, just as misleading, are not so easily discarded with plain facts  in this manner. A composite of these might go: “Truffaut made charming comedies about children and love; his best work was produced in the first part of his career; he betrayed his New Wave ideals to create works resembling the cinéma de qualité he had decried as a critic; by the end of his life he had become a bourgeois director out of tune with his time, serving up a lukewarm philosophy of the juste milieu (happy medium). One could add to this the blaring fact that his films propose a sexist representation of women.” Obviously the passage of time has not been on Truffaut’s side. He used to appear conciliatory and consensual, whereas evidently he has become controversial. So much about him has been inverted that curiously, as Desplechin pointed out in an earlier interview, everybody now agrees about Godard and his impact, but “On peut se disputer très fort sur Truffaut.” To argue about Truffaut, however, we must begin by looking at him closely, which is exactly the challenge we issued to recruit our contributors, many of whom were skeptical at the outset. Sam Di Iorio’s response to this challenge is exemplary: “The more I watch Truffaut’s work, the more convinced I become that it doesn’t need to be reread, it needs to be unearthed.” And Di Iorio does just this in digging to the roots of “the radical” Truffaut. This is not to suggest, however, that Truffaut should be repositioned in every case on the side of “acceptable politics.” As in the Langlois Affair, he could be the first to mount the barricades, but if the issues seemed distant, he refused to sign petitions for or against them. Moreover, he was capable of supporting unpopular and even discredited

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figures, like the fascist critic Lucien Rebatet, even while being an unwavering fan of Sartre. He has deservedly encountered hostility from feminists, yet he would never apologize for his feelings, since they involved the most personal part of his world. Ginette Vincendeau shows just how paradoxical (her term) was his attitude toward the women who took over his life and art, tempting him – perhaps forcing him – to intermingle characters, actresses, and human beings in an exceptionally troubling yet endlessly fascinating manner. Yes, compared to Godard, today the mention of Truffaut is likely to draw one into an argument. Godard may be inveterately difficult, truculent, and contradictory, but his oeuvre is so expansive in style and topics that it calls out for an overriding vision, one that hundreds of critics and thousands of paying spectators have supplied as they lionize or disdain it. Truffaut’s “Petite Planète,” more restricted and understated, has proven far more elusive and avoidable. As Michel Marie details, Godard and Truffaut were lifelong enemy brothers. When he was alive, Truffaut was considered the more popular artist, Godard known as the provocative rebel of the avant-garde. Today, Godard has become a conventional value and, unlike Truffaut, the darling of academia. Godard’s bibliography is abundant, the majority of leading film scholars having written about his work at some point. Whereas in the past two decades Truffaut has attracted comparatively little criticism. Scholarship exists, of course, and some of it in English, though not nearly enough. One can find a collection of Truffaut’s interviews (Mississippi Press), of his “Early Criticism” (Nebraska Press), of materials relating to Shoot the Piano Player and The Last Metro (Rutgers Press). Even while he was alive, a number of devotees aimed to make sense of the films in portraits of Truffaut as auteur; by far the best of these is Annette Insdorf ’s elegant and deservedly famous volume published in 1978, then later updated. After his death there came a lull until 1998, when the BFI included La Nuit américaine in its “Classics” series, and when Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram addressed his full output (in the Manchester series on French directors). As for more targeted studies, disappointingly few exist. In chapters within books of their criticism,  T. Jefferson Kline (on Adèle H.) and Eliane DalMolin (on women) pursue a psychoanalytic inquiry to startling conclusions. The most sustained and exciting study in English must be Robert Stam’s François Truffaut and Friends. Like the director in his own “real life,” it mixes issues involving cinema with those involving cultural history, including extraordinary “true romance” adventures of bohemian writers and artists as these were inflected by actual politics and as they came to bear on a suite of novels and films, the centerpiece being Jules et Jim. Truffaut has received far more critical attention around the world, especially in France, of course, but of the many books that engage his films in acts of interpretation, only Anne Gillain’s Francois Truffaut, the Lost Secret, exists in English translation. Beyond critical studies, three particularly important French resources have fortunately found their way into English. The first, a partial compendium of his  correspondence, lets one inside the day-to-day life of what can only be called this “total man of cinema.” No one who pages through his letters will ever doubt Truffaut’s passion, vigilance, morality, and energy. Just browsing the Correspondence

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one finds not a single tepid letter. As both of us know from accessing the archives at the Bibliothèque du film (at the Cinémathèque Francaise), hundreds more letters could fill an additional volume or two. We are fortunate to have this one. Then there is the 400-page Truffaut: A Biography, for which Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana went through much more material than just all the letters. This essential source of information about the director’s life includes a lively and detailed account of the material conditions, the inspiration, and the realization of each film. However, it does not aim to portray or assess aesthetic achievements, for instance, Truffaut’s contribution to the history of cinema. That task fell to Carole Le Berre, whose François Truffaut au travail (François Truffaut at Work) describes in detail the genesis and production of each film from start to finish. Le Berre interviewed Truffaut’s collaborators: scriptwriters, cinematographers, editors, and actors. A wonderful volume in the Phaidon series on key directors, hers delves into the minutiae of the creative process, inevitably sparking valuable insights on the films. Our contributors, who work in English or French, immediately consulted these fastidiously researched volumes while exploring specific films and issues or in pursuit of lines of thought on Truffaut and his work never before ventured. Other contributors working in Spanish, Japanese, or Portuguese were able bring to their essays ideas bubbling out of quite distinct academic and film cultures. Penetrated this way from the multiple angles permitted by the format of the Blackwell Companion, Truffaut’s hermetic works begin to open, responding to a discourse that honors their privacy  while extolling what is universal about them. We are glad the films remain recalcitrant, for that is part and parcel of their appeal, and indeed their power. We take this book, then, to be a rare moment of sustained scrutiny of a director who made what he called “closed” films, in contrast to “open” works that enter directly into dialogue with the public (Godard’s trademark, in his opinion). Truffaut likened his own films, especially those created in the second half of his career, to objects that could be held up, admired, and touched, but whose intricate inner organization made them nearly impossible to break into or take apart. Where Godard, while deliberately withholding satisfaction, challenges the viewer to understand him, even to deconstruct him, Truffaut’s films are specifically designed to be experienced, to be, in the first instance at least, undergone but not understood. The implicit contracts that these two “enemy brothers” (Michel Marie’s term) maintain with the spectator form a chiasmus. Godard, who has generally feigned indifference to audience response, and who even broke completely with the public in the seventies to produce trenchant political videos, attracts high-level critical discourse, to which, let us admit it, his work appeals in the true sense of the word. Few of his films feel finished, or carry a smooth finish. Truffaut, for his part, keeps the audience’s experience so constantly in mind that he closes off each work, cutting short any analysis of an experience that should be so complete it leaves the spectator speechless. Rather than instigate discourse, Truffaut wants to compel his spellbound spectators – perceptually with images, narratively with fictions – until they are riven with emotion. Hence his complicity with Hitchcock (see the chapter by Jonathan Haynes), for whom “suspense” describes the lure and entrapment of the viewer. Truffaut preferred the term

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“emotion,” because suspense is inflicted by filmmaker on spectator while emotion is something they can be said to share. In this, as Ludovic Cortade shows, he was closer to Renoir, who claimed all his life to have but a single ambition: “to meet,” to come together with others via the cinema. If Truffaut’s films feel more closed than Renoir’s, is it not because he came to meet his ideal spectator in himself ? Not only did he watch an extraordinary number of films all his life but that life began, so to speak, in the movie theater where he escaped the Occupation and his miserable adolescence. Hence, the adult filmmaker aimed to tap and deepen the emotions he first felt as a compulsive viewer when he was at an age he believed to be by far the most crucial in everyone’s life. This helps account for his success filming adolescence, as the contributions by Angela Dalle Vacche and Dudley Andrew demonstrate, and, as Martin Lefebvre’s chapter reveals, for the complex body/screen relations all his films establish, including doubles formed  by  mirrors, photos, paintings, and allusions. More generally Truffaut’s recursion to himself as spectator underwrites the pleasure he takes and gives in so assiduously observing, then occasionally flaunting, the pictorial protocols of the classical cinema he grew up with: close-ups, looks, gestures, off-screen spaces; Michel Chion and Tom Conley both explore this aspect of his work. If each Truffaut film is calculated to hold your attention, the entire oeuvre, whether calculated or not, forms an interdependent environment, a “planète.” Unlike Godard’s expanding universe, Truffaut’s planet turns on itself, indeed on himself; Truffaut obsessively restages the terrors of adolescence, of betrayed love, of sublime but destructive passion, as Anne Gillain, John Orr, and Francis Vanoye show; he navigates this planet like a sailor by locating his position under familiar constellations of books and movies, as he travels his interior distances. And he never loses sight of death, the unchanging pole star under which all his films whirl. While he personalizes these obsessions, Truffaut has never claimed them to be his “invention.” Inventiveness lies elsewhere, in what you do with them. Hence his relation to tradition is fraught. As a critic he excoriated “a certain tendency” (as Richard Neupert writes), yet he wrote fondly, reverentially of melodramatists like Griffith and Gance. He loved Hollywood and he proudly called on a line of French progenitors and uncles, including Renoir, Cocteau, Guitry, Becker, Bresson, and Ophüls (whom he took to be French). All of them refreshed the cinema, even in their failed works. How to refresh the legacy one loves? How to make cinema as if one were inventing it from scratch? “It’s all in the petty details of cinematography” James Tweedie quotes Truffaut as saying just as he was launching his career as critic. Tweedie reinforces Richard Neupert’s examination of that career, showing how attuned he was to the “petty details” of filmmaking as these reveal the texture of a world that was modernizing under his eyes and later under his own camera. Truffaut’s New Wave style surely contributed to a world of which he, like his avatar Antoine Doinel, was suspicious. To circumvent its depersonalizing automation, he would have to be rebellious, delinquent, and inventive. And invention comes, for Antoine, from reading, from Balzac. For the next 20 years (1959–1979) Antoine and his creator, Truffaut,

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would proclaim their allegiance to the purity of the literary imagination, novels giving them the courage to author lives of flesh and blood in an increasingly plastic world. Desplechin believes no postwar French director to be more inventive than Truffaut.  Others appear more radical in featuring off-limit subjects or concocting ostentatious stylistic strategies. Truffaut’s inventiveness, by contrast, can be felt in the minute choices – those “petty details of cinematography”– he continually made within films whose subjects are unapologetically generic (La Peau douce, read by Tom Conley, Michel Chion, and Hilary Radner). You just need to look closely; you need even to look at what you don’t see, at the intervals that stretch Truffaut’s space, distending it until its emotion and significance take shape, as Alain Bergala does. You have to be sensitive to what Adrian Martin calls “the untimely moment and the correct distance.” Martin is especially sensitive to the risks Truffaut takes, risks for which he has seldom been given credit. He “approaches the sun with sunglasses on.” His films are full of “incandescent” material, and his characters are, in Desplechin’s term, brûlant (burning, on fire). This applies to his anguished children as much as to his anguished lovers. By restraining thematic violence with narrative and pictorial control, Truffaut manages to lure us into the recesses of the psyche. Francis Vanoye follows him there in a piece he aptly titles “A Fine Madness.” To channel, repeatedly, the subterranean currents that unexpectedly burst to the surface of his narratives, Truffaut relied on a highly structured and controlled aesthetic vision residing in some buried interior space. Like the “madeleine episode” in Proust, physical shocks or the innocuous details of everyday life often lead to emotional memory, the sensory body mediating a psychic topography, as Carlos Losilla and Anne Gillain show. This is where his autobiographical impulse sets him apart from Hitchcock, who inscribed his obsessions on the bodies of others; Truffaut, meanwhile, obstinately tracked his own drives and etched them into the bodies of his films. He often thematized this practice by focusing uncomfortably on the vulnerable bodies of the adolescent (Antoine when given a bath by his mother, or the wild child, Victor, when stretched out nude on an examination table), or on the visibly aching bodies of those driven by sexual passion (especially women, including Adèle, the two English girls, and “the woman next door”). Finally, there is the scandal of corpses, Catherine and Jim incinerated in Jules et Jim (as discussed by Elizabeth Ezra and Dudley Andrew), Bertrand Morane still ogling the women who pour dirt on him in his grave (referenced by Luiza Jatobá and Lúcia Nagib). Few of his films fail to touch on death, with La Chambre verte being an undisguised homage to “nos pauvres morts,” opening as a hymn to the millions lost in the Great War; Françoise Zamour and Philip Watts both foreground this theme. How did Truffaut handle such unflinching awareness of the frightful force of inner drives – of the loneliness, suffering, madness, and death they entail? He did so with rare lightness, thanks to the splendid artistic achievements to which drives can give rise. In the midst of disorder, Truffaut kept faith in reason and in its main instrument, language, to liberate us who are all, at base, wild children needing to grow up.

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He claimed Lubitsch to be his model, in striving for mastery, elegance, and originality. Understanding this, Phil Powrie keeps track of Truffaut’s systematic, yet expressive use of the pan shot, while Junji Hori goes through Truffaut’s ingenious and varied deployment of photographs and of photography, whether to capture a sense of the past or of time passing, to produce sometimes a morbid stillness, or to imply a witness to the events on screen. Truffaut emerges from such analyses almost as an avatar of Racine, a genius who has managed to calculate the infinitesimal motions of the heart, giving near mathematical precision to inner turbulence. He is at once a victim of his passions and prodigiously enlightened about how they can fuel and be contained by his greatest obsession, the cinema. As with many masters, over the years Truffaut’s style increased in its economy as well as in its evocative power. However, the elements he worked with, as Martin Lefebvre demonstrates with a dazzling set of examples, were there from the outset. Truffaut performed stylistic variations on certain themes, manipulating actors, props, and locations whose value he understood and put in play like a composer orchestrating a composition; or, to use an analogy far better suited to him, like a writer over the course of many books, like Balzac, for instance, or Henry James. We must never forget that Truffaut was, before anything else, a reader and a writer. Timothy Corrigan shows him to be a thoroughly literary creature, adapting fiction naturally, because fiction has already adapted the stuff of history and lived experience. Like Roland Barthes, another lover of Balzac and nearly his exact contemporary, Truffaut moved productively from reading to writing, as critic, adaptor, and author. The constellation of characters and situations of La Comédie humaine, which Balzac derived both from history and from fiction, helped Truffaut navigate his own life, including the history he lived through, the encounters he had, the entanglements that producing films involved him in. His two marvelous films on “directing,” La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro, make this abundantly and entertainingly clear, and so this anthology concludes with them. Jean-Michel Frodon excavates Europe’s traumatic history in the theater of the latter film, demonstrating the permeability of Truffaut’s supposedly hermetic cinema even when he was immersed in the hothouse years of the Occupation. Marc Vernet puts the two films in motion like a Möbius strip along which art and life pursue one another interminably. His conclusion – and the final words of this anthology – give a new twist to the crucial notion of adaptation: “It’s the films that are the remakes, not life.” Yes, Truffaut’s life and his films never ceased feeding on one another, to the point of exhaustion. Did he dry up his life to irrigate his art? Yet his movies hold the secret to that life. In an issue of Cahiers du Cinéma ( July–August 2004) devoted to Truffaut, Hou Hsiao-Hsien summed up this paradox by recounting a fable. Once long ago, the  king of the seas, disappointed that his daughter had married a mere scholar, locked her in his palace deep under the ocean. The distraught scholar was so intent on recovering his bride that he enlisted a genie to evaporate the seas by boiling them. Confronted with this disaster, the king returned his daughter to her husband. François Truffaut, Hou Hsiao-hsien implies, is just such a “passionate scholar,” burning with desire but well-versed in the magic of cinema, so that, in the face of authority

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and convention, he boils to extinction everything that stands in the way of what he loves. Ultimately, however, it is the cinema itself that Truffaut loves. We pledged, in setting out to edit this anthology, that we would touch both the heat  of Truffaut’s films and the coolness of his cinematographic intelligence. We think we have done just that, by gathering for our contributors an array of sensitive viewers–reviewers from around the world, writing in different languages and representing distinct traditions. The discoveries they each made in encountering Truffaut demonstrate that, while time inevitably removes the sheen from the novelty of films (and certainly from something datable called the “New” Wave), this process also exposes layers of significance beneath; and with the veneer gone, a close look at the grain reveals a great deal about the texture of these films and how they were made. We believe this volume will prove beyond a doubt that time is on Truffaut’s side. Dudley Andrew Anne Gillain

Filmography

1954 Une Visite (A Visit) (short) 1957 Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers) (short) 1958 Une Histoire d’eau (A Story of Water) (short) 1959 Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows) 1960 Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) 1962 Jules et Jim ( Jules and Jim) 1962 Antoine et Colette (Antoine and Colette) (first sketch of L’Amour à vingt ans (Love at Twenty)) 1964 La Peau douce (The Soft Skin) 1966 Fahrenheit 451 1967 La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) 1968 Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) 1969 La Sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid) 1970 L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) 1970 Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board) 1971 Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls) 1972 Une Belle Fille comme moi (Such a Gorgeous Kid like Me) 1973 La Nuit américaine (Day for Night) 1975 L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (The Story of Adele H.) 1976 L’Argent de poche (Small Change or Pocket Money) 1977 L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) 1978 La Chambre verte (The Green Room) 1979 L’Amour en fuite (Love on the Run) 1980 Le Dernier Métro (The Last Metro) 1981 La Femme d’à côté (The Woman Next Door) 1983 Vivement dimanche! (Confidentially Yours or Finally, Sunday!)

Part I

La Planète Truffaut

1

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I Truffaut and His Position Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew Paris, June 18, 2010 “Je suis un converti” q:

When did you start watching Truffaut’s films? In your childhood?

d:

No. Quite late, quite late. I remember a screening of Les 400 Coups [1959] when I was twenty-nine, something like that.

q:

Before that you had not seen any of his films?

d:

Oh no, I saw all of them, for sure, but they didn’t register with me, since these are films which belong to my father’s generation, not mine. You know, I really hate the idea of showing films to kids. So, sure, they showed Truffaut at school, but it left no impression. … Perhaps it wasn’t Les 400 Coups. It was L’Enfant sauvage [1970]; yes. I remember, I saw that one when I was still in primary school. It was part of the social life of every young pupil. So I knew of them early but hadn’t really seen them, not till I was twenty-nine. Till then I was stupid. I love to admit I was stupid, because it means that something happened in my life to have changed me. For me at twenty-nine something happened.

q:

What were the circumstances?

d:

It was at film school. A bunch of us were discussing what it meant to be a director when watching films. We were mainly thinking of Pialat and the films of the generation after the New Wave: Eustache, Garrel, Doillon. As for the New Wave itself, I mean for us it was already just history. Perhaps I remember so clearly this screening of Les 400 Coups because I hadn’t seen the film on a screen

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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since I was twelve. I knew it by heart, but through video. Then came this big-screen experience, and perhaps I was mature enough then to be able to see how each raccord, each cut was shocking. There was something brutal and subtle in the filmmaking that I missed before because I thought I knew what cinema was about, yet I was so wrong. After that, from say 1990, I started to see all his films again, and to work on them, and to see how they were made. But I couldn’t see all this when I was young. I just didn’t see it. So, je suis un converti. That’s why I’m such a fanatic. [laughs] q:

What did you like about the films, what struck you?

d:

There was something, in every cut, that allowed each shot to exist of its own volition. Usually when you link two shots, you’re putting them in the service of a story, but here, on the contrary, the shots retain their integrity, their will.  Every  shot is a unit of thought: “We are going to film that!” You see a woman, you see  her face, you see her directly for a certain time. You see the mother. You see the table. You see everything, including the filmmaking. You see the tracking camera. You see all the angles, very clearly. Sometimes it can be extremely subtle, but not in Les 400 Coups, where it is obvious: chaque plan existe comme une volonté. You don’t find that in Pialat.

q:

Nothing is gratuitous?

d:

Yes, there is a dramaturgical thought each time. The entire screen is occupied by  this dramaturgical thought nothing is given to some vague naturalism, nothing to chance, nothing to the plot. … There’s only cinema, nothing but that. Everything is called for, even the weaknesses are called for whatever is there is  wanted, wanted for support, just as beautiful as in Howard Hawks or The Searchers [John Ford, 1956]. All at once, I managed to really sense with each shot  how he was going to show this or that. I could see each shot and what he was doing. He would say, “I’m going to make a shot very simple like that.” I could see all the shots individually and as they fit together. Well, I was stupefied, because I had never seen this before.

q:

Why has his work not really been valued at its proper level? It’s underestimated particularly in the US, but also in France, where it is sometimes considered bourgeois, not advanced enough. Why this reaction?

d:

The other day I was rereading the book of interviews you assembled, Anne, Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut.1 It’s like the Bible to me, just as useful as the Hitchcock/Truffaut. It’s so technical. It’s amazingly useful. And you had this great idea to group the interviews around each film and include the years, so the  reader can see the development of his thinking: what he thinks of a film he has just made in ’68, then what he thinks of the same film a year later, then later still. It’s so great to have this. There are very few books useful to directors. There’s the big illustrated Scorsese,2 which is very good. There’s the Hitchcock/ Truffaut and then there’s Le Cinéma selon Truffaut. I reread the section yesterday

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on Tirez sur le pianiste [1960]. What he says at the outset is magnifique. Going back to the success of Les 400 Coups, he says, “Les 400 Coups belonged to the public who doesn’t really like cinema, to the spectator who goes to the movies twice a year.” Now this is so mean, so mean! “It belonged to the audience of René Clair or of The Bridge on the River Kwai [David Lean, 1957] which is the audience I fear most in the world.” (I too don’t like those choosey guys who just go to the movies twice a year to see a talked-about film. Nowadays they decide to go see, let’s say, the new film by Haneke. This is the audience I myself fear.) And this is what he was thinking about when he knew Tirez sur le pianiste would fail. He says, “I felt watched by this audience and their expectations; so I was glad to send everyone and his father packing,” which is a joke … “everyone and his brother.” And so he made a film, Tirez sur le pianiste, against the public, which is a sin, and we all know that it’s a sin, but he’s saying, “I committed that sin. I’ve made a film against a sort of audience that I don’t like. The people who don’t really love cinema.” So I guess this is part of my answer, the fact that you have to accept the idea that Truffaut’s work is pure cinema. We know that the audience for true cinema is smaller and smaller. Each year it’s shrinking. Perhaps that’s one reason. q:

One would have thought that precisely this diminishing group, the elitist cinephiles, rejected Truffaut the most. L’Argent de poche [1976] was very badly received by American intellectuals. They found it a minor film, charming but insignificant.

d:

But L’Argent de poche is not an easy film for me. It has this mania for story, actually for a series of small stories. Each shot is a story. It seems to be a realist and naturalist movie, but each shot goes against naturalism and realism. Each shot is an absolute story, as if Truffaut thought, how can I make it shorter, briefer,  neater, stronger? And the actors, because he can’t guide them since they’re just kids, turn it into pure life. First Truffaut brings the forms – these short stories which are so neat – and into this neat drawing he welcomes the pure, raw, life, brought by the kids, with all their disorder. Remember the long scene where the boy throws the cat out the window; you can’t direct kids or pets. The way that it’s shot and organized and edited, is like a classical narrative film from 1937 or so, but using very different materials, so there is a strong contrast between the formality of the filmmaking and the material which is used, which is pure life. Organizing pure life into a shape which belongs to the late thirties, we have to admire that; if not we are blind. I was guilty of this elitist view of Truffaut myself. I’m saying that I was stupid; I admit it (which means that I’m still stupid, and will discover in ten years I am stupid now). So I made that elitist mistake, which I think is something that belongs mainly, but not only, to the French. It’s also a generational thing. I know that when I was, say, between fourteen and twenty-five or something like that – let’s say twenty-two – I thought that the New Wave was Pialat and Eustache. … I didn’t know exactly the dates of the real New Wave, or what their goal was; plus

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I didn’t know the books – you know, Bazin – and I didn’t know the history of Cahiers du Cinéma, because, again, this was not my generation, it was my father’s.

The New Wave and Modernity q:

So your prejudice against Truffaut came from a prejudice against the New Wave?

d:

In fact, the reason is even more stupid. We are talking about why Truffaut is ignored and about the received ideas circulating in France, and therefore also in  the United States and therefore also in Japan. “How come I don’t feel like seeing a ‘French film’?” The clichéd answer is, “Because it is going to be some New Wave thing.” What people mean by “New Wave” here is: a political subject, social implications, no camera work, and it is going to be boring. But actually, if  you take all the New Wave films, there is not a single social topic really addressed; there is only fiction, inspired by Balzac, or by the American detective novel, never inspired by political stuff and not aiming at naturalism, which is their enemy. Even Resnais, who dealt with massive political and historical issues, he’s such a formalist! Why does everyone revert to such commonplace notions, such clichés, when they talk of him?

q:

Why is such a well-known movement not better understood?

d:

Actually, another thing which misled so many people: the New Wave guys were  such cinephiles, which meant that they promoted whoever did the contrary of what they were doing. Sure they liked what they themselves were doing, but they accepted the idea of the opposite and were curious to see the next generation. Truffaut was so generous because he had been raised by Bazin in the idea of loving all kinds of cinema. Godard is bitter, so this question is different in relation to him, but it still operates. What this means is that as soon as new guys arrive on the scene with ideas opposite to the idea of the New Wave, they were still accepted. “I will be modern, I will put modernity in my film,” says Garrel; or “I will be political, I will be social,” says another; or “I will be linked to the new American cinema;” or “I will be linked to the political engagement of British cinema.” Truffaut bankrolled these ideas; he was ready for new blood, new methods. … Why not? He said, “Let’s do it, yeah. This new guy’s a terrific filmmaker. Let’s put L’Enfance nue [Pialat’s film produced by Truffaut in 1968] on screen; it will be great because it’s the antithesis of Les 400 Coups.” So, fifteen years after the New Wave, I come along in 1975, and I stupidly think these two films are the same because of what I was reading at the time.

q:

So there was an amalgam between two generations with divergent aesthetic goals.

d:

I was not able to understand that in terms of periods in art, such as you read about in Panofsky or Elie Faure (fauvism, for example), the New Wave is a completely different period from these later filmmakers, whom I guess we could call

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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les nouveaux réalistes – Pialat, Doillon, etc. – though we have no set name for this movement. Anyway, as soon as Doillon arrived, trying to make a small film in the seventies, the former New Wave directors, even Chabrol, immediately said nice things about him. But in fact the generation following the New Wave – I mean Pialat and the rest of them – these people don’t know a thing about cinema. I mean: they play reality against cinema. In their interviews, they were always saying how the New Wave was uninteresting, not really deeply socially involved, etc. That’s what I read when I arrived in Paris, and so that’s what I thought too. q:

Truffaut actually said that he had no feel for the modern world yet he produced Pialat’s film nevertheless.

d:

Yes, it seems strange that he was a producer for Pialat, but actually, it’s not really so strange, quite the opposite. Not being a “modern” himself, he wanted to produce one. It seems to me that none of them, none of the New Wave, was truly modern. Okay, Rivette may claim to be modern, but he gives you bits of  Balzac done in crêpe-paper costumes. And Rohmer is hardly modern obviously. And even with Godard, it’s funny, but you get the feeling that their films were not made by young men; they are films created by people very, very distant from Pialat, or from Eustache, the next generation. This is a very French issue. I  remember when I was an adolescent and I saw Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain [1973], which is a very Truffaldian film in many ways. Is it modern? You may really wonder. It’s paradoxical. Who would listen to songs by Fréhel3 (as Jean-Pierre Léaud does in that film)? In the seventies I used to listen to the English Mods, angry young men, not Frehel. I find it ridiculous, but this may be a French characteristic, this business of having problems with modernity.

q:

Truffaut often said that he was mixing different time periods in his films. Les 400 Coups are set in the fifties with childhood memories from the forties.

d: Yes. Actually I watched L’Argent de poche last night. It is quite surprising because when the kids go to the movies, they watch newsreels that look like they are from the forties. Plus nostalgia for the silent cinema is embedded in that one kid who has never learned how to speak. You really can’t orient yourself to what you are watching in L’Argent de poche, and don’t really know in what period it was made. Personally this doesn’t bother me because, in any case, there is nothing that’s modern or fashionable in that film. One of the strengths of this film and of Truffaut in general is that he never tries to seem up to date. This may come from the impact of Bazin’s writings. You obviously know these better than I do. Bazin’s idea of “cinema being committed to reality” is so crucial. But what is reality? Here, as filmmakers, we come to what happens inside the camera, whether you want it or not. Clearly for Bazin, it would be foolish for the filmmaker to try to be “modern” or to “put something really modern” into your camera, because what is in the camera – what will be screened – belongs to

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the mystery of the camera itself. So Truffaut accepts being old-fashioned, knowing that the bodies that he’s filming are contemporary bodies. He can’t stop an actor from belonging to his own period, so he won’t try to put himself or his ego in the place of that actor, since the process of cinema is connected to reality as such. If you put yourself between the camera and reality, you will stop the mystery of cinema, which is an idea coming straight from Bazin. So it’s not me, the filmmaker, who should try to be modern; modernity has to exist in the relationship between the camera and what is filmed … accepting the fact that the  filmed bodies, their way of acting, their way of moving, are modern by definition. It’s a Bazinian definition of reality. q:

There are some allusions to social or political events in Truffaut’s film. At the beginning of Baisers volés [1968] you see the closed doors of the Cinémathèque which alludes to André Malraux decision to fire Henri Langlois in 1968. In L’Amour en fuite [1979], Antoine Doinel and his wife illustrate a new law regarding the divorce par consentement mutuel.

d:

Yes, I remember, I had just moved to Paris when I first saw L’Argent de poche, and was upset by one thing, which is still a problem to me. I felt ill at ease with the way that poverty is shown. The way one of the kids is dressed: is he a North African or a Gypsy? At the time, I thought Truffaut’s film seemed so Giscardien. And at one point you can hear the voice of Giscard d’Estaing coming from the TV people are watching. Today, with a little more knowledge about the France I was living in, I  know that Giscard was the first to recognize the rights of families to be reunited, the families from North Africa. This is stupefying since it means that for twenty years before that time men had lived as bachelors in awful conditions. I recall as a child of thirteen or so seeing Giscard d’Estaing on TV arriving in some camp where Harkis were living in caves it’s incredible to  think they had been living that way for twenty years. All this is forgotten now, but in 1974 people were living in caves right in the middle of France. No electricity, no water, just these holes in the rocks where they had been living since they had first come over.

q:

L’Argent de poche was shot in ’74, the same year?

d:

Yeah, the same year. That’s when le regroupement familial (the family reuniting act) was finally voted in. It was done with Giscard d’Estaing as president and Jacques Chirac as prime minister. So Truffaut brings this up in his way in this film that I thought, “It’s so unpolitical, it’s not radical enough, etc.” Yet it’s the only film where you feel this major social event, even if it’s just acting. As a filmmaker I say “acting,” but if I were a philosopher I would say it’s acknowledging the fact that this year, in 1974 at last, something like one of the worst injustices that France committed stopped. And this is signaled in the film both in the movie theater with the documentary about France, and in the voice-over on the radio. It says that it’s better when a father is allowed to see his wife and his kids rather than having them split on two sides of the Mediterranean.

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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q:

Few viewers, even in France, would probably catch this allusion. It is quite “indirect,” to use a word Truffaut liked.

d:

That’s Truffaut’s way of putting reality in his film, as if saying, “I’m doing the film this very year. This is it. It’s not me speaking as an artist this is not my opinion.” So in a way, being old-fashioned and trying to describe his own childhood, he is describing France at that moment, in 1974. This allows such a reality to enter into the screen and get into the plot. Because he thinks that since you can read this in the newspaper, he better add this voice at the editing table. So what’s the real news in France that year? Well, he may not be showing us anything about strikes, but these things between Algeria and France, it is a very subtle, nice, and moral way of showing all this. You hear Giscard say, “Le peuple Algérien a à faire avec” … and later you notice that the hairdresser is named Fatima. So you get to see in a very subtle, wise way a sort of network that tries to take on some of the relationship of what it is to be French and North African at the same time. But me, I couldn’t see it at the time, because I would have preferred something more radical.

Les 400 Coups q:

The consensus about Truffaut is that he makes films of the past in the present because of his autobiographical inspirations. It starts with Les 400 Coups, of course.

d:

Autobiography is certainly part of it, but the film mixes in Hitchcock’s life as  well! The famous story of Hitchcock’s father bringing his son to the police station when Hitch was five. … That’s what strikes me at the beginning of the scene in Les 400 Coups, when the father takes his own son to jail. We see angels rotating in two large store windows because it’s Christmas time. It’s like a sort of odd fairy tale, because of these department store windows. So is it a

Figure 1.1

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew

fairy tale or not? I love the father’s character, how nice he is. There’s nothing really mean about him. Truffaut must have asked himself: so how can I tell this story without being judgmental about my characters? If there’s something awful, it’s just because of the plot, because what’s happening to the young boy is awful; but there is no general evil, certainly not in this man who is really lost, though he’s sure he is doing the right thing. So it’s not just a mean father putting his son in jail. Sure there is Truffaut’s personal involvement since he is using part of his life, but there is also a strong cinephilic commitment because he’s doing it à la Hitchcock. After that opening the jail scene becomes so simple, just a documentary … plus. q:

Like Jacques Demy playing one of the policemen?

d:

Yes, another small “plus,” is the fact that those policemen are playing a board game with horses, and because of that, all the characters become something like merry-go-round figures: then, you have these three prostitutes, and then later, as Antoine’s being taken away, he notices a sort of merry-go-round in the street fair. The first thing is to accept these characters as they are. It took me a decade to understand what Hitchcock and Rossellini meant when they said, “We are not psychological.” And Truffaut at the same time was saying that he  was deeply interested in the psychology of his characters. But not to be psychological means simply to use characters as they are, as Truffaut uses the cops, who seem so nice, all of them; it’s their job which is terrible. The boy is handed from one cop to the next (“He’s yours, he’s yours”); after that the prostitutes enter, then he sleeps. Next the cop says, “Le carrosse est arrivé.” He uses this word “coach” because of the three prostitutes. Forget psychology. You have these pure shapes, these three prostitutes, just like in a fairy tale, the three witches, the three fairies … something like that. So in a way, what I mean about not being psychological is that each character, if the dialogue is good, utters a sort of absolute truth. You find the same formal composition at the beginning of La Sirène du Mississippi [1969]. There again you have three ladies, as in many fairy tales, and one man. While Belmondo is in front of a mirror, getting ready because he’s about to get married, there is a cut to three women working there. The first asks, “Is what they say true: they say he has never seen his bride?” And the next adds, “He doesn’t even know what she looks like.” And the third answers, “Of course he does; they must have exchanged photos.” It’s a scene that seems totally  realist, but the storytelling lets you really feel the rigor of the writing, since the form is so strong. Truffaut gives you “the three” just to make it more legible, more neat. He doesn’t want to impose his point of view [on] the audience, saying “Look how clever I am because in a way it’s a fairy tale,” and so you don’t notice the shape of it. So in Les 400 Coups, when the cop says, “Le carrosse est arrivé,” he means that, in a way, this is a fairy-tale coach plus a paddy wagon. So even if the kid is crying in that paddy wagon, these may be fake tears (he’s not using Cassavetes-type acting), because it’s magical at the same time. And the music is so obviously

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

Figure 1.2

11

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

there to underline everything. His final ride in the city turned out to be a good ride, since for once, as a kid, he can see Paris. And, it’s night, so you have the street carnival, and you have the images of the prostitutes, nudes. It’s something magical, with the neon, the street lamps; it’s something desirable in a  way, like a dream. Is it awfully sad, or is it magic? “It’s both,” is Truffaut’s answer. Here you can even start to feel a connection to Bresson, because each shot is pure; this is not realism, it’s not the capturing of reality, not recording reality. It’s all about making a film, which means to organize the space. q:

The camera is never still.

d:

Never. It’s always tracking. Just like the tracking in The Wrong Man [Hitchcock, 1956], when Henry Fonda goes inside the jail while outside there’s this same sort of tracking. This paddy wagon scene comes from a film lover; it’s a bit of Bresson.

q:

What do you think about the striking shot in the jail sequence of the policeman in silhouette at the end of the corridor? It’s rare for Truffaut to give you a kind of postcard shot. But It’s so very beautiful.

d:

It has to be frightening too. I guess that, while not wanting to describe the cops as bad cops, he shows you that, within the system, they are pigs. Come on, the boy’s twelve, he’s being put in jail. So once at least Truffaut has to film the fact that this is absolute terror, and that inadmissible violence is being done to this kid. He’s not asking the actors to impersonate the violence of the scene, but as a filmmaker he organizes the violence and shows that it’s something you have to condemn, the violence, that is, not my actors. He chooses an actor to play the cop who is well known in France, because he has a face which is quite terrifying, but he’s really nice. There is always this kind of contrast in Truffaut that I so love because he’s putting the burden on his own shoulders. “I have to do it, if I want to say something to the audience, then I have to say it; I won’t ask an actor to express something that is my job to express.”

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Since I have a young kid these days, I can reconnect with my own perception of life from, let’s say, two to ten years old. Sometimes you have this image when your parents or some adults are driving you in the night, and you catch glimpses of things, often just the lights, shapes. Truffaut uses this kind of perceptual memory, reconnecting with his own perception of the forbidden world, the world of adults (prostitution, the street carnival), which is both desirable and dangerous at the same time. It’s a dream and a nightmare. C’est magnifique. q:

And it comes with this strange graphic effect of the camera staying the same distance from the paddy wagon, looking at his face, while still moving around. It’s almost as if it were done in a studio with a rear projection, providing a very strange feeling, maybe a Hitchcock-type of rear projection.

d:

Truffaut saw so very many films, he knows you can be moved by a scene that uses rear projection. Look at American cinema. You are not obliged to go out onto the Parisian streets all the time. Just making it for real won’t help you, because everything must come from the conception of the shot. Then after that,  if you have the money, you say let’s go into the studio and do it with rear  projection, and if you have no money, you say let’s do it in the street and just move the camera slightly, the thing will work, if the emotion is real. And so they grab images of Paris, and that’s enough. It’s so clever. No, clever is the wrong word: it’s so moving.

q:

It’s all about trying to organize emotions in a sequence.

d:

Yeah, and to have a lot of different colors of emotion, and to jump from the emotion to the idea. It’s more than the kid crying in the paddy wagon because he will be taken far from Paris, or because of his father. It’s not just to make us  cry it’s to make us think about it, to realize that the system shouldn’t be like this, or that the paddy wagon he’s riding in is also a carriage from a fairy tale. So the sequence is between ideas and feelings, and that is something which exists only in films. I don’t know exactly if it’s emotion or thinking. It’s ideas on screen, it’s mise-en-scène.

q:

What about the script construction? It is very linear, very classical. We follow the character from beginning to end.

d:

Not really linear. It’s more like Bergman’s Summer with Monika [1953]. We always imagine that something like two-thirds of Monika takes place on the island, which is wrong, because it’s a three-part movie with three different genres. The beginning part is like a French film, with two young workers and the bad capitalist. They are bored with their parents and authority and capitalism … so, it’s a French film. Even the style – the lighting, etc. – is what you could call réalisme poétique (Carné, that sort of film). Then you have the second part that we all remember, going to the island, which actually is just a third of the movie. And after that, you have a sort of prequel of what that Bergman will do later: a bitter endless domestic dispute. The woman is double-checking on the husband after the birth of their

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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kid.  And so you have modern life, which is a film quite different from the two others, very dreary, very dark, very brutal, as you know, like Scenes from a Marriage [Bergman, 1973] or Passion of Anna [Bergman, 1969], that kind of dark, dismal film. … Look at the set, just a naked wall, and a face, the woman, saying to the man, “I despise you,” in a very crude way. So we really have three tales. One social tale, one utopia on the island, and the last part, a sort of existentialist kind of novel. q:

And how does Monika relate to 400 Coups?

d:

Because you have several tales in one film. And you can see that Truffaut thinks, okay, maybe it’s too cheesy, the relationship between the boy and the young bloke in school. But not at all, it’s a little novel, filmed that way. I haven’t seen the film in ten years, but there’s the scene in René’s large attic bedroom when the  two of them escape from school one afternoon. And then you have his relationship with the mother, and it’s very different, it’s really crude and he adds the father into the mix with the two of them. Then the school is something else. Finally there’s that last part of the movie, a sort of cry for freedom or something like that. The middle part of Monika was sort of a cry for freedom too. I can see that Truffaut knows Monika by heart, saying, “I will do this part that way, this one I’ll do this way, this one is like that.” I can always see the solution to the mise-en-scène that he’s finding to tell the story in a very straightforward way. The beauty is to see in short segments how the man is finding a way of going straight to the point, but in a cinematic way.

q:

There’s a tension between recounting a story which is a line that goes somewhere and the fullness of each shot being sufficiently autonomous. We know Truffaut doesn’t want his films to stop moving. When he was planning Fahrenheit 451 [1966] they wanted to bring Richard Avedon to show him how to work with color. He said, “Avedon’s a still photographer, I don’t want a still photographer to show me how to do color because cinema’s not part of plastic arts, it’s dynamic, it’s a flow.” And his hatred of Antonioni … he doesn’t want things to sit. You say, I think rightly, that each shot in Les 400 Coups goes right to  the heart of what’s supposed to happen then, but that moment also has a place within the larger project too, within the story. So how do you go from each shot being perfect in itself to Truffaut never wanting the film to slow down?

d: Many of his films, not all of them, but many, have great shifts. They don’t have just one story; I mean, they’re going here and there. And so in Les 400 Coups, you follow this young guy, but you have several stories, and the film has  at least  three parts. L’Histoire d’Adèle H. [1975] has just one point, one obsession, and there are other films too where you have a straight line: La Chambre verte [1978] is a bit like that, or La Femme d’à côté [1981], which is a straight journey. But in most of his films you can see how he loves to jump around, like in all the Doinel films. And in Jules et Jim [1962] and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent [1971] you have chapters. He loved novels, so sometimes he made films like novels.

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Tirez sur le pianiste q:

What about the abrupt change of style in Tirez sur le pianiste? You mentioned that the film was “made against” a certain type of audience. Tell us about the big transgressions: the mirror, where you see the caricature of the two gangsters, and the scene when one of those gangsters says, “May my mother drop dead,” and you see it happen. These are huge transgressions against the story, and Truffaut risks it even before Godard does. A Bout de souffle [Godard, 1960] doesn’t go this far. With Les Carabiniers [1963], Godard began to sabotage his plots, but Truffaut started earlier.

d:

Yeah, he loves to do that; although later Truffaut would say that he interrupted the story line too often with such scenes, that he went too far from time to time. Let’s look at the scene that really exemplifies that kind of break; it’s when Charlie and Lena are being followed by the two gangsters at night after work. Charlie’s feeling is so important for Truffaut, it’s so full that he needs to add a voice-over to underscore this. So is this meant to interrupt the story for us? On the contrary, it’s another layer of storytelling, because the guy is full of Murnau’s movies and Renoir’s silent movies. Then come the close-ups, and after that the extreme close-up, and you see Charlie counting with his fingers, and then he’s doing a mime face, and the girl is laughing. In this quick flow of shots next comes the wonderful poetic idea which belongs to silent movies: the mirror with gangsters framed in it. After that the couple escapes, and then you have the wonderful gesture where she touches Charlie’s shoulder. Touching the shoulder, yeah, but what does it mean? She’s okay to go a little bit farther, but how far does it mean, the shoulder? And because Charlie is thinking about this, you have the voice-over during the tracking shot, but when the camera tracks back to a wider shot the girl has disappeared just like in a fairy tale. He gives us one line of monologue about jazz musicians because he’s a pianist and it’s over. Amazing scene: every ten seconds, a new idea, I mean it keeps going like that. The craft here is just amazing. So in this film those little transgressions are supposed to  deliver more cinematic thrills, not ruin the storytelling, and Truffaut was desperate when it didn’t work. All the interviews about Tirez sur le pianiste are heartbreaking because he’s really hard on himself: “Where did I fail?” Yet today we want to say, “Nowhere, you failed nowhere.”

q:

Truffaut is so rambunctious in Tirez sur le pianiste. He jumps from comedy to melodrama in a single pan. Remember the little boy and the two gangsters in the gas station, where the boy drives the car? It’s hilarious, but then the camera pans and you see Charlie and Lena heading to the mountains in another car. This pan connects the joke with a very deep feeling, made deeper by the song on the radio and by the alternation of black and white as the sun glints off the snow on the windshield.

d:

Truffaut always gives you more stories rather than less. I like to quote a line that I read in the files at the BiFi,4 where he writes, “Please, not an idea in four

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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minutes, but four ideas in one minute.” And he delivers four ideas; you can count them on your fingers. As the first sequence closes, you have Aznavour at the piano, and the bar owner arrives and you get four topics of conversation including the revelation that “the girl is in love with you.” They talk about the quality of girls, about the barman’s being ugly, until the voice-over returns when Charlie gives his wonderful line, “Scared. I’m scared; shit, I’m scared.” Now all this is done as a single scene, with some shot-reverse shot but mainly in one continuous take. Had this been shot by Antonioni you would have had one scene too but only with the guy saying, “I’m scared … actually perhaps I’m scared,” and it would take four minutes for him to get to the point of saying that. But in Truffaut inside this single scene, you actually have four or five or six scenes. So that’s what amazes me, how he fills the screen with ideas, just like Hitchcock always said to. q:

Like the silent inserts of the barman, Plyne, while the gangsters explain how he gave them Charlie’s and Lena’s addresses.

d:

Something struck me in one of Truffaut’s interviews you edited, Anne. Talking about Tirez sur le pianiste, he worries that he made a mistake in the way he treated the barman. Worrying about the audience, which is an obsession of a pure filmmaker, he says, “I was too nice to Plyne.” When Aznavour kills him the audience is upset with the star and when that happens Truffaut realizes that the bastard in his movie does not do his job. He thinks about this years after the film’s release, still trying to understand. In another interview, this one from 1961, just after the film came out, he talks about the importance of showing a type of woman rare in French cinema in those days. Speaking about Marie Dubois he says, “I want women who come from real life, not stars.”

q:

What about the raincoat she wears?

d:

That, too, I find that it is part of his attitude toward women in film. When an interviewer asked him, “Why did you use an unknown actress for the principal female role?” (since, in fact, Marie Dubois was totally unknown), you can feel the anger of the French film establishment, given the fact that there were loads of young actresses under thirty then. Here’s what Truffaut answered [Desplechin reads from the interview in French]: “Yes, French cinema has at its disposal a wide array of young actresses who are less than thirty years old and whose artificiality is appalling to me; these Mylènes, these Pascales, these Danys, these Pierrettes, these Luciles, these Danicks, are neither ‘real’ young girls, nor ‘real’ women, but ‘broads,’ ‘dames,’ ‘pin-ups.’” Everything he hates. It’s almost a line which could be given to Jean-Paul Belmondo in La Sirène du Mississippi when he’s talking with Catherine Deneuve about parasites. Truffaut goes on: “You have the sense that they have been created for cinema and would not exist if cinema did not exist. That’s why I wanted to take an unknown actress for the main part of Tirez sur le pianiste. Marie Dubois is neither ‘spicy’ nor ‘mischievous’ but she is a young, pure, and dignified woman with whom one could ‘likely’ fall in love.”5

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What Truffaut says here is right. A sudden freedom comes when you realize that the cinema is not young any longer, that young actresses already know all the film codes. So how can you refresh it? Well, he does it in an old-fashioned way, but which seemed actually quite fresh when the film was released, because Marie Dubois doesn’t possess the codes that the French cinema is trying to impose. In fact there are two codes – how the woman is supposed to look and act and how the man is supposed to look and behave – and Marie Dubois upsets these causing an equality between men and women. Look at their two raincoats; I mean there is something really lovely in it. q:

But the raincoat makes me think of Le Quai des brumes [Marcel Carné, 1938] and Michèle Morgan.

d:

Sure but what’s new since the 1930s? Look, he’s a man, she’s a woman; so if a  guy  tries to impress her, she will try to impress him too. There is a sort of challenge between the two characters. … It’s modern love. … Finally women are allowed to be thinking; plus she’s making fun of him. She has a very childish way of embarrassing him. “She refused me,” he realizes, and then she’s laughing. Usually it’s the man of thirty treating the woman of twenty-three that way, but the parts have changed. She’s got the upper hand.

Les Deux Anglaises et le continent and Jules et Jim q:

What do you think of the notion that the second half of Truffaut’s career is a  complete betrayal of the first half, that he’s become academic? Is there a transformation or, on the contrary, a continuity?

d:

For me, the continuity is total.

q:

But the manner of making films has changed. Instead of natural decors, he’s now working in the studios.

d: Because it’s a lot simpler to construct certain sets than find them. In Vivement dimanche! [1983] you have both a studio and not a studio, just like the use of the studio in Je vous présente Paméla, the movie being shot inside La  Nuit  Américaine [1973]. There’s mainly studio work in Le Dernier Métro [1980] since of course there are sets, but you also find natural decors. At the end of his career, Truffaut was underestimated in the way he did things. I can feel it with people of his own generation; it’s fascinating to talk to Jean Douchet, for instance, who missed the point. Or the woman who edited Les 400 Coups. The people who worked with him, sometimes they are so blind. They don’t get it. It’s strange. q:

Actually it started with La Sirène du Mississippi which was a total flop and even more with Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. It was a critical and financial disaster.

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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d:

Today, if there’s a film that you can’t contest, an absolute masterpiece in the history of cinema, it’s Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. Do we like it or not? That’s another question. I don’t like Antonioni (just as Truffaut didn’t like him), but I can see when he has made a masterpiece. I remember this line of dialogue, this line – I would cut my finger to write such a line – “Why are you touching me?” “Because you come from the earth and I think I like that.” How great is that! Because it’s so brief, it’s neat, it’s absolute, and it leads perfectly to the following scene. Now that’s good storytelling. But then someone of Truffaut’s own generation says, “Oh no, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent is a silly movie; it can’t work because Jean-Pierre Léaud can’t seduce two women; he’s too skinny for that.” This reminds me of this American book I read that claims the French are ridiculous since they seem to like having fat men seduce women, like Jean Gabin when he was sixty-five. In America there are nice thin actors. The release of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent was such a disaster that they took back the prints from the theaters. How heartbreaking it must have been. They cut and pasted right on the positive release prints, and quickly re-released it. They recovered the six or ten prints on Sunday and put it back on screen again the next Wednesday, after reworking it. But it was useless.

q:

How do you explain this terrible failure?

d:

There’s no star in it. It’s too dry. If you love the film you have to do part of the job. The actors won’t do it for you. There’s no movie star doing it for you. I think the three players actually do a great job, but not the job of a movie star. So you, the audience, have to do it. In Jules et Jim, he had a star, he had Jeanne Moreau and it was a miracle. I’m not sure that an audience accepts the two male  characters because, okay, Henri Serre we know was not that fascinating an actor in those days, and Oskar Werner may have become a movie star in the US, but in France, come on. He was nothing. Remember Prince of the City [1981], a strange American film, a film I love by Sydney Lumet? Well in that movie, you have this tough Italian cop with his wife, and they go to the movies. They are in line for tickets, and Treat Williams says, “I can impersonate Marlon Brando or  I  can impersonate Oskar Werner.” It was so snobbish, that line. I couldn’t believe that a cop would say that. The joke doesn’t work in France, because Oskar Werner was unknown. Anyway, it’s true, these two men don’t have the power of Jeanne Moreau. It’s shocking how strong she is.

q:

Les Deux Anglaises et le continent deals with a material that abruptly contrasts with Jules et Jim. It gives a harsh depiction of love.

d:

The feelings which are explored are quite uncomfortable. This film comes from 1971, and I try to imagine what it was like not for girls of my age (I was eleven) but for the friends of my older sister. Truffaut gives you what it’s like when you are a woman having sex for the first time: “This is how it is,” he seems to say. I mean, it’s raw and crude: no bullshit, this is what it’s about. And the discussion after that, when one sister, Anne, is speaking about sex and saying,

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“So I met that man, Diurka, and he is good for my art, he will help me. Each time he talks, he teaches me things. But in bed, I can say I’m not that fond of Diurka; it’s okay, I mean, it feels safe.” She’s saying such things to her lover, “I feel safe with Diurka”; “We still have good sex, but it’s not that passionate.” Then she takes Léaud by the hand, and says, “Okay, let’s have sex right now because actually I’m leaving Paris in something like half an hour, so we just have enough time,” while the voice-over lets us know that Léaud is not okay with the idea, that he doesn’t like this moment. Yet they do have sex, and in bright daylight. It’s quite shocking, taken as it is in one very long shot, so it feels quite crude. Indeed it’s brutal, the fact of two sisters being in love with the same man. For an audience it can be quite crude. q:

And Léaud doesn’t have much heft. He is small and he plays a small man.

d:

That’s what all those people of Truffaut’s generation were complaining about, Douchet, that editor, etc. … but for me, it’s not an obstacle, because for me Henri Serres, who plays Jim in Jules et Jim, he has no charisma, and Léaud has a lot of charisma. In the scene where he explains how brothels work he’s so funny and strange that I can buy the fact that the two girls fall in love with him. Plus they are two real girls. … They don’t want to have a rock singer as a lover; this young French guy is okay. And also there’s his fragility, the way he is with his mother, which is quite disturbing too, the fact that he doesn’t dare to confront his mother. Anyway, a lot of things can make an audience back off. There’s a scene that must be disturbing to any audience, a scene of suffering, so tough to take. The girl says, “You know, I was masturbating. …” This makes the audience uncomfortable.

q:

And the visual depiction is pretty direct.

d:

Absolutely shocking.

q:

It’s what she’s remembering from her diary, the burst of flowers and the sensuality of all of this.

d:

That was his goal, and still the audience didn’t like it. They loved the other adaptation from Roché (Jules et Jim). But to be so very physical about love in this later film, to see people puking, crying, sobbing … to see such fluids is embarrassing; to film the states of the body like the crude image of the young woman puking in front of her sister. This is what love is doing to her, and it’s coming from inside their bodies and transforming them. But it’s great that we have bodies; I mean, it’s embarrassing but it’s great … though perhaps too tough for an audience to take straight.

q:

There are also very lyrical passages in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, like the two boats leaving the island.

d:

Two boats, one going to France and the other one to England, which seems silly, but which is perfect because of the line, “We were free and it was beautiful.” Just these simple images. They are free, so it’s not so sad that their paths are different

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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one from the other. Truffaut gives us the separation in a single image instead of the usual tears in the train station when someone is leaving. The director should always find the simplest way to say what he has to say. This is an idea that I worship and is so useful for me. The lovers are splitting, Anne leaves in one boat and Claude – Jean-Pierre Léaud – in the other, but it’s not Sturm und Drang, not at this point in the story. But some of Truffaut’s cohort, his generation, claim that it’s not believable. Jean-Pierre Léaud can’t have two women, it’s just not believable. They must have been blind, they just didn’t see it. q:

This is what Truffaut called “stylization,” a way of using a few sparse figures to represent reality. It is a codification of reality to concentrate emotion.

d:

I’m sure that this appreciation of simplicity will return to cinema, as happens in painting. Remember the obsession of Truffaut’s generation with painting, with the idea that they thought they were doing for the history of cinema something close to painting, up through, let’s say, Matisse. They knew what they were up to. And so perhaps today we can recover that. Though maybe this kind of recognition has passed, or is not taught in the university, because universities and critics are still writing the same things. I read a recent piece of criticism that claimed, “Truffaut is the same as Pialat, but less brutal, less crude, less social.” The writer evidently means, “He’s less good than Pialat.” When people write this for twenty years, the audience starts to become blind because they are exposed again and again to the contrary of the truth. After a while, a sort of blindness comes over all of us in my generation. If you want to think about film theory, there’s a brief shot in Jules et Jim which is so theoretical it fascinates me. It’s when they are by the sea staying in that large house. Remember when they open the windows and say, “Let’s go to the beach.” There follows a scene with a handheld subjective camera, a very close shot, with jump cuts in it. You can’t quite tell exactly what’s happening in the frame because you can’t see the actors, just their feet, while the voice-over says what they are doing. But that voice-over is absolutely useless in the narrative even if the whole movie is an exercise in storytelling. For throughout, each element is used fully for the following scene or for the plot and for the development of the film in general. Yet right in the middle of that you have this scene, which is pretty long, let’s say forty seconds, where the camera moves around looking at the ground.

q:

Searching for “les traces de la civilisation.”

d:

And they find a small broken cup, a box, a shoe, some matches, a cigarette, saying, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” Here is a sort of theory of the film, and of the New Wave itself, indeed of the modern technique of the cinema altogether: to build a film with things that you find in the garbage. This is a sort of plaidoyer pro domo, the scene speaking on behalf of the New Wave and of the modern cinema. Even the way it’s shot, to try to catch actuality – technically, isn’t this a metaphor for the cinema that Truffaut is calling for, suggesting that it’s inferior to make movies out of things that have just been passed down, high-class acceptable

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things? No, no, no, cinema is taking a broken lamp and fixing it. Plus, in the movie, this is linked to cubism. You take a broken cup and you put it on screen. Remember, Picasso is quoted so many times in Jules et Jim. q:

But still that sequence begins with the triangle of three windows, a very classical shot, a very allegorical shot of the three windows. So you have that also.

d:

Which is a different kind of cinema, I agree. It’s a different style. But this scene in the forest is so absolute, really with no actors visible, just a voice-over. It’s a sort of homage to cubism, saying that we should be as moral with cinema as the cubist painters have been with their own art. Wow, to make it simple, so that even someone fourteen years old can catch it. The pure pleasure of saying, “Let’s reinvent our lives, with just rags and bones.” Or look at the opening credits of Jules et Jim; I’m sure that this editing influenced the American cinema in an amazing way. Because it’s so full of storytelling. You have a complete friendship develop. Each time I see it I find it amazing, the numbers of ideas he packed in. How can one be that clipped and that lyrical at the same time? In this scene, there is a frenzy of activity which shows incredible passion for filmmaking. A sort of mad passion, you know, an obsession. Once again, we sense a gap between what the New Wave wants to do and how they can do it, especially for Truffaut and Godard more than the others. For Truffaut, the lack of money makes him free. It gives him this contrast: direct storytelling without any direct dialogue because he can’t afford sync sound. As a storyteller, he says, “Okay, my two characters are leaving for Greece, and, wham, here they are.” Immediately in Greece, you have that “travelling compensé,” which is a nightmare to do technically, the adjusted tracking shot invented by Hitchcock in Vertigo [1958].

q:

You mean the sweeping camera around the statue?

d:

No, it’s the shot just before, with the tracking forward and the zoom backward, so the perspective enlarges, making the face of the statue become the face of the whole world. This shot conveys absolute passion, but it doesn’t spoil the film, and it doesn’t become a spectacle like Doctor Zhivago [David Lean, 1965] either. It’s still straight and clipped. You can imagine Oliver Stone and Scorsese going crazy looking at this. A couple of generations learned from this film, much more than from Godard, for sure. The opening sequence establishing the friendship, it’s so fast, the very image of speed.

La Politique des Auteurs q:

Can we take up the issue of influences, of auteurs?

d:

One thing that bothered us a lot here in France around, let’s say, the eighties, is the fact that the American “author theory,” which to me was uninteresting, had nothing to do with the politique des auteurs. So when today someone young goes

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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to see a Godard film, he might think before buying his ticket, “It’s good because it’s by an auteur,” which is absurd; to Bazin it is completely absurd, and it has no meaning. Do you say of the Lumière films they were made by Lumière? No, they were made by guys whom they just sent out with their cameras. There’s a confusion between the two things here. When the ego of the director is the show that you are paying the ticket for, this is not at all the same thing that Truffaut was doing for a living, which was politique des auteurs, different from this American idea that the only thing valuable in a film would be the director. You don’t have this exactly in Truffaut. The film is there first for him. q:

Could you comment on Truffaut’s definition of “auteur”? You have Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, or in France, Renoir, Cocteau.

d:

And Guitry. It took me a while to understand his taste in auteurs, like his passion for Sacha Guitry, which is a very French thing that even I will never understand because he’s not part of my generation. I remember Truffaut speaking on TV, explaining his disdain for René Clair. Which is strange for me because actually, I don’t know René Clair, since he was not shown on TV when I was a kid. Truffaut was trying to tell some journalists – intellectuals and writers, not really film lovers – why pure mise-en-scène is so important. Truffaut said, “You know, in a René Clair movie,” and he quotes Clair against himself, which is to my mind a sin, to say bad things about a director when you are a director. But Truffaut comes from a different generation, and he attacks Clair because Clair left France for America, for his supposed love for American films. Truffaut goes on to say, “In each of Clair’s films, he uses stupid tracking shots and this tracking is only to prove that he’s the director of the movie.” But, with Sacha Guitry, you realize that when he needs a close-up, he asks the actor to walk forward right to the camera, and this amounts to a tracking shot too. It’s not the camera that tracks, but Guitry’s method achieves the same effect, since for me as a spectator, I see someone moving from the wide shot to a close-up. And Guitry always does this at the right point in the story. Truffaut goes on saying, we New Wave guys, we were constantly thinking about mise-en-scène, and we had this idea that to be an American film director, it is not enough to simply to add useless tracking to a scene. No, no. It’s to track at the right moment. This is why he can consider Renoir an American director when he’s making Le Crime de M. Lange [1936], but never René Clair. American cinema to him has this strange transparence and this is the way he wants to treat the couple in Tirez sur le pianiste. The street may look fake behind them as they walk, because with so little money it has to be lit with a single very harsh lamp. Needing to open the lens, the shot looks like a rear projection. Although it’s all a real street, he shoots in a French way, so that saving on the cost of shooting becomes a sort of ethic. Now I can see what amazed him in Sacha Guitry. Curiously, one of the very last texts that he published in Cahiers du Cinéma has  this photo of Guitry who truly represented that strong conception of mise-en-scène that Truffaut wanted to maintain.

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q:

Mise-en-scène, and nothing else, defines the politique des auteurs.

d:

The moment the New Wave critics saw this concept of mise-en-scène emerging, rising on the screen at the Cinémathèque, they fell for it immediately. So there’s Guitry, and then later there’s Rossellini, and of course Hitchcock. Truffaut thinks, what has René Clair to do with Rossellini? Nothing. Yet Bazin taught us that Rossellini and Hitchcock are the same. So anyone who says that Rossellini is nothing and that Hitchcock is everything, he’s a fake, a phony, he’s not into pure mise-en-scène, because the cleverness of Hitchcock amounts to the same gesture as the sincerity of Rossellini. All this is a very complicated issue that does not really belong to my generation. I understand it from time to time through some bit of film I come upon when watching older movies.

Notes 1

Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); trans. Alistair Fox, Francois Truffaut: The Lost Secret, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 2 Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson, Voyage de Martin Scorsese à travers le cinéma américain (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997). English edition, Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (New York: Hyperion, 1997). 3 Fréhel (1891–1951) was a popular singer before World War I. She left the stage because of alcohol and drug abuse but had a revival in the thirties and even played in a few films, among them Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko (1936) where she sang the nostalgic “Où sont-ils donc?” 4 La Bibliothèque du film, part of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. 5 “Le cinéma français dispose d’un lot de jeunes comédiennes de moins de trente ans dont l’inauthenticité me paraît consternante; ces Mylènes, ces Pascals, ces Danys, ces Pierrettes, ces Luciles, ces Danicks ne sont ni de ‘vraies’ jeunes filles ni de ‘vraies’ femmes, mais des ‘pépées’, des ‘souris’, des pins up, on a le sentiment qu’elles ont été crées par le cinéma pour le cinéma et qu’elles n’existeraient pas si le cinéma n’existait pas. C’est pourquoi j’ai voulu prendre une inconnue pour le rôle principal de Tirez sur le pianiste. Marie Dubois n’est ni ‘piquante,’ ni ‘mutine’, mais c’est une jeune fille pure et digne, dont il est ‘vraisemblable’ qu’on puisse devenir amoureux. ” François Truffaut, quoted in Gillain, Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 113.

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Truffaut and His “Doubles” Martin Lefebvre

Figure 2.1

La Chambre verte (François Truffaut, 1978, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.2 Le Dernier Métro (François Truffaut, 1980, Les Films du Carrosse).

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Figure 2.3

La Chambre verte (François Truffaut, 1978, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.4

Le Dernier Métro (François Truffaut, 1980, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.5

Le Dernier Métro (François Truffaut, 1980, Les Films du Carrosse).

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25

Figure 2.6

L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (François Truffaut, 1977, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.7

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.8 Domicile conjugal (François Truffaut, 1970, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Figure 2.9

Une Belle Fille comme moi (François Truffaut, 1972, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.10

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.11

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Figure 2.12

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.13

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.14

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945, Les Films Raoul Ploquin).

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Figure 2.15

Vivement dimanche! (François Truffaut, 1983, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.16

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945, Les Films Raoul Ploquin).

Figure 2.17

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.18

La Peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.19

Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.20

La Mariée était en noir (François Truffaut, 1967, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Figure 2.21

La Mariée était en noir (François Truffaut, 1967, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.22

Baisers volés (François Truffaut, 1968, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.23

La Sirène du Mississippi (François Truffaut, 1969, Les Films du Carrosse).

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.24 Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.25

La Nuit américaine (François Truffaut, 1973, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.26

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Figure 2.27

L’Argent de poche (François Truffaut, 1976, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.28

Une Belle Fille comme moi (François Truffaut, 1972, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.29

L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (François Truffaut, 1977, Les Films du Carrosse).

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.30

L’Amour en fuite (François Truffaut, 1979, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.31

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.32

Baisers volés (François Truffaut, 1968, Les Films du Carrosse).

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Figure 2.33

Domicile conjugal (François Truffaut, 1970, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.34

Le Dernier Métro (François Truffaut, 1980, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 2.35

La Peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964, Les Films du Carrosse).

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.36

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La Femme d’à côté (François Truffaut, 1981, Les Films du Carrosse).

Reflecting on Reflections of Truffaut in His Films There is certain tendency to address only the films of great visual stylists who have either acquired their status through ostentation (Welles, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fellini, Godard, Greenaway) or through controlled restraint and dépouillement (Straub/ Huillet, Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni, Kiarostami, Ozu, Haneke). François Truffaut belonged to neither group. As a result, many critics and scholars seem to feel that, with the exception of his remarkable start with three rambunctious masterpieces, Truffaut grew to embody a new form of “cinema of quality,” in which the expressive resources of the medium and of mise-en-scène become blandly subservient to characters and plot. Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson summarized this view when, in 1999, he wrote, “He is the New Wave’s Steinbeck, beloved by the middle class, formally outbid by his own Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, and eventually dismissed by a cognoscenti more enraptured by the restless reinvention of the art than by its heartfelt expression of humanity.”1 Now that the dust has settled on the exorbitant hopes of the New Wave and on the trenchant political radicalism of the years that followed, we should abjure such hasty judgments and try instead to experience Truffaut. We will find that he demands and rewards a very singular form of experience, one based on the accumulation of personal details drawn from his life, from the films he loved, and increasingly from the universe that those films seem to have been constructing from beginning to end. To watch Truffaut’s films most productively is to look for the Big Secret they promise to reveal. This essay is written in that spirit. There is probably no better way to describe Truffaut’s entire oeuvre than to say that it resembles an array of mirrors that point and reflect in several directions. Some reflections are autobiographical, starting with the filmmaker’s first feature, which contains a now famous shot of its hero sitting at his mother’s dresser while his likeness is reflected in three mirrors (Figure 3.1). Truffaut sometimes downplayed this dimension of the film, but clearly the world of Antoine Doinel (named after Cahiers du Cinéma cofounder Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) owes a great deal to Truffaut’s world

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which he “adapted” in the same way he would later “adapt” literary works. Often he reproduced the “original” verbatim, while at other times he transposed situations or “rewrote” them. In Les 400 Coups (1959) some direct references from Truffaut’s childhood years include the cramped apartment with a makeshift bed in the entrance hallway, the lack of attention and overall disinterestedness of his parents, the lie about his mother’s death to explain an absence from school, the “borrowing” of passages from Balzac for a school assignment, the theft of a typewriter from his father’s workplace, a night in the neighborhood police station’s jail followed by a longer stay in a center for delinquents. Looking through the films of the Doinel cycle seems facile; but look elsewhere and oblique autobiographical features crop up everywhere. For example, Truffaut’s partial deafness (caused by artillery exercises during his disastrous military service) is evoked by the character of Ferrand (played by Truffaut), the filmmaker of La Nuit américaine (1973), who wears an earpiece. Moreover, the name “Ferrand” is a diminutive of “Monferrand,” which was the maiden name of Truffaut’s mother. If we skip back two films to Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) when Claude (played by Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud) introduces one of his lovers to his mother, he presents her as “Monique de Monferrand” (the name of Truffaut’s maternal aunt). Truffaut injected the names of people from his past into his films. In La Peau douce (1964) the central protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, carries the surname of Truffaut’s childhood friend,2 Robert Lachenay, who, in Les 400 Coups and Antoine et Colette (1962) is rebaptized “René,” this also being the name of Truffaut’s half-brother, Janine and Roland Truffaut’s only legitimate child, born in the spring of 1934 only to die two months later. Thus names, such as “Lachenay,” are mirrored (echoed, we might say) in various directions at once; indeed Robert Lachenay was also a pseudonym used by Truffaut to pen several film reviews for Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts in the 1950s.3 Furthermore, the name is also an homage to Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) – a favorite in Truffaut’s canon4 – whose Marquis “de la Chesnaye” (a homonym) hosts a weekend retreat at his countryside manor of La Colinière. Should we be surprised when, in La Peau douce, Pierre Lachenay takes his mistress to a small country hotel called La Colinière? Mirrors and echoes initiate our search for the self-reflexive “texture” of Truffaut’s cinema.

Photographs from a Family Album In three of Truffaut’s films, a character erects a shrine: Antoine does so to honor Balzac in Les 400 Coups; Adèle H. makes a shrine to her beloved British officer; and in La Chambre verte (1978), Julien Davenne’s initial shrine to his dead wife, Julie, after being destroyed by fire (like Antoine’s altar to Balzac), is rebuilt as a chapel – a “temple,” Davenne says – to all the deceased people he was ever close to.5 Reflecting each other, these scenes also point to the idea of enshrining what one loves.

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One could say that as a critic Truffaut wanted to enshrine the directors he believed in. After all, the politique des auteurs posits the adulation of a director for the strength of his worldview and his personal approach to mise-en-scène. When Truffaut called a filmmaker an “auteur,” inviting him within his “very closed, private museum,”6 he felt obliged to stay absolutely faithful to him – for better or for worse! – to the point of defending even his failed films. Davenne’s “temple” is a private museum not unlike Truffaut’s pantheon of auteurs. In assuming the role of Davenne, Truffaut allowed himself to fill a fictional shrine with photographs that mix cultural personages of the period of the film (1928) with persons important to his own genuine past: thus, on a single wall we see Apollinaire, Jacques Audiberti, Louise de Bettignies (a famous World War I British spy7), Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Henry James, Maurice Jaubert, Oscar Lewenstein, Jeanne Moreau (seen as a child with her sister), Sergei Prokofiev, Marcel Proust, Raymond Queneau, Henri-Pierre Roché, Oskar Werner, Oscar Wilde, as well as what appears to be a picture of Orson Welles as a child. Several of these pictures normally hung in Truffaut’s home or in his office at Les Films du Carrosse (named after Renoir’s 1952 Le Carrosse d’or). Davenne’s monologue during the pan across the photos occasionally touches on their actual relations with Truffaut.8 In moments such as these, the space that might otherwise separate the work from the auteur is compressed so that the fictional énoncé seems to join the nonfictional énonciation. Thus Davenne’s great shrine to the dead doubles over as a personal gesture on Truffaut’s part, through the use of artifacts belonging to his own intimate “museum.” Truffaut, the auteur of La Chambre verte, here gives embodiment to the belief that one must love auteurs for the way they personalize their films. “The coming cinema appears to me more personal than a novel, individual and autobiographical like a confession or a personal diary. … The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who shot it and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow shall be an act of love.”9 Truffaut wrote this in May 1957, as he was preparing Les Mistons, imagining his future as a filmmaker. Davenne may remind us of Truffaut the critic who collects his favorite people, but like a filmmaker, Davenne also builds a set and arranges props. On two other occasions Truffaut played a major role in one of his films and in both, as here, that role is an avatar of a director.10 Of L’Enfant sauvage (1970), Jean Collet wrote, Doctor Itard’s role as regards the child is analogous to that of a metteur en scène. When he teaches him the use of a spoon to eat his soup, when he tries to have him repeat words, he acts just as a filmmaker does with his actor. Truffaut, in playing the role of doctor Itard, continued to direct the child in front of the camera. In La Nuit américaine a similar line of thought led him to interpret the role of Ferrand, a filmmaker.11

However, it is in La Chambre verte, playing an obituary writer, that Truffaut best depicts the “act of love” that animated him as critic and filmmaker alike. This is because the temple he has built holds a tabernacle of photographs whose innate power (whose “ontology”) precedes and exceeds this film. For instance, the photo of Raymond Queneau reappears somehow in Marion Steiner’s office in Le Dernier Métro (1980)

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(see Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2). When she visits Bernard Granger, a photo of Audiberti12 has somehow migrated to his dressing room from Davenne’s chapel, and next to it is a school photo that shows the young Truffaut with his classmates (Figure  2.3 and Figure 2.4). In this scene in Le Dernier Métro, Granger’s wall also holds a photo of Valentina Cortese (Severine in La Nuit américaine) that reappears in Bertrand Morane’s hands in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) (Figure 2.5 and Figure 2.6)13 and a photo of a child which turns out to have come from Antoine Doinel’s flat in Baisers volés (1968). The same photo can be highlighted in one film and sit imperceptible when it reappears in another. Oskar Werner made up as Mozart moves through Jules et Jim (1962), Domicile conjugal (1970), and Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972) (Figure 2.7, Figure 2.8, and Figure 2.9).14 In the first instance Catherine explains to Jim that Jules’ father liked Mozart so much that one day he dressed up his son to look just like him, but the photo’s appearance in the other two films is more difficult to account for. A drawing of Mozart is a reasonable prop in either film, but not a photo of Oskar Werner dressed up as Mozart! Chances are that first-time viewers will not register the photo, yet, once we become aware of its circulation it alerts us to the fact that something is playing itself out in the mise-enscène, something below or above the demands of narrative. Details lying at the margins allow a “parallel” universe to emerge. Not surprisingly, this duality may remind us of the “doubled” universe in Hitchcock’s cinema, where what first appears to be a marginal detail – a windmill, a crop-dusting plane, a bottle of wine, a night’s stop at a roadside motel – serves as a doorway onto an entire “other” and darker universe.15 In Truffaut, such marginalia serve as a passageway to the world of the “self.” If we forgo chronology and reconfigure instead Truffaut’s cinema as a single great text, then La Chambre verte’s chapel is not so much a culmination but a matrix, a source radiating in both directions. Take Truffaut’s appearances in his films, whether as cameos or leading roles. As Davenne, after his death, will come to inhabit his chapel, Truffaut’s presence etches him into his own (cinematic) “chapel.” More than this, like the pharaohs of Egypt, Truffaut would take with him his closest associates, whom he had coaxed to appear in his films, if only to establish their existence on celluloid. Cameos were a common practice in New Wave cinema. Godard appeared in A Bout de souffle (1960) and other of his films, and he got favorite filmmakers (Melville, Fuller, Leenhardt) and cultural figures to participate as well.16 The same was true early on with Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette. Truffaut shares such obvious intertextual and cinephilic “clins d’oeils,”17 but his use of cameos is far more personal, encompassing actor friends, lovers, family, and crew members. What begins with brief appearances in Les 400 Coups by Jean-Claude Brialy, Jeanne Moreau, Philippe de Broca, Jacques Demy, Simone Jollivet, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Douchet (who were friends of Truffaut at the time) continues with the presence of close friends such as Jean-Louis Richard (in Jules et Jim and La Peau douce – and in more important roles in Le Dernier Métro and 1983’s Vivement dimanche!), Danielle Bassiak (in Jules et Jim), Claude de Givray (in La Peau douce), Jacques Robiolles (in 1968’s La Mariée était en noir, Baisers volés, and Domicile conjugal), and of his daughters, Laura and Eva Truffaut, in L’Enfant sauvage, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, L’Argent de poche (1976),18 and in Vivement dimanche!.

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As for his crew and his “family” at Les Films du Carrosse, Truffaut distributed them across his oeuvre: Marcel Berbert (chief producer at Les Films du Carrosse) played in no less than eleven films: La Mariée était en noir, Baisers volés, La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), Domicile conjugal, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, Une Belle Fille comme moi, La Nuit américaine, L’Argent de poche, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte, and Le Dernier Métro.19 Keeping to alphabetical order, in one or several films you can find Walter Bal (soundman), Martine Barraqué (editor), Gérard Bougeant (electrician), Josiane Couëdel (production secretary), Catherine Crassac (hairstylist), Jean-Loup Dabadie (scriptwriter), Yann Dedet (editor), Georges Delerue (composer), Jean-Claude Gasché (electrician), Jean-François Gondre (assistant cameraman), Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko (production designer), Christian Lentretien (production administrator), René Levert (soundman), Jean Mandaroux (set decorator), Hilton McConnio (production design), Claude Miller (production manager), Thi Loan N’Guyen (makeup artist), Christine Pellé (script), Jacques Preisach (property master), Suzanne Schiffman (writer, assistant director), Roland Thénot (production manager), and Pierre Zucca (set photographer). Now some filmmakers, such as Renoir, gave roles to their associates ( Jacques Becker played in six of his films). But Truffaut developed this practice to an unprecedented and sometimes flagrant degree. For example, in Vivement dimanche!, a film in which his makeup artist Thi Loan N’Guyen plays a small role, Truffaut self-consciously had the name THI-LOAN painted in large letters over the sign for “L’Ange Rouge,” the cabaret that serves as a front for a prostitution ring; and in both La Sirène du Mississippi and Le Dernier Métro he had Marcel Berbert play a financial “numbers cruncher,” a role not at all unlike that which Berbert played in real life for Les Films du Carrosse.20 If we factor in Truffaut’s liaisons with most of his leading actresses ( Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Marie-France Pisier, Julie Christie, Claude Jade, Catherine Deneuve, Kika Markham, Jacqueline Bisset, Fanny Ardant) we can sense why he felt La Chambre verte to be his most personal film, the film where he collected and preserved what he loved. There may be nothing bizarre in his including within his films his favorite photos or his collection of miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, but when it came to his friends, associates, family members, and lovers, their near systematic presence suggests that his oeuvre is sui generis. Add to this the various doubles of the filmmaker (Antoine Doinel, Charlie Koller, Dr Itard, Ferrand, Bertrand Morane, Julien Davenne), and Truffaut’s films give the impression of going through someone’s family album or even of watching a kind of home movie playing itself out alongside the ostensible plots we have paid to see. Truffaut’s cinema is a memory palace, a celluloid shrine.

Picasso, Masked in the Filigree of Jules et Jim The walls of Truffaut’s films hold not just photographs but paintings that reflect off one another and produce a parallel trajectory the alert viewer can follow. The supreme example is Jules et Jim, a film that contains no less than thirteen paintings by Pablo

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Picasso: L’Etreinte dans la mansarde (1900), Famille d’acrobates avec singe (1905); Jeune Fille à la mandoline (1910), Etude pour Les Bateleurs – Jeune Fille avec chien (1905), Au Lapin Agile (1904–1905); Femme nue assise (1905); Compotier, verre, bouteille, fruits (also known as Nature morte verte; 1914); L’Italienne (1917); Les Deux Saltimbanques au café (1901); Pierrot (1918); L’Arlequin assis (1923); Les Amoureux (1923); Mère et enfant (1922). I have listed the paintings in the order they show up in the film. Notice that, with a few exceptions, most of them appear in rough chronological order: we move from Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods to Cubism and later to his Neoclassical period of the early twenties. In this regard, the paintings indicate temporal progression through the diegesis. The plot of Jules et Jim covers over twenty years, beginning around 1912 and closing off soon after the May 1933 Nazi book burnings. There are, however, very few physical transformations in the actors and no attempt to use makeup to make the  characters look twenty years older; save for Jim shaving his moustache after World War I and Catherine wearing eyeglasses, they are as eternally youthful as the antique sculpture Jules and Jim visit on the coast of the Adriatic and whose smile they recognize in Catherine. Time, as it were, moves “around” them, that is, in the clothes they wear, in various artifacts (such as cars) or in the archival footage Truffaut uses to show Paris and the war. However, because the characters do not interact much with the world about them, the passage of time is an abstraction here, and the paintings by Picasso become temporal landmarks. But they also amount to more than a simple hourglass. From Jules’ longing for love to Catherine’s wish for a child with Jim, each painting is chosen to mirror aspects of the film’s content as well as mood or transformations in the characters. The pattern of the paintings’ use is established early on, after the voice-over introduction by the narrator is completed and as soon as Jules and Jim occupy separate spaces on screen:21 Jules in his apartment with Thérèse where we find L’Etreinte dans la mansarde (Figure 2.10)22 and Jim in Gilberte’s apartment, where Famille d’acrobates avec singe hangs at the head of the bed. The differences in the content of both paintings captures the differences in the characters: whereas Jules seeks the company of a woman, Jim, we are told, enjoys the company of many women and refuses at that point to live with Gilberte or even spend the entire night with her. The metaphor of the painting is obvious enough: Jim, the bohemian, is an “acrobat,” a “saltimbanque” of love walking a tightrope, trying to keep his balance (only later will he be willing to “settle” and have a family, with Catherine and then with Gilberte). The painting plays on the theme of nativity, but the father, though the color of his dress is reminiscent of Pierrot, wears Harlequin’s bicorn hat (and tight-fitting costume). This is life at the circus, or better yet, life as circus. Indeed, there is a circus-like atmosphere that permeates the entire opening of the film, starting with the credit sequence. The Picasso paintings associated with Jim clearly further this theme. Indeed, throughout the film Jim is matched with several painted Harlequins as well as a Pierrot, stock characters from the Commedia dell’Arte. In a scene where he waits for Catherine in a café with a drink, there hangs behind him a poster for a Picasso exhibition (at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery) showing a Harlequin having a drink: Au Lapin Agile (also known as Arlequin au verre) (Figure 2.11).

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As it turns out, the characters in this painting and their story have some bearing on the plot of Jules et Jim. The Harlequin possesses Picasso’s features and the woman next to him is Germaine Gargallo – once said to be a femme fatale (the term, by the way, surfaces in the song Jeanne Moreau performs later in the film). Picasso’s close friend, artist Carlos Casagemas, was madly in love with Germaine but the feeling was not mutual and she turned down his marriage proposal. Depressed and driven mad by his obsession with Germaine, he tried shooting her and, believing her to be dead (she had merely fainted), turned the gun on himself. It is said that Picasso was greatly affected by the death of his friend (he even claimed it had led directly to his Blue period), however when he returned to Paris from Barcelona he began an affair with Germaine, who later married another of his friends, Ramon Pichot. Norman Mailer, in his biography of the young Picasso, believes that in being with Germaine, in “inhabiting [her] body,” “Picasso was appropriating the psychic remains of Casagemas even as he was violating his friend’s romance. Yet, by a more occult logic, he was offering his sanctification to the dead man’s lost relationship. … To fornicate with Germaine was to invoke Casagemas rather than dispel him.”23 An eerily similar (and, one feels, equally misogynist) idea is found in Henri-Pierre Roché’s Carnets, in a letter from Roché to Franz Hessel (the real-life Jules of Roché’s novel) where he writes, “Making love with [Helen, the real life Kathe or Catherine] is a little like making love to you.”24 As Au Lapin Agile hangs behind Jim, he does not yet know (nor does the film’s first-time viewer, for that matter) that the spurned Catherine will brandish a handgun in his face and that she will soon after take her own life (and his as well), yet, to some extent, all these elements are already present, prefigured, if only configured differently, in the “background.” Upon his return to Paris, after falling in love with Catherine, Jim meets Gilberte in a café and announces his desire to marry Catherine as soon as she and Jules are divorced. Right next to them is hung one of the first paintings from Picasso’s Blue period Les Deux Saltimbanques au café: L’Arlequin et sa compagne showing a Harlequin (again with Picasso’s features) and a woman not speaking to each other and looking in separate directions. The painting is obviously chosen to mirror the situation and the mood. Later, as we return to Gilberte’s room and she pleads with him to delay his departure for Germany, Jim seems incapable of severing his ties with her completely. The acrobat family seen initially above the bed has disappeared, however, and a new painting now appears on a different wall above the bed: Pierrot. One of the character traits that distinguishes Pierrot from Harlequin is the former’s sensitivity, his gentler nature: Jim will accede to Gilberte’s demand. The mood, once more, is reflected in the painting: Pierrot has removed his domino mask, his gaze (which is cut by the framing in the film) is blank as he stares, pensive, into the emptiness, sitting lifeless, exhausted, despondent, sad. Restricted on black-and-white film is the color scheme of the painting, where the usually immaculately white clothes of the Pierrot reflect hues more typical of Harlequin’s checkered costume (green, orange, purple, yellow). On the table lies a discarded open book: was Pierrot reading the Elective Affinities? Finally, after Catherine has rejected Jim and sent him back to Paris, we find him once more in

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Gilberte’s bed. Again a new Harlequin painting appears where the Pierrot was previously hung: Arlequin assis. In muted colors (so different from the vivid costumes of the film’s two previous Harlequins) it reveals a seated, introspective, and passive Harlequin, alone and perhaps fatigued by his tricks. A similar process of pictorial association applies to Jules et Jim’s other principals. Thus, when Albert is introduced, we see the Cubist-period Jeune Fille à la mandoline in his kitchen. Albert, of course, is associated with a string instrument – a guitar – as later in the film he composes and plays “Le Tourbillon de la vie” with Catherine. As for Catherine, it is important to note that by the time she is associated with paintings by Picasso, she has already been identified by Jules and Jim with an ancient, archaic sculpture. For them, she is what the French call “l’éternel féminin.”25 The various Picasso works that relate to her are therefore sundry archetypical versions of this fantasy: the young virginal girl, the sexually available woman, the lover, and the mother. They are various masks of the feminine for the male imagination. The first print is a study Picasso made for his 1905 series Famille de saltimbanques (also known as Les Bateleurs) entitled Etude pour Les Bateleurs: Jeune Fille avec chien. It shows a young girl with a dog. The work is offered as a gift by Jim to both Catherine and Jules. The next painting associated with her is Femme nue assise. The film’s black-and-white photography is insensitive to the way it opposes hot reddish-orange hues for the body in the lower part of the frame to cooler, darker hues for the head in the upper part, suggesting duality: a mind–body split. This painting first appears when Catherine announces to Jim, by phone, her forthcoming wedding to Jules (see Figure 23.1). The painting is a portrait of Madeleine, a professional model who was Picasso’s lover and was pregnant with his child (she either miscarried or was convinced by Picasso to have an abortion). The third painting with which Catherine is matched is L’Italienne. Picasso based it on a postcard image of a stereotyped Italian country girl: the national colors of Italy are present (red, green, and white) and the Basilica of Saint Peter is represented schematically in the background. According to one commentator the popular source of the imagery is “consistent with Picasso’s embrace of the Commedia dell’Arte while in Rome.”26 The work, painted in the style of Synthetic Cubism, is said to be one of the first by Picasso to simultaneously show a front and profile view of a face – although it is ambiguous whether the front and side views form a single character or whether they show two characters kissing. Indeed, behind the central figure lies a tall dark shape possibly suggesting the presence of a character embracing the woman from behind. In Jules et Jim, the painting is first seen when Catherine shows Jim to his room in the German chalet after their first night together – note that, when the painting first comes into view, Jim initially stands behind Catherine like the dark shape in the painting. Finally, towards the end of the film, in the old mill house by the Seine where Jules and Catherine now reside, the Neoclassical Mère et enfant is seen as Catherine cries for the child she and Jim never had and Jim declares his intention to marry Gilberte. There remain two paintings to mention briefly. The first, Nature morte verte, is barely seen, though it stands in the living room of the German chalet Jules shares with Catherine. This Cubist painting shows an empty fruit bowl, a bottle, a glass, and

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some fruit. On the table there is also an object with the letters “JOU” on it. The latter is very likely the representation of a newspaper (journal in French – Picasso had used the same motif elsewhere, including Nature morte à la chaise cannée in 1912). This nature morte in Catherine’s and Jules’ living room is a good metaphoric reflection for the state of the couple’s relationship at this point in the film: little more than an empty vessel. The newspaper on the table might thus stand for Jim’s arrival, since at this point he makes his living writing for newspapers. Finally, towards the end of the film, Jules and Jim catch up with each other. Years have now gone by since they lived together in Germany and Jim brings Jules to his home, where he introduces him to Gilberte. Behind them lies Les Amoureux, painted in Picasso’s Neoclassical style from the early twenties: Jim is no longer a character of the Commedia dell’Arte, even though melancholy seems to hold dominion over the now “classical” couple. As Truffaut wrote to Helen Scott, Jules et Jim is a “demonstration through both joy and sadness of the impossibility of any amorous combination outside of the couple.”27 The paintings by Picasso are used by Truffaut to create a doubling effect, one not entirely unlike that produced by the mirrors with which this chapter began, the ones in which Antoine Doinel reflects himself seated at his mother’s vanity table. The difference, obviously, is that the artworks’ reflections are not determined by the laws of optics. Rather, thanks to the Commedia dell’Arte tradition that Picasso invokes, we might think of them as masks that the characters wear. Though they connote the theater and the arts in general – Picasso frequently painting himself or other artists and poets as Harlequins and saltimbanques – and therefore the world of play and make-believe, the Commedia dell’Arte paintings often call on the Symbolist trope of the wistful, withdrawn, or despondent outcast clown, while eventually introducing domesticity into the picture (a growing concern during the Rose period). In the end, it is less the stage performances of his Commedia dell’Arte characters that interest Picasso and more the projection of their masks onto the world; he looks at the world metaphorically through them. Indeed, is it not a devilish-looking jester’s mask that adorns Jim’s house towards the end of the film? (Figure 2.12). Perhaps all of this suggests that we ought to conceive of Jules et Jim as a sort of comedy of masks whose originality lies in the way it operates variations on character type and on the innamorati plot in which, among other things, Pierrot and Harlequin both pine for Columbine.28 To put it differently, the masks of “husband, lover, wife” of the traditional melodrama are upset by Jules et Jim. Indeed, in staying close to the spirit of the novel, Truffaut claimed he wished to avoid the stereotypes of brutish or boring husband and sympathetic lover common to so many love triangles, and he often explained how important it was for him that both male protagonists be endearing characters. But where does this leave Catherine? It is she, of course, who drives the narrative, who continually sets the wheels in motion, proposing that all three characters go the seaside, asking Jim to her apartment to help her with her luggage, calling a rendezvous with him for which she arrives late, calling for him to bring Goethe’s Elective Affinities so she can seduce him, sending him back to Paris after they fail at conceiving a child, etc. Mercurial, moody, regal ( Jules compares her to a queen), capricious, tyrannical, and despotic, vindictive

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and selfish, unfaithful, and even cheating at games (“She always wins,” says Jules), she wears several masks, as we have seen. “She is a force of nature,” says Jules, and is therefore as unpredictable as nature itself. She even successfully disguises herself as a man: “What a mix [Quel mélange], this Catherine,” says Jim. In the end, in fact, it is she who comes to embody the true spirit of Harlequin, as suggested by the diamondshaped motif of the long scarf she wears in the final moments of the film (Figure 2.13). For the last trick will be hers. Meeting Jim by chance in a cinema where newsreels show the Nazis’ auto da fé, the three characters drive off to the outskirts of Paris. There, under the pretext that she has something to tell him, Catherine asks Jim to accompany her for a ride in the car. Jules looks on, powerless, as a smiling Catherine – it is the smile that struck Jules and Jim when they first saw the ancient sculpture projected by Albert’s magic lantern – intentionally drives the car off the broken arch of a bridge into the Seine, killing both herself and Jim. I do not pretend to offer here a new “reading” of Jules et Jim for my immediate concern lies elsewhere: namely, in showing how Truffaut’s mise-en-scène in this film offers its viewer a game that plays itself out on the margins of the film (quite literally so), an associative game not entirely unlike a rebus. Moreover, this game with Picasso’s paintings rests on the duplicitous or dual character acquired by an artifact that belongs to the furniture of the fictional world and yet functions as a mirror opening onto another dimension, that of the metafilmic, where the film comments on itself. A more formalist way to put it would be to say that such artifacts emphasize the fact that they are motivated by two otherwise incompatible principles, filmic and metafilmic. Thus, if Picasso portrayed himself as a Harlequin, in the end so did Truffaut through his use of Picasso in Jules et Jim. Harlequin, after all, is a master of duplicity, an intermediary between two worlds who does one thing while doing another. In a letter he sent his friend Helen Scott in June 1962, at a moment when the shooting of Jules et Jim was still a fresh memory, Truffaut explained he was about to leave for the land of the Commedia dell’Arte with Jeanne Moreau to discuss the film’s ban in that country. Not surprisingly, he signed the letter “Truffaldin.”29

On Details On va travailler sur les détails. Fergus, to Julie Kolher, in La Mariée était en noir This section concerns a practice in Truffaut’s cinema that I took up at the outset, but that was not exhausted by my account of the autobiography-as-intimate-museum strand, for the reason that the ground it covers is wider still. To put it simply, my aim is to show how Truffaut creates a network of internal references whereby one film is connected to another, or mirrors another. More specifically, his films repeatedly put the viewer in a position to say (quite literally): “I’ve seen this or I’ve heard this before.” To my knowledge, no major filmmaker was ever so self-quotational and self-allusive as Truffaut.

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We recall the reappearance of the photographs of Audiberti, Queneau, and Werner (dressed up as Mozart). Although these images and the individuals they portray belong to Truffaut’s intimate museum, they also belong to another important strand in his work whereby his films reference or mirror each other. Considered from the viewer’s perspective, it is one thing to recognize and identify Audiberti or Queneau in Davenne’s chapel in La Chambre verte, but it is an entirely different matter to experience the return of the same photographs in Le Dernier Métro. These are two different – though related – games. One cannot help but feel that something here exceeds the referencing of favorite figures and the family album (the “extra-cinematic autobiography-as-intimate-museum game”), adding, if you will, a distinct extra layer to the phenomenon (the “cinematic self-referencing game”). Indeed, even viewers who do not recognize the content of these photos (who are not fully cognizant of the “first game”) can nonetheless perceive their return in a second film (the “second game”). For the spectator who notices them as repetitions (to be sure these are somewhat marginal details, not easily picked up until pointed out), Truffaut appears to be quoting himself, creating an allusive connection between his films. As a result, such moments acquire a special value, something belonging to the mise-en-scène that can, intentionally though unexpectedly, deflect the viewer’s attention. As a cinema critic and a cinephile, Truffaut’s approach to films was not primarily plot-centered. Like most French critics of his generation – especially those associated with Cahiers du Cinéma – Truffaut cared chiefly for mise-en-scène as the basic medium of auteurist expression. Of Hawks’ Scarface (1932), for instance, he noted how crosses – “on walls, on doors, or via the lighting” – constitute a “visual obsession” that rhymes with Tony Camonte’s frightened face all the while evoking death. Of course, appreciating a film’s mise-en-scène often required repeated viewings so that the critic might free both gaze and mind from the pressing demands of plot. Yet, as Paul Willemen30 and Christian Keathley31 have noted, cineplilic discourse – especially of the French persuasion – implied a specific way of looking at films, focusing on individual moments that, for one reason or another, caught the cinephile’s eye. Keathley, for instance, rightly points out that “most often … Truffaut focused on details, little bits of business, specific moments.”32 And he cites a 1951 letter of Truffaut to Eric Rohmer where he writes, quoting Jean George Auriol, “If you make a film, don’t forget that ‘cinema is the art of the little detail that doesn’t call attention to itself.’” The letter goes on, still quoting Auriol: “‘Cinema [also] consists of doing beautiful things to beautiful women.’”33 One could not wish for a better testimony to the libidinal investment of cinephilia. Two years later, in a review of Hathaway’s Niagara (1953) made (in)famous by his discussion of Marilyn Monroe’s lingerie, Truffaut (under his Lachenay pseudonym) wrote, I would probably surprise Cécil Saint-Laurent [author of the novel Caroline chérie], – who, recently, in Cinémonde, compared (to his own advantage) the adaptations of Caroline chérie [Pottier, 1951] and Le Journal d’un curé de campagne [Bresson, 1951] – if I declared that there is more eroticism (to my way of thinking) in the three minutes of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [Bresson, 1945] when Elina Labourdette, all dressed up,

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seated in a chair, raises her bare legs one after the other in order to better slip over them those silky pre-nylons stockings, and her garment is then covered over with the ingenious raincoat – more eroticism, I say, than in all of Caroline, beloved, capricious, and dry as a desert.

It seems obvious that Truffaut was alluding to this scene from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne when he had Jacqueline Bisset (as she slips in and out of Alphonse’s hotel room in La Nuit américaine) and, later, Fanny Ardant (for some twenty minutes of screen time in Vivement dimanche!) wear a raincoat over a nightgown or a skimpy theater outfit (Figure 2.14 and Figure 2.15).34 Incidentally, later in Vivement dimanche! Ardant will impersonate a prostitute.35 But it is the other moment from Bresson’s film, the preceding one where the actress slips on her stockings, that reverberates most profoundly in Truffaut’s cinema.36 Indeed, Truffaut appropriates the motif and turns it into a privileged cinephilic moment in his own films, in a sense importing his cinephilia over to the practice of filmmaking, and then, as we shall see, marking such moments as cinephilic through self-referential repetition. Whence the many variations in Truffaut of this moment from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, beginning with Les 400 Coups and Antoine’s mother as she removes her stockings (Figure 2.16 and Figure 2.17). To be sure, self-reference here is a complex matter involving an intricate web of thematic and motifemic recurrences whose source reaches back to Truffaut’s comments on Les Dames du Bois de boulogne and to the connection established between the fictional character of Antoine Doinel and Truffaut’s biography. The network develops around making crudely explicit the more implicit erotic undertones of Gilberte Doinel’s characterization in Les 400 Coups by way of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes’ indirect allusion to it. In other words, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes serves to relay the link, otherwise visually cued, between Agnès, the “grue” of Bresson’s film, and Antoine Doinel’s mother, Gilberte. This self-referential relay is achieved through black-and-white flashback scenes of Bertrand Morane’s childhood in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes which are shot and narrated in such a way as to unambiguously recall Antoine’s home life in Les 400 Coups (for one thing, other flashbacks in the film are in color). However, the key singularizing trait may be the extra-filmic fact that both Gilberte Doinel and Christine Morane reference Janine Truffaut (through the artifice of fiction, of course). Again, Truffaut rummages through his own childhood memories to imagine Morane’s mother as someone who – like Janine Truffaut – could not stand any noise from her son and so insisted he sit quietly with a book.37 He shows Morane’s mother parading in lingerie before her son38 and reveals her to have had several lovers (in Les 400 Coups Gilberte is shown to have at least one extramarital affair). The allusion to Les 400 Coups works on several fronts at once. In the end, however, the connection is finally buttressed “filmically” – in yet another film! – when a shot from a flashback of Bertrand Morane’s youth (from L’Homme qui aimait les  femmes) reappears two years later, in L’Amour en fuite (1979), as a flashback from  Antoine Doinel’s childhood: this is the moment when both youths discover that their mothers had had lovers. In short, Antoine and Bertrand are clearly linked

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(as mentioned earlier, both may be seen as stand-ins for Truffaut), as are their mothers.39 Once this is established, the strongest argument concerning the mother’s eroticization in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (and by association in Les 400 Coups) comes when Truffaut has the actress who portrays Christine Morane (Marie-Jeanne Montfajon) also portray a prostitute in the film: both characters are immediately compared and associated (through voice-over and editing) by way of their similar, fast-paced gait. If the figures of “mother” and “prostitute” are consciously united in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes with a single actress playing both roles, in Les 400 Coups the erotic association benefits notably – though less explicitly, to be sure – from the visual allusion to Agnès in Les Dames du Bois de boulogne (and from Truffaut’s response to this film). In short: through a complex network of allusions, the treatment of the mother in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (specifically her eroticization) makes explicit the content of the intertextual referencing of a moment from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne in Les 400 Coups. What is more, the motif of women’s stockings will conspicuously reappear in Truffaut: for instance, in both Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and La Peau douce the female lead asks the hero to get her a pair of stockings;40 in La Mariée était en noir Bliss fetishistically records the sound that his fiancée Gilberte makes when crossing her nylon-clad legs; in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes Bertrand is exhilarated by the same sound made by a cinema usherette seated next to him; and in Le Dernier Métro the camera captivatingly ogles women’s fake or painted stockings during the war. What must be emphasized, however, is how the “Bressonian” cinephilic moment that is replayed in Les 400 Coups initiates a self-referential network of associations and recurrences (mirror images or visual rhymes) with other mise-en-scène “moments” in Truffaut. This includes the shots of women’s legs scattered throughout so many his films. However, one also finds a recurring, erotically charged, pose in La Peau douce, Fahrenheit 451 (1966), La Mariée était en noir, and Baisers volés that stands as a true selfallusion and seems to find its source in Les 400 Coups’ own allusion to Bresson (Figure 2.18, Figure 2.19, and Figure 2.20). Each of these films seems, then, to reflect one another in this regard. In the process, the network they create – which in this case surges from Truffaut’s cinephilia (and his own libidinal investment with a moment in a film by Bresson) – helps shape cinephilic engagement with his films – as do the returning photographs of Audiberti, Valentina Cortese, or Oskar Werner – by singling out certain mise-en-scène “moments,” those unobtrusive “little details” Truffaut mentions in his letter to Rohmer – through repetition. Not all self-referencing moments in Truffaut are as intricate as the one just examined. In fact, most of them simply repeat a motif or borrow a line of dialogue from a previous film regardless of other concerns (thematic and otherwise). A complete “catalogue” of self-quotations and self-allusions would take up far too much space. But even a partial account can provide a sense of the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon. What follows, then, is akin to a list, a record of film experiences. It is a (partial) map of Truffaut’s hall of mirrors that represents the brute experience of

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intersecting film moments. It is also a map of cinephilic obsessions as determined by Truffaut’s films. As such, there is no attempt in what follows to look for causes or reasons, nor (for the most part, at least) do I attempt to analyze, comment on, or interpret what is documented (e.g., why did Truffaut quote or allude to a given visual motif or a line of dialogue from a previous film? what does each occurrence of selfquotation or self-allusion mean for each given film? etc.). Taken individually most of these recurrences may seem banal, indeed even trivial. However, it is as an ensemble, as a repetition of repetitions, that the network of relations they create becomes valuable in the experience of Truffaut’s cinema.

Tirez sur le pianiste r

From Les 400 Coups: Charlie’s comment to Plyne (the owner of the bar where he plays piano) who complains that women do not notice him: “It might be the glands …?” echoes the English teacher’s comment regarding Antoine’s behavior in Les 400 Coups: “It might be a problem due to glands …?”

La Peau douce r

From Jules et Jim: Picasso’s L’Etreinte dans la mansarde, first seen in Jules et Jim, reappears in Pierre’s Lachenay’s study. r From Tirez sur le pianiste: Like Léna with Charlie in Tirez sur le pianiste, Nicole asks Pierre to pick up some stockings during their stay in Reims.

La Mariée était en noir r

From Tirez sur le pianiste: Charlie’s comment about women, addressed to the two gangsters who have abducted him and Léna, that “once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” first heard in Tirez sur le pianiste, is repeated by Bliss ( Julie’s first victim) in an exchange with his friend Corey and partially by Corey himself later in the film.

Baisers volés r

From Fahrenheit 451: A toy car (fire-engine red) in Antoine’s studio apartment (it is the first object he touches upon entering this room after his dishonorable discharge from the army) lies on a bookshelf next to some books (!). On the toy car’s door one can see a yellow design: it is the dragon motif of the firemen in Fahrenheit 451, which is seen on the firehouse, as an ornament on the fire truck, and on the captain’s uniform and helmet, etc. (See also in this list, Domicile conjugal.)

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From La Mariée était en noir: In Hotel Alcina where Antoine works as a night watchman we see a poster for sleeping cars of the SNCF (the French railway service) that appeared earlier in La Mariée était en noir (Figure  2.21; see also Figure 28.1). In the latter film, it was seen in Coral’s room ( Julie Kolher’s second victim). In Baisers volés the poster first appears when Christine visits the young man during his work shift – he’s reading Woolrich’s La Sirène du Mississippi (thus announcing Truffaut’s next film!). It is seen again, in the background, several times over (though never in totality) during the whole business with the private investigator, the betrayed husband, and the cheating wife (see under L’Argent de poche).

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From La Peau douce: During their stay in Lyon, Julie/Marion’s comment to Louis that “he now seems to be looking at women a lot” echoes a comment made by Nicole in La Peau douce when she tells Pierre that he suddenly “seems to pay a lot of attention to women.” r From La Peau douce: When Louis returns to Lyon to find Julie/Marion in bed with her clothes on (it is night and she has just dressed herself ), he sits next to her, as did Pierre with Nicole after arriving at La Colinière, and begins caressing her in a similar fashion – the camera following his hand as he caresses her legs and thighs. r From Baisers volés: Meeting Comolli,41 the detective he hired to find Julie/Marion, Louis sits at the terrace of a café in Aix-en-Provence. He suddenly flees by entering the café (looking for a back exit). In the café there is a poster for a Jean Pougny exhibit (February–May 1961, at the Galerie des Ponchettes in Nice). The same poster – which shows a Harlequin – was first briefly seen in Baisers volés, in the café where Antoine, after being fired from his job, meets the detective from the Blady agency (Figure 2.23). r From Tirez sur le pianiste: The film ends in the same location as Tirez sur le pianiste and, recognizably, the same Alpine cabin is used.

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From Jules et Jim (already mentioned): The Werner/Mozart photograph from Jules et Jim reappears on a wall in Antoine and Christine’s apartment (see also under Une Belle Fille comme moi). r From La Sirène du Mississippi: Towards the end of the film, Antoine (in a restaurant with his new lover, Kyoko) phones Christine (they have now separated). Their conversation quotes an exchange between the newlyweds Louis and Julie/Marion in La Sirène du Mississippi: “I kiss you” ( Julie/Marion); “Me too” (Louis); “Tenderly” ( Julie/Marion); “Me too” (Louis). The rhythm and tone of the delivery is similar,

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except that Truffaut has inverted the gender roles: words initially spoken by Louis are now spoken by Christine, and those spoken by Julie/Marion are spoken by Antoine. (The inversion is coherent with Truffaut’s “feminization” of the character of Louis Mahé.) From Baisers volés: A photograph of the Papin sisters that first appears in Baisers volés (on Antoine’s dresser) is seen in the living room where it is reflected in a large mirror (see also under Le Dernier Métro).42 Several other objects from Antoine’s apartment in Baisers volés reappear: the red toy car with the Fahrenheit 451 design from Baisers volés (again on a bookshelf ); a photo of Jacques Audiberti returns in Antoine and Christine’s bedroom; a painting by Balthus;43 a blue vase and a small kitchen pot. From La Peau douce: A photograph first seen in Pierre Lachenay’s home study (next to Picasso’s L’Etreinte dans la mansarde) reappears on one of the walls of Antoine and Christine’s living room (when Christine gives a violin lesson it can be seen just above the child’s lectern). From Jules et Jim: Antoine’s lover, Kyoko, writes brief love notes that she slips in the bulbs of tulips. One of them reads “Come when you can, but come soon,” as written by Catherine to Jim in Jules et Jim. From Baisers volés: A scene from Baisers volés is replayed (though inverted) when Antoine and Christine go to the wine cellar in the Darbon house. In Baisers volés Antoine tries to kiss Christine who rejects the young man’s advances; in Domicile conjugal it is Christine who kisses Antoine in the cellar (he complies). From Les 400 Coups: When Christine returns home she tells Antoine, “What a smoke shop in here!” Her words echo those of René’s father in Les 400 Coups: “It’s a real smoke shop in there!” (Antoine and René had been smoking in a closed room while René’s father was out.)44 From La Mariée était en noir: A prostitute visited by Antoine tells him, “If you don’t attend to politics, politics will attend to you.” The same line was addressed to Julie Kohler by René Morane ( Julie’s third victim) in La Mariée était en noir. From La Peau douce: A scene from La Peau douce is alluded to when Christine asks that Antoine take back a painting he offered her. In both cases the couple is separating and virtually the same dialogue is heard: La Peau douce franca (holding the Foujita painting): Here, take the Foujita. pierre: There’s no reason, I gave it to you, it’s yours. franca: No, I don’t want to keep it, take it back. pierre: No, I don’t want it, it’s yours and that’s that. Franca puts back the painting. Domicile conjugal christine (holding the Balthus print): Here, take the small Balthus. antoine: The small Balthus, I gave it to you, it is yours, keep it. christine: Yes, take it. antoine: Listen, it’s yours, I gave it to you. Christine hangs the Balthus back on the wall.

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From Jules et Jim and La Peau douce: Picasso’s L’Etreinte dans la mansarde appears once more. It is seen by Claude at an art dealer’s. From Jules et Jim: The narrator’s comment – “Claude rode [his bicycle] behind Muriel, fixing his gaze on the nape of her neck, the part of her he preferred since he could look at her without being seen” – alludes to Jim’s comment to Catherine in Jules et Jim: “I’ve always loved the nape of your neck. The only part of you I could look at without being seen”; several point-of-view shots also show Jim looking at Catherine’s neck as she rides her bicycle before him. (In Antoine et Colette Antoine spends an evening seated behind Colette and says to René, “Throughout the entire evening I looked at her hair and at the nape of her neck.”) From Jules et Jim: Muriel writes to Claude, “This paper is your skin, this ink is my blood. I press hard so it can enter,” which reprises a letter sent to Jim by Catherine in Jules et Jim. From Jules et Jim: The voice-over narrator repeats a sentence from the voice-over narration of Jules et Jim: “Happiness doesn’t narrate easily, it also frays without anyone noticing.” From La Peau douce: When Claude meets a young female artist in her studio they have a conversation that echoes one from La Peau douce – a similar conversation also with reference to a man named “Massoulier” will again recur in Le Dernier Métro (see below Le Dernier Métro): La Peau douce nicole: You know I almost made your acquaintance six months ago. pierre: How is that? nicole: Well, at the time I was dating someone working in television with Louise de Vilmorin. One evening he took me to dinner at her home and you were expected. pierre: Ah, yes, let me see … nicole: Well you called to say that you would come after dinner but you never showed up. pierre: Indeed I was detained … Les Deux Anglaises et le continent woman artist: You know, we almost met before? Friday night, you were at Massoulier’s. claude: Yes, indeed. woman artist: Well, I arrived at midnight, and you had just left, like Cinderella.

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From Jules et Jim and Domicile conjugal (already mentioned): The Werner/Mozart photograph first seen in Jules et Jim and Domicile conjugal reappears in Camille’s dressing room.

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From Les 400 Coups: As a possible allusion to Les 400 Coups we see Camille escape from a “center for delinquents” (see “Motifs Repeated and Inflected” later in this chapter for a brief comment).

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From Fahrenheit 451: An Asian-looking vase first seen in Montag’s house in Fahrenheit 451 reappears (Figure  2.24 and Figure 2.25). It leads to a discussion between Ferrand and his prop man: the vase belongs to the hotel where the film crew is staying; however, the filmmaker wishes to use it in the film he is shooting, (see under L’Amour en fuite). r From Jules et Jim: At the end of the film, the camera assistant announces to Ferrand his upcoming wedding to Odile, the makeup artist: “She has known many men and I, on the other hand, have known few women. It will average out.” The passage alludes to Jules et Jim where Catherine answers Jules’ wedding proposal saying, “You have not known many women. I, on the other hand, have known many men. It will average out.” r From La Peau douce: Truffaut alludes to a scene from La Peau douce – the one with a small cat – by showing how a similar scene was shot for Je vous présente Paméla: Two lovers meet in a hotel room. To ensure their morning intimacy the woman leaves the breakfast tray outside the room. There follows a shot of the tray and a small cat comes into view to lap some milk or nibble at the food (see also under L’Homme qui aimait les femmes). r From Antoine et Colette: Truffaut alludes to Antoine et Colette when, for Je vous présente Paméla, he creates a variation of a situation from it: In Antoine et Colette Antoine rents an apartment directly across the street from Colette and her parents. In Je vous présente Paméla it is the young couple played by Alphonse and Julie Baker who come to live directly across the street from Alphonse’s parents (see “Motifs Repeated and Inflected” later in this chapter for a brief comment). r From Fahrenheit 451: A zoom on a television antenna early in the film (a television crew interviews the actors from the film) alludes to the opening credit of Fahrenheit 451.

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From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: Adèle writes in her diary (in regards to Lieutenant Pinson), “I can now learn anything on my own, but for love I only have him.” This passage quotes the voice-over narrator of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (as he speaks in the voice of Anne Brown addressing herself to Claude): “I can now learn anything on my own, but for love I only have you.” r From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: Adèle writes in her diary, “When a woman like me gives herself to a man, she is his wife.” The passage is a quote from

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Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, where Muriel writes to Claude, “If a woman like Anne or me gives herself to a man, she is his wife.” r From La Nuit américaine: When Adèle visits Judge Johnstone in the hope that Lieutenant Pinson’s planned wedding will not go through, she says, “It is possible to love someone about whom we know that everything is contemptible.” In La Nuit américaine, after Liliane has left him, Alphonse says to Julie Baker: “It is possible to love someone, to be desperately in love with someone for whom we have contempt.” r From Les 400 Coups (already mentioned with regards to La Chambre verte): Adèle’s shrine to Lieutenant Pinson is reminiscent of Antoine’s shrine to Balzac.

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From La Mariée était en noir and Baisers volés: The SNCF poster from La Mariée était en noir and Baisers volés appears for a third and final time in the hairdressing salon of Mr and Mrs Riffle. r From Les 400 Coups: A mistreated youth in the film, Julien Leclou, is seen throwing a broken china plate in the gutter in a gesture that clearly recalls Antoine Doinel shoving a milk bottle in the gutter in Les 400 Coups (see below L’Homme qui aimait les femmes). r From Les 400 Coups: At school, Julien steals from his classmates’ coat pockets as the coats are hung in the hallway. A similar action (shot from a similar angle) is shown in Les 400 Coups (Figure 2.26 and Figure 2.27).

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From Les 400 Coups and L’Argent de poche: I have already mentioned how the flashback scenes of Bertrand Morane’s youth generally allude to Les 400 Coups. In one of the flashbacks the young Bertrand, in a gesture that recalls both Les 400 Coups and L’Argent de poche, tosses into the gutter a letter his mother has addressed to one of her lovers and asked him to mail. In Les 400 Coups, when Antoine runs away from home one night, he steals a bottle of milk. Like a homeless drunkard clutching a bottle of spirits, he furiously drinks the milk while trying to hide. Once he has finished he throws the bottle into the gutter; in L’Argent de poche, Julien, a child mistreated by his mother and grandmother, throws a broken plate into the gutter for fear of punishment at home. A small network of associations develops: milk, of course, is associated with the mother (and her sexuality) and with food; the plate is associated with food and the mother ( Julien throws the plate because he fears receiving a beating from his mother and grandmother); the love letter Bertrand throws away into the gutter is associated with the mother’s sexuality. Moreover, in all three instances the children have unhappy childhoods.

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From Tirez sur le pianiste: Bertrand’s injury and death allude to the story told by one of the gangsters in Tirez sur le pianiste: his father was run over by a car because he could not help looking at a woman’s legs. From La Mariée était en noir: The character of Morane as a “cavaleur” (ladies’ man) reprises that of the painter Fergus in La Mariée était en noir (the penultimate victim of Julie Kohler – see the discussion about miroirs grossissants later in this chapter). From Baisers volés: Morane works with scale model boats and planes, which recalls Baisers volés, in which Antoine works with scale model boats (see also under La Femme d’à côté). From La Mariée était en noir: Bertrand is excited by the sound of a woman’s stockings as her legs rub together, as is Bliss in La Mariée était en noir, who goes as far as to record the sound made by his girlfriend Gilberte crossing her legs wearing nylon (not silk!) stockings. From La Peau douce and La Nuit américaine: Truffaut shoots, for a third time, a scene with a couple in a hotel room who leave a tray outside the door. Again, a cat comes to nibble on the food. In all three variations of this scene, the man involved in the situation dies: Pierre is killed by his wife in La Peau douce; the character played by Alexandre in La Nuit américaine is killed by his son (whereas Alexandre himself dies in a car accident); and Bertrand dies after being run over by a car in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. Thus, a small network develops that somehow associates a cat, food, a couple having sex, and the death of the male lover. From Une Belle Fille comme moi: A painting by Paul Klee, This Star Teaches Bending (1940), seen in Bertrand Morane’s Paris hotel was first seen in Hélène’s apartment (Stanislas Prévine’s assistant) as she types recordings and comments regarding Camille Bliss in Une Belle Fille comme moi (Figure 2.28 and Figure 2.29).

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From the Doinel cycle: The idea for the last film in the Doinel cycle rests almost entirely on quoting and alluding to the previous films in the series through flashbacks consisting of moments from earlier Doinel films, as well as “fake” Doinel flashback material from La Nuit américaine and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes.45 Altogether, the present time of the film is “interrupted” forty-two times by flashback images from previous Doinel films – to which one can add the fake flashbacks and the flashbacks shot for this film. It might be argued that this film captures the essence of self-quoting and self-allusion in Truffaut. Indeed, through its mosaic of flashbacks, L’Amour en fuite functions somewhat like a “mini” Doinel retrospective or festival, and part of the (melancholy) pleasure it affords its viewers – especially those already familiar with the other films of the cycle – inasmuch as it emerges from the flashback scenes, is akin to a form of cinephilic pleasure. From La Nuit américaine: Truffaut asked actress Dani, who plays Liliane, to utter a variation of the dialogue she had performed six years earlier in La Nuit américaine, where her character was also named Liliane.46 In both films she announces her

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breakup from someone played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. The initial exchange in La Nuit américaine (with Jacqueline Bisset) runs a little bit longer than its partial quote in L’Amour en fuite (with Claude Jade): La Nuit américaine julie baker: He [Alphonse] will be in a dreadful state. liliane: Yes, but he is always in a dreadful state. He’s a capricious, spoiled child, and he’ll never be a man. julie baker: He loves you. You were supposed to get married. liliane: Ah, he’s the one who said that. I never spoke of marriage. In any case the word marriage alone makes me sick, so … And furthermore he needs a wife, a mistress, a nanny [nounou], a nurse, a little sister. I feel incapable of playing all these roles at the same time. julie baker: It’s very bad what you’re doing. You just don’t realize. You are too hard. liliane: Anyway, it’s over. I don’t want to hear about Alphonse anymore, so … And what is more, it’s not because someone has had a difficult childhood that they have to make everyone pay for it. L’Amour en fuite christine darbon: Antoine will be in a terrible state. liliane: But Antoine is always in a terrible state. He needs a wife, a mistress, a little sister, a wet nurse [nourrice], a nurse. … And I feel incapable of playing all these roles at the same time. christine darbon: Liliane, I find you too hard with Antoine. liliane: I am as I am. It’s not because someone has had a difficult childhood that they have to make everyone pay for it. From L’Homme qui aimait les femmes: Bertrand Morane repeats what Christine (Antoine’s wife) had said of Antoine in Domicile conjugal: Domicile conjugal christine: With him [Antoine] I was never bored. L’homme qui aimait les femmes bertrand: With Delphine I was never bored. From Baisers volés: Sabine, Antoine’s new love, repeats a sentence Antoine spoke in Baisers volés: “No! I never blow my nose with paper.” From La Nuit américaine: The title of Antoine’s autobiographical novel, Les Salades de l’amour, quotes a remark made by Ferrand, the filmmaker of La Nuit américaine, in response to a crew member’s comment about Alphonse’s complicated love life. Ferrand says, “One day I’ll make a film entitled Les Salades de l’amour.” From Fahrenheit 451 and La Nuit américaine: The Asian-looking vase first seen in Fahrenheit 451 and later in La Nuit américaine reappears, this time as a wastepaper basket where Antoine throws away the love letter he was writing to Sabine – a gesture that recalls the moment in La Peau douce when Pierre Lachenay throws away the brief love letter written for his mistress, Nicole, at the airport. From Les 400 Coups: In a bold move, Truffaut alludes to Les 400 Coups by using the same arrest photograph file number (LL4-8426) initially used for the young

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Antoine Doinel for a man by the name of Charles-Antoine Gargonne47 who is accused of slaying his three-year-old son, as if both characters were inverted mirror images of each other, as if the “delinquent” Antoine could have become the murdering, socially maladapted Charles-Antoine (an association reinforced by the fact that they also share a name) (Figure 2.30 and Figure 2.31). r From Une Belle Fille comme moi: Sabine and her brother Xavier go to the cinema, where they see Truffaut’s Une Belle Fille comme moi. Several moments from the film are shown.

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From Baisers volés, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, and La Chambre verte: I have already mentioned the photographs that recur in Bernard Granger’s dressing room and Marion Steiner’s office which allude to Baisers volés, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, and La Chambre verte. r From Baisers volés and Domicile conjugal: The photo of the Papin sisters from the cover of Détective magazine first seen in Baisers volés and in Domicile conjugal appears again in Marion Steiner’s office (Figure 2.32, Figure 2.33, and Figure 2.34). r From La Peau douce and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: A dialogue exchange from La Peau douce and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent about a missed rendezvous is taken up again with slight variations (the reference to Massoulier from Les Deux Anglaises et le continent also returns): nadine: We almost met. Hello, we almost met at a common friend’s house, at Lucien’s. You were expected at his housewarming party. bernard: Ah! Massoulier? Well I couldn’t make it. (See under Vivement dimanche! for Massoulier.) r From La Sirène du Mississippi: The film freely quotes dialogue from the final moments of La Sirène du Mississippi. (In both instances the female character, whose name is Marion, is played by Catherine Deneuve.) The repeated lines belong to two scenes that immediately follow each other in La Sirène du Mississippi: La Sirène du Mississippi julie/marion: I’m attaining love, Louis. I hurt, Louis. I hurt. Is this love? Does love hurt? louis: Yes, it hurts. … louis: You are so beautiful. It’s a suffering when I look at you. julie/marion: Yet, yesterday you [tu] said it was a joy. louis: It is a joy and a suffering. In Le Dernier Métro, this dialogue closes off the play, La Disparue, that the troupe of the Montmartre theater is putting on. With rehearsals and performances, the repeated lines are heard, in part or in totality, no less than four times throughout the film: marion: Now I’m attaining love, Karl, and I hurt. Does love hurt? bernard: Yes, love hurts. …

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bernard: You are beautiful, Helena. So beautiful that looking at you is a suffering. marion: Yesterday, you [vous] said it was a joy. bernard: It is a joy and a suffering.

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From Domicile conjugal and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes: Like Antoine in Domicile conjugal and Bertrand in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, Bernard Coudray works with scale model boats. r From L’Homme qui aimait les femmes: Two sections of a dialogue exchange between Vera and Bertrand Morane in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes are reprised in distinct exchanges between Mathilde and Bernard. The first one is quoted verbatim and the second one introduces slight variations: L’homme qui aimait les femmes vera: You were tender with me. bertrand: … You too were tender with me. vera (to Bertrand): I just had to do what I did [leave Bertrand] . … It was either that or become mad. … We could now finally become friends. La Femme d’à côté mathilde: You were tender with me. bernard: … You too were tender with me. mathilde (to Bernard): When I worked up the courage to leave you … it was either that or become mad. … We might as well become friends now. r From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: A line from a dialogue spoken by Diurka (in a conversation with Claude) in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent is quoted by Mathilde (in a conversation with Bernard): Les Deux Anglaises et le continent diurka: I tell myself that love stories must proceed naturally with a beginning, a middle, and an end. La Femme d’à côté: mathilde: Do you remember what you used to say eight years ago? God knows how unhappy it used to make me feel whenever you said it: “Love stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

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From Baisers volés: The owner of a private detective agency, Mr Lablache, reprises a comment made in Baisers volés by Mr Blady of the Blady Detective Agency: “Our field of work requires ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.”

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From La Mariée était en noir, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and Le Dernier Métro: The mysterious Massoulier, mentioned (but never seen) in La Mariée était en noir (where he is said to have had sex in an airplane with a stewardess – an echo of La Peau douce?), in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and Le Dernier Métro becomes a “flesh and blood” character. In fact, there are two different Massouliers in this film: one is a crooked cinema owner who is seen briefly when he is shot at the opening of the film and whose murder sets the narrative going; the other is his brother and a priest whom we find at the film’s close celebrating Barbara’s and Julien’s wedding.

Motifs Repeated and Inflected We see that there is hardly a Truffaut film that is not alluded to or does not allude to another film. It is the accumulated weight of these self-quotations and self-allusions that may lead the spectator to liberally extend the self-reflexive game to situations whose self-reflexivity is less obvious. For instance, there is a recurring gesture motif in Truffaut that usually expresses tenderness: a caress of the hand on the face of someone (see Figure 2.35 and Figure 2.36). This is not a gesture that is a priori specific to the Truffaldian universe, no more so, for instance, than the actions of walking down the street or speaking on the phone. And in fact, there would be something odd in trying to make the argument that two or more Truffaut films allude to each other whenever a character is seen walking down the street or speaking on the phone in a nondescript manner! What then transforms this motif into a “move” in the self-reflexive and cinephilic game Truffaut plays with his spectator? What turns it into a “reflecting” or “mirroring surface” akin to the various examples seen in this chapter? First, there is the very context created by those examples just listed, several of which emphasize Truffaut’s control over small mise-en-scène details that very few first-time spectators notice (the case of the red toy car with the Fahrenheit 451 design on Antoine’s bookshelf – of all places! – in Baisers volés and in Domicile conjugal is a good illustration). Secondly, there is the sheer insistence on the same gesture motif in film after film. In fact, this is a fine example of singularity emerging out of repetition, to borrow an idea from Deleuze’s Différence et répétition. Deleuze distinguishes between the blindly legal or rule-following aspect of generality and the singularity of repetition. “To repeat,” writes Deleuze, “is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique which has no equal or equivalent.” And: “Repetition belongs to humor and irony [and therefore game]; it is by nature transgression or exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws.”48 Indeed, what strikes us in Truffaut’s great hall of mirrors is that repetition does not appear to be determined by law, which is precisely why, once noticed, such repetitions can be so arresting. They concern singularities. And repetition in this case only serves to emphasize this singularity (what Deleuze subsumes under différence). A line of dialogue, a photograph, an object such as a vase, a situation or a gesture, even a name, are brought to our

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attention, singled out, made different, by virtue of repetition. Repetition literally extracts them from the law or rule-like character of some “reality-effect” or “genreeffect” where their singularity would be lost – even though we may eventually reassign them to an alternative rule-like behavior as soon as we attempt accounting for them conceptually (it might be, for instance, that we will end by understanding them as falling under the umbrella of rule-like or habit-like principles such as auteurism or cinephilia).49 In short, the less singular or unique an event, an action, or a detail – a motif – will be, the less pertinent or noteworthy its recurrence will appear. Yet, paradoxically, the more it is repeated, the more it may gain in singularity. Indeed, it is by virtue of its repetition that the hand gesture acquires a uniqueness it may not seem to possess the first time it is experienced. The more it is repeated, therefore, the more it appears at a remove from the film understood as a self-contained event and as part of a greater phenomenon, an effect which may perhaps be experienced simply by looking at the collection of stills shown here. Repetition, in other words, enables us to capture the uniqueness of this gesture in the context of Truffaut’s cinema. It is this well circumscribed uniqueness that leads us to conceive of the various repeated occurrences of the gesture motif as self-reflexive, akin to a quote or an allusion. The same principle holds for other recurring motifs that exhibit a great consistency throughout Truffaut’s carreer. These include 1 References to the “magical” quality of women and to some of them being “apparitions”: – “Woman is magical.” (Plyne to Charlie in Tirez sur le pianiste) – “You are magical.” (Coral to Julie Kohler in La Mariée était en noir) – “Are women magical?” (Alphonse to Jean-François, to Alexandre, and to Bernard in La Nuit américaine) – “For too long I believed that women were magical.” (Alphonse to Julie in La Nuit américaine) – “Women are magical Mr Lablache.” (Maître Clément to private detective Lablache in Vivement dimanche!) – “She is an apparition for all, maybe not a woman for one’s own.” ( Jim discussing Catherine with Jules in Jules et Jim) – “Your apparition at the train station …” ( Jim to Catherine in Jules et Jim) – “She is an apparition.” (Corey speaking of Julie Kohler in La Mariée était en noir) – “Madame Tabard is not a woman, she’s an apparition.” (Sales clerk quoting Antoine Doinel in Baisers volés) – “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman, which is the opposite. … You say that I’m exceptional. Yes, it’s true, I’m exceptional …” (Fabienne Tabard to Antoine in Baisers volés). These lines are taken up again verbatim in Domicile conjugal, in a highly reflexive manner (at least, for viewers who recognize them) by the character played by Claude Véga – a professional imitator – who, in this case, imitates the voice and speech inflections of Delphine Seyrig (who plays Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés), under the astonished, dumbfounded gaze of Antoine who watches him perform on television.

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2 The number 813: This is one of the most mysterious and spectacular of Truffaut’s recurring motifs. Starting with La Peau douce, this number is either seen or heard in no less than nine films: Fahrenheit 451, La Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi, Une Belle Fille comme moi, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., Le Dernier Métro, La Femme d’à côté, and Vivement dimanche!. Truffaut once explained that it was a tribute to an Arsène Lupin novel by Maurice Leblanc that he especially liked (in the novel Lupin must clear himself from a murder charge by discovering that 813 is the combination of a safe which is opened by pressing the face of a clock on 8-1-3 at noon or midnight). In fact, in a scene deleted from La Peau douce Pierre buys Leblanc’s 813 for Nicole since this was her room number in the Lisbon hotel where they began their idyll. Be it as it may, it seems difficult to make sense of this reference: why does it show up in certain films – all the way to Vivement dimanche! – and not in others? The number sometimes serves to indicate a room (often a hotel room): in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. it is Lieutenant Pinson’s room number in the Halifax army barracks; in Le Dernier Métro the mention of “room 813” is overheard in the hotel where Marion resides; in Vivement dimanche! it is the hotel room of MarieChristine Vercel in Nice (a room later occupied by Barbara Becker). However, 813 also comes up in other places: in Fahrenheit 451 the number is discussed in a conversation between Montag and Clarisse, but it is also the number of the block they inhabit and the number by which their files are identified at the fire station. In La Mariée était en noir 813 is a flight number. In La Sirène du Mississippi and Une Belle Fille comme moi it is seen on a road sign indicating the distance to Paris. In La Femme d’à côté the number is seen on Bernard’s car plates and in Le Dernier Métro Bernard explains it was the plate number of his stolen bicycle.50 Also in Le Dernier Métro 813 is said to be the number of days and nights Lucas Steiner stayed in hiding in the basement of the Théâtre Montmartre. In La Sirène du Mississippi the number appears on the wall of Julie/Marion’s and Louis’ barely furnished Lyon apartment (alongside what appear to be architects’ measurements). Finally in Une Belle Fille comme moi it is seen on the uniform of a prison guard. Though it would seem difficult to find a system capable of accounting for the presence of this number in all the films mentioned above, it is interesting to note nevertheless that 813 is absent from all films with Jean-Pierre Léaud, including, of course, the Doinel cycle, absent as well from the films where Truffaut has a lead role, from the films closely associated to the Doinel cycle (La Nuit américaine and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes both have scenes that serve as flashbacks of Antoine in L’Amour en fuite), and from L’Argent de poche, the only other film after Les 400 Coups and L’Enfant sauvage that deals directly and centrally with childhood. 3 Falls: Numerous characters in Truffaut’s films fall. Gérard dies in a mountain climbing accident in Les Mistons; Thérèse Saroyan throws herself out of a window in Tirez sur le pianiste; Catherine drives off a bridge killing herself and Jim in Jules et Jim; Julie attempts to kill herself by throwing herself out of a window in La Mariée était en noir and she kills Bliss by pushing him off a balcony; the real Julie is pushed off Le Mississippi in La Sirène du Mississippi; Camille kills her father by orchestrating his fall from the second floor of a barn in Une Belle Fille comme moi; in La Nuit américaine, the heroine of Je vous présente Paméla dies when her car falls into a ravine; in L’Argent de poche, little Gregory falls from a window; in La Femme d’à côté, Odile Jouve has injured her leg

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attempting suicide by throwing herself from a window. Some of these falls are accidental, other are suicides (or suicide attempts) and others amount to murder. However, it may be worth noting that “lovesick suicidal falls” only concern female characters (Tirez sur le pianiste, Jules et Jim, La Mariée était en noir, La Nuit américaine, La Femme d’à côté). 4 Names: In Truffaut’s films names recur insistently, including Charlie Koller in Tirez sur le pianiste/Julie Kohler in La Mariée était en noir (the names are pronounced identically – and are homonymic with the French word for anger: colère); Mr Bliss in La Mariée était en noir/Camille Bliss and the Bliss family in Une Belle Fille comme moi; Mlle Baker in La Mariée était en noir/Barbara Becker in Vivement dimanche! (again the names are homonymic in French); Mr Bigey in Les 400 Coups/Geneviève Bigey in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes;51 René Morane in La Mariée était en noir/Bertrand Morane in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes; Bernadette Jouve in Les Mistons/Odile Jouve in Vivement dimanche!; Julien Davenne in La Chambre verte/Michel Davenne in Truffaut’s script for La Petite Voleuse;52 Pierre Lachenay in La Peau douce/Lucien Lachenay in Truffaut and Gruault’s script for the television miniseries Belle Epoque; and both Jules et Jim and Le Dernier Métro have a character named Merlin. A number of given names also recur in several films (for instance, Clarisse in Tirez sur le pianiste and Fahrenheit 451). However the most common ones are: Julie, used for four important female characters (in La Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi, La Nuit américaine, and La Chambre verte – and in L’Amour en fuite we learn that it was the name of Colette’s dead child), and its male variations, Julien or Jules, found in six films (Les 400 Coups, Jules et Jim, Baisers volés, L’Argent de poche, La Chambre verte, and Vivement dimanche! – moreover, Cécilia’s father in La Chambre verte is named Julien, in Jules et Jim Jim’s novel is entitled Jacques et Julien, while in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent Claude entitles his novel Jérôme et Julien). Other given names used frequently include Sabine (in Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, and L’Amour en fuite), Gilberte (Antoine’s mother in Les 400 Coups, Jim’s fiancée in Jules et Jim, and Bliss’ fiancée in La Mariée était en noir), and Bertrand (in La Nuit américaine and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes). Marcel Berbert twice plays a man named Jardine (in La Sirène du Mississippi and La Chambre verte); the same goes for Catherine Deneuve, who plays a character named Marion in La Sirène du Mississippi and Le Dernier Métro, and for Gérard Depardieu who plays a character named Bernard in both Le Dernier Métro and Vivement dimanche!. (And perhaps as a joke, Truffaut has Jean Dasté, who plays Dr Itard’s colleague, Philippe Pinel, in L’Enfant sauvage, play a character named Dr Bicard in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes.)

Other Kinds of Mirrors Finally, under the pressure created by this context, the viewer may also discover more “diffuse” forms of allusions in Truffaut’s hall of mirrors. So far, I have focused mostly on motifs without addressing the issue of thematic recurrences. For instance, the themes of romantic love and childhood have become commonplace in Truffaldian criticism. With regards to the former, critics have noted how Truffaut often opposes

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what is “permanent” or “absolute” with what is “provisory” or “relative,” whether it be in a comic or in a tragic mood (examples include such films as Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, La Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte, La Femme d’à côté, and the feature films of the Doinel cycle with the exception of Les 400 Coups). Thematic criticism requires relatively abstract interpretive procedures; a theme, after all, has a conceptual nature, it is not a material entity, not something that has been shot or recorded by the apparatus of cinema. Consequently, much mediation is needed to identify a theme, for it may be substantiated in an indefinite number of ways. The spectator who says “I’ve seen this before” after recognizing that two films share the same theme is obviously not saying something false, but is not using the verb “see” in its literal sense either: what is “seen” here is a network of relations somehow “abstracted” from concrete images and sounds and related at a higher level under a concept. When viewers recognize the recurrence of certain themes in the work of a filmmaker they obviously perceive (conceptually, with the mind) a family resemblance that likely creates a sense of consistency or unity which can then be ascribed to the auteur – that is, as long as they are not predominantly ascribed to some other determining factor (zeitgeist, cultural formation, studio practices, etc.). But even though we might say of a filmmaker who reuses the same themes over and over again that he’s canvassing the same ground, we don’t usually think that, in so-doing, he is self-quoting or self-alluding (to) his work. Hitchcock does not quote himself with each wrongly accused man, nor does Truffaut whenever he opposes permanent and provisory love. But even though we might say of filmmakers who reuse the same themes over and over again that they are canvassing the same ground, we do not usually think that, in so doing, they are quoting themselves or making allusions to their own work. For themes are continuous; a filmmaker whose new film reprises a theme previously broached is simply continuing his exploration of it, not quoting it. Motifs, on the other hand, tend to be conceived of as less conceptual and thus closer to the material or figurative aspects of texts (verbal or pictorial). Often the motif is said to relate to the concrete “stuff ” that coalesces conceptually into a theme. This is why they have been more important than themes in this study. Yet motifs are notoriously difficult to define, as any student of poetics knows. And the reason for this is that they are not completely inimical to generality. Without entering into a theoretical digression we can briefly look at two instances in Truffaut of narrative development and transformation sustained by a motif. To maintain the terminology adopted here I call such instances miroirs grossissants and miroirs déformants. 1 Miroirs grossissants: I have already mentioned how La Nuit américaine possibly alludes to Antoine et Colette by having Alphonse and Pamela (the characters from Je vous présente Paméla) move across the street from Alphonse’s parents. In this filmwithin-the-film, Pamela falls in love with her father-in-law. Now, it might be argued

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that it is this very same situational premise that finds itself both mirrored and further developed in La Femme d’à côté, with one difference: here the romantic couple (Mathilde and Bernard) is made up of former lovers. It is as if Truffaut had decided to explore what would happen should Vera and Bernard (the ex-lovers from L’Homme qui aimait les femmes) have been thrust into the physical situation – that is, living across from each other – of Antoine et Colette and Je vous présente Paméla. In other words, the mirror, here, is a miroir grossissant, for it mirrors a situation by expanding it. Similar miroirs grossissants are found in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes and L’Argent de poche: in the former it is used to develop the character of Bertrand Morane, whose skirt-chasing antics mirror and expand those of Fergus, the artist and penultimate victim of La Mariée était en noir (also played by Charles Denner); in L’Argent de poche, a film that is filled with many autobiographical details and in which Truffaut projects himself into three characters (the school teacher who at the end of the film voices Truffaut’s philosophy of life and childhood; Patrick, whose summer camp experiences come from Truffaut’s life; and Julien Leclou, who is partly a figuration of the young Antoine Doinel), there are strong echoes of Les 400 Coups: we see Julien empty the coat pockets of his schoolmates – something we also see happening in Les 400 Coups – and like Antoine, Julien spends one night away from home on the streets of the city. To some extent, however, the film can be conceived as an expansion of Les 400 Coups, as if, instead of following the single story of Antoine, Truffaut had followed the lives of several school children at once. 2 Miroirs déformants: We encountered an earlier example of this in the murderer from L’Amour en fuite, Charles-Antoine Gargonne. However, there are also vague situational echoes or miroirs déformants of the young Doinel in films as different as Une Belle Fille comme moi or L’Enfant sauvage. In the first instance, Antoine’s escape from a detention center is replayed when Camille flees from a centre de détention des mineurs délinquants. Of course, Camille’s fate after her escape is different from Antoine’s, yet the film could also be seen as a sort of exploration of the Doinel cycle in the conditional mood – “What if Antoine Doinel had been a girl?” – set in a comic, burlesque mode. As for L’Enfant sauvage, there can be no doubt that the young Victor de l’Aveyron belongs to that collection of alienated youths in Truffaut who, alongside Bertrand Morane, Camille Bliss, Alphonse (the actor in La Nuit américaine), Georges (the mute boy in La Chambre verte), and Julien Leclou, mirror the young Antoine Doinel and his (and Truffaut’s) unhappy childhood. Not surprisingly Truffaut dedicated L’Enfant sauvage to Jean-Pierre Léaud. But there is at least one further obvious link: Truffaut chose to set the plot of L’Enfant sauvage on the outskirts of late-eighteenth-century Paris, in the Commune of Les Batignolles. In other words, he symbolically situated the story of L’Enfant sauvage in the same terrain as Les 400 Coups, around what later became Place de Clichy, Montmartre, and the eighteenth arrondissement (this was also where Truffaut lived with his parents). Are Victor and the young Antoine doubles of each other? Again we have a sort of “What if Antoine Doinel, an unloved child, had been abandoned by his parents in the eighteenth century? Would he have become a wild child?” Interestingly, another commentator, Jean Collet, saw a thematic connection between L’Enfant sauvage and Une Belle Fille comme moi as both films build

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on the premise of a man of science (Itard, Prévine) becoming fascinated by a “savage,” “untamed,” or “uncultivated” being (Victor, Camille).53 Through Jean Collet’s comment, we reach the boundary traced by thematic criticism proper, making a conclusion possible. We can begin to see how Truffaut’s selfreflexive practice fosters an obsessive viewer for whom one of the filmmaker’s principal preoccupations seems to relate his films to each other, to create various networks of associations among them. This is the texture of the Truffaldian experience. Its source, I argue, is found in Truffaut’s own cinephilia and film criticism. For the viewer, the “self-reference game” may give rise to a peculiar feeling. (Again, this may perhaps be felt by looking at the various series of stills gathered here.) Describing this feeling is no simple matter, of course. However, I should say it is akin to that which accompanies the uncovering of a secret or to hearing out a confession (to borrow Truffaut’s term from his Arts piece quoted in the first section of this chapter). Though nothing may actually be revealed by it – or, at least, nothing important per se, save perhaps the experience of the feeling itself – the feeling is nonetheless comparable to that which attends a revelation. This may be explained by the fact that such recurrences as the ones documented above are usually noticed as the result of a “peculiar” (perhaps obsessive) form of cinematic engagement. Not surprisingly, then, when Truffaut edited a selection of his critical essays in 1975,54 the first two sections were entitled “What do Critics Dream About?” and “The Big Secret.” What critics have always dreamt about is knowledge of the “Big Secret” – all forms of hermeneutics widely attest to this. In the case of Truffaut, I believe his conception of mise-en-scène and his obsessive cinephilia – he claimed to have learned by heart the entire dialogue of certain films – led him to make films that can sustain the same sort of cinephilic engagement and, in return, “reward” those spectators (those willing to engage with his entire body of work) by arousing the feeling associated with the uncovering of a secret – of certain “little details” that create a sense of underlying unity (such as would be expected by the work of a true metteur-en-scène). This implies that aspects of Truffaut’s mise-en-scène require from the spectator a particular form of involvement or transaction – one unusual only in the sense that the bulk of spectators do not repeatedly view the same films. In short, the argument is that while Truffaut obviously cared a great deal about the box-office success of his films – and therefore cared for the “average” viewer – he also made films for the same sort of obsessive filmgoer he had himself become since the mid-1940s. The institutions of Parisian film culture, some of which persist to this day (ciné-clubs, second-run art houses, retrospectives, the Cinémathèque française), among other things, made it possible to be such a spectator.55 To put it differently, Truffaut’s mise-en-scène, this “art of the little detail,” entails – or, if this is too strong a word, nourishes – cinephilia, its institutions, and the sort of spectatorial engagement that accompanies them. To someone who might see as trivial the fact that Truffaut recurrently used the names “Julie” and “Julien,” that he inserted the number 813 into nine films, or reused props, on the grounds that they seem to have no intrinsic meaning, I would respond that the value of these “details” lies elsewhere, that it lies in the form of experience they

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foster. Their significance, in other words, lies not in our ability to use them to “read” a given film, to make sense of the plot, or even articulate Truffaut’s “worldview.” Rather, their significance lies in the sort of spectatorship they cultivate and in a type of experience that can only be achieved through repetition – in this case, repeated viewings – as an agent of singularity. Perhaps this is the Big Secret, after all. If so, it is the secret of the “initiate,” that which is possessed or ought to be possessed by the cinephile, the critic, the scholar, in that it distinguishes them from other spectators.

Notes 1 2 3 4

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Michael Atkinson, “A Rising Tide,” The Village Voice (20 April 1999), consulted online at http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-04-20/film/a-rising-tide/. He also worked as production manager on Les Mistons (1957). Truffaut also signed some of his first articles under the name “François de Monferrand.” References to La Règle du jeu abound in Truffaut’s films. In Le Dernier Métro, for instance, the play inside the film (La Disparue) has a gamekeeper dressed exactly like Shumacher – the gamekeeper in Renoir’s film – whom we see rehearsing the following line of dialogue: “I saw some light, I thought I saw a vagabond and I shot,” a variation on the Marquis de la Chesnaye’s “My gamekeeper Schumacher thought he saw a poacher and shot”; in La Nuit américaine Joëlle, the assistant director, openly quotes the kitchen chef in La Règle du jeu (“I accept diets but not fads”); and in Vivement dimanche! (1983), in a ploy to catch an assassin, commissioner Santelli explains to Barbara Becker (an homage to Jacques Becker) how to make a potato salad by peeling the potatoes and pouring wine on them while they’re still hot. Santelli’s words clearly echo those of La Colinière’s kitchen chef in La Règle du jeu when he points out la Chesnaye’s culinary refinement (Santelli: “[To make this potato salad] you mustn’t be afraid of burning your fingers”; La Colinière’s chef: “[This is what Célestin omitted to do] because he’s afraid of burning his fingers”). Contemplated from the perspective of La Chambre verte, the fire which threatens these two shrines can probably be connected to the fire which destroys books in Fahrenheit 451. As Montag tries to explain to his wife Linda, “These books are my family. … Behind each of these books there is a man, that’s what interests me.” Books are people, and books are the memory of people; both of these premises are expressed at the end of Fahrenheit 451 with the “book people.” A further connection between the Doinel cycle and Fahrenheit 451 will be mentioned later. Truffaut, “Ali Baba et la ‘politique des auteurs,’” in Cahiers du Cinéma 44 (1955): 46. Louise de Bettignies, code name Alice Dubois, was the daughter of Julienne Mabille de Ponchevillle and was therefore a relative through marriage of Marie Jaoul de Poncheville, widow of François Mabille de Poncheville and Truffaut’s lover at the time. Today, Marie Jaoul de Poncheville is a filmmaker. Thus, in the case of Oskar Werner – with whom Truffaut had been on bad terms ever since Fahrenheit 451 – Davenne/Truffaut says, “Concur with me that, looking at this photograph, it is difficult to consider this man to be an enemy.” And when the camera stops to regard Henry James, whose stories (especially “The Altar of the Dead”) serve as inspiration for La Chambre verte, the voice-over says, “This one is an American. He loved Europe so much that he ended up adopting British citizenship. I hardly got to know him. Yet it is through him that I learned the importance of respecting the dead.” More touchingly

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“cinephilic” is the comment about the photograph of the young Orson Welles: “This little boy? When I was an adolescent I saw him die one summer during the holidays.” Indeed, Truffaut was fourteen in the summer of 1946 when he saw “Welles” die (though it was actually Charles Foster Kane). François Truffaut, “Le Cinéma crève sous ses fausses légendes,” in Arts 619 (May 1957): 3–4. This does not include his several cameos à la Hitchcock: in Les 400 Coups, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., L’Argent de poche, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, and on the soundtracks of La Peau douce and Domicile conjugal, as the post-synchronized voice of a gas station attendant and a newspaper vendor, respectively. Truffaut’s voice can also be heard briefly in Jules et Jim in the café scene when Jules waits for Catherine (an off-screen voice says, “Come Alphonse, let’s go”); in the opening credit sequence of La Sirène du Mississippi; as the voice-over narrator of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent; and as the telephone voice of Bertrand Morane’s insurance claims person in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. Jean Collet, François Truffaut (Rome: Gremese, 2004), pp. 50–51. Truffaut himself recognized this quite clearly: “From this experience I don’t retain the impression of having played a role but simply of having directed the film in front of the camera rather than behind it as is usual.” In Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 256. Truffaut and Audiberti became close friends during the mid-1950s, their friendship lasting until the writer’s death in 1965. Truffaut made several homages to him in his films. It was Truffaut who convinced actress Claudine Huz to adopt the name Marie Dubois (the title of a novel by Audiberti) for the credits of Tirez sur le pianiste. In La Sirène du Mississippi Truffaut renamed a square in Antibes (the birthplace of Audiberti) “Place Jacques Audiberti” and gave the name “Monorail” (the title of another novel by Audiberti) to the hotel across from it. A different photo of him also appears in Baisers volés and Domicile conjugal. The picture of Valentina Cortese is dedicated by hand to “François.” The picture is likely a production still from Karl Hartl’s 1955 film Mozart (also known as The Life and Loves of Mozart), which Truffaut might have seen in competition at Cannes in 1956. In the case of Werner’s Mozart photo in Baisers volés and Une Belle Fille comme moi, one doesn’t know whether it is Jules et Jim, Hartl’s 1956 Mozart film, or even Mozart himself that is being referenced. The pictures cast reflections to La Nuit américaine where there’s a brief discussion about the young Mozart – and through him, about actors and artists in general. He also appeared in films by New Wave directors, including Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961), Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Bourdon’s Le Soleil dans l’oeil (1962), and Lévy’s L’espion (1966). These include a pastiche of L’Arroseur arrosé (1895) in Les Mistons; allusion to Chabrol in the school’s courtyard and to Monika (1953) in Les 400 Coups; the use of iris shots that recall silent cinema; allusion to Judex (1916) in Jules et Jim; the various Hitchockian inflections of Fahrenheit 451 and La Mariée était en noir (including, in the latter film, a man getting shot at on the steps of a building at the moment his picture is taken – an obvious tribute to Foreign Correspondent, 1940); a brief allusion to L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), to Jean Eustache and Jacques Tati in Domicile conjugal (the Hulot-like character is played by Jacques Cottin who was Tati’s costume designer on Mon Oncle, 1958, and Play Time, 1967; this scene follows a more subtle reference to Play Time when Antoine waits

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for a job interview in the lobby of an American shipping company, the exaggeration of ambient sounds – footsteps, sitting in leather seats – in a modern décor recalls the use of sound in Tati’s film); mention of Arizona Jim, the character dreamed up by Lange in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), and mention of Rohmer’s L’Amour l’après-midi (1972) in La Sirène du Mississippi; allusion to Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (Anne hangs a blanket between herself and Claude as she prepares for bed); drawings from the production of Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) in L’Amour en fuite (1979); asking Roger Leenhardt to play the director of a publishing house in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, Henri Agel to play an editor in the same film, and Graham Green to play an insurance broker in La Nuit américaine; allusion to Rohmer’s La Femme de l’aviateur (1981) in La Femme d’à côté, etc. In L’Argent de poche, Laura Truffaut has a role in the fake documentary Truffaut shot for a scene that takes place in a cinema. She plays the mother of Oscar, a Pierrot character who is a famous mime. Her name in this film-within-the-film is Madeleine Doinel; “Madeleine” was, of course, the given name of her own mother: Madeleine Morgenstern. In one of Antoine’s flashbacks in L’Amour en fuite we can briefly glimpse a photograph of Berbert standing for one of Gilberte Doinel’s lovers – the shot is itself a remake of a similar one in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. In La Nuit américaine, a film that is highly reflective of Truffaut’s cinema, Truffaut comments on his use of crew members to play small roles when the actress Severine complains, after blundering a scene, that she is confused: “I don’t know whether this is Odile the actress or the makeup artist. … In my day, actresses were actresses and makeup artists were makeup artists.” L’Etreinte dans la mansarde also appears in the credits sequence, which, as Robert Stam has noted, functions almost like a trailer for the film. See Robert Stam, François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 94. Notice that the painting – the first Picasso seen in the film – lies just above an hourglass! Later in the film, in the cabin in Germany (as Jim first arrives to visit), one of the other Picasso prints, Etude pour Les Bateleurs: Jeune Fille avec chien, will reappear on a wall next to a clock (the ticking is prominently heard). Norman Mailer, Picasso: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), p. 53. Quoted in Stam, François Truffaut and Friends, p. 107. See Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: Un Cinéma au masculin singulier (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2005). Yve-Alain Blois (ed.), Picasso Harlequin, 1917–1937 (Milan: Skira, 2009), p. 114. François Truffaut, Correspondance (Renens: 5 Continents, 1988), p. 172. At least two commentators thought so, although they had not noticed Picasso’s Commedia dell’Arte paintings in the film. In The Triumph of Pierrot, Martin Burgess Green and John C. Swan write: “Truffaut’s great love-triangle film, Jules and Jim, flirted with the ghosts of Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine in Jim, Jules, and Catherine. The playful/serious layering, the deliberately loose and many-threaded narrative, and the constant ironic self-reflection, humorous up to and beyond the brink of tragedy, all are analogous to the ways of commedia modernism.” Martin Burgess Green and John C. Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 160.

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A character from the Commedia dell’Arte, Truffaldino is a close relative of Harlequin – indeed they are often one and the same character as in Goldoni’s Commedia dell’Arteinspired Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters, 1745/1753). Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Keathley, Cinephilia and History, p. 85. Truffaut, Correspondance, p. 54. At the end of La Peau douce, Pierre’s estranged wife, Franca, also wears a raincoat, but instead of using it to conceal a revealing outfit, it serves to hide the rifle with which she will shoot Pierre. In L’Homme qui aimait les femmes a young woman puts a black raincoat over a revealing tennis outfit at Bertrand Morane’s funeral, and later in the film one of Bertrand’s lovers, Delphine, visits him with nothing on but a raincoat and a hat. Ginette Vincendeau has pointed out that the “raincoat” was a symbol of the “lost girl” in 1930s French films. See Ginette Vincendeau, “Melodramatic Realism: On Some French Women’s Films in the 1930s,” Screen 30 (3) (1999). Truffaut’s obsessive erotic fixation on women’s legs is well known, of course. Starting with Les Mistons this is a quasi-constant in his films, as several critics have noted. It explains how his female characters dress (skirts or dresses mostly), but it is also an obsession shared by several of his male characters, including Antoine Doinel, Pierre Lachenay, Lucas Steiner, and Bertrand Morane, who accidentally dies from it in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. Furthermore, as early as Les 400 Coups, it almost seems as if the only reason why flights of stairs appear in Truffaut is to show off women’s legs: in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes Delphine tells Bertrand, as they are about to go up a flight of stairs, “I’ll go first, but I forbid you to look at my legs,” and in Le Dernier Métro Lucas Steiner inverts the idea when he lets Marion go up a staircase before him: “You think I’m being polite in letting you go first? Not at all! It’s only so I can look at your legs.” Truffaut’s fixation on women’s legs translates into a recurring motif in his work. This motif, moreover, might be sufficiently recurrent to legitimately support its self-referential status (see discussion on repetition later in the chapter). Indeed, any ambiguity in this regard is dispelled, I believe, when Truffaut reprises gangster Ernest’s story about his father’s death in the plot of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes or when – in the light of other staircase scenes (for instance in Les 400 Coups or in La Mariée était en noir, immediately prior to Morane’s murder) – he reprises and inverses Delphine’s deceitful prohibition in Le Dernier Métro. In an interview with Luce Sand in 1968, Truffaut explained, “I lived with my mother who couldn’t support noise and asked me to stay immobile, without speaking, for hours on end. Therefore I read. This was the only occupation I could perform without bothering her.” In Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 30. This was initially something Truffaut had conceived for Les 400 Coups, eventually deciding against it. A clear Oedipal trajectory is drawn, furthermore, when Truffaut opts for “Christine” as the name of Morane’s mother, the same name as Antoine’s wife! There is an interesting and quite conscious inversion of this situation in La Sirène du Mississippi where Marion buys socks for Louis. The inversed self-allusion hints at Truffaut’s attempt to play slightly on stereotyped gender roles: “feminizing” his lead male character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo while giving the female lead, played by

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Catherine Deneuve, certain typical movie “bad boy” characteristics. In a 1971 letter to Roger Diamantis Truffaut writes: “The script reverses the usual situation since Jean-Paul Belmondo is frightened like a young virgin before Catherine Deneuve whose past is that of an adventurer.” In Truffaut, Correspondance, p. 398. This is an obvious, if somewhat unflattering, reference to Cahiers du Cinéma editor JeanLouis Comolli who, by 1969, was the Cahiers’ leading and unflinching ideologue. The Papin sisters, Christine (like Antoine Doinel’s wife!) and Lea, are a cause célèbre in the annals of French law and psychiatry. In 1933, the two French maids working and living in Le Mans savagely attacked and killed their employer’s wife and daughter, gouging their eyes out and hitting them with hammers and other household objects with the utmost violence. In jail, Christine developed pathological behaviors. Begging to see her sister, she had fits of hallucination and tried to gouge her own eyes. The idea of an incestuous relation between the two sisters also surfaced. Christine received a death sentence but a presidential stay of execution sent her to an insane asylum where she died of cachexia in 1937. He sister Lea was released in 1941 on good behavior. The Papin sisters caught the imagination of a generation. Writers such as Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Lacan all wrote about them; Jean Genet wrote a play inspired by their story (Les Bonnes); and several films were also based more or less loosely on the events, including Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995) and Jean-Pierre Denis’s Les Blessures assassines (2000). Lacan saw in the sisters a case of “délire à deux” – when an active subject’s paranoia is “suggested” and passed onto a passive subject which accepts it. It has been said that his conception of the Papin sisters’ “doubled” or “shared” psychosis played an important role in the development of the idea of the mirror stage. See Jacques Lacan, “Motifs du crime paranoïaque,” Le Minotaure 3 (1933) and 4 (1934). The caption that accompanies the Détective photo of the two sisters reads: “The mad ewes. Two angels? No! Two monsters who, at Le Mans, gouged the eyes of their employers. With empty orbits, crushed skulls, yet still breathing, the victims died after a terrible agony.” Finally it may be worth mentioning that the Papin sisters did not grow up at home but were placed by their mother (described as an uncaring person), occasionally together or separately, in various foster homes and institutions after she divorced a husband who had had incestuous relations with a third sister, Emilia. Are they yet another image of childhood alienation in Truffaut? In the June 1962 letter to Helen Scott mentioned earlier when discussing Jules et Jim, Truffaut – whose own embrace of fiction filmmaking was set against any documentary impulse – wrote, somewhat surprisingly: “[Balthus] is the contemporary painter I prefer and I’m considering shooting a short film on his oeuvre. It will be extremely simple and respectful, showing the paintings without any acrobatic camerawork or pretentious commentary.” In Truffaut, Correspondance, p. 207. This scene from Les 400 Coups is seen again as a flashback in Antoine et Colette. One of these “fake” Doinel flashbacks consists of a shot lifted from Bernard Dubois’ first feature Les Lolos de Lola (1976) that shows Jean-Pierre Léaud with Julien Dubois, the boy who plays Antoine Doinel’s son in L’Amour en fuite. Other “fakes” – shot specifically for this film – include flashbacks scenes with Dani and Julien Dubois (Antoine’s son) and the twice-told flashback that shows how Antoine found Sabine’s torn photograph in a telephone booth. Finally, in La Nuit américaine, Truffaut chooses to name the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud “Alphonse,” which is also the name of Antoine Doinel’s son. The name “Liliane” captures another autobiographical element in Truffaut. Liliane Litvin was Truffaut’s first teenage love interest. She inspired the character of Colette in

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Antoine et Colette. Liliane’s stepfather worked in a garage – as do both Colette’s and Christine’s stepfathers in the Doinel cycle. Jean Gargonne worked as an editor on L’Histoire d’Adèle H. Truffaut sometimes picked up the names of actors and crew members for his characters. In La Peau douce he used the name “Kanayan,” which was the name of the boy who played Charlie’s little brother Fido (Richard Kanayan – who also had small roles in Les 400 Coups and L’Amour en fuite). And for Antoine’s wife Christine he used the name “Darbon,” which was the name of the actor who played Colette’s father in Antoine et Colette (François Darbon). However, a Balzacian intertext may also be the source of this character’s name. Balzac wrote several novels between 1830 and 1837 (including Le Lys dans la vallée, which is discussed in a key scene in Baisers volés) at his friend Jean Margonne’s castle – the Château de Saché in Tourraine. Margonne was the lover of Balzac’s mother and an illegitimate son was born from this union. In L’Amour en fuite Charles-Antoine Margonne murders his son on the belief that he is an illegitimate child. On Balzacian intertexts in Truffaut, see Arner Preminger, “The Human Comedy of Antoine Doinel: From Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut,” The European Legacy 9 (2) (2004). Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul R. Patton (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 1 and 6. It is here that I part company with Deleuze’s conception of singularity. Indeed, because of an inherent dualism in his conception, Deleuze fails to recognize the conditions under which singularity and generality (the latter need not be as mechanical or as blind as Deleuze suggests), while distinct, can be compatible, or, to put it otherwise, Deleuze fails to recognize how intelligible relations always require mediating terms. This, however, is a topic to be tackled elsewhere. The story of the stolen bicycle, as told by Bernard, obviously brings to mind De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948). In 1950 Truffaut wrote a letter to his friend Robert Lachenay signed “your grand-mother, M. Bigey.” In Truffaut, Correspondance, p. 45. In an earlier version of the script for La Chambre verte Davenne was named Julien Ferrand, giving him the same family name as the filmmaker in La Nuit américaine. Collet, François Truffaut, p. 64. François Truffaut, Les Films de ma vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). It goes without saying that the rise of VHS and DVD, pay-per-view, and now the Internet, have transformed these conditions and have made them all the more available to everyone. Almost all of us now “live” in Paris – if only vicariously through our DVD players and other playback devices!

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Aesthetic Affinities François Truffaut, Patrick Modiano, Douglas Sirk Anne Gillain

Cinema’s dignity lies in the expectations it arouses, in the perceptual labor it requires. Dudley Andrew1

Imagination: “La Reine des Facultés” This chapter will focus on François Truffaut’s films as a model for the creative imagination and the way it engages the spectator’s perception. Recent research by Raymond Bellour on cinema and hypnosis and by Daniel Stern on the pre-linguistic infant will provide the theoretical framework. In order to define Truffaut’s work, I will point to some analogies between his films and other forms of fiction: Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) will briefly be compared to a novel by Patrick Modiano, Quartier perdu, and La Femme d’à côté (1981) to a Hollywood classic by Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1955). Like Truffaut, Modiano and Sirk have developed fictions whose design was not to convey ideas or transmit knowledge. This may explain why Truffaut has been labeled limited, Modiano repetitive, and Sirk solidly locked in a genre without prestige, melodrama. However, all three have forged a distinctive style that activates hidden perceptual circuits and accounts for the enduring appeal of their work. A biographical component is also operative in their fictions, illustrating the complex alchemy of imagination and experience in the formation of metaphors. Another feature these three authors share is to have been profoundly marked by World War II. A defining moment in Truffaut’s life took place during the German Occupation in 1944. He was twelve years old and alone in his parents’ apartment on rue Navarin. The boy started rummaging through his father’s belongings. He had been feeling for quite a while that something was amiss in his lineage and he had to know. That day A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Figure 3.1

Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut, 1959, Les Films du Carrosse).

he found a little Hachette engagement book for the year 1932. Roland Truffaut used one of these every year to note appointments and important events. The young Truffaut rushed to the date that would tell it all: 6 February, his birthday. On that date the diary was bare of any information. François Truffaut knew at that moment that Roland Truffaut was not his father. He kept the revelation to himself. This moment is emblematic of the triad that dominated Truffaut’s childhood: solitude, secrecy, and silence. These components define his stylistic trademark. They inform the mysterious atmosphere that often prevails in his films. If I had to name one stylistic figure each displays, it would be, punctuating the end of a scene, the silent close-up of a face expressing surprise or shock. Carole Le Berre notes that in Truffaut’s films, off-screen glances are often not realistic or logically justified.2 They just feed a climate where stupefying discoveries are always around the corner – the end of Le Dernier Métro (1980) comes to mind. The childhood episode also explains the prevalence of identity and filiation issues in Truffaut’s narratives. This revelation must have been deeply damaging, but Truffaut was endowed with a formidable gift of resilience. In his case, it took the form of a magical kingdom that could be entered at any time – even without any money, if you were clever enough – and would substitute for the grim realities of wartime France, a tense family life, and the useless routine of school, a tantalizing world of vivid forms, sounds, colors, and music. Against solitude, secrecy, and silence, the young Truffaut found resilience in a boundless ocean of images. From early on, Truffaut understood the remarkable healing power of imagination – Baudelaire called it “la reine des facultés” (the queen of faculties)3 – and totally surrendered to it. In his case, its power was all the more encompassing because it never competed with other cognitive tools. In the course of normal education, children are initiated into other ways of bringing sense and coherence to the world than the tales of their childhoods. For Truffaut, fiction remained during his formative years the primary way of organizing reality and defining himself. This is probably why his films display such an impeccable mastery of fiction’s internal mechanisms.

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Truffaut’s films were fated to come to life during a time when works of imagination were out of fashion. The sixties and the seventies saw an exceptional development of the social and human sciences in France. In his critical writings, Truffaut often protested vehemently how much he hated “la hiérarchie des genres” (the hierarchy of genres).4 The reason was simple: he understood that with international attention focused on exciting new concepts – in philosophy, history, sociology, psychiatry, and literary criticism – works of fiction could only stand on the second row. Truffaut knew this was unfair, but he also probably liked the idea of going against his time. He remained forever a rebel. This had allowed him to survive as a child and this would make his fame as a film critic. Knowing that, of all the various components of the human psyche, imagination is the most central to adaptation and survival, Truffaut also knew that it was by far the most mysterious. Again, we can quote Baudelaire: “Mystérieuse faculté que cette reine des facultés” (This queen of faculties is a mysterious faculty).5 In order to elucidate this mystery, he decided to interrogate the master of the trade, Alfred Hitchcock. It is worth remembering that when Truffaut started his famous interviews with Hitchcock, the great artist was chiefly considered a successful public entertainer. Hitchcock was victim of the “hiérarchie des genres.” One remembers Truffaut’s answer to an American journalist who was unwise enough to tell him that Rear Window (1954) was just a documentary on Greenwich Village, which impressed the French critic because he was not familiar with the neighborhood: “I don’t know Greenwich Village, but I know cinema.” Hitchcock’s films fascinated Truffaut because they were works of pure cinema, of pure fiction, of pure imagination devoid of social, political, or even psychological content, that cast their powerful spell upon the spectator without the support of any additive. Truffaut, when he started his interviews, hoped to get the master to define the secret of his craft. Hitchcock did, and the book is a testimony to the precision and tidal energy of film language. Like two skilled artisans, Truffaut and Hitchcock discussed the various ways to achieve the perfect sequence of shots. They agreed that the cardinal instrument of their trade was emotion. The spectator came to the cinema to find emotion, and was grateful if it was delivered to him continuously throughout the film, like an intravenous drip. A few quotations will illustrate the central importance of this concept. First, let’s listen to the master: “The main objective is to arouse the audience’s emotion, and that emotion arises from the way in which the story unfolds.”6 Now the disciple, after he became a master on his own: “A film has nothing to say, a film conveys emotional information too moving, too sensual, too distracting for a phlegmatic message to result.”7 And again: “I am not indifferent to people’s opinions, because I’m trying to affect them physically. I’m even trying to make them cry.”8 At the end of his career Truffaut was even bolder: “I want my public to be constantly captivated, bewitched. So that it leaves the theater dazed, stunned to be back on the sidewalk. I would like my public to forget the place and time in which it finds itself, like Proust immersed in reading at Combray.”9 Etymologically, “emotion” involves motion. As we watch the film, something moves inside us, something is displaced and shifts places. Emotion involves disorientation and an altered state of consciousness.

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Emotion involves the body: Truffaut speaks about affecting the spectator physically. As Hitchcock explains, this uncanny state is engendered by the way the story is told – in other words, by formal elements. Emotion is style and style exerts a form of perceptual violence.

Emotion and Hypnosis In the sixties, Anton Ehrenzweig undertook to elucidate the creative process. In a seminal book entitled The Hidden Order of Art10 he analyzed the organizing role of the unconscious in artistic creation and proposed a definition of the unconscious that sharply differs from the Freudian model. For Ehrenzweig, the unconscious is the locus of what he calls “dedifferentiation,” an inner state where perceptions lose their set contours to enter a network of correspondences. This undifferentiated perceptive mode allows for the emergence of new aesthetic forms. One sentence summarizes Ehrenzweig’s perspective: “Art creates tasks that cannot be mastered by our normal faculties.”11 In this sentence, the key words are “tasks” and “normal.” If, as Truffaut states, the film has nothing to say, it has a lot of work to accomplish. Simply put, it needs to knock the spectator out; no wonder our “normal faculties” are, so to speak, out of the picture. Truffaut’s description of the flabbergasted spectator or entranced reader of novels evokes the condition of a hypnotized subject. A recent book by Raymond Bellour examines these phenomena. Entitled Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions animalités, it represents a monumental contribution to our understanding of the power of images on our psycho-corporeal system.12 I must borrow concepts from this major opus while scarcely doing them justice. Bellour’s title, Le Corps du cinéma (The body of cinema), should be taken literally. Bypassing the  narrative garb of the film, Bellour invites us to explore the quivering flesh of cinema – its network of blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, and muscles – in order to understand the mysterious communication between this vast body and the immobilized body of the spectator in the theater and how they both end up, as they did so rapturously for the young Truffaut, pulsating at the same rhythm and breathing in harmony in the dark. Bellour provides a detailed historical account of the link between hypnosis and cinema, from the genial Jean Epstein, who called cinema “la machine à hypnose” (the hypnosis machine), to the most recent research on hypnosis and, in particular, the writings of François Roustang, a leading theoretician in the field. Roustang completely reformulated the definition of hypnosis by linking it closely to the human faculty of imagination; that is, the ability to reorder reality and to reconfigure the world. Using the model of paradoxical sleep (the REM, or rapid eye movement, phase of sleep), during which dreaming takes place, Roustang defines, under the label of “paradoxical awakening,”13 a perceptual mode that hypnosis would liberate. Imagination is the link between the nocturnal and diurnal states. Under the spell of an imagination not limited by the constraints of consciousness, new perceptual

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circuits are suddenly made available. The main target of this procedure is the reordering of memorial traces and a realigning of past and present. Roustang’s Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? is a vibrant tribute to the power of imagination: “Hypnosis can be considered an introduction to the power to imagine, that is, to transform the present reality, because it is comparable to the power to dream, which defines our species’ behavior, and to the power to configure the world, which is the newborn’s innate prerogative.”14 For Bellour, cinema is, among the arts, the most invested with the “power to configure the world.”15 Our expectations when we enter a movie theater already create an induction to hypnosis, which the film will bring to its full potential. This is when emotion occurs. In the case of a successful fiction, it will remain operative throughout the screening until the instant the spectator lands on the sidewalk in the modified state Truffaut so eloquently described. At the conclusion of his demonstration linking “paradoxical awakening” and the experience of art, Bellour will baldly write, “L’émotion … équivaut à l’hypnose” (emotion amounts to hypnosis).16 If we keep in mind that imagination is the key faculty involved in hypnosis, this brilliant insight is fully persuasive. A film capable of generating hypnotic emotion will have a universal appeal, since it masters a langage, a form that precedes all geographical, historical, and cultural differences. It is endowed with timeless grace. Hypnotic emotion still needs to be defined and Bellour proceeds by noting that, the instant hypnosis and film are connected, the body becomes an integral part of the perceptual equation. This is why, like Roustang,17 he uses the expression “la pensée du corps” (embodied mind)18 when he analyzes the nature of filmic emotion. As this expression suggests, emotion involves the merging of functions that are normally dissociated and contrasted. “Emotion is the fold that, in the perceptual in-between of unconscious and conscious, fixes in the soul the impression received from the organs.”19 And again, “Emotion is the shock, the discontinuous perceptual fold, that is broken, that continually slides from the exterior to the interior of the body, swings from unconscious to conscious.”20 Emotion occurs when two systems touch, as in the Deleuzian fold, or suddenly collide; whether “fold” or “shock,” it represents a complete deviation from normal perception. In order to document its effect, Bellour uses research conducted on analogous perceptual states. As Roustang observes,21 hypnosis – the condition when the human imagination works at its optimal capacity – presents strong analogies to the world of poets, borderline patients, and, more importantly because more universally, infants. The second major theoretical field Bellour calls upon to describe the hypnotic emotion is the study of pre-linguistic children, and in particular the groundbreaking research presented by the American psychiatrist Daniel Stern in two major books: The Interpersonal World of the Infant and The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.22 In these volumes, Stern, while describing his work on the perceptions of infants, redefines some fundamental concepts such as: conscious/unconscious, body/mind, verbal/nonverbal, intersubjective/intrasubjective experiences, all structures the fiction film sets in motion, upsets and shifts in order to create modified configurations.

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Defining himself as “a reader of the nonverbal,” Stern tells the following anecdote: I was seven or so, I remember watching an adult try to deal with an infant of one or two years. At this instant it seemed to me so obvious what the infant was all about, but the adult seemed not to understand it at all. It occurred to me that I was at a pivotal age. I  knew the infant’s “language” but also knew the adult’s. I was still “bilingual” and wondered if that facility had to be lost as I grew older.23

Allowing the spectator to become bilingual again and recapture the gift for this first language is probably one of fiction’s most coveted goals. For Stern, unspoken language is not only richer but also far more accurate than its verbal counterpart. “Nature was wise not to introduce babies to symbolic language until after 18 months so they would have enough time to learn how the human world really works without the distraction and complication of words – but with the help of the music of language.”24 According to Stern, this knowledge “of how the human world really works” will remain active throughout life and follow its course in parallel with symbolic language. His books represent a fascinating account of the infant’s first reception of reality that sharply contrast with previous theories, in particular those of Piaget, who envisioned the child’s development as a series of successive stages, each replacing the previous one. For Stern, both systems (pre- and post-linguistic) remain operative and develop in parallel without meeting each other: words cannot and will not “translate” the prelinguistic system, which will need to be periodically reset in a variety of human contexts, such as intersubjective, analytical, religious, or aesthetic experiences. It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that for Stern this first perceptive mode represents a state of grace that the initiation to language will either limit or mutilate. The infant is, in his view, an independent being with a rich, complex, and finely tuned system of representation.25 This view, as Bellour notes, contrasts with the Freudian concept of a fusional bond between mother and child.26 Instead of merging with the maternal body, the pre-oedipal infant is, according to Stern’s research, capable of both multisensorial and interactive differentiations. Using Maurice Blanchot’s concept of “fascination,” Bellour compares hypnosis to the mutual – and not unilateral – fascination between infant and mother and identifies it as the origin of aesthetic emotion. “It is everything that gets carried away in the life of the adult, all that art rediscovers, and especially cinema.”27 Stern’s second book, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, precisely develops the modalities and role of this perceptive mode in adult life. His research on nonverbal perceptions allows him to bypass most classical psychoanalytical concepts without even fighting them. Stern is not particularly impressed with Freud’s “talking cure” – in which, he states, “much is lost”28 – and instead proposes a detailed description of what he calls “implicit knowing” in the course of psychotherapy: “Most simply, implicit knowledge is non-symbolic, nonverbal, procedural, and unconscious in the sense of not being reflexively conscious.”29 Implicit knowing represents the development of the prelinguistic system and requires a new definition of the conscious/unconscious Freudian dyad. For Freud, repression and resistance are the processes that render inaccessible the

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unconscious material; not so for Stern, who prefers to label this reservoir of hidden material as “nonconscious.”30 Implicit knowing brings it to consciousness. From this description it follows that “consciousness is the real mystery.”31 Implicit knowing remains fully active, as a parallel system, through adult life and its scope is wide enough to include language: “Implicit knowledge is not restricted only to the rich world of nonverbal communication or body movement and sensation, but rather applies to affects and words as well, at least what lies between the lines. For instance if someone repeatedly says: ‘Yes, but …’ you quickly grasp that the ‘Yes’ is a Trojan Horse to get inside your walls.”32 Like Stern, Truffaut remained all his life actively “bilingual,” which explains his legendary skill for working with children. The dual play between the metaphoric language of imagination and symbolic language of words will always be a subject of passionate interest on his part and finds itself at the heart of one of his masterpieces, L’Enfant sauvage (1970). It should also be noted that language in his films is never realistic or utilitarian. Truffaut uses either literary texts or sophisticated dialogues that indeed invite the spectator to “read between the lines.” Implicit knowing is operative in all fiction films, but its use by Truffaut is truly masterful. Behind the realistic plots, his films are deliberately packed with material destined to stimulate and expand the spectator’s perceptual capacities. This is what he called “indirect style.” Truffaut always professed a “hatred”33 for direct information, and indirect style is a key component of his films’ hypnotic spell on the spectator. As Arnaud Desplechin notes, Truffaut liked to illustrate his directorial work with short metaphoric inserts. In Baisers volés (1968), the famous pneumatique scene can be read as a visual translation of his artistic motto. Like the pneumatique, information should not follow a straight, predictable trajectory, but speedily take us through a network of hidden subterranean circuits to be discovered with wonder and exhilaration. In La Femme d’à côté, the peregrinations of a postal worker through a garden will repeat the metaphor. It is not the message, but the way it is delivered. A film has nothing to say.

David Stern’s Infant and the Spectator When David Stern shoots short films to examine in slow motion the most minimal reactions of an infant interacting with his caretaker, he is gathering data that can be applied to different fields of human experience, among which art figures prominently. He is in fact documenting a perceptual mode that can be directly applied to cinema. This is what Raymond Bellour so aptly understood: “L’infant de Daniel Stern est le spectateur de cinéma” (Daniel Stern’s infant is the cinema spectator).34 He proposes in Le Corps du cinéma a detailed comparison between the spectator in the theater and the child in his bedroom. Bellour warns us however that he does not intend to “apply” Stern’s concepts to cinema the way psychoanalysis can be applied to films. It is rather a matter of thinking up a situational analogy that applies to the ontological, perceptual and environmental reality – the child’s bedroom and the cinema, where the world makes and remakes itself each moment for the spectator as it does for the “baby,”

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with an eye to the learning of the new, from which minimal regularities can be observed. As such, this analogy provides a framework for a redefinition of the impression of reality – the cinema-effect understood as a copy of the never-ending genesis that made up the world for the small child. Thus we attain the perspective from which to ponder the differences of upbringing/experience/regime that create emotions. What concerns us, therefore, is a micro-elementary analogy regarding even the process of image (and sound) formation and of their effect as a body on the body, according to a logic that is affective and non-psychological.35

Among these “minimal regularities” theorized by Stern and highlighted by Bellour, I will select three key concepts: amodal perception, vitality affects, and temporal contour. Bellour first notes that Stern uses the expression “alert inactivity”36 to describe the infant in his crib. This state very much resembles Christian Metz’s evocation of the spectator’s under-motility and over-perception. The spectator also shares with infants the prevalence of the act of looking in his experience. For Mesmer, as Bellour remarks,37 sight had the capacity to assemble all the other senses. This is what Bellour calls, after Stern, “amodal perception.” The infant appears to have an innate general capacity, which can be called amodal perception, to take information received in one sensory modality and somehow translate it into another sensory modality. … Infants seem to experience a world of perceptual unity, in which they can perceive amodal qualities in any modality from any form of human expressive behavior, represent these qualities abstractly, and then transpose them in other modalities.38

In other words, the infant can transfer information between the visual and the tactile or auditory modes. The essential terms here are “perceptual unity.” Endowed with it, the child naturally evolves in a world of correspondences. Amodal perception functions as an abstract matrix where energies rather than objects will be perceived. The infant conducts his first reading of reality through a global perception of intensities and rhythms rather than by perceptions channeled through separate senses: “These abstract representations that the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal pattern, the more ‘global’ qualities of experience.”39 The “vitality affects” are directly connected to this global quality of experience. They are chiefly observed in the course of interpersonal exchanges, within what Stern calls the “intersubjective matrix,” a space he considers much more central to human development than the intrasubjective space that is the domain of classical psychoanalysis. The simplest way to define vitality affects is to oppose them to classical categorical affects such as joy, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, etc. The infant perceives the interpersonal world under a more continuous and diversified form than the codified version of the discrete categorical affects. Why is it necessary to add a new term for certain forms of human experience? It is necessary because many qualities of feeling that occur do not fit into our existing

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lexicon or taxonomy of affects. These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging,” “fading away,” “fleeting,” “explosive,” “crescendo,” “decrescendo,” “bursting,” “drawn out,” and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even if momentary, importance. … The infant is immersed in these affects of vitality. … Like dance for the adult, the social world experienced by the infant is primarly one of vitality affects before it is a world of formal acts. It is also analogous to the physical world of amodal perception, which is primarily one of abstractable qualities of shape, number, intensity level, and so on, not a world of things seen, heard, or touched.40

Stern selects as examples of vitality affects a few actions such as smiling or getting up from a chair and remarks, “There are a thousand smiles, a thousand getting-out-ofchairs, a thousand variations of performance of any and all “behaviors,” and each one presents a different vitality affect.”41 The pre-linguistic child is much more aware of these minute variations than the adult subject who relies on the limited categories of language to organize his perceptions. Stern’s careful observation of the ways in which the infant reacts to its physical and human environment presents a world of great complexity, diversity, and beauty that the acquisition of language will either repress or fracture. As an example, I will select Stern’s description of an infant licking with rapturous delight a ray of sunshine on the floor: “The child is engaged in a global experience resonant with a mix of all the amodal properties, the primary perceptual properties, of the patch of light. Its intensity, warmth, etc.”42 The caretaker will abruptly put an end to this multiperceptual experience with the word “dirty.”43 Language acquisition, while obviously indispensable to the child’s socialization and to the development of his cognitive skills, is done at a loss, the magnitude of which can be measured by the intense pleasure art will later on bring to the adult. In fact, this first perceptual mode is, for Stern, the source of all human creativity. “This global subjective world of emerging organization is and remains the fundamental domain of human subjectivity. … It is the ultimate reservoir that can be dipped into for all creative experience.”44 In the course of his research, Stern worked closely with choreographers and musicians and he selects most of his aesthetic examples from these two art forms: “Abstract dance and music are examples par excellence of the expressiveness of vitality affects.”45 Bellour is prompt to correct this statement and to assert that cinema, much more than music or dance, is the art form that most closely duplicates our first reading of reality. What medium, Bellour asks, reproduces better than film the whole spectrum of exchanges between bodies and spaces? Analyzing the motions in a shot from Mizoguchi’s Oyû-sama (Miss Oyu, 1951), he writes for instance: What can be said about such precision, about the placement of bodily figures rhyming across the surface-volume of the distance traveled? … Vitality affects seem capable of being circumscribed and named, deduced from all those things whose bodies they outline, as can be seen from the work of art of which they have become inalienably a part. Amodal perception, on the other hand, never truly able to be localized, is

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the multifarious force that acts – with everything that implies on the level of form, of intensity, of number and rhythm.46

Bellour accounts for Stern’s choice of artistic media by his preference for art forms “devoid of content” because of the difficulty separating vitality affects from discrete affects in the narrative arts, where they always coexist and are inexorably linked. “All the resources of the shot and of the progressions of shots serve the sustained deployment of vitality affects, under the pretext and according to the inclinations of psychological affects, supporting identification with the characters, with the fiction.”47 Le Corps du cinéma displays, as this quote suggests, an anti-narrative stand and offers a wealth of riveting analyses from a Sternian perspective showing how vitality affects, amodal perception, as well as polytemporal and polyphonic patterns are at work in cinema and impact the spectator at least as much as the story development. More so, in fact, since “the features of images are much more varied, in nature, in number and in importance, than the elements of the narrative, always more synthetic.”48 Following Stern, Bellour establishes “a frontal equivalence … between the vitality affects in spontaneous behavior and style in art.”49 If emotion is hypnosis and style is vitality affects, the phenomena are linked. The slight hypnosis induced by the fiction film favors an implicit reading of the vitality affects embedded in the images. This is why, even if we know nothing about plot and characters, we can tell after a few minutes if a film “speaks” to us or not. Serge Daney used to think that the first twenty shots were enough for him to know whether he would feel “at home” or not in a film.50

Tirez sur le pianiste: The Metaphoric Network Applying this approach to Truffaut’s work seems especially useful, since his films have been discussed much more for themes and characters than for directorial prowess. As a director, Truffaut was, by all accounts, most sensitive to the ways bodies related to space. He often complained about the fact that actors, while playing a scene, would never use all the floor space available to them.51 Carole Le Berre was the first to remark that his characters are almost never immobile in a frame.52 A perpetual motion inhabits them, only to be frozen in emotionally charged moments. Truffaut was also known to say that, if most shooting mistakes could be rectified on the editing table, an error of casting was irreparable. The wrong body was forever a flaw. For instance, Truffaut always thought that Jean Desailly – a wonderful actor – was miscast in La Peau douce (1964) since, as Michel Chion writes in his article, “his sluggish gait did not drive the film forward in space.”53 As a director Truffaut worked with bodies the way a conductor works with instruments. David Stern, in order to illustrate the inscription of vitality affects in a performance, uses the example of an orchestra rehearsing and the way the conductor will shape and refine each detail of the performance in terms of intensities: “No, attack those first

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notes more fiercely, da, da, da.”54 Jeanne Moreau recalls that after shooting a scene that was to his liking, Truffaut would thank the actors and add, “Do you think you could you do it once more, cutting two or three seconds on the time?”55 Like Hitchcock, Truffaut often compared cinema to music and films to the unrolling of a musical score with its specific tempo. Let’s remember the opening scene of La Nuit américaine (1973) and the weaving of bodies on a street according to the cadence imposed by the director. Intensities and rhythms are central to Truffaut’s aesthetics; bodies and spaces inscribe vitality affects in the texture of the shots. In his interview for this volume, Arnaud Desplechin states that Truffaut’s characters are all “brûlants” (burning hot).56 This is also true of his mise-en-scène that runs like feverish blood through the body of his films. This is where the autobiographical impulse lies. All of Truffaut’s first full-length features open on a swift, pulsating rhythm – in Les 400 Coups (1959), the concentric swirls of a camera around the Eiffel Tower; in Jules et Jim (1962), the dazzling montage of flash shots. Few films, however, exhibit as much raw physical energy as the opening of Tirez sur le pianiste. The first shots follow a strange ballet in the dark: an unknown body runs madly through the night surrounded by the menacing noises of a car engine and the luminous streaks of its headlights. We have to wait for one minute and fifteen seconds to finally recognize a decipherable image and another fifteen seconds to hear words: two men start discussing quietly the pros and cons of marriage. The spectator knows that images and dialogue are two sides of the same coin, but in this jarring context the verbal component assumes an uncanny resonance. After taking his leave from the passerby, Chico will resume his panicky flight through the night. This opening is exemplary of the way Truffaut weaves communication channels in order to create a full-scope perceptive mode that reality cannot duplicate. From beginning to end, Tirez sur le pianiste displays both an ironic use of language (Charlie to Plyne: “J’ai peur. Merde, j’ai peur”) and a transgressive play with bodies. Let’s remember Boby Lapointe’s spastic motions when he sings like a giant puppet in Plyne’s bar, but also the numerous scenes in which close-ups of body parts, mostly Charlie’s hands, dance an ironic ballet around a broken-down female body cut into pieces by the camera – a leg or breast here, a waistline there. We also remember Charlie’s body, crippled by shyness, learning to strike advantageous poses in front of the journalists, or his extended index finger approaching in three gigantic close-ups the bell of the impresario’s door. Rarely has a film so aptly mimicked the uncodified perceptions an infant has of adult motions around him. It is also quite evocative of silent films, in which, save for a few written inserts, bodies and spaces were the vocabulary of cinema. A kinetic reading of Tirez sur le pianiste generates a vision that sharply contrasts with the tragic love narrative. Vitality affects are present in abundance in the form of a formidable physical energy, and the film reflects from beginning to end a swift and invigorating forward motion. Following a journey from black to white, from the Parisian night to the morning sun on the snow-covered Alps, Tirez sur le pianiste speaks of freedom, childlike innocence, and endless resilience. Early on

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Chico ends up in the bar where Charlie has been hiding and forces the pianist to leave his self-imposed exile in a bunker to join him in a run that has the exhilarating excitement of life itself. There is one nodal moment when this forward motion comes to a screeching halt. Charlie and Lena have managed to escape the gangsters’ car thanks to Lena’s bold gesture: she has pressed the accelerator at a red light, triggering the intervention of the police. The car must stop. This action metaphorically applies to the narrative. Lena will bring Charlie to her apartment where he will experience a confrontation with his past. Time is the great protagonist of Truffaut’s films. Tirez sur le pianiste is not only split between images and words, but also between past and present. Their collision will take up only twenty seconds and six shots: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Charlie and Lena go through the door of Lena’s apartment. Look of stupor on Charlie’s face. (4s) Poster for Edouard Saroyan as a classical pianist. (5s) Charlie looking at the poster. Pan right to isolate the poster. (3s) Superimposition of the poster and Edouard playing piano in a tuxedo. (2s) Triple superimposition: Edouard on the poster/Edouard playing/close-up of Edouard’s face looking at us. (1s) The poster and Edouard playing fade away and we are left with Edouard looking straight at us with an intense sorrow. (2s)

Just before the door opens, the camera follows, in an archetypal pre-coital Truffaut shot, the vertical motion of Charlie in the staircase while his voice-over comments on Lena’s legs. The still shot of the poster – an ominous figure in Truffaut’s vocabulary – brutally breaks the dynamic rhythm. Instead of sex, Charlie will find death and his body will fragment from the shock. Shot 5 reflects this physical dissociation in a series of superimpositions. Within the same shot, three faces of Edouard will appear on the screen: on the poster, as a classical pianist, and in a close-up of his face looking at us. This construction reminds us of the slower series of shots in Les 400 Coups when Antoine, alone at home, sees his reflection in three of his mother’s mirrors. This visual echo is emblematic of a constant play of repetitions in Truffaut’s films. They take many forms: objects, camera angles, numbers, sentences, punctuation between scenes. I would like to highlight here a particular type of repetition that is slightly more cryptic, but powerfully operative in the films. It concerns metaphors. Truffaut’s films all display metaphoric figures that recur from film to film, whatever the surface plot may be. David Stern, in his analysis of precognitive skills, is keen on pointing to the central role of metaphor in the processing of experience: Metaphor is a major form of linkage between unconscious autobiographical memory and conscious experience. … Metaphor is not just a figure of speech but a primary form of cognition (prior to symbol formation and language) that links different domains of experience including past and present. Language can later use these linkages and turn them into linguistic metaphors, but it does not start with language.57

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Imagination is the key operator in the metamorphosis of experience into metaphors and Stern’s statement fully integrates this process into the pre-linguistic system. Metaphors would represent the mind’s fundamental way of structuring reality and establishing a signifying network of “correspondences.” This process seems highly operational in Truffaut’s work. Under the slight hypnosis generated by fiction, the spectator will decipher the metaphoric network through implicit knowing in the same manner he perceives vitality aspects in the mise-en-scène. Truffaut’s indirect style plays a key role in the activation of this perceptual mode. Another way to describe it would be to compare this type of perception to peripheral vision as contrasted with focused vision. The soft-focus hypnotic gaze absorbs these figures without consciously registering them. Peripheral vision anchors the focused realistic plot in a subterranean network that endows it with coherence and continuity. The most central of these metaphors is a recurrent pattern of dissociations. In Tirez sur le pianiste, everything is split in two: images/dialogues; past/present; two women; two brothers; two gangsters; two love rivals, Schmeel and Plyne; two love stories that echo one other; two deaths of loved women. The main split, however, is the identity of the central character: Charlie Kohler/Edouard Saroyan. Truffaut’s third full-length film, Jules et Jim, will center on the divided masculine figure and document its formation and pattern. Dissociation, Jules et Jim tells us, is a means of psychic survival. It is a defense mechanism dictated by resilience. Confronted with an omnipresent and all-powerful feminine figure, the male self splits, showing that there are two options at his disposal: to remain a passive spectator of life and survive ( Jules) or to fuse with her and burn ( Jim). Dissociation is a continuous metaphor in Truffaut’s films and reaches a climax in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), where every possible item is divided in two: two Montags, two women, twin books, twin male nurses, etc. The splitting up of reality in that film reaches a schizoid magnitude that threatens destruction; at the other end of the spectrum, La Sirène du Mississippi (1969) displays one of the lowest indices of dissociation. Dissociation is particularly explicit in the three films in which Truffaut himself plays the central role. It takes the form of a generational divide between child and adult. In L’Enfant sauvage and La Chambre verte (1978) there is a young boy at Truffaut’s side, while in La Nuit américaine, we find not only Truffaut’s constant double, JeanPierre Léaud, but also the child in the director’s dreams. Some physical infirmity is part of the equation. The handicap can affect either side of the halves. The young heroes of L’Enfant sauvage and La Chambre verte are deaf; in La Nuit américaine, Ferrand, the director, will wear a hearing aid following damage to his ears sustained during the war. In one of his dreams, the cinephile child will run in a dark street where a neon sign reads “Surdité” (Deafness). It should be added that in Le Dernier Métro, where the  Steiner/Granger duo duplicates the Ferrand/Alphonse couple from La Nuit américaine – even if, for obvious reasons (the Jewish component, theater instead of cinema, etc.), Truffaut does not play Steiner’s role – the same pattern is observed. The handicap takes the form of Steiner’s attempts to hear what is happening on the stage above him. A broken pipe in the wall will replace Ferrand’s hearing aid.

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Truffaut’s heroes are marked by an original trauma that irreversibly split experience and impaired their capacity to communicate. Their revolt and anger (Charlie Kohler or Julie Kohler in La Mariée était en noir, 1967) will mark them as outcasts. Society cannot absorb them and delinquency will be part of the equation. Stealing is the form it most often takes, but it can include murder when the irrepressible feminine component takes over (La Mariée était en noir; La Sirène du Mississippi; Une Belle Fille comme moi, 1972). The three films in which Truffaut acts all describe a creative project – a scientific experiment, a film, the creation of a chapel for the dead. In Truffaut’s metaphoric language, war (the origin of dissociation), deafness (the resulting handicap), delinquency (the social consequence), and creativity (the only way to link the fragments) form a strong metaphoric pattern. The most haunting image of dissociation appears in La Chambre verte, Truffaut’s most personal film. During the credits, a close-up of Davenne’s face is superimposed on a war landscape, a fine line of fire cutting through his lips. The image is tinted in a dream-like blue hue. World War I and its trenches are some of the most expressive figures of the inner rift that once broke the artist’s self and forced him to confront psychic death. World War I clearly stands as a historical event that Truffaut’s imagination hijacked for use in his private constructions. It is impossible to know why and how, except that Truffaut, born in 1932 and brought up by his grandmother – much more prone to evoke the past than young parents – must have heard of the ravages of the trench war and of the terrifying injuries it left behind. For a young child, who early on must have felt different and handicapped, the correspondence was powerful. In La Chambre verte, the deaf boy to whom Davenne presents a slide show of mutilated bodies may evoke the artist François Truffaut in his youth. Throughout the film the visual evocations of uniformed men pushed along in wheelchairs by nurses draw a desolate landscape of handicapped adults. A parallel exists between these mutilated soldiers and Davenne, whose intact body shelters a broken self. The powerful World War I metaphor was already present in Jules et Jim, where a long panoramic shot followed Jim across the cemeteries, a scene totally absent from the novel. Truffaut’s heroes are warriors who bravely (“vaillance, vaillance” – courage, courage – was Truffaut’s motto) carry within themselves a dead self that must be brought back to life. In Tirez sur le pianiste, the confrontation with death is visualized at the beginning of the flashback. The triple superimposition of the pianist ends with a close-up of Edouard’s face looking straight at the spectator with an intense expression of guilt and sorrow. From a narrative point of view, this shot is a puzzle. It looks like a flashback but it is not. Edouard does wear the overcoat with the fur collar we associate with his wife’s suicide sequence, but this specific shot does not appear in that episode, where we see Edouard leaving the hotel room, walking down the corridor, and running back to the room when he hears the window being opened. The suicide scene represents, of course, the most fatal dissociation of the film, the one that occurs between body and mind. Edouard’s inner voice urges him to stay with his wife and not to leave her alone. Dissociation here proves lethal. In shot 6, the close-up of his face functions like an extradiegetic comment pointing to this instant when Edouard’s

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life breaks in two. This shot is analogous to the last frame of Les 400 Coups. The freezeframe that closes Truffaut’s seminal first film gives us a full frontal representation of the dead self that inhabits all of Truffaut’s heroes. In Tirez sur le pianiste, the sequence that will conclude the episode in Lena’s apartment offers a beautiful visual rendering of mending in action. It can be read as yet another of the metaphors Truffaut creates under the pretext of love stories. Through a combination of superimposed shots and of Lena’s voice-over, the lifegiving feminine weaves back together the fabric of life, restoring to its fighting self the inert and silent male body lying next to it in bed. In the following scene, a confrontation at knife point will confirm the success of her intervention. This scene prompts the review of yet another major form of dissociation in the films. The heroes are not only divided between child and adult, making time the major theme of Truffaut’s films, but also between masculine and feminine halves, making love their secondary motif. These representations are modulated in subtle ways in every narrative, so I will simply take the most extreme forms as examples: Davenne in La Chambre verte and Camille in Une Belle Fille comme moi. Both are outcasts, but one will let himself sink from melancholia into death while the other will kill with such lust for life that the spectator will have to take her side. Truffaut said that the heroine of Une Belle Fille comme moi was L’Enfant sauvage’s big sister. In Truffaut’s figural world, vitality affects are primarily embodied in children and women. The dissociated female figure keeps alive the rebellious energy of childhood that refuses to comply with social taboos and restrictions. This untamable figure of resilience is also, within the artist, the nurturer of the creative impulse. Metaphoric figures are, so to speak, the hardware Truffaut worked with to build his narratives, and they were imposed on him by the imperious surge of imagination that turns experience into creation. I remember Truffaut telling me after he had completed his last film, Vivement dimanche!, that it bothered him (“ça m’embête”) that his hero was again in a cave like Steiner in Le Dernier Métro. Clearly this buried figure could not be erased, and stubbornly remained as the core of the creative impulse. As the novelist Patrick Modiano noted more than once, “One is prisoner of one’s imaginary world as one is prisoner of one’s voice.”58 And: “One cannot change one’s voice; the voice always stays the same.”59

Patrick Modiano: Literature and Amodal Perception These apologetic remarks emanate from one of France’s best fiction writers today, whose body of work displays a very distinctive voice. For Modiano, as for Truffaut, imagination is a well-travelled territory that takes the form of a lost past to be recaptured. This geographical metaphor is appropriate, since topography is a major component of Modiano’s imaginary world. Most of his novels are situated in Paris and offer minute descriptions of its network of streets and avenues. Modiano also works with old directories, where he gathers real names, addresses and phone numbers to

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insert into his narratives. These fragments of reality function as landmarks in the ghostlike reality his novels explore. Modiano was born in 1945, and World War II casts an ominous shadow over his fictional world. In the sixties, at a time when French fiction cultivated, under the label of Nouveau Roman, texts without any historical or personal reference, Modiano plunged straight into the darkest years of recent history. His first novel, La Place de l’étoile (a pun on the Parisian landmark and the star the Jews had to wear during the Occupation), directly confronts collaboration and anti-Semitism. Describing his work, Modiano declared in an interview that reading Serge Klarsfeld’s Memorial (a list of all the names and birth dates of the Shoah’s victims), he had experienced a shock of recognition: It touched on things that had always haunted me: pinpoint precision surrounded by immense nothingness. Memorial touched on one of my major reasons for writing: to find something very precise – but only a single element, the rest being fraught with uncertainty. And it also echoed a feeling I have about my childhood. There are childhoods one could call logical, comprehensible. Mine had something fractured about it; it was made up of scattered pieces that I had trouble coordinating.60

For Modiano, world history and personal history deeply resonate with each other because both are inextricably linked to the enigma his parents – and in particular his father – represented for him. As for Truffaut, filiations and identity problems are at the heart of his creation. Truffaut did not know his real father, and when his mother died in 1968 he was shooting Baisers volés, a narrative that takes place around a detective agency. Truffaut hired one of the detectives he had used for his documentation to find out the truth about his origins. He was told his father was Jewish and had become a dentist who lived in eastern France. Truffaut never contacted him, but legend has it that he made the trip to go and observe him in secret at night. Unlike Truffaut, Modiano knew his father only too well, but knew nothing about him. The man remained a disquieting enigma. Modiano’s father was Jewish and had had to hide in occupied Paris during World War II; he was also strangely mixed up, probably through some black market-related activities, in the dangerous underworld that worked with the Gestapo at rue Lauriston. While Modiano was growing up, his father kept him exiled in boarding schools far from Paris, and Modiano often tried to escape. During a violent episode when he was an adolescent, his father attempted to have him arrested by the police, very much as Truffaut’s stepfather had done. This life at the margins of society, where money was scarce and disaster looming around the corner, marked Modiano profoundly. His only close family tie was with a brother, two years his junior, who died when Modiano was twelve. He dedicated his first novels to his memory and often used his brother’s birth date as his own. The two words Modiano most often uses in his interviews are “bizarre” and “compliqué.” He declared that he would never attempt psychoanalysis because it would amount to waking up a sleepwalker. In a childhood “fractured” and made of “scattered parts,” dissociation represented for Modiano, as it did for Truffaut, a fundamental experience. Children who grow up

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in an atmosphere of undisclosed secrets and disturbing mysteries can find themselves very much in the position of borderline patients: they suffer from an overabundance of perceptions but lack the necessary codes to decipher the world around them. For both Truffaut and Modiano, the missing codes concerned their origins, and so they were crucial to the development of identity. When language is used to lie or to distort reality, it becomes menacing. Modiano speaks of words that are like grenades the child carries within him that some day in the distant future will blow up when they are finally associated with meaning.61 Confronted with signifiers lacking referents, the young artist relies – as Truffaut and Modiano did – on his early capacity to read non-linguistic signs. Implicit knowing will remain for them exceptionally active as a privileged way to decipher reality. This world of exacerbated and enigmatic perceptions will find direct expression in their creations. Truffaut and Modiano explore similar territories in their fictions, but the process may be more explicit in literature than in cinema since, as Jean Epstein remarked in his essay on hypnosis,62 cinema and images have a much more direct access to the nervous system than literature and words. Stern, however, observes that “the paradox that language can evoke experiences that transcend words is perhaps the highest tribute to the power of language. But these are words in poetic use. The words in our daily lives often do the opposite and either fracture amodal global experience or send it underground.”63 Modiano’s style displays an unparalleled gift for rendering amodal perception in its pristine splendor. Like Truffaut’s, Modiano’s work has often been labeled “autobiographical,” a qualification he was prompt to dismiss: “Autobiographical writing has always bored me,”64 Modiano declared to a journalist who pointed to the recurrence of family patterns in his novels. “These are things I experienced. But I wanted to make of them a kind of atmosphere, a particular luminosity. … I was always obsessed in cinema with the cameramen. Lighting interested me. … When one writes, it is perhaps difficult to translate a peculiar light, but it has always preoccupied me.”65 Modiano’s language captures with vivid accuracy these elusive perceptions, such as a certain quality of light – which reminds us of the Sternian child playing with the ray of sunshine. It endows his novels with a powerful hypnotic quality, and the contrast is uncanny between the melancholy his narratives distill and the aesthetic jubilation his style generates. This contrast between narratives and style is just as strong in Truffaut’s work, but less obvious because of the director’s play with narrative genres: comedies, melodramas, documented fictions. Truffaut’s polymorphous narratives tend to mask his stylistic mastery while Modiano’s plots, all centering on absence and loss, let his vigorous “écriture” emerge in plain view. The energy Truffaut injects into his mise-en-scène is very similar to Modiano’s vibrant style. Both closely follow the reception of reality through an “embodied mind.” In both cases, autobiographical experience lies not in events, but in a style that captures vitality affects embedded in a stubbornly present childhood. One of Modiano’s novels, Quartier perdu, bears a striking structural similarity to Tirez sur le pianiste. Like Charlie Kohler, the hero has two names and a buried past

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involving murder. Returning to Paris after a twenty-year exile, he will be confronted with his former self. As in Tirez sur le pianiste, the dissociated self will generate a dissociated time and, as the narrative progresses, past and present will undergo a frontal collision. As in Tirez sur le pianiste, repressed memories are associated with a deadly danger and compared to black swamp waters that threaten to swallow the narrator. For the novel’s hero, one word sums up his malaise: “vertigo.” Vertigo is the basic ontological condition of characters who, like Truffaut’s, do not feel included in “the society of men.” Vertigo has, however, two sides; it reflects inner dislocation, but also allows for the formation of a new self. Vertigo erases and rewrites. In Quartier perdu, as in Tirez sur le pianiste, a woman will be the agent of the hero’s revival. Her name is Carmen, and he meets her at dusk in the French Alps, where she is about to leave her snowbound luxury hotel by car. The power has just gone out and the whole encounter takes place in a décor where torch, candles, cigarette lighters unite to animate a world of shadows. This segment vividly illustrates Modiano’s fascination with cameramen. For me, Carmen will always be associated with that poignant and delicate moment when night falls. … The concierge’s flashlight lit her blonde hair. … Her face turned slightly in my direction and, thanks to the flashlight’s shining beam, I noticed that she seemed worried. She picked up the electric flashlight on the counter and pointed it at my face. … The beam of light blinded me and I tried to keep my eyes open wide.66

A hypnotic séance is almost staged in this segment and the visual – and cinematic – quality of Modiano’s evocation is striking. He is not working with character development, but with lights. Carmen is a face and body moving through a dimly lit space. The narrator will agree to convey her suitcases by train to Paris. In this respect, she becomes the counterpart to the “femme locomotive,” the allegorical feminine figure that, at the opening of Jules et Jim, announces Catherine as the “tourbillon de la vie” (whirlwind of life). In Quartier perdu, the arrival of the narrator in the French capital will coincide with a second birth: Life was beginning for me. … The traffic was light and the car slid along without my hearing the noise of the engine. The radio was on … and I recall that an orchestra was playing the music from “April in Portgual.” … Paris, beneath the springtime sun, seemed to me a new city into which I was entering for the first time, and the Quai d’Orsay, after the Invalides, had, that morning, a Mediterranean holiday charm. Yes, we were driving along the Croisette or the Promenade des Anglais.67

This kinetic evocation of Paris in springtime overflows with joyful physical sensations, music included. Instead of swamp waters, the sunny seas of the French Riviera bring their carefree spirit to the capital. Superimpositions of heterogeneous landscapes – urban and marine – are typical of Modiano’s style. This filmic technique is reminiscent of the device that brings back the blissful past in Tirez sur le pianiste. The anguished close-up of Edouard in shot 6 is followed by a second series of superimpositions.

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1.

Over the shot of his face appears the luminous sign for a restaurant (“L’Arbois”). (1s) 2. Triple superimposition of Edouard’s face/L’Arbois/Edouard with Thérèse and Lars Schmeel inside a restaurant. (2s) The luminous sign that appears in the night dissolves into a shot of the bright inside of the restaurant, where a smiling Charlie is sitting at a table and speaking to a blonde waitress who turns out to be his wife. The comforts of light, warmth, food, and love are accentuated by old-fashioned music. After a quick series of close-ups, this long shot in which bodies are nested in a wide space brings tremendous visual relief. Since the plot demands to be primed, Lars Schmeel lingers in the background between Charlie and Thérèse. Emotion culminates in this scene, as it does in the evocation of Paris in Quartier perdu, because fiction oscillates between the edges of two worlds. The present rewrites the past, and the two merge to create a moment that has not yet been touched by death and dissociation. For Modiano, as for Truffaut, time is the central theme of fiction, and their works have a distinct Proustian overtone. In Proust et les signes, Gilles Deleuze compares involuntary memory to metaphor:68 linking heterogeneous elements and, in particular, past and present, metaphor is analogous to involuntary memory, in which a physical sensation brings a lost fragment of the past back to the embodied mind. Deleuze insists on the lightning speed of these spatiotemporal flashes, which only last for a few seconds before consciousness steps in – “the revelations of involuntary memory are extraordinarily brief ”69 – and explains that involuntary memory transforms the object it selects: “Combray reemerges in a completely new form.”70 Using quite different language, David Stern devoted a whole book to an analogous perceptual phenomenon. In The Present Moment, he scrutinizes the three- to foursecond-long perceptual spasms during which experience is formed in real time and encoded in memory while simultaneously rewriting the past: “As each new present moment takes form, it rewires the actual neural recording of the past and rewrites the possible memories of the past. The originals are changed and no longer exist in the way they were initially laid down. … Or to put it more strongly, the present can change the past.”71 Time is critical to this experience, and each present moment has a specific “temporal contour” associated with its set of vitality affects. Everything we do, see, feel and hear has a temporal contour. …We are immersed in a “music” of the world at the local level – a complex polyphonic, polyrhythmic surround where different temporal contours are moving back and forth between the psychological foreground and background. These temporal contours of stimulation … are transposed into contours of feelings in us. It is these contours of feelings that I am calling vitality affects.72

While vitality affects, expressed in kinetic terms, are experienced subjectively, temporal contours are objective changes in the intensity and quality of a stimulus.

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Like involuntary memory, present moments are the locus of intense perceptual activity, “break[ing] through ordinariness and violat[ing] expected smooth functioning.”73 They require work, but the work is intensely rewarding. The present moment concentrates time and condenses different perceptual modes. These perceptual flashes allow for the experience of what Gregory Bateson calls “psychic integration,”74 that is, the systemic nature of the human mind. As such, they are inseparable from creation and from the artistic experience. In Le Corps du cinéma, Raymond Bellour devotes some essential pages to the concept of the present moment: “The present moment is fundamentally the locus of a rearticulation of memory through the prism of a constantly renewed present.”75 This is exactly, Bellour promptly observes, a feature of the filmic image, something that leads him to draw an analogy between the Sternian present moment and the basic unit of cinema, the shot: Where does the temptation come from to see a correspondence between the present moment and the shot and the virtual succession of present moments to the arrangements of the editing? … It comes from the polyphonic, “polytemporal” character … of the present moment and the vitality affects of which it is composed, which animate it with as many modalities as the living present.76

The present moment illustrates the perceptual work a shot accomplishes. Bringing to the surface of consciousness a surge of the non-conscious, it concentrates, condenses, and harmonizes in a few seconds a set of crystallized perceptions that are normally non-conscious, fragmented, and scattered. I think that Modiano’s “vertigo,” Proust’s “involuntary memory,” and Stern’s “present moment” all point to the same perceptual “happening” that a successful shot triggers under the spell of hypnotic emotion. As mentioned earlier, theoreticians such as Roustang and Stern, but also Bateson, propose a new definition of the unconscious that renews the Freudian model. In their view, it is not repression that makes the unconscious inaccessible but rather the wealth of material it stores. The unconscious is inaccessible for structural reasons. The narrow screen of consciousness is incapable of processing the vast reservoir of memorial traces sheltered in the non-conscious mind. Roustang evokes the overconnected landscape of perceptions hypnosis uncovers. Film, as hypnosis, activates this network. Far from storing free-floating energy, the non-conscious mind is, on the contrary, the locus of a myriad of liaisons and correspondences that consciousness is unable to grasp without risking a brush with madness.77 This brings us back to the description of borderline patients who precisely do not have the capacity to process this wealth of material and are overloaded with disturbing perceptions: In childhood, they could not accept the simplifications proposed to them by adults. They perceived without mediation the things left unsaid, the mental restrictions, the latent intentions, the flux of tenderness, and more often of violence, that presided over relations among adults. They saw the sounds, they touched the words, they heard the gestures. They felt the full weight of the various feelings that circulated … without being able to make sense of them.78

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This is a description of the pathological form of amodal perception. As Bateson notes, mental patients lack the metaphoric function (“as if ”) that is the attribute of creative artists.79 Stern, for his part, does not hesitate to agree with novelist Alessandro Baricco when he writes that “clear ideas are a fraud”80 and that creation is always a “beautiful mess.”81 Louis-Ferdinand Céline used to say, “La création est une bataille dégoûtante” (creation is a disgusting battle).82 Works of imagination involve a brush with perceptual chaos that formal constructions, against all odds, organize. Consciousness is the real mystery.

La Femme d’à côté: Stylization and Repetitions Truffaut’s work displays a keen knowledge of the mind’s processes, and several of his films offer clinical profiles of mental disorders. La Femme d’à côté focuses on one of its most painful forms, associating madness and lucidity. I will select six shots from the film. The segment lasts thirty-five seconds and takes place after the scandal at the garden party. It is a silent scene where body and space speak. 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Medium shot of Mathilde sitting in front of a fireplace where flames are blazing. Zoom on her face as she feverishly cuts up photographs with scissors. (12s) Close up of her hands holding the photographs and the scissors. Mathilde is cutting Bernard’s silhouette from the pictures. The flames are visible in the background. (5s) Close up of Mathilde’s tense face. (2s) Close up of the hands, photographs, scissors, and flames. (3s) Close up of Mathilde’s face; she throws a photograph in the fire. (5s) Close up of the flames while they are burning up the picture of Bernard. (8s)

This is quintessential Truffaut. In a few seconds we are given to understand, without any words, that Mathilde is dissociating. This scene is embedded in a specific context. In the segment immediately preceding it, she wakes up in her bed and goes to kiss her husband, Philippe, who is shaving in the bathroom. He angrily shakes her, telling her that in her sleep she pronounced the name of her lover, Bernard. The fire scene is an exorcism. Mathilde tries to expel from her body the truth it utters when she sleeps. In both scenes, she wears a nightgown that speaks of physicality. We are leaving the formality of social life to enter the inner world. The preceding scene was filmed in a single medium shot with a simple reframing in close-up. Here the montage dissociates face and hands. The shot/counter-shot construction asserts Mathilde’s fighting will. Like Adèle H. or Muriel in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), Mathilde will not submit. The vitality affects, however, are all negatives: the convulsive gestures of the actress, the frantic motion of her hands on the scissors, the painful way her body is contorted and bent next to the fire, the ominous half-light that surrounds her. The rapid editing injects the scene with panic and despair. The same action filmed in a

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single continuous medium shot would convey quite a different emotion. This example illustrates the distinction made between vitality affects and temporal contour as subjective and objective components. The number, the length, the speed or slowness of the shots actively participate in the induction of emotion: they are its modulators, in proportion to the many vitality affects and … temporal contours that animate them. This states how difficult it is to speak of rhythm and time. Because if the temporal contours are … quantifiable, the vitality affects are subjective experiences.83

Each spectator will read this segment in a personal way, but psychic violence is captured here – as it is in the opening of the flashback in Tirez sur le pianiste – in a series of flash shots that display panic. Mathilde has lost the battle. Such economy of representation is exemplary of Truffaut’s Spartan style in his later films. Scissors, photographs, and flames are three of the most frequently recurring figures in Truffaut’s work, and any cognoscenti will embark on an intertextual ride. I will set aside the scissors (L’Enfant sauvage) or the photographs (everywhere) as well as the scissors and photographs (La Sirène du Mississippi) to concentrate on the culminating shot, because it seals Bernard’s fate. At the beginning of Jules et Jim, Catherine’s gown catches fire as a foreshadowing of the final cremation. In the fire scene from La Femme d’à côté, Mathilde is hovering above the flames as if she were mastering them. The fire seems to be at her service. This is, of course, a delusion, as the long final shot of the flames consuming Bernard’s image attests. The high flames that burn his effigy are identical to the immolation of Balzac by Antoine Doinel, to the white lingerie in La Sirène du Mississippi, or to the fire in La Chambre verte. Just as Jim burned with Catherine, Bernard will be consumed by Mathilde’s “corps brûlant.” La Femme d’à côté, like Tirez sur le pianiste, depicts a collusion between past and present. The photographs Mathilde cuts up in this scene function as the flashback to a past marked by death. Like Charlie, Mathilde will be broken into two parts: her social persona, and the mutilated self she carries within (she attempted suicide in the past and still bears the scars). Dissociation will be reflected by many doubles in the narratives: two houses, two little boys with the same name, two lovers who are mirroring each other in a deadly play of reflections. The fight is pointless, as Madame Jouve explains in the first shot of the film. Infirmity is represented here not as an acoustic impairment but as a loss of mobility in space. In this context, the “normal selves” are the tennis players evolving behind the fence. Madame Jouve is Mathilde’s noble and horrific double. Like Charlie’s wife, she once threw herself from the window “as a bundle of dirty laundry” and survived. In Tirez sur le pianiste, Therese, before she commits suicide, describes herself as “just a dirty rag.” Imagination invests spaces and uses them as formal structures. In Truffaut’s films, the fundamental dimension imagination embraces is vertical. Verticality is a vector of subjectivity, and characters are defined according to this parameter. Verticality is a characteristic also present in Quartier perdu, where throughout the

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novel a series of images follows a gravitational downward motion. Does the spectator/reader perceive this spatial organization, which has little to do with plot? We will come back to this issue. The connections between Truffaut’s early and later films are obvious and dispel the silly notion that his work evolved into the cinéma de qualité he despised as a critic. In La Femme d’à côte, we find the same clinical probing into inner violence as in his earlier films; the only difference is that by now Truffaut has created his own set of signs to evoke reality without reproducing it. He moves swiftly and assuredly right into the emotional nexus, stylization allowing for a simplified way of drawing that evokes Matisse’s etchings at the end of his life. Mise-en-scène has become a mise à l’écart of reality, or, to use a Proustian image, a translation; Truffaut delights in using the personal code he has created, where each sign synthesizes reality, forming tight and condensed patterns. These patterns take hold of the spectator’s perceptual system and open it up to a vast, almost infinite, field of resonances within the human imagination. This language is empowering for whoever creates it or simply deciphers it, as the spectator does. The experience is intoxicating. Two additional registers contribute to this scene, music and clothing. The scene is wordless. The dialogue in La Femme d’à côté insists repeatedly on the failure of language in the realm of psychic suffering. The leitmotiv “we have to talk” never gets the characters anywhere. Mental disorders abolish symbolic constructions and drag people down to the instinctual level of animals. Madame Jouve’s black dog plays a distinctive role in the film.84 In the absence of language, passion is linked in the film to a musical theme by Georges Delerue. It first appears at the beginning of the film in the supermarket scene. Mathilde proposes that she and Bernard be good friends, and he agrees. They go down to the garage chatting happily. As they part, Bernard brushes Mathilde’s cheek with his hand. A dog can be heard barking in the background. She faints. At this instant, the musical theme surges in a lyrical outburst. Its reappearance in the fire scene cancels out Mathilde’s useless attempt to cut off the past with her scissors. The musical theme appears, under a slightly different form, twice more in the film: when the lovers have sex in Bernard’s car, and when they meet in the last scene to make love and die. The four appearances of this musical theme inextricably link passion and annihilation. Let us now consider the most peculiar aspect of this scene. In the first shot, a darkened window behind Mathilde attests to the fact that she has woken up in the middle of the night – as Bernard will, later on in the narrative, wake up and walk to his death. Strangely enough, on top of her nightgown, she wears not a robe but an open raincoat, the same raincoat she was wearing fully buttoned in the garage scene. This raincoat will appear one more time in the film: Mathilde wears it when she lures Bernard to his death. Raincoats belong to Truffaut’s cosmogony. It is the attire of the street walker, as in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945), the woman who has no home and falls victim to her inner fire. In Tirez sur le pianiste, Charlie and Lena both wear raincoats displaying the shared homelessness that brings them together. The raincoat becomes associated with murderous passion in La Peau douce. Franca, the wife, will hide her rifle under a raincoat to go and kill her unfaithful

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husband. The insertion of this garment in Truffaut’s world is linked to his fascination with a criminal case in the early sixties – L’Affaire Jacoub – a fascination Modiano shared ( Jacoub is mentioned in one of his novels, Pedigree).85 A blood-stained raincoat was part of the enigma. Like Modiano, Truffaut liked to appropriate fragments of reality and turn them into pieces of his creative puzzle. La Femme d’à côté is stylistically one of Truffaut’s most perfect films, where all signs are interconnected within the narrative and a large number of them linked to previous fictions. How many of all these liaisons and repetitions does the spectator see? It all depends on what one means by “to see.”

Douglas Sirk: Deciphering Style Laura Mulvey raises the question in an article on Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), in a text that focuses on films and genres that can benefit from the kind of “deciphering” enabled by new technologies, such as the DVD, that allow for the slowing down of moving images. Melodrama is one of these genres: “Melodramatic aesthetic … produces a style that demands to be deciphered and thus, in turn, produces rich material for the practice of textual analysis. While an alert and practiced spectator of the melodrama may well read the cinematic language of displacement, consciously or subliminally, textual analysis enriches and illuminates these signifying elements.”86 Developing this point, Mulvey points to a shift from plot to mise-en-scène in the way that films can produce meaning: “Mise-en-scène ‘fills in’ meaning at the point when speech fails. … Meaning is displaced onto its surrounding mise-en-scène, invested in particular objects or inscribed onto the body through inarticulate gesture.”87 In fact Mulvey will soon make a bolder assertion. In Sirk’s films, the dissociation between narrative and style reveals “hidden meaning”: Rather than a displaced expression of the unspeakable, meanings are encapsulated, materialized and mapped on to the image through the signifying potential of cinema itself. … From this perspective, there is a built-in demand or “preprogrammed” demand within the film itself, to break down its more obvious narrative continuities, its forward movement, in the interest of discovering these otherwise hidden meanings.88

Not only does melodrama demand textual analysis, but the “signifying potential of cinema itself ” becomes the medium of a language to be decoded “consciously or subliminally.” While Mulvey’s article starts out with a reflection on the activity of the film analyst, it ends up questioning the ability of the ordinary moviegoer to read this “subtext.” Does the spectator “see” what the analyst uncovers when he/ she slows down the filmic apparatus? While opposing narrative and style within the spectator’s perceptual activity, Mulvey seems to point to the non-narrative dimension of cinematic language that Bellour analyzes in Le Corps du cinéma, a

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dimension the Sirkian melodrama inadvertently emphasizes in its relentless distancing from plot in favor of style. Although the New Wave bestowed on him the title of auteur, Douglas Sirk never dreamt of expressing anything personal in his films. In Hollywood, he became a melodrama professional who made money for the studios. Unlike Truffaut and Modiano, Sirk did not devise his plots; they were imposed on him. Autobiographical resonances, or even the expression of personal imagination, were out of the question. How they both crept into his films, or rather invested his style, is revealing. First, the irony is that Sirk’s own life had been a novel. In Jon Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk, the director describes himself exactly in the terms that define Truffaut’s or Modiano’s fictional characters. Like Charlie Kohler or Jean Dekker, Sirk had a double identity and two names: “There are two Douglas Sirks. The trouble started when I changed my name.”89 As we know, Sirk left Germany in 1937 to escape the Nazi regime, moving to the United States, where he changed his name from Hans Detlef Sierck to Douglas Sirk. “What happened in Germany altered my outlook on life in every possible way. It made me look at people with extreme care. So many of my friends became Nazis.”90 Dissociation was a lived personal experience for Sirk who, because the historical situation had forced so many people to lie about themselves, also professed a great distrust for “language as true medium and interpreter of reality. … I learned to trust my eyes rather more than the windiness of words.”91 Implicit knowing became for him the medium of truth about the world and people. Agreeing with Truffaut that “a film has nothing to say,” Sirk declared, “I hate movies with messages.”92 He also professed a complete indifference to the stories he had to tell and called himself a “story bender”: “It has nothing to do with the story. It is a matter of style.” This led, of course, to this famous statement: “The angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.”93 Like Truffaut and Modiano, Sirk is a great stylist, and he used camera work to express a cryptic reality that triggers a powerful and lasting emotion for the audience. “Cryptic” because this process belongs, as Mulvey suggests, to an “implicit knowing” at work not only for the audience but also for the artist in his creative activity. Actually, Mulvey notes, Sirk’s narrative displays an emotion that was immediately deciphered by certain audiences in the fifties: “The very duality of melodrama, its play on the relation between a surface appearance and an implied, hidden vulnerability in which the theatricality of masquerade also acknowledges the pain it conceals, would inevitably appeal to a gay audience.”94 “Hidden vulnerability” was indeed part of Sirk’s experience and there was a harrowing personal experience connected to his 1937 departure from Germany. At the time, Sirk was leaving behind an adolescent son he had not seen since the child was four. His mother, Sirk’s first wife, was an ardent Nazi supporter, and when they divorced she used Sirk’s remarriage to a Jewish actress as a pretext to officially deny him any contact with his only child. The young Sierk, who bore the same name as his father, enrolled in the Hitler Youth and became a child star in Nazi films. The only way Sirk could see his growing son was on the screen in the Nazi propaganda films in which the handsome adolescent played. In 1944, Sirk learned that his son had disappeared while fighting on the Russian front. He made a trip to Germany in 1949

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to try to find a trace of him. His quest was unsuccessful, and his son’s body was never recovered. Sirk kept this experience a secret and returned to the States, where, throughout the fifties, he made his most celebrated films. Style became the locus of this experience. Of many possible illustrations, let me mention one shot from All That Heaven Allows, a film that is in many ways formally and thematically analogous to La Femme d’à côté. This shot distills a high index of emotion. The heroine, Cary, sits silently at the piano with her face reflected in the glossy varnish of the instrument. For one minute and twenty seconds, nothing happens. The plot is suspended. This is the sort of shot that Sirk relished. Lying outside the narrative, it is pure style – devoid of content, packed with affects. This non-narrative segment is where autobiography lies. Objects, light, mirror effect, clothes – everything points to a rigid, smothering structure that speaks of entombment. Cary is the prisoner of a dead world, trapped in the still universe built by her late husband. This scene prepares one of the most famous shots in Sirk’s cinema – the television scene, in which Cary’s face is reflected on the TV screen as it is here on the wood of the piano. Sirk’s films, like Truffaut’s, display not only a sophisticated work of stylization to encode reality, but also a strong network of repetitions, and this calls for a remark on the essential role of memory in the spectator’s perceptual experience. Exactly as the suicide/murder scene in La Femme d’à côté is carefully anticipated by the repetition of shots (ominous night scenes), of visual figures (fainting in the garage), or of figural elements (the raincoat), the television scene in All That Heaven Allows is announced by a series of window or mirror shots. These repetitions and variations stimulate the memory into expanding its capacity far beyond its normal range. The viewer’s working memory superimposes these scenes without knowing it, or knowing it only implicitly, creating a perceptual mode that allows for multitemporal representations. This is yet another example of the deep modifications the reception of fiction imposes on our perception. Normal faculties are superseded and the perceptual system is fully activated to include a mode of cognition that is normally dormant. Studying the repetition of imperceptible and nonverbal exchanges between patient and therapist in the course of analysis, Stern writes, “Multitemporal presentations are largely treated in the implicit domain. They involve nonlinear and noncausal processes and have a closer relationship to metaphor as a fundamental mode of cognition.”95 Works of pure fiction with “nothing to say” seem to rely to an inordinate extent on this mode of cognition. Encoding experience in style as the vector of hypnotic emotion may in fact be fiction’s raison d’être.

Fiction and the Intersubjective Matrix Just as gay audiences in the fifties could read in Sirk’s film a subtext that spoke of hidden vulnerability behind the garish varnish of melodrama, the young Truffaut could also decipher a subtext in all the great genre films he compulsively watched as

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a child instead of going to school. The concept of auteur is born from these early readings. Through hypnotic trance and perceptual stimulation, the body of the spectator engages in an exchange with the body of the film that causes temporary mental modifications. Bellour mentions in his book Roland Barthes’ famous article, “En sortant du cinéma,”96 which directly connects hypnosis and the special form of healing the viewing of a film can bring. Jean Epstein was the first to assert boldly that “le cinéma crée de la réalité psychique” (cinema creates psychic reality),97 an assertion echoed by Gilles Deleuze, who considers that the perceptual circuits activated by films do not already exist but rather, are created by the viewing experience.98 Neurobiology, Deleuze suggests, may someday account for the functioning of this inner circuitry, a hypothesis that Bellour also expresses while uncovering, for instance, Stern’s fascinating description of mirror neurons that intervene in mimetic behaviors between two persons.99 While suggesting, in Le Corps du cinéma, that someday brain imaging and neurobiology will be able to enlighten the functioning of what he calls “la pensée matérielle d’imagination,” (the material thought of imagination),100 Bellour tempers his remarks with an insistent caveat: “toute oeuvre d’art est une exception”(all works of art are exceptions), and cannot be reduced to a model. “That’s why we have been very insistent – especially with regard to the fabulous, exact visions that Stern proposes of the world of early infancy as consisting of micro-elementary experiences specific to the present moment – on the dimension of analogy and isomorphism that these visions contribute to the intelligence of film.”101 Armed with this essential warning, I would like to call upon one last Sternian concept to enlighten the spectator’s exchange with the fiction film. In The Present Moment, a volume that centers on the therapeutic experience, Stern analyzes the decisive instants that mark a turning point in the therapy and trigger the healing process. He labels them “moments of meeting” or “shared feeling voyages”: “During a shared feeling voyage (which is a moment of meeting) two people traverse together a feeling-landscape as it unfolds in real time. … Although this shared voyage lasts only for the seconds of a moment of meeting, that is enough. … There has been a discontinuous leap. The border between order and chaos has been redrawn.”102 It is tempting, following Bellour’s insight about the analogy between the present moment and the shot, to apply this description to filmic emotion. The spectator under the spell of emotion enters into a dyadic relationship with fiction. He enters what Stern calls the intersubjective matrix, a space of exchanges between the body of the film and the body of the spectator. “The moment opens a special form of consciousness and is encoded in memory. … Moments of the therapeutic present, with its intersubjective matrix, or moments of lived empathy with the film edited by each spectator according to what he understands of the way in which the film itself is edited.”103 What Stern calls the intersubjective matrix contrasts with the intrasubjective space that is the field of classical psychoanalysis. The most economical way to describe its specificity is to use the notion of “attachment” as a landmark. As Stern points out, autistic children are capable of attachments, but they are incapable of entering the intersubjective matrix where people read each other through implicit knowing and can be modified by the exchange. “This matrix is like oxygen. We

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breathe it all the time without noticing its presence. When confronted with autism, we can sense the world without oxygen and it is a shock.”104 We could suggest boldly that a high dose of oxygen is what style provides to the spectator’s body when he watches a film, to the point of creating the intoxicating dizziness that Truffaut called for in his description of emotion. “Oxygen,” or the lack of it, “asphyxia,” is also the metaphor that appears frequently in Modiano’s book when he explains why he writes or describes his hero’s “vertigo.”105 Let us also remember Adèle H. choking during her nightmares or Muriel’s labored breathing during her nervous breakdown in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. Bellour, in Le Corps du cinéma, likens the present moment, which lasts only a few seconds, to the rhythm of human breathing. When we watch a film, a weight is lifted, exactly as it is for Antoine Doinel in the Rotor, where gravity is suspended. Thematically, the intersubjective matrix is the domain Truffaut’s films explore relentlessly, mapping out its topography from one extreme pole to the other, from fusion to autism.

Conclusion: The Obscure Side of the Moon Works of imagination all speak indirectly of intensely private experiences – in this case, the loss of a father for Truffaut, of a brother for Modiano, of a son for Sirk. The specifics of the artist’s life are irrelevant to aesthetic emotion, and we do not need to know them to fall under the spell of style, but it is clear that experience is the stuff imagination processes. Imagination “works” on experience, and autobiography is inextricably linked to fiction, more or less explicitly. Truffaut and Modiano both knew very well that they were constantly working with their own lives. What else would they use? As Modiano says, one cannot change one’s voice. Life is the rough and repetitive stuff they use to create their cryptic network of signs. The author has no intention of revealing personal data, as is obvious with Sirk, but also with Modiano (“Autobiography bores me”), and Truffaut, who often said that he understood the “meaning” of a film many years after completing it.106 When Modiano says he is only interested in capturing a certain light and Sirk a reflection in a mirror, when Truffaut says that he is inspired by images – a car in the snow for Tirez sur le pianiste or teeth colliding in a kiss for La Peau douce107 – the artists are referring to perceptions that capture experience under the form of pre-linguistic metaphors. Autobiography, like dough, must constantly be kneaded to produce a style that will activate the mental circuitry of spectators and readers. Autobiography is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. It is indispensable and trivial. Most importantly, autobiography in fiction fully belongs to implicit knowing and, in this respect, it is revealing to contrast two aspects of Truffaut’s creation: scriptwriting and mise-en-scène. When I interviewed Truffaut in 1979, I kept asking him to comment on formal elements – for instance, the countless shots of windows in L’Enfant sauvage. He answered, “I needed them. This is instinctive. The decisions about mise-en-scène are instinctive.”108 This enigmatic assessment contrasts with the

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explicit, and often acerbic, comments Truffaut would write in the margins of the scripts his collaborators proposed to him, where he fully accounts for his decisions. Let’s remember his famous motto: “Four ideas in a shot and not four shots for one idea.” Carole Le Berre masterfully analyzed this controlled and conscious aspect of Truffaut’s pre-planning. He is, of course, also completely in command of mise-en-scène, but the process in the midst of production is radically different. As Bateson explains, the more experienced an artist becomes, the more he knows what he wants and the less he can explain why:109 “I needed it.” David Stern at one point wanted to call his book on the present moment “The Obscure Side of the Moon.”110 The processes described in this article represent a specific form of cognition and point to this obscure side – obscure for both the creator and the spectator, but, of course, inseparable from its luminous other side that shines in the movie theater. Strangely enough for a director whose obsession with style is his distinguishing feature, Truffaut has suffered more criticism over content than most of his New Wave colleagues; he has been – and still is – alternately praised for content (children) and vilified for content (women). The triviality of content appears more clearly now, when certain formerly “bad” Truffaut films (La Sirène du Mississippi, Domicile conjugal, L’Amour en fuite, 1979) are suddenly reappraised in a positive light. This light comes from the perfection of the films’ inner geometries. Whatever its topic, a Truffaut film has the power to carry you away; this has nothing to do with content and everything to do with style – with architecture, consistency, harmonization of representations, speed of perceptions, and acceleration of the mental mechanisms that are stimulated, challenged, and taken to the most extreme edge of their operational capacities. The Truffaut touch has everything to do with physical sensations setting off chemical reactions in the spectator’s embodied mind, which suddenly moves, is set in motion, in emotion. Great fiction films, no matter how many times you have seen them, are intoxicating and addictive. They trap your mental system, and will not let go of it. I will end on a personal note. As a Truffaut specialist, I have studied his films for many years. I remember that, when I first started noticing the stream of repetitions, correspondences, and metaphors in his films, I felt both elated and helpless. First, I could not find the appropriate terminology to describe the objects of my analysis.111 These were definitely not symbols. Using “motifs” or “figures” was a way around the problem. But the most discouraging part of the analysis was that every time I would isolate a figural element and try to account for it separately, it would lose all life. I will take one of the less obvious examples. In L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), Lieutenant Pinson is always elevated, either filmed in the top part of a shot or in surroundings that figuratively suggest vertical domination – on top of a flight of stairs or on a landing. This detail is constant and consistent and, by the way, I am certain that Truffaut had no conscious sense of this “décision de mise-en-scène.” What does the analyst do with it? Not much. I felt very much like someone admiring beautiful creatures in an undersea landscape and isolating them, only to be left with a dead fish, all beauty gone. These patterns cannot be isolated and are not susceptible to being reduced to logical categories. The determining factor is the connective tissue that binds them together and assigns to each of them their exact positioning – for each

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element there is only one position, not two. We should remember that in metaphors, the key components are not the two objects compared, but the way they relate to each other within both units. In Truffaut’s films, the objects are the same as in normal life, but what is different is the inner geometry that binds them together. This geometry is totally absent from everyday reality and not perceivable with “normal faculties.” The precision and beauty of this hidden topography often reaches perfection in Truffaut’s films. Imagination is its ruler. Comparing human imagination to the ocean is a classic literary image. I like to think of the last shot of Les 400 Coups where Antoine Doinel stands, pensive but determined, in front of the sea, as an image of the artist in front of his metaphoric territory.

Notes 1 Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 89. 2 Carole Le Berre, Truffaut au Travail (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004), p. 188. 3 Charles Baudelaire, “La Reine des facultés,” Le Salon de 1859, Œuvres Complètes, Collection Bouquins (Robert Lafont, Paris 2004). 4 François Truffaut, Les Films de ma vie (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), p. 16; François Truffaut, Le Plaisir des Yeux, (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987), p. 38. 5 Charles Baudelaire, “La Reine des facultés,” p. 751. 6 François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. edn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 335. 7 “Un film ne dit rien, un film véhicule des informations émotionnelles trop bouleversantes, trop sensuelles, trop distrayantes pour qu’il en résulte un message flegmatique.” “Entretiens avec François Truffaut,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 316, p. 33. 8 “L’opinion des gens ne m’est pas indifférente puisque je cherche à agir sur eux physiquement. Je cherche même à les faire pleurer.” Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), p. 335. 9 “J’ai envie que mon public soit constamment captivé, envoûté. Qu’il sorte de la salle de cinéma, hébété, étonné d’être sur le trottoir. Je voudrais qu’il en oublie l’heure, le lieu où il se trouve, comme Proust plongé dans la lecture à Combray.” Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 415. 10 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (London: Phoenix Press, 2000). 11 Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, p. 31. 12 Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2010). 13 François Roustang, Qu’est ce que l’hypnose? (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), p. 18. 14 “L’hypnose se révélerait comme une introduction au pouvoir d’imaginer, c’est-à-dire de transformer la réalité qui s’impose, parce qu’il est semblable au pourvoir de rêver qui commande les comportements de notre espèce et au pouvoir de configurer le monde, qui est le lot inné du nourrisson.” Roustang, Qu’est ce que l’hypnose?, p. 17. 15 Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 104. 16 Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 122. 17 François Roustang, La Fin de la plainte (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), p. 139. 18 Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 161. 19 “L’émotion est ce pli qui, dans l’entre-deux perceptif de l’inconscient et du conscient, fixe dans l’âme l’impression reçue des organes.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 141.

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“L’émotion est ce choc, ce pli perceptif, discontinu, continuellement glissant de l’extérieur à l’intérieur du corps, et basculant de l’inconscience à la conscience.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 214. Roustang, Qu’est ce que l’hypnose?, p. 47. David Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985); David Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 2004). Stern, The Interpersonal world of the Infant, p. viii. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 113. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 99. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 104. “C’est tout ce qui s’emporte au delà dans la vie de l’adulte, et ce que l’art retrouve, et singulièrement le cinéma.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 295. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 142. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 113. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 116. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 148. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 114. “La haine de l’information directe.” Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 440. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 151. “Il s’agit plutôt de penser une analogie de situation quant à la réalité ontologique, perceptive et environnementale – la chambre d’enfant et de cinéma, où le monde se compose et se recompose à chaque instant pour le spectateur comme pour le ‘bébé,’ en regard d’un apprentissage du nouveau, par rapport auquel s’éprouvent des régularités minimales. En cela, cette analogie fournit le cadre d’une redéfinition de l’impression de réalité: un effet-cinéma vécu comme double de la genèse à jamais reconduite qu’a été la constitution du monde pour le tout petit enfant. Ainsi s’ouvre la perspective à partir de laquelle penser ces différences de régime qui provoquent les émotions. Il s’agit donc d’une analogie micro-élémentaire tenant au processus même de la formation des images (et des sons) et de leur effet comme corps et sur le corps, selon une logique affective et non psychologique.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 152. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 152. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 153. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 51. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 51. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 54 and 57. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 56. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 176. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 144. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 67. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 56. “Que dire d’une précision telle, de cet enchâssement des figures de corps rimant à travers la surface-volume de l’espace parcouru? … Les affects de vitalité semblent pouvoir être circonscrits et nommés, prélevés sur tout ce dont ils dessinent le corps, comme on le voit dans l’oeuvre d’art dont ils deviennent une part inaliénable. Alors que la perception amodale, jamais proprement localisable, est la force multiple qui agit, par tout ce qu’elle implique au niveau de la forme, de l’intensité, du nombre et du rythme.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 161.

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“Toutes les ressources du plan et des enchaînements de plans servent au déploiement soutenu des affects de vitalité, sous le prétexte et selon les inclinations d’affects psychologiques, soutenant les identifications aux personnages, à la fiction.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p.163. “Les traits d’image sont … toujours beaucoup plus variés, en nature, en nombre et en importance, que les éléments du récit, d’emblée plus synthétiques.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 175. “Une équivalence frontale … entre les affects de vitalité dans les comportements spontanés et le style dans l’art.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 163. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 117. François Truffaut, from Grandes Traversées, Radio Program for the station France Culture, by Serge Toubiana. Grandes Traversées comprised five successive 210-minute sessions, July 28 to August 1, 2008, each consisting of archive radio broadcasts alongside round table discussions about Truffaut. The excerpt cited here comes from the segment called “L’Homme Cinéma,” broadcast on Thursday, July 31, 2008. Le Berre, Truffaut au travail, p. 180. Michel Chion, “The Elevator and the Telephone,” Chapter 24 in this volume. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 66. Jeanne Moreau in an interview from a television program entitled “Un film et son époque. Il était une fois Jules et Jim” (Collection: Documentaire. Authors: Serge July et Marie Génin. Director: Thierry Tripod. Production: France 5/Folamour/TCM. 2008). Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew, interview with arnaud desplechin, part 2: truffaut and his methods, in this volume. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 200. “On est prisonnier de son imaginaire, comme on est prisonnier de sa voix.” Patrick Modiano, “Modiano: Seule l’écriture est tangible,”Magazine Littéraire 490 (2009): 67. “On ne peut pas changer de voix, la voix reste toujours la même.” Patrick Modiano, “Patrick Modiano: Travaux de déblaiement,” Magazine Littéraire 302 (1994): 104. “Ça rejoignait des choses qui m’ont toujours hanté: une précision très ponctuelle, entourée d’un immense néant. Le Mémorial rejoignait l’une des motivations essentielles que j’ai d’écrire: retrouver quelque chose de très précis, mais un seul élément, le reste étant nimbé d’incertitude. Ça faisait écho aussi à un sentiment que j’ai par rapport à mon enfance. Il y a des enfances que l’on pourrait dire logiques, compréhensibles. La mienne avait quelque chose de fractionné; elle était faite de pièces éparses que j’ai du mal à coordonner.” Modiano, “Modiano: Seule l’écriture est tangible,” p. 65. Patrick Modiano, La Petite Bijou (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 105. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 293. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 177. Modiano, “Modiano: Seule l’écriture est tangible,” p. 67. “Ce sont des choses que j’ai ressenties. Mais je voulais en faire une sorte d’atmosphère, de luminosité particulière. … J’ai toujours été obsédé dans le cinéma par les opérateurs. La lumière m’intéressait. … Quand on écrit, il est peut-être difficile de traduire une lumière, mais ça m’a toujours préoccupé.” Modiano, “Patrick Modiano: Travaux de déblaiement,” p. 103. “Pour moi Carmen restera toujours associée à ce moment poignant et délicat où le jour tombe. … La torche du concierge éclarait ses cheveux blonds. … Son visage a légèrement oscillé dans ma direction et grâce au faisceau lumineux de la torche j’ai remarqué son air  soucieux. … Elle a pris la torche électrique sur le comptoir et l’a dirigé vers mon

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visage. … Le faisceau de lumière m’éblouissait et je m’efforçais de garder les yeux grands ouverts.” Patrick Modiano, Quartier perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 90–93. “La vie commençait pour moi. … La circulation était fluide et l’automobile glissait sans que j’entende le bruit du moteur. La radio marchait … et je me souviens qu’un orchestre jouait la musique d’Avril au Portugal. … Paris sous ce soleil de printemps, me semblait une ville neuve où je pénétrais pour la première fois, et le Quai d’Orsay, après les Invalides, avait, ce matin là, un charme de Méditerranée et de vacances. Oui, nous suivions la Croisette ou la Promenade des Anglais.” Modiano, Quartier perdu, p. 103. Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Perspectives Critiques, Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), p. 75. “Les révélations de la mémoire involontaires sont extraordinairement brèves.” Deleuze, Proust et les signes, p. 78. “Combray resurgit sous une forme absolument nouvelle.” Deleuze, Proust et les signes, p. 76. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 201. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 64. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 34. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 145. “Le moment présent est fondamentalement le lieu d’une réarticulation de la mémoire à travers un présent chaque fois renouvelé.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 219. “D’où vient la tentation de faire correspondre le moment présent au plan et la succession virtuelle des moments présents aux agencements du découpage? … Elle tient au caractère polyphonique ‘polytemporel’ … du moment présent et des affects de vitalité qui le composent, l’innervent comme autant de modalités du vivant immédiat.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 218. Roustang, Qu’est ce que l’hypnose?, p.47. “Dans l’enfance, ils n’ont pu accepter les simplifications que leur proposaient les adultes. Ils percevaient sans médiation les nons-dits, les restrictions mentales, les intentions latentes, les flux de tendresse et plus souvent de violence, qui présidaient aux relations entre adultes. Ils voyaient les sons, ils touchaient les mots, ils écoutaient les gestes. Ils recevaient de plein fouet les sentiments divers qui circulaient dans l’entourage … sans qu’ils puisssent en maîtriser le sens.” Roustang, Qu’est ce que l’hypnose?, p. 44. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, p. 140. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 117. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 144. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, interview with Madeleine Chapsal, L’Express, June 14, 1957. “Le nombre, la durée, la vitesse ou la lenteur des plans participent activement à l’induction de l’émotion: ils en sont les modulateurs, à proportion des multiples affects de vitalité et … des contours temporels qui les innervent. C’est dire la difficulté de parler de rythme et de temps. Car si les contours temporels sont … quantifiables, les affects de vitalités sont de expériences subjectives.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 257. Let’s just mention the chilling scene in which Bernard takes his wife to a restaurant in a futile attempt to return to normalcy. Madame Jouve’s iron leg and her dog suddenly invade the vertical space from above, descending a small spiral staircase toward the couple. Patrick Modiano, Un Pedigree (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 65. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, rev. edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 231.

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Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 231. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 232. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 40. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 126. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 40. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 27. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 40. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 233. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 215. Barthes, Psychanalyse et cinéma, pp. 104–107. “Le cinéma crée de la réalité psychique.” Jean Epstein, “Intelligence d’une machine,” in Ecrits sur le Cinéma, Vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1974), p. 292. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 320. Stern, The Present Moment, pp. 78–79 and 129. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 319. “C’est pourquoi on n’a cessé ici, s’agissant en particulier des fabuleuses visions exactes que Stern propose du monde de la première enfance comme des expériences microélémentaires propres au moment présent, d’insister sur la dimension d’analogie et d’ismorphisme que ces visions offrent à l’intelligence des films.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 319. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 317. “Le moment ouvre une forme spéciale de conscience et est encodé dans la mémoire. … Temps du présent thérapeutique avec sa matrice intersubjective, ou temps de l’empathie vécue avec le film découpé par chacun selon ce qu’il reçoit de la façon dont le film se découpe.” Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 219. Stern, The Present Moment, p. 94. Modiano, “Modiano: Seule l’écriture est tangible,” p. 64. François Truffaut, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., L’Avant Scène Cinéma 165: 5. Gillain, (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, pp. 109 and 152. Anne Gillain, “Reconciling Irreconcilables: An Interview with François Truffaut,” Wide Angle 4 (1979): 32. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, p. 141. Stern, The Present Moment, p. xiv. A splendid exploration of patterns of correspondences can be found in Martin Lefebvre, truffaut and his “doubles.”

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Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part II Truffaut and His Methods Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew Paris, June 19, 2010 L’Enfant sauvage and Structuralism q:

We would like to come back to the moment when you changed the way you looked at Truffaut’s work as a director.

d:

When did I realize that Truffaut could matter for me? It was the day I realized that The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach [Huillet and Straub, 1968] had been shot only a bit before L’Enfant sauvage. Then I saw the two films again, and I thought that to my mind L’Enfant sauvage is slightly superior to The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach – which is a great film, no question – but I could see that these two guys belong to the same artistic movement. Élie Faure would say, “In your museum, you can put the two paintings side by side”: I mean, they share the same radicalism, same asceticism, or dryness. … When I came to study in Paris, our film teachers were preaching, “This is good” (meaning Straub) and “This is bad. This is popular art” (meaning Truffaut); but when you look at L’Enfant sauvage … popular art? – come on, come on!

q:

It did make money.

d:

Definitely, Picasso made good money too, but that’s another question. What counts is that L’Enfant sauvage is advanced, even in its storytelling. Remember the period when it was made. My parents used to buy Le Nouvel Observateur each week. So, when I was twelve, I read Le Nouvel Observateur – not the political part of it, but the parts about Paris and the intellectual scene. So I remember when he made the film – and this you can feel in the script and in his notes and files at the

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BiFi – structuralism was everywhere. Le Nouvel Observateur ran articles and pieces about structuralism each week: the structure of language – Lévi-Strauss – and soon you started to have articles about Lacan. Then Barthes arrived, who wrote a column in Le Nouvel Observateur, and Barthes was always speaking about Saussure. Okay, fine. I didn’t know who Barthes was or structuralism. Still … q:

You think that Truffaut was in tune with all this?

d:

Yes. He wanted to make a serious film, but how? The solution he found in L’Enfant sauvage is so clever. He took everything which is novelistic out of the script – so, no depiction of the character, and the plot is just, “What is a word?” Truffaut says to himself: I will start to teach the kid language. First step, phonetics: “Okay, you have to learn the vocal thing.” Then comes writing: “I have to teach him lait for milk,” but it won’t work because “what is a sign?” It’s the relation between the signifier and the signified. I’m sure that Truffaut never read Saussure, but still he thought, “This is a great idea for me, a story about language, about how you recognize ‘scissors’ and how you recognize ‘key,’ etc.” I was deeply influenced by the many articles I read in the French press about Bruno Bettelheim and Françoise Dolto. I remember in Le Nouvel Observateur a famous photograph of an autistic kid – you know this photo, we all remember it – a kid drawing weird concentric circles on the chalkboard and looking at the camera with wideopen eyes (Figure  11.1). Well, you have the same shot in Truffaut, in a single scene, an absolutely no-plot scene, where that photo underlies the shot; he has a feeling about childhood which connects his film to autism, and then he reduces the film further till he arrives at just this single scene, which has no beginning and no end, which is a picture of despair, absolute autism. And you have the same thing in a different way with Straub, saying about his film, “Okay, all the plot, I will get rid of it. I will just have the execution of the music, that’s it – I won’t tell the story of the Bach family, I will just tell the depiction of the gestures.” And that’s what these two guys are doing, because they belong to the same period, the same movement. The big shift in the plot of L’Enfant sauvage is when Itard realizes that his way of teaching language is incorrect, because actually a sign is the difference between the signifier and the signified. He needs writing to enter in. So he uses those wooden letters. Now the kid gets it, and then he starts to be able to ask for milk – spelling out L-A-I-T (milk). These were the great years of Piaget in France. We had arguments about him in L’Education Nationale and other journals. So Truffaut built a file up and used these very abstract ideas around Piaget as a perfect motor for his story. The first versions of the script that aren’t kept in the BiFi were evidently two hours and a half long or something like that. Then he cut away the “novel” and just kept everything that had to do with how you can learn a sign when you don’t belong to humanity. That’s all. That’s it. And the plot is perfect. That’s the beauty of it – not any snobbish reference to Saussure or anyone else – but to “reduce” the plot to pure action, to go straight to the point, and to be able to share the hidden emotions with the audience through such a dry process.

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The audience will fill in the gaps. And the austerity of such a film is transformed into a shivering ode to childhood, rebellion, progress, etc. … q:

This is why you say he was in fact quite connected to the intellectual context of his time.

d:

Very, very strongly. That really struck me. If he hadn’t lived in the Lacan years, we would never have seen that film. Never.

q:

L’Histoire d’Adèle H. too, perhaps. Since L’Histoire d’Adèle H. is right out of Lacan.

d:

Very strongly. For Truffaut, modernity’s arrival is inevitable, but he won’t accept fads. In the file on L’Enfant sauvage at the BiFi, I saw Rivette’s letter to Truffaut about the film. To see the real document broke my heart. They have the letter, which is handwritten, and they also have the typescript because Truffaut asked his secretary to type the letter to study it. Knowing that the relationship between Rivette and Truffaut was quite complicated – I mean, warm, but complicated too – what moved me so much is the fact that you have Rivette, a pure intellectual coming from a wealthy family, full of knowledge and at ease with clever expressions, and then you have Truffaut, who was not a graduate in anything. The letter is quite elaborate, almost a structuralist kind of writing. So Truffaut studies it: “You won’t fool me. Okay, let me work on it. I’m up to this.” And the film is structuralist in its way. There is no depiction at all of the psychology of Itard, as there had been in the first version written by Gruault, where the character of Itard was developed, and then the character of the housekeeper, Madame Guérin, and where perhaps you feel the idea of the film moving in towards the feelings of the kid (are they like father and son?), etc. But in the final version all this has been suppressed. He sends Gruault these tough notes. He wrote notes even on cigarette packages, like, “It’s a shame, it’s a disgrace, it’s crappy work.” But then comes another note: “My dear friend, may I clarify a small weakness, perhaps one could …” So in this dossier at the BiFi you can see his reactions which are always brutally neat and clear, like “cut the crap.” But then right away you have the same thing written in very sweet, elaborate language. It’s really lovely. To see this file on L’Enfant sauvage is really wonderful.

q:

What about the ending of the film? Truffaut thought afterwards that it was too abrupt.

d:

I remember in the subway I was reading an article about the happy ending, an angry text, saying let’s get rid of happy endings, which go against the tough manner of modern cinema. But the happy ending in L’Enfant sauvage comes with one of the most famous lines in all cinema: “In a little while we’ll go back to our exercises.” For me the ending is happy, but mainly because of the way it is shot. In fact it just shows a little boy going up to his room at the end of the day, and nothing is finished, it’s just a start. If I could compare this end to just one other film, it would be Some Like It Hot [Billy Wilder, 1959], with that famous last line – “Nobody’s perfect.” The story is that Billy Wilder didn’t like the line as they had

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it in the script. And on the last night of shooting, they said they would try it anyway: “We’ll do a retake tomorrow and we will find a great line.” Well, the line worked. But it’s ambiguous, because we know Jack Lemmon won’t marry the millionaire. That’s how things happen in cinema. As for Truffaut’s line, it is heartbreaking; his happy ending is really ambiguous because in a way, there exists a sort of utopia for the boy when he runs away late in the film: he knows his real home is nature. But since nature has now become all hostile, he has no home any longer, except Itard’s house. So it’s back to the routine. “What will we do today? We will work.” You have lines like that in Chekhov: “What will we do? We will work; we will go on with work.” His characters are always saying such lines. And this is the promise that the film is offering the audience: “Let’s work.” It’s endless, and so it’s ambiguous. But the way it’s shot is so warm and human and straight. Of course it’s a great line, a really great line. And the composition of the shot, there on the staircase, with the three of them worried; but they want a happy ending, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s a film which is pro-progress. The era was like that. So at the end you have the three of them – the woman, the man, and the child – all looking worried, but they think, “Let’s go for progress,” for some progress at least. It’s so heartbreaking.

Truffaut the Outsider q:

Truffaut often said, “An artist is someone outside society.”

d:

What strikes me is a paradox – that Truffaut could have ever seemed like notable (a dignified bourgeois). Given his films, that’s idiotic, since the films always favor those who aren’t part of society. Always, always. It’s a moral point of view, not at all an auteurist pose, really a moral and artistic point of view on the world. It’s from the margins that the best of society comes. This is true of the New Wave movement overall – you could mention five or six directors, with the major exception of Resnais, who just happened to film politics and so stood more in the center of culture. He had status because of what happened to him in life – because of his wife [Florence, daughter of André Malraux], because of the famous novelists he was working for. He was not really filming politics but rather scripts written by novelists, because he was against the idea of writing his own scripts. The French writers of the fifties and sixties wanted to write books about politics, then scripts about politics. This is why Resnais’ first films came from these political novelists. Later we had primarily formalist writers in France, and so he made formalist movies. If the French writers had written westerns, he would have filmed a western. He’s a simple guy. As for Godard, he may be complicated, but I think when it comes to politics, he isn’t serious – that’s what I think. Truffaut on the other hand firmly refused to dabble in political filmmaking, and he took this issue very seriously.

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q:

Yes, his characters aren’t engaged in politics. Actually the only important work that any of them can be said to undertake is writing. Most of them just play at politics and at their jobs.

d:

Truffaut is after the inner life. He doesn’t take the work of his male characters seriously. They are always doing silly jobs. He could never film Jean Gabin driving a locomotive [Renoir’s La Bête humaine].

q:

Yes, Depardieu in La Femme d’à côté operates this model remote-control boat, as does Antoine Doinel in Domicile conjugal. It makes you realize Truffaut works within his own petite planète, his own tiny enclosed world. So many of the same characters return in later films, and certainly the actors come back. He references his earlier films more and more as his career develops. This is very different from Eric Rohmer, who also has his petite planète. But for Rohmer it’s a question of alternance, since each film must establish itself as different from the one before, variations on a theme.

d:

Rohmer, like Truffaut, is almost the opposite of Pialat in the way he thinks of his characters. This is a crucial distinction. Pialat asks himself, “Is my character driving a train, or making money working in a bank?” – it’s a big thing. If the guy was, let’s say, a driving a locomotive or if he was a banker, it’s not the same film. But for Godard or Rohmer or Truffaut, it’s exactly the same film. The character has a job. Okay, fine. He can be a banker, he can drive a locomotive, he can drive a little boat – who cares? We don’t care, we just don’t care. In later [post-New Wave] French cinema they do care: the deep artistic implications in such films are always social implications, whereas for the New Wave group, there’s a refusal of this. And definitely Truffaut is the one who has gone the furthest away from direct social cinema.

“Resolutely Scandalous” d:

To get at his cinema and at the New Wave there’s another adjective that’s very strong, brûlant. Truffaut tells burning stories about people who burn themselves  – in this Truffaut is exceptional, very much alone. He can touch every spectator, even a fifteen-year-old. … He touches you in a very intimate place, when you realize during some moment of the intrigue that the character is burning from something. It happens in all the films, all of them.

q:

Even L’Argent de poche.

d:

We know Truffaut wanted to make a film about the Holocaust but for lots of reasons had to abandon it. He couldn’t find an honest way to film such a disaster. Do you ask your actors and extras to go on a diet? It would be obscene. Now in L’Argent de poche effectively Truffaut says, “When we see a beaten child, which is the worst thing to see, we think of ourselves and imagine our own suffering.”

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The difficulty is to have the audience compare their suffering to, let’s say, absolute suffering. “A child is beaten” – this phrase was strong in the seventies. For instance, I remember as a kid, noticing in Le Nouvel Observateur: “Un enfant est battu, le fantasme originaire” – Lacan’s text on the beaten child. Un enfant est battu is absolute evil, and so, stupidly, we compare our situations and our own suffering to this absolute of suffering. Whatever sadness I might imagine from my own childhood, I shouldn’t compare that suffering to a beaten child. In L’Argent de poche, this is what Jean-François Stévenin [the teacher] says in his last speech to the class. Now we, as spectators, can relax. Stevenin adds, “That’s why in a way I chose to be a teacher – to recover something of my suffering.” This is how an ethical difficulty is transformed into a fictional scene, a great one. To me, such a way of sorting out a problem is great mise-en-scène. As great as Lubitsch. If you look at the film with a certain shivering in your soul – it just has to be the right day or the right night or, you know, the right moment of your life – you burst in tears looking at this scene. Still, the film is pure comedy too, but it’s so inhabited – the characters are burning, the young character burning of love for the mother of his friend. … He’s invaded by a feeling which is larger than himself. In all Truffaut’s films – the comedies, the tragedies – there is this burning, and it’s really beautiful. q:

That’s what interests him. That’s what he’s looking for in each film.

d:

For so long I hadn’t seen the brûlant [burning] side of him, thinking of him instead as tiède [lukewarm] – which is an adjective people applied to Truffaut – but he’s just the opposite. All his characters burn with a very, very strong passion. It’s ironic because now, for me, the so-called new realism feels tiède. I find some of those films good, but the feelings are tepid and the characters don’t go to their limit. So they can’t hurt themselves. I say to myself: “Okay, if they get divorced, they get divorced, but they will find something else to do. Their lives will go on just fine.” But not Truffaut’s characters.

q:

This is interesting because what you just said contrasts with the cliché about “juste milieu” [middle-of-the-road position] that was used so often to characterize Truffaut when he was alive. In a way, all the violence of his films has been erased by this cliché. How do you feel about that?

d:

It is because paradoxically his violence is quiet. When I began to learn from Truffaut again, and I learned more from him than from other directors, I learned one can be quietly violent, discreetly provocative. The contrast with the new realists is too obvious. I was never that attracted to Pialat. I mean you can have the actors yell, then yell louder, louder, louder, and after that? After that, nothing. You just reach a certain level of yelling. Then what? Then nothing. We can say that Truffaut is on the other side, and became a victim of the fact that he was working with this paradox of quiet violence. Still he affected a lot of people, we who feel elected to a sort of secret club. We don’t form a majority, even with his successful films, because Truffaut speaks to a very secret part within each one of

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us, and the kind of feeling we get from him is not a feeling that we can share as a group. With Jaws [Steven Spielberg, 1975], which is a great film, a lot of people share its emotions, so when the shark arrives on the beach, it’s quite scary. Okay fine. But with Truffaut, you can see how feminine and audacious and sexual a film like La Sirène du Mississippi is; it’s subtle. Think of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent and the scene we discussed yesterday which is very blunt, really very, very blunt: these two young girls who masturbate in bed. But it gets through to us, so even today we can still see it with a lot of pleasure and embarrassment. You see them, you really see the two kids lying down (imagine if they filmed this today, it would be shocking). In the key shot, I think there is a blonde and a redhead and one seems to say, “Could we actually do that?” while the other one is laughing. She is there in the shot, but because of his ethics of cinema, his conception of cinema and his notion of the off-screen, or because of his debt to Bazin, pornography is something that held no interest for him. How to be crude when you have to, how to even be obscene without being trapped in pornography? But at the same time this is not entirely true, since the notion of showing a woman’s breast as a sort of claim of modern cinema is present in lots of his films. Remember Tirez sur le pianiste when Aznavour is with Clarisse the prostitute and when her breast is shown they make a joke about censorship and the new cinema? So there is no question of pornography, it is rather the question of freedom. Truffaut once wrote a beautiful text about one of Fassbinder’s films: “How sad it is that it is so difficult to film a man naked and I’m not about to do it well either, for in the history of classical cinema, we don’t see many naked men filmed in a noble way.” Truffaut was speaking about that wonderful actor El Hedi Ben Salem, who is naked in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974]. It’s beautiful to see how Truffaut acknowledges Fassbinder’s way of dealing with this problem: “It’s great for cinema because now our art is larger than before.” q:

This accords with Truffaut’s indirect style. Pornography would be too frontal.

d:

I think he would have said that pornography is not cinema. It might exist for the nickelodeon, which is something else. Okay, you look at dirty images; that’s fine, that’s great; that’s even funny. But the nickelodeon is a toy; it’s not cinema. Cinema needs a screen. It’s not pornographic. Truffaut has his own kind of frontality in the acting, in the way sexuality is shot. In La Sirène du Mississippi, we see sex but not directly, which would be boring for Truffaut. We don’t exactly watch two leading French actors shagging together on the couch. Instead we just move slightly from one idea to another, just slightly. So when Deneuve puts her head on the lap of Belmondo in La Sirène du Mississippi, everyone knows what this means. Then she will gesture, seeming to suggest, “Let’s do it from behind.” She gestures like that at this moment of the plot, because each time she offers a sexual favor to this new husband, it’s because she wants something from him. The first time, they just have sex like good Catholics; after that, each time she asks him something it is to disturb him or to hide something; so now she is offering a

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new sort of game. But as soon as you catch on to it, you see that the way it is shot is so direct, almost crude. It’s crude because you have simply the movement, as neat as in a Robert Bresson movie. As soon as you understand the code, it’s absolutely clear. Even in a small scene, the characters present themselves in front of the camera straight on; their way of acting is really direct, and the naked feelings are right there on screen. q:

And yet critics find it more comfortable to think of him as discreet and “timid.”

d:

Maybe I was a little hasty when I said Truffaut is calmly scandalous; in fact he is resolutely scandalous. This is indisputable in all his films. For instance, take a scene from L’Argent de poche (and remember this is a film that is not easy for me politically given my age when I saw it): the mother along with the grandmother has beaten up her son; she is a drunkard, and the boy is trying to help her as the police get the derelict women out of the house to take them away. The woman yells, “Bastards, you are trespassing; get out of my yard, stop photographing us, this is shitty behavior.” The women are quickly shoved into the police van but the mother looks out the window where the journalists and television people stand and she spits on them. Well, should we, the audience, feel close to this woman, or are we voyeurs, just like the journalists in the scene? This is what I mean by “calmly scandalous,” for Truffaut knows that if he films a poor woman who beats up her child, he still must stand morally behind this woman. Truffaut was always on the side of scandalous behavior. Look at L’Histoire d’Adèle H., a film that was also not easy for me. I don’t know why, but certain things make me uncomfortable, like when Adèle sees Pinson and that woman in bed. Truffaut says very simply, “She’s peeping and she is coming.” That’s it. This doesn’t mean that it’s exciting to come. All you have to do is ask psychotics. There are times when it isn’t pleasant at all, and one would rather not … nobody wants to come all the time. But it is said very simply. He is not passing a judgment on this woman. He is not saying, “She is perverse.” It happens to her body like it can happen to an eight-year-old child who sees a sexy image and he comes because of it. But because Truffaut says this in so calm a way, it is terribly scandalous, for he is specific about where the scandal lies. I like this tone infinitely. I like the way he always situates himself aesthetically on the side of scandal. And he is deliberate about this, sometimes pressing hard to look at things as they are, accepting them always, always.

French Cinema vs. Hollywood q:

Truffaut’s way of working on the set must have varied with his scripts. It is said he had two sides that were noticeable right from the outset, a Hitchcock side and a Renoir or Rossellini side. On some sets he wants to move fast like Rossellini, writing the dialogue late, even on location, and operating with real spontaneity. But in certain films – L’Histoire d’Adèle H., La Chambre verte – things are very carefully

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constructed, and there’s no room for movement just as in Hitchcock. I don’t know whether you feel this difference. d:

As a filmmaker, I find myself often thinking about Truffaut and his methods. He was from a generation where there was not that much – let’s say – rivalry between Rossellini and Hitchcock. To the New Wave, they are just two great voices. Yet he was aware that he himself was making films in a country, France, that is way smaller than the US. And he knew this more and more since he spent a lot of time in the US. When you are making a film in a small country, you can’t spend the same kind of money as in a large country, because we have less potential spectators. So his response was really clever. He kept to a low budget as a sort of aesthetic statement, but he was really also thinking about what a movie has to do commercially; it wasn’t always about the idea of making masterpieces. I remember this note he wrote to Catherine Deneuve before La Sirène du Mississippi. He was scared that she wouldn’t be available and there would be a problem with the contract, etc. So he sends her a note – which is really moving when you know how disastrous La Sirène du Mississippi was in terms of box office – he writes, “Surtout [above all], surtout, mademoiselle, I won’t make a masterpiece. I don’t masterpieces for a living” – what a funny line – “we’ll just try to make a sympathetic film, joyful, dramatic, full of energy, and that’s it. If what you are looking for is a genius, I’m not the right guy.” I’m sure that he was thinking of Jeanne Moreau who had gone from working with him to making films with Antonioni. So he thinks about Deneuve in a very realistic way: “Okay, she’s making films with a genius, Buñuel” – and we know that Buñuel was not really his cup of tea. He thinks, “I’m not doing masterpieces, I’m doing small films.” Even Le Dernier Métro was a small film really. Maybe his greatest commercial success, but when you look at the box office figures, I think it was something like 1.2 million spectators. The lowest French comedy today attracts two and a half million. Okay, fine. His film was not so expensive. That’s how he worked. He didn’t want to make a big Antonioni masterpiece; he preferred to make a nice reasonable Nicholas Ray. That was the kind of thing that he wanted to do, where he thought that he was able to express himself and to be good. But he didn’t want to be Fellini. He was not interested in that. He kept his budgets very modest. Once, I was at Les Films du Carrosse and looked at the budget for La Femme d’à côté: seven weeks was all it amounted to, maybe even six weeks – that’s insane.

q:

I believe it was two months.

d:

No, he didn’t have eight weeks on this one. In France eight weeks is the norm, the standard time of shooting. Truffaut’s film was seven weeks, a little less than usual. When you are eighteen years old, and when you love a Bergman or a Rossellini movie and you love a Hitchcock movie too, you understand physically that Hitchcock has the power of the American industry behind him and that is something incomparable. So it’s meaningful to have everything planned, everything perfect, when you are making a film in Hollywood, since they have the

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knowledge, the technicians, the money, the audience. But if we are talking, let’s say, about Bergman working in Sweden, or Rossellini in Italy, or Truffaut in France, you can’t reach the same level of technical perfection. He knew that. So that’s why, I guess, he thought that to do the same job as Hitchcock but to do it in France means that you are shooting in seven weeks instead of fourteen, that you improvise a little bit, because we don’t have a large enough crew not to have improvisation. So to reach the same goal as Hitchcock, you have to use different methods. You see what I mean? So I don’t see an opposition to Hollywood. I think he’s just being realistic. To really love American films is not to kneel in front of the power of the industry but to try to reach what the great American directors aimed at. You see what I mean? This is still relevant. Do you think everyone in France is amazed by American films? Not at all, many of us ignore them. We may be amazed by the power of the American industry, but that’s something different from American films. As a cinephile Truffaut thought, “Yes, in France, you have a different technique than in the US, which means you have no storyboard since it would be useless here” – yet part of what you aim at is what Hitchcock was aiming at. I  think it was Dominique Paini [former director of cinema at the Centre Pompidou] who told me that, that there is a deep link to Cocteau in Truffaut’s relationship with Hitchcock. Every time Hitchcock saw Truffaut again, he would ask, “By the way, what is Cocteau doing these days?” You can sense this rapport in the obsession these guys had with fire, with handmade special effects, with rear projections. Paini stressed the idea of actors playing in front of a screen. So Hitchcock, who was not a cinephile – except for just one filmmaker, Cocteau, whom he worshipped – was honest when he said, “There is one guy who did a better job than I. It was Cocteau.” It’s this mixture of depicting reality with dreams or depicting dreams with reality – something in between – that Hitchock loved, and when he saw Cocteau do it with no storyboard, just homemade effect, he realized that it was the same stuff that he was doing in Hollywood. q:

There are many references to Cocteau in Truffaut’s films: in Les 400 Coups, the scene at René’s parents was filmed “à la Cocteau” and then in La Peau douce you can glimpse a Cocteau poster in the hall of the movie theater.

d:

Cocteau has really a lot to do with La Sirène du Mississippi, even down to the name of the hotel, which is Heurtebise [a key character in Cocteau’s 1950 Orphée]. There’s one scene in the film that links Truffaut to Orphée but it is also in Vertigo [1958] in a way: it’s just after Belmondo’s nervous breakdown, his nightmare in the clinic. I love this one shot; it’s the action shot in the film, when Belmondo scales this wall to climb in Deneuve’s hotel room window. We know that the French are proud that Belmondo did his stunts himself. It was the big thing in France. And so I’m so sure the guy says, “Okay, you want me to climb the big wall of the hotel? I will do it by myself, because I’m doing my stunts myself.” And you can imagine Truffaut behind the camera thinking, “That’s not

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my way of being virile. I don’t climb walls. My ways are different; still, why not?” But he’s also wondering, “What am I going to do now, with Belmondo playing this? It will not be spectacular but rather boring.” And he films it in a way that could sound lazy. He gives us just a wide shot of the actor blindly going up the wall, and, yes, risking his life – which is stupid, because a stuntman would have done it far better, but Belmondo is doing it – and in a strange way, we recall through this shot the sort of poetic power of similar scenes done by other directors with fake walls; the fake would have been really better for Truffaut – I’m sure of that – but if you look at the film in the right mood you catch this little allusion to dreams, nightmares, and such, this link to Hitchcock–Cocteau, because you remember flat walls and what can happen with them. There is a very simple trick in cinema: you put the camera above, you make the floor into a wall, you paint windows on it, and you have the actor walk a certain way. … It’s much more beautiful when faked this way. Unfortunately, Truffaut didn’t have the money for a fake wall, and yet he had this actor, who was slightly a stuntman. “Okay,” he thought, “let’s try to do a flat wall effect with a real wall.” He’s trying to reach the poetic power of Cocteau’s movies. You remember this shot in Orphée? It’s so nice. Then there’s the theme of fire, a mythological power alive in the everyday world, and the constant theme of the rebel in society, characters who are inassimilable by society. Cocteau truly forms a link from filmmaker to filmmaker. q:

What do you think of Truffaut’s references to other directors in his films? For instance, in L’Histoire d’Adèle H., where purportedly Chaplin was the inspiration for certain scenes?

d:

Well, Truffaut never ever gives you quotations just as something clever. … It’s much more practical than that … no winking at the smart spectator. There’s no such thing in Truffaut. Something that moved me is the fact that during the shooting of La Sirène du Mississippi he suppressed a scene that was too close to Vertigo. It happened because he and Belmondo had an argument – their one and only argument during the filming – which is funny to think of, since, having seen a few of Belmondo’s films, I would have thought there should be a lot of arguments given the role he was asked to play. Anyhow, they had this one fight … they were upset one with one another – nothing awful or rude – perhaps Belmondo was late to the set or something like that, and then Truffaut said “Okay, let’s just forget what we were going to do today; I’m going to the restaurant; I won’t wait for an actor.” And so he just cut the scene. It’s the scene just after they’ve been to watch Johnny Guitar [Nicholas Ray, 1954] and Belmondo is buying new clothes for Deneuve because they need to disguise themselves.

q:

Yes, the coat. The Yves Saint Laurent coat with the feathers.

d:

And Belmondo was to be sitting in this fancy chair and looking at the beloved woman as she comes out of the dressing room to show off how she looks … exactly the same thing as in Vertigo.

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q:

When Scottie tries to dress Kim Novak up.

d:

Yeah, this is the scene Truffaut cut. On the set, Deneuve and the crew worried that this argument had created a really tough situation. But after a while, she realized that Truffaut used it as an opportunity to get rid of a scene that was too obviously close to Vertigo. The fact is he never wanted to copy for the sake of copying. I remember he used to say that a weakness of French cinema is that you think a good film has to come from an original scenario. With American cinema, it’s the reverse. You can have the same film if you replace romantic dialogue with pistols, or have pistols instead of romantic dialogue. It’s always a matter of understanding the mise-enscène. For Truffaut, the discipline of mise-en-scène is always understanding what he’s in the midst of doing. He might think as an afterthought about what other directors would do, and that helps enormously. So he says, “What is it I’m trying to recount?” “Ah, I’m trying to get this across.” And so he goes to certain classic directors to find the purest form of what he is after. That’s it.

Scripts, Voice-over, and Music q:

Did Truffaut have a particular way of working with his scripts? Did he need a perfected script before he could really get to work? And what about the voiceover, the off-screen voice he deploys so much? Is he a novelistic kind of filmmaker? Does he need this? Like with La Femme d’à côté: does he need a narrator to start things going at the beginning?

d:

To me, some of his scripts really are perfect. But I get what you mean. When just now I was comparing the American system to the French system, it applies to scripts as well. To have that kind of perfection when you are Lubitsch means that there is a producer who can pay for your hotel room for a few months. And then supply three genius writers (who might be great directors, too) working for you on each line over the course of months. But when you are in France, you never meet a producer who will pay that. So you have to go on the set and invent things on the spot to reach that perfect point if you are lucky. You won’t have the luxury of a room in Hollywood with Cukor writing the funny lines for you and Billy Wilder fixing the plot. So you have to invent another way.

q:

But Truffaut does have Jean Gruault working for longer than two years on some of his scripts.

d:

Yes, but he’s just this one writer, Jean Gruault, and he’s paid badly. No salary really. This is the kind of expense one can manage; but to have three or four writers working together, never.

q:

But Truffaut himself worked on his scripts more than most American directors. He was a writer himself after all …

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d:

That’s true. Look at Hawks. I read this wonderful biography of Howard Hawks by Todd McCarthy. I had never fully understood how a Hawks movie worked before I read that book. When I understood how it’s made – wow! You have two or three writers on the set. You might even have Faulkner, maybe drunk. Now if you have some weak plot points, Hawks just says to the actors, “So you go in the room through this door, then you say something incredibly funny, and then you say something romantic. Okay, we shoot in two hours.” Then he turns to these writers: “Could you write something very funny here, something very dramatic there, and give me a hilarious line at this moment?” Two hours later he has what he asked for and the actor does it. But if they can’t come up with anything, or when they fuck up, Hawks just doesn’t shoot. So that’s why his films lost money, because this method was too expensive, with really lengthy shooting sessions. This way of rewriting on the set put him over budget even for those times. Wow. It’s an intense way of thinking about film. It’s a really good book.

q:

It’s hard when you teach students about the New Wave not being a literary cinema compared to the cinéma de qualité of the 1950s, because so many Truffaut films use a text in voice-over. They say, “He’s taken a shortcut, the easy way out.” They think he’s being literary instead of cinematic.

d:

I’ve always loved his voice-overs without knowing exactly why. Then when Scorsese in the last decade adopted this technique it helped me a lot to understand. It seems to me that the voice-over allows me as a spectator or as a filmmaker to go back to the silent movie spirit. I would link the voice-over to the music; you know I never understood Truffaut’s strange taste in music, especially his passion for Maurice Jaubert.

q:

Doesn’t his love for Jaubert stem directly from his desire to draw on Vigo?

d:

Well, to me his voice-overs are much more beautiful than his scores – not all his scores, but a lot of them. And I take the voice-over as a sort of music, like the piano player during the silent era. It is expressive, but if you don’t listen, if you cut the voice-over out, the scene is still wonderful. The voice-over allows him to go back to those wonderful years where you have the piano telling you the plot – “This is sad, this is funny, this is etc.” – and then, as a filmmaker, you can do anything that you want. That way you get rid of the story, and are free to invent visual solutions since you are not tied down to the dialogue. Each time I can see this in a Scorsese or Truffaut movie, I realize that they understand that, from here to there – from this point to that one – there will be a voice-over, and so they can operate just like a director in the great silent period. This is a way of going back to the very roots of cinema. That’s how I look at it. This lets me join my own current perception of cinema with my childhood, since a grownup is telling me the plot, which is something I now experience with my nephew and nieces. When I take them to the movies – they are, let’s say, five or six years old – it’s like the kid is on your knee and you tell him, “Okay, the story is vaguely about this. That guy is the bad guy,” and then the kid is free just

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to look at the screen, as in a Murnau movie. It’s not something for grownups. Not at all, it’s something for kids. As a spectator in the audience, it’s as if I were twelve years old. I love it when the voice-over takes care of me and gives me the story this way. It’s often taken to be something elitist and literary, but in fact voice-over is something very popular. q:

Yet Truffaut admired literature so much. He once told me that he preferred, more than all his films, just having his name in the card catalogue because of his Hitchcock book. “Now I am a writer, my name among authors.”

d:

That remark demonstrates another strong difference between the two movements we discussed earlier, the New Wave and the New Realism. With the New Wave, you have Chris Marker who writes admirably, and Resnais loves literature so much that he’ll never write so much as a postcard. And Rohmer, obviously, since he used to be a novelist. Godard – it’s almost embarrassing the extent to which he has a writer’s ego. His dream was to be accepted by the NRF [Nouvelle Revue Française, Gallimard’s prestigious coterie of authors]. And in many ways Chabrol too loves literature. He edited detective novels for a time. So there was really a very, very strong literary ambition in each of them. While the New Realists, like Pialat, Eustache, and Doillon, have nothing of the sort.

The Innocence and Simplicity of Melodrama q: The beginning of La Chambre verte reminds me of Abel Gance. When I first watched Gance, I wondered, “How could Truffaut like this man who only wanted to make grand masterpieces overflowing with himself ? Whereas Truffaut is the timid artisan.” But in the opening of La Chambre verte, when Truffaut takes on the face of his character Davenne – it looks quite like J’accuse [Gance, 1919] – the face of Truffaut/Davenne layered atop shots from World War I; plus the soaring music could have come from Vénus aveugle [Blind Venus; Gance, 1941], an incredible melodrama about a man blinded in the war who regains his sight only when the girl comes back – and Truffaut claims he saw this film twenty times. d:

Strange guy, Truffaut, and strange artist because I see what you mean. You wonder if he is telling the truth. I’m sure he is, because he maintained absolute respect for daringly frontal cinema – I mean, for melodrama. In all his own films there is a sort of apology for simplicity as a goal. And so, yes, Abel Gance is obviously great. And Truffaut was the one to have most recognized it. When I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine I first heard this famous line that might sound so silly but is really so deep: “Cinema exists just to film men saying beautiful things to beautiful women.” Something like that. Truffaut’s love of Nicholas Ray and Abel Gance stems from the idea that great characters with great feelings are much more interesting to film than mean or bitter characters.

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This is something that he taught Philippe Garrel. Once I heard Garrel talking to an actor. It was so funny. The film was being made with one take per shot, sometimes two takes. So there was a lot of pressure on the set and on the actor – Benoît Régent had the lead role, a great actor. Anyway, Benoît says, “So, do we start?” Garrel says, “We can’t shoot, we are waiting for you.” Benoît, who was right there, says, “I’m ready, we can go on.” “No, no, no, no. You have bad thoughts. It’s not right yet, so we can’t film. We’ll wait for you to have beautiful thoughts, and then we’ll start to shoot and you’ll say your lines.” “Bad thoughts?” the guy says, annoyed. “Don’t look at my thoughts, just look at my acting!” “No, I can’t film someone who doesn’t have noble feelings, and yours aren’t noble at the moment. People are waiting, so get ready.” Finally they did the shot. In those years, and still today, most artists have the idea that mean or bitter feelings are more interesting than great feelings. This is so French, this notion that something bitter is proof that you are a serious writer. In fact this has been really a nightmare in France since Flaubert, and it deeply involves anti-Semitism. “If I’m anti-Semitic,” the intellectual says, “then that means I’m clever, I’m a writer. Because common people are nice, but we writers, we must be mean.” Anti-Semitism is a transgression, being mean and bitter. This awful ghost haunts our smartest writers. But during the New Wave, there came the idea that cinema could favor the right guys and get behind great feelings, great guys and great women. You didn’t have to apologize for believing that it’s not silly to film and to capture generous feelings. q:

This is where the famous “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” comes from. Truffaut just hates those writers and directors for their mean-spiritedness, their haughty cleverness.

d:

Yes, this goes right to the definition of cinema itself and to the relationship between bitter France and innocent America. For cinema has to be more innocent. The great cinema of Europe needs to be linked to Abel Gance (J’accuse), and to Murnau (Sunrise, Tabu).

q:

One of the things you stress about Truffaut is the way he stayed true to his dictum: “Let’s make this simple; let’s tell a story in a straight line.” But Truffaut is a filmmaker who works so much with indirection, ricochet, echoes, and very subtle layers operating all at the same time.

d:

There’s an important old interview in Cahiers du Cinéma where the question of painting comes up. You know they were often speaking about Matisse and also about Picasso and Cubism: “How can I say something complicated simply?” Now this really is Matisse’s question, and that’s why the New Wave guys were always quoting him when they were young critics at Cahiers. They kept asking in terms of cinema, “How would Matisse have done that?” This sometimes might sound silly, but I think it’s a great ambition. Truffaut shares the idea that it’s quite difficult to make something simple.

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True, his art is allusive, complicated, full of implications that create double, triple, and quadruple meanings, because he took the question of cinema so seriously. Still each film presents itself as naked and going straight toward one emotion; yes, more toward an emotion rather than toward plot. Adèle H. is in love, yet we don’t know what love is. I would say she’s not in love at all. I would say she’s mad, insane, and needs to be cured. But no, no, no. Adèle said she was in love, so in a way it is love. We have to accept it, to stick to her, to follow this emotion in a very simple line, just like the line of a song – like, “They love each other until death.” It’s exactly the same in La Femme d’à côté. And it’s the same for the more general question of art and cinema. Even if this question must be awfully complicated and deep, for Truffaut whatever is done with cinema must be done in a very direct way, a very neat way. I guess this links him to Rossellini.

Le Bel Objet q:

Straight line, okay. Here’s a final question. It’s about what the French call le bel objet, the perfectly rendered object. You pointed out that Truffaut used to say, “I’m not so interested in making a masterpiece, I just want people to like my movie. So I will even cut thirty minutes from Les Deux Anglaises et le continent if they don’t like it, because I’m sad that they don’t like it, so something must be wrong – I’ll fix it.” But some of his films he seems to have wanted to make into beautiful objects, not caring about the public.

d:

Plus the idea that all his films respond to one another. Truffaut proposes coherent worlds, although he is not after la belle ouvrage [tasteful craftsmanship]. He wouldn’t have been able to put this in an academic way, and I’m not able to do that either, but I take very seriously his assertion that to be an artist is to be against life. Cinema says, “I don’t want to be part of this world.” Each film is its own world. Cavell would express this very easily, quoting Husserl’s notion of alternative worlds. So you can inhabit first this film, then this one, and this one. Each film has to be absolutely coherent as a sort of proposal, an experiment we make in the theaters, when we are fourteen or fifteen years old. It’s a real proposition. Truffaut wanted to have all these worlds that you could inhabit. So when the audience can’t inhabit your film, you’re sad. You think, “I fucked up.” What’s really enlightening about his dialogue with Hitchcock is how few of the master’s films are pure films, pure beaux objets, and how much of his work would be classified, let’s say, as more mainstream. I don’t know which film of Truffaut one could say is most mainstream. Perhaps Le Dernier Métro, but, you know, everything in Le Dernier Métro is so personal.

q:

It is very personal.

d:

It’s so personal. He even quotes his own films, so it’s absolutely personal. It’s the film that he was really dreaming to make. When he told Charles Denner that he

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couldn’t be in this film because he looked too Jewish, it was brutal. You have to have guts to say that, and to endure the fact that the guy will hate you as a fucking racist the rest of your life because you said such a thing, but Truffaut was right. He wanted to show a man putting on a nose, taking off the nose, putting on a nose again, taking off the nose, and with a strong accent. So, you know, Charles Denner was not appropriate. Yet there is something still shocking in this image – the idea of making an audience accept the fact that the woman has the right to have sex with two men – it happens – and to make it accepted in a different way than in Jules et Jim. So we can be sure that Truffaut was scared to death to make this film, since usually when he made a period movie, the result was a disaster. He must have been so anxious. Plus I understand he was ill. When he started the film, he couldn’t watch the dailies because he was too ill. Deneuve would watch the rushes when he was too tired. He had headaches, he slept. If it happened that this film became a massive audience hit, clearly he was not making it for this reason, but just because he loved the topic and the actress. Or take another highly personal project, L’Enfant sauvage; on paper this project shouldn’t work. It just shouldn’t work. He was surprised and embarrassed that the film was such a success. You know the story that the American studios offered plenty of money for La Sirène du Mississippi and nothing for L’Enfant sauvage. q:

What about failures? Are there any of his films that clearly come up short?

d:

There are few of his films that I don’t like. L’argent de poche is a film I don’t know what to do with. Yet when I looked at it yesterday, it’s perfect, it’s a world that is absolutely coherent. You can’t remove a single thing. Such a film you don’t make for an audience; you have to do it for yourself, completely personal. It’s pure. There isn’t a single Truffaut film that you feel is made with you in mind. I may be uncomfortable with Une Belle Fille comme moi, but he made it because of this girl, wanting to test a certain conception of relationships between men and women; so he was making it for himself, but still hoping that spectators might like to inhabit what he built. My way of looking at all these films has changed, since each year I’m slightly more a director. Even without inside knowledge, I’m sure I’m right about how personal his work is, because I know the gestures. I know what it means to make films in a certain way. In New York recently, presenting La Sirène du Mississippi – a film about landscape and painting and the question “What is beauty?” – I could see the film so differently from the American audience, who were sure it’s just a depiction of France because of these two big French actors. But looking at the film, I feel it is very far from France. Is he a French director or not? If I’m in a foreign place and you refer to France, everyone right away says “Truffaut.” Why? I remember this wonderful program when Truffaut was on TV, and you can see him sitting stiff, because he was against TV and for cinema, but he’s there with Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, and the interviewer asks, “Why did you choose these two?” – a stupid question, since they were the most famous movie

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stars in France. But Truffaut answers, “Because I thought that the two together made a wonderful American couple.” And the interviewer – I think it was … q:

Was it Drucker?

d:

Yes, it was Drucker. So Michel Drucker says, “Why are they American?” Truffaut replies, “I don’t know. She’s a beautiful woman, he’s a handsome man, and they have a certain air américain.” So Truffaut thought of his film à l’américaine, not as French. If you are abroad and someone asks, “What’s France?” you say, “Truffaut.” You think you have it, you have France. Like if you want to say, “What is Holland?” you would say, “Vermeer.” It seems obvious. It’s Vermeer. Simple and neat, like an egg in ivory – it’s Holland. But I know a little bit about Vermeer, and compared to all the Dutch painting I have seen, I find nothing about Holland in the painting of Vermeer. When all the Dutch painters were giving us Holland, Vermeer has just one painting which does this [“View of Delft”] which is famous, because Proust made it important. But apart from that one …

q:

Yes, the paintings are all inside.

d:

All inside. And what do you see of Holland? Nothing. There is nothing typically Dutch, like in Franz Hals, nothing like that. You just a have woman reading a letter.

q:

But you have maps on the wall.

d:

You may have maps, but that is actually a religious issue about the partition between the Protestants and the Catholics in those days. Maps, but landscape through the window. What you see is an interior, and then you have an image on the wall of something outside, something elsewhere in the world. So Vermeer is not interested in painting Holland, but in a bigger question: “Do we have to represent?” This is a question for painting, where in cinema and for Truffaut it would be reformulated: “What kind of connection is there to reality?” since he is working in an art connected to reality as such. Being a follower of Bazin and of Rossellini, he has to take this question of reality seriously. But reality is a pure cosa mentale, a pure shape. The shape he gave reality is so neat that ten or a hundred years later, everyone will say, “It’s Holland,” or “It’s France,” but there is nothing literally French there. It’s funny because this always has been a big difficulty for Truffaut and Godard: what can you film which will celebrate the fiction that you are doing and not the documentary? And the choice is tricky. For instance what kind of newspaper can you put in a movie to still have good fiction? It sounds silly, but it’s a really practical question about props that comes up in every film. Props must help make something beautiful happen between the characters. And the way I see the films of Truffaut is really the way I see the paintings of Vermeer: he removes all those silly framed things in the interiors, keeping just a few, just enough to signify a world which is outside, out of the frame, or behind it. Godard has one solution. In A Bout de souffle, the girl sells The New York Herald Tribune: direct reference to a real paper. But Truffaut goes the other way and

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creates fake newspapers, like Vermeer and his fake maps. In La Sirène du Mississippi you have two fake newspapers, one in the restaurant scene and one at the end with the small Disney photos. I can sense what Truffaut was thinking here: the couple reads a paper called La Dépêche. La Dépêche works. If he had them read Libération, come on, it’s boring. If it were Le Monde, it would be so pretentious, or Le Figaro, too controversial. A character who reads Libération or Le Figaro, you don’t want to talk to him. A guy who reads, let’s say, Les Nouvelles du Centre, that’s a real cinema character. You have removed the “reality thing” that was troublesome. And you stick with the architecture, the cosa mentale. q:

It’s a little bit like Carné and réalisme poétique.

d:

Not exactly. No, because there is no poetic realism in Vermeer. No, no, it’s really realism. Or I could put it in another way: Truffaut doesn’t want to impose or add noble poetic bullshit to reality, like Carné. He just clears up the frame, to show the beauty, including the triviality of life itself.

q:

You strip down everything, leaving only the things that signify, building the work with a few signs. Economy – another Truffaut dictum – “economy of signs.”

d:

And it has to do with the budget, and with his having been such a cinephile. Many New Wave directors quit seeing films, but Truffaut continued and he used what he saw. I’m trying to put myself inside the head of Vermeer – to find out why Vermeer did not paint more of Holland, since he could have sold more paintings. But he was not trying to sell his paintings, since he sold the paintings of the other artists. He was a great collector and he bought and sold paintings. In the same way Truffaut always was a cinephile promoting cinema and the art of films. Both had a conception that art should be pure, and yet you love all those paintings which were in the real house of Vermeer – because he chose them, since today we know which paintings he gave away, which ones he sold, etc.

q:

Those paintings came through him.

d:

He distilled. There was a distillation effect in Vermeer, and I think there is an act of distillation in Truffaut.

q:

That’s a great point.

d:

When you fall in love with a Truffaut film, you easily see the cosa mentale, the mental thing – perhaps the word pleases me because it’s Italian – that’s what I see, the cosa mentale. And I see it in material terms, because cinema is reality, while being a purely mental object. It’s so very, very real. This may sound ridiculous, trivial – but it’s real. And that’s its power.

Part II

Style and Sensibility

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Flashes of Happiness Alain Bergala

What are the conditions favorable to the eruption of a moment of joy, of happiness, or of gaiety in François Truffaut’s films? Joy is a short-lived and obvious state; happiness as a state is more stable and often more discreet, while gaiety is the most fleeting as well as superficial of the three. As one might expect, in Truffaut these states are never a purely psychological affair, “internal” to the character, so to speak, having to do with just his personal life. Joy in Truffaut, like its foundering, is always dependent on a state of the social circle, of the small community to which the character belongs, or which surrounds him. Which is surprising coming from a filmmaker who declared that the only things that interested him in his films were the personal relationships between two or three individuals and childhood. Some of these communities are an ideal breeding ground for the birth of joy, others render it impossible or very rare.

Communities, Good and Bad In his films, the moment where the social group gathers all together in an interaction meant to be joyful is always tinged with impending doom. The feigned joy of the small community can very quickly founder or be transformed into its opposite. In La Mariée était en noir (1967), the day when Julie Kohler marries the man of her life, the one she has loved since childhood, the collective joy that is supposed to belong to a wedding is dramatically interrupted by the husband’s absurd murder on the steps of the church. The film’s only community is the bad one of the little group of “friends” who take aim at the young bridegroom with their rifles as a sport, out of boredom and stupidity. There is no real tie between them: they are united by tedium, vulgarity, big game hunting, and womanizing.

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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In the course of the film, Julie feels no elation as she systematically carries out her revenge in eliminating one by one these men who have destroyed her happiness. Her obsession and her drive towards a unique goal prevent her from savoring the success of her schemes. For Truffaut, an all-consuming passion is never a source of joy. The only happy shot of the film is a flashback – surprising in such a dark film – where Julie recalls a childhood memory, a summer day when she and her future husband-for-aday played in the countryside, dressed up as man and wife. The oxymoron of a “children’s marriage” expresses, perhaps naively, a dream of Truffaut’s that he knows is impossible in real life: love between a couple (without the complications and the infidelities of adulthood) within a child’s state of innocence. In the sterile society of Fahrenheit 451 (1966), happiness is socialized, controlled, compulsory, sad, and glum. (“Are you happy?” “Of course!”) The “community” is artificial, made up of spectators glued to their falsely interactive televisions and of women who are bored collectively at their get-togethers, always in Tupperware-style. As for the men, the head of the pyromaniac firemen boasts about making “his” men happy through sports. Physical love is limited to pitiful autoeroticism or a brief, frigid embrace. The only emotional peak in the film – where you can feel real emotion – is the scene expressing the malevolent joy of the chief fireman discovering the hidden library which he is going to set on fire with fascinated jubilation, seen in his reflection in the mirror; meanwhile, we have the joy of the old woman who resists and escapes this submissive society by dramatically choosing to burn with her books. The prototype of this arsonist’s crazed joy is the scene in Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) where Mercedes McCambridge becomes hysterically giddy in watching her rival’s saloon go up in flames. The good society of book-men at the film’s end turns out to be a melancholy community, devoted to the preservation of a culture in danger of disappearing; their mission (like the one Julien Davenne assigns himself in La Chambre verte, 1978) estranges them from all happiness in the present. The little provincial society that forms around Madame Jouve’s tennis club in La Femme d’à côté (1981) is not in itself a bad community, nor is it particularly oppressive. However, it is when this society is all together that, twice, the illicit lovers suffer a breakdown, first one, then the other. In the film’s first garden party, organized by Mathilde’s husband to announce their departure, that very day, on their delayed honeymoon, the guests, made up of friends and relatives, are there to share a moment of the couple’s happiness. It is precisely on this occasion, in front of the Grenoblois middle class, that Bernard, exasperated by Mathilde’s involuntary exhibition in her lingerie before all the guests, gives way to a spectacular demonstration of his secret love affair with her and the renewal of that passion. The second acting out, that of Mathilde, will take place some time later at the same tennis club and in front of the same public. This time she is the one to fall apart after the Buñuelian incident of the fire in the kitchen; she collapses sobbing under a bush, marking the first stage of her nascent depression. This collapse would have remained secret and private if her husband himself had not sent everyone – just like Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar – to look for her. So it is he who created the conditions of the public exposure of his wife’s personal state, which should have concerned just the two of them.

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In Truffaut’s films, we also find examples of good communities that encourage joy and that are favorable to the emergence of happy, lighthearted moments. The first “good” model is that of the typical Parisian courtyard in Domicile conjugal (1970) where working-class individuals rub shoulders with the lower middle class, where everyone comfortably knows and jokes with one other, and where they help each other out. In L’Argent de poche (1976), the courtyard of the building in Thiers stands as the provincial version of this model of a gentle community, in contrast to the two isolated houses without neighbors on the outskirts of Grenoble in La Femme d’à côté. L’Argent de poche is undoubtedly the Truffaut film in which the possibility of joy and happiness in the social group is most evident. This joy is first of all that of a community of children at the heart of the film. Everything is seen from the point of view of the children, who manage to infect the entire film. Their spontaneous gaiety is shared by the grown-ups. The community found in the courtyard and in the streets of the small city of Thiers is exemplary of the kind of light yet benevolent social filiation propitious for a certain state of diffuse happiness where nothing too serious can occur. Even the fall of a child from the seventh story is of no importance. When the little girl, who pretends having been locked in the apartment by her parents, calls for help (“I’m hungry!”), the whole building rallies, but in a spirit of joyful and timely mutual assistance rather than one of outrage and denunciation. The town’s movie theater is the festive, Sunday counterpart of the building’s courtyard: a happy space in a happy society. Here we find the pleasure a small-town community takes in going to the movies on Sunday, everyone relieved of work, responsibilities, and social roles (the school teacher openly flirts with a stranger). Even the outsider, Julien, succeeds, through cunning and with the help of a boy of his own age, in joining this community from which he is normally excluded. In the weekly newsreel, you find something for everyone: for the adults (the aftermath of the Algerian war) and for the children (Oscar, the mime, whistling). The movie theater is also the place of Patrick’s initial failure in love, entirely because of his shyness. But he will get his revenge in summer camp, when the community of children push him, even if it is done tauntingly, to overcome his inhibitions. Structurally, this happy community needs two victims of social exclusion in order to function: Julien, an abused child, who is poor and ashamed of his family, and Patrick’s father, who is paralyzed and never leaves home (although, from a window that looks out onto the projection booth, he takes part in his own way in the collective moment of the film screening). Likewise, in Domicile conjugal, the Renoiran population of the Parisian courtyard requires an imaginary scapegoat, “the strangler,” to seal its small, harmonious society. The excluded person ultimately joins the courtyard community – and with great prestige – after his appearance on television, an absolute marker of social integration. But in L’Argent de poche, Julien must be separated both from the community of his classmates and from his harmful family to move toward a new life that his teacher will present as a step forward for him, even if this liberation entails a painful but necessary separation. In Truffaut’s films, one infallible marker always indicates a joyful state: the onset of ethereal music that silences the dialogue and takes over the image-track for a few

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shots during which happiness reigns. The first happy moment in La Peau douce (1964) occurs when the writer–lecturer, unsettled by the stewardess, whom he has just bumped into in the hotel elevator in Lisbon, receives a phone call in his room accepting the invitation he had made earlier and that she had refused. Joyful music immediately floods the soundtrack, growing steadily, to flood a shot wherein Lachenay gets up from the bed and lights all the lamps in his small suite, one by one (a Truffaldian tribute to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 1954). This expresses the joy of an individual for whom a mere phone call has kindled amorous expectation. Music often conveys joy in Truffaut’s film, but it is not always so easy to establish its cause. In L’Enfant sauvage (1970), music plays a key role, highlighting certain upbeat moments. But whose joy is it? Is it that of the filmmaker in the process of making his film? Is it that of the protagonist, the silent boy? Or is it the joy of the film itself ? Most often it seems that of the teacher, the one who transmits, and hence transforms, the other, whose progress he observes in stages, suddenly reaching a superior level, despite the numerous setbacks. But when Victor associates words with objects, when he traces signs on the blackboard imitating Itard, then the film itself is happy. Victor’s moments of happiness, also marked by a flight of music, are not quite the same: they occur when this enfant sauvage runs into traces and signs of his past life: the rain, a view of nature perceived through a window, or that of trees flashing by, seen from a carriage in motion (as in Proust). Joy for him does not come from learning, nor from his potential progress, but from the memory of his former condition: water and nature. In his own way, Victor too is a melancholy individual. The creative team in La Nuit américaine (1973) is one of Truffaut’s “good communities.” We find there the social mix characteristic of the courtyards in Domicile conjugal and L’Argent de poche, but here everyone is busy with the making of a film. Despite everything that goes wrong in the private sphere, a manifest happiness reigns over all who belong to this ephemeral community; still, this feeling is tinged with nostalgia because everyone is also aware that theirs is an artificial community to be disbanded at the end of the shoot. Joyful moments in this film do not arise in people’s private lives, where tangled love stories dominate, where everything is unstable, and where betrayal threatens every moment, but rather in the fact that the film advances “like a train in the night,” against all odds. Joyous music dominates several scenes from which Truffaut strips all direct sound, all audible dialogue, all signs of realistic temporality. Thus we sense the film moving ahead like a well-oiled machine, with a will all its own, independent of the human beings that work on it, with the fluidity of film stock running through an editing machine and spilling into a bin. Of this film’s scenes accompanied by ethereal music, the most beautiful may be the one that begins with the dialogue written on a sheet of paper slipped under the door of the actress’s room and that concludes with the end of the actual “take” of that scene on the word “impeccable!” Here Truffaut relies on nothing more than the purely rhythmic and non-narrative editing of gestures that guarantee that the scene will be ready to shoot and that the result will be felicitous. As though some benevolent god, expressing himself in music, takes charge of the film and smooths out all of its difficulties: for example, the worry that the pregnant

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actress’s bulging stomach will be noticeable in the pool scene, the risk that the stunt scene will be spoiled when the car falls into the ravine, the difficulty the English actress has in pronouncing her text in French beside the windows. Léaud/Alphonse wants to abandon the shoot because of a heartache, but Truffaut/Ferrand tells him that real film people – like the two of them – can’t be happy in everyday life, only in making movies. A nearly identical type of joy infuses the little community in Le Dernier Métro (1980), which is another micro-society of creativity, like that of La Nuit américaine, and which resembles a popular Parisian courtyard with its endearing and colorful secondary characters (the chubby and resourceful working-class fellow, the Renoirian figure of Paulette Dubost, the ambitious young debutant actress, the secretive wardrobe mistress, etc.). But this little community, which has everything it needs to be happy in another Truffaut film, is surrounded and endangered by German occupiers and French collaborators. The theater could be closed at the slightest false move and its troupe scattered into the dark outside world. Here the excluded person is none other than the Jewish stage director, Lucas Steiner, who is responsible for staging the play, but in permanent danger of arrest and deportation to a death camp. Even the times when joy should reign, like the evening of the play’s opening night, the threat that weighs on the theater and on Steiner does not allow him to enjoy his success. The only moments of joy possible in this oppressive situation are Marion’s brief erotic embraces, first with her husband, then with Bernard.

When the Stalling Stops Truffaut’s films are often happy on the incremental model of progress staked out in L’Enfant sauvage when, after the characters have stagnated in a quagmire, after a discouraging absence of progress, suddenly the difficulty is overcome and the forward movement can resume. When the standstill gives way, a sort of rhythmic joy arises in the very body of the film that sometimes can be felt physically by the spectator. Such joy permeates the heart of filmmaking in all its stages. It is the joy that a filmmaker occasionally experiences in editing, when after a lengthy standstill – after the regrets, the discouragements, the dead ends – all at once the film finds its rhythm and takes on a form that asserts itself as obvious. Take the burst of joy in Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972) when two amateur detectives see the film of a precocious young cineaste that irrefutably establishes the woman’s innocence (and cinema’s recording power), a proof that will turn their investigation around. Or, in La Peau douce, take the moment of happiness that follows the nightmarish evening in Reims where the couple find themselves stuck and separated because of Lachenay’s social obligations, and where a romantic encounter could have hit a dead end or gone terribly awry. After this frustrating evening where nothing has happened, where love’s morale has hit bottom, they end up taking refuge in a small inn where Truffaut, paying tribute to Lubitsch, indirectly expresses the joy

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of the couple at last freed of social constraints via the image of the little cat drinking milk. He will repeat this scene in La Nuit américaine. The structure is the same: an impasse and a difficulty overcome. But in the film about moviemaking, the stalemate of the shoot, occasioned by a stage cat that refuses to drink the milk, is resolved, to the great relief of the entire crew. In L’Argent de poche, the pupil Demouceaux experiences this liberating joy when the bell marking the end of class liberates him from the hot seat he has been occupying in a state of nerves, anxious lest the teacher’s question be posed to him. Children in Truffaut’s universe, even when their lives are difficult, always keep a huge measure of gaiety in reserve. Vivement dimanche! (1983) is an excellent example of a film without children but with childhood. It ends, moreover, with a shot of kids’ feet playing with the sun shield of the photographer’s camera on the wedding day, a shot that may be the key to the film. There is a manhunt for Julien Vercel, who is accused of murder and risks being arrested at any moment, but every time he finds himself with his secretary in his office (where it is always night, even in the middle of the day, as if this hideout were timeless) they become children playing hide-and-seek and scaring each other: these scenes are imbued with the carefree gaiety of childhood. Truffaut clearly takes immense pleasure in making his two actors play like children. A passionate love affair, which in Truffaut’s cinema is always serious, never gay, must not hold them back: their affair will only become love in extremis. And this slow development of love is accomplished by games: she disguises herself (as an androgynous pageboy and then as a prostitute), walking back and forth in front of the small basement window to show him her legs when she understands that what interests him is not the woman in the flesh next to him but shadows glimpsed in the basement window, as in Rear Window. Borrowed from the Hitchcock film, this motif reappears in Le Dernier Métro, where a man forced to inhabit a confined space sends a woman out into the world in his place. Truffaut postulates the infantile belief that if you decide you are hidden, you inevitably become invisible. In Vivement dimanche! the last place where Trintignant should hide, just when the police are looking for him, is in his office; however, this place serves as a protective cocoon that the adult world and its threats cannot enter, and where there can be real pleasure in playing hide-and-seek with society. Hidden loves form a common theme in Truffaut, from La Peau douce to  La Femme d’à côté, where secrecy is part of the “tribulations and delights” of passionate love.

Love is Not Cheerful Love in Truffaut’s universe rarely is a source of joy, albeit it is sometimes a source of fleeting pleasure. The obsession of his passionate characters is accompanied by a tension that denies them all possibility of joy and happiness. Adèle Hugo, who, in all Truffaut’s oeuvre, is the passionate character in the most pure chemical state, never experiences a moment of joy throughout her exhausting search. Her passion only

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generates anxiety, even when she finds the man whom she loves and who she knows deep down does not love her. Even when her untiring tenacity succeeds in achieving her goal – to obtain her father’s permission to marry – she experiences no joy, no more than Jeanne Moreau ( Julie) did in executing one after another the murderers of the man who was her husband for an hour. If “happiness is not cheerful” for Max Ophüls, passion is never joyous for Truffaut. Julien Davenne’s passion for the dead is an obsession that prevents him from knowing other joys than that of remaining faithful to his goal. He refuses to let himself live in the present and finds satisfaction only in worshipping the deceased. This is Truffaut’s only film to give way to an almost mystical moment of joy, the single moment when Julien shows Cécilia the forest of flaming candles in his “ardent chapel,” which he asks her to watch over after he is gone. An almost religious music accompanies this scene that portends his own death. Surprisingly, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) is, of all Truffaut’s films, the one in which the protagonist is continuously the most tense and worried. Morane never smiles and his romantic conquests never manage to cheer him up. His publisher tells him, towards the end of the film, that he looked for happiness quantitatively while it would have been so easy to find it in just a single woman. She is right, but what she does not know is that there is one woman with whom he was passionately in love and of whom he does not speak in his manuscript. All women are “relative” for him, to quote the man at the end of Baisers volés (1968). Morane’s obsession with women does not make him happy; it does not even make him cheerful when he succeeds in his seductive ventures – and he almost always succeeds – because as a collector, it is always a question of starting over from scratch; and the lack of that one woman whom he really loved and who made him suffer leaves an unfillable void. Is the couple a basis of happiness in Truffaut’s film? From Antoine et Colette (1962) on, we see that the birth of love is only a source of anxiety since it is something too serious to permit the lightness of gaiety or the fullness of joy. Treated in a low-key manner, marriage and the birth of children are messengers of a heavy and diffuse threat. The finale of Baisers volés is symptomatic of the real difficulty Truffaut had in trying to treat the coming into being of a couple as a “happy end.” In the film’s last sequence, at the moment when the couple has just become engaged, the mysterious, paranoid follower sententiously reminds the young woman on whom he has set his heart that in love “everyone betrays everyone,” that the dream of absolute love is illusory. He expresses a painful contradiction, which is that of Truffaut, between the desire to believe in a pure, absolute, and enduring love, and the simultaneous awareness that conjugal love is always relative, doomed to wear out and ultimately to fail. Could the birth of a child be a solution to this contradiction? In Domicile conjugal Antoine is filled with joy when he learns, belatedly, that his wife is pregnant, but the child’s birth is itself much more ambiguous. On her first night home from the hospital, his wife asks him to let her sleep alone with the baby in their bedroom. He accepts without understanding and without making a fuss, but soon thereafter he has an extramarital affair. The joyous moment of the child’s birth is immediately followed by a double threat for the couple: the baby deprives him of his wife’s love, and consequently, tit for tat, he betrays her by giving in to the first amorous temptation that

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presents itself. Truffaut, even if he does not say so with the same cold lucidity, is not so very distant from Ingmar Bergman, for whom the birth of a child carries the seeds of the couple’s destruction. There is a single exception to this rule: the birth of the teacher’s child in L’Argent de poche, a scene that Truffaut films as if participating in the collective joy shared by the neighbors in the building. For Antoine Doinel, who ends up in analysis, joy comes from feeling adopted by the parents of the girl with whom he is in love. In the Doinel trilogy, the protagonist’s moments of gaiety are always tied to this situation where he is happy at last to be integrated into a family that is whole, normal, and content – everything that his own childhood was not. He discovers a juvenile pleasure, as in the scene in Baisers volés where the whole family plays at guessing the profession he is imitating. Already in Les 400 Coups, Antoine’s only really happy scene occurs after going to the movies with his parents, when in a unique moment of gaiety and harmony they laugh together in the car riding home.

Touching the Ground Adèle Hugo’s single smile thoughout the entire film comes when she sees the man she loves kiss her rival. To observe this betrayal with her own eyes fills her with a sort of contentment, because she has reached the depths of the abyss; she cannot fall any further. At this moment, she is beyond jealousy. Her pleasure is that of complete lucidity vis-à-vis herself, and she makes no excuses. Likewise, the lawful wife in La Peau douce smiles after having shot her husband: she will no longer feel love or jealousy, since her husband is now dead. This constitutes a delight fairly similar to that experienced by the hero in La Sirène du Mississippi (1969) after he becomes disillusioned with the woman he loves and notes, with a certain jubilation, his liberating renunciation of all self-esteem. At last he can love lucidly, without indulging in illusions, having given up on idealizing reality. Mathilde’s kind husband in La Femme d’à  côté will never know this almost joyous feeling of release and lightness felt by someone who has lost all illusions about the woman he loves. When he realizes after the public scandal of the garden party and their ruined honeymoon that he continues to love a liar who utters the name of his rival, it will be without joy and with no feeling of relief.

Untimely Joys The strangest scene (and perhaps one of the most personal) in La Femme d’à côté is that in which there is a totally unexpected return of gaiety when the script’s dramatic logic of the arc of this amorous relationship would least have led us to anticipate it. What might be called a relapse into “gaiety” occurs at the very moment when the

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tension between the two lovers is at its breaking point. Mathilde has just twice told her lover, after his absurd fit of jealousy over the telephone, that she never wants to see him again, that he frightens her, that it’s all over between them. He then leaves work in the middle of the day and tries to convince her to join him at their little hotel; finally, he loiters around her house like a madman. Catching sight of her, he begins to speak to her imprudently and passionately through the kitchen window. She tells him to go home and remains adamant about her decision. Their bitter argument continues, until suddenly, without any real psychological motive, the tone changes and the tension dies down. In the middle of their discussion, Bernard, exhausted by all the pressure, says, “We’ll become friends again, as before,” to which she responds with amusement, “Before what?” These two replies are enough to make them laugh together joyfully, lightly, whisking away all animosity between them. The tension instantly dissolves, without this being, however, a lasting turnaround: they know very well that the crisis of their relationship is not going to cease and that their temporarily giddy laughter will not change a thing. But unintentionally a kind of gaiety and complicity reappears, a psychological safety valve that is stronger than the objective situation, and beyond all logic of feelings and emotions. But what is most surprising is that at this moment in the film such excessive cheerfulness becomes contagious. When Mathilde asks him what he is going to say to his wife if she sees him returning from her place, Bernard answers lightly and with a smile: “I’ll say I feel better, that I can breathe.” Back home, instead of being overwhelmed, he gaily proposes an evening out to his wife Arlette: a movie and then dinner at a restaurant. It is as if this untimely state of joy, this sudden alleviation, this decompression, is independent of the woman with whom he speaks, whether the mistress or the wife. In an earlier sexual encounter, in the car, we witness an ephemeral joy between the lovers after a sad, illicit meeting in which she had refused to enter their hotel and they talked about the past. This erotic parenthesis ends with Mathilde’s woefully definitive phrase: “You understand, Bernard, that that was wonderful, but it will not happen again.” It is not Truffaut’s only film where sex operates as a “safety valve” for psychological relaxation, independent of the partner’s psyschological situation and identity. The same is true in La Peau douce in the scene where the husband, in love with another woman, makes love to his wife. The fleeting pleasures of sex in La Femme d’à côté are practically independent of the woman with whom Bernard makes love. In Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), the two gangsters and the hostages they have taken in their car are similarly seized by an improbable fit of gaiety. When Marie Dubois utters the phrase, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” the foursome are overtaken by uncontrollable laughter, something that is totally unexpected and contrary to the psychological basis of the situation. Jules et Jim (1962) is without a doubt the Truffaut film where we find the most gaiety, joy, even happiness. Its famous beginning with the birth of the friendship between Jules and Jim and their discovery of Catherine comprises a long interlude without tension, in which a gentle happiness reigns, like a moment in some fragile Eden. The film’s characters are on the fringe of society’s rules; they earn their living by their writing and are subject to practically no pressure from the society around

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them. Almost no film can last more than fifteen minutes in such a state of grace without foundering in sentimentality or boring the spectator. Happiness itself has no history, and it takes an event exterior to the sentimental relationships of the characters, World War I, to disrupt their delicate balance, as if that war put an irrevocable end to a time when such gentle happiness was still possible. One chosen space is allotted to the joy of being together in this film: the terrace where the quartet plays dominoes. But the moments of happiness in this film are relatively independent of the general evolution of relationships and feelings. These are the erratic scenes, parentheses in the middle of the pains of love, where the happiness of being together, with a little girl’s childhood as catalyst, prevails over changes of heart, jealousies, and so very many moments of tension and of despair. The initial happiness of their meeting before the Great War will never be completely lost or forgotten and regularly resurfaces unexpectedly with much playful and innocent joy, as if it were long-lasting and beyond all time, an intact block of some original Eden from which nothing has managed to permanently oust them. The real François Truffaut had a gentle laugh that he transmitted to the adult Antoine Doinel. With Godard, he shared a taste for jokes, bad puns, and idiotic stories. He practiced a kind of morality of light gaiety, something he believed we owe to others and that serves to banish a spirit of seriousness. The melancholy that runs through his oeuvre is often pierced with such jokes, with gags that are not always funny; it was almost a duty for him to sprinkle his films with them, even the more serious ones. That particular gaiety, superficial as it may seem, is part of the poignant image that I still have of this man. As much, finally, as the serious question of joy in his films. Translated by Sally Shafto

6

Truffaut and the Photographic Cinema, Fetishism, Death Junji Hori

François Truffaut is often said to be an auteur of “motion,” as Carole Le Berre says, insisting that a “fear of stopping” lies at the heart of a body of work “characterized by mobility and vivacity.” She provides abundant examples of his “passion for female bodies in motion,” and for “active and often nervous characters” in general.1 However, being “a devotee of paradox, contradictions and opposite views,”2 Truffaut, it is not surprising to realize, cultivated in his films elements that are the opposite of “motion.” This chapter draws attention to the importance of a too little studied aspect of the Truffaut corpus: the stillness that so often freezes his images. To this end, I focus on the motif of the photographic – which mainly refers to actual photographs and the act of taking photographs at the level of the diegesis, but which also comprises figures of immobility, such as freeze-frames, at the level of the narrative. Photographs abound in Truffaut’s works, from a production still that Antoine and René steal from a movie theater in Les 400 Coups (1959) to an enormous number of portraits of the dead in La Chambre verte (1978), and the act of taking photographs appears not infrequently, with the example of Pierre Lachenay joyfully taking pictures of his mistress in La Peau douce (1964) at the head of the list. I shall closely examine various manifestations of the motif of photography from three distinct viewpoints: cinema, fetishism, and death. In the first section, with film stills appearing in Les 400 Coups as well as in La Nuit américaine (1973) as a starting point, I aim to draw a portrait of Truffaut as a “possessive spectator”3 who attempts to appropriate his favorite films by means of immobile images, with a particular focus on his activities as a film critic – that is to say, as a movie spectator. Next, I note that women frequently appear in still images; I also explore the way fetishistic desire functions in a series of (mainly masculine) protagonists possessed by images. Finally, I look at the link, explicit or implicit, between photography and death in Truffaut’s cinema.

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Cinema Throughout Truffaut’s oeuvre, we frequently encounter film stills and movie posters – still images that traditionally act as effective surrogates for perpetually moving filmic images. The most remarkable case of such instances is the scene in which Antoine and René, in Les 400 Coups, steal one of the stills of Ingmar Bergman’s Monika (1953) showcased at the entrance of a local movie house. A similar scene can also be found in La Nuit américaine, which begins with a film still of Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912) as an homage to the debut of the Gish sisters: in one of director Ferrand’s recurring dreams, a smartly clad boy, using a stick to thwart a protective gate, snatches a bunch of film stills of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) from a display in front of a movie theater. It is well known that these scenes are based on Truffaut’s real experiences in his childhood. Engaged in “a small traffic in film stills” in 1948 with his best friend Robert Lachenay, he addressed a note to the latter: Let’s meet at the Studio Raspail and try to get stills from Goodbye Mr. Chips and, especially, The Story of a Cheat. We can also try to get the stills at the Abbesses movie house. That’s the easiest because there’s no one around. The time to go is around 11 or midnight. … This week we have photos from Napoléon, Les Inconnus dans la maison, The Story of a Cheat, Fanny, Scampolo. I think they’ll bring in a good price.4

Needless to say, these activities were not simply a way to make a living, but also an embodiment of their cinephilic desire. Truffaut later recalled the moment when he stole a still from Citizen Kane – a different one from those stolen by the boy in Ferrand’s dream – in the following terms: a shot of Citizen Kane, which lasts only three seconds between two dissolves. We see Orson Welles in this shot, straddling piles of newspapers, wearing a hat, and looking up. The image was shot from above, and – contrary to popular belief – gives an impression of power. At the age of sixteen, in 1948, I stole this photo from the studio Raspail, and I enlarged it.5

As this remark suggests, Truffaut’s desire as a cinephile was particularly related to his desire for “collection.” Jean-Charles Tacchella, alias “L’Ami Pierrot,” who was in charge of answering readers’ letters sent to L’Ecran Français in 1948, remembered incessant letters from the young Truffaut asking for filmographies.6 Truffaut so enthusiastically collected various documents concerning his favorite films, classifying them by director, that the folders containing them finally occupied half of Lachenay’s tiny apartment.7 The act of stealing film stills is just one of the first expressions of his “taste for archives,”8 an extraordinary mania for collection and classification that would later characterize his life. Stills and posters, as in the above-mentioned scenes, relate to the privileged site of the movie theater. In La Peau douce, while Pierre Lachenay gives a lecture on André

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Gide in a Reims movie theater, his neglected lover, Nicole, walks back and forth in front of a poster of Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). Louis and Marion in La Sirène du Mississippi (1969) watch Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) when hiding in Lyon. In one of the scenes in which a hippieish man taps Antoine for money in Domicile conjugal (1970), a huge advertisement featuring a screening of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) can be noticed in the background. In contrast to these explicitly respectful allusions to his favorite films, in Les Mistons (1957), when, after making fun of Bernadette Lafont and Gérard Blain kissing in the darkness of the movie theater, the “mischief makers” of the film are running away, one of them tears down a poster of Jean Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier (1955) displayed on the nearby wall while humming its theme song. This blasphemous act, which re-presents Truffaut’s extremely acerbic attack on the film in the pages of Arts,9 paradoxically suggests that, in Truffaut’s cinema, a film’s immobile replacement (a poster, in this case) carries no less weight than the film itself; the poster is supposed to have more value – often fetishistic value – than a simple printed advertisement might normally have, so that the act of tearing it down may function as a true provocation. In fact, despite the recurrence of movie theaters in Truffaut’s films, we seldom see any moving images actually projected in them. The newsreel footage that announces the result of a slalom while Antoine Doinel desperately tries to kiss Colette in a movie house (Antoine et Colette, 1962); the Nazi’s book-burning shown in the Studio des Ursulines where the protagonists of Jules et Jim (1962) happen to meet again; and the (fake) Pathé Journal introducing the fabulous life story of a whistler, Oscar, screened in the movie theater where Patrick and one of his friends have a casual date with two girls in L’Argent de poche (1976), are exceptional moments in that they are also actually shown to us. In contrast, when, again in L’Argent de poche, Julian, an abused child, sneaks into a movie theater without paying for the ticket, we are exclusively shown the behavior of the local audience, even after the darkening of the hall and the rise of the curtain, so that the content of an opening newsreel footage concerning Algeria is only partially transmitted to us by means of the commentary voice and the flicker of the images reflected on the faces of the audience. We should also remember the Eden, a movie theater in Vivement dimanche! (1983) at the entrance to which are displayed the posters of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977). However, we never see the inside of the theater; even when a woman at the box office is beckoned in by an unknown person and then murdered, we only intermittently hear the soundtrack of Kubrick’s war film. Furthermore, in that Reims movie theater of La Peau douce, Lachenay confirms, with his friend and organizer Clément, the projection of Marc Allégret’s Avec André Gide (1952), which begins after the lecture, from behind the screen. Even on this rare occasion when the moving images actually projected are shown, there exists a disturbing scaffolding between the images and us. Finally, in the scene already mentioned in La Sirène du Mississippi, we only witness Louis and Marion coming out of the movie theater where Johnny Guitar is on view. Except for quoting Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) at the beginning of this film, Truffaut never directly cites moving images from another film. Such scenes as the beautiful interpenetrative moment in Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), in which

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Figure 6.1

La Peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964, Les Films du Carrosse).

Anna Karina watches in tears Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) are excluded from Truffaut’s cinema.10 Why does Truffaut prefer the para-filmic immobile images to the film itself when he invokes a film? Where does the unusual privilege granted to still images come from? Roland Barthes explained the reason for preferring the still photogram to the film’s development in time in the following terms: Do I add to the images in movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness [pensivité]; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram.11

Extending Barthes’ remark that the cinema lacks pensiveness, Raymond Bellour called the spectator who is capable of imaginatively “stopping” a film the “pensive spectator.”12 However, rather than being a pensive spectator who wants a filmic image to be a striking punctum, Truffaut would more appropriately qualify as what Laura Mulvey called a “possessive spectator.” If, as she points out, traditional means of  satisfying “the desire to possess and hold the elusive image” – at least before electronic or digital viewing – were either to amass “a panoply of still images,” such as production photos, posters, and pinups, or “repeated viewing” of the same film as though forced by a repetition compulsion,13 the young Truffaut, as a fanatic movie spectator, was indisputably so possessed by this desire for possession that he pursued both paths. Undoubtedly, his “taste for archives” was fundamentally propelled by the desire for possession, and he notoriously had a mania of watching the same film over and over again – for example, in the mid-forties, he went to see “The Raven thirteen times, Children of Paradise nine times, and Autant-Lara’s Douce (Love Story)

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seven times.”14 Regarding the experience of such repeated viewing, Truffaut wrote, “Sometimes I saw the same film four or five times within a month and could still not recount the story line correctly because, at one moment or another, the swelling of the music, a chase through the night, the actress’ tears, would intoxicate me, make me lose track of what was going on, carry me away from the rest of the movie.”15 In contrast, Mulvey observed the generalization of the viewing mode that is “fetishistic scopophilia” – which was once limited to, for example, the films of Josef von Sternberg – with the advent of new viewing technologies that enabled the spectator to manipulate cinematic time with ease; she stated that “the ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen.”16 There is no need to overemphasize the fact that Truffaut as a movie spectator practiced nothing less than this viewing mode avant la lettre. Motionless supplements to movies occupy a privileged place in Truffaut’s works because they can be possessed. Tellingly, Truffaut was very fond of Willy Rizzo’s portrait of Sacha Guitry on his deathbed, still working hard at his editing table. He explained the personal effect of this photograph in the following terms: Whenever I feel tired, ready to give in to discouragement and sink into melancholy, acerbity, or grief, and that the disgusting shadow of abandonment looms over the current work, then I only have to look at the photograph of Sacha Guitry taken by Willy Rizzo to feel like a million dollars, to recover my good mood, bravery, and every courage in the world.17

This is a perfect example of a photograph that acts as a fetish in the anthropological sense of the term; this picture plays an almost talismanic role for Truffaut. For this exemplary “possessive spectator,” every para-filmic still image must have produced, more or less, a fetishistic effect that would never be achieved through moving images.

Fetishism The object that provoked the young Truffaut’s strong passion was not only cinema, but also women, both real and fictional. Nourishing “a taste for concurrent relationships” as early as 1950,18 he would later find his double in the character of the cavaleur in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), modeled on Henri-Pierre Roché, who scrupulously recorded his every “conquest” of women. However, it is more important to focus on the way Truffaut looked at women on screen. Antoine de Baecque believes that “Truffaut’s passion for women and his compulsive cinephilia are both essentially organized around fetishes” and that he undertook the “project of fetishistic taxonomy” in his early criticisms, especially when he uses the pseudonym of Robert Lachenay.19 One who is aroused by various part-objects, such as “loose-fitting blouses, the soft

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rustle of skirts, white breasts more guessed at than seen, perfectly round knees,” and who laughs at a panoply of pseudo-Freudian symbolisms – “smokestack,” “fountain,” “piston,” “surf,” and the like – could appropriately be called a fetishist in the ordinary sense of the term.20 Truffaut’s fetishism is famously inherited by some of the characters of his films. In particular, as Arnaud Gigue pointed out in relation to the motif of “undressing,” three protagonists – Pierre Lachenay in La Peau douce, Louis Mahé in La Sirène du Mississippi, and, to a lesser degree, Claude Roc in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) – stand out for “the fetishistic act of the lover undressing the one he wants to possess.”21 However, it is more important to note that the three fetishists are without exception entangled in visual desire evoked by photography. The protagonist of La Peau douce, having finally spent a peaceful night with his lover in a country inn on his way back from a lecture tour at Reims, takes pictures of her in the nearby woods with his twin-lens reflex camera. The visual pleasure enjoyed by the amateur photographer when he poses his lover, meticulously indicating how she should cross her legs, is clearly distinct from that of the protagonist of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963) in another scene of photography. Godard’s version is dominated by more rational desire, or by his trust in a photographic device which automatically captures truth: army deserter Bruno Forestier takes a snapshot of Veronica Dreyer in her apartment and the famous aphorism “Photography is truth; the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second” is pronounced. By contrast, Pierre Lachenay attempts to subordinate the photographic act to his own economy of desire.22 Secondly, at the beginning of La Sirène du Mississippi, Louis Mahé drives to the quay to pick up his fiancée, whom he has known only by letters and seen only in a photograph. It is easy to imagine that this monochrome picture functions for him as a sort of fetish; in fact, it has been enlarged and framed and hung on the wall. After meekly accepting the claim of a totally different-looking Marion that she sent him a picture of her sister, he lets her tear to pieces the much-revered original photo. Louis will nevertheless have a photograph of this “new” Marion taken at the wedding and even have her image imprinted on the pack of cigarettes made in the factory he manages. It is as if he were the one who cannot help but retain still images of the woman he loves. Louis’ desire here is quite similar to that which propelled the young Truffaut as a “possessive spectator.” Claude, in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, is less explicit in his fetishism, but it seems that a certain photograph plays a decisive role in his life: a picture of the little Muriel that appears in the Musée Rodin sequence at the beginning of the film. One of the two English girls, Anne, confesses to Claude that she has a younger sister, Muriel; she takes out of her handbag a picture of Muriel when she was ten years old and shows it to him. It is noteworthy that Muriel appears for the first time in the film as an image in a photograph. The affection that arises between them is asynchronous; it might have started for Claude before Muriel ever saw him, from that very moment in which he fixed his gaze on her image. If, in the middle of the film, he pays a visit to an atelier of a woman photographer and displays indifference to a full-sized nude photograph of the artist, it may be because he is possessed exclusively by the picture of Muriel. The same photograph reappears briefly at the end of the film when, fifteen

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Figure 6.2

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Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (François Truffaut, 1971, Les Films du Carrosse).

years later, Claude is taking a walk in the Musée Rodin and looks among a group of schoolgirls on an educational tour for a girl who might be Muriel’s daughter. This image en fuite, which seems to put the entire film under its influence by appearing both at the beginning and at the end of the film, reminds us of an episode of a character in Citizen Kane who would be possessed all his life with the fleeting image of a girl he only saw for one second when crossing the Hudson on a ferryboat (Truffaut focused on this in his review).23 Jim, in Jules et Jim, also has a similar experience of an immobilized image of an impressive moment engraved on his mind: the narrator says that the spectacle of Catherine’s plunge into the Seine at midnight “was engraved in the eyes of Jim, to the point that he made a sketch of it the next day, although he did not have the habit of drawing.” However, what interests us more is a series of freeze-frames that appear in the previous scene in which the three protagonists spend a blissful moment together in a house by the sea. We are presented with five brief freeze-frames, three of Catherine making grimaces (she confesses that she has never laughed before getting acquainted with Jules and Jim) and two of her joyful expressions. Ludovic Cortade perceived “the hesitation between desire for movement and nostalgia for immobility” in the punctuation of the ordinary stream of filmic time by these freeze-frames and analyzed this from the perspective of Truffaut’s “Pygmalion complex.”24 However, it would be equally interesting to regard this succession of freeze-frames, which occurs at a different level than that of the diegesis, as an imaginary shooting of photographs by Truffaut the filmmaker. Akin to the fetishistic characters in his films, Truffaut himself also had a desire to turn the attractive figure of Jeanne Moreau into an immobile image by way of the photographic.25 The characters maintaining intensive relations with the photographic image are not limited to the three fetishists mentioned above as examples. In fact, characters possessed by images are abundant in Truffaut’s cinema (in this sense, in her intention to bring the two together as a couple, Anne takes the right course in showing Claude a photograph of Muriel). To fully understand their economy of desire, it is useful to

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refer to Serge Daney’s text on L’Enfant sauvage (1970), where he draws our attention to the “haste” and “precipitation” with which Dr Itard launches an educational plan for the wild child as soon as he is aware of his existence, without even seeing him, and points out that they are “the cause of all fiction”: It is always without any vision, any real encounter, that intersubjective relations are constituted like so many fantasies. It is before having seen her that Jules and Jim love Catherine whose “archaic” smile they already knew by having discovered it on a statue; it is men she knows nothing about that the Bride is going to eliminate; it is a woman of whom he knows only the photo (in addition, the wrong one) that Belmondo is going to marry in La Sirène du Mississippi. What each film stages is the provisional lack of the referent, the temporary eclipse of every guarantee and its slow reinscription in the film as it progresses.26

In this otherwise highly perceptive observation, Daney inadvertently asserts that “fantasies” driving Truffaut’s characters are formed “without any vision.” Yet just as Belmondo certainly saw the photograph of his fiancée beforehand, Jules and Jim had seen slides of the statue before they went to admire it in an open-air museum on an Adriatic island. Even the Bride would probably have recognized from their photographs those against whom she had sworn vengeance. Consequently, while the “provisional lack of the referent” does drive the protagonists in Truffaut’s works, it should be noted that there exists a prior, more fundamental visual experience – one that kindles and agitates the protagonists’ desires in the first place. From this perspective, let me focus first on the story of a gunner Jim tells to Albert and Jules in an open field: for two years, a gunner exchanges piles of increasingly affectionate letters with a girl he met on a train while on leave, until he asks for her hand and accomplishes an “extraordinary deflowering by mail” without ever seeing her again. An important role that photography plays in this story should not be overlooked: he asks for a photograph of her in the “third letter” and later “describes the photo in detail” in a letter to her, speaking of “the breasts he imagined under her housecoat.” It is easy to imagine how much fetishistic visual pleasure he might have taken from this photograph, given that it was the only image in the midst of the exchange of letters.27 Antoine Doinel in L’Amour en fuite (1979) is similar to this character in terms of the economy of desire. The protagonist of the Doinel cycle does not seem to belong to those who invest their excessive libido in visual objects. However, if we remember how Antoine, in L’Amour en fuite, met his new sweetheart Sabine, we understand that he is also one of those recurring Truffaut characters “possessed by images”; he falls in love with a girl he has never met by picking up and reconstituting all the fragments of a photograph of her that her infuriated ex-lover had torn into pieces in a telephone booth before Antoine’s eyes. First told to Colette on a train as the plot of his next novel, then to Sabine herself at the end of the film as an event he actually experienced, this episode eloquently testifies to the perversion of Antoine’s desire by which he finds himself possessed by a reproduction of reality before the reality itself begins to kindle his interest.

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Figure 6.3

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L’Amour en fuite (François Truffaut, 1979, Les Films du Carrosse).

Let us recall here the scene in Les 400 Coups in which Antoine is so enthusiastic about Balzac that he sets up a kind of altar devoted to the novelist. He lights a candle in reverence not just to Balzac but to a photographic reprint from the only daguerreotype of the novelist taken by Nadar. It would be a slight exaggeration to say that he adores not so much Balzac the novelist as his image in the literal sense of the term, but I could at least say that he needs the image to admire Balzac.28 In this sense, Antoine could be called the first iconophile in Truffaut’s works. And the extraordinary successor of the boy Antoine is none other than Adèle H. As if to repeat Antoine’s act, Adèle also erects a little altar decorated with a photograph of Lieutenant Pinson, whom she frantically adores, and places a candle on it. However, while Balzac is undoubtedly a real person for Antoine, it is less certain whether the photograph acts as a substitute for the referent (i.e., Lieutenant Pinson in person) for Adèle; in fact, toward the end of the film, Adèle, plunged into madness, can no longer recognize Lieutenant Pinson when she meets him in the street in Barbados. Is she an iconophile in the pure state, since she venerates the photograph itself, detached from its referent? Adèle, who now lives in her fantasy and does not need referential reality, might no longer even have a desire for images. In this sense, the case of Adèle H., rather than constituting the extreme limit of Truffaut’s characters who are possessed by images, belongs to a lateral branch of such genealogy, which may not be irrelevant to the fact that she is the only woman among all the iconophiles in Truffaut’s works.

Death It has been already pointed out that the motif of photography plays a sinister and even deadly role in Truffaut’s works.29 The most striking example of the inseparability of photography and death can be found in La Mariée était en noir (1967). In the traumatic original event that turned the Bride into a merciless avenger, the bridegroom

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was killed by a bullet in a church square at the precise moment when the photographer – had he existed at all – would have taken a picture of the couple who, coming out of the church, stopped walking to stare tenderly at each other. At that instant, the sharp report of a gun instead of the click of the shutter is heard; we can hardly believe that in reality there is no photographer – all the more so because in La Sirène du Mississippi there will surely be a photographer taking pictures of the justmarried Louis and Marion in a church square (later one of these photos will be displayed in the window of the photographer’s studio, confirming Marion’s false identity when she runs away with Louis’ fortune). Although this scene in La Mariée était en noir was inspired by a commonplace double meaning of the word “shooting” (with a gun and with a camera), it nevertheless constitutes an emblem of the link between photography and death in Truffaut’s cinema. Another remarkable example can be found at the end of La Peau douce. The photographs of the mistress into which Pierre Lachenay crystallizes his fetishistic desire fall into the hands of his suspicious wife as irrefutable evidence of his affair. On the one hand, they would have been a privileged source from which the husband would repeatedly derive visual pleasure. However, on the other hand, they immediately lead his wife into an impulsive action, instead of intensifying any of her fetishistic desires: armed with a shotgun hidden under her coat, she enters her husband’s usual restaurant, goes directly to his habitual place at the corner table – many pictures hang on the wall just behind him – throws the photographs at him, and mercilessly fires the shotgun. Lachenay thus dies, literally – almost “caricaturally” – surrounded by photographs. The husband’s shooting of the mistress entails quite logically, with some temporal gap, the wife’s shooting of her husband. In this sense, the shooting in the woods, despite its idyllic atmosphere, could be retrospectively said to have been fatal. In Truffaut’s works, the act of taking photographs, if not explicitly linked to death as in these instances, is often linked to an impending sinister event in the story. Alphonse, in La Nuit américaine, is informed of the departure of his capricious girlfriend, Liliane, at the precise moment when the whole crew is about to be photographed in celebration of the end of shooting for the Italian actress. In addition, the still photographer, Pierrot, who is also in charge of the commemorative picture here, is the one who is caught from far away by the director, Ferrand, in the act of flirting with Liliane in the shade of a tree. The earlier scene in which the American star Julie arrives at the airport to be met by a crowd of cameras reminds us of another scene of a press conference in Tirez sur le pianiste (1960): Edouard Saroyan, a concert pianist who conquers his extreme timidity with considerable practice, no longer gets nervous about being photographed in a press conference, but his wife soon commits suicide after telling him the true reason for his present glory. Photography also has a connection with the inspecting gaze of power incarnated by the police. When the Bride in La Mariée était en noir deliberately lets herself be arrested by the police with a view to eliminating her last target, a scrap merchant in jail, a detective shows her a series of slides to make her identify the victims of the serial murders and, much to his surprise, she easily acknowledges four murders without confessing her motivation. This scene echoes another in the police station in Les 400 Coups in which the police take Antoine’s

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fingerprints as well as his full-face and profile photographs for the files. Photography is never a cheerful act in Truffaut’s films. It is therefore perfectly logical that the schoolteacher Richet in L’Argent de poche is too overwhelmed by the spectacle of his wife’s giving birth to press the shutter of his twin-lens reflex camera, although he was just about to take a picture and was even urged by a nurse to do so. In contrast, Antoine Doinel in Domicile conjugal, another character who begets a child, cannot attend the birth of his baby and is thrown out of his wife’s hospital room; consequently, he cannot help getting his picture taken by a photographer, alone holding the newborn baby in his arms. This child – named Alphonse – will later take a Polaroid photo of his mother and her friend, Liliane, cheerfully dancing together in L’Amour en fuite. This scene might be the only instance in which photography as a practice is depicted with sheer joy. The Polaroid camera also appears at the beginning of the garden party scene in La Femme d’à côté (1981) when Bernard’s wife, Arlette, snaps a picture of Bernard and Mathilde, thus fixing them in a motionless image. As she will soon point out in showing the developed photo to other guests, Bernard looks gloomy in contrast to the cheerful atmosphere of the party. It is as if this act of taking a photograph intensifies Bernard’s derangement, for, at the end of the scene, a terrible scuffle breaks out between Bernard and Mathilde which exposes their unusually strained relationship. In fact, their secret intimacy had already been suspected in the previous scene by Mathilde’s husband, Philippe, for he happened to find out, while chatting cozily with Mathilde in the living room, that the “man next door” was in one of the old pictures of hers that he was putting in order.30 Determined to bury the past, Mathilde later cuts Bernard’s figure from some of her photographs – also a very unnatural act – to burn them in the fireplace, as if repeating the scene in La Sirène du Mississippi in which Louis puts Marion’s lacy lingerie in the fireplace after realizing that she has run away with his money. However, Mathilde here acts in a manner contrary to Louis and to all Truffaut’s men, possessed by images, as if she could rid herself of the object of her amour fou by doing away with the photographs. Furthermore, this love tragedy which ends in double suicide has been under the sign of “photography” from the very onset: for in the first sequence, when Madame Jouve, as on-screen narrator, introduces Bernard’s family to the audience, they are being photographed in front of their house. But by whom (no photographer appears in the frame), and, in particular, for what (this picture will never be mentioned in the film)? Behind this scene, which apparently depicts an ordinary, trivial sight, probably lies a perverse desire of the filmmaker to artificially freeze Bernard and others for a moment, thereby symbolically foreshadowing the “death” that awaits them at the end. This scene corresponds to the last shot of L’Histoire d’Adèle H., which in black-andwhite shows us Adèle standing on a seaside rock, making a resolution to follow her lover overseas – the same image but in color has appeared earlier in the film. What makes us uncomfortable with this image in black-and-white is that she remains totally motionless for as long as a minute and a half as the credits unfold. Unlike the last shot of Les 400 Coups, here Adèle is not eternally immobilized by a freeze-frame but put in the ordinary flux of filmic time. It is as if Adèle unnaturally stands motionless to pose

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Figure 6.4

La Femme d’à côté (François Truffaut, 1981, Les Films du Carrosse).

for a non-existent photographer. Undoubtedly, this imaginary shooting also functions as a premonition of Adèle’s plunge into madness, both retrospectively (for the scene is situated at the end of the narrative) and anachronically (for it goes upstream through the diegetic time). Here we cannot but shudder over “a catastrophe which has already occurred,” like Roland Barthes in front of such photographs where “this  will be and this has been” can be read at the same time – that is, those of his mother as a child and of Lewis Payne in his cell.31 La Chambre verte is the exception rather than the norm in Truffaut’s filmography in that it all too explicitly links the motif of photography to death; in fact, the film even gives us the impression that photography is so omnipresent that its sinister power is slightly muffled in comparison to his other films. The “green room,” situated upstairs in Julien Davenne’s home, is devoted to his deceased wife; like the abandoned chapel which he made into a mausoleum to honor his lost loved ones, it is adorned with innumerable photographs. One stormy night it catches fire, as if repeating the scene in Les 400 Coups in which the altar dedicated to Balzac begins to burn.32 However, as he himself explains to Cécilia, the mausoleum is not a “place of death,” but a “place of life.” That is why he cares a great deal about maintaining the flames of the candles so that the reflection from their incessant flickers brings “anima” to immobile photographs.33 Put differently, here Davenne, in contrast to those characters who invest excessive desire in the fixed images of photography, attempts to tame the photographic immobility by means of the flames of candles. If he is intensely disgusted by the wax effigy of his beloved wife that he himself had asked an artisan to construct, it is precisely because he cannot bear its uncanny absolute motionlessness. A writer of obituaries at The Globe, an obsolete newspaper for which he works, Davenne is patently obsessed with memories of the dead. Nevertheless, far from being paralyzed by the idea of the final immobility of death, he is inclined to motion, like all ordinary “sound” characters in Truffaut’s films. It is Truffaut’s narration, in fact, that renders the film morbid. For  example, more striking than the mass of photographs with

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which Davenne has covered every wall of the chapel is Truffaut’s dissolve from a photographic portrait of Davenne’s wife in profile (located in his “secret room”) to the same photographic image engraved on her tomb.34 The link between these identical images makes it abundantly clear that every photograph is marked with an implicit sign of death.35 This technique of memorialization suggests the all too famous concluding freeze-frame of Les 400 Coups – a technique related to the motif of photography in that it belongs to the “photographic.” Running away from the observation center and finally arriving at the ocean, Antoine turns around to look directly into the camera, at which instant it zooms in and freezes on his face. Daney speaks of this “brilliant intuition” in the following terms: “[It is] a way of ending the film not in the usual theatrical fashion (the effect of the curtain, of the empty scene), but in a pathetic fashion; a way of returning the film to its skeleton of still images, just like returning a corpse to the ashes from which it was made (ashes to ashes, frames to frames …).”36 In fact, as Daney suggested with a series of gloomy tropes, the suspended moment that suddenly appears at the end of the film gives us an ineffable impression of uncanniness. In a manner of speaking, this freeze-frame brings virtual death to the cinematographic movement by making us penetrate the moment of “stillness,” which normally never comes up, although it certainly lurks behind the incessant movement of the films. In his well-known article on La Femme d’à côté, Daney said that there were two Truffauts. While Truffaut-Jekyll, “respectable” and “tidy,” tries to reconstruct the family in the broad sense of the term, Truffaut-Hyde, “asocial, solitary, coldly passionate, fetishistic,” pursues to the end his “exclusive and private passions.”37 However, though Daney might have thought so, these two Truffauts do not meet for the first time in La Femme d’à côté. Carol Le Berre rightly emphasized that they coexist in each of his films where we can discern an “essential, intimate duality, probably born of the contradiction between his desire for integration and what always remained in him as implacably asocial.”38 What I have confirmed thus far through three perspectives – cinema, fetishism, and death – is nothing other than the fact that the motif of photography also ceaselessly activates this duality. Let me conclude by turning to the end of Vivement dimanche! – to the end, that is, of Truffaut’s entire oeuvre. At the wedding ceremony of Barbara and Julien, after the case is closed, the photographer – who is also Barbara’s ex-husband – takes a picture of the couple. But he carelessly drops the lens hood on the floor, and the children of the choir play with it to the joyful and hilarious music composed by Georges Delerue as if they were passing a soccer ball to each other. Do these children really attempt to “relaunch movement, film, and life,” “against the photographer who is going to fix the image?”39 On the contrary, anyone who has traced the motif of photography in Truffaut’s works would inevitably have the impression that the playful act of the children is rather a desperate gesture to exorcise the malefic power of photography. It is now sufficiently clear that this power is not so feeble as to be cancelled out by such an innocent game. Translated by Sally Shafto

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1993), pp. 180–184. Cyril Neyrat, François Truffaut (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), p. 10. This is the title of chapter 4 in Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Cited in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 31. Robert Lachenay and Claude Vega both recounted memories of those days: “Later, in 1946–47, to improve these famous folders, we would spend whole nights, with a screwdriver in the pocket, unscrewing the cases outside movie theaters to get photos of the films,” Lachenay, in Le Roman de François Truffaut (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), p. 16; “I wanted a photo of Yvonne Printemps with Pierre Fresnay, and he told me: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find it for you.’ And I was overjoyed to have the photo he succeeded in pinching,” Vega, in Le Roman de François Truffaut, p. 21. François Truffaut and Claude-Marie Trémois, “Les Plus Grandes Surprises, on les a avec les enfants,” Télérama 1816 (October 31, 1984): 54. Jean-Charles Tacchella, “‘Prête-moi ta plume,’” in Le Roman de François Truffaut, pp. 22–23. Robert Lachenay, “Une Jeunesse,” in Le Roman de François Truffaut, p. 15. Benjamin Esdraffo, “Archives,” in Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004), p. 26. Truffaut’s harsh criticism of the film can be found in Arts (November 9, 1955). See also de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 101. In the last tableau of Vivre sa vie, there is a traveling shot, taken from a passing car in which Nana is riding, of the façade of a movie theater where Jules et Jim was actually being shown. It is as if this traveling shot imparted “motion” to the immobile advertising image of Jules et Jim displayed there. Seldom in Truffaut’s works are film’s motionless replacements endowed with such conspicuous movement. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 55. Raymond Bellour, “Le Spectateur pensif,” in L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 2002), pp. 75–83. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 161. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 22. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 4. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, pp. 165–166. Cahiers du Cinéma 323–324 (May 1981): 61. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 52. Antoine de Baecque, “Fétichisme,” in Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 170–171. The most interesting piece written under the name of Robert Lachenay is a catalogue of “sexual perversion” – sadism, masochism, fetishism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and even homosexuality –titled after Krafft-Ebing’s famous book Psychopathia Sexualis: “Cinepsychopathia Sexualis,” Cahiers du Cinéma 42 (December 1954): 35–42. For example, the entry “Fetishism,” divided into four subcategories – a part of the body, a corporal quality, a part of female clothes, and a psychic quality – enumerates eighteen titles in total. This is a

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good combination of Truffaut’s “taste for archives” and his “fetishism” (especially his foot fetishism). Robert Lachenay, “L’Amour aux champs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (February 1954): 47. One of the more erotomaniac aspects of Truffaut the film critic might be reflected in the preference of Antoine and René in Les 400 Coups for the production still of a half-naked Monika among many other possible choices. We can also remember that, in the classroom sequence that opens this film, a girlie calendar circulates among schoolboys. Arnaud Guigue, “Déshabillage,” in Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 131–133. In my view, Pierre Lachenay and Bruno Forestier represent the respective statuses of photography in Truffaut’s and Godard’s cinema in general. For Godard, the fetishistic aspect of photography is totally absent; instead, the interest in the mechanism of photographic apparatuses is in the foreground – from Letter to Jane (1972) and Ici et ailleurs (1974) to Film socialisme (2010). Truffaut mentioned this episode in his 1967 article on the film: “When Everett Sloane, who plays the character of Bernstein in Kane, relates how, one day in 1896, his ferryboat crossed the path of another in Hudson Bay on which there was a young woman in a white dress holding a parasol, and that he’d only seen the girl for a second but had thought of her once a month all his life … ah, well, behind this Chekhovian scene, there was no big director to admire, but a friend to discover, an accomplice to love, a person we felt close to in heart and mind.” Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 280. Ludovic Cortade, Le Cinéma de l’immobilité (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008), pp. 71–74. Dudley Andrew makes a similar point concerning freeze-frames in this film: “Imperceptibly at the ends of several scenes, and flagrantly on one occasion, Catherine’s image is literally frozen into a photographic pose to be held in eye and mind, to be remembered, as though she were being returned to the statue from which she emerged.” See Dudley Andrew, “Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin,” in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 39. Serge Daney, “Amphisbetesis,” in La Maison cinéma et le monde, tome 1: Le Temps des Cahiers, 1962–1981 (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), p. 116. The model for the artilleryman is evidently the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. At the beginning of 1915, he met Madeleine Pagès on the train and started to correspond with her from April 16 onwards, asking for a photograph of her as early as May 11. In a letter dated June 23, he detailed the three photographs sent separately to him. To cite just one example, it is not difficult to imagine that the following passage could have strongly impressed Truffaut’s erotomaniac aspect: “I believe Madeleine has no corset, at least in this photo, and one rejoices to guess the juvenile roundness of the soft, young body hidden under the fabrics.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Lettres à Madeleine: Tendre comme le souvenir, ed. Laurence Campa (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 67. I notice here another reflection of Truffaut’s childhood experiences. In an interview, he answered the question, “What kind of pictures do you collect?” in the following terms: “Pictures of writers. I would pin them on the back of the door of a small closet. There were Balzac, Flaubert, Alfred de Vigny, with their date of birth and that of death.” Truffaut and Trémois, “Les Plus Grandes Surprises,” p. 54. See in particular Jean Collet, François Truffaut (Paris: Editions Pierre Lherminier, 1985), p. 148; Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 186.

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If the act of closely scrutinizing a monochrome photograph with a magnifying glass looks quite natural, it undoubtedly results from Truffaut’s highly accomplished miseen-scène. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96. The “green room” and the mausoleum, which directly repeat and extend the altar of Balzac in Les 400 Coups and that of Lieutenant Pinson in L’Histoire d’Adèle H., are also the culmination of a series of “rooms decorated with photographs” in Truffaut’s films. Sparsely decorated rooms hardly exist in his oeuvre. I should especially note that Antoine Doinel’s apartments are normally decorated with many pictures (most remarkably, in Domicile conjugal, as the story develops, photographs of baby Alphonse proliferate). In this sense, Cécilia’s apartment, which Davenne visits for the first time in the latter half of the film, only to find pictures of his inveterate enemy Paul Massigny everywhere, constitutes an exact counterpart to the “green room” and the mausoleum. See Collet, François Truffaut, p. 118. The motif of a photograph engraved on a tomb is repeated in his next film, L’Amour en fuite, when Antoine is taken to his mother’s grave in the Montmartre Cemetery by her former lover, Mr Lucien. In his dazzling discussion of the operation of “photo-synthesis” in La Chambre verte, Garrett Stewart analyzes the same dissolve in the following terms: “Emphasized in this softened toggle between equivalent funerary icons is the photogrammatic manipulation that alone permits this and any such transition. Montage has at this moment become in its own right a parable: in the interstices of cinema is always lurking – sequestered by negation – the deathwork of the stilled image.” I think his point also applies to the final freeze-frame of Les 400 Coups, a film which tells, according to Stewart, “a story in which the photograph that starts the film rolling anticipates the fixed image into which plot will unravel at its point of impasse.” See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 90 and 138. Serge Daney, “Photo et cinéma,” in La Maison cinéma et le monde, tome 2: Les Années Libé 1981–1985 (Paris: P.O.L., 2002), p. 542. Serge Daney, “La Femme d’à côté,” in Ciné Journal, 1981–86 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1986), pp. 39–41. Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 12. Collet, François Truffaut, p. 144.

7

The Impasse of Intimacy Romance and Tragedy in Truffaut’s Cinema John Orr Triangulating Truffaut There are two sides to Truffaut. The first is the saga of Antoine Doinel, boy and man, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud as Doinel grows out of adolescence into manhood over the course of five feature films. Antoine’s fractious éducation sentimentale, along with Léaud’s tour de force in La Nuit américaine (1973), is for many the defining feature of Truffaut’s career, this presentation of his on-screen double placing the cineaste on the side of youth, novelty, and rebellion in a new age. The second dimension is more complex: the uneasy relationship of Truffaut to classical genre in which he was neither a full-blooded revisionist, like the movie brats of the New American Cinema, nor, like Godard, a full-blooded deconstructionist of the Hollywood he loved. Truffaut’s cinema has more continuity with classical Hollywood and specifically with the psychodramas of the 1950s. Here, the morality tale is driven by psychological complexity, and directors like Hitchcock, Mankiewicz, Preminger, and Nicholas Ray create worlds in which there are infinite shades of gray that override the black-andwhite format of noir melodrama. If his use of generic romance transcends melodrama, which it does, it is because at the end of the classical period in Hollywood it had already been done by the auteurs that Truffaut most revered. Right through the 1960s and 1970s his loyalty to that period of Hollywood was unwavering and the New American Cinema almost seemed to pass him by. He knew, for example, he could not do revisionist gangster movies like Melville – his first and last attempt was made early on with Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). And he had no interest in political conspiracy thrillers. His first English film, Fahrenheit 451 (1966), was his first and last science fiction film. His work modulates the American psychodrama, makes use of the freedoms outside the American studio system, and blends psychodrama with the lyrical rhythms and visual boldness that he inherited from Jean Renoir. A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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If he went beyond melodrama, he also stopped short of the tragic sense that pervaded the best of nineteenth-century European fiction and drama. He produced a European cinema of the in-between, near to tragicomedy in Jules et Jim (1962) but still unnamable, an unfinished form we can call proto-tragic, a tragedy in the making that is not, finally, strong enough to be so. In the six films we analyze there are two variants on the proto-tragic: either his protagonists outlive the impasse which seems to govern their lives, or else death strikes unexpectedly through an act of sudden destruction. At the same time, crucially, all six films are intricate variations on what Thomson has called “the passionate triangle,”1 where love is identical to impasse and all passion a cul-de-sac from which there is no exit. What Truffaut brought to this impasse, quite self-consciously, was the sensibility of “l’amertume,” the volatile, bittersweet love that produces no happy endings and instead shakily treads the tightrope between survival and disaster, a strategy of risk whose outcome is always uncertain. Truffaut’s most powerful chronicles of adult life emerge out of this sensibility in Jules et Jim, La Peau douce (1964), La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), and La Femme d’à côté (1981), films where the impasse of intimacy is overwhelming and the passionate triangle, in all its subtle varieties, has a haunting quality which lingers on in the imagination long after the film has ended. To call Truffaut a Francophone Hitchcock or follower of film noir would therefore be misleading. On one level this was a matter of style. Of all the New Wave directors, he was the most buoyant, the most impressionist, the closest to Renoir père et fils, a director whose soft textures, whirling pans, and elegant tracking shots could intimate the effusive lightness of being. On another level, he was searching to put himself beyond genre, to hover in that liminal space where clear boundaries dissolved, art and life were transitional, and where form could yield no fixed conclusions. Truffaut was not, like Godard, Pasolini, or Fassbinder, a director who would self-consciously experiment or polemicize. His best films were often literary in formation, highly structured, and thought out in painstaking detail with his script associates Jean Gruault or Suzanne Schiffmann; his narratives were transparent in ways that those of Resnais and Rivette were usually not. He stood in that respect closer to Chabrol or Rohmer, those other Hitchcock admirers who had written at length on the maestro before he did. But with Chabrol and Rohmer the camera was more deliberate, more economical in the service of its narrative; for Truffaut, by contrast, its perpetual movement seems to be in advance of the story it tells, to be lyrically impatient in its progression, in its desire to float forward through space and time, at times as if it were never grounded. This became a trademark signature of the first and most famous of the six, Jules et Jim, where Truffaut evolves a stylistic breathlessness to match that of his brother-inarms, Jean-Luc, but does it through a novel-memoir by Henri-Pierre Roché that is way out of Godard territory. The triumphant unity of form comes through the match between “breathlessness” and the empathic triangle who are the subject of the film, perhaps the most lovable trio, Jules, Jim, and Catherine, in all of New Wave cinema. If this was too good to be true, romantic bohemians as the most beautiful of beautiful

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people, then in retrospect it was too good to be true. It was something that could be copied on screen by others but never repeated, not even by Truffaut himself, a once-only inspiration where the director happened to be in the right place at the right time, a bold remaking of costume drama with the restless novelty of an eternal present mirrored in the restless novelty of a not-so-distant past. Truffaut’s ancestors of the new (before and after the Great War) are free spirits beyond convention seen through the glimmer of the looking glass by a 1960s audience and filmed superbly by Raoul Coutard in black-and-white CinemaScope. The anamorphic ratio, the sheer width of the image, and the delicate textured softness of the look – all were generated by Truffaut taking the swift, elegant pan of medium-long shot into new dimensions. After Jules et Jim we are destined not to fall in love with such a passionate trio again. Instead, we are distanced: two years later, La Peau douce was a stark reality check most audiences could not take. In La Sirène du Mississippi those star icons of the New Wave Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo still looked the most beautiful of all, but the mirror was badly cracked. After Jules et Jim the repetition of Roché’s “history love-triangle” in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent was severe and meticulous in its framing, and in Truffaut’s penultimate film, La Femme d’à côté, the nightmare of impossible love was thrust with shocking conviction back into the routine of family life in provincial France. One way Truffaut is nearer to Hitchcock than to film noir is his use of the single child. In noir the catalyst for passion is often the dissatisfaction of the childless marriage, but Hitchcock has children close to disaster in films like Sabotage (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956), and The Birds (1963). Likewise, the delightful Sabine Haudpin cannot forestall parental disaster in either Jules et Jim or La Peau douce, and in La Femme d’à côté Bernard and Arlette Coudray have a charming fair-haired son, Thomas, who cannot alter Bernard’s tragic fate. The legacy is there already in Les 400 Coups (1959), where Antoine senses the shortcomings of his parents and is made to suffer for them. Truffaut never makes the mistake of using children as a sentimental device and reminds us that adult bust-ups occur in spite of them. Les 400 Coups also acts as predecessor to adult Eros through the attraction of the son to the maternal body, especially, as Anne Gillain notes, through the mother’s contemptuous flaunting of “her silky legs,” a linking of maternal exhibitionism and sexual attraction that remains a seminal shot for Truffaut’s cinema.2 His later adults, including the grown-up Antoine in Baisers volés (1968), repeat the primal scene in a way that makes Eros and nostalgia seem inseparable. Yet the adult act of touching, the caressing lover’s fingers on the “soft skin” of the beloved between upturned skirt and stocking tips, is also redemptive. Coming after Les 400 Coups, it turns ice into fire, coldness into tenderness. And Truffaut knew that for the image to work, to overcome the cliché of words and phrases, of “soft skin” and “tender touch,” it had to have diffuse magical warmth and the most beautiful actresses in French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, and Fanny Ardant, to make it work to perfection. But let us not forget that Truffaut can turn the meaning of the image inside out, too, as in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. It is not the body of the beautiful twenty-year-old Isabelle Adjani as Adèle that helps convey the image of the hand on the stocking; rather, she watches

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it secretly and voyeuristically, along with the spectator, as she spies on her ex-lover seducing a widow in the latter’s bedchamber. Here, as if to counter the criticism that he is fixated on “soft skin,” Truffaut reduces a previously mesmerizing gesture to the filter of a voyeur’s gaze, a lover’s tactic that brings an enigmatic smile to the watching Adèle’s lips. Our pairing here of these six features (six into three) highlights the boldness of larger brushstrokes and greater vision: first, the two history films of the passionate triangle taken from the novels of Roché; then, the love impasse of the couple shadowed by absence of the “third” in La Sirène du Mississippi (the already murdered betrothed) and in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (the famous father back in Guernsey). Finally, the betrayals in contemporary life, one early on in the city in La Peau douce and the other nearly twenty years later in the country in La Femme d’à côté. Of these films, three are proto-tragic through the sudden shock of violent death, but all six are prototragic in conveying a wider experience of impasse and loss. In addition, all six are premised on the failure of the romantic quest to realize an impossible dream. And because the romantic dream in each film becomes impossible in a particular way, what unites all six is a growing sense of doom, a haunting narrative, and, at the end, a destroyed sensibility. Having learnt from Hitchcock the lessons of shock and suspense, Truffaut surprises us in each case with the way in which disaster strikes. At critical moments, all six films keep us off balance. It is not just the novelty effect of viewing the unexpected outcome the first time around: for, in seeing things again, we recognize more clearly the second time around how it can happen, while still being surprised that it actually does. The destructive act or effect remains enigmatic long after the film has ended – the sign of a director at the height of his powers. The sense of loss is just as strong in those films without the violent death of major protagonists: death and loss often head in opposite directions. The endings of Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, and La Femme d’à côté are hammer blows out of nowhere. La Sirène du Mississippi, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and L’Histoire d’Adèle H. are about the outliving of pain and loss, the frayed journey of uncertain endurance, the open ending. All six films exist in the hiatus between romantic impasse and the fullness of tragic experience. History and circumstance impact upon Truffaut’s characters, but finally, we feel, their fragile fate does not impact upon wider circumstance. Truffaut puts melodrama behind him because the motives of his subjects are mixed and complex; yet somehow the intimate life-world he builds is enclosed. Personal loss seldom shatters society to its foundations, even though the impact of external breakdown – in Jules et Jim, the Great War and its ruinous aftermath – can accelerate the journey of his characters towards impasse. In truth, Godard reinvents the tragic sense more fully in his spectacular early series, A Bout de souffle (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Le Mépris (1963), and Pierrot le fou (1965), precisely through his revolution in film form. In Truffaut, life goes on; for Godard, the tragic always intimates a simultaneous rupture in the order of things and in the nature of the medium – cinema – that conveys it. Godard’s shattering of the cinematic art form intimates the shattering of a world. For both, violent death becomes a bold modernist shortcut to exit the impasse of failed romance, one that celebrates the shock of the new and brims with conviction.

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Let us start with the history triangle where Truffaut, like Bergman, was fascinated by the life of the new century before the Great War, but, like Renoir, even more fascinated by the later impact of that war upon European culture. We start then with Names as pairings, as masculine and feminine versions of the archetypal Same – Jules and Jim, Anne and Muriel; and, of course, the missing names that are not only vital but central, the nucleus from which intimacy radiates – the “Catherine” of Jeanne Moreau and “le continent” (Claude) of Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Reverse Triangles: Jules et Jim and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent In Jules et Jim we have the predicament of a woman who must choose between two men, and in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent that of a man who must choose between two women. In both films, no final choice is made. We have the clear biographical source in Roché, as self-fictionalized lover ( Jim) who “is chosen” in the first film and as hesitant lover (Claude) who must “choose” in the second. But in both films Truffaut takes untimely death beyond anything present in Roché’s fictions. They are the director’s endings, appended, that change the mood and the sensibility of story line. In Jules et Jim tragic death is prefaced by the trio watching footage of the Nazi bookburning in a local cinema. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent Truffaut confers upon Anne the deadly fate of tuberculosis. The other key advance in Truffaut is his fixing of narrative as a tale of two halves, where the settings of the first part of the film are in stark visual contrast to those in the second. In Jules et Jim we have the buoyancy of Paris and the Côte d’Azur for the prewar settings; for the postwar setting we have the more sober family chalet in Alsace. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent we start with the somber, austere family cottage that Claude visits on the west coast of Wales; in the second half we return with Claude to a bright sunlit Paris whose dazzling variations in mise-en-scène make us feel we are stepping back into a series of paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Degas. The difference between the two films is telling in terms of the finished look. In using Coutard’s sparkling widescreen black-and-white, Truffaut had attempted a visual homology to the painterly look of Impressionism; with the brilliant color cinematography of Nestor Almendros, he attempts to enfold us entirely within the Impressionist world, to make us enter like his characters into a series of animated paintings. In our second pairing this tale of two halves also becomes, in both endings, a tale of two worlds: in La Sirène du Mississippi, the south–north transition from an island off Africa (Réunion) to the South of France, and then the foothills of the French Alps; in L’Histoire d’Adèle H., the north–south reverse takes place in the New World, from a wintry Nova Scotia to the heat of tropical Barbados. Jules et Jim seems to enclose a whole cinema of active movement. In the figure of Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine we have the impulsiveness of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, but without the Norwegian’s housebound cowardice. Catherine plays love games and mind games, changes mood and sentiment in the blink of an eye, but she is also a

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doer, an active figure in the social scene, a body in perpetual movement. She controls Oskar Werner’s Jules and Henri Serre’s Jim at times as if they were her children – “mes enfants,” she calls them, and then rotates them as occasional lovers among other lovers, even though one of them, Jules, becomes her husband. The eternal present-ness of things in the film, on which Carole Le Berre has commented,3 is also the playfulness of things, of a life improvised, made up as it goes along, in the same way as Godard’s A Bout de souffle (1960) or Une Femme est une femme (1961). Here, music and song are essential. Georges Delerue’s score exudes a buoyant musical impressionism to match the impressionist rhythms of Coutard’s widescreen image. The keynote song by Boris Bassiak (who features as the guitar-playing Artur, one of Catherine’s fleeting lovers) is “Le Tourbillion de la vie.” With its irresistible femme fatale as theme, it turns out to have prescient lyrics. The song is sung to Bassiak’s guitar accompaniment by Catherine herself and is a triumphant cameo, a musical self-portrait. As both pleasurable interlude and vocal narrative, it reminds us not only of Truffaut’s debt to Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli but also of his inversion of their classical form. Bassiak’s song is joyous in tone but ominous in meaning: its “whirlwind of life” has no happy ending and is marked instead by Catherine’s final act of destruction as she drives herself and Jim off the edge of a ruined bridge to a watery grave. Another feature, which Les Deux Anglaises et le continent later continues, is the literary voice-over (here Michel Subor), a voice-over that is strictly impersonal, unlike the subjective fall-guy narration of film noir. It is literary commentary that frees the film from descriptive staging and makes its images fast and autonomous – hence, a film of the existential moment. But voice-over is also rhythmically integrated by Truffaut’s editing into the mix of song, music, and image, adding a vital fourth dimension. This then, we might argue, is a film with variations in speed but without longueurs or silences; verbal commentary distances it from melodrama, and shot composition within sequences takes stylistic priority over editing between sequences. The luminous instant is more important than the broader perspective. As Raymond Durgnat notes too, it highlights the new principle of the New Wave – pictorial space is moral space where morality is dynamic and has no rigid structure.4 Truffaut thus reenacts the New Wave (or Cahiers du Cinéma) reading of the widescreen films of Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger, here converted out of astute criticism into flamboyant practice. The spectator’s judgment on the actions of on-screen characters is itself part of the “whirlwind of life” that the films evoke. In Truffaut, though clearly indebted to Renoir’s legacy, it is a new mode of cinematic impressionism. When Terrence Malick takes voice-over back into the first person in Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), his intricate mix of image, voice, sound, and music seems more indebted to Truffaut than to anything prior in American cinema. Truffaut reminds us that Catherine is a bona fide femme fatale by echoing two famous instances from the American canon. Catherine’s sudden jump into the Seine when in the company of Jules and Jim echoes Madeleine Elster’s sudden jump into the sound beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo (1958) spotted by the watching Scottie Ferguson. The fatal downward flight of the car that contains Jim and Catherine at the film’s ending reminds us of the reversing car that contains Jean Simmons and

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Robert Mitchum at the end of Preminger’s Angel Face (1952). But the repetition of death by water as a haunting motif gives Truffaut’s narrative an internal logic that is all its own. In both cases Catherine’s actions are impulsive, but equally they give a new meaning to the word “impulsion.” It is a motion towards, a perpetuum mobile so that only a hair’s breadth separates the impulse to life from the impulse to death. The car’s death leap is the final movement that both sabotages and consummates all the prior movements in the film. It is the “end of the journey.” The impasse of intimacy is not, therefore, a cul-de-sac, but a void. The car crashes not into bricks and mortar but drowns in the liquid flow of water. The second half of the film attempts to relive the impulsiveness of the first, but to no avail; it is not so much the new domestic world of Jules, Catherine, and Sabine that undermines it. It is the external world of the war, of newsreels about the war and its universal disfigurement and death – the world of the front where Jules, Jim, and Albert have all fought, and where Jules and Jim had been on opposite sides. The bleak and grainy footage from the front that Truffaut inserts offers a brutal contrast to the sensuous look and tone of his own film: it shadows part two in a way that it never touched in part one. The tragic story of Guillaume Apollinaire that Truffaut has Jim tell as the anecdote of an unknown soldier, a gunner he has met at a hospital, shadows their collective desire to forget and let life go on. Toward the end, the stark newsreel of the book-burning hints at the repetition of nightmare – Truffaut had significantly shifted the end of Roché’s story forward three years from 1930 to1933. The world of sexual freedom now seems, in retrospect, to have been a world of political virginity, and is a fading memory. After the Apollinaire anecdote about a dying soldier’s unconsummated love, the passionate trio instantly attempts to escape the memories of war by bursting into song, but Catherine’s keynote song, as we have seen, casts her as an angel of doom, and the darker message lingers beyond the gaiety of the moment. Catherine’s tragedy is the refusal to choose, the opposite of that sense of resolution that existential thought demands, so that life for her consists of a continual postponement of choice, to the point at which both choice and lack of choice become unbearable. The proto-tragic can then be seen as a contradiction in terms – the tragedy of the existential. In Truffaut’s vision, the existential displaces the tragic world, but only in part. It cannot burn off its residue. What is proto-tragic, in this embryonic process of becoming tragic, is also, in the history films, retro-tragic, Truffaut’s obsession with a past world, and with modernism’s early loss of innocence. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent he represents the past largely through painting: his camera, courtesy of Almendros, painted rooms and landscapes in color with a vigor and precision that he seldom matched in any of his other films. During the Welsh sequences that take up the first part of the film, the palette was deliberately restricted to avoid primary colors. “We preferred compound, intermediate shades,” Almendros noted, “mauves, siennas, oranges.”5 The mauve walls of Claude’s room in the Brown family cottage on the Welsh coast are cool, dark, constricting: the light outside is that mainly of faded summer twilight as Truffaut sought to give Brittany, where he filmed, a more Nordic look. The scene is thus set for a tale of two worlds – Wales, where everything proceeds superficially according to the rules of the game,

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politeness, respect, courtship, decency; and France, where sunlight seems to radiate through the camera lens, to glimmer on the walls, to turn nature and culture into luminous miracle. In Wales, courtship begins with furtive glances and copious letters: in France, seduction takes over. In Wales everything seems humane: in Paris, everything seems attuned to betrayal and desire. In Wales, Truffaut strives to make Impressionism cinematic by staging it as “coasterly” and northern: in France he returns it to its origin in Paris and around the Seine, where it is self-conscious and full-blown pastiche. Monet and Renoir are everywhere and Degas joins them. Manet folds into Monet, who folds into Renoir, Auguste, who is suddenly flanked by Renoir, Jean. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe morphs into Partie de campagne (1936). The city, the Seine, and surrounding countryside are a riot of color and light. In somber “Wales,” Truffaut never shows us the sky. And in the bed in Calais where Claude eventually seduces Muriel, the suspenseful moment of the primary color: the white bed sheet is stained deep crimson by blood from the virgin’s broken hymen. Out of geography, Truffaut constructs his emotional axis for the film. In the north everything is constricted in the service of love, marriage, and family: in the south everything is opened in favor of polyvalent desire. There are also conflicting forms of matriarchy at work that reinforce this flow of movement. The mother of the two sisters, Mrs Brown, favors conventional morality and married love for her daughters. Claude’s mother, Madame Roc, favors for her son, by contrast, an easy promiscuity in the art world of Paris that subverts emotional attachment to either of the English sisters. The former morality, we could say, is late Victorian. The latter morality is no morality at all, but rather a strategy to preserve Oedipal attachment. To the very end, Claude remains a mama’s boy. And we could say, strangely, that Truffaut’s voice-over is inadvertently on Madame Roc’s side. It insists not merely on signposting the action but on commenting directly on the state of mind of its protagonists, thus creating even greater distance from them. For sure, it works against uncritical empathy, but does it also work against the emotional power of the image? It is a fine balance, a balance that Truffaut hoped to strengthen by blending the equilibrium of film and painting with that of film and writing. Perhaps he is saying to us, “Look! A movie that is both literature and painting at the same time!” It was a calculated risk that, commercially speaking, did not work in his favor. The venture itself remains fascinating. In the French sequences the characters seem transformed, placed in a series of scenes defined by painterly staging. Given that they are all self-consciously attached to the art world, Claude as dealer and critic, Anne as ambitious artist, Madame Roc as cultivated art lover, Diurka as Claude’s editor who later becomes Anne’s lover, style merges almost completely with subject. With its endless letters and diary and insistent voice-over, the film comes to resemble both a textual image and a painted book. Just as in painting, the artist’s studio and models are subjects of the artist’s gaze, so here, reflexively, they are the subjects of Truffaut’s gaze. But there is more. It is as if, wishfully, his characters enter into painterly stagings that are not real but oneiric, the subject of their own imagination and desires. They step into scenes their minds have invented. This uncanny use of staging is justified and attenuated by time-lapse. They are now new century art people

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stepping back into painterly scenes from the works of a previous generation. Truffaut draws primarily on French painting of the 1870s and 1880s for his staging of the 1900s and beyond. In effect his subjects live out their impressionistic dreams in a postImpressionist world, absorbing the legacy of the previous generation (even though, of course, Monet and Renoir would still be alive). Just as Léaud’s Claude starts off in the picture looking anachronistic, dressed as he is in clothes reminiscent of 1960s Antoine Doinel, so he ends up wearing fin-de-siècle clothes in the Impressionist stagings that, as time passes, become distinctly passé in their look. This gives a feel to the film that is hallucinatory twice over – Léaud is dressed for the future but framed by the past. Just as Claude is stepping back into the vision of a previous generation, so Doinel is stepping back into the vision of a previous epoch. Through the face and figure of Léaud, Claude becomes Antoine’s distant ancestor and double, locked into a process of backward transition. Claude’s existential slogan might well have been “To choose is to lose.” For, in a perverse way, he enjoys the delay in consummation which prolongs the art of seduction at the expense of its ultimate purpose. But the malaise runs deeper. The delay has been such that neither of the sisters will now consider their seduction as an act of love, as both would have done much earlier. Truffaut plays here with the delay of suspense. We first think Muriel will be the chosen one, but Claude lacks the conviction (and freedom from his mother) to make it so. When it comes, actual seduction – twice over – is reversed (Anne before Muriel), and it is haunted by its virtual history of love’s opportunity lost. Claude simply becomes the way station for other experiences – with Anne, it is the pursuit of the visual arts and further intimacies elsewhere in Paris; for Muriel it is love, marriage, and family life back in Wales. Failing to choose one but seducing both, Claude ends up with neither. He is left with a sense of his own redundancy. For Truffaut to engineer, contrary to the novel, the deaths of Anne and of Madame Roc seems meretricious – a desperate attempt to up the romantic pathos in the home straight. For the prior narrative points elsewhere to a life going on independently of its unstable center, that is, Claude’s brittle being.

Shadows of Absence: La Sirène du Mississippi and L’Histoire d’Adèle H. In these two films, one contemporary, one historical, intimacy is shadowed by an absent third party, a hauntingly absent presence. Instead of the Roché lover who cannot finally choose in the ménage à trois, we have the troubled couple who cannot throw off the effect of the absent other, the off-screen figure who, in one film, is a famous author and, in the other, a corpse with a photograph for a face. “Adèle H.” turns out to be the younger daughter of Victor Hugo, a little-known woman whose real-life diary, written in code, had been deciphered only a few years before Truffaut’s film. In history, the absent father; in time present, the absent betrothed. For in La Sirène du Mississippi (the title of the original William Irish novel Waltz into Darkness would have

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been  better),  the absent Julie Roussel is impersonated by the arriving Marion (Catherine Deneuve), who wants to marry Réunion’s tobacco magnate, Louis Mahé ( Jean-Paul Belmondo as the most unlikely virgin in screen history), and has murdered en route the rival she impersonates in order to abscond with his fortune. Truffaut can get no closer to Hitchcock than this. The second Mrs de Winter (Rebecca, 1940), Marion Edgar, peripatetic girl-thief with hair-dye disguises (Marnie, 1964), the fake Madeleine Elster helping to murder the real Madeleine Elster (Vertigo), all are in the mix. Deneuve is their fair-haired French composite. Belmondo, in turn, seems to blend the pursuing Scottie Ferguson with rich businessman Mark Rutland, whose office safe Marnie robs with such erotic zeal. Just as neither Scottie nor Mark can punish the glamorous blonde who has duped them, so the bedazzled Louis takes up again with the femme fatale who has fooled him. Just as Hitchcock had turned Sean Connery against his James Bond image to make him husband-voyeur and rapist in Marnie, so Truffaut upends Belmondo’s existential glamour image by making him a foolish husband-cum-fall-guy. Connery and Belmondo give great performances, but not those expected of them by audiences, and Truffaut unwittingly enacted a repetition of the disappointment that shadowed the tepid reception of Hitch’s 1963 picture. Yet film-wise, Truffaut is ambitious. His feature projects a complex afterlife where contingency and being supersede genre. It is a sign the old genre cinema he loved had already gone by 1969. Other echoes of postwar Hollywood haunt the picture, among them the isolated farmhouse in the winter snow that is the centerpiece of the murder hunt in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951). It resurfaces in the Alpine sequence with our murderous couple on the run, and that image, rather than the recent Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which Truffaut had declined to direct, seems more germane – as were the fugitive newlyweds of Ray’s earlier film, They Live by Night (1948). With a film dedicated to Renoir, however, you feel Truffaut wants to demythologize the mythic subjects of his Hollywood favorites, to empower naturalistic locations (the plantation house, the plantation itself, and, later, the road journey and winter settings in the South of France): all gain definition through contrasts of climate and continent, and Truffaut uses widescreen color to generate Bazinian transparency of vision through the constancy of motion. It is, like Pierrot le fou, a road movie for a post-Renoir age, but one in which the master’s touch is still felt. The film is therefore less an imitation of suspense than a Renoir-style deconstruction of suspense. One breathtaking scene illustrates this – the sequence-shot in Jacques Audiberti Square in Antibes. After Marion has absconded with his fortune, Louis tracks her down to a nightclub in the town on the Côte d’Azur where she is now a hostess (and probably a prostitute). The sequence opens with Marion making the journey across the square from her hotel to the club opposite: from the Monorail (named by Truffaut after an Audiberti novel) to the Phoenix (presumably since she has risen from the ashes). Louis waits until the square is deserted, then enters her hotel room via the outside balcony. It is a role reversal of Grace Kelly’s jaunt across the courtyard in Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) to enter the apartment of wife-killer Raymond Burr. Here it is not what happens but how Truffaut films what happens, that counts. While Hitchcock opted for a fixed point-of-view camera to intimate the

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anxious gaze of James Stewart as Kelly makes her move, Truffaut’s moving camera stands for our collective gaze, which is at first attached to Louis but then detaches itself from him so that he becomes the object of our gaze. We are, in effect, looking clinically at the subject whose gaze we had shared only moments before. The shot takes place at night, starts with Marion at her top floor window looking out, then tilts down to the street until Louis, fore-grounded, enters the frame left to right and watches her exit the hotel from behind a tree in the square. The camera leaves Louis to pan left–right, following her semicircular route to the club; after her club entry (and exit from the frame) Louis again enters the frame left to right, but this time the camera tracks forward in a following shot as he approaches the doorman, who tries to persuade him inside. Louis refuses then retraces Marion’s steps to the front of the hotel. He waits for a passerby to move out of sight before swiftly ascending, in long shot, up the front of the building via its balconies and fire-escape. The camera records in real time the grace and athleticism of Belmondo’s movement upward, right until the moment that he disappears through the window of Marion’s room. The shot ends with him in the very position that Marion had occupied at its beginning. The elliptical cut that follows is to Belmondo in the hotel room, loading his revolver as he hears Marion’s voice on the stair outside. So this is noirish after all, the girl, the guy, the gun, the double-cross. Moreover, it takes place at night. And yet Truffaut reformats the atmosphere. There is no menacing music on the soundtrack, only brief disco sounds as the club door is opened and closed; indeed, the soundtrack is silent save for occasional footsteps and brief altercation between Belmondo and the  doorman. Belmondo’s ascent of the hotel façade, wreathed in shadows, can hardly be heard and is only dimly seen in the distance. This is not noir chiaroscuro, elongated shadows, and high-contrast lighting. The colors are too soft, the darkness too delicate: it is film art as a pure impressionism of the nocturnal scene. Were Truffaut to add music, to cut sharply, to show Belmondo’s ascent in reverse-angle close-up as melodramatic signifier of danger, we would be back to classic noir. But we are fully and firmly out of it. With his back to us throughout, Louis’ actions are natural in their execution, and Truffaut’s camera is unobtrusive. He is, we could say, more like Renoir than Renoir himself, for this is the genius of Renoir taken out of a cinema of light and transformed into a cinema of darkness. Truffaut claimed that in this film, uniquely, there was no second man or woman to create an intimate triangle.6 Taking her cue from this, Gillain quite rightly claims that the originality of the film lies in the loneliness of its lovers.7 The third element, for her, is not personal but institutional – the interventions of Comolli, the private detective hired by Louis, and then the police after Comolli’s murdered corpse has been discovered. Yet the truth is more complex. The loneliness is generated precisely by the absent third, Julie Roussel, present by proxy in the face and figure of her sister, Berthe, who has come to Réunion to search for her missing sister. Since Truffaut used actress Nelly Bourgeaud for the role of Berthe and the photograph of Julie, the arrival of Berthe constitutes an iconic return of the repressed in which a resemblance between the destroyed photograph and live sister – despite differences in hairstyle and

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color – is clear. “Do I remind you of her?” Judy asked Scottie concerning the “dead” Madeleine. Well, this is Truffaut’s variation on the Vertigo template, and Rivette will later repeat the strategy with the dual casting of Laure Marsac in his “identical sisters” mystery Secret défense (1998). In La Sirène du Mississippi, the unassuming presence of Berthe animates the photograph and brings Julie back to life – a reunion in Réunion. Later, Louis will confess to Marion that Julie’s letters were truly beautiful, thus echoing the trope of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: the word in itself can generate true love. But it is more than this: the word of the deceased is permanent, the presence of the active lover fleeting. The letter-writing and photo of Julie has sealed the ideal of love in Mahé’s imagination as idée fixe; the beauty and intrigue of Marion will be its converse, an expression of its fragmented, unreliable, and mundane being. It is the trigger for Louis’ erotic masochism that takes what is on offer over what might have been, knowing the difference can never be forgotten. To live with betrayal, murder, and near-death by poisoning is the extreme form of Louis’ surrender: he will remain haunted by the dead letter-writer he never met. We might add that Marion’s off-screen lover who puts her up to murderous intrigue is Truffaut’s version of Hitchcock’s Gavin Elster, but since he is jailed after taking Louis’ fortune away from Marion, he just becomes another loose end in Truffaut’s convoluted plot. Usually, say in the Rohmer romance, it is the young idealistic woman is who driven to make compromises through the vicissitudes of experience. But there is a neat comparison to be made between La Sirène du Mississippi and Rohmer’s successful film of the same year, Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969), where Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the Belmondo role of the male suitor searching for the ideal spouse. With Rohmer, however, things fall into place – though only just. Trintignant as the unnamed narrator sleeps with the experienced, divorced Maud before marrying a younger Catholic woman he assumes to be chaste but who has in fact had an affair with Maud’s ex-husband. Here Rohmer plays on the irony of the brittle ignorance that often proves the dubious foundation of love, marriage, and family: Trintignant has his cake and eats it. Belmondo, on the other hand, has the worst of both worlds. He submits to the impulses of Julie’s beautiful killer, who then betrays him. And yet Truffaut goes against the grain and drains the situation of melodrama: in fact, he may well have de-dramatized the plot altogether. For the motif of the couple’s uncertain journey shadowed by the absent other is familiar from Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), which Truffaut did not particularly care for. The absent third deepens the intimate impasse even where our uncertain couple are determined to tough it out to the end. It is the nearly the same in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. But there is a crucial difference. The impasse is in place from the very start and nothing can turn it around. Adèle – played with overwhelming conviction by Isabelle Adjani – feels rejected by her famous father, who had a fondness for her older sister Léopoldine, and she wants entitlement in society more than transgressive passion.8 She pursues Pinson, the young English lieutenant in Nova Scotia who has previously seduced her, not so much out of infatuation but through the desire for marriage – to become Mrs Pinson, a name in society that is not her own. Truffaut’s use of suspense itself works through the

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withholding of the surname Hugo, as Adèle tries one subterfuge after another to conceal her parentage. Not only does she not want to be known for who she is, disguising herself constantly, but she does not really know who she is, a girl with the first name of her mother and the second name of her father who senses she has no name of her own. Her new life in Nova Scotia thus exists in the limbo of nonidentity. To become the English lieutenant’s wife is her main aim, and Truffaut’s film provides uncanny comparison with both novel and film of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Fowles’ 1969 fiction, Sarah Woodruff has been dishonored by an affair with a French lieutenant for whom she waits in vain out on the wave-swept Cobb at Lyme Regis (not too far north of Guernsey, where Truffaut shot his film). In the 1981 film of the book, directed by Karel Reisz and scripted by Harold Pinter, Sarah and her  Victorian suitor Charles Smithson are played by real-life lovers, Anna and Mike, having an off-set affair. The reflexive device was an ingenious fix by Pinter and Reisz to reproduce the multilayered nature of a retro-Victorian fiction. To watch it now, however, might prompt us to think it a conflation of L’Histoire d’Adèle H. and La Nuit américaine. Whereas Fowles has played ironically on Victorian conventions of love and dishonor, Truffaut and Jean Gruault had passionately forged something much bolder, an absence of love that had no possible name at all. This film is Truffaut’s delineation of the female gaze, Adèle’s obsession with Pinson that Truffaut had taken from her diary and her letters home. From the time she spies him out of the window in the local library in Halifax, she is spying on him, voyeuristically, as much as confronting him. While Victor Hugo is the absent third who shadows her liaison, since her actions are infected by her love–hate relationship with Daddy, there is the sense that she, too, wishes to be a third party. This “marriage” scenario is not the wish-dream of a romantic woman who wants to rescue an officer from his philandering and turn him into a good husband. It is the perverse strategy of a near-psychotic obsessive who wants the title of his officer’s name to spite her father and is happy for Pinson to continue with his affairs as usual so that she can view them from the outside. The scene in which she spies on the bedroom from the tree branch outside the window, seeing Pinson seducing a willing widow confirms her attitude: she takes a delight in the voyeurism of the third party, wishing to be the absent, unseen third who secretly watches her spouse’s carnal betrayals. The traditional role of the male voyeur in film is upended here by Truffaut’s genre (and gender) transformation. Adele’s deepest desire is not love but to watch desire, to become a surrogate aroused by the mutual arousal of the intimate couple who betray her. So while the absent father has preempted conventional love and marriage, the “absent” daughter desires to delight in observing transgression with a fixed title as Mrs Pinson, or, as she claims to prefer, “Mrs Penson.” With an i or an e, the new title would kill two birds with one stone: it would cover up the traces of ancestry but also the void of self that love, in her case, could never fill. The narrative thus oscillates between Hugo and Adèle as the absent “third” in couple relationships. But there is another absent third – the deceased older sister. The dream-drowning sequences, in which Almendros brilliantly superimposes images of  Adèle’s drowning body upon her sleeping nighttime figure, intimate another

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reason for the void – the celebrity existence in life and death of Léopoldine, much loved and lamented by father Victor. The fame of her drowned sister has metaphorically drowned Adèle’s sense of self: the repeated dream turns the metaphor into vivid repetition of the sisterly fate, to which she becomes an involuntary slave. If  Adèle has craved the paternal love bestowed upon her sister, she does not want to be her drowning double in order to receive it. And yet, nightmare makes it so – again and again. The pincer movement of father and sister has crushed her protective shield, and the new shield lies in the name that is nowhere in her own family and that she can never claim except mendaciously – Mrs Pinson. The influence of Bergman is at its strongest in this film. It is, as Truffaut acknowledged, the story of a face, made a year after Truffaut had seen Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972), which he rightly predicted would be the Swede’s biggest international success since The Silence (1963). For Truffaut, the later Bergman stresses “the absolute priority of the human face,”9 and then he makes the vital qualification. The face is female. “His female characters,” he observed, “are infinitely subtle, while his male characters are conventions.”10 For art-house audiences of the period, The Silence and Cries and Whispers stressed the priority of the female face without the puzzling abstractions of Persona (1966). Truffaut absorbs key aspects of both films: from Cries and Whispers, a history drama of family life shot in beautifully restricted colors (black, white, and red); and from The Silence, both the motif of voyeurism, with older sister Ester monitoring the sexual adventures of the younger Anna and the initial journey of both sisters to a forbidding foreign land. But there are also critical points of departure. The Bergman films are sister relationships with peripheral males. Adèle H. is a woman alone. Truffaut’s absolute priority is the face of Adjani. This singularity is  a pure Truffaut conception, where everyone else is on the  outside and Adjani dominates the screen. The decision by Truffaut to shoot most of  the Nova Scotia sequences at night to stress claustrophobia and isolation is vindicated by the painterly look that Almendros brings to the screen with the use of tinted oil lamps, near underexposure, and a new Kodak emulsion with greater chromatic range.11 The blue eyes, dark brown hair, and pale forehead of Adjani stand out  against the light and against the night. The singularity of the image is so powerful you do not feel that any love affair could rescue Adèle from her emotional obsession with names and naming, to which truth, honesty, and ordinary living are all subordinate and inconsequential. If this is a film about impasse, it is also a film about humiliation. Adèle appeals to Pinson knowing he will reject her and continue to do so, doing everything in her power to secure not love but a wedding ring, trying to blackmail him by turning his army superiors against him or, in desperation, pretending to be pregnant. Nothing works but Adèle fails at such great unendurable length that this is the one film where Truffaut takes humiliation out of familiar Bergman territory and makes it his own, examining the emotional cruelty that people wreak on each other at close quarters, and doing so in a perfectly balanced way, without coldness or sentimentality. The film  is no clichéd romance of unconsummated passion – after all, sex has already taken place between the couple. It is a romance of rejection and its many repetitions. If Adèle has felt rejected by her father, she can now at least feel rejected by

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someone else, and go on doing so. Perhaps it is northern winter psychosis in Nova Scotia, but there is a human limit to how far Adèle can go on playing this tortuous masochistic game. In the blaze of tropical color that is Barbados (shot by Truffaut in Gorée, a small island off the coast of Dakar), the heat seems to have bleached everything to oblivion, including her memory. So although she has followed her English lieutenant to his new destination, the abrupt change of climate and culture conspire to eliminate his very being from her world. The stultifying madness is shown at its best in the intricate sequence where Truffaut films the non-recognition of her street encounter with the officer she has stalked endlessly in the New World. Walk on by. It is a fitting climax to one of the most disturbing and precise of all his films.

Personal Catastrophes: La Peau douce and La Femme d’à côté Truffaut’s twin contemporary tales of adultery are among his most challenging works, and the pairing of Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in the later film generates greater emotional intensity than any of his previous couples. Both films have appeared to critics to be straightforwardly naturalistic, but both show Truffaut’s flair for innovation, his ability, at his best, to find a distinctive style and look to a film that suits its story. If this is understated, it is nonetheless vital. Truffaut has described La Peau douce as a film which delivers “an antipoetic image” and is the antithesis in that respect of Jules et Jim.12 The anti-poetry of infidelity is presented through sharp cutting, jagged leaps in time and space, and the repeated foregrounding of everyday objects over its fragile characters. The clandestine lovers are, as it were, immersed in the bric-à-brac of modernity, and just as brittle. Convention has it that, in cinema, romantic love shines out radiantly and eliminates non-signifying objects; but here, fragmented desire is forever lurching around material obstacles, a prisoner to banality. Pompous writer and critic Pierre Lachenay lusts after beautiful airline stewardess Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), but for Truffaut the pair are also trading the culture brands they represent. The 1960s jet plane (Paris to Lisbon) is a sign of status travel, complemented by the beautiful girl in uniform; while the Balzac expert, forever travelling on his prestigious lecture tour, has his own line in cultural capital. The affair is messy and imprecise, unpredictable and governed by risk. It aspires to Eros and glitter but remains persistently mundane, and so, sadly, Truffaut could not take his audience with him. Where is the empathy, and where is the steamy, uncertain passion of Mitchum and Greer, Gardner and Lancaster, Bogart and Gloria Grahame? Truffaut freezes us out by making his adulterous couple vain and febrile. We are on the outside looking in, and if there is viewer empathy, it comes for the figure of aggrieved and vengeful spouse Franca, played with such passion by Nelly Benedetti. The domestic scenes (shot in Truffaut’s Paris apartment) center the film where everything else floats in fragments. But the cinematic fragments are the real challenge.

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Here his ambition runs parallel to other New Wave films whose commercial failures have often blinded critics to the knockbacks the movement had to endure in the early 1960s. Truffaut mentioned Resnais’ Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) as a film close to his own, sharply cut, segmented, observational, experimenting with continuity. Although his film is technically less daring, there is a key parallel: the long mobile takes of Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) are replaced by dissonant montage in Muriel ou le temps d’un retour just as Truffaut’s panoramic Jules et Jim is inverted by elliptical desire in La Peau douce. The latter has close affiliations with other New Wave city films that were equally baffling for audiences, Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion (1962), and Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961). We might want to call this series the Infamous Five, since each of the five directors altered course soon after in re-planning their film futures. The blip in Truffaut’s career should be seen as part of a wider New Wave fragility often glossed over in the complacent retro-myth of its dazzling effervescence. Viewed now, La Peau douce is just as important in New Wave history as any of the other four, and neglected at our peril. After the film’s failure, Truffaut regretted not proceeding with an idea shelved in  preproduction – telling the story through flashback. This, after all, had been a favorite noir signifier of erotic disaster. But this film is better for its straight chronology and shock finale, just as Truffaut’s use of flashback for his later film with Ardant and Depardieu now seems equally right. La Peau douce startles us with the murderous suddenly issuing from the mundane. La Femme d’à côté has tragic inevitability stamped all over it, a sense of doom foretold, which a framing narration, the eyes and voice of Madame Jouve, captures perfectly. Separated by use of time-sequence the two films also present opposed versions of the passionate triangle. In La Peau douce it is tight, secretive desire, and in La Femme d’à côté, unconditional love. Both are doomed, and the latter, we might add, is even more destructive than the former. We might also note another difference. With its attention to place and detail and character, La Peau douce was, as Truffaut claimed, realism incarnate. La Femme d’à côté seems, by contrast, a film that comes out of a dream, the product of a dreaming brain that escapes the strictures of waking logic in its leaps of the imagination. You wake up one day to discover your former lover has moved in opposite your family home … but then perhaps you haven’t woken up at all. So, once again, the Truffaut paradox: for the 1960s, a realist location narrative so disassembled in its composition that it jars the eyes and ears; for the 1980s, a realist location narrative so flowing in its form you can almost forget that its initial premise makes of it a dream that turns to nightmare. Before we proceed, a necessary diversion: the Truffaut empathy factor that can be so troubling stares us in the face in one key instance linking sisters Dorléac and Deneuve. It is Truffaut’s ban on blue jeans, the nearest he came to a prohibition on idolatrous images. Old-fashioned at heart, he copied Hitchcock in his predilection for haute couture, but the Edith Head costumes for Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedren had blended with Hitchcock’s aesthetics of artifice. Without blue jeans in their Truffaut location movies, Dorléac and Deneuve look, as young women of the 1960s, like fish out of water. This is because Truffaut does not create a cinema of

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artifice but one of pictorial realism in the Renoir style. The costumes, however, of Dorléac and Deneuve in La Peau douce and La Sirène du Mississippi look at times like pastiche Edith Head, the two sisters fussily overdressed as though they were forever on the catwalk. Not only does Godard’s Jean Seberg come to mind as a refreshing counter but equally Audrey Hepburn in Donen’s Two for the Road, his 1967 road movie, Hepburn happily wearing blue jeans for her journey through France two years before Truffaut released La Sirène du Mississippi. In La Peau douce, when Dorléac is not only reprimanded by her stuffy lover for wearing them but told to change out of them, Truffaut turns the prohibition into a reflexive fix. Wearing jeans in Pierre’s car as it speeds towards Reims, Truffaut films just two unflattering shots of Dorléac in jeans – the first a close shot of her rump as she turns and reaches back over the passenger seat, the second a tunnel-vision out-of-car shot as she walks away to change into something more “feminine.” Without skirt or dress, Bazinian clarity is duly denied to the Truffaut heroine. Meanwhile, at the end of her fugitive road movie, in which she should have been wearing blue jeans, boots, and blouson noir, Deneuve is struggling ankle-deep in snow in her best winter fashion outfit, having earlier been shown in the club Phoenix in a silly bunny costume to which Truffaut apparently has no aesthetic objection. This does indicate a deeper dilemma. It is precisely because Truffaut’s flair for the  lightness of being moves him away from a cinema of the body, that when embodiment does become a tactile presence in his films we notice it immediately. Nelly Benedetti has it for sure in La Peau douce as she marches, shotgun in hand, towards her husband’s local bistro to take her revenge. Ardant as Mathilde and Depardieu as Bernard together have it in La Femme d’à côté in a way that makes Truffaut’s previous couples seem ethereal. Here, the tale of two halves that marks the earlier films is continued in a novel way. The first half of the story sees events from Bernard’s point of view while the second half focuses largely on Mathilde, creating a double subjectivity within the objective framing of the Jouve narration. We start with the focus on Bernard’s ideal family as the childless Mathilde and her  husband move into the empty house that, situated at an angle of forty-five degrees, is near enough to be “next door” yet, separated by a country lane, far enough away to be “opposite.” There is a direct sight line on the diagonal from one house to the other, where the motif of seeing out through windows and doors is central to the plot and where the dynamics of visual topography blend with developing psychodrama. There is a sense, then, of isolation – the two houses and nothing else nearby, but also a sense of propinquity, where Truffaut creates suspense by playing on the fluid boundaries of the public and private spheres. Front bedroom windows give a perfect view of the front door opposite, from where the lovers monitor respectively the movements of the other couple. One sequence, soon after the new neighbors have settled in, illustrates this. In a symmetrical shot/reverse shot match, the two women are leaning simultaneously out of their front first floor windows in unexpected greeting as a flustered Bernard, anxious to avoid Mathilde and drive off quickly to work from outside his front door, absentmindedly leaves his briefcase on the car roof. It is a brief spectacle of apparent

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connection, though of course, at that point, the audience knows what Bernard’s wife and Mathilde’s husband do not, the real nature of that connection in the past. This accretion of topographic detail drives forward the drama of love–hate infidelity. Here Truffaut touches base, after over twenty years, with the American psychodrama of the late 1950s – with Ray, Preminger, and Hitchcock. It is almost as if the New Wave had never been born. And the key to this is the link between moral and pictorial space. If we take the early Cahiers view of the 1950s American cinema not as film noir but as moral fable, where psychology is complex, unlike melodrama, but also takes second place to the posing of moral dilemma, a view that Truffaut as critic fully endorsed,13 we have the key. Film is an arena for judgment where we move beyond immediate identification with character. This explains many of his favorite films of the late fifties, among them Bigger Than Life (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), and Bonjour Tristesse (1958). In Bigger than Life, Truffaut, though seeing psychology as secondary to fable, applauds Ray’s detailed accuracy in portraying the growing madness of family man Ed Avery, who is addicted to cortisone. The crucial role of the telephone and of the staircase in the Avery household, the madness in the garden, the hospital stay after the breakdown, all are extended visual images echoed in La Femme d’à côté. In discussing Bonjour Tristesse, Truffaut spotted a likeness to Preminger’s earlier film Angel Face, with its destructive powers of the child-woman who cannot face adulthood. For La Femme d’à côté, Truffaut now generates the psychodrama of a woman in trouble completely dominating the second part of his film. In this case, however, the woman is already adult, and in despair because she cannot alter the past. Finally, two things stand out for Truffaut in The Wrong Man, Hitchcock’s creation of a film without a hero, in which, halfway through, a transfer of guilt takes place, followed by a crucial switch in emphasis. The wrongfully accused Henry Fonda unwittingly transfers his guilt to his besieged wife, who translates it into shame and madness. We see here something of the exchange-dilemma of Bernard and Mathilde. In the first part, Bernard becomes erratic and unpredictable because he is torn between guilt and desire. In the second part after the affair is out in the open, Mathilde cracks up, torn between shame and desire. And finally we should not forget Sunset Boulevard (1950), with its voice-over informing its travelling shot of police speeding on open roads to a fateful emergency, a shot that begins and ends Truffaut’s movie just as it had the classic noir of Billy Wilder. From all these elements Truffaut forges an original film and creates telling, remarkable suspense out of l’amour fou. Early on, we expect Bernard to restart the relationship; instead it is Mathilde. We then expect the volatile Bernard to dominate it, but Mathilde begins to back away from the risk and the danger, at which point Bernard snaps. Once the affair is in the open with the scandal of his attack on her at the garden party, we expect Bernard to break down when Mathilde is snatched back by her husband. Instead, it is Mathilde who cracks up and is hospitalized as Bernard seeks marital reconciliation. We expect the betrayed spouses to be openly angry and unforgiving; yet by and large they are compassionate and forgiving, as in a dream. At each stage Truffaut wrong-foots us, and so does his ending. With the selling of the house by her husband and Mathilde’s release from hospital, we expect bittersweet redemption in

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which wounds start to heal as the ex-lovers again go their separate ways. But Truffaut turns back to Angel Face and to Jules et Jim – to the passionate woman as double killer. Just as everything seems right, catastrophe strikes, and yet Mathilde is no femme fatale. She is the agent of a fate foretold, a fate which engulfs both her and her lover who, as Madame Jouve tells us, can neither live with each other nor live without each other. It is the purest expression of impasse that Truffaut ever created.

Conclusion: Truffaut and the Modernist Psychodrama The impasse of intimacy is at the very core of Truffaut’s psychodramas. His modernism revolves around different ways of expressing it. These, as we have seen, create impressive variations. Each commands a distinctive style that blends with a general vision. In Jules et Jim he reinvents not only the costume drama but also the travelling shot for black-and-white CinemaScope, and transforms the lyrical use of song and music. In La Peau douce he foregrounds the daily sounds of modern life and makes them, as Michel Chion has noted, a crucial part of the film’s journey to inescapable fate.14 Sonic details follow one another relentlessly like singular noises freighted as portents of disaster – telephone, lift, petrol pump, jet engine, electric entry buzzers – all, in retrospect, seem audio cues for the brief and brutal showdown still to come. In the earlier film he leaps and spirals through history, in the latter he enshrines the detail of the everyday in the durée of movement. In Les Deux Anglaises et  le continent he paints an impressionist picture of a post-Impressionist age where bodies and objects seem to drift across the surface of the screen. In L’Histoire d’Adèle H. the textures of New World Halifax are by contrast dark, somber, material, and grounded. In La Sirène du Mississippi his uncertain lovers take flight in a patchwork of  iridescent images, the whiteness of summer light turning to the whiteness of winter snow. In La Femme d’à côté, his uncertain lovers are rooted by propinquity. They periodically move away, only to return to their adjacent houses. One film gives us trajectory, the other circularity. But each unlocks a psychodrama whose outcome is uncertain. In La Sirène du Mississippi, we expect our febrile couple to go under, but they survive until the last frame. In La Femme d’à côté we expect them to tough it out and head their separate ways, but instead they go under. In film noir, uncertainty until the very end is a function of suspense. It is largely melodramatic – will transgressors finally get away with their crime? (Of course in classic noir they do not.) But in Truffaut it is psychic, existential, a function of emotional impasse. Will our flawed moral beings survive their own failures and shortcomings? As a watching audience we must judge whether or not they will, and then we must judge them. Simple attraction and repulsion are polarities which Truffaut disallows. His psychodrama is then a moral fable of sorts, in which the complex nature of his subjects cannot easily be simplified, and there is too much stylistic and thematic variation between the different “impasse” films for moral fable to be reduced to any simple formula. Hence the framing of suspense differs from one film to another, each

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has its unique variant so that the audience must judge and guess at the same time, and the modernist spectator is handed this double function – to guess and to judge – that deters the viewing extremes of being close and then swept away, or of loftily sitting on high. Put more succinctly, the phenomenology of impasse must be felt and judged at the same time. Truffaut’s variations on impasse are all modernist innovations, so that we must strive for balanced judgment by being emotional but also clinical. Jules et Jim could well have been a cozy ride, but the newsreel footage of war and bookburnings makes things otherwise: the darkening of mood coincides with the darkening of history. And Truffaut can darken mood, as in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, even when he is brightening the image. Impressionist paradise, in this, is accompanied by impending death. If the Doinel cycle, followed by the utterly whimsical L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), is the light side of Truffaut, then the impasse of intimacy is the dark side. Darkness makes him more lyrical, more pungent, his camera more fluid, his colors more breathtaking. It is no good demanding cinematic gravitas because he does not deliver it, and to do so would compromise his unique style. The paradox is a fertile one. He lightens darkness, and yet darkness can only be created in the first place by giving it light and visible movement. Thus the sequence-shot in Jacques Audiberti Square is not only an inspired piece of filmmaking in its own right. It also becomes a visual metaphor for all that is great in Truffaut’s cinema.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

David Thomson, “François Truffaut,” in A Biographical Dictionary of Film (London: André Deutsch, 1994), p. 759. Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 193; trans. Alistair Fox François Truffaut : The Lost Secret (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2013). Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, trans. Bill Krohn (London: Phaidon Press, 2005), p. 42. Raymond Durgnat, “From Moral Space to Pictorial Space,” preface to François Truffaut, Jules et Jim, trans. Nicholas Fry (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 9. Nestor Almendros, A Man with a Camera, trans. R.P. Belash (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 102. Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 249. Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 196. Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, pp. 227–228. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (London: Allen Lane, 1980), p. 259. Truffaut, The Films in my Life, p. 258. Almendros, A Man with a Camera, pp. 143–144. Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 156. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 146. Michel Chion, Film: A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 271.

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A Fine Madness Digressions on Pathologies in Truffaut’s Films Francis Vanoye Vivement dimanche! (1983), the last work of François Truffaut, was adapted from a novel by Charles Williams and is a curious film that opens with a shotgun murder filmed in a direct, front-on mode. This is followed by a typically film noir story, which is characterized by the stylistics of sentimental comedy. The film ends with the murderer–lawyer character named Master Clément, played stoically by Philippe Laudenbach, who, cornered by the police in a phone booth, gives the following speech after having confessed to his crimes but before shooting himself in the head: “I have no remorse for I am not a part of society. Everything that I have done was for women, because I like to look at them, touch them, smell them, come with them and make them come. Women are magical … so I became a magician and a minute from now there will be another dead body in this story.” Prophetic remarks? (Truffaut died the following year from a brain tumor.) In fact, one could attribute them to the author of the film himself, as though, breaking from the role of the beloved director for his audience and colleagues, he could finally fully embrace the intricate entanglements between his sexual and murderous drives.

Prowling Madness Truffaut’s first feature-length film, Les 400 Coups (1959), portrayed a character named Antoine Doinel ( Jean-Pierre Léaud) who embodied almost all the criteria for antisocial personality disorder before the age of fifteen, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM IV): he plays hooky, lies, is kicked out of school, vandalizes and steals, runs away, drinks alcohol, attempts sexual encounters, stands trial, escapes from the center for juvenile delinquents. … And yet, throughout, Doinel does in fact A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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assert himself through antisocial behaviors (Baisers volés, 1968; Domicile conjugal, 1970; L’Amour en fuite, 1979); professional instability (he performs low-skill odd jobs); emotional and sexual instability (indeed, he does marry, but continues to be drawn towards other women); impulsiveness; negligence; lies; parental irresponsibility (he will never truly care for the child he had with Christine). … Nevertheless, Antoine remains relatively well adapted to his social environment, which more or less indulges his shortcomings and lapses in judgment; it even tends to protect him from their consequences. (Think, for example, of the role played by the parents of his wife, Christine, in Domicile conjugal.) The tragic future suggested by the end of Les 400 Coups does not come to pass: Truffaut transports his character to a comic universe. This universe, however, as is confirmed by Vivement dimanche!, does not provide shelter from the chaos brought about by desire – whether one is thinking of the shadowy man who follows Claude Jade throughout Baisers volés to declare his “unfailing” love in the film’s last scene or of the cop’s lecherous glances towards Christine’s legs in Domicile conjugal – “That little one over there, I’ll fuck her bad, but I’ll fuck her good.” The universe of François Truffaut’s films is, at its core, created in the image of the Doinel series: it is made up of a couple of crazy people, harmless half-wits, soft asocial types, and also of more perverse and dangerous characters – predators, machines of desire, possessed by impulses or obsessions that can drive them to murder or selfdestruction. These characters sometimes play a secondary role (such as Delphine in 1977’s L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, a hopeless romantic with a personality disorder who ends up shooting her husband), or move to the foreground of the film, as in La Mariée était en noir (1967), La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), La Chambre verte (1978), L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), or La Femme d’à côté (1981). But it is a thin line that separates, or allows one to distinguish between, serious pathologies and minor disorders. A whole body of work speaks to this, for instance 1962’s Jules et Jim (in which Catherine’s character moves towards the act of murder/suicide at the end), or 1971’s Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (in which Muriel alternates between hysterical and depressive crises), La Nuit américaine (1973), or Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972). It is easy to see that death is markedly present throughout Truffaut’s corpus, in some cases even taking up the entire field of vision (La Chambre verte). But at least as much as death, and perhaps even more than it, it is craziness that prowls and threatens so constantly, madness in all its forms, so that even death appears as the ultimate delivery from the psychological disorders that eat away at the characters. The end of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, for example, testifies to this, for it moves from a universally recognizable comedic form, with dramatic breaks, to a deadly, hallucinatory ending: the amusing pursuit of women’s legs from the beginning of the film – which is certainly a bit worrisome given Bertrand’s stubbornness, although it is treated lightly – takes on an increasingly compulsive and suicidal character. So much so that Serge Daney famously proposed, in his critique of La Femme d’à côté (in Libération, September 30, 1981), that two Truffauts exist, “a Truffaut-Jekyll and a Truffaut-Hyde who, for more than twenty years, have pretended not to know about the existence of the other.” However, if one considers each of Truffaut’s films as an independent totality offering a kind of self-portrait of their auteur, then the two Truffauts never

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denied each other’s existence. Rather, they consciously coexist, observe each other, play with one another, share personalities, embrace each other, even struggle with each other.

Intoxications Enclosed in his telephone booth, Master Clément points to women as the principal reason for his murderous bouts. A Cause, à cause d’une femme (Because, Because of a Woman): such was the title of a Michel Deville film from 1962, a title that sums up the alpha and omega of the various Truffaldian madnesses. Truffaut is generous with his simplistic explanations for his characters’ affective and behavioral dysfunctions: the mother, of course, the mother must come first – whether she be too distant, too indifferent or even hostile, too self-involved (think of Les 400 Coups, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes) or too involved, too intrusive (Les Deux Anglaises et le continent). That said, neither the biological nor the adoptive fathers are spared. But this is not a question of previously explored biographical elements. And Truffaut is no fool for his own simplistic “explanations,” he who makes Louis say that if Marion loves bald men it is because she never knew her father (La Sirène du Mississippi). Everything happens as if he were protecting himself from psychological or psychoanalytic approaches towards his works and his characters, for he more or less ironically provides just enough to chew on, as far as interpretation goes. So it is that the elementary school teacher in L’Argent de poche (1976) discovers through the course of a reading that the relationship between a man and his mother will greatly affect his future relationships with women. And then, in addition to the mothers, there are the female lovers, those who abandon you by leaving you or dying (L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte), those who manipulate you (La Sirène du Mississippi), those who become crazy in love or enraged at being loved themselves (Jules et Jim, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., La Femme d’à côté, La Mariée était en noir). Reeled in at first by desire – looking, touching, smelling, climaxing – man is quickly driven by woman to the abyss of passion and the most intense of urges – possession, complete takeover, devouring, killing. More than an ensemble of analyzable, treatable symptoms that function within a story, the different forms of madness, whether minor or acute, appear as a way of dealing with the world that, once acknowledged, must be followed through to its logical end. One must see and hear Pierre Lachenay in La Peau douce as he describes to Nicole with great relish the madness of Balzac, who went so far as to cast the typeface used to print his books. Madness can be intoxicating, beginning with the chain of events in which it catches those it seizes, who then live their lives as a sort of challenge, absolutely loyal to themselves, like Julien Davenne, entirely devoted to his dead ones (La Chambre verte), or Julie Kohler, engrossed in her vengeful pursuits (La Mariée était en noir). “Women are magic,” says Master Clément, “so I became a magician.” It is an adamant response to the question posed by Alphonse in La Nuit américaine: “Are

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women magical?” It is a refrain, a sort of Truffaldian antiphon, perhaps partially responsible for the overwhelming use of the adjective “magic” whenever someone struggles to describe or explain an impression or a powerful effect produced by some spectacle or landscape. Magic sometimes appears as a means of escaping the bewitchment of passion, one stranglehold replacing another. It is thus that Adèle H. will turn to the services of a hypnotist–magician to assure the love of Lieutenant Pinson. For we know that it is not Lieutenant Pinson who has Adèle under his influence; in fact he does not in the least seek to seduce her; rather, her own fantasies exert their “magical” powers over the young woman. Adèle constitutes an exception in Truffaut’s films, for as a woman she is not magical (rather, Isabelle Adjani incarnates this), nor does she ever become magical. She is a victim. Nor is this the only case in Truffaut’s films where a woman has lost her magical powers: in La Peau douce, Madame Lachenay, although maintaining a certain erotic hold over her husband, whom she successfully leads to the conjugal bed, cannot rival the youth of Nicole, who also sees her powers threatened by those of Lachenay when she wears jeans or speaks a bit too loudly in public. In Truffaut’s films, magic, always associated with desire and the need for love, comes back to that which deprives individuals of their free will, that which leads them to neglect, or abandon, or sacrifice what belongs to duty or social identity, namely family, children, and goods. Magic makes them disappear, in a certain sense, bit by bit, first socially, then physically (like Louis and Marion moving further and further into the snow at the end of La Sirène du Mississippi or Catherine sinking into the Seine) or psychologically (Adèle).

Traps, Ramparts Master Clément is a prisoner of the telephone booth that was supposed to function as the escape vehicle from the suspicions weighing upon him. The director’s visual cues draw attention to the trap that is closing in on him: distant, almost vertical highangle shots from the booth onto a small public square at night, surrounded by police officers. The imprisonment of Master Clément echoes that of Julien Vercel, confined for a good portion of the film by his secretary, Barbara, between the walls of his real estate agency. At first, being imprisoned protects: in this way, Barbara shields Vercel from police inquiries (in Vivement Dimanche!); the Jewish director Lucas Steiner escapes from Nazi persecution in the basement of the Parisian theater where his wife is keeping him (Le Dernier Métro, 1980); the artifices of cinema protect a director from the chaos of reality (La Nuit américaine); hotel rooms provide shelter from the obstacles of love (La Peau douce, La Femme d’à côté); the elaboration of an entire world of fantasy derived from an obsession protects crazed women from the disillusionment and violence of the Real (L’Histoire d’Adèle H., La Mariée était en noir). But these shelters are illusory, porous, ensnaring even: it is in such a setting that Lucas Steiner learns of the love that his wife Marion has for Bernard; Barbara in some way takes hold of Vercel, who marries her (and this “happy end” appears quite ironic when one

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thinks of what marriages become in Truffaut); the psychological shelter constructed by Adèle closes in on her completely and no longer gives her access to the Real; in La Nuit américaine the filming of “Je vous présente Paméla” is constantly interrupted by external events. The elaboration of a refuge that can protect against aggressions from the Real, from all those intangibles pertaining to the Real, is a titanic work requiring perpetual consolidations, and it is inevitably condemned to imperfection. This explains perhaps, in my point of view in any case, the frequent impression of do-it-yourself, artificial elements in certain films or scenes of Truffaut. As if the labor that consists in constructing a plot, in mapping out scripts or mise-en-scènes from ideas, in developing a shooting script, in directing the actors, revealed its seams to the eyes of the spectator. As if the artificiality of the cinematographic universe, far from concealing itself, paraded itself about in spite of itself – but not at all in a Brechtian perspective of detachment or with the intent to parody. No, what one perceives and feels here is a sort of psychological process projecting itself onto the activity of creation. It is the effort of building a defense against the threat of madness, against the process of psychological or social disconnection, such as the shelter of theater (its basements, dramatic works and their representations) that the Steiners take in response to the chaos of the Occupation in Le Dernier Métro (“They’re crazy,” declares Lucas, referring to French Nazis and informants), a film that, along with La Nuit américaine, gives me the strongest impression of artificiality. As for the impression of a do-ityourself quality, it is evidently at its apex with L’Amour en fuite, which does little more than take the logic on which Baisers volés and Domicile conjugal were built to their most extreme conclusions: a sequence of rough-cut ideas, sketches always in the readjustment stages but nevertheless forced to become a whole, in the manner of Antoine Doinel or Bertrand Morane wearing themselves out in an effort to embody their lives in the books they are writing, or of Julien Davenne forcing himself to keep his dead in his little chapel, or of the castaways from Fahrenheit 451 (1966) striving to save literature and culture through the collection of books that they memorize. “Je vous présente Paméla” (May I Present Pamela), “Les Salades de l’amour” (The Confusions of Love), “Le Cavaleur” (The Skirt-chaser): one can hardly imagine more bland or common fictional titles concocted for these films appearing within his films; they are completely incommensurable with the actual titles of Truffaut’s films, which are generally so restrained and precise, if sometimes a bit enigmatic (La Sirène du Mississippi or Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, or La Nuit américaine). The existence of such made-up titles of films embedded within the actual corpus contributes to my impression of Truffaut’s taste for heterogeneity, including a discontinuity of tone, and a manner of writing and directing that allows, for example in Domicile conjugal, the coexistence of an obviously telegraphed gag like that of the flowers Antoine dyes with bright colors alongside so fluid and touching a scene as the one near the end of the film, the scene of “little Balthus,” which begins with a long sequence-shot in the agitated key of Antoine’s feelings and then later slides toward its melancholy resolution on the Parisian sidewalk, when a compassionate Christine slips away from an Antoine

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henceforth left to his lonely nights. Such coexistence of opposite tones operates across the scale of the entire corpus, from Le Dernier Métro, whose artificiality (the historical reconstruction, the script, the acting) culminates in its concluding scene (a crude ploy that moves us from film to live theater) to La Peau douce, with its unrelenting tempo, its fluidity, and the magnificent way it captures the essence of an era (places, clothing, jargon, gestures).

Perversions? Voyeurism and fetishism have been designated time and time again as Truffaut’s characters’ most popular perversions and, therefore, those of the auteur himself. But they are so clearly and obviously portrayed that we hesitate to consider them perverse. In any case they do not manifest themselves as such, that is to say, as deliberately intended to destroy others, but rather as a surge of desire, from Les Mistons (1957) to Vivement dimanche! – as the means for men to cultivate the pleasures so dear to Master Clément – those of seeing, touching, of breathing in women. “I am going to look at you. … This will be my pleasure,” declares Lachenay to Nicole, who worries while in the nightclub about what he could possibly be doing while she dances. We find the severe and dangerous perversions in women – specifically, lies, manipulations, the desire to possess and destroy (think of Catherine in Jules et Jim; Julie Kohler in La Mariée était en noir; Julie/Marion in La Sirène du Mississippi; Camille Bliss in Une Belle Fille comme moi; Adèle H. – who proudly practices the “religion of love” – or Mathilde in La Femme d’à côté). With these characters, we are far from the rather benign perversions of Eric Rohmer’s films, which are, even so, not lacking in lies, ruses, and machinations – La Collectionneuse (1967), Le Genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee, 1970), Pauline à la plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1983). One must wait for Triple Agent (2004) and L’Anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke, 2001) to discover in Rohmer’s films virtuosos of deception and fatal double-dealings, which are, notably, significantly inscribed in historical contexts that are themselves perverse (the war and Occupation, the Terror). Likewise, we can observe that the perverse characters of Chabrol, great and small alike, as well as his lunatics and delinquents, are themselves also inscribed in significant historical or social contexts and appear, in sum, as symptoms of the profound dysfunctions of these environments – war, the upper-middle class, the media, the business world (think of Les Cousins, 1959; La Cérémonie, 1995; Masques, 1987; Une affaire de femmes, 1988; Violette Nozière, 1978; L’Ivresse du pouvoir, 2006; Betty, 1992). There is no such thing in Truffaut’s films: nothing of sociology, nor of history, with the exception of Le Dernier Métro, where madness and perversion are entirely associated with the Nazis, most notably with the character of Daxiat, the critic of the newspaper Je Suis Partout. There is nothing seriously psychological either, as we have seen. From the trivial to the onerous, perversions are to be taken, according to an existential perspective, as ways of being in the world; the pleasures offered by the

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former should be enjoyed, and the sufferings that the latter inflict should be resisted or succumbed to. The case of Julien Davenne does, however, invite consideration. His madness, his perverse behavior (fetishism, necrophilic tendencies) are well inscribed in a historical context (the 1914–1918 war) and seem to proceed from it: it is about honoring the memory of the dead, about fighting against forgetting what we owe them. With Davenne, personal bereavement (he has lost his wife, Julie) and collective mourning come together; they amalgamate. And the logic of his pathology does its work, for it slips from the need to celebrate the dead to that of living with them and loving them “contre les vivants,” as Cécilia reproaches him, in order, eventually, to join them. His particular use of the wax model which he has had made in Julie’s likeness and that he immediately destroys in coming into contact with her fixed gaze retrospectively sheds light on forms of fetishism particular to Truffaut. This model stands as an extension of her plaster hand that Julien lost when his Green Room burned. This of course makes one think of the wax model that is burned instead of Lavinia in Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Luis Buñuel,1955) and whose function is somehow inverted. In Buñuel’s film, the model is substituted for the woman and Archibaldo kisses and then burns it out of frustration at not having been able to kill Lavinia herself, thus confirming Lavinia’s life. The effigy of Julie, however, only confirms her death – the fetish disappoints, failing to trigger the expected pleasure. And this model’s fate makes us think of the strange abstraction, of the coldness of the sex scenes in Truffaut’s films – abstraction, distance, coldness that are generally accounted for by his modesty. But those isolated shots of women’s upper thighs, there where the hosiery meets the skin; those chanted words, “yes,” “wait,” “come”; those eager gazes of men on the bodies of clothed women; that furtive parade of underwear – panties, soft silk slips; those solemn pauses that characterize the moments immediately before the sex act and that go so far as to render it sacred (Les Deux Anglaises et le continent); the absence of nakedness, whether shown or suggested (we are far from the carnal densities of a Renoir, as in the episode of the wasp sting in 1935’s Toni or that of Maigret visiting Winna in La Nuit du Carrefour, 1932), perhaps evoked quite fleetingly when Madame Lachenay, in La Peau douce, points out to her friend the unkempt conjugal bed, which testifies to the sexual encounter she has just had with her husband; the absence even of a nude sublimated by aesthetic composition and pictorial or literary references, as in Rohmer’s films (La Collectioneuse; Pauline à la plage; La Marquise d’O, 1976; Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, 2007); everything that testifies to a kind of urge withheld, of the tormenting need to express and represent such impulses (think of Antoine Doinel in Les 400 Coups stealing the photo of Harriett Andersson in Monika by Ingmar Bergman, another director working with carnal intensities and nudes), but always contained, so much so that they are shielded from any prolonged view. As if the impulse could not be shown without embarrassment, even shame. So it is that Christine’s father appears in the brothel’s stairway without saying a word (Domicile conjugal), and so it is that homosexual couples are  shown both as obvious facts and as distant mysteries (La Femme d’à côté, Le Dernier Métro).

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Collapse and Dissolution Completely surrounded on all sides, Master Clément finally loses his head. He had, however, until that point, been quite adept in his theatricalities and deceit. A law office library communicating with a salon/spa, a cinema covering the activities of a cabaret-brothel: one could not do any better in terms of restrained impulses at the core of Law and Art. But once discovered, the very poised Master Clément explodes – both internally and externally. François Truffaut’s films, like those of his master, Alfred Hitchcock, navigate between mastery and delusion. Fluid, well-oiled moments coexist with those that are chaotic, even completely hallucinatory. Cinema’s aptitude for capturing the Real cannot resist the force of fantasy. Conviction, or faith in the possibility of containing and metamorphosing savagery into language, culture, civilization (L’Enfant sauvage), clashes with bodily impulses, with the powers of frenzy. In this regard La Chambre verte is akin to Fahrenheit 451 – an underestimated film, highly concerned throughout with the impossibility of resisting madness – as well as the endings of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Sirène du Mississippi, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., or La Femme d’à côté. Films, books – they cannot really pretend to contain the Real, either because if they eliminate the embarrassing elements from it they are cheating (like Madame Jouve in La Femme d’à côté, preferring to leave on a trip rather than confront her former lover) or because if they include everything they explode (like Mathilde). Films are not as harmonious as Ferrand wishes them to be when he speaks to Alphonse in La Nuit américaine, and he knows it. In this way, it is striking to observe in Truffaut’s films the recurrence of two types of figures who tend to render the quest for harmony both perilous and dubious. First, the figures of the unattainable. They structure certain sequences in detail. So it is that Lachenay fails to catch up with Nicole at the exit to the cinema during their trip to Reims, from the moment that he crosses her in the hallway until the moment that he sees her, through the window of the café, pursued by the solicitous attentions of a passerby. So it is that the arms of Bertrand Morane reach out towards the nurse’s legs at the end of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes or that, at the opening of the film, he casts a dead man’s “gaze” from his grave in a low-angle shot onto an official delegation of offered legs. So it is, too, that this same Bertrand Morane as a young boy seated on his chair with his book moves his head to catch a peek as his mother passes behind him, wearing her silk lingerie, while he hopes for a glance or a word. As for lingerie there is the silk slip that Bernard begins touching from the moment he and Mathilde separate in the hotel room, and that he sniffs, before throwing it out, as though discouraged. These figures also structure the group of films designed on the flight/pursuit “pattern” (La Sirène du Mississippi, L’Histoire d’Adèle H.), from which we know that there is a tendency to defer indefinitely the attainment of the object. In a way, the cult of speed plays a role in these figures: the panting narration in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (with a voice-over from Truffaut himself ) suggests a kind of lost pursuit on the part of the narrator behind characters fleeing either a destiny or desires of which they

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are not master. As if this narration were aiming to make some sense, as quickly as possible, of the chaotic feelings that trouble the protagonists, to observe, in the end, that they are simply undergoing the work of time, perceptible only in the reflection on the window of the taxi where Claude is surprised by his own face: “I look old today.” Furthermore, there are various figures of collapse, both physical and psychological. La Femme d’à-côté both combines and rigidly declines these two groups of figures. First, there are figures of the unattainable: for Madame Jouve, this is her lover in the past; for her ex-lover in the film’s present, it is Madame Jouve; for her husband, it is Mathilde – until he realizes that the one he believed to be his “last chance at happiness” is in fact a “liar”; for Mathilde it is Bernard, a boy who is “easy to have, difficult to keep”; the right moment to constitute a “perfect” couple (two people who love each other and who wish to have a child, as Veronika describes it so simply in Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain, 1973). When Mathilde and Bernard first met “it was too soon” – and this led to an abortion – and now “it is not the same” – and it is Bernard’s wife who is pregnant at the very moment when her husband’s liaison is revealed. Equally unattainable figures are the sharing of words (“I must speak with you”; “We must speak”), always deferred, always replaced by a clench which we must associate with the failure to understand what we live (“I would like to understand,” Mathilde repeats to herself ), the exchange that Vera finally has with Bertrand when they unexpectedly meet five years after their breakup. This scene is filmed in a tight series of shot/reverse shots, underlining the inescapable separation of the former lovers which Véra’s gesture of caressing Bertrand’s face will fail to conjure. There are figures of the script, therefore, and figures of dialogue (summarized by the final formula: “Neither with you, nor without you”), figures of montage (the two telephone calls that collide with and neutralize one another), visual figures of a body spying on, or in pursuit of, another body, or of bodies in spaces deprived of the desired body (Mathilde in the hotel, Madame Jouve’s lover at the tennis club). There are cinematographic figures as well, where the unattainable has perhaps best been portrayed in Max Ophüls (or in Lubitsch or Hitchcock); Truffaut’s complex zoom in the sequenceshot showing a young telegraph messenger looking for Madame Jouve and moving from one point to the next at the tennis club recalls a famous shot from Le Masque (in Le Plaisir, Ophüls, 1950) in which a young bellboy is looking for a doctor among the dancers in the Palais de la Danse – but in La Femme d’à côté we are far from the baroque abundance for which Ophüls is known. All these figures are interwoven with those of the breakdown. The defenestration of Madame Jouve (recounted by her) after the blow of having been deceived in love, Mathilde’s fainting fit as she is embraced by Bernard in the supermarket garage, her fall after having been attacked by Bernard on the tennis court, and her depressive breakdown in the bushes (“She had a breakdown,” her husband Philippe will say), her long depressive episode at the clinic (Véra and Bertrand evoke the same type of episode, experienced by Bertrand), the final murderous acting out, the definitive breakdown of the two lovers’ bodies: La Femme d’à côté comes to life as a “chronicle of a breakdown foretold,” which itself comes from an excess of the unattainable.

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For the absolutely unattainable is the past. Not that it is impossible to recall, to represent, and to reconstitute images from the past, which Bertrand attempts to do in writing his memoirs as a “skirt-chaser,” or Antoine Doinel with his “troubles,” or Truffaut in filming his “400 coups.” Not that one regrets that these representations can never be up to the task, can never be more than approximate reconstructions, serving as lacunae, no doubt distorted by the whims of memory. But these reproductions constitute a kind of trap: they confront the impossibility of correcting the past and they confront the illusion, through direct action or the magic of art to transform that which has come to pass. Bernard and Mathilde realize, no doubt in a confusing way throughout the course of their more recent encounters, that they will never, despite the intensity of their desires, succeed in correcting their past failure. Their overwhelming compulsion keeps them from living what could be after all nothing but an adulterous liaison without any spiritual connection. This is also what makes Madame Jouve flee: the absolutely unattainable nature of her unrealized happiness in the past bars the way to a certainly hazardous but still possible happiness in the present. This is also what Bertrand Morane refuses to Véra when the latter, after they have evoked their failed past (which is like the initial section of the script for La Femme d’à côté), proposes a rekindling of their relationship. And thus the demon of representation seizes Bertrand who has “forgotten” Véra in his book, even though it is perhaps because of her that he felt the need to write that book in the first place. But the editor refuses to revise the manuscript and Bertrand is only able to carry out a trivial correction of the past, at the last minute substituting the adjective “blue” for that of “red” to describe the dress worn by the little girl whom he had once consoled at the foot of a staircase. We know that L’Amour en fuite is entirely run through with this compulsive desire to correct the past. Aside from a negligible framework – Antoine Doinel thankfully recovers the Colette from Antoine et Colette (1962) and revisits his past with her – Truffaut, lacking the power to manipulate his own past, manipulates that of his character as well as his films, and not only those of the Doinel cycle. L’Amour en fuite proceeds through flashback, citation, displacement, retouching the scripts of situations borrowed from various films. This is a comedy: the auteur gives it his all, deploying his magical cinematic powers to rework an unsatisfying past and lead his character towards a reassuring happy ending. But this artificial, makeshift job cannot fully protect against threats of the Real. Moreover, he is drawing attention to them – with growing old for example, as experienced by Doinel and by Léaud, shown through the juxtaposition of images from films of different time periods; with finitude – before the obvious fact that we are witnessing the last film of the Doinel cycle, an adieu to youth; or with death, which this time threatens children in particular (the child playing with the train door, in some way saved by Colette, who, appropriately, has lost her own little girl in an accident). One cannot remedy the past: imagining a sympathetic meeting between two exes (Christine and Colette) is illusory and does not keep anyone from “falling back into the same sentimental sadnesses.” L’Amour en fuite appears as a compulsive and desperate attempt simultaneously to revive and correct the character’s past, as well as that of the director and his films, which are sometimes cited at

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length (note the scene of the “little Balthus” in Domicile conjugal evoked above). It is thus less love that is on the run than the past, though it is certainly confused with love in this case (or with love in general) but above all with death, notably that of Antoine’s mother, recaptured and lost at the same moment by the intervention of Monsieur Lucien who, while laying out a flattering and gratifying picture of Madame Doinel, leads her son to his tomb.

The Madness of the Real The figures of the unattainable and of breakdown offer beautiful visual motifs: Muriel fainting in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent at the reception, when under Claude’s direction, her body sinks into the very English décor; Mathilde fainting in Bernard’s arms, then her disappearance from the screen; the superb wandering of Fanny Ardant in the opening of Vivement dimanche! as she is followed about by an agitated camera, Truffaut’s camera being, for that matter, often agitated in its pursuit of characters who do not stop moving while speaking (Doinel–Léaud) and threatening to disappear from the field of vision, in the manner of Julie/Marion fleeing Louis in La Sirène du Mississippi or of the women escaping from Bertrand Morane. An immobilized body contemplates bodies that move: the destiny of both spectator and director. But although harmonious films should serve as protection from the Real by substituting for it a world made according to our desires, to paraphrase the famous formula introducing Le Mépris (Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), they in fact prove besieged by the Real. And the Real, as Truffaut lives it, is madness: the Real of love, of the couple, is the madness of passion (uncontrollable sexual urges, the drive to control, jealousies, narcissistic wounds, obsessions, with the cortege of their effects: depressions, deliriums, suicide attempts, murders). The Real is what taints the films of Truffaut with an indelible melancholy. Translated by Mary Anne Lewis

9

The Ecstatic Pan Phil Powrie

Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion). Ecstasy means being “outside oneself,” as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one’s position (stasis). To be “outside oneself ” does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is the absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time). Milan Kundera1 There is no such thing as a straightforward image in Truffaut’s work. Underneath an apparently neutral image the meaning of which appears obvious, there always emerges a second image more violent, deeper than the first which it eventually replaces and surreptitiously subverts. Carole Le Berre2 We are thirteen minutes from the end of Les 400 Coups (1959), in the Centre d’Observation de Mineurs Délinquants. Antoine and a new friend are talking about what brought them there. Antoine’s new friend expresses surprise that Antoine stole a typewriter, because it would have been traceable, unlike the tires stolen by the boy across the park to whom he points. We cut to this boy, who is talking about his father to another boy, as they sit on a bench beneath a stone statue: “Me, every time I cried at home, my father would imitate my crying with his violin, just to annoy me. But one day I got fed up, I had a fit and, bang! I slugged him” (1:21:50).3 During this speech the boy strokes the buttocks of the statue’s female figure. As he says “bang!” the camera pans up from him to the figure of a child, held aloft by the female figure,

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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and his companion says, “You did the right thing. I’d have killed my old man if he’d done that to me.” This fourteen-second exchange is only tenuously linked to the narrative. We never see this boy again. And yet the shot includes a highly visible camera movement that draws attention to itself by its unmotivated nature. Why does the camera suddenly pan up, away from the two boys, to an angelic-looking child? What exactly is the pan’s function? What might it be encouraging the spectator to think or feel? Is it part of a pattern in Truffaut’s cinema, and if so is it merely a mannerism, or is it a functional trope? I shall claim that it is the latter, and that it has a specific function. In so doing, I am attempting to correct the view that Truffaut’s work is technically unsophisticated. That view was to some extent encouraged by Truffaut himself, who said that his objective was to film beauty without appearing to do so (“sans en avoir l’air”), or to do so nonchalantly (“en ayant l’air de rien”).4 For that reason no doubt commentators, particularly since the mid- to late 1980s, have tended not to enter into sustained discussion of his camerawork. Two earlier commentators, Jean Collet and Elizabeth Bonnafons, both talk about Truffaut’s “aerial” camera, particularly in his early films. Bonnafons also establishes a useful framework more generally when she posits that Truffaut’s cinema is caught between two polarities: the “definitive,” or the “ideal,” on the one hand, and the “provisional,” or “reality,” on the other, although she does not link this structure systematically to Truffaut’s camerawork.5 Collet talks of the opening crane shot of La Nuit américaine (1973), positing a correlation between the camera movement and an aesthetic jouissance of a clearly sexual nature.6 Nestor Almendros, director of photography (DP) for nine of Truffaut’s films, puts it well in a memorial issue of Cinématographe when he says that a typical figure in Truffaut’s work is the “the lyrical and amorous moment when the camera takes off.”7 I will investigate these moments, looking closely at both the upward pan and the upward crane shot, bringing together the insights of Collet and Bonnafons so as to define the nature of that “taking-off.” It is true that the upward shot is less frequently used by Truffaut than the relatively ubiquitous horizontal tracking shot, which is often combined with a horizontal pan, and which I will also consider. But when the upward shot occurs, it is generally an emphatic shot that draws attention to itself in ways that are quite the opposite of “en ayant l’air de rien.” It is often associated with specific objects: a woman’s legs, an art object (a painting, a photograph, a book, an instrument), or a place like a movie theater. It is often also accompanied by epiphanic music that signals a revelation. Hence the title of this chapter: the upward shot in Truffaut’s cinema is a moment of ecstasy, a momentary flight towards some ambiguous ideal combining the erotic, the violent, and the artistic. As my epigraph from Milan Kundera suggests, ecstasy is an intensely present moment that is in some respects “outside” time and space. I will claim that these moments in Truffaut’s films, whether punctual and flagrantly intense, or more subdued and diffuse, are held in tension with the horizontal tracking/pan shot. The upward pan is a key figure in Truffaut’s aesthetic.

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The Case of the Missing Camera (Movement) In a letter to an unknown screenwriter, Truffaut writes, “I never know where I’m going to place the camera one hour before I begin shooting,”8 underlining the prejudice that his approach to the camera is cavalier. In his introduction to Almendros’ autobiography, Truffaut similarly downplays his interest in camerawork: “How [does the DP] interpret the desires of a director who knows exactly what he wants but can’t explain what he does want?”9 Although this off hand attitude is very much part of the New Wave’s mythmaking, which minimized studied technique and emphasized the improvisational and the spontaneous,10 neither of these statements is likely to be true, given the length and complexity of so many tracking shots in Truffaut’s films, often combining lateral and upward pans. We might think, for example, of the opening and closing sequences of Les 400 Coups, or the opening sequence of La Nuit américaine, or the opening sequences of Vivement dimanche! (1983). And then there are the extended horizontal tracking shots within the body of many of the films, such as Mathilde’s walk into the woods before collapsing in La Femme d’à côté (1981), or some of the cemetery scenes in La Chambre verte (1978). Many of these have been commented on at length, particularly the closing sequence of Les 400 Coups and the opening sequence of La Nuit américaine.11 The absence of sustained attention to the camera is even odder when we consider that one of the nostrums of the New Wave is its energy and vibrancy, partly achieved through the use of a very mobile camera. An early volume on Truffaut mentions the camera frequently, but this is subsumed within a general point about innovation, exuberance, and vitality; in La Mariée était en noir (1967), for example, “the camera seems to flow and glide in patterns of never-ending harmony. … The effect is almost literally one of a dance.”12 Don Allen has a number of comments on Truffaut’s camera for some of the earlier films – he talks about the use of zooms at the start of Fahrenheit 451 (1966)13 or the pans and tracks at the start of L’Enfant sauvage (1970)14 – but there is no sustained analysis, and the comments on camera technique peter out after Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), as if attention to the camera is somehow more appropriate for the period corresponding to the New Wave than for Truffaut’s cinema as a whole. True, Truffaut does not talk much about the camera, even in his private letters. The letters nonetheless contain some fascinating if contradictory passages on the value of tracking shots. These are in letters to the director Bernard Dubois concerning a film that Les Films du Carrosse was producing, Les Lolos de Lola (1976). Truffaut questions Dubois’ predilection for long tracking shots, saying that they make him wonder how the director will bring those scenes to an end;15 it is almost as if the long tracking shot generates an unstoppable and therefore problematic momentum of its own. And yet in a letter written the very next day, he advises Dubois to employ the long tracking shot, because, he claims, it can “build up the tension” and “keep the audience on their toes.”16 Commentators have not noticed

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even these sparse indications of Truffaut’s concern. Hervé Dalmais, in a long section on Truffaut’s techniques, discusses scriptwriting, adaptation from novels, dialogue, sound and music, the use of color, editing, and décor; he has nothing on camerawork.17 The substantial Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, published twenty years after Truffaut’s death, seems the ideal place to address a wide range of issues relating to the technical aspects of filmmaking; it nonetheless downplays the camera. Jérôme Larcher’s entry on the use of the iris shot points out how “the form of Truffaut’s films is rarely talked about” because he “often uses a handful of stylistic procedures.”18 It is a position also taken by Vincent Amiel in the same volume. His entry on Truffaut’s use of black-and-white stock shifts attention away from formal techniques to narrative: “The least that can be said is that Truffaut’s sensitivity to form is less marked than his interest in dramatic or narrative techniques. Visual elements in his films are dealt with simply, not indifferently, but without any particular sophistication.”19 When there is a focus on the camera in broader terms, or on the DP, it is on lighting and color. Michel Marie’s entry on Raoul Coutard dwells on his use of light;20 Coutard himself, in the extended scene-by-scene commentary for the DVD version of Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), does not mention camera movement at all, his focus being on the use of a heavy camera, lighting, and print development. Amiel’s entry concerning the other major DP associated with Truffaut, Nestor Almendros, focuses on “the harmony of light and color that tends to close off space” in the films.21 Almendros himself, as we have already seen, is sensitive to much more than light and color. He points out that “though people think a cinematographer has to take care of lighting first and foremost, I believe the frame is just as important.”22 He stresses the way in which Truffaut engages with an actor’s movements to create a continuous fluidity, echoing Petrie’s comments on the “dancing” camera: “Truffaut … tends to follow the actors’ movements at medium distance with dolly shots. … Truffaut also likes to use the plan-séquence, choreographing the movements of actors and camera, so as to minimize editing.”23 It is hardly surprising that the tracking shot has been the focus of the relatively few comments on Truffaut’s camerawork, given Jean-Luc Godard’s famous declaration in a roundtable organized by the Cahiers du Cinéma around Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) that “tracking shots are a question of morality.”24 This is a provocative restatement of Luc Moullet’s “morality is a question of travelling shots.”25 Both statements were repeated in the journal two years later by Jacques Rivette.26 This focus on tracking shots obscures the importance of upward shots in Truffaut’s aesthetic. The tracking shot grounds the character while the upward shot is a metaphorical flight, violently ecstatic, as Carole Le Berre suggested in passing in her 1993 study of Truffaut.27 Indeed, it is all the more violent and ecstatic because of its close relationship with the tracking shot. Where the tracking shot compresses and restricts, the upward shot uplifts and transports. The tracking shot deflates; the upward shot elates.28 The tracking shot anchors desire to the stickiness of the body; the upward shot causes the body to disintegrate in vertiginous desire.

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Methodological Issues What exactly constitutes an upward pan, and how might it differ from a simple reframing of an object or of a character in movement? The majority of the upward pans in the films are the latter. A character in medium close-up stands; the camera is close enough that it must pan up to keep the character in the frame. A phone rings; the camera follows the character’s hand as it stretches down to pick up the phone, and pans back up to the character’s face. The character climbs stairs in medium or medium long shot; the camera follows. Nothing might seem more natural than these reframings, although they do raise a question: why is the camera so close to the character that it has to pan up or down? Why not have a static camera in medium shot? The majority of such “natural” reframings, precisely because they are so “natural,” in all probability do not strike us as significant. They might do so, however, if there seemed to be a large number of them, or if a pattern emerged whereby they tended to be associated with specific objects; for example, women’s legs or items linked to creativity (photos, books, letters, etc). It is for these reasons that I will consider them. Kundera writes that “the acoustical image of ecstasy is the cry.”29 If the reframings I have discussed might be likened to “statements” in normal speech, the “cry,” or the “exclamation,” comes from those moments where there is a bigger and less obviously motivated upward movement. In these instances, the camera is not so much following a movement originating from a character as it is creating a movement-in-itself, a movement designed to attract attention to itself. These are not just moments of elation; they are self-conscious moments of excess. As we shall see, upward shots are heavily gendered: “statements” are male, “exclamations” are female; “statements” are about desire, “exclamations” are about jouissance and death; “statements” are timidly attempted ecstasies, “exclamations” are epiphanic ecstasies. Given that such feelings accompany camerawork, to what extent is the upward shot a marker that we might wish to associate with Truffaut, rather than his DPs? This question is particularly acute when we remember that during the New Wave, the DP “became the primary partner, adviser and second-in-command to the director” and that “accomplished cinematographers are likely to be auteurs themselves.”30 Coutard was Truffaut’s DP for five films during the 1960s;31 Almendros was his DP during the next decade or so for nine films.32 There were other DPs, of course, including Pierre-William Glenn for three films,33 and Denys Clerval for two.34 Given Truffaut’s relative indifference to technique, it would not be unreasonable to assume that it is not just the color palette that changes with the DP – something noted by the contributors to Le Dictionnaire Truffaut – but also the camera movement. A significant shift in the use of a movement such as the upward pan – its absence, or its insistence, or a very different use in specific contexts – might suggest that it is less a marker of Truffaut’s aesthetic than of his DPs. Table  9.1 provides a breakdown of upward pans or cranes in the twenty-three principal films. The table calculates the ratio of upward pans relative to the length of

The Ecstatic Pan

Table 9.1

Upward pans/cranes in Truffaut’s films. Date of film

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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Les Mistons Les 400 Coups Tirez sur le pianiste Jules et Jim Antoine et Colette La Peau douce Fahrenheit 451 La Mariée était en noir Baisers volés La Sirène du Mississippi L’Enfant sauvage Domicile conjugal Les Deux Anglaises et le continent Une Belle Fille comme moi La Nuit américaine L’Histoire d’Adèle H. L’Argent de poche L’Homme qui aimait les femmes La Chambre verte L’Amour en fuite Le Dernier Métro La Femme d’à côté Vivement dimanche!

DP

Upward pans

Film length (minutes)

Ratio

1957 1959 1960 1962 1962 1964 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1970 1971

Malige Decae Coutard Coutard Coutard Coutard Roeg Coutard Clerval Clerval Almendros Almendros Almendros

6 41 17 39 9 28 34 12 16 38 27 41 31

17 95 78 101 29 113 107 103 87 117 84 93 124

2.8 2.3 4.6 2.6 3.2 4.0 3.1 8.6 5.4 3.0 3.1 2.3 4.0

1972 1973 1975 1976 1977

Glenn Glenn Almendros Glenn Almendros

27 41 27 36 35

94 112 96 101 114

3.5 2.7 3.6 2.8 3.3

1978 1979 1980 1981 1983

Almendros Almendros Almendros Lubtchansky Almendros

25 24 41 31 33

90 91 126 101 106 average

3.6 3.8 3.0 3.3 3.2 3.6

each film; in other words, in the case of the first film, Les Mistons (1957), there is one upward pan for every 2.8 minutes of the film. While this kind of data analysis is clearly a blunt instrument, since it normalizes a procedure that does not necessarily occur at regular intervals during the film, such purely quantitative data nevertheless encourages a look at technique across Truffaut’s career. With the exception of three films, the ratio ranges between one upward pan for every 2.3 to 4 minutes, right across Truffaut’s career. However, three films have considerably fewer upward pans (although this may make those few occurrences all the more interesting). All three are in the pre-1968 period; after 1968, no film has a ratio of less than one per 4 minutes. The average ratio rises after 1968. It is possible to claim that the change may be connected to the DP, given that the ratio for the films with Coutard in the 1960s is 4.6, and those with Almendros in the 1970s and 1980s is 3.3. However, the difference corresponds reasonably closely to the pre- and post-1968 data overall, suggesting that Truffaut’s inclinations had changed regardless of the DP.

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Stairs: “Women’s Legs Are Compasses” A focus on women’s legs is one of the systematic motifs of Truffaut’s cinema, more often than not associated with an upward pan rather than with a static camera. This, at least, comes very much from Truffaut and not his DPs. As Bertrand Morane said in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), “Women’s legs are compasses that measure out the globe, bringing balance and harmony.”35 This phrase also serves as an entry in Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, in which Arnaud Guigue points out how Truffaut uses stairs as a means of showcasing women’s legs.36 This is particularly the case in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, in which the camera pans up the legs of three women as they climb stairs: the woman in the factory early on in the film (0:5:50), Delphine in the restaurant (0:47:54), and Geneviève as she runs up the stairs (1:49:52). Charlie in Tirez sur le pianiste similarly gazes at Léna’s legs as she climbs some stairs (0:29:0). Indeed, Truffaut ensures that the link between women’s legs and stairs, with the associated upward pan, are foregrounded in the dialogue on a number of occasions. As Charlie follows Léna up the stairs, his voice-over says, “Don’t look at her legs, it’s bad form.” “Look at your mother’s beautiful legs,” says Antoine’s stepfather, Julien, to him in Les 400 Coups, as the family climb back up to their flat after a night at the cinema (0:50:0); and in Le Dernier Métro (1980), Lucas says to his wife Marion as they climb the stairs back up to the theater, “You think I make you go first out of politeness? Not at all. It’s to look at your legs” (0:27:55). Domicile conjugal (1970) focuses obsessively at times on Christine’s legs. The opening scene of the film has a series of left–right–left horizontal pans of her legs over two shots as she walks outside, ending with an upward pan. This is immediately followed by a staircase scene with a shot of her legs as she climbs; it is from the point of view of the old concierge, who stares lecherously up her skirt. We return to her legs in a standard staircase scene a few minutes later (introduced by a slight upward pan), as she and Antoine climb out of the cellar where they have gone to get a bottle of wine (0:8:38). As they later climb the stairs to their flat, he pretends to be a monster who, he tells her, comes at night “to grab hold of women’s legs” (0:13:19). Later in the film, attention is drawn to her legs by an upward pan from the concierge’s point of view, as he makes a considerably cruder comment than Julien or Lucas, after she has collected her baby from the child-minder: “I wouldn’t be able to screw that sweet thing particularly well, but I’d certainly love to” (0:46:24). After Christine’s separation from Antoine, she is “replaced” by a number of prostitutes in the brothel he visits, who come down and then go back up the stairs (1:23:24), again with upward pans, as is the case with all of these examples. The return to normal married life is signaled at the end of the film when Christine rushes down the stairs, left behind by Antoine; even though she is going downstairs, the camera still pans up slightly (1:32:11). Pans up women’s legs, but without stairs, occur on many occasions. Clarisse in Tirez sur le pianiste (0:17:0); Julie in La Mariée était en noir (1:18:0); Liliane in L’Amour en fuite (1979) (0:42:15; 1:18:50) – although these last two are in fact outtakes from La Nuit américaine, released six years before; Marion in Le Dernier Métro,

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as she lies in bed with her husband (1:03:00). In his last film, Vivement dimanche!, Truffaut pans lovingly up Barbara’s legs when she is dressed as a prostitute (1:19:25), and a second time a few minutes later as she perches on a chair to spy on Louison (1:23:12). Such upward pans could amount to mannerism. However, Truffaut seems well aware of this and is quite capable of poking fun at himself. Recall Bertrand Morane’s statement that women’s legs represent “balance and harmony.” In Vivement dimanche!, Barbara leaves Julien in the basement of his office. He stares not so much disconsolately as expectantly up at the window, which is at street level. She realizes that this is so that he can stare at women’s legs as they pass by, and she shakes her head with a wry smile (1:13:33), although on coming out onto the street she walks back and forth in front of the same window so that he can see her legs. The emphasis on women’s legs in close association with staircases suggests that we might explore in more detail what would otherwise seem a “natural” use of the upward pan. Many upward pans in Truffaut’s films function merely to emphasize a change of location as a character moves from a ground floor to another, higher floor. But there are also enough of these instances associated with the desire to be with a woman to suggest a pattern. The clearest examples are all of Jean-Pierre Léaud climbing towards a woman, most often in the Antoine Doinel films. We have already seen how this happens repeatedly in Domicile conjugal, where the emphasis is on Christine’s legs; we also saw how substitutes for Christine in the form of the prostitutes were associated with staircases and upward pans. In the same film, Antoine’s courting of Kyoko is emphasized by repeated shots of him climbing up to her flat (0:59:40; 1:01:30; 1:04:23). When he starts to tire of her, we see him repeatedly and comically climbing the stairs to a telephone booth in the restaurant where they are dining, so as to talk to his estranged wife (1:28:27; 1:29:40). The return to the “conjugal home” of the title, is, as we have seen, also effected by a staircase scene at the end of the film. This pattern is a constant in the Doinel films. In Les 400 Coups the woman desired is Antoine’s mother, shown in the key staircase scene mentioned above. In the next film of the series, the short Antoine et Colette (1962), we see Antoine climbing stairs to Colette’s flat towards the beginning and the end of the film (0:14:0; 0:25:45), and in between we see him moving to a new flat opposite Colette’s, emphasized by a rapid upward swish pan on the outside of the block of flats (0:19:20). In Baisers volés (1968), when released from military prison at the start of the film, Antoine’s first thought is to visit a prostitute. We see him climbing the stairs, accompanied by both a prostitute and an upward pan (0:06:20); when he decides that she is not the one for him, he meets another in the same hotel and climbs back up, with an upward pan that takes in her legs (0:07:46). As his affair with Fabienne develops, we see him climbing up the stairs to his flat to discover a present and a letter from her, which makes clear that she would like to have an affair with him (1:07:49). After he rejects her, she visits him in his flat so as to sleep with him. The scene is introduced by another ostentatious procedure favored by Truffaut, and one which we have already seen in Antoine et Colette: the rapid upward swish pan from the street up to a high-level flat.37 This time, however, it is not the flat of the desired woman but Antoine’s flat, suggesting her control over the situation.

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When Antoine finally gets his girl, Christine, this is signaled by a series of three tracking shots with a handheld camera, the second of which pans up the stairs to Christine’s bedroom, where we eventually discover the lovers sleeping (1:21:50). Although the pattern of upward pans linked with stairs and a desired woman is more prevalent in the Doinel films, we also find it in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, another film starring Léaud. The relationship Claude has with the two sisters is punctuated by staircase scenes with upward pans, signaling Claude’s desire. Mrs Brown climbs the stairs followed by her daughters and by Claude after the game of charades, when Claude stops outside his bedroom, flanked by the two sisters (0:17:27). The staircase scenes subsequently chronicle his attempts to get close to each sister in turn. When he and Muriel climb the stairs, he touches her, to her surprise (0:28:20). He later climbs the stairs to Anne’s artist’s studio after they have become lovers (1:19:04); not long afterwards he climbs the stairs again when he realizes that he may be losing her to Diurka (1:22:45). After Anne’s death, he finally sleeps with Muriel, who has remained a virgin, but only after they climb the stairs in a Calais hotel (1:52:46). It is in that hotel scene that Muriel says to Claude that he is not the marrying kind, something that is true of all of Léaud’s characters in his Truffaut films. Climbing stairs and the associated upward pan forms a trope signaling desire for the “definitive” woman, to use Truffaut’s terminology; but it is a desire doomed to fail, as the urge for the ideal is overtaken by the “provisional.” The drive towards Kundera’s ecstatic moment beyond time is submerged by the return to reality and the everyday.

The Work of Art: “I Have the Religion of Love” Another truism of Truffaut’s films, according to Holmes and Ingram, is that each displays “a fascination with virtually anything connected to the process of artistic creation.”38 They then explore in particular how Truffaut’s characters write books and letters.39 Many of these references involve upward pans. The camera is placed close to characters writing, obliging a reframing onto their face. A medium distance rather than a medium-close or close-up would not have required a reframing with an upward pan. What does the pan add to the shot? We might argue, irrespective of whether it is intentional or not, that it establishes a subliminal link between the object (the book, the letter) and the immediacy of the character’s body, the better to suggest the act of creation as desire, either for the other or for one’s self-development. In the former case, we find such pans when Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine tries to write a letter to Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés (1:08:46). The same actor plays Claude in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and he writes to Muriel that he loves her, the camera lifting pointedly, almost ironically, to a painting of a seated man reading with a child by his side, and two women. It thus reflects Claude’s situation in relation to the sisters, and his desire (expressed in voice-over as he writes) to marry Muriel and have a family (0:35:40). In the same film, Muriel writes to Claude to win him back (0:56:44), echoing the earlier shot, reinforced by the fact that both shots use voice-over and both

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are accompanied by Georges Delerue’s romantic strings. In L’Histoire d’Adèle H., a film dominated by the shadow of a great writer, Victor Hugo, we frequently see Adèle, Hugo’s daughter, writing. On one occasion she is writing her journal, when an upward pan accompanies the voice-over: “I have the religion of love” (0:30:54); indeed, we later see her kneeling and praying before a makeshift altar that enshrines her lover’s photograph. In the case of characters who write for themselves rather than for those they desire, there is still a strong component of desire for a woman. In Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972), the sociologist Stanislas Prévine uses a tape recorder to collect material from Camille (played by Bernadette Lafont, star of Les Mistons) for his thesis on deviant women; he will increasingly fall for her charms. There is an upward pan from the recorder to Prévine early in the film (0:16:13), echoed by a similar shot from the recorder to Camille as she tells him about her love life (0:32:16). In similar vein, we see Bertrand in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes standing on a stool in front of a wardrobe to reach for his typewriter as he decides that he will record his loves in a novel (0:26:18). The shot is echoed later when the young Bertrand stands on a stool in front of a wardrobe and finds photos and lists of his mother’s lovers (0:42:59); Bertrand draws a direct comparison between what his mother did and what he is doing. The most ideal form of writing in Truffaut’s films is the work that Jean Itard, played by François Truffaut, engages in with Victor in L’Enfant sauvage. One key sequence of upward pan shots focuses on language learning: panning up from the wooden letters Itard uses to teach Victor the alphabet (0:55:54; 1:00:58), Victor picking them up from the floor where he has thrown them in frustration (1:01:38), Itard reframed as he stands and enters a battle of wills with Victor (1:06:14), and a final pan as Itard writes his journal, celebrating Victor’s “first spark of the imagination,” as he calls it (1:10:31). These examples of upward panning associated with writing do not constitute a form of mannerism, even as they are repeated, unlike the shots of stairs and women’s legs we examined. Nor are they simply a stock technique, which might recommend that when a character writes, the camera should focus on the writing and then pan up to the character’s face. Rather, I believe they form part of a pattern that associates the act of writing with desire. A variant of this procedure can be found in Tirez sur le pianiste, where sustained repetition of upward pans is used to explore issues of identity, with at its center a painted image rather than writing. Half an hour into the film there is a complex flashback sequence where Léna reconstructs Charlie’s past. The sequence is punctuated by the same kind of upward pan shots we found in L’Enfant sauvage. There, the focus was the acquisition of language, with Victor increasingly affirming his subjectivity and identity. Here, it is also about identity, in this case the reconstruction of Charlie’s identity as Edouard Saroyan, the concert pianist. Until this point Charlie’s past has been a mystery. In this sequence, we see him courting Thérèse; climbing stairs to the offices of Lars Schmeel, the music agent (a first upward pan, 0:32:03); we see his rise to fame as a concert pianist; Schmeel’s advice to him that he should try to cure his timidity (a point underscored by Schmeel standing up with an upward pan reframe, 0:36:59); and we will soon see Schmeel lift a large portrait of Edouard, accompanied

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by an upward pan reframe, as he says that having the portrait means that Edouard cannot escape him (0:38:00). This sequence rebuilds the lost identity of Charlie as Edouard the concert pianist. Following Thérèse’s suicide he has taken the job of pianist in a bar, in a scene introduced by an upward pan from the piano keys to the hammers and a comment by Léna who asks pointedly: “Who is Charlie Kohler?” (0:44:28). A few minutes later, we return to the present; Léna tells him that she will “wake” him, and that he will become once more Edouard Saroyan, the concert pianist, the point underlined by an upward pan which takes in both Léna and the poster of Edouard the concert pianist that Charlie keeps in his room (0:48:43). But Edouard is not who he seems to be. At the end of the film, we understand that he is rather more like his violent brothers than he originally thought. When his gangster brothers learn from him that he has killed a man, Chico proudly claims that Edouard is like them (1:09:45), that the four brothers are all the same, his point emphasized by an abrupt upward pan reframing him as he stands up (1:10:42). Importantly, the struggle for identity consistently involves death. Edouard’s rise to fame as a concert pianist leads to Thérèse’s suicide when she throws herself out of the window. Léna’s attempt to reconstruct Charlie’s identity as Edouard, to rebuild that same career as a concert pianist, to take him from the low life she despises back to the high life of fame and fortune, leads to her death at the hands of the gangsters as she tumbles down the snow slope in the penultimate scene of the film. Like Sisyphus, the small and timid Edouard and his women struggle up figuratively towards success and self-confidence, their ascent marked by upward pans, only to fall, the women literally as well as figuratively, Charlie only figuratively. Thérèse’s defenestration is emphasized by Charlie’s point-of-view shot looking down from the balcony with a rapid downward pan (0:43:30), and Léna’s slide down the snow slope is accompanied by a slow downward pan, also Charlie’s point of view (1:15:12). Edouard in the concert hall tumbles figuratively to become Charlie in the backstreet café; he exchanges arpeggios and a bow tie for a riff and a drooping cigarette. The sequence of upward pans therefore suggests the fragility of Edouard/Charlie’s identity, as is confirmed by the discussion between the brothers at the end of the film. It is hardly surprising that two of the pans in the sequence I have analyzed involve images of Edouard, as Schmeel and Léna respectively talk about who he is. If we had to isolate a single iconic image in this sequence, it would be, precisely, the painted image of Edouard. Both Schmeel and Léna think that they can “capture” Edouard/ Charlie, but he remains a “mystery,” which is what Léna calls him in answer to her own question: “Who is Charlie Kohler?” So far, I have attended to repeated patterns of what might otherwise have seemed to be unremarkable reframings, or “statements” as I label them. Truffaut’s repeated upward pans map specific emotions and urges onto the characters: sexual desire, self-expression, self-affirmation. All three connect with the urge for the ideal – the ideal woman, the ideal identity – articulated through the work of creation. My exploration of Tirez sur le pianiste suggests that the urge for the ideal can lead to failure, and is intimately bound up with violence. This configuration is considerably more in evidence in those punctual upward shots that function as “exclamations” rather than the “statements.”

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Ecstasy: “Films Are More Harmonious Than Life” Writing may be important, as is suggested by Fahrenheit 451 with its human books, or by Doinel and Morane as writers of novels, but Truffaut reserves a special place for the cinema in his films. Holmes and Ingram point out that, with the exception of his historical films, one usually finds in Truffaut “some self-referential tribute to the pleasure of watching and/or making films.”40 In Les 400 Coups, for example, we see Antoine and René skipping lessons and going to the cinema; the camera lifts up from street level to the sign “CINE” (in bold uppercase) as if to express the cinema’s literal ascendance (0:20:15), even eclipsing the film being shown, in spite of its lurid poster.41 The opening shot of Antoine et Colette is a familiar pan up from the street to the cinema on the Place de Clichy (0:1:41) before moving to Antoine’s flat.42 The most obvious expression of cinema’s importance in Truffaut’s work, however, is La Nuit américaine. Although it contains many examples of relatively unobtrusive upward pans, or “statements,” the film stands out for its “exclamations,” ostentatious crane shots incorporating pans. The best example of this comes about halfway through the film, and halfway through the shooting of the film-within-the-film. As Holmes and Ingram describe it, “Ferrand concludes a voice-over monologue on the complexities of the director’s role with the words “le cinéma règne” (“cinema reigns”), which trigger the opening bars of an exuberantly triumphant musical score and a series of rapid cuts between shots showing aspects of the filmmaking process, concluding with a crane-mounted camera soaring into the sky to the music’s crescendo.”43 In fact this is a double crane shot; we see the crane panning up while the image we see on screen is also the result of an upward pan. Holmes and Ingram draw out the implications of the shot: “Film is unequivocally celebrated as a medium that both represents and transcends the real,”44 quoting a statement Ferrand makes later in the film, that “films are more harmonious than life” (1:22:58). Unsurprisingly, we find similar crane shots in L’Enfant sauvage when Victor escapes from his captors at the beginning of the film (0:10:24) and later when he escapes from the constraints of the house and his education (1:15:44). The “first spark of the imagination” brought about by education was associated with relatively unobtrusive upward pans. Victor’s escape from nurture back to nature is the occasion for expansive shots accompanied by the same kind of baroque music used in La Nuit américaine’s expansive upward cranes.45 As I suggested at the outset, the combination of expansive crane shots and music creates epiphanic moments. The film that has the greatest number of these – all are sweeping helicopter shots – is Jules et Jim (1962). None of them are associated with Jules; they are all associated with Jim and Catherine, who will both die at the end of the film when Catherine drives the car over the broken arch of a bridge. This link with death is important; indeed, the first of these epiphanic helicopter shots occurs when Jim visits the war cemetery (0:35:21). The rest are connected to his relationship with Catherine, initially figuring his desire for her. When he visits Catherine after the war the voice-over explains that it is as if she had finally arrived at the missed rendezvous in the Paris café years before; meanwhile the camera pans up and away from the

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station to a view far out over the pine forests, accompanied by Delerue’s lushly romantic strings (0:36:23). On another occasion, they have spent the night together, after a month-long courtship. The camera sweeps away from Catherine’s face, panning laterally to a copy of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and takes off up towards the window focusing once again on distant trees, as the voice-over says that “other women did not exist” for Jim (1:02:57). Three further helicopter shots occur at the next stage of their relationship, when they desire a child. We see Jim leave for Paris on the train, the camera lifting away as the train leaves, with the voice-over saying that Jim and Catherine wanted to get married and have children (1:08:16). Jim returns to the chalet some weeks later, and they spend the night together. The camera again takes off in a helicopter shot over the trees, accompanied by swelling strings, as the voice-over says, “Once again they soared high like great birds of prey. They had to remain chaste until Catherine was sure that she wasn’t pregnant by Albert. This restraint exalted them. They stayed together all the time; they didn’t cheat on each other. The Promised Land was in sight” (1:16:26). A final instance introduces a new technical element: superimposition. Jim and Catherine have separated again, as she seems not to be able to become pregnant. Jim receives a letter from her in which she tells him that she is pregnant. A helicopter shot soars across the treetops, with Catherine’s face superimposed, as she voices what she has written: I love you, Jim. There are many things we don’t understand, and many incredible things that are true. I’m pregnant at last. We must thank God. Bow to him, Jim. I’m sure, absolutely sure that you’re the father. Please believe me. Your love is part of me. You live in me. Believe me Jim, believe me. This paper is your skin, the ink is my blood. I am pressing hard so that it can sink through. Answer me quickly. (1:25:59)

The same type of shot occurs six years later in La Mariée était en noir, also starring Jeanne Moreau. She has just pushed Bliss – one of the men responsible for the murder of her husband – to his death from the balcony of his high-rise flat. The white chiffon scarf she used to lure him to his death floats away in the wind high above Cannes to the accompaniment of a Vivaldi mandolin concerto (0:16:02). The cranes or helicopters used to achieve these shots literally transport the spectator into a mobile space. That space is one of exaltation, as the narrator of Jules et Jim comments. The etymology of “exaltation” confirms the “lifting up” out of the ordinary (Latin’s exaltare, meaning to lift up).46 These shots are ecstatic, in the sense commonly accepted, and used by Kundera in the epigraph to this chapter; they take us out of stasis so that we are “outside ourselves,” in a privileged moment of absolute presentness, “outside time and independent of it.”47 And as Kundera also notes, ecstasy is associated with climactic emotion. Indeed such shots are climactic, expressing a desire for the ideal, for harmony. This is true, even if that harmony is born out of revenge in the case of La Mariée était en noir: as Dominique Auzel writes, “the flight of the white scarf in the clear sky is an ethereal vision of revenge, as if an evil genius had floated weightlessly out of a lantern and were materializing the act.”48 Everything

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about these shots emphasizes the desire for harmony as a reordering of the everyday: they soar into the sky, flying above the mundane and the problematic; they are accompanied by music that either expresses the romantic ideal of transcendence and fusion or, in the case of baroque or pseudo-baroque music, the notion of an almost mathematical order.

The Agony and the Ecstasy When discussing Jules et Jim’s discrete technique, Holmes and Ingram point out how the end of the affair between Jim and Catherine, when she pulls a gun on him, jars with the rest of the film because it is “high melodrama.”49 I would argue that the “ecstatic pans” identified above are equally melodramatic, both by virtue of their quality (helicopter shots, once with superimposition) and of the “exalted” language spoken over them. In this section, I reflect on the implications of the melodramatic mode used in combination with the upward pan as part of a complex network of mobile shots. We could argue that the melodramatic nature of these upward pans expresses Catherine’s nature, which, according to Jules, tends to the excessive. He says to Jim, “Your love went from zero up to a hundred with Catherine’s. I never knew your zeros or your hundreds” (1:38:21). But we have seen that the melodramatic, “ecstatic” pan is not confined to Catherine; it touches Julie in La Mariée était en noir, played by the same actress. Similarly the less ostentatious upward pans, closer to reframing, are overwhelmingly associated with Léaud in his many roles in Truffaut’s films. We could conclude that the upward shot is fundamentally gendered: flamboyant and aerial for Moreau, discrete and more earthbound for Léaud. This corresponds to Truffaut’s clearly gendered style, which Holmes and Ingram characterize pithily as “small men/big women,”50 one of the subheadings of their chapter on sexual politics. Truffaut’s men are weak and timid while his women are powerful. The melodramatic nature of the truly ecstatic shot (via crane or helicopter), as opposed to the reframing upward pan, works in complex ways, however. It may well suggest the desire of a powerful woman, but its excessive nature functions to undermine that power, to ironize it. In the key shot with Catherine’s superimposed face, arguably the high point both of her feelings and of the helicopter shot, there is an abrupt and ironic reversal. We had been flying forward and up across the trees but are arrested and taken backwards, as a superimposed statement in block capitals reads, “The Promised Land jumped backwards” (1:16:45). With this gesture Truffaut takes away with one hand what he gives with the other.51 Antoine Doinel is also treated with particular irony by Truffaut, as Holmes and Ingram argue when demonstrating how the director’s misogyny is offset by irony at the expense of some male characters: “The extent to which Antoine Doinel is treated ironically varies between the films, but after Les 400 Coups the identification with his viewpoint on the world is tempered to some degree by techniques which underline

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the partiality of his vision and illuminate (albeit briefly) the opposing vision of the women he encounters.”52 But what is striking in Jules et Jim and La Mariée était en noir is the way in which ecstatic shots are contrasted with the more ubiquitous tracking shot. This works to ground Moreau’s characters, to bring them back to earth, and, ultimately, to reduce the power that the ecstatic shot might otherwise have given them, and which irony had already worked to undermine. Both men and women reach for the sky in Truffaut’s films. But men do so timidly, hardly aiming higher than a bedroom while women reach melodramatically for an ideal. Both fail, and it is the tracking shot, often combined with horizontal pans, that insists on that failure. Tracking shots in Truffaut’s films occur more frequently than upward shots, as common sense would suggest since characters are more likely to walk than climb. However, tracking shots require rails and the careful blocking of the action. Almendros has commented on Truffaut’s predilection for sequence shots, “He tries not to edit. If he can keep it all in one shot, he’s very happy,”53 leading to what Almendros calls “choreographing the movement of actors and camera.”54 Hence tracking shots are aesthetically motivated. Just as was the case with upward shots, some of which are excessive and ostentatious, so too there are particularly long tracking shots scattered throughout Truffaut’s films which also draw attention to themselves. Anne Gillain has shown how in Les 400 Coups they are positively contrasted with static interior shots to suggest freedom from constraints.55 My analysis, focusing on the system of mobile shots, leads me to a different conclusion. In the case of Jules et Jim, the majority of these long tracks bear negative connotations. After the three characters have been to the theater, a set of tracking shots leads to Catherine throwing herself into the Seine (0:24:53). When Jim visits Jules and Catherine in the chalet, he and Catherine explain their feelings in a set of tracking shots, the first of which lasts almost two minutes (0:49:15); we could argue that this event is positive, but we know where this relationship will lead. Towards the end of the film, there are a number of long tracking shots: Jim leaves the chalet in an atmosphere of discord (1:22:20); the two men leave Catherine with Albert for the night in the Auberge La Bécasse (1:32:12), accompanied by the same music we hear in the later combination of swish pans and tracks as Catherine drives herself and Jim to their deaths (1:38:38). And, finally, there is the final long track as Jules walks through the cemetery (1:40:57). The negative associations of so many tracks undoes both the urge for the infinite expressed in the ecstatic pan, and also the rather more joyous tracking shots for which the film is famous: the sprint on the bridge with a handheld camera (0:13:25), and the two bicycle rides (0:21:45; 0:58:58). A similar development occurs in La Mariée était en noir. After the ecstatic shot following Julie’s murder of Bliss, each of the subsequent murders has a long tracking shot incorporating horizontal pans, generally at the beginning of the sequence. Julie accompanies Robert Coral as they walk away from the theater, the long track ending with a slight upward pan on the statue of the nineteenth-century naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Etampes (0:24:28). Julie gains entrance into the house of René Morane by following his son after school in an extended two-minute track/pan that is clearly from her point of view (0:36:52). The sequence opens in the car-lot

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belonging to Delvaux with a track. Similarly, Julie investigates the gallery belonging to Fergus with a very mobile track/pan (1:10:09). Finally, she allows herself to be caught at Fergus’ funeral so she can kill Delvaux in prison. The funeral cortege is filmed as an extended track/pan (1:35:02). A further pattern emerges from these two films. First, their function is to ground the characters, to undermine the longing to rise above, the longing to engage with the aerial ideal. Second, tracking shots are associated with violence and death, as is clear in their finales, most emphatically in the last shot of Jules et Jim, which takes place in a cemetery. The association of long tracking shots and cemeteries is equally obvious in La Chambre verte. A minor upward pan occurs only once, as the camera lifts up onto photographs of Julien Davenne’s wife in the green room, which functions as a chapel to her memory (0:24:18). A similar sequence towards the end of the film occurs as Davenne shows Cécilia the actual chapel he has refurbished in the cemetery. The camera lingers once more on photographs of the dead, but this time all the camera movements are tracks and horizontal pans (1:00:11). In between we find several long track/pans in the cemetery, first of Davenne at night (0:46:97) and then a set of tracks culminating in Davenne’s long walk with Cécilia (0:51:04). A further long track accompanies the two of them talking about the chapel, the dead, and Julien’s eventual death (1:10:05). Long tracking shots are not just associated with death but with loss more generally. Recall the tracking shot in La Femme d’à côté which occurs after Mathilde is reminded of her affair by chance at her book-signing, and which is accompanied by Delerue’s plangent cello (1:19:21). The same can happen to Truffaut’s male characters. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, immediately after the sequence when – with a strong upward pan – Claude climbs the stairs to Ann’s flat, comes a sequence the next day in the garden with an extended track as she explains that she has transferred her affections to Diurka (1:24:02). Truffaut’s characters reach up for what he calls the “definitive,” his men timidly, his women more urgently, if melodramatically. This urge for the ecstatic is articulated technically by the upward shot. But ecstasy is always accompanied by agony: for all the upward shots in his films, there are far more extended horizontal tracking and panning shots, most of which occur in contexts of loss, violence, and death.

Conclusion Let us return to where we started. There are plenty of extended horizontal track/ pans in Les 400 Coups, most of them penning and constraining the children. Even the final glorious track to the sea cannot hide the fact that Antoine will be caught, which is one way of interpreting the ultimately ambiguous freeze-frame as negative (en) closure. Antoine, being male, does not have the ostentatious upward shots associated with Truffaut’s female characters. He, like so many of Truffaut’s men, has to make do with the occasional reframing onto objects he yearns for: his mother’s legs after a night out at the cinema, the cinema itself.

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The statue shot discussed earlier is emblematic of Truffaut’s aesthetic. Like so many upward pans in Truffaut’s films, it expresses desire for an ideal, the love between mother and child, absent from his life. While not directly linked with Antoine, this scene displaces both his desire and his anger onto an anonymous boy. Antoine is both there (on the other side of the park), and not there (for we focus on the exchange between two different boys). The statue shot is both part of his story, and yet someone else’s, as if the sequence were saying, “My parents are not really like that; I don’t feel the same rage.” Le Berre astutely summarizes this paradox: “The spectator is both with the character, swept up in the spiral of passion, and standing back, both caught in the drama and distanced from it.”56 My first conclusion, therefore, is that, as Kundera puts it, the moment of ecstasy “stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it.”57 Such moments are not hiatuses, or intervals; rather, they are interstices that articulate a beyond, which is also anchored in the present. As Kundera says, “Ecstasy is the absolute identity with the present instant.”58 Second, the ecstatic pan, as I have defined it, is both epiphanic and cumulative. Some examples depend on repeated instances of unobtrusive reframing (what I have called statements); others are ostentatious to the point of ironic excess, cries of joy and of anguish at one and the same moment, which define a specific aesthetic space, that of elation. Truffaut’s films are calibrations of speculative ecstasies. Third, the ecstatic pan is a moment of intense desire shot through with violence and anger. Ecstasy is elusive, and once attained, ephemeral; this might well explain the frequent appeals in Truffaut’s work for the “definitive.” Only violence and anger, and ultimately death, the empty space of the eternal present, to recall Kundera, can break through the ordinary to reach the ideal, as is amply demonstrated by Jeanne Moreau’s characters. Fourth, that violence and anger is gendered. Truffaut’s women are passionate, his men diffident, more likely to accept the dilution of the definitive by the provisional. But, crucially, his men would like to be passionate, would like to be women. Truffaut cannot allow that to happen; it would mean dying, as so many of his women do. No matter how much he may be attracted to the “definitive,” his films work to contain the urge to dispense with the real that Truffaut believes is a specifically female urge. This might well explain why so many of his films carry male voice-overs, often by Truffaut himself, as if attempting to corset and harness the enthusiasm of his women. It also explains one of the more curious scenes in his films, the final sequence of Baisers volés. Antoine and Christine are about to enter into a settled couple relationship. The man who has been stalking Christine approaches them and declares his love for Christine: Before you, I’d never been in love. I hate the temporary [provisoire]. I know all about life. I know that everyone betrays everybody. But you and I will be different. We will be exemplary. We’ll never leave each other, not for a single hour. I have no work, I have no obligations in life. You’ll be my sole preoccupation. I understand … I realize that all this is too sudden, for you to say yes at once, and that you must first break temporary ties with temporary people. I am definitive. (1:25:18)

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The ever-sensible Christine comments that the man is mad. Antoine comes across as considerably less sure about this. Holmes and Ingram point out the paradox here: “The commitment to an absolute, uncompromising form of love is attached to an enigmatic, sinister and possibly crazy stranger – who nonetheless, both in his pursuit of women … and in his romantically idealizing passion for a woman he scarcely knows, strongly reminds us of Antoine.”59 The stranger’s statement that he will spend every hour with Christine is repeated in La Chambre verte, where Davenne, played, let us remember, by Truffaut himself, speaks approvingly of a couple who were unable to spend time apart (1:02:13), suggesting that the desire for an intense couple relationship may be mad, but is certainly worth thinking about. Holmes and Ingram (and Le Berre) are right in concluding that there is a tension in Truffaut’s work between “a yearning for the definitive, the permanent, the absolute,” and “a preference both aesthetic and moral for all that is impermanent, mobile, adaptable and provisional.”60 What my analysis shows is that attending to the details of camera technique reveals a much deeper affinity with the definitive than Holmes and Ingram suggest. Yes, there is tension between the definitive and the provisional, the absolute and the quotidian, the extraordinary and the perfectly ordinary. But the thirst for the definitive as expressed by upward shots, whether discretely male or melodramatically and passionately female, structure Truffaut’s films in consistent patterns. We should look at Truffaut’s films not as narratives with a technique “qui n’a l’air de rien” (a nonchalant technique), but as an elaborately choreographed dance between upwards and sideways cinematographic gestures, “qui a l’air de l’air” (which looks like the aerial), a dance that expresses both the joy of desire and its continual evanescence. As my second epigraph claims, “There is no such thing as a straightforward image in Truffaut’s work.”61 Le Berre is referring to mise-en-scène. I hope to have shown how camerawork is equally significant and complex in Truffaut’s films. Truffaut’s cinematographic technique cannot be ignored.

Acknowledgment I am grateful to Diana Holmes, Sarah Leahy, and T. Jefferson Kline for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Notes 1 2

3

Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 85. Carol Le Berre, François Truffaut (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1993), p. 193; trans. Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 58 n.22. The DVD versions of the films used for this chapter are as follows: MK2 box-set (2009) containing twelve full-length films and two shorts, in chronological order: Les Mistons,

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Les 400 Coups, Tirez sur le pianiste, Jules et Jim, Antoine et Colette, La Peau douce, Fahrenheit 451, Baisers volés, Domicile conjugal, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, L’Amour en fuite, Le Dernier Métro, La Femme d’à côté, Vivement dimanche!; MGM box-set (2009) containing seven films, in chronological order: La Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi, L’Enfant sauvage, L’Histoire d’adèle H., L’Argent de poche, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte; 2 Entertain (2007; CCD30504) Une Belle Fille comme moi; Warner (2008; D5/Z791779) La Nuit américaine. Timings correspond to the beginning of the event analyzed, not necessarily to the beginning of the whole scene. François Truffaut, “Entretien avec François Truffaut,” Cahiers du Cinéma 239 (1967): 70. Elizabeth Bonnafons, François Truffaut: La Figure inachevée (Lausanne: L’age d’homme, 1981), p. 105. The terms are used by characters in Truffaut’s films (Baisers volés, La Sirène du Mississippi); see Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 174–175, who use the opposition between these two terms to structure an analysis of Truffaut’s aesthetic (pp. 173–203). Jean Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut (Paris: P. Lherminier, 1977), p. 233. Nestor Almendros, “ Nestor Almendros,” Cinématographe 105 (1984), p. 38. François Truffaut, Letters, trans. Gilbert Adair (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 144. Nestor Almendros, A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Belash (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. viii. See, for example, Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 86–87. Jean-Luc Godard, reviewing Les 400 Coups in Arts, wrote that the director should “accord more importance to what is in front of the camera than to the camera itself,” quoted in René Prédal, Le Cinéma francais depuis 1945 (Paris: Nathan, 1991), p. 152. As Prédal points out, this is an “aggressive rejection of technique” (p. 152) in favor of “neutral recording” (p. 153). For the latter, see Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut, p. 233, and Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 97. Graham Petrie, The Cinema of François Truffaut (New York: Barnes/London: Zwemmer, 1970), p. 33. Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 117. Allen, Finally Truffaut, p. 143. Truffaut to Bernard Dubois, in Truffaut, Letters, p. 409. Truffaut to Dubois, in Truffaut, Letters, p. 414. Hervé Dalmais, Truffaut (Paris: Rivages, 1987), pp. 48–69. Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004), pp. 166–167. De Baecque and Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, p. 283. De Baecque and Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 111–112. De Baecque and Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, p. 14. Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p.12. Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p 87. See similar comments made almost a decade earlier in an English-language collection focusing on cinematographers: “[Truffaut] usually follows the actors. [He] tries not to edit. If he can keep it all in one shot, he’s very happy”; Nestor Almendros, “Nestor Almendros,” in Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato (eds), Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 10. Jean Domarchi et al., “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du Cinéma 97 (1959):1–18; translated in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma. Vol.1, 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/British Film Institute, 1985), p. 62.

The Ecstatic Pan

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Luc Moullet, “Sam Fuller sur les brisées de Marlowe,” Cahiers du Cinéma 93 (1959):14; translated in Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma. Vol.1, 1950s, p. 148. Jacques Rivette, “De l’abjection,” Cahiers du Cinéma 120 (1961): 54–55. Le Berre, François Truffaut, pp. 184–189. The term is used by Holmes and Ingram to describe the aerial shot in Jules et Jim, which, they suggest, is “evocative of fierce elation.” Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 70. As we shall see, however, that elation is made more complex by irony. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 86. Alison Smith, “The Other Auteurs: Producers, Cinematographers and Scriptwriters,” in Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 201. Tirez sur le pianiste, Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, La Mariée était en noir, and the short Antoine et Colette. L’Enfant sauvage, Domicile conjugal, Les Deux anglaises et le continent, L’Histoire d’Adèle H., L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte, L’Amour en fuite, Le Dernier métro, Vivement dimanche! Une Belle Fille comme moi, La Nuit américaine, L’argent de poche. Baisers volés and La Sirène du Mississippi. Translated in Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 119 n3. De Baecque and Guigue, Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 283–285. There is a similar although slower pan in La Peau douce from the street to the flat where Pierre Lachenay wishes to install his lover Nicole (1:36:57). My thanks to Sarah Leahy for reminding me that Truffaut also favors the horizontal swish pan, albeit more functionally to indicate motion or point of view. If we consider just his first three major films, in Les 400 Coups, for example, it links the two cinemas visited by the boys (0:20:11), and is used in the rotor sequence to indicate circular motion (0:20:21). In Tirez sur le pianiste it is used somewhat more conventionally to follow a car as the thugs take Charlie and Léna away (0:26:37). In Jules et Jim, there is a series of swishes purporting to be the men’s point of view as they search for the enigmatic statue on an Adriatic island (0:8:26); a similar pointof-view shot occurs as the men turn their gaze onto Catherine’s car towards the end of the film (1:29:41). Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 4. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 164–167. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 170. The film is Frank Lloyd’s The Shanghai Story (USA, 1954, released in France in 1956). The film in this case is Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (France, 1962). Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 170–171. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 171. In La Nuit américaine the music is composed by Georges Delerue and is “half-Vivaldi, halfTelemann,” according to Delerue’s official website. See Stéphane Lerouge, “The Cinema of François Truffaut,” http://www.georges-delerue.com/eng/oeuvres/musique-ecran/ truffaut/cinema-truffaut.html (accessed February 2, 2011). In L’Enfant sauvage it is a Vivaldi mandolin concerto. Collet makes a similar comment when discussing the crane shot in La Nuit américaine, suggesting that the work involved in making a film “exalts us, in the strong and etymological sense of the term, it lifts us up and makes us take off ” (Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut, p. 233). Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 85.

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Dominique Auzel, François Truffaut: les mille et une nuits américaines (Paris: Veyrier, 1990), p. 86. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 74. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 120. Phil Powrie, “Truffaut’s Vivement dimanche! (1983), or, How to take away with one hand what you give with the other,” in Modern and Contemporary France, 43 (1990): 37–46. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 128. Almendros, “Nestor Almendros,” in Masters of Light, p. 10. Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p. 87. Anne Gillain, “The Script of Delinquency: François Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups (1959),” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Text and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 189. Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 174. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 85. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 85. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 175. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 176. Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 193; translated in Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 58 n22.

10

The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance Adrian Martin For Cristina

The Untimely Director L’Enfant sauvage (1970) was a film out of its time. Truffaut himself was extremely aware of the fact that it did not jibe well with a period of widespread political upheaval; he rightly wondered, “Will we be able to get people interested in a little boy found in the forest, who is taught to stand erect and eat at a table?”1 Not only did the film offer an unambiguously positive account of a young subject’s entry into the Symbolic Order – even if that entry is still incomplete and uncertain in the final frames – but it also stripped away any countercultural aura that could be applied to the child’s initial state of wildness. There is nothing liberated or Edenic about this kid as incarnated by Pierre Cargol: equating him with the abandoned, underprivileged, deprived children of other films (earlier, in 1959, Les 400 Coups; later, in 1976, L’Argent de poche), Truffaut shows him, at the outset, as helpless, afraid, at the mercy of savage dogs. Moreover – and on this point he was well and truly trumped five years later by Werner Herzog with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) – in young Victor’s interactions with the overdressed, gawking bourgeoisie of the period, Truffaut stripped away celebration of anything that could be even vaguely evocative of a countercultural allure, any song of the natural, animalistic body in the vein of Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) or Claude Faraldo’s roughly contemporaneous Themroc (1973). The child is wild, but no anarchist. In his notes on a script draft by Jean Gruault for L’Enfant sauvage, Truffaut toyed with what was for him an uncharacteristic scene idea, to be handled in a stylistically characteristic way: “Without falling into a scatological film, it’s important to show at the beginning that he relieves himself anywhere. … The scene would take place in the garret and would be seen from pretty far off by some nurse, which would permit A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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it to be filmed with decency.”2 Seen from far off, with decency. As I shall go on to argue, this could be a descriptor of much of Truffaut’s cinema. But the citation can give a misleading impression of this most camouflaged of filmmakers. Truffaut the puritan? Whatever one might make of this proposition on a biographical level (and it is clear that, as with Robert Bresson or Eric Rohmer, we brutally scale down the many-sided richness of a director’s psychological makeup if we too quickly project the apparent chasteness of a signature style back into the person’s private life, or, vice versa, project the seeming decorum of the life onto the surface placidity of the work), it is clear that Truffaut had a complex relation to decency in both subject matter and his chosen modes of depicting it. After all, was this not the man who conceptualized Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) as “not a film about physical love, but a physical film about love”3 – a film whose central scene of bloody deflowering amidst nature inescapably places it in a charged, erotic circuit that begins with Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1936) and continues through Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002)? An artist described by filmmaker Olivier Assayas in the documentary François Truffaut: Portraits volés (1993) as one secretly driven by an underlying violence? A director whose work was once characterized, by Alain Masson in his discussion of La Femme d’à côté (1981), as an interplay of ice and fire?4 It is not for nothing that Truffaut’s cinema is one of fainting and dizzy spells, sudden blackouts, lights in the eyes. It would surely be a trap to read Truffaut’s tendency towards decency as a sign of reticence – of the kind for which Noël Burch castigated Robert Bresson, high among those directors (Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni were other disappointments) who “exclude from their work any painful violations of taboos, or include such violations only reluctantly, inserting any such element in their films in the most gingerly sort of way”5 – or, far worse, of an intrinsically repressive, conservative nature. Rather, this reticence – which deserves a careful, step-by-step description in terms of its actual filmic crafting – is some kind of ploy, a mask … but also a gesture, a way of separating the work from the too-loud and too-urgent timeliness of its present moment. What else can begin to explain – once we jettison facile attributions of nostalgia, or a taste for the old-fashioned, to Truffaut – the case of La Chambre verte (1978), his most intense and seemingly personal love story, in which the central male and female characters never kiss, and hardly even touch hands? We have before us, when contemplating Truffaut, a delicate double act, and a devious dialectic. If he advances discreetly masked, this is partly because a mask allows the artful dodge, the quick getaway or, as Raymond Durgnat would often say, the “bat it and run” manner characteristic of a classical-era professional like Howard Hawks: a way of touching upon difficult and painful topics while, at the same, glancing off, elegantly skating away from them and onto the next thing. “Certain styles exist to skim along their themes. The boxer makes the moves but pulls the punches.”6 This is related to what Serge Daney had in mind when he described Truffaut’s filmmaking method as that of a “cruiser who places emphasis on the manner in which he will

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flee the very place he penetrates.”7 But a mask can also allow, quite to the contrary, a subtle and ongoing form of revelation, often of the deepest and most agonized kind – a subterranean probing. Was this not at the very heart of the politique des auteurs that Truffaut himself helped formulate as a young critic at Cahiers du Cinéma and elsewhere: what Raymond Bellour once called the “indirect aim” of an artist who is obliged – or, in Truffaut’s case, chooses – to speak through conventions, genres, formulae, and formalities of all kinds?8

A Logical Game For Daney, Truffaut should be considered “a filmmaker of the scene, not the shot.”9 “Every scene in Truffaut,” he wrote, “is a logical game which obeys one single principle: how do you get out? Everything is filmed from the point of view of the door, the corridor, the basement window, the line of flight.”10 He pictured Truffaut as someone “who does not stop to ‘make the point’, but only negotiates passages.”11 Daney’s words suggest a fruitful way to return to Truffaut and look at the momentto-moment intricacy of his style. By any reckoning, the first big, explosive, dramatic moment in La Femme d’à côté – carefully prepared by several well-spaced, smaller shocks – occurs sixty-four minutes in. Bernard snaps, accosting his ex- and now current lover, Mathilde, alternating in split-seconds between brutality and lust – shoving her, kissing her, yelling at her, forcing her down the stairs. Yet, at a certain key moment, Truffaut decides, in a striking manner, to take leave of this spectacle. He does so by contriving an ordinary, commonplace piece of action – a technique that is very frequent in his work. On their way out of the house, Bernard and Mathilde storm past two guys who happen to be coming in. Truffaut stays with these anonymous figures, following them with his camera as they rush to the window in order to watch the continuation of the drama outside on the lawn, where Mathilde faints and Bernard is pulled off her. All this happens in the matter of a few brisk seconds of screen action. If you study these two men closely, nothing they do in the scene is really logical or believable. As Bernard rages past them, they make a vague attempt at putting a hand on him, but hardly succeed in intervening. And why would they go to the window rather than simply follow the couple outside? Of course, we are not given time to register this illogicality in the speed of the scene; it is quickly smoothed over in the flow of action. But the answer to this mystery is obvious: Truffaut wants that view of the lovers from behind and through the window, and he needs a quasinaturalistic pretext, a bit of business (as filmmakers say) to stay in that room (where most other filmmakers would move or cut to the outside) and maneuver over to the window. Never would Truffaut simply cut ostentatiously to exhibit this angle from behind glass. This is what Daney meant when he called Truffaut a filmmaker of

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the scene rather than the shot. Truffaut left such options for overt display to other directors whose style it suits; for him, however, the art and craft of cinema involves finding subtle, fluid, dramatically seamless ways of arriving at the strongly expressive cinematic effects and moments that he wants, the very moments that (presumably) drove him to make the film in the first place. But, as we shall see, there may well be more invested in this type of technique than merely canny craftsmanship. Directorial decisions such as the one I have just described from La Femme d’à côté would seem to make Truffaut, more or less, a classical artist. But it is a particularly and remarkably personal adoption of classicism that takes place and plays out in his films – something that a fellow filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, intuited in 1974 after seeing and admiring La Nuit américaine (1973). Pasolini noted that Truffaut’s work seemed to be “written and shot with its montage always in mind” – a mode of découpage “characteristic of commercial films, and more appropriately of the American commercial films.”12 Yet Truffaut’s goal was not (according to this account) merely hyper-professionalism, fine craftsmanship, or the much-vaunted “invisible style” of the great classical filmmakers such as Hawks, John Ford, or Raoul Walsh. Rather, this mode was “conceived not as a practical operation but rather as an aesthetic endeavour.”13 Pasolini summed up what he dubbed Truffaut’s “technical aesthetic awareness” in the following, striking way: “ ‘I produce technically perfect cinema, comparable to a mythical American craftsman of the old school,’ Truffaut appears to be saying, ‘yet I know that I am making artistic cinema.’ ”14 Another untimely gesture.

Secret Shocks We can say it like this: for Truffaut, what matters is the finding and arranging of what he might have called the correct distance – the best, most appropriate, proper position for the camera from which to observe and record the actions included in the script and staged on the set. Best and most appropriate, above all, in terms of tone – discreet, unspectacular, but also nonjudgmental. Involved, empathetic, but also withdrawn – not detached or cold, but somehow protected, shielded from the white-hot intensity of the emotional material that is unleashed and then handled or negotiated via cinema. The correct distance is Truffaut’s dialectic. We often sense this hide-and-seek, this discreet but ever-trembling tension in Truffaut: he makes films to approach pain, l’amour fou, death, grief, suffering, depressive melancholia – but also to manage them, contain them. He approaches the sun with sunglasses on. But if there is such classical restraint, such tact in Truffaut – observe the polite prelude to the first sex scene in La Peau douce (1964), where Pierre runs his finger along the contours of Nicole’ face in the dark – there is also the reverse effect: a simple insert shot, unremarkable in many other films, can register as a significant eruption of supercharged emotion.

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Let us look at a rich moment from La Peau douce in this light. Pierre has rushed to the airport in the hope of catching Nicole; an overhead plane signals to him that he has missed her, that he may as well drive back home. But he enters the terminal, anyhow, to write a telegram – a passionate declaration of his devotion, and of her overwhelming role in his life (“I’ve become a new man”), which ends with the words “I love you.” The way that Truffaut treats this simple sequence of actions is very telling. As Pierre enters the airport, the shots follow La Peau douce’s standard pattern: three images record the banal actions of his walking, getting a ticket, approaching a counter. But when a lap-dissolve ellipse takes us to the telegram that he handles, and on which he will write, everything quickly becomes more stylized. Georges Delerue’s music languidly builds in layers of chords – a suspension effect that Ennio Morricone also often uses. The first dissolve inaugurates a series in which, for once, strict narrative economy (despite the evident time abridgements) seems secondary to the effect of the moment: the leap from him writing the name “Nicole” to the view (closer up) of him inscribing “I love you” has an immense, even unexpected, expressive power. After a shot of Pierre reading, yet another shot of the telegram allows a scansion of the entire text. This insistence, the literalness or spelling-out of such detail – similar to the by-play with the mixed-up numbered hotel door keys earlier in the film – is more than the plot (in any Hitchcockian-Langian sense) strictly requires. Yet another shot of the telegram has an odd narrative pretext, just like the through-the-window shot from La Femme d’à côté cited earlier: Pierre adds a superfluous dash between the last word of the text (“aime”) and his own name. And it is on this precise shot – in an image-sound overlap technique prevalent in Truffaut – that the scene hinges: Nicole’s voice is heard off-screen. The editing moves faster now: she is walking, talking to a friend; he calls to her, she stops and notices him. Then comes the real shock of the entire scene: a close-up insert – the fifth time now that we have been shown this page – of the phrase “Je vous aime,” which motivates the following close-up of Pierre, but is itself, in a strictly classical sense, unmotivated: the character is not looking, from far or near, at the object/prop which is this telegram. A secret plot action (secret in that it is neither seen nor known by Nicole) instantly follows in the same shot of Pierre: a quick pan shows his folding and pocketing of the note. Nicole and Pierre approach each other slowly, in a dance-like movement – but the music has ended, Raoul Coutard’s camerawork has a deliberate, cinéma vérité bumpiness to it, and the everyday register is returning: the soundtrack is  filled with the dull murmur of flight announcements. The final shot of the scene, under a dialogue exchange of banal pleasantries, shows the terminal point of Pierre’s previous, private gesture: presumably without looking (because he fumbles a little), he swiftly takes the telegram from his pocket, scrunches it up, and bins it. A  chapter in this histoire d’amour has been closed, and the emotional force or intensity underpinning it has been both unleashed and contained. Let us return to La Femme d’à côté. In its prologue, the into-camera framing narration by Odile introduces two neighboring houses as the central characters in the

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drama. She is not joking: almost everything in this film (except for the Rohmerian interludes at Odile’s tennis club) is patterned around the way each home can be viewed from the vantage point of the other building: through windows, doorways, corridors. Sequences set in the front of these homes (frequently registering the existence of children largely insignificant to the tale) follow an implacably distant, long shot/long take logic. It is, again, a correct distance. Yet all this order, symmetry, distance, and poise ceaselessly create the conditions for their own upsetting or destabilization. All it takes, during a dinner party, is for Mathilde to enter the frame – it is her first appearance in the movie – and exchange a charged glance with Bernard, for the first of many shocks to be registered.

Linkage and Balance, Repertoire and Score Four years after the director’s death, Luc Moullet, in a far-reaching essay, suggested that the twin drives of Truffaut’s cinema are linkage and balance: joining all the fragments together as seamlessly and smoothly as possible and then creating an overall structure of mood and tone to balance the whole.15 Nothing, it seems, was more important to Truffaut than this sustained economy of expressive means, an economy of filmic narration in its fullest sense. Recall the words scribbled by the director in the margins of Henri-Pierre Roché’s book and displayed during the credits of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent: “Beginning here, things must go very fast.” These words betray an intense obsession, peculiar to Truffaut, with narrative speed, compression of information, and tight, telescopic transitions. The interplay of linkage and balance extends to the weaving-in of music. Georges Delerue composed in two modes when he worked for Truffaut. On the one hand, Delerue was happy to create tiny stings (as musicians call them): brief swirls of notes that surge up and die away within moments, especially in the transitions between scenes (La Femme d’à côté is full of these). On the other hand, Delerue was a master of the long, sustained melodic development, such as we hear in La Peau douce or, elsewhere, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) and James Toback’s Exposed (1983) – the type of tune whose poignancy and ache derive from the fact that the emotion seems so stretched out in its statement. Truffaut fully utilized both musical/stylistic modes. In this obsession with speed, economy, and lightness of touch, is not Truffaut again close to the spirit of classicism, albeit an almost neurotic, exacerbated classicism? Especially from the late 1960s through to his death in the 1980s, he seems a filmmaker trying to prove he can do the “classic American” style better than his US contemporaries. Pasolini saw Truffaut’s style differently, and more radically, as a marker of a particular variant of modernism, a variant peculiar to Truffaut in his untimely time. The aping of classicism was (in Pasolini’s view) “nothing more than rigid discipline, a conscious self-imposed formal restriction” – leading to his bold statement, in relation to La Nuit américaine, that “we cannot but deduce that the film’s real content must in

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fact be its rhythm.”16 What does it mean to suggest such a thing of Truffaut, and what are its consequences? Pasolini offers a guide: The rhythm is not determined by the characters’ psychology. … On the contrary, it is the rhythm that determines the psychology of the characters and the story. In the interlocking of rhythmic motifs, whenever Truffaut required increased rhythmic incidence, the characters became happy and excited. When he needed a more moderate, somber rhythm the characters had to control and contain their emotions, their gestures, etc. This arbitrariness in centering creativity around the mathematical and abstract rhythm of concretely psychological and existential situations endows those situations with an extraordinary degree of truth and elegance.17

Pasolini juggles a lot in this description, and (like Truffaut’s films) crosses a long distance swiftly: from abstraction and mathematics to truth and elegance. Intriguingly, in light of my discussion of Delerue, Pasolini called upon the musical concepts not only of rhythm but also of repertoire and score to account for the particular meshing of form and content in Truffaut. Repertoire in this context refers to the director’s pool of “his own experiences,” especially, in the case of La Nuit américaine, those deriving from a career in filmmaking. These experiences, Pasolini notes, have been “slightly conventionalized,” nudged into the realm of stereotype and cliché, as has their “execution.”18 The musical score is, quite precisely in this context, the script; it is the script that allows the pre-planning of the rhythmic structure of the work (“composed completely of allegretti, mossi, andanti, vivaci, vivaci ma non troppo”19 – plus a single adagio movement, the scene in the car featuring Alexandre’s confession).

Birth of the Lyric Every Truffaut fan knows how staunchly attached he remained to a form of omniscient, third-person, novelistic narration – high on plot information and whimsical observation, delivered in a sly, swift, matter-of-fact way. This is part and parcel of his great formal economy. An example can be heard in his splendid short Antoine et Colette (1962): “Antoine and Colette met often and traded books and records. They discussed hi-fi over coffee and lemonade, and walked each other home, talking for hours on end in their doorways. Colette treats Antoine like a friend. He either doesn’t notice or accepts it for the time being.” In terms of sheer storytelling craft, Truffaut achieves here as elsewhere something exceptionally difficult in cinema: to convey the iterative, the things that happen in more or less the same way every darn day. But, for a more cinematic thrill, listen closely to the total soundscape of Antoine et Colette, its crisp montage of sounds and aural clusters: grabs of songs, specific everyday noises (clock alarms, pneumatic drills), classical music dwelling within a scene, then soaring beyond it. This little, thirty-minute film speeds by so fast, in fact, that Truffaut can instantly turn anyone into the narrator: Antoine tells the story of his week, Colette recalls a

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story. Such constantly displaced, insistent flow of narrated stories helps give Truffaut’s films their flavor of freedom and lyricism. Lyricism is an aesthetic attribute that further complicates and deepens the portrait of Truffaut-as-stylist that I have been building. Lyricism goes beyond rhythm per se – or is an intensification of its affect – and beyond even the suggestive association that Pasolini made between Truffaut and Jean Cocteau, representative of “realistic Elegance, par excellence.”20 Take a symptomatic scene from La Nuit américaine invariably cited by commentators for its flagrantly cinephilic gesture of acknowledging the masters. The director, Ferrand, throws down on his desk a pile of his latest film-book acquisitions (on Bresson, Rossellini, Hitchcock …). How does this brief, seemingly unassuming scene work stylistically? The accompanying soundtrack is curious, the kind of oddity allowed by the behind-the-scenes premise: Delerue’s musical theme, in his expansive mode, is piped through a tinny telephone speaker; we will have to wait until much later to hear this music liberated, as it were, into the plein air. The scene’s mixture of candidly portrayed everyday detail with an unexpected, carefully restrained burst of lyricism is quintessential Truffaut. This feeling of restraint is significant. Truffaut keeps his Jean Vigo-like poetic lyricism – sometimes of a quite anguished variety – on a tight leash, locked up in the submerged, subterranean levels of his work, waiting to escape and be expressed. A burst of lyricism has to be carefully prepared and pulled off – it needs to be earned by the work. But it is also, in the first and last instance, what the work exists for: these moments of lyrical rapture, so few and so fleeting.

The Essential Part of the Superfluous There are at least a dozen good reasons why Truffaut’s admirers liken him to Alfred Hitchcock on one side (classical formalism, tricks and techniques, suspense and glamour) and to Jean Renoir on the other (generous humanism, behavioral observation, social panoramas). Other less obvious but usefully provocative comparisons are possible. I have already noted Pasolini’s twinning of Truffaut with Cocteau, as well as the affinity with Hawks, in whose work a similar dialectic of restraint and explosiveness is at play. In a personal conversation, the esteemed Japanese film scholar Shigehiko Hasumi used the concept of correct distance to link Truffaut with (of all people) Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his disquieting horror-thrillers, Cure (1997), Pulse (2001), and Loft (2005). Most recently, the work of another Cahiers critic-turned-filmmaker, Mia  Hansen-Løve, has revived the Truffaldian taste for attenuated ellipsis and understatement – even at the price of being accused of a certain coldness – in her autobiographical Un Amour de jeunesse (2011). For my part, I would propose the duo of Ernst Lubitsch and Jacques Becker – Truffaut wrote and spoke about both in glowing terms – as a more apt pegging of the origins of his very particular variant of classicism. “I set myself to watching

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Lubitsch’s films and to asking myself, ‘But how did he do that?’” declared Truffaut in 1979, adding, “I would say that in recent years the influence of Lubitsch is the strongest.”21 From Lubitsch Truffaut learnt the fine art of ellipsis. Take the moment in La Peau douce – economic, too, in the strictly financial sense, for we must never overlook how assiduous Truffaut was as his own producer – when Pierre is waiting in the wings to go onstage and deliver a lecture in Lisbon. There are references to the crowd, a full house, a theater, preparations for the host’s introduction of Pierre. Truffaut shows us none of this; only his pale hero standing behind a frosted pane of glass (no visibility through the glass this time, as in La Femme d’à côté), with the speech and applause heard from off-screen, and Pierre’s quick exit from the frame. Cut to a cab, after the speech is over. Like Lubitsch and his brilliant screenwriters, Truffaut often appears to have asked himself and his collaborators: why show it, when we can briskly skip over it? This is Truffaut’s thoroughly and systematically indicative side. Truffaut reworked the “Lubitsch touch” throughout his career, achieving the same paradoxical invocation of both tact and erotic spice – another untimely gesture since, in Truffaut’s case, nothing like the Hays Code ruled over his field of operations. But there is also a shimmer of what the writer-filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky once attributed to Lubitsch, the “gaze of the outsider” that is common to exiles and émigrés in a new or adopted land: a gaze that makes all manners, all customs, all cultures appear strange, a puzzle to be cannily decoded and negotiated.22 For instance, in his tenacious insistence on finding interesting, curious jobs for his characters to be engaged in, Truffaut quietly revealed the inherent strangeness of all daily, salaried employment. One can also see a kinship between Lubitsch and Truffaut in the guarded, but invariably devastating, revelation of deep emotion: the silent moments of Jennifer Jones’ humiliated distress in Cluny Brown (1946), held on screen just a fraction longer than all the lighter, more flippant touches, could serve as a borrowed emblem for the subterranean streams in Truffaut’s cinema. In contrast to all the briskness in Truffaut, other details are lingered over in a special, intense way. In La Peau douce, much is made of Pierre’s passages – his moving up and down stairs and along streets, into and out of rooms. In the hotel scene where Nicole unexpectedly phones Pierre who has returned to his room, the joy he feels is conveyed by the mundane but entirely thrilling act of turning on all the lights – almost comically accompanied, at every gesture, by the layered swirls and arpeggios of Delerue’s music. This is where Becker comes into the picture. He, too, was obsessed with economy, but with an added focus on the everyday. As Truffaut himself put it: “He keeps only what is essential … even the essential part of the superfluous. He will skimp what another director would treat most seriously in order to linger over the characters eating breakfast, buttering a roll, brushing their teeth.”23 Becker was, like Truffaut, a perennial problem-solver, which Truffaut explained in the following way: he was “preoccupied only by the problems of his art,” and “wanted to achieve an exactitude of tone.” Becker “knew much more about what he wanted to avoid than what he wanted to get at,” and what he wanted to avoid was “the kind

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of cinema that might be called abusive: bombastic, erotically exploitative, violent, a mechanical raising of the tone of voice.”24 The Becker–Truffaut filiation was certainly not lost on Serge Toubiana. In an essay aptly titled “Jacques Becker’s Currency,” Toubiana suggested that the director of Antoine et Antoinette (1947) is for us a kind of passeur, between Renoir and the Nouvelle Vague. Himself formed as a professional director under Renoir, he secretly influenced Truffaut: Baisers volés [1968], L’Homme qui aimait les femmes [1977], or La Chambre verte undeniably recall for us Becker’s cinema. Thanks to him, it is possible for us to retie the thread of a certain kind of French cinema from Antoine Doinel back to Boudu.25

Brutality and Nuance In Pasolini’s appreciation of La Nuit américaine, he remarked, “I could embark on a long enumeration of situations and feelings in the characters’ relationships with one another: all surprisingly true, full of brutality and nuances, of the cruelty and heedlessness of life, with its demonic, sluggish nature, condemned to remain forever obscure (to the analysis, but not to the representation).”26 To the analysis, but not to the representation: Pasolini pinpoints here one of the many paradoxes in Truffaut’s cinema that I have tried to bring to light. What often proves difficult to analyze rarely seems difficult to watch, to take in: it flows. Truffaut’s approach was the polar opposite to that of Maurice Pialat (whose stubborn 1968 L’Enfance nue he helped produce) or Pialat’s spiritual brother in the United States, John Cassavetes, who in 1983 advised his actors, “Don’t make it easy to make the scene work, because then there’s no scene.”27 For Truffaut, by contrast, every scene ideally needed to feel easy. But are Truffaut and Pialat/Cassavetes really so far apart, ultimately, in cinema’s continually evolving adventure of forms? We have noted (via Pasolini) how Truffaut adopted a certain conventionalization that depends on a repertoire of familiar (even stock) characters and situations. And yet he was able to achieve, through that, a portraiture that was “surprisingly true, full of brutality and nuances, of the cruelty and heedlessness of life.”28 … Is this a contradiction? Or rather, the wellspring of a certain artistic mystery? Nicole Brenez’s analysis of Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974) springs to mind: “Certain very simple acts … remain absolutely incomprehensible,” she writes, while at the same time, “inversely, certain very difficult and delicate phenomena, or those among the most ancient in the history of representations, are made the object of a resolutely clear treatment.”29 Truffaut’s careful work on the gestures, postures, and attitudes of his performers would richly reward study from this angle. There is yet another crucial torsion in Truffaut’s cinema. For all his evident tact and discretion, Truffaut was sometimes willing, within his own trajectory, to risk the complete reversal of this politique. Like many popular artists, he was drawn – almost

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despite himself, or perhaps deep within his truest self – to the power of the vulgar, the graphic. This is the dare we see taken within, above all, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. And indeed – as with all the strongest moments of lyricism, violence, or the enactment of lustful desire in Truffaut – we can wonder whether this, far from being some lapse or deviation on the director’s part, is really the most profound and secret motivation for each individual film and for the oeuvre as a whole. Pasolini titled his reflection on La Nuit américaine (which he surprisingly twinned with the contemporaneous 1973 La Grande Bouffe by Marco Ferreri) “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality.” Has anyone ever devoted himself or herself to the ambiguity of narrative ritual more completely than François Truffaut?

“A Riddle in the Book of Love, Obscure and Obsolete”30 In Don Allen’s respectful but unambitious book on Truffaut we read that the major problem with La Peau douce is that adultery is a “cinematically hackneyed subject.”31 The film has often drawn this kind of condescending scorn, even from specialist commentators. But why should this subject be more hackneyed than any other in the annals of fiction? Is it because the eternal triangle somehow reduces life to the level of a cheap, trashy soap opera? But we surely have to take that cheap, vulgar, melodramatic dimension of love and life quite seriously. “Who Wrote the Book of Love?” That old doo-wop song by The Monotones expresses both exasperation and admiration that someone, somewhere, foresaw so perfectly all the inevitable steps, stages, phases, and levels of the typical love relationship. This, too, forms the type of repertoire that Truffaut learned well to draw upon. But we ignore or disdain this age-old wisdom at our peril, because the story in that book is going to engulf and implicate us, whether we like it or not, no matter how atypical or special or different we think we are. This is the truth that is vaguely shameful or embarrassing to some viewers about the experience of watching La Peau douce – and the same can be said for many Truffaut films, including La Femme d’à côté, L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), and La Chambre verte, all those works in which he gets into the uncomfortable, morbid side of wild yet mundane romantic–erotic passions. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once responded to the idea that in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) the characters speak only in empty, mindless clichés of romance and destiny, and that the film seeks to expose their debilitating construction. Cavell asks, in effect: what would you rather have them speak? What reliable profundities will surpass the banality but also the wonder of our everyday speech? “In what spirit does the girl entrust the narration of her life to the rack of  phrases picked from magazine shelves? Which shelves would you recommend? To have company under whatever sky, you will have to entrust its conformation to whichever booth of expression you can occupy. … To whom, from where, does one address a letter to the world?”32 Truffaut had a similar fix on the words and gestures, acts and passions of everyday life in the course of composing his letters to the world.

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There is certainly something derisory, even pathetic about it all: the “man who loved women” who dies, run over by a car, because he’s looking at yet another shapely pair of legs; the weak-willed, philandering husband who receives his comeuppance with a shotgun blast in La Peau douce; and the ever-fleeing Antoine Doinel, eternal kid veering between excitement and moroseness, in L’Amour en fuite (1979) as in every installment of his quotidian chronicle. But there is more: that charge of intense feeling – never entirely attached to or explicable by the represented narrative situations it invests itself in – which constantly floats underneath and keeps bursting out of Truffaut’s movies. Truffaut wrote of Becker that the normal world was a kind of screen for him, just a sort of surface: using that seemingly indifferent canvas, he could create masterpieces “on pretexts as slight as a lottery ticket or a dinner jacket.”33 We return to one of cinema’s most fundamental and enduring mysteries: the often wrenching discrepancy between the brute signifier – that often tiny, uninteresting thing or event upon which the camera focuses – and what it comes to signify for us, in our hearts and minds, where it expands and works. Truffaut spent his entire career as both critic and filmmaker seeking out and exploring the secret of that power, that cinematic affect. Truffaut once wrote of Becker, in his tribute to the man and to his final film Le Trou (1960), that Jean Renoir had revealed his then-assistant’s true nature in several playful on-screen cameos: “Restless, anguished, elegant, lyrical, nervous, tormented.”34 Did Truffaut perhaps foresee his own future self-portrait as an artist in this fleeting mirror?

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Quoted in Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, trans. Bill Krohn (London: Phaidon, 2005), p. 129. Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, pp. 135–136. Quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 284. Alain Masson, introduction to “La Femme d’à côté,” L’Avant-scène Cinéma 389 (1990). Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker & Warburg), p. 127. Raymond Durgnat, “Durgnat vs. Paul,” Film Comment (March–April 1978): 66. Serge Daney, L’Exercise a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), p. 352. Raymond Bellour, “Alfred Hitchcock,” in Jean-Louis Bory and Claude-Michel Cluny (eds.), Dossiers du cinéma: Cinéastes (Paris: Casterman, 1971), p. 50. Daney, L’Exercise a été profitable, Monsieur, p. 351. Daney, L’Exercise a été profitable, Monsieur, p. 351. Daney, L’Exercise a été profitable, Monsieur, p. 352. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” Framework 2 (1975): 5. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” p. 5. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” p. 5. Luc Moullet, “La Balance et le lien,” Cahiers du Cinéma 410 ( July–August 1988): 26–32. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” pp. 5–6.

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Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” pp. 5–6. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” pp. 5–6. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” pp. 5–6. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” pp. 5–6. François Truffaut, interview by Anne Gillain, “Reconciling Irreconcilables,” Wide Angle 4 (4) (1981): 28–29. Edgardo Cozarinsky, Cinematográfos (Buenos Aires: Bafici, 2010), pp. 25–30. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 179. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, pp. 184–185. Serge Toubiana, “Actualité de Jacques Becker,” in Jacques Aumont (ed.), La Mise en scène (Brussels: De Boeck, 2000), p. 215. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” p. 6. Quoted in Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 495. Pasolini, “The Ambiguous Forms of Narrative Rituality,” p. 6. Nicole Brenez, De la Figure en général et du corps en particulier: l’invention figurative au cinéma (Brussels: De Boeck, 1998), p. 256. Leonard Cohen, “Recitation,” from Live in London (Columbia, 2009), CD/DVD. Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (New York: Beaufort Books: 1986), p. 104. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 246. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 180. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 184.

Part III

The Making of a Filmmaker

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Every Teacher Needs a Truant Bazin and L’Enfant sauvage Dudley Andrew

From Year Zero to Maturity “Four Hundred Blows: 1946–1952”; this is how his biographers designate the second chapter of François Truffaut’s life.1 Truffaut’s post-adolescence was particularly painful, as he struggled to come into his own by breaking free of a bleak home environment and reaching toward a scarcely glimpsed destiny that was illuminated by novels and movies. I would shift these dates forward to 1948–1953 so that they coincide with events in his career. That career might be said to start with his sixteenth birthday (February 1948) when, having moved his already impressive “archives” on film directors to the little room his friend Robert Lachenay was now living in, he determined to enter into the cinematic public sphere in one way or another. Just a month after that birthday his name first appeared in print in the form of a letter to the editor of L’Ecran Français, one of fifteen he would dash off that year.2 If 1948 marks his year zero, Truffaut attained his majority at the end of 1953 when his coming-out article, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français,” went to press. Twenty-one at the time, Truffaut in effect demanded that the “cinéma de papa” grow up, denigrating these directors for patronizing the public, and surely remembering André Bazin’s L’Ecran Français article on American auteurs, “Le Cinéma est-il majeur?” (Has the cinema reached maturity?).3 I open this study of L’Enfant sauvage (1970) on the notion of maturity because in Truffaut’s case it brings together his obsessions with the parents he was glad to leave, with film directors he wanted to join, and, as we shall see, with the teachers who retarded or enabled this process. Moreover, his own five years of maturation – attaining a voice of his own – coincide with a particular stage of cinematic modernism, bracketed by Roberto Rossellini’s masterpieces, Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948) to Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1954), as well as with a grim period in history A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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when the adolescent hopes that followed VE Day turned sour in the dull adulthood of Europe during the Cold War. Hardened partisan positions were transmitted under steel gray skies, as politics cast a pall over aesthetics from the Berlin Airlift and the Korean police action, right up to the death of Stalin. At the outset of this period JeanPaul Sartre handed down a heavy burden to the literary imagination, when he called for writers to suspend all search for self-expression and aesthetic innovation; social responsibilities had grown too large, he intimated. Writers must exercise their prowess to help bring down the old order and build a just (and communist) society. We know how this played out in the Parisian cinema sphere. Truffaut was witness to ugly debates that took place among journals and at ciné-clubs, as the Parti Communiste Français did its best to counter the enormous advantage Hollywood cinema gave to capitalist ideology. Critics as good as Georges Sadoul felt the need to set themselves against Welles and Hitchcock and to support the most tendentious movies coming from the Soviet Union, while, on the other side, a young Jean-Charles Tacchella responded with flimsy defenses of often trivial American films. The even-tempered André Bazin was pulled into arguments he would rather have avoided. Though personally he stood to the left on nearly every social issue, as a noncommunist he found he had to defend American cinema, which only two years earlier he had denigrated to the advantage of neorealism. Now he was on stage facing off against Sadoul or Louis Daquin. In fact, he had reservations about Hitchcock’s manipulation of the audience and was known to temper the uncritical enthusiasm of his young followers for the master of suspense; but how could he not stand up for the free exercise of cinema and defend a Hollywood that had been a haven for so many Europeans, including not just Hitchcock but Clair, Renoir, Duvivier, Siodmak, Lang, and Ophüls? The poisoned Parisian atmosphere exasperated him to the point that in 1950 he poured his rhetorical talent into the incendiary article “The Stalin Myth in the Soviet Cinema.” This brilliant essay cost him friendships and opportunities. L’Ecran Français would never publish him again. In such a climate of bickering and retrenchment, however, Truffaut must have recognized the deep changes taking place in what can best be termed “the idea of cinema.” For one thing, starting in 1948, short documentaries began to benefit from government subventions that offered opportunities to young French directors like Alain Resnais, Pierre Kast, and Georges Franju. These shorts exhibited aesthetic breakthroughs in subject matter, editing, and narrative voice that stood out against the conservative feature films of the cinéma de qualité that often followed them in movie theaters on a standard exhibition program. Experiments are far more common in the arena of the short subject than in feature productions, since the financial stakes are low and conventions are more flexible and less carefully policed. Furthermore audiences were prepared to be startled or even shocked by documentaries, thanks to the raw newsreel footage that peppered the screen during and just after the war. But raw realism – underwritten by what he famously called “the ontology of the photographic image” – was not enough to change the cinema in toto. And by 1948, Bazin must have realized that his “realism axiom” was in danger of being consigned to a few genres like neorealism and the documentary, whereas he wanted to help usher in a complete change among filmmakers and viewers. This is when his

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attention can be seen to move beyond realism per se to cinema’s larger role in culture; this is when he began supporting what he and Alexandre Astruc called “la nouvelle avant-garde,” fiction films that were overturning classical norms, like those he programmed for the Biarritz Festival of July 1949. Presided over by Jean Cocteau and attracting the future lions of the New Wave, Biarritz showcased difficult works by prophetic masters such as Vigo, Bresson, and Welles. Jean Renoir’s The Southerner received its European premiere there too, not because it forecast some new style but because it testified to the persistence of a sophisticated sensibility operating even within a crass Hollywood milieu. Bazin welcomed Renoir back to France just a few months after Biarritz. Recalculating his ideas in dialogue with Renoir’s work, Bazin formulated his well-known positions concerning deep focus, decoupage, sound, acting, and adaptation. While looking up to Renoir, Bazin was simultaneously looking out for Truffaut, whom he first met in 1948 before taking him on both as his assistant and effectively as his foster child. Truffaut preceded him at Biarritz as his paid assistant, and Bazin introduced him to many of those who would thereafter be crucial to his growth. Starting in 1948, Truffaut’s “Bazin period” can be said to conclude at the end of 1953, when, as editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, Bazin gave his imprimatur to the essay that introduced the world to this vibrant and impassioned new voice. There is something personal in the way he concludes “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” by accusing the architects of the qualité approach this way: “Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men, and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by underestimating it. They behave, vis-à-vis the scenario, as if they thought to reeducate a delinquent by finding him a job.”4 For personal and professional reasons, Truffaut and Bazin both had delinquency, reeducation, and genuine maturity on their minds. This is why the story of the modernization of European film aesthetics can be tied to the development of François Truffaut, who watched that modernization come about at close quarters, and then contributed to it in his films. From this perspective Truffaut can be said to have reached a new stage in his biography in 1954, once his broadside had been released. Immediately, he took up with Rossellini, whose Viaggio in Italia was touted by Truffaut’s best friend, Jacques Rivette, as cinema’s first truly modern and adult work. For the next several years, Truffaut served as Rossellini’s assistant, an apprenticeship leading to Les Mistons (1957) and Le 400 Coups (1959). But the Bazin years were obviously essential; Truffaut would never forget this miracle of his education under Bazin, memorializing it most vividly in L’Enfant sauvage.

Bazin From the tenor of his classical prose style one would never take André Bazin for anything but civilized; he was, it seems, a purveyor of civilization, a teacher par excellence. This was evidently his self-conception and his goal. Indeed the very first article

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he ever published was on educational reform.5 This was in the summer of 1941, a few months before “the catastrophe” that struck him when he failed his oral at the Ecole normale supérieure and was denied the chance to contribute to the national pedagogical endeavor.6 He had failed to speak clearly at the exam, stuttering badly in his explication du texte. His scholarship revoked, Bazin was turned out onto the cold streets of Occupied Paris. What little information we have from his friends tells of a distraught young man who adamantly refused to present himself a second time to “the institutionalized idiocy that calls itself a jury,”7 and who turned instead to surrealist practices while losing himself with ever more frequency in movie theaters. Did he consider his stutter a symptom of something untamable, even irrational, something that both surrealism and cinema spoke to? During these years of personal and political darkness, when he had lost faith in institutions and may have questioned rationality itself, cinema’s openness to mute mysteries held great appeal,8 an appeal still evident late in his career, for example in his review of Edgar Morin’s Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire.9 Let us not exaggerate. Bazin never doubted that teachers must pass on the achievements of civilization; he believed that his criticism participated in this mission. In 1946, while spending his days in outreach programs designed for labor unions and school groups, he developed a series of ten newspaper columns under the rubric “the little school of the spectator.”10 Yet he seems never to have been patronizing, for he understood education to be a search for the unknown more than an inculcation of the known: hence his championing of films of exploration and of animals, in which the untamed world crept or leaped on screen. Indeed, cinema’s way of importing the savage into the protected movie theater gives it a function completely different from that of the traditional arts. Children make a vivid example: on screen they are part animal, whereas in plays, paintings and novels, they are puppets in the hands of artists.11 To Bazin, cinema’s value comes from its ability to put spectators in contact with bare existence like nothing else; films – the great ones – let you see the effects of civilization on the human animal, on Boudu who is saved from drowning, for instance, or on little Edmunde in Germania anno zero, or on Antoine Doinel, whom François Truffaut conceived just before Bazin died. Cinema’s ethnographic prowess outdistances every pedagogic task it serves. Is this not the lesson of neorealism … that the world is there for our attention and our love before we bend it to our needs and beliefs? No wonder Bazin excoriated Disney’s domesticated animals while looking with awe upon Buñuel’s olvidados (his “Young and Damned” delinquents).12 And no wonder he was drawn to the sixteen-year-old Truffaut, a brash ciné-maniac who barged into his Travail et Culture office in October 1948 demanding that he shift the screening times of his hugely successful club, Objectif 48, so it would not conflict with his own fledgling “circle of cine-maniacs.” Bazin did not comply, but he did remember the encounter; and so a few months later when the boy was incarcerated for filching money from his parents and embezzling funds from L’Ecran Français and MGM to run his club, Bazin vouched for him, convincing the judge that Truffaut could be socialized better out of prison. He promised to give him the job of his paid assistant at Travail et Culture. It was in this capacity that the scruffy delinquent went to

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fashionable Biarritz in the summer of 1949 where Objectif 49 (the name had been updated with the calendar) had programmed a score of films maudits (“accursed movies,” the reference being to Rimbaud, the “poète maudit”) meant for an audience put off by the commercial ambience of Cannes and Venice. This was the beginning of Truffaut’s “schooling” as it were, indispensable to the miracle of Les 400 Coups that occurred exactly a decade later, which was itself the visible crest of what has been called “the school of the New Wave.”13 Biarritz proved a contradictory classroom, since even though it featured abject works of art, it attracted a high-end audience, mainly patrons of Objectif 49, which, truth be told, operated in part as an exclusive social club. It was there that wealthy patrons paid money to listen to filmmakers screen and discuss recent work. Sometimes this amounted to a Parisian premiere, as had been the case with Cocteau for Les Parents terribles (1948) and Rossellini for Paisà (1946). Roger Leenhardt and Robert Bresson had been on stage at their events, as had Orson Welles. All these filmmakers were uncle figures to the New Wave, elders who gave encouragement and showed that you did not need to take your parents too seriously. To keep up the scholastic metaphor, we might see them as sophisticated collegians in a stodgy institution that was wary of their insolence. Truffaut, Rivette and the others admired the styles of these men, and the way they flaunted their independence without having been exactly expelled (though Welles was in Europe because Hollywood had thrown him out). Of all the anecdotes that have come down to us from Biarritz, the most vivid is the spectacle of Cocteau, in tuxedo, skipping down the staircase of the palatial casino to keep the doorman from ousting a rowdy gang of interlopers who had just arrived by car: the teenagers Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Charles Bitsch, Jean Douchet, Jean Gruault, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jacques Rivette. Eric Rohmer was there too, more stately, but just as out of place. This is where they all met Truffaut for the first time, he having arrived early to help with the arrangements.14 The week spent at the screenings and, for most of them, in the dingy dormitory, helped bond this group into the “young Turks” they were already becoming. So too did their distaste for the radical chic of this tourist city. Bazin opens his festival report to his thousands of readers at Parisien Libéré with a hilarious description of the frantic lending of coats and ties so the bohemians could meet the inflexible standards of this beach resort or so some of them could attend the gala dinners where the dignitaries and stars were to be found.15 As organizer of the festival, Bazin tasted a social experience from which his young followers were barred. I have come to believe that he may have conspired to inject these subversive cinephiles, like vigorous microbes, into his own organization, just to change its constitution. Biarritz was a mixed success, but film culture would not be the same again. For one thing, Bazin seems to have finished his book on Welles right there at the festival, cajoling Cocteau to compose its preface.16 For another, Godard immediately took to Truffaut and brought him into Rohmer’s circle just as the latter launched La Gazette du Cinéma early in 1950. Rohmer would give him intellectual stability for some time to come.17 Many of the New Wave critics, all of whom were regulars at the Cinémathèque screenings, were given their start at La Gazette and were anxious a year later to help

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steer the newborn Cahiers du Cinéma toward serious cinephilia. That journal came to life in April 1951, under the helm of Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Volcroze, both veterans of La Revue du Cinéma, Objectif 48, and Biarritz. While these three institutions had been crucial to the development of Parisian film culture, they had also needed to please their funders, some of whom treated cinema like classical music or even like the Roland Garros tennis tournament, as occasions for le tout-Paris to socialize. Truffaut and his friends had another idea altogether: cinema should be explosive, and contact with it dangerous. This same fire for cinema burned in Bazin too, though he felt more need to harness its energy for larger sociocultural ends than did his young friends. But Truffaut found in Bazin an adult who shared his passion for life as well as for cinema; just knowing Bazin helped him on his otherwise wayward course throughout 1950 when he was effectively on his own, dodging the military, in tough straits with women, often ill, and struggling financially. Bazin had been sent to a mountain sanatorium because of his tuberculosis for most of that year. When Truffaut showed up for a visit, they discussed a collaborative book on Renoir. In a way, Renoir stood to Bazin as he himself stood to Truffaut, an elder you could admire and count on but who was not locked into the establishment and who remained open to the unexpected. Bazin loved Renoir’s paganism, as he sometimes called it. In the same way, Truffaut appreciated Bazin’s consistency, to be sure, but also his readiness for whatever might come up. In a revealing letter written after his desertion from the army, he linked Bazin and Jean Genet, confessing that they “did more for me in three weeks than my own parents had done in fifteen years.”18 The scurrilous homosexual thief and the sunny, upright Catholic made a natural pair in Truffaut’s mind; he saw them as adults who had not lost their playfulness, men of some reputation who cared not at all about reputation, and were spontaneously nonconformist. They listened seriously to him and responded generously by instinct. He wanted to think of them as friends who happened to be older. They were clearly more than friends, especially Bazin who frequently extricated him from one of his many stupidities, and who provided him with shelter in all senses of the term. Truffaut always honored teachers above parents, calling them adult protectors whom you could choose to follow. Bazin stood somewhere between parent and teacher. If there were a serious teacher in Truffaut’s life, it would have to be Rohmer who seems to have played that role for many at La Gazette du Cinéma. In fact, Rohmer actually was a teacher by profession, and he commanded respect as teachers can. His tastes in films were notoriously rigorous; he prided himself on high standards; and his younger acolytes weighed everything he said, accepting much of it. You can sense Truffaut trying to break through a certain professional distance in the rather desperate letters he sent Rohmer early in 1951 from his military base in Germany (he addresses him once in English as “my old fellow,” at other times as “le Grand Momo”). Atop a card he signed “Trufo,” you can see a caricature he drew of the very formal Rohmer.19 Antoine Doinel could have made and signed such a drawing. For Truffaut, the gaunt and forbidding Rohmer would remain the image (not the caricature) of the morally upright pedagogue. On the other hand, if Bazin thought of

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himself as a teacher, it was as an unconventional one. His actual classrooms were open and moveable (ciné-clubs and union halls throughout Paris and around Europe); his virtual classrooms were the journals in which he published (from the elementary school Parisien Libéré, to the high school L’Ecran Français and the university level Esprit). In 1948 he wrote several articles about the educational place of ciné-clubs and the role of the discussion leader. Chris Marker had commissioned these during the first year he edited Documentation Éducation Populaire, a tabloid for adherents of Travail et Culture. Bazin and Marker worked closely together in these years, planning strategies to engage those who had been sidelined or wrecked by the national education system or who had just never responded to school. That was one of the key goals of Travail et Culture; and it was because of this that they inevitably ran into the most important pedagogical figure in their circle, someone who would affect Truffaut immeasurably.

Deligny Five years older than Bazin, Fernand Deligny had preceded him in joining leftist educational groups and ciné-clubs during the Popular Front years. A charismatic student of psychology and philosophy, he moved from one teaching post to another before the war, implementing strategies radical enough to gain him a reputation as an anarchist in the classroom. He quickly found himself consigned to take on the most difficult students as well as those deemed mentally handicapped. This suited him, as early on he declared himself intent to break with the tyranny of language in French education.20 Working with mutes, with the unruly, and with the mentally handicapped during the Occupation in his home city of Lille, he introduced mime and drawing into the routine of what could hardly be called his “classroom,” and he screened films whenever possible. After the war, while regional director of a division of Travail et Culture north of Paris, he called on Bazin and Marker to locate The Road to Life, Nicolaï Ekk’s 1931 masterpiece about troubled kids and the community they form. After helping him secure a print and lead the discussion, they were glad when Deligny moved to the headquarters of Travail et Culture at 5 rue des Beaux Arts, to head an outreach special education effort.21 Marker wrote an especially appreciative review in Esprit of Deligny’s 1947 Vagabonds efficaces, a paean to those rare teachers who creatively channel rather than control the impulses of inadaptable adolescents.22 Deligny would send Truffaut this book (the only remaining copy, he complained) in the summer of 1958 when the two began a correspondence that would last seventeen years. In fact, Truffaut’s relation to Deligny could be said to have started in 1948. For Bazin consulted Deligny when weighing the risks of lifting Truffaut out of the correctional system and taking on responsibility for him by employing him. In the summer before he met Truffaut, Bazin had helped Deligny move to Paris, actually finding him an apartment in his own building on rue Cardinal Lemoine. Whether on the occasion of Bazin’s successful appeal to the judge in spring 1949 or his later official

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“adoption” of Truffaut, the army deserter, in 1951, it is easy to imagine Bazin turning to Deligny for advice.23 Later on, when Truffaut was struggling with his scripts about children, Bazin naturally suggested that he contact Deligny, by then a notorious figure on the margins of French education. Deligny’s first “anti-institution,” named La Grande Cordée, was an alternative school for troubled children, chartered in 1947 thanks to Henri Wallon, the famous psychologist (and communist), who underwrote its program. Its initial location was described as “a theater in Montmartre [that] resembled something like the waiting room of a train station, full of weird, nervous, noisy travelers arriving in waves throughout the day, from morning to night, in a state of constant need.”24 For six years Deligny received children (a total of thirty-four) over whom he had full responsibility until in 1953 he lost his government funding and needed to go nomad, as it were. Deligny would not regret giving up on city life. He was happy to take a number of his wards to the countryside where he found patrons to set him up in inexpensive housing. Always believing that “milieu” constitutes the most important factor in the growth of any human, he was glad to give these children a place where they could breathe, express themselves, and live out their lives in dignity. He was finished compromising with authority; henceforth, if he took direction from anyone, it would be from those supposedly inadaptable beings who had been consigned to him. Deligny’s “anthropocultural” attitude,25 at once moral and philosophical, resembles Bazin’s. For both men language, because it names whatever it touches, makes us forget that human beings act and react in a world that is only partly human. At the outset of his period of genuine vagabondage, Deligny published an article extolling “the camera as pedagogic tool,” able to grasp the gestures by which adolescents – particularly those who are troubled or mute – respond pre-linguistically to what they feel both inside themselves and around them.26 Through the camera the “slightest gesture,” including hesitations, instincts, and screams, can be comprehended.27 Deligny would later admit that his own particular attachment to film could be summed up by a sentence he remembered from a letter André Malraux had written to Bazin: “What interests me in cinema is its way of linking man to the world (as a cosmos) in a manner other than language.”28 More important to Truffaut than his article about the camera was Deligny’s Adrien Lomme, a novel about a tough adolescent that Gallimard published in 1958, just as Les 400 Coups was in final preparation. Bazin urged Truffaut to send Deligny his script. Never letting tact get in the way of saying just what he believed, Deligny instantly ridiculed the dialogue Truffaut and his co-writer, Marcel Moussy, had concocted for Antoine Doinel’s visit to the psychologist. This was also when Deligny sent Truffaut his books. Under Deligny’s advice, the scripted scene was jettisoned entirely and replaced by the remarkable, indeed revolutionary, improvised shots of Jean-Pierre Léaud speaking directly to the camera (and to us as well as to the psychologist) without a single reverse shot intervening. Truffaut made the trip to Deligny’s temporary establishment north of Vichy as he was desperately trying to complete his script.29 There Deligny suggested that the film conclude with the boy’s escape from the institution, with a run to the sea and to whatever freedom or fate awaited him in the open.

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For this was just the way he believed kids should grow, with sympathetic adults following them, like Truffaut with his mobile camera. Les 400 Coups propelled Deligny in his resolve to make a film in his own manner, involving a deeply autistic boy with whom he had been living. He claims to have been intent on making such a film since 1949, that is, since his days around Bazin and Marker. Determined not to straighten out any child, nor even teach him or her in the normal sense, he wanted to film Yves (the name of his main charge) in such a manner as to encourage him to be exactly as he was. Yves should be given a chance to signal what mattered to him through vision, not language. A more specific idea for this film came together after Deligny alighted in the Cévennes in 1959, the mountainous region in the South of France where he would spend most of the rest of his life. He first asked Marker to shoot the film with him, but this was just when the latter was making his productive peregrinations to Beijing, Siberia, Cuba, and Japan. Next he approached Truffaut, who seemed quite interested but finally was too wrapped up in his own first features to find the time to codirect such a project as Deligny proposed. Nevertheless, Truffaut generously supplied Deligny with encouragement, offering to help him with technical information, with names of people in the industry, and with advice about managing the schedule and budget of a production. He even made good on his promise to send one of his assistants to kick the project from its planning stage into realization. Claude Jutra, the Québécois apprentice to the New Wave, took Truffaut’s advice and went to the Cévennes in the winter of 1960, probably thinking this an opportunity to add to his string of National Film Board documentaries. After a few days of shooting, it became clear to Deligny that Jutra did not accept his conception of a shared documentary in which he and the young boy Yves would participate in the adventure of the filmmaking.30 Neither man was able to use the footage that was exposed there and which has since been lost. A few months later, Deligny’s partner, Huguette Demoulin, seems to have visited Truffaut in Paris for quick hands-on advice about operating the camera and filming children. Nothing came of this, however, probably because Deligny and Demoulin split up in 1962, marking the conclusion to what they had started as La Grande Cordée. Truffaut would hear next from Deligny two years later, after Le Moindre Geste (1971) was underway. Josée Manenti, who had worked with Deligny since 1954 and helped him enormously with financial support, obtained a 16 mm camera and plenty of stock. She shot most of the footage over a number of months. Truffaut was called upon to help speed things along with the laboratory and, later, for advice about the soundtrack. Manenti moved to Paris in 1965 and showed Truffaut ninety minutes of a rough cut, hoping to pique his interest. Deligny went further, sending him a contract to become the film’s producer. But Truffaut seems baffled by what he saw and by Deligny’s overall design. He offered no funds; this was just as he left for London to shoot Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Truffaut may have held back because he and Deligny held such distinct ideas about cinema. Even if they were the two filmmakers most obsessed with bringing to the screen the life-world of troubled children, their sensibilities differed. Although he had

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written a novel, what Deligny sent Truffaut about Le Moindre Geste suggested only the barest hint of narrative motivation, just enough to let the camera provide the details of the quotidian experience of three or four autistic boys. Truffaut urged him to make extensive use of voice-over to develop some tension and to frame the images (he was no doubt thinking of his experience with Les Mistons, shot in Nimes, not far from the Cévennes). But Deligny would never let any voice, be it authoritative or childlike, limit images, such was his animus when it came to language. He preferred to tape fragments of mumbled, often unintelligible dialogue, to suggest that words could not possibly be adequate to what the camera was privy to. If Deligny considered his method and style close to what Jean Rouch was doing, he should have known that of all the New Wave directors, Truffaut had shown least interest in Rouch, or in cinéma verité, or in any form of documentary for that matter. Instead, especially when it concerned adolescent characters, Truffaut wanted to turn reality into a fairy tale and vice versa. Their correspondence, even in this quite awkward moment of 1965, was always cordial. Deligny was under stress at the time, as Manenti’s funds had dried up and the small group, still eking out a living baking bread and tending goats in the Cévennes, was forced to look elsewhere to survive. By the time Truffaut wrote back to him, Deligny had a new address, a famous one. Appealing to Jean Oury, a now successful, though highly controversial colleague who had been there at the founding of La Grande Cordée in 1947, Deligny joined the experimental commune he had established at La Borde in the Loire Valley with Felix Guattari. It is fascinating to think of Truffaut’s letters being read by Deligny there in the outbuilding that Guattari had let him use as an educational “studio.” For two years Deligny hovered around La Borde without ever quite buying into its ideology, which owed a lot to Guattari’s Lacanian formation. For one thing, Deligny was contemptuous of psychoanalysis and of therapy in general, believing that there seldom was anything wrong with a human being other than the environment into which he was forced. Moreover, Deligny loathed group meetings even more than authority figures, and such sessions were the norm at La Borde. Evidently Deligny was left to himself, with his studio operating at the edge of La Borde, its satellite. Deligny returned Guattari’s indulgence when he provided him with the concept (and the term) “nomadism,” later to be so crucial when Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on Mille Plateaux. In 1967 Deligny was asked to leave Le Borde and take his group back to the foothill region of the Cévennes where Guattari had bought some land that included several broken-down structures. Living there with his small band he reorganized his “network” of shelters, goats, assistants, and tools (something Deleuze would surely have recognized as an “agencement” or assemblage). But the routine Deligny sought to establish was soon be interrupted when Guattari invited various politically vulnerable figures to join him at this refuge just after May 1968. Julien Beck even stayed there for a time, joining his Living Theater to the one Deligny can be said to have kept going all these years. Still on the far Left, Deligny wrote tracts against America’s involvement in Vietnam, but he was far more involved in creating new forms of social

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and natural coexistence than in interacting with anything so large as the national or international situation.31 And so he had to find an adjacent farmhouse to inhabit. Once back in the Cévennes, Deligny realized that Le Moindre Geste was languishing in metal cans. He turned the footage over to Jean-Pierre Daniel, a recent graduate of IDHEC (L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques) who was a militant communist and in tune with his philosophy. Deligny soon put him in touch with Chris Marker who, after watching a three-hour compilation, agreed to monitor the editing intermittently, encouraging Daniel to build a free and experimental soundtrack. Marker also looked into completion funds, and later intimated that his famous collective SLON (La Societé pour le lancement des œuvres nouvelles) was founded to bring Le Moindre Geste to the public.32 This took some time, but at last the finished film premiered, and did so prestigiously in “La Semaine de la critique” at Cannes in 1971. Deligny did not attend the screening, however; he felt distanced from it after all these years and in any case was taken up with another boy, Janmari, who occupied him fully; a completely silent and deeply autistic child, far more difficult than Yves, the star of Le Moindre Geste. It was surely to interest Truffaut in collaborating on a film that in 1968 he wrote to him giving the following description of Janmari, his autistic ward who had grown up in the “civilized” world of the Paris suburbs but was now with him in the wilds: A kid 12 years old who hasn’t said a word his whole life. He is neither deaf nor dumb, agile as a chimpanzee. One thing makes him shiver and vibrate: that’s running water whether from a well, a fountain, or a tap. … By instinct he refuses to talk. From the cretin that he was, constantly swaying, throwing himself on the ground, knocking his head against the wall, he has become a nice little fool [bête] who sets the table, gets water, washes the dishes; he doesn’t leave us wherever we go, having adapted himself to our savage life [la vie sauvage]. … Here [in the Cevenne] he goes naked when he can in the sun; you could say that he knows by heart all those passages from The Jungle Book. He dances in front of the fire … he sniffs for a long time what he eats. He’s beautiful, except when he scowls, just like a young orangutan.33

Deligny could not have known that just then, in the autumn of 1968, Truffaut was preparing his own L’Enfant sauvage … not until he received Truffaut’s enthusiastic reply. He would love to see Janmari himself, he wrote, but needed to fly to the Isle of Réunion to shoot La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). So he proposed sending his trusted associate Suzanne Schiffman. In less than a week, Schiffman was in the Cévennes taking notes and photos.34 Deligny’s ward, she realized, could never submit to the rigors and frustrations involved in a film shoot, but he could, and did, provide the ideal model for whatever actor Truffaut might find to play the wild boy of Aveyron. For his part, Deligny was disappointed when Schiffman showed him Truffaut’s script for L’Enfant sauvage. It merely illustrates the diaries of Itard; that’s the object of the film, to render as faithfully as possible Itard’s notes. But what about the child? … His attitudes, his reactions, his little gestures should be those of Janmari who, with all his senses intact and sharp, yet

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deprived of speech, is very much the “brother in situation” of your wild child who is deprived of other people. Their gestures are not like ours. Their gestures speak another language, one that isn’t a complement to words; those gestures are closer to those of a chimpanzee than to those of a child. This is a question neither of deformation nor retardation; they are different because what controls them is not verbal thought.35

Despite their differences, Truffaut and Deligny found themselves writing to each other again thanks to Janmari. Each aided the other, just as they had a decade earlier when script changes to Les 400 Coups coincided with Deligny’s determination to make a film with Yves. As before, Deligny’s experience with actual children had a significant effect on Truffaut’s film. Now he could be confident when directing Jean-Pierre Cargol, the young Gypsy boy chosen to play Victor, for he drew on the behavior and movements of Janmari whom Deligny called “Mowgli,” the jungle boy. This direct connection between their leading “characters” would prompt Truffaut to involve himself fully in Ce Gamin, là, which Deligny began shooting in 1971 with the help of Renaud Victor (another May 1968 film student associated with Marker). Victor had seen Le Moindre Geste at Cannes and immediately offered his expertise to Deligny for his next project. They spoke of producing “a response to The Wild Child,”36 which was in the theaters (though not at Cannes) at the time, and which they found far too civilized. Despite their opposed orientations, Truffaut coproduced Ce Gamin, là. There would be arguments, to be sure, Deligny wanting a four-hour marathon without commentary, Truffaut insisting on a ninety-minute final product with a voice-over to stitch together the semblance of coherence. Drawing in other well-known film personalities to assist financially, the film came out in 1975, just before Truffaut’s own final film in this genre, L’Argent de poche (1976). Compared to Ce Gamin, là, which is difficult to watch (and was effectively undistributed, hence difficult to see), L’Argent de poche can appear ingratiating and middle class (“Giscardian” is the adjective that was used). However, in hindsight Truffaut’s allegedly light film delves into some heavy social and political matters, though, thanks to its director’s aversion to even the hint of preaching, it has never been taken as seriously as Alain Tanner’s trenchant critique of education also on display in 1976, Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000). Dominated by the spirit of Rousseau, whose statue is reverently shown in its first scene, Tanner’s bittersweet lament over the failure of 1968 returns us to Truffaut’s Rousseauian L’Enfant sauvage, which was infused by the spirit of 1968 and its indictment of education. May 1968 spawned radical reflections on education and the place of the state, if not of society. The thinking of philosophes like Condillac and Rousseau on the nature of the human animal and its struggles with loneliness, social survival, and development brought both Truffaut and Deligny into the contemporary discourse. The latter emerged in the seventies with the ascendancy of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari as a man who set children free and wanted to set cinema free in a pursuit of the knowledge that children imagine as they traverse the landscape. L’Enfant sauvage, Truffaut’s most carefully researched period film, definitely belonged to the period in which it was made and discussed.

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Itard It is a tribute to the idealism of both men that Truffaut and Deligny stood ready to assist each other for seventeen years despite holding such different views on all the topics that brought them together: What is a child, at base? What should a teacher be to a child? What is the place of language? And most important to us, Bazin’s question: What is cinema? Their differences on these topics became apparent in 1964 when Lucien Malson published an acclaimed book on feral children featuring the writings of Jean Itard that described his attempt, starting in 1800, to civilize and educate the wild boy of Aveyron. As his later notes to Truffaut make clear, Deligny believed that Itard had headed in the wrong direction at the outset, when he determined to bring the boy into language, rather than to try to comprehend the boy’s own orientation to the world. Itard should have followed the boy, not led him; he should have trusted the boy’s behavior as the proper reaction to the hazards of experience rather than forcing him to learn lessons laid out in advance. Truffaut, on the other hand, was inspired by Itard’s diaries; he reports that he suspended his work on what would later become L’Argent de poche so as to try immediately to make an historical film about this enfant sauvage. But it would not be easy to mount such a film. Jean Gruault developed a screenplay as early as 1965, but Truffaut did not like it; nor did he like the next version, or the one following that. It would not be till mid-1968 that he felt he could move forward, but by this time he was caught up in the events of that May (which must have made him think profoundly about civilization and language); moreover, the experimental turn of so much French cinema made creditors wary. So when he finally received backing that summer, the script had been halved to 150 pages, a spare film to be shot in black-and-white. And backing came only because Baisers volés (1968) had been a hit and Truffaut was in a position to insist that United Artists accept L’Enfant sauvage as a pet project (he renounced a salary) to piggyback atop the lush La Sirène du Mississippi, which everyone anticipated would be a surefire commercial success given Belmondo and Deneuve in the leading roles.37 Famously, the surprising worldwide response to L’Enfant sauvage bailed out the disastrous career of the star vehicle that was supposed to carry it along. Truffaut must have felt vindicated, proving again, ten years after Les 400 Coups, that the plight of an anonymous adolescent, played by an unknown boy, could rivet an international audience. How could it do so? Everyone identifies with the title, L’Enfant sauvage, if not with the title character. For every child is wild at birth, and largely wild during those excruciating years of education. When Victor collapses to the floor, defeated by the puzzle that Itard insists he solve, when he thrashes about first in protest then despair, who does not recognize this expression as a standard bodily reflex, recurrent in every child growing up? We recall our own frustrations and rebellions; we feel them still when authorities demand more than we can, or are willing, to come up with. One scene triggers my own revulsion with pedagogy, Victor tracing clumsy circles on the chalkboard. While saluted by Itard as a triumph of the boy’s acumen in geometry,

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Figure 11.1

L’Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1969, Les Films du Carrosse).

Victor’s awkward hand and arm movements and the marks these leave replicate my own failure in third grade to form with my pencil the series of superimposed circles demanded by “The Palmer Method of Penmanship.” Left-handed like Victor (or at least like the actor portraying him), I found myself handicapped. Mrs Holland repeatedly shoved the pencil into my right fist, even slapping the left one on several occasions. I could never match the pattern in the textbook, nor come near the variants other children made with ease and pleasure, their rigid wrists gliding rhythmically across the paper, producing long tunnels of ‘O’s that resembled a popular toy of the time, the slinky. Was the wild boy of Aveyron mentally defective? The child who plays him certainly is not, and no amount of acting will ever make us think him so. By happenstance he was socially retarded, but as portrayed in the film he is naturally bright, clever, and inventive. His guardian in the months before he was sent to Paris, Bonnaterre, had no doubt about this. Shortly after his capture, Bonnaterre showed the boy a mirror to see how he would react; it was a standard test for savages and idiots. He apparently saw a person but did not recognize himself. He had formed no self-image. He tried to reach through the mirror to grasp a potato he saw in it; but the potato was being held behind his head. Then, after a few tries and without turning his head, he reached back over his shoulder and grasped the potato. The boy’s visual-motor coordination appeared excellent.38

Truffaut would leap to depict this fascinating scene just as it is described, only he substituted an apple for the potato that the boy in fact preferred, and he put himself (as Itard) in Bonnaterre’s position. He also added his skeptical mentor, Professor Pinel, in the background. The scene is updated to Paris, center of the Enlightenment where,

Every Teacher Needs a Truant: Bazin and L’Enfant sauvage

Figure 11.2

L’Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1970, Les Films du Carrosse).

Figure 11.3

L’Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1970, Les Films du Carrosse).

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after emerging from the forest, being held first in a village, and then by Bonnaterre in the town of Rodez, he was sent to be studied and “improved.”39 This is just what Pinel and Itard are intent upon. For as soon as they meet the boy upon his arrival in Paris, they instantly lay him out on a table to measure him in every possible aspect.Their obsession with describing this specimen objectively tells us as much about civilization as about this bare human being. So absorbed are they in their calculations and speculations that Itard and Pinel are startled to look up and find the boy standing before a mirror kept in the office. The shot that follows might be called the film’s crystal,

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showing the boy at the mirror, reaching, perplexed, in all directions for the apple held behind him by Itard, while further back stands Pinel. As Anne Gillain describes it: The apple of knowledge is set in direct relation to cultural objects. The wild child grabs it, with the intention of eating it. This action, reflected in the mirror, marks his potential access to the status of a subject, whereas the preceding scene had reduced him to the condition of an object, naked on an examining table. … The image, in which three generations of men are present, [depicts] a patrilineal transmission of cultural heritage.40

Gillain might have gone further, for this “patrilineal transmission” is equally one of cinematic heritage. Jean Dasté who plays Pinel starred in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), a beloved film which obsessed Truffaut just as he made Les 400 Coups. More pertinent, Dasté played the complicit “instructor” in Zéro de conduite ( Jean Vigo, 1933), alluded to in that same Les 400 Coups. Hence, this mirror into which Victor peers holds the fullness of French cinema, with Vigo’s avatar in the background benevolently watching Truffaut who in mid-plane is intent to monitor and assist French cinema’s future (the wild boy of this film dedicated to Jean-Pierre Léaud) as it strives to recognize itself. Here and throughout, Truffaut underscores the boy’s shrewdness, veering away from Itard’s occasional doubts and the unequivocal judgment of the historical Pinel, head of the Paris insane asylum who was charged with deciding if the boy should be treated by an acclaimed language specialist. “He is an idiot,” Pinel’s long report concluded, and had likely been left in the forest by parents in despair over raising someone “whose behavior seems to place him lower than all animals, both wild and domestic.”41 Effectively forgotten by the state when Pinel’s report confirmed that, after a few months at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, no progress in civilizing him could be discerned, the boy came under the care of Jean Itard, a young surgeon who had come to the Institute that fall and just happened upon him. Full of the theories of Locke, Condillac, and Rousseau, he wrote to the authorities and received permission to take on the boy, assisted by a caretaker who lived at the Institute, Madame Guerin. Itard, twenty-five at the time, was probably a dozen years older than his charge, roughly the same age spread as between Truffaut and Léaud, or between Bazin and Truffaut for that matter … too young to be taken as a father, he could play the older brother, the young uncle, or, why not, the benevolent and idealistic teacher. Roger Shattuck’s research confirms my own conclusion after looking at Truffaut’s massive research files, that the director did his best to replicate both the facts and the point of view expressed by Itard in the journal he kept throughout the nine-month experiment to bring the boy into language and culture. This is meant to be a tale of progressive refinement. At the outset crude scissors snip the blackened nails of the boy’s gnarled hands, while later on he moves lithely through the house in a billowing silk shirt. Only an education of the senses could bring about such a transformation, and this is exactly what Itard and his colleague determine to attempt when they initially size up their task. Steaming baths, evidently two to three hours long, soften him and gradually make him react to hot and cold. A baptism of sorts, the boy

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emerged from the waters into a higher state of being and the grace of a new family. He was named “Victor,” perhaps after the title character in Pixérécourt’s first successful melodrama, “Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt,” written, coincidentally, in the same year that a real boy emerged from the woods of Aveyron; it was playing in a Paris theater in 1800 and Itard almost certainly saw it. Truffaut himself annotated the play thoroughly, but he suppressed all reference to it in his film, for he was intent on following Itard, who claimed to have chosen the name on account of its final phoneme which the boy associated with his favorite element, eau (water). So often does Itard refer to the boy’s delight in water that Truffaut encouraged Nestor Almendros to indulge in some of his most lyrical camerawork in shots of the boy lapping joyously at a stream, drinking from a cup, splashing in the tub, gazing longingly through a window at the rain, or standing in a field, face upturned, to receive that rain. Itard also records his ward’s “ecstatic contemplation” of the moonlight on the occasions that it entered his room. Almendros keyed his delicate cinematography to such ethereal moments. But the film makes no attempt to enter the boy’s inner world, the way Werner Herzog would when he intercut dreamscapes shot in 8 mm into his 1974 film of Kaspar Hauser.42 Herzog adopted the look of German Romantic painting, consonant with a story that developed in Nuremberg in 1828. This look was relayed through earlier German filmmakers, particularly Murnau, whose Faust and Nosferatu plumbed the irrational. Truffaut, on the other hand, identified himself with Itard, son of the Enlightenment, a physician bent on clarifying the mysteries of human behavior so as to help bring about a rational society. “For the first time,” Truffaut admitted, “I identified not with the child but with the father,” or, more specifically, with the teacher, the one who passes on to each new member of the species the accumulated heritage of civilization after they have come into the city as if out of a forest, knowing nothing. The equanimity of Itard, portrayed with the utmost sobriety by Truffaut, seems to violate one of the director’s fundamental tenets, that filmmaking should create opportunities for surprise so as to achieve its only real justification as an art, to astonish the spectator, to make him see anew, as if for the first time. This tenet is behind Truffaut’s distrust of storyboards and even of detailed scripts. Like Vigo before him, he prized a rambunctious cinema, the fresh feeling caught either on location, on a set, or later on in the zest of editing and the uptake of the musical score. Yet in this case, Truffaut’s research was obsessive. He collected and read all the legal and journalistic documents surrounding the boy of Aveyron. Especially important was George Hervé’s 1911 essay in the Revue Anthropologique which included Pinel’s report to the commission and several texts by Itard.43 He began to collect books and articles about autistic children that came out, fortuitously, in the mid-1960s, including not only Bruno Bettlheim’s The Empty Fortress but Bernard Rinland’s Infantile Autism. Truffaut took note of Rinland’s 1965 lecture in Washington, DC and of a 1967 conference in London in which cinema’s use in the treatment of autism was discussed. Clearly most crucial to him, partly because written in French, was Octave Mannoni’s 1965 article, which treats the wild child while questioning the scientist’s unconscious motivations.44 Would all this research, added to his decision to stick close to the observations and narrative of Itard’s journals, not drag Truffaut into the bog of replication that he

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abhorred? His starting point could not have been more different from the one Herzog would adopt soon after; L’Enfant sauvage would be neither a creative expression based on an historical incident nor a documentary on the singular actor (Bruno S., for Herzog) inhabiting this singular role. The Gypsy boy chosen to portray Victor was not essential; perhaps another would have performed as well. What was needed was patience and a certain docility, even in the depiction of a boy who was utterly impatient and nearly intractable. This would be a flagrant re-creation, not pretending to be a documentary. And yet Truffaut approached the enterprise with febrile anticipation. He may even have taken this to be his matrix film, for the presence of an on-screen diary stages cinema’s primordial tension between writing and spectacle, action and reflection. In effect, Victor’s behavior is subject to a double retrospection, that of Itard who remained a few hours behind his subject in recording and filtering his perceptions and interpretations, and that of Truffaut, who filtered the diary 170 years later. The many shots showing Truffaut as Itard at the window may be taken as emblems of cinema’s constitutional fissure between seeing and reflecting upon what is given to see. Placing the diaryscreenplay on screen, within the frame, limits its authority, puts it at risk. Indeed, the film’s denouement occurs when Itard has just concluded penning what he believes could be his diary’s final entry, certain that he is that he will not see Victor again after the boy’s escape. A tapping at the window wakes Itard from his sad reverie; looking up from his scriptorium, he finds that the outside world in the person of the wild boy wants again to enter his home, his life, his future. Action and spectacle win out over thought. In scanning Mannoni’s book, Truffaut took note of that psychoanalyst’s concern with the teacher’s, rather than the pupil’s, drives. What was Itard after, Mannoni asked? Did he even know why he rerouted his career as a surgeon to become a Pygmalion, sculpting a civilized being out of the tabula rasa he stumbled upon at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes? Truffaut identified with Itard, Truffaut who had already shaped the life of Jean-Pierre Léaud. What is a director but someone whose script and planning establishes an arena in which the action of another human being (a “personage,” the French call him) can take place, an action that need not accord with the plan. Teachers, like parents, delight in watching the discoveries children make each day. That delight depends on their own prior knowledge of the world that will open up for the child. A lesson plan serves as a script that the teacher hands each student in his care, each student who to the surprise of everyone, comes to a realization, a genuine epiphany. Such repetition of absolute novelty equally defines the kind of cinema for which Truffaut stood. How often did he proclaim that he wanted his films to give the effect of cinema being made “for the very first time.” L’Enfant sauvage provided him with the ideal template for this mission. As Itard brought Victor to a state of heightened attentiveness, so Truffaut led the young Gypsy acting for the first time to be sensitive to every nuance of his body and his surroundings. His wariness of shoes, his learning to walk in them, his way of looking at his new surroundings, at the trappings of civilization, at himself in a mirror, at Madame Guerin, and, in the final magnificent shot on the staircase, at Itard–Truffaut, teaches us to watch this film with care. The boy’s unique circumstances led him to undergo with ten years’ delay the adventure of every newborn to train wildly scanning eyes to focus on the challenging

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environment into which each of us is thrown. Truffaut envied the achievement of what must have been daily revelations. He mimicked the act of attention with the use of the iris, reinventing the language of cinema in pristine black-and-white as if he were Victorin Jasset or Louis Feuillade. Sharing Godard’s and Rohmer’s desire to purify cinema, Truffaut had digested the full history of the language of his art so as to backtrack down its evolutionary path to celebrate and revivify some of its primary achievements: a long shot of dappled leaves, a zoom and iris out on a boy rocking himself in a tree, the clarity of shimmering water, of pure white milk, of the moon above a forest, of a candle moving through a room, casting shadows as it goes, then cradled by a hand that glows in its aura. We are touched by such visions because of the presence of the boy, a tabula rasa on which everything makes a first impression. Just as at the founding of Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut’s uncorrupted cinephilia had kept Bazin attentive and slightly off balance, attuned to the stunning novelty opening before him on the screen each day, so twenty years later the now-savvy film director brought to bear on this remarkable and genuine adventure all the sophistication of his art in order to become adequate to the utterly simple ways of his Gypsy actor and the bare boy he represented. To make us see anew, to surprise us and themselves, filmmakers must lie prostrate before the question “What is cinema?” and then slowly mount the stairs of discipline: “Tomorrow it’s back to our exercises.” Every teacher needs the kind of truant the wild child represents. Civilization depends on it.

Notes 1

Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 29–69. 2 De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 33. 3 André Bazin, “Le Nouveau Style américain: Le Cinéma est-il majeur?” L’Ecran Français 60 (August 21, 1946). 4 François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods, Vol 1. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 224–235. This famous essay originally appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma 31 ( Jaunuary 1954). 5 André Bazin, “L’Enseignement primaire supérieur, suivi de Péguy et les instituteurs,” Rencontres ( July 1941). 6 This episode is detailed in Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 38–39. 7 Andrew, André Bazin, pp. 38–39. 8 For two brilliant discussions of Bazin and the irrational, see the contributions by JeanFrançois Chevrier and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin to Dudley Andrew (ed.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 André Bazin, “L’Homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma,” France Observateur 331 (September 13, 1956). 10 This series appeared in Le Parisien Libéré from August through December 1946, with columns on the producer, the metteur-en-scène, the script, the actor, etc. 11 Volume three of Bazin’s Qu’est ce que le cinéma? opens with a set of essays to which he gave the rubric, “Enfance sans mythe.”

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On Disney, see André Bazin, “Les Aventures de Perri: Walt Disney, romancier et poète de la nature,” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (May, 1958); on Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1950), see “Pitié pour eux-Olvidados,” Esprit 186 ( January 1951). The title of the book by Michel Marie is Nouvelle Vague: Une Ecole artistique (Paris: Nathan, 1997); trans. Richard Neupert, French New Wave: An Artistic School, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003). Bazin actually came down only as things were getting underway since his only child, Florent, was born just at this moment. André Bazin, “A Biarritz Cocteau joue du tambour pour les paysans basques et participe activement aux débats publics,” Le Parisien Libéré 1519 (August 2, 1949). Jean Cocteau, “Profile of Orson Welles,” preface to André Bazin, Orson Welles (Paris: Editions Chacane, 1950). Bazin seriously revised and added to this early book in the posthumous version available in both French (1972) and English (1973). Unfortunately his 1950 version is now readily accessible only in the single Italian volume edited by Elena Degrada: André Bazin, Orson Welles (Trento, IT: Temi Editrice, 2005). Truffaut claims that from May to December of 1950 he produced twenty-two reviews and seven articles. See his letter to Rohmer in François Truffaut, Correspondence 1945– 1984, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 34. De Baecque and Toubiana cite this letter to Robert Lachenay in Truffaut: A Biography, p. 62, although this sentence does not appear in the letter as reprinted in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, pp. 57–58. Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, pp. 33–36. Louis-Pierre Jouvenet, Fernand Deligny, 50 ans d’asile (Toulouse: Privat, 1988), p. 16. From 1937–1938 Deligny evidently bounced around three different schools from Paris to Lille as “instituteur suppléant” and in each case introduced improvised performance, drawing, and other non- linguistic forms of expression. See the appendix “Chronologie” in Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, ed. Sanra Alvarez de Toledo (Paris: Edition L’Arachnéen, 2007), pp. 1822–1823. Fernand Deligny, Les Vagabonds efficaces (Paris: Editions Victor Michon, 1947). See Jouvenet, Fernand Deligny, 50 ans d’asile, p. 23. Josée Manenti, “Fernand Deligny … ,” Chimères 30 (Spring 1997): 104, cited in François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Interesecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 72. Jouvenet, “Deligny et sa dérive anthropoculturelle,” chapter 2 in Fernand Deligny, 50 ans d’asile. I elaborate on this idea of gesture in “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Andrew (ed.), Opening Bazin, p. 162. I also suggest the possible role played by Antonin Artaud in linking Bazin and Deligny, since the latter commented on Artaud after an exhibition of the famous actor’s drawings made in an asylum. Deligny had surely read Merleau-Ponty’s lengthy discussion from 1951, “Les Relations avec autrui chez l’enfant,” available in English in The Primacy of Perception (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 96–155. Deligny reads this sentence in the film Fernand Deligny, à propos d’un film à faire (dir. Renaud Victor, 1989). This film is available along with Deligny’s Le Moindre Geste in a 3-disc packet from Editions Montparnasse. Truffaut’s relation to Deligny is most thoroughly detailed in Deligny, Œuvres, pp. 599–606 and in that book’s excellent “Chronologie.” A résumé of this relation can be found in

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Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue, Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004), pp. 122–123. After rejecting Jutra’s approach in a letter to Truffaut, Deligny actually mentions Rouch’s work as close to what he has in mind. See note to the letter dated September 17, 1958 (erroneously, as the year must be 1959), and also the letter of October 1959, in Bernard Bastide (ed.), “La Correspondance Truffaut–Deligny,” 1895, 42 (February 2004): 88. Deligny went to Paris in the midst of the May 1968 events to discuss, and then reject, Guattari’s request that he edit a daily newspaper focusing on the revolution in progress. See Deligny, Œuvres, p. 1826. See the “Chronology” in Fernand Deligny, Œuvres (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2007). It is more accurate to say that SLON was established in 1967 to help films like Le Moindre Geste see the light of day. Deligny seems to have contacted Marker in 1968, while SLON had produced Loin du Vietnam in1967. Bastide (ed.), “La Correspondance Truffaut–Deligny,” p. 98. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 261. Deligny to Truffaut, November 22, 1968, in Bastide (ed.), “La Correspondance Truffaut– Deligny,” pp. 102–103. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, “Renaud Victor,” liner notes on the DVD box, Le Cinéma de Fernand Deligny (Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 2008). De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, pp. 261–263. Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981), p. 27. Shattuck’s description is taken from Bonnaterre’s report of 1800 available in Harlan Lane, Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Curiously it was Lucien Bonaparte, the emperor’s brother, who, as minister of the interior, personally demanded the boy be transferred to the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, where he might be studied and treated by the legendary savant Abbé Sicard. See Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment, pp. 21–22 and 40–41. Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, trans. Alistair Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment, pp. 43–44. Although Herzog has always claimed not to have investigated the boy of Aveyron, and not to have seen L’Enfant sauvage before making his Kaspar Hauser, even ridiculing the idea of influence, Truffaut’s archives include “Extraits de Gaspard Hauser ou la paresse du cœur,” from which he enumerated elements, such as Kaspar’s lack of a sense of past or future, his fear of statues, his indifference to others who harassed him as they crowded the stairs to catch a glimpse of him in his tower prison. Truffaut carefully underlined one passage central to his attitude: “on peut conclure que l’enfant, connu sous le nom de Sauvage de l’Aveyron, est donné du libre exercice de tous ses sens, qu’il donne des preuves continuelles d’attention, de réminiscence. … On remarqua que des changements heureux sont venus dans le court espace de neuf mois, chez un sujet qu’on croyait incapable d’attention, et l’on en conclut que son éducation est possible, si elle n’est pas même dejà garantie par ces premiers succès.” All this material is contained in the Fonds F. Truffaut at the BiFi (Bibliothèque du Film, La Cinémathèque Francaise, Paris). Octave Mannoni, “Itard et son sauvage,” Les Temps Modernes 233 (October 1965) 647–663. This essay became a chapter in Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire; ou, l’autre scène (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1969), 184–201.

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Certain Tendencies of Truffaut’s Film Criticism Richard Neupert

To defend the auteur cinema it was necessary to begin by demolishing a certain number of old gents and clichés. The demolition expert was Truffaut. … François Truffaut thrashed and thrashed about. He was at every screening, every discussion. He wrote like Saint-Just, leaning on the guillotine. His style was so lively it raced out of control, his expressions struck hard, his sentences decapitated. … “A Certain Tendency” was his bayonet attack. Claude Chabrol1

A Critic Before a Filmmaker While the majority of François Truffaut’s hundreds of film reviews and articles, most of which appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts, have yet to be translated into English, most film students know his most notorious piece from 1954 entitled “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema,” and we are aware of at least a few of the scores of his exemplary reviews and polemical articles which are readily available. His confidence, wit, and impatience show through in most of his critical writing. Clearly, Truffaut’s sometimes reckless, but always passionate, brand of criticism helped define and establish aesthetic and auteurist battle lines for decades to come. Truffaut’s bold writing style is legendary, and film scholars have long agreed that his criticism is closely intertwined with his personal life and with his eventual filmmaking strategies. For instance, Colin Crisp notes that Truffaut’s often violent brand of criticism, and his anxious desire to begin filming, were “derived solely from his total commitment to the cinema.”2

A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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While concentrating on the instinctual, hidden side of Truffaut’s filmmaking, Anne Gillain points out that his criticism, and his later films, are fascinated with the functions of mise-en-scène and narrative to stimulate the spectator in emotional, engaging, even unconscious ways.3 Steven Lipkin outlines the ways in which Truffaut championed the value of individual filmmakers, taking risks and attacking the compromises of the commercial “Tradition of Quality,” which was so entrenched in the industry that he would later work to reform.4 Philippe Mary argues that Truffaut was driven by a very private rage fueled in large part by the symbolic pain inflicted by his mother, as well as by his struggle to overcome and repress his ambivalent class situation.5 Truffaut’s becoming a well-known, occasionally brutal critic and then a highly successful director were essential stages in his development, according to Mary. Further, Antoine de Baecque, in a volume entitled Cinéphilie and in his biography, Truffaut (co-written with Serge Toubiana), praises Truffaut for the talent and ambition with which he strove to reframe crucial arguments about French cinema and its aesthetic history, helping to change both. One thing these and other historians share is the belief that Truffaut wrote bright, insightful, if occasionally self-serving criticism. Moreover, the act of writing was more than an occupation for him. He wrote from a burning compulsion, whether in his voluminous letters, critical reviews, or scripts. He undoubtedly would have loved the world of the Internet where he surely would have become a tireless blogger. As we know, Jean-Luc Godard liked to quip that by writing reviews he and his Cahiers du Cinéma cohorts were already preparing to direct movies. Truffaut may have been the best, most accomplished participant in that sort of practical critical activity, and he certainly valued his preparation as a writer. When interviewed for the 1962 special New Wave issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut explained that writing plot summaries in film reviews helped him think more about story construction and served as his formal training for script writing and directing: “I came to dissect films so much that during my last year at Arts I was no longer writing criticism proper, I was speaking as a director.”6 Always a pointed advocate for a lively contemporary cinema, Truffaut’s reviews typically included precise details as evidence and even offered suggestions for directors and actors alike on how to improve their craft. For instance, he suggests Sacha Guitry’s movies as “instructive lessons to watch” for examples of honest, personal cinema.7 The value of Jean Renoir’s cinema also comes up repeatedly, especially for better understanding how to direct actors: “It is a phenomenon worthy of impassioned study.”8 Yet, Truffaut’s brand of critical advice was often harsh, and occasionally humiliating for his targets. He scolds Marcel Pagliero for the laziness of his direction in  Vestire gli ignudi (Clothe the Naked, 1954), which is not up to Pagliero’s potential,9 and derides Claude Autant-Lara for his flat, “overly prudent” mise-enscène in Marguerite de la nuit (Marguerite of the Night, 1955).10 Truffaut mocks George Stevens for his repetitive use of “glaring symbols” in Giant (1956) and for his refusal to grant James Dean reaction shots during one scene.11 On another occasion he writes that Robert Hossein needed to be less theatrical in his “vulgar” first film Les Salauds vont en enfer (The Wicked Go to Hell, 1955) and add more of his

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own personality and instinct in his search for more compelling dialogue and camera angles to save it from resembling a naïve radio drama.12 However, Truffaut is also always on the alert for top young actors. In a 1953 review of The Turning Point (William Dieterle, 1952), Truffaut points out William Holden, “one of the three great actors of tomorrow.”13 He also calls attention to how Jean-Claude Brialy “breaks away from other actors,” providing a model for ease and humor in front of a camera.14 Clearly Truffaut makes an effort to assess a wide range of parameters from storytelling to shot composition to casting, pointing out positive and negative practices. Truffaut’s criticism consistently championed one sort of cinema and railed against another, with only a few films falling somewhere in the middle. Importantly, his written discourse, whether celebrating or condemning a specific movie or director, or even blasting the nominations for the Academy Awards, helped launch the era of mise-en-scène criticism. As a critic, François Truffaut challenged the status quo of 1950s’ French cultural criticism, and regularly attacked the assumptions of those on the Left, inviting suspicion and sometimes retribution from major figures within the industry and fellow critics at more politically engaged journals. As de Baecque and Toubiana point out, like Orson Welles before him, Truffaut was famous before he shot a single foot of film: “For an entire generation, Truffaut played the part of a catalyst for debate and … became the spokesman for a culture that had been scorned up to then, the culture of film devotees.”15 He, along with Jacques Rivette, also originated the practice of interviewing directors via a magnetic tape recorder so as to publish informed “conversations” with key directors from Jacques Becker to Alfred Hitchcock. In the end, Truffaut did not just discuss auteurism, he helped teach every devoted cinephile how to practice auteur criticism and evaluation. Significantly, Truffaut’s particular contributions include launching the systematic, close analysis of a director’s core themes and technical choices. The bulk of his critical writing exhibits a determined, very personal, aesthetic perspective onto the cinema as he evaluated stylistic values in adaptation, screenwriting, and directing decisions, including casting. In fact, it is often surprising how much attention the young Truffaut devoted to evaluating the craft of acting. His commitment to mise-en-scène criticism proves truly remarkable over the course of his hundreds of reviews and lends his criticism a special place and lasting influence in the history of film aesthetics. Reportedly, near the end of his life Henri Langlois declared that François Truffaut was one of the two most important film critics of twentiethcentury France (along with the notorious François Vinneuil, a.k.a. Lucien Rebatet), and thus even more significant than André Bazin.16 Truffaut’s criticism, therefore, should not be seen as a simple training ground or first step for a future director, nor should it be reduced to being read retrospectively in light of his eventual films. Rather, his reviews and articles of the 1950s should be assessed as a highly significant and coherent body of creative and immensely influential critical writing in their own right.

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Truffaut’s Critical Strategies Because François Truffaut wrote so regularly, and for such a wide variety of outlets, including places as diverse as Elle, La Parisienne, and La Revue des Lettres Modernes, and because he used several pseudonyms, it is not easy to count the number of his published articles and reviews. The careful reference work by Eugene P. Walz lists 569 articles and reviews written by Truffaut during the 1950s alone, with the vast majority in Arts and Cahiers du Cinéma. But even Walz misses a number of entries, newspapers, and journals, including those in Cinémonde. Thus, Truffaut’s output is impressive on every level. Even within a single week’s issue of Arts he would regularly publish a substantial interview, review article, or festival report, as well as three or four short reviews. For instance, on February 13, 1957, his lead article was about Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), but he also had shorter reviews of Sacha Guitry’s Assassins et voleurs (Lovers and Thieves, 1957), The Man Who Never Was (Ronald Neame, 1956), and Yves Ciampi’s Typhon sur Nagasaki (Typhoon over Nagasaki, 1957), with the latter two signed under his occasional pseudonym, Robert Lachenay, which also functioned as a tribute to his best friend from childhood. Truffaut often added a short calendar of movies opening that week, as well. His in-depth “interview encounters” with favorite directors were also a staple of his output. In 1956 alone, Truffaut published lengthy discussions with Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Robert Aldrich in Arts. After his incredibly productive critical career of the 1950s, Truffaut the director gave a dizzying number of interviews with international journalists and at film festivals throughout the next twenty-five years of his life. Many of these interviews could also be counted as valuable critical discourses for those looking for insights into Truffaut’s perspectives on cinema. He regularly positioned his own cinema within arguments related to film history, auteurism, strategies of adaptation, and mise-en-scène. During 1962, following the triumph of Jules et Jim, Truffaut stepped back from production to record long sessions with Alfred Hitchcock for the book-length dialogue between the two director friends. Hitchcock by Truffaut still stands as the ultimate model for in-depth auteur criticism in action.17 And, in part inspired by Jean Renoir’s book Ma vie et mes films (My Life and My Films, 1974), Truffaut revisited and repackaged many of his reviews for his own book Les Films de ma vie (The Films in My Life) in 1975.18 After his death, Jean Narboni and Serge Toubiana published another collection of essays, initially selected by Truffaut, entitled Le Plaisir des yeux (Pleasure for the eyes).19 François Truffaut began his critic’s career very young. At barely eighteen, he initially landed a brief job with Elle magazine, where he took journalistic photos of celebrities and wrote several short articles. But it was thanks to Eric Rohmer and his Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin and its tracts La Gazette du Cinéma that Truffaut began writing criticism, and quickly attracted attention. His earliest publications brought the young Truffaut a sudden and needed sense of direction, and introduced him to a whole new realm of friends and mentors. Moreover, right from the start Truffaut established his own personal, very confident aesthetic preferences, compiling a rigid list of his

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canonical films and worthy auteur directors. Jean Renoir and André Bazin were also there from the beginning. As Noël Herpe explains, It was via the very detailed analysis of the reconstructed copy of La Règle du jeu [Renoir, 1939], a film he had already seen 12 times, that Truffaut got his real start as a critic in 1950, writing for La Gazette du Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, led by Eric Rohmer. … Truffaut’s in-depth knowledge of Renoir’s work attracted the attention of André Bazin.20

In fact Bazin had already met Truffaut in 1948; their encounter motivated the ailing Bazin to offer Truffaut a job as his research assistant on a book about Jean Renoir. That and another Renoir project were delayed, and the restless Truffaut famously enlisted in the military following a failed romance, suspending his critical career. But even in the barracks, the psychiatric hospital, and finally in military prison, Truffaut kept notes and compiled letters, writing feverishly about movies and literature, often from memory. Finally, freed from military service and incarceration, in 1952, François Truffaut landed a job for a time working with Cinémonde where he wrote review articles. “Protected by anonymity, Truffaut wrote at length, in a short, lively, rapid style. If nothing else, Cinémonde gave him his first opportunity to focus his journalistic writing specifically on cinema.”21 Importantly, he had also focused his aesthetic range and his rhetorical strategies by this point, which all helped immensely when he received the opportunity to begin writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. Truffaut burst onto the critical stage with an almost fully developed set of assumptions and a cluster of trusted, canonical filmmakers to champion. For him, writing criticism was not just a profession but a sort of calling. Early on, his reviews followed a set formula: A stable pattern emerges in Truffaut’s approach to any film. He will offer some principle of cinema (acting, directing, writing, etc.) which will function as the criterion for success or failure he has brought to the film; apply the principle across references to the plot; return to other considerations which require mention, such as the use of color or Cinemascope; and then reaffirm the evaluation and give his recommendation for seeing the film.22

Truffaut’s “other considerations” often concerned a politique of adaptation, auteurism, and mise-en-scène, including a fetishistic attention to actresses. Truffaut’s first review in Cahiers, published in March 1953, was for an RKO Joan Crawford vehicle, Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952). It allowed him to set down many of the traits he would systematically insert into his writing for the rest of the decade. He begins his review by proving he is appalled by average French productions and that his is a new, fresh voice on cinema. To open, Truffaut claims he recently approached a “first or second director,” seen shooting a scene in the streets: “What are you filming?” The answer was “a linking shot” (un plan de raccord), which allows Truffaut to lament, “That’s French cinema: three hundred linking shots end to end, one hundred ten times a year.”23 Truffaut contrasts this predictable practice with American cinema,

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specifically the “brilliant,” Hitchcock-like Sudden Fear: “Not a shot, either, that isn’t fascinating and doesn’t make us think it is a masterpiece of filmmaking.” Thus, he establishes that French filmmaking is weak in contrast to the vibrancy of America, where each shot is important, unlike the endless “linking” shots of France. Further, Truffaut informs the audience that some spectators will not be prepared for this movie because twenty years of poor adaptations and “fake great subjects” have led to a public whose tastes have been systematically lowered since the war.24 Already, at age twenty-one, Truffaut plays the role of an educator, overtly pleading, cajoling, and challenging the audience. But another point of this review that recurs throughout his career is his sexist attention to the casting and direction of actresses, here, Gloria Grahame. As Truffaut puts it, “Cinema is the art of doing pretty things to pretty women.”25 Sudden Fear is part of a long history lesson for Truffaut that American cinema knows best how to direct actresses, and the treatment of Grahame’s face reminds him that American cinema “proves to us every week that it is the greatest in the world.”26 His initial Cahiers reviews of diverse American films, including The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952), South Sea Sinner (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1950), and The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952), provided Truffaut with a chance to celebrate the value of inexpensive, even modest, films while berating technically perfect, but dull costume dramas and super-productions. Technique, economics, and technology interested Truffaut right from the start. His review of The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) became an early referendum on CinemaScope’s potential, and this in July 1953, months before André Bazin wrote about whether CinemaScope would “save” the cinema.27 Truffaut faults popular press journalists for readily accepting claims that widescreen lends a greater impression of 3D, when in fact it only provides a wider view, like modern architecture’s oblong bay windows: “We may be reminded here that cinema is an art of sight, that our natural vision is panoramic.”28 For Truffaut, the aesthetic potential of widescreen is an important stage in cinema’s “evolution,” echoing Bazin’s famous use of the term. “It is pleasant to think about the films we like and to note that the elongated apartment of Rope [Hitchcock, 1948], the cars of Europa ’51 [Roberto Rossellini, 1952], and the movements of The Golden Coach [Renoir, 1952] would gain in fascination. … We are entering the era of wide vision.”29 He is anxious for the day when “the most brilliant directors of actors, and the most inventive directors of mise-en-scène” have access to the process, and of course he would make stunning use of widescreen for his own films, beginning with Les 400 Coups (1959). Like Bazin, Truffaut was intrigued with cinema history, and studied it one film at a time, though Truffaut also had a long agenda of often rigorous narrative and stylistic issues that he tested with each new movie. Clearly, Truffaut’s most significant article is “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” Antoine de Baecque has helpfully chronicled the long process of Truffaut’s composition of the manuscript, which really could be called an ongoing project since it grew out of notes he had been keeping and revising for some time. He gave the first draft, entitled “The Time of Contempt: Notes on a Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” to André Bazin in December 1952. But it would not be published

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until January 1954, after many suggested revisions from Bazin and coeditor Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Despite an editorial commentary in Cahiers preceding Truffaut’s article, trying to prepare readers for its rash tone, “A Certain Tendency” had an immediate effect. As de Baecque explains, “On January 28, the main subject of conversation at the professional critics’ luncheon was Truffaut’s article. The camps were clearly divided.”30 This article, which cruelly attacked Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, as well as Henri Jeanson and directors Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara among others, not only upset many established figures in French film production and criticism, it also helped solidify some of the aesthetic and political stances at Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1959, on the occasion of the one-hundredth issue of Cahiers, Doniol-Valcroze assessed the journal’s history thus far and observed, I state objectively that the publication of this article marks the real point of departure of what Cahiers du Cinéma represents today, for better or worse. A hurdle was crossed and a trial launched, and we all agreed. Something now held us together. Henceforth, we knew we were for Renoir, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Bresson … and against X, Y, and Z. Henceforth, there would be a doctrine, a ‘politique des auteurs’ … which led naturally into a series of interviews with the great directors, and a real contact was established between them and us.31

Even six years later, Doniol-Valcroze is clearly more diplomatic than the young Truffaut had been, since he still does not mention the names of directors dismissed by “A Certain Tendency.” Truffaut had no such scruples. It was understandable that some of Truffaut’s brash assaults and highly subjective claims in his most famous article should trouble film professionals, critics, and historians alike. As Naomi Greene points out, its tone was polemical and passionate: “Unlike Bazin’s measured and nuanced critique of the Tradition of Quality, Truffaut’s essay was both virulent and highly personal in nature.”32 The article takes rapid aim at prestigious films by some of France’s most award-winning directors in order to jar the audience and sow doubt concerning the industry and its mainstream critics. After all, the “Tradition of Quality” was just that, a cinema thought to offer both technical polish and lofty historical or literary subjects that built on France’s prestigious cultural heritage. Yet Aurenche and Bost, two respected, progressive screenwriters, were targeted in particular for their adaptations of novels by prominent authors as diverse as Colette, André Gide, and Georges Bernanos. Truffaut charged that these and other popular, commercial adaptations regularly betrayed the original novels by freely imposing new dialogue and actions as “equivalent” replacements for “unfilmable” aspects in the literature. Truffaut’s frustrations are largely centered on his belief that great directors can and should do their own adaptations rather than relying on these scriptwriters and their repetitive devices. Truffaut prefers an “auteur’s cinema” to the “screenwriter’s cinema” that directors such as Yves Allégret, Autant-Lara, and Delannoy allow to dominate French screens. His frustration endured. In 1958 Truffaut was still railing against Aurenche, Bost, and their resilient, continually popular string of adaptations, which reduce great, diverse novels to dull theatrical play-like

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scripts: “But the cinema is something different: mise-en-scène. The sole sort of valuable adaptation is by the director, that is, founded on the reconversion of the literary ideas in terms of mise-en-scène.”33 This proclamation was already fundamental to “A Certain Tendency.” Among Aurenche and Bost’s worst crimes, to Truffaut, was their pale version of Raymond Radiguet’s Le Diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh, AutantLara, 1947). Throughout “A Certain Tendency,” which firmly establishes Truffaut’s agenda, his sharp vocabulary, love of literature, and fragmented format display an anger and impatience quite unlike anything seen in other critical essays of this era. As Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau succinctly conclude, The piece is typical of the vituperative, fearless and much feared Truffaut, who used to demolish films by the dozen when he was a critic on the weekly Arts as well as Cahiers in the 1950s. What may surprise readers today who are familiar with Truffaut’s films is the article’s resolutely right-wing stance: he takes a very poor view of anti-clerical, antimilitaristic and anti-bourgeois films, as well as what he sees as blasphemy.34

But, according to Philippe Mary, the article was also seen as a sort of blasphemy by many mainstream filmmakers and critics, a sacrilegious attack on respected figures in French cinema. If some readers found Truffaut’s reckless rage refreshing, even liberating, others detected an opportunist attempt to increase his own status.35 For Mary, Truffaut’s socially superior mother inflicted symbolic pain upon him, hence his appetite for a violent and self-righteous cinephilia which lent him cultural capital. The ferocity of his attacks on the Cinema of Quality once he becomes a film critic has its operating principle in this destructive “rage.” … By inflicting a wound on the cinema of prestige (doubtless the sort his mother was fond of ) and which may be symbolic of legitimate culture … he at once goes against his mother and imposes himself upon society.36

Whether these discursive ploys or aesthetic judgments should be linked to Truffaut’s relations with his mother can be debated, but “A Certain Tendency” did produce the lasting effect of boosting the prestige of Truffaut’s “chosen” directors at the expense of those he dismissed, which in turn established auteurism as a central critical strategy in France and beyond. As de Baecque concludes, “A Certain Tendency” proved to be a turning point in Truffaut’s career, but it would also “mark and influence a whole generation” of cinephiles.37 Throughout the rest of 1954 Truffaut delivered a series of assertive, confident reviews of new films by some of his favorite directors, including Fritz Lang, Jacques Becker, Sacha Guitry, George Cukor, and Otto Preminger. He praises Lang’s highly moral world in The Big Heat (1953), Becker’s narrative economy in Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), and Cukor’s masterful comic pace in It Should Happen to You (1954), among other things. His reviews range far and wide, such as discussing Lumière before getting to Cukor’s comedy, praising the Soviet movie Cossacks of the Kuban (Kubanskie kazaki, dir. Ivan Pyryev, 1950) before criticizing Delmer Daves’ routine Cold War tale Never Let Me Go (1953), and mentioning other representations of the monarchy before

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approving Guitry’s conservative brand of royalism in Si Versailles m’était conté (Royal Affairs in Versailles, 1954). His system for reviewing always involved film history as context or criterion for the praise or opprobrium he directed at some new film. Thus, Lure of the Wilderness ( Jean Negulesco, 1952) is dismissed as a vapid remake of Renoir’s Swamp Water (1941), while his article on Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) also refers to F.W. Murnau, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini as cinematic touchstones. Repeatedly, over the course of the decade, Truffaut reinforces central points and figures mentioned in his “A Certain Tendency.” He regularly asserts that American cinema is more modern and engaging than the average French production, and his European exceptions are almost always from the same cadre of auteurs, including Jean Cocteau and Robert Bresson. Yet, for all his rash claims and passionate outbursts, Truffaut became fairly predictable, or as Don Allen writes, “remarkably consistent, even static, in his cinematic judgments over the years.”38

Provocation on the Front Lines of Criticism Film histories often simplify Truffaut’s position as a young Turk rabble-rouser, by suggesting it was mainly the conservative old guard who feared his brash young wit and clever critiques. His political leanings during the 1950s, however, were indeed provocative on a number of levels, granting good reasons for progressive voices within France’s leftist film culture to be suspicious of Truffaut. For instance, in a footnote to his review of The Big Heat, Truffaut thanks American censorship for making sure Philip Marlowe is no longer a homosexual, as he was in the original book.39 Importantly, in the issue of Cahiers following “A Certain Tendency,” Truffaut wrote a book review of the new edition of Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach’s infamous Histoire du cinéma. However, he limited his criticisms to assessing and critiquing the book’s aesthetic value while seeming to applaud or at least excuse its fascist ideology. That Truffaut, who often dismissed socially engaged cinema and criticism, even granted attention to Bardèche and Brasillach proved provocative and revealing to his contemporaries. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, who had written the careful introduction trying to soften the blow of “A Certain Tendency” for readers, here wrote a more direct disclaimer, distancing himself and Cahiers from Truffaut’s review. DoniolValcroze acknowledges that Truffaut is critical of some of the history’s inaccuracies and judgments but complains that he is far too forgiving of their politics: “I cannot allow an article on this book to appear in a journal I co-edit without addressing its unacceptable neo-fascist angle and its puerile and odious anti-Semitism.”40 Bardèche and Brasillach both identified with the fascists, and “Brasillach proved a notoriously enthusiastic collaborator” – so much so that he was executed shortly after the Liberation.41 Their history book, originally published in 1935 and revised during the Occupation, argued that Jewish influences, from producers to exhibitors, dragged down French cinema during the 1930s and destroyed its national themes. They even praised Joseph Goebbels for rebuilding Germany’s Nazi-era cinema and

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criticized Renoir’s sympathetic portrayal of Rosenthal in La Grande Illusion (1937): this “first Jew made sympathetic by the Popular Front” was indeed “troubling.”42 Truffaut’s review did complain about the book’s overall quality and its failure to address recent films by Rossellini, Hawks, or Hitchcock. But it was Truffaut’s conclusion that most bothered Doniol-Valcroze and others. He wrapped up by admitting that some readers will be surprised that his review skipped over the authors’ controversial political ideas, though he quickly added a brash, reckless claim: “Views that earn their advocates the death penalty are bound to be worthy of esteem.”43 Yet his review concentrated on the book’s technical and critical shortcomings. The ideal cinema history, he argues, must be constantly revised and rethought, with repeat viewings of past films: “Clearly, the real History of Cinema is written and learned every night on the little screen of the Cinémathèque.”44 By extension, Truffaut suggests that Cahiers du Cinéma, in opposition to this old-fashioned book, is the best sort of history, and that he and his colleagues are the true historians of their era. This review, like many others, reveals Truffaut’s carefully calculated ability to generate controversy while simultaneously suggesting that his is the most insightful, timely, and trustworthy voice of cinema criticism and history. The steady stream of engaging, often controversial articles and reviews by François Truffaut drew attention from editors at Arts – Lettres – Spectacles, home to an intellectual, right-wing cluster of cultural critics who invited him to join their staff. Their writers were referred to as “hussars of the right” for their brash style. Arts “instigated big cultural debates; in the fifties it was the true rival of the left-wing journals and magazines.”45 During September 1954, Truffaut began contributing regularly to Arts, eventually taking control of its cinema pages. As de Baecque and Toubiana note, “A film a day, an article every other day – this was the pace the young man kept up, working every night, imbibing Maxiton, cigarettes, and coffee. Life and work were one.” They also assert that from these first reviews in Arts, Truffaut established a clear tone: “A style blending vehemence and humor, it was rich in wordplay, jokes, and hoaxes and was clearly intended to draw in the reader.”46 Part of Truffaut’s engaging style was also exasperation at what he saw as missed opportunities, often involving mise-en-scène choices or careless scriptwriting tactics. He clearly envied all directors their jobs and could not bear to see movies that were mediocre or compromising. For instance, his review of Rhapsody (Charles Vidor, 1954) combines his frustration over the lack of personal style with suspicion about the director: “This is the most boring American film of the year. … The Technicolor is decent, Elizabeth Taylor is pretty. … The dullness of Rhapsody leads one to think that Charles Vidor only gave his signature to the pleasant movie Gilda [1946], with cameraman Rudy Maté probably being the real auteur.”47 At Arts Truffaut also launched occasional columns designed to ruffle feathers among the mainstream critics and producers and simultaneously win increased attention for his own causes. Two important articles appeared in 1955, “A Crisis of Ambition in French Cinema,” and “Criticism’s Seven Deadly Sins.” For Truffaut, the problems of French production were tied to laziness and routine, and the crisis to him was proven by the fact that only a small percentage of the ninety-five active directors that year were “ambitious,” while the bottom thirty “deliberately commercial” directors

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just shot anything in the most efficient manner to make the highest profit. These most guilty of directors accounted for 247 films over the previous ten years, reinforcing the low value of the “Tradition of Quality” that weighed down French cinema.48 That summer his article on the sins that tempt critics charges that they are easily misled because they fear upsetting the big-name stars and producers but also because they know so little about film history and technique. He even names these critics, some of whom were quite prominent. The suggestion, of course, is that only Truffaut has the knowledge and honesty to offer unbiased insights. As de Baecque and Toubiana conclude, Truffaut “had sired a new form of film criticism – frank, direct, violent, sectarian, founded on value judgments, always detailed but often provocative and scathing, with no qualms about being peremptory and unfair.”49 The clever, often spiteful attacks in Truffaut’s columns at Arts drew devoted fans as well as a strong backlash from a number of quarters. Later in 1955 the editor even sent Truffaut a warning: “Letters of complaint are piling up. … From now on, in your articles for Arts, I forbid you to use terms like ‘plagiarized’ or ‘copied,’ or to make physically or sexually discriminatory remarks. You’re entitled to dislike skinny women or homosexuals, but you must refrain from expressing this in your columns.”50 Earlier, at Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut had tried to dismiss Autant-Lara’s “quality” film Le Blé en herbe (The Game of Love, 1954) as “a gross lesbian story,” however, Bazin would not allow it.51 Writing for Arts, Truffaut displayed more of his rash, immature, and subjective traits, but also wrote some of his most cruelly entertaining and risky reviews. Truffaut’s best reviews at Arts and Cahiers clearly evaluated films in relation to his consistent aesthetic principles of adaptation and direction. Though he may have attacked new films from his usual enemies, he also evidenced that he looked at each of them closely and explained his reactions. Further, as Dudley Andrew points out, Truffaut regularly ridiculed France’s industrial process wherein “businesslike directors” routinely and faithfully filmed inferior adaptations: “After all, how could Jean Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale (1946) from Gide’s elegantly slim twentieth-century novella come out looking like Christian-Jaque’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1948), taken from Stendhal’s sprawling novel?”52 When Claude Autant-Lara directed Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1954), adapted from Stendhal by Aurenche and Bost, Truffaut cleverly claimed the result was so diluted that it should be renamed “The Pink and the Gray.”53 Yet, he could praise the team of Autant-Lara, Aurenche, and Bost when he saw fit, though his comments retained their sarcasm: I have consistently attacked Claude Autant-Lara and I have always deplored his tendency to simplify everything, make it bland. … But I admire, without any real reservations, La Traversée de Paris [Four Bags Full, 1956]. I think it’s a complete success because AutantLara has finally found the subject he’s been waiting for – a plot that is made in his own image, a story that his truculence, tendency toward exaggeration, roughness, vulgarity, and outrage, far from serving badly, elevates.54

Again, in 1958 Truffaut allows that Autant-Lara has some merit and that his cinema is perhaps moving the public forward with films like En Cas de malheur (Love Is My

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Profession, 1958), which Truffaut admits he would have condemned angrily a few years earlier.55 Throughout his 1950s reviews, Truffaut struggles over a number of directors with whom he has real problems but also sees potential. Julien Duvivier’s Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier Than the Male, 1956) not only afforded Truffaut a chance to rethink this uneven director but also allowed him to discover an important young actor, Gerard Blain. “Julien Duvivier has directed fifty-seven films. I have seen twenty-three and liked eight.” Here, Truffaut finds Duvivier “fully sure of himself,” tying together well for once the script, mise-en-scène, and music.56 Throughout the 1950s, François Truffaut expressed disappointment with many aspects of French cinema, often countering their restrained studio system with the vitality of American productions and continually opposing films by his least favorite directors with the newest triumphs of his preferred auteurs. Most importantly, however, he retained a sense of optimism for the future. He was well aware of his obligation as a critic to warn everyone of what was wrong with cinema, but he could also point out and champion new signs of promise, especially from young talent. During an era of nouvelles vagues in culture, Truffaut was one of those observers watching for evidence of youthful, new trends in French cinema. His articles helped pave the way for his own eventual productions, but he also served as an advocate, encouraging new talent when he saw it. For instance, for his review of Toute la ville accuse (The Whole Town Accuses, 1956) by Claude Boissol, Truffaut complains that too many French filmmakers are stuck in place, refurbishing pre-World War II tales: It is incredible that the flow of American films washing across France since the Liberation has not had more influence on our own productions. Is it perhaps because the average age of French directors is so high? But thanks to Norbert Carbonnaux (Les Corsaires du Bois de Boulogne [The Pirates of the Bois de Boulogne, 1954]), Michel Boisrond (Cette Sacrée Gamine [Naughty Girl, 1956]), Alex Joffé (Les Assassins du dimanche [Every Second Counts, 1957]), and Claude Boissol, French cinema is revitalizing its themes, its style. They have all decided to produce the sorts of films we need most urgently: moderate-budget B movies of real quality. … It is naïve to think that on one side is Art cinema, with a capital “A,” and on the other commercial cinema.57

Truffaut approves of the thirty-six-year-old Boissrond’s first film, and especially its use of location shooting. Months later, in his wrap-up article for 1956, he again mentions Toute la ville accuse and other “Good ‘B’ Films”: “Most of these are made by young filmmakers who are still unpretentious enough to shoot average-budget films, which ensures them a kind of freedom. (As a general rule, the more expensive a film is, the more likely it is to be stupid.)”58

Toward “Tomorrow’s Cinema” and a New Wave Truffaut also reviewed several films that would indeed be accepted later as the ground-breaking first signs of a New Wave. In 1956 he covered the short film festival

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in Tours, and announced, “The French short film is waking up.” In particular he signaled Chris Marker’s Dimanche à Pekin (Sunday in Peking), Jacques Rivette’s Le Coup du berger (Fool’s Mate), and Jacques Demy’s Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (“Clog-maker of the Loire Valley”). Truffaut observed that Demy bridged the gap between Bresson and Georges Rouquier, providing a new hope for France thanks to his cinematic “intelligence, taste, and affection.”59 However, Truffaut was less sure about just what to make of Agnès Varda’s first feature, La Pointe courte (1954). He seems both intrigued and puzzled by Varda’s film, which he labels “an ambitious experimental work” that is even outside cinema.60 But he also has the honesty to admit several times that he did not understand much of it and thus had trouble assessing whether its story and style are “poetic or pretentious.” “It is difficult to form a judgment of a film in which the true and the false, the true-false and the false-true, are intermingled according to barely perceived rules.”61 The movie is too studied and theoretical for Truffaut, flaws that are especially noticeable in the actors. He also suggests that his critic colleagues are equally confused by La Pointe courte, whether they want to admit it or not. Yet Truffaut urges viewers to head to Studio Parnasse, where La Pointe courte was showing, to participate in the post-screening ciné-club debates. That this was also Varda’s first film appears to create some hesitation for Truffaut the auteurist – he wants to praise daring new work but feels much more confident testing films against the past work by their directors. Further, since mise-en-scène and especially acting are so fundamental to his aesthetic judgments, the unusual La Pointe courte genuinely rattles the normally decisive Truffaut, while André Bazin, by contrast, immediately crowned Varda an auteur because of her free, personal style in the same film.62 But, if there was one original youthful film that Truffaut could champion wholeheartedly, it was Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu … créa la femme (… And God Created Woman, 1956). He quickly became convinced that it offered a new path for French cinema. “It’s a film that belongs to this generation: simultaneously amoral (rejecting the current moral system but proposing no other) and puritanical (conscious of its amorality and disturbed by it). Far from being trivial, it is revealing and completely honest.”63 In a subsequent Arts article, further defending Et Dieu … créa la femme, and Bardot’s performance in particular, Truffaut praised Vadim’s use of CinemaScope, especially for a first-time director, and for taking his actors and camera outside, while, in contrast, “French cameramen and filmmakers are afraid of nature.”64 Vadim is bold too in his representation of sexuality, since “perhaps for the first time in cinema history [he] dares to show us a young married couple behaving like a young married couple.” And much of the power of this intimate display involves filming Bardot and her “everyday gestures,” rather than copying how people act in other films.65 This personal “notebook film” impresses Truffaut on nearly every level (save the acting of Curt Jurgens), and Et Dieu … créa la femme provides another parallel with Truffaut’s future films since he too would stage actresses in ways that recall Vadim’s exhibitionistic presentation of Bardot. Admittedly, Truffaut had been fascinated with the bodies and eroticism of actresses since his earliest articles. However, Vadim and then Louis Malle, with Les Amants (The Lovers, 1958), brought together new representations of sexuality with new modes of

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production. Malle in particular proved an intriguing role model for Truffaut. While Truffaut was cautious about Malle’s first feature, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958), even though it won the Louis Delluc award, he fully agreed when the Venice Film Festival gave their jury prize to Les Amants. He found the movie intelligent, free, and spontaneous, like early Renoir: “One has the feeling of discovering each thing along with the filmmaker.”66 And, he named it the best film of the year by someone under thirty, in part because Malle managed to break away from norms to reveal “what happens ‘before’ and ‘after’ love, that is, at the moment when the two partners show themselves to us as human beings.” He also pointed out that for the latter half of the film, “Jeanne Moreau is either in a nightgown or completely nude without any of those special indirect effects, such as having her silhouette cut off by a light, the kind that was constantly inflicted on us in Martine Carol films.”67 Truffaut’s interest in women’s bodies on screen, and off, became another key area of critical interest for him, and another signpost of new directions among a jeune cinema that ran counter to tired “Tradition of Quality” conventions. Geneviève Sellier points out that Truffaut was a central figure among the young men involved in 1950s’ French film culture who associated cinephilia, “an amorous relation to filmed images,” with a masculine perspective. At Cahiers, this “erotomania” included “plastering the walls of their office with photos of their favorite Hollywood actresses.”68 Truffaut’s provocative claim that cinema equals pretty women is played out in a variety of ways within his reviews, including his 1953 praise for Elena Verdugo in Tuna Clipper (William Beaudine, 1949) for her “promising bodice; no, generous; or rather willing”69 and for claiming that Joan Bennett, crouched and walking on all fours in Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach (1947), provides the most erotic moment in American cinema.70 Le Dictionnaire Truffaut even has a section entitled “Erotisme” which observes that Truffaut regretted Marilyn Monroe’s nude calendar photo session since it spoiled his imagining what she looked like under her clothes. However, as they note, his attention soon shifted to young European women, especially Brigitte Bardot and Harriet Andersson: “His adolescent adoration for undergarments on Hollywood stars gave way to the discovery of new female bodies corresponding to  the emergence of the modern European woman acknowledging her body and her  desires.”71 Dixon labels Truffaut’s attitude toward women as “pre-feminist,” acknowledging that “this insistence on viewing the female body as an object, a locus of male desire” is regularly disconcerting.72 Interestingly, Truffaut often signed Robert Lachenay’s name to his more openly suggestive and sexist articles, a displacement which provides further fuel for those applying psychoanalytic models to Truffaut the critic. But Truffaut, of course, is also famous for his real life frenetic sexual activity. Among his fascinating array of liaisons, Truffaut apparently even dated a carnival performer during the 1950s whose act included being shot out of a cannon.73 Women were always related to visual spectacle in Truffaut’s life, reviews, and cinema. Repeatedly, Truffaut reveals or at least projects a fetishistic attraction to body parts and women’s clothing, such as when he observed that June Allyson’s sex appeal is in her voice and she is also “pleasant to look at. I particularly recommend one of her skirts: the one with the vertical stripes, split on the side.” In the same review of

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Remains to Be Seen (Don Weis, 1953) he refers to Debbie Reynolds’ memorable gray pleated skirt from Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952).74 And, for a review of The Mummy’s Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940) he writes, “Preoccupied as I was with the size of the female doctor-explorer-Egyptologist-American’s bust, I completely forgot to pay attention to the story.”75 He found certain actresses continually alluring, and seemingly therefore more cinematic, including Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Susan Hayward, and Marilyn Monroe. From that first Cahiers review of Sudden Fear onwards he continues to assert his claim that American cinema has more directors who work well with actresses than any other. His attention is not always praise, as there are certain actresses, including Joan Crawford (“a matter of taste,” “hotheaded, menopausal”), whom he dismisses. Moreover, Truffaut was one of seven critics at Cahiers du Cinéma compiling a special edition article devoted to “F comme femme” (W for woman) with an actress profiled for each letter of the alphabet. Marilyn Monroe’s nude image is used (under “T” for Thunder!) and Jane Russell is summarized simply with a photo of her cleavage.76 During his tenure at Arts, Truffaut printed some equally exploitative reviews and photos, including a review of Lo Duca’s book on eroticism in cinema, which motivated Truffaut/Lachenay to assert that cinema is preferable to painting since it can simultaneously present a nude model and her portrait being painted in the same shot while pondering where the dividing line lies between refined art and perversion.77 Mise-en-scène, voyeurism, fetishism, and the female body were all intertwined near the core of Truffaut’s cinephilia and critical output, as this account of a scene in Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit, Kô Nakahira, 1956) proves: When [Nakahira] is about to film a couple lying on the sand, he first shows us the girl as we would see her if we were lying behind her: an oblique perspective on her body, a little glimpse of her breasts through the gap in her bathing suit, very pretty and not edited out for the screen. Having filmed that view, now he frames the faces vertically. … The girl’s hand moves slightly from her thigh and brushes against the boy’s hand; a shot of the boy’s body, lightly turned on his side, and a discreet glimpse of his bulging trunks. All of this, which I explain more or less well, has absolute simplicity and clarity on the screen. These are, all of them, full, rich shots because each has equal value; none is there merely to introduce the next one.78

Though not precisely accurate, Truffaut’s account displays eloquently how his personal obsessions, voyeurism, and creative mise-en-scène criticism coalesce into a mode of writing like that of no one else. He also suggests that the IDHEC film school show Kurutta Kajitsu to its students each month to help teach them the value of working quickly, “in mad haste,” with youthful intuition and spontaneity, and “to keep them from acquiring the mentality of assistants.” Beyond Truffaut’s concern with auteurism, adaptation, mise-en-scène, and actresses, he was also acutely aware of needed changes within the institutions of French cinema. In particular, he was a vocal, sometimes arrogant advocate for changing the conventions within film criticism and production, but also the film festivals, which too often continued to reward the wrong sort of cinema, in Truffaut’s opinion.

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While Truffaut, Arts, and Cahiers du Cinéma championed a specific brand of auteur cinema, the prestigious “Tradition of Quality” remained a persistent force within the established institutions of French cinema and criticism. For instance, French films won many of the top prizes at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d’Or for Le Monde du silence (The Silent World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau/Louis Malle, 1956)  and Jury Prize for Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956), and Palme d’Or for best short film for Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse, 1956). However, rather than being proud of his national cinema, Truffaut found the awards ridiculous: “It is not blasphemous to point out that neither Le Monde du silence nor Le Mystère Picasso are directed, or that imagination and invention play no direct role in them.”79 He could not believe how Susan Hayward’s “bad acting” earned her an undeserved prize that year, and he also disagreed with the choice of Sergei Yutkevich as Best Director for the overly theatrical Othello. Truffaut was offended by the jury’s choices, which rejected what he saw as the thoughtful, well-written, and well-acted films of the year, such as Zoltan Fabri’s Korhinta (MerryGo-Round). He countered with his own alternative list of prizes, including Hitchcock for Best Director, and lamented that Cannes director Robert Favre Le Bret “had not made me president of the jury.”80 Such self-serving, direct attacks were central to Truffaut’s critical strategies and helped secure his status as the privileged voice of youthful opposition within French film culture. Repeatedly in reviews and his journal entries from film festivals, Truffaut expressed impatience with a large portion of the featured movies and their critical reception. He occasionally even accused his fellow critics of writing glowing reviews of movies after the same colleagues had expressed boredom or worse at festival or press screenings. He claimed they feared losing their press passes or access to top stars and parties. By contrast, Truffaut set himself up as honest and consistent, if controversial, in his own critical writing. For instance, he complained at the 1956 Venice Film Festival that the ten or so excellent films were drowned out among the thirty bad films, and he suggested a remedy: “It seems the problem lies in the desire to internationalize festivals. While not calling for a racist festival, I do believe that the absence of Egyptian, Indian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, and Belgian films would not deprive anyone and there would be more time for serious productions.”81 He also attacked the American Academy Awards, which he suggested rewarded each studio in succession over the years. The “scandal” of 1956 was awarding three Oscars to Marty, including Delbert Mann as Best Director, rather than the more deserving Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, or Hitchcock.82 The next year, in Arts, he labeled Cannes a complete failure, dominated by mediocre producers and organized poorly by people “who do not love cinema.” The real function of Cannes, he argued, had become to fill hotels and casinos for the local business community. After bashing the top prize that year, Friendly Persuasion (William Wyler, 1956), Truffaut provided a list of recommendations for fixing Cannes, including allowing more than one entry per national cinema.83 He was clearly horrified that the weak Wyler film represented all of American cinema that year. As de Baecque and Toubiana observe, “by violently and insolently attacking the festival, Truffaut gained yet further authority.”84

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However, one of his most angry outbursts came during the run-up to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival when he wrote, “If radical modifications are not put in place, the next festival will be condemned.” Claiming that year’s festival was being avoided by professionals and dismissed by international critics, Truffaut’s column in Arts complained that only three or four of that year’s thirty films were even worth showing. Cannes had lost its prestige and reputation, and most top international producers were now going to the Berlin and Venice festivals instead, while they only sent their weaker films to Cannes. He even provided long lists of films, from the United States, France, Germany, and even Poland, that should be in competition instead of the poor slate selected that year.85 That same issue of Arts cited a CNC survey that revealed that 36 percent of French adults were no longer going to the movies, reinforcing his warnings of a growing crisis that only Truffaut seemed willing to address. He saw the problems and he offered the solutions. All during the 1950s, Truffaut’s critical platform set an agenda for change within everything from how scripts were adapted and which directors should be avoided to which films should be rewarded at film festivals. He also regularly acknowledged the significance of film criticism and the responsibility critics bore for helping guide filmmakers and audiences alike and for nurturing a new film environment in France. “The critic should be an intermediary between the auteur and the public,” he wrote, but he claimed that since critics must be brutally honest, it would be best if they could only review films they loved, though that was unlikely, especially since “nine out of ten films we analyze are made by men less intelligent and no more ‘artistic’ than we.”86 Throughout there was a carefully articulated warning about the crisis facing French cinema. Yet, he remained convinced that a handful of new forces, including himself, could help solve the central problems of French film and launch a youthful “cinema of tomorrow.” François Truffaut’s criticism clearly helped pave the way for a rebirth in France’s film production. His summary of 1956 included a positive trend among a few films that broke from the usual sorts of adaptation: “The script done away with, tomorrow’s good films will be more different from one another, more intelligent, more sincere, and more personal.”87 The next year, a particularly significant article argued boldly that only a crisis could save French cinema. He pointed out that there was a hopeful sign in 1957 with fifteen new directors entering the industry, but he warned that as the old guard was still in place they might just become fifteen unemployed directors by the end of 1958 unless things changed. Producers had to become more courageous and shift away from their tired business models. As evidence of the current problem, Truffaut pointed out that the salaries for Autant-Lara’s En Cas de malheur, which included Jean Gabin, Bardot, Aurenche, and Bost, added up to roughly $500,000, “which would be the total cost of four intelligent and well-made films made without big names.”88 For a new cinema to arise, young directors must avoid the mistakes of mainstream French cinema: In order for real relief, brought by young blood, we need young directors to stop walking in the tracks of “old cinema.” … This does not mean making B gangster films with half

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as many gangsters, half as many cops, on lousy sets, but with twice as many pistols to compensate. One must film different things in a different spirit. It is necessary to abandon overly expensive studios … to invade the sunny beaches where no director (save Vadim) has dared plant his camera. Sunshine costs less than floodlights and teams of electricians. One must film in the street and even in real apartments.”89

Truffaut warned against the routine dependence on dated formulas of psychological realism or cliché dialogue in favor of personal, honest filmmaking refreshed with spontaneity. Low budgets, contemporary stories, and new talent were constant refrains: “Truffaut comes back again and again to those artists working on the edges of the cinema, precisely because those artists create out of faith, skill, and a transcendence of available materials.”90 He helped generate an awareness of problems and then prescribe their solutions. As Lipkin concludes, “Truffaut sought not only to reach filmmakers with practical recommendations for changing the cinema, but also to prove to his readers the justice of his positions.”91 The cinema could be changed on several fronts, from criticism to adaptation to film festival selections, and Truffaut set himself at the crossroads of all those activities. Once he prepared the audience, he, his friends, and his followers could make this new cinema a reality. In fact, during 1957 Truffaut wrote a scathing denunciation of the current state of French cinema, claiming the old guard “false legends” were weighing everything down, but then he promised, “The film of the future will be shot by adventurers”: It seems to me that tomorrow’s film will be even more personal than a novel, more individual and autobiographical than a confession or a private diary. Young cineastes will express themselves in the first person, and talk about things that have happened to them; perhaps an account of their first love or their most recent, the growth of their political awareness, or a travel tale, an illness. … Tomorrow’s film will not be made by employees going about their daily routine, but by artists for whom the shooting of a film constitutes an exciting and exalted adventure.”92

Clearly, Truffaut was calling out to young, motivated readers to seek out a new cinema while challenging young filmmakers to embark on a personal mission to remake the cinema. As for Truffaut, Les 400 Coups, which ironically won him the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival he repeatedly disdained, was his contribution to reforming the cinema with an adventurer’s film of tomorrow.

Conclusions On first glance, Henri Langlois’ claim that François Truffaut was one of the two most important film critics of the twentieth century may have seemed exaggerated or even unwarranted to some, but Truffaut does genuinely deserve that label. His onslaught of critical writing during a handful of years in the 1950s changed the tone and direction of modern cinematic journalism. Then, when he and his colleagues from Cahiers

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du Cinéma in particular joined the ranks of the New Wave filmmakers, their daring short films and features lent concrete justifications to Truffaut’s recent campaign advocating new, critically informed directions for French cinema. Truffaut, from his earliest reviews, pointed out which cinema was valuable and which cinema failed to live up to its potential. His insights into adaptation, film style, acting, directing, and even criticism, while sometimes rash and always passionate, were nonetheless full of  evidence. He presented himself as a student of film history, from Lumière and Chaplin up to the latest Bresson, Hitchcock, and even Marilyn Monroe movies. His range was all of cinema practice, but his goal was to ferment a new critical atmosphere and production environment to welcome and nurture the sort of auteur cinema he championed. His tactics and vision paid off handsomely for France and influenced international film criticism and reception. François Truffaut liked to quip that the Cinémathèque was his only real school. He took that schooling and brought it to others. His unique brand of impassioned, informed, and convincing criticism provided valuable lessons for spectators and filmmakers for decades to come. After all, one of the chief tendencies of Truffaut’s criticism was to force readers to test his aesthetic judgments, or pronouncements, against their own. But do to so his audience first needed to learn their film history before applying close, insightful analysis of storytelling and mise-en-scène to every film they saw. He taught cinephiles to consider the quality of dialogue and search out marks of authorship in every aspect of characterization, acting, and cinematic techniques. But he also proved that writing about cinema, like making movies, must be a personal, creative practice, and he convinced his generation that just going to the right movies could be liberating. Truffaut, more than any other individual, helped launch a new era of cinephilia that rapidly unleashed a brash New Wave of filmmaking. He proved decisively that criticism was practice.

Notes 1 Claude Chabrol, Et pourtant je tourne (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976), p. 108. “Pour défendre le cinéma d’auteur, il fallait commencer par démolir un certain nombre de bonshommes et de poncifs. Le démolisseur était Truffaut. … François Truffaut se démenait, se démenait. Il était de toutes les projections, de toutes les discussions. Il écrivait comme Saint-Just, appuyé sur la guillotine. Son style était vif jusqu’à s’emballer, ses formules percutaient, ses sentences décapitaient.” 2 Colin Crisp, François Truffaut (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 15. 3 Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), pp. 22–23; trans. Alistair Fox, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 4 Steven Neal Lipkin, “The Film Criticism of François Truffaut: A Contextual Analysis” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, December 1977), pp. 172–173. 5 Philippe Mary, “Cinematic Microcosm and Cultural Cosmologies: Elements of a Sociology of the New Wave,” Cinema Journal 49(4) (Summer 2010): 155–162. 6 Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: BFI, Palgrave, 2009), p. 195. 7 François Truffaut, “Sacha Guitry fut un grand cinéaste réaliste,” Arts 630 ( July 31, 1957): 5.

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François Truffaut, “Les Etoiles ne meurent jamais,” Arts 621 (May 29, 1957): 5. François Truffaut, “Vêtir ceux qui sont nus, de Marcel Pagliero,” Arts 555 (February 15, 1956), p. 5. François Truffaut, “Marguerite de la nuit, de Claude Autant-Lara,” Arts 552 ( January 25, 1956): 5. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 86–87. François Truffaut, “Les Salauds vont en enfer, de Robert Hossein,” Arts 557 (February 29, 1956): 5. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut , p. 34. François Truffaut, “L’Ami de la famille,” Arts 627 ( July 10, 1957): 5. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); trans. Catherine Temerson, Truffaut: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 123. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 85. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. edn (1966; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Atheneum, 1974); François Truffaut, The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Da Capo, 1978). François Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987). Noël Herpe, “Jean Renoir,” in Antoine de Baecque and Armaud Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004), p. 333. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 72. Lipkin, “The Film Criticism of François Truffaut,” p. 167. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 13. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 13. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 14. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 15. André Bazin, “Will Cinemascope Save the Cinema?” Velvet Light Trap 21 (Summer 1985): 9–14. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 26. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 26. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 75. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “L’Histoire des ‘Cahiers,’” Cahiers du Cinéma 100 (October 1959): 68. “Je constate objectivement que la publication de cet article marque le point de départ réel de ce que représentent aujourd’hui à tort ou à raison, les Cahiers du Cinéma. Un saut était franchi, un procès était intenté dont nous étions tous solidaires, quelque chose nous rassemblait. Désormais, on savait que nous étions pour Renoir, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Bresson … et contre X, Y, et Z. Désormais il y avait une doctrine, la ‘Politique des auteurs.’ … C’est tout naturellement qu’allait se faire la série des ‘Entretiens’ avec les grands metteurs en scène et un contact réel allait s’établir entre eux et nous.” Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A New Look (London: Wallflower, 2007), p. 27. François Truffaut, “L’Adaptation littéraire au cinéma,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes, 5(36) (Summer 1958): 243. “Le cinéma est autre chose: mise en scène. Le seul type d’adaptation valable est l’adaptation de metteur en scène, c’est-à-dire basée sur la reconversion en terme de mise en scène d’idées littéraires.” Graham and Vincendeau (eds), The French New Wave, p. 37. Philippe Mary, La Nouvelle Vague et le cinéma d’auteur: socio-analyse d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Seuil, 2006), pp. 94 and 96.

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Mary, “Cinematic Microcosm and Cultural Cosmologies,” p. 159. Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 156. Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (New York: Beaufort Books, 1985), p. 16. François Truffaut, “Aimer Fritz Lang,” Cahiers du Cinéma 31 ( January 1954): 54. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “Livres de Cinéma,” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (February 1954): 59 “Je ne peux, pour ma part, laisser paraître dans une revue dont je suis co-rédacteur en chef un article sur ce livre sans en signaler l’inacceptable aspect néo-fasciste et le puéril et odieux antisémistisme.” David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 40. Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, Histoire du cinéma (Paris: Denoel, 1943), pp. 345 and 356. François Truffaut, “Livres de Cinéma,” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (February 1954): 60. “Les idées qui valent à ceux qui les répandent la peine de mort, sont forcément estimables.” Truffaut, “Livres de Cinéma,” p. 59. “Il est bien évident que la véritable Histoire du Cinéma s’écrit et s’apprend tous les soirs sur le petit écran de la Cinémathèque.” De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 80. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 81. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 130. François Truffaut, “La Crise d’ambition du cinéma français,” Arts 509 (March 30, 1955): p. 5. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 83. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 82. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 74; see also de Baecque, La Cinéphilie, p. 142. Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 118. François Truffaut, “Le Rouge et le noir,” Arts (November 3, 1955): 5. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 171. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 174. François Truffaut, “Débat sur Duvivier,” Arts, 564 (April 18, 1956): 5. François Truffaut, “Toute la ville accuse, de Claude Boissol,” Arts 570 (May 30, 1956): 5.  “Il  était incroyable que le flot de films américains déversé sur la France après la Libération n’ait pas influencé notre production. C’est peut-être que l’âge moyen de réalisateurs français est trop élevé? Grâce à Norbert Carbonnaux (Les Corsaires du Bois de Boulogne), Michel Boisrond (Une Sacrée Gamine), Alex Joffé (Les Assassins du dimanche), et Claude Boissol enfin, le cinéma français renouvelle ses thèmes, son style et se décide à produire le genre de films dont nous avons le plus urgent besoin: de série B à budgets moyens mais qualité réelle. … Il est naïf de croire qu’il y a d’un côté l’art majuscule et de l’autre le commerce.” Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 154. François Truffaut, “Renaissance du court métrage,” Arts 594 (November 21, 1956): 3. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 308. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 309. André Bazin, “La Pointe courte: Un Film libre et pur,” Le Cinéma français de la libération à la nouvelle vague (1945–1958) (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1983), p. 194. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 311. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 72.

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Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 73. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 314. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 315. Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier (Paris: CNRS, 2005); trans. Kristin Ross as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 28. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 4. François Truffaut, “L’Amour aux champs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (February 1954): 47. De Baecque and Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 153–154. “Finie la vénération adolescente pour les sous-vêtements des stars hollywoodiennes, place à la découverte de  nouveaux corps féminins correspondant à l’émergence de la femme européenne moderne assumant son corps et ses désirs.” Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 5. Chabrol, Et pourtant je tourne, p. 108. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 61. Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 32. “F comme femme,” Cahiers du Cinéma 30 (December 1953): 29–41. François Truffaut, “La Dynamique de l’érotisme,” Arts 601 ( January 9, 1957): 3. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, pp. 246–247. François Truffaut, “Festival de Cannes: Un Palmarès ridicule,” Arts 568 (May 16, 1956): 1. “Ce n’est pas blasphémer que de remarquer que Le Monde du silence et Le Mystère Picasso ne sont ni joués ni mis en scène et que l’imagination et l’invention n’y ont de part qu’indirecte.” Truffaut, “Festival de Cannes: Un Palmarès ridicule,” p. 5. François Truffaut, “Venise: Triomphe des jeunes cinéastes,” Arts 534 (September 21, 1955): 5. “Sans plaider pour un festival raciste, j’ai le sentiment que l’absence de films égyptiens, indien, brésiliens, bulgares, tchèques, grecs et belges ne priverait personne et permettrait de consacrer plus de temps aux productions sérieuses.” François Truffaut, “Le Scandale des Oscars à Hollywood,” Arts 561 (March 28, 1956): 5. François Truffaut, “Cannes: Un Echec dominé par les compromis, les combines, et les faux pas,” Arts 620 (May 22, 1957): 1. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 102. François Truffaut, “Le Prochain Festival est condamné,” Arts 671 (May 21, 1958): 1. “Si des modifications radicales n’interviennent pas le prochain festival est condamné.” François Truffaut, “Nous sommes tous des condamnés,” Arts 621 (May 29, 1957), p. 5. “Le critique devrait être généralement l’intermédiaire entre l’auteur et le public. … Neuf sur dix films que nous analysons sont tournés par des hommes moins intelligents et pas plus ‘artistes’ que nous.” Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 155. François Truffaut, “Seule la Crise sauvera le cinéma français,” Arts 652 ( January 8, 1958): 1. “C’est à dire le coût total de quatre films intelligents et bien faits mais sans noms prestigieux.” Truffaut, “Seule la Crise sauvera le cinéma français,” p. 1. “Pour qu’il y ait véritablement ‘relève’, apport de sang neuf, il faudrait que les jeunes cinéastes soient décidés à ne pas marcher sur les empreintes du ‘vieux cinéma.’ … Il ne s’agit pas de tourner des films de série noire avec moitié moins de gangsters, moitié moins de flics, dans des décors minables et avec deux fois plus de revolvers pour ‘compenser.’ … Il faut filmer autre chose avec un

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autre esprit. Il faut abandonner les studios trop coûteux … pour envahir les plages au soleil ou nul cinéaste (hormis Vadim) n’a osé planter sa caméra. Le soleil coûte moins cher que les projecteurs et les groupes électrogènes. Il faut tourner dans les rues et mêmes dans de vrais appartements.” 90 Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, pp. 30–31. 91 Lipkin, “The Film Criticism of François Truffaut,” p. 163. 92 Crisp, François Truffaut, p. 15.

13

Truffaut–Hitchcock Jonathan Everett Haynes

Qu’est-ce qu’un metteur en scène? Un metteur en scène c’est quelqu’un qui en pose sans arrêt des questions, des questions à propos de tout. Quelquefois il a des réponses, mais pas toujours. François Truffaut, La Nuit américaine

The Hitchcock Correspondence Apart from the scholastic uses to which it has mostly been put, Truffaut’s massive book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock is a Truffaut work through and through.1 This is obviously the case to the extent that Truffaut orchestrated the conversation, the true dimensions of which Hitchcock himself, like one of his own hapless protagonists, caught in someone else’s “plot,” did not and could not know. But the book is also Truffaut’s because it partakes of the very universality that Truffaut imputes to Hitchcock himself within the book – a universality that is keyed to Truffaut’s particular sense of what a book is. For the maker of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), after all, a book is nothing less than a person. The “Hitchbook” (Truffaut’s pet name for the project) was precisely that sort of book for Truffaut. He began the project at the crest of both his career and Hitchcock’s, in the wake of Jules et Jim (1962) and The Birds (1963). It was finally published for the first time in 1967, when both men were reeling from commercial failures. He wrote the epilogue, which amounts to a eulogy for its subject, in 1983, extremely near the end of his own life. The epilogue is among his very last works. Thus, we might think of the Hitchbook as an autobiography that runs alongside the “official” one, the Antoine Doinel cycle, which encompassed the same span of years (insofar as the Antoine films became a cycle with Antoine et Colette, in 1962; the last Antoine film was A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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L’Amour en fuite, released in 1979). This is a reference book and a technical manual – the go-to source for Hitchcock specialists seeking his signature pronouncements and an explanation of “how he did it” – into which Truffaut poured his entire, evolving sensibility. Indeed, the final edition resembles nothing so much as a photo album, replete with documents – postcards, fragments of notes, letters, inside jokes, and personal photos of Truffaut together with Hitchcock at various ceremonies and public events – that evoke the accumulations of a marriage. Often in the book, especially in the 1983 epilogue, we have the impression that Truffaut is superimposing his own features on those of his idol. Truffaut’s Hitchcock is nothing like the Jansenist exegete of Chabrol and Rohmer’s monograph, let alone the “murderous gazer” or ominous “Absent One” of later theories. Instead, he is lovelorn and familial, utterly dependent on the women in his life, yet incessantly in pursuit of an “ideal” – a Grace Kelly, an Ingrid Bergman; a painfully shy person who cloaks his social discomfort in scrupulous pre-planning and in an art of rigorous empirical effects; a successful businessman who always calculates the “public” into the equation and is heartbroken when it rejects him; an anachronism who quixotically tries to prolong a feeling for classical cinema into a period characterized by “visual culture,” prurient sex, and radical politics; and a sensualist for whom love scenes and murder scenes are indistinguishable. He is very much like the alter egos Truffaut imagines for himself in films like La Nuit américaine (1973) and Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). At the same time, his interlocutor, “Truffaut,” often displays characteristics that we might associate with Hitchcock – a ruthlessness and cunning during the interview that evoke scenes from Psycho (1960) and The Wrong Man (1956). Nonetheless, the dominant figure by which we should understand the Truffaut– Hitchcock relationship, as refracted through the text, is not the Hitchcockian “double,” with its overtones of the uncanny and Edgar Allan Poe (although Truffaut once wrote an influential article about the doubles in Shadow of a Doubt, 1943). Instead, the book transpires under the sign of “correspondence.” This term hearkens to Charles Baudelaire’s poetic “unisons” and to what we might call the “epistolary imagination” underpinning Truffaut’s work. Both meanings of correspondence come into play in the Hitchbook. From their meeting in 1962 onward, Truffaut and Hitchcock are inexplicably harmonized, to the point where to speak of one is to speak of the other. At least, to speak of either of them is to speak of the book, the record of their correspondence – their duet. This statement may be startling, considering that we traditionally think of Truffaut’s relationship to his other artistic “father,” Jean Renoir, as the harmonious one, lending the generous spirit of “everyone has his reasons” to Truffaut’s humanist masterpieces. Critics usually find Hitchcock’s “influence” on Truffaut more troubling, associating it with Truffaut’s late-1960s’ films maudits, La Mariée était en noir (1967) and La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). With this notion of “correspondence,” however, I mean to suggest something much deeper and more elusive than “influence,” while also complicating the idea that Hitchcock was only “father” to Truffaut. He was also the subject of Truffaut’s book and thus inextricably linked to Truffaut’s personhood. Within that book Hitchcock plays multiple roles for Truffaut; and the book, in

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turn, has played multiple roles in film history. The significance of this argument is that “Hitchcock” – surrounded by the quotation marks appended to the name by English and American film students in the 1970s, the period of the book’s greatest influence – was a major result of the book. “Hitchcock,” therefore, should be counted among Truffaut’s children. Letters played a privileged role in Truffaut’s creativity, even launching his two most indelible pieces of criticism, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” and the “Hitchbook.”2 Furthermore, an epistle is often the key to the particular suspense in Truffaut’s films, which frequently pivot on the great expectations that are aroused by the transmission and reception of a heartfelt note. In the frontispiece to the final version of the Hitchbook, from 1983, Truffaut writes, “Alfred Hitchcock made 53 films and one daughter. I dedicate this book to Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell” – and prints the dedication in his own handwriting. Was he thinking of his own children? Or was he imagining Adèle H., the daughter of Victor Hugo and heroine of his 1975 film, who devoted her tragic life to writing fervid and unanswered love letters to a callous English soldier?

Pneu-ma-tique! It all began with a love letter. “Dear Mr. Hitchcock,” François Truffaut wrote from Paris, on June 2, 1962. “Allow me to remind you who I am.” He then proceeds to relate the anecdote that will also begin the finished book, the funny, humiliating story of his first meeting with Alfred Hitchcock. In 1954, while still fledgling cineastes on assignment for Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut and his colleague Claude Chabrol approached the venerable filmmaker for an interview in Saint Maurice, where he was polishing the soundtrack for To Catch a Thief (1955). Overcome with joy after witnessing some tantalizing images from the work in progress, and blinded by the dazzling sun in the courtyard, the two young journalists stumbled into an icy lake and had to be fished out by a “charitable bystander.” Hitchcock, sizing up his trembling, semi-frozen petitioners and their ruined tape recorder, tactfully proposed that they reconvene for the interview at his hotel later that evening.3 The scene could have appeared in one of the Antoine films. Truffaut, the precocious young private investigator, bungles his first encounter with an awe-inspiring grownup, the object of a thousand lonely reveries, who responds to his embarrassment with kindness and thereby acknowledges an affinity. The punch line of the frozen lake story, too, seems to belong to the chronicle of Antoine’s sexual misadventures. It specifically recalls those moments when Truffaut’s maladroit hero attempts to cover a narcissistic wound with a show of good-humored bravado, revealing by the cracks in his smile and by his very insistence that he’s not over it yet. “Subsequently, each time you visited Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting you,” Truffaut writes. “And the following year you even said to me, ‘Whenever I see ice cubes in a glass of whisky I think of you.’”4

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Baiser volés (1968), the third film in the Antoine cycle, has a great scene that portrays Antoine’s unendurable embarrassment in the presence of an older person to whom he is painfully devoted. It therefore owes more than a formal debt to Hitchcock. Indeed, beginning with La Peau douce (1964), the first film he made after his epochal 1962 meeting with Hitchcock, Truffaut’s work not only reflects, but also thematizes an “anxiety of influence.” The later Antoines, for example, put Truffaut’s alter ego into confrontation with a new set of Hitchcockian rules, both cinematic and social. The scene in question begins when Antoine is left briefly, terrifyingly, alone with the dazzling (“astonishing, magnificent, superlative!”) Fabienne Tabard, when her husband – his boss – leaves the room for a moment. We know that she knows that Antoine is in love with her, for in the previous scene we witnessed her eavesdropping on a conversation between two shop girls about Antoine’s obsession. Antoine does not know that she knows, however, and there is awkwardness between them as he tries to control his trembling coffee cup. She smiles coquettishly and twirls her spoon. They squirm in their chairs for a full minute, not talking. Finally she goes to the record player, asking him if he likes music. “Oui, monsieur,” he blurts. Seeing her startled expression, Antoine realizes the enormity of his error. Yes, sir – had he unconsciously mistaken Madame for Alfred Hitchcock?5 The tension explodes. He drops his coffee, which topples across the tray – Truffaut registers the seeping black liquid in a woozy camera tilt – then dashes out of the apartment, down the winding steps of her building, through a chaotic shop, and out into the busy street. Sometime later he slinks dejectedly up the stairs to his meager, depressing flat. There by his front door he finds three silk neckties in a box, garnished by a droll card from Fabienne Tabard. Like her gift – three phallic symbols and instruments of strangulation – the card is Hitchcockian. It is a ribald parable intended to reassure Antoine and to provoke him at the same time: A college professor of mine explained the difference between politeness and tact. A gentleman mistakenly opens a bathroom door and finds a woman totally naked. He quickly steps back, closes the door and says, ‘Pardon me, madam.’ That’s politeness. The same gentleman opens the same door and finds the same naked woman, and says, ‘Pardon me, sir.’ That’s tact. I understand why you ran off, Antoine. Until tomorrow.

Accompanied by the insinuating gift of the neckties, Fabienne’s card amplifies the first humiliation by redoubling its sexual confusion. Here, according to the message’s logics of substitution, Antoine is both the woman in the bathroom and the man who stumbles in by mistake. Thus, he has been multiply exposed in the nakedness of his longing for Fabienne. But Fabienne is equally stripped. By her letter, Antoine knows that Fabienne has made herself available. Seizing the opportunity of his inadvertent self-exposure, she has put herself at risk. She is at risk because she suspects what we have guessed, that Antoine’s crush is predicated on the closed doors that she is now hurling open – he admired her when she was taboo; she also knows that Antoine probably did not know this about himself until he read her note.

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Until tomorrow. … Earlier in the film, Truffaut showed Antoine in front of his bathroom mirror, chanting, “Fabienne Tabard, Fabienne Tabard,” over and over, until it became his own name. “Antoine Antoine, Antoine Antoine,” he said with increasing vehemence, flexing his hands, until he was out of breath from slinging the words at his reflection. Is this the “bathroom” into which Fabienne has just barged? The private space of his fantasy life, where his narcissism is in full view? Antoine composes his miserable response – “I’m unworthy of your generosity. You’ll never see me again. I’ve quit my job at the shop. … I’m a worse imposter than you could ever imagine. … Adieu” – and thrusts it into a mail slot. “Pneu-ma-tic,” he pronounces in voice-over, one distinct syllable for each necktie, as his missive wends its fateful course. Now imagine a transatlantic system of pneumatic mail tubes, along the lines of the one in Baiser volés that conducts Antoine’s anguished reply through the labyrinthine tunnels below the streets of Paris and into the presence of Madame Tabard. From Truffaut’s desk in Paris, in June 1962, the Hitchcock letter rocketed to Helen Scott, in the French Film Office in New York (“She carries out simultaneous translations at such a speed that we would have the impression of speaking to one another without any intermediary,” Truffaut told Hitchcock6); Scott dispatched it to Los Angeles, where it ricocheted off Hitchcock’s agent (“It’s essential we avoid going through that very unpleasant agent of his, with whom I exchanged a few bitter-sweet words” Truffaut instructed7) to land directly on the Bel-Air doorstep of the man who, thanks to Truffaut’s ministrations, would soon be universally recognized as “the greatest film director in the world” and the only auteur “left standing” if and when the cinema goes mute.8 “I come now to the point,” Alfred Hitchcock read. Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love for the cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself and it is that that I would like to talk to you about. I would like you to grant me a tape-recorded interview which would take about eight days to conduct and would add up to about thirty hours of recordings. The point of this would be to distil not a series of articles but an entire book which would be published simultaneously in New York … and Paris … then, probably later, more or less everywhere in the world. … Awaiting your reply, I beg you to accept, dear Mr. Hitchcock, my profound admiration. I remain Yours sincerely, François Truffaut.9

Hitchcock cabled his acceptance at once. The “stops” in his telegram gasp with emotion: “Dear Monsieur Truffaut – Your letter brought tears to my eyes and I am so grateful to receive such a tribute from you – Stop – … I think we will wait until we have finished shooting The Birds and then I will contact you with the idea of getting together around the end of August – Stop – Thank you again for your charming letter – Kind regards – Cordially yours – Alfred Hitchcock.” The successful suitor received Hitchcock’s message with triumph. Truffaut wrote to Scott that he “never doubted

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for a moment what his answer would be,” and immediately began plotting his itinerary for the historic interlude.10

The “Hitchbook” The result is one of Truffaut’s most enduring contributions to global film culture and a book that nearly everybody loves. The Hitchbook is a singularity. Not only is there no other book like it – it is impossible to imagine another book like it, so perfectly does it fit its contradictory moment and the sensibilities of the two men (and one woman – Helen Scott, who is the main character on the tape recordings, indefatigably injecting perfect French into Hitchcock’s languid pauses and peppering Truffaut’s darting, tense French with crisp English; she is the hyphen in Hitchcock–Truffaut, just as Catherine is the “et” between Jules et Jim) involved in its production. It is a book that one can as easily imagine holding pride of place on Christian Metz’s desk as on Steven Spielberg’s. By now, of course, the book is recognized as the essential Hitchcock concordance. In France, the book was originally published with the New Testament-tinged title, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock – and, indeed, it has become the standard Hitchcock gospel for film scholars and biographers: within its pages is the famous parable about the MacGuffin (demonstrating that what interests the characters within the film and what interests the film’s audience are rarely the same thing); Hitchcock’s instruction on the nature of “suspense” (the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, but the characters don’t); the lesson on the difference between a mystery plot and a Hitchcock plot (the Hitchcock plot is grounded in suspense, which is the opposite of “surprise”); the enumeration of the cinematic sins committed by “our friends the plausibles” (those critics and filmmakers who valorize narrative credibility over pure cinema); and so on. As with Shakespeare, virtually every page is filled with a piquant anecdote or a witty aphorism that we recognize as a familiar quote. On parallel lines, the published work captures Truffaut’s criticism at its most accessible, controversial, and astute. Here we find Truffaut’s definitive observation that Hitchcock filmed his love scenes like murder scenes and his murder scenes like love scenes; his incendiary assertion on the antithesis between “Cinema” and “Britain;” his passing, but, for cinephiles, crucial remarks on “great flawed films” … and his overarching argument, made much more forcefully here than in the book’s obvious forebear, Chabrol and Rohmer’s Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (1957), that Hitchcock’s Hollywood films dispense with all “contexts” other than the passionate vision of their creator. Here, too, are the technical details that grounded the filmmaking of the burgeoning New Hollywood auteurs in Hitchcock’s pedagogy. Hitchcock’s gripping demonstrations for Truffaut of precisely how he achieved tour de force shots in films like Psycho and Vertigo (1958) galvanized Scorsese, De Palma, and Spielberg and the other seventies “superstars.” The Hitchbook, I assert, is the root of all Hitchcockianisms. Every shot that usually goes by the designation “Hitchcockian” is described

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somewhere in the book.11 American film students from that generation also absorbed the fundamental principles of the Hitchcock oeuvre qua Hitchcock: plausibility should always be sacrificed to emotion; style should serve the needs of the story (and point of view); character cedes to situation; and every shot within a sequence should be storyboarded for “maximum impact.” The book is more nuanced and dialectical about such matters than Hitchcock himself is. In fact, the drama of the text resides in its tense moments when there is a methodological disagreement between the two men – when Hitchcock sanctions Truffaut for a laxly edited sequence in Jules et Jim or when Truffaut offers his opinion that Hitchcock was the wrong director for The Wrong Man because he had no feel for documentary. The Hitchcock myth really begins here, with the US publication of Truffaut’s Hitchcock, a truth that even the usually proprietary Peter Bogdanovich acknowledges (Truffaut consulted Bogdanovich’s 1961 interview with Hitchcock in preparing for the book).12 The watershed impact of the book was no doubt partly attributable to the “cultural laundromat” effect the French New Wave had on America’s relationship to its own cinema (one has to remember that Truffaut was held in higher esteem than Hitchcock in the United States in the 1960s, a situation that the book, ironically, had a part in overturning); but it also had to do with the book’s physical presentation, in particular, its lavish pictures and big soft covers, which allowed readers in the days before home video to have the illusion of experiencing the Hitchcock catalogue in its entirety, to the accompaniment of the greatest “director’s commentary” ever conceived. This is a book – I can attest – which even children read, thereby fulfilling Truffaut’s highest expectations for the project: “In my opinion,” he wrote on July 5, 1962, the interest of the book will lie in the fact that it will describe in a very meticulous fashion one of the greatest and most complete careers in the cinema and, at the same time, constitute a very precise study of the intellectual and mental, but also physical and material, “fabrication” of films. I’d like everyone who makes films to be able to learn something from it, and also everyone whose dream it is to become a filmmaker. There you have it as far as Hitchcock is concerned.13

Despite its breathless beginnings, the interview did not appear in print until 1967, five years after Truffaut and Hitchcock first met for a fifty-hour conversation in Hitchcock’s office at Universal Studios, and thirteen years after Truffaut and Chabrol “broke the ice” in Saint Maurice. For Cahiers du Cinéma, soon to be radicalized by the 1968 events, Hitchcock’s legacy was secure. What was needed was a more flexible “politique” that could take account of the new cinemas emerging in Europe and elsewhere in the world. By 1967, in fact, French literati were proclaiming the death of the author, and soon thereafter Jean-Luc Godard would bury his father’s name in the so-called Dziga Vertov Collective. At the same moment, in a kind of historical parallax, American critics and filmmakers were enshrining “auteurism” as their dominant critical and industrial paradigm, under the acknowledged influence of Godard and Truffaut. Just as European cinephile communities were abolishing the “author,” fifties-style “authorial politics” were forming the philosophical nucleus of a New Hollywood cinema.

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(This was evidently a reversal of the usual axiom that the French get everything ten years after the Americans.) Truffaut had firsthand experience with the latter development, for in 1964 he gave some structural lessons, no doubt gleaned from Hitchcock, to the screenwriters of Bonnie and Clyde.14 Truffaut wanted the Hitchbook to mediate between French and American film contexts. As implied in the letter quoted earlier, he imagined a work that would appear on both sides of the Atlantic at once – a simultaneous transcription, made possible by Helen Scott’s dexterous cross-linguistic renderings. This was not to be. First, Truffaut probably underestimated the difficulty of producing a readable transcript from a prolonged conversation in two languages. Despite the almost eerie focus and precision that presides over the voices on the tapes – listening to them, you nearly feel as if Truffaut could have realized his plan, so eloquent are the conversationalists – one must always construct the illusion of improvisation, as we learn from a key conversation in the book about Murder! (1933). Second, the vicissitudes of obtaining the necessary film stills and the relevant permissions for using them caused endless delays. Third, film projects intervened and claimed the better part of each man’s attention (La Peau douce and Fahrenheit 451 in Truffaut’s case; 1964’s Marnie and 1966’s Torn Curtain in Hitchcock’s). And fourth, Truffaut was apparently reluctant to relinquish the solitude of his memories of his Hitchcock idyll. From the correspondence, one gets the sense that Truffaut – laboriously tracking down and printing photographic stills from Hitchcock films for his book – was delaying the moment when he would have to open those tender, cherished hours he had spent in Hitchcock’s thrall to the gaze of the world. Nevertheless, and in ways Truffaut could not have anticipated, the Hitchbook accomplished its objective. In retrospect, Hitchcock–Truffaut forges an unlikely bridge between the French “death of the author” and the “American authorial apotheosis,” absorbing the transatlantic décalage into its dialogic structure. On the one side it emblematizes a triumphant auteurism – the ultimate meeting of cinematic titans (the 1983 reprinting puts their surnames on the spine of the book in bold capital letters and, by reversing the orientation of one name against the other, even hints at the form of a Palindrome). On the other side, it almost unwittingly models a post-structuralist critique of “the subject” and builds a Hitchcockian foundation for l’analyse du film.

The Man We Loved to Be Hated By In the preface to the book, and also in his letters, Truffaut illuminates several reasons for writing it, among which his encounter with American critics was probably the most significant for determining the book’s final intellectual shape. While he was in the United States promoting Jules et Jim, he says, journalists constantly quizzed him about the French fascination with Alfred Hitchcock. “I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question,” he writes.

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“Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful but his movies have no substance.” In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window [1954] to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, “You love Rear Window because, as a stranger to New York, you know nothing about Greenwich Village.” To this absurd statement, I replied, “Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.”15

What was needed, Truffaut realized, was a book that would do for Hitchcock in America what Cahiers had already done for Hitchcock in Europe – establish his credentials as a great artist, arguably the greatest artist in the cinema. To accomplish this, Hitchcock’s artistry would have to be made understandable to the critics Truffaut encountered on his trip. “When talking to American journalists,” he explained to Scott, I came to realize that, even though Hitchcock is very popular in America, he’s only understood very superficially and, above all, he’s considerably underrated as an artist by the critics. In France, on the contrary, he’s been supported, especially on the part of Cahiers du Cinéma, by a major critical movement, though one that’s too excessively intellectual, and what we have to achieve in this book is something between the two, something closer to the truth and above all very exhaustive.16

This would require not only polemic but also pedagogy. Truffaut had to teach Americans to see cinema where before they had seen Greenwich Village. Correspondingly, he would have to reinvent Hitchcock. The fact was, Cahiers du Cinéma’s Hitchcock was intellectual in the extreme – both in the sense that his art had been made visible by the critical labors of intellectuals who wrote passionately, and intellectually, about it; and also because the dominant theme of these writings was that Hitchcock’s art was superlative for the reason that it manifested la caméra-stylo – an intellection in images. Arguably, Cahiers even based its critique on the premise that Hitchcock’s artistry was imperceptible to the very American mindset Truffaut hoped to reach with his book. For Alexandre Astruc, who first theorized the concept, la caméra-stylo was the blind spot of the critical establishment. Chabrol and Rohmer’s monograph, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, for example, presents itself as a summing-up of the Cahiers position and the final word on Hitchcock’s artistic seriousness. A characteristic passage concerns a line from Saboteur (1942), one of Hitchcock’s most self-consciously “Hitchcockian” films from the forties. The authors extract runic significance from what seems like a throwaway line: The hero of the film tells a blind pianist that when he was young he played the triangle but had to give it up. To which the blind man replies that he was wrong to do so, that the triangle is a noble instrument. We like to think that this is an allusion to The Manxman, the failure of which forced Hitchcock to give up that noble dramatic instrument known as the “triangle.” He was not to attempt it again until Under Capricorn.17

Chabrol and Rohmer’s argument rests on the idea that Hitchcock’s most important films were I Confess (1953), The Manxman (1929), and Under Capricorn (1949), all

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commercial failures. In their view, these grim movies revealed Hitchcock’s moral imagination at its bleakest and most pure, precisely because they were shorn of the usual Hitchcock trappings – the humor and spectacle to which his public had grown accustomed. They were not necessarily his best films – but they were martyrs, literally incarnating the Catholic themes of universal guilt and punishment that ordered the Hitchcock universe. This was not exactly Truffaut’s position on Hitchcock, and it seems clear that part of his objective in reinventing Hitchcock for Americans was to rewrite the Chabrol and Rohmer monograph. He structures his book chronologically, as they do, moving in sequence from film to film, and he more or less follows their demarcation of the major Hitchcock periods. However, even in the early days, Hitchcock was first and foremost a commercial artist for Truffaut. “There are two kinds of directors,” he wrote about Rear Window, in 1954. “Those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don’t consider the public at all. … For Hitchcock as for Renoir … a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production.”18 In other words, to borrow a later terminology, Hitchcock’s cinema is by definition one in which our “gaze” is included. Rear Window is about the cinema not simply because of its voyeuristic themes but also because Hitchcock has calculated the spectator’s “wretched” desires into its total effect. Rear Window is a film about indiscretion, about intimacy violated and taken by surprise at its most wretched moments; a film about the impossibility of happiness, about dirty linen that gets washed in the courtyard; a film about moral solitude, an extraordinary symphony of daily life and ruined dreams. … To clarify … I’d suggest this parable: the courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.19

This may seem obvious to us today, after forty years of film theory premised on this very insight into Rear Window. But it marks a significant reorientation of the “excessively intellectual” Hitchcock that Cahiers propagandized elsewhere. For Chabrol and Rohmer, I Confess and The Wrong Man were as isolated and guilt-ridden as their respective protagonists. For them, these movies were sui generis – a self-affirming proposition, in so far as it was vouchsafed by the fact that these movies had failed to find an audience (and of course by the films that Chabrol and Rohmer made themselves, under the influence of their “Jansenist” Hitchcock).20 For Truffaut, on the other hand, Hitchcock’s great accomplishment was to use the means of cinema to share his very particular obsessions with a large public. We are made to experience his fears, his loneliness, his desires, his guilt, and his (self )contempt along with him. Hence, Hitchcock’s most commercial films – his most “Hitchcockian” – are also his most personal. For Truffaut, this seeming paradox made Hitchcock’s work universal. “Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions as

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suspicion, jealousy, desire, and envy,” he writes in his introduction to the Hitchbook. “And herein lies a paradox: the director who, through the simplicity and clarity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal audience, is also the director who excels at filming the most complex and subtle relationships between human beings.”21 Truffaut concludes scandalously, challenging Hitchcock’s puritanical American critics to admit to their own jouissance: “To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner.”22 A pedagogical impulse is evident in Truffaut’s decision to structure the book as an interview with Hitchcock himself, who “exhaustively” demonstrates his sophisticated understanding of those “complex and subtle relationships between human beings.” No doubt this testimony would satisfy the American reader Truffaut probably imagined, for whom artistic importance equaled serious intentions realized. But the interview form also brought new layers of complexity to the project. In the first place, the conversation at times resembles an interrogation from one of Hitchcock’s own films. More centrally, the drama of the exchange often turns on misrecognitions, whereby each man seems to be responding to his own ideas of what he believes the other to be seeing in him. Such a dynamic is especially evident in those moments when Hitchcock, finding in Truffaut the reflection of his own, clichéd, image of a French intellectual, asks him to verify his understanding of a symbolic detail from one of his works. Truffaut, perceiving in this gesture an evasion, evades – although it is possible that Hitchcock is simply trying to connect: ft:

The finale of The Lodger, when the hero is handcuffed, suggests a lynching.

ah: Yes, when he tried to climb over the railings. Psychologically, of course, the idea of the handcuffs has deeper implications. Being tied to something … it’s somewhere in the area of fetishism, isn’t it? ft:

I don’t know, but I have noticed that handcuffs have a way of recurring in your movies.23

Of such exchanges, when Truffaut deflects one of Hitchcock’s self-analytical gestures (which are themselves “deflections”), William Rothman writes, Truffaut’s book reads like the script of a play or, more exactly, the transcript of a trial. Hitchcock’s intelligence can be discerned, but only by reading the dialogue as a scene in a Hitchcock film, imagining Hitchcock as, say, Norman Bates and Truffaut as Marion Crane. The author of Psycho could not be oblivious to how Truffaut changes the subject or speaks for him every time a “serious” matter comes up. Viewed in the Hitchcock spirit, Truffaut’s obtuseness is often very funny, but the poignancy of Hitchcock’s situation is all too real: unable to enter into a serious conversation with a man who thinks he is his intellectual superior but is far from his equal, Hitchcock remains isolated and unacknowledged.24

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Rothman exaggerates. It is hard to see how Hitchcock is unacknowledged by a book that exalts him from first word to last. However, it is clear that Truffaut wants to avoid the modality of the “excessively intellectual” Chabrol and Rohmer text with its emphasis on deep symbolic structures (those “triangles” which communicate subliminally from film to film). If this avoidance does not have the effect of isolating Hitchcock in the way that Rothman suggests, it does alienate Hitchcock the person, with his all-too-human prejudices and preconceptions, from the “Hitchcock” of the films, which (not who) is the dominant subject of the conversation. Two consequences follow from this alienation within the Hitchcock persona. On the one hand, the discussion becomes flagrantly auteurist: Hitchcock is asked to describe his original intentions for each of his projects and then to comment on how well he believes the finished films have realized them. The object of this exercise is to handcuff, so to speak, Hitchcock the man to the “Hitchcock” we imagine when watching the films. And yet, Truffaut’s dramatic presence in the book establishes a fraught and sometimes perilous situation. Under pressure to delineate the meanings of the work as a whole for another who seems to possess all the interpretative keys, Hitchcock is often compelled to acknowledge his absence from the screen. The Lodger (1927) is Hitchcock. The Skin Game (1929) is not. The Wrong Man is not fully Hitchcock – “Let’s file it among the indifferent Hitchcocks.”25 Blackmail (1929) is Hitchcock; so is Notorious (1946). Rebecca (1940) is Hitchcock as re-imagined by David O. Selznick. So a second consequence is that a role reversal begins to take place in our reading of the book. Hitchcock begins to assume the Truffaut part, while Truffaut becomes more like Hitchcock (or how we imagine each man should be – Socrates and his disciple). Hitchcock admits to Truffaut that he sometimes makes bad Hitchcock imitations, just as Truffaut will soon be accused of doing. And Truffaut finally allows Hitchcock to convince him of what both men knew all along, that the quintessential Hitchcocks are those that have had the best success with the public. Where Rothman sees Psycho in the tensions of this interchange, Raymond Bellour sees Henry James. In a brilliant early review of the book, from the May 1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, Bellour compares the Truffaut–Hitchcock correspondence to the finely grained, intra-subjective field of James’ 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. His article, called “What Hitchcock Knew,” begins with a key quote: “If Beale had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision.”26 For Bellour, Hitchcock’s work is centrally about the “way desire and fear are bound up in the act of seeing/knowing.”27 He distills this idea from Truffaut’s investigatory procedures. Bellour’s conceptual insights into those “extraordinary mute passages” taken up by the spiraling “visions” of Truffaut and Hitchcock lead him to impute the Hitchbook’s “imaginary” to Hitchcock’s films.28 Hitchcock’s cinema, he argues,

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irremediably ruins any objectivity of representable content by a violent regression that articulates, in the sole gaze of he who organizes them, the shimmering series of representations. This is what explains those games of interposed visions that always return to the home from which they originate, thus determining between Hitchcock and his characters even more directly than between the characters themselves, a perpetual relationship of consensual doubling that finds in the scissions and oppositions of characters an echo as perverse as it is essential.29

Here Bellour announces the strategies of his own later film analyses and promulgates an incipient version of the “gaze theory” that will be elaborated by Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey. Furthermore, he definitively assigns to the “gaze” what will come to feel like its native coordinates – the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

What Truffaut Knew Bellour’s Henry James analogy is also fortuitous in another way, for Maisie might as well be a character of Truffaut’s. In the book, Maisie is the troubled but perspicacious child of divorce, shuttled between the new couples that her parents have formed with other people. As Bellour observes, Maisie is constantly seeking the “form of her life and the reality of her desire” in the eyes of the adults who surround her. Her parents and her parents’ lovers dodge Maisie’s visits out of guilt. When in her presence, they implicitly beseech from her an outward sign of forgiveness or accusation. Maisie can neither forgive nor accuse, because her knowledge of the total situation is confined to her own need to have her emerging identity ratified by a sympathetic adult. By the end of James’ novel, Maisie has completely lost her “moral sense.” She has, at first uncomprehendingly, and then with full self-consciousness, manipulated every grownup in her orbit. But, with her newfound awareness of her existential solitude, she has also put herself on the path to “all knowledge.” Bellour concludes his review with an allusion to Hitchcock’s childhood memory. Early in Truffaut’s book, Hitchcock recounts an incident when his parents, aided by the neighborhood constabulary, put him in jail to teach him an inexplicable lesson. Bellour imagines little Hitchcock as Maisie, seeking an explanation for his senseless punishment in the empty stares of the police. Bellour postulates that it was then that Hitchcock lost his “moral sense” and was put on the path to the omniscience that shapes his cinema around dovetailing visions. The image of little Hitchcock in his jail cell also inevitably recalls Les 400 Coups (1959), Truffaut’s first Antoine film. It evokes the famous scene near the end of the movie when Antoine’s parents imprison him for stealing his father’s typewriter. Antoine, pulling up the collar of his turtleneck sweater so that his mouth is covered, hunches against the cement wall of his cell. His eyes register wary calculation as they take the measure of his new, oppressive surroundings. Bellour’s Henry James comparison thus strings several children together in a sequence of shrewd “looks” between texts – Hitchcock and Maisie, Antoine and Maisie, Truffaut and Hitchcock.

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Hitchcock certainly put Truffaut “on the path” to a different kind of knowledge about himself and his works. From an April 1963 letter to Helen Scott it is clear that Truffaut is already starting to judge his previous films through Hitchcock’s eyes: I’m not convinced by what you say about Hitch concerning Jules et Jim, since, on the contrary, it was to be expected that he wouldn’t like it. At best, he probably thinks that, of its type, it’s not bad or that it deserves its reputation, but he cannot genuinely like a film which was shot in ignorance and defiance of the laws which he himself has been laying down for thirty-five years to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. For that matter, he’s obviously a puritan and therefore opposed to any favourable [sic] depiction of adultery, etc.30

His next film was a far more somber, if not necessarily puritanical, treatment of adultery than Jules et Jim. La Peau douce everywhere shows the influence of Truffaut’s Hitchcock experience and his incorporation of the “laws” that he was busily putting down in the book at the same time. From the first scene of the movie, in which Lachenay races to catch a flight for which he is already late, La Peau douce declares itself to be about the Hitchbook. With this opening, in fact, Truffaut is illustrating his own Hitchcockian lesson in suspense, from the book’s introduction.31 Truffaut’s Hitchcock is also present in the film’s detailed attention to the object world of latemodern culture – in the extreme close-ups of fingers dialing telephones; in the repeated scenes of clothes heaping into suitcases; and so on – as well as in its anxiously protracted scenes of the hero’s sexual and social embarrassments. Truffaut regards his protagonist with markedly colder eyes, instantiating the gaze of the man by whom we love to be hated. A celebrated intellectual who falls helplessly, tragically in love with a stewardess, Pierre Lachenay is among Truffaut’s most troubled and troubling alter egos. Incapable of choosing between his wife and his young mistress, the middle-aged intellectual falls into an ugly pattern of lies and dissimulations until his wife, in the film’s histrionic final moments, kills him with a shotgun in his favorite café. This is a movie about implacable rules and the consequences not just for breaking them but also, cinematically speaking, for following them. The film’s most compelling Hitchcockian inscription binds La Peau douce to Hitchcock’s contemporaneous project, Marnie. Both Hitchcock’s film and Truffaut’s circulate the “enigma” of female desire. La Peau douce often feels as if it developed out of a series of exquisite portraits of Françoise Dorléac, who plays Lachenay’s mistress. The mood of these portraits is doleful, rather like Godard’s painterly studies of Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962). As a function of La Peau douce’s plot, however, they are probing the stewardess’s cryptic countenance for a clue to her affections for the ineffectual bourgeois who is haphazardly pursuing her into his own grave. Marnie, too, is about an enigmatic woman and, by extension, the Enigma of Woman. Critics generally understand Marnie to be Hitchcock’s response to European art cinema.32 I would argue that Marnie is specifically Hitchcock’s response to his analytical session with Truffaut. The film’s suspense builds to the revelation of Marnie’s secrets, but Hitchcock’s primary focus is on the masculine figure’s bewildering fascination

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with the disturbed woman and on the bizarre form that his obsession takes. By blackmailing Marnie into marrying him, Mark Rutland hopes to coerce her into answering unanswerable questions about herself – Why is she sexually frigid? What has caused her to be a kleptomaniac? Why does she go “blank” when she sees the color red? Marnie’s plot is consumed by his relentless interrogations, during which Mark’s own sordid desire to invade the locked cabinet of Marnie’s befogged memory constantly surges into view. Ultimately, it seems, what Mark really wants is to catch Marnie in the act of stealing from him. Unconsciously, of course, Marnie wants to be caught. Near the end of the film, both characters get their wishes. Marnie, in the grip of her kleptomania, enters Mark’s office, where Mark’s safe is already unlocked. Mark is waiting for her. He urges her to take the money and run, but she can’t do it. … Her hand hovers over the tantalizing packets of bills, trembling. … He grips her wrist … The scene from Marnie returns us to another Hitchcockian fantasy of interlocking exhibitions and voyeurisms – the fantasy that underpins the moment from Truffaut’s Baiser volés when Antoine receives the salacious note from Madame Tabard. Recall that Fabienne’s text, explaining the distinction between “politesse” and “tact,” also turns on a scene in which a man stumbles into the sight of a woman who is in the grip of her “compulsion.” Recall, too, that the letter implicates Antoine and Fabienne as mutual bearers and objects of this forbidden look; and that the reading of the note, with Fabienne’s voice resounding in Antoine’s ears, has drawn them into an even closer subjective complicity. While composing this letter on Fabienne’s behalf, Truffaut might have been remembering a story that Hitchcock related in the course of their discussion about sexuality. Hitchcock defines “true love at work” as a situation in which looking and being looked at does not acknowledge bathroom doors. ah: I was on a train going from Boulogne to Paris and we were moving slowly through the small town of Etaples. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As we were passing a large, red brick factory, I saw a young couple against the wall. The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm. She’d look down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work. ft:

Ideally, two lovers should never separate.

ah: Quite. It was the memory of that incident that gave me an exact idea of the effect I was after with the kissing scene in Notorious.33 The scene to which Hitchcock refers – everybody knows it – is astonishing in its raw passion and in the brazenness of its duration. In this essay, I have tried to divulge the “stolen kisses” between the works of these two authors, who often seem to me as close as Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in that swooning close-up from Notorious, staggering together from one end of film history to

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the other. From the Hitchbook’s voluptuous clinches – where the usual discretions are unobserved, the barriers between cinematic universes disintegrate, and each artist is caught “stealing” from the other the intimate fears and desires that belonged to him in the first place – come the various “Hitchcocks” and “Truffauts” that have populated cinema culture on both sides of the Atlantic since the book first appeared.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Christopher Dumas, David Haynes, Kaja Silverman, and Désirée Pries for their invaluable contributions to this essay.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

Subsequent footnotes refer to the definitive edition of this book: François Truffaut (with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott), Hitchcock, rev. edn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); the parallel French edition is François Truffaut, Hitchcock: Édition Définitive (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Truffaut’s “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” laid the political groundwork for the politique des auteurs by militating against the French “Tradition of Quality” films, France’s festival-ready movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Truffaut’s notorious polemic began with a ruse. Truffaut approached Pierre Bost, an important screenwriter of the “Tradition of Quality” variety, claiming to be a devoted fan. Flattered by the young critic’s compliments, Bost gave Truffaut access to his drawer of un-filmed screenplays, which turned out to be a fatal act of hubris. In “Une Certaine Tendance,” Truffaut published extracts from these scripts to illustrate the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the contemporary French cinema. See Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1996). Translated into English by Catherine Temerson, Truffaut: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 72–76 and 399n.14 (for Bost’s aggrieved letter to Truffaut: “In any case, sir, you lack elegance. I’m sorry to tell you so, but I’m entitled to say at least that.”); and Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie: invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968 (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2003), pp. 135–136. François Truffaut to Alfred Hitchcock, in François Truffaut: Correspondance, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray (Paris: Librarie A. Hatier, 1988), trans. Gilbert Adair as François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 177; Truffaut, Hitchcock (1983), pp. 13–14. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence, p. 177. Truffaut on what the scene owes to Hitchcock: “We know that Jean-Pierre is in love with Delphine but we also know that she knows and that Léaud doesn’t know that she knows so the game goes three ways. The scene is not between Jean-Pierre and Delphine. It’s between Jean-Pierre, Delphine, and the audience. It’s much stronger with three players, much more intense, which means you can take your time. The long silences make you expect something unusual. Perhaps he’ll lunge at her for a kiss. We don’t know what to expect, but we expect something. My only direction to them was, stir the sugar not once but six times. Don’t sip it right away. We have all the time in the world in a scene like this

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where the situation is so intense. The anticipation comes to a climax with this ‘Yes, sir.’ The wrong way to do the scene would be to fade to the next scene. This ‘Yes, sir’ is like a moving locomotive. To keep it on track, you have to keep the momentum. Your only salvation is flight. So the music becomes very frenzied. I asked Duhamel for something like a chase scene in American movies, and, most importantly, not to break the tension. The music mustn’t stop, even when there’s dialogue. It’s a frenzy. The camera is constantly moving. … It’s a lesson from Hitchcock, who said: ‘You work hard to create an emotion, and once the emotion is created, you work even harder to maintain it.’ You mustn’t dissolve or break it.” Interview with Truffaut, in Jean-Pierre Chartier (dir.), Cinéastes de notre temps: François Truffaut (1970), from François Truffaut (dir.), Stolen Kisses (1968; The Criterion Collection, 2003), DVD. Delphine Seyrig, the actress who plays Fabienne, is a classically Hitchcockian blonde. Moreover, she was the star of Alain Resnais’ Muriel (1963), which Truffaut reviewed as if it were a Hitchcock film. In that review, Truffaut reports that he conveyed a morbid letter from Hitchcock to Resnais about another, unfortunate “Muriel”; see François Truffaut, Les Films de ma vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975); trans. Leonard Mayhew The Films in My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 327. Finally, the toppling coffee cup suggests the poisoned coffees that Sebastien and his mother administer to Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), as well as other tainted liquids in Hitchcock’s works. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 178. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, pp. 181–182. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 179. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, pp. 178–179. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 183. Indeed, the book has made fleeting, Hitchcock-like cameo appearances in other films. For example, it showed up on a shelf in Brian De Palma’s counterculture classic Greetings (1968) many years before De Palma was recognized as the book’s best pupil. My favorite walk-on of Truffaut’s Hitchcock tome is in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982). Kristy McNichol brings the book as a gift to a friend in the hospital who is recuperating from a savage attack by the titular creature – a German Shepherd that was trained to attack black people. Fuller never clarifies why McNichol is giving her friend this particular gift or how it will aid in her convalescence. “It was François Truffaut’s interview book … that finally altered the balance: certain of us have an insecurity/snobbishness about things homegrown so that it usually takes foreign approval to make such work respectable.” Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 474. Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films was first published in 1965 and also contributed to Hitchcock’s worldwide critical reputation in the mid-sixties. Wood himself identified the key difference between auteur theory in the United States and the United Kingdom and authorial politics in France. Godard and Truffaut’s work was primarily addressed to other filmmakers, Wood observed, while auteurists in the United Kingdom and the United States usually wrote for other critics. With this in mind, Truffaut’s book “altered the balance” because it was devoured by both scholars and filmmakers. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 192. For a wonderful account of Truffaut’s part in the development of Bonnie and Clyde, see Mark Davis, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 34–37. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 11. Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 191.

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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31

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Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, Hitchcock (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1957); trans. Stanley Hochman, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), p. 70. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 77. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, pp. 78–79. In an interview given in the early 1960s, Truffaut pinned the box office failures of recent New Wave films on their lack of structure. “[Truffaut] blamed Chabrol for the failure of his 1960 film Les Bonnes Femmes – specifically for being unwilling ‘to imagine how Hitchcock would have undertaken a film like Les Bonnes Femmes’ – and he described the film that Chabrol should have made, calling it The Shopgirls Vanish. The editors of Cahiers summarized Truffaut’s remarks in a telling caption: ‘Let’s Imitate Hitchcock.’” Brody, Richard, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), p. 123. Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. 17–18. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 16. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 47. William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 344. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 243. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 137. Constance Penley, preface to Raymond Bellour and Constance Penley (eds), The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. xi. Intriguingly, these moments are “extraordinarily mute” on the tapes – filled with caution. We might also recall that Truffaut’s introduction to the book accentuates the fundamental silence of Hitchcock’s work; Hitchcock’s cinema accesses the subtleties of human emotion without “explanatory dialogue.” “ruine d’une manière irrémédiable toute objectivité des contenus représentables par une régression violente qui articule, dans le seul regard de celui qui les dispose, la série miroitante des représentations. C’est là ce qui explique ces jeux des visions interposées qui toujours en reviennent au foyer d’où elles s’originent, déterminant entre Hitchcock et ses personnages bien plus directement encore qu’entre les personnages eux-mêmes, une perpétuelle relation de dédoublement consenti qui trouve dans les scissions et les oppositions de personnages un écho tout aussi pervers qu’indispensable.” Bellour, Raymond, “Ce que savait Hitchcock,” Cahiers du Cinéma 190 (May 1967): 36. (I wish to thank David Pettersen, University of Pittsburgh, for his help with the translation.) Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 215. I have retained Truffaut’s exclamatory emphasis. He hurls this discourse at a mirror, like Doinel in Baisers volés – “Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock” – “François Truffaut, François Truffaut.” “Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film’s narrative material, or, if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations. Here’s a case in point: A man leaves his home, hails a cab and drives to the station to catch a train. This is a normal scene in an average picture. Now, should that man happen to look at his watch just as he is getting into the cab and exclaim, ‘Good God, I shall never make that train!’ the entire ride automatically becomes a sequence of pure suspense. Every red light, traffic signal, shift of the gears or touch on the brake, and every cop on the way to the station will intensify its emotional impact.” Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 15. See, for example, Joseph McElhaney, The Death of the Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 86–88. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 262.

14

The Paradox of “Familiarity” Truffaut, Heir of Renoir Ludovic Cortade

Jean Renoir holds an important place in the critical and cinematic oeuvre of François Truffaut, playing the role of “boss.”1 This would later lead the auteur of Les 400 Coups (1959) to be regarded by American critics as “the new Renoir.”2 In 1950, the eighteenyear-old cinephile admits to having seen the “semi-complete version” of La Règle du jeu (1939) for the “twelfth time.”3 Renoir’s works would thereafter influence the conception of cinema that Truffaut would develop as a critic, and later as a director. In fact, it is under the auspices of La Règle du jeu that Truffaut’s transition from cinephile to film critic began, thanks in part to the tutelary presence of his spiritual father, the famed critic André Bazin, who put his young protégé in charge of compiling a complete filmography of Renoir. Truffaut writes to his friend Lachenay: “Bazin will be responsible for the text and I’ll do the research, since Renoir made lots of films that he didn’t finish or put his name to, and we’ve got to track them down. I’ll be going to see Claude Renoir, Pierre Renoir, Braunberger, etc. It’s very interesting work.”4 The author of What is cinema?, who met a premature death during the first days of shooting Les 400 Coups in 1958, did not have the time to finish the work he intended to dedicate to the auteur of La Règle du jeu. Truffaut later took the initiative to collect his mentor’s texts on the subject: the posthumous publication of Bazin’s Jean Renoir in 1971 was an opportunity for Truffaut eagerly to come back to the oeuvre of one of his masters. The book was more than just a monograph for Truffaut, then almost forty years old, it was also a mirror allowing him to take another look at his own work, seeing how Renoir influenced his life as a cinephile, as a critic, and later as a director: No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment, or equanimity. André Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much to me for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean Renoir by André Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by the best critic, about the best director.5 A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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In his preface to Bazin’s book, Truffaut defines what seems to him to be a fundamental concept in the work of his master: I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is the work of an infallible film maker. To be less extravagant, I will say that Renoir’s work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: familiarity. It is thanks to this familiarity that Renoir has succeeded in creating the most alive films in the history of the cinema, films which still breathe forty years after they were made.6

We would like to define the notion of “familiarity” in the work of Renoir in order to show how this concept constitutes the cornerstone upon which Truffaut would build his critical and cinematic works.

Renoir at the Heart of the Politique des Auteurs The familiarity that Truffaut felt towards Renoir came from the critical campaign he had led roughly twenty years before. From the beginning of his career as a critic in the 1950s, Truffaut saw the need to defend Renoir’s work relentlessly. La Règle du jeu and his other subsequent films received a mixed, if not an entirely bad, reception, whether they were films made in Hollywood (Swamp Water, 1941; The Southerner, 1945; The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1946; The Woman on the Beach, 1947); in India (Le Fleuve, 1951); or in Europe (Le Carrosse d’or, 1952; French Cancan, 1954; Elena et les hommes, 1956). The young Truffaut used his pen as a weapon, fiercely defending Renoir against the kind of criticism that “systematically liked every other film by Renoir,”7 an opinion entirely opposed to his unconditional ardor: “We only knew Renoir to be great.”8 Propelled by Bazin, swelling critical enthusiasm for Renoir gave rise to a consensus among the contributors of Cahiers du Cinéma, a publication in which Renoir has the privilege of being the most written about director during the first decade of its existence.9 The worship of the auteur of Le Carrosse d’or did not come about by chance. In fact, it was a key feature in the critical war machine that Truffaut was putting in place: the politique des auteurs. He believed that it was necessary to highlight Renoir’s stylistic and thematic unity, regardless of the film’s plot, geographical and historical setting, or the circumstances of the film’s production: A director has a style that one can find in all of his films, and this is true even of the worst directors and their worst films. … I am in favor of judging, when it is necessary to judge, not the films, but the directors. I will never like a film by Delannoy; I will always like a film by Renoir.10

The “familiarity,” which Truffaut defines as the main concept in his master’s work, corresponds with the feeling of a unity felt by the viewer in regards to the filmography of every great filmmaker, for it is possible to recognize an auteur through thematic

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and stylistic recurrences which serve as his signature. The occasional stylistic or technical imperfections of one film or another are not as important as the consistency of the filmmaker’s personality and style, even if the film is an adaptation of a book or a play. One of the goals of the politique des auteurs was to raise the best directors to the same level as the best writers. (Truffaut quotes Jean Giraudoux: “There are no works, there are only authors.”11) It was important, however, to liberate cinema from the absolute reign of the word over the image. Renoir played an important role in this: The greatest directors, Jean Renoir, Robert Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Max Ophüls, Robert Bresson, and others, write their own films. When they are inspired by a novel, a play, a true story, this starting point is only a pretext. A filmmaker is not a writer; he thinks in images and in terms of mise-en-scène. Writing down the adaptation is boring to him.12

Indeed, Renoir knew how to play cleverly with the literary origins of his works in order to put his personal stamp on them, instead of sacrificing the image to the text. About La Bête humaine (1938), he states, “I remained as faithful as I could to the spirit of the book. I didn’t follow the plot, but I have always thought that it was better to be faithful to the spirit of an original work than to its exterior form.”13 Truffaut made Renoir’s freedom in regards to adaptation an important aspect of the politique des auteurs: “At least fifteen of Jean Renoir’s thirty-five films are drawn from others’ work: Hans Christian Andersen, La Fouchardière, Simenon, René Fauchois, Flaubert, Gorky, Octave Mirbeau, Rumer Godden, Jacques Perret. Nonetheless, in each we inevitably rediscover Renoir’s tone, music, style, without betraying the original author in the slightest. Renoir absorbs everything, understands everything, is interested in everything and everyone.”14 Indeed, filmmaking is for Renoir, as for Truffaut, an instrument based upon “love” and “care,” humanistic qualities that would know no bounds in their work.15 This empathy plays a key role in establishing the feeling of familiarity. Keeping with the work of Bazin, which emphasized the fact that Renoir’s period in the United States allowed him to achieve classicism and universality,16 Truffaut takes a stand against the common idea of “an aging sterilization or a drying-up of Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Hawks, Rossellini, or even Jean Renoir during his Hollywood period.”17 In the case of the latter, the circumstances of the film’s production, the changes happening at the time (reconstruction after the Second World War), the culture (in the United States), and the production system (the studios in California), would not alter the permanence of the auteur’s style. Truffaut’s elevation of the figure of the auteur in his critical apparatus led him to radicalize his views, sometimes at the cost of a discrepancy with Renoir himself, mainly on two issues: the direction of the actor and the analysis of film from a sociological point of view. Renoir states that his films are the fruit of a collective work. When discussing La Règle du jeu, he maintains, “Yes, I improvised a great deal. The actors are also the directors of a film, and when you’re with them, they have a reaction you hadn’t foreseen. Their reactions are often very good, and it would be crazy

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not to take advantage of them.”18 However, in his writings Truffaut challenges the collective dimension of the film’s creation and sees the filmmaker as the cornerstone of its production. A skillful polemicist, he invokes Renoir in order better to assert his own conception of cinema, based on the primacy of the personality and signature of the director: “Renoir always says that he is not the auteur of his films, that his friends did it all, invented it all, that the film is a collective project, but he thinks nothing of the sort.”19 In order to support his arguments in favor of the auteur, the young Truffaut tended to overlook a more complex approach to cinema, as exemplified by his reservations about sociological readings of films. Bazin, by contrast, had seen in Renoir’s work the equilibrium between a personal style and the ensemble of the characteristics particular to his own culture: “He brings together both individual cinematic genius and the infallibility of a culture, or at least one of the highest aspects of Western culture, its painting.”20 For Bazin, evoking the “infallibility” of a culture does not consist in making a moral judgment but rather in embracing a sociological approach that aims to describe how a film is both a product of the context in which it is conceived while also possessing a universal dimension. Contrary to this conception, Truffaut’s idealist approach opposes all culturalist or sociological interpretations of films.21 Truffaut’s notion of the infallibility of the auteur is at odds with Bazin’s notion of the infallibility of culture. The author of What is Cinema? understood in Renoir the importance of anchoring his films in a certain social reality, a belief that later led the director to consider Truffaut’s films as a product of their time, to the great surprise of the latter. Truffaut stated, when discussing Les 400 Coups, “I was asked if I intended to make a social criticism. The film took on, in spite of myself, a general meaning. When Jean Renoir saw it, he had just come back from America, and he said, ‘Essentially, it is a portrait of France at this point in time,’ whereas I had never had such an idea.”22 In a letter to Truffaut, Renoir also remarked, “I consider Jules et Jim the most accurate portrayal of modern French society I have yet seen on the screen.”23 In spite of this subtle difference separating Truffaut from both Bazin and Renoir, the author of La Règle du jeu significantly contributed to the refinement of the young critic’s aesthetic sensibility. The analysis of Renoir’s films not only provided the basis for a critical conception of filmmaking, the politique des auteurs, but also for a philosophy of familiarity and empathy which would advance Truffaut’s passage from critic to director. During the lengthy interview with Renoir, conducted with Rivette in 1954, Truffaut takes notice of some encouraging words: And to love a film, one must be a would-be filmmaker. You have to be able to say to yourself, “I would have done it this way, I would have done it that way.” You have to make films yourself, if only in your mind, but you have to make them. If not, you’re not worthy of going to the movies.24

As early as the following year, Truffaut goes along Renoir’s lines and rebukes his fellow critics for lacking the sensibility that would allow them to do their jobs decently: “Critics are defined by a total lack of imagination, otherwise they would make films

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instead of just talking about them.”25 Truffaut also retains from Renoir the idea that watching a film is at once an exercise in empathy with the director and an initiation into directing. In other words, Truffaut’s Renoirian dynamic has another side: creation. One year before he began filming Les 400 Coups he described this “immense machinery” that “dominates” the filmmaker, “and that he dominates successively, taking it by force … He can only stop the progress of his work by suddenly going crazy, like Lantier aboard his locomotive in La Bête humaine.”26 At the dawn of the New Wave, it was through the tutelary figures of Renoir and Bazin that Truffaut was guided towards directing, becoming heir to a palpable legacy which would be inscribed in his own films.

Renoir’s System of “Checks and Balances” Truffaut inherits from Renoir the taste for working with actors and technicians who form a family, similar to the “compagnie Jean-Renoir.” He worked with some of  Renoir’s producers, like Pierre Braunberger (Partie de campagne, 1936) and the Hakim brothers (La Bête humaine), who would respectively produce two of his films: Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). The choice of actors also evokes Truffaut’s homage to Renoir: Georges Flamant, playing Monsieur Bigey, the disillusioned father of Antoine Doinel’s friend in Les 400 Coups, had played the role of Dédé in Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne (while Antoine’s last name echoes the name of Renoir’s collaborator27). Paulette Dubost, playing a dresser in Le Dernier Métro (1980), had played Lisette, Christine’s chambermaid, in La Règle du jeu. Jean Dasté had a special status: he acted in the films of Vigo (another of Truffaut’s favorite directors), and portrays in both Renoir’s and Truffaut’s films, characters who express a love of literature and knowledge. Dasté, who had played the role of a Voltaireloving student in Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), and the role of a schoolteacher in La Vie est à nous (1936) and in La Grande Illusion (1937), went on to play the role of Professor Pinel in L’Enfant sauvage (1970), as if to serve as proxy for Renoir’s presence in a film in which Truffaut himself plays the role of educator. Truffaut subsequently gave Dasté the role of a doctor in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), a character who declares that “there is nothing more beautiful than carrying a book around in one’s heart,” echoing the student in Boudu sauvé des eaux. The following year, he played a director at a newspaper in La Chambre verte (1978), a film made the year before Renoir’s death in 1979 in which Truffaut declares the importance of souvenirs to keep a community alive. Besides the Renoirian dimension of his casting, Truffaut also retains a fundamental aesthetic lesson from Renoir: the experience of familiarity in cinema lies in the balance between the proximity of “reality made art” (Bazin’s expression) and the feeling of distance.28 “Familiarity” is not based on the mere imitation of the real but, on the contrary, on the feeling of a certain distance conveyed by the spectacle of reality. Renoir specifies the terms of this paradox:

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In Toni, people appear so ordinary that you can have them speak in a poetic language, because the poetry is balanced by their character, their behavior, the way they’re dressed. Whereas in a film in which the characters’ appearances are far from reality, you have to try to get closer to daily life by means of the dialogue. It’s a system of checks and balances.29

In his critical writings, Truffaut comments on this paradox of “familiarity”: “Renoir likes to point out that Toni, shot entirely against real backgrounds mostly with nonprofessional actors, is the first neorealist film. In fact, what is striking about Toni is its dreamlike quality, the fantasy-like atmosphere surrounding the rather ordinary drama.”30 Similarly, Truffaut says of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), “Here is another example of a phenomenon common in Renoir’s work: in his concern for human truth, he creates a film which quickly enters into the realm of fantasy.”31 Like Renoir, Truffaut understands that one must not confuse realism with naturalism. He refuses convention, substituting instead the Renoirian system of “checks and balances” based on three main factors: improvisation, characterization, and theatricalization. Like the auteur of Boudu sauvé des eaux, Truffaut favors a conception of cinema based on capturing the world and its contingent presence. From Renoir, he learns that the spontaneity of the actor and the freedom given to him by the director are key:“The actor has to discover the scene himself and has to bring his own personality to it, and not the director’s.”32 Bazin claims that Renoir, “the most visual and most sensual of filmmakers, is also the one who introduces us to the most intimate of his characters because he is faithfully enamored of their appearance, and through their appearance, of their soul. In Renoir’s films knowledge comes through love, and love through the epidermis of the world.”33 In fact, Bazin had shown the “prime importance” of Renoir’s actors, whose “physical and psychological qualities color the direction and can go so far as to modify the meaning of the work itself.”34 Even if, in his first critical writings, Truffaut had relativized the collaborative dimension of Renoir’s direction, claiming that any apparent collaboration actually took place the better to carry out the artistic vision of the auteur, he later accepted Renoir’s profession of faith, writing, “You must be willing to accept the idea that actors are more important than the characters they play, the idea that the concrete counts more than the theoretical. This kind of theory obviously stems from Renoir, but I’ve always felt that way.”35 Truffaut retains this lesson when it comes to the direction of actors: “My imagination works with the real, not with what is in my head. I believe in improvisation.”36 Les Mistons (1957), Les 400 Coups, L’Enfant sauvage, and L’Argent de poche (1976) benefit from the spontaneity of nonprofessional actors, which allows the viewer to feel empathy with and familiarity with the characters. Sometimes, the professional actors achieve a similar result: La Sirène du Mississippi “is dedicated to Renoir because in my improvisational work, I was always thinking of him. With every difficulty I faced, I asked myself, ‘How would Renoir pull it off ?’”37 At the same time, Truffaut understands that in Renoir’s work, familiarity, in which improvisation plays a large part, is coupled with a feeling of distance, obtained through actors playing against type. Bazin had pointed out Renoir’s “casting ‘errors’”: “None of

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the major actors in The Rules of the Game is in his element.”38 In fact, for the role of the marquis, Renoir was keen on casting Marcel Dalio, an actor whose physique did not correspond with the French public’s idea at the time of what a French aristocrat should look like: “I think that it’s always very helpful, in film, in whatever you’re writing, to go against conventions.”39 Likewise, Truffaut wanted the role of Mahé, a sensitive and subtle character in La Sirène du Mississippi, to be played against type: “Belmondo was already known as a virile braggart, and there I was making him into an Antoine Doinel.”40 The actors in Truffaut’s films bear witness to this ambivalence: starting with Les 400 Coups, he skillfully played with the spontaneity of the young actor, all the while directing him in such a way as to produce a conflicting tone. In the scene in which Antoine falsely tells his teacher that his mother is dead, Truffaut had asked him to think about Gabin in Renoir’s La Bête humaine.41 Even Truffaut, when playing in some of his own films (L’Enfant sauvage, La Nuit américaine (1973), La Chambre verte), slightly overacts, just as Renoir did (Partie de campagne, La Bête humaine, La Règle du jeu). To describe familiarity as an effect of the equilibrium between the revelation of the real and distance, Renoir used an example from Le Carrosse d’or (Truffaut would later name his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, after it): “To create this intended confusion between theater and life, I asked my actors, especially those who played real-life roles, to act with a little bit of exaggeration, so as to give life to this theatrical side and to allow me to create the confusion.”42 The same contradiction can be found in the children in L’Argent de poche: despite the feeling of familiarity that comes from recognizing the real, thanks to their innate rambunctiousness, the film also maintains a certain distance from them, as in a documentary filmed on a set. This is close to the way Renoir had filmed the attempted-suicide scene in Boudu sauvé des eaux, which integrates bystanders who are shocked and curious both because the script required them to react to a man drowning and also because of the real-life situation (the excitement of watching a film being made).43 For Truffaut, putting the Renoirian system of balances into play also implies a questioning of conventional characterization found in classical cinema. The familiarity that the viewer experiences is not a result of identification with essentialized characters who embody prescribed values, as in melodrama. On the contrary, in Renoir’s wake, it is a question of bringing to the screen the richness and the moral contradictions found in every person. It is the acknowledgement of the complexity of their respective feelings that integrates them, for better or worse, into a system of a game that they are unable to grasp. In his film notes on La Marseillaise (1938), Truffaut notes that Renoir, faithful to his principle of balance and careful to avoid the artifice and stiffness inherent in a period film with costumes and historic characters, succeeds perfectly in humanizing the thirty or so major characters in this neorealist fresco by using details from everyday reality. … We are moved by the Swiss guards as much as by the troops from Marseille, by the emigrant courtiers as much as by the oppressed peasants. We note much nobility in the revolutionaries, much ingenuity and honesty in the nobles. Renoir serves up an entire world, where all causes are presented with the objectivity, generosity, and intelligence which mark all his work.44

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By refusing simplistic psychologizing, Renoir instead reveals empathy and respect for his characters and their complexity. Devoid of moralistic judgment, Renoir’s love paves the way for the viewer’s identification with characters that he sketches with both their strengths and weaknesses. As Octave, played by Renoir himself in La Règle du jeu, famously points out, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” This is the great lesson of cinematic modernity that Truffaut inherits from Renoir, and more particularly, from this film in which Truffaut, at the age of eighteen, first sensed the complexity of human relationships. In a letter written to his friend Robert Lachenay he recalls a lively party to which he had been invited and compares it with the film of which he was particularly fond: “The rest was like something out of La Règle du jeu. Intrigues, rows in the street, doors slamming, L- played Nora Grégor, she switched ‘Saint-Aubains’ 4 or 5 times, I was Jurieu, someone had to be the victim.”45 Truffaut’s opinion of the film went against the commercial and critical verdict it received after its initial release: La Règle du jeu, even today, has not been equaled. It is the film that has best shown the complexity of sentimental relationships between men and women, the whims, the changes of heart, the extent of vanity, the outbursts of anger, the degree of intensity, everything that makes these relationships terribly complicated and at times comical, when you’re on the outside looking in, when you don’t feel those strong feelings yourself … all that, no film has shown it better than La Règle du jeu.46

Through their fragility and their weaknesses, Truffaut’s characters seem to be avatars of Jurieu. Indeed, he has a predilection for characters who are destined to die, or, in the best-case scenario, to be alone and misunderstood, following the example of the famous pilot who becomes an antihero because of his inability to conform to the rules of a game whose subtleties he is unable to grasp. Truffaut was drawn to the character played by Charles Aznavour in Tirez sur le pianiste because of his “fragility” and “vulnerability.”47 In La Peau douce (1964), he creates the character of Pierre Lachenay, a literature professor, and shows his inability to come to terms with the contradictions of his sentimental double life within the “human comedy,”48 which is the major theme of Balzac, in whose work he specializes. After a disappointing tryst with his mistress in Reims, at the auberge “La Colinière” (a reference to the manor in La Règle du jeu), Lachenay dies by gunshot, like Jurieu. In La Mariée était en noir (1967), Coral is a man who is unsure of himself and who is dragged into the murder of the husband of a woman with whom he later falls in love. In La Sirène du Mississippi, Louis Mahé is an entrepreneur who is hoodwinked by the dual identity of Marion/Julie Roussel. In Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972), Stanislas Prévine is enthralled by Camille Bliss, the object of his sociological study; he is unable to profess his love for her and winds up in prison. In La Nuit américaine, a film in which Truffaut clearly established an affiliation with La Règle du jeu, the character Alphonse is constantly playing a role, as if he were onstage: he is a jilted victim of love, unable to give up the narcissistic desire to have a mistress by his side who would perform every role.49

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Jurieu’s most direct descendant, however, is Antoine Doinel: his extreme vulnerability is portrayed with a sensibility teetering between realism and theatricality. Already in Les 400 Coups, he seems unable to fit in: his flight at the end of the film foreshadows the constant escape that distinguishes all of his subsequent appearances. In Antoine et Colette (1962), Antoine gravitates to the object of his desire without really being able to be a part of her world. In the trilogy made up by Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970), and L’Amour en fuite (1979), he is the victim of his circumstances; he goes from job to job and from woman to woman: from Christine, who has the same first name as the character that Jurieu is in love with in La Règle du jeu, to the elegant and theatrical Madame Tabard in Baisers volés. His attempt at domestic stability in Domicile conjugal is destined to failure: fatherhood only brings to light his sentimental indecision against the background of childish regression. The childishness and ultimate impotence of Jurieu, the pilot, clearly finds an echo in Antoine’s character, who plays with remote-controlled toy boats and escapes his troubles by riding a go-kart around a track. Truffaut builds an impression of familiarity with his characters but does so paradoxically via a certain clear-eyed distance; this is reminiscent of Bazin’s analysis of Renoir: Of course, the characters of The Rules of the Game had his [Renoir’s] sympathy too, but the tenderness they inspired in him did not in any way mitigate his mercilessly lucid appraisal of them. After all, his heroes were equally conscious of their fate. Their destiny had been ordained. The love and attention which Renoir gave them was a tribute to a world which knew how to die with a slightly ridiculous grace, which achieved a sort of grandeur in its amused consciousness of its own anachronism and vanity.50

Truffaut shows his characters through a window opening onto the world, but it is a dramatized window, much as in the works of Renoir, whom Truffaut assisted in staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.51 For both directors, the line that distinguishes real life from theater is fluctuating and tenuous. Whether it be La Chienne, Boudu sauvé des eaux, Partie de campagne, La Grande Illusion, La Règle du jeu, Le Carrosse d’or, French Cancan, or Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970), the characters created by Truffaut’s master are multiple and fleeting, so much so that it is impossible to say whether or not they evolve behind the scenes. Theatrical presence in Renoir’s work is sometimes taken literally, as he transforms cinematic space into a stage or into a marionette theater, something that happens in the pre-credit sequences of La Chienne and Boudu sauvé des eaux. Even more symptomatic is the courtyard that unites the residents in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange regardless of their divergent occupations, political opinions, or their secrets. Clearly an allegorical microcosm, this courtyard appears in a believable, organic, and unified way, while at the same time serving like a small theater that is more real than reality itself. Truffaut also invented a courtyard full of a variety of types; in Domicile conjugal, we have the character who is nostalgic for, and acts like, Maréchal Pétain, reminiscent of the reactionary concierge in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. We also have the mysterious neighbor suspected of being a killer whose true

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Figure 14.1

Le Crime de M. Lange ( Jean Renoir, 1936, Les Films Obéran).

identity is revealed only during a televised impersonation. Here, and in other films, residents of the courtyard shout out to one another from floor to floor, or exchange food (L’Argent de poche). Once, the concierge’s lodge even serves as a collective phone booth (Domicile conjugal). It is undoubtedly in these chronicles of daily life that Truffaut most follows Renoir, even on a formal level. The overlapping conversations that take place in a building’s courtyard provide great sonorous depth of field and evoke the frenetic activity that so enlivened Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Inventive panning and tracking shots preserve the integrity of space and suggest friendly connections that unite the residents. Deep focus shots, deliberately chosen by Truffaut in certain scenes of Domicile conjugal, as well as frames within the frame, transform urban space into a familiar and theatrical place, continuing the great tradition of Renoir. Theatricality is especially important for Truffaut because it makes possible the contemplation of the feminine body. In Les Mistons, the preadolescents hanging out at the Arena of Nîmes, the place where games took place in antiquity, scrutinize Bernadette’s body, all the while making fun of the couple she forms with Gérard. The places where the boys meet up become an outdoor theater where they observe the games of love. This echoes the boys hiding behind the fence to gaze at Sylvia Bataille’s body on the swing in Renoir’s Partie de campagne. Likewise, when Bernadette swims in the river in Les Mistons, Truffaut takes up one the themes favored by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean’s father.52 In Truffaut’s work, the representation of seduction is necessarily theatrical because, paradoxically, it is from theatricality that familiarity is born: as in the scene where Jean-Claude Brialy pretends to look for Jeanne Moreau’s dog so that he can seduce her in Les 400 Coups, or when, in Antoine et Colette, Antoine moves from one window to the next in order to better observe, like a helpless spectator, what the woman he loves is doing.

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Figure 14.2

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Domicile conjugal (François Truffaut, 1970, Les Films du Carrosse).

The theatrical device whereby voyeurism instigates desire recurs throughout Truffaut’s work, up to his last films. In Le Dernier Métro, which was partially inspired by Renoir’s play Carola, the desired body never totally takes on reality: Lucas Steiner, sequestered in the basement of the theater, no longer knows whether he should see Marion as his wife or as a director or as an actress; meanwhile, Bernard Granger, who is in love with the same woman, weaves his ambiguous love story on stage and behind the scenes, hiding his activities as a Resistance fighter. This multilayered drama echoes the confusion between onstage space and offstage space in Le Carrosse d’or. In La Femme d’à côté (1981), Bernard and Mathilde spy on each other through their windows and live with their secret passion while pretending to have a peaceful home life with their respective spouses. In Vivement dimanche! (1983), Truffaut’s last film, Julien Vercel, looking through the basement’s transom window, observes Barbara’s legs as she walks down the street, as if everyday life were a theater.53 Following Renoir’s example, the cornerstone of Truffaut’s films could be defined by the marquis in La Règle du jeu, who cries in exasperation, during the apogee of mayhem, “Stop this comedy!” to which his butler Corneille subtly answers, “Which one, Monsieur le Marquis?”

Conclusion Throughout his life, Truffaut manifests an unfailing fidelity to Renoir in his critical writings and in his films. Just like the auteur of La Règle du jeu, Truffaut makes films that are filled with empathy and indulgence for characters who are carried away by their circumstances, without fundamentally changing their core personalities. In that respect, Truffaut remains true to the analysis of Bazin, the figure mediating his

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relationship with Renoir: “Renoir does not construct his films around situations and dramatic developments, but around beings, things, and facts. This assertion, which explains his method of handling actors and adapting the scenario, also gives us the key to understanding his method of filming.”54 Renoir’s “cinema of characters” gives the viewer a feeling of familiarity, revealing the complexity of human beings who are striving to adapt to their environments. That is why, for Truffaut, as for Renoir, empathy and familiarity go hand in hand with characters who put up ever-changing theatrical fronts, constantly revealing new truths about their weaknesses. Hence Truffaut’s texts and films constitute a community of remembrance like the candles and photographs in the chapel in La Chambre verte, a film made seven years after he had arranged for the posthumous publication of Bazin’s great book on Renoir. However, this legendary image must be nuanced because of the complexity of the aesthetic influences exerted on Truffaut. While making his many trips to visit his master in Beverly Hills, Truffaut never stopped paying homage to an equally important director in his personal pantheon: Alfred Hitchcock. In this respect, the publication of the book of Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock in 1966 and the release of Bazin’s Jean Renoir in 1971 constitute an essential diptych bearing witness to his attempt to forge a style that brings together the two masters, even if his fascination with Renoir may seem to contradict his passion for Hitchcock. As far as working methods go, Hitchcock’s meticulous planning is the opposite of Renoir’s penchant for improvisation and free speech. The master of suspense’s artful montage is also at the other end of the spectrum from the painter’s son’s long takes and unified space. Besides, Hitchcock seems to show little appreciation for the auteur of La Règle du jeu: “Why is it that Renoir cannot tell a story? … I’ve always felt he’s very vague.” Truffaut subtly defends his French master by defining Hitchcock’s art of storytelling: No, the man falls in love with the actors and with the characters, and he changes everything as he works along, even if the story is destroyed by it. He’ll always have the nostalgia for the commedia dell’arte and the initial pictures of Mack Sennett and all that. … He’s the contrary of you. The situation is less important to him, he’s only interested in the characters.55

Hitchcock ironically answers, “Well, that’s fine if he can hold your attention.” But Truffaut resists the temptation to oversimplify the terms of the Hitchcock–Renoir opposition: I have an idea, mind you, that is interesting like all other ideas, also a little crazy like all ideas that are too theoretical, to work out a possible reconciliation between Renoir and Hitchcock, between the pinnacle of “cinema of character” that is the work of Renoir, and the pinnacle of “cinema of situations” that is the work of Hitchcock56

The whole of Truffaut’s work is an attempt to reunite two poles of cinematic history, which sometimes resulted in critics’ skepticism and the public’s disapproval. La Sirène du Mississippi symbolizes this double filiation: if it begins with a dedication to Jean

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Renoir and an excerpt from La Marseillaise and if it concludes like the final sequence of La Grande Illusion, the film also includes allusions to Hitchcock, both in its themes and its form: I think that at this moment the public has the impression that I am making fun of them. But it’s not true. The preceding scenes were from Renoir’s cinema and the next thing you know I switched to the cinema of Hitchcock before coming back to the cinema of Renoir. In the end, it’s a bit the way I balance my life. I try to reconcile two things that seem to be completely different. And they are different, for that matter. In order to carry out such a rupture in tone, it is necessary to believe and to understand sixty years of film history.57

Truffaut suggests that his work can be read like a Hitchcock movie, filmed in the manner of Renoir: My work, and it is perhaps one of the reasons for the misunderstanding about La Sirène … , it’s that I make myself very well understood when I make a film very close to life like Les Quatre Cents Coups or Baisers volés. I make myself less understood when I take American themes about death or even about murderers or detectives as in Tirez sur le pianiste or La Mariée était en noir or La Sirène because I treat those films, which have exceptional subjects, exactly the way I treat Les Quatre Cent Coups or Baisers volés, that is to say, compelling the viewer to believe that they are the ones who are closest to the characters, and that one day they could kill someone. It is the familiar treatment of this dramatic treatment that, at times, creates a feeling of uneasiness. This is not something I regret. It is something that I am mindful of, that I want to impose.58

Bazin had noted that it is precisely by emigrating and by exposing himself to different influences that Renoir was able to develop a personal and familiar style. Likewise, Truffaut develops his style by crossing the fault lines that separate apparently opposing cinematic traditions. It is in this hybrid and creative journey of self-discovery that he is profoundly Renoirian. Translated by Megan D. Russell

Notes 1

In 1967, three televised interviews between Jacques Rivette and Jean Renoir were grouped under the title “Jean Renoir le patron” (the boss). The programs were produced for Janine Bazin’s and André S. Labarthe’s series “Cinéastes de notre temps.” See Jean Renoir, Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 168–210. 2 Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 272. 3 François Truffaut, letter to Robert Lachenay, June 28, 1950, in François Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 22.

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Truffaut to Lachenay, August 19, 1950, in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 28. André Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 7. Truffaut’s emphasis. Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 8–9. Annette Insdorf also underlines the importance of this analysis in the chapter “Renoirian Vision” in her book François Truffaut, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 69–103. François Truffaut, “Les Sept Péchés capitaux de la critique,” Arts (1955), reprinted in Le Plaisir des yeux (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), p. 233. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are translated by Megan D. Russell. François Truffaut, “Les Truands sont fatigués : sur Touchez pas au Grisbi,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 34 (February 1955): 56. Truffaut would keep the same line of defense later: “I did receive the Renoir by Pierre Leprohon, but I didn’t much care for it. Jean Renoir made 35 films, Leprohon likes only 13 of them. Without going into detail, this would seem to indicate that he was perhaps not the man for the job, as after all I’m not alone in thinking that Renoir is the greatest film director in the world.” Truffaut to Pierre Lherminier, November 27, 1967, in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 313. Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue, tome 1. A l’assaut du cinéma: 1951–1959 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991), p. 231. Truffaut’s defense of Renoir was, however, one of the reasons for the falling-out between him and Godard in the 1950s – first for aesthetic reasons, then later in the 1960s and 1970s for political reasons. Truffaut does not agree with Godard, who writes that “certain critics, having seen Strangers on a Train, still withhold their admiration from Hitchcock, the better to lavish it on The River. Since they are the same persons who criticized Renoir so loud and long for remaining in Hollywood, and since they demonstrate so lively a taste for parody, I would ask them: do not these strangers on a train represent them in the exercise of their trade?” Hans Lucas [Jean-Luc Godard], “Suprématie du sujet,” Cahiers du Cinéma 10 (March 1952). Translated in Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings, trans. Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 26. Their disagreements intensified later when Godard radicalized his conception of a politicized cinema, and the Renoir/Bazin axis was attacked by the ideological criticism in Cahiers, notably in Jean-Louis Comolli’s article after the rerelease of La Marseillaise in 1967: “If it is necessary to first resort to this humanism, and then to this elegance, alternatively or at the same time, in order to penetrate the beauty of Renoir and the meaning of his films, then there is no doubt that all film criticism can be achieved through prayer.” The rift between Cahiers and Truffaut widened between 1967 and 1971. Truffaut answered through  Marion, one of his characters in La Sirène du Mississippi – when the character named Comolli dies, she says, “That’s one less bastard!” See Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: Histoire d’une revue, tome 2. Cinéma, tours et détours: 1959–1981 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991), pp. 134–135 and 226–227. Paradoxically, Renoir would be associated with political struggles at the time, as he was impelled by Truffaut to become honorary president of the Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque Française during the Langlois Affair in 1968. Moreover, Truffaut came to Renoir’s defense, calling Godard a “poser” when he “lump[s] together Renoir and Verneuil as though they were the same thing.” Henri Verneuil was a commercial filmmaker scoffed at by the New Wave. See Truffaut’s letter to Godard, May–June 1973, in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 387. François Truffaut, “Vous êtes tous témoins dans ce procès: le cinéma français crève sous les fausses légendes,” Arts (May 15, 1957), in Le Plaisir des yeux, p. 239. Cited in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 99. See also Truffaut, “Les Sept péchés capitaux de la critique,” p. 233.

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Truffaut, “Vous êtes tous témoins dans ce procès,” pp. 234–235. Jean Renoir, interview by François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, in Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks, trans. Carol Volk, p. 3. The original appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma 34 (April, 1954). François Truffaut, “A Jean Renoir Festival,” in The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 36. Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 90–91. Special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma entitled “Renoir,” 8 ( January 1952). See de Baecque, Histoire d’une revue, tome 1, pp. 65–66. In this issue, Bazin’s article “French Renoir” is representative of the Cahiers’ reading of Renoir at the time; Renoir distinguishes himself by his “quest for a universally human essence through the accidental. Not that he resorts to using abstraction and symbols, or even less so to adopting conventions, but rather, he looks to get closer to the essence of being through a meditative approach to its appearances. Renoir was never ‘absorbed’ by Hollywood, but it is true that he became an international director who was almost as at ease in Rome as in the Indies, or in England or America as in Paris.” See also Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 74–91. On the equilibrium between nation and universalism in the work of André Bazin, see Ludovic Cortade, “Cinema Across Fault Lines: Bazin and the French School of Geography,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds), Opening Bazin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 13–31. François Truffaut, “Ali Baba et la ‘politique des auteurs,’” Cahiers du Cinéma 44 (February 1955). Renoir, interview by Truffaut and Rivette, in Renoir on Renoir, p. 4. Truffaut, “Vous êtes tous témoins dans ce procès,” p. 237. On this point, Truffaut seems to differ with Bazin, who, taking an example from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, was of the opinion that “perhaps more than any other of Renoir’s works, it was a film made by friends, for friends.” Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 43. Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 135. On the limits of the politique des auteurs and the necessity of film analyses that integrate the sociological and historical contexts in which they were made, see André Bazin, “De la Politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (April 1957). De Baecque, Histoire d’une revue, I. p. 78. Cited in Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 102. See also p. 261. Jean Renoir to François Truffaut, February 8, 1962, in Jean Renoir, Jean Renoir: Letters, trans. Anneliese Varaldiev (London: Faber & Faber), p. 428. Renoir interview by Truffaut and Rivette in Renoir on Renoir, p. 24. Truffaut, “Les sept péchés capitaux de la critique,” p. 231. Truffaut, “Vous êtes tous témoins dans ce procès,” p. 239. The comparison between the image of a film and a train speeding out of control in the dark will be taken up again fifteen-odd years later by the character of the director (Ferrand) in La Nuit américaine, played by Truffaut himself. Antoine’s last name was “Loinod” before Truffaut changed it to “Doinel,” paying a discreet homage to Renoir: Ginette Doynel worked on the script for Le Carrosse d’or and later became Renoir’s secretary. See de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 131. Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 119. Renoir, Renoir on Renoir, p. 93. Film notes for Toni in Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 238. Film notes for Le Crime de Monsieur Lange in Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 241.

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Renoir interview with Truffaut and Rivette, in Renoir on Renoir, p. 46. Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 90. The published translation of this last sentence reads “In Renoir’s films acquaintances are made through love, and love passes through the epidermis of the world.” The original French sentence is as follows: “La connaissance chez Renoir passe par l’amour et l’amour par l’épiderme du monde.” Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 124–125. Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 304. Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 96. Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 249. Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 74. Interview, June 2, 1966, in Renoir, Renoir on Renoir, p. 197. Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 250. Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 101. Renoir interview with Truffaut and Rivette, in Renoir on Renoir, p. 47. “The crowd of unpaid extras gathered on the bridge and the river banks was not there to witness a tragedy. They came to watch a movie being made. … Some of the spectators turn around to get a better look at the cameraman, much as in the earliest newsreels when people had not yet grown accustomed to the camera. And, as if he felt the falseness of the acting were not sufficiently apparent, Renoir had some rapid shots taken from behind the crowd, which leave no doubt of its lack of emotion.” Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 31–32. Film notes for La Marseillaise in Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 251–252. For an analysis of Renoir’s relationship with the quotidian, see Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 274–316. See also Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 142–174. Truffaut to Lachenay, July 21, 1950, in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, p. 24. The name “Saint Aubin” is also the name of one of Marion’s dance partners in Le Dernier Métro. François Truffaut, interview by Jacques Chancel, Radioscopie, April 15, 1975. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 154. Renoir includes Balzac’s work La Physionomie du mariage in Boudu sauvé des eaux. On the influence of La Règle du jeu on La Nuit américaine, see Truffaut’s letter to A. Insdorf, January 8, 1981, in Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, pp. 529–530. It is also worth noting that the script girl of La Nuit américaine cites a quip by the cook in La Règle du jeu: “I can allow for diets, not obsessions!” Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 111. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 91. Jean Renoir would take up this theme two years later in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959). In an article published in Arts (November 27, 1957), Jacques Rivette analyses the Truffaut– Renoir connection in his review of the film at the festival in Tours; see de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 116. Vivement dimanche! subtly brings La Règle du jeu to mind when the young woman provides a recipe for potatoes with white wine sauce, another allusion to Renoir’s film. Bazin, Jean Renoir, pp. 83–84. The quotation is from the recordings of the interview between Hitchcock and Truffaut (Hitchcock’s comments are transcribed by myself and Truffaut’s answer is simultaneously translated by Helen G. Scott). Source: http://trombonheur.free.fr/HitchcockTruffaut/16.mp3 (9:43 to 10:45) (accessed October 28, 2012). Special thanks to Sam Di Iorio

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for drawing this to my attention. Interestingly, Hitchock’s comment on Renoir is absent from the final edition of the book whose preface is rather a homage to both directors: “On May 2, 1980, a few years after his death, a mass was held in a small church on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. One year before, a farewell to Jean Renoir had taken place in the same church.” François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 12. 56 Cited in Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 184. David Bordwell advanced this comparison long ago in an essay titled “François Truffaut: A Man Can Serve Two Masters,” Film Comment 7(1) (1971). 57 Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 321. 58 François Truffaut, interview by Jacques Chancel, Radioscopie, June 24, 1969.

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François Truffaut, to the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma: Call me “conventional,” but I remain skeptical of Godard’s “antisocial” side. For a filmmaker to solicit advance-on-receipts, he has to send in a full dossier, and when he is a candidate for a festival, he presents his film to the selection committee. Look at Godard, he picks up the phone; he has lunch with the president of this, the director of that, and they trust him; his daily life is completely organized, even though in interviews, he plays the solitary martyr and refines his prestigious image as the misfit.1

Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, edited by Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue, contains an entry devoted to Jean-Luc Godard by Vincent Amiel. It reads in part, “Without a doubt there is fascinating material, worthy of a novel, in the intersecting paths of the two filmmakers, from their shared adolescent interests up to their scathing correspondence in the 70s and 80s.”2 Fascinating material for a novel indeed. It could also be the subject of an academic thesis or a long chapter in a history of French cinema from 1949 to 1985 at least, stretching across thirty-five or forty years, or even a documentary film. Such a film, in fact, was recently made using archival documents and excerpts from the two directors’ films; produced by Emmanuel Laurent with a script by Antoine de Baecque, it was released in January 2011 under the title Deux de la vague (Two in the Wave). Alongside Le Dictionnaire Truffaut we now have a new publication, Jean-Luc Godard, dictionnaire des passions, which naturally contains an entry on “Truffaut (François)” where the careers of the two filmmakers are laid out in parallel, from their initial friendship to their falling-out in the seventies and eighties.3 Lengthy excerpts from their correspondence are quoted, concluding with Godard’s 1988 foreword to the posthumous edition of the letters of François Truffaut: “What held us together as intimately as a kiss – as when we used to buy our pathetic little cigars on emerging A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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from the Bikini cinema on Place Pigalle or the Artistic … What bound us together more intimately than the fake kiss in Notorious [Hitchcock, 1946] was the screen and nothing but the screen.”4

Decade by Decade I will limit myself to a few aspects of this long, complex, and stormy relationship, which concluded with a terribly violent quarrel and a definitive break on Truffaut’s part. Godard’s pitiful epigraph at the death of the auteur of Les 400 Coups did not really change the moral image that he presented. I want to bring up his article “Tout seul” (All alone), published in December 1984 in the special “François Truffaut” edition of Cahiers du Cinéma: A film is something that comes out … of someone … comes out of and comes from someone. … When he wrote … hurling his writing … out from himself … against a certain tendency of the French cinema … François reproached them for not going out from themselves … to make cinema … a whole cinema … before making films … to start from within themselves … like a real spectator … since every entry into the movie theater begins with the spectator leaving from where he is. François began by making cinema with his hands … with ink stains … pebbles in the pond. … He did not hesitate to throw the first stone at others. … I do not know if he continued … one can’t do everything … to take responsibility for the sins of others before his own. … He did everything, all alone … all while giving the opposite impression … so he died from it. … A film is never made all alone … in solitude … yes … often … the white beach and the white screen … as well-known as the white wolf … but actually the wolves … or the assassins that Henri Langlois talks about … who smile at you. … We knew that a film was made alone … but there were four of us … so it took time for us to admit it to ourselves … then for some to forswear it. … The screen was our examining magistrate.5

And yet, it all started well, with a true collaboration between young cinephiles in 1948–1949. We have a precious testimony by François Truffaut, who described his intitial encounter with Jean-Luc Godard in the first book about him by Jean Collet.6 In what follows I will quote several excerpts from his account as I try to summarize the main chronological phases of the relationship between Godard and Truffaut. Their initial period lasted from 1948 to 1959, the period of cinephilia, the critical articles, the production of the first short films, the shared experience of making Une Histoire d’eau (1958), and the screenplay of A Bout de souffle (1960), which Truffaut sold to Godard at the latter’s request. Next came a second period, which spanned the 1960s. The two filmmakers independently developed their careers as auteurs of feature-length films with mixed success, from both commercial and artistic points of view. Godard directed fifteen feature-length films, from A Bout de souffle to Week-end (1967), so his level of productivity was exceptionally high, while François Truffaut

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directed only six films between Les 400 Coups (1959) and La Mariée était en noir (1967). Truffaut was much more prolific in the following period, from 1969 to 1980; during this time he directed twelve feature-length films that rank among the most important of his career, from Baisers volés (1968) to L’Amour en fuite (1979). During these years, Godard opted for the semi-secrecy of the Dziga Vertov group, then of experimental television, until Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). The second period seems particularly fruitful since it was marked by a certain complicity between the two successful directors, supporting one another when they ran into trouble, a complicity that extended that of the fifties, in the course of which the two young future filmmakers had conscientiously practiced the politics of friendship. Thus Godard praised the direction of Les 400 Coups and published very admiring articles about Jules et Jim (1962) and still more about La Peau douce (1964). He went to visit his friend Truffaut in the London studios during the preparation period for Fahrenheit 451 in 1966. One example, among others, from “Apprenez le François,” (Study François, with an echo of “Study French”) in L’Avant-scène Cinéma: Films … they are memory … and François has chosen to make them … chosen, by the same token … to make me remember him … so I remember quite a lot of things … no Vigo before he began … and talking of L’Atalante, François’ dissolves, superimposition on superimposition, will lead him to Hitchcock … no Vigo, because Gaumont had killed him, but now his blood brother … a hot Saturday in July, we set off from the Place Clichy … the most beautiful square in Paris, François insisted.7

Truffaut, for his part, did all that he could to help Godard make his first feature-length movie, and he would go on to write a very beautiful article on Vivre sa vie (1962) published in L’Avant-scène Cinéma: The physical joy and the physical pain evoked by certain moments in A Bout de souffle and in Vivre sa vie – I will never attempt to convey these in writing to those who have not felt them. … A film like Vivre sa vie leads us constantly to the limits of the abstract, then to the limits of the concrete, and it is undoubtedly this balance that creates the emotion. … There are films that we admire but that discourage us: “what good is it to keep going after this,” etc. Yet these films are not the best, for the best give the impression that they open doors and also that the cinema begins or is reborn with them. Vivre sa vie is one of these.

The sixties culminated with the parallel political evolution of the two filmmakers, who had emerged from certain right-wing schools of thought in the fifties, as Antoine de Baecque has rightly reminded us in several accounts. Both men would be on the front lines with Cahiers du Cinéma in opposing the 1966 banning of their friend Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse. They would meet again at the head of the Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque Française in February–March 1968, and together, they would boycott the Cannes festival in May 1968, hanging onto the stage curtains and leading many attendant filmmakers to join forces with the students on strike. Truffaut had just finished shooting Baisers volés at this point and was supervising its editing in Paris.

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Back in Paris, while the filmmakers were compiling the famous “Estates General of the French Cinema,” Truffaut refused to become involved directly and did not participate in the creation of the Society of Filmmakers launched by Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, his former colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma. He justified his position in this way: “I feel solidarity with Rivette, Godard, and Rohmer, because I like them and admire their work, but I don’t want to have anything to do with Jacqueline Audry, Serge Bourguignon, Jean Delannoy or Jacques Poitrenaud. The fact of having the same profession is meaningless to me if admiration and friendship don’t come into play.”8 Godard, meanwhile, threw himself body and soul into unbridled leftist activism, directing several “ciné-tracts” and commissioning works that he transformed into experimental and militant films like Un Film comme les autres (1968) or Le Gai Savoir (produced by the ORTF in 1968!). He would then make sure his director’s credit dissolved into the pseudo-collective of the Dziga Vertov group, first with Jean-Henri Rouger for Pravda in 1969, then with Jean-Pierre Gorin for Vent d’est (1969), Luttes en Italie (1970), and finally Tout va bien (1972).

The End of a Friendship This period immediately following 1968 marked the beginning of a third phase, one that would cause a brutal rupture in the friendship of the two auteurs. We can see the private manifestation of this in Truffaut’s correspondence, published in 1988, particularly in the May 1973 letter from Godard to Truffaut: “Yesterday I saw La Nuit américaine. In all likelihood no one will call you a liar, so I am doing it.” Truffaut responded to this letter with extraordinary violence, but also an extraordinarily lucid understanding of the personality of Jean-Luc Godard, a brilliant artist, but one whose sadomasochistic narcissism was often unbearable to even his closest friends. This rupture was only indirectly public during the 1970s, glimpsed via malicious allusions from each of the two men, especially on Godard’s part, over the course of the many interviews that they gave throughout the seventies and into the eighties, until Truffaut’s death in 1984. Godard’s personal attack on La Nuit américaine (1973) gained public notoriety only in 1980 when Editions Albatros published a transcription of the lectures he delivered starting in the fall of 1978 in Montreal at the request of Serge Losique, director of the Conservatoire d’Art Cinématographique de Montréal. We know that these were largely improvised talks, Godard commenting on his own feature-length works and projecting them along with selected reels from other films. So on his second trip, discussing Le Mépris (1963), he showed three other films about cinema, and not just any three: Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) by Vincente Minnelli, and La Nuit américaine by his former friend Truffaut. These lines from Godard’s commentary are revealing: To me [he has had] a truly strange career. François Truffaut’s real life would be a grand film that would be horribly expensive to make. Because he has had a very strange

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career – when you watch his first film, The Four Hundred Blows, and you know a little bit about his life before – for me, there was a break right after The Four Hundred Blows. And I don’t know how that happened. He let himself be taken in by cinema, he became everything he hated.9

Truffaut responded indirectly to Godard in a long interview with Cahiers du Cinéma in September and October 1980, answering questions from Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, and Jean Narboni: You refer to Godard, but the example is a bad one because he belongs directly in the group of compulsive enviers. As far as I’m concerned, Godard’s declarations of hate no longer matter; it seems I made him lose sleep. … Even at the time of the New Wave, friendship worked differently with him. Because he was very gifted and very good at making people feel sorry for him, we forgave him for his meanness, but everyone will tell you, the devious side that he is no longer able to conceal was already there. We always had to help him, to do him favors, and wait for a low blow in return.

After this episode Truffaut and Godard never spoke again, as confirmed by an anecdote Gilles Cahoreau described in his biography of Truffaut: “In a New York restaurant where Truffaut was having lunch in the company of Fanny Ardant and several other witnesses, Godard happened to enter. He came over to Truffaut’s table to say hello to the people he knew. Truffaut said dryly, without looking at him: ‘Godard, I am not saying hello to you.’”10 The anecdote is confirmed in Antoine de Baecque’s biography: “Godard had seen Truffaut but a single time since the 1973 rupture, and it was by chance in a New York hotel: ‘François refused to shake my hand. We saw one another again on the sidewalk waiting for a taxi, and he pretended not to see me.”11 Godard brought up this episode in 1980, “attempting to dispel the quarrel that had bruised both men” so badly, but it was far too late.12 It must be noted that throughout the decade, Godard continuously attacked his former friend through the press. For seven weeks in the summer of 1978, from July 5 until August 19, he was interviewed at length by Alain Rémond and Jean-Luc Douin for Télérama. He agreed, “for 4000 francs,” to “tell his life story,” under the sensational title “Godard Tells All.” He said he despised the New Wave and settled his scores – particularly with Truffaut: I believe that François absolutely does not know how to make movies. He made one that really suited him, and then it stopped there; afterward, he did nothing but tell stories. Because he is incapable of inventing anything at all, incapable of the least imagination, he set about adapting books, and it became more and more fake, because it bore absolutely no relation to what he was. In my opinion, he has neither a career, nor … He is a usurper. If he could get into the Académie Française, I’m sure he would try.13

Five years later, after Godard’s return to cinema with Sauve qui peut ( la vie) in 1980 – in which he gave the female lead role, that of Denise Rimbaud (!), to Nathalie Baye, an actress discovered by Truffaut – the Franco-Swiss filmmaker learned that Chabrol had

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just made Le Cheval d’orgueil (1980), Rivette Le Pont du Nord (1981), and Truffaut Le Dernier Métro (1980). So in August 1980 he wrote a letter to his three old friends proposing a group meeting in Rolle, his Swiss home, in order to recreate the “shock patrol” of the New Wave twenty years later. The letter was addressed to “Dear Claude, François, and Jacques (in alphabetical order),” and adds, Can’t we have a “discussion”? Whatever our differences, I would be interested in finding out in viva voce what’s become of our cinema. … We could make it into a book for Gallimard or some other house. … While a reunion of just two of us might be felt as too explosive, with four of us there should be a way of underplaying the differences in potential so some connections could get through. Best regards, anyhow, Jean-Luc.

Truffaut, who had not reacted to the attacks in Télérama, now responded immediately to this private letter with a rather radical refusal: Your invitation to Switzerland is extraordinarily flattering knowing how precious your time is. So now that you’ve put the Czechs, Vietnamese, Cubans, Palestinians, and Mozambicans back on the right track, you will turn solicitously to reeducating the last outpost of the New Wave. I hope this plan of unloading a hasty book on Gallimard isn’t a sign you now don’t give two hoots about the Third World. … So you don’t completely hold against us the fact that you called us crooks, dregs, scum. … I’m not excessively impatient as I wait for your reply, for if you are becoming a Coppola groupie, you might be short on time and you should by no means hastily throw together the preproduction work on your next autobiographical film, whose title I think I know: a shit is a shit.14

Mutual Fascination, Mutual Support Returning in a somewhat radical shift back to 1948–1949, and the decidedly happier period of their meeting, it must first be noted that Godard’s personality always fascinated Truffaut, and even elicited his admiration, at least in the 1960s. As Antoine de Baecque writes, Godard was certainly “the most taciturn of the group, acting most like an artist dandy, and he fascinated the others, probably because he also kept his private life shrouded in mystery – his trips to Switzerland and throughout the world, his family, his lovers.”15 To appreciate the evolution of their relationship and their respective strategies within French cinema, we must take into account their social upbringing, their early childhood, and then of course their adolescence. For Godard, a background in the uppermost bourgeoisie, with a very sheltered childhood until his parents’ rift after the war; for Truffaut, a far more modest upbringing, as everyone knows. This would result in radically different connections to the realm of cinema. On one hand, there is Godard, an iconoclastic bourgeois anarchist who “has fouled his own backyard,”16 as Truffaut facetiously and lucidly wrote. On the other hand, there is Truffaut, head of a small film enterprise, obsessed with the economics of his business, Les Films du

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Carrosse, whose survival depended on making some profit, this, nevertheless, going hand-in-hand with a fierce drive for independence that even made him reject the official honors the French Republic tried to bestow on him. Let’s go back to Truffaut’s earliest reflections: I met Jean-Luc Godard around 1948 at the cinémathèque on the Avenue de Messine, and at the Latin Quarter film club which held its sessions on Thursday afternoons at the ClunyPalace Theatre. The films were introduced by Eric Rohmer. That is where I met Rohmer, and then Rivette and Godard. At the time, I was working for Travail et Culture under the direction of André Bazin. I believe Godard was a first-year student at the Faculté des Lettres then. Rivette would come in from Rouen and spend the whole day at the movies.17

There you have Truffaut’s first account, with extremely precise dates and facts, as was always the case with him. And he developed this over nearly ten pages; I will limit myself to a few revealing excerpts. “My first memory of Godard? He didn’t wear glasses, he had curly hair, and was very handsome, with very regular features. As a matter of fact, Rivette chose him as the actor in Le Quadrille, a short 16 mm film he made (in 1950), in which Anne-Marie Cazalis also appeared.”18 Today we can see the silhouette of the young Jean-Luc Godard from 1951 by re-watching Charlotte et son steak, since he played the male lead in this short feature by Eric Rohmer. Thin, curlyhaired, with no glasses and no hat, he corresponds rather well to the evocation of him that François Truffaut gave in 1963. His look was similar to that of the young men found in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini twenty years later. Truffaut then provides two key pieces of information about Godard’s personality: What struck me most about Godard at that time was the way he absorbed books. If we were at a friend’s house, during one evening, he would easily open forty books and he always read the first and last pages. He was always very nervous and impatient. He liked cinema as much as any of us, but he was capable of going to see fifteen minutes each of five different films in the same afternoon. … After having told us well for months that he was going off to Jamaica, he left one day with his father. When he returned, we all hoped for a long, detailed description of his trip. Nothing. From that moment on, he no longer spoke. J-Luc G. was so paradoxical and peremptory that I never believed in his cinematographic possibilities until I saw Une Femme coquette (1955). Because he never explained himself. He judged things very severely in general, but, in a rather off hand manner. Chabrol was also somewhat like that. Jean-Luc doesn’t like to argue. He has an immediate opinion which is often quite profound, though one rarely realizes it until later on. He never liked to go into details, never; that is his great point in common with Rossellini.19

Truffaut then comments on each of the first short films directed by Godard starting with Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (1957), providing valuable information never before published about the genesis of Une Histoire d’eau (1958) and A Bout de souffle. I will not dwell on either of these two films, whose production histories are now well

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known. The shared experience of Une Histoire d’eau, which originated with Truffaut and was credited to both men, confirmed that Truffaut did not like to improvise and, on the contrary, that Godard was capable of inventing all kinds of stories and voiceover commentaries from rushes that he himself had not filmed. The monologue delivered by Catherine Dim (the hitchhiking student) that Godard tacked onto Truffaut’s images is an anthology of his literary tics, his tastes and obsessions. We find them again, unaltered, except for a couple authors, in the soundtrack of his Histoire(s) du cinéma from the 1990s (1988–1998). Here we find several very significant sentences from the voice-over of Une Histoire d’eau delivered by the young girl: “Let me open a parentheses: everyone despises Aragon, I love him; close parentheses.” She then recalls a lecture on Petrarch where Aragon was speaking at length about Matisse: “When a student chimed in to remind Aragon of his subject, he replied, superb and masterful in tone, that all of Petrarch’s art consisted of digression. It’s the same for me; I do not stray from my subject, or else it is actually a deeper subject. Just as when a car is diverted from its normal trajectory by a flood, forcing it to go through fields in order to reach the main Paris highway.” This describes Petrarch’s oeuvre, no doubt, but also the poetic art of Godard through to his final films. Some time ago, I analyzed the stages of the production and execution of A Bout de souffle, Godard’s first feature-length film.20 Here let me stress the decisive role that Truffaut played in the final phase of the film’s genesis. We know there were several versions developed from Truffaut’s initial screenplay, two of which have been published. Truffaut first drafted a four-page synopsis in November and December 1956 which sketched the adventures of Michel and Betty, a fictionalized adaptation taken from news stories about Michel Portail and his American girlfriend, which had already been amply addressed in a 1952 issue of Détective. At first Truffaut tried to direct the film himself; he even considered casting certain actors including Jean-Claude Brialy, and initially sold the screenplay to Philippe de Broca. But none of his efforts got off the ground in 1957–1958. It was only after coming back from the Cannes festival of 1959 that Godard asked him to sell him the old script, which was sitting in a drawer after having passed through many different hands. All things considered, Truffaut’s final version is rather faithful to the definitive script of the finished film. Godard, however, did alter several decisive elements in July 1959; in particular, he greatly expanded the scene in room 12, writing all of the dialogue, enriching it in his fashion, with all the literary and artistic references that would later characterize his films. Furthermore, he opted for a tragic conclusion, with Michel Poiccard being shot in the back by the police, a scene that had no precedent in any of the earlier versions. It’s worth recalling the vehement moral protest of Truffaut, who explicitly asked his friend to change one of the last lines of dialogue he wrote, when one policeman orders the other to aim for the fleeing criminal’s spinal column (Truffaut: “We can’t include that!”). I’ll come back to this protest in touching on La Nuit américaine. This collaboration on A Bout de souffle was rather circumstantial and would not be repeated, but Godard never forgot that he owed his first break to his old friend Truffaut. Surely this was also one of the indirect reasons for his aggressiveness in the

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seventies. He could not bear to owe such a debt to the author of La Nuit américaine, to say nothing of their professional and romantic rivalry.

Reflections: Film to Film Today I am more interested in the direct and indirect echoes found in the two men’s films throughout the sixties. Beyond the radically different conceptions of mise-enscène evident in A Bout de souffle, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), and Bande à part (1964), one sees many similarities: notice the detached irony related to film noir, to “B-movies,” that characterizes these three films. We find the same fractured tone, with the same abrupt changes in subject, detached humor, nostalgia combined with an obsession with death, all paced in a very similar rhythm, perhaps more hectic in A Bout de souffle and in certain parts of Tirez sur le pianiste, while more nostalgic and nonchalant in other sections of that film as well as in Bande à part, the most “Truffaldian” of Godard’s movies. In contrast, it does not seem very productive to compare Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Alphaville (1965), even if the two films are more or less contemporaneous and belong to the same genre. On the contrary, their shared science fiction context highlights what sets them apart: their construction of narrative and their conception of character, as much as the styles they deploy as such. On the other hand, La Peau douce, one of Godard’s favorite films at the time, had a latent but real and deep influence on Une Femme mariée; the former was produced in 1963, the latter in 1964. When with the eye of an entomologist he films the body of Charlotte in amorous poses with her lover and her husband, Godard is recalling the first shots of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) as much as the way in which Truffaut framed Françoise Dorléac’s body in La Peau douce. While a certain desperate coolness is undeniable in these two other French films, the sociological dimension pervading Une Femme mariée is more characteristic of Godard’s aesthetic. Of course, La Peau douce is built around the point of view of the male character embodied by Jean Desailly, who repeats and counters the standard Truffaut masochist, while Une Femme mariée is primarily a portrait of a female character and her imagination as Godard constructs it. Her voice runs throughout the narrative as the actress provides a whispered commentary on all the events that punctuate her day. Still, the fact remains that the similarities between the two films are numerous and disconcerting. It would not seem to be very useful to compare Le Mépris and La Nuit américaine, the contrast being too easy and obvious. Godard’s film is clearly one of the richest of his 1960s oeuvre thanks to Alberto Moravia’s novel, which allowed the director to execute his own veritable “discourse on method,” in which he evokes the great eras from the history of cinema, including his film fetishes – Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) – and his favorite auteurs (Lang, of course, being present in the flesh, but also Ray, Rossellini, and Bertolt Brecht). Made in 1973,

Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut

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Truffaut’s film was deliberately anachronistic, based on a certain mythology of French cinema, spanning different eras to underscore their continuity. Whereas Godard directs five distinct characters isolated from the world in an empty studio, Truffaut values the “choral film” with its multiplicity of characters, like a large cinematic family together with their many little affairs. Godard actually shows us his film’s rushes in one scene, as well as the takes from a couple shots, but he emphasizes the conflicts and discussions between director, producer, and screenwriter. Truffaut instead pays a great deal of attention to the film shoot itself, with documentary-like precision. (According to Truffaut, “I kept to what could be seen, what was visually verifiable. … I treated everything like a news report, as if we were making a film for TV about my work.”) A number of details in La Nuit américaine must have provoked Godard, such as the unexpected appearance of Ernest Menzer – one of Godard’s token actors since Une Femme est une femme (1961), where he played the manager of the cabaret Le Zodiac. For Truffaut Menzer is on the set of Je vous présente Paméla, wearing a grimy raincoat and his ever-present hat; he is escorted by two Germanic “Gretchens” in clownish makeup whom he wants to introduce to Ferrand (the director, played by Truffaut himself ), asking him, “Why don’t you make political films, erotic films?” This question resurfaces later in one of Ferrand’s nightmares. The allusion to Godard’s political cinema of the seventies is clear enough. Later, Ferrand opens a parcel of books he had ordered, and a series of monographs spill out devoted to Dreyer, Buñuel, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Bresson, and Hawks. When Richard Roud’s study of Godard happens to turn up, Godard understood very well that Truffaut was including him among directors who were at the end of their careers. During a later sequence, on a highway near Nice, the film crew crosses paths with a cart driven by two peasants. We hear the line, “We are a couple of Jewish peasants,” a comic slogan referring to those with whom Godard forged the Dziga Vertov group between 1970 and 1972. The romantic theater costume that Alphonse wears in one of the last scenes with Julie, the candlelit meal, recalls the one that Jean-Pierre Léaud wears in the theater scenes of La Chinoise (1967) and Week-end. More directly, and rather cruelly, Truffaut enjoyed reusing Godard’s dialogue with biting irony. In one instance, the wife of the production manager Lajoie rails against the world of cinema: “What is this cinema? What is this profession where everyone sleeps with everyone else? Where everyone talks so familiarly [se tutoyer]? Where everyone lies? Tell me, what is it? Do you find this normal?” These sentences had been uttered by Godard’s own voice in 1959, when he dubbed Jean-Paul Belmondo in Charlotte et son Jules, with Jules also vehemently denouncing the immoral behavior in the world of cinema. Another kind of reference crops up in the scene when Ferrand, returning to the Hôtel Atlantic where the crew is staying, is informed that a certain “Mademoiselle Dominique is waiting for him.” The props man specifies that the lady in question is a  “local call girl,” whom Ferrand turns away because he has too much work that evening. The allusion to the call girl is reminiscent of Godard’s notorious behavior during his shoots, as Antoine de Baecque confirms in his biography; however, Truffaut’s practices were not much different.

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In the epilogue, Ferrand is forced to modify the scene where the son murders his father because the father, Alexandre, has in reality been killed in an accident on the ridge road in Nice, under circumstances very similar to those of Deborah Kerr in Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) – one of Godard’s favorite films around the time of A Bout de souffle. Someone suggests to Ferrand that he could have Alphonse, the son, shoot Alexandre in the back, because the actor had to be replaced after his death. Ferrand adopts the suggestion, adding, “Shooting his father in the back, that will be much more violent!” – Now recall that request Truffaut had written to criticize his friend Godard about that line at the very end of A Bout de souffle. Furthermore, this murder, committed from behind with a revolver in plain daylight, had been staged by Godard at the end of his second feature-length film, Le Petit Soldat (1963), when Bruno Forestier assassinates the law professor who is a member of the National Liberation Front. More generally, Godard must have hated the largely festive atmosphere of the shoot that Truffaut is glad to depict, and not without nostalgia. As Ferrand says, “An entire era of the cinema is going to disappear along with Alexandre. We’ve abandoned the studios; films are being made in the streets, with