Adaptation and the New Art Film: Remaking the Classics in the Twilight of Cinema (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture) [1st ed. 2021] 3030629333, 9783030629335

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Adaptation and the New Art Film Remaking the Classics in the Twilight of Cinema

William H. Mooney

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series Editors Julie Grossman Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA R. Barton Palmer Atlanta, GA, USA

This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture. Advisory Board: Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia James Naremore, Indiana University, US Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US Robert Stam, New York University, US Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Université de Bourgogne, France More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654

William H. Mooney

Adaptation and the New Art Film Remaking the Classics in the Twilight of Cinema

William H. Mooney Department of Film, Media, and Performing Arts State University of New York New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-629X     ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ISBN 978-3-030-62933-5    ISBN 978-3-030-62934-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2 Chapter 6 is reprinted by permission of LFQ: Literature/Film Quarterly; an earlier version appeared in Summer Vol 5. No 3, 2017. Material in chapter 8 previously appeared in Dashiell Hammett and the Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2014). © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Miramax/Photofest. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to President Joyce F. Brown and the board of trustees of The Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, for granting a sabbatical leave during the 2019–2020 academic year—without that time there would be no book. The interlibrary loan desk at the Gladys Marcus Library provided valuable assistance—thank you Paul, Peggy, and all. I am grateful to Dean Patrick Knisley of the School of Liberal Arts and to the Center for Excellence in Teaching at FIT for grants in support of travel to conferences. In conjunction with these, I should add my appreciation to fellow members of the Literature/Film Association and The Association of Adaptation Studies, and to the band of conspirators at SAMLA and NEMLA—you know who you are! I am especially grateful to Julie Grossman and Barton Palmer for welcoming this title into their series, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture—thank you Barton and Julie for your encouragement throughout. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Cordula Böcking of Maynooth University for help with all things German, but also for valuable insight in response to all of the book’s chapters. Thank you Lina Aboujieb for making the experience of working with Palgrave Macmillan a smooth and enjoyable one. Thanks to my son Will for serving as music consultant. Finally, the forbearance award goes once again to Margret Mercer—I can never thank you enough.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Adapting a Classic Film  25 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk: Recreation of All That Heaven Allows as Angst essen Seele auf (1974) 27 3 Far from Heaven (2002) 69 Part II Film(s) to Film  85 4 Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and City Lights (1931) 87 5 Rewriting Roma città aperta (1945) as Das Leben der Anderen (2006)117 6 From All About Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm151

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Part III Book/Film/Film Multiplicities 171 7 Chantal Akerman, Marcel Proust, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)173 8 From Dashiell Hammett to the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)207 9 Citizen Kane (1941) and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013)237 Index269

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Ali is introduced to Cary’s children Cary’s shocking red dress Emmi prepares to dance Bruno responds to his mother’s marriage Raymond: a Black Ron Kirby The Asphalt Bar: Emmi’s Welcome Reaction to Cathy and Raymond Paris view A homeless man in the shelter Alex’s desperation Pietà The extended family A child learns from its elders A child of the GDR Maria’s replacement Eve’s replacement Maria and Valentine rehearse Connection and separation Simon’s world darkens Shadows pass in the night Simon follows Ariane Johnny Caspar: Mimicking The Godfather (1972) Leo begs Tom to Stay

49 54 55 62 73 80 80 102 104 111 128 137 138 140 155 156 161 181 183 184 193 224 227

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Fig. 9.1 Leonardo DiCaprio as Orson Welles Fig. 9.2 Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949) Fig. 9.3 At the Perkins Sanitarium Fig. 9.4 Nick’s typewriter Fig. 9.5 Gatsby’s Xanadu Fig. 9.6 Gatsby the collector

252 252 256 257 259 259

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The principal aim of this book is to identify and make clear the importance of a particular group of “art films” during the last thirty years, films that redeploy canonical cinema in ways important to their engagement with the present. Scholars and students will already be aware of the frequent use of intertextual citation in films of the period; less understood, however, is the use of well-known precursors in the rhetoric and creation of meaning as a distinguishing characteristic of this subset of art films. If this book finds its unity in what these films share, however, it also emphasizes diversity among these works that are elaborated in conscious exploration of the serialities and multiplicities active in film/film and film/book relationships. Attention to this group of films also highlights a significant difference between the recirculation of texts in the art film and that in much of mass-market cinema, in part a function of framing its directors as artists with personal visions. Finally, I would underscore the importance of the sense of radical change, an ending of theatrical cinema, as one motivating condition of the orientation of these films. Theatrical viewing defined cinema for nearly a century, as an experience and as a parameter of exhibition that influences a film’s form; the nature of movie theaters and the media rivalry within which they exist has evolved over time, but ultimately the importance of the theatrical experience is receding in what is most likely a definitive shift away from the “cinema” as a primary venue and social situation for engaging with visual narratives. Thus, the films examined here, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_1

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simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking, participate in this ending of an era; they memorialize the past as they define the present, with varying degrees of anxiety about the future. The terms brought together in this book’s title—art film, adaptation, and remaking—are unstable concepts because of discursive shifts over time that have applied the same words to a wide range of objects, processes, and circumstances. “Art film” has a history that responds variously to textual modes and institutions of production, distribution, and exhibition, intersecting with overlapping categories such as “art house,” “independent film,” and “world” cinema. “Adaptation” and “remake” are both still used in narrow conventional senses, while in academic circles their meanings have expanded and shifted considerably. It is worth pointing out that ideas of adaptation and art frequently converged in early cinema, where making films based on literary classics served not only to attract audiences with pre-sold material, but also to draw the new popular medium of film into, to repurpose Dudley Andrew’s phrase, the “aura” of art.1 If convergence of the terms here is motivated by a different logic, the recycling and citation of canonical films might still be seen in part as a way of augmenting the value of the more recent works that evoke them. In order to frame the films taken up here, as well as the relationships among them and with books, some context is required, for the art film, for adaptation and remaking, for the influence of postmodernism in the period when they were made, and for what leads me to use the word “twilight” in association with “cinema.”

The Art Film “Art cinema” has been a catch-all term that has variously referred to films outside of the mainstream, for elite audiences, exhibited in particular venues, or defining one segment of the film industry and market. From a US perspective, it was long synonymous with “foreign”; from a Western orientation it has overlapped with “world” cinema. We should question, however, definitions that depend on notions of Western or Hollywood dominance, though as Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover argue, European cinema’s role in the formation of the concept of art cinema heavily influenced its currency worldwide and remains significant in the art film’s “global” expression.2 The most frequently cited characterizations of the art film are those of David Bordwell in his 1979 “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” and

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of Steve Neale’s 1981 “Art Cinema as Institution.” Bordwell and Neale refer to the same films, but from different perspectives, Bordwell emphasizing formal qualities while Neale emphasizes art cinema’s position in the market. After listing films such as 8½ (1963), Persona (1966), Jules and Jim (1962), and Vivre sa vie (1962), Bordwell opens his article with this declaration: “whatever else one can say about these films, cultural fiat gives them a role altogether different from Rio Bravo on the one hand and Mothlight on the other.”3 Rio Bravo (1969) is a Howard Hawks/John Wayne Hollywood western; Mothlight (1963) is a four-minute abstract film created by Stan Brackage by drawing directly on celluloid film stock. The art film occupies the space between: “These are ‘art films,’ and, ignoring the tang of snobbishness about the phrase, we can say that these … constitute a distinct branch of the cinematic institution.”4 Neale fundamentally agrees. Art films’ formal qualities help differentiate them from Hollywood, while the films additionally “turn to high art and to the cultural traditions specific to the country involved.” Thus, art cinema is “supported by discourses functioning to perpetuate art and culture”; but the films must not be Mothlight: they must not “transgress the social, sexual, political and aesthetic boundaries that these discourses construct”—or they end up as “the avant-garde, agit-prop, pornography….”5 Differing from the mainstream, especially from “Hollywood,” is important, but art films must not cross other boundaries in ways that render them marginal. Bordwell focuses on the art film’s narration as communicating a fundamentally different reality from that of “classical” narratives.6 The perspective of the viewer of classical cinema is omniscient, viewing the world of the film from the outside, separate from a story that has its own reality, however recounted. Characters’ motivation and objectives are clear, deadlines are set, the movement of the story is linear, excluding the extraneous gaps that are covered over in the editing and in movement between scenes. By contrast, the art film is more committed to an “objective and subjective verisimilitude”7 in which time expands and linear order is disrupted, while chance events impede forward movement of the narrative and divert attention. Characters become reactive and wander, lacking “defined desires and goals.” Knowledge of the world of the film is limited, full of lacunae. Above all, in the art film, authorial commentary is intrusive, to be inferred from camera movements, distances, and angles that call attention to themselves, and by disjunctive editing. In this way, “the art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film’s system … [as] a formal component, the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension.”8

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Both Bordwell and Neale associate the art film with the modernist novel, Bordwell borrowing the phrase “boundary situation” to describe narratives “organized towards pointed situations in which a presented persona, a narrator, or the implied reader in a flash of insight becomes aware of meaningful as against meaningless existence.”9 But when Bordwell identifies the important quality of “ambiguity” that marks the art film, it is not as a representation of mysteries of the human condition, but rather as a formal “device” employed by the author to unify a film when its “realisms” and its authorial expressivity become contradictory. “The art film solicits a particular reading procedure,” such that “whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or spatiality, we first seek realistic motivation…. If we are thwarted, we next seek authorial motivation.”10 “Put crudely,” he writes, “the slogan of the art cinema might be, ‘When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity’.” Bordwell’s dismissive tone here seems to stem from a belief that the art film is merely a minor variant of the vastly more important mass-market cinema, with an unarticulated assumption that Hollywood imposed itself globally as the “classic” cinematic form. Thus, “the art film requires the classical [Hollywood] background set because deviations from the norm must be registered as such to be placed as realism or authorial expression.”11 In other words, the art film can only be understood with reference to “classical” form. For Neale also, art films are “marked at the textual level by the inscription of features that function as marks of enunciation… and hence, as signifiers of an authorial voice (and look).”12 And again, stylistic features and the foregrounding of authorship of the art cinema arise not for expressive or communicative value; rather, for Neale, their reason for being is a market opportunity—they “differentiate the text or texts in question from the texts produced by Hollywood.” Neale recognizes Hollywood’s dominance in international markets, but from a European perspective, he underscores “the role played by … ‘Art Cinema’ in attempts … both to counter American domination of indigenous markets in film and also to foster a film industry and a film culture of their own.”13 Pathé and Gaumont in France, UFA in Germany, and the Cinecittà studios in Italy were never, in their various configurations, able to compete with the power of the Hollywood studio system. Thus, on the one hand, Britain and countries across Europe repeatedly set up protectionist barriers to slow the inflow of Hollywood imports, on the other, they subsidized indigenous production, usually with an emphasis on art cinema and the culture of the particular country. France’s 1953 Loi de Dèveloppement de l’Industrie Cinèmatographique, for

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example, placed “enormous stress …on art, culture, and education, both in drafting the law and in arguing and reporting it to the various state bodies involved.” As Neale writes, “the function of differentiation is crucial”; “art” becomes “the space in which an indigenous cinema can develop and make its critical and economic mark.”14 In the period between 1945 and the 1970s, the binary opposition between the United States and Europe with respect to the art film is particularly marked. From the American perspective, recession in Hollywood was accompanied by an expanded awareness of “art house” imports—the Italian neorealists, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, the French Nouvelle Vague, a later wave of directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and so forth—which put pressure on the American industry to open to European influence, as well as to currents within its own developing “independent” cinema. Yet while there was growth in the number of art houses in New York and across the United States, and while there was wide awareness of European and other “foreign” directors internationally, knowledge of them in America remained more narrowly restricted. While “art” was a space for indigenous cinema in Europe, the American market resisted penetration of the “foreign” films lumped together under the “art house” label; art films, strictly speaking, were only one strand of this market. “As originally understood by the trade,” writes Tino Balio, “the art [film] market was a subindustry devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of critically acclaimed foreign and English-language films produced abroad without Hollywood involvement. … they encompassed a range of styles, genres and modes of production. … About the only generalization one could make about the style of these films is that they departed more or less from Hollywood narrative norms.”15 Resistance to art-house cinema was rooted in all aspects of its alien nature, from languages other than English and subtitles, to the “cultural traditions” cited by Neale, encompassing ways of living, morality, and even American audiences’ fundamental education as viewers.16 Arthur Knight, writing in the Saturday Review in 1952, describes this well: “Our cinema habits have long been used to a sort of comic strip clarity, and it is quite possible that Diary of a Country Priest [1951] calls for the exercise of faculties more often required by the serious novel….”17 “Comic strip clarity” is, of course, the overdetermined directness reflected in Bordwell’s description of classical Hollywood film. The art film, then, was one strand of art-house exhibition, which ultimately became a venue for nearly any film that stood apart from the

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mainstream market, including films on social issues, politics, the avantgarde, or “off-beat” in any way, such as the British Ealing comedies. One of the more important strains was the erotic, sometimes described in terms of artistic realism in representing love and sexuality, sometimes recognized as soft-core pornography. “No one on either side of the Atlantic or Pacific wants to admit it today,” wrote Andrew Sarris in 1999, “but the fashion for foreign films depended a great deal on their frankness about sex. At a time when the Hollywood censors imposed twin-bed strictures on American movies, foreign films were daringly adult.”18 Daniel Talbot, manager of New Yorker Theater in the 1960s, clearly expressed frustration with the deceptive “art house” label: “We show old films, new films, foreign or American films. Just so long as they’re good. Don’t call us an ‘art house.’ I hate the term.”19 “Good” films, as distinct from the ordinary, reflects an assumption of elite audiences for art-house fare, reminding us of Bordwell’s “tang of snobbishness” associated with the words “art film.” A 1954 article in Variety underscores the point: art houses captured a “lost audience,” that is to say, “mature, adult, sophisticated people who read good books and magazines, who attend lectures and concerts, who are politically and socially aware and alert. These people have been literally driven out of the motion picture theater by the industry’s insistence on aiming most of its product at the lowest level.”20 People learned about art-house films almost exclusively from reviews and word of mouth, with New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther playing an outsized role, the Times readership including, as Balio emphasizes, the “well educated, affluent, and politically liberal, the exact demographic of the art house.”21 It is important to emphasize that at the height of its success, the art house competed for a very small share of the US market, rising to a maximum of 7 percent in the 1960–1973 period, then falling back to an average of only 2 percent.22 If the art film, among a range of other imports, was resolutely defined in its art-house circulation as “foreign,” US cinema in Europe was fully familiar, as Bordwell and Neale emphasize. Much of Hollywood’s revenue came from international distribution, and while these films can be seen as colonial invasion, on the one hand injecting into other national settings images, assumptions, and agendas constructed via the powerful American film industry, on the other hand studios aimed at creating films that would market well everywhere, an extension of their aim to address all audiences in the broad domestic market. As Douglas Sirk repeated in conjunction

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with the radical simplicity and overdetermination of his style, his films were expected to play as well in Singapore as in Kansas.23 More to the point here, the successful export of Hollywood films throughout the twentieth century made them a staple in the menu of viewing options for people in many countries. This is to say that, consumed from childhood, Hollywood films were largely naturalized as a common local experience. Take an extreme example, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931): given the scale of Chaplin’s celebrity and the affection with which the French appreciated Charlot, how easy is it to disentangle the British, American, and French strands of a French viewer’s experience of this comic melodrama? Discerning the transnational dimensions of many films becomes as complex as parsing other transnational complexities of daily life, from widely used loan words, to imported products, fashions in clothing, musical styles, and so on. Elements of “foreignness” are frequently a part of, even typical of, one’s local situation and formation. European adaptation or citation of canonical Hollywood movies, occurring mainly in an art film context, builds on shared experience within the local culture of this nominally foreign product. The international art cinema remained “foreign” in the United States, but differentiating a domestic equivalent from the mainstream became more complicated because of changes in American culture and in the film industry from the late 1960s on. As Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1970, “the movies entered the 60s as a mass entertainment medium in trouble, and they leave them as a mass but minority art form, important and newly influential, widely divergent and addressed to many divergent audiences….”24 Interesting for this book is not the rich and complex history of US independent cinema per se, but how, as a category, “independent” intersects with “art cinema.” “Independent” is as multifaceted and unstable a term as “art film,” and the categories overlap to the point that each can be described as a subset of the other. As Yannis Tzioumakis has documented, “independent” has included a very wide range of financing and production situations throughout cinema history; as a result, his important book on the subject tracks not a specific type of film but rather an evolving “discourse” around the idea of independent production.25 To define “independent cinema” in a critically useful way, Tzioumakis and others are inevitably forced to rely on a basket of characteristics beyond the production situation and the film’s place in the market, only some of which pertain in any given situation. Jim Hillier emphasized that “historically, ‘independent’ has always implied work

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different from the dominant mainstream.”26 Emanuel Levy’s more pointed definition introduces other characteristics: “Ideally, an indie is a fresh, low-­ budget movie with a gritty style and off-beat subject matter that expresses the filmmaker’s personal vision.”27 Geoff King finds—as did Bordwell and Neale in attempting to define the art film—that “independent cinema exists in the overlapping territory between Hollywood and a number of alternatives: the experimental ‘avant-garde’, the more accessible ‘art’ or ‘quality’ cinema, the politically engaged, the low budget exploitation film, and the more generally offbeat or eccentric.”28 Typically, King’s effort to circumscribe independent cinema includes “the position of individual films, or filmmakers, in terms of (1) their industrial location, (2) the kinds of formal/aesthetic strategies they adopt, and (3) their relationship to the broader social, cultural, political or ideological landscape.”29 If his second category echoes Bordwell’s formalist definition of the art cinema, his third reminds us of the inclusive art-house aggregation of non-mainstream types. “Independent,” for King, again echoing Bordwell and Neale, “is a space that exists between the more familiar, conventional mainstream and the more radical departures of the avant-garde or the underground.”30 Low budgets, as Levy suggests, are important with respect to authorship, regardless of the sources of financing, for they allow filmmakers to address a narrow audience without the risk of losing large amounts of money. As King emphasizes, this freedom permits authorial choice of “form and content”: “the indie sector is, clearly, a place where more scope generally exists than in Hollywood for the pursuit of auteurist individual freedom of expression; for filmmakers to express their own particular vision of the world though choices of form and content.”31 Yet the prerogative of authorship is sometimes also asserted with larger budgets, of course, particularly in the US market where “specialty” divisions of conglomerates have financed well-known directors capable of achieving commercial viability—the Coen Brothers and Todd Haynes, among the directors considered in the chapters that follow, are examples of this. “Independent” film remains an elastic term that both escapes inevitable association with “foreign” and the limiting elitism of “art,” while including films such as Stranger than Paradise (1984), Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), or those of Hal Hartley, which might easily be categorized as American art films. We will return to the insistent presence of auteurism in all definitions of art cinema, but here I would also mention the unstable term “world” cinema. From a US perspective, “world” is a substitute for “foreign,” with

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all of its implications of otherness. Thus, problematically, as Steven Rawle writes, “what is often not included in the term ‘world cinema’ is Hollywood, against which all world cinemas are considered to struggle, resist and/or oppose.”32 American art cinema, however labeled, similarly falls prey to exclusion from “world” cinema, and the label cogently raises the issue of a US and Eurocentric point of view in film studies and generally; as Rawle suggests, “shifting from a mono-cultural point of view to multi-cultural polycentric outlooks invites us to challenge how we see the world, especially if we view the world through the point of view of western privilege.”33 He embraces Lúcia Nagib’s advocacy for “a method in which Hollywood and the West would cease to be the center of film history, and nothing [would] need to be excluded from the world map, not even Hollywood.”34 Rawle prefers to focus on the idea of the “transnational”; for their 2010 Global Art Cinema, Galt and Schoonover reject “world” in their title for the same reasons that Rawle and Nagib criticize it.35 For Galt and Schoonover, however, “foreign” and specifically European in relation to art cinema remain a historical dimension of the development of the art cinema concept, actively real in filmmaking practice and institutionally. They argue that “synthetic accounts of the European art cinema tend toward a ‘taken-for-granted sense of Europeanness’ that connects and nourishes the canonical art cinema directors, usually in opposition to Hollywood as the commercial and stylistic other.”36 This continues to exert pressure on filmmakers beyond the United States and Europe to distinguish their work from the local and to address international audiences in a marketplace linked to the major European film markets and festivals. To define a global art cinema, Galt and Schoonover in fact return to qualities identified by Bordwell, Neale, and King: “We propose the category of art cinema can only be mapped with an approach that intersects industry, history, and textuality,” which translates for them into its market segment and the issues of content and form that set it apart from commercial mainstreams. “Impurity” is Galt and Schoonover’s term for what characterizes the art film. Art cinema “perverts” standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, histories, or spectators. It has an “ambivalent” relation to location, to critical and industrial categories such as stardom and (Hollywood) authorship, and it troubles notions of genre (including “independent cinema”). Furthermore, global art cinema constructs a “peculiarly impure spectator” by soliciting, for example, one who is “intellectually engaged and emotionally affected.” Galt and Schoonover

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emphasize authorship as do all definitions of the art film, specifically “a different version than the Hollywood auteur.” Summing up and echoing a familiar refrain, they write: as a term, art film remains “an elastic, hybrid category [that] has nonetheless sustained an astonishing discursive currency in contemporary film culture. … Used in critical histories of postwar European and U.S. cinema to carve out a space of aesthetic and commercial distinction that is neither mainstream nor avant-garde, the term remains an everyday concept for film industries, critics and audiences.”37

Adaptation and Remaking The centrality of authorship in the art film—and in “independent” cinema—along with its elite, cinephile audience, is one of the major reasons that adaptation/remaking in art films is different from what occurs in more mainstream and commercial cinema. The cultural status and pre-­ sold titles of canonical literary works are at the heart of what was, from the beginning of film history, a particular category of films, establishing the conventional transmedial, book-to-film use of the word “adaptation,” which only gradually has given way to more expansive, inclusive, and exploratory applications. In this conventional usage, the source text must be known to audiences if a film made from it is to be read as an adaptation. In Linda Hutcheon’s words, “… if we are not familiar with the particular work that [a film] adapts, we simply experience the adaptation as we would any other work.”38 Though books and films are “inherently ‘palimpsestuous’,” their double, or plural, nature must be recognized before they can be experienced as adaptations, and, for Hutcheon, “it is only as inherently double- or multilaminated works that can be theorized as adaptations.”39 Implicit in the relationship between revered books and movies is the unequal status of source text and “copy,” an imbalance especially exaggerated in an earlier era when film, as a new and merely popular medium, was regarded as inferior. The persistent debates in adaptation studies over “fidelity” are an outgrowth of the status accorded to the literary work— one needs to be faithful only to an esteemed object of cultural significance and historical priority.40 The emphasis on change in the word “adaptation” referred more to the shift from one medium to another than to deliberate alteration of core elements of the “original.” In the art film, the emphasis on authorship—what might be called an arrogance of authorship—reduces the likelihood of fidelity even as a secondary goal of an adaptation because the textual authority of the source is

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challenged by the “personal vision” and claims to importance of a second author, the creator of the film. Even where a film author deeply admires the source, there is an inherent competition for control of the work. André Bazin’s well-known essay on the film adaptation of George Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de champagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) provides an example, arguing powerfully that Robert Bresson’s cinematic style imposes itself. If in a long history of adaptation, Bazin writes, “film tended to substitute for the novel,” yet in the case of Bresson “there is no question of translation, no matter how faithful or intelligent. Still less is it a question of free inspiration with the intention of making a duplicate. It is a question of building a secondary work with the novel as a foundation.”41 Bazin’s analysis goes beyond the question of medium specificity to insist on Bresson’s authorial vision in a “new aesthetic creation.” The idea of adaptation as theorized by Hutcheon and others largely favored a comparison of whole texts, eschewing multiple sources on the one hand, and fragmentary influences on the other. We can take Andrew’s definition from the perspective of the 1980s as typical of this earlier model: it refers to an “explicitly, foregrounded relation of a cinematic text to a well-constructed original text from which it derives and which in some sense it strives to reconstruct.”42 This idea has changed to reflect both an evolution in our critical understanding of texts as a nexus of intersecting currents and multiple relationships, and an evolution in the media landscape that promotes, to borrow Constantine Verevis’s phrase, an increased circulation of texts. Robert Stam refers to this shift in our critical understanding as the “impact of the posts,” which leads to a dismantling of hierarchy, a devalorization of artistic “originality,” and a distrust of authorship as a product of the “ego-artifact” of the self, in Lacanian terms. Barton Palmer and Amanda Ann Klein express a now widely accepted view of the porosity of texts, which “…are hardly self-contained, being joined by various bonds to other texts and often participating in more than one series or grouping.”43 “If authors are fissured, fragmented, multi-discursive, hardly ‘present’ even to themselves,” Stam asks, “how can an adaptation communicate the ‘spirit’ of ‘self-presence’ of authorial intention?” Adaptation becomes “an orchestration of discourses, talents, and tracks, a ‘hybrid’ construction mingling different media and discourses and collaborations.” Approaches such as “cultural studies” contribute to a disintegration of individual texts by emphasizing “‘horizontal’ relations between neighboring media.”44

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The expansion of adaptation studies as a field occurred in tandem with this altered sense of textual dis-integrity, directing the attention of scholars to the movement of narratives and images through texts across many media, a reorientation additionally facilitated by a shift in emphasis from using “adaptation” as a noun to using it as a verb. Referring to the process as well as to the product further deemphasizes both the source and the result in favor of a ubiquitous and incessant activity of transformation, from books to films, certainly, but also of films to books, intra- and trans-­medial permutations among novels, comics, films, television, video games, historical narratives, news reports, theatrical performances, and paintings—there can be no exhaustive list. In its verb form, inevitably shadowed by Darwinian associations, “adaptation” has come to refer to all kinds of transformations, leading, in Stam’s words, to “a well-stocked archive of tropes and concepts to account for the mutation of forms across media: adaptation as reading, rewriting, critique, translation, transmutation, metamorphosis, recreation, transvocalization, resuscitation, transfiguration, actualization, transmodalization, signifying, performance, dialogization, cannibalization, reenvisioning, incarnation, or reincarnation.”45 Among the terms for adaptation within one medium, “remaking”— which is originally described as, in Leitch’s plain-speaking phrase, “new versions of old movies”—has followed “adaptation” in being applied to an increasingly broad range of situations, now extending, in David Will’s words, to a generalized study of “institutional form[s] of the structure of repetition,… the citationality or iterability, that exists in and for every film.”46 In Hollywood, the practice arose where ownership of a literary property’s adaptation rights allowed its owners to reuse stories and characters to make as many film versions as they like.47 Leitch was primarily interested in situations where the rights of an underlying literary property are held separately from the film adaptation of it, creating a triangle of relationships among a literary work, a film adaptation of it, and remakes of that film which also relate in complex ways to the literary source. The word “remake” survives removal from this literary connection, however, because in commercial cinema such film-to-film remaking often replicates the relationship between films in the earlier context. Commercial film remakes without a literary precursor continue to exploit the pre-sold value of a previous film title or story, the reference to the earlier film usually presenting itself as a mixture of homage and improvement in bringing the earlier work to a later cultural moment with the latest film technology. In large-scale commercial production, where considerable money is at risk,

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pressure increases to secure box-office receipts. This financial reality typically reduces the role of authorship. Because such films must attempt to please everyone, as Leitch argued, references to a precursor are likely to be non-essential to the audience’s appreciation of the remake. Citations can be relegated to “throwaway jokes whose point is not necessary to the film’s continuity,” merely providing “an optional bonus of pleasure to those in the know.”48 In the art film context, this will be different, among other reasons because it is situated differently in European markets. As Leitch also notes, “film classics occupy a much more marginal status in American culture. … The ‘film classic’ has a much narrower meaning in America than in France.”49 This is one consequence of film having long been legitimized as art in Europe, with an “enormous stress …on art, culture, and education,” to repeat Neale’s phase. Film classics in such a context can claim a higher status, more akin to that of literary works. It follows that where the film classic is closer in status to the literary classic, film “remakes” of them can follow the pattern of literature/film adaptation, that is to say, fuller and more profound engagement with the source text. Film references in art cinema can constitute considerably more than “throwaway” citations of the Hollywood remake; the film artist can now deploy references as an essential aspect of the rhetoric of a new film. Because “remaking” in the narrow sense is largely a phenomenon of commercial cinema, most of the academic literature on transnational films focuses on Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films for US markets.50 Constantine Verevis and Iain Robert Smith argue that “it may be time for scholarship to start addressing other remake trajectories.”51 Shifting the focus to the art film reverses, in some degree, this unidirectional critical orientation. It would, of course, be incorrect to view art cinema as immune to late twentieth-century changes in production, distribution, and exhibition in the broader film industry. Citation and remaking were stimulated in both commercial cinema and the art film by technological developments in the early 1970s, as home video circulation created a library of readily available films, which, as Verevis describes, “radically extend[s]… the ability to recognize and cross-reference multiple versions of the same property.”52 The resulting increase in “film literacy” does create an “institutionally determined practice of film canon formation and its contributing projects—the determination to comment upon and conserve a film heritage, the discussion and citation of particular films in popular and academic film criticism, the selective release and re-release of films to theatrical and video

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distribution windows, the proliferation of talk and websites on the Internet and (in circular fashion) the decision of other filmmakers to evoke earlier films and recreate cinema history.”53 But the impact of these changes on film audiences is not uniform. For cinephiles—already prone to repeated viewing where public exhibition permitted it—as well as multiplying the echoes of star postures, telling confrontations, sharp dialogue and gestures, the increased access to a library of admired films encourages, whether through limited or extensive allusion, further comparison among integral texts and directorial styles. Even where a citation itself is brief, it can evoke Andrew’s “well-constructed original text,” facilitating a perspective on the new work “as an adaptation.” Whether under a rubric of adaptation or of remaking, critical and scholarly consideration of the relationship among texts must now include all aspects of continuity and difference, acknowledged and unacknowledged, admiring and corrective, complicit or progressive. A phrase borrowed by Adrian Martin from Raúl Ruiz, “vicinity and resonance,” captures this open field of possible intertextual association.54 Preferring the more neutral word “sequel” to adaptation or remake—ignoring its narrow use for the continuation of a narrative or fictive world—Martin is especially interested in disjunctive and antithetical relationships. He calls them “modernist sequels,” and advocates for a way of reading films that disrupts those they are in dialogue with, by way of “commentary and critique,” discovering “ruinous sequels” that subvert the original rather than demonstrate continuity.55 As with radical recasting of actors in particular roles, he imagines a new work, “exploding the identity” of the earlier one.56 Advocating a less “pacific route” that does not limit itself to “conscious artistic strategies,” he cites Claire Denis’s ideas of “filiation,” “transmission,” and an “unconscious” passing of material from one text into another.57 To this I would add Marie Martin’s notion of Le remake secret, in which a viewer elaborates a fiction théorique in perceiving how, in psychoanalytic terms, a later film can recapitulate the Traumarbeit of an earlier one, masking the commonality of their repeated narrative of trauma in order to dissipate its menace58—she rightly introduces the idea of adaptation as a “heuristic” strategy on the part of viewers as well as of directors.59 Even if the auteurist imperative of the art film inevitably foregrounds a director’s “conscious artistic strategies,” this should not foreclose the viewer’s prerogative of discovering and elaborating a film’s “resonance” with other texts.60 In what I take as an invitation, Adrian Martin concludes his article with the question: “Why has there been so little work done thus far, within scholarly film analysis, on the modernist sequel”?61

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Postmodernism and the Decline of Theatrical Exhibition An openness to seeing more varied interrelationships among films and their precursors reflects, as Verevis underscores, “a historically specific response to a postmodern circulation and recirculation of images and texts.”62 While more selective in its canon of prestigious films, the art cinema resists neither the abundant citation that this encourages, nor postmodernism as a style and a philosophy. One of Stam’s “posts,” postmodernism is more directly influential on cinematic style because of its emphasis on allusion and the recycling of images, and because of its skepticism—more radical in some instances than in others—concerning the referential nature of narratives and images. Noël Carroll could write in 1982 that “allusionism, specifically to film history, has become a major expressive device, that is a means that directors use to make comments on the fictional worlds of their films.”63 “Allusion” for Carroll includes “quotations, the memorialization of past genres, the reworking of past genres, homages, and the recreation of ‘classic’ scenes, shots, plot motifs, lines of dialogue, themes, gestures, and so forth from film history.” It is based on this, in some degree, that critics refer to the existence of a “cinematic postmodernism” since the early 1980s.64 We should keep in mind, however, that this cinematic postmodernism varies from deliberately and programmatically postmodern films to those merely participating in a zeitgeist of embracing allusion as an element of style. “Postmodern theory presents the world as a text,” as Catherine Constable writes in Postmodernism and Film, “one that is constantly constructed and reconstructed through competing discourses.” For Constable there are two strains of postmodernism, a “nihilistic” one and a more “affirmative” one, exemplified on the one hand by Jean Baudrillard, followed closely by Jameson, and on the other by Linda Hutcheon.65 Like Carroll, both Baudrillard and Jameson present what Constable calls “narratives of decline,” Baudrillard, using the concept of remaking in the broadest sense, describes a process that “constitutes a move into the hyperreal because it builds image upon image.” Movement in this direction transpires through five stages: the image begins as (a) the “reflection of a basic reality, then progressively (b) it “masks” and perverts reality, then (c) “masks the absence of a basic reality,” then (d) bears no relationship to reality whatever. “The final stage [e] marks the ‘order of simulation,’ marking the beginning of the postmodern, an era in which there no

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longer is any reality—only the hyperreal.”66 Cinema that has reached this stage becomes “locked into an utterly circular process”; it “plagiarizes and copies itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, [and] retroactivates its original myths….”67 The emptiness of meaning that results from a loss of referential power creates the “nihilism” to which Constable and others refer, which she works to counter by way of Hutcheon’s definition of the postmodern based on a notion of parody: “While Baudrillard constructs the loss of the objective ground of value as the end of all possible value systems, Hutcheon focuses on diverse socio-cultural constructions of value.”68 For Hutcheon, “…postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and its theory) at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic rereading of the art of the past.”69 The sense of whether a movement from modernism to postmodernism represents continuous evolution or a fundamental discontinuity is among the questions about which there is little consensus. From the perspective of Baudrillard and Jameson, a radical break occurs from the past when the image becomes severed from notions of an underlying reality. Hutcheon denies such a break, arguing that postmodernism “clearly also developed out of other modernist strategies: its self-reflexive experimentation, its ironic ambiguities and its contestations of classic realist representation.”70 Thus she presents postmodernism as a polyphony of voices, none fully informed by the real and yet remaining linked to it. In practice, the new art film is a space within which contradictions between views such as those of Jameson and Hutcheon find expression, for as a category of film it straddles the divide that separates them, some art films continuing with the concerns and manner of modernism, some showing the radical skepticism that defines reality as free-floating images, narratives, or voices, without grounding in any deeper reality, accessible or not, from which they spring and to which they refer. Interestingly, Jameson’s 1991 book on postmodernism opens with a phrase suggesting the sense of an ending that pervades the films examined here. “The last few years,” he writes, “have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that—the end of ideology, of art, or social class….”71 To Jameson’s list, I would add the end of cinema and, more specifically, of theatrical cinema as the

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primary viewing situation of visual narratives, which must compound the sense of an ending mentioned above, Baudrillard’s view of a cinema “locked into an utterly circular process [that] plagiarizes and copies itself….” Here is Tzioumakis’s account of the shift away from theatrical cinema, beginning in the 1990s and picking up speed in the twenty-first century when “digital technology … started changing the rules of film distribution.” “Bypassing of the theatrical distribution and exhibition circuit,” he writes, results in “a lot of this activity not being seen anymore as ‘cinema’ or ‘filmmaking’ but rather as media making, which can circulate fluidly in a multitude of digital platforms in order to reach as easily as possible the smart screen technologies.” To emphasize his point, he quotes Patricia R.  Zimmermann’s call in 2005 for an “independent narrative film … to be rethought as a form of cinema that moves across different platforms and through different audiences and economies, rather than the more static model of the feature-length film on celluloid that plays in theatres and film festivals.”72 I will not belabor the point, but merely ask the question: can there be an “art cinema” without the cinemas that shape viewing practices, including duration, long associated with the feature film? Clearly “art” will not cease to be made, yet fuller consideration would take us immediately to other forms of visual narrative, from “quality” television series to music videos, games, and to a flow of gestures and images circulating on devices of all kinds. Nearly all of the directors discussed in this book were formed in the long shadow of the French Nouvelle Vague, heavily influenced not only by its auteurist obsession, but by the profound cinephilia of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the 1950s and their confreres across Europe and globally. Their films are art cinema, varying across the wide parameters described above, all marked in various ways as distinct from the mainstream, as Neale would argue one aspect of positioning them in the market. Some have circulated more widely in networks of commercial exhibition, yet they nonetheless insist on authorship well beyond its use in brand recognition, even in instances where their view of reality might subvert the concept of authorship. Some distinguish themselves from classical models more obviously by their formal experimentation, but in all cases, I would argue, their exploitation of classic precursors in itself insists that we see them as art cinema. In looking to the past for support, all of the films considered here exist in a tension of continuity and discontinuity, embracing the precursors they

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evoke and rewrite. Emphasizing these tensions, we can use Martin’s term and call the relationships “modernist.” But it goes beyond an aesthetic strategy, to reflect tensions between past and present that we feel in life with respect to our history. The cinema so beloved in the 1960s and 1970s was already threatened by population shifts to the suburbs and television, and forecasts of the end of cinema are a frequently recurring trope in film history.73 Faced with an onslaught of multiplying screens and Internet connectivity, however, the pressure on theatrical distribution and reception grows ever more intense. From the 1990s, approaching the millennium and into the twenty-first century, the directors taken up here—some emphasizing spectacle best appreciated on the large screen—all seem to work with an awareness of being in an extended moment of twilight, shortly before theatrical cinema goes dark. It should be pointed out that the “classics” that these directors remake are themselves “independent” productions, or at least films by directors able to defend their singularity within the studio system—Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Mankiewicz, or Douglas Sirk. Canons of “great directors” and “great films” form and shift over time, sometimes gradually, sometimes precipitously for the widest range of reasons in their intersection with audiences and culture. Welles was long synonymous with the artist in Hollywood; Hitchcock franchised authorial control and identity; Mankiewicz was elevated above the mass of Hollywood directors by the Cahiers critics defending their politique des auteurs; Sirk’s melodramas for Universal carried Hollywood style to excess such that he was canonized in the early 1970s by cinephiles and critics, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Charlie Chaplin was deified globally, guaranteeing extraordinary independence and artistic freedom as a director. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) became the center of a myth of independent production and launched a florescence of European art film exhibition and influence in America. The “classics” cited by the Coen Brothers in Miller’s Crossing are first of all literary, the creations of Dashiell Hammett, but additionally films-noir and neo-noir, the gangster genre, and The Godfather (1972), all variously askew in their relationships with the mainstream. For the directors who chose these films and their makers as points of reference, as lenses for definition and qualification of the present, these works become part of an origin story and anchor for their own. This book is organized in three parts, the first focusing on Fassbinder as a transitional figure into the “postmodern” period that produced the

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rest of the films. Fassbinder is by any measure an extraordinary figure, but from the perspective of adaptation studies he is particularly interesting, heavily influenced by his experience of adaptation and performance in the theater of the late 1960s, by the cinema of the French New Wave and especially of Godard, making a prodigious number and range of films in thirteen years, including adaptations of the novels of Theodor Fontane, Alfred Döblin, and Jean Genet, for audiences ranging from German television viewers to art cinema aficionados. Fassbinder introduces the other studies in this book because of his remarkable move to treat film-to-film adaptation with the seriousness traditionally reserved for literary sources. Examination of Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002) rounds out the first section. His radical and uncanny recasting of the world represented in Sirk’s films—with retrospective knowledge of Rock Hudson’s gay identity and Fassbinder’s urban Munich remake—dramatizes a shift occurring in the art cinema in the generation following the 1970s. Part II focuses on three very different instances of film-to-film adaptation. Leos Carax’s aggressively postmodern elaboration based on Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) continues, contests, and comments on Chaplin’s performance, narrative, style, and manner of representation, deploying as part of Carax’s stylistic arsenal reference to numerous other films, especially Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), in dialogue with Roma città aperta (1945), contrasts with Carax’s film in its almost classical rhetoric, yet the film opened for public examination the wound of East Germany’s authoritarianism and collaboration, in the deeper shadow of German actions during World War II and the Holocaust. Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) is a reworking of the aging actress motif, All About Eve (1950) for a social media generation; Assayas’s unassuming sophistication models yet another of the art film’s disguises, that of an apparently mainstream European product that upon closer examination makes one feel acutely the ephemeral and performative nature of personal identity. The cluster of films examined in Part III of this book develops complex relationships with literary antecedents through a filter of canonical films. Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000) redeploys Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as a lens through which to read Volume V, La Prisonnière, of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990) remixes Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novels, especially The Glass Key, with reference to two early film versions, as well as to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The concluding chapter takes up Baz

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Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2013). Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain” style foregrounds music and spectacle, introducing in kaleidoscopic fashion images from, and references to, a broad swath of cinema and cultural history, including Leonardo DiCaprio’s star persona, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes from The Aviator (2004), and in turn Welles’s Citizen Kane. The films examined here have been selected as both typical and idiosyncratic, their geographical range limited mainly by my experience—a book taking a similar approach to Asian cinema would be especially welcome. They are all art films remaking the classics in a period of anxiety about change, expressing in their various ways nostalgia for a once popular art form now destined for museums, capturing the moment between past and future.

Notes 1. See his 1984 book of that title. 2. Galt and Schoonover (Kindle), Introduction. 3. Bordwell, 1979, 649. 4. Ibid. 5. Neale, 15. 6. See also “Art Cinema Narration” in Bordwell, 1985, 205–228. 7. 652. 8. Ibid. 9. 1985, 209. He quotes Horst Ruthrof from The Reader’s Construction of Narrative (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 102. 10. 654. 11. 656. 12. 13–14. 13. 13. 14. Neal, 19. 15. Balio, “Introduction.” 16. In Vincent Canby’s words, viewers “persist in calling any film that is subtitled an ‘art’ film, no matter how commonplace the subject matter, theme, and treatment.” Balio, “The De Sica – Loren Collaborations.” 17. May 24, in Balio, “The French New Wave”; Godard was taken as emblematic of the “avant-garde,” described by Eugene Archer in the NY Times as “filling every requirement: … eccentric, irritating, rebellious, intellectual, original and totally personal” (February 5, 1961). Vivre sa vie (1962) inspired visceral anger and dismissal by all major critics but one, in Time magazine.

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18. New York Times, May 2, 1999, quoted in Balio, Chapter 14, “Collapse.” 19. Balio, Chapter 4, “Market Dynamics.” 20. Ibid. 21. Balio, “Introduction.” 22. Balio, “Epilogue.” 23. Werner Rainer Fassbinder recalls Sirk quoting Darryl F.  Zanuck. The Anarchy of the Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 77. 24. Balio, Chapter 14, “Hollywood in Transition.” 25. 10. 26. Hillier, Jim, ed. The American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader. London: BFI, 2001. In Tzioumakis, 6. 27. Levy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of the American Independent Film. New York: New York University Press, 1999. In Tzioumakis, 1. 28. King, 5–6. 29. King, 2. King here excludes the “quality” art film from his version of independent cinema, following Geoffrey Nowell-Smith who divides the art film into “quality” mainstream films and those that are avant-garde. Galt and Schoonover, “Introduction.” 30. King, 10. 31. King, 10. Clearly there are exceptions—where an author’s name is a powerful brand, he or she maintains influence over content even with large budgets. 32. Rawle, 6. 33. Rawle, xii. 34. Quoted in Rawle, 7. 35. That is, a “fetishistic multiculturalism [of] discourse in world cinema that does not mean the whole world but those areas outside Europe and North America.” Galt and Schoonover, “Introduction.” 36. Galt and Shoonover, “Introduction.” 37. Ibid. 38. 120. 39. 6. 40. Although Dudley Andrew famously labelled debates over fidelity “tiresome,” back in 1980, they remain common in reactions to new adaptations of well-known works. 41. What is Cinema, 142. 42. From Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, Braudy and Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2009, 373. Early writing on the remake made this same assumption, as in Michael Druxman’s Make it Again Sam, which required the remake to “borrow more than just an element or two from its predecessor.” Cited in Verevis, 5.

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43. 1. 44. 9. 45. 25. 46. Verevis, Film Remakes, 3. 47. Leitch’s interest is in the triangular relationship formed among books that are made into films which are then “remade.” The property rights align the initial commercial worth of this “original” with its cultural status. Understanding this triangular relationship allows us to see, in Leitch’s view, how textual authority is distributed among a literary source, a film adaptation, and a subsequent film version (the remake). 48. 42. 49. 48. 50. As Verevis and Iain Robert Smith write, “Given the Hollywood-centrism of film remake scholarship, and film studies more broadly, it is perhaps no surprise that the majority of publications dealing with transnational film remakes have focused on Hollywood remakes of films from other national contexts.” 3. 51. 8. In this regard, see also the forthcoming European Film Remakes, Eduard Cuelenaere, Gertjan Willems, and Stijn Joye, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 52. Film Remakes, 18. 53. Film Remakes, 26. 54. 52. 55. 51. Borrowed from Stephen Heath with reference to Nagisa Oshima’s The Realm of the Senses (1976) as a “direct and ruinous remake” of Max Ophüls’s Letter from and Unknown Woman (1948). 56. 60. 57. 58. 58. 15–20. 59. 29. 60. Julie Grossman’s term “quiet adaptation” comes to mind here, for “an elastextity that may not be tied to explicit intentions of the adapters.” 106. 61. 63. 62. 23. 63. 52. 64. See, for example, Adrian Martin’s flat declaration: “in the early 1980s, a cinematic postmodernism was born.” 50. 65. Constable derives this distinction from a reading of Nietzsche, specifically Also sprach Zarathustra, 40–46. 66. Constable, 46–47. 67. 53. 68. 81.

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69. Constable, 80. 70. Constable, 87. 71. 1. 72. Tzioumakis, 259. 73. See John Belton in Screen 55:4. Belton emphasizes how the definition of “cinema” changes to keep up with an industry in constant evolution.

Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Balio, Tino. The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. (Kindle). Bazin, André. What is Cinema, Volume I.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism, 4:1, Fall 1979. 56–64. Belton, John. “End of Cinema.” Screen 55:4, Winter 2014. 460–470. Constable, Catheine. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics. London: Wallflower Press, 2015. Carroll, Noël. “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies and Beyond.” October 04-1:20, 1982, 51–81. Forest, Jennifer and Leonard R. Koos, eds. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Galt, Rosalind and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y.  McDougal. Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Klein, Amanda Ann and R. Barton Palmer, eds. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Leitch, Thomas. “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake.” LFQ 18, 1991, 137–49. Revised version in Forrest, 37–62. Leitch, Thomas. Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

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Martin, Adrian. “Ruinous Sequels.” Reading Room, issue 03-09, 2009. Martin, Marie. “Le remake secret: généalogie et perspectives d’une fiction théorique.” Revue d’études cinématographiques, 25: 2–3, Spring 2015. Neale, Steve. “Art Cinema as Institution.” Screen 22:1, Spring, 11–39. Rawle, Steven. Transnational Cinema: An Introduction. London: Palgrave, 2019. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Tzioumakis, Yannis. American Independent Cinema, Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Verevis, Constantine and Iain Robert Smith. Transnational Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

PART I

Adapting a Classic Film

CHAPTER 2

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk: Recreation of All That Heaven Allows as Angst essen Seele auf (1974)

Fassbinder’s career exemplifies the situation of art-film directors of his generation with respect to adaptation and remaking in many ways. His active creative life roughly spanned the years 1966 to 1982, a revolutionary period, an era of breaking molds and questioning institutional assumptions, of aspiring to new freedoms that in turn were met with new waves of repression. The avant-garde theater scene that he entered in 1967 embraced experimentation under influences as diverse as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and New York’s Living Theater, as well as the growing importance of performance art. In film, the influence of the French Nouvelle Vague was at its height, fostering a golden age of auteur art cinema, while those in film and visual art circles were also aware of alternative models such as Andy Warhol and the structural filmmaker Michael Snow, among others. Anglo-American music pervaded and transcended popular culture, part of a robust counterculture protesting the Vietnam war, capitalism, colonialism, repressive governments, and social conventions. Fassbinder insatiably absorbed it all, relentlessly writing and directing until his death at the age of thirty-nine. A product of this astonishingly broad array of forces, within German society, across Europe, from the United States and beyond, Fassbinder’s work can nonetheless be characterized by its simplicity and directness, a quality intensified under the acknowledged influence, especially between 1971 and 1976, of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas.1 In imitation of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_2

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Sirk, he condensed and clarified, embracing narrative while continuing to advance formal means that allow his films to objectify their meanings, affectively and existentially to be as much as to say. The ultimate focus of this chapter is Fassbinder’s adaptation of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) as Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), a culmination of his formative influences and a work that adapts a film classic in the manner of a canonical work of literature, inaugurating an idea of film-to-film adaptation that prefigures the practice of filmmakers in the following decades.2

Fassbinder’s Background in the Theater Fassbinder’s theater background prepared him to approach the adaptation of precursor texts without restraint, while at the same time it schooled him in the extent to which plays and films are fully realized in dialogue with audiences, under the tyranny of their frames of reference and a commercial imperative of addressing them in terms they can understand. Every small city in Germany had a subsidized theater company, which provided a rich culture for the propagation of talent and ideas in the theater scene that would nurture Fassbinder. He wrote his first play at nine years old, and when he failed to get into the Berlin Film Academy in 1966, Fassbinder studied acting for two years at a private school in Munich, joining the Action Theater in August of 1967.3 Even when filmmaking came to occupy most of his time, he continued to create works for the stage until opportunities dried up after 1974, when he was accused of anti-Semitism for his play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death), canceled during rehearsals and not produced in Germany until a press performance in 1985.4 “I learn more when I am working in the theatre,” Fassbinder said in one interview. “Experiences one makes when shooting a film can’t be reused in the theatre, but it does work the other way round.”5 Fassbinder saw a version of Sophocles’s Antigone staged at the six-­ month-­old Action Theater in Munich by Peer Raben, who would become a close collaborator and composer of the music for his films. When an actor broke a finger, Fassbinder became part of the cast, also recommending Hanna Schygulla to replace another drama school friend, Marite Greiselis, when she was stabbed by her jealous husband.6 By autumn 1967, Fassbinder was co-directing a play, Georg Büchner’s Leonce und Lena, with Raben. The Action Theater was always “desperate to perform,” as Christian Braad Thomsen writes; Fassbinder directed eight plays in 1968,

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and five in 1969 while also making four films. He followed Leonce und Lena with Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Verbrecher (The Criminals), then with a play based on Marieluise Fleißer’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Pioneers in Ingolstadt), which would also serve as a point of departure for his later film of the same name.7 When in 1969, two violent episodes involving Horst Söhnlein and Andreas Baader—the latter notorious for his leadership of the Red Army Faction—left the company homeless, Fassbinder and Raben founded the antiteater, first preparing a version of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, to be staged in the Büchner Theater. Fassbinder later described this Orgy Ubuh as “something like a comical family party, which degenerates into a kind of inhibited group sex.”8 The director of the Büchner found it so offensive that he closed the theater fifteen minutes into the premiere. The antitheater then moved to a bar called the Witwe Bolte, with a “boxing match atmosphere,”9 beginning this time with Goethe’s version of Sophocles’s: Iphigenia in Taurus. Thomsen reports that “in Fassbinder’s manuscript, practically nothing is left of Sophocles and Goethe,” though the production did include reference to a recent trial in Berlin of members of Kommune 1 “for offences against public decency.”10 Fassbinder also wrote original pieces for the antiteater, “collage pieces without a real plot,” but many of the productions, in Thomsen’s words, “took on the classics, destroying rather than adapting them.”11 These included rewritings of Sophocles’s Ajax, Brecht’s version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Carlo Goldini’s La Bottega del Caffè, and Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. The practice of Klassikerzertrümmerung, “reducing the classics to rubble” by questioning their formal and thematic premises, was not uncommon in the experimental theater at the time,12 but as an approach to adaptation, it sheds light on the freedom with which Fassbinder would approach his use of precursor texts from Fear Eats the Soul to his final film Querelle (1982) based on Jean Genet’s novel. German theater at this time embraced many currents of influence beyond Artaud, Brecht, Beckett, and other major figures, from the Regietheater, or director’s theater, to uses in the Weimer Republic period of the Volksstück tradition, which “concentrated on the lives and … languages of the lower strata of society.”13 The New  York-based Living Theater of Julien Beck and Judith Malina was an inspiration—in 1968 Fassbinder responded to the Living Theater’s Paradise Now with his own Preparadise Now. In his book on Fassbinder’s theatrical work, citing Michael Töteberg’s argument that the action-theater was “the Munich

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branch of The Living Theater,” David Barnett argues that “Fassbinder has been mistakenly portrayed as an Artaudian, a sensual, irrationalist director, fascinated by the unsayable in performance.”14 Barnett counters this argument by emphasizing the contrary influence of Brecht, especially noticeable on acting style as a dimension of the relationship of audiences with the performers and text. In his theater productions, Fassbinder manipulated the pace of speech to stylize and defamiliarize language in dialogue, which left the text “floating” free of the action, creating a critical distance for audience understanding of the situations presented.15 “One’s gait must never be private,” Fassbinder argued. “It always has to have something to do with the character,” that is to say, with its social construction.16 For this latter aspect of performance, Brecht had invented the term Gestus, meaning “the mimicking of social relationships through detailed choices of movement during performance.”17 He advocated the “quoting” of a character rather than “being it.”18 Character, for Fassbinder as for Brecht, would grow out of social conditions and circumstances. As Barnett underscores, “the antitheater itself was a redefinition of the relation between dramatic work and the audience in the manner of Brecht, not a rejection of theater per se, but of its social function for 200 years.”19 Brecht’s practice went far in the direction of audience participation, especially in his Lehrstücke, where he envisioned nonprofessionals performing a play, even without an audience, in order to explore the nature of their social condition.20 According to Leo A. Lensing, Hungarian-­ born playwright Ödön von Horváth was an even greater influence on Fassbinder than Brecht.21 But Brecht’s influence was pervasive in German theater and internationally, and remains so, well beyond a narrow case of direct influence. Brecht’s impact was felt by Fassbinder, he said in 1975, “as much as anybody in Germany. What’s important to me and everyone else is the idea of alienation,” Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt.”22 Beyond performance and staging, Fassbinder’s primary film debt to his theater experience was his approach to production—throughout his filmmaking career he relied heavily on a repertory acting troupe and production personnel that not only allowed him to work with extraordinary efficiency, but was also an important element in the reception of his work. To some extent his method was a version of the standard practice of a classic Hollywood studio, promoting leading figures as stars and surrounding them with recognizable character actors from within his organization. More clearly, his practice was a direct continuation of that of the Action Theater and antiteater, exaggerated by Fassbinder’s habit of working and

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living with members of his troupe in a communal way, drawing on their personalities and relationships in developing his fictional characters. If Fassbinder is to be believed, he owes his comfort with the communal working and living situation to his early family life in a boarding house where he hardly identified which of the adults were his parents.23 His reliance on familiar collaborators extended to production personnel such as Peer Raben for music, Kurt Raab for production design as well as acting, and cameramen Dietrich Lohmann, Michael Ballhaus, and Xaver Schwarzenberger. However natural the communal way of functioning— sometimes compared to Warhol’s New  York “factory”—seemed to Fassbinder, his process clearly also owes something to the ethos of collective decision making (Mitbestimmung) in the post-1968 cultural moment. Hanna Schygulla is only the very best known of his regular players, followed by Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Barbara Sukowa, Kurt Raab and a long list of others—including himself and his mother, Liselotte Pempeit. Most frequently used were Ingrid Caven, Ursula Strätz, Irm Hermann, Harry Baer, Günther Kaufmann, Ulli Lommel, Karlheinz Böhm, Barbara Valentin, Günter Lamprecht, Klaus Löwitsch, Peter Chatel, Hark Bohm, Gottfried John, Armin Meier, and Volker Spengler. This practice clearly facilitated casting and Fassbinder’s rapid production process, but for those seeing more than one or two films, the recirculation of familiar performers also contributes to a “Verfremdungseffekt,” reminding us of the dual nature of a character and the actor performing the role. Among other things, by evoking characters and performances from other Fassbinder films, the practice encourages intertextual and auteurist readings. One has only to think of Irm Hermann in Katzelmacher (1969), Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972), and Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of the Four Seasons, 1972). When we see her in Fear Eats the Soul as one of Emmi’s grown children, she has some of the pinched severity of the protagonist’s wife in The Merchant of the Four Seasons, though we also cannot help remembering the masochistic slave of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant who rebels only when Petra (Carstensen) becomes considerate. Hermann appeared in some nineteen Fassbinder films, eleven roles before her appearance in Fear Eats the Soul, including one in the five episodes of the television series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, 1972–1973). Fassbinder’s casting of and creating major roles for his lovers, mainly Günther Kaufmann, Armin Meier, and El Hedi ben Salem, invites further awareness of his intermingling of life and art. This sometimes led, from

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the beginning, to an overemphasis on biographical interpretations of the films. As Thomsen writes, Fassbinder admitted to him in an interview that in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, “he himself was Petra and Karin was Günther Kaufmann, while Peer Raben was portrayed in the loyal maid, Marlene.”24 From this perspective, Fear Eats the Soul owes a great deal to Fassbinder’s relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, whom he had met in 1970 at a sauna and gay meeting place in Paris, shortly after his trip to Lugano, Switzerland to visit Douglas Sirk. Salem was soon traveling with Fassbinder, then living with him in Munich, though there were frequent scenes of jealousy over Fassbinder’s affairs with other men. One close collaborator, Kurt Raab, said of Salem: he “was an affable, affectionate man, ready to be of help, but could, after enjoying whisky become a furious demolishing devil.” The prominent role in Fear Eats the Soul came toward the end of their relationship, described by some as a “farewell gift,” after which Fassbinder disentangled himself from the relationship.25 If Fassbinder’s repertory troupe became an element of his films’ Brechtian address, then, how much more so did the recognition that a lead role was being played by the director’s lover? But this was known, in some degree, only to insiders, less so with distance from immediate press coverage of a production or gossip about its celebrity director. Critics aware of Fassbinder’s milieu and very public life have frequently overemphasized the importance of his biography,26 but as Elsaesser argues, “it will not do to treat any of [Fassbinder’s films] as the ‘waste product’ of more or less unsavory episodes and anecdotes from a chaotic private and sexual life.”27 Perhaps more important for Fear Eats the Soul was the direct knowledge of the immigrant experience in Germany that Salem brought to Fassbinder, which the non-actor could also embody directly as a man who could have been a Gastarbeiter or “guest worker.” An important distinction should be made in this regard, however, that authenticity attaches itself to the actor, who nonetheless stands apart from the character in the fable—he remains a non-professional actor walking somewhat woodenly through the role, enforcing a Brechtian double reception of a story and the awareness of its performance. Without essentializing the films or ignoring fissures and contradictions that can arise, one must appreciate the remarkable convergence, or layering of ideas and ways of meaning, that Fassbinder achieved out of very diverse materials.

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The Filmmaking Environment of the 1960s: Remaking Godard If understanding Fassbinder’s work in theater helps us grasp his approach to performance, his understanding of audiences, and his openness to transforming texts in the adaptation process, one must also take into account the cinema landscape he entered and worked in. Fassbinder’s principal framework until his 1971 encounter with Douglas Sirk was the European art film and especially discourse around the French Nouvelle Vague, with its politique des auteurs, including embrace of strong Hollywood directors such as Raoul Walsh and Sirk. Fassbinder’s first feature length film, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love is Colder than Death, 1969), was dedicated to, among others, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-Marie Straub, acknowledging his interest in the Nouvelle Vague specifically, as well as in more programmatically experimental filmmakers such as Straub. “Conspicuously absent” from this dedication, as Laura McMahon points out, is Jean-Luc Godard: “In a film that perpetually alludes to the work of Godard, both implicitly and explicitly…, such an omission appears perverse.”28 Katzelmacher, while dedicated to the playwright Marieluise Fleißer, shows the importance of Godard’s work for Fassbinder, especially Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962)—one can even see Katzelmacher as adapting many elements of Vivre sa vie, a rehearsal for Fassbinder’s way of absorbing Sirk’s influence and remaking All That Heaven Allows. In an interview related to Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982), Fassbinder referred to Vivre sa vie as Godard’s masterpiece; he is reported to have watched it twenty-seven times,29 and comparison with Katzelmacher shows significant similarities as well as differences. One thing they share is the development of the narrative as a series of tableaux—Godard’s subtitle is “film en douze tableaux,” which are then announced and numbered like chapters. Katzelmacher similarly proceeds by cutting between scenes in a way that emphasizes a discontinuity as deliberate as Godard’s. Godard establishes his filmic tableaux with two qualities, extended shot duration and a lack of action, leaving the viewer to explore images as various as a profile in close-up of Nana (Anna Karina), or a medium shot of Nana waiting, against a wall or elsewhere. Fassbinder’s tableaux usually involve several characters, doing nothing, the camera holding on them to emphasize the absence of activity. The seriality of the characters lined up against the wall and in the café in Katzelmacher echoes the prostitutes in two street

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scenes of Vivre sa vie, and also takes up a major theme of the film, the web of conditions within which Nana chooses prostitution. Such conditions are featured in Katzelmacher for three characters, two women and one man, though the element of prostitution is only a more explicit version of the contingencies of exchange within all of the relationships.30 Katzelmacher, along with The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, was one of Fassbinder’s own plays that became especially important for his career. Written in 1967, it was produced that year as a play by the Action Theater. A considerable success, it opened the door to his subsequent productions and to the creation of the antiteater. And it prepared the way for his transition into film: after the lukewarm reception of Love is Colder than Death earlier the same year, praise for Katzelmacher (1969) brought him to the front rank among filmmakers of the New German Cinema. It is especially important as a precursor of Fear Eats the Soul in that it addresses the theme of xenophobia so central to this later film. The narrative of Katzelmacher is simple, a Greek “guest worker” named Jorgos arrives in working-class suburban Munich among a group of young people whose relations Fassbinder has described as follows: “Marie belongs to Erich, Paul sleeps with Helga, Peter lets himself be kept by Elisabeth, and Roxy does it with Franz for money.”31 There is more nuance to the characters and difference among their relationships than this, though the limitations of their situation are foregrounded so that we see them as constructed on a basis of desire and economic considerations; they are ignorant and unmotivated, in a social wasteland, so that they respond to the introduction of an intruder as a major event. All are stylized to the point of parody, including the Greek foreigner, played by Fassbinder himself, whom xenophobic rumors frame as a sex-obsessed monster to be driven out. Jorgos’s inability to speak much German—Bavarian dialect in the film—makes him an easy target for willful cross-cultural misunderstandings. Only one character, Marie, played by Hanna Schygulla, sees a relationship with Jorgos as an opening on a larger world, for her an escape fantasy in an idealized Greece defined summarily as “different from here.” But description of the narrative and characters does not do justice to this film, which stylistically is carefully conceived, portraying the characters flatly against an impoverished landscape out of which their way of being seems to grow, with painful inevitability. There are few sets: an exterior wall where the characters frequently congregate, an equally barren “tavern” where also against a wall they sit to drink, talk, and play rapid, repetitive games of cards. Other interiors, where the intimate encounters occur

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are reduced to a bed, a couch, or a table and chairs. The camera is typically straight on, squarely on the wall, the order of the lined-up individuals changing to emphasize their cipher-like interchangeability. Takes are long, the minimal action occurring within a very few shots with abrupt editing between scenes. Intercut into the crudely episodic narrative are interludes in each of which a pair of the characters walks toward the camera down a constricted lane in mock ceremony that almost suggests a wedding, their dialogue delivered under musical themes that act as commentary. These pairs reemphasize the permutation of possible relationships, a minimalist echo of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 Reigen, best known to cinema audiences from Max Ophüls’s film adaptation, La Ronde (1950). The distancing effect of the interludes helps lift the accumulation of stylized scenes beyond the film’s social analysis into a more expansive aesthetic experience. Katzelmacher shows Fassbinder with a similar awareness of mise-en-­ scène to that of Godard, his constructed scenes of minimal action, “doubly deprived of depth by Fassbinder’s head-on shots and static camera set-­ ups,” in Elsaesser’s words, with graphics and art in the background that offer commentary on characters and the moment.32 Godard’s arbitrary introduction or inclusion of elements—a gesture of authorial intervention—is taken up by Fassbinder in the interjected scenes of pairs of characters walking down the lane toward the camera. Dietrich Lohmann has described how these shots, in contrast to the others where the camera is static, were a result of the availability of an expensive dolly.33 But Fassbinder seized on the opportunity to regularly break away from the narrative, “alienating” the viewer from the story for moments of dialogue that serve as commentary. The Brechtian orientation of Godard is evident, beyond the tableau format, in everything from Raoul Coutard’s independent camera movement to the discontinuity of the cuts, interruptions of sound with silence, and pantomime acting as when Nana measures herself with her hands, when she dances in the poolroom, when a client wrestles with a her in a hotel room, or when she is shot down in the final scene. The gangster theme, mock-gangsters really, is less evident in Katzelmacher than in Fassbinder’s other early films,34 but the acting style—of performers pretending to act like young men who are pretending to be gangsters—is evident here in the deliberately fake beating given Jorgos toward the end of this film. The idea of a beating is represented without moving the audience to experience it viscerally as violence. Yet Vivre sa vie and Katzelmacher also remain radically different: Godard’s use of the camera is analytic, his editing synthetic in a way that

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Fassbinder’s is not. Godard visually dismantles, and then through editing recomposes the world from its parts in a process that foregrounds his authorial intervention; he creates essay films even when the narrative is prominent. Fassbinder, on the other hand, rarely dis-integrates the space his characters inhabit, staging his less than realistic images and scenes almost neorealist-like within the frame, holding characters firmly within that world, however much he manipulates these larger blocks of captured time and space. This is especially clear in Katzelmacher when his characters are displayed together along the wall or in the tavern, for example, staged moments, yet with complete integrity of the space from which the characters cannot be extracted. While Godard’s commentary is lucid and explicit, Fassbinder presents framed material that is pregnant with ambiguity. Godard was only the most important of Fassbinder’s Nouvelle Vague influences, which extended to his awareness of the auteurist critical discourse emanating from Cahiers du Cinéma in the service of creating a personal counter cinema that ironically embraced Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and Alfred Hitchcock, were Raoul Walsh and Douglas Sirk.35 For Fassbinder, Sirk especially provided the compromise solution to a question raised in Germany by young filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema: how to create for serious films an audience comparable to that for commercial products, Hollywood or local. The twenty-six signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 called for production circumstances “free from control of commercial partners,” declaring themselves to have, “detailed spiritual, structural, and economic ideas about the production of new German cinema.”36 As Timothy Corrigan argues, there was a “problematic at the heart of [films of the New German Cinema] according to which the struggle to produce a new language remains tensely balanced by the need to communicate it.”37 By this he means balancing an artistic practice with an infrastructure of producers, distributers, press, and audiences that will facilitate reception.38 Sirk offered a model of Hollywood commercial success where the films nonetheless transcended their popular positioning through trenchantly ironic social criticism and aesthetic radiance.

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Fassbinder’s Encounter with the Films of Douglas Sirk Douglas Sirk was born in Germany in 1900. He studied law, philosophy, painting, and art history in German universities. Instead of pursuing those fields, however, he developed a successful career in theater, overseeing productions of Sophocles, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, and Bertolt Brecht, among others. While the impact of Hitler’s government began to be felt, he began making films at Germany’s UFA film studio, developing skills he could use as an émigré before he left Germany in 1937. Encountering Sirk’s 1950s melodramas in 1971, Fassbinder openly declared his admiration for Sirk, and no one since has doubted the importance of the encounter for Fassbinder’s embrace of a more directly narrative style from The Merchant of the Four Seasons forward. Yet his evolution as a filmmaker, in The Merchant of the Four Seasons and thereafter, is less of a clear-cut break from his past than is often suggested, and defining this period of his work with the label “Hollywood” is misleading. Furthermore, Fassbinder’s discovery of Sirk’s films dovetails with his wider engagement with European film culture and efforts to extend his reputation in that arena. Widely popular in the 1950s, Sirk’s films were little remembered by 1970, beyond the notice of a few cinephiles—the year 1971 marked the beginning of a full-blown international reevaluation and celebration. Fassbinder’s commentaries on six of Sirk’s 1950s melodramas were a part of this, published in Germany, but also in Cahiers du Cinéma and in Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey’s edited collection in conjunction with the 1971 Edinburgh Film Festival. At the time of their initial release, as Barbara Klinger has documented, Universal-International Pictures presented Sirk’s melodramas as “slick, sexually explicit ‘adult’ films,” and they were “decried” by critics as soap operas of little value or interest. Much of their popular success had to do with the establishment of Rock Hudson as a model of “normal” heterosexual masculinity “in the face of a social crisis about virility in the postwar era.”39 But between the 1950s and 1971, in cinephile and academic circles, Sirk’s reputation evolved. Sirk attracted recognition as a Hollywood auteur by the critics writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. “While Sirk was not a Cahiers fetish-object like [Nicholas] Ray, [Howard] Hawks, or Alfred Hitchcock,” writes Klinger, “a series of 1955–1969 reviews gave him a visibility that would inspire later, more extensive work on the director.”40

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These reviews gave no systematic sense of Sirk’s vision as expressed in the style of his films, nor did Andrew Sarris when he wrote about Sirk in Film Comment and in his influential 1968 book The American Cinema, where he placed Sirk in his second-highest category, “The Far Side of Paradise.” “But beginning with Screen’s special issue on Sirk, in 1971,” according to Klinger, “critics not only resolutely secured meanings for Sirk’s peculiar stylistic ‘signifiers,’ [they] escalated him unwaveringly into the ranks of great auteurs.”41 The special issue of Screen was part of a “boom” period of Sirk criticism in the U.K. that also included Halliday’s important interview with Sirk, published as Sirk on Sirk, and retrospectives by the National Film Theater and the Edinburgh Film Festival, the latter of which led to the Halliday and Mulvey collection of essays in which Fassbinder’s commentaries appeared.42 Two aspects of the timing of Fassbinder’s exposure to Sirk should be emphasized. One is that the moment preceded sustained academic attention to melodrama as a genre, which dates from 1972 with the publication of Peter Brooks’s article “The Melodramatic Imagination” and Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.”43 Extensive feminist and psychoanalytic analysis of the genre would continue for two decades. The second is that 1971 also long preceded the recognition of Rock Hudson’s gay identity following his treatment for AIDS, which fostered readings of Sirk’s films as, in Klinger’s words, “treatises on the artifice of romance and gender roles.”44 Fassbinder saw Sirk’s films at the end of 1970 in a retrospective at the Filmmuseum in Munich that included All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind (1956), Interlude (1957), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and Imitation of Life (1959).45 His essay included a short biographical introduction, followed by commentary on each film, then a passionate conclusion closing with these words: “I’ve seen far too few of his films. I’d like to see all thirty-nine of them. Then maybe I’d be further along, with myself, with my life, with my friends. I’ve seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world.”46 Whatever the impact on Fassbinder’s life, beginning with Merchant of the Four Seasons in 1972, his twelfth film, Fassbinder’s work changed significantly. “After I’d seen Sirk’s films,” Fassbinder said later, “when I made my next film—that was Merchant of The Four Seasons—I was in danger of copying All That Heaven Allows.”47 And in terms of thematic content, Elsaesser accurately writes that Fassbinder began “a cycle of films focusing

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on the impossibility of love and happiness in the bourgeois family,” which continues until Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette) in 1976, Fassbinder’s twenty-seventh film, not counting the five-episode TV series Eight Hours don’t Make a Day.48 Laura Cottingham describes Fassbinder as moving toward “more mainstream narrative models,”49 and Laura McMahon goes so far as to claim that The Merchant of the Four Seasons marks the end of Godard’s influence and the beginning of Sirk’s.50 Examining Merchant, however, we can see that Fassbinder’s change in direction is neither so complete nor definitive. Merchant presents the story of Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), who is unappreciated by his family, loses his job as a police officer, fails in his relationship with a dissatisfied and manipulative wife (Irm Hermann), becomes depressed by circumstances that he seems thoroughly to understand, and deliberately drinks himself to death. The narrative emphasizes the arc of Hans’s life, reductive in its simplicity, especially in its dialogue, which explicitly articulates the meaning of each moment. In structure, the story mimics aspects of Sirk, and even more anticipates Fear Eats the Soul, moving from the problem of Hans’s illness early in the film, to a period of success and uplift after Irmgard’s idea that they hire someone to do the work, before taking another downward turn as Hans is betrayed by Irmgard, and by his friend Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), the conclusion after Hans’s death showing how seamlessly Hans is replaced by Harry, Hans leaving the world without a trace.51 But in many ways, Hans and Irmgard and the others are little different from the socially and economically confined characters of Katzelmacher, and their social situation is marked with the same transactional logic of material need leavened by sexual desire. Furthermore, the flow of Fassbinder’s narrative is disrupted, the story told in a series of tableaux, if less abruptly discontinuous than those of Katzelmacher. In no sense do Fassbinder’s individual scenes employ the continuity/invisible/psychological editing of classical Hollywood style. While there are eyeline matches linking characters, there are few establishing shots; instead duration and framing of the mid-distance compositions more typically isolate characters in opposition rather than connecting them within real or psychological space. Flashbacks are interjected, but disjunctively, in a way reminiscent of the walking couples in Katzelmacher. They offer brief glimpses of Hans’s backstory perhaps exaggerated in memory: Hans is received dismissively by his mother (Gusti Kreissl) after his military service; he is rejected by his “great love” (Ingrid Caven) because her family disapproves his social

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position; and he is betrayed by his friend Harry during service in Morocco. These flashbacks have a synoptic quality that helps turn his story toward allegory rather than offering a psychological explanation of Hans’s depressed condition. The acting, similarly, is exaggerated and varies in style from scene to scene, as when Irmgard laughs hysterically when she hears that Hans has spent the day spying on their new employee, a man she casually had sex with earlier in the film: in a single long take, Irmgard stands at a counter in the distance, with Hans partially in view in the foreground, but her exaggerated amusement can only be seen as a performance of laughter, well beyond naturalistic representation. The colors and sometimes the lighting are vivid in Fassbinder, yet in contrast to Sirk’s practice, they seem to mark the human failure of the characters to impose harmony within their lives rather than a director’s overall representation of the world.52 Fassbinder did indeed adopt Sirk’s reductive simplicity, directness, and clarity. The ideas of Fassbinder’s “fables,” a word repeatedly applied to both his and Sirk’s films, drive their narratives more than does the psychology of characters. His dialogue, like Sirk’s, explicitly announces the themes of the stories, and furthermore, as with Sirk, an overdetermination through which all elements conspire to restate the film’s ideas and meanings gives them the clarity of parables while delivering an affective and aesthetic impact more powerful than their ideas. Sirk’s and Fassbinder’s practice, in this respect, is interrelated with their embrace of melodrama as a genre. As Peter Brooks writes, “Melodrama … is an expressionistic form. Its characters repeatedly say their moral and emotional states and conditions, their intentions and motives, their badness and goodness. The play typically seeks total articulation of the moral problems with which it is dealing; it is indeed about making the terms of these problems clear and stark.” In climactic moments, furthermore, melodrama “has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing its meanings.”53 Such “mute tableaux” in Fassbinder appear repeatedly at significant moments in scenes. As mentioned earlier, Elsaesser first emphasizes Fassbinder’s embrace of new subject matter. Sirk, Elaesser writes, “specialized in what could be called negative emotional experiences—love unrequited, hopes dashed, agonized waiting, painful embarrassment, tragic misunderstandings, trust betrayed—in petit-bourgeois or middle-class settings.”54 This catalogue provides a checklist almost entirely adopted in Merchant of the Four Seasons alone. But as Elsaesser also points out, Fassbinder conveys strong emotions “in order to allow the spectator to notice the frame.”55 He

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emphasizes what he describes as Fassbinder’s redefinition of Hollywood “naivety,” quoting Fassbinder’s statement that “the American method of making [films] left the audience with emotions and nothing else, I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling.”56 This is a product of the discontinuity described earlier, and the result is to break up the single, coherent management of point of view of Sirkian and other classical Hollywood films in favor of a “clash of unmediated and irreconcilable points of view.”57 Thus in Fassbinder, one both understands or sympathizes with opposing characters, grasping the “view from within” each character at the same time as a socially defined “view from without.”58 In Merchant, again as in Katzelmacher, we understand the transactional motivations of Frau Epp in her betrayal of Hans, from her sexual appetite, to contempt for the sexual partner who becomes their employee, to her greed, and ultimately her practical replacement of Hans with Harry, who meets all of her personal needs, including to be a father for her daughter, acceptable to her family, and able to run her business. She is horrifying while fully comprehensible, as is Hans in his morbidly yet ultimately just recognition that his life is not worth living. In turning to Fear Eats the Soul as an adaptation of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, it is worth noting again how Fassbinder remained disciplined with respect to public knowledge of an original and its impact on a film’s reception. Nothing shows his awareness of this more clearly than his adaptation of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, released the same year as Fear Eats the Soul. Made for television, the film was titled Fontane Effi Briest as if to signal Fassbinder’s engagement with the original. It is a distillation of important moments from the novel that employs Fontane’s language, sometimes in voice-over narration delivered by Fassbinder himself. The film is comprised of these essentialized fragments delivered through a tableau style recalling, for the student of Fassbinder’s work, Godard’s influence and the storytelling of Vivre sa vie. Exquisite control of the sense of a viewer’s proximity to and distance from the characters echoes that of Fontane’s novel, however, which in Germany, much of the television audience would have read in school or at the university. In a situation such as this, engagement with the audience’s bedrock knowledge of the book moderates imposition of the director’s views.59 Fassbinder was in a different position with Fear Eats the Soul. Though All That Heaven Allows was being accepted as a classic in cinephile circles by the early 1970s, it would still have been largely unknown even to the relatively select audience

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Fassbinder wanted to address. Thus Fear Eats the Soul can still be largely understood without knowing All That Heaven Allows, though for those who know Sirk, the experience becomes, to adapt André Bazin’s words, “a question of building a secondary work with the [precursor film] as a foundation.”60

From All That Heaven Allows to Fear Eats the Soul Universal International’s goal in making All That Heaven Allows was to capitalize on the box-office success of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession (1954), a remake of John Stahl’s 1935 film of the same name starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, itself an adaptation of a popular novel by Lloyd. C. Douglas. The 1954 film was Sirk’s first big commercial success with Universal, and the strategy for All That Heaven Allows involved using the same producer, Ross Hunter, and cast, Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, and Agnes Moorehead. The new film would even recycle the situation of Jane Wyman as an “older” widow falling in love with a younger man. In Sirk’s view, the story was extremely weak, “a nothing of a story,” but eventually he warmed to the project.61 But it was this “nothing” of a story that attracted Fassbinder, highlighting as it did the elements of fable over psychology, direct and simple dialogue, framed within in a lush production design and saturated with music that lifted the melodrama beyond the real. Fassbinder was asked by an interviewer about his reason for the simplicity of Fear Eats the Soul: “In this film you’ve told a provocatively simple, simplified story—is there a didactic program implied in your reduction of the conflicts to such a level?” “It seems to me,” Fassbinder responded, “that the simpler a story is, the truer it is. The common denominator for many stories is a story as simple as this.” Here he adopts a position that simpler, more elemental narratives generally underlie even complicated plots; presenting these in their reduced, simplest form fosters critical distance on the part of the viewer: “People are forced,” Fassbinder says, “to dissociate themselves from the story,” and thus to think about “their own reality.” Yet his embrace of simplicity is extreme: “You can’t make it simple enough.”62 In his written commentary on All That Heaven Allows, describing the opening sequence and Sirk’s careful and limited use of close-ups, he wrote: “so simple and beautiful. And everybody gets the point.”63 Even the sentences in Fassbinder’s description of All That Heaven Allows underscore his sense of the film’s elemental simplicity:

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“Jane Wyman is a rich widow, and Rock Hudson is pruning her trees. In Jane’s garden is a ‘love tree,’ which only blooms where love is present, and so Jane’s and Rock’s chance encounter becomes a great love. But Rock is 15 years younger than Jane, and Jane is completely integrated into the social life of an American small town. Rock is a primitive type, and Jane has a lot to lose—her girlfriends, good reputation she owes to her deceased husband, her children. In the beginning, Rock loves nature, and Jane doesn’t love anything.” In Fassbinder’s view, she stands out from the other women as someone worth loving, while of the range of male characters he writes dismissively, “there aren’t any other men in the film besides Rock.” So they begin their romance until, “finally June tells Rock she’s leaving him, because of the idiotic children and so on.”

For Fassbinder, this allows the moment of epiphany: “Jane sits there on Christmas Eve; the children are going to leave her and have given her a television set. At that point, everyone in the movie house breaks down. They suddenly understand something about the world and what it does to people.” Significantly, he frames this as a realization not only by Cary (Jane Wyman) but by the audience as well, and the new understanding is not only about this story, but about life, about “the world.” Fassbinder bluntly highlights the sexual obsession in All That Heaven Allows: “Later Jane goes back to Rock, because she keeps having headaches, which happens to all of us if we don’t fuck often enough.” In Fear Eats the Soul, by contrast, sex will no longer be a hidden motive; rather it openly shades into other modes of affection and companionship. And importantly for Fassbinder, the ending of All That Heaven Allows is only superficially a “happy” one: “But when she is back, it isn’t a happy ending, even though they’re together, the two of them. A person who creates so many problems in love won’t be able to be happy later on. That’s what he makes films about, Douglas Sirk. Human beings can’t be alone, but they can’t be together either.”64 At bottom, in Sirk’s films as in Fassbinder’s, the social construction of one’s way of being is articulated through the sets. “In Jane’s house,” he writes, “you can only move a certain way. Only certain sentences occur to you when you want to say something, and certain gestures when you want to express something. If Jane entered another house, Rock’s, for instance, would she be able to adjust? That would be something to hope for. Or has she been so molded and messed up that in Rock’s house she would miss the style that’s hers, after all. That’s more likely. That’s why the happy

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ending isn’t a real one. Jane fits into her own house better than into Rock’s.”65 This sense of being as interdependent with material and social circumstances is thoroughly Marxist, and in theater terms, Brechtian— people in Fassbinder can never be dis-integrated from their material settings, whether in Katzelmacher, Fear Eats the Soul, or Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) later in the director’s career.66

Fear Eats the Soul as an Adaptation Fear Eats the Soul can be understood and enjoyed independently, but the film is transformed if viewed with All That Heaven Allows in mind. Both films offer a parable of class barriers to a relationship between a widow and a younger man, and both narratives pass through the same stages of unexpected love, challenges to its acceptability, persistence then wavering, and finally, reunion. In Fassbinder’s story, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), an older German Putzfrau, or cleaning lady, is drawn to a younger Moroccan immigrant whose full name is El Hedi ben Salem M’Barek Mohammed Mustapha, though he is called Ali. Like Cary and Ron in All That Heaven Allows, Emmi and Ali go through moments of attraction, estrangement, and reconciliation. Fassbinder has shifted the class conflict down several rungs on the social ladder, staging it as between a white, working-class German and a non-white North African immigrant, thus introducing both racism and xenophobia as motives for disapproval, in addition to the age and class differences of Sirk’s film. Unusually for a remake or adaption, Fassbinder had significant elements of his story in mind even before he encountered Sirk’s film. These derived from a news item that he had earlier given as a monologue to the chambermaid (Margarethe von Trotta) in The American Soldier (1970); she recounts the story directly to the camera while the hitman Ricky (Karl Scheydt) and Rosa (Elga Sorbas) sprawl behind her on the bed. Here is her monologue: Fortune isn’t always amusing. There was a cleaning lady in Hamburg. Her name was Emmi. She was sixty or sixty-five years old. One day, on her way home, it began to pour with rain. So she goes into a bar where foreign workers hang out, and she sits down and drinks a cola. Suddenly a man asks her to dance with him, a really big guy with broad shoulders. She finds him attractive and dances with him. Afterwards he sits down and talks with her. He tells her he doesn’t have a place to stay. So Emmi says he can go to her

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place. He goes to her place, and he sleeps with her. And a few days later, he suggests they get married. And so they got married. Suddenly Emmi was all young again. From behind, she looked about thirty. For six months they lived madly and were incredibly happy. Life was one round of parties. Then one day, Emmi was found dead, murdered, with the marks of a signet ring on her throat. The police arrested her husband. His name was Ali, and there was a letter A on the ring. But he said he had lots of friends named Ali, and they all had a signet ring. They interrogated every Turk in Hamburg called Ali. A lot had returned to Turkey, and the others didn’t understand. [This translation is that of the subtitles.]

The epigraph of Fear Eats the Soul, “Das Glück ist nicht immer lustig,” is already used here, translated more appropriately for the later film as “happiness is not always fun,” and Fear Eats the Soul opens with the actions described in the earlier version—Emmi comes in out of the rain and has a cola. Variations begin where, in this early version, the man says he has no place to stay. In Fear Eats the Soul, Ali accompanies Emmi as a thoughtful or chivalrous gesture, and Emmi invites him in for coffee. (I refer to the character as “Ali,” the false name given him in Germany, in order to avoid confusion between character and actor.) In the American Soldier version, Ali asks Emmi to marry him, while in Fear Eats the Soul, Emmi claims they are planning to marry in answer to her building manager’s complaint, which Ali then agrees to. And of course Emmi doesn’t die in Fear Eats the Soul. She and Ali end up together, a nuanced “happy ending” like that of All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder never felt constrained or made any attempt to produce an exact equivalent of All That Heaven Allows. The interview about Merchant of the Four Seasons in which he mentions the danger of copying Sirk’s film continues with specific reference to Fear Eats the Soul: “I tried to do a remake of what I’d seen in it. But you mustn’t simply do something over again, just because you like it; you should tell your own story, using your film experience.”67 His adaptation takes up aspects of All That Heaven Allows in ways ranging from the quotation of specific scenes, to exploring how ideas from Sirk’s film can play out in his Munich world, to playful redeployment of details, echoing Sirk but developing entirely new ideas. Essential in both narratives is the disapproval by those around them that Cary and Emmi experience. In the case of Cary, this includes the women in her social circle and her children, Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds). Her friends all gather at a country club, a suitably

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direct Sirkian metaphor for the social group one belongs to or is excluded from. Emmi in Fear Eats the Soul has no comparable social life so her neighbors and fellow workers replace the disapproving “club women” of All That Heaven Allows. In both films, there is a specific moment of recognition on the part of the woman that she has fallen in love. For Cary, this occurs after she spends an evening with Ron and his friends instead of attending Sara’s dinner party. For Emmi, it follows her shock at having slept with Ali and realizing she very much wants to see him again. Each woman will announce her new situation to her confrontational children. Beyond social condemnation from others, the differing ways of life between each woman and her lover, underscored by the disapproval, will continue to be a barrier for the couple to overcome. The couples are also reunited because of a vulnerability exposed in the men, signaled respectively by Ron’s injury and by Ali’s ulcer; the women stay at their side in this emergency, but the story of what will follow in the relationships remains untold. These are the broad and fundamental similarities between the films’ narratives; beyond them are the specific situations, events, characters, settings, bits of dialogue, and the fundamental stylistic choices through which Fassbinder evokes and plays off of his Sirkian model. The main dramatization of disapproval by Cary’s friends is the scene at her club where, hoping naively that once they get to know Ron they will like him, Cary takes Ron in order to introduce him to all her acquaintances. At the club Ron is greeted with great anticipation, and with a wall of rejection. Sara (Agnes Moorehead), apparently Cary’s best friend, had shown condescension upon first meeting Ron, and she tries to advise Cary on consequences of her involvement with him. Then at the club, one young woman, Jo-Ann Grisby (Leigh Snowden) suggests that in spite of her age, Cary is a good catch for Ron because of her money. “I guess it is more unusual when someone your age gets married,” she says to Cary, then: “No one in my family’s had a dime since the Civil War. So, Tom won’t get anything but poor little me.” A doyenne of the club, Mrs. Humphrey (Eleanor Audley), fails even to recognize Ron, though he has tended her garden for years. When he reminds her of this, she simply turns away, an unconcealed expression of disdain on her face. Ron’s invisibility to her and the fact that few know his name is reenacted in the complete suppression of the name El Hedi ben Salem in Fear Eats the Soul, where Fassbinder has even Emmi refer to him as Ali. And most of the middle-­ class women of All That Heaven Allows are no more deliberate in their blindness to Ron’s existence than Emmi is in leaving “Ali” nameless. In

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spite of Ron’s presence at the club, Howard (Donald Curtis) takes the opportunity to assault Cary, bringing about a display of Ron’s physical superiority among this white-collar crowd. Mona (Jacqueline deWit) is the most deliberately malicious of the women—she not only makes caustic remarks behind Cary’s back at the club, but facilitates gossip throughout the story, most notably when she learns that Cary has spent a weekend away from home with Ron. The function of the club women is carried out in Fear Eats the Soul by Emmi’s neighbors and work colleagues. Mrs Kargus (Elma Karlowa), clearly modeled on Mona, takes the lead in their apartment building, rushing to alert another neighbor of Ali’s presence when he first comes home with Emmi—he is instantly identifiable as an outsider by his race as well as his clothes. Specifically reflecting the scene in All That Heaven Allows where Mona sees Cary get out of Ron’s truck, Mrs. Kargus observes from her window when Emmi and Ali part ways after spending the night together. The neighbors repeatedly turn their backs to Emmi, gossiping among themselves, complaining to the police about noise, even suggesting that the apartment building has become dirtier since Ali has moved in. Emmi’s fellow cleaning workers carry out the broader social ostracizing of her after one of them stops by and discovers Ali at home with Emmi. The extent of their malice is clear when they even exclude her from going for a cancer screening encouraged by one of their colleagues. The totality of her rejection is the point, as with Cary because of her relationship with young working-class Ron, here because El Hedi ben Salem is young, a foreigner, and a person of another race. The power of pressure to conform takes one particularly German turn in Fear Eats the Soul, to address the question of collaboration with the Nazis. Emmi’s former husband and Emmi herself were Nazi party members; she casually tells Ali this, oblivious to the profound irony of her actions, before taking him to an Italian osteria in a building known for having been the site of Hitler’s favorite restaurant. Emmi’s casual shrugging off the Nazi past has a double result: first it presents working-class people like Emmi and her husband as ignorant pawns swept up by forces beyond their knowledge and powers; second, as her ignorance of the weight of guilt associated with the Holocaust flattens historical perspective, it raises the relative importance of this liaison with Ali, a man perceived to be of another race. Blind to Germany’s darkest history, she is personally countering it in the present with the meaningful action of her relationship with Ali.

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Emmi’s children are older than Cary’s, they are married, and they no longer live at home, but again they have the same function in the narrative that Cary’s children have: both sets of children react with horror to their mother’s choice of a socially inappropriate partner, considering it an injury to themselves. The confrontation scene in both narratives is fully staged as an event of major significance. In All That Heaven Allows, it arrives for Ned and Kay when Cary announces to Kay that she plans to remarry. Kay says is not surprised, because of Cary’s ongoing association with the elderly and sexless Harvey (Conrad Nagel). Early in the film Kay expressed her “modern” perspective that widows need not entomb themselves with their dead husbands as in ancient Egypt. But at the mention of the young, working-class Ron Kirby, all sympathy and comprehension disappear. Ned is particularly harsh in his rejection, asking bitterly if it is “a joke”; he invokes tradition, the family house, and the sacred memory of his father, and later that evening, following the scene of rejection at the club, Ned declares he will break all relations with his mother if she goes through with the marriage. Kay’s similarly steely response rises above a level of personal emotion as if the transgression is of some inviolable law or prohibition like those in Greek tragedy evoked by Sirk in interviews.68 Emmi’s announcement is developed in two separate scenes, one before and one after the marriage. First she goes to the house of her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) to confess that she has fallen in love. It is her “duty” to tell them she says, and announces that the man she loves is a foreigner and an “Arab.” In this instance Fassbinder specifically evokes Ned’s response to Cary; he translates Ned’s dialogue into an image, a close-up of Krista’s face laughing with Eugen (Fassbinder) in the background wearing a look of amusement at the absurdity of Emmi being in love at all, let alone with a young Berber: Krista says Emmi must be joking, but Emmi confirms that “Das ist kein Witz, Krista” (“It’s not a joke, Krista”). For the second scene of the revelation, Fassbinder visually exaggerates the abruptness even beyond that of Cary’s announcement. After their marriage, Emmi has called her three children and their spouses to the house. They are seated in the small living space like an audience listening to her formal declaration that she is now married; she introduces Ali, who from out of sight in the hall steps through the doorway as if onto this make-shift stage, giving an awkward, slightly comical bow in their direction (Fig.  2.1). It is a small moment of theater, leaving all three of the offspring stunned, then furious: Bruno kicks in the picture tube of the television set; Albert calls his mother a whore; and Krista rushes out of

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Fig. 2.1  Ali is introduced to Cary’s children

Emmi’s apartment saying it is a “pigsty.” The adaptation of Sirk’s confrontation of the mother by her children is made to work with Emmi’s more advanced age and with the Munich working-class circumstances so different from Cary’s; its very different elaboration also shows how Fassbinder both wants to maintain the link with All That Heaven Allows yet develop new ideas as his story deviates from Sirk’s. Fassbinder similarly follows Sirk’s lead in elaborating Ali’s employment and living situations. He has already addressed Emmi’s in a long monologue where she explains to Ali how people look at her when she tells them she is a cleaning woman, and where she details the conditions of her work. In All That Heaven Allows, Cary does not work, of course, and Ron’s devotion to tree farming is suggestive in several directions. It is a physical employment in contrast to the white-collar business and professional work of the men in Cary’s set and to Ned’s prospective job with an oil company in Iran. Even enrichment from the nursery business would not necessarily redeem Ron in their eyes. But Ron’s employment also ties

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in with his ambition to be in harmony with nature, his emulation of Henry David Thoreau’s ambition not to be alienated from nature by social conventions in the way that the club members so obviously are. His employment cannot be separated from his life. So Ron’s modest pallet in a room open to the light and airy growing spaces of the greenhouse is highlighted through Cary’s observation of it during her first visit, exemplifying Ron’s absence of interest in a house that would represent achievement and social status as hers does the achievements of her late husband. Ali’s situation is different in so many ways, which further shows how Fassbinder uses the Sirkian pretext to develop ideas appropriate to his different setting. Ron’s workplace is peaceful, clean, and filled with an organic beauty of growing plants, all under his control; Ali’s, by contrast, is emphatically loud, dirty, and industrial. Furthermore, Ali is treated like a “dog” by his German employers, as we see when Emmi goes there to tell him how much she needs him after Ali has not come home, and where she is ridiculed as his “grandmother” by his fellow workers. Ali’s sleeping quarters would never be conjoined with his workplace, and they are not— he shares a sleeping room with five other immigrants, a situation Emmi calls inhuman (menschenunwürdig). In his imitation of Sirk, then, Fassbinder contrasts the real situation of an immigrant worker in a modern German industrial city not only with Emmi’s home; he also sets it against the escape fantasy embodied in Ron’s evergreen world as that stands in opposition to the false values of the American upper-middle class of the country club. The question of different ways of living, between Cary and Ron, and between Emmi and Ali, leads us into the heart of both films, for which the women’s homes and the values expressed in them are fundamental. Home is a central motif of both films: Ned, as we have seen, frames the family home as the essence of tradition, and moral rectitude, almost a bastion of civilization to be defended against the rabble, a monument to the family patriarch. Ron is wary of every aspect of Cary’s lifestyle, countering it with his gospel according to Walden; he will go so far as to try to establish a new type of home by refurbishing his mill for his bride. If Ron’s living arrangement is an extension of his philosophy, Ali, indifferently accepting to bunk with several other immigrant workers, must look for social dimensions of a home at the Asphalt Bar. Emmi’s apartment can then replace this, offering him the warmth and companionship of a marriage, the ultimate marker of home, which more typically leads to or derives from the notion of family. Given Cary’s youthful appearance, children almost still

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seem a possibility for Ron and Cary. One of Fassbinder’s significant statements in Fear Eats the Soul is that the bond between Emmi and Ali can be sufficient without children, supplying the needed warmth of companionship in a cold world. For Cary, not only the scale of the house and its furnishings are important, the wealth they represent, but also their ability to express the social group to which she belongs, an extension of the manners of her group, the way they must move and talk in such an environment as Fassbinder suggested. Harvey’s visit, where Ned prepares a martini for him, is a perfect example of the ritual; the formalized banter is little more than a celebration of their style of living, from emphasis on the patriarch’s athletic and social achievements to Ned’s following the same path and Harvey’s willingness to continue on this path to his grave. Kay similarly will follow Cary’s example, developing the requisite social and homemaking skills and raising a family, despite her academic pretensions. But emphasizing Cary’s house and the rituals that transpire there is only important in conjunction with how Ron offers an alternative model. Even Ron’s elegantly refurbished old mill, however comfortable and beautiful, is presented as nonconformist. The challenge to Cary is whether she can break the mold of expected social behavior, as a widow taking a young lover and even marry the man who has no interest in defining his life according to others’ opinions. The question remains unresolved at the end of the film because these two worldviews cannot be reconciled. This, in Mulvey’s words about Sirk, is the “strength of the melodramatic form, [which] lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road, a cloud of over-determined irreconcilables which put up resistance to being settled in the last five minutes.”69 For Emmi and Ali, the question presents itself somewhat differently. Ali represents values of warmth and emotional accessibility. To Emmi’s statements about her husband’s death and her children living apart from her, he counterposes the situation of his mother in Morocco—families continue together, and the house, so important in All That Heaven Allows and reimagined in Emmi’s apartment, is irrelevant as the Berbers are nomads, wandering across northern Africa. Thus, in emotional terms, Morocco is the alternative world comparable to the “natural” life that Ron represents in All That Heaven Allows. Ali’s brief statements here are the equivalent of Ron’s sermons: Ali states unequivocally that a family belongs together and being alone is not good. His line later in the film, “Angst essen Seele auf,” that provides the title of the film, punctuates these statements. He offers Emmi a path out of her isolation, an immediacy of warmth and

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conversation that contrasts with her position frozen in the social hierarchy of a well-ordered German life. And yet, as does Cary, under the pressure of disapproval by the world around her, including her own family, Emmi begins to wish that Ali would assimilate and get used to the way people live in Germany. “People in Germany don’t eat couscous,” she says. He cannot change, of course, just as Ron cannot live in Cary’s house, and becoming German in his habits and actions threatens not only his happiness but the potential of a different life for Emmi as well. Fassbinder takes one passage of dialogue from Kay in All That Heaven Allows, in which she says she is unable to withstand the social pressure because of her mother’s affair, and gives the speech directly to Emmi in Fear Eats the Soul. It occurs at the moment of maximum pressure on Cary: Kay, having been taunted by her friends, left school in anger, and broken up with Freddie (David Janssen), breaks down in tears. “I told him I didn’t care what people said,” she says, falling into Cary’s arms: “But I do care! I care terribly.” Exerting maximum emotional leverage on her mother, the question is put directly as to whether Cary loves Ron so much that she is willing to “ruin all our lives.” In the comparable scene in Fear Eats the Soul, Ali and Emmi are in an outdoor café with the staff grouped at a distance from them in a tableau of rejection. Emmi, like Kay and Cary, has reached the limit of her strength to resist the social pressure on her and Ali, and before exploding in anger at the café staff, she breaks down in tears. “I pretend I don’t care,” she says, “but I do!” Consoling her, Ali is moved to his only use of Arabic in the film, repeating a single word “habibi,” my love. Like Sirk, Fassbinder also creates specific scenes dedicated to elaborating the positive elements of the alternative situation of the social outsider, how they too are to be understood within a network of social relations with their friends. The dedicated scene to dramatize this in All That Heaven Allows is Ron’s visit with Cary to his friends Mick and Alida Anderson. The values on display are informality and absence of social distinctions that allow for personal warmth and relationships to trump representations of social position. Though they are just dropping in for a visit, Ron and Cary are immediately invited for dinner and swept up in an impromptu party, in contrast to one of Sara’s dinner parties or a function at the club. Red wine from bottles in straw baskets that Ron uncorks with his teeth contrasts with the fetishized martinis and the ritual surrounding them. At Mick and Alida’s, a dinner table is created by putting boards on sawhorses, and the guests include Italian immigrants of various ages. Cary,

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the outsider in this situation, is warmly embraced in contrast to the rejection of Ron at the club. This scene is as ritualized as the cocktail hour at Cary’s house, but Cary is invited to cross the ideological divide. All here is a melting pot of singing, dancing, story-telling, and laughter. For the immigrant laborer in Munich, such camaraderie is only to be found at the Asphalt Bar, its name pure urban poetry. As Barbara (Barbara Valentin), the bar owner, articulates to Emmi, this is where they can be with their friends and listen to music from back home. They can drink, and there seems to be no class hierarchy, racism or xenophobia restricting the casual sexual relationships. As the party scene at Mick’s shows the way of life that Ron is offering Cary, two comparable scenes in Fear Eats the Soul represent attempts to bridge the distance between Emmi’s and Ali’s ways of being. In one, Emmi drinks with Ali and his male friends at the bar; in the other, Emmi has Ali invite his friends home to drink, listen to music, and play cards. The women in the bar are less welcoming of Emmi, because of her age and obvious social difference from them as a conventional working-class German woman, and to some extent out of jealousy as Barbara says plainly to another of Ali’s sometime female partners. As we come to understand, the Asphalt Bar is not a paradise—none exists in Fassbinder’s world—and Ali complains of spending all his time working and drinking. He is not fundamentally happy, which is why he needs Emmi in this fable. Again Fassbinder insists on both reproducing scenes with a function comparable to those of Sirk, while creating something entirely new. Both of these films are told largely from the perspective of their female protagonists, and in each case this frames the narration in the context of their social fears. Both women are lonely, without being fully aware of it until the possibility of love appears. Among the baggage each carries is her age and her situation as a widow. In All That Heaven Allows, after she has met Ron but before she recognizes the meaning of this, Cary’s announcement of a new openness to life is her appearance in a low-cut red dress. The meaning of this is emphasized in the script by the reaction of both children. It sparks the monologue by Kay that she does not believe widows should be entombed with their husbands, and the “Oedipal” response by Ned that the dress is too revealing, implying that it displays his mother as available sexually. It even draws comment from Harvey, though he comments that an even more revealing dress would be needed to reawaken his dormant sexuality. And it displays Cary in a way that attracts the attention and admiration of everyone at the club, even setting off a preliminary sexual assault by Howard as he traps Cary on the balcony. Jane Wyman,

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Fig. 2.2  Cary’s shocking red dress

forty-eight years old at the time, is framed as stunning in the dress, which announces to Cary’s friends that she is returning to life even as it reminds the viewer that only social convention and a widow’s wardrobe could have concealed her desirability (Fig. 2.2). So what will Fassbinder do if, while imitating Sirk’s narrative, he makes his widow a much older woman, sixty-five according to the earlier American Soldier narrative? Fassbinder does not deemphasize her body as one might predict; just the opposite—he emphasizes her weight and shape so at odds with common images of sexual desirability. But in the first scene of the film, he performs an alternative costume revelation that directly refers to Cary’s red dress. Entering the bar from the rain, Emmi huddles in a dark coat, by herself, at the small table far from the others, a forlorn figure, closed in on herself, uncertain and apologetic. When Ali has been challenged to ask her to dance, she hesitates, but then she surprises us by accepting. And getting quickly to her feet, she opens her dark coat to reveal a light-colored dress with a crazy-quilt, abstract pattern that, however ordinary it may be for a German woman of her age and situation, stands in striking contrast the black coat, as if Fassbinder is telling us to pay attention to the contrast between Emmi’s drab exterior and her capacity for a vibrant emotional life. However

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different she is from Cary in terms of conventional norms of feminine beauty, this scene is a variation on Sirk’s: in place of a half-understood announcement of renewed sexuality availability, Emmi’s gesture announces an emotional availability that marks her as a fitting partner for Ali (Fig. 2.3). A shared dimension of the narrative point of view of these films is the agency of their female protagonists. Among Fassbinder’s comments on Sirk’s films was his observation that “in Douglas Sirk’s movies, women think. I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any. Usually the women just react, do things women do, and here they actually think.”70 Indeed, since the viewer’s perspective is close to that of Cary, there are numerous moments of decision where she hesitates, the camera showing her troubled brow or eyes, moments which make full use of Jane Wyman’s ability to convey shades of feeling in response to her developing thoughts and in anticipation of what she will say. One occurs when Cary is told by Kay that she is marrying Freddy, and while Kay recalls their earlier breakup the camera holds on Cary’s face, until after a silence, Carry says, “Yes,

Fig. 2.3  Emmi prepares to dance

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I remember, that was the day you told me your life would be ruined if I married Ron.” These words go beyond the immediate moment to reveal the inner progress of Carry’s thoughts as the story has unfolded, a reflection that ends following Ned’s announcement that he will be leaving and that they should sell the house. Cary’s face reflects a summation of all that has happened, accompanied by the words, “Don’t you see, Kay, the whole thing has been so pointless.” Cary, of course, is confined by a paternalistic discourse within which, after her husband dies, she falls back on a succession of male counselors to inform her and authorize her behavior. There is Ned, replacing his father, but also Harvey, and even Ron, in a much more forceful way. There is also the figure of the doctor, a staple of classical Hollywood, combining scientific authority and common sense, aligned with the establishment and the law, but for the most part also practical and humane. Cary’s doctor rules out physical causes for her distress, and ultimately he tells her to disregard the club women and to pursue Ron. But even thus circumscribed, Cary is the driving force in the film. She becomes alert to Ron in the opening scene, seizes the opportunity to go to his nursery, fights her losing battle with the club women and with her children, then realizes she has made a mistake to give in to them. While Ron is frozen by his own surprising inability to act—even when Mick asserts that women want men to tell them what to do—Cary takes the step of driving to the mill to see him. In a typical melodramatic trope, this gesture is foiled by an accident of timing, she leaves just before he arrives home. The directorial intervention to produce Ron’s fall brings her to his bedside. At a narrative level, the action is driven by the needs of Cary’s perspective, specifically her need to break out of the stricture of social conventions in order to be fulfilled. In Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder emphasizes Emmi’s “thinking.” He echoes Sirk’s use of mirrors, having both Emmi and Ali examine themselves early in the narrative, though the emphasis is on Emmi as she looks to see if she still recognizes the woman who has slept with Ali. Brigitte Mira is a well-trained and experienced professional actor, in obvious contrast to the untrained El Heidi ben Salem. Yet by lingering on Emmi’s expressions, Fassbinder is able to create in her case as well a Brechtian formality, representing an idea rather than leaving it within the character’s psychology. Emmi not only thinks, she performs the idea that she is thinking. Fassbinder makes Emmi a more active and powerful force than Cary. Ali takes the initiative in offering to walk her home, but Emmi is the one who insists that he come inside, that when the rain continues he come

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upstairs, and that he have a brandy with his coffee because “it’s not fun to drink alone.” She has the courage to face down those who disapprove, and when the conflict caused by differences in their ways of living creates a distance between them, her pursuit of him to his place of work and at the Asphalt Bar is more courageous and decisive than Cary’s actions. Among the expressions of Emmi’s perspective is a sense of her sexuality, evident, for example, in the scene where she gazes at Ali’s naked body when he is taking a shower. While Cary is presented as an object of desire, Emmi is not, her body emphasized, for example, when she and Ali are saying good night the first evening: she is clearly attracted to Ali, and after telling him that she has laid out a pair of her deceased husband’s pajamas for him and he moves out of the frame, Jürgen Jürges’s camera lingers on Emmi, moving ever so slowly down over her body, pausing when she is framed from head to knees. The physical contrast between her and Ali is driven home in the scene when she gazes at his body in the shower, telling him simply how “beautiful” he is before saying that the coffee is ready. Emmi ultimately becomes the voice of realism in the film, the one who understands and communicates the lesson Fassbinder means for us to embrace, that one must seize opportunities to live when they present themselves, however imperfect or incomplete. With Emmi’s authority augmented, that of the doctor has a much smaller role to play in this film, though he retains something of a scientific voice of authority in reminding us that Ali’s stomach ulcer will recur because the social forces that produced it have not changed. Emmi is the dominant actor in her relationship with Ali from the beginning to the end of the film, except in a few moments when she is disarmed by social convention, refusing at first to take money from him for their shared living expenses, for example, or when she insists he should learn to appreciate German food over Moroccan couscous. The sexual relationship between Emmi and Ali is among the important thematic links to All That Heaven Allows even as the handling of sex underscores one clear difference between the universe of Fassbinder and that of Sirk’s 1955 Hollywood film. Sex is obsessively present in All That Heaven Allows as a dominant motive force in human relationships, managed by social conventions and feared as dangerous to a social order. As all the ideas of Sirk’s film are, this is made explicit, in this instance through Kay’s application of Freud from her psychology class when she lectures her mother and brother, reemphasized by Sirk’s transparent phallic symbolism of Ron’s inability to shoot straight when his relationship with Cary is broken and of his potency regained when she is at his side in the final scene. In the view of Cary’s friends

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and family, Harvey is right for the “aging” widow because of his absence of sexual passion, while sex is the reason assumed by Ned and by Cary’s friends for her attraction to Ron. All admire his muscles, and Howard takes Cary’s interest in Ron as evidence of an ungovernable sexual appetite. Kay similarly dramatizes the idea of the superficiality of stated, conscious desires when, as soon as she is kissed by the captain of the football team, she throws off her glasses and academic ambitions. So, ironically, sex, as an idea, dominates this narrative while at the same time the color, lighting, costumes, speech, and acting conspire to create a feeling of artificiality, undercutting any sense of bodily reality in the film. The irony of Sirk’s emphasis on sex in All That Heaven Allows is inverted in a banalization of sex in Fear Eats the Soul, the work of a filmmaker who foregrounds the body from Love is Colder than Death at the beginning of his career to Querelle at the end, even in his own confrontational nude performance in his segment of Germany in Autumn (1978). Sex in Fear Eats the Soul is no longer an underlying motive of behavior, but rather an openly expressed desire, a physical extension of normal social intercourse. Ali is given words that emphasize the importance of people talking with each other, and it is Emmi’s interest in his life that first opens the door between them. Their sleeping together seems to grow out of a desire that complements the need to escape loneliness. This contrast between Sirk and Fassbinder, a product of the difference in time and place, between classic Hollywood of the 1950s and European modernism of the 1970s, is developed mainly through another trope from All That Heaven Allows that Fassbinder transforms in Fear Eats the Soul: the threat of a younger, conventionally more appropriate partner for the older protagonist. In Cary’s case, the threat is only imagined, a figment of Cary’s insecurity. Cary first notices the warm, even flirtatious greeting between Ron and Mary Ann (Merry Anders) when Cary and Ron arrive at Mick and Alida’s. Cary’s lingering hope to be with Ron is crushed when Mary Ann appears as Cary is buying a Christmas tree, thinking fondly of Ron’s silver spruces until she sees Mary Ann at Ron’s side and assumes that they are a couple; she is only disabused of this when Alida says later that she and Mick are going to Mary Ann’s wedding to someone other than Ron. So the entire specter of a rival is a dimension of our experience of things from Cary’s perspective, through a lens of her insecurity and society’s definition of her role. From Sirk’s efficient use of this trope, Fassbinder elaborates Ali’s relationship with Barbara, the owner of the Asphalt Bar. Barbara is a strong presence from the opening moment: through her eyes we observe Emmi

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enter the bar and order her cola. Barbara knows Ali well, though in the first instance it is the other woman in the bar whose invitation to have sex he turns down with memorable eloquence. The second time Emmi comes to the bar, looking for Ali this time, Barbara feels the need to declare the bar her territory, saying for no other apparent reason, “I own the bar.” And her further development has several stages. When Ali comes to invite his male friends to leave the bar and go home with him, Barbara asks him if he is happy, following it up with a more loaded question of whether he is afraid of Emmi. Then later, when Ali goes to the bar without Emmi in response to her request that he “get used to the way things are done in Germany,” and he finds the bar closed, he hesitates briefly, but goes to Barbara’s apartment above it. She offers to make him the couscous when Emmi has refused, and the point is programmatically clear: at this moment Barbara is giving Ali the acceptance and affection that Emmi is denying him. This second episode drives home the point that Ali’s relationship with Barbara is also a gratifying sexual relationship, for both of them. For Ali’s second night with Barbara, we see them take off their clothes, embrace, Barbara then pulling him down to the bed where the camera lingers. Especially in the first of their two scenes together, Barbara has a Nosferatu-­ like vampire quality because of her prominent teeth and her approach as she takes possession of Ali. But it is significant that Fassbinder shows sex between these more appropriately matched bodies whereas he withholds images of Ali with Emmi, presenting her more as a spectator of his physical beauty. In a literal reminder of Cary’s taking Ron to her club in order to “show him off,” Emmi invites her neighbors to admire Ali and to feel his muscles as if he were a prize piece of livestock at a county fair. But the fact that Ali has a satisfying sexual relationship with Barbara paradoxically underscores the fact that his relationship with Emmi offers something beyond sex, something more. It is sustained by a quality of companionship not otherwise available, of which sex is merely an extension, not the veiled motivation for it. The quid pro quo of relationships in Fassbinder’s films—in Katzelmacher, for example—frequently involves an implicit or explicit exchange of sex for money, but both Fear Eats the Soul and All That Heaven Allows are careful to disentangle these motives. In Sirk’s film the issue is raised by Jo-Ann at the club when she implies that Cary’s wealth is offered in exchange for Ron’s youthful body, while Sirk has inoculated us against this reading by showing us the monkish simplicity of Ron’s chosen way of life. Fassbinder similarly raises and dismisses the issue, having Emmi refuse to accept money from Ali as he refuses free room and board; Emmi yields only when she understands that he wants to share responsibility for their living expenses.

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Local merchants in both films tie the situation of the couples into the daily economy of their worlds, though the merchants’ relations with the protagonists is different because Cary’s bourgeois standing puts the butcher in a more subservient position to her than that of the local shop owner with working-class Emmi. While deferential with Cary and her middle-class crowd, the butcher nonetheless offers Mona the information that Cary did not pick up her order because she was away, to which Mona responds that “at least [Cary] is not lonely.” In Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder makes the merchant’s role more active in expressing the community’s rejection of Ali. He takes a position of superiority, refuses to serve the Moroccan laborer and even pretends he can’t understand Ali’s German. It will be the merchant’s more practical wife who insists that he make up with Emmi when she and Ali return from the vacation and that he accept Ali as a client. She may or may not be less xenophobic than her husband, but for Fassbinder, as for Sirk, self-interest has a powerful impact on people’s ideas. In both films, for example, a sudden shift in thinking follows changes in the circumstances of characters. Cary’s children completely lose interest in their mother’s concerns when their own loom more important. This is the meaning of Kay’s reversals, first when she gives up her studious pretensions for her athletic boyfriend, even more so as she forgets all her concerns when she is engaged to be married, the deal sealed with a diamond ring. Even Ned, self-appointed guardian of the family name and his father’s reputation, all apparently vested in the family home, is ready to sell the house the moment his career takes off with a fellowship and the offer of a longer-term job with an oil company in Iran. Fassbinder exaggerates Sirk’s already abrupt transformations to create an atmosphere of almost fairy-­ tale reversal of fortunes. After declarations of love, Emmi saying she loves Ali “from here to Morocco,” a fantasy world like Greece in the mind of Marie in Katzelmacher, Emmi and Ali take a holiday, not to Morocco but to Steinsee, a lake not far from Munich. Magically, when they return, everything is better, the changes presented by Fassbinder in quick succession: Emmi’s neighbors are friendly again, because she is willing to share her basement storage area with one of them; the merchant cheerfully welcomes her business following his wife’s instructions; and because he wants her help with childcare, her son Bruno returns to her, having already sent a check to pay for the television set. This miraculous alteration, based on the self-interest of others, is nonetheless not sufficient in itself to overcome the strain created by Ali’s youth and cultural otherness. That requires another miracle.

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In All That Heaven Allows, it is a genuine deus ex machina, a plot-twist so implausible that it clearly is produced by the author’s moral aims in his allegory rather than growing from the circumstances and psychology of the characters. Ron, a man totally at home in his body and in harmony with nature, loses his way when Cary breaks off their engagement to the point that he slips in the snow and steps off a cliff. Arbitrary as this plot intervention is, the scene also has a secondary function of demonstrating Ron’s fallibility, his vulnerability—now if only in a token way we are shown that he is rigid in following his convictions, too stubborn to subordinate his views for the larger goal of winning Cary. (Fassbinder transfers this apparently gender-based difference to the shop-owning couple in Fear Eats the Soul.) Ali’s vulnerability is also something beyond his control, his situation framed scientifically by the doctor at the hospital who says the ulcer is an inevitable result of Ali’s situation as a Gastarbeiter, and therefore most likely to recur. Emmi’s reconciliation with Ali is framed in a way that also responds directly to Sirk’s ending. The medical emergency reunites both couples, and in both cases fails to resolve the real tensions between them, which are based in social class and foreignness, different lives that have produced different ways of being in the world. In Sirk’s film, the moment is an excessively harmonious one: Ron’s recovering consciousness at dawn summons to his window a deer that represents his connection to nature, and as he turns to embrace Cary his leg rises like an enormous erection, symbol of his restored manhood. Fassbinder responds to this scene by framing it with a difference: Ali’s setting is a public hospital ward, with Ali one in a serial representation of invalids, immersed in rather than isolated from society. In this urban context there will be no deer, but with Emmi standing behind him, Ali’s arm, held by Emmi at right angles to his body can also echo Sirk in the momentary restoration of Ali’s manhood, Ali’s arm less prominent than Ron’s leg, perhaps appropriately since sex in this film, rather than looming large as in All That Heaven Allows, remains more firmly embedded within its social context. Finally, Fassbinder’s rendering of the famous scene featuring the TV set in All That Heaven Allows exemplifies his approach to adaptation, and how the experience of watching Fear Eats the Soul is transformed by an awareness of the references to Sirk even while Fassbinder “tells his own story, using his film experience.” In All That Heaven Allows, the television is a gift from Cary’s son, palliative care for her loneliness since the children will be gone and Cary has, for the moment, given up her lover. Sirk’s camera moves toward the television set where Cary’s reflected image is trapped

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within the frame of the screen, the salesman congratulating her on now having “life’s parade at her fingertips.” The scene is crucial in conveying Cary’s realization of the gravity of her mistake, as well as the larger import of the arrival of television as a medium, deeply intertwined with other changes taking place in American life in the post-war period. Without love, you need television. In Fear Eats the Soul, rather than giving Emmi a TV set after she renounces her lover, Emmi’s son destroys the TV when Emmi introduces Ali as her husband (Fig. 2.4). The violent gesture expresses the son’s anger, but it can take on additional meaning in light of the reference to Sirk, for it can carry the implication that if Emmi has Ali, she might need the television less. Thus Fassbinder recalls Sirk’s juxtaposition of love and life with television fictions, at this moment emphasizing Emmi’s gain where Sirk emphasized Cary’s loss. In this, as in so many aspects of Fear Eats the Soul, the meaning of the film as a “remake” or adaptation must be understood as the derivation of something new out of the structures of Sirk’s earlier film.

Fig. 2.4  Bruno responds to his mother’s marriage

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Fassbinder maps a new situation over that of Sirk’s film, allowing himself to develop the suggestive opportunities created by chance in the process. In doing so, he normalizes a notion of film to film adaptation, so different from the commercial remake. This became a widely adopted method by the next generation of directors taking up classic films, Todd Haynes among them, who returns to Sirk’s melodramas as viewed through a lens significantly colored by Fassbinder.

Notes 1. Elsaesser specifies the films between Merchant of the Four Seasons (1972) and Chinese Roulette (1976), 263. 2. After a first mention of Fassbinder’s German titles, I will use the English ones. 3. Thomsen, 45–46. 4. Thomsen considers Garbage, the City, and Death Fassbinder’s “most explosive and original play,” and that the campaign against Fassbinder was unjustified. The play was attacked by critic Joachim Fest in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 19 March, 1976 as “left-fascist and anti-Semitic” based on dialogue delivered by characters who are, in fact, Nazis. The play was based on a novel by Gerhard Zwerenz, and in Thomsen’s account, the Jewish community in Frankfurt rushed to support Fest’s criticism because its leader, a real estate investor named Ignatz Bubis who later became wellknown as President of the Central Council of Jews, was a model for the corrupt character Abraham in Zwerenz’s novel. 203–208. 5. Barnett, 255. 6. Thomsen, 47. 7. Fleißer was mentored by Brecht, who apparently had a hand in the production of, and scandal around, Pioneers. According to Thomsen, “Just as Fleißer would hardly have managed to make her breakthrough without Brecht, so the young Fassbinder would hardly have started to write without Fleißer.” 95. 8. From an interview with Corinna Brocher, in Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, Frankfurt am Main, 1986. Quoted by Thomsen, 49. 9. Barnett, 23. 10. 49, 51. 11. 50. 12. Barnett, 85. 13. Barnett, 9 and 17: “Regietheater was both sensual and cerebral, plumbing the text for impulses that went beyond the bourgeois functions of the theatre, such as providing cultured entertainment of education for its audience.” 125.

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14. Barnett, 5. 15. Ibid., 52–3. 16. Ibid., 148. 17. Ayers. 18. Ibid., 78. 19. 76. 20. See Elizabeth Wright, 13. She draws on material made available by Reiner Steinweg in his Das Lehrstück, 1972. 21. “The poetically heightened conversational style, the critique of a language of emotions perverted by jargon and cliché, and the investment in the power of speechlessness in Horváth’s plays… are much closer to Fassbinder’s early work in theater (and film) than anything Brecht wrote after Baal.” Peucker, 60. 22. Barnett, 6. 23. One account can be found in Thomsen, 2–9. 24. 110. 25. Katz, 72–74. Salem’s life after starring in this successful film and being estranged from Fassbinder was troubled; in 1977 in a French prison, he hanged himself. Fassbinder found out about this only later, dedicating Querelle (1982) to him with the words “To my friendship with El Hedi ben Salem.” 26. See, for example, Laura Cottingham, 22. 27. 298. Elsaesser writes this specifically in response to two projects left unfinished at Fassbinder’s death, prefacing the cited remark with: “a reading of his work that stresses the psycho-biographical links … is deeply unsatisfactory.” 28. Peucker, 81. 29. Braun, 76. See Wilfried Wiegand: Interview 1. In Peter W.  Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (ed.): Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Frankfurt, 1992, 75. Thomsen refers to Vivre sa vie as Fassbinder’s favorite film and describes his early short, Das kleine Chaos, 1967, as a direct homage. 30. For more on the Godardian side of Fassbinder, see McMahon. She finds in Katzelmacher, as in Godard’s work, “an extreme instrumentalization of intersubjective relations, emphatically showing forms of economic and emotional exploitation to be inextricably bound up with one another.” McMahon goes so far as to associate the “on screen spectacularization of Karina and Schygulla by their directors as related to a conscious production of their star personas, [such that] female stardom in this context emphatically assumes the seriality of a commodity.” Peucker, 85. 31. Elsaesser, 270. For his source, see note 11, 386: “Spielfilme im Deutschen Fernsehen,” ARD Brochure 1973. 32. 45.

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33. Hans Günther Pflaum, Ich will nicht nur, daß ihr mich liebt—Der Filmemacher Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a documentary film, 1992. 34. Love is Colder than Death (1969); Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague, 1970); Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier, 1970); and Rio das Mortes (1971). 35. Fassbinder frequently used in film credits the pseudonym Franz Walsche, a mash-up of Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz and Raoul Walsh. 36. Wir haben von der Produktion des neuen deutschen Films konkrete geistige, formale und wirtschaftliche Vorstellungen. https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/ fileadmin/Kurzfilmtage/Kurzfilmtage_allgemein/Manifest/heller_ob_ manifest_text.jpg. 37. xv. 38. Fassbinder, though not a signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto, became the movement’s most prolific and controversial participant, inevitably a leading voice because of his visibility. With Wim Wenders, he was among the founders of the Filmverlag der Autoren in 1971, which attempted to address the challenges of distribution for the work of the New German Cinema directors. 39. xv. 40. 3–4. 41. 5. 42. 6. 43. Monogram, No. 4, 2–15. 44. xv. 45. Michael Töteberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rowohlt e-book, Kindle. 46. Reprinted in Anarchy, 77–89. 47. Anarchy, 42. 48. 275. 49. 50. 50. Cited by Peucker, 5. McMahon’s chapter focuses on Godard’s influence in the early films. 51. Fassbinder may have been influenced by the strikingly similar conclusion of Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965). 52. For analysis of how Fassbinder’s use of color routinely differs from that of Sirk, see Brian Price, “Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority,” in Peucker, 159–180. 53. 56. 54. 50. 55. 51. 56. 50. From an interview with Norbert Sparrow in Cineaste VIII/2, 1977, 20. 57. “A character’s false consciousness became the vehicle for showing up a world of insincerity and bogus values, where the deformation of subjectiv-

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ity—say a mother’s harsh disappointment in her son or a shrewish wife— merely mirrored the deformation of social reality.” 51. 58. 51. 59. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) was a similar attempt to adapt a canonical novel for television; it was a failure at the time—by then Fassbinder’s public reputation had been tarnished, the book was difficult and less familiar than Effi Briest, and the film’s lighting and cinematography made the images on the television screen difficult to discern. 60. What is Cinema, 142. 61. Special Features, The Criterion Collection DVD, 2001. 62. Anarchy, 11–12. 63. Anarchy, 80. 64. Anarchy, 78–80. 65. 81. 66. This dimension of Sirk was clearly recognized by others at the time, for example Halliday, writing that “Heaven, along with Imitation of Life, 1958, represents Sirk’s most sustained dissection of pretense connected with class, fakery which has accumulated historically and now caked into ideology.” Halliday, Monogram, No. 4. London: Monogram Publications, 1972. 67. Anarchy, 42. 68. Euripides especially is frequently evoked; see for example Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk. 69. Home, 76. 70. 81. Provocateur that he was, Fassbinder immediately countered this expression of sympathy for women by continuing dryly: “That’s something you’ve got to see. It’s wonderful to see a woman thinking. That gives you hope. Honest.”

Bibliography Ayers, Jessica. Vanderbilt University Theater. Notes for a production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/goodperson/ brechtian-­acting/. Barnett, David. Fassbinder and the German Theater. New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Braun, Theodor. “The Helplessness of Immersion: Melodrama, Vivre sa vie, and Veronika Voss.” Spectator (USC), Vol. 8, issue 2, 1988. Corrigan, Timothy. New German Film: The Displaced Image, Revised edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

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Cottingham, Laura. Fear Eats the Soul. London: British Film Institute, 2005. Elsaesser, Thomas: Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974). Criterion Collection DVD, 2003. Godard, Jean-Luc. Vivre sa vie (1962). Halliday, Jon. Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday. New  York: Viking Press, 1972. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Christine Gledhill, ed. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, second edition. London: Routledge, 2013. Katz Robert, and Peter Berling. Love is Colder than Death. London: Paladin Books, 1986. Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Leo, A. Lensing. “Literature between Cinema and Life.” In Peucker, 53–66. Mayne, Judith. “Fassbinder and Spectatorship.” New German Critique, No. 12 (Autumn, 1977), 61–74. Peucker, Brigitte, ed. A Companion to Reiner Werner Fassbinder. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968. Sirk, Douglas. All That Heaven Allows (1958). DVD, The Criterion Collection, 2001. Thomsen, Christian Braad. Fassbinder, The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Töteberg, Michael. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1992. Frankfurt: Fischer Cinema, 1992. (Kindle). Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Wright, Elizabeth. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. New  York: Routledge, 1989.

CHAPTER 3

Far from Heaven (2002)

In a magisterial interview for the Criterion DVD of Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), Todd Haynes speaks clearly about the importance of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as influences that he had not addressed openly. Thinking about a new project following Velvet Goldmine (1998), he says, “I felt that it was time to really get into this specific influence more directly. So I went back to All That Heaven Allows, this beautiful 1956 [sic] film starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and it’s the same film that for most practical purposes Fassbinder was looking at as well when he made Fear Eats the Soul.”1 Like Fassbinder, Haynes also felt a need to recreate Sirk’s film. Among the most striking differences between Far from Heaven and Fear Eats the Soul, however, is that Far from Heaven remains dependent on its precursor, and intentionally so. Far from Heaven integrates the rhetoric of Sirkian melodrama to the extent that Haynes’s reflection on the world of Sirk remains incomplete without some awareness of its model. With adaptations of classic novels or plays, of course, an audience is often expected to recall in some degree the original. If they cannot, the film may still be intelligible, but it will remain considerably less rewarding than if the viewer can, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s word, “oscillate” back and forth between it and the source text.2 Far from Heaven goes farther than this. As Haynes remarks in one interview, his film recalls representations of the 1950s more than individuals’ memories of the period, and it recalls Sirk more directly and vividly than anything © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_3

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else.3 Richard Dyer suggests that audience responses to the film “operate mostly between bafflement at its difference and geekish noting of every Sirkian nuance.”4 Without some knowledge of Sirk’s 1950s melodramas, Far from Heaven challenges viewers to make sense of it, above all at the level of style. The opening credits of the film and the opening images of autumnal red and golden leaves, accompanied by a lush score by Elmer Bernstein, announce that we are in another period of time, the Sirk 1950s. As the film unfolds, however, a sense of the uncanny creeps in, as we recognize the images or memory of them, yet with something altered. Along with an awareness of Haynes’s virtuosity, we watch his recreation of a Sirkian melodrama mindful of all that has happened since, the Civil Rights movement and the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, for example, but also changes of clothing styles, manners, and mores. Even more profoundly unsettling than watching earlier stages of American history, however, including injustices that continue in the present, is a sense that aspects of that period, settled in our minds and thought to represent historical reality, have changed. Differences have been injected into the memory itself, calling into question more than the country’s repressive past, infecting the very processes of memory and foregrounding the false consciousness within which images of the past were and are created.5 The plot of Far from Heaven is complicated, yet unfolds rapidly while the pace of the film seems nonetheless measured. Cathy (Julianne Moore) and Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) are a striving and successful couple in an affluent Connecticut community in 1957; as the film opens, Cathy is waiting for Frank to arrive home so that they can go to a dinner party. But Frank Whitaker, an ad-man under pressure at work and drinking heavily, is picked up by the police for “loitering,” by mistake he insists—Cathy ultimately explains to their friends that they missed the party because of a fender bender. In fact, Frank is a closeted gay man, hiding his feelings from his wife; now he has begun to seek partners in the shadows of Hartford. More clouds gather immediately. Cathy is being profiled for a society magazine when she is suddenly frightened to see a black man on her lawn, though he turns out to be Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), son of their former gardener who has recently died and who is taking over his father’s work. Then one evening Cathy surprises Frank in his office with a lover. Full of despair and self-loathing, Frank goes to a doctor who recommends various forms of conversion therapy. Unable to confide in

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her friends about such a taboo subject, Cathy finds herself isolated; Raymond, strong and handsome, is the only sympathetic person around her. Frank is progressively unhappy and the stress on their marriage begins to show. Meanwhile, Cathy encounters Raymond and his daughter Sarah (Jordan Nia Elizabeth) at a local art opening, the only people of color there. Cathy’s friends notice, with raised eyebrows, her friendliness with Raymond, and when she sees him again, Cathy asks Raymond what it is like to be the only black person in such a situation; in response he offers her a comparable experience, taking her to a restaurant/bar where she is the only white person. This, however, creates a major scandal, in his community as well as in hers. Cathy breaks off contact with him. She and Frank go on a holiday to Miami to escape their situation, Cathy hoping to repair their relationship. Instead, Frank meets a new lover, and when they return, Cathy and her children are shunned by the community over her friendship with Raymond. The consequences are worse for him: his daughter is bullied at school, seriously injured when she is struck by a thrown rock. With Frank ready for a divorce, Cathy’s life is collapsing, and when she hears of the injury to Raymond’s daughter, she rushes to him. He has now made plans to leave town, in order to protect his daughter and because his neighbors are attacking him. Cathy tells him that she wants to join him in Baltimore, where no one will know them and they can be together. He responds firmly that he does not think that would be wise. The film ends with her sadly waving goodbye to him as his train departs. Direct reference to All That Heaven Allows begins with the word “Heaven” in the title, with Far from Heaven much more unequivocally foreshadowing the finality of this film’s ending in comparison with that of Sirk’s film. All That Heaven Allows ends with Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) at the side of Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), at least allowing a trial of whether they will be able to bridge the gap between their different ways of life. Fassbinder had described Sirk’s as a deliberately false happy ending that leaves one unsatisfied. He copies it closely in having Emmi (Brigitte Mira) at the side of Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) for the final scene of Fear Eats the Soul.6 But Far from Heaven’s most obvious borrowing from Sirk, beyond its recreation of Sirk’s style, is the narrative thread involving Raymond Deagan and Cathy Whitaker. Age and class difference in Sirk’s film have become race and class here, as in Fassbinder’s film with El Hedi ben Salem as the Berber migrant from Morocco—Raymond Deagan equals Ron Kirby plus Ali. Following the plots of both earlier films, the stages of

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Haynes’s story involve attraction and the beginning of a relationship, negative pressure from the community, a reversal of the woman’s embrace of her socially inappropriate partner, followed ultimately by an effort to reaffirm the relationship, impossible here where it was merely left in doubt in the earlier two films. Cathy Whitaker’s rejection of Frank when she discovers him kissing a man is presented as so visceral and complete that from early in Far from Heaven she might as well be a widow as are the protagonists of All That Heaven Allows and Fear Eats the Soul. When Frank arrives home and encounters Cathy, who like Frank’s partner fled his office after the men were discovered together, communication is impossible. With Sirkian transparency, the dialogue dramatizes this: Cathy struggles even to speak, finally forcing out two words, “I can’t.” While the narrative of Cathy and Raymond has a self-evident source in All That Heaven Allows, that of Frank has a different kind of origin story: Haynes responds to a dimension of Sirk and to readings of Sirk’s films that changed significantly in the years after Fassbinder’s remake, on the one hand with the serious academic investigation of melodrama in which Sirk’s films played a prominent part, but more importantly with the transformation of Rock Hudson’s reputation following his treatment for and death from AIDS.7 Reevaluation of Sirk “boomed” at the time Fassbinder saw and wrote on six of his films in late 1970 and early 1971. Following their release, writes Barbara Klinger, “with Rock Hudson as their star, Sirk’s films represented a certain celebration of ‘normal’ masculinity in the face of social crisis about virility in the postwar era.” Later, however, “reviewers operating under the influence of the powerful nostalgia of the 1970s transformed Sirk’s films … into ‘classics,’ while the revelation of Hudson’s gay identity in the 1980s made Sirk melodramas into treatises on the artifice of romance and gender roles in the Hollywood cinema.”8 With his success in Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and other films, Hudson’s image as a sexual icon developed as an alternative to more tortured types such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. As Klinger argues convincingly, Hudson embodied a certain brand of “sexual normalcy,” an image which “functioned defensively against changing conceptions of masculine power and sexuality in the post-World War II era. In a society obsessively concerned with the problem of male ‘weakness,’ posed as a result of such social specters as the ‘modern woman’ and the ‘homosexual menace,’ the media developed Hudson’s image as proof of the widespread appeal and

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endurance of uncomplicated virility.” The level of his popularity is significant: Modern Screen in 1954, Look in 1955, and Photoplay in 1957 declared Hudson the most popular movie star, as did theater owners the same year. Along with Cary Grant, Hudson was the dominant male star of the period, and nothing provides better evidence of his image than All That Heaven Allows, a “’natural man’—earthy, generous, soft-spoken, and unassuming.”9 Hudson was beefcake and decency combined, and what should be immediately evident to viewers of Far from Heaven is how perfectly Raymond, embodied in Dennis Haysbert, is created out of this same mold (Fig. 3.1). He is a loving father, with an impressive physique, tasteful clothing, a sonorous voice and articulate, educated speech, and a knowledge of art comparable to Ron’s literary tastes; Raymond is all strength and decency, a conventional ideal of masculinity, an African-American Rock Hudson. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he still fits perfectly Klinger’s description of Hudson as “an alternative to the psychoanalytic romantic hero, a testimony to the continuing appeal of the normal in the face of disturbing new trends in male stardom. Above all, the … persona communicated a masculinity that was always non-threatening and that supported the tradition of a ‘clean-cut’ masculine ethic.”10 His blackness, in addition to recalling Sirk’s focus on race in Imitation of Life (1959), follows

Fig. 3.1  Raymond: a Black Ron Kirby

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Fassbinder’s model of adding ethnicity to other dimensions of class, and to youth, in making El Hedi ben Salem Emmi’s inappropriate lover. “Ali” was clearly perceived as black in Fear Eats the Soul. We need only listen to Fassbinder’s dialogue when Emmi’s neighbor (Lilo Pempeit), based on Mona Plash in Sirk’s film, rushes to announce that Emmi has a foreigner (einen Ausländer) in her apartment. When questioned, she adds, “Ja, einen Schwarzen” (a black), asked in return “Einen Neger?” (a negro?). Her response to this dwells literal-mindedly on Ali’s color: “nicht ganz schwarz, aber ziemlich schwarz” (not totally black, but fairly black). But if Raymond embodies the Rock Hudson of the 1950s, Frank Whitaker derives from the re-readings of Sirk that followed revelations that Hudson was a closeted gay man. This burst spectacularly into public awareness on July 25, 1985, when a French publicist announced that Hudson was in Paris for AIDS treatment, having been diagnosed with the disease the year before. There had been few public hints of Hudson’s sexual orientation beyond a rumor in 1971 of a “secret wedding to Jim Nabors,” which Hudson declared false.11 So, according to an article in People Magazine in 1985, “Hudson had stunned the world and shattered an image cultivated over three decades. … For fans who know him onscreen it was hard to reconcile the image of the indestructible and quintessential ‘50s movie star with that of the insidious and quintessential ‘80s disease.”12 Hudson’s impact on AIDS awareness is a remarkable story in itself, but significant here is its impact on how a film like All That Heaven Allows would be seen by the generation of viewers that included Todd Haynes. The overall impact of the tension between the old and new images of Hudson, in Klinger’s words, “lends an artifice to Hudson’s roles by directing attention to the apparatus of deceit on which the ‘magic’ of Hollywood is based, as well as its primary convention, heterosexual romance. … A self-reflexive and distancing element is thus introduced into the spectatorial experience of these films.”13 This new degree of alienation compounded the period stylization that already made them Brechtian vehicles of irony and social critique.14 In addition to the double image of Hudson, Haynes also had the model of Fassbinder as an openly gay director, publicly comfortable with his sexuality and the creator of films such as Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972), Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and his Friends, 1975), In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons, 1978), and Querelle (1982). Directly relevant to Fear Eats the Soul, El Hedi ben Salem, the actor cast in the Rock Hudson role, was not only

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gay, he was widely known to be Fassbinder’s lover. Ali, then, like Ron Kirby in Sirk’s film, is a model of idealized heteronormative masculinity whose sexuality is hidden beneath a role he is playing. However Haynes came to write Frank’s story as a counter plot to Raymond’s, the two characters together in Far from Heaven seem to represent a splitting of Rock Hudson’s persona between the image of Ron Kirby and that of Hudson as a closeted gay man.15 Cathy’s first response is to flee, then to encourage Frank to face up to his “problem.” Frank accepts society’s definition of himself as “sick,” telling the doctor he consults that he will “beat this thing,” as if it is a kind of cancer. But his self-loathing is accompanied by anger, and he drinks too much, lashing out at Cathy until, in another moment borrowed from Fear Eats the Soul, he realizes something important has happed to him. Confession scenes involving the children are important in both All That Heaven Allows and in Fassbinder’s version, but here the children are still young, so the confessional scene involves only Cathy; she provides the disapproving judgment that was delivered by Cary’s children in All That Heaven Allows and by Emmi’s in Fear Eats the Soul. Frank breaks down in tears, echoing Emmi in expressing something he finds surprising and troubling, “I’ve fallen in love.” Frank’s unmentionable situation also brings Cathy to tears, which again echoes the earlier films, in All That Heaven Allows when Cary’s daughter falls in her mother’s arms and admits that she cannot stand being ostracized, and in Fear Eats the Soul Emmi’s similar breakdown, which moves Ali to console her with the Arabic word “habibi” (my love). Haynes has spoken of the way Emmi’s crying is framed in this scene by the formal, upright positioning of her body and Ali’s.16 Cathy’s moment of tears in Far from Heaven similarly elicits tenderness from Raymond that is a turning point in their relationship, opening the way for him to invite her into his world, where they dance as potential romantic partners, beyond simply “friendship.” Thereafter, her relationship with Raymond and Frank’s sexuality become two sides of the same coin; both situations are subject to repressive social conventions that confine people and deny them the expression of love. The story of the attraction between Cathy and Raymond clearly derives first from All That Heaven Allows, and specific references go well beyond the female protagonist’s frustrated love story. Cathy Whitaker has a best friend, for example, comparable to Cary’s friend Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead) in All That Heaven Allows. Cathy’s friend is Eleanor Fine (Patricia Clarkson), who similarly plays a role of well-meaning advisor to

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the protagonist, counseling and defending her when rumors begin to fly— Haynes formalizes her role to the point of making her a consultant for the décor of Cathy’s house. As Sara in All That Heaven Allows organizes the party at the country club where Cary introduces Ron to her friends, witnessing their complete rejection of him, Eleanor in Far from Heaven organizes the art show where Cathy publicly encounters Raymond. Eleanor seems understanding of Cathy throughout her ordeal, but in the end, more categorically than Sara in All That Heaven Allows, she turns openly against Cathy when the latter reveals that Raymond makes her feel “alive, somehow,” and that she constantly thinks about him. “I’m sure I must have looked the fool crusading away against Mona Lauder and all of her so-called inventions,” Eleanor says indignantly and, responding to Cathy’s denial of having acted on her feelings, “you certainly make it sound as if something happened.” Sex is below the surface here, much as it is in All That Heaven Allows, even in Cathy’s dawning understanding of her desire. Mona Lauder (Celia Weston) in Far From Heaven takes her name and function in the narrative from Mona Plash (Jacqueline deWit) in All That Heaven Allows. In each film, Mona is the most vicious gossip, the kind of person driving tribal exclusion of those guilty of deviant behavior. Both women gleefully spread rumors, and both are made by the writer/director eyewitnesses to evidence of the illicit relationship. Sirk’s scene unfolds with characteristic overdetermined clarity. Mona enters the butcher shop in time to hear the butcher tell Cary how he was unable to deliver her roast over the weekend. After Mona has entered, he addresses to her the remark that he could not figure out where Cary could have gone. Mona, of course, would like to know, but from Cary she gets only the vague answer “upstate.” The full answer comes, however, when Cary leaves the shop—Mona sees Ron pull up in his utilitarian wagon with “Kirby’s Nursery” on the door. Ron holds the door for Cary to get in and Mona comments to the butcher: “It’s comforting to know she’s not lonely.” The comparable scene in Far from Heaven has Mona Lauder observing when Raymond and Cathy drive up to Eagan’s Restaurant. Mona is picking up her car at a repair garage when her attention is called to Raymond’s pickup truck, with his business logo and name on the door, very like Ron’s in All That Heaven Allows. Mona watches as Raymond opens the door and Cathy gets out of the truck. Haynes provides a close-up of Mona’s face to show her following Cathy and Raymond with her eyes all the way to the restaurant door, then laughing with derisive pleasure at her discovery. Both the quotation in the action and his borrowing the name Mona

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underscore Haynes’s homage to Sirk’s film. Furthermore, his casting choices for Eleanor and Mona resemble physically and in manner Sirk’s actors in All That Heaven Allows. In all three films, a scene to establish the world and social lifestyle of the “inappropriate” lover is important. In All That Heaven Allows, it occurs when Ron introduces Cary to his friends Mick and Alida. Though Ron is just dropping by, he and Cary are immediately swept up in an impromptu party, a dinner table improvised with boards across sawhorses, as other friends join in, including children and the Italian immigrant grandparents. In Ron’s world, all is a melting pot of singing, dancing, storytelling, and laughter, in contrast to the snobbism of Cary’s club. The comparable scene in Far from Heaven, however, follows much more closely that in Fear Eats the Soul, set in the Asphalt Bar, which the immigrant workers treat as their home away from home. Here they can listen to “their own music,” for example, as the bar owner (Barbara Valentin) explains to Emmi. While Emmi is not the only person of her race or ethnicity in the Asphalt Bar, she differs in age and lifestyle from the bar owner and the other women who socialize there. This situation is underscored after Ali and Emmi have become a couple and Emmi joins Ali and his male friends in the bar. The bar owner is openly cool to Emmi, while a woman whom Ali had rejected in the film’s opening scene is aggressively jealous, referring to Emmi as “the old whore.” In the Far from Heaven scene where Cathy is brought into Eagan’s Restaurant, Haynes refers directly Fassbinder’s scene by having Esther (Mylika Davis) in Far from Heaven, a sexy waitress who has clearly been close to Raymond, show jealous hostility to this alien white middle-class rival. Far from Heaven also adds to Fassbinder’s elaboration of the vacation scene, if we can call it that, in All That Heaven Allows, Cary and Ron’s weekend together. In Fear Eats the Soul, this becomes Emmi and Ali’s vacation to the Steinsee near Munich, which though it occurs off-screen and between scenes is a turning point in the narrative, marking an almost fantasy-like disappearance of the external pressures on the couple—when they return from this holiday, the merchant, the neighbors, and Emmi’s colleagues all suddenly accept her again. In Far from Heaven, the vacation of Cathy and Frank to Miami is a similar turning point; it marks the definitive break between Cathy and Frank, in whose life she is replaced by a male partner. If there is a magical resolution of problems in Far from Heaven as there is in Fassbinder’s film, it is that Frank finds love for the first time. For Cathy, the vacation is followed ruthlessly by the consequences of her

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actions with Raymond: Cathy and her children become pariahs; Raymond and his daughter are attacked by both the white and black communities. The doctor’s role in Far from Heaven closely echoes that of Dr. Hennessy (Hayden Rorke) in All That Heaven Allows—the society represented in the films is the same, with the familiar trope of the doctor as an educated man of common sense. In Sirk’s film there is little irony as he counsels Cary, telling her that there is nothing wrong with her physically and that she must take action on her feelings for Ron, in spite of the gossips like Mona. In that instance, the doctor introduces an objective perspective, of a man who has considerable intimate knowledge of the people in the town and is free of their biases. In Fear Eats the Soul, the unnamed doctor played by Hark Bohm only appears briefly in the final scene, offering the difficult truth that Ali’s stomach ulcer cannot be cured until all of the social pressures faced by migrant guest workers disappear. In Haynes’s film, however, Dr. Bowman (James Rebhorn), while still a man apparently admired and trusted by his community, is grotesquely wrong in his attempt to treat Frank’s “problem.” His acceptance and recommendation of the tortures of conversion therapy is one of the adjustments to memory that bring to the film a sense of revising beliefs previously accepted as settled— the once trusted figure of authority is now unveiled as a vehicle for a particularly pernicious element of the period’s gender paradigm. As mentioned earlier, the use of the children in Far from Heaven is categorically different from that of Cary’s or Emmi’s grown children in the other films. Cathy’s children are young, and Raymond also has a young daughter. Rather than participating in the disapproval of their parent as in the other films, in Far from Heaven the children are victims of the troubles experienced by their parents. A strain of this film echoes what we might call melodramas of Civil Rights terror in the mode of To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962), here the scene in which Sarah Deagan is pursued and attacked by the white boys. Fear and foreboding, a sense of horror of the violence against black people, of lynching, is framed through the lens of anguished white liberalism, represented in Far from Heaven by Cathy’s support for the NAACP, her wanting to do the right thing even though her understanding, from our present perspective, is wildly inadequate to the situation. This is comparable in one sense to the irony of Emmi’s behavior in Fear Eats the Soul, untroubled by her casual acceptance of Nazi ideas in the past while living with the bigotry of Ali’s exclusion in the present. Watching Haynes’s film, we know that however much has changed, the children we see in the world of Far from Heaven internalize the attitudes of their time,

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leading to decades of suffering in a slow process of social evolution that continues now. Many details in Far from Heaven refer directly to either Sirk’s or Fassbinder’s film. Cathy’s manner of vacillating before accepting the invitation to spend a day with Raymond, for example, replicates that of Cary with Ron in All That Heaven Allows. The image of Raymond’s garden shop in Far from Heaven, with Christmas trees for sale in the lighted space next to it, echoes the moment in All That Heaven Allows where Cary buys a Christmas tree from Ron and, seeing Mary Ann (Merry Anders) with him, thinks that Ron is lost to her. One reference to Fear Eats the Soul could not be more explicit. Haynes echoes Emmi’s unabashed appreciation of Salem’s physique where she pauses to tell him “you are beautiful” as she looks at his body in the shower. This same line is given to Cathy, looking at Raymond and telling him, “You are so beautiful.” A transactional dimension of relationships is implied in the reference to Cary’s age and Ron’s relative poverty at Cary’s club in All That Heaven Allows—he is marrying her for her money. The issue is raised differently between Emmi and Ali in Fear Eats the Soul when Ali insists on sharing their household expenses, their negotiation foregrounded in several scenes. In Far from Heaven, one aspect of Cathy’s relationship with Frank was clearly his value to her as a partner in their joint striving for status, succeeding to the point that they are being featured in a local magazine. But Frank loses his value to Cathy, and the quid pro quo of their relationship now rebounds to her disadvantage. All of this is implied in a single line of dialogue. Hearing of the impending divorce, Eleanor asks Cathy a simple question: “Are there savings?” The answer in this case is no, reminding viewers of a persistent household division of labor where the husband earns money and the wife becomes dependent and vulnerable by staying home to manage the household and raise children. Although Far from Heaven principally imitates Sirk in style, Haynes sometimes foregrounds his awareness of Fassbinder’s distancing techniques. One instance that Haynes himself has described occurs in the filming of the art gallery scene. As Cathy and Raymond talk they become subjects of interest to those around them. We see Cathy and Raymond framed in conversation, isolated in the middle distance, then in reverse long shot, Eleanor and others clustered in a tableau as the disapproving observers. The shot mimics moments such as the opening scene of Emmi in the Asphalt Bar observed by the regulars (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3), or a favorite scene that Haynes

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Fig. 3.2  The Asphalt Bar: Emmi’s Welcome

Fig. 3.3  Reaction to Cathy and Raymond

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has said he borrowed for his earlier film Poison where Ali and Emmi sit in the empty outdoor café, observed by the staff who are clustered together in the distance as a disapproving chorus. Fasbinder’s use of framing, of the static tableau, and of lingering duration, as well as their mise-en-scene, distinguish his images from those composed for Hollywood’s “invisible” editing. Haynes, we must remember, having studied semiotics at Brown University, is more than a casual cinephile; his analysis of Fassbinder in interviews and his embrace of Fassbinder’s technique in this instance evoke a 1977 article by Judith Mayne on Fassbinder’s use of characters’ spectatorial looks as framing devices to express the social position and judgment throughout Fassbinder’s films.17 The style of Far from Heaven, however, principally mimics Sirk’s. “Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven references Douglas’s Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows,” writes Richard Dyer categorically, “by looking like it.”18 Dyer’s list of similar features includes: “the painstakingly recreated style of settings and costumes…, the use of lighting, the prominence of two-shots over close-ups, the held-in style of performance, the use of overt symbols…, the concern with the interface between inner feeling and social attitudes. “In short,” he concludes, there is “extreme closeness with elements of discrepancy and slight distortion, very like, but not quite like.”19 This stylistic closeness is largely what complicates the reading of Far from Heaven as an adaptation, for rather than proposing specific ideas by juxtaposing actions in one film to those in another, the stylistic mimicry is part of the broader evocation of an era and the representation of it. Even while a viewer “oscillates” back and forth comparing characters and narrative elements, the stylistic sameness creates the feeling of inhabiting Sirk’s world, with a sense of difference. In his discussion of Far from Heaven, Dyer emphasizes emotional response, and there is no question that Haynes’s film seems to escape Fredric Jameson’s observation that postmodern “remakes” suffer a “waning of affect.”20 The source of this emotional response, however, is less due to the fact of a “pastiche” or adaptation of Sirk than it is to the common factor of melodrama as a genre within which both films operate. To this is added reaction to both films as “camp.” As Klinger asserts with respect to Sirk, “within the highly self-conscious and intertextual climate of today, Sirk’s melodramas appear as ‘camp,’ as parodic spectacles of excess.”21 So too, deliberately, does Haynes’s film, and as with melodrama, this shared quality helps to dissolve any clear boundary between the films. They are bodies that cannot be separated because they share vital organs. It is this interrelationship that fosters in

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the audience an uncanny feeling of a remembered experience within which elements have been altered. The fact that we cannot easily disintegrate the style of Far from Heaven from that of All That Heaven Allows helps us differentiate Haynes’s mode of adaptation from that of Fassbinder. Fassbinder transposes Sirk’s narrative to a different time and place, using the specific incidents in All That Heaven Allows to generate new incidents and meanings in his own film. He was inspired by the directness and transparency of Sirk’s style, yet his own film looks and feels very different—Fear Eats the Soul is a different universe, comprehensible in its own terms. Without an awareness of Sirk, by contrast, Haynes’s film merely “baffles” us by its “difference.” We still are encouraged to compare narratives, but the rhetoric of Haynes’s film cannot operate on our intelligence except by speaking through Sirk’s style. Without the engagement of the Sirkian world, which Haynes goes to great pains to impress on us, the serious work of his film in exploring the historicity of our cultural assumptions cannot be accomplished. As Dyer recognized: “Homage is a dimension of … Far From Heaven. However, it is not the main point of [it].”22 Haynes alters the world of Sirk while creating a double awareness of being part of it and seeing it from without. This is the sense in which Far from Heaven incorporates Sirk’s canonical film as an essential part of its rhetoric, a process also carried out in various ways by other art-film directors in the generation following Fassbinder’s.23

Notes 1. Sundance Channel Interview on the Criterion of DVD Far From Heaven. Universal Studios, 2003. 2. Hutcheon, xvii. 3. Sundance Channel Interview. 4. 176. 5. In his examination of pastiche, Dyer cites Far from Heaven as one example where: “It suggests the ways in which feeling is shaped by culture.” “The pastiche of Far From Heaven,” he writes, “allow[s] us to realize the historicity of our own feelings.” 178. 6. Anarchy, 78–79. 7. I am drawing on Barbara Klinger’s Melodrama and Meaning, which so thoroughly documents the evolution of Sirk’s and Hudson’s reputations. 8. xv; Klinger makes her argument concerning the use of Hudson’s popular image in this period in Chapter 4, 97–131.

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9. 99–100. 10. 106. 11. Klinger, 120. 12. Ibid., 121. 13. Ibid., 127. 14. For distancing effects of Sirk’s style and how he “inscribes his own distance from the spectacle into the film,” see Paul Willemen’s 1972 articles, reprinted in Fischer, 268–277. 15. If this is echoed with a difference in Ali and the real El Hedi ben Salem, Frank’s struggle to conceal his sexuality also parallels the attempt of Sarah Jane (Karen Dicker and Susan Kohner) to pass as white in Imitation of Life, a reading that reconnects race and dissimulation in Far from Heaven. 16. “Todd Haynes.” Angst DVD. Bonus Features. 17. Mayne. 18. 23. 19. Dyer, 175. 20. Jameson, 10. 21. xv; Klinger makes her argument concerning the use of Hudson’s popular image in this period in Chapter 4, 97–131. 22. 37. 23. Far from Heaven in some degree addresses a mass audience as a “remake” of Sirk’s commercial film. Yet even in this postmodern moment, Haynes’s orientation includes that of the art film. Thus Dyer feels compelled to add that “seen in more of an art film context, it might be easier to relate Far From Heaven to Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar,….” 176.

Bibliography Dyer, Richard. Pastiche. London: Routledge, 2007. Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974). Criterion Collection DVD, 2003. Haynes, Todd. Far from Heaven (2002). DVD, Universal Pictures, 2003a. Haynes, Todd. “Todd Haynes.” Interview from March 23, 2003. Criterion Collection DVD of Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, 2003b. Imitation of life: Douglas Sirk, Director. Lucy Fischer, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, second edition. London: Routledge, 2013.

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Mayne, Judith. “Fassbinder and Spectatorship.” New German Critique, No. 12 (Autumn, 1977), 61–74. Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

PART II

Film(s) to Film

CHAPTER 4

Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and City Lights (1931)

The relationship between Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Lovers on the Bridge) and City Lights begins with their performers, above all Denis Lavant and Charlie Chaplin. Lavant is a stage performer and student of mime, with great admiration for the American silent comedians, especially Buster Keaton and Chaplin. His first major film roles were in Leos Carax’s films, and the director found in Lavant his ideal protagonist. After their first film, Boy Meets Girl (1982), the two men worked together so closely as to be seen as alter egos, on screen and off.1 Carax, a cinephile who at nineteen began to write for Cahiers du Cinéma, was devoted to silent cinema for its reliance on the image and powerful use of mise-en-scène. It is hardly surprising that as he developed Les amants du Pont-Neuf specifically for Lavant, the best known of Chaplin’s films would come to mind. Furthermore, elements of City Lights speak directly to prominent concerns in Carax’s earlier films; important are the excessively idealized notion of women as expressed in the Blind Girl (Virginia Cherrill) and the Tramp’s love for her, as is Chaplin’s Tramp as a figure too unique ever to be assimilated into society. Drawn to a cinema of image more than of story, Carax found in City Lights a ready-made situation and narrative that provided a structure within which he could work with his actors—Juliette Binoche and Klaus Michael Grüber as well as Lavant—to elaborate his own expressionistic and associational scenic structures.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_4

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Both City Lights and Lovers on the Bridge function on two levels: they emphasize physical performances and spectacle, while at the same time they construct allegories of class difference and marginalization. Furthermore, while both films are framed within socioeconomic realities, they indulge in fantasy, narrating tales of miraculous cures; in Chaplin’s film the Tramp is improbably taken under the wing of a Millionaire, and in Lovers on the Bridge Alex is furnished with a protector who literally holds in his hands the keys to the city. Carax’s film is in no sense a simple remake: choosing such an early and celebrated classic, he had to take into account the profound social and aesthetic evolution that occurred in the sixty years between the films. One key difference, for example, is a shift to a more cynical tone, in conjunction with a reversal of a key action in Chaplin’s story.2 Whereas Chaplin’s altruistic Tramp will do anything for the Blind Girl, in Lovers on the Bridge Alex acts in his own interest rather than Michèle’s. He understands that if Michèle (Binoche) is cured he will lose her, so unlike the Tramp, he works to prevent a cure rather than facilitate it. Most importantly, unlike Chaplin’s Blind Girl—and unlike the hyper-idealized images of women that obsess male protagonists in Carax’s earlier films—Michèle Stalens is fully developed and in many respects drives the action of Lovers on the Bridge. Additionally, where City Lights is a story with nameless characters set in a generic city, Carax’s film unfolds in the very specific historical context of Paris during the 1989 Bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution. The gulf between stylistic options available to Chaplin in 1931 and to Carax in 1991 is enormous, of course, especially if one considers that most of the history of classic Hollywood and of the European modernist art film falls in the period between the production of these films. By 1991, the social reality of Carax’s film is circumscribed within an audiovisual environment exemplified by France’s advertising-inspired Cinéma du look. Carax’s narrative no longer contains its characters and ideas but is roiled from within, moving beyond any definition of realism in the relationship among story, characters, events, and their representation. This chapter explores not only Carax’s use of Chaplin’s precursor film, as well as Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), but also the extent to which in redeploying Chaplin, Carax attempts to mark off cinema of the present from that of the past.

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Leos Carax and Alex Carax’s development of Alex as the protagonist of his first three feature films echoes the gradual evolution of Chaplin’s Tramp, but it also follows more narrowly the model of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel. As Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd write, Carax’s early career, was “conducted under the scrutiny” of Cahiers du Cinéma. A prize at the Hèyers Film Festival for Strangulation Blues (1980), Carax’s first short film, was recognized in the celebrated journal’s pages, and Serge Daney, who had moved from Cahiers to the widely read Libération, praised Boy Meets Girl. By 1991, Carax was given a free hand to edit a “numéro hors série” of Cahiers, and his name featured in a list of “cinéastes pour l’année 2001.”3 He was directly influenced by several of the Cahiers directors, above all Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut was a worthy model not only of personal filmmaking, but as a star director; the enormous success of Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) launched the Nouvelle Vague as a commercial phenomenon and magnet for international prestige. In his creation of Alex, Carax echoes Truffaut’s personal identification with Doinel as well as following the same actor and character through his maturation in several films. Truffaut developed Antoine Doinel, the protagonist of his debut film, around the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, then over time made four more films in which both the actor and the character mature.4 Carax would pursue a comparable identification between his protagonist and himself. His birth name was Alexander Oscar Dupont, Alex Oscar in reduced form, the letters of which yield the anagram Leos Carax; Alex is the name given the protagonist played by Denis Lavant through the three films that established Carax’s reputation, Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang (The Night is Young, 1986),5 and Lovers on the Bridge, retrospectively defined as a trilogy. Alex in Boy Meets Girl is established as a small, boyish young man who after his girlfriend betrays him with a friend, wanders until he focuses on Mireille (Mireille Perrier), herself suffering when her lover deserts her. At twenty-three years old, Denis Lavant seemed younger; he was small, with a child-like blankness of expression and smooth skin, in his ruffled innocence and aimlessness suggesting a kinship with Doinel in The 400 Blows. While openly displaying his debt to many of the Cahiers directors of the 1960s and 1970s, Carax was most frequently linked to the disruptive and discursive style of Godard.6 David Thompson, for example, adopts Godard’s name as a shorthand for describing Boy Meets Girl, calling it “a black-and-white trip through a Paris night haunted by the spectre of

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Godard,” and as an origin story, the lineage is not one that Carax challenged.7 To a question by Thompson in 1991, for example, Carax responded, “I was fascinated by [Godard’s] style from the beginning, but now I feel so lost in my own filmmaking that I don’t think about how it relates to anyone else.”8 Most importantly, Carax absorbed Godard’s Brechtian manner of subverting audience immersion in a single diegetically coherent narrative, inverting the relationship between story and more discursive elements, encouraging spectators to follow and create lines of thought woven from heterogeneous elements of image, word, sound, and reference. The plot of Boy Meet’s Girl is skeletally paradigmatic, as caricatured in its reductive title; its scenes and images are generated as metaphorical illustrations, expressive of the central, unexplained passions. Love occurs and disappears in the film without reason or circumstantial framing. Outside an apartment building, Alex overhears Mireille’s lover break up with her via their apartment intercom. Later, without further explanation, Alex walks, wearing a headset that seems to be blaring the pop songs of the soundtrack; his focus on what he is listening to, however, creates an image of tracking Mireille as if by mysterious signals, an impression confirmed by a dissolve linking the characters. He soon finds her at a party, itself a miniature of the film—the guests are faux celebrities among whom he wanders until he locates Mireille as if by a combination of chance and fate. He confesses his love, they leave together, and they become separated—he falls asleep on the metro, then misses a train. Still in despair at her lost love, Mireille prepares for suicide in her apartment, actions that Alex seems supernaturally alert to. He runs to rescue her, arriving too late, and both collapse. But a reboot of the scene suggests that the failed rescue was only imagined: Alex arrives again, this time bursting into her apartment. He finds her facing away from him, holding a pair of scissors, and when he embraces her, the sharp blades are pushed into her, effecting a second death. Two scenes provide examples of how events are represented as illustrative and typical of a generic paradigm rather than as occurrences within some real-seeming world of the film. Alex goes to a hotel room to leave a note and a record as a parting gift for Florence (Anna Baldaccini). As he approaches the room, we hear dialogue from inside, between Florence and Thomas (Christian Cloarec), the friend who betrayed Alex. Their dialogue, explicit and clearly audible, focuses on their sexual relationship. Alex could not possibly hear it from down the hallway as he approaches, yet neither is there any rhetorical framing to suggest that it is a product of

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his imagination. This ambiguity of the place of the dialogue in the reality of the film isolates it, outside the diegesis or experience of characters, so that the narrated fragment instead functions discursively to represent the stage of Alex’s acceptance of the separation. The moment when Alex runs to Mireille’s rescue is similar. She is evidently preparing for suicide: we see an image of the overflowing warm bath in which she will cut herself with a pair of scissors. Having intuited what is occurring, Alex is running to save her. But the image is neither from Mireille’s perspective nor from Alex’s—it represents the idea of a suicide that the new lover in the schematic narrative will try to prevent. This disintegration of time, material continuity, and characters’ points of view leaves many events and images free-floating, as metaphors in a poetic discourse of situation and theme. The method of this film, including the suggestion of alternative endings, will also be that of the more complex Lovers on the Bridge. Daly and Dowd connect Carax’s approach to character in Boy Meets Girl with Ferdinand in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), “a fragment of a world of scraps without cohesion. … These characters are not so much individual beings as a collection of traits lying between beings.” They describe well how Carax’s “personages morcelés” go beyond Godard’s reflections on the cinematic medium: “What we get instead is the persistence of duplicating devices that call attention to the image as image.”9 In Mauvaise Sang, Carax’s second feature, the “collection of traits” that make up Alex presents him as more mature, his character shaped now by his physical gifts, ranging from quick hands running a Three-card Monte game, to jumping out of planes, riding motorcycles, running, and dancing. Now twenty-five, Lavant portrays an Alex who seems more purposeful and hardened. In the narrative he has served time in prison; this and the travails of his early life result in a sense of having “béton” (concrete) in his belly, a trope of heaviness already suggested in Boy Meets Girl. Alex in Mauvais Sang prizes his self-sufficiency and independence. As a child he was nicknamed Langue Pendue, meaning chatterbox, an ironic descriptor for the silent child who already exhibits the social isolation of a person on the spectrum of autism. In this film, Alex is once again motivated by passion for excessively idealized female characters, principally Anna, played by twenty-two-year-old Juliette Binoche. Mauvais Sang is very different from Boy Meets Girl, however, in the way it employs a tongue-in-cheek international thriller plot that serves as an armature for thematic explorations similar to those in the earlier film.

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Marc (Michel Piccoli) is an old gangster deeply in debt to an international mob led by an American woman (Carroll Brooks).10 Marc recruits Alex to replace his recently deceased father because for the job he has planned, he needs Alex’s extraordinary dexterity. The caper is to steal a virus for which multinational companies are competing to discover a vaccine, called STBO, a metaphorical extrapolation of the AIDS virus, spreading among “people who have sex without feeling.”11 We can think of this as a pretext narrative. Even the characters see themselves as acting out a genre movie scenario long absorbed into the culture. This represents a use of plot directly recalling Godard’s practice from early on, including Michel Poiccard’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s) film-noir posturing in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), itself framing a situation of impossible love. In a similar manner, within the caricatured thriller story in Mauvais Sang, a version of the paradigm of Boy Meets Girl is replicated. As in the world of Boy Meets Girl, there is a claustrophobic or paranoid narrowness: Alex is “mesmerized by a mysterious woman he sees on a bus,” as Daly and Dowd describe it, who, enacting the chance/fate convergence, “turns out to be Marc’s girlfriend Anna.”12 So in this film, Lise (Julie Delpy) loves Alex, who loves Anna (Juliette Binoche), who loves the much older Marc—absolute passions without explanation. At bottom, Alex seeks to free himself of the weight of his life, and when the caper succeeds, and the American woman and her companions are killed, Alex is also shot, freed of the “concrete,” as he says, by the bullet in his belly.13 Alex as a character from this film is carried forward into Lovers on the Bridge, as is, to borrow Phil Powrie’s phrase about Mauvais Sang, “the tension between an asocial amour fou and patriarchal law.”14 In place of a thriller plot, however, City Lights is adopted, less as a pretext narrative than as a structuring and generative template, one that includes Chaplin’s Tramp and his relationship with the Blind Girl.

The Two Narratives In several respects, Chaplin’s film was already retrospective in 1931, most famously in his refusal to adopt sound dialogue, but also in the film’s embrace of Victorian melodrama as a narrative frame for his performance and humanistic social critique. Previous to City Lights, the Tramp character was developed over many years, in a wide array of situations, transcending any single Chaplin film and becoming a dimension of his star persona. A version of this character appeared as early as 1914 in Keystone’s Mabel’s

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First Predicament, and Chaplin continued to develop the figure through his short films at Essanay and Mutual, in the independent features distributed by First National, and into his major productions after founding United Artists with D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. The recognizable core of the Tramp figure that transcended the boundaries of individual films was evident to all. As André Bazin wrote in 1948, “For the general public, Charlie exists as a person before and after Easy Street [1917] and The Pilgrim [1923]. For hundreds of millions of people on this planet he is a hero like Ulysses or Roland in other civilizations— but with the difference that we know the heroes of old through literary works that are complete and have defined, once and for all, their adventures and their various manifestations. Charlie, on the other hand, is always free to appear in another film. The living Charlie remains the creator and guarantor of Charlie the character.”15 Charlie the character is consistently a figure of marginalization, frequently homeless, defining himself against middle-class mores, at odds with conventional ways of doing things, and usually in conflict with government and the law. In The Kid (1921), for example, he becomes the accidental parent of an abandoned baby, scrambles to develop highly idiosyncratic childcare skills, then is forced to fight governmental social services in order to preserve the relationship he develops with the child. From early in Chaplin’s career, this character is defined by the impossibility of his assimilation into the normal social world. His condition is dramatized through costume and make-up, a modified clown suit of oversized shoes, baggy pants, and a tight jacket that emphasizes his small form, his hat, mustache, and other facial make-up. And he brings this costumed figure to life through his bodily movements, the duck-footed walk, quirky gestures, facial expressions, and a remarkable nimbleness in interacting with constraints of his physical environment. The overall effect is to express abnormality, which places him in a parallel reality, separated from the rest of humanity. He spends much of his time trying to overcome the gap between himself and others, struggling yet resilient, and dealing with hardship as it comes. City Lights functions first on the level of Chaplin’s remarkable performance of this character, a spectacle in itself; but his personal oddity dovetails with social critique, an allegory of class conflict as well as of a more profound existential alienation. Chaplin’s costume, gestures, and actions all work within narratives framing an unjust distribution of wealth and power, the social context of a figure who nonetheless would be displaced in any society. Modern Times (1936) provides the most

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directly political image of a worker’s alienation in the modern industrial world: an accidental activist, Charlie is literally run through the gearwheels of a machine in the factory. Even the world of the less explicit City Lights, however, is clearly defined by class distinctions and an abyss between poverty and abundance. In City Lights, the unnamed homeless protagonist encounters a Blind Girl selling flowers on the street. When he takes a shortcut through a parked car and emerges on the sidewalk beside her, she hears the car door close and assumes he is a man of wealth. She approaches to sell him a flower, and he is delighted, moved when he perceives her blindness and vulnerability. Her belief in his wealth and respectability continues until the final moments of the film when, her sight and place in society restored, she touches his hand to give him a coin and recognizes him. Shortly after they meet, the Tramp is also befriended by an Eccentric Millionaire (Harry Myers) who with a failed marriage and no sense of purpose is depressed and ready to throw himself in the river. The Tramp rescues him and is embraced as the Millionaire’s savior. Unfortunately, whenever the man is sober, he forgets the Tramp and resumes a complete indifference to him. The narrative moves back and forth between the Tramp’s attempts to help the Blind Girl and his encounters with the erratic Millionaire, who after one night out, impulsively departs for Europe. Meanwhile, the girl has become ill, and she is also faced with eviction from her apartment. The Tramp briefly finds work as a street cleaner and attempts, unsuccessfully, to win fifty dollars in a fixed boxing match; he is especially concerned that he cannot afford the cure he has learned of for the girl’s blindness. When he again suddenly encounters the Millionaire, back from Europe, drunk and therefore generous as ever, Charlie convinces him to pay for the girl’s operation. But when the man sobers after a robbery attempt at his mansion, the Tramp is accused of stealing the money. Knowing he will be sent to jail, he nonetheless flees the police in order to give the Blind Girl the money. The final scene is, of course, among the best known in the history of cinema. Upon his eventual release and more destitute than ever, the Tramp finds himself in front of an elegant flower shop the now-sighted Blind Girl has established. Not recognizing him, she condescendingly laughs and offers him a coin. But when her hand touches his, she knows him, and in that instant she is forced to realize that her long dreamed of benefactor and prince charming is none other than this wretched homeless man.

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As melodrama, this narrative is marked by what Peter Brooks labels an expression of the “moral occult,” that is to say simplifying and bringing to the surface values ordinarily buried in the complexities of life. In melodrama, as Brooks writes, “the world is subsumed by an underlying manichaeism, and the narrative creates excitement by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface of things.”16 It is emptied of psychology, which is replaced by moral value: all that oppresses the Blind Girl as a figure of innocence is evil; the Tramp, as the agent of her protection and liberation, is good. Of particular interest for City Lights, as well as for Lovers on the Bridge, is the frequency with which the “moral state” in these Manichaean tales is represented in physical afflictions: in Brooks’s words, “the halt, the blind, and the mute people of the world of melodrama. … There are paralytics, invalids of various sorts whose very physical presence evokes the extremism and hyperbole of the manichaeistic struggle.”17 The Blind Girl’s condition in City Lights is in this way emblematic of her “moral state,” and this is an essential element of City Lights taken up by Carax in Lovers on the Bridge. In Carax’s film Michèle’s blindness, but also Alex’s damaged leg, similarly represent the “moral state” of the characters. And in both films these “afflictions” are part of the parable of social class: the marginalization that comes with blindness opens to the Blind Girl and to Michèle otherwise socially impossible relationships with the Tramp and Alex. As with the Blind Girl’s, Michèle’s condition turns out to be temporary, and Alex, like Chaplin’s Tramp, is ultimately a character whose passion and idiosyncratic way of being prevent him from assimilation into middle-class society of the modern city, in this case the City of Light, Paris.18 Lovers on the Bridge begins with Alex’s injury, when he has drunkenly fallen to the street and a speeding car runs over his ankle. Michèle observes him, assuming he is dead. She too is homeless, gradually losing her eyesight and thus her avocation as a painter. Collected by social service employees, Alex is taken to a city shelter where his ankle is put in a cast. Meanwhile, Michèle takes refuge on the Pont-Neuf, closed for renovations in the run-up to the city’s Bicentennial celebration, where Alex and his friend Hans have been living. When Alex returns to the bridge, he finds Michèle and is immediately attracted to her, especially when he sees that from memory she has drawn pictures of him lying in the street. Michèle responds to Alex’s energy and originality. He steals food from Paris’s open markets, and earns pocket money as a street entertainer, blowing fire from his mouth while doing

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cartwheels. Michèle’s alienation is compounded by her having been rejected by Julien (Chrichan Larsson), her “first love,” producing emotional turmoil that Alex sees an impediment to Michèle’s fully accepting him. But Michèle and Alex become companions: they drink together and dance wildly on the bridge as the city explodes in music, with military parades and flights of helicopters and jets filling the sky. Fireworks light up the city, and they steal a boat so that Michèle can water ski along the Seine between walls of light. Following this night, Michèle decides to take Alex to the sea, which he has never seen, and after gathering money by fleecing bourgeois clients in Paris cafés, they run off to the Normandy coast, where they consummate their relationship. Alex, however, wants to return to the bridge, and back in Paris their amour fou is disrupted as Michèle, almost completely blind by this time, learns that her family has been searching for her and that there is a cure for her condition. Alex has been trying to prevent her from learning this, and he accidentally kills a man who is hanging posters that identify her as a missing person. When Michèle discovers Alex’s efforts, she leaves him. He is sentenced to three years in prison for manslaughter, and during that time her sight is restored. Unable to resist her memories of their time together, Michèle visits him in prison. With treatment, Alex has apparently regained the ability to function in society, and they plan to meet when he is released. Michèle does not tell him, however, that she has formed a relationship with the surgeon who restored her vision. So when they are reunited on New Year’s Eve on the Pont-Neuf, and she reveals in the early morning hours that she must leave, he feels betrayed. Alex pulls Michèle over the parapet of the bridge and into the Seine. In the dark water they are briefly separated, they find each other, then finally they are rescued by an elderly couple piloting a barge on one final run to the port of Le Havre. The scenes on the barge directly evoke Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). Michèle and Alex decide to stay with this retiring couple as they move down the river toward the sea, perhaps ultimately to replace them. With its suggestion of alternate tragic, ironic, and implausible “happy” endings, Lovers on the Bridge retains the ambiguity of City Lights; in that film, with the formerly Blind Girl reintegrated into society, the Tramp, forever an outsider, will most likely—as in other Chaplin films—move on alone.

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Chaplin and Alex as Performers Alex’s uniqueness, like that of the Tramp, grows out of his extraordinary relationship not only with people, but with his material environment and with his own body. Images of Chaplin’s physical performances from throughout his career come readily to mind, whether seasick in A Day’s Pleasure (1919), golfing in The Idle Class (1921), being undressed by monkeys on a high wire in The Circus (1928), roller skating blindfolded along the edge of a two story drop in the department store in Modern Times (1936), or balletically cavorting with the globe as Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1941). In City Lights, his high-speed performance as a boxer is a tour de force, but the Tramp is defined by his physical being beyond his acrobatic feats and pratfalls, his posture and minor tics of movement. Like Chaplin’s, Alex’s physical singularity, a compensatory complement to his social alienation, marks the protagonist of Lovers on the Bridge as marginal. From the opening scene in the streets of the nocturnal city, where his lurching walk presents him as a Frankenstein monster, to the final moments of walking on the parapet of the bridge before throwing himself and Michèle into the river, Lovers on the Bridge provides an uninterrupted sequence of physical feats that define his efforts to escape or transcend imprisonment in his body. Especially early in the film, the emphasis of his performance and of the filming is on his body. When we first see him lying in the street, he deliberately scrapes his forehead back and forth on the rough paving—a viscerally affective moment—inflicting pain with the double purpose of punishing himself and allowing himself to feel something. In at least two other instances he mutilates himself: he cuts his chest and belly with glass one night when Michèle deserts him to go with Hans. When she leaves him again before his prison term, he shoots himself in the hand. But his body is also the all-purpose implement of his everyday life. After Michèle’s failed attempt to knock out a guard with a champagne bottle, Alex head-­butts the man. At the shelter early in the film, he is only a body, sprawled like a corpse and dragged to the showers among others before being posed by Carax almost heroically like a Prometheus condemned to live with unrelenting pain. The counterpoint to scenes of his body being cared for by the state occurs when it is brutally beaten by the police with heavy telephone books to extract a confession following his arrest for manslaughter.

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The crutch and the cast on Alex’s damaged leg, emblems of his vulnerability and emotional impotence, also become props for his athleticism as he walks, runs, and climbs, using these prosthetic extensions of his body in a way that shows its continuity with the material world. In this disabled condition, he apparently walks the ten miles to Michèle’s former apartment in the suburb of St. Cloud, then scales walls and crosses a narrow beam to climb in her second-story window. Surprised while he is discovering her notebook labeled “Michèle and Julien: L’Amour de la Fille et du Garçon,” he then leaps from the window, catching a beam with his hands with the confidence of a circus acrobat. As already mentioned, Alex is a street performer who turns cartwheels while spitting fire, the camera emphasizing his taut and sweating muscles in the dramatic light of the flames. When pursuing the sounds of Julien’s cello in the Metro, he leaps among people-moving conveyer belts and even across the rails between subway trains. Michèle seems to appreciate him above all as a physical creature; as her eyesight dims, he offers to be her guide dog, then does back flips off the sides of the subway passage to entertain her when these gross movements are all that Michèle can see. This demonstration of physical prowess, however, ultimately exists to emphasize a discontinuity of body and inner being, some imprisoned desire that in Alex’s case becomes focused on connection with Michèle. Alex needs drugs to quiet himself enough for sleep, and he needs alcohol to liberate or animate himself. When Michèle takes him to the sea and their physical connection graduates to love making, Carax gives Alex an enormous prosthetic phallus that we see silhouetted as the lovers chase each other along the beach by the water. Alex skips stones across the surface of water one sleepless night, but the most dramatic demonstration of his attempts to overcome material heaviness is the scene where both he and Michèle dance wildly to music blaring throughout the city. This film thus continues tropes from Mauvais Sang, echoing Alex’s need in that film to rid himself of the feeling of concrete in his belly, and it reduplicates his solo dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” In this instance both he and Michèle dance across the Pont-Neuf, lifting themselves off the stone street, the sidewalks, the stone benches and parapets, the bridge becoming a radio dial with the music changing as they dance across.19 Sharing this physicality with animals and children, Alex, like Chaplin’s Tramp is an innocent, even when his actions occasion someone’s death. When she visits him in prison, finally able to see him clearly, Michèle seems to emphasize in her simple phrase, “T[u] et beau,” the extent to which Alex’s being is concentrated in his physical presence.20

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The Social Text Inherently physical as they are in their acrobatic performances and spectacular dexterity, the male protagonists of both films are framed in allegorical narratives of social injustice. The opening scene of City Lights emphasizes this theme. The setting is a ceremony to unveil a public monument representing Peace and Prosperity that features the figure of a robed, seated woman, with two male figures at her feet, a reclining soldier sword in air, and a man kneeling and making enigmatic hand gestures of supplication. When the cover is pulled off to reveal the monument, however, it also reveals the living Tramp, asleep in the lap of Prosperity, horrifying the on-looking crowd of respectable citizens. The total disjunction between his values and theirs is dramatized as the scene unfolds. After a near miss at being shafted on the soldier’s sword as he climbs down, he sits unceremoniously on this figure’s face; when the crowd roars at this offense, he uses the hand of the other statue to thumb his nose at the public. Such an opening clearly establishes a conceptual framework for reading what follows, a film that dwells on the reasons for the Tramp’s marginalization: he regularly misses conventional social cues, thus having to forge an original relationship with all aspects of his environment. Typical is his passage through an automobile rather than around it to the sidewalk where he meets the Blind Girl. Or later, when he stands on a water barrel to watch her enter her apartment: he is oblivious to the fact that the neighbors will regard him as a peeping Tom. When confronted, he upsets the water barrel, swamping his accuser, one more metaphor for his disturbing the social order. At a party given for the Tramp by his wealthy friend, he swallows a whistle from a party favor and with every breath that follows disrupts that event, including its formal, art song entertainment, inadvertently summoning all the dogs of the neighborhood and creating mayhem. When the wealthy drunk first takes him to a club for what looks like a New Year’s Eve party, Chaplin is wildly out of place. He comically loses his footing on the waxed dance floor, and throughout the scene as throughout the film, mistakes one object for another. At the later party, the Tramp mistakes a man’s bald head for a blancmange that he had previously been offered, and while on the job as a street cleaner, he inadvertently replaces a piece of cheese with a bar of soap in a fellow worker’s sandwich. Here he rejects sausages that look to him like cigars and chews on a paper streamer that he confuses with the spaghetti on his plate. Watching a dance performance, Chaplin mistakes the male lead’s

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dramatized abuse of his female partner for real violence. He intervenes to rescue her, and when the band plays to cover the resulting chaos, he dances with a woman he mistakenly thinks is alone, then ends up dancing with a waiter carrying a tray of dishes. The Tramp’s blindness to distinctions that are effortlessly recognized by others highlights the absurdity and the arbitrary nature of the conventional social world around him. This occurs with issues large and small. The interrupted dance performance, for example, highlights the sadistic misogyny implicit in this entertainment. The Tramp’s social blindness extends to assumptions about gender: after a night of drinking, he ends up affectionately sharing a bed with his wealthy host who, when he wakes up sober, becomes alarmed at this intimacy. The moment is paired with a similar confrontation in the run-up to the boxing scene when; with coy, openly flirtatious smiles, Charlie tries to ingratiate himself with his macho opponent, behavior that, especially in the locker room’s atmosphere of hyper-masculinity, strikes his adversary as dangerously queer. The most telling dramatization of the Tramp’s confrontation of middle-­ class norms is the final scene, which was the focus of Chaplin’s development of the film from the very beginning of its three-year production. Recently out of prison, Charlie now looks particularly ragged—there is a harder edge to this presentation of his condition. The image is not funny; he is vulnerable and pathetic here. When he bends over to pick up from the gutter a flower discarded from the flower shop, one of the street kids pulls a piece of his underwear out through his torn pants.21 Baiting the social outcast, the boys have now crossed a line from playfulness to meanness. This sets up the moment of recognition by the Blind Girl, now a shop owner who feels entirely superior. To give him a coin, she has to reach across the social barrier, first represented by the store window that keeps the homeless person out of the beautiful shop, then by the bold visual vertical line of the doorjamb that marks their separation in the mise-­ en-­scène. To touch his hand she must break that line, and when she does, her face registers the resulting struggle in her mind. “Can you see now?” he asks, his eyes conveying the broader question of whether she now fully understands the story we have watched unfold. To which she responds, “Yes. I can see now.” Chaplin has described the final close-up of the film on his face as well as anyone. Concerned to elicit a convincing performance from Cherrill, which had proved difficult throughout the shoot, Chaplin was attentive to her expression. “I was looking more at her and interested in her, and I

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detached myself in a way that gives a beautiful sensation. I’m not acting,… almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking, studying her reactions and being slightly embarrassed about it. And it came off. It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful; and because it isn’t over-acted.”22 It is a moment of pathos, but also of enlightenment, and the heretofore marginalized figure is suddenly elevated to the position of the person with the correct values in the coldly capitalist society that spurns him. Chaplin’s uniqueness remains the central problem of the film, elaborated in the challenge he poses to conventional society in the world of the modern city. Lovers on the Bridge re-articulates the social allegory of City Lights. Alex too is homeless, and like the Blind Girl, Michèle is torn from her middle-­ class life by her failing vision. When her vision is restored and she is reincorporated into middle-class society, a clash of visions of the world results that is impossible to resolve. Carax emphasizes the romantic and erotic passion between his protagonists, of course, and he updates Chaplin’s text in at least three ways: he sets the narrative in a specific historical setting; he adopts a powerfully realistic style to drive home the experience of the homeless; and he creates a more dynamic female counterpart to his male protagonist. In contrast to Chaplin’s generic modern city, that in Lovers on the Bridge is immediately identifiable as Paris, the film’s action deliberately linked to the famous Pont-Neuf’s refurbishing and the Bicentennial events of July 14, 1989. Chaplin had thought to set his story in Paris, but instead he created a generic city, or as Robert Sherwood described it, a “weird city, with confusing resemblances to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangier, and Council Bluffs.”23 Its elements are representative rather than unique. The public monument of the opening scene could be in any city, and there are busy streets for commerce, workers cleaning the streets, the boxing ring as an instance of mass entertainment, and a nightclub for the wealthy. We have the juxtaposition of a mansion with the working-class neighborhood and home of the Blind Girl and her grandmother. Chaplin’s city is not only assembled from a limited number of places, representing an idea of the city, it is self-evidently artificial, a movie set designed also for staging the performances that Chaplin wants to showcase.24 In Lovers on the Bridge, the Pont-Neuf also exists in a primary way as a stage for the performances of Alex and Michèle, as when they dance during the night of the Bicentennial celebration. Closed to traffic, it is more a haven or refuge than bridge and, cluttered with the debris of a construction site, its lines and stone textures in a very elemental way provide a

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metaphorical frame for the narrative. In this respect, it echoes one noteworthy image from City Lights, the bare stone quay that is similarly a metaphorical location on the bank of a river of darkness and oblivion into which the drunken Millionaire will throw himself if not rescued by the Tramp. Framing the allegory of Lovers on the Bridge, the stone bridge and quay by the Seine are similarly a material island in a river of time; Hans walks into the Seine as the Millionaire tries to in City Lights, and the river is also where Alex attempts his suicide/murder with Michèle.25 Yet the materiality of the bridge cannot be divorced from its other dimensions. The Pont-Neuf complicates the film by being more than a visually immediate stone platform and a stage for the actors. Carax gives his audience views of Paris from the bridge in all directions, and when Juliette Binoche looks toward it from downstream, the view places the Pont-Neuf among some of the world’s best-known historical monuments and tourist sights—the towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame appear in the upper left of the image (Fig. 4.1). With the added emphasis of the ongoing celebration, these views aggregate French history and tourist images—including the midnight tour of the Louvre—allowing Carax to have his present-day Paris understood against a background that includes everything from ideas of the Rights of

Fig. 4.1  Paris view

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Man to a colonial empire and the Algerian war for independence. Graeme Hayes underscores the bridge’s historical resonance: “Constructed on the Île de la Cité, the Pont-Neuf stands geographically at the heart of Paris. Despite its name, it is the oldest surviving bridge in Paris, [and its] history parallels that of Paris: it was the first bridge in the city to break with the medieval tradition of constructing a row of houses along each side and marks the first attempts at coordinated city planning.”26 Furthermore, to quote Ginette Vincendeau, this history-rich landscape is already entirely familiar to viewers: “To make a film about Paris in 1991 is inevitably to quote the déjà vu. There is hardly a landmark in Paris left unexamined by a major painter, photographer, novelist, song-writer, or filmmaker.”27 Thus, the bridge frames the social text of Lovers on the Bridge historically, asking how France’s familiar political, economic, and cultural history led to the current homelessness in the heart of the City of Light, and how one is to further reconcile this reality within a tourist economy and media representations of the city and its history. The Bicentennial celebration itself is a pop-culture spectacle, and from the placement of homeless people on the ancient bridge to the contradictory evocation of cultural history and popular ignorance of it, the sense is one of discontinuity, raising the question of what that imagined past can offer by way of explaining the present. Homelessness in 1991 can, additionally, no longer be treated with the sentimental distance of Chaplin’s 1931 narrative—it is a social issue that demands more powerful modern cinematic means to make it viscerally compelling. Thus Carax’s cinéma vérité realism, developed through long takes and filming Lavant among non-actors in a way that allows Carax’s camera and microphone to capture, rather than create detail, giving the early scenes a texture of reality even if they will later be framed in the allegorical narrative. Especially the scenes on the bus and at the Nanterre shelter feel authentic, because they are, non-actors captured on location with a mobile camera and long takes allowing the richness of detail to come through, the damaged bodies and psyches, small gestures, mutterings, curses, and songs. At the shelter, as people are processed and herded into showers, emphasis is on their bodies as the physical site of their suffering (Fig. 4.2). Their emaciated forms echo familiar images of concentration camps, while from this setting Alex looms dramatically posed, almost signaling the end of this mode of realism in the film. This strategy connects with Lavant’s own physicality, a materiality of being established in moments as when he rubs his forehead on the rough pavement. Only when Alex returns to his spot

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Fig. 4.2  A homeless man in the shelter

on the Pont-­Neuf is his situation framed more broadly against the historical and universally familiar Paris. Meanwhile, homelessness as a contemporary issue is foregrounded as in Chaplin’s narrative when the Tramp is discovered in the lap of Prosperity, a rhetorical strategy firmly establishing a social metric that remains relevant throughout the film.28 Of all the elements of City Lights that require updating for 1991, the Blind Girl as distressed object of the Tramp’s rescue mission is perhaps the most obvious, and Michèle presents a very different profile. Mireille of Boy Meets Girl is an entirely idealized figure, wilting under the rejection of her male lover, perhaps appropriate to Alex’s immature obsession. Anna in Mauvais Sang exhibits a similar quality, though Binoche already reveals qualities that would lead Carax beyond such idealization. She “already strikes an original figure in the gamine spectrum,” as Vincendeau writes: “she possesses the petite but bouncy physique, glowing health and tomboyish energy of Colette’s Gigi, as well as the romantic despair associated with the Victorian waif and her modern counterparts”29—including Mireille Perrier in Boy Meets Girl. In Lovers on the Bridge, Binoche’s Michèle is an entirely active force, a mind that encounters Alex’s body and attempts to direct and rescue him even while he is her refuge in blindness.30 Michèle brings to Alex a consciousness of his own image in her

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drawings,31 and her role in the film is to help release him from the prison of his isolation. Her embrace of a relationship with her surgeon has plausibility beyond the Blind Girl’s continuing fantasies of the return of her imaginary “gentleman.”32 Michèle’s confrontation with Alex is thus a knowing engagement in the conflict between the social and the personal. Apparently Carax’s script originally called for Michèle’s suicide. The reasons for changing the ending will be discussed further on, but the earlier version merely highlights the stark confrontation the lovers shared amour fou creates with the conventional social world, one that cannot be resolved. As an “updating” of Chaplin’s generic neo-Victorian waif, Michèle additionally offers evidence of progress in Carax’s filmic representation of women, though ultimately she, the daughter of a Colonel in the Armée de l’Air, is representative of the bourgeois social order, a world of museums, government institutions like the social services and the police, and official ceremonies such as that for the Bicentennial. Even in Lovers on the Bridge, Michèle remains the link to social convention from which the romantic hero, however caricatured in Alex, is alienated.

The Other Major Intertext: L’Atalante In Lovers on the Bridge, Carax embraces the Eros of L’Atalante, a physical passion entirely absent in the Tramp’s idealized love of the Blind Girl. Alex’s attraction to Michèle involves a carnal longing like that in Vigo’s film, and she reciprocates with a passion that pervades her mind and body in a way that challenges her measured middle-class existence. Yet however much Lovers on the Bridge resonates with this dimension of Vigo’s film, the textual points of intersection are limited to the character of Hans, and to Carax’s ending. Hans evokes Père Jules of L’Atalante, as played by Michel Simon. Closing the film with images of Alex and Michèle huddled together on a barge carrying them to the sea introduces Vigo’s film as an interpretive tool for viewers’ analysis of the couple’s relationship in Lovers on the Bridge. Hans also, of course, carries out functions of the Millionaire in City Lights. The Millionaire, a patriarchal and capricious embodiment of economic power that influences the destinies of the Tramp and the Blind Girl, is essential to that film’s structure of ideas. He serves to introduce the Tramp into environments to which he otherwise has no access, and his double personality—warm and generous when drunk, indifferent and exclusive when sober—is a shorthand for Chaplin’s view of the way the

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logic of industrial capitalism can chill human feeling. Above all the Millionaire exemplifies a magical power of money in such a system, providing mansions, elegant cars, an army of servants, and even the miracle of restoring the Blind Girl’s sight. Hans exhibits a similar power for Alex in his role as guardian of the bridge; most importantly he helps Alex to survive by reminding him of boundaries he must not cross if he is to avoid trouble. As the Millionaire provides the money for the Blind Girl’s operation, restoring her to society, Hans is ultimately allied with Michèle in her potential to partner with Alex and provide him the possibility of social interaction. The Millionaire suppresses the sentiment he experiences while drunk; Hans would suppress Michèle’s erotic power, which can draw Alex, as love once drew Hans, into a condition of vulnerability. Hans is the father from whom Alex must break away if he is to connect with Michele and the world. As Graeme Hayes writes, Hans’s “position as father-figure to Alex is reinforced by the position in each of Carax’s previous feature films of an older man called Hans who, as here, dispenses drugs to Alex. The keys carried by Hans … are here a metaphor for patriarchal authority: they enable access to the spaces of knowledge and language closed off from Alex, symbolized by the Louvre, but also to a space of non-­ transgressive adult sexuality.”33 Hans, like the Millionaire in City Lights who wants to drown himself, finally walks into the river and sinks like a stone, though Carax allows ambiguity as to whether his fall is entirely intentional. The resemblance between Hans and Père Jules of L’Atalante is more direct, even if Hans remains a conflicted figure like the Millionaire, mean and darkly pessimistic on the one hand while expansive and embracing of life on the other. With its narrower focus on the young lovers’ passion, L’Atalante offers a very different narrative from that of City Lights and Lovers on the Bridge. It is the story of a young couple who marry and begin their life together in the confined and isolated space of a barge, which can be understood as a metaphor for the world concentrated by their passion for each other. Juliette (Dita Parlo), however, is also drawn to a brave new world beyond the barge, tempted by a peddler of colorful garments and even more so by the city lights of Paris. She and Jean are separated, then ultimately reunited with the help of Père Jules, the barge’s mate, an ancient mariner defined by his experience of sailing the seas, witnessing love, war, and all the myriad forms of human being, evident in the souvenirs overflowing his cabin in the barge and in the tattoos covering his body. Pere

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Jules is an anarchic and capricious god presiding over the love of the young newlyweds, embodying an amoral appetite for life like the energy that feeds their desire. Hans is comparable to Père Jules in his wealth of experience. His backstory of love and heartbreak gives him the experience necessary for the wisdom of age, and he is someone who once embraced life, though unlike Père Jules, experience has turned Hans fearful and defensive. Hans’s lust for Michèle revives his past in his last hours before he disappears (to rejoin his wife) into the Seine. Their fleeting liaison recalls the attraction between the old satyr and Juliette in L’Atalante—Jean (Jean Dasté) is careful to get Juliette out of Père Jules’s cabin when she risks being seduced by the wonders of his world. The ending of Lovers on the Bridge deliberately and overtly evokes L’Atalante. The barge alone is enough to summon images from the iconic 1934 film, seminal in a Cahiers view of French cinema history. Shots of the couple in silhouette recall a memorable image early in Vigo’s film of Juliette moving across the barge, the camera fixed on her walking figure while the barge itself is moving faster than she through the frame. Central to L’Atalante is the moment when, suffering from their separation and on the advice of Père Jules who tells him that under water one can see their beloved, Jean dives into the Seine and sees the image of Juliette. Vigo’s oneiric image is recalled by Carax when Alex and Michèle go off the bridge, separated yet looking for each other under the water. As in Boy Meets Girl, Carax offers alternative endings in sequence: the lovers drown, the lovers are aware of losing each other, or the lovers are rescued by a kindly couple who also provide them with a future, together in their own isolated world like that of the reunited lovers of L’Atalante. The happy ending is self-evidently an arbitrary fictional one, so we are left with the range of options, as mentioned earlier an ambiguity comparable to that of City Lights. Carax’s initial plan for Michèle to commit suicide addresses in a darker way the fact that she is similarly confronted by mutually exclusives options, living in society or embracing her passion for Alex.

Stylistic Hybridity Lovers on the Bridge had a troubled reception for reasons that included high expectations based on Carax’s reputation and the notoriety of the film’s production difficulties and cost overruns. Furthermore, the film is a difficult one, its stylistic variations requiring viewers to adjust their

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expectations as the film progresses. It was released into a cinema culture in flux. Phil Powrie describes the French film industry of the 1980s as in “crisis.” The total number of spectators was in steady decline, and by 1986 fewer went to French than to US films. There was a perceived “dissolution of auteur cinema” that accompanied the “integration of cinema with television,” while traditional genres had lost popularity in favor of American-­ style super-productions, and younger directors such as Jean-Jacques Beineix and Luc Besson were being influenced by the look of advertising.34 Lovers on the Bridge seemed to embrace a large-budget cinema of spectacle while at the same time clinging to the personal expression of an art cinema auteur. Its initial budget of 32 million Francs was large but not excessive, as Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd report, approximately double the average for a film in 1988.35 When the Pont-Neuf was closed for repairs in the summer of 1988, in anticipation of the Bicentennial celebration of the 1789 revolution, Carax secured permission to shoot from July 18 to August 15. Then, however, Denis Lavant damaged a tendon in his wrist, which prevented him from performing as required. Carax shot what he could, but filming of most of the action had to be delayed; a replica of the Pont-Neuf was built in a reservoir outside Montpellier. Further delays allowed this set to deteriorate until, as Daly and Dowd write, “due to the increasing risk of total collapse, not only of the set but of the entire production,” the company insuring the production refused to continue to underwrite it. Only twenty-five minutes of usable footage had been shot, and the film was already well over budget. Construction of a new set began in June 1999 when 18  million Francs were injected into the project by Swiss financier Francis Van Buren and producer Philippe Vignet, under the name Pari-à-deux. The cost of the film by then approached eighty-­ million Francs, and when this was exhausted, there was still only forty minutes of usable footage. Christian Fechner stepped in to supply the eighty million francs needed to complete the film; and if Jean-Michel Frodon is correct, Carax’s original ending was abandoned when Fechner insisted on an “uplifting” ending in an attempt to protect this investment, though both Carax and Juliette Binoche have claimed in interviews that the current ending was her inspiration.36 The expense, the scale, the presence of Binoche,37and pre-release publicity of the film’s production difficulties all fostered expectations of something both spectacular and important. When the film turned out to be difficult to understand, these inflated expectations encouraged its

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rejection as a pretentious failure. Knowledge that the bridge in the film was not the real one seemed to undercut the realism in the early scenes, initially to be shot on location.38 Yet this realism also clashed with later scenes of fantasy and spectacle. Carax’s efforts and the expense of replicating the iconic Paris bridge in Montpellier were derided as self-indulgent excesses. That Carax was frequently framed as the heir to the consistently controversial Godard only made him a more inviting target.39 Lovers on the Bridge continues Carax’s practice in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang of subordinating character and plot to a poetic visual expression, but in this film his stylistic shifts demand more; they become a gestural dimension of the intellectual space of the film. The opening moments introduce the kind of stylistic mutation that viewers will be required to follow. The film opens with a car speeding through a traffic tunnel, after which we see a Paris street at night, the figure of a man, Alex, lurching along, and elsewhere that of a woman in a red shirt, Michèle. This minimal crosscutting creates anticipation, the mood of a thriller, highlighted with a close interior shot of the expensive car that shows the hand of a woman reaching to close on that of the male driver on the car’s gearshift—will they have control if something unexpected occurs? The speeding car runs over the ankle of the fallen Alex. The woman in the red shirt, Michèle we will learn, stops and stares at what appears to be his dead body. Yet the film is not the thriller that this opening signals; its narrative follows not the privileged couple whose lives might be disrupted, but rather Michèle and Alex, collaterally maimed by the couple’s recklessness. From the fast pace and tension of the thriller, the film moves into a methodical realist examination of Alex’s situation among the homeless. After the opening scene flashes by in three minutes, the film settles into the pace of the cinéma vérité shooting of real-time moments in the bus that collects Alex and transports him to Nanterre, continuing at the shelter, into the next morning, through Alex’s return to the bridge. These scenes in a more realist mode last some twenty minutes, setting a tone and creating an interpretative frame of Alex’s life on the streets. The movement away from this style is gradual, even as the events become less plausible. By fifty minutes into the film, the film has morphed into a fantasy with a mode of representation that is transparently spectacular. The intense visual realism and pace begins to yield to a feeling of fiction when, twentytwo minutes into the film, Michèle faints and Alex discovers in her paintbox iconic elements of many movies, a gun and a letter.

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The narrative thread of the gun is followed through in Michèle’s dream of killing Julien, and ultimately to Alex’s shooting himself in the hand. But the specter of violence it raises is largely a red herring. The letter, by contrast, provides information about Michèle that immediately enters into Alex’s thinking, and the scenes that follow his discovery of the letter open a bifurcation between the realist filming of Alex as he watches Michele, sketching in a park, for example, and a voice-over that captures his memory of the letter. Michèle similarly watches Alex, at work spitting fire as a street performer, which is filmed realistically until the light of the fire hurts her eyes and seems to explode in her head.40 The night that Michele watches Alex—a scene that also merges the real and the circus-like spectacular in Lavant’s performance—ends with Michèle’s fainting spell, and the transition to the next morning is made by a shot of jets flying overhead in formation against a blue sky, the first image of the Bicentennial celebration. At this point, the fictional nature of the narrative becomes undeniable as Alex travels to the suburb of St. Cloud, invades Michèle’s former apartment and discovers her diary about Julien. As the narrative becomes untethered from reality, the images become expressionistic and increasingly spectacular. Following the pursuit of Julien in the maze of subway tunnels and Michele’s dream of murdering him, there is a scene of Alex and Michèle drinking together; they begin a night of celebration in which their state of being becomes fused with the visual spectacle of the Bicentennial music and fireworks. Carax opens this by showing them as Lilliputians in the bridge’s gutter next to an empty plastic wine bottle ten times their size, the stone curb itself equally magnified. There is no diegetic pretext for this leap away from any approximation of realism. Then, with music thundering over the city, the sky lit with fireworks, they dance ecstatically, the emotional state of the characters merging with the exploding celebration of the city. Michèle’s water-skiing scene is the climax of this sequence, a final moment of ecstasy in which the fantastic event of the narrative entirely merges with its spectacular image. The narrative from this point on remains indifferent to plausibility: the couple’s drugging and robbing café customers to fund their trip to the sea; Michéle’s midnight visit to the Louvre under Hans’s guidance to see the Rembrandt self-portrait; a public Paris-wide search across all media for the “missing” Michèle, including radio broadcasts and a poster campaign that blankets the walls of metro tunnels. The film’s ending, rescue by the old

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couple and a possible future on the barge, similarly has more to do with desires than with any likelihood of occurence. A defining scene is that in the subway tunnels when Alex discovers Michèle’s image on every poster. She is almost too blind to see them, but they nonetheless represent his greatest fear, losing her. The narrative event—exaggeration of the campaign to locate Michèle and Alex’s sudden awareness of the danger—is already excessive. But what marks Carax and this film is the way he extends this excess visually into the image: Alex ignites the posters so that the subway tunnel becomes a wall of fire, the image of his beloved consumed by flames, serially, to infinity, as he tries to escape with Michèle (Fig. 4.3).41 His immolation of the man who hangs the posters continues this excess, before the calming moments of Alex in prison, apparently being treated for his abnormality, being brought back to a world of ordinary events, space, time, and experience. We have lived these moments, however, not as some dream sequence or mental aberration, but as an external reality that can only be known through its spectacular images, the logic of which has taken over the narrative. The weight of the stone bridge in the early scenes is transformed by views of historic Paris and the Bicentennial event, a double-sided

Fig. 4.3  Alex’s desperation

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evocation of the city and of France that includes its history and contemporary tourist experience, both aspects extending the material city into a realm of ideas and media. To this intellectual framing are added the film’s intertextual relationships with other films, above all City Lights. Certain images of the film remain obscure without reference to L’Atalante, but additional films are evoked as well, for example Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958), in which Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) wanders the streets looking for her inadvertently imprisoned lover Julien—Michèle’s calling in Lovers on the Bridge might be either the character’s reference to this well-known French film or the director’s. Also evoked is Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939), another widely known French film, in which François (Jean Gabin) sacrifices himself to protect Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), a young woman he loves. That film opens with François killing the villain Valentin (Jules Berry), after which the story unfolds fatalistically in flashbacks while he awaits the police to come shoot him down. The theme is once again a transcendent love, in this case of a foundry worker for a young woman who works in a flower shop, her innocence and beauty under attack. When in Lovers on the Bridge, Alex takes off his welding mask, we are invited to recall the moment in Le jour se lève where Françoise arrives at the foundry to deliver a bouquet of flowers for the owner’s wife. Struck by her beauty, François takes off his mask while the heat of the foundry wilts the flowers, a metaphor for beauty imperiled by the modern industrial world. This too is a classic, like City Lights and L’Atalante, known to all French cinephiles, with a script by Jacques Prévert and typifying a movement labeled “poetic realism.” The citation adds yet another to Carax’s variations on the theme of love, this flower girl a direct echo of Chaplin’s, while Carné’s style offers an alternative poetry to Vigo’s and Carax’s. Following its early cinéma vérité realism, Lovers on the Bridge moves progressively away from the literal and plausible; the physicality of the performances and any remaining sense of materiality are part of a continuity of Carax’s universe that includes, inseparably, the material, the poetic, and the intellectual. Material reality is shaped by laws of physics, of economy and government, of psychology and emotion, of passion and poetry. In Carax, and specifically in Lovers on the Bridge, the radical skepticism of the postmodern seems reborn as a new idealism, in this sense complicating the imagined landscape of Chaplin’s social and metaphysical alienation, which is replaced by a world more entirely reflected and transformed in a postmodern mindscape.

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City Lights’ is fundamental to this film in that it begins as a point of origin and remains an active presence. Carax comes to City Lights with ideas and impulses previously explored in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. Following Chaplin’s template, he elaborates his story of Alex and Michèle. The classic film remains in our minds, framing Lovers on the Bridge as an adaptation, enriching and complicating both texts, both versions of idiosyncrasy, alienation, and love. City Lights canonical status gives it further weight as a historical marker, a time capsule, a window into the past; it remains a miniature, an imbedded object in Carax’s exposition of the present, emphasizing historical difference and the ongoing transformation of experience.

Notes 1. See Kent Jones’s description of the relationship, in Louise-Salom’s Mr. X. This partnership was disrupted by an eight-year hiatus forced on Carax after the disastrous cost overruns of Lovers on the Bridge. 2. See Jonathan Rosenbaum: “If the plot recalls City Lights in some particulars, it is Chaplin fully revised and updated by contemporary posthumanism.” 3. Daly and Dowd, 1. 4. The segment “Antoine and Colette” of L’amour à vingt ans (1962), Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board, 1970), L’amour en fuite (Love on the Run, 1979). 5. Because The Night is Young misrepresents the film and has no particular recognition value, I will refer to the film by its original title, Mauvais Sang. 6. See, for example, Rosenbaum, and Melissa Anderson, who describes Carax as “deeply in thrall to the masters of the Nouvelle Vague, particularly Godard.” 7. Thompson, Sight and Sound Interview. 8. 10. 9. 38. 10. Brooks’s only other film role was as the American woman, an agent of some kind, hosting the party in Boy Meet’s Girl. Carax’s mother was American. 11. “Parmi les gens qui font l’amour sans aucune sentiment.” Obviously alert to the epidemic, Carax dwells on the fact that Alex and Lise use a condom when they make love early in the film. The playful treatment in the thriller plot of the AIDS virus, a “retro … virus” especially affecting the young, now strikes a painfully false note. 12. 34, my italics.

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13. Mireille Perrier from Boy Meets Girl has a cameo in Mauvais Sang, while Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche, as Daly and Down write, “designed to remind the spectator of [Anna] Karina” in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, were both created as a reconstruction of her image in Boy Meets Girl. Anna, in this film, tells a story of her first love with Julien, a story developed further by Binoche in the role of Michèle Stalens in Lovers on the Bridge. Similarly, Alex’s dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” is developed in the performance by Michèle and Alex across the stage of the Pont-Neuf in Lovers on the Bridge. 14. 1980s, 139. 15. Bazin, 144. 16. 4. 17. 46 and 56. 18. It is difficult not to recall other well-known films in which blindness plays a similar role, such as Dark Victory (1939), or Magnificent Obsession (1935 and 1954), both of which Carax seems to reference by having Michèle become romantically involved with her surgeon. 19. See Daly and Dowd, 18. 20. This is the second time Michèle says this, the first shouted while Alex is driving the boat behind which she water skis, underscoring the new adventures he is leading her to. Her comment also echoes Emmi’s “Du bist schön, Ali,” to El Hedi ben Salem in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1973). 21. This contrasts with the earlier scene of the Blind Girl inadvertently unraveling the yarn of his underwear, winding up the yarn for her knitting. 22. Quoted in Robinson, 410. 23. Robinson, 395. 24. Among the few locations shots is the exterior of the Millionaire’s mansion, a building on Wilshire Boulevard. Robinson, 408. 25. For fuller analysis of the stone/water juxtaposition see Cristina Álverez López and Adrian Martin, “Water and Stone,” a video essay on the Lovers on the Bridge DVD. 26. 200. 27. Sight and Sound, 46. 28. These opening scenes led critics and audiences to expect the film to address homelessness in a more immediate way, inspiring attacks on the film that in addition to Carax’s excesses, condemned the film for exploiting the homeless in a sensational and frivolous story peopled by a movie star like Binoche. See Graeme Hayes, in Powrie 1990s, 199. 29. Stars, 243. For Vincendeau, the Carax-Binoche partnership has elements of deliberate myth-making, in which she functions as “beautiful female ‘object’ within a long iconic tradition, and as a ‘subject’ who focalizes the

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auteur’s philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations. … There have been precedents for this kind of creative partnership, some of which were explicit models for Carax, especially Griffith and Lillian Gish and Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. The Godard-Karina partnership was particularly important, because their relationship was both sexual and professional.” (244) In Binoche, Carax “found, and helped construct, a star who summed up the seductive paradox of his mise-en-scene: a smooth youthful surface hiding romantic passion.” (246) 30. One could argue that the Tramp/Blind Girl relationship is entirely reversed, with Michèle mentoring the asocial, barely literate outsider Alex, but this distorts a more complexly reconfigured relationship. 31. Identified as his mirror stage by psychoanalytic critics: see for example, Hayes, 202–203. 32. Chaplin’s comic naming of an Austrian physician “Dr. von Bier” is replaced by Carax’s naming his doctor after Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose surname at birth was Destouches. 33. Powrie, 1990s, 205. 34. Powrie, 1980s, 1. 35. 107–109. 36. Daly and Dowd, 108. The cost overruns ruined Carax’s reputation; he was unable to make another film for eight years. 37. Binoche had arrived, at this point, with triumphant performances in films such as André Téchiné’s Rendez-Vous (1985) and a prestige project such as Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), in addition to Carax’s two early films. 38. Asked by David Thompson about shooting his fictional narrative in a context of real homelessness, Carax says: “For me it’s an attempt to break down the frontier between what people call fiction and non-fiction, which doesn’t interest me. Real homeless people and actors, a false bridge and genuine fireworks, money and no money—I didn’t mix these things consciously.” 10. One suspects he would have said the same thing about shooting in a realistic style on the Montpellier set of the Pont-Neuf. 39. For a more detailed account of Carax’s relationship with Godard, see Daly and Dowd, a list of specific influences, 36–38; discussion of Carax’s role of Edgar in Godard’s King Lear (1987), 103–105. The critical and commercial failure of Lovers on the Bridge was such that it did not even find an U.S. distributer until 1999. 40. Alex’s stealing a red snapper in the market is presented with a similar visual realism, even with the fish’s tail sticking out of his shirt; observed by normal Parisians around him, it marks his difference and marginalization. 41. Jonathan Rosenbaum has made this point: “When a missing person poster for Michelle (Juliette Binoche) suddenly turns up all over Paris in Pont-

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Neuf—a poster so “unbelievably” widespread and endlessly reproduced that one is made to feel briefly that no other poster exists in the city—the outlandishness is poetically apt, because it corresponds to the paranoid sense of threat that Alex feels about the world impinging on his love, an overwhelming emotional reality that is no less valid than the more mundane physical reality an American director would be more likely to honor.”

Bibliography Anderson, Melissa. “The Triumph of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang.” The Village Voice, November 27, 2013. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale University Press, 1995. Carax, Leos. Les amants du Pont-Neuf. Lovers on the Bridge, Kino Lorber DVD. Daly, Fergus and Garin Dowd. Leos Carax. Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2003. Frodon, Jean-Michel. “Leos Carax: tous derrière et lui devant.” L’Âge Modern du Cinéma Français: De la Nouvelle Vague à nos Jours. Paris: Flammarion, 787–93, 1995. Hayes, Graeme. “Representation, Masculinity, Nation: The Crises of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.” In French Cinema in the 1990s. Ed., Phil Powrie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Louise-Salom, Tessa. Mr. X: A Vision of Leos Carax (2014) The Artificial Eye. DVD. Powrie, Phil. French Cinema in the 1980s. New  York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———, ed. French Cinema in the 1990s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Thompson, David. “Leos Carax.” Sight and Sound. 5:2. September 10, 1992. Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1985. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Leos Carax: The Problem with Poetry.” Film Comment. May–June, 12–18, 1994. Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. New  York: Continuum, 2000.

CHAPTER 5

Rewriting Roma città aperta (1945) as Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

Recognizing an interrelationship between apparently unrelated films like Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and Roma città aperta (Rome Open City) can occur gradually: a similarity between two scenes seems coincidental; a second perceived echo strengthens the association; a third confirms it, until gradually a viewer is encouraged to read the later film in terms of the earlier one, in this instance placing a twenty-first-century German film in dialogue with the Italian twentieth-century classic Rome Open City. Roberto Rossellini’s canonical work is not the only precursor that critics identify in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film. Paul Cooke cites Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974),1 and Eva Horn, without labeling it a “source,” compares in detail the use of surveillance in Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928) with that in The Lives of Others. Lisa Sternlieb identifies Donnersmarck’s citation of Rome Open City, while further examining references to Casablanca (1945), The Third Man (1949), The Red Shoes (1948), and other films. She goes so far as to conclude that “each character in Lives is drawn from previous cinematic characters; nearly every scene evokes scenes from some previous movie.”2 Significantly, three of the films cited by Sternlieb are from the World War II period, about the war and its aftermath: Casablanca is an effort to gain American public to support for engagement in the war effort; Rome Open City presents the struggle to liberate Rome; and The Third Man explores corruption in Vienna immediately following the war. One obvious © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_5

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question to ask about The Lives of Others is why a film set in East Germany between 1984 and 1991 should so insistently evoke the World War II era. A first response lies in pointing to the fact that recent German history cannot be disassociated from the past of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that for historians of Germany, as for a wide range of Germans and non-Germans generally, questions of German identity immediately confront the issue of Nazism and the Holocaust, whether this period is ultimately regarded as exceptional in German history or in continuity with structures of power and politics from the preceding century and during the postwar period and reunification. Reviewing the work of historians for a signal turning point in German history, Mary Fulbrook writes without hesitation, “The current most favoured candidate for a ‘real break’ is 1945, despite analysis of continuities across the myth of Stunde Null (zero hour).”3 Both the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) evolved in the shadow of the Hitler era; the fall of the Wall reignited debate over the GDR’s authoritarianism in relation to the Third Reich. Richard Ned Lebow, in his introduction to The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, underscores a “longstanding [German] cultural practice of using the past as a resource to frame thought about the present.” “Postwar debate about the Nazi period and the Holocaust,” he argues, “continued this pattern.”4 In the GDR, fascism and the Holocaust were quickly sidelined as products of capitalism, irrelevant to the East German present, but in West Germany this was not the case: the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past, progressed decade by decade, frequently responding to generational change as well as to political pressures of the moment. “During the first wave of Allied trials in Nuremberg,” to quote Wulf Kansteiner, Germans “confronted shockingly direct representations of German crimes.”5 But in the decade of the 1950s, except for “lamentations of German victimhood,” this devolved into a “communicative silence about the most troublesome aspects of the burden of the past.”6 By the early 1960s, this silence was broken, and an “astonishing obsession with the history of the Third Reich” developed,7 though it was devoted largely to political repression during the Nazi era rather than to the Holocaust or to crimes of the Wehrmacht. The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem 1961 and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965 were covered extensively by West German media, and serious works of literature appeared, such as Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) by Günter Grass, and the

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play Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, 1963) by Rolf Hochhuth, which “indicted Pope Pius XII for complicity in the Nazi crimes.”8 Yet these had little impact on the general public, and on commercial television narratives about the war period were populated by a narrow range of stereotypes: the “helpless German soldier; the heroic but failing resistance fighter; the principled, passive victim; the naïve, coerced, or seduced collaborator; and the vicious Nazi.”9 German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s kneeling at a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 stood out as a watershed political event for those of the postwar generation. An American television series, Holocaust, in 1979, was the event that broke through—apparently for the first time—popular ignorance of and indifference to Germany’s war crimes and genocide, with an awareness of its victims. It marked, as Kansteiner writes, “the rise of the survivor in the international memory of the Final Solution.”10 The subject became a staple of prime time television, monuments to the victims were created in cities and towns across the country, and major museums developed permanent exhibitions about the war and the Holocaust. A widely seen exhibition of soldiers’ photographs and written documents on “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” (Verbrechen der Wehrmacht), chronicaling the participation of ordinary soldiers in the genocide, continued this trend into the 1990s, as did Daniel Goldhagen’s, bestselling book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The unveiling of the widely celebrated Holocaust Monument in Berlin in 2005 seemed to mark a final normalizing of the crimes of the war within German discourse, bringing an end, some hoped, to the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The Lives of Others “fits within [this] larger context of memory politics in Germany,” Marc Silberman writes, “where the representation of victims and perpetrators has a sophisticated history anchored in controversial discussions about German shame for the genocide of the Jews and responsibility for crimes against humanity in the Second World War.”11 Following 1989, public discussion of Stasi repression in the GDR was silenced in a way similar to that about the Holocaust and crimes of the Wehrmacht after World War II. The Lives of Others broke this taboo, and in doing so inevitably evoked the earlier period’s collaboration of ordinary Germans in the crimes of Hitler’s government. This linkage multiplied the “hurt” Donnersmarck has identified as part of the experience of his film by German audiences: “people remembered the hurt while watching the film,” he says, making the film “a dark thing for German audiences to watch,” because “we did what the film is about.”12

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From its initial release in 1945, Rome Open City was more than an Italian film, internationally celebrated and concerned with the war that had enveloped the Western world. Except for screenings in private cinema clubs, Rome Open City was banned in Germany in 1950 (in the period of “communicative silence”); it was allowed general release only in 1961, with a preface added declaring that Himmler’s SS controlled policing duties in Rome and the Wehrmacht was not responsible for crimes depicted in the film.13 In 1995–1996, there was commemoration in Germany and across Europe of Rome Open City’s fiftieth anniversary, with screenings, discussions, and articles. Rossellini’s legendary struggle in making the film was even celebrated in a feature film, Celluoide (1996), by Carlo Lizzani. This was the year Donnersmarck decided to become a filmmaker: he interned on the production of Richard Attenborough’s In Love and War during the spring and summer of 1996, then attended the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München. He conceived the story for The Lives of Others during his first semester when a professor assigned the task of developing brief “exposés” for fourteen original film ideas. In addition to reconnecting the GDR to the war period, Rome Open City exemplified a kind of success sought by directors since the New German Cinema, that rare accomplishment, a serious film that attracts a wide audience. The formula, if we can call it that, was to deal with a compelling issue by superimposing melodrama on a foundation of fact and authenticity. Donnersmarck conducted extensive research into the Stasi and life in the GDR in the 1980s, then developed as the centerpiece of his film Rossellini’s narrative of an actress who betrays her lover in the resistance. In response to Rossellini’s dominant metaphor of an extended Roman family, The Lives of Others reveals a world defined by its isolation of individuals, frozen in the present under Stasi surveillance.

Realism and Authenticity; Admiration and Criticism The assertion of being deeply rooted in reality is as important for The Lives of Others as it is for Rome Open City, though this claim is necessarily advanced in different ways. Donnersmarck’s film looks back from a perspective of two decades later on a momentous social change, while Rossellini’s was written barely a year after the events it represents, toward the end of 1944, released in 1945. Rome Open City is set during nine months in late 1943 and early 1944 after the Italian government had capitulated to the Allies, but while Germany still controlled much of the

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country, including Rome. Italian critics and audiences responded to the film as “realistic” not only because the images photographically captured Rome as they knew it, but also because events in the film’s narrative echoed well-documented and widely publicized occurrences. The shooting of Pina (Anna Magnani) in the film, for example, was based on that of a woman named Teresa Gullace: as David Forgacs recounts, she was “a pregnant woman aged thirty-seven with five children who was shot dead in the Viale Giulio Cesare on 2 March 1944.” Don Pietro in the film was a composite of two priests. One, Don Pietro Pappagallo, worked with the partisans and was executed on March 24, 1944. The other was Don Giuseppe Morosino, a military chaplain who supported resistance to the occupiers, executed in January 1944.14 Locations shown in the film were sometimes those where the events referred to had actually occurred, most notably the field at Forte Bravetta where several antifascists, including Morosino, were shot during the occupation and where notable fascists were executed afterward.15 Thus, in Forgac’s words, the “authenticating function” of the scene of Don Pietro’s execution is assured by its staging at Forte Bravetta.16 For German audiences of The Lives of Others in 2006, GDR history was necessarily less present than were images of Rome for Italians in the immediate aftermath of occupation, yet Donnersmarck understood the extent to which acceptance of his film depended on a convincing recreation of the place, time, and socio-intellectual ambience that some in his audience would remember. While writing the scenario, Donnersmarck consulted GDR historian Manfred Wilke, and he studied not only the GDR’s security apparatus, but the arts in East Germany as well, wanting “the year 1984 to feel completely real.”17 For details in the interrogation scenes, Donnersmarck relied on the testimony of dissident writer Jürgen Fuchs’s Vernehmungsprotokolle (Interrogation Protocols), which describes his detention in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen prison from November 1976 to August 1977.18 Of particular value were interviews Donnersmarck conducted with GDR residents who had suffered under the Stasi, as well as with Stasi agents proud of their work for the state. One of these, for example, provided the details featured in the opening scene of how interrogators were trained to collect samples of their subjects’ scent from the cushion of the seat in the interrogation room.19 The article written by Dreyman (Sabastian Kock) for Der Spiegel was based, according to Manfred Wilke, on “a Spiegel publication from 1978, the manifesto of the

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Bund Demokratischer Kommunisten Deutschlands (Association of Democratic Communists of Germany), based in the GDR.”20 Recreating the look of East Berlin—considerably altered by 2006—was as important as accuracy about conditions of life in the GDR. Because of the film’s modest budget, few wide exterior shots were used, but in what would appear on screen the production team went to great lengths for period authenticity, requiring, for instance, shop-signs to be made using pre-digital technologies of 1984. Nagra analogue tape was used in order to reproduce the sound quality of recordings from the period.21 The visual drabness of the GDR was simulated by replacing blues with greens and reds with brownish orange hues wherever possible, producing a stylized and homogeneous color scheme that felt true to viewers with memory of the GDR.22 Interiors of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison were reconstructed based on visits and photographs.23 Scenes later in the film, set in the archives of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, abbreviated as BStU), were shot on location in the Stasi Records building. These attempts to achieve a sense of authenticity were reinforced through the film’s casting, especially of Ulrich Mühe, who was strongly associated with East Germany. Mühe had been born and raised in the GDR, achieving recognition in the prestigious East German Deutsches Theater. He had been prominent in public acts of resistance in 1989, and eventually he starred in historical dramas that were, as Jeremy Fisher writes, “invariably tied to his own biography.” Mühe’s association with East Germany extended to his statements in a book published by Suhrkamp to accompany release of the film, recounting how, for example, when he was already an important actor and threatened with a draft notice, he was protected by political connections, as are Dreyman and Sieland (Martina Gedeck) in the film. In publicizing The Lives of Others, Fisher argues, “Mühe could now be deployed discursively as a victim of the regime.” This was reinforced when Mühe’s Stasi files revealed that his wife, Jenny Gröllmann, along with many of his fellow Deutsches Theater actors, had been a Stasi informant.24 The Lives of Others strongly asserts, as did Rome Open City, a foundation in reality in order to add weight to its arguments and emotional appeals, and yet, interestingly, both films were ultimately criticized for suppressing the truth of history. Rome Open City deploys a rhetoric of Popular Front unity against fascism, which conceals Italian complicity with the German

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occupiers; The Lives of Others supports “consensus” following the reunification in 1991 rather than accountability for the GDR government and the abuses of its extensive security apparatus. Whether or not Donnersmarck was deliberately emulating Rossellini in this respect, The Lives of Others also targeted a wide audience while engaging viewers on a subject of national and international importance. Both films employ a rhetoric of popular cinema, while like the liberation of Rome and the defeat of Hitler, the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification were topics of intense global interest. Rome Open City was the highest-grossing Italian film of the 1945–1946 season, as well as attaining widespread international success, running for a record-setting twenty-one months, for example, at the World Theater in New  York.25 This combination of local and international acclaim created a feedback loop that made Rossellini famous, established a solid foundation for a career that included considerable artistic freedom, and fostered the recognition and prestige of Italian neorealism. A similar dynamic occurred when The Lives of Others won an Oscar for the Best Foreign Film in 2007. It had successfully drawn German viewers to theaters, though fewer than the Ostalgie comedy Goodbye Lenin (2003) and with only one fifth of the audience for a wildly popular hit such as Michael Herbig’s Der Schuh des Manitu (2007). But the Oscar ensured wide release internationally, earning the film eleven million dollars at the US box office alone, which in turn magnified for Germans a sense of the film’s importance. The scale of its international success even raised the possibility of renewed prominence for German cinema, diminished since celebration of New German Cinema in the 1970s, especially of Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. For Donnersmarck as for Rossellini, success at home was greatly amplified by success abroad. Yet as mentioned, both films were also attacked for distorting history, The Lives of Others at the time of its release, Rome Open City only many years after 1945. Mario Cannella in 1966 is typical of this retrospective criticism, writing, as Michael Rogin points out, “from the more radical perspective of the Italian New Left, [arguing] that the neorealist counter position of humanism to ideology was simply another ideology, the ideology of the Popular Front. Because the original enthusiasts for Rome Open City shared its inclusive antifascist politics, they saw authenticity where viewers not under its historical spell are more likely to see a tendentious point of view.” Canella emphasizes the plot that brings together a Catholic and a Communist in heroic resistance to fascism, “burying native Fascism,

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capitalism, and papal hierarchy, the state, class, and church enemies within.” Thus, Popular Front alliances against fascism become an ideology of “popular nationalism” that suppresses more nuanced identification of roles and responsibilities within Italian society, including collaboration with the Germans.26 Those associated with Neorealism attempted to connect visual and narrative style with social responsibility, Cesare Zavattini, for example, advocating avoidance of Hollywood-style plots, extraordinary characters, and the lives of a wealthy elite, recommending instead mining in detail the experience of ordinary people. Rome Open City, however, is a carefully plotted film exactly of the kind criticized by Zavattini, “one situation produc[ing] another, and another, and another, again and again.”27 It deploys the machinery of genre, a crime film including detection, pursuit, and intrigue in a melodramatic conflict of good and evil, a carefully constructed adventure of heroic characters battling evil invaders. Hybrid in its visual style, the film has been shown in retrospect to continue the use of the elements of popular cinema in the Fascist era as much as to break with those practices. Peter Bondanella lists its “melodramatic cinematic codes with stereotypical characters; vaudeville actors; slapstick comedy; ideologically loaded characters; professionals and non-professionals mixed together; some location work combined with a great deal of traditional shooting within constructed sets; a documentary-style photography that also had its antecedents in the cinema before 1945.”28 The Lives of Others has not become legendary in the way that Rome Open City did, but its appearance at a time when one faction of German film culture was celebrating Berlin School realism led to a comparable critique of its carefully scripted and plotted “Hollywood” style. The Berlin School label refers to a group of directors who graduated from the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin in the early 1990s, including Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Thomas Arslan. “If one wanted a film-historical shorthand description for the films of the Berlin School,” writes Marco Abel, one could “start by considering how they tend to pursue an aesthetics of reduction reminiscent of the films by Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, or the Dardenne Brothers, as well as second generation directors of the French New Wave such as Maurice Pialat.”29 Berlin School films also deliberately avoid a perspective that defines German life through internationally recognizable historical lenses, especially the Holocaust, Stasi oppression, and the Wall (at least

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until Petzold’s Barbara, 2012, which was recognized as a direct response to The Lives of Others). Rüdiger Suchsland’s harsh review of The Lives of Others can be understood as representative of this perspective. He describes it as: “A palatable melodrama, from the brown dusty days of the GDR, seasoned with some sex and art, lots of horrible repression, some dead people, still more heartache, a few cold, evil perpetrators, lots and lots of German victims and a Saul who becomes Paul. … [Donnersmarck] presents the GDR so simplistically, clearly and unambiguously that one doesn’t have to think much.”30 Implicit in condemning the film’s melodrama, its stereotypical characters and situations, are both the idea of a betrayal of reality in a neorealist sense,31 and by appealing to the emotions, subverting critical distance and thought. Most trenchantly, Eric Rentschler—a prominent Berlin School supporter—pigeonholed The Lives of Others as belonging to “a New German Cinema of consensus,” one of those that embrace a self-serving myth of a successful (capitalist) Germany of the present and that obliterates realities of life on both sides of the Wall before reunification.32 His rejection of films such as Donnersmarck’s goes beyond their ideas to style and politics. “What above all dismayed me about the cinema of consensus,” Rentschler writes, “was the way in which this cycle of comic populism functioned in a more general turn against personal and critical filmmaking and within the wider framework of a political regime wrestling, … especially after the opening of the Wall, with questions of diversity and difference.”33 The “consensus” label interestingly replays Canella’s attack on Rome Open City for burying native fascism, capitalism, papal hierarchy, and so forth. It attacks the film for minimizing differences of ideology and in aspects of everyday life, as well as glossing over responsibility for complicity with the state. Especially offensive for some was Donnersmarck’s invention of a “good” Stasi agent, seen as comparable to Steven Spielberg’s emphasis on the good Nazi in Schindler’s List (1993).34 In defending his film, rather than engage the narrower terms of theoretical and ideological debate, Donnersmarck suggests that consensus is simply another word for popular, that is to say broad embrace of values expressed in the film.35 Like Rossellini, Donnersmarck was willing to use the means of popular cinema, including genre elements and sentimental address, careful plotting and dialogue, to create a vehicle for his humanist vision.

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The Lives of Others, in Dialogue with Rome Open City Donnersmarck’s initial inspiration, as he has reiterated frequently in interviews, was an anecdote that Maxim Gorky recounted about Lenin, who told him he would have to give up listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata because the music so affected him that he was afraid it would interfere with his carrying out the cruel work of revolution. This image of the impact of Beethoven’s music on Lenin intersected with an interest in the GDR and Stasi agents’ close monitoring of people’s behavior. “Suddenly,” writes Donnersmarck, “I had the story, the complete plot.” Several years would go by until, following the festival success of his short film Dobermann (1999), Donnersmarck researched the East German context and developed a full screenplay for The Lives of Others. As he recalls beginning that process: “I found a copy of the original Exposé [in a file from his first year of film school]…, and I’d say it contained about eighty percent of the final plot of the film.”36 The film opens with a title card announcing that the year is 1984, which cannot but bring to mind George Orwell’s novel. Stasi officer Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is introduced interrogating a prisoner, though this is soon revealed to be a session previously recorded on audiotape, now visualized for the viewer as Wiesler recalls it. The recording of the interrogation is being used in his lecture to Stasi trainees. At the end of the class, Wiesler is invited by former classmate Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) to attend a play written by Dreyman and staring Sieland. At the performance they are in the presence of the powerful Minister of Culture, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), whose lust for Sieland leads him to encourage Grubitz when he seeks to uncover dirt on Dreyman, Sieland’s lover. Grubitz has Wiesler install listening devices in the apartment of Dreyman and Sieland, and as Wiesler listens day after day, he becomes drawn into the personal lives and relationship of the director and actress. Dreyman is privileged and protected—by among others the wife of long-­ time GDR leader Erich Honecker—and as a result he is somewhat arrogant. In dialogue with more militant friends and members of the arts community he remains committed to working within parameters set by the state, yet the fact that his own plays are produced while the artists he most admires are blacklisted—especially Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) who would be the ideal director of Dreyman’s work—leads him to question the system.

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Meanwhile, Sieland finds herself in an impossible situation. Hempf employs his power over her career to impose himself on her, and when Sieland resists, he rapes her, leaving her trapped between unacceptable alternatives of continuing to submit to his abuse or renouncing her art. When she needs Dreyman’s support the most, she is unable to confide in him. At this moment Wiesler impulsively facilitates Dreyman’s discovery of Sieland’s predicament. The crisis in Sieland’s life and in her relationship with Dreyman coincides with the turning point of the more explicitly political strand of the narrative when Dreyman hears that Jerska, depressed after years of being denied the opportunity to work, has killed himself. The cumulative effect of these events on Dreyman pushes him from a willingness to work within the system to active opposition. Under a pseudonym he begins to compose a damning article about the high rate of suicide in the GDR to be published in the West German magazine Der Spiegel. As Sieland prepares for a rendezvous with Hempf, Dreyman finally confronts her, arguing that she can survive without Hempf’s support. But it is only after an accidental, decisive encounter with Wiesler, who poses as a devoted admirer of her art, that Sieland decides to shun Hempf. Unfortunately, Grubitz now knows about Sieland’s use of the drugs that she acquires through her dentist; informed of this and enraged at Sieland’s rejection of him, Hempf has her arrested. Under suspicion himself by this time, Wiesler is called on to interrogate Sieland, who is rendered helpless by the drug charges and by Wiesler’s intimate knowledge of her life. In the hope of avoiding prison, she reveals Dreyman’s hiding spot for the typewriter he had used to write his treasonous article. Before Grubitz can arrest Dreyman, however, Wiesler removes the incriminating evidence, compromising his own career in this attempt to rescue Dreyman. But during the Stasi raid on their apartment, before she can learn that the incriminating evidence has been removed and unable to bear the expected revelation of her guilt, Sieland rushes out and steps in front of an oncoming truck. The image of her body in the street (Fig. 5.1), where Wiesler stands by her and then Dreyman kneels holding her, echoes two moments in Rome Open City: one is Don Pietro’s holding Pina after she has been shot; the other is the unconscious body of Marina (Maria Michi) when she has collapsed to the floor after realizing that her betrayal of Manfredi (Marcelo Pagliero) has led to his torture and death.

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Fig. 5.1  Pietà

The Lives of Others could easily have ended with the tragedy of Sieland’s suicide, but following a brief transitional scene set in November 1989 when Wiesler hears that the Wall has been breached and the border has officially been declared open, there is a thirteen-minute postscript set in 1991, one year after German reunification. Wiesler is employed delivering advertising flyers to mailboxes, while Dreyman continues to suffer a creative paralysis brought on by Sieland’s death. Now, however, Dreyman crosses paths with the unrepentant Hempf, from whom he is surprised to learn that the Stasi had audited every word of his private life. Reviewing transcripts of recordings and documents in GDR archives opened to the pubic following reunification, he learns how Wiesler had begun to falsify his reports and of the Stasi agent’s actions to save him following Sieland’s confession. This inspires Dreyman to write again, a novel based on Wiesler’s actions, entitled “Sonata for a Good Man” after the musical composition Jerska had given Dreyman. The film ends with Wiesler in turn discovering Dreyman’s novel and that it is dedicated to him, an acknowledgment that his sacrifice has been recognized. Donnersmarck’s film, predictably, presents a changed world from that of Rossellini’s film over a half-century earlier. But just as predictably in these narratives of oppression and resistance, individuals’ relationships with power create similar moral dilemmas. Less inevitably, both films focus on the same issues: the role of ideology, of love and family, of gender, and of the importance of art. The Lives of Others is more individualistic in its emphasis, less communal in its appeal than Rome Open City—in fact, the

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isolation of the characters in the later film in response to the sense of community in the earlier is one of its defining qualities. Ultimately the films are linked by a humanistic idea of “goodness,” a sympathy among people that leads to altruism and is proposed as a supreme value. In both films, power is centralized and imposed from above.37 Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) in Rome Open City, carrying out the work of the German occupation, pursues Manfredi by examining with a magnifying glass photographs taken throughout the city. His perspective is through a grid superimposed on maps, in contrast to the street-level personal experience of Rome’s residents. The occupiers’ means of implementing power is military, foregrounded from the opening shots of marching soldiers accompanied by military songs. The army enforces a curfew and controls the movements of people, as well as the distribution of scarce resources such as food and tobacco.38 In The Lives of Others, the figure comparable to Bergmann is Minister Hempf, a representative of the highest levels of the GDR government under Erich Honecker. Control of the population is similarly from above and at a distance, operating through a highly developed system of information gathering. Its totalitarian nature is displayed in the virtuosic demonstration of expertise about the imprint of typewriter brands that allows tracking of every typed document in East Germany. Grubitz and Wiesler are agents of Hempf and the state. Wiesler’s thoroughness is demonstrated in his ability to silence a neighbor who notices his intrusion into Dreyman’s apartment with a simple warning that her daughter could lose her place at the university. The state seems to know everything about everyone. Its agents produce ever more information through an ever-expanding network of willing and unwilling collaborators, which in a context of central control over the economy ensures leverage. Surveillance dominates the narrative visually through the repeated images of Wiesler and his assistant at their listening post. The grid superimposed in this film is a map drawn to scale in chalk by Wiesler on the floor of the attic, which allows him to follow in his mind every movement of Dreyman and Sieland in their apartment.39 In broad terms, the difference in the exercise of power between the films is the cruder brutality of military force in Rome Open City, a direct extension of the violence of war, especially in the scenes of torture and execution. Soldiers with guns conduct searches by forcing their way into people’s homes, and they gratuitously shoot down Pina when she runs after the truck carrying away her fiancé, Francesco. The scene of Manfredi’s torture drives home the point that the victims’ bodies represent their

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ultimate vulnerability. Hunger affects behavior, for example driving the mob to sack a bakery. Marina’s use of drugs creates a physical dependency that expresses and adds to the weakness of character that allows her to betray Manfredi. In the torture scene itself, the emphasis is on his exhausted and broken body, on skin burned with a blowtorch, fingernails torn off with pliers. Alternately revealing and withholding details, Rossellini manages our experience of the torture before framing the victim in a way that recalls images of the crucified Christ, thus evoking centuries of philosophical reflection on the relationship of body and “soul,” on death and the intangibles of mind or spirit tied to physical being. If the violence of World War II yields the physical brutality of Rome Open City, the less direct imposition of power in the waning years of the Cold War is more insidious, especially Wiesler’s penetration into the lives of others by listening to their conversations, to their very breathing and expression of emotion, which seems a deeper intrusion than visual observation. Rather than physical torture, extensively researched psychological techniques are used in interrogation, as seen in the thesis, “Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists,” for which Grubitz serves as an advisor. The elaborate opening scene shows not only the state’s methodical approach, but sets up the later interrogation of Sieland as the film reaches its climax. In that crucial scene, coerced by Grubitz and after having identified himself to the actress as a member of her admiring “public,” Wiesler confronts Sieland with questions to which, as she is aware, he already knows the answers—all under the gaze of Grubitz. The scene dramatizes the state’s forcing Sieland to choose between two forms of destruction, that is, between prison and betrayal of Dreyman, her lover and partner. Rather than exhibiting the absolute resistance of Manfredi and Don Pietro, Sieland vacillates, but she will be ruined in any case. Like Jerska, she is driven to suicide, a fate described as epidemic in East Germany by Dreyman’s article for the Western press. The Lives of Other follows Rome Open City in displaying a full spectrum of collaboration with, and resistance to, the oppressors. In Rossellini’s film the range of characters extends from the Italian Police Commissioner who willingly serves Major Bergmann at one extreme, to Don Pietro, Manfredi, and Pina, those who resist, at the other. Lauretta’s fraternization is typical of the vast middle ground, mirrored on a greater scale by Marina’s compromises. Marina tells Manfredi indignantly that of course she has had lovers—how else would she have gotten her furniture! Only when she sees Manfredi’s tortured body does she understand where her choices have led

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her. By contrast, Pina’s rejection of this kind of compromise takes the form of revulsion at the occupiers’ physical violation of selfhood when, in spite of his evident power over her, she slaps away the fondling hand of a soldier during the round up, shortly before she is shot down. In The Lives of Others, the range of compromise is exhibited within the restricted theater world, from Schwalber (Hubertus Hartmann), labeled a Stasi informant, to the outspoken opposition of Paul Hauser (Hans-Uwe Bauer), and to Jerska, already blacklisted. Even more than in Rome Open City, however, the focus is on the troubled middle ground occupied by Sieland and Dreyman. He is superficially loyal to the state, while passively in league with friends active in the opposition; she is sympathetic, yet apparently less political and more self-centered, her attention on her art and career. Both she and Dreyman, protected by public recognition and influential backers, attempt to function within the system of government restrictions: the film’s plot dramatizes the unsustainability of their compromised position. While both films arrange their characters on a spectrum of collaboration and resistance, both also defer judgment with respect to certain broad ideological positions, for which, as mentioned previously, both were ultimately criticized. Most obvious in Rome Open City is the cooperation between the communist Manfredi and the Catholic priest Don Pietro, both in opposition to the fascist occupiers. The communist/Catholic cooperation is reflected more modestly in Pina’s desire for a church wedding to her non-believing communist lover. Love and desire—Pina is already pregnant—are more immediately compelling than the couple’s belief systems, just as love for the people of Rome transcends ideological positions of the priest and the partisan. Don Pietro frames the occupiers’ actions as offensive to God while nonetheless seeming personally motivated by human sympathy. Francesco and Manfredi represent two levels of the secular commitment to freedom, one more intuitive, the other more cerebral. It is in a context of prioritizing human sympathy above ideology that we can understand Rossellini’s superimposition of Christian imagery on the torture and death of Manfredi: in this film Communism is interchangeable with religion, Christianity with political ideology—either belief system can be proposed as an understanding of more fundamental attitudes. In The Lives of Others, Donnersmarck similarly defers judgment on both socialism and capitalism, while he is in opposition to the oppression of the totalitarian GDR government. This is an aspect of the “consensus”

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posture for which some critics attacked the film. Wiesler, a true believer, comes to reject the corruption of Grubitz and Hempf rather than the state’s Communist ideology per se, as do Dreyman and his fellow artists— they are more interested in freedom of expression than in the material wealth produced by the capitalist West. In so far as the film addresses ideology, the message is nuanced. Acknowledgment of the GDR’s ideological rigidity and hypocrisy marks all of the characters in the film, from the cynical Hempf and Grubitz to Dreyman’s circle of idealistic artist/rebels. Dreyman’s play, which receives a threadbare and incompetent staging early in the film, is reprised in postwall Berlin as an opulent spectacle for a well-heeled audience among whom the film’s villain, Hempf, seems right at home. Gorky-style socialist realism is exchanged for a trendy Robert Wilson staging, as Donnersmarck noted.40 Yet the play, even on the evidence of a very brief fragment, is weak. Dreyman only becomes a true artist when life-experience and his understanding of Wiesler leads him to write the novel Sonata for a Good Man. As well as about resisting fascism, Rome Open City is about human sympathy that transcends Catholic and/ or communist dogma; The Lives of Others is about a similar sympathy that unites people of different ideological views against the GDR’s repression. Thus, Wiesler can be transformed by his experience of the lives of Sieland and Dreyman; Dreyman is in turn transformed when he understands Wiesler’s sacrifice, ultimately identifying it with the spirit of the music given him by Jerska. Wiesler’s attempts to discover the truth about Dreyman grow out of his initial exchange with Grubitz at the performance of Dreyman’s play, after which Wiesler becomes the lens through which we observe Dreyman and Sieland. He performs this function, for example, when he watches Dreyman pause to kick a soccer ball with the children in the street, one of the first images recalling Rome Open City. Dreyman engages with children near his apartment, towering above them, his long coat swaying from his body as his feet shuffle skillfully around the ball. For those familiar with Rossellini’s film, Dreyman here evokes Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizzi) as he supervises parish children, soutane swaying around his legs, similarly unable to resist when the children and the ball come his way, an image fixed in memory by the comic turn of the ball bouncing off his head. Wiesler watches Dreyman as he turns away from the children, then observes him with Sieland, framed in the window of their apartment. Such acts of observation are similarly important in Rome Open City, as when Manfredi and Francesco arrive to meet Marina at a restaurant while

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German soldiers are bringing two live sheep for their dinner. The soldiers are unaware of being observed, entirely oblivious to the layered readings that their actions inspire in the restaurant owner and Manfredi, who see not only the oppression of occupiers taking what they want, but also biblical echoes and a parable of murdered innocents, a dimension of the layered text which includes this representation within the diegesis as well as in the authorial commentary. Surveillance by the oppressors in Rome Open City is counterbalanced by observation and critique on the part of those who resist, which is also the case in The Lives of Others. A particular scene from Rome Open City replicated in The Lives of Others is that in which Francesco watches from the shadows of their apartment building’s entranceway when Lauretta, Pina’s sister, returns home after an assignation with a German soldier, pausing to adjust newly acquired stockings, apparently having enjoyed a social and sexual encounter. Lauretta’s act of fraternizing with the enemy here incites no particular reaction from Francesco, an aspect of the film’s recognition of human frailty, especially understood through the perspective of Don Pietro who understands that “sin” is the norm, the reason prayer and forgiveness are so necessary. In fact, Lauretta’s weakness is a representation in miniature of the greater transgressions of Marina, whose failure of character leads to Manfredi’s death as well as her own destruction. In The Lives of Others, Dreyman, like Francesco observing Lauretta, watches Sieland from their entranceway as she adjusts her clothing after leaving Hempf’s car. Here Wiesler has become a meta-observer, even directing the action like a filmmaker arranging the events of a narrative. Muttering “time for some bitter truths,” he has arranged for Dreyman to observe Sieland’s arrival. An extensive narrative borrowing from Rome Open City is the story of Marina Mari (Maria Michi), retold in The Lives of Others as that of Sieland.41 Each woman is an actress, lover of a man resisting a repressive regime; each woman is tempted by the protection and favors of the powerful, intimidated by their threats, torn between austere adherence to a cause and rewards of theatrical stardom that promotes each woman as an object of desire in public spectacles. Importantly, the relationship in both films is used to focus fundamental moral dilemmas: Manfredi decides he must break with Marina because her apparent weakness for luxury is in conflict with his priority of resisting fascism; Sieland voices a similar question in The Lives of Others, asking Dreyman directly if he too is not in bed with the government as he accepts favors that allow him to keep working. Women in both films are in varying degrees presented as less rigorous in their

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thinking than men, Marina much more so than Sieland, whose qualities as a performer nonetheless seem to have more to do with her beauty, intuition, and charisma than with intellect, reducing her to a vehicle for the words of her male partner. Marina is shown from the first scene in the pose of a movie star, lounging in bed against her sunburst headboard, telephone in hand, though Pina soon reveals that Marina is just another working-class young woman, daughter of a “portera” (translated in the subtitles as “janitor”) from her neighborhood. We never see Marina on stage, but her revealing costume suggests some kind of cabaret performance where she is an object of desire for a male audience, mainly the German SS officers. As mentioned previously, in conversation with Manfredi she reveals the quid pro quo of material rewards for her compliance with these admirers—a fur coat awarded for betraying Manfredi is merely the final gift of many. She and Manfredi became lovers after meeting during an air raid, drawn to each other by their unwillingness to give in to fear in such a situation. As will Sieland in the later film, Marina remains torn between her love for Manfredi and a way of life that lifts her above ordinary reality, in Marina’s case working-­ class poverty. She refuses to understand that she must choose between sides in the conflict. Christa-Maria Sieland in The Lives of Others is also caught between the rewards of patronage and fidelity to her lover who, like Manfredi, is on the side of solidarity with her fellow citizens. She and Dreyman are joined in the privileges that success and compromise bring them, an elegant apartment, lives free of hardship, and freedom to inhabit the unsullied role of artist, superior observers of life apart from a troubled world. Like Marina, Sieland needs to be lifted above ordinary people by admiration she receives. There is a narcissism in the posture that her art is everything and that she cannot live without performing and being admired, including by the likes of Wiesler and Minister Hempf. Unlike Manfredi, Dreyman fully commits himself to the opposition only after the suicide of his friend Jerska. Sieland, however, very much like Marina, remains indecisive until it is too late. Sieland finally has courage to reject Hempf, as Pina defies the Germans, though this leads to a revelation of her betrayals and of her earlier moral cowardice comparable to Marina’s. Because of her decision to reject Hempf, the image of Sieland lying in the street evokes Pina’s death as well as Marina’s collapse. One aspect of these narratives that strengthens a sense of direct borrowing is that like Marina’s, Sieland’s need for admiration is mirrored in a

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clandestine addiction to drugs. Marina is given her drugs by Ingrid, agent of the SS, but she tells Manfredi that the drugs are left over from those her dentist gave her for a toothache. The source of Sieland’s drugs in The Lives of Others is, in fact, her dentist, which seems a playful reminder of Marina’s lie. For both women, drug addiction is a result of the pressures they face, above all the need to make a tough decision between a moral stance and career or material wellbeing. Sieland, admired as an artist, is represented in a higher social sphere than Marina, yet the role or her sexual appeal in her success and the extent to which this wins the protection of Hempf undercuts any claim that she is so different. In the end, each woman’s vulnerability, increased by her addiction, leads her to betray her lover and the resistance, as well as hopelessly entrapping her in circumstances from which there can be no escape.42 The image of Sieland’s fallen body strongly recalls Rome Open City, first of all Pina cradled in the arms of Don Pietro when she has been shot down, but also Marina collapsed to the floor upon seeing the tortured body of Manfredi.43 We understand the tragedy of Pina’s death in part through Don Pietro’s eyes—he is an observer with full knowledge of her circumstances. Wiesler’s perspective as he helplessly stands over the body of Sieland is similar, complemented by that of Dreyman when he kneels to cradle Sieland in his arms. These images in both films offer a pietà-like tableau, the dead Christ in the arms of his mother Mary, though here it is the woman who is sacrificed. Such religious imagery is consistent throughout Rome Open City, as in the framing of the dying Manfredi as Christ on the cross. The shared use of the pietà image, with its accumulated power of a long history in sculpture and painting, further reinforces our association between the films. Beyond specific story elements and imagery, a central trope of The Lives of Others stands out by its absolute difference from Rome Open City. Where fecundity and community are the vital heart of society in Rossellini’s Rome, Donnersmarck’s East Berlin under the Stasi is marked sterility and isolation. Focus on the relationship between Francesco and Pina establishes the importance of forming a family in Rome Open City, emphasizing a future embodied in the expected child, which amplifies the tragedy of Pina’s death. Pina’s domain is the apartment building, and when she encounters Manfredi there, she is immediately defined as a mother, a fact inflated in significance in that she is the only parent of her son Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico). Marcelo is sent to bring Don Pietro, acting as messenger immediately suggesting children as the link or bond that ties

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society together. Their role is made explicit in the dialogue between Francesco and Pina. When she expresses a sense of despair, Francesco talks of fighting for change and a “better world. … for our children.” This cliché is not framed as such, for it states directly and clearly a central reality of the world of this film, the raison d’être of adult lives and commitments, including the fight against fascism. At first, the young boys act the part of soldiers, only to be quickly reabsorbed into their families as children. Completing the logic of the narrative in the final images of the film, the army of these children, having witnessed the execution of Don Pietro, moves off against a backdrop of St. Peter’s Basilica, a new generation to replace Manfredi in future battles for the Eternal City.44 Children embody a future for which Don Pietro, Manfredi, and Pina willingly sacrifice themselves. Children are presented as the agents of both continuity and change in this film, the working of time in history. Generalizing the notion of family bonds beyond blood ties, Francesco’s affection extends, before and after Pina’s death, to her son by a previous marriage. On the eve Francesco’s planned wedding to Pina, the child asks if he can now call Francesco “Papà.” Then, after Pina’s death, two distinct moments show Francesco accepting that role without hesitation or reflection. In the first, significantly, it is the very fact that he pauses to say goodbye to the child that saves him from being captured along with Manfredi. Evoking the earlier moment, Marcello calls Francesco “Papà” in saying goodbye. Then as Francesco turns to follow Manfredi and Don Pietro, the boy calls him back to give him Pina’s scarf; this action leaves Francesco several hundred feet behind the others, so that when he reaches the street he sees German soldiers loading the prisoners into cars. In a film narrative so coherently conceived and overdetermined, every detail of the action becomes allegorical. In the second moment, at the church before returning to his work with the resistance, Francesco’s final act is to cover the child for whom he is responsible with a blanket, recognition that this is why they fight. One scene, thirty minutes into the film and fully ten minutes long, establishes an idea of family that not only extends beyond blood relations, but encompasses neighbors who share the apartment building’s cramped spaces. We are shown the anxious turmoil around a dinner table as the boys return from their military adventure (Fig. 5.2). From what seemed an establishing shot, however, we are lifted outside this frame to see a toothless old man in his bed, which we later learn is in another corner of

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Fig. 5.2  The extended family

the same room; out of wisdom or senility, he ignores the family drama and thinks only of a wedding cake baking in the kitchen. This is merely the first move in representing the extended family through a remarkable series of close shots that dissolve walls. When we see one of the adults, perhaps Francesco’s brother, get up from the table, a jump cut suddenly shows him elsewhere with his trousers off, crowding into a small bed with his wife. The next image is of Pina’s son Marcello lying propped up in bed and speaking: we have no clue of his whereabouts in the apartment, even when a reverse shot shows a girl his age listening, with a younger child deeper in the space behind her. A cut returns us to the boy, then another back to the girl. Suddenly, still without establishing the space, the camera shows a very young child, sitting on a pot and looking intently up, apparently at the girl speaking, the child’s gaze swinging to the right as the boy speaks again (Fig. 5.3). This multigenerational family that is neither defined nor divided by physical spaces represents all families, whose similarity we have witnessed

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Fig. 5.3  A child learns from its elders

floor by floor as the boys climbed the steps of the apartment building to be greeted at every landing with concerned anger. In turn, the implied kinship extends through interlocking relationships to all Romans, including Manfredi and Don Pietro, the black marketeer, Italian policemen, even Lauretta—stupid, in Pina’s words, rather than bad—who at the end of this scene leaves the household to join Marina. If Marina is initially framed like a Hollywood star, an opening statement of her moral portrait as materialistic and self-interested, early in the film Manfredi has already realized she is “not the woman for him.” He says this to Pina, the mother, the character providing the most extreme contrast with Marina, who will be unable to form a family with Manfredi or to become a mother. The central fact of Marina’s tragedy is her turning away from her working-class roots and in doing so, removing herself from the extended Roman family. To quote Horn’s comments on Lang’s Spione and The Lives of Others, which can equally apply to Rome Open City: the films “oppose the

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intimacy of the romantic couple to a political apparatus that intrudes into their togetherness and disrupts or even destroys their intimacy and eventually their lives.”45 The German occupiers in the world of this film are hostile to love and family, representing an imposition of power that interferes with the natural processes of renewal. Only Rossellini’s emphasis on children and heteronormative families can explain his queering of the villains in Rome Open City, which now stands out as incongruous. As Michael Rogin has observed, this seems on the face of it illogical in light of the Nazis condemnation of “decadence” and homosexuality in the Third Reich. “Those who see the film for the first time today,” Rogin writes, “are more likely to wonder why Rossellini (casting the homosexual actor Harry Feist as Gestapo agent Major Bergman) lined up Nazis with the homosexual decadence that was one of their targets, why the Gestapo drug supplier Ingrid … is a lesbian femme fatale. Such questions will produce others: Why are the (German) villains mannered and the (Italian) heroes natural?”46 The explanation is in Rossellini’s focus in the film on the heteronormative family as a dominant metaphor. Donnersmarck’s response to the centrality of family is one of counterpoint. In the GDR of The Lives of Others, the idea of family seems unthinkable. Until the fall of the Wall offers the possibility of real change, all of the characters are imprisoned in the present. Whatever the reason, Sieland and Dreyman show no interest in children. Their lovemaking remains a moment in the present through which they try to bridge a growing distance between them as individuals. Although other couples are mentioned, we see mainly isolated individuals in the film, above all Wiesler, part of the explanation for his hunger to participate vicariously in the relationship of Dreyman and Sieland. Grubitz and Hempf are alone, as well as Hauser and the other artists—the intellectuals are discouraged even from assembling. The blacklisted Jerska is effectively exiled to a cluttered but lonely room in a vulgar household characterized by the noise of a loudly barking dog and a quarreling couple. Children seldom appear in this world, so when they do appear, on screen or merely in the dialogue, it is significant. The first mention, underscoring the authoritarian state’s intrusion into the family, is in the opening scene. To turn up the pressure on his sleepdeprived interrogation victim, Wiesler threatens him by saying that his children, Jan and Nadja, “will be put into state care.” This threat is repeated with Frau Meineke (Marie Gruber), after Wiesler has installed microphones in Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment: “One word to anyone

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and your Mascha [Frau Meineke’s daughter] loses her spot for studying Medicine at the University.” When children do appear on screen, the point is driven home. The first instance occurs when Dreyman pauses to play soccer with the boys outside his building. As with Don Pietro’s action in Rome Open City, Dreyman’s actions reveal a nostalgia for childhood, and to an extent a persistence of innocence within the experience-hardened adult. As mentioned, this moment occurs under Wiesler’s chilling gaze, and Dreyman explains to one of the children that he must go or he will be “in trouble” with his girlfriend. When Sieland and Dreyman are observed within the frame of their apartment window shortly afterward, the children in the street are quickly forgotten. The second instance represents an austere reality in the GDR that almost amounts to hostility toward children. Wiesler approaches his sterile modernist apartment block, enters the building, and then the elevator. Suddenly a soccer ball bounces into view and into the elevator, followed by a child (Fig. 5.4).47 The elevator is a cold, empty space in which the isolated Wiesler becomes an object of the child’s gaze, until he asks if Wiesler is a Stasi agent. “Do you even know what the Stasi is?” Wiesler asks. When the child says he has heard from his father that they are bad men, Wiesler’s first instinct is to get the man’s name. He refrains from this, however, which calibrates his gradual softening over the arc of the narrative. Beyond that, the scene powerfully reiterates the film’s emphasis on isolation, visualizing

Fig. 5.4  A child of the GDR

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the child separate from family or friends in this steel box, reminding us of the state’s willingness to destroy families, and underscoring that Wiesler has no social connections. Wiesler’s love life, as shown shortly before, is comprised of sex with a businesslike prostitute, placed in the film immediately following Hempf’s rape of Sieland. Both sex acts are in obvious contrast to Dreyman and Sieland’s love making. Wiesler’s brief encounter with the sex worker leaves him clinging to her, while the way he buries his head between her large breasts suggests his emotional need and even a longing to return to the lost warmth of a mother. In deliberate contrast with Rome Open City, where children and their future are the center of life, The Lives of Others emphasizes an absence of children in a world where even art cannot compensate for lost love, corrupted and crushed even for the most fortunate. Among things that have changed between Rome in 1945 and Berlin in 1984 or 2006, the situation of women is among the most obvious. Unsurprisingly, the world of Rome Open City is entirely patriarchal whether among Catholics or Communists. Little Marcello flatly contradicts his sister’s claim that girls can be heroes too. We are meant to understand, of course, that Pina is as heroic as Manfredi, yet within her prescribed sphere. As I have suggested, Rome Open City identifies motherhood as women’s primary role, represented above all by Pina, the good woman, contrasted with Marina, a femme fatale who abandons the primary responsibility of family. Here, women are represented as governed by emotion, Pina clinging to religion in contrast to Francesco’s embrace of the more rationalist Marxism; Manfredi’s disenchantment with Marina is based on her inability to grasp the important reasons not to give in to the Germans, an intellectual as well as a moral failing. All of the authority figures in this film are men. Ordered by class and gender, as Peter Brunette has pointed out, in this world the masses are shown as suffering, rather than taking action, and “the chief sufferers are … the women.” Men act, and women are acted upon; when Pina attempts to act, “motivated by natural ‘womanly instinct’ in the defense of her man,” she is killed.48 This is a familiar trope of melodrama, one that finds a significant continuation in The Lives of Others. An imbalance between men and women in Donnersmarck’s film not only reflects a representation of inequalities within GDR society, it is central to the plot machinery. Superficially, the situation of Sieland seems very different from that of the women in Rome Open City. Sieland and Dreyman, for example, seem to be in a balanced relationship, two

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beautiful, independent, and talented people who respect and care for one another. Sieland, more privileged and more cognizant of the pressures she is facing is also more empowered to choose than the women so deeply enmeshed in the social machinery of Rome Open City. Sieland might even have chosen not to have children, valuing her own life, though in any case motherhood could have no part in defining her in an environment that excludes family as a viable possibility. Sieland is both set apart and made central: the narrative is set in motion by Hempf’s desire to control Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the GDR,” which motivates the surveillance and the vise Sieland finds herself in. Hempf’s harassment and rape of Sieland, as Dreyman sees it reflected in her anguish, reinforces Dreyman’s commitment to resist the government: along with the suicide of Jerska, it pushes Dreyman to action. Sieland, more than Dreyman, whom Wiesler despises for his arrogance, is the focus Wiesler’s attention, her struggle motivating his transformation. In contrast to Dreyman and to Wiesler, both fundamentally observers, Sieland is the one who is forced to choose between accepting Hempf’s abuse or giving up her art and identity. She finds herself entirely alone, but as the only woman, her isolation and the intense focus on her character convert Sieland into something more and less than a person. In the manner of Pina and Marina, she is elevated (or reduced) to the representation women generally, embodying in concentrated form the tensions of the drama. Like the women in Rome Open City, she must be martyred in the struggle.49 As Cooke writes, The Lives of Others “follows the classic melodramatic pattern of a female protagonist being punished for disloyalty to her lover, her betrayal ultimately leading to her death in the arms of the weeping Dreyman.”50 The two plays within The Lives of Others both underscore Sieland’s position as a woman. In one, Gesichter der Liebe (Visions of Love), Sieland plays Martha, one of a group of women working in a factory in wartime while their men are at the front. Martha has visions, including one that she recounts in which of the son of a fellow worker at the front has fallen to his death, “crushed by the mighty wheel.” Then, after a temporal ellipsis, she rebels against a male supervisor, followed by a moment of gaiety where the women all dance. As well as a parody about an oppressed worker and an oppressed woman, the play presents Sieland as exceptional among her colleagues, her beauty barely concealed by the factory grime and costumes. The second play is an imaginary project invented on the spot by Dreyman when Sieland interrupts his conference with Hauser and the

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editor from Der Spiegel. It will be about Stalin, Dreyman says, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. “Who’ll play the lead role?” Sieland asks lightly. “We planned to ask you, Christa,” is Hauser’s rude response, deliberately indifferent to gender: “who would you rather play, Lenin or his dear old mother?” In terms of Rome Open City, these are the stereotypical roles of (male) hero and brave mother. In this situation, Sieland’s response is to the point: “I see I’m not wanted here.” Both of these inserted texts can only emphasize that Sieland is the only woman in a film with many male characters. Beyond very minor figures such as the neighbor who helps Dreyman with his tie and the sex worker hired by Wiesler, Sieland is the lone female in the company of Hempf, Grubitz, Wiesler and his crew, Dreyman, Hauser, Jerska, the editor of Der Spiegel, and so forth. This is particularly surprising in that there were readily available historical models of women artists active in challenging the GDR government.51 But creating such an allegorical drama around a single female character also goes some way to explain the importance of the rape scene, which brings together so many essential elements of the film.52 Hempf, sensual and self-indulgent, takes what he wants because as Minister of Culture he has absolute power over Sieland’s fate, at every level. He can keep her off the stage, which robs her of her identity and reason for living; he can have her arrested and imprisoned; and, with the assistance of his thugs if need be, he can overpower her physically and violate her body. This use of Hempf also responds to Rossellini’s queering of his villains to set them apart from the beatified heteronormative family. Donnersmarck’s villains will not only be heterosexual, they will be monstrously so: extending beyond the mere disengagement of individuals from social bonds, Hempf’s rape of Sieland becomes a metaphor for the inevitability that power will corrupt, the very embodiment of evil, at a level of personal relations, but also encompassing the film’s broadest ideas of state power figuratively raping the arts and crushing a world of ideals to which the artists aspire.53 The centrality of artists and the arts in The Lives of Others, beyond referencing the anecdote of Lenin and Beethoven’s Appassionata, is Donnersmarck’s direct response to one scene in Rome Open City that questions the importance of the arts as a civilizing force. That scene is set in an officers’ lounge adjacent to the rooms that include Bergmann’s office, the holding cells, and the space in which Manfredi is being tortured. In contrast to the functional desk and the instruments of torture, the officers’ retreat is luxurious, decorated with looted cultural artifacts.

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There are chivalric armor, a Renaissance putto statue, classical paintings, and Captain Hartmann (Joop van Hulzen) at the piano playing a pastiche of a Chopin waltz. Bergmann sees the interrogation of Manfredi as a test of Arian superiority over an inferior Italian, which Manfredi’s resistance will refute. But the larger implication of Rossellini’s mise-en-scène is that even Europe’s brilliant cultural and artistic legacy can neither forestall nor conceal the barbarism of armed invasion, repression, and torture, as the Germans, in Hartmann’s words, “murder their way across Europe.” Art becomes a trophy of power that veils an ugly reality, a message repeatedly underscored as Bergmann passes back and forth between the contrasting spaces. The failure of the arts to rescue us is driven home yet again when Hartmann, eloquent in his conviction when drunk, obediently executes Don Pietro the following morning.54 Donnersmarck elaborates a very different position: the arts in The Lives of Others become a vehicle for representing the possibility of connecting with others, the basis of “goodness” in the film. This is most evident in the way that the “Sonata for a Good Man,” given by Jerska to Dreyman as sheet music for his birthday, is used to express the depth of Dreyman’s sense of loss after Jerska’s suicide. Their relationship is one between friends, but it is also one between playwright and director within the shared enterprise of the arts. Wiesler, in turn, is moved to tears while listening to Dreyman play the sonata, the remnant in the film of Donnersmarck’s seminal anecdote of Lenin being softened by listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata. The music stimulates feelings that have developed from Wiesler’s voyeuristic participation in Sieland and Dreyman’s lives, such that there is no clear demarcation between Wiesler’s growing empathy for the couple and the power of the music to express, communicate, and evoke emotional experience. The ultimate recognition of Wiesler’s actions and sacrifice finds its artistic embodiment in Dreyman’s novel, named after the sonata; it becomes a gift that Donnersmarck allows Wiesler in turn to receive in order to create the film’s uplifting ending. Art in this film, then, is a formalized representation of shared human sympathy, its transformative power demonstrated by its impact on Wiesler, which rebounds in the effect of his actions on Dreyman. Donnermarck’s singling out of Bertolt Brecht as a representative figure adds further nuance. Brecht was recognized by communists and capitalists alike as a genius who remained committed to Communism even while criticizing the East German state. In this respect, he is appropriate as a model for Dreyman and his friends. Significantly, however, Donnersmarck

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ignores Brecht’s revolutionary theater in favor of the poem “Erinnerung an die Marie A.” (“Memory of Marie A.”). In it, the poet marvels how a moment of love proves ephemeral while a small cloud that he had barely noticed at the time persists in memory, instrumental in recalling the experience and all that remains. The poem, in a collection given to Dreyman by Margot Honecker, examined by Jerska, and eventually borrowed by Wiesler, presages Dreyman’s losses, first of Jerska and then of Sieland, and it focuses on personal experience rather than on the social and political perspective of Brecht’s plays. We can say the same about The Lives of Others, which prioritizes the common feeling between Dreyman and Wiesler over ideological differences and matters of government. Furthermore, Donnersmarck’s film style is the antithesis of Brecht’s “non-­ Aristotelian” theater practice, inviting empathy in a way opposed to the Verfremdungseffekt of Brecht’s “epic” and dialectical theater practice. Donnersmarck’s selection of Brecht’s poem is, in its way, another move toward consensus, embracing a work that unites, rather than divides, Brecht’s admirers. Donnersmarck’s view of the arts in The Lives of Others frames the relationship between his and Rossellini’s film as much like that between Dreyman and Wiesler, a meeting of minds that transcends differences. The differences between the films are in some degree a matter of updating, accounting for the distance between Rome and Berlin, between the closing days of World War II and the last days of the German Democratic Republic, changed historical circumstances that nonetheless remain rooted in the earlier period. As Dreyman sees beyond Wiesler’s narrow adhesion to GDR orthodoxy, appreciating as heroic Wiesler’s inner transformation and his actions to protect Sieland and Dreyman from the machinery of the Stasi, so Donnersmarck sees beyond the historical circumstances of Rome Open City, accepting Rossellini’s understanding of Catholicism and Communism as attempts to embrace an underlying human solidarity and need for community. For this is also Donnersmarck’s theme, if expressed in more intellectual terms as a function of the arts. In creating a new text by rewriting Rome Open City, Donnersmarck replicates the chain reaction of his own film: “Sonata for a Good Man” moves Wiesler; Wiesler’s actions affect Dreyman; Dreyman’s novel rewards Wiesler. In the same sense, Rome Open City is a model for The Lives of Others, Donnersmarck responding fundamentally to Rossellini’s humanism, “adapting” events, images, and ideas of the earlier film to suit Donnersmarck’s own narrative of East Germany and reunification.

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Notes 1. Cooke, 224–232. “Von Donnersmarck’s Dialogue with Hollywood: from The Lives of Others to The Tourist (2010)”, in The Lives of Others and Contemporary Film. 2. Sternlieb, 26. 3. Fullbrook, 272. 4. Lebow, 27. 5. Lebow, 107–108. 6. Ibid., 108. 7. Ibid., 119. 8. Ibid., 117. 9. Ibid., 116. 10. Ibid., 124–125. 11. Cooke, 157. 12. DVD Interview. 13. Der Spiegel, February, 22, 1961, reported that the film could now be seen for the first time by the German public. 14. Forgacs, 14–18. Details of the events and resistance actions in response were widely publicized. As Forgacs writes, “some of this source material was in circulation … in the form of narratives and visual representations. The narratives were either fictional texts, like the story of the boys [forming their own resistance group], or were part of a tradition of oral and written accounts of events that had begun to form as soon as these had taken place.” 15. As Forgacs notes, the same year as Rome Open City’s release, these executions could be seen in a documentary directed by Luchino Visconti, Giorni di Gloria (1945), 108. 16. Gottlieb, 108. 17. DVD interview. 18. Cooke, 39. 19. Donnersmarck, NPR. 20. Cooke, 47. 21. DVD interview. 22. Cooke, 32; Donnersmarck, NPR. 23. Hubertus Knabe, director of the museum that the prison has become, refused to let Donnersmarck shoot on location because his story was fiction, as Knabe testifies on screen in Karl Marx City (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2016). 24. Fisher, 79–98. In footnote 41 on page 97, Fisher writes “there is some controversy as to whether she actually reported the material [in the Stasi files] attributed to her.”

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25. Forgacs, 9–10; Gottlieb, 134. 26. Rogin, 136–137. 27. Zavattini, 52. 28. Bondanella, 64. Bondanella makes the point that realism was not Rossellini’s goal in Rome Open City, 60. 29. Abel, 10–15. 30. Cooke, 8. 31. See for example, Zavattini, who calls neorealism as a “moral discovery…. I saw at last what lay in front of me, and I understood that to have evaded reality had been to betray it.” 51. 32. Rentschler, 243. 33. 245. 34. Cooke, 8, citing Günther Jeschonnek. 35. Rupprecht. 36. Cooke, 27. 37. Eva Horn has compared the surveillance in The Lives of Others with that in Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928). 38. For further description of Bergmann’s “controlling view of the city from above,” see David Forgacs, who in turn cites Peter Brunette. Gottlieb, 113. 39. In the comparison of The Lives of Others with Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928), Eva Horn emphasizes a banker named Haghi (Rudolph Klein-­ Rogge), his surveillance technology, and his impact on lovers who are spies working for competing interests. Horn’s observations apply equally to Major Bergman in Rome Open City and the impact of his forces on Manfredi and Marina as well as on family and social formations generally. 40. Wagner interview, cited in Sternlieb, 30. 41. Oddly, Sternlieb ignores this parallel entirely, preferring to focus on models for Sieland that include Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in Casablanca (1942), Anna (Alida Valli) in The Third Man (1949), and Victoria (Moira Shearer) in The Red Shoes (1948). 42. Anna in The Third Man, as Sternlieb points out, creates yet another instance of this type, the woman entertainer caught between the government and her lover. She, however, is protecting the evil, if charming, Harry Lime (Orson Wells) and represents the position that love is more important than his crimes, the opposite of the view in Rome Open City and The Lives of Others. 43. Sternlieb emphasizes this citation of Rome Open City, 36. 44. For Rogin’s well-argued contrary view that defeat dominates the film, see Gottlieb, 139–143. Rogin seems to me to ignore the role of children in the film and its final shots. 45. 131. 46. 132.

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47. As Sternlieb has pointed out, this is a clear citation of the scene in The Third Man 1949 where a bouncing ball precedes the moon-faced child’s appearance at the door of the apartment where Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) are questioning the porter (Paul Hörbiger) about the last moments of Harry Lime (Orson Welles). 34. For Sternlieb, Anna Schmidt in The Third Man is among the models for Christa-­Maria Sieland—I find little resemblance between the characters except for Anna’s employment at the Theater in der Josefstadt, where she, like Sieland, is shown briefly acting in a women-centered drama, in this case in an eighteenth-­century drawing room comedy. 48. Brunette, 50. 49. I fundamentally agree with Rinke’s emphasis on melodrama in The Lives of Others and on the centrality of Sieland, although Rinke, while correctly refuting readings of Sieland as a “ ’bad woman’ who deserves to be punished,” undercuts Sieland’s active role by describing her as a “virtuous victim.” Cook, 118. 50. 232. 51. Bärbel Bohley, for example, who after brief exile for demonstrating against the government returned to help form New Forum when?, a reform group equally disdainful of the FRG.  Bohley was an artist who would have fit perfectly with the dissidents in Donnersmarck’s film. 52. Attributing the power of the scene in part to Martina Gedeck’s adjustment of Donnersmarck’s stage directions, Andrea Rinke convincingly corrects the surprising resistance of some reviewers to calling Hempf’s attack on Sieland a rape. I largely agree with Rinke when she writes, “Through the moral indignation at this brutal abuse of male power, the spectator’s allegiance is drawn to the (innocent) female victim of a patriarchal totalitarian power” (113). 53. The absence of diversity of sexual orientation in The Lives of Others is noteworthy especially in the context of Rome Open City. Even in the ­background at the cast party or in Sieland and Dreyman’s apartment for his birthday, we see only heterosexual couples. By contrast, the question of race in West and reunified Germany relative to the GDR is raised by casting a woman of color in Sieland’s role for the post-Wall reprise of Dreyman’s play. 54. Another representation of culture giving way to power occurs when Don Pietro is shown “books without words” in which the pages have been replaced by printed currency. Artistic expression that is closer to everyday life is embraced—in contrast to Hartmann’s piano recital—when Don Pietro whistles a popular song as a signal when delivering the money.

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Bibliography Abel, Marco. The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Bondanella, Peter. “The Making of Roma città aperta: The Legacy of Fascism and the Birth of Neorealism.” Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Celluoide, Dir. Carlo Lizzani. 1996. Cooke, Paul, ed. The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. von Donnersmarck, Florian Henkel. Interview with Dave Davies on NPR, February 7, 2007. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/ cpb-­aacip_215-­84zgn3ns. Fisher, Jaimey. “A Historical Sort of Stardom: Casting, Ulrich Mühe and The Lives of Others’ Authenticity Problem.” The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film. Ed. Paul Cooke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Forgacs, David. Rome Open City (Roma città aperta). London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2012. Forgacs, David. “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City in Roma città aperta.” Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany, Third Edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Kindle. Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004. “Interview with Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.” Filmed September 9, 2006. Special Features. The Lives of Others, Sony Pictures Classics, 2007. DVD. Karl Marx City. Dir. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. 2016. The Lives of Others. Dir. Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck. 2006. DVD. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Losing the War, Winning the Memory Battle: The Legacy of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany.” In Lebow, 102–146. Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Rentschler, Eric. “The Lives of Others: The History of Heritage and the Rhetoric of Consensus.” The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film. Ed. Paul Cooke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Rinke, Andrea. “Fear and (Self-)Loathing in East Berlin: Gender and Melodrama in The Lives of Others.” The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film. Ed. Paul Cooke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013.

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Rogin, Michael. “Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini’s Beautiful Revolution.” Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rome Open City. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1945. DVD. Rupprecht, Annette Maria. “A Man of Stature.” October 10, 2006. http://www. cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffocusinterview&l=en&tid=1288&did=69041. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. Wagner, Annie. “An Interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.” The Stranger. N. p. 16 Feb. 2007. Web. 21 July 2007. Wilke, Manfred. “Wiesler’s Turn to Dissidence and the History behind the Film.” The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film. Ed. Paul Cooke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” Sight and Sound 23:2 (October– December 1953). Translated by Pier Luigi Lanza.

CHAPTER 6

From All About Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm

Olivier Assayas bridles at being described as a critic, preferring that his writing about film—primarily for Cahiers du Cinéma between January 1980 and November 1985—be seen as the work of a film director finding his way. In this, he follows Jean-Luc Godard, an ever-present link to the magazine’s most influential years in the 1950s: “All of us at Cahiers,” Godard wrote, “thought of ourselves as future directors. Frequenting ciné-clubs and the Cinématheque was already a way of thinking cinema and thinking about cinema. Writing was already a way of making films.”1 Assayas had grown up in a rich cultural milieu that included the film-­ industry associates of his screenwriter father, who eventually was able to arrange valuable internships for Olivier.2 He learned screenwriting when his father began to be disabled by Parkinson’s disease—Assayas helped him adapt several of George Simenon’s Maigret novels for television, then began writing scripts on his own. By the time his short film Copyright (1979) brought him to the attention of Cahiers editors Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana, he was also writing widely in the trendy Parisian press, “attempting to bridge the gap” between cinema, post-1968 disenchantment, and the “modernity” of the Anglo-American music scene.3 At this time, the Cahiers staff was reorienting the magazine from politics back to film, embracing the cinephilia of its early years while looking for new voices.4 “The only reason [he] took seriously their invitation,” according to Assayas, “was Cahiers’s tradition of publishing future filmmakers.”5 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_6

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Yet Assayas was responding to more than Cahiers’s value as a launching pad. He embraced the intellectual traditions of André Bazin and the critics who would become Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, known for their engagement with the auteurs of American cinema, including Joseph Mankiewicz.6 As Assayas’s career developed, the Cahiers critics’ interrogation of filmmaking practice through the lens of cinema history became a dimension of his films, most obviously as in Irma Vep (1996), which plays with the idea of adapting Louis Feuillade’s popular serial Les Vampires (1915–1916) in a context of late twentieth-century French film culture. A similar kind of film-historical layering is present in Clouds of Sils Maria, if less ostentatiously. Like All About Eve, Clouds of Sils Maria examines a star’s coming to terms with aging in a world that is also evolving. This chapter explores how All About Eve can be understood as a template for Clouds of Sils Maria, even as Assayas adapts the aging-actress paradigm for an era of accelerated media convergence. Assayas’s work always conveys a sense of living in the flux of history, memory of what came before providing a frame of reference in the fleeting moment. A comparative reading of these films sharpens our understanding of both and in the process makes us more fully aware of the mechanisms of time as Assayas dramatizes them. Before turning to All About Eve, we should recognize other films invoked in Clouds of Sils Maria in ways that deliberately transgress the closure of a single text or even of a single film tradition. Das Wolkenphänomen in Maloja (Arnold Fanck, 1924) is screened for Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) because it documents the Maloja snake cloud movement that provides the title and central metaphor of the play she is rehearsing. But citing Fanck’s work also creates a wide frame of reference for Assayas’s meditation on performance and the function of film in society, reaching back to the silent era, and recalling Fanck’s association with Leni Riefenstahl and hers with Adolf Hitler.7 Reviewers of Clouds of Sils Maria also mention Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972).8 Persona explores the relationship between a celebrated actor, Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) and a young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), who loses her bearings and enters a realm of identity confusion famously depicted by Bergman in a shot that merges the faces of Andersson and Ullmann. In Clouds of Sils Maria, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), the personal assistant of actor Maria Enders, similarly becomes unsettled in her relationship with the star. Assayas has said that Persona is among his favorite films, and that he knew he was “in Bergman territory.”9 Assayas initially planned for The

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Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to be the play that is revived in Clouds of Sils Maria, replacing it with the invented Maloja Snake. Fassbinder’s film, and his original stage play, present the love of fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen in the film) for the younger Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla), a doomed longing that reveals to Petra her inexorable movement toward solitude and death. Along with their theater associations, Persona and Petra von Kant have in common with Clouds of Sils Maria an older woman artist’s process of self-discovery through her intense relationship with a younger woman. In Fassbinder’s film, significantly, Petra dictates a letter to Joseph Mankiewicz.10 The film offers no explanation, but as Peter Matthews has written for the Criterion DVD: “Without precisely attempting a remake of [All About Eve], Fassbinder brings out its daring lesbian subtext and upholds Mankiewicz’s philosophical nihilism.” Like All About Eve, Clouds of Sils Maria explores the crisis of an actress who has recently turned forty. While Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in Mankiewicz’s film is confronted with the increasingly difficult task of playing twenty-something protagonists in the popular plays of Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), in Clouds of Sils Maria Maria Enders is faced with taking on the role of an older woman in a play that had first brought her recognition twenty years earlier as the woman’s much younger lover. Both films are melodramas about an adjustment in actors’ understanding of themselves brought about through their interactions with younger women who are their assistants and replacements. Margo makes Eve her assistant, but Eve then becomes her understudy and finally replaces Margo in a new play written for her. Maria gradually takes on the character of the older woman as she rehearses the role of Helena with her assistant Valentine; by the time of the play’s performance in London, Maria feels herself pushed aside, in life as on stage, by the young actor cast as Sigrid, social-media celebrity Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). In both films, the stars must come to accept that time has driven a wedge between who they are now and who they were when their public images were established, images with continuing influence on each woman’s sense of self. Clouds of Sils Maria has a play-like three-part structure, presenting three segments of time in three different settings. The film actually opens on a train bringing Maria and Valentine from Paris to Switzerland, where Maria is to present a career achievement award to Wilhelm Melchior, the playwright who created the role that first brought her to celebrity. Since that initial success as Sigrid in Maloja Snake, Maria has become a widely renowned star, in theater, in European art films, and even in Hollywood

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blockbusters, a serious actor, charismatically beautiful, an object of both admiration and desire. On the train, she learns that Melchior has died suddenly—the award celebration will now be a memorial service. The theater director who has been pursuing Maria to appear in a revival of Maloja Snake will use the occasion to push her toward accepting the role. In the second part, Maria secludes herself with Val at the chalet of the deceased Melchior and his widow to rehearse the role of Helena. The house overlooks the valley of Sils Maria, known for the Maloja snake phenomenon after which the play was named, low-lying clouds that follow a serpentine route through the mountain passes, devouring the landscape before them, an obvious metaphor for the action of time and mortality. Even after having signed the contract, Maria has doubts about playing a role that will very publicly present a confrontation between her past and present selves. But she and Val go to work, Val reading the part of Sigrid while Maria struggles to take on the role of Helena. Gradually the boundaries between actor and character blur, between Maria and Helena and between Val and Sigrid. As they near the completion of their work, Maria and Val make several visits to a higher vantage point in the landscape, once at dawn specifically to witness the action of the Maloja snake. This occurs at the apex of Val’s growing frustration with ambiguities in her relationship with Maria and, as they approach the peak, Val allows Maria to go on alone, abandoning her as Sigrid in the play abandons Helena. For part three of the film, the action moves to London where Maloja Snake is to be staged. Maria has already replaced Val with an equally young, attractive, and competent assistant, and now she meets with the play’s director and with Jo-Ann Ellis. Jo-Ann had visited Maria briefly in the Alps to pay homage to the older star, but she, herself, is a celebrity of a new type, based on teen movies and social media gossip. In fact, her affair with a hip London novelist whose painter wife has attempted suicide goes viral and threatens to engulf all other attention to the play and to Maria. Walking through a last dress rehearsal, Maria suggests to Jo-Ann that she cast a lingering glance back at Helena, as Maria had in the role twenty years earlier. “You leave without looking at me,” Maria says, “as if I didn’t exist, … the audience follows you out, but instantly forgets about [Helena], so….” “So … so what?” replies Jo-Ann, feigning puzzlement (Fig. 6.1). “No one really gives a fuck about Helena at that point, do you think? I’m sorry, but I mean it’s pretty clear to me this poor woman’s all washed up.” She adds after a pause, almost sarcastically, “I mean your character, right, not

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Fig. 6.1  Maria’s replacement

you.” To make sure that Assayas’s point cannot be missed, Jo-Ann is made to explain emphatically, “it’s time to move on—I think they [the audience] want what comes next.” There will be no appeal in the film to this final judgment. Maria, like Helena, is being left behind. Her only recourse might be to accept a film role offered her by a young director who will use her as an embodiment of values he admires of a bygone era. At the heart of Clouds of Sils Maria, as of All About Eve, is a confusion in the actor’s mind of her theater/screen image with her off-stage/off-­ screen self, and Assayas’s film follows the earlier one in emphasizing (a) the role of the assistant/replacement in the process of the star’s adjustment, and (b) the existential challenge of performance, at the intersection of stardom and a life. The function of Eve, carried out in Clouds of Sils Maria by Valentine and Jo-Ann in combination, is to force the mature star to confront the widening chasm between youthful image and aging actress. Understanding that All About Eve is in fact about Margo Channing, we can see Eve (Ann Baxter) as a necessary creation of Margo’s imagination that ultimately allows her to take the risk of being loved for herself rather than cling to a fading star persona. More literally, Eve is an invention of Gertrude Slescynski, the ambitious girl from Milwaukee, and her android-­ like perfection in becoming Eve sets her apart from the other, more human characters. The idealized Eve who masks the monstrously ambitious Gertrude is a perfect projection of Margo’s fears, a talented young beauty arriving on the scene to replace her.11 That she is a type is underscored by her chosen name and by Mankiewicz’s introduction of Phoebe (Barbara Bates) to repeat the pattern of the new replacing the old (Fig. 6.2).

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Fig. 6.2  Eve’s replacement

Pheobe is multiplied infinitely in the mirror for the film’s final shot. The simplification of the story into the stages of Margo’s adjustment is naturalized as a product of memory, a retrospective narration in a flashback from the Sarah Siddons Awards ceremony that presents only relevant facts: Eve appears in Margo’s life, becomes her assistant, increasingly takes control of Margo’s affairs, becomes her understudy, replaces Margo on stage, and, finally, usurps Margo’s role in Lloyd’s new play. Margo’s closest friend Karen (Celeste Holm), the person who should help Margo adjust to her new stage in life, is the agency through which Eve appears in Margo’s life, and it is Karen’s voice that takes over the narration from Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) to lead us back to that moment. It is through Karen that Eve becomes Margo’s understudy, and Karen gives Margo the “boot in the rear she needs and deserves,” in Lloyd’s words, by keeping her away from the theater so that Eve can replace Margo on stage. In a complementary way, Margo resists change and tries to deny that it is coming. After their “honeymoon,” she pushes Eve away toward a job

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with her producer Max (Gregory Ratoff). She learns only after the fact that Eve has become her understudy, which some in the film find surprising, then a few minutes later pretends still not to know; and she seems content to remain ignorant of the betrayal when Karen prevents her from getting to the theater. Most significantly, Margo’s acceptance of her changed self occurs at a distance from Eve’s final step forward. While Eve is blackmailing Karen to force Lloyd to give her the role in Footsteps on the Ceiling—turning the world upside down—Margo voluntarily decides to give up the part. We see Eve at work, then we learn of a decision Margo has already made, understanding that the events are profoundly related but not directly as cause and effect. All of the actions in the film involve Eve, but they are only meaningful in terms of Margo’s gradual understanding and acceptance of the change in her circumstances and self. While Clouds of Sils Maria does not open with a flashback, the memorial event for Wilhelm Melchior gives it a similar temporal framing. In All About Eve, Addison refers to the “hallowed walls, and indeed many of these faces” of the Sarah Siddons Society as the camera shows a chorus of elderly waiters as the surviving witnesses of long-forgotten actors; in Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria describes “a sea of gray hair” as she scans the crowd at the Melchior gathering. The fact alone of Melchior’s death invites a retrospective glance toward Maria’s youth and first success, and to heighten this effect an aging actor, Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), is introduced and invited to join Maria as one of the speakers. Long associated with Melchior’s plays, Wald also made two films with Maria: he had seduced and treated her badly as a neophyte during the first, and she rejected him six years later, spurning him entirely when he was drawn to her by her fame. He is a shell of an actor, doing his best work, according to Melchior’s wife, when he doesn’t understand a line of the play. He is comparable to the “Aged Actor” of the Sarah Siddons ceremony who can’t resist citing Macbeth’s metaphor of an actor who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Wald suggests that Melchior will continue to live through his plays, concluding, “so I say not ‘adieu’, but rather ‘see you later, Wilhelm’” (“deshalb sage ich nicht Adieu, sonders bis bald”). But the obvious irony here is that Melchior’s literary immortality will be brief; rather, he will soon be joined in oblivion by the strutting Wald and their gray-haired admirers. Valentine has already been established as a youthful counterpoint to this crowd—she escapes with a hip young fashion photographer after undercutting Wald’s high-art pretensions by referring to a movie he made as being about “missile codes and shit.” Maria’s own

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Margo-like irreverence comes out in her remark to a friend, “don’t be so solemn—he’s dead, I’m not.” These ceremonial introductions emphasize the artificiality and the archaic status of the theater, but they also establish both films’ focus on the theatrical and on performance, the nexus of stardom and personality for their protagonists. The theatrical and histrionic dominate virtually every scene of All About Eve, from the early monologue delivered to Eve by Bill (Gary Merrill) claiming that everything is theater, to Lloyd’s shouting across the empty theater that it is time “the piano realized it has not written the concerto.” Because they are self-consciously people “of the theater” instead of “ordinary human beings,” as Addison articulates, their speech is laced with theater metaphors, most extensively in the thirty-­ minute party scene at Margo’s where all of the strands come together in a final dialogue that begins when Margo says Lloyd’s suggestion to go home and go to bed “won’t play.” Karen calls the idea “un-dramatic” but practical, to which Margo responds, “this is my house, not a theatre.” Then, “stop being a star and stop treating your guests as a supporting cast,” Karen tells her. When Margo goes upstairs followed by Bill, Addison remarks, “too bad, we’re going to miss the third act. They’re going to play it off stage.” The function of the theatrical language is to underscore the fundamental difficulty Margo faces of shedding her change-resistant star image in favor of a new identity as an ordinary human being, allowed to mature and to have normal human relationships. Margo’s problem is an existential one, that in becoming characters for which she is rewarded by a “wave of love” from her audience, she loses a sense of self, a danger only for the talented. Thus Addison distinguishes between reading a part and a transformative performance, full of “fire and magic.” Lloyd’s words that “Margo compensates for underplaying on stage by overplaying reality” drive home the danger of the “magic” for Margo off-stage. Eve is dangerous to Margo, and to herself, precisely because she too has this power, demonstrated in two key moments. One is the performance of her invented past, the tragedy of losing her young lover to war, during which she seems more authentic than in all her attempts to please Karen, Margo and the others. Her crying in response to Margo’s performance the end of Aged in Wood can be read as a testament to Margo’s power. But Eve’s second triumph is toward the end of the film when she addresses Karen in the ladies’ room to demand the role in Lloyd’s new play. She shows sincere anger at what she presents as Addison’s betrayal, only to shed that for yet a deeper authenticity when telling Karen

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what she wants. Registering the impact of Eve’s acting, Karen is moved from being cold and superior, to understanding, to be finally rendered helpless. Margo is the epitome of this kind of acting talent, as she demonstrates in her mercurial shifts throughout her party. But the central fact on which the success of All About Eve depends is Bette Davis’s embodiment of such a character. Although Davis was a last-minute replacement for Claudette Colbert, who injured her back two weeks before shooting was to begin, Davis is widely recognized to be perfect in the part. Margo Channing corresponded to Davis’s star persona—Davis had played egocentric, willful, capricious women, and she was known in Hollywood as difficult and demanding to the point that other directors warned Mankiewicz about problems he would have in working with her.12 Additionally, she was the right age, 41, with more than sixty films behind her, so that Davis brought to the role of Margo the challenges of an aging star who, while never a beauty, had been successful as an object of romantic desire. It was as if the part had been written for her as the role of Maria Enders was created for Juliette Binoche.13 The impossibility of detecting any precise boundary between the Davis persona and Margo Channing’s character dramatizes a central premise of the film. Typical of Mankiewicz’s text, which openly articulates its ideas, Margo describes the fluidity of performance as a way of being when she and Karen are left stuck in the car and Karen remarks that her friends can’t stay angry at her because she is just being Margo. “What is that,” Margo asks rhetorically, “beside something spelled out in light bulbs, I mean?” When Karen reminds her that Bill loves her, Margo responds: “More than anything in the world I love Bill, and I want Bill, and I want him to want me. But me, not Margo Channing, and if I can’t tell them apart, how can he? [my emphasis]” She continues a moment later “… ten years from now, Margo Channing will have ceased to exist. And what’s left will be … what?” This defines the problem that results from the actor confusing herself with a star image—an identity created in collaboration with fans—that will be slower to evolve, and decline, than the flesh and blood performer. In Clouds of Sils Maria, separating the role of the assistant, Valentine, from that of the star’s replacement, Jo-Ann Ellis, allows fuller development of the interaction between the assistant and the star, since no time need be spent showing how the assistant becomes the replacement. Yet while the work with the assistant is extended and the encounter with Maria’s replacement—Jo-Ann as Sigrid—is simplified, these two in

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tandem serve the same psychological function for Maria that Eve performs for Margo: they force her to confront the problem and then to accept the coming change as inevitable. While Eve’s introduction to Margo is an important early scene in Mankiewicz’s film, Sils Maria begins at the next stage, where Val has already become for Maria—to use Margo Channing’s words—a “sister, lawyer, mother, friend, psychiatrist and cop.” Val is deeply involved in all aspects of Maria’s life, managing not only the full range of Maria’s professional relationships, but acting as a sounding board for decisions, even helping to orchestrate plans related to her divorce and offering to write Maria’s personal remembrance of Melchior. The women appear to be close, humor and frankness giving their banter some sharp edges. Above all, Val provides Maria with a window on “reality,” by which she means an awareness of the current media-rich world that is too much for Maria to keep up with. Val is shrewd and practical, helping Maria evaluate what could seem to the older actor an undifferentiated sea of meaningless detail. And Maria seems to lean on her emotionally. Theatricality and performance in Maria’s situation present her with a variation of the existential challenge faced by Margo in All About Eve: if Maria can be Helena, the older woman in Maloja Snake, then it seems to go without saying that she can no longer be the younger woman, Sigrid. In fact Maria has offered this as a reason to reject the role: because she was Sigrid, she tells the director Klaus, she cannot possibly be Helena, to which he responds that Helena is what Sigrid becomes after twenty years. This would seem to simplify the issue but actually complicates it by posing the question of the continuity of an individual’s identity between youth and age. In order to become Helena, Maria will have to accept the fact that she is no longer Sigrid. The confusion of identity between actor and character in performance of a role is thoroughly dramatized as Maria and Val rehearse, leading us as viewers into ambiguities about any boundary between actor and character (Fig. 6.3). This is established in the scene where Maria as Helena describes to Sigrid what others say about her, words that could be equally applicable to Val. Val/Sigrid responds: “And why are you telling me this? It’s none of my business. You want people to know? (pause) You think that if you arouse their pity, people will back off. I’ve been around a lot less than you, but in my experience it’s quite the opposite, wouldn’t you agree?” Our first response is to assume that these lines are about the relationship between Maria and Val, to wonder how close they really are, perhaps even lovers. We remember, for example, the hint of possessive jealousy Maria

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Fig. 6.3  Maria and Valentine rehearse

had revealed when authorizing Val to go off with the photographer. “When they tell me about you,” Maria says, “how much they appreciate you, they’re using you to humiliate me.” But then Maria suddenly breaks out of playing Helena, entirely changing her facial expression and yelling “Shit!,” making us realize that we have mistaken her performance as Helena for her life as Maria. We have not been able to distinguish Maria from Helena nor Val from Sigrid. The film continues to build on this confusion, another powerful instance occurring after they lose their way in the dark one evening after going higher in the mountains. Val confronts Maria, listing several of Maria’s frustrations such as not liking the play and saying with emotion in her voice, “you don’t have to take it out on me.” Cut to the next morning, where Maria seems angry with Val for secretly making reservations on a flight to Tokyo in order to leave her. But in fact the flight reservations are in the play, Sigrid is leaving Helena, not Val leaving Maria—we have been tricked and Maria has seemed totally authentic as Helena, totally one with Helena. When Maria is struggling with Helena’s lines and takes a break, she comments on the actress who originally played Helena, and how “disgusted she made me feel when she slipped into the skin of this defeated woman. She got such obscene pleasure out of it, night after night.” “Why defeated?” asks Val. “Defeated by … by age, by her insecurities. Letting this kid lead her around by the nose.” After Val suggests that there is more to it, Maria continues, “this poor woman is ready to kill herself before the play even

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starts. She’s using Sigrid as a weapon, that’s all” [my emphasis]. When they start rehearsing again, they perform the lines we saw interrupted earlier, and though we now know that it is only rehearsal for the play, we once again see not the slightest distance between Maria and Helena, continuing into new territory when she levels her eyes and says: “There’s one thing I excel at, that’s reading people’s behavior.” “So how should I be reading yours?” Sigrid/Val responds. This scene is a mini-drama about the inseparability of the actor from the performance, a tour de force by Maria and by Juliette Binoche (and by Val and Kristen Stewart), just as the role of Margo was for Bette Davis. As with the scene where Sigrid’s betrayal is first misunderstood to be Val’s, Maria has successfully become Helena, the performance becoming the reality, while reality itself is a performance. Both Maria and Margo Channing use their assistants as “weapons” to force themselves to accept change, in essence the suicide of a star-identity based on youth. Yet this process must play out differently in the changed world of 2014, far from the reality Mankiewicz was addressing in 1950. In an interview in Slate, Assayas distinguishes his film from All About Eve on the basis of an evolved context of manners and attitudes. Mark Lukenbill, the interviewer, says to Assayas: “Obviously the ‘aging actress’ is such an old Hollywood trope, and I think one thing that I really liked about this movie [Clouds of Sils Maria] is that Juliette’s character’s personal image, her physical image, isn’t what concerns her.” Assayas responds: No, it’s not and I don’t think that the film deals at all with the issue of decline. It’s not All About Eve, where it’s youth against age, or a young actress against an older actress. That’s not what it’s about. Also because the process of aging has changed. We don’t age the way our parents or grandparents aged; it’s a different world in that sense. And if we’re talking about an actress like Juliette, she has possibly her best work still ahead of her. [Aging is] still an issue. You still have to accept that it’s happening…. (Slate)

In fact, age is a principal reason Maria cannot play Sigrid, and her physical maturity is emphasized in the scene where Maria and Val undress to go swimming. Kristen Stewart remains partially covered while a long shot in broad daylight contrasts her with the full-frontal nudity of Binoche. The scene perhaps hints at a modesty Val adopts with Maria, but it also offers

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the audience an opportunity for a non-erotic assessment of Binoche’s aging body. Maria’s age has been highlighted by the reference to her affair with Henryk Wald; at this stage in her career she is no longer awed by him, and she laughs dismissively when he invites her to his room, though she also gives him her room number and he does not call her. In contrast to Margo Channing, Maria’s comfort with her aging is a separate issue from its impact on roles she can play and on her evolving public image. The differences between the Mankiewicz era and that of Assayas are especially significant in two areas, the situation of women and the media landscape. With respect to women, change from the early film to the later one is most evident in the protagonists’ relations with men. All About Eve frames Margo’s dilemma explicitly according to the rules of classical Hollywood patriarchy: being a woman is “one career all females have in common,” she says, and “sooner or later we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted.” And in the lines that most offend today: “nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings. But you’re not a woman.” Narrative closure is achieved with the announcement of her wedding plans with Bill. But the film also subverts this patriarchal framework, in part through the generic conventions of melodrama: it focuses almost entirely on women, Margo, Eve, and Karen, three strong characters around whom the men revolve. Bill and Lloyd essentially work for Margo, and Lloyd is a nitwit easily manipulated by Eve. In fact the women settle among themselves what will happen. Karen mediates the relationship between Margo and Eve, and when Eve asks what Bill, Lloyd and Max might say about her becoming Margo’s understudy, Karen has the punch line: “they’ll do what they’re told.” So the world is superficially organized and managed by men, but women rule from behind the scenes. More radically, Margo’s words frame the issue of gender as secondary to the notion of performance. In her a-woman-needs-a-man speech she defines being a woman as a “career” comparable to other kinds of work, including acting, with socially defined modes of operation and measures of success. She emphasizes that even her confessional statement must be cataloged with lines delivered in all of her other roles, to be followed by “slow curtain. The End.”14 Addison is immune to Eve’s seductive charms—if he wants to possess her, as he enjoys being accompanied by Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe), it is part of his performance in the role of a man “of the theater.”

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Assayas’s film is similarly a women’s melodrama in which Maria, Val, and Jo-Ann dominate, and although a sharp word is still required from time to time to remind men of the changed reality, the power of women in Clouds of Sils Maria is no longer concealed behind a façade of patriarchy. In fact, most of the men are gone. Instead of wanting a husband as Margo does, Maria is divorcing one. The revered playwright Melchior is not just a puppet like Lloyd, he is dead. Wald is reduced to impotence, and only Klaus, director of the new production of Maloja Snake, has something of the presence of Bill, Lloyd, or Max, and he, like them, is subservient to the women. The photographer with whom Val goes off and Jo-Ann’s painter friend are playthings for the women, and even for sex the men may be irrelevant, given the suggestions of a sexual interest between Maria and Val. There are the hints of jealousy when Val goes off with the photographer and Maria’s gaze at Val’s body as she sleeps, exposed and wearing only a thong, after returning from her date. Val’s sickness on the roadside that night remains unexplained: did she have too much to drink, or is she experiencing revulsion after her encounter with the photographer? Val’s thong in this scene contrasts sharply with her boyish boxer briefs in the swimming scene with Maria. Finally, there are moments of emotional and physical closeness between the two women that might pass for sexual tension. But Maria is also given the opportunity in the film to declare that she is “straight,” and a “lesbian subtext,” to borrow the phase Peter Matthews applied to All About Eve, might be even more a matter of performance here than was Margo’s need to play the married woman in the earlier film. As we have seen, the sense of identity of the actors, Maria and Val, is confused with the roles Helena and Sigrid that they take on in rehearsal. It would seem to follow, then, that what we are witnessing in Maria’s attraction to Val and Val’s conflicted response might be artifacts of their becoming the lesbian couple Helena and Sigrid. If sexuality is taken up more overtly in Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria’s aging is framed in a context of more rapid generational change fostered by developments in media technology. An evolution of the mediascape was already a theme of All About Eve, with Hollywood presented throughout as threatening and cheapening the sacred institution of the theater. Bill is warned about its dangers by Eve, and she, herself, is set to leave for Hollywood following the Sarah Siddons Award banquet. For Assayas, there will be additional layers to unpack, and the change that is in the background in All About Eve moves to the foreground in Clouds of Sils Maria: Maria is an important stage actor, a film star in European art cinema, and even known to audiences of Hollywood blockbusters. In fact,

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the career of Maria Enders, apparently born in the early 1970s, corresponds to one stage of media convergence that is now giving way to the next stage, the evolution of the Internet and social media. The real stars of the opening scene of Clouds of Sils Maria are the cell phones and tablet that allow Val and Maria to swim in a media sea while on the train to Zurich. But Val can handle two smartphones and a tablet at once, while Maria reads a newspaper and writes longhand, only accepting Internet gossip when it suits her. “I thought we despised the Internet,” Val needles her. Another sign of their generational difference is that Val and Maria cannot agree on the value of Jo-Ann Ellis’s cartoon-like films, Val telling her clearly how she is out of touch with this reality, not because she has aged, but because the world is rapidly changing. Val asks Maria at one point, “what world do you live in?” And in answer to Maria’s comment that Christopher Giles is only “uber famous … on their planet,” she declares: “Their planet has a name, it’s called the real world.” Her frustration with Maria must in part come from a sense that she is so much more competent than this older woman at navigating the contemporary world. Enter Jo-Ann, a product and artist of social-media stardom, and a pop-­ culture icon in campy sci-fi films that are totally discordant with the tradition of European auteur cinema (as practiced by Assayas in films such as Summer Hours, L’heure d’été, 2008). In All About Eve, all of the talk about love of the theater is nostalgic, as well as blatantly ironic in an exemplary major-studio film almost half a century after the film industry first plundered Broadway. Furthermore, the nostalgia might seem to extend to classical Hollywood, in decline since the 1948 Paramount case and consequent breakup of the studio system, with many Americans moving to the suburbs and shifting their attention to television. A similar nostalgia for cinema is present in Assayas’s film, as Maria seems to deplore the culture of blockbusters where acting becomes “hanging from wires” in front of green screens, not to mention Jo-Ann’s film and the newer technologies of Internet and social media. As Margo remains a figure of the theater, Maria remains at heart a figure of European art cinema; in the young director introduced at the end of Clouds of Sils Maria, who admires the values represented by Maria (and by Juliette Binoche) we can see a poignant, self-reflective note from Assayas—his film is old-fashioned, heavily scripted, talky, and full of ideas, as is All About Eve.15 This is the final layer of the comparison between Clouds of Sils Maria and All About Eve, their extra-textual dimensions. Margo Channing

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carries with her the weight of Davis’s star persona, but with the character of Maria created specifically for Juliette Binoche, Clouds of Sils Maria was able to build more systematically on her history. “La Binoche,” as the French refer to her, is the preeminent female actor of her generation. She had become a star in important French films, in major international productions, and in big-budget Hollywood movies—even the shortest list from her fifty-four titles before Clouds of Sils Maria suggests the broad scope of her movie career.16 She is known to have selected less-commercial films because of a script or a director she wanted to work with. She had performed in marquee theatrical productions of Chekhov, Pirandello, and Pinter, and she had spoken out on issues such as the imprisonment of Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Viewers cannot watch Clouds of Sils Maria without confusing star with character as they do Bette Davis with Margo Channing. Throughout his career, Assayas has been adept at using celebrities to complicate his films,17 and beyond Binoche, the public lives of Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz bleed into the portrayal of generational contrast with Binoche/Maria. Stewart brings her fame from the Twilight series (2008–2012), as well as social media and YouTube scandal reminiscent of Jo-Ann’s in Clouds of Sils Maria, celebrity that includes openness in her sexual orientation.18 Moretz similarly brings her career history: she too was a child actor, becoming popular in films such The Amityville Horror (2005) when she was eight years old, and later Kick Ass (2010) and Kick Ass 2 (2013). One particularly significant extra-textual thread relates to Assayas’s relationship with Binoche, which dates to 1985 when with André Téchiné he wrote Rendez-vous, Binoche’s breakthrough film in France. In creating Clouds of Sils Maria for her twenty-nine years later, he is working with an actor who is now more Helena than Sigrid. Rendez-vous presented a young Binoche playing a provincial girl whose passionate emotional encounters in Paris as she strives to become an actress prepare her for success in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The closing shot of Clouds of Sils Maria can be read as echoing that of Binoche’s face at the moment of realization and change that closes Rendez-vous, with Nina (Binoche) about to go on stage as Juliet. It is especially this postmodern emphasis by Assayas on the openness of textual boundaries that invites a reading of his film to include his knowledge and ours of All About Eve. As he has said, Clouds of Sils Maria is not All About Eve, but just as clearly his film embraces a cinematic past that includes All About Eve, a marker of the distance traveled, cultural

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evolution, and the passage of time. Margo Channing and Maria Enders are characters who experience and dramatize a process also experienced by Mankiewicz, Davis, Assayas, and Binoche. As the world evolves, a new Margo and a new Eve are different characters, in a different film, adapted to a new era increasingly defined by convergence of cultural spaces, times, and media.

Notes 1. Hiller, 13. 2. His father, under the name Jacques Remy, worked closely with Raoul Lévy, a producer riding the success of Et Dieu … Créa la femme (1956). Eventually Assayas would find internships on productions in France, Geneva, and at Pinewood Studios in England, all through his father’s “old buddies” [“chez des vieux copins”]. 3. “…Je sortait pas mal, j’écrivais dans la presse branchée, en fait j’etais l’un des seul à faire le pont entre le cinéma and cette modernité.” Assayas, chapter 2, “Mai 68 et après.” 4. Among other contributions Assayas edited a special issue entitled Made in China: Taipei, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Peking. He produced a long retrospective interview with Ingmar Bergman and later published an extended essay on Kenneth Anger. 5. Assayas. 6. In Cahiers 10, 1952, All About Eve is number five in a list of the best films of 1951—one through four are films by Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, and Luis Buñuel. For an example of the Cahiers critics’ admiration of Mankiewicz, see Jean Domarchi, “Le Fer dans la plaie,” Cahiers du Cinéma 63, October 1956. (Hiller, 245–6) 7. Riefenstahl made her first screen appearance as the star of Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), and Fanck edited The Blue Light (1932), the film that brought her to Hitler’s attention. Additionally, Sils Maria was the summer home of Friedrich Nietzsche during the last ten years of his life, where he explored the idea of an eternal return. 8. See for example Jon Frosch in The Atlantic, May 24, 2014, or John Powers in Vogue, April 9, 2015. 9. Lukenbill. 10. “I won’t be able to make the payment—circumstances between heaven and earth. … But to whom am I telling this? Hope you understand. I remain your friend, Petra von Kant.” 11. Mankiewicz has suggested that the casting of Baxter would allow him to take advantage of her similarity in appearance to Colbert, further under-

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scoring the point of like replacing like: it “gave another dimension to the story,” he said. “We lost that shading.” Chandler, 185. 12. These never developed, according to Mankiewicz, who found her professional and delighted to be working with an excellent script. Carey, 86–7. 13. Joseph Mankiewicz has said that Davis was not originally offered the part because “throughout that period she was filming Payment on Demand [Curtis Bernhardt, 1951] and was therefore considered hopelessly unavailable.” Carey, 71–2. 14. Barbara Leaming’s interpretation represents the alternative to this, an insistence that Margo is a reversal of all Davis’s prior roles as an independent woman. “The most potent symbol of wartime female independence and self-sufficiency appeared suddenly to accept and even to recommend the retrograde sexual politics of the 1950s. Casting off the boldness and daring that Davis’s powerful female characters had once adamantly insisted upon, Margo Channing loudly declared herself unable to live without her man: a declaration rendered all the more astonishing by Margo’s vividly established sauciness and theatrically.” Leaming, 245. 15. We should remember that Assayas, like Mankiewicz, was first a screenwriter, and continued to see the importance of writing in the process of elaborating films, though he manages to marry that commitment to a process of working with actors that yields spontaneous performances. 16. From André Téchiné Rendez-vous (1985), through The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1991), Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Three Colors: Blue (1993), The English Patient (1996), Caché (2005), and even Godzilla (2014) the same year that she made Clouds of Sils Maria. 17. As in Irma Vep, where he had used Jean-Pierre Leaud and Maggie Cheung in ways that appealed respectively to audience knowledge of the French New Wave and to Cheung’s international stardom. Many similar instances throughout his body of work, if less easily identifiable by non-­French audiences, are documented in Assayas par Assayas. 18. See Internet coverage of her affair with director Rupert Sanders and public apology to fellow Twilight star Robert Pattinson, or her affair with Alicia Cargile and public statements that she sees no need to define her sexuality.

Bibliography All About Eve. Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD. Assayas, Olivier, and Jean-Michel Frodon. Assayas par Assayas: Des debuts aux Destinées sentimental. Paris: Stock, 2014. Kindle. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann. Filmverlag der Autoren, Tango Film, 1972. Film. Criterion, 2015. DVD.

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Carey, Gary, with Joseph Mankiewicz. More about All About Eve. New  York: Random House, 1972. Chandler, Charlotte. The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Clouds of Sils Maria. Dir. Olivier Assayas. Perf. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz. CG Cinéma, 2014. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD. Hillier, Jim. Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Irma Vep. Dir. Olivier Assayas. Perf. Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard. Dacia Films, Canal +, 1996. Film. Fox Lorber. DVD. Jones, Kent, ed. Olivier Assayas. Vienna: SYNEMA, 2012. Print. Leaming, Barbara. Bette Davis. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2003. Lukenbill, Mark. “Interview: Olivier Assayas.” Slate. April 1, 2015. http://www. slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-­olivier-­assayas. Magny, Joël. “Sils Maria d’Olivier Assayas,” Les Fiches Cinéma. Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2016. Kindle. Matthews, Peter. “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: the Great Pretender.” https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3429-­the-­bitter-­tears-­of-­petra­von-­kant-­the-­great-­pretender. Persona. Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. Film. Criterion, 2014. DVD. Rendez-vous. Films A2, T.  Films, 1985. Film. Home Vision Entertainment, 2005. DVD. Summer Hours (L’heure d’été). MK2, France 3, Canal+, 2008. Film. Criterion, 2010. DVD. Das Wolkenphänomen in Maloja. July 27, 2016. Film. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=tQMT5v0yk9o.

PART III

Book/Film/Film Multiplicities

CHAPTER 7

Chantal Akerman, Marcel Proust, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)

Adapting La Prisonnière, volume five of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (hereafter La Recherche), was recognized by reviewers of Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000) as a task that borders on the impossible, though most gave her respectful, if not enthusiastic, praise for the result.1 The length and complexity of the novel, its interiority, and the narrator’s attempt to analyze his jealous ambition to possess Albertine, all pose extraordinary barriers. Volker Schlöndorff’s conventional costume drama based on the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, was a failure, while Raúl Ruiz’s attempt to recreate the Bal des têtes from Proust’s final volume, in Le temps retrouvé, d’après l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, 1999), if more fruitful, was accessible only to viewers deeply familiar with Proust’s text.2 Akerman would proceed very differently. From La Prisonnière, which in Gallimard’s Folio edition runs to four hundred pages, she selected only Marcel’s relationship with Albertine, what she called the “noeud,” or “knot,” of the narrative.3 According to her writing partner, Eric de Kuyper, she relied at first on her “impression” from reading the novel years before, returning to Proust’s text for useful particulars as her script developed. De Kuyper describes how they discussed issues and ideas at great length, after which Akerman would draft the scenes and dialogue.4 Rightly, the titles of La Captive (2000) declare in bold letters “A Film by Chantal Akerman,” with, in smaller print underneath, “inspired by Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière.” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_7

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Akerman’s openness about her reduction of La Prisonnière in La Captive, however, does little to simplify the inherent challenges of adapting even part of such a monumental work of modernist fiction, especially that of addressing the broad spectrum of knowledge of Proust that viewers bring to the film. Schematically, we can think of four “texts” to be discovered in La Captive. First is the film as understood by those with little or no awareness of In Search of Lost Time or, specifically, of La Prisonnière. This is not to imagine a work free of all context; it merely raises the question of what the images, words, and music in Akerman’s film convey without specific reference to Proust’s novel. Second is a reading of the film with the recognition that it is based on Proust’s story of Marcel and Albertine, renamed Simon and Ariane by Akerman, but which she has made her own. This text incorporates recognized story elements, but without any need to consult the novel to understand what they mean. Third is the reverse, the film understood as entirely dependent on and fundamentally unintelligible without Proust; this text demands keeping in mind the richness of Proust’s novel, perhaps even considering Akerman’s work an extension of it, the latest small accretion on this monumental formation of cultural geology. This version is created in the minds of viewers out of the experience of reading Proust, of watching Akerman, and of considering the two in relation, a compounding that goes beyond passive acceptance of Akerman’s borrowing and rewriting of La Prisonnière. According to these three models, we watch La Captive in ignorance of Proust, we focus on the film as a new creation based on the novel, or we focus on Proust’s novel and ask what Akerman’s commentary adds to it. This schematizing helps to introduce a fourth “text” to be discovered in the film, one that includes Hitchcock’s Vertigo as an explicit tool for reading and for further complicating Akerman’s film as well as Proust’s La Prisonnière. Akerman’s films typically exhibit a stripped-down quality, “utterly ascetic” though prizing “materiality,” to borrow Ivone Margulies’s phrase. Emphasizing a sense of duration and displacement, Akerman’s is often a phenomenological cinema within a spare narrative frame.5 While La Captive is not among her most radical films in this regard—in contrast to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), for example, or D’Est (1993)—it eliminates all of the developments beyond the Marcel/Albertine relationship and the ties of this story and this volume to the rest of La Recherche. More importantly, it also excludes the exhaustive and at times exhausting analysis provided by Proust’s narrator, an interpretative apparatus on which the novel depends to create the rich

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affective and intellectual experience intended by Proust. The most frequent word applied by critics and reviewers to Akerman’s characters, even by Akerman herself, is “opaque”; in this film, Ariane remains unknowable to Simon, as he does to us.6 This epistemological impasse is endemic in Akerman’s films, which often restrict us to surfaces and bewilderment, but in re-presenting Proust’s narrative in La Captive, the elimination of Proust’s analysis—a stand-in for more direct knowledge of the inner lives of the characters—is so constraining that Akerman explicitly introduces Vertigo, through quotation and allusion, to explain her film and Proust’s novel. Akerman invokes Scottie’s pursuit of the invented Madeleine, his makeover of Judy, the tragedy of her death and the impossibility of his fulfillment, using Vertigo to illuminate and complicate the Proustian narrator’s obsession with Albertine and Simon’s with Ariane.

Chantal Akerman Akerman’s early career and personal story are well known, having received broad attention following the extraordinary release of Jeanne Dielman in 1975—few films in the history of cinema have stimulated as much critical debate or so dominated the career of an important filmmaker. The daughter of Polish Jews living in Brussels, her mother a concentration camp survivor, Akerman left film school, and spent time in New York, where she was exposed to, among other things, the films of Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1973) reflect this, after which she made Je Tu Il Elle (1974), and then the three-hour-and-twentytwo-­minute Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Akerman was prolific—Internet Movie Database lists forty-eight works, among them thirteen shorts and a number of films made for television. She experimented with a range of forms including non-fiction works such as in News from Home (1977) and Sud (1999); she made an experimental musical, Golden Eighties (1986), and a comedy, A Couch in New York (1996). D’Est (From the East, 1993) was presented both as a theatrical feature and as a multi-screen museum piece (in 1995), one of many such gallery installations by Akerman beginning in the mid-1990s. In addition to La Captive, Akerman also adapted a novel by Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (2011). Her final film, No Home Movie (2015), focused on her mother, adding to her exploration of autobiography, identity, and family, a major strain of her work. Two days before the screening of No Home Movie at the New York Film festival, Akerman ended her life,

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an action that saddened, but did not entirely surprise, devoted admirers of her work. From the first, her films are strongly marked by a particular sensibility and filmic techniques that convey it. Most typical is the long take, offering the experience of time, and confining or empty spaces, usually with little action within the frame and that action without significance to a particular argument. Her camera is often stationary, with ambient sound, and radical ellipses between shots, flattening hierarchy within the frame and between moments of the serial presentation, subordinating purpose to a sense of an ongoing, static present. Interpretative frames are suggested, but minimally, so that tension builds between potential meaning and the weight of being. Akerman’s is a cinema of deliberate impoverishment as she denies herself most of the conventional means of supplying discursive meaning, including the elaboration of narrative, drama, expressive performance, close-ups, shot-reverse-shot “psychological” editing, and so forth. As her collaborator Claire Atherton has said, Akerman’s cinema “does not explain anything. It doesn’t give any reasons.”7 In Kelly Conway’s words, “film critics and historians typically characterize Akerman’s films as minimalist and melancholy,”8 an opinion which I share, while recognizing that criticism of Akerman diverges considerably when it comes to providing the “reasons” that Akerman withholds. Some look to her relationship with her mother, her family’s trauma in the Holocaust, even mental illness, as repressed causes of the displacement in her films, emphasizing recent, non-fiction works such as No Home Movie and the 2015 installation Now.9 Others, taking their key from Margulies’s seminal 1996 book Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, emphasize inherent qualities of the films and how we respond to them, how her deliberate withholding of interpretative direction foregrounds a dumb presence of the world, emphasized by Akerman’s static camera and shots of long duration. Frenetic activity dominates her first short, Saute ma Ville (1968), in which a young woman, whimsically played by the filmmaker herself, dances, eats, and carelessly blackens her shoes. These actions are set off against those of turning on a stove and taping up cracks to keep the gas in the small apartment, which will ultimately lead to an explosion like that ending Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), a film she credits with inspiring her to become a filmmaker. Activity stands apart from meaning in this film, such that “easy dialectical resolution” between the specific moments and the narrative frame, as Margulies writes, “obscures the

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degree to which Akerman’s work holds the figurative and the literal, the dramatic and the mundane, in unstable poise.” Saute ma Ville “inaugurates Akerman’s characteristic oscillation between registers with an explosive dissolution of orders.”10 Few early shorts announce the nature of a director’s work better than Akerman’s third and fourth films, La Chambre and Hotel Monterey. La Chambre was made under the influence of Michael Snow’s La Region Central (1971)11 and consists of a slow, three-hundred-sixty-degree pan of a room, repeated three times and then reversed and curtailed, showing along with the room’s clutter and wall surfaces a young woman (Akerman) in bed, variously at rest, restless, and eating an apple. Interesting in itself, the film establishes the double thrust of Akerman’s work, first of all the sense of duration and of a material world that is the object of observation, second, the placement of the director within this space, an animate object among the inanimate, never fully integrated into a human environment. There is a repetitive seriality, which insists on the permanence of the material as a counterpoint to change and mobility in the living viewer, and there is a willful intervention by the filmmaker—the change in the direction of the panning camera—by way of statement, experiment, or resistance. With the filmmaker, the viewer shares an anxiety of being. In the sixty-five-minute Hotel Monterey, there is similarly no narrative, merely an implied situation of loneliness created by long takes, largely empty of people, of the shabby hotel’s corridors, rooms, elevator, and lobby. Even this minimal interpretative frame ultimately gives way to an impact on perception of the film’s rhythms and framings, such that by the end of the hypnotizing experience one focuses not on the lonely environment, but on lines and shapes, densities of darkness and light, the potentially human world of stories and sentiment voided in place of compelling visual abstraction. Je Tu Il Elle (1974), made quickly to establish Akerman’s credibility as a feature director while she raised money for a script featuring Delphine Seyrig,12 redeploys long takes and a distancing objectivity while the film moves conceptually in an entirely different direction. It is a theatrical triptych, its first segment presenting a performance, by Akerman herself, in the enclosed space of a room. The character is an alienated person in an urban space, an almost Beckettian figure in a philosophically inflected metaphorical landscape; she moves the furniture out of the room, spreads pages of her writings on the floor, obsessively eats confectioner’s sugar out of a bag, lies on her pallet-like mattress in various locations and postures,

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removes her clothes—she is her bodily self, while also an intelligible and interpretable poetic figure. The second segment focuses on a truck driver with whom this same character gets a ride. That is the narrative pretext, but the young woman’s relationship to him becomes secondary to his reality: defined by his employment, his truck, his clothing and appearance, and the mise-en-scène of a bar that they visit. It includes the capture of his upper body and face when he guides her to masturbate him, followed by a description of his relationship with his wife, from impulsive sex and early marriage, through the waning of desire with the arrival of children and increased hours of driving. The third segment of the film takes Akerman’s character to visit a female friend and lover, for the evident purpose of sex, what one critic describes as “an absolutely uneroticized lesbian love-­ making scene.”13 The friend hesitates, then accepts her visitor; they take off their clothes and wrestle together, real bodies performing the idea of sex rather than creating an inviting illusion of lovemaking. The three segments of the film are loosely linked by the lone person, brought into contact with others, male and female, by circumstance and sexual desire, which nonetheless leaves the individuals separate, external to each other, in each case the “literal” standing apart from the metaphorical. This could be a description of several Akerman films, and it anticipates her depiction, a quarter century later, of the relationship of Simon and Ariane in La Captive. Jeanne Dielman remains the central film in the Akerman corpus, and looking back on it even she was impressed by its radical nature. After the modest efforts that preceded it, the film was something of a miracle produced by a young filmmaker groping her way forward, striving and intense, yet without an assured mastery of technique that she admires, for example in Hitchcock’s films of the 1950s.14 On the one hand, Jeanne Dielman provides an extreme instance of a film focused on the ordinary life of a woman which, interpreted as exemplary of women’s condition and rebellion against patriarchy, made the film a magnet for feminist critics. On the other hand, it also offers the most extensive and obsessive incursion into Akerman’s quasi ethnographic register, which frames an alienation beyond gender and particular socioeconomic realities.15 In fact, Akerman’s literalness “defies interpretation,” remaining in tension with merely social arguments. In the sparse narrative arc, Jeanne’s murdering of one of her clients tears the literalist fabric of the film, the event nonetheless remaining an exception that proves the point of how much of the long film remains in an anti-narrative or anti-fictional mode.16

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The kitchen scenes of the film, showing Jeanne washing dishes, preparing veal cutlets, and peeling potatoes, are among the most frequently examined. But almost any scene—a five-minute bathing scene, or the long, nearly silent dinner with her son—creates the same inversion of the typical cinematic relationship between narrative movement and being, repetitive actions, in particular, defeating a sense of progress or meaning outside of the present, the action seen for its own sake. In this static context, normally insignificant gestures do begin to reveal Jeanne’s decline, though the film’s final moments, a seven-minute scene in which she sits at a table and does nothing, face expressionless, while we watch and wait, equally returns the film to its universal, existential dimension. In Margulies’s words: Akerman’s “use of extended duration, provoke[s] a radical separateness of actor, camera, and spectator.” The result is to produce simultaneously in the viewer a visceral experience and a thoughtful reading of the alienation defined by the character in her peculiar temporal/spatial vacuum. After the unforeseeable success of Jeanne Dielman, Akerman spoke of feeling a need to discover new directions, rather than to repeat herself.17 Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), a depiction of serial encounters by a woman nearly as affectless and alienated as Jeanne Dielman, seems a more conventional European art film. Reviewers found it a compromise with commercial filmmaking. In a series of barely motivated “rendez-vous,” the film underscores alterity, the opacity of people, and the isolation of the individual apart from social identities. One of these is with her mother, to whom, as they lie in bed, Anna describes a liaison with another woman. This theme of passing encounters and a discontinuity of provisional framings with their underlying reality, persists in Toute une Nuit (1982), while the variously successful Golden Eighties (1986), Night and Day (1991), or A Couch in New York (1996) all seem like attempts to escape a more or less constant state of depression or existential angst. D’Est (1993) exhibits the power of the tension in Akerman’s non-­ fiction explorations between a more general vision and material from her life. Even in a “paratextual” discourse that foregrounds statements about the process of moving east with an awareness of her family history and that of Europe, from the Holocaust to the Stalinism of the Soviet empire, however, this film creates an experience of waiting, of time and space in the margins of life, promoting these margins as more real and more imposing than the actions usually foregrounded as central. As Claire Atherton

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confirms, more than referring specifically to their creator’s life, Akerman’s images are made to open spaces for a range of associations from viewers.18 No Home Movie (2015), Akerman’s last film, exemplifies the autobiographical dimension of her oeuvre, especially in conjunction with her 2013 memoir, Ma Mère Rit. That film assembles scenes of Skype footage from her mother’s apartment in Brussels as Akerman speaks with her, with long takes of desert landscape, as from a train window.19 Once again there is the sense of duration, now in a context of age, illness, and even impending death. Once again there is a sense of anxiety and of things that take their meaning from their presence rather than from some teleological narrative. As in some other Akerman films, No Home Movie allows a sense of incompleteness, as of a film without borders or frame, such that one seeks paratextual information to continue thinking about it. Particularly noteworthy in this case is Ma Mère Rit, in which Akerman articulates her feelings about her interactions with her mother, and how it will be to live without her.20 No Home Movie in this sense remains an open work, in contrast to Jeanne Dielman or Rendez-vous d’Anna, where one brings many things to the experience of the films but they nonetheless seem sufficient in themselves. In making La Captive, a fiction film and one that adapts, however loosely, a canonical novel, Akerman relegates the autobiographical strain of her filmmaking to the background, leaving, for example, her own experience of jealousy without identifiable reference in the text.21 In one interview, Akerman tells us of her response to La Prisonnière as material for a film: “an obsession, an apartment … what’s not to like?!”22 Yet the film at once creates a tension between what is immediately present on the screen and how this is to be understood.

La Captive The character’s actions in La Captive have little meaning in themselves and the expressionless performances of the actors tell little of their thoughts or feelings. Ariane (Sylvie Testud) lives with Simon (Stanislas Merhar) and his infirm grandmother (Françoise Bertin). Simon jealously stalks her and encourages her companion Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) to report on her movements and contacts. They perform a peculiar sexual ritual in which, fully dressed, he rubs against her while she feigns sleep. Eventually, unable to contain his jealousy, Simon decides to break off his relationship with her, though instead of to her aunt’s, they end up going to a hotel by the

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sea in Biarritz. Here, Ariane goes for a swim, is discovered by Simon flailing in the waves, and he dives into the water after her. We cannot see enough to know exactly what happens, but the next morning Simon is in a rescue boat, apparently after an unsuccessful search for Ariane’s body. Super 8 footage of girls at the beach, including Ariane and Andrée, both precedes and closes the main narrative, framing it as Simon’s memory of his relationship with Ariane. These images stand apart from the main narrative except in so far as Simon watches them, as do early images in the film of Simon stalking Ariane which transparently evoke Hitchcock’s Vertigo—I will return to these later. But if the actions themselves and the actors’ performances convey only a minimum of meaning, the mise-en-scène progressively provides a sense of the characters’ situation and condition. In an oft-cited scene where Simon and Ariane bathe in adjoining bathrooms, for example, frosted glass between them offers an obvious metaphor for their closeness and separation. The partition remains dark during conversation that establishes their physical intimacy, after which we see Ariane’s body through the distorting glass as she and Simon stand, touching the glass (Fig. 7.1). This remains one of the dominant images of their relationship. It is followed by the first of their simulated sex scenes, which seems to mark the

Fig. 7.1  Connection and separation

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end of the film’s beginning, of its first act in conventional three-act screenplay terminology. The narrative movement and feeling of the film change radically at this point, the metaphorical relationship between character and setting coming to dominate. Just after thirty minutes into the film, a scene opens with a view down the hallway toward the apartment’s front door. The walls have been stripped for painting, there are drop cloths, and a ladder is carried out of a room on the right, crossing toward one on the left. Its progress is stopped by Françoise (Liliane Rovère), bringing Simon’s breakfast, who tells a painter firmly that “Monsieur” is not to be disturbed. At this point, the ongoing construction in the apartment, which we have glimpsed before, becomes an expressive background of Simon’s thoughts, framing his image against its disarray, its unfinished nature, its grays and browns, the apartment’s convoluted passageways and compartmental bedrooms, some still luxurious, some stripped, veiled, and raw. In this scene, Françoise tells Simon that his grandmother is quite ill and Ariane is “inquiète,” (“fidgety” in the English subtitles). Simon telephones Andrée to come for Ariane, then helps his grandmother to a taxi to go to the doctor. After greeting Andrée, he follows her to Ariane’s room, but does not enter; rather, he stands in the visually complex hallway, wooden and glass panels at different angles, behind him through a door at the far end of the hall an as yet untouched room with an oriental carpet, and he listens to Andrée and Ariane’s conversation as they prepare to go out. This visual context marks Simon’s state of mind—multifaceted, unfinished, with clear moments and confused ones—as he takes in the trivial details of their plans. After seeing them off, again in the unfinished hallway, where all three characters are doubled in the mirrors near the door, he gazes at himself. The camera then follows him slowly back along the hallway, pausing while he is against a room full of draped furniture, then continuing past others like it, through this complicated hallway with workers moving about at the far end. We see him sitting in his cloistered room, looking at a newspaper. He gets up, Françoise opens the blinds, and he watches two young women meet affectionately below in the street—against an arid, if sunny cityscape made of a stone facade, an empty street lined by parked cars, only the young women move on the sidewalks. He opens a notebook, stares at a blank page, but writes nothing. After a few moments, he puts his pen down and looks toward the camera, thoughtful. Then the image cuts to the hallway, Simon coming toward the front door in his overcoat.

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Simon searches for Ariane, but much more important than this plot detail is the film’s transition to an entirely different kind of cinema, one of image and metaphor, of textures and backdrops that poetically fill in the meaning that has little definition in the sparse narrative. The scene in the apartment firmly establishes it as an expression of Simon’s state of mind; this exterior scene builds on that, creating larger-scale backdrops that express his isolation and solitude in a stone-cold and progressively dark environment. First he inquires after Ariane at a restaurant, then at a dark and empty bistro where the mise-en-scène of abandonment and closure carry the weight of expression. This is an even more complex visual space than the apartment interior, with depths in shadow, empty chairs, mirrored surfaces at various angles, providing among other images multiple, incomplete iterations of Simon. On the soundtrack, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s ominous Isle of the Dead begins to be heard. The camera tracks Simon slowly past this desolate background. The next image is still more extreme: in near darkness Simon appears at the end of an enormous stone wall, walking along it toward the camera (Fig. 7.2). His shadow on the wall accompanies him, suddenly magnified and animated by lights from a car passing off screen. As the camera follows him,

Fig. 7.2  Simon’s world darkens

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it also picks up a woman walking away, with a white scarf like Ariane’s. He follows her, through an archway, when he is out of sight the camera lingering on the emptiness of the space. In the next shot we see Simon walking, crossing paths with a woman’s shadow. Then his shadow and hers merge and separate (Fig. 7.3). Suddenly, as he comes out of the darkness at another corner, a woman— not unlike Andrée—appears, calling his name. She is Helen (Vanessa Larré), a friend of Ariane’s, with a message for Ariane about their group of friends, her “petits camarades.” Simon tries to cross-examine Helen, but she quickly disappears into a taxi. A long take follows, of Simon stationary and barely visible in a passageway among large plain stone walls, while Isle of the Dead swells on the soundtrack. Following this sequence, Simon arrives home in his chauffeured car, looks up to see light in the windows, enters, and makes his way quietly down the wooden hallway, once more a vividly expressive backdrop for his depressive mental landscape. Now he finds Ariane with Andrée, and after the preceding scenes we understand Simon’s state of mind at the discovery. At this point, nearly fifty minutes in, we understand the nature of the film—it is about the state of Simon’s mind within which unfolds this story of frustrated desire and impossible connection. Ariane’s position is that of

Fig. 7.3  Shadows pass in the night

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cause and victim, while she also becomes an independent perspective through which we see Simon and his mania. If there was any pretext of cinematic realism, it is gone by this point in the film, which now proceeds with little narrative causation. In the background is a story about Ariane going to a performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, itself an archetypical narrative of a woman inspiring jealousy to the point that her lover murders her, raising the issue here of Ariane’s agency, as well as foreshadowing her death.23 Other references in the film include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, because of a duet that Ariane sings. Yet these provide more limited, targeted commentary on La Captive than does Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Lea, who will play Carmen in the opera, is another of the real or imaged rivals to Simon, but here as elsewhere the film pursues Simon’s state of mind rather than Ariane’s actions. Three scenes in succession register Simon’s mental path with an almost Godardian disregard for realism: the duet sung between Ariane and her unnamed neighbor; followed by a formal interview of two women by Simon about lesbian love; followed by a Felliniesque parade of Bois de Boulogne prostitutes at night. Later, after a third sex scene with Ariane, during which she mumbles the name Andrée, and a brief moment showing Simon in tears being consoled by his grandmother, he wakes up in a chair as if from a dream—he wants to break with Ariane. They drive to her aunt’s, then to the sea, where the precise manner of her death is withheld from us. The filming does not let us know whether she drowns intentionally, whether Simon simply fails to rescue her, or even whether he helps her drown. Even her death is only a likelihood, never proven. This veiled action thus dramatizes the film’s ambiguity of meaning, its opacity, the difficulty of knowing the impact of the obsessive lover on the ever-­receding and unknowable object of desire.

Akerman’s Proust Proust’s La Prisonnière is an iceberg only the tip of which is visible in Akerman’s La Captive. For those deeply familiar with La Recherche, details included in the film are placed there as reminders of Proust’s depths, while the Proustian text cannot, of course, be brought into the film wholesale without the voice, and without the elaborate reasoning, of its narrator. Excluded entirely are references to the novel beyond the Marcel/Albertine narrative, impossible to place in relation to this story within La Captive’s limited framework. Most important of the major threads of La Recherche

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that run through La Prisonnière are those involving Baron de Charlus, his passion for a young violinist Morel, and the social-climbing couple Les Verdurins. Early in La Recherche, Charlus is a model of aristocratic society, a sought-after arbiter of manners who polices and excludes the unworthy; by the end, as developed in this volume, we see him indifferent to society and fallen into disrepute, at one moment discovered in a brothel, acting out a sadomasochistic drama for which he is chained to a wall and beaten by a muscular young worker. In his decline, Charlus falls victim to Mme Verdurin and her husband, who early in La Recherche host a marginal salon, the invitees of which include Odette, love-object of Charles Swann, another man ruined by obsession and jealousy. By the end of La Recherche, Les Verdurins have achieved a central position in French high society of the World War I period, replacing in their prominence figures such as the Guermantes, so admired by the narrator in his youth. M. and Mme Verdurin prize Morel as an attraction of their circle; they encourage Charlus to orchestrate a brilliant evening around his performance, then they turn Morel against Charlus to precipitate his public disgrace. These narratives, developed significantly in La Prisonnière, are deliberately ignored by Akerman. Akerman focuses on the love story, perhaps described more accurately with respect to Proust as the story of Marcel’s jealousy. For the relationship, as we see it from Marcel’s perspective, is dominated by his compulsion to know Albertine’s inner thoughts and feelings, and in this way to possess her, which proves impossible. The volume explores many dimensions of this desire, inevitably cycling between the pleasure it promises and renewed frustration and despair. Nothing will allow Marcel to experience directly Albertine’s inner being, which he can only speculate about based on visual clues and the statements made by Albertine and others, especially by her companion Andrée. Progressively he trusts what he hears less and less, sometimes approaching in tone the state of one of Edgar Allen Poe’s obsessed and paranoid narrators, sometimes the isolated voice of Samuel Beckett’s creations. Ultimately, Marcel decides to break with Albertine; as if intuitively in response to this wish, she disappears from his apartment without requiring action on his part. Marcel’s exclusion and distance from Albertine take many forms, perversely driving his desire to overcome them. Early in the volume he sees her as “une bête domestique,” like a house cat free from the social demarcation of spaces and responsibilities within the apartment, and later, even more indifferent, as a plant.24 Her staying with him is accounted for in part

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by her poverty; she is not only “trop pauvre” to expect him to marry her, her options are circumscribed by bourgeois social expectations without the financial resources to sustain them. He knew her as one young girl among many at the seaside “Balbec,” where in a later encounter he unsuccessfully attempted her seduction. He wonders about her sexual orientation based on hearsay and a single witnessed glance between her and two young women at a casino near the house of the painter Elstir. Now, when she is living with Marcel, everything that he does not know provokes jealousy, produced more, as he writes, by “images” in his imagination than by plausible “probabilities” of betrayal. Just as jealousy drives his desire, from the moment that Albertine sees the “inquisitorial” symptom of his “love,” she hides everything from him.25 Yet from Marcel’s perspective, jealousy is the driving force of all desire, of all “love”—his interest fades when not aroused by potential infidelities—while in a counter movement to this he is, on occasion, saved from sadness by her presence, he says, which “fills the apartment with happiness.”26 Only the interest of others in Albertine excites him, and as La Prisonnière progresses, Marcel’s fears are embodied in Albertine’s potential lovers, most of them women. Andrée plays a special role. Albertine’s companion from their adolescent days at the beach, she is now used by Marcel to chaperone Albertine and to supervise her behavior. Yet she also becomes a prime suspect, nearly surprised with Albertine in bed, and Marcel increasingly believes her to be arranging and covering up other liaisons. Albertine’s history includes a connection with Mlle Vinteuil, something of a mentor to her, and the daughter of a composer greatly admired by Marcel, yet also known to be of “mauvais genre,” Marcel’s coded phrase for lesbianism— she was once witnessed having sex with her lover while they profaned a portrait of her father.27 This image and Mlle Vinteuil’s reputation haunt the narrator until he imagines Albertine in a web of lesbian relationships that includes Andrée, the remembered girls from the casino in Normandy, the opera singer Lea, and others. Much of La Prisonniére, as a consequence of Marcel’s fears, becomes the story of his maneuvers to control Albertine, to track her movements, to program “safe” activities, to surprise her in lies, and to catch her with real or imagined lovers. If much of this is excluded from La Captive, there is nonetheless an additional layer of Proustian reference in details that invoke La Recherche tangentially, often in trivial or playful ways. In this sense, Proust’s concern with jealousy and alterity not only “inspires” Akerman to construct her film around a similar situation, she also evokes details of Proust’s novel to

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supplement her own text. Scenes recreated from the novel, such as that of the contiguous bathrooms, retain values they had in Proust’s narrative even if the particulars are different. The frosted glass in the novel lets in light from outdoors, not a view of the other bath. Yet Akerman’s formulation allows her both to consolidate Proustian borrowings and to inject novelties pertaining to her own goals. In La Prisonnière, Proust writes: “The partitions that separated our two bathrooms … were so thin that we could talk while we were washing, continuing discussions that were only interrupted by the noise of the water, with an intimacy that the constraints and closeness of rooms in a hotel allows, but which in Paris is very rare.”28 Akerman builds on Proust’s suggestion of intimacy by inventing the most intimate dialogue between Simon and Ariane in the film,29 and by developing a visual metaphor of their closeness and separation as described earlier. Thus, a single sentence in Proust’s four-hundred-page volume can suggest an entire scene, one from a total of twenty, in Akerman’s La Captive. Many references are actively repurposed. Repeated association of Albertine with the sea, in conjunction with Balbec and when her eye color recalls the ocean, are echoed in Akerman’s use of waves over which the opening titles appear, of the Super 8 footage of the girls at the beach, Ariane’s drowning, and the final image of Simon alone against the backdrop of the sea. The character named Bloch in the novel is important as one embodiment of Jewishness and in relation to the theme of anti-­ Semitism, particularly at the time of the Dreyfus affair. In La Captive, Bloch is renamed Levy, yet in the film Levy’s very limited function is to allow Akerman to dramatize how Simon keeps friends other than Andrée away from Ariane. Simon’s fruitless search for Ariane, described earlier, rather than recalling Marcel and Albertine in the novel, seems a repurposed version of Swann’s frantic hunt for Odette, much earlier in La Recherche. The parallels and differences between the Swann/Odette and Marcel/Albertine love stories are important in the novel, but they are merely evoked here for those informed enough to pick up the reference. One instructive repurposing includes the minor detail of some flowers given to Marcel by the Duchesse de Guermantes in the novel because she knows that Marcel loves them. In the novel, Marcel brings them home, encountering Andrée on the stairs leaving the apartment. She seems surprised by his “early” return, and holds him in conversation about the flowers, the odor from which bothers her and, she claims, will annoy Albertine. Marcel eventually knocks at the apartment door and Albertine answers;

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yet instead of to her own room, she leads him to his, apparently—Marcel surmises in retrospect—in order to distract him from the fact that Andrée and Albertine have nearly been caught in bed together. He would notice the messy bed, “son lit en désordre.”30 In La Captive, by contrast, similar flowers are already in the apartment when Simon arrives and stealthily approaches Ariane’s room. When she opens the door, Simon puts his handkerchief to his nose and mouth. Ariane reacts by turning and looking at the flowers; after a moment’s thought she thrusts them toward Andrée to take away with her. Most interesting in this repurposing of one detail without major significance is the fact that Akerman does it at all. She focuses on the flowers not because of their importance in Proust, nor because they are essential to her film. She simply retains the echo of Proust for its own sake, while giving it an entirely different meaning, probably assuming that few, if any, viewers will even remember the mock orange blossoms (“seringas”) given Marcel by the Duchesse de Guermantes. Akerman even reverses the trajectory: in La Captive, Ariane acquires the flowers, noxious here to Simon rather than to Ariane: in fact, this evidence of his fragility is also a marker of the progress of his disease of jealousy. The flowers are a sensual pleasure, and here Ariane embraces them while they make Simon ill. Yet they are still associated with the possibility of sex between Andrée and Albertine or Andrée and Ariane. Even more so in this case, where we actually see the messy bed, and Ariane offers some of her most affectionate smiles to Andrée, who at this moment is freer for having been drinking. Asked by Simon if she has anything to tell him, Andrée flatly says no, though she has something to tell Ariane—that Lea will be singing Carmen and that they must attend. This invented action actually challenges Proust’s version in which Marcel is the one who directs everything, even though for Marcel love is mutual “torture” and he comes to see himself as a prisoner.31 Akerman has suggested that she sees the relationship from Albertine’s perspective as well, as more consensually “sadomasochistic.”32 Very little detail from Proust’s principal narrative, beyond a silent stalking of Ariane, is used in Akerman’s film, but even more significant is the absence of Proust’s narrative voice. What made the book a surprising choice to adapt in the first place was its emphasis on the inner life expressed in the first-person narration. In one respect, this raises the old question of medium specificity—how can the particularity of Proust’s analytic language be represented, or “inspire,” alternative visual particularities of performance and mise-en-scène? There is a wide range of material within the

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narrator’s all-encompassing monologue—some valued by Akerman, some not—in a wide range of registers, from narrated actions and descriptive passages to analyses of everything from jealousy and human psychology to painting, literature, and music. Proust frequently deploys metaphor, as well as hypothetical scenarios across a spectrum of the likely, the possible, and the imaginary, the borders between these modes blurred within the narrator’s subjectivity. One irony of La Prisonnière and other first-person narrations that dramatize alienation is the sense of intimacy they provide the reader, a sense of proximity and access to the inner world of the writer. In this case Marcel cannot fully know Albertine, or anyone, and yet he opens himself, apparently, to us, though at times we may suspect he is not fully reliable in his self-judgment or conclusions. This will be a difference from Akerman, whose camera provides us with a perspective close to that of Simon, but retaining an exteriority, among other things the image of Simon himself, placed within in the scene. Certainly in Proust we are more aware of Marcel’s voice and language-based ratiocination than we are of anything similar in Akerman’s image-based narration. Simon’s isolation in the settings serves as an expression of his condition, but much of the anxiety-­driven texture of Marcel’s madness and solipsistic isolation disappear behind the opacity of Akerman’s characters. The following statement about memory serves as one example of the kind of thought not conveyed in Akerman’s film. From a specific question as to whether Albertine previously knew Lea, now a successful opera singer and a notorious lesbian, the narrator proceeds to a general comment— Proust’s French displays the elegant precision of his language: “Car […] la mémoire, au lieu d’un exemplaire en double, toujours présent à nos yeux, des divers faits de notre vie, est plutôt un néant d’où par instant une similitude actuelle nous permet de tirer, ressuscités, des souvenirs mort; mais encore il y a mille petits faits qui ne sont pas tombés dans cette virtualité de la mémoire, et qui resteront à jamais incontrôlables pour nous.”33 (“Because memory, rather than an always visible copy of the facts of our life, is a void from which, occasionally, some current similar thing lets us pull up dead recollections, brought back to life; but there are also thousands of little facts that never fell into this repository of memory, and that will stay forever out of our control.”) If Akerman were so inclined, how might she represent this analysis of the workings of memory? Through a voice-over narration, or in discussion between characters, or perhaps dramatized around something we have witnessed that a character has “forgotten.”

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Otherwise, even if Simon thinks such a thought, it is silenced behind his impassive facial expression. Just below this passage is a metaphorical explanation of jealousy: jealousy is personified as a historian who has to write a history for which there is not a single document.34 The point here is not so much the challenge of “medium specificity,” exacerbated by Proust’s immersion in the mind of his writer/narrator; it is, rather, that Akerman’s artistic project is a different one from Proust’s. She might have been able dramatize the notion of jealousy as an historian without documents, but given Akerman’s own auteurial ambition, evident in proclivities demonstrated throughout her long career, she responds to her Proustian “inspiration” differently. As a filmmaker, Akerman is not so much interested in articulating arguments as she is in creating a phenomenal mindscape, an affective equivalent of a human experience dominated by anxiety and an absence of meaning or solace. Proust, by contrast, articulates everything, discerning and describing each nuance of Marcel’s experience of a situation. How can Akerman explain her meaning, then, when she has exchanged Proust’s language for images of Simon walking in darkness in empty spaces past bare walls, for an apartment in disarray, or a handkerchief held to his face, blank looks of incomprehension, and for Ariane’s willful failure to remember or articulate her thoughts? One way to augment this dimension of her text is to introduce another, to encourage the viewer to think not only of Proust, but also of Hitchcock and Vertigo. Akerman apparently had Vertigo in mind from the beginning as she developed her film,35 but unlike La Prisonnière, a source text “inspiring” the characters and narrative situation of her film, Vertigo is superimposed as a lens external to that source, introducing Scottie’s relationship with Madeleine/Judy as a counterpoint to Proust, an additional lens through which to see Simon and Ariane.36

Vertigo The general parallel of Vertigo with La Prisonnière and La Captive is self-­ evident: all three texts focus on a man who becomes obsessed with a woman in a way that overwhelms any sense of objectivity; they show his relentless pursuit, his trying to possess her, leading ultimately to her departure or death. In Vertigo, former police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), retired because of his fear of heights, is hired to follow Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wife of an acquaintance named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), with a double motive of discovering her secrets and protecting

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her. Curious at first, he becomes drawn in by her mystery—she is ostensibly haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Carlotta Valdes. After rescuing her from an apparent suicide attempt in San Francisco Bay, he becomes enamored of her. He wants to help her and, though perhaps unaware of it at first, he wants to possess her. When he arrives at confessing his passion, however, she escapes his oversight, apparently leaping from a bell tower at San Juan Bautista Mission when Scottie is unable to follow her up the stairs. Later Scottie encounters a woman named Judy, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Madeleine; he pursues her and tries to transform her into the lost Madeleine. Mid-narrative, however, through a flashback from Judy’s perspective, we learn that the body that Scottie saw fall from the tower was Elster’s real wife; Judy was hired as part of a scheme to provide a cover story for her murder. Unable to resist Scottie’s passion for Madeleine, Judy finally cooperates in again becoming Madeleine. Unwisely, however, she has retained a piece of Carlotta Valdes’s jewelry from the earlier charade and, when Scottie sees it, he suddenly grasps her imposture. Angry, he confronts Judy with his knowledge of her role, and overcoming his vertigo, he forces her to reenact the death scene in the tower. Judy, surprised by the shadow of a nun coming to investigate, falls to her death. Scottie is left a second time feeling guilty and bereft, both of the idealized woman he first pursued and of the real person whom he refused to acknowledge. Elements that especially resonate with Akerman’s film include Madeleine’s staged suicide attempt by drowning, the Pygmalion makeover of Judy, and the idealization of Scottie’s object of desire. This last encompasses his need to know the desired other, the extent to which the passion dominates his thoughts, an obsession without sexual consummation, and alternatives to this idealized love presented in the film. Remaining problematic in the triangulation among Proust, Akerman, and Hitchcock are the specific figures of Albertine, Ariane, and Madeleine, especially the balance of power and the degree of their agency in the relationships. Albertine, the least known, is seen only through Marcel’s narration of his thoughts; Ariane, while visible to us, expresses little and remains “opaque”; by contrast, the non-existent “Madeleine” is made entirely available to us as the very real, complicit Judy. We come to understand from her perspective Scottie’s aggression in his attempts to make her over. The importance of Akerman’s extensive reference to Vertigo in La Captive is enhanced by its strategic placement at the opening of her principal narrative. For some five minutes, from the first shot of Ariane in the

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Place Vendôme, Akerman shows Simon following her, without sound beyond Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead,” which creates suspense during the stalking (Fig. 7.4). The pace, camera angles, and editing that create Simon’s perspective from the car all imitate Vertigo, replicating the beginning of Scottie’s investigation when hired by Gavin Elster. As Robin Wood describes it in his seminal work on Hitchcock, in Vertigo there is “…about [a] quarter of an hour without dialogue…, mainly shots from Scottie’s point of view, including many through his car’s windshield, as he follows Madeleine.”37 At least twice during this stalking in La Captive, additional details reinforce the sense of imitation. Ariane/Testud is dressed in a grey dress that emphasizes her hips in a way that echoes the filming of Novak in the grey tailored suit worn by Madeleine and later purchased by Scottie for Judy. Then Simon follows Ariane to a hotel, only to be told that she is not there. This recalls the scene in Vertigo where Scottie follows Madeleine into the McKittrick Hotel and is similarly told that she is not there. Scottie is invited to her room to verify this fact, while in La Captive the hotel clerk soon explains that Ariane had in fact been there moments before. But viewers will already have connected the moments in the two films—this

Fig. 7.4  Simon follows Ariane

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detail in La Captive has no meaning except to add momentary mystery and further echo Vertigo. The Hitchcock references are confirmed beyond any doubt when, still early in the film, Simon tracks Ariane to the Rodin Museum, a scene which evokes Madeleine’s visits to the Legion of Honor Museum in Vertigo. When Scottie stands behind the seated Madeleine as she gazes at the painting in that film, cuts to close-ups emphasize a similarity of Madeleine’s hairstyle to that of Carlotta in the painting, her hair gathered up in a swirling chignon. In La Captive, walking among the sculptures, Simon comes upon one with exactly this hairstyle. The spiraling chignon is so symbolically important in Vertigo that Hitchcock based his title sequence on it, a graphic representation of a spiraling vortex as a visual representation of the film’s title and of the concept of vertigo. In La Captive, we are given this image as final punctuation after the stalking sequences, further highlighted as Ariane enters the frame, replicating the scene in Vertigo in which Scottie watches Madeleine as she looks at the painting of Carlotta. Akerman herself, then, is underscoring that there is nothing casual, and nothing uncertain in this citation of Vertigo; reference to Hitchcock’s film prominently and aggressively frames Akerman’s narrative, insisting on a comparison of Vertigo with La Captive and, implicitly, with La Prisonnière. The protagonist’s inability to know and possess the person who is the object of desire is central to all three works, if in very different forms. Jealousy is not a word we would apply to Scottie’s torment in pursuit of Madeleine, of course, while for Marcel in La Prisonnière, knowing the other is both an epistemological and a psychological problem. Anything beyond his grasp inspires an anxiety akin to jealousy, imagined or possible lovers dramatizing his fears to the extent that in Marcel’s own mind, love and jealousy cannot be disentangled. In La Captive, much remains unspoken. As in Proust, women are Simon’s primary rivals, but his jealousy must be inferred from his actions, of which there are very few, as when he pulls Ariane away from her friends at the opera. Otherwise, we rely on brief conversations with Andrée and questions to Ariane herself. Once the subject finds clear verbal statement, when Simon interviews two women about the nature of same-sex love, intent on discovering if a lesbian orientation on the part of Ariane prevents her from genuinely loving him. For the most part we see possessive behavior, but there is little explanation beyond the film’s association with Proust’s novel and the clear references to Vertigo.

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Proust’s vision is already a dark one, of isolation, even solipsism, and a profound emotional deprivation, balanced by an intellectual and aesthetic grasp of the nature of things which breaks out of the solipsism of consciousness through the creation of art objects—the paintings of Elstir, the septet of Vinteuil, and Proust’s own novel—which have a transcendent social reality. Hitchcock offers no such solace: shaken by his near death and guilt at causing the policeman’s death, Scottie is psychologically “left hanging,” in Wood’s formulation. He is then tricked by Elster and falls for the replica of Madeleine. But part of the power of Hitchcock’s narrative, opened to the audience at the film’s midpoint and long before Scottie discovers the deception, is its literalization of the more fundamental problem of Scottie falling for an idealization created out of his own desires: Elster fabricates a figure that he knows Scottie wants, Hitchcock’s version of a popularly defined ideal of feminine beauty in the America of the 1950s. Then Scottie tries to remake Judy—sensuous, morally flawed, available, and desiring—into a copy of this same fantasy, already denied him. As much as Proust’s, Hitchcock’s objects of desire cannot be realized, though in Vertigo the male protagonist is left a gibbering idiot rather than an artist finding salvation through his art.38 The sensuous must be accepted for what it is, not transformed into an ideal that it cannot be. As to where Akerman arrives on this issue, she leaves Simon as empty as Scottie, closing her film with the image of Simon alone in the prow of a search boat against the backdrop of the sea, closing the circle with Super 8 images of Ariane at the beach that open the film. Simon’s art is limited to an image of a blank page and verbal mentions of his “work,” inexplicable without reference to Proust. Alternatives to the fiction that is Madeleine are presented in two forms in Vertigo, through the character of Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), and in Judy as a flawed, flesh and blood woman acting a part. These alternatives are not, of course, divorced from Madeleine’s nature as an essentially imaginary object; in fact they are fundamental to defining it. Midge, in Wood’s words, is “practical, realistic, emancipated, eminently sane, positive and healthy in her outlook,” though he also sees her as superficial, too limited in imagination to appreciate Scottie’s longing for “a higher reality.”39 Yet Midge’s sanity is meant to call our attention to the unreliability of Scottie’s perspective. As Wood argues, in the first half of Vertigo Hitchcock exploits his audience’s “escapist expectations,”40 and yet the director also challenges these at every turn. Midge laughs outright at Scottie’s gullibility about Madeleine’s possession by Carlotta Valdes. “Oh,

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now Johnny, really, come on!” she exclaims, then identifies the obvious motive for his self-deception, desire for Madeleine. Midge’s grotesque painting, which replaces Carlotta’s head in a version of the museum portrait with her own, is an unsuccessful attempt to deflate Scottie’s romanticizing of the Carlotta story in its cartoon version of history. The McKittrick Hotel episode similarly confronts Scottie, and us, with the untenable nature of his pursuit. Through Scottie’s eyes, we see Madeleine go into the hotel, and yet she is not there. It is important to notice how the McKittrick Hotel is rendered, like a drawing or an etching out of the past, or perhaps a façade that is part of a stage set. When Scottie looks at the street, we see the real world, in color, movement, and three dimensions. When he turns to the hotel, by contrast, it looks flat, unreal, dreamlike. Scottie saw Madeleine go in, he saw her at the window, yet when he investigates, going to the room, he must admit that Madeleine is not there and there is no trace of her. Furthermore, when he looks out the window, her car too is “gone.” So, either Scottie is imagining things and we are seeing the world through his eyes, or he is being tricked, which we have no solid reason to believe at that point in the film. But we are confronted with evidence of madness or deception, though the impact of this in the story is simply to draw the level-headed policeman, whose initial skepticism was made clear in his first meeting with Elster, further into the mystery. Given our “escapist expectations,” we, against all logic, go along with him until we too accept the melodramatic love story dramatized in swelling music and an explosion of waves on the rocks behind Scottie and Madeleine when they kiss. The story is frankly absurd and we are told so, repeatedly, but we will not face that fact until we are forcibly “detached” from Scottie’s consciousness when Hitchcock shows us, in the scene as remembered by Judy, that the death of Madeleine was, in diegetic fact, a hoax. Judy is the second alternative to Madeleine, presented as sensual and immediate by comparison. François Truffaut made the observation that when she is first seen on the street she is braless, which while perhaps not literally accurate, is noteworthy given the focus on the brassiere which Midge is drawing for magazine advertisements, a work of cantilevered engineering.41 But Judy’s difference from Madeleine is evident in everything, in her looks, her manner, and her voice, as Scottie says once he has discovered the truth. As Truffaut pointed out, giving Judy an “animal-like sensuality” is the triumph of Novak’s performance.42 Visually, her mascara and eyebrows are exaggerated to emphasize the difference, broad, dark,

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and oversized patches on her face that call attention to themselves and detract from her features, her relaxed and undisciplined mouth again in contrast to that of Madeleine. We have been prepared to accept this apparently bad copy for the beautiful Madeleine in that, from Scottie’s perspective, we have been searching to fill the void of her absence. Once he is released from the institution—prima facie evidence of his madness—following “Madeleine’s” death, he is shown going to the McKittrick Hotel, to Ernie’s restaurant, to the Legion of Honor Museum, and to the flower shop, driven in each case by memories of Madeleine, finding only inadequate copies of the type. For one point is certainly that she is a type, an elegant woman surrounded by the trappings of wealth. He longs to find Madeleine so much that when we and Scottie see Judy on the street, her apparent difference from Madeleine does not prevent Scottie from fixating on her. Judy asks, “Do I really look like her”? Though she is in fact the same person, the answer must be no, the reason that a complete makeover is necessary. Following the presentation of Judy’s memory that reveals to us Elster’s murder of his wife and Judy’s complicity, we are given the astonishing fifteen minutes during which Scottie cruelly makes Judy over as Madeleine, overcoming her resistance at every step until her final acquiescence at the end of the sequence. She agrees to have dinner with him and he takes her to Ernie’s restaurant, where her working-class difference from the others is obvious and painful to her, Scottie looking for a moment at another women dressed more as Madeleine had been. So Scottie buys Judy clothes, the grey suit and a gown like Madeleine’s. Judy fears becoming Madeleine again for many reasons, among them the loss of her identity: “Couldn’t you like me?” she pleads, and, if she goes along with changing her hair color, “Will you love me?”. The final stage is to style her hair exactly like Madeleine’s, a final detail, and the dramatization of this completion of her transformation combines Judy’s submission with Scottie’s reaction.43 We first see the impact of the newly recreated Madeleine in Scottie’s expression. He is against the pale green curtains in the hotel room anxiously awaiting Judy’s reemergence from the bathroom, and when she appears, he stares in wonder at this reincarnation. In fact, Madeleine, as first shown in the reverse eye-line match, is only partially present: she is shown framed in the doorway in a gauzy light, only half materialized as if foreshadowing a Star Trek character being beamed up to the spaceship. After another shot of Scottie’s awed expression and a reverse shot, she steps forward, out of this unreal haze

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and becomes real, fully material and present, walking toward Scottie and the affirming kiss, like those by the sea and in the stables, that proves they have fully reanimated their love. The music swells to accompany this, and we must breathe deeply afterward. There is a cut to black, a pause, then a noteworthy shift of tone in the next scene when Judy/Madeleine is again emerging, this time dressed in the elegant black gown, without the passionate score. Sex has been elided, as was the moment during which Scottie undressed “Madeleine” earlier in the film. Now, after apparent fulfillment, Scottie will notice that Judy is wearing Carlotta’s pendant, which brings the entire edifice of love and imagination crashing down so that the film can race to its conclusion. The makeover of Judy has its analogue in Proust’s La Prisonnière in scattered references rather than in a single scene. Marcel gets advice on clothing for Albertine from the Duchesse de Guermantes, a model of elegance even after her title of Duchess no longer means much. And Marcel imagines a recreated Albertine who is a result of his influence: “without me she would not speak as she does, she has so profoundly been influenced by me, she couldn’t not love me, she is my creation.”44 As with Marcel and Albertine, Scottie’s remake of Judy is a physical makeover that carries with it a makeover of manners, posture, and the inner adjustments of the uneducated shop-girl Judy to the more worldly and sophisticated Madeleine. Akerman’s Ariane undergoes no recreation or makeover beyond what can be assumed with reference to Proust and Hitchcock. She is an expressionless figure on whom we can project Albertine and Judy/Madeleine. If there is an alternative, it is simply an alternative perspective to the one we receive by following Simon so closely in the film. What unreliability we sense in the narration of Proust’s Marcel is created largely in the occasional hysteria and exaggeration in his assertions, unverifiable because we are otherwise locked inside of the narration. In Akerman’s film the situation is similar, but at times we are given a disengaged view of Simon’s imprisonment, reading his position in relation to the mise-en-scène as a comment on his frame of mind. The facts offered by Ariane and Andrée also open a window to question whether they are simply toying with him, a person obviously handicapped by physical frailty as well as by his jealousy. Simon cannot remember whether Ariane’s trapeze or singing lesson happens on Tuesday or Thursday. He thinks he remembers what he has been told, but he might remember wrong, the schedule might have been changed, or Ariane might have miscommunicated. A similarly confusing exchange that

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Simon has with Andrée confirms how unlikely he is ever to know what is happening, when, or where. Ariane and Andrée apparently do what they want, with little regard for his confusion or desires. The question of Ariane’s active role is raised playfully by Akerman in the question of who drives the car: in their visit to the Bois, Arianne asks to drive and is given the opportunity. Following the visit to her aunt’s home, in the final stretch of the film’s action and without a chauffeur, we see Ariane driving again. Recognition of Ariane’s agency inverts the assumption that because the narrative follows Simon’s point of view, therefore he is the controlling figure in the relationship. This is the same ambiguity that defines the film’s ending, where Akerman refuses to let us see what occurs. If the character of Ariane must be fleshed out by reflecting on Albertine and the quite different Judy/Madeleine, Simon can be understood as an interface between Proust’s Marcel and Hitchcock’s Scottie, that is to say between the neurasthenic intellectual and the flawed, modern, man of action, a police detective. We need these precursor texts in order to understand, because without them Simon is a cipher, lacking the exposed intellection of Proust’s Marcel, or Scottie’s supposed penchant for pragmatism and action, interrupted by his experience of vertigo. Reality is in question from the beginning for Proust, philosophically in doubt. Scottie’s condition is framed in a more contemporary way, as a mental disorder. Hitchcock gives him a literal fear of heights, institutionalizes him, and dramatizes his obsessive quality in his abuse of Judy, though we are ultimately invited to go beyond the literal and psychological to see his condition as more profoundly existential. Sexuality, or the repression of it, is a prominent issue for all three protagonists. In La Prisonnière, though Marcel alludes to physical intimacy, the most startling and graphic description of it is on the second page of the book,45 where the narrator describes Albertine slipping her tongue into his mouth. Beyond this, we experience Albertine more as a series of mental constructions based on insufficient evidence. In these less material terms, here is perhaps the most erotic passage in the novel. It comes as he is approaching her sleeping form, aware that he knows “many Albertines in one,” and that with each subtle change of perspective, “she creates a new woman, often unknown to [him],” such that he “seems to possess not one, but innumerable young girls.” He continues: Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not run aground of reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of

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­ rofound slumber, I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, p lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips on her cheek and on her heart and then my free hand on every part of her body in turn, so that it too was raised, like the pearls, by her breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion; I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep.46

In the next moment, Marcel mentions reaching a physical climax after merely touching his leg against hers. But this comes as a mild distraction to the more important aesthetic fulfillment, which is at once poetic and intellectual, rather than rooted in sensual detail, emphasizing the role of the imagination. Most importantly, the longer passage of which this is a part emphasizes how Marcel’s erotic moments depend entirely on the disappearance of Albertine’s identity, her unique personality: she must be fully asleep, such that she can be anyone and everyone in Marcel’s imagination, possessed entirely. In La Captive, of course, the mark of their lovemaking is a literal separation, visualized by the glass partition between the baths, and more directly expressed by the layers of cloth between the lovers that prevents contact of their bodies during the three sex scenes. The metaphor of the frosted glass partition implies that the perspective might be from either side; sex in La Captive is imagined as a cooperative masturbation between isolated figures with significant constraints on their communication. This aligns with Marcel’s isolation in La Prisonnière, and perhaps with Scottie’s alienation as well—he is impotent until Judy is transformed into the figure of his fantasy. Scottie at first seems constrained by professional ethics and prudishness, well-established dimensions of Stewart’s star persona. He undresses the unconscious Madeleine and later passionately kisses her, but only in the second go around of their relationship, after Judy is made-over into Madeleine, do they consummate their passion, which deflates Scottie’s fantasy: as soon as they have made love, he sees that the relationship as fraudulent. Judy can never be Madeleine. The deliberate ambiguity of Akerman’s ending is important for a number of reasons, but mainly because through this strategy Akerman is able to avoid short-circuiting thought on the part of the audience by giving us a ready-made understanding. She clearly distances herself from Proust’s ending: in La Prisonnière, Albertine magically takes herself out of the picture as soon as she ceases to be the subject of Marcel’s obsession. Refusing to show us what happens to Ariane in La Captive might allude to that

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magical disappearance. But in Proust’s novel, Albertine’s death is in no sense a suicide—she falls from a horse, independent in time and place from Marcel and their relationship. Vertigo, by contrast, offers a fully developed template for understanding the complexity of Akerman’s ending. In La Captive, Ariane swims out to sea, and Simon goes in after her—as previously mentioned, we are prevented from knowing specifically what happens at that point. Akerman obscures the scene to the point that we cannot tell what occurs. I discount completely the option of an accidental death, which as well as unsatisfying, would vitiate the force of this deliberate directorial intervention to veil what transpires. For, rather than simply allowing us to blame Ariane for suicide or to blame Simon for murder, the unresolved ending makes us reconsider what we have seen, perhaps to conclude that neither individual is solely responsible for the tragedy, but rather that they are locked together in their dance of control and resistance, that both are at fault and both are victimized. Hitchcock’s film similarly offers two possible interpretations or emphases balanced against each other, refusing to resolve for the viewer the dilemma of Judy’s and Scottie’s responsibility in their tragedy. On the one hand, the film is about Scottie’s impossible reach for something higher, better, more perfect, making him a figure like Icarus, scorched when he flies too close to the sun. On the other hand, it is about a man’s sick and brutal attempt to impose a clichéd and fetishized identity on a vulnerable woman, driving her to her death. Wood set the pattern for the first reading.47 Thomas Leitch’s reading in Find the Director provides an example of the second.48 In the second of these scenarios, of course, Scottie is responsible for killing Judy. In the first, Judy has brought it on herself as Elster’s accomplice, pretending to be what she is not, to please Elster, and to earn a part of his wealth—the nun provides a shock to which Judy is open because of her guilt.49 The complexity of the Scottie/Judy relationship helps us see the two sides of La Captive more clearly. The film plays with Simon’s dominance in several respects. First, because of his money, his social position and his gender. In relation to these, he is the more proactive character in the narrative, for which reason, apparently, Akerman adopts his point of view—as Proust did Marcel’s—through which to present the story. Yet in contrast with Proust’s version, Akerman present’s Ariane as separate and resistant to Simon’s dominance, engaged with his perversion on her own terms.

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Thus, she exhibits a comfortable lucidity in creating the situations that enflame the jealousy that tortures him. This is the echo of Bizet’s Carmen running through the film, seen in creating provocative situations, withholding information, and offering transparent lies that serve the function of confirming Simon’s suspicions. At an allegorical level, Ariane takes control of the car and, possibly, she chooses her death. At the same time, Simon is a tyrant, relentless to control Ariane’s every breath, the intensity of his attempt killing all affection, his dissatisfaction ultimately leading him to want to silence that which he cannot otherwise control. If Hitchcock is the model, we must accept the interlocked and irreconcilable perspectives, a tragedy of individuals that reflects broader perspectives in and on reality. Akerman, in ways different from all the other directors in this book, introduces one text in a direct and implemental way to cast light on another. Her own filmmaking privileges affect, creating an opaque world heavy with despair. She is at the same time profound, literal-minded, explicit, and inarticulate, a philosopher without words. Yet she undertakes to adapt a novel that is all intellect, argument, and self-questioning, articulated in a richly nuanced vocabulary and tortuous sentences. Her solution is to introduce another witness, another narrative, and to present her own work as an interface between the two, in so doing reflecting on cultural history in a way that bears the mark, and the weight, of her own sensibility.

Notes 1. This from July 28, 2005, by Jean-Luc Douin in Le Monde is representative: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2005/07/28/la-­c aptive-­ chantal-­akerman-­a-­la-­recherche-­du-­trouble_675900_3260.html. 2. Swann in Love (1984). 3. Interview, “Proust à l’écran.” 4. Kuyper, Frankfurt interview. He is also credited on Je tu il elle (1974). 5. See Margulies, “The Politics of Singular,” in Nothing Happens. 6. Chantal Akerman. Autoportrait en cinéaste, 128–130. 7. Camera Obscura, Interview with Ivone Margulies, 23. 8. Camera Obscura, 140. 9. 2015, The Jewish Museum, New York. 10. Margulies, “The Politics of Singular,” in Nothing Happens, 3 (Kindle). 11. Camera Obscura, 32 and 51. In this interview with Janet Bergstrom, Akerman’s early collaborator Babette Mangolte recounts how they watched Snow’s film over and over.

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12. Mangolte interview, Camera Obscura, 45. 13. Cited by Foster, 2, along with the alternative point of view of Andrea Weiss. 14. Akerman interview, “Proust à l’écran.” 15. Critics such as B. Ruby Rich and Margulies take issue with “easy” feminist readings of the film, called by Rich a “subsidiary effect” based on narrative interpretations and “anti-illusionism” that frees the film from the complicity of classical Hollywood cinema in psychoanalytic terms. 16. In Margulies’s words, the murder scene “destroys the perfect homology between literalness and fiction, effecting “a switch from the literal to the fictive.” 5 (Kindle). See also Joël Magny for the sense of how the murder shifts audience reception of all that precedes it. 17. In various interviews, e.g., from Fluctuat.net, reprinted by Isabelle Price, January 1, 2008. https://www.univers-­l.com/captive_interview_chantal_ ackerman.html. 18. “Chantal always wanted to give space to viewers to build their own relationship with the film, to raise questions by themselves, to work…. She wanted to be at the same level as the viewers.” Camera Obscura, 17. 19. The desert images were from another project Akerman was working on, inserted among the images of her mother accumulated in the years preceding her death—the emptiness of the desert conveys Akerman’s feeling as she confronts the end of her mother’s life. 20. Ill and 90 years old, against all evidence, her mother thinks “she can still make progress.” Ma Mère Rit, 8. 21. Though the critic or researcher may find it: in Ma Mère Rit, for example, the partner from whom Akerman is separating is jealous in the manner of Marcel and Simon. 22. Akerman repeated this idea in various interviews, e.g., “Proust à l’écran,” August 15, 2009. 23. That the composer of Carmen was the first husband of one of Proust’s models for Mme de Guermantes, is most likely an accidental irony. See Caroline Webber, Proust’s Duchesses. New York: Phaidon, 2018. 24. “Une bête domestique,” 9. “Elle n’etais plus animée que de la vie inconsciente des végétaux, des arbres…”, 62. 25. “Depuis ce jour-là, elle m’avait tout caché,” 50. 26. “…le bonheur la remplissait,” 48. 27. Recalled from Du côté de chez Swann in La Prisonnière, 73. 28. Les cloisons qui separaient nos deux cabinets de toilette… étaient si minces que nous pouvions parler tout en nous lavant chacun dans le nôtre, poursuivants une causerie qu’interrompait seulement le bruit de l’eau, dans cette intimité que permet souvent à l’hôtel l’exiguité du logement et le rapprochement des pieces, mais qui, a Paris ést si rare, 5.

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29. Ariane mentions reservations about the odor of her vagina; Simon reassures her. 30. La Prisonnière, 48. 31. Ibid., 101. 32. Akerman discusses the relationship in several interviews, for example, “Proust á l’écran,” August 15, 2009. 33. La Prisonnière, 137. The translation here is a slightly altered version of the much-revised Scott Moncrieff translation. 34. “Comme un historien qui aurait à faire une histoire pour laquelle il n’est aucun document.” La Prisonnière, 137. 35. See de Kuyper, or “Proust à l’écran.” 36. Emma Wilson writes: “Making her own version of Vertigo in La Captive, [Akerman] repeats a narrative of dizziness and murder, but stretches it out, and makes it opaque, impeding any move to closure and relief.” Afterlives, 97–98. The “murder,” in both films, remains a question of interpretation. I argue that Akerman foregrounds Vertigo in her film in order to make La Captive less opaque. 37. Wood, 113. 38. See Leitch’s view, in contrast to that of Wood, of Scottie as pathologically incomplete, 205. 39. 111. 40. 115. 41. Truffaut, 247. In the interview, Hitchcock confirms Truffaut’s observation. 42. Truffaut, 248. 43. In his interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock speaks of the scene as leading up to sex, the resisting Judy finally “taking off her knickers.” He also speaks of Scottie’s desire in terms of “necrophilia.” 245. 44. 120. “…sans moi elle ne parlerait ansi, elle subi profondément mon influence, elle ne peut donc pas ne pas m’aimer, elle est mon oeuvre.” 45. La Prisonnière, 4. 46. Alors, sentant que son sommeil était dans son plein, et que je ne me heurterais pas à des écueils de conscience recouverts maintenant par la pleine mer du sommeil profound, délibérément je sautais sans bruit sur le lit, je me couchais au long d’elle, je prenais sa taille d’un de mes bras, je posais mes lèvres sur sa joue et sur son coeur, puis sur toutes les parties de son corps posais ma seule main restée libre, et qui étais soulevée aussi comme les perles, par la respiration d’Albertine; moi-même, j’étais déplacé légèrement par son mouvement régulier. Je m’étais embarqué sure le sommeil d’Albertine. La Prisonnière, 64. With one minor correction, the English translation is that of CK Scott Moncrieff, and Terence Kilmartin, revised by DJ Enright. New York: The Modern Library, 1992.

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47. Of Scottie’s aspiration in respect to Madeleine, Wood writes, “…this rejection of life for an unattainable Idea is something fundamental in human nature.” 127. 48. “Scottie is at heart a voyeur who, fearing sexual consummation, prefers to avoid intimate and endangering involvements in favor of relationships he can control completely.” 198. “Scottie is not so much destroying his own identity as re-enacting a ritual that dramatizes the self-alienation…. Judy, like Madeleine before her, is simply the agent of the realization that Scottie has never had a self to lose.” 205. 49. Tania Modleski argues convincingly that the viewer is manipulated into holding both of these positions, Judy’s as well as Scottie’s. 99–101.

Bibliography Akerman, Chantal. Autoportrait en cineaste. Claudine Paquot, ed. Paris: Edition du Centre Georges Pompidou/Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004. Akerman, Chantal. Proust à l’écran: ‘La Captive’ de Chantal Akerman. Interview, France Culture, August 15, 2009. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/ les-­nuits-­de-­france-­culture/proust-­a-­lecran-­35-­la-­captive-­de-­chantal-­akerman Atherton, Claire. “Our Way of Working: A Conversation with Claire Atherton about Chantal Akerman,” Interviewed by Ivone Margulies. Camera Obscura 100, Volume 34, Number 1, 2019. Beugnet, Martine, and Marion Schmid. Proust at the Movies. New  York: Routledge, 2016. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2003. Individual essays copyright 1999. Leitch, Thomas. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Leitch, Thomas and Leland Pogue. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Magny, Joël. “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna: Le ‘non’ de l’auteur,” Cinéma Volume 78, Number 239, November 1978: 92–93. Mangolte, Babette. “With Chantal in New York in the 1970s: An Interview with Babette Mangolte,” Interviewed by Janet Bergstrom. Camera Obscura 100, Volume 34, Number 1, 2019. Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988. Proust, Marcel. La Prisonnière. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

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Schmid, Marion and Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Cambridge, UK: Legenda, 2019. Spoto, Donald. Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his Leading Ladies. New York: Harmony Books, 2008. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock, revised edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Webber, Caroline. Proust’s Duchesses. New York: Phaidon, 2019. Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films, revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

CHAPTER 8

From Dashiell Hammett to the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990)

The principal source of the narrative of Miller’s Crossing is Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 novel The Glass Key, though the film also draws from the rest of Hammett’s authorial oeuvre, from the 1935 and 1942 film versions of The Glass Key, and from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), deploying that classic film as an additional lens through which to refract the Coens’ ironic reworking of Hammett. The novel is set during Prohibition, late in the Tammany Hall era when competing political factions found support from immigrant communities who were awarded employment and city services in a direct quid pro quo for votes. Its narrative follows a fixer who is trying to prevent his boss from losing control of the city, in the process revealing the machinery of social class and power through which established groups attempt to ward off the challenges of more recent arrivals. The early film versions reflect the interference of industry censors, who were wary of allowing either ethnicity or government corruption to appear on the screen. As a reading of The Glass Key, novel and films, Miller’s Crossing revisits Hammett’s allegory of assimilation, his almost prudish sublimation of sex, and the novel’s gangster subtext, already underscored in the 1935 and 1942 film versions. Miller’s Crossing is in no sense a simple adaptation or remake. From their perspective in 1990, the Coen Brothers relish and rewrite the play of ethnic (and sexual) diversity in all of their source texts. Fredric Jameson’s words about Body Heat (1981) apply even more cogently to Miller’s Crossing: “our © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_8

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awareness of the pre-existence of other versions (previous films of the novel as well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure.”1 Miller’s Crossing cannot be meaningfully engaged independent of its references; they are, indeed, “constitutive and essential.” This chapter will examine how Miller’s Crossing builds on the prior Hammett texts and The Godfather to produce a work that, while less affectively powerful than a well-made hard-boiled detective thriller or gangster film, offers intellectual and aesthetic pleasures that can be at least as rewarding.

The Coen Brothers, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona Miller’s Crossing is an early Coen Brothers film, the third in an oeuvre that now extends to over twenty features.2 Joel was born in 1954 and Ethan three years later. They grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, both attending an independent private high school in Massachusetts, after which Joel spent “four unhappy years in New York University’s undergraduate film program,”3 and Ethan got a degree in philosophy from Princeton. By the time Ethan joined Joel in New York, Joel had broken into the film industry, mainly through his association with Sam Raimi, assisting in the editing of the successful, low-budget horror film Evil Dead (1981). Blood Simple (1984), the Coen Brothers’ first feature, which takes its title from a phrase used in Hammett’s Red Harvest, is a neo-noir film that, in its pacing, performances, openly manipulative camera movements, and overlay of musical commentary maintains elements of stylized self-parody and comedy while presenting a gritty story of deception and murder worthy of James Cain. A bar-owner named Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires a private investigator to kill his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) after she has taken up with one of his employees, Ray (John Getz). The investigator, Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), fakes photos of their death, collects his money from Marty, then shoots him with Abby’s gun. Discovering the body, Ray assumes Abby has killed Marty; he cleans up the mess and loads Marty into his car to dispose of him. But Marty isn’t dead: Ray buries him alive in a farmer’s field. Distraught, Ray confronts Abby and returns her gun. Before the shooting, Marty had left an accusing message with another of the bartenders, Meurice (Sammy-Art Williams), that money was missing from the bar; unaware of Marty’s fate, Meurice alerts Ray, who returns

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to the bar, as has Abby earlier, now wondering if Marty has come back from his shallow grave. When Ray leaves the bar, he realizes Visser is following him, and he goes to warn Abby. But Visser catches up with them. Through the window of Abby’s apartment, he shoots Ray before Ray can explain to Abby, then comes after her. After some cat and mouse with the intruder, she shoots Visser, but she is shocked to discover that the man who has been chasing her is not Marty. Reviewing Blood Simple with an awareness of Miller’s Crossing, we can see elements that would be further developed in that film. One is the complexity of a story in which characters never grasp much of what is happening. A second is a foregrounded embrace of a popular genre, in this case film-noir, made ironic through its stylization. The ironic regard and stylization that already approaches caricature in Blood Simple remains a vivid aspect of most of the Coen Brothers’ films, and in their second film, Raising Arizona (1987), they push these qualities to the extreme. The plot is ostentatiously ridiculous: a repeat offender, H.I.  McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), marries a prison guard, Ed (Holly Hunter); when she cannot bear children, they steal one of the “Arizona Quints,” born to the wife of a furniture dealer who is prominent from television commercials. The situation is further complicated when McDunnough’s former prison mates, played by John Goodman and William Forsythe, interfere—they have a plan to rob a bank. Additionally, a quasi-mythical bounty hunter is on the trail of the stolen baby, accompanied by music that gives him the aura of a Sergio Leone character. Stylistically, this film foregrounds camera movement, editing, and music even more than did Blood Simple, and the performances of the actors are deliberately broad. “Having completed Blood Simple,” Joel tells an interviewer from the French magazine Positif, “we wanted to make something completely different.” In Ethan’s words, “we decided we’d make a connection with the things of the imagination.”4 The departure from realism suggests to one interviewer the cartoons of Chuck Jones, which Joel admits to having had in mind when filming one long scene in Blood Simple, that of Ray trying to kill and bury Marty. One quality of Raising Arizona that appears with varying degrees of exaggeration in all of the Coens’ films is its grotesque parody, in this case of an obsession with achieving the American Dream of a nuclear family in which characters’ longings represent an internalization of clichés, all reflected, multiplied, and magnified by popular culture and media. In this funhouse hall of mirrors, stealing the

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baby to replicate the perfect family is framed against a further need to raise him in an environment of consumer goods that defines American life.

Dashiell Hammett and The Glass Key Miller’s Crossing is a new departure both as a period recreation and in its rich exploitation of classic precursors, books and films. Hammett is not credited, but referring to the obvious debt, Ethan Coen facetiously admits that their film is “an homage [pause] or a rip-off” of Hammett’s book.5 The Glass Key was Hammett’s fourth novel of five, following The Maltese Falcon and preceding The Thin Man. It was the culmination of a three-­ year burst of activity between 1927 and 1930 that produced all of his novels except the last. Hammett had long looked down on the murder mysteries he produced for pulp magazines, aspiring to write what he saw as a higher form of literature. The more complete social context of The Glass Key was a further step in that direction. As mentioned earlier, central to the novel—and to the Coen Brothers’ film—was the corrupt system of government that had arisen to fill the needs of cities overwhelmed with immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The Glass Key was written following more than six decades of Tammany-­ Hall political bosses and the quid pro quo among ethnic gangs vying for power in cities that had grown exponentially as a result of the Industrial Revolution. By March 1930, when The Glass Key began to appear serially in Black Mask, machine politics was hardly fresh material. New  York’s famously corrupt Boss Tweed had been locked away in 1871, and muckrakers had been attacking patronage in cities across the country for a half-­ century. But the urban political machine was an enduring reality, and two struggles of the 1920s brought it into the headlines: the battle over Prohibition, and that over Al Smith as a candidate for national office, both of which set rural nativist conservatives against urban voters.6 Set in an unnamed city assumed to be Hammett’s native Baltimore, the narrative of The Glass Key develops within the familiar system by which the boss profits from his role as intermediary between a government with the power of patronage and immigrant communities with large numbers of votes. The novel is a murder mystery wrapped in a political thriller, and both its complicated plot and the book’s ethnic conflicts become the materials for the Coen Brothers’ play with this text as well as with the earlier films from the novel. The narrative follows Ned Beaumont, a political fixer, as he tries to resolve murder accusations that are hindering the boss, Paul

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Madvig, from ensuring victory in a mayoral election. The murder victim is Taylor Henry, brother of Janet Henry whom Madvig is intent on marrying, and son of Senator Henry, Madvig’s candidate for mayor. Complicating the situation, Taylor had been threatened by Madvig for seducing his daughter Opal, so that Madvig immediately becomes a suspect in Taylor’s murder. He is unwilling to shed light on the crime, however, because that could impact his relationship with Janet as well as undercut the Senator’s election campaign. There is another suspect for the crime, but the real problem for Madvig is that his rivals for power are able to use the murder accusation as part of a public campaign against Madvig for corruption. One rival is a bootlegger named Shad O’Rory, and when Madvig’s supporters begin to defect to him, Madvig responds by closing O’Rory’s speakeasies. This ignites a violent struggle for control of the city. In order to infiltrate O’Rory’s operation, Beaumont pretends to break with Madvig, but his trick backfires. He is imprisoned and mercilessly beaten by O’Rory’s thugs, though he eventually escapes. From the beginning Beaumont has understood that Madvig’s pursuit of the WASP Janet Henry is motivated by an obsession with social legitimacy and that Janet only feigns affection for Madvig in order to support her father’s ambitions for power. When Madvig, grateful to Beaumont for his sacrifices, visits him in the hospital and brings Janet along, she and Beaumont are immediately drawn to each other. The political situation grows steadily worse: Madvig is blamed for a growing crime wave, letters from Madvig’s daughter that assert his responsibility for murdering Taylor Henry are leaked to the press, and Beaumont genuinely breaks with Madvig because of the boss’s refusal to trust him. But Beaumont is still intent on unknotting the political stalemate. He eliminates O’Rory by provoking a fight between him and one of his henchmen, then Beaumont and Janet force the Senator to confess that he quarreled with Taylor, leading to the revelation that the Senator killed his own son. Madvig is ultimately cleared, but by this time Janet has decided to leave town with Beaumont on a train for New York. All of the economic and political mechanisms of the system are demonstrated by Hammett, from patronage, kickbacks on construction projects, control of the police, the judicial apparatus, and the press, to vote-rigging and protection of illegal traffic in liquor and gambling. The factions competing for power and wealth are reinforced by ethnic loyalties that as a result of waves of immigration align with conflict between social classes. Historically, this predominance of immigrants and the growing power of

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the cities produced a backlash. One sign of it was legislation in 1921 and 1924 to curtail immigration; a more general response was the development and spread of an ideology promoting assimilation, most aggressively advocated by conservatives yet so widely accepted that it became a cultural master narrative of American identity shaping novels and films ostensibly concerned with other issues.7 Ella Shohat describes the effect on American cinema of the period as creating “a tendency toward ethnic ‘allegories’ … of texts which, even when narrating private stories, managed to metaphorize the public sphere.”8 Hammett’s novel already creates just such an allegory through a three-­ tiered structure of Senator Henry, Paul Madvig, and Shad O’Rory, a structure ultimately dismantled by Beaumont. Hammett has the senator described as “one of the few aristocrats left in American politics,” whereas from the Henrys’ perspective, Madvig is “the lowest form of animal life and none of the rules apply.” But the Madvigs, their name implying Danish roots, are light-haired, blue-eyed and thoroughly assimilated. O’Rory is identified as Irish by his name and the “faintest of brogues,” most likely having arrived in the United States as a child. Beaumont coaches Madvig on etiquette, but his story to Janet that Madvig “picked him up out of the gutter”—Beaumont’s way of lampooning her view of Madvig and himself—underscores the obscurity of his origins. Beaumont’s whole persona is an embodiment of classlessness, or of an invisibility of class and ethnicity, making him comfortable with everyone. Over the course of the novel, Hammett’s allegory shows the WASP elite crumbling as Senator Henry, the aristocratic father, murders his own degenerate son. Madvig will not be permitted to join the elite as kingmaker; he merely survives, maintaining his place in the hierarchy. O’Rory, his Irish American challenger, meanwhile, is violently eliminated, and with him the most directly expressed ethnicity in the text. The ethnically colorless Beaumont brings about the resolution of the conflict represented in the allegory: he supervises the execution of O’Rory, the ethnic upstart, and rescues Janet from the crumbling WASP aristocracy. His pairing with her elevates the two of them as a meritocratic elite: the two smartest, best-­ looking, and most refined people, regardless of origin. Their departure for New  York, in the 1920s a modern hub of ethnic mingling detested by nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, makes them emissaries to the future. Beaumont and Janet represent a new generation permitted by Beaumont’s Oedipal triumph over Madvig, his surrogate father, for the hand of Janet, Madvig’s would-be wife. Hammett’s variation on this

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master narrative of Americanization attacks the idea of an old-stock elite while it nonetheless expels O’Rory, the least assimilated character, still a stock figure in this social comedy, the ethnic gangster. I dwell on the immigration theme and the ethnic allegory because, as well as relevant in the two early films from the novel, it becomes central to the Coen Brothers’ use of the novel in Miller’s Crossing. Beaumont’s personal qualities, of course, embody ideas beyond those of ethnicity and class, above all a mental toughness and willpower that prove superior to physical and political force. These had been the qualities of Hammett’s detectives, The Continental Op and Sam Spade, and would be those of Nick Charles, the retired detective of The Thin Man. In the end, Beaumont is shown to be single-minded in his pursuit of loyalty, or its equivalent, a trusting relationship. The break, or “kiss-off,” between Madvig and Beaumont arises precisely because Madvig fails to trust him, lying in order to protect the Senator and Madvig’s dream of marrying Janet. However understandable, the lie is a betrayal, and Beaumont cannot forgive it. Significantly, and perhaps explaining Janet’s late appearance, halfway through the novel, Beaumont only becomes close to her as his relationship with Madvig dissolves. His pairing with Janet is confirmed with an agreement to join forces in order to prove or disprove whether Paul is the murderer. Beaumont’s trust is expressed by his openly giving Janet information about the case. “But no tricks,” he warns her, to which she replies: “If you only knew how happy I am to have your help … you’d know you could trust me.”9 This trust will ultimately be the reason they can go off together at the end of the novel. Yet the book’s final sentences, when Madvig has left the new couple together, create ambiguity: “Janet Henry looked at Ned Beaumont. He stared fixedly at the door.” Beaumont’s sadness at the loss of his relationship with Madvig seems more compelling than his excitement about the relationship with Janet.10

The Early Films, 1935 and 1942 The Coen Brothers knew Hammett’s novel well, but cinephiles and students of history that they are, they were also thoroughly familiar with the adaptations of The Glass Key and aware of the impact of Hays Office censorship on them. The films, directed by Frank Tuttle and Stewart Heisler, can both be described in terms of their responses to Hammett’s handling of ethnicity, the urban power struggle and the chess game of Tammany Hall political corruption. Central to all versions, including Miller’s

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Crossing, is the face-off between the boss and the gangster, after which the boss’s fixer and strategist tells him he is making a political mistake. In all versions the Beaumont figure pretends to go over to the other side and is caught. Beaumont and Janet are adversaries in the early films, and they remain so in Miller’s Crossing, though as Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) in that film, she and her situation are entirely reimagined. Ethnicity and political corruption were sensitive issues for film-industry leaders wary of government regulation; the 1935 and 1942 versions were shaped by industry censorship in ways that stand in sharp contrast to the freedom with which the Coens worked. In March 1931, almost a year before US publication in book form, the novel was reviewed by Jason Joy for the Motion Picture Association’s Studio Relations Committee. Joy identified the principal challenge for making any film of The Glass Key: it was a story too “mixed up with the politics and administration of municipal and state government.”11 In a meeting between Joy and the authors of a first treatment, Lloyd Sheldon and Bartlett Cormack, the “elements involving the municipal and State office holders were eliminated.”12 The full screenplay by Kathryn Scola and Kubec Glasmon for the 1935 film, while very different from that early treatment, followed Joy’s recommendations.13 The characters in the novel, however, only gain meaning through their class and political affiliations; without the political context, an entirely new sense of purpose had to be invented for the films. For the 1935 film, the solution was to focus on Paul Madvig’s warmth and generosity, his “big heart”; the film could have been called simply “The Boss with a Heart of Gold.” The enthusiastic innocence of Madvig (Edward Arnold) inspires the support of Beaumont (George Raft), and Beaumont’s belief in and affection for Madvig in turn inspire Madvig’s daughter Opal (Rosalind Keith) to love Beaumont. The flashpoint creating this emotional chain reaction occurs two-thirds of the way through: as in the novel, Opal believes that her father killed Taylor Henry (Ray Milland). In the back of a taxi, Beaumont explains to her why he is protecting Madvig: “That guy could never kill anyone. He’s all heart.” In Beaumont’s faraway, tear-filled eyes, Opal sees his love for Paul. This provides the key revelation for the audience: Beaumont’s openness and sentiment in response to Madvig represent the basis of goodness in the world of the film, the reason that Opal falls in love with him. In this version, Beaumont, a surrogate son to Madvig, ends up paired with his daughter. The simplified story of the film enhances the importance of its fewer characters—and thus of its stars—part of the shift from a focus on the

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political machine to a story about individuals. The power of the political organization and of the boss are also reduced relative to the press; public opinion is now being mediated by news rather than in retail interactions typical of machine politics. By removing the sociopolitical background and emphasizing the sentimental, the film converts Hammett’s hard-­ boiled social allegory into something reassuring. The three classes in the novel are reduced to two, a fading WASP elite and the people, united by a vague quality of goodness. With political intrigue reduced, emphasis from the beginning falls on the social-climbing aspect of Madvig’s interest in the Senator, and significantly, when the Henry family falls, the “honest” candidate who replaces him has the Irish surname Doherty, marking him as one of the people. Ethnicity is deliberately minimized in the 1935 film, especially through the casting, an ethnic scrubbing typical of Hollywood in the mid-thirties. In an industry where immigrants played such an important role, as Ella Shohat has pointed out, filmmakers’ “agility in expressing, and more often repressing and sublimating America’s multiethnic dimension offers a barometer for the sociopolitical context within which these images were produced.”14 Sound had made accents difficult to ignore, especially in the cycle of films most famously represented by Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932). If this version of The Glass Key is not a gangster film, it is a near cousin, and the casting of George Raft, a veteran of gangster roles such as Guino Rinaldo in Scarface, encouraged viewers to imagine a past for Beaumont that is not supplied in the film.15 Yet the casting of George Raft also allowed the producers to have their gangster in assimilated form. As Rinaldo in Scarface, he contrasted starkly with a heavily accented Tony Carmonte (Paul Muni)—the accentless Rinaldo manages to be both ethnic and assimilated.16 In The Glass Key, Edward Arnold, without a hint of immigrant ethnicity, brought with him a history of roles representing the rich and powerful, which supports Madvig’s being firmly positioned here as a member of the establishment.17 Casting Robert Gleckler as O’Rory completed the job of eliminating the ethnic allegory. In fact, all of the white male characters look like successful businessmen, speaking without a trace of a foreign accent in standard English at a time when vernacular speech was a way of coding the ethnic. Two African Americans in the film—a gentle doorman at Madvig’s Voter’s League headquarters (George Reed) and a singer (Herbert Evans) in a bar—are carefully placed on either side of what in the novel was ethnic rivalry. The only other group given separate treatment in the film is the

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normative, and therefore ethnically invisible, WASP Henrys, marked for extinction and excluded from the Madvig family as definitively as are the criminals. Minimizing references to ethnicity—remarkable when the Tammany Hall system was notoriously dependent on immigrant ghettos—reinforced the effects of Jason Joy’s elimination of politics, further removing motivation for the conflicts among the characters. Yet the film requires conflict: Frank Tuttle seems to have tried to compensate for this by creating tension, and even violence, through his mise-en-scène. He creates visual barriers between Madvig and Janet to compensate for less confrontational dialogue. Following up on hints from Hammett’s language in the novel, he introduces heavy shadows more common to film noir, as during one conversation between Beaumont and Madvig where their unexpressed thoughts seem projected as dueling shadows on the bare wall behind them. Furthermore, a theme of imprisonment throughout the film is represented in a grid of shadows cast over the characters, first when Beaumont is held by O’Rory’s thugs, then when Opal, described by Janet as “a prisoner,” climbs stairs between a railing and shadows of the balusters projected on the wall. Finally, in a scene in the District Attorney’s office where Madvig is still under suspicion, a medium shot shows Madvig visually imprisoned by a grid of shadows, until the Senator confesses and the bars fade and disappear. Mark Winokur has argued that where ethnicity as an evident element of the social dynamic is repressed, we should expect “a displacement of ethnic tension onto other issues that allow these tensions to emerge in disguised form.”18 Such a displacement is most obvious here in the killing of O’Rory who, even after having been stripped of his markings as immigrant upstart, is treated as a scapegoat. In one sense, O’Rory’s killing is a vestige of the novel that was seen as complying with the Production Code Administration (PCA) rule that murder must not go unpunished.19 Yet the film ultimately concentrates, and still manifests in disguised form, what the PCA found unacceptable in the source material, ethnicity in relation to politics, and sex. The principal sex scene in the novel is Beaumont’s seduction of the wife of the newspaper publisher, excised from the narrative of this film. The only other encounter exhibiting sexual tension is that between Beaumont and Jeff (Guinn Williams), who in the novel looks on Beaumont as a perfect sadomasochistic partner: Jeff calls Beaumont a “tough baby” who likes to be beaten, saying, “I never seen a guy that liked being hit so much or that I liked hitting so much.”20 He also calls

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Beaumont a “massacrist,” inadvertently combining “Christ” and “masochist,” and when Beaumont encounters him while pursuing O’Rory, Jeff announces to the men in the bar: “Excuse us gents, but we have to go up and rehearse our act, me and my sweetheart.”21 The scene is important in all versions of The Glass Key, worth emphasizing because homosexuality is foregrounded in the Coen Brothers’ film. In the 1935 version, even with the hints of brutality to come, the relationship is at first played as comedy. Jeff calls Beaumont “Cuddles,” which draws a laugh. Shortly thereafter when Jeff strangles O’Rory under Beaumont’s steady gaze, however, there is no hint of humor, rather the moment conflates the repressed sexual tensions with those of the film’s ethnic cleansing. A bare bulb under a shade is set swinging as Jeff grabs O’Rory and the line of darkness swings just to Beaumont’s eyes as he coldly watches the murder. Especially in the 1935 version, this degree of violence confronts the Pollyanna storyline in a film that otherwise eliminates ethnic, class, and sexual material. In the allegory of Americanization in the novel, the killing of O’Rory is a performance of “assimilation,” an acting-out of the expulsion of ethnicity itself through the elimination of the only character openly marked as ethnic. In this adaptation, the scene’s visual expressionism becomes, in Winokur’s terms, a displacement or release of tensions that could not be permitted more direct statement through the events and dialogue. But the scene is jarring; it intrudes as “visual and narrative incoherence,” which, as Ruth Vasey has argued, often resulted from film industry censorship.22 Beaumont’s cold brutality here, true to the novel, cannot be squared with his sentimental goodness as he wins Opal’s heart. If the adaptation of the 1935 film turned on reducing the social and political content of the novel, the 1942 film was shaped first and foremost by Paramount’s interest in promoting Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd as a romantic screen couple.23 The new production relied heavily on the studio’s earlier script, but the Ladd/Lake emphasis is set up by a new opening scene that confirms with a single gesture that, as in the earlier film, all motivation will be personal. When Madvig (Brian Donlevy) enters his campaign headquarters in a hotel lobby, loudly insulting Senator Henry (Moroni Olsen), he is slapped by a woman in the crowd who turns out to be the Senator’s daughter, Janet. This slap has the magical power of making Madvig fall in love with her, which in turn motivates his political shift to support Senator Henry. Beaumont will yield to Janet’s charms more gradually. To the exclusion of almost everything else, the relationship

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between Beaumont and Janet is developed persistently over seven scenes throughout this film, from their first introduction when Beaumont and Janet size each other up as people who understand more than those around them, through a tug of war in which Janet declares her liking for Beaumont while he resists, until the final moment in which Madvig realizes that they are in love and gives Beaumont permission to pursue the relationship. One aspect of Hammett’s novel that reappears in the 1942 version is the ethnic allegory.24 Here, Janet, Taylor (Richard Denning), and Senator Henry (Moroni Olsen) remain the WASP elite, and the actors look the part. The main coding of Madvig as ethnic or immigrant is simply his identification with the political machine and crime, and his heavy reliance on vernacular speech.25 Casting is important, as usual: Brian Donlevy typically played energetic tough guys of indeterminate ethnicity; his most significant part with respect to The Glass Key was as Dan McGinty in Preston Sturges’s The Great McGinty (1940), a role that cast him as a pawn for a Tammany-style political machine that over the course of the film helps him rise from a ballot box stuffer to a governor elected on a “reform” ticket. Donlevy’s progression from McGinty to Madvig is nearly seamless. In the 1942 version, the ethnic gangster is newly emphasized, but the Irish American gangster of Hammett’s novel and the earlier film now becomes Italian, in Madvig’s derisive term, a “spaghetti bender.” Varna is played by the Maltese actor Giuseppe Maria Spurrin-Calleja, better known as Joseph Calleia,26 but the point is that he is “foreign.”27 Transforming O’Rory and his light brogue into the dark-haired Varna with a thick accent adds visual and auditory confirmation of his status as a recent and identifiable immigrant. This film, then, presents an Italian gangster confronting a more assimilated Irishman (with a Danish name) who seeks to marry the daughter of the WASP king. As in Hammett’s novel, Taylor Henry stands for the degeneration of the line and of the WASP elite’s hold on power. Furthermore, the women in the film reflect the WASP-to-Italian spectrum of Senator Henry to Varna: in this black-and-white film, Janet’s hair is Lake’s almost silvery blond, while Opal’s hair and that of Eloise Matthews is darker, more like Paul’s. The color-coding is complete when we add the black-haired nurse (Frances Gifford) with whom Beaumont flirts in the hospital, who, while attractive, is of the working class. The African-­ American entertainer (Lillian Randolph, uncredited), outside the spectrum of women Beaumont encounters directly, must be seen as either entirely marginal or at least a step farther away from blondness than the

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dark-haired nurse.28 As in the novel, only Beaumont, because of his perfect assimilation, can carry off the blonde princess. Again, I dwell so much on the theme of ethnicity because it is central to Miller’s Crossing.

Miller’s Crossing Hammett was revered in the 1980s when Miller’s Crossing was conceived, even if he was seen as a figure of the past. The 1930 publication of The Maltese Falcon established him as an initiator of the hard-boiled detective genre, and John Huston’s beloved 1942 film version starring Humphrey Bogart, the third adaptation of the novel, assured that Hammett would be seen as a progenitor of neo-noir films of the 1970s and 1980s. In the decades after he stopped writing and well into the 1950s, Hammett was kept in the public eye by radio and television series based on characters from The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon.29 He also became prominent for political activism: he was imprisoned in 1951 for refusing to testify as a trustee of a bail fund for the Civil Rights Congress, declared a subversive organization, his arrest captured in a full-length photo on the front page of the New  York Times.30 Hammett later refused to answer questions before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Investigation Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations.31 Because of his long relationship with Lillian Hellman, furthermore, his reputation remained intertwined with her very public life as she was first branded an unrepentant Stalinist, then celebrated by feminists for her success as a playwright with works such as The Children’s Hour (1934).32 So Hammett was far from forgotten, but he was seen as someone to memorialize. He received this treatment in Hellman’s memoirs—the last section of her best-selling An Unfinished Woman (1969) was devoted to him—and in Fred Zinnemann’s film Julia (1977), based on Hellman’s 1973 Pentimento.33 Indicative of his standing in the 197Os is a novel entitled Hammett by Joe Gores, an homage that conflates Hammett the celebrity author, who had been a Pinkerton detective before becoming a writer, with his most famous creations. The novel was in turn produced as a film (released in 1982) by Francis Ford Coppola, at the peak of his fame, who hired New German Cinema director Wim Wenders to direct it.34 This is the context in which Miller’s Crossing was developed, in full awareness of all of Hammett’s writing and the films made from it, an awareness which includes the underlying relationship of the books to Prohibition gang violence of the 1920s.

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The failure to credit Hammett and The Glass Key as sources would be more puzzling if the Coen Brothers’ entire project were not about emphasizing what had been at once unstated and fundamental.35 The multi-­ layered nature of Miller’s Crossing made it a difficult film for audiences. The Coen Brothers had a bigger budget for this film than they had had previously—the box office success of Raising Arizona allowed them to raise $14 million from Twentieth Century-Fox based on a “two-line pitch.”36 But the film was a financial disappointment, taking in only $4.7 million (Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas earned ten times as much the same year),37 and reviews point to its complicated intertextuality as the reason for the film’s cool reception. Vincent Canby wrote that “Miller’s Crossing wants to be both fun for the uninitiated and for those who are hip to the conventions of the genre that is being recalled.”38 Roger Ebert suggested that “it [was] most likely to be appreciated by movie lovers who [would] enjoy its resonance with films of the past.”39 Gary Giddins was less generous. He argued that “Joel and Ethan Coen may represent the apotheosis of classroom cinema. [Miller’s Crossing is] so clever about its sources … that it has little life of its own.”40 Set around 1930, Miller’s Crossing recounts the story of The Glass Key but with the pieces of the puzzle rearranged and characters assigned somewhat different values. The main figures are still the political fixer, the boss, the gangster who challenges the boss, and a woman, love for whom distracts the boss from conducting his affairs with his customary ruthless efficiency. But the social pyramid from The Glass Key has been inverted, which brings about other changes. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) is the fixer for political boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney). But whereas in the earlier versions Madvig falls for Janet Henry, in social terms trying to marry up, here Leo falls for Verna, the sister of Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a bookie derived from Hammett’s Bernie Despain. Johnny Caspero (Jon Polito), an Italian gangster and rising rival of the Leo/ Madvig character (as in the 1942 film version), wants to kill Bernbaum for cheating him, echoing Beaumont’s beef with Despain in The Glass Key. But because of Verna, Leo protects Bernie—rather than Madvig protecting Senator Henry—thus producing the confrontation between the rising gangster and the boss like that between O’Rory and Madvig. As in all earlier versions, the fixer, here Reagan, tries to infiltrate the camp of their adversary, here Johnny Casper, and he is caught. In this narrative, Tom Reagan and Verna sleep together, setting up a Reagan/Verna/Leo love triangle comparable to that of Beaumont/Janet/Madvig. In this film,

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however, there are no fewer than three love triangles. A second is formed by Bernie, who sleeps with Mink (Steve Buscemi), who is also the lover of Johnny Caspar’s henchman, The Dane (J.E. Freeman). The third triangle is that of Verna, her brother Bernie, and Reagan—to Verna’s suggestion that the three of them leave town together, Reagan quips sarcastically, “Where would we go, Niagara Falls?” The opposite of Hammett’s novel, this film concludes with Verna spurning Reagan rather than walk away from the boss, Leo, whom she embraces. As for Madvig in all versions of The Glass Key, behavior that is predictable on the basis of greed and other forms of self-interest is redirected by desire, or as Reagan voices explicitly to Johnny Caspar, “there’s always that wild card when love is involved.” Hammett’s characters are redesigned for Miller’s Crossing in ways that replicate, alter, and comment on the originals. Caspar, for example, is still the gangster who challenges the boss, but now, ironically, he harps on “ethics.” Leo is still the object of affection—as in the 1935 film—because he has, as Verna tells Reagan, “a big heart.” As mentioned earlier, Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing is an elaboration of Bernie Despain, who in the novel had a significant role in running off with Beaumont’s winnings and thus allowing Hammett to establish important aspects of Beaumont’s character, his intelligence and force of will. The chapter devoted to the pursuit of Bernie Despain is entitled “The Hat Trick,” the unexplained point of origin for the many hat references in Miller’s Crossing. Yet Bernie Birnbaum also parallels the role of a character named Sloss, the missing witness in The Glass Key films who was named after another minor figure in the novel. Everything and everyone is recognizable, yet all are changed; the Coen Brothers had no reason to redeploy these characters except for the playful enjoyment of opening up the text to include earlier ones. Tom Reagan in the Beaumont role is the most complicated character. The Coens’ working title for the film was “The Bighead,” their nickname for Reagan,41 and, like Ned Beaumont, he is smarter than everyone else. The word he is most associated with is honesty, and throughout the film he tells people difficult truths they don’t want to recognize, such as informing Verna that her brother Bernie does not deserve her support and telling Leo that Verna is unfaithful. Based on a lucid evaluation of evidence and probabilities, he tells Leo that protecting Bernie is a “bad play” because it will erode his power. At another point he insists that people should only do things when they have a “reason.” Reagan and Bernie discuss their reasons in terms of selfish motivation, without malice toward those who inadvertently suffer the consequences. Thus, Reagan has “no

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hard feelings” when he is beaten up for failing to pay his gambling debts. But Reagan’s behavior ultimately has no rational goal and he frequently lies to Caspar and to Verna, who at the end claims that lying rather than honesty defines him, as does, in contrast to Leo, his absence of a heart. Key scenes from Hammett’s narrative and the earlier films are reworked with layers of reference and revision, especially those in which O’Rory confronts Madvig, Beaumont’s meeting with O’Rory after pretending to break with Madvig, and the “kiss-off,” the definitive break with Madvig over the issue of trust. The scene where Reagan approaches Caspar after breaking with Leo is a good example of how the Coen Brothers transform the material. In The Glass Key, O’Rory offers to set Beaumont up with his own gambling casino for changing sides. In Miller’s Crossing, the money is specifically to pay off gambling debts and the cooperation begins with turning Bernie Bernbaum over to Caspar. As in Hammett’s novel, Caspar offers a deal. Reagan seems to play along, learns what he can, then refuses to cooperate. For this he is beaten. But unlike all versions of The Glass Key in which Beaumont is held and tortured for days, in Miller’s Crossing Reagan is rescued almost immediately by a police raid. The Coens pass up what the earlier filmmakers took as a prime opportunity for violent spectacle, replacing that with one when Leo is attacked and displays his prowess with a Thompson machine gun. Meanwhile, the chair that fragments when Reagan hits the oversized Frankie (Mike Starr) before being quickly subdued by the much smaller Tic-Tac (Al Mancini) is a playful reference to the chair in the novel and earlier movies that Jeff effortlessly rips apart with his hands. Here, the chair is used to highlight the comic odd-couple of thugs, adding yet another reversal of events from The Glass Key: just as the big man is not tough, and the imprisonment of Reagan will not lead to a harsh beating, The Dane (in Jeff’s role) will not kill his boss. The way the police submerge Reagan in water directly references Jeff’s method of bringing Beaumont around for more interrogation in the earlier versions. In the novel, Beaumont uses Jeff to kill O’Rory (Varna in 1942) then turns him over to the police for trial and, we can assume, execution. Since in Miller’s Crossing the torture does not occur, the revenge scene is also reconfigured: Reagan sets up Bernie to kill Caspar, then personally executes Bernie for his earlier double-cross. In Miller’s Crossing the cops ask Reagan if he wants to “scrap a knuckle” on the thugs; but “skin a knuckle” is a phrase given to Jeff in the novel and in the earlier films. This kind of verbal echo, insistent and unnecessary to the story, helps interweave the narrative and visual citations of earlier material into this film. Some are

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used as they were in the novel, such as Beaumont’s line, “How far has this dizzy blond daughter of his got her hooks into you?” which becomes Reagan’s, “How far has she got her hooks into you?” Beaumont’s “as far as I’m concerned we’re quits” becomes Reagan’s “We’re quits as far as I’m concerned.” But many phrases are inserted in significantly different contexts. When Leo says, “Call me a big-hearted slob,” he is echoing the thug Jeff’s phrase in the novel, “I’m just a good-natured slob,” uttered after strangling O’Rory and memorably delivered by both Guinn Williams in the 1935 version and by William Bendix in the 1942 version. Delivered by Leo, the similar line focuses our attention on characteristics Leo shares with Jeff in the earlier versions: physical power and limited intelligence. O’Doole in Miller’s Crossing, the anxious police chief modeled on District Attorney Farr—especially as performed by Donald MacBride in the 1942 film—becomes the target of a line originally thrown by Madvig at Beaumont: “Don’t anything ever suit you?” In the revenge scene in the films and novel, which occurs in Hammett’s chapter “The Heels,” Jeff refers to Beaumont and O’Rory/Varna as “a couple of heels.” In Miller’s Crossing, Verna says to Reagan, “We’re a couple of heels” when she is apparently contrite at her betrayal of Leo with Regan, or at least chagrinned at losing Leo. The line given Casper, “Just me, Mink, and my friend Roscoe,” mixes Jeff’s reference to a gun as a “Roscoe” with his comment to Beaumont—in the films only—that his secret concerning who killed Sloss is between “me and Shad [in the 1935 film] and the lamppost.” The Dane’s reference to Reagan as “little Miss Punching Bag” is similar to Jeff’s comments to Beaumont but The Dane’s contempt in feminizing Reagan contrasts with Jeff’s sadomasochistic pleasure in feminizing Beaumont as his “sweetheart.” As Sabine Horst notes, Reagan’s “’Lo Shad” on the telephone with the police is a Beaumont mannerism.42 Yet in allocating “Shad,” the first name of the Irish gangster in the novel and in the 1935 film, to a cop, the Coens encourage us to reflect on the relationship between gangsters and the police. Of course, this conversation, in which Reagan has taken the receiver from Verna who has called the police, also recalls The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), in which Vivian Sternwood (Lauren Bacall) calls and then hands the telephone to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart). As The Big Sleep reference suggests, Miller’s Crossing’s practice of citation goes beyond the The Glass Key novel, and the 1935 and 1942 films, beyond other Hammett writings, to the gangster film genre and especially The Godfather (1972).43 Nothing exemplifies its complicated referencing

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of other texts better than Miller’s Crossing’s opening scene, which replicates the crucial “Cyclone Shot” chapter of the novel while also offering, in Ronald Bergan’s words, “a pastiche of the opening monologue of The Godfather.”44 In that film, the camera shows the undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) facing the camera, light reflecting off his bald pate and highlighting the tips of his white shirt collar and cuffs, the camera ever so slowly pulling back until Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) begins to be seen at the edge of the frame. In Miller’s Crossing, during his interview with Leo, the Irish godfather, Caspar is in the spotlight, bald pate gleaming, but the camera movement is reversed—instead of pulling back, it moves forward from a medium shot until Caspar’s animated face crowds the frame (Fig.  8.1). The stylistic contrast between Miller’s Crossing and The Godfather is as important as the scene’s similarities, of course, but there are numerous other elements of Coppola’s film that allow the Coen Brothers to triangulate among it, their own film, and the various versions of The Glass Key. Tom Reagan is cold and calculating like Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), for example, and his name echoes that of Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Don Vito’s consigliere in The Godfather; but beyond these and the gangster element, especially important is the attention to ethnicity and assimilation, made explicit in the scene where Don Vito Corleone expresses his regrets that his plan for

Fig. 8.1  Johnny Caspar: Mimicking The Godfather (1972)

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Michael to become a senator or governor has failed. Citing the opening scene of The Godfather highlights a crucial intent of Miller’s Crossing, to turn The Glass Key inside out by bringing to the foreground elements that Hammett and the early versions of The Glass Key had left in the background: the gangster elements, ethnicity, and sex. Ethnicity in Miller’s Crossing represents the film’s most profound engagement with Hammett’s novel and the two earlier films. Whereas Hammett’s critique of society, explicit and implicit, was contemporary, the Coen Brothers place their viewers in the comfortable—or, more likely, uncomfortable—position of judging that world through a post-civil rights era lens in a time in which concepts of multiculturalism have challenged assumptions of the rightness of assimilation, the melting pot, as a national ideology. With the passage of time, ethnic bigotry that once passed as normal or invisible now leaps to the eye and ear, while at the same time the ethnic difference that it signals is no longer assumed to be something that should be stamped out. Recognizing this, the Coen Brothers have Leo refer to Johnny Caspar as “the Guinea,” “the Itai,” and “that dago.” Caspar refers to Tom Reagan as a “potato eater,” as does The Dane, whose surname refers to his ethnicity. Bernie Bernbaum is nicknamed “the Schmatta Kid,” or just “Schmatta,” and is variously referred to as “sheeny,” “Hebrew,” and “hymie,” while Tom Reagan tells Verna that if he had known they were going to cast their feelings into words, he would have “memorized the ‘Song of Solomon.’” But the definition of their characters as ethnic grotesques goes well beyond derogatory verbal stereotyping. Miller’s Crossing follows the 1942 film in adopting the stereotypical Italian gangster rather than the Irish O’Rory of Hammett’s novel, though as we have seen, Leo, the Irish boss, is clearly developed out of the Irish gangster. Leo and Reagan were originally conceived as assimilated Irish Americans, apparently, offering the layers of progressive assimilation that we find in Hammett and in The Glass Key (1942).45 But this layering is maintained instead by the relative exaggeration of Jon Polito’s playing of Johnny “Casparo,” with his spoiled son and an overfed, operatic wife who speaks volubly in Italian. The Coens, Jewish themselves, are as comfortable magnifying Jewish stereotypes— both Bernie and Verna—as they are with the Italians and the Irish.46 In Bergan’s words, “The Irish and Italians don’t come out too well, both being equally corrupt. The Jews, as represented by Bernie Bernbaum, come off worse.”47 Instead of the novel’s use of stereotypes as a shorthand to provide a social background, Miller’s Crossing pushes Bernie’s character

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to that of an extreme outsider, because of his ethnicity, but also as part of the homosexual love triangle with The Dane and Mink. The already exaggerated ethnic coding is then pushed to a further extreme by Carter Burwell’s musical score, most obviously in the maudlin rendition of “Danny Boy” to accompany Leo’s triumphant performance with the machine gun. “Danny Boy” was in place from early in the project, but Gabriel Byrne recommended some of the songs Burwell would ultimately use. “When we were finishing the movie we started listening to a lot of Irish music,” Ethan Coen noted in an interview. “The song on which Carter Burwell based the main theme is an old ballad suggested by Gabriel … called ‘Come Back to Erin.’”48 This is complemented by the singing in Italian during the Miller’s Crossing sequence. The performance of “Danny Boy” by Irish tenor Frank Patterson was “paced to fit the finished scene.” Patterson “was able to watch the action and match the rhythm of his vocal to the unfolding violence.”49 The result is that the music in the film comes to the fore, as in a music video, rather than being relegated to the background as is the theme of ethnicity itself in The Glass Key. Byrne reports Ethan Coen saying that he and Joel “got mugged by the whole Irish concept,” but this statement must be understood in the context of a film based on a book and earlier adaptations that already revolved around the issue of ethnic stratification. Sex, like ethnicity, is pulled from the background in The Glass Key to the foreground in Miller’s Crossing, developing ambiguities that include queer and straight readings of the film. In Hammett’s novel, the attraction between Beaumont and Janet is so understated that their going away together at the end almost comes as a surprise; their relationship is finally solidified by a very rational pact without a hint of sexual passion. This plays out in Miller’s Crossing as the voracious coupling of Reagan and Verna, in contrast to Leo’s prudish modesty. The Coen Brothers address the Jeff/ Beaumont relationship, which reaches its climax when Jeff strangles O’Rory while his eyes are fixed on Beaumont, by making the equally brutal Dane openly homosexual, and his relations with Mink and Bernie a central plot element. Furthermore, there is what we might call the central “bromance” between Madvig and Beaumont, which over the course of Hammett’s novel gives way to Beaumont’s pairing with Janet. The Coens take up this ambiguity, not only with the suggestion that Verna and Reagan are competing for Leo’s affection, but through Albert Finney’s performance in

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Fig. 8.2  Leo begs Tom to Stay

the last scene dramatizing Leo’s anguish just after he has told Reagan that he and Verna are getting married (Fig. 8.2). Leo pleads, “Jesus, Tom, I’d do anything if you’d work for me again…. I need you, and things can be the way they were.” When Reagan refuses Leo’s forgiveness, Leo’s face shows an extraordinary sense of loss. In Erica Rowell’s words, “As with so much in the film, there is a straight way to read things and a ‘queer’ way,” but the Coens, deliberate in their play with gender roles, retain an ambiguity from the Madvig/Beaumont relationship in that between Leo and Reagan.50 The difference between Janet Henry in the novel and earlier films and Verna in Miller’s Crossing helps us understand the ways in which the Coens have turned the allegory of The Glass Key inside out. Janet is blond, a member of the WASP elite, her mind rather than her physical presence capable of challenging Beaumont’s; by contrast, Verna is dark, coded as ethnic, and physically aggressive, either in a fight or in bed. Hammett portrays Janet as redeemable in spite of her class position because she is genuinely superior—she has the intelligence and beauty to match Beaumont’s. Verna is believed by everyone except Leo to be a treacherous whore, potentially a femme fatale. Yet here, too, there is ambiguity: little evidence is offered to show that Verna is not what she pretends to be, a woman concerned about her brother who finds Leo’s honesty and good

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heart attractive. Reagan’s belief that she shot Rug Daniels (Salvatore H. Tornabene) turns out to be unfounded, and The Dane’s labeling Verna a whore seems a product of his hatred of all women. Her concern for Bernie is genuine, and when she comes to see Reagan after Leo has broken with her, Verna is crestfallen—nothing in her manner suggests a grifter looking for a new angle. Reagan is the one seeing an angle and taking it: he gets Verna to give him Bernie’s address, not in order to help Bernie but to resolve Leo’s problem by turning Bernie over to Caspar. Perhaps because as viewers we are under the spell of Reagan’s skepticism, we too are unable to get beyond the fiction he spins out of his own inner darkness, to see Verna for anything other than a grifter and whore. However we understand her, Verna is central to the allegory of Miller’s Crossing, which at its simplest is that of The Glass Key with the top layer eliminated: there is no longer a Senator Henry figure, no WASP elite. Instead Leo, the political boss, is at the top of the food chain. In this version, he is unquestionably Irish American, while the Beaumont figure is thoroughly Irish, foreign rather than entirely assimilated. The challenge to the boss’s power comes from an Italian racketeer, who in turn—adding a lower layer to the allegory in this case—is challenged by a bookmaker who is Jewish and homosexual. As the suppressed material from the novel and earlier films has now been emphasized by the Coen Brothers, however, the ethnic allegory has also been reformulated ironically to fit the times: Caspar with his “ethics,” rather than Reagan or Leo, is now the person trying to safeguard the values threatened by a changing world. Marriage, which so often sorts out Hollywood morality, is used in this instance for a comic inversion of Hammett’s paradigm: rather than using it as a strategy for upward mobility as Madvig does, Leo has fallen in love with the triple outcast, Verna. In place of Janet’s proposing to go off with Beaumont, Verna, rising above her family and ethnic ties, proposes marriage to Leo, just as Janet escaped her WASP background. In the Coen Brothers’ allegory, to use The Dane’s words, “Up is down, black is white.” The ethnic criminals, however—Italian and Jewish—are still purged from the story, as are the three figures who challenge the dominant heterosexual order. Untangling this allegory, we can see the difficulty of trying to narrowly articulate the meaning of the Coens’ film. It is the difficulty of postmodernism, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s phrase, “an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society.”51 In what sense are we to understand its re-­ creation of the past when so much about the film deliberately prevents us from accepting it, even as a nostalgia film? There is, for example, the

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exaggerated acting, which creates a sense of conspiratorial pretending; the obsession with costuming details, especially the men’s hats; music that washes the film in sentiment and helps further stylize its narration; and the aestheticism of Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography with its long lenses, static framing, and luxurious palette of carefully coordinated colors. Miller’s Crossing “doesn’t look like a gangster movie,” Roger Ebert wrote, “it looks like a commercial intended to look like a gangster movie.”52 Then there are the cameo appearances of director Sam Raimi, of actress Frances McDormand following her prominent roles in Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, and the name Lars Thorvald, a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), on a boxing poster in Drop Johnson’s room—all of these are a wink to the Coen Brothers’ knowing audience, not to mention cross-dressing extras in the women’s bathroom scene along with one of the film’s stars, Albert Finney, in a maid’s uniform. All these aspects contribute to a “depthlessness” and a “waning of affect” that in Frederic Jameson’s formulation characterize the postmodern, an extension of the film’s pastiche of other texts.53 “The fiction of the creating subject,” as Douglas Crimp wrote of Robert Rauschenberg’s use of reproduction and parody, “gives way to the frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity and presence … are undermined.”54 Rather than comment directly either on the earlier work or on society, this film will not “emit propositions,” to use Jameson’s phrase, or “have the appearance of making primary statements or of having positive (or affirmative) content.”55 From another perspective, however, Miller’s Crossing and other postmodern films do not so much reject reality as embrace the form of it in which we live now, that is to say one dominated by a profound skepticism that, in combination with metastasizing modes of communication, has transformed our experience from one rooted in materiality, to a view of the world as a flow of images of people and places, of historical and scientific information, and of representations of ideas and ideologies. The rich and puzzling experience, sometimes stimulating, sometimes short-­ circuiting emotion, of films such as Miller’s Crossing or Les Amants du Pont-Neuf offer direct experience of what is in fact an altered reality.

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Notes 1. Jameson, 20. Discussing the relationship of Body Heat with Double Indemnity (1944). 2. Internet Movie Data Base. 3. Palmer, 6. 4. Ibid., 160–161. 5. Interview, The Big Lebowski DVD, Universal Home Entertainment, 1998. 6. Smith’s career began in the streets of New York City’s Irish Fourth Ward, and even when he was Governor of New York the buzzwords “Tammany Hall” and “gang rule” linked him to the teeming immigrant city, a refrain taken up again by adversaries during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924 and when he became his party’s candidate against Herbert Hoover in 1928. Thus, the novel becomes a tale of ethnicity and immigration. In showing the competing forces that Beaumont must navigate, Hammett constructs an allegory of successive waves of immigration, each ethnic group competing with those that preceded it. 7. Vivian Sobchack, “Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity.” In Friedman, 329. 8. Ella Shohat, “Ethnicities in Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of American Cinema.” In Friedman, 234. 9. Hammett, The Glass Key, 171. 10. For a very different reading of Beaumont’s liaison with Janet, see Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled American Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. 122. 11. Letter from B. P. Schulberg to Jason Joy, March 24, 1931. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter MHL). 12. “Col. Joy’s Resume” of the meeting with Lloyd Sheldon and Bartlett Cormack, March 25. 1931. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL. 13. “By looking over the file,” a 1934 review of the screenplay under Joseph Breen states, “you will see that they have gone a long way themselves to change the picture from the condition which earned Col. Joy’s condemnation three years ago.” Memorandum from Stewart to Dr. Wingate, December 20, 1934. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL. 14. Shohat, 218. 15. Raft’s reputation included real-world underworld connections. Materials in Paramount’s pressbook for The Glass Key not only recommend that Raft’s reputation be at the center of promotions for the film, but that they

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s­pecifically mention his role in Scarface. (The Glass Key production file, MHL.) Raft’s role here has close parallels with that of Rinaldo as Tony Camonte’s (Paul Muni) sidekick. 16. The violent, antisocial figure of the ethnically identified gangster attracted attacks not only from nativist Protestants, but also from immigrant Catholics and audiences in foreign markets, an important source of film industry revenue (Munby, 105). Stories that dealt with ethnic bigotry were censored wherever raising the issue was seen as “provocative and inflammatory” (Vesey, 137). “Industry policy” led to blurring the ethnicity: “‘Foreignness’ became less clearly associated with particular ethnic and national groups… so that specific interest groups could find fewer grounds for complaint” (Vesey, 101 and 108). 17. Arnold cannot be disentangled from his screen history of playing the rich and/or powerful. A comic version can be seen in Mae West’s I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) where he plays Big Bill Barton, or his role as a financier in Thirty Day Princess (Marion Gering, 1935). Dramatic embodiments include alcoholic millionaire Jack Brennan in Sadie McKee (Clarence Brown, 1934), the Secretary of War in The President Vanishes (William Wellman, 1934), and, immediately before The Glass Key, King Louis XIII of France in Cardinal Richelieu (Rowland V. Lee, 1935), 26. 18. Winokur, 4. 19. Letter from Joseph Breen to John Hammell of Paramount Studios, May 9, 1935. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL. 20. Hammett, The Glass Key, 91. 21. Ibid., 185–186. 22. 128. 23. Veronica Lake was seen as a rising star on the slender basis of two films, most importantly Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941). But on the set of This Gun for Hire (Tuttle, 1942), in production when The Glass Key was being cast, the chemistry between Lake and Ladd was recognized. Paramount wanted to promote Ladd as romantic lead, so in this version of The Glass Key, Beaumont is represented as a prize catch. 24. This was possible because the PCA, under pressure of an antitrust suit filed, was narrowing the scope of its censorship. As Richard Maltby writes, “The affairs of the late 1930s suggested that mechanisms for the control of content had become too extensive… The censorship of the movies—as opposed to the movie content—was in danger of becoming the issue.” 36. 25. In The Great McGinty, the political boss coded as ethnic is played by the Armenian actor Akim Tamiroff with a vaguely Russian accent. The boss takes a liking to McGinty because he recognizes himself in McGinty’s tough insubordinate way of being. “He thinks he’s me!” the boss pro-

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claims, and in The Glass Key, Donlevy has indeed become the boss, though he is more assimilated than Tamiroff’s portrayal. Released by Paramount on August 23, 1940, The Great McGinty would inevitably have come to mind for studio executives and with regular moviegoers considering The Glass Key. 26. Calleia was well established with audiences as both a gangster and a foreigner. John T.  McManus had described him in a review of Tough Guy (Chester M. Franklin, 1936) as “probably our favorite public enemy” (44). Varna in The Glass Key is a direct continuation of Calleia’s role as Italian gangster Eddie Fuseli in Golden Boy (1939). 27. See Vesey. In Munby’s words, “For the gangster to be recognizable as such, he must be specifically demarked as an ‘ethnic’ outsider (which, in this context connoted someone of Irish, Southern or Eastern European, Catholic or Jewish stock)” (43). 28. The PCA made a point of telling Paramount not to present Randolph surrounded by white men (Letter to Luigi Luraschi, February 6, 1942). Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL. 29. The Adventures of Sam Spade and The Fat Man radio series were broadcast from 1946 to 1951, the second inspiring a movie, The Fat Man (William Castle, 1951). The Adventures of the Thin Man radio series was broadcast from 1941 to 1950, followed by seventy-two episodes of a television series, The Thin Man, aired from 1957 to 1959, starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk as Nick and Nora Charles. 30. July 10, 1951. 31. This time he was not imprisoned, but, according to the New York Times obituary eight years later, “Hammett’s novels were plucked from the shelves of seventy-three of the 189 American libraries overseas as a result of State Department confidential directives, based largely on testimony before the McCarthy Committee” (January 11, 1961). 32. See Kessler-Harris, especially 244–249. Hellman credited Hammett for giving her the subject of The Children’s Hour and for mentoring her through the play’s writing. The last section of her best-selling memoir, An Unfinished Woman (1969), was a celebration of Hammett, and the chapter entitled “Julia” from Pentimento (1977) was made into a successful film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda; Jason Robards won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Hammett. 33. Pentimento and Hellman herself achieved additional notoriety when the character of Julia was discovered to have been invented rather than remembered.

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34. The film goes even further than Gores in using the author’s fiction to animate his biography, citing aspects of Hammett’s Pinkerton apprenticeship while creating scenes that evoke The Glass Key (in which the fictional Hammett’s imprisonment replays Beaumont’s) and The Maltese Falcon (a fat man á la Gutman appears and the fictional Hammett’s hands shake like Bogart’s in the 1941 film). The sense of the film’s memorializing a lost past is underscored by its use of old Hollywood faces: Sylvia Sidney, Samuel Fuller, Hank Worden, and especially Elisha Cook Jr., Gutman’s “gunsel” in The Maltese Falcon who now, forty years later, plays Hammett’s taxidriving sidekick; referring indirectly to Hammett’s politics, he explains himself as “an anarchist with syndicalist tendencies.” 35. One reviewer wrote that the Coen Brothers were lucky not to have been sued by Hammett’s estate. John Harkness, Sight and Sound (Winter 1990–1991), cited by Horst, 96. 36. Robson, 72. 37. Ibid., 81. 38. New York Times, September 21, 1990. 39. Chicago Sun-Times, October 5, 1990. 40. Village Voice, September 25, 1990. 41. Robson, 68. 42. 98. 43. Miller’s Crossing’s final farewell scene, set in a cemetery, for example, transforms a scene from the 1942 film where they gather to bury Janet Henry’s beloved brother and Opal Madvig denies her own brother the opportunity to take her home; in Miller’s Crossing they are burying Verna’s brother, and Verna takes the car, making the men walk home. And the slap that sets off Madvig’s love for Janet in the 1942 film is parodied in Miller’s Crossing when Verna punches Reagan, after which Reagan falls for Verna, losing her to Leo just as in the earlier film Madvig lost Janet to Beaumont. The raid on the Sons of Erin Social Club in Miller’s Crossing echoes Red Harvest, while also showing an awareness of films inspired by Red Harvest, Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), and especially A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), by copying the way members of the opposing gang are shot as they emerge from the burning building; in this instance the Coen Brothers emphasize the path that leads from Hammett to their film. 44. 120. 45. There are various accounts of how the Irish characters acquired accents, but all agree that Gabriel Byrne—born in Dublin with a mother from Galway, who claimed that he took his cue from the rhythm of the writing—suggested reading Reagan’s part with his Irish accent. “’We were skeptical,’ says Joel, ‘but we said fine, go ahead. He did it and we liked the way it sounded.’” (Robson, 70).

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46. An irony that would not be lost on the Coen Brothers is that John Turturro’s family roots are in Sicily and Puglia. Audiences for Miller’s Crossing when it was released in October 1990 would have associated him with the loudly bigoted Italian American Pino in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which had appeared to great acclaim in June 1989. Miller’s Crossing was filmed the following winter. 47. Robson, 78. 48. Ibid., 70. 49. Ibid., 88. 50. As Eddie Robson writes, “It’s worth considering that there is a possible gay subtext in the dynamic between Tom and Leo, a reading that has become popular with many Coen commentators” (94). This reading centers on the idea that Reagan expresses little passion for Verna and that it is jealousy of Verna’s closeness to Leo that drives Reagan to sleep with her. Rowell looks for evidence of Reagan’s passion for Leo in a dissolve from the blowing curtains at Verna’s place to those in Leo’s bedroom, where he is about to be attacked (84). By pushing a queer reading of the film to its limits, Rowell does us the service of testing conclusions that run the full gamut from the obviously valid to the highly speculative. 51. Hutcheon, 4. 52. Chicago Sun-Times, October 5, 1990. 53. Jameson, Postmodernism, 6, 10. 54. Hutcheon, 11. 55. 392.

Bibliography Bergan, Ronald. The Coen Brothers. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000. Friedman, Lester D. Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity in American Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. New York: Vintage, 1989. Horst, Sabine. “Miller’s Crossing.” In Joel and Ethan Coen. Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen. New York: Limelight Editions, 2001. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Kessler-Harris, Alice. A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. Mooney, William. Dashiell Hammett and the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

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Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Palmer, Barton. Joel and Ethan Coen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Robson, Eddie. Coen Brothers. London: Virgin, 2003. Rowell, Erica. The Brothers Grim: The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. Shohat, Ella. “Ethnicities in Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of American Cinema.” In Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity in American Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Sobchack, Vivian. “Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity.” In Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity in American Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Vesey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Winokur, Mark. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and 1930’s Hollywood Film Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 9

Citizen Kane (1941) and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013)

Baz Luhrmann’s work is marked by excess and pastiche to the extent that it borders on a caricature of postmodernism. One dimension of this is an obsessive, sometimes exhausting, practice of citation, often an outgrowth of his methodical research into his source materials. This habit of reference overlays a deep-seated tendency toward travesty that animates everything he does, while joined to these dimensions of his vision and characteristics of style is an embrace of myth and of music, including opera, in ways that reduce the role of narrative in his approach to recycling pre-existing materials. He takes up stories with a sense that they are archetypal and already known, highlighting commonalities by referentially superimposing one on another and riffing on them with the freedom of jazz, or hip hop, improvisation. Myth, for Luhrmann, includes that of the artist, so that—while embracing the importance of his design collaborator and wife, Catherine Martin, and a rhetoric of collective creation—Luhrmann foregrounds his own authorial persona, a practice which merges seamlessly with strategies of branding and publicity characteristic of the contemporary art market. This chapter will explore the multiplicities that make up Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013), ultimately to focus on Citizen Kane (1941) as one of the many precursor texts incorporated into the film’s rhetoric and creation of meaning. In order to arrive there, however, it is important to place The Great Gatsby in a context of Luhrmann’s earlier films, especially

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_9

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Romeo + Juliet (1996), and of Leonardo DiCaprio’s star persona, particularly as manifest in The Aviator (2004).

Baz Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain” Cinema Luhrmann came to consider his first three films, Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) as a trilogy developing his own characteristic mode of cinema. Strictly Ballroom first brought him to the world’s attention following a midnight screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the 45th Cannes Film Festival on May 10, 1992, that received a standing ovation. “Word-of-mouth reports spread like wildfire,” Pam Cook writes, which led to the low-budget film’s being sold for distribution in eighty-six countries and an eventual box-office gross of seventy million dollars worldwide.1 The film already exhibited many of the characteristics that would define Luhrmann’s work: simplified narrative, caricature, a foregrounding of performance, visual excess and reliance on music, with a theme of love in tension with structures of authority. Growing up over a gas station run by his father in rural New South Wales, Luhrmann himself had been a ballroom dancing champion, so he knew intimately the world he reinvented for the film. The Australian Dancing Federation as presented in Strictly Ballroom is already a travesty of weightier structures of government, and the individuals are cartoonish in style and behavior. While the European press, according to Luhrmann, referred to the look of his film as Felliniesque, he substitutes the phrase “Australian kitsch stylization,” adding: “It’s our style. It’s the way we tell.” So while the characters are grotesques, with a degree of difference in the case of the lead couple, Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) and Fran (Tara Morice), the caricature is softened with a sense of acceptance, as if this is simply the way life is. Luhrmann quotes advice given to him by the painter David Hockney that conveys Luhrmann’s sense of his style as a way of seeing rather than as a pointed critique: “Whatever you do, don’t judge the way you see it.”2 The story of Strictly Ballroom, sketched in broad strokes in the film, is that of a young man who does not want to dance the steps traditionally accepted in competition by the Dancing Federation. Scott is in rebellion against his mother (Pat Thomson) who is active in the Federation, and he receives support from a father (Barry Otto) whose talents were smothered years earlier when he too challenged tradition. Scott finds his true partner in Fran, a shy and disadvantaged dance student with parents linking her to more authentic Spanish folk dance traditions, represented by a pastiche of

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the Paso Doble as practiced by Fran’s authoritarian father (Antonio Vargas). Hers is an Ugly Duckling story, with a happy ending as the young people break free with Fran and Scott’s triumph in the dance competition, a victory for them and for the true and vital over everything false, debased, and conventional. None of this needs to be fully articulated in the film, however, because all is openly formulaic and clichéd; rather the film celebrates the readily recognizable tropes with color, movement, and music in a ritual of good feeling. Luhrmann’s style mediates the distance between send­up and embrace of a theatrical product constructed out of prefabricated materials. The film’s success launched Luhrmann’s personal image-­ building project in spectacular fashion. “He was in the process of making his own experience into a universal theme,” writes John Ryan; not only is Scott a competitive ballroom dancer as Luhrmann was, with respect to the Ugly Duckling paradigm, “there’s more than a skerrick of Fran in Luhrmann.”3 Strictly Ballroom was followed by Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann turning to Shakespeare perhaps because of his successful experience directing Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Australian Opera in 1993, a production that won the Critics’ Prize at the Edinburgh Festival the following year.4 Romeo + Juliet earned only grudging acceptance from many film reviewers, such as Janet Maslin at the New York Times, who while offering praise, described it as “an attempt to reinvent Romeo and Juliet in the hyperkinetic vocabulary of post-modern kitsch.”5 But the film remained at the top of US box-office charts for several weeks and earned $147  million worldwide, a commercial success by any measure, truly extraordinary for a Shakespeare film or any adaptation of a canonical literary work.6 Romeo + Juliet is particularly important here because it anticipates The Great Gatsby in three ways. First, it established the working relationship between Luhrmann and DiCaprio. DiCaprio was involved in the film’s development, traveling to Australia to rehearse and shoot scenes that Luhrmann could then use to assure financing for the production. Second, the film was a literary adaptation, based on one of the best-known titles of a uniquely famous author, its tragic love story attractive to young people and familiar to them from school classes. The Great Gatsby is a similar cultural touchstone, a clear, relatively simple text, appealing to youthful idealism, and required school reading.7 Finally, the film carried both DiCaprio and Luhrmann across the threshold to stardom. It is hardly surprising that following the failure of Australia in 2008, Luhrmann would seek to regain

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his career momentum by returning both to DiCaprio and to a canonical literary work. Romeo + Juliet moved beyond Strictly Ballroom, especially in its use of music and décor; in updating Shakespeare’s play, this film sheds any pretense of being bound to a narrow diegetic cohesion. Pam Cook describes the “hyperbolic” dimension of Luhrmann’s style,8 inspired by Shakespeare’s language, the sets and costumes working expressionistically and metaphorically. As we will see, Luhrmann approaches narratives with a sense that, wherever they are encountered, all are variations on simpler and more fundamental underlying “myths.” To this end, he emphasizes the fact that Romeo and Juliet is not itself an original, but rather is based on earlier narratives: Shakespeare “did not write Romeo and Juliet, he stole it, a long poem that was based on an Italian novella.”9 Yet Luhrmann’s film uses Shakespeare’s words, a practice, as Cook writes, that “both acknowledged the playwright’s prior authorship and displaced it by asserting the updated version’s innovative qualities.”10 As several reviewers noted, the dialogue is often overwhelmed in the pace, performance, setting, and the flow of images created by a moving camera and editing. Nonetheless, even if Shakespeare’s words come only occasionally into focus, the presence of this intact verbal text creates some sense of its inviolability, imported whole and maintaining its separate identity within the new theatrical show. Fitzgerald’s novel is treated with the same double sense of priority and displacement in the later film, which deploys Fitzgerald’s same few scenes and borrows eloquent phrases from key passages, while alternative versions of the underlying “myth” found in The Great Gatsby narrative are given equal authority with Fitzgerald’s. New in Romeo + Juliet was Luhrmann’s use of music, which breaks out of all constraints with respect to period and genre, as deliberately anachronistic as the costumes and staging. The music ranges from songs by British pop recording artist Des’Ree, to alternative rock bands like Garbage, One Inch Punch, Radiohead, and others, to a score of choral and orchestral pieces by Nellee Hooper, Craig Armstrong, and Marius de Vries. The songs not only set the tone for scenes, eliciting nostalgic sentiment directly, they also reference styles, periods, and social contexts outside the film. In this way music becomes a fundamental tool for opening up the narrative beyond any single period or location, so that the conceptual space of the film can include all elaborated, evoked, or referred-to fragments of additional storylines as part of the viewing experience.

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Spectacular theatrical set pieces, comparable to the dance performances in Strictly Ballroom, continue to be important in Romeo + Juliet, especially in a masked ball setting that provides a stage for a performance in drag by Mercutio (Harold Parrineau) that concludes, literally, with fireworks.11 Mercutio’s performance is merely one spectacle within a spectacle that is marked as such, but the entire scene of the masked ball, modeled on Fellini Satyricon (1969), looks forward to Gatsby’s parties. Romeo + Juliet as a whole emphasizes a sense of the histrionic, from the declarations of love to the fight scenes and Mercutio’s death; theatrical performance— broken by moments that suspend narrative movement altogether—overlays the exaggeration inherent in adolescent passion. In Luhrmann’s next film, Moulin Rouge!, the deliberate spectacle of theatrical performance in Strictly Ballroom, continued in Romeo + Juliet, becomes central in the metaphorical cabaret setting. If critical acceptance of Romeo + Juliet was mixed, Moulin Rouge! (2001) proved even more polarizing. In it, Luhrmann pushed to an extreme the stylistic project that he retrospectively labeled “Red Curtain” cinema. The film earned $300 million at the box office and was recently staged extravagantly as a Broadway show, though the film’s merits remain highly debated among critics and audiences, mainly because of the extent to which it displaces narrative elaboration and character psychology in favor of a garish pastiche of types, images, performance gestures, references to the Hollywood musical, songs in many styles and from many eras, and more. Historical framing of the fin de siècle Paris setting is replaced with a pastiche of images from throughout the twentieth century that refer to it, so that the elements of the film float free of time and location, organized around thematic juxtapositions echoing a wider array of sources, ostensibly including the Greek myth of Orpheus, as well as, more obviously, Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. Catherine Martin’s costumes, in Cook’s words, are important here for “projecting the Moulin Rouge as a Carnivalesque space where different classes and ethnic groups mingled, artists and intellectuals came together and all manner of sexual fetishes were practiced and bizarre habits indulged. … The Moulin Rouge was conjured up as a liminal area at the edges of bourgeois society simultaneously compelling and fraught with danger.”12 Luhrmann has declared in numerous interviews that the story in his films, rather than elaborated in detail, can be evoked by an image or by a line in a song because it is already known to the audience. Moulin Rouge! provides a multitude of references with a minimum of narrative exposition. The film’s visual effects, though

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they “support story and character” according to Cook, also “break up the linear trajectory.” They “break with naturalistic conventions of space and time, pulling against the forward drive of narrative toward death and despair and projecting a utopian fantasy that tragedy might be avoided.”13 Luhrmann describes his “Red Curtain” style in ways that echo Bertolt Brecht and more especially Antonin Artaud, whose writings he encountered as a theater student at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Less a theory than a handful of easily digestible aphorisms, Luhrmann’s statements can be organized around three categories: those about the narratives or myths to which he refers for substantive content; about the heightened “theatrical” dimension of his style; and about music as an integral and animating element. These are all present, for example, in a 1997 interview with Sonya Voumard: “Essentially [Red Curtain] is theatrical cinema … and it has some fundamental requirements: (1) the films are based on primary mythologies, so you know how they are going to end when they begin; (2) they are set in heightened creative worlds; and (3) they have some kind of device to awaken the audience’s experience. They are not psychological works; they demand the audience to participate in them.” Or again to Ray Pride in 2001: “Red Curtain cinema … is audience participation cinema. It is a cinema that demands of its audience that they participate. It is theatricalized cinema. It tells very common stories where you know how it’s going to end from the time it begins. It utilizes devices to wake you up: music, iambic pentameter, whatever. You’re involved. That’s the philosophy.” In 2010, James Mattram was offered a synoptic version: Red Curtain boils down to “the theatrical philosophy (simple story, heightened reality).”14 The idea of “common stories where you know how it’s going to end from the time it begins” appears repeatedly in Luhrmann’s comments, along with the statement that these are “not psychological works.” Rather, they deploy character types—Luhrmann cites the theater of Molière as a model.15 The pre-established quality of Luhrmann’s stories stems from his understanding of them as familiar myths, “primary mythologies,” rooted in the audience’s experience and human understanding. Early in his career Luhrmann had an interest in Joseph Campbell; he seems to have been influenced by Campbell’s sense of an underlying “monomyth” that takes myriad forms in narratives central to cultures across the globe.16 “Stories never change,” says Luhrmann. “The way we tell them must change so that we can re-enliven the ears and the eyes of the audience.”17

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This sense of the already known functions at a macro and at a micro level. It pervades his filmic practice from the most inclusive narrative arc and his play with genre formulas to the smallest detail. In Catherine Martin’s words, “What Baz forces you to do is go through the cliché to a transcendental understanding.”18 In Luhrmann’s words: “I think it’s really important that you take the obvious. You take what you might think is the ‘cheesiest,’ and what you do is turn in on its head. Because there is a reason why things are obvious. They have value inside them.” Luhrmann’s understanding of the word “theatrical” and his emphasis on spectacle rests on a sense that the ideas and feelings he hopes to stimulate already reside within viewers. Awakening the audience (“through music, iambic pentameter, whatever”), his films “demand that the audience participate in them.”19 Especially, in his view, “music unites us” [my emphasis]. The known tropes and dissolving of textual boundaries, especially through music, make film “participation” a collectivized ritual. In the most diverse forms of music, “the universality of things is what attracts, not the division.”20 Music thus extends the power of the theatrical and comes to dominate his method and sense of form. “To me all movies are a piece of music,” he tells Elsie Walker. Most radically in Moulin Rouge!, he replaces the cause-and-effect sequencing of narrative action with a musical associational movement. “We write [a film] exactly like an opera. … You set up a primary theme, a song or aria, and then you thematically weave that through depending on what the action is.”21 It is noteworthy that Luhrmann directs opera in addition to films. He created an innovative version of La Bohème in Sydney in 1990 before making Strictly Ballroom, as well as Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream shortly before making Romeo + Juliet. Luhrmann’s two-minute film, Chanel #5 (2004)22 pushed the reductive dimension of his Red Curtain aesthetic to its limit, a story boiled down to a few postures that could then be richly embellished in the mise-en-scène and music.23 Weaving the Chanel product and logo into the fabric of the advertisement, of course, entirely dissolves borders between art and commerce, between auteur filmmaker and marketing, “Brand Baz” as he has labeled it, “Bazmark Inq., with divisions handling design, film, live entertainments, music, and housewares.”24 More profoundly, these Red Curtain films perform a merging of values typically held in opposition: cliché and truth exist in tension like charged particles of an atom, as do material reality and the ideal. Luhrmann’s method is always one of amalgamation rather than of discerning or distinguishing difference. A sense of duration

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is scarcely needed in his timeless present of static values, within which performance becomes an endless repetition.

The Great Gatsby (2013) In Australia (2008), Luhrmann had deliberately stepped back from his Red Curtain style, most obviously reintroducing narrative elaboration and an element of cinematic realism. The film was an “epic” that attempted to capture the history of Australia, in a form that references “classic Hollywood genres such as the Gothic woman’s picture, the Western, the war film, and action adventure.”25 But Australia suffered largely negative reviews, and not merely the polarized critical love/hate that greeted Moulin Rouge!. Rather, critics found the admirable and the awful within the same film. Richard Schickel’s review for Time magazine is a telling example of reception in the USA: “Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before? Sure you have. It’s a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr. Frankenstein-­ style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining?”26 To some extent, this description fits Luhrmann’s earlier approach in his Red Curtain films, but Australia provoked widespread rejection and sent him looking back to the point where his meteoric career first gained momentum. He had established a bond with DiCaprio with Romeo + Juliet, a film extremely important in the success of both men. Now, while traveling on the Trans-­ Siberian Railway, according to his statements in interviews, he discovered his next project in an audiobook of The Great Gatsby, that is to say a work as fully familiar to audiences as Romeo + Juliet.27 More than most adaptors—one exception being the Coen Brothers— Luhrmann investigates the multiple iterations of his source materials. A 1926 silent film of The Great Gatsby staring Warner Baxter and directed by Herbert Brenon already exploited the book’s party scenes as an opportunity for visual spectacle. More obviously important for Luhrmann was the 1949 Alan Ladd version directed by Elliott Nugent. As Gatsby, Ladd was a less charismatic star than either Robert Redford in 1974 or Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013, but Ladd’s history triggered its own cinematic associations, notably recalling Raven, the killer in This Gun For Hire (1942). That film launched Ladd’s career, leading to the Stuart Heisler version of The Glass Key (1942), in which Ladd played gambler and political fixer Ned Beaumont, an “elegant young roughneck,” to use Nick’s words

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about Gatsby,28 with a veneer of social polish. Ladd’s history as Raven and Beaumont is all that audiences of the time would have needed to imagine Gatsby’s bootlegger past: in this version of the narrative, when a gangster at Gatsby’s party suggests that he knows Gatsby by a different name, Ladd draws him aside and knocks him cold with one punch. In the scene where Gatsby has Nick’s cottage redecorated for his rendezvous with Daisy (Betty Field), the wildly excessive abundance of flowers also anticipates Luhrmann. But the most important idea for Luhrmann from this film was that Nick (Macdonald Carey) could be presented as the author of The Great Gatsby—Fitzgerald’s novel is framed as thinly disguised autobiography. In the novel, Nick merely mentions having had literary aspirations in college. In the 1949 film, by contrast, before leaving to return to the Midwest, Nick says to Jordan Baker (Ruth Hussey), “I have some writing to do,” which identifies Nick with Fitzgerald. Luhrmann goes even farther: evoking Fitzgerald’s biography, he has Nick (Tobey Maguire), suffering from alcoholism and on the brink of a mental collapse, check himself into a sanatorium, where a psychiatrist then encourages him to produce a manuscript which he entitles The Great Gatsby. Even in positioning Nick as a writer, of course, Luhrmann has more than one source; he is also recalling Moulin Rouge! through the image of the typewriter associated with Christian (Ewan McGregor), the writer who falls for Satine (Nicole Kidman). In the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby, only the casting of the handsome and charismatic Redford might have been suggestive for Luhrmann. Otherwise, the production is noteworthy primarily for its “fastidious, literally faithful, meticulous concern” for the novel, an approach that Luhrmann shunned.29 The stylistic distance between Luhrmann’s and the 1974 film approximates that between his Romeo + Juliet and the well-­ known film of Shakespeare’s play directed by Franco Zeffirelli.30 Leonardo DiCaprio’s star persona is more directly useful for the Gatsby role than was Redford’s: DiCaprio’s important body of films created a narrative for him that echoes Gatsby’s development in the novel.31 Fans might even say of DiCaprio what Nick Carraway says of Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”32

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DiCaprio’s “successful gestures” were the twenty-five movie roles that established his public persona between This Boy’s Life (1993) and The Great Gatsby (2013). These are the films: This Boy’s Life (1993) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) The Basketball Diaries (1995) The Quick and the Dead (1995) Total Eclipse (1995) Romeo + Juliet (1996) Marvin’s Room (1996) Titanic (1997) The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) Celebrity (1998) The Beach (2000) Don’s Plum (2001) Gangs of New York (2002) Catch Me If You Can (2002) The Aviator (2004) The Departed (2006) Blood Diamond (2006) Body of Lies (2008) Revolutionary Road (2008) Shutter Island (2010) Inception (2010) J. Edgar (2011) Django Unchained (2012) The Great Gatsby (2013) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) From this body of material, we can identify four stages or dimensions of DiCaprio’s star narrative, all of them relevant to the character of Gatsby: Troubled Youth; the Idealistic Lover; the Con Man; and the Man of Power and Mystery. For the category of Troubled Youth, the most important films are This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and The Basketball Diaries. In all of these, DiCaprio plays a character full of innocent energy, blocked by constraints of social convention and excessive authority; he faces a monstrous father figure, unforgiving social norms, or is a free spirit crushed by constraints of reality. These three films established the young

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actor’s reputation and image, but it is important to note that in later films the figure of a son in tension with a father remains part of DiCaprio’s persona. In Catch Me if You Can, for example, the young Frank Abagnale Jr. (DiCaprio) works to impress his father as played by Christopher Walken, as well as an FBI officer played by Tom Hanks who becomes something of a surrogate father. In Gangs of New York, such figures include the murdered father whose death Amsterdam (DiCaprio) seeks to revenge, as well as a surrogate father, Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), whom in Oedipal fashion Amsterdam must kill. Romeo + Juliet, along with Titanic, established Leo as an Idealistic Lover. Luhrmann’s Shakespeare adaptation was hugely successful, as mentioned, but it was far overshadowed a year later by Titanic, at that point the largest grossing film of all time. Following that film, as DiCaprio has said, there was nowhere on earth he could go without being recognized as Jack Dawson. Other films in which we see him in some form as the lover include Total Eclipse, The Beach, Revolutionary Road, and of course The Great Gatsby. They build on, or inflect, the image created in the first two, as in Gangs of New York, where Amsterdam’s love for Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) becomes a subplot alongside the central revenge story and historical backdrop. The Con Man as a dimension of DiCaprio’s star persona was defined most sharply in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. In this film, he is a shape shifter whose depths cannot be penetrated, a person whom we may never really know. Unable to locate some essential inner self, he mirrors public, social values and expected postures. Related roles show him trapped within conflicting identities, for example in The Departed, as both privileged and a tough kid from South Boston. Concealing his true identity, the character he plays in The Departed goes undercover; in Body of Lies he becomes a CIA agent. In more psychological terms, questions concerning identity and an authentic self also arise in Inception and Shutter Island. The unknowable aspect of the Con Man remains with DiCaprio as he becomes a Man of Power and Mystery, a type also explored in many variations. One of the simplest iterations is that in J. Edgar—few people have ever had more power or been less transparent to the public than J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI for thirty-seven years. Power and mystery are central in The Man in the Iron Mask, where DiCaprio plays King Louis XVI of France, as well as his masked identical twin brother Philippe. In Blood Diamond he is Danny Archer, more adventurer than Man of Power, while in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, his power is that of the

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slave owner. Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, inflating the value of the penny stocks he sells, is clearly another con artist, though he also attains the power of wealth before his pyramid scheme collapses. It is in The Aviator, however, where DiCaprio embodies Howard Hughes, that we find his purest embodiment of the Man of Power and Mystery. The film follows Hughes’s career from movie-industry rebel and aviation innovator to his years as the immensely rich and reclusive owner of Hughes Aircraft Company and Trans World Airlines. The role of Howard Hughes fleshes out the late stage of DiCaprio’s star persona, even while its story recapitulates the full trajectory of his star narrative’s developmental arc. Luhrmann achieved two things in selecting The Great Gatsby as material for a film with Leonardo DiCaprio: he linked the figure of Gatsby to Romeo and this film to the triumph of the earlier one. Furthermore, he imbued Gatsby with qualities associated with DiCaprio from his roles as a Troubled Youth, an Idealistic Lover, a Con Man, and a Man of Power and Mystery. Like DiCaprio’s versions of the young person who struggles with society and defines himself against a strong father figure, Jay Gatz is born into abject poverty and finds in Dan Cody a father figure, while remaining an outsider in Fitzgerald’s class-conscious world. Like Romeo and Jack Dawson, Gatsby is the lover in his romance with Daisy, a love that becomes his obsession. Gatsby is the con man on many levels, first in the façade that thinly disguises his success based on crime, but most profoundly in the way he exists as an image created for others, for Daisy and the world she represents, yet fabricated out of a popular, clichéd American Dream. The false biographical narrative he creates for Nick is, in Nick’s words, “just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent.”33 Gatsby is a figure of mystery both in the rumors that circulate about him, remaining hidden to the point that some wonder if he really exists. Mystery shrouds Gatsby’s power as it does the source of his wealth, though this is gradually explained through the figure of Meyer Wolfsheim, Fitzgerald’s stereotypical Jewish gangster. Wolfsheim’s role in the novel’s static economy of values is as a representative of relentless materialism. Gatsby’s power comes through money, from a business network based on bootlegging and even on physical violence. Tom Buchanan’s wealth, his intimidating physicality, and his social position, though inherited, weigh on this same side of material reality, in confrontation with which Gatsby’s fantasy cannot survive. For Baz Luhrmann’s film, DiCaprio becomes Gatsby and vice versa, their complementary narratives becoming further interwoven with the

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memory of Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and of Charles Foster Kane/William Randolph Hearst in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

The Aviator and Citizen Kane The life of Howard Hughes, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, roughly fits the pattern of Gatsby’s, though more to the point for Scorsese would have been parallels with that of Charles Foster Kane and William Randolph Hearst. Hughes moved to Hollywood in 1926, became prominent and immensely rich, then an object of much speculation when he disappeared from public life from the late 1950s until his death in 1976. In The Aviator, a troubled childhood for Hughes is implied by a single moment, seen twice in flashback, where his fearful mother is drilling the young boy on the correct spelling of the word “quarantine.” DiCaprio’s embodiment of Hughes as a lover takes advantage of his star persona in several ways. In his off-screen life, DiCaprio has received much social-­ media attention for his serial dating of prominent models; Hughes was similarly associated with many of the best-known female movie stars of his day, alluded to in the film by mention of Jean Harlow and Ginger Rogers, the presence of Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), and a relationship with Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett). In the film, Hughes/DiCaprio is first presented as a philanderer, leveraging his charm, attractiveness, extreme wealth, and inflated self-assurance to overwhelm a “cigarette girl” (Josie Maran) in a nightclub, a trope even more strikingly offensive today than in 2004. Over the course of The Aviator, however, the Hughes who crassly exploits his power gives way to a more romantic Hughes who pursues Katherine Hepburn, thus forming a more earnest relationship with a woman who counterbalances his power and egocentricity with her own. The Con Man in DiCaprio’s star persona is reflected in The Aviator only in Hughes’s inventiveness and in his ability to persuade, less through deception as in Catch Me if You Can than because of a passionate belief in his ideas. Hughes, as we are shown him, is a driven and obsessive man, qualities that both distance him from others while allowing him to focus his considerable abilities, leading to his achievements. The obsessive dimension of his passion in the pursuit of Hepburn accounts in some degree for his success with her, and this same relentlessness combined with an attention to details like the rivets on a plane’s fuselage contribute to his setting aviation speed records, completing difficult film projects,

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successfully defying the Hays office, challenging the power of Pan American Airways and the US Senate, and the absurd triumph of flying his enormous, wooden airplane, the “Spruce Goose.” All is achieved through a rare concentration of intelligence and will. Martin Scorsese is perhaps even more of a cinephile than Baz Luhrmann, and Citizen Kane long held canonical status in film on a par with that of The Great Gatsby in American literature.34 The Aviator is marked by Citizen Kane most obviously in the similarity of their narratives, stories of immensely wealthy men whose power and overarching ambition carry them to a state of alienation, on the brink of madness. The scenes of Hughes locked away in a screening room where he lives and works, with bottles of his urine lining one wall and red streamers crisscrossing as if to establish the trajectory of bullets at a crime scene, are thus comparable to those of Kane in the enormous cold and silent spaces of his Xanadu, his “pleasure dome” devoid of pleasure, and more importantly of love. In The Aviator, Hughes is similarly left alone when he is unable to sustain his relationship with Hepburn. Scorsese’s film evokes Welles’s especially in the method of explaining Hughes’s condition: all returns to the character’s childhood, to a mother fiercely determined to protect her child and his future, rhetorically reduced to highly stylized moments that can stand as a key for the audience, unknown to those around the films’ protagonists. The final, and most famous revelation in Citizen Kane is, of course, the image of flames licking at the brand-name “Rosebud” on the child’s sled as it is fed into a furnace; the scene explains to the audience, if not to the journalists in the film, the meaning of Kane’s last words, which might also be the secret of his psyche, his having been torn from his parents to be raised in a mausoleum of wealth. This childhood memory of “Rosebud” gets clear, if indirect reference in The Aviator, where Howard Hughes’s childhood is similarly explained through the simple image: his mother (Amy Sloan), as severe as Kane’s (Agnes Moorehead), and exhibiting obsessive personality traits that will be passed on to Hughes, quizzes him on the spelling of “quarantine.” Close shots of parts of the child’s body being washed open the scene, until the mother is revealed, her relatively short hair neat, carefully in place, her expression intense and eyes sharply and unvaryingly focused on the boy. She is concerned and careful as she bathes him, emphasizing his separation from the world of ordinary people—especially of black communities where “cholera” and “typhus” might be found. Scorsese boils down the message to the young Hughes into a single sentence: “you are not safe.” This sentence, the word “quarantine”

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and the unnatural intensity of Hughes’s mother’s manner must stand for everything otherwise unexplained about him. The scene is a shorthand that frees up valuable minutes in which Scorsese can focus on Hughes’s later struggles and achievements. In taking this route, Scorsese evokes Citizen Kane, the remembered sled, the lost father, the mother’s decision to send Charles away, and Mary Kane’s excessive concern for young Charles’s health, conveyed in the sharp voice in which she calls out to her child playing in the snow: “Be careful, Charles. Pull your muffler up around your neck!” In Citizen Kane, the mystery or void at the heart of Kane’s personality is the subject of the film, more like The Great Gatsby in that respect than like The Aviator. If DiCaprio is Hughes, then, he is also Kane, and Luhrmann’s amalgamation of Jay Gatsby with the movie star brings with him not only The Aviator, but also—complementing more direct references—that film’s associations with Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst, and Orson Welles. The Great Gatsby reiterates these narratives of immense wealth, overarching ambition, and obsessive love that carry their heroes to alienation and the brink of madness.

Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby Among the most direct references to Citizen Kane and to Orson Welles in Luhrmann’s film is a single shot when Gatsby finally introduces himself to Nick. It is a moment when the film echoes Fitzgerald’s prose closely; Nick’s narration mentions a “smile such as you see four or five times in a lifetime.” (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2)35 The face of Gatsby/DiCaprio suddenly fills the screen in an image that evokes Orson Welles as the young editor in Citizen Kane and, even more, the well-known image of Welles’s face as that of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). These faces are handsome, but above all they exude a self-­ confidence and charm capable of carrying all before them. Citizen Kane is evoked in The Great Gatsby incidentally and in re-mixed forms, especially (a) in the scene of Kane’s modest Colorado origins as echoed in Gatsby’s North Dakota childhood, (b) in scenes at the sanatorium where Nick Carraway will write the Gatsby novel, (c) in the use of falling snow for transitions in location, time, and memory, and (d) in the mise-en-scène of the empty mansion that reflects the condition of its owner. The flashback to the childhood of James Gatz occurs slightly less than halfway through the film, when Jay and Daisy have been reunited

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Fig. 9.1  Leonardo DiCaprio as Orson Welles

Fig. 9.2  Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949)

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following their lunch rendezvous at Nick’s. Jay then revises the earlier, generic and false, summary of his life. This North Dakota part of the flashback consists of four shots with a total duration of twenty seconds, showing a sepia-like monochrome brown desert landscape under a heavy brownish sky, a single tree in silhouette to the left, with a worn-looking man in a battered cowboy hat leading a tired horse slowly toward the foreground from right to left, a small shack behind them at the horizon. Gatsby’s voice-over here tells of their poverty, and the shot dissolves to an exterior of the small shack, with a canvas tent-roof extending it out to the left. The shack is ramshackle, little left of its peeling paint, so that now it is awash in shades of brown, some dark chickens moving randomly in the yard among the debris of desolation and failure. Dissolve again, to the interior, a medium shot of a young James Gatz (Tasman Palazzi) sitting on a bed with a rusted frame and a dull plaid blanket. Then cut to the boy getting up onto the bed in order to look through an opening in the hovel’s wall, out onto a world beyond the shack, suddenly more colorful with blues, blacks and what might be starlight in a darkening sky. This final shot occurs accompanied by prose paraphrasing the novel: “In his imagination he was the son of God, destined for future glory.”36 In this film, inverting the origin story of Kane, the child rejects his parents rather than the opposite. But the shack of Jimmy Gatz nonetheless invites juxtaposition with the wooden walls of “Mrs. Kane’s Boarding House.” In Citizen Kane, the scene opens as a screen entirely white with snow— only a child on a sled can be discovered, a small figure on the large canvas. As the camera moves to include it in the frame, we then see the boarding house with its sign, until the camera moves inside the wooden structure, reversing the perspective to show through the open window the child playing in the snow outside. The camera tracks back to reveal Mrs. Kane and, gradually, more of the room, including the boy’s father (Harry Shannon) and Mr. Thatcher (George Coulouris); the window becomes small, deep in the shot, while continuing to frame the child, whose fate is being decided by his mother as she signs him over to Mr. Thatcher. This scene is monochrome, of course, shades of grey against the snow, with the almost black clothing of Mary Kane and Mr. Thatcher, puritan-like in contrast to the shabbily dressed father, who is more like the worn-down soul we will see in The Great Gatsby’s North Dakota moment. This scene in Citizen Kane encompasses a mini-drama where the fond if erratic father wants to keep the boy but becomes quickly resigned when he hears that the boy’s parents, after giving the child over to the custody of the banker,

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will receive fifty thousand dollars annually for life. For all their particular differences, these origin scenes—as also the very brief one in The Aviator— are similar in offering symbolic rather than real explanations for the obsessive drive of the children. All are presented as distant in memory, stylized and isolated within their respective narratives, recalled indirectly and perhaps unreliably, as in the banker Thatcher’s diary, as memory through Hughes’s troubled perspective, and through Nick’s record of Gatsby’s account of his past. Images of snow play a crucial part in the intersection of Citizen Kane with The Great Gatsby. Citizen Kane is framed as an exploration, an attempt to discover something that will explain the mystery of Kane’s tortured existence. The film begins with Kane’s death, but the story of Kane’s life begins with the snowstorm and his family’s poverty. Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby will be told as a similar exploration, from a perspective following Gatsby’s death, Nick Carraway as a would-be novelist trying to understand the meaning of Gatsby’s innocence in a corrupt world. Snow provides the transportation in both films, in time and space, and between exterior and inner worlds. Snow appears in this transporting role in the opening death scene of Citizen Kane when an interior shot of Kane’s high window dissolves to falling snow, then to the interior of the snow globe. The opening of Welles’s film is widely familiar: a No Trespassing sign on a fence, the camera then moving in steps toward the darkened mansion high on the hill. There is a gothic familiarity about it, echoing, among other films, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, released in 1940, shortly before Citizen Kane. In Welles’s film, however, the fences already show a baroque complexity, chain links yielding to other types and patterns until the iron gate is shown, including the letter K. This will be seen again as the final image of the film, Xanadu rising above and to the right in the distant background. In the opening, the camera takes us to the high window behind which Kane is dying, dissolving to an interior shot of the same window, then to the snow, and to the interior of the snow globe. Finally, we get a shot of the snow globe in Kane’s hand, followed by the enormous close-up of his lips pronouncing “Rosebud,” after which the snow globe falls from his hand, rolling and breaking on the stone step. Most remarkable here is that, as the shot goes from the interior of the snow globe to showing it in Kane’s hand, the snow appears to continue to fall in the space of Kane’s room as if escaped from the globe or, more plausibly, reflecting his memory of being in the snow in Colorado as a child. The snow even continues

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in the enormous image of Kane’s lips, showing Welles’s fully expressionist use of this element of the setting. Images of snow enable transitions at other key moments in the narrative, filling the screen, for example, as if to mark a time and location shift to young Charles’s first Christmas in Chicago. Similarly, as Bernstein (Everett Sloane) begins to tell his part of Kane’s story, he stands and looks out on a snowstorm that again marks the narrative’s shift back into memory. Rain marks the camera movement down through the skylight into a bar where Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) drinks, but when she is still with Kane, her jigsaw puzzle shows a peaceful winter landscape in the snow, like the snow globe an alternative to the dark reality of Kane’s life and hers. Finally, when Susan leaves him, after Kane angrily breaks up the things in her room, he picks up the snow globe and looks at it, its swirling snow inspiring him to pronounce the world Rosebud, anticipating his final words as shown in the opening moments of the film. Snow covers movements in time and space within the film, and within characters’ memories, as well as suggesting idealized alternatives. Luhrmann embraces the magic of falling snow for similar transitions in his film. The Great Gatsby titles open with movement through a stylized graphic of fences or gates, centered on the monogram JG, which will appear throughout the design scheme of Gatsby’s mansion, seen once above the iron gates where an intruder is beaten and expelled.37 The first image appears with the camera passing through these gates toward a light in the distance, tracking slowly forward toward it, a long distance across water as the light shows green, then white, eventually becoming the lights of a mansion. Meanwhile, a voice-over narration begins with an edited version of Nick’s words from the novel: “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me a piece of advice. Always try to see the best in people, he would say.” The camera seems to be closing in on the subject of the novel’s and film’s investigation like Welles’s camera stepping toward Kane’s Xanadu. Snow fills the night sky until a dissolve disguised by a brightening light reveals the mansion, now in daylight: we first see a gate and the edifice beyond—we must be approaching Gatsby’s mansion. But here is the first surprise, above the gate we do not see the JG logo; rather, following two dissolve cuts closer and accompanied by Nick’s voice-over saying, “back then, all of us drank too much,” we read: “The Perkins Sanatarium.” Luhrmann has performed a bait and switch: this Kane-like opening has been deployed to take us not into Gatsby’s story, but into Nick’s novel. Furthermore, it is by way of Fitzgerald’s biography

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and naming the recovery facility after his famous editor at Charles Scribner and Sons, Maxwell Perkins. It is the snow, like that of Kane’s snow globe, that has this magical power of memory, of free narrative movement among past and present, from the East to the Midwest, and beyond the diegetic boundaries of The Great Gatsby.38 Luhrmann’s playfulness hardly ends there. The scene in The Great Gatsby continues within the room where Nick is talking to his psychiatrist. Shots through the windows looking out on the snow storm echo those from the childhood scene in Citizen Kane, and here Luhrmann references the deep focus for which the Boarding House scene in Citizen Kane is famous, by framing the psychiatrist in the background sharply in focus through a triangle in the foreground formed by Nick’s bent arm (Fig. 9.3). We then see Nick from outside of the window, followed by a shot that slowly reveals the décor of this room as it was revealed in the scene from Citizen Kane. We see Nick in profile against the windows and the snowstorm, until finally music invades Nick’s narrative, the camera pulling back into the snowstorm for travel in time and space, dissolving to a long shot of Manhattan and a hip-hop music soundtrack, this shift in the narrative like the movement in Citizen Kane from the distant, retrospective childhood scenes to an intermediate present of Kane as a young muckraking journalist, upsetting Thatcher, his former guardian. Put simply, the elements of this scene in The Great Gatsby recapitulate those in Citizen Kane, yet everything has been altered, remixed by Luhrmann.

Fig. 9.3  At the Perkins Sanitarium

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Fig. 9.4  Nick’s typewriter

The snow returns in the film’s final scenes when Nick has finished his manuscript, but the snowflakes have become letters of the alphabet, merging memory and the act of writing the novel (Fig. 9.4). Both of these film narratives are structured around a pivotal moment before which we may have some hope for the success of the protagonists, but after which we must realize that they have become divorced from reality. In Luhrmann’s film this occurs when the audience is forced to recognize that, however “hopeful” Gatsby’s dream is, it is that of a man who cannot adjust to the world. The language of his dream is excessive from the start, the narration borrowing Fitzgerald’s words. After a kiss, for example, Gatsby feels he has “forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath,” and that “his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”39 At the end of the second party scene where Nick tells Gatsby politely that Daisy said she had a wonderful time, Gatsby says he knows she did not. He turns, his thoughts elsewhere, and says of Daisy, “She has to tell Tom that she never loved him.” Nick looks stunned, and we realize that what might have seemed like passionate love is actually madness. This leads to the exchange where Nick tells Gatsby that he cannot recreate the past, an idea that Gatsby flatly rejects. It is also the point in the narrative when the parties stop, when Gatsby’s mansion goes silent, and his staff is replaced by “Wolfsheim’s people.” From there the story moves with operatic simplicity to the confrontation at the Plaza hotel, the death of Myrtle Wilson, and the death of Gatsby. The similar turning point in Citizen Kane is couched more directly in an action of the story: Kane’s political rival, Boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins)

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discovers Kane’s affair with Susan Alexander, and Kane is forced to choose between retiring from the race for governor and having the affair made public, which in turn is a choice between continuing with his marriage and divorce. Willfully, Kane insists trying to become governor while persisting in his affair, and by force of will trying to make Susan Alexander into an opera star when she cannot sing. The parallel between the films is not in the details of their title characters’ collision with reality, but in the way that both films pivot from narratives of energetic and charismatically successful youth to stories of isolation and alienation. (The Aviator offers another variant; Hughes’s pursuit of love fails, but though he pays a price for his own kind of madness, many of his dreams are ultimately realized.) The most remarkable dimension of Welles’s film is its visualization of Kane’s transformation, his final isolation in the cavernous spaces of Xanadu, which Luhrmann then echoes in framing Gatsby’s final emptiness. Citizen Kane most fully exploits this mise-en-scène after Susan’s rebellion against Kane’s attempts to make her an opera singer, then again after his death. In the first of these situations, one scene shows Kane entering, small in the distance, through a Gothic arch into a cathedral-scale space, with Egyptian, classical, and Renaissance statues catching the light here and there. The key to the image’s meaning is the immense space and the contrast in scale between it and the small human beings. Kane crosses slowly to where Susan, bored, is working on a jigsaw puzzle. When he attempts conversation about New Yorkers going out to theaters for the evening, Susan’s words about her life in Xanadu are pointed: “Forty-nine thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues—I’m lonesome.”40 Kane now steps onto the hearth of the fireplace, looking like a small man in the mouth of a dragon. In response to her saying she wants to go to New York, he answers, “our home is here,” the concept of “home” clashing violently with the image of this cold, palatial museum. If the setting dramatizes Susan’s loneliness, even more it expresses Kane’s emptiness. The scene is soon repeated, this time with Kane in white flannel trousers indicating a change of season, and he also looks older. From a dynamic and handsome young man, in fact, Kane has in stages become monstrous, bald, heavy, and stiff. Susan works on another puzzle, but now she is in the mouth of the cold fireplace. She will soon leave Kane, and after his death, the film’s final shots build on these earlier scenes, long shots of Kane’s amassed art treasures in the cavernous palace devoid of life. The Great Gatsby’s visual evocation of this occurs when Gatsby’s mansion too becomes empty after the parties of “friends” similarly fail to satisfy the object of his love. Shots place Gatsby in the empty halls that were formerly filled with revelers, and in the dark spaces behind him we see

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walls covered with art, classical paintings large and small covering every inch of the extensive space (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6). The image is, again, that of a collector, of a museum. Luhrmann’s dialogue underscores the meaning of the image even more directly than Welles’s: to Nick Gatsby says, “I thought I had a lot of things … but the truth was, I was empty.” Luhrmann could not be much more obvious in his recreation of the later moments of Citizen Kane: shots of the now empty mansion continue to appear, until after Gatsby’s death we see his body in a long shot, laid out very much like that of Kane in the early moments of Welles’s film. Gatsby’s house, “cleaned out by Wolfsheim’s people,” is like Kane’s Xanadu being emptied out by workers after his life has been picked over by the journalists and other investigators in the film.

Fig. 9.5  Gatsby’s Xanadu

Fig. 9.6  Gatsby the collector

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The precursor narratives for Luhrmann’s film accumulate, including Hearst’s life story, Fitzgerald’s novel, Hughes’s biography, Citizen Kane, the Ladd and Redford Great Gatsby films, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s star narrative, a list to which we could add Orson Welles’s authorial persona, that of the boy wonder of the Mercury Theatre whose 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds frightened New Yorkers, his creation of the revered masterpiece Citizen Kane, media war with Hearst, and the challenges of Welles’s later career, which also yielded his performances as Falstaff and as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958). For a director like Luhrmann, who has mythologized his own career from the beginning, the figure of Orson Welles provides an attractive one to emulate, if perhaps also a cautionary tale. Luhrmann’s use of music to facilitate what he calls “participation” on the part of his audience is as important in The Great Gatsby as in Romeo and Juliet, even more important if one considers the film’s positioning with respect to markets and audiences. After the failure of Australia, as previously mentioned, Luhrmann’s effort to regain his rising stardom involved selecting a universally known literary property and the biggest movie star of the period. To this we must add a selection of music stars to create the soundtrack with greater popular reach than Luhrmann, than Fitzgerald’s novel, and even than DiCaprio. Jay-Z (Sean Cory Carter) and Beyoncé (Giselle Knowles-Carter), to name only the most prominent figures of the all-star lineup, are the world’s bestselling music artists. Luhrmann was apparently introduced to Jay-Z by DiCaprio during the rapper/mogul’s collaboration with Kanye West while they were recording “No Church in the Wild,” a song that was adopted for use in the film.41 Jay-Z’s participation in the project grew to his playing a major role, beyond his songs—including $100 Bill, which layers additional narratives of criminal success and money on direct references to Gatsby and Wolfsheim; he was important because of his reach throughout the popular music world, securing the collaborations not only of Beyoncé, but also of André 3000 (André Lauren Benjamin), Will.i.am (William Adams), and others. With stars of this magnitude, individual songs, and possibly the soundtrack album itself, were expected to be commercial products rivaling the success Luhrmann’s film. Luhrmann was prescient in featuring Lana Del Ray (Elizabeth Woolridge Grant); her extraordinary success developed as the film was being released.

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The star power of the performers is inseparable from the foregrounding of the music in the film and Luhrmann’s direct use of it as a quasi-­ independent and additional layer in the experience of the audience. As a precursor, Martin Scorsese once again comes to mind in this respect: from as early as Mean Streets (1973), and increasingly in films such as Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wallstreet (2013), Scorsese’s musical elements separate themselves from those clearly within or simply enhancing his films’ narratives: they further introduce cultural contexts, references, ideas in the lyrics, and an independent emotional pull well beyond that of most film scores. In this they anticipate Luhrmann, who promotes the music to being an equal partner with his images and stories, frequently seizing momentum from the displaced stories. Del Ray’s voice in singing “Young and Beautiful” becomes a prominent part of characterizing Daisy while the lyrics present a version her ambivalence to Gatsby. As well as stimulating audience “participation” directly, that is to say promoting the film as an ephemeral emotional experience, the complexity of the music adds to Luhrmann’s amalgamation of repeated narrative tropes and images, highlighting the extent to which adaptation pervades the film. “Sampling” and other forms of cross referencing are a ubiquitous dimension of in popular music, especially in hip hop, where open homage, quotation, commentary and other forms of repetition probably exceed even those that found in visual culture. Some of the most obvious adaptations in this film include the Bryan Ferry Orchestra’s attempts to rework 1920s musical rhythms, Beyoncé and André 3000s cover of the Amy Weinhouse song “Back to Black,” as well as the Scottish singer Emeli Sondé’s cover of the Beyoncé song “Crazy in Love” in a Bryan Ferry arrangement. A thorough analysis of the music is beyond me, and beyond the scope of this book, but one senses that a historian of popular music might approach Luhrmann’s film as a byproduct of the music industry, as a rich and complex music video, rather than treating the music as secondary to the film adaptation. The ritual dimension of Luhrmann’s cinema, underscored by his emphasis on music, will seem familiar to students of film history, for this seems, if in a somewhat more visceral form, the very definition of popular cinema, including that of the classical Hollywood era when ninety million people attended movies every week to see actors they knew and loved in recognizable roles and stories, in familiar genres that endlessly repeated

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industry formulas where, come what may, the ending was never a surprise. And it is this popular ambition that perhaps differentiates Luhrmann most from the other directors taken up here who, even when they seek wider audiences, insist on their authorial prerogative of being appreciated by an elite who can parse their unique visions. Luhrmann rather courts the broadest audience, denying any distinction between popular and elite, including the most widely known elements as well as those he has encountered in his journey through theater and opera, his research into cinema and cultural history. He breaks down distinctions to the point of merging his own image with the product, partaking in the shared ritual driven by the most popular music, the most accessible spectacle.

Conclusion Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby seems an appropriate film with which to end this book because of Luhrmann’s simultaneous use of and disconnect from his preexisting materials. For Luhrmann and all of the directors considered here, one thing stands out: the “original” films that they adopt as a point of departure, as well as providing a familiar cultural lexicon for communicating with their audiences, become part of the directors’ method of composition. All of the films employ some version of a familiar practice of updating, re-envisioning an earlier text in new circumstances, in order to discover the implications. The process brings to the fore unrecognized aspects of the earlier text, while at the same time emphasizing features of the new setting. Obviously, updating is not a new adaptation phenomenon. If you set a Romeo and Juliette story in Manhattan in the mid-twentieth century, you can produce the Broadway show West Side Story and the Robert Wise film version. If you situate Jane Austen’s Emma in a world of Los Angeles teenagers, you can produce Clueless (1995). Nothing could be more self-aware than Fassbinder’s use of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) in this manner. Before he adopted that film’s plot for Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), he was already worried about imitating it too closely while making Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of the Four Seasons, 1972). In Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Lovers on the Bridge, 1991), Leos Carax, inspired by Denis Lavant’s physical qualities as a performer, very deliberately took the situation of City Lights for his story set in Paris, developing his narrative and imagery out of that situation. Olivier Assayas knowingly responds to

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All About Eve in asking himself how aging plays out for a female star in the globalized media-rich environment of the early twenty-first century. We might think of these deliberate uses of earlier works and of updating as “heuristic,” in the sense of an almost mechanical technique applied to the problem of discovering new ideas.42 Transposing the narrative of All That Heaven Allows to working class Munich in the 1970s opens a world of opportunities: it raises the questions of about equivalent of Cary Scott and her country club, about a figure comparable to Rock Hudson in his role as a landscape gardener with his Spartan living quarters. These questions directly summon the social environment of Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and El Hedi ben Salem as the Moroccan Gastarbeiter, his employment in an auto repair shop, a sleeping space shared with a half dozen fellow immigrants, and so forth. Similarly, transposing Chaplin’s Tramp to contemporary Paris highlights the challenge of current-day homelessness. The evolving status of Broadway and Hollywood stardom in All About Eve, when transposed from 1950s New York to the European present, raises the issue of the layered complexities of celebrity in a global culture that includes theater, the art film, blockbusters, and social-media fame. We can see this at work for these filmmakers at both a macro and micro level, as when the “aging actor” and a row of octogenarian waiters at the awards banquet in Joseph Mankiewicz’s script suggest the observation given Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) of the “sea of grey hair” in the audience attending the playwright Wilhelm Melchior’s memorial—the larger point is the idea of departure, an inexorable movement, for all of us, into oblivion. This heuristic use of the originals as a method of composition often extends to the invention of details beyond what is necessary for the narrative. Thus, where in All That Heaven Allows the reflection of Cary (Jane Wyman) in a television screen becomes a metaphor for the loneliness she anticipates with her children leaving home, Fassbinder, with innumerable ways at his disposal to dramatize the response of Emmi’s grown children to her marriage, has one son kick in the screen of a television set. The devotion of Ron (Rock Hudson) to the books of Henry David Thoreau in All That Heaven Allows becomes an appreciation of painting by Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) in Far from Heaven (2002). In Les amants du Pont-­ Neuf a doctor’s advertisement in a newspaper from City Lights grows into a cross-platform media campaign to find the missing Michèle Stalens (Juliette Binoche). In Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), a child bereft of his mother in Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) becomes a lone child under the cold eye of a Stasi agent. From Proust’s La

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Prisonnière, the exterior window of a bathroom is repurposed in La Captive (2000) as the transparent partition between bathtubs that allows Simon (Stanislas Merhar) and Ariane (Sylvie Testud) to perform their allegory of proximity and separation. This detail is not inspired by the relationship between the characters, which of course must be illuminated, but rather by the fact of the glass window in Proust’s novel, salvaged by Akerman for her own use. A chair uselessly broken over the head of a thug during the brief capture of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) in Miller’s Crossing (1990) is an unanchored vestige of those pulled apart by Jeff (Guinn Williams and William Bendix, respectively) in the early film adaptations of The Glass Key. Flying snow in Citizen Kane (1941) is duplicated to create similar transitions in The Great Gatsby, further supplying Midwestern snow for the sanatorium scene in Luhrmann’s film that in turn recalls that surrounding the child Charles Foster Kane. An element of fetishism is involved in these borrowings, of cinephilia, such that beyond the central actions, the model or template generates directions and details for the new film. But we should also frame this pragmatic question of creative process within the more difficult one: why are these directors turning to the past, and what are the terms of their engagement with it? Their impulse is hardly a conservative one, a neo-classicism that finds reassurance in fundamental truths that remain valid today as they were when first discovered or defined. These directors are not simply imitating their forebears, encouraging their contemporaries to return to sound principles. Rather, in the work of these current directors there remains, in Constantine Verevis’s phrase, an “historically specific response to a postmodern circulation and recirculation of images and texts.”43 I would add to this Frederic Jameson’s previously cited description of the situation as part of the postmodern condition, a sense of “an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that—the end of ideology, of art, or social class.”44 The likely end of theatrical cinema is one of these looming finalities, but the broader context is most relevant here. If our attitude toward the future is one of uncertainty, our response is ambivalent because it combines distrust with nostalgia, skepticism with affection. One looks to the past with a sense of the concreteness of memory which nonetheless we know is deceptive, a sense that the reality itself is, in fact, ephemeral, unknowable, and in that sense unstable. While films of the past reflect their world through a

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glass darkly, we are equally uncertain about our ability to capture present experience, that any media representation can map current reality. Let me borrow an idea from the novelist John Barth to describe the posture of the directors here, similar perhaps to the challenge faced by fiction writers in the 1960s: he labeled their efforts a “literature of exhaustion.”45 “Exhaustion,” as he used it, applied both to the world about which fiction writers created their works, and to the means at their disposal for understanding and describing it. They faced, he argued, anticipating Jameson, “an age of ultimacies and ‘final solutions’—at least felt ultimacies, in everything from weaponry to theology, [and] the celebrated dehumanizations of society”; while it was not necessarily a cause for despair, artists wanting to address that moment had only a “used-upness of certain forms, or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities.”46 In the late twentieth century—with the cinema that nurtured the filmmakers taken up here losing its public place in favor of serial productions for small screens, short attention spans, situations of isolated, distracted, and fragmented viewing—we can similarly speak of a cinema of exhaustion. The assumptions of these filmmakers seem to be those attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, that “no one has claim to originality; all are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.”47 For these filmmakers, to attempt to add overtly to the sum of “original” films is, to paraphrase Barth, too presumptuous, too naïve; that kind of cinema is “done long since.”48 Claims of the end of cinema appear at moments of transition to a different kind of cinema, John Belton has argued, and no one now predicts an end to visual narratives.49 But at this conjuncture, these particular filmmakers, nurtured in the era of the big screen, the dark auditorium, the celebration of the auteur and his or her art, turn to past works that they have found meaningful in order to find a language with which to address a new age of “ultimacies.” This accounts for the dimension of the new art film examined here, a remaking of the classics in the twilight of theatrical cinema.

Notes 1. Baz Luhrmann, 41. Cook’s is the first and best book-length study of Luhrmann’s work to date. I rely on it for much background information as well as for insightful examination of the films prior to The Great Gatsby. 2. Interview with Mark Mordue, Ryan, 17. 3. Ryan, 9.

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4. Cook, 58. This was set in India, and Luhrmann’s research trip brought an important Bollywood influence to his filmmaking. 5. November 1, 1996. 6. Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2305590785/ weekend/. 7. The Great Gatsby was only modestly successful, given a boost when one hundred and fifty thousand copies were distributed to American soldiers in World War II. See the foreword to the 2018 Scribner edition, by Eleanor Lanahan, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter. 8. Cook, 65. 9. Interview with Pauline Adamek. Ryan, 27. 10. Cook, 66. 11. Interestingly, Mercutio’s death and relationship with Romeo seem to carry more emotional power than Romeo’s with Juliet, perhaps anticipating a homoerotic subtext in the Nick Carraway/Gatsby relationship that some find in the later film. 12. Cook, 90–91. 13. Cook, 94. Cook, who writes extremely well about Strictly Ballroom and Romeo+Juliet, is restricted to describing filmic style in her analysis of Moulin Rouge because there is little narrative, character, or dialogue to explicate. So her account of Moulin Rouge reflects her interviews with Luhrmann and his statement of his intentions, as when she writes: “Luhrmann’s investment in artifice creates a world that is distinct from reality, but is nevertheless truthful in that it enables the audience to respond emotionally to the ideals of beauty, truth, freedom and love adhered to by the characters, and emerge from the experience with a changed perspective. The emphasis is on the interaction of audience and film.” 93. 14. Reprinted in Ryan, 55 (Voumard), 76 (Pride), 119–20 (Mattram). 15. Ryan, 11–12. 16. For Campbell, the adventure of the hero typically follows a pattern that includes: “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.” Campbell, 35–37. 17. To John Lahr; Ryan, 85. 18. To Lahr; Ryan, 84. 19. Luhrmann ignores entirely the last half century of academic film theory, especially psychoanalytic notions of identification with characters that knit viewers as subjects into the fabric of unfolding narratives. 20. To Lahr; Ryan, 98. 21. Ibid., 49–51. 22. The film has an additional one minute of credits. 23. In the narrative frame, a handsome but scruffy young man (Rodrigo Santoro) “awakes into a dream,” where he encounters a star (Nicole

9  CITIZEN KANE (1941) AND BAZ LUHRMANN’S THE GREAT… 

267

Kidman) he does not recognize; they have a moment of romance, then she returns to her world. There is no need to elaborate this predigested story, so the film’s two minutes can be employed in presenting a glittering simulation of Manhattan’s lights, Kidman in a sumptuous gown and diamond jewelry, then glancing back from a red carpet awards ceremony setting toward her remembered love. A marginalized artist is again a central figure, in counterpoint here to the celebrated actress. The artist, like Joseph Campbell’s hero, is: “… a personage of exceptional gifts [who] frequently is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained.” Campbell, 35–37. 24. To Stephen Galloway; Ryan, 132. 25. Cook, 130. 26. November 25, 2008. 27. To Maddox; Ryan, 122. 28. 48. 29. Though panned by critics, the 1974 film was successful at the box office mainly due to prerelease ticket sales because of a publicity campaign worthy of a Luhrmann film. This brought Redford to the cover of Time magazine, along with an article based on an interview with Robert Evans. Time, March 18, 1974, pages 82–91. According to that article, “Paramount signed four companies to market a selection of ‘Gatsby products’ linked through advertising to the film” in a campaign “now recognized as the prototype for Hollywood’s marketing of its blockbusters.” Stoddart, 103. 30. Romeo and Juliet (1968), with Leonard Whiting as Romeo. 31. Redford was a star by 1974. It is difficult to identify useful precursors for the Gatsby role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) or The Sting (1973), despite the latter film’s 1930s setting; perhaps images from The Candidate (1972) or The Way We Were (1973) were more suggestive to Jack Clayton and his casting director. 32. Fitzgerald, 2. 33. 98. Luhrmann echoes this with a reference by Nick to Gatsby as a sixteen-year-old. 34. Its reputation seems to have faded with generational change, as has that of most studio era films. 35. Fitzgerald, 48. 36. Ibid., 98. “He was a son of God.” 37. Echoing the Ladd Gatsby. 38. Snow in Fitzgerald’s novel is mentioned by Nick in association with his memory of and attachment to the Midwest. 175. 39. Fitzgerald, 110. 40. Kane mentions the many guests they have had, and that if she looks carefully in the West Wing, she will probably find “a dozen of the vacationers

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still in residence.” In this, Welles might be echoing Fitzgerald’s novel; Luhrmann echoes Welles and the novel. 41. Trakin. 42. A term that carries over to audience reading of texts as well; see Marie Martin and “Le remake secret,” referred to in the Introduction. 43. Verevis, 23. 44. 1. 45. Barth, 62–76. 46. Ibid., 67 and 64. 47. Barth, 73. 48. Ibid. 49. 460–470.

Bibliography Barth, John. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Belton, John. “End of Cinema.” Screen 55:4, Winter 2014. 460–470. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Cook, Pam. Baz Luhrmann. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2018. Luhrmann, Baz. The Great Gatsby. DVD. Martin, Marie. “Le remake secret: généalogie et perspectives d’une fiction théorique.” Revue d’études cinématographiques, 25:2–3, Spring 2015. Ryan, John, ed. Baz Luhrmann: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Scorsese, Martin. The Aviator. DVD. Spada, James. The Films of Robert Redford. Secaucus NJ: Citadel, 1977. Stoddart, Scott. “Redirecting Fitzgerald’s Gaze: Masculine Perception and Cinematic License in The Great Gatsby.” Trakin, Roy. “From Flappers to Rappers: The Great Gatsby Music Supervisor Breaks Down the Film’s Soundtrack.” Interview with Anton Monsted. Hollywood Reporter. May 11, 2013. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/great-­gatsby-­soundtrack-­track-­by-­track-­521092 Welles, Orson. Citizen Kane. DVD.

Index1

A Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (1972-1973), 31, 39 Action Theater, The, 28–30, 34 Adaptation, 2, 7, 10–14, 19, 20, 21n40, 22n47, 22n60, 27–29, 33, 35, 41, 42, 44–63, 69, 81, 82, 113, 207, 213, 217, 219, 226, 239, 247, 260, 261, 262, 264 Akerman, Chantal, 19, 173–202, 264 À la recherche du temps perdu, 19, 173, 174, 185–188 All About Eve (1950), 19, 151–167, 167n6, 263 All That Heaven Allows (1955), 27–63, 69, 71–79, 81, 82, 262, 263 Almayer’s Folly (2011), 175 Amants du Pont-Neuf, Les (1991), 87–113, 113n1, 114n13,

114n25, 115n39, 168n16, 229, 262, 263 Amerikanische Soldat, Der (1970), 65n34 Amityville Horror, The (2005), 166 Andersson, Bibi, 152 Andrew, Dudley, 2, 11, 14, 21n40 Angst essen Seele auf (1974), 27–63, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77–79, 82, 114n20, 262 Annicchiarico, Vito, 135 Antiteater, 29, 30, 34 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 5, 124 Armstrong, Craig, 240 Arnold, Edward, 214, 215, 231n17 Arslan, Thomas, 124 Artaud, Antonin, 27, 29, 242 Art film, 1–10, 13, 14, 16, 18–20, 21n29, 27, 33, 82, 83n23, 88, 153, 179, 263, 265

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 W. H. Mooney, Adaptation and the New Art Film, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2

269

270 

INDEX

Art house, 2, 5, 6, 8 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958), 112 Assayas, Olivier, 19, 151, 152, 155, 162–167, 167n3, 167n4, 168n15, 262 Atalante, L’ (1934), 19, 88, 96, 105–107, 112 Atherton, Claire, 176, 179 Austen, Jane, 262 Australia (2008), 239, 244, 260 Auteur, 27, 33, 37, 108, 152, 165, 240, 243, 265 Authorship, see Auteur Aviator, The (2004), 20, 238, 248–251, 254, 258 B Bacall, Lauren, 223 Baer, Harry, 31 Baldaccini, Anna, 90 Balio, Tino, 5, 6, 20n15, 20n16, 20n17, 21n18, 21n19, 21n21, 21n22, 21n24 Barbara (2012), 125 Barnett, David, 30, 63n13 Bates, Barbara, 155 Baudrillard, Jean, 15–17 Baxter, Ann, 155, 167n11 Baxter, Warner, 244 Bazin, André, 11, 42, 93, 152 Beckett, Samuel, 27, 29, 186 Beckinsale, Kate, 249 Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 108 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 92 Belton, John, 23n73, 265 Bendix, William, 223, 264 Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 129, 130, 139, 143, 144, 147n38, 147n39, 147n41, 152, 167n4 Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, 121, 122

Berlin School, 124, 125 Bernanos, George, 11 Bernstein, Elmer, 70, 255 Berry, Jules, 112 Bertin, Françoise, 180 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 5 Besson, Luc, 108 Big Sleep, The (1946), 223 Binoche, Juliette, 87, 88, 91, 92, 102, 104, 108, 114n13, 114n28, 115n29, 115n37, 115n41, 152, 159, 162, 163, 165–167, 263 Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, Die (1972), 31, 74 Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The (1972), see Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant Bizet, Georges, 185, 202 Blanchett, Cate, 249 Blechtrommel, Die (1959), 118 Bogart, Humphrey, 219, 223, 233n34 Bohème, La, 241, 243 Bohm, Hark, 31, 78 Böhm, Karlheinz, 31 Bonamy, Olivia, 180 Bordwell, David, 2–6, 8, 9, 20n3, 20n6 Bowie, David, 98, 114n13 Boy Meets Girl (1982), 87, 89, 91, 92, 104, 107, 109, 113, 114n13 Brando, Marlon, 72, 224 Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 29, 30, 37, 63n7, 64n21, 144, 145, 242 Breen, Joseph, 230n13, 231n19 Brenon, Herbert, 244 Bresson, Robert, 11, 124, 167n6 Britten, Benjamin, 239, 243 Brooks, Carroll, 92 Brooks, Peter, 38, 40, 95, 113n10 Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen

 INDEX 

Demokratischen Republik, Der, 122 Burwell, Carter, 226 Buscemi, Steve, 221 Byrne, Gabriel, 220, 226, 233n45, 264 C Cage, Nicolas, 209 Cahiers du Cinéma, 17, 36, 37, 87, 89, 151 Calleia, Joseph, 218, 232n26 Campbell, Joseph, 242, 266n16, 267n23 Cannella, Mario, 123 Captive, La (2000), 19, 173–175, 178, 180–185, 187–189, 191–194, 200, 201, 204n36, 264 Carax, Leos, 19, 87–92, 95, 97, 98, 101–113, 113n1, 113n10, 113n11, 114n18, 114n28, 115n29, 115n32, 115n36, 115n37, 115n38, 115n39, 262 Carey, Macdonald, 168n12, 168n13, 245 Carmen, 185, 189, 202, 203n23 Carné, Marcel, 112 Carroll, Noël, 15 Carstensen, Margit, 31, 153 Casablanca (1945), 117, 147n41 Catch Me If You Can (2002), 247, 249 Caven, Ingrid, 31, 39 Celluoide (1996), 120 Chambre, La (1972), 175, 177 Chanel #5 (2004), 243 Chaplin, Charlie, 7, 18, 19, 87–89, 92, 93, 95–101, 103–105, 112, 113, 115n32, 263 Charlot, see Chaplin, Charlie Chatel, Peter, 31

271

Cherrill, Virginia, 87, 100 Children’s Hour, The (1934), 219, 232n32 Chinesisches Roulette (1976), 39 Cinecittà, 4 Circus, The (1928), 97 Citizen Kane (1941), 20, 237–265 City Lights (1931), 7, 19, 87–113, 262, 263 Clarkson, Patricia, 75 Classics, 2, 4, 13, 15–18, 20, 29, 72, 265 Cloarec, Christian, 90 Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), 19, 151–167 Clueless (1995), 262 Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, 8, 18, 19, 208–210, 220, 226, 233n45 Colbert, Claudette, 159, 167n11 Comingore, Dorothy, 255 Conrad, Joseph, 175 Constable, Catherine, 15, 16, 22n65, 22n66, 23n69, 23n70 Conversation, The (1974), 117 Coppola, Francis Ford, 19, 117, 207, 219, 224 Copyright (1979), 151 Cormack, Bartlett, 214, 230n12 Corsitto, Salvatore, 224 Cosi Fan Tutte, 185 Couch in New York, A (1996), 175, 179 Coulouris, George, 253 Crowther, Bosley, 6 D Daney, Serge, 89, 151 Dardenne Brothers, the, 124 Dasté, Jean, 107 Davis, Bette, 153, 159, 162, 166, 167, 168n13, 168n14

272 

INDEX

Davis, Mylika, 77 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 247 Day’s Pleasure, A (1919), 97 Dean, James, 72 Delpy, Julie, 92, 114n13 Denis, Claire, 14 Denning, Richard, 218 Departed, The (2006), 246, 247 Des’Ree, 240 D’Est (1993), 174, 175, 179 Deutsches Theater, 122 deWit, Jacqueline, 47, 76 Diaz, Cameron, 247 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 20, 238–240, 244–249, 251, 252, 260 Django Unchained (2012), 246, 247 Dobermann (1999), 126 Doinel, Antoine, 89 Donlevy, Brian, 217, 218, 232n25 Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von, 19, 117, 119–121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141, 143–145, 146n23, 148n51, 148n52 Du côté de chez Swann, 173, 203n27 Duvall, Robert, 224 Dyer, Richard, 70, 81, 82, 82n5, 83n23 E Easy Street (1917), 93 Effi Briest (novel), 41, 66n59 Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972-1973), see Acht Stunden sind kein Tag Elsaesser, Thomas, 32, 35, 38, 40, 63n1, 64n27, 64n31 Emma, 262 Erinnerung an die Marie A., 145 Evans, Herbert, 215 Evil Dead (1981), 208

F Fabrizzi, Aldo, 132 Fanck, Arnold, 152, 167n7 Far From Heaven (2002), 19, 69–82, 263 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 18, 19, 21n23, 27–63, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83n23, 114n20, 123, 152, 153, 262, 263 Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975), 74 Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, see Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik Feist, Harry, 129, 139 Fellini, Federico, 5 Fellini Satyricon (1969), 241 Field, Betty, 245 Finney, Albert, 220, 226, 229 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 240, 245, 248, 251, 255, 257, 260, 267n38, 268n40 Fontane Effi Briest (1974), 41 Fontane, Theodor, 19, 41 Fox and his Friends (1975), see Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975) Freeman, J.E., 221 Fuchs, Jürgen, 121 G Gabin, Jean, 112 Galt, Rosalind, 2, 9, 20n2, 21n29, 21n35, 21n36 Gangs of New York (2002), 247 Garbage, 28, 63n4, 240 Gardner, Ava, 249 Gaumont, 4 Gedeck, Martina, 122, 148n52

 INDEX 

Getz, John, 208 Gifford, Frances, 218 Glasmon, Kubec, 214 Glass Key, The (1935), 207, 223 Glass Key, The (1942), 207, 223, 225 Glass Key, The (novel), 19, 207, 223 Gleckler, Robert, 215 Godard, Jean-Luc, 19, 20n17, 33–36, 39, 41, 64n30, 65n50, 89–92, 109, 114n13, 115n29, 115n39, 151, 176 Godfather, The (1972), 18, 19, 207, 223, 224 Golden Eighties (1986), 175, 179 Goldhagen, Daniel, 119 Goodbye Lenin (2003), 123 Goodfellas (1990), 261 Gores, Joe, 219, 233n34 Grass, Günter, 118 Great Dictator, The (1941), 97 Great Gatsby, The (2013), 20, 237–265 Great Gatsby, The (novel), 245 Great McGinty, The (1940), 218, 232n25 Grüber, Klaus Michael, 87 Gruber, Marie, 139 H Halliday, Jon, 37, 38, 66n66, 66n68 Hammett (novel), 212, 216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 225, 226, 232n31 Hammett, Dashiell, 18, 19, 207–229 Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (1972), 31, 37–40, 45, 63n1, 262 Haneke, Michael, 124 Harden, Marcia Gay, 214 Harlow, Jean, 249 Hartley, Hal, 8 Hawks, Howard, 3, 36, 37, 223

273

Haynes, Todd, 8, 19, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74–79, 81, 82, 83n16, 83n23 Haysbert, Dennis, 70, 73, 263 Hays Office, 213, 250 Hearst, William Randolph, 249, 251, 260 Hedaya, Dan, 208 Heisler, Stewart, 213, 244 Helmore, Tom, 191 Hepburn, Katherine, 249, 250 Hermann, Irm, 31, 39, 48 Herzog, Werner, 123 Heure d’été, L’ (2008), 165 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 19, 36, 37, 173–202, 254 Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 119 Hochhuth, Rolf, 119 Hockney, David, 238 Holm, Celeste, 156 Holocaust (1979), 119 Hooper, Nellee, 240 Hotel Monterey (1973), 175 Hudson, Rock, 19, 37, 38, 42, 43, 69, 72–75, 82n7, 82n8, 83n21, 263 Hughes, Howard, 20, 248–251, 254, 258, 260 Hunter, Holly, 209 Hunter, Ross, 42 Hussey, Ruth, 245 Huston, John, 219 Hutcheon, Linda, 10, 11, 15, 16, 69, 228 I Idle Class, The (1921), 97 Imitation of Life (1959), 38, 66n66, 73, 83n15 In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), see In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978)

274 

INDEX

Independent film, 2, 8 In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), 74 In Love and War (1996), 120 Irma Vep (1996), 152, 168n17 Isle of the Dead, 183, 184, 193 J Jameson, Fredric, 15, 16, 81, 207, 229, 230n1, 264, 265 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), 174, 175 J. Edgar (2011), 247 Je Tu Il Elle (1974), 175, 177, 202n4 John, Gottfried, 31 Jones, Chuck, 209 Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, novel, 1951), 11 Jour se lève, Le (1939), 112 Joy, Jason, 214, 216, 230n11 Julia (1977), 219 Jürges, Jürgen, 57 K Karina, Anna, 64n30, 114n13, 115n29 Katzelmacher (1969), 31, 33–36, 39, 41, 44, 60, 64n30 Kaufmann, Günther, 31, 32 Keaton, Buster, 87 Keith, Rosalind, 214 Kick Ass (2010), 166 Kick Ass 2 (2013), 166 Kid, The (1921), 93 Kidman, Nicole, 245, 267n23 King, Geoff, 8, 9, 21n28–31 Klassikerzertrümmerung, 29 Kleinert, Volkmar, 126

Klinger, Barbara, 37, 38, 72–74, 81, 82n7, 82n8, 83n21 Kock, Sabastian, 121 Kuyper, Eric de, 173, 202n4 L Ladd, Alan, 217, 231n23, 244, 245, 260, 267n37 Lake, Veronica, 217, 218, 231n23 Lamprecht, Günter, 31 Lang, Fritz, 117, 138, 147n37, 147n39 Larré, Vanessa, 184 Larsson, Chrichan, 96 Laurent, Jacqueline, 112 Lavant, Denis, 87, 89, 91, 103, 108, 110, 262 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 89, 168n17 Leben der Anderen, Das (2006), 117–145, 263 Leitch, Thomas, 12, 13, 22n47, 201 Leonardo DiCaprio, 238, 244, 245, 248, 252, 260 Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (1969), 33, 34, 58, 65n34 Little Caesar (1931), 215 Living Theater, The, 27, 29, 30 Lizzani, Carlo, 120 Lommel, Ulli, 31 Love is Colder than Death (1969), see Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (1969) Löwitsch, Klaus, 31, 39 Luhrmann, Baz, 20, 237–265 M Mabel’s First Predicament (1914), 93 MacBride, Donald, 223 Magnani, Anna, 121 Magnificent Obsession (1954), 42, 72, 114n18

 INDEX 

Maguire, Tobey, 245 Malle, Louis, 112 Maltese Falcon, The (1942), 219 Maltese Falcon, The (novel), 210, 219, 233n34 Ma Mère Rit, 180, 203n21 Mancini, Al, 222 Mankiewicz, Joseph, 18, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 167n6, 167n11, 168n12, 168n13, 168n15, 263 Maran, Josie, 249 Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999), see Temps retrouvé, d’après l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust, Le (1999) Marlowe, Hugh, 153 Martin, Catherine, 237, 241, 243 Mauvais Sang (1986), 89, 91, 92, 98, 104, 113, 113n5, 114n13 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 219 McDormand, Frances, 208, 229 McGregor, Ewan, 245 Mean Streets (1973), 261 Meier, Armin, 31 Melodrama, 7, 18, 27, 37, 38, 40, 42, 63, 65n52, 69, 70, 72, 78, 81, 92, 95, 120, 125, 141, 148n49, 153, 163, 164 Merchant of the Four Seasons, The (1972), see Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (1972) Mercurio, Paul, 238 Merhar, Stanislas, 180, 264 Merrill, Gary, 158 Michi, Maria, 127, 133 Midsummer Night’s Dream (opera), 239, 243 Milland, Ray, 214

275

Miller’s Crossing (1990), 18, 19, 207–229, 233n43, 234n46, 264 Mira, Brigitte, 31, 44, 56, 71, 263 Modern Love, 98, 114n13 Modern Times (1936), 93, 97 Molière, 242 Monomyth, 242 Monroe, Marilyn, 163 Moore, Julianne, 70 Moorehead, Agnes, 42, 46, 75, 250 Moreau, Jeanne, 112 Morice, Tara, 238 Mothlight (1963), 3 Moulin Rouge! (2001), 238, 241, 243–245, 266n13 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 185 Mühe, Ulrich, 122, 126 Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, Der, 28 Multiplicities, 1, 237 Mulvey, Laura, 37, 38, 51 Muni, Paul, 215, 231n15 N National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), 242 Neale, Steve, 3–6, 8, 9, 13, 17, 20n5 Neorealism, 123, 124 New German Cinema, 34, 36, 65n38, 120, 123, 125, 219 News from Home (1977), 175 Night and Day (1991), 179 Night is Young, The (1986), see Mauvais Sang (1986) No Home Movie (2015), 175, 176, 180 Nouvelle Vague, 5, 27, 33, 36, 89, 152 Novak, Kim, 191, 193, 196 Now (2015), 176 Nugent, Elliott, 244

276 

INDEX

O Olsen, Moroni, 217, 218 One Inch Punch, 240 Orpheus, 241 Orwell, George, 126 Otto, Barry, 238 P Pacino, Al, 224 Pagliero, Marcelo, 127 Palazzi, Tasman, 253 Panahi, Jafar, 166 Parlo, Dita, 106 Parrineau, Harold, 241 Pastiche, 81, 82n5, 144, 224, 229, 237, 238, 241 Pathé, 4 Patterson, Frank, 226 Pempeit, Liselotte, a.k.a. Lilo Pempeit, 31, 74 Pentimento, 219, 232n32, 232n33 Perkins, Maxwell, 256 Perrier, Mireille, 89, 104, 114n13 Persona (1966), 3, 152, 153 Petzold, Christian, 124, 125 Pialat, Maurice, 124 Piccoli, Michel, 92 Pierrot le Fou (1965), 91, 176 Pilgrim, The (1923), 93 Poetic realism, 112 Polito, Jon, 220, 225 Positif, 209 Postmodernism, 2, 15–20, 22n64, 228, 237 Prévert, Jacques, 112 Prisonnière, La, 19, 173, 174, 180, 185–188, 190, 191, 194, 198–200, 264 Production Code Administration (PCA), 216, 230n11, 230n12, 230n13, 231n19, 231n24, 232n28

Proust, Marcel, 19, 173–202, 263, 264 Public Enemy, The (1931), 215 Puccini, Giacomo, 241 Q Quaid, Dennis, 70 Querelle (1982), 29, 58, 64n25, 74 R Raab, Kurt, 31, 32 Raben, Peer, 28, 29, 31, 32 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 183, 193 Radiohead, 240 Raft, George, 214, 215, 230–231n15 Raimi, Sam, 208, 229 Raising Arizona (1987), 208–210, 220, 229 Randolph, Lillian, 218, 232n28 Ratoff, Gregory, 157 Rauschenberg, Robert, 229 Rear Window (1954), 229 Rebecca (1940), 254 Rebhorn, James, 78 Recherche, La, see À la recherche du temps perdu Red Curtain, 20, 238–244 Redford, Robert, 244, 245, 260, 267n29, 267n31 Red Harvest, 208, 233n43 Red Shoes, The (1948), 117, 147n41 Reed, George, 215 Region Central, La (1971), 177 Remake, 2, 12–14, 16, 18, 19, 21n42, 22n47, 22n50, 22n55, 42, 44, 45, 62, 63, 72, 81, 83n23, 88, 153, 195, 198, 207 Rendez-vous (1985), 115n37, 166, 168n16, 179 Rendez-vous d’Anna, Les (1978), 179

 INDEX 

Reynolds, William, 45 Riefenstahl, Leni, 152, 167n7 Rio Bravo (1969), 3 Rogers, Ginger, 249 Roma città aperta (1945), 18, 19, 117–145, 146n15, 147n28, 147n39, 147n42, 147n43, 148n53, 263 Romeo + Juliet (1996), 238–241, 243–247 Rorke, Hayden, 78 Rossellini, Roberto, 18 Rovère, Liliane, 182 Ruiz, Raúl, 14, 173 S Salem, El Hedi ben, 31, 32, 44, 46, 47, 56, 64n25, 71, 74, 79, 83n15, 114n20, 263 Sanders, George, 156 Santoro, Rodrigo, 266n23 Sarris, Andrew, 6, 38 Saute ma Ville (1968), 176, 177 Scarface (1932), 215, 231n15 Schanelec, Angela, 124 Schindler’s List (1993), 125 Schlöndorff, Volker, 173 Schoonover, Karl, 2, 9, 20n2, 21n29, 21n35 Schuh des Manitu, Der (2007), 123 Schygulla, Hanna, 28, 31, 34, 64n30, 153 Scola, Kathryn, 214 Scorsese, Martin, 20, 220, 249–251, 261 Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, Die (1982), 33 Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), 8 Seyrig, Delphine, 177 Shannon, Harry, 253 Sheldon, Lloyd, 214, 230n12

277

Simon, Michel, 105, 174, 175, 178, 180–185, 188–191, 193, 201, 202, 264 Sirk, Douglas, 6, 18, 19, 21n23, 27–63, 69–79, 81, 82, 82n7, 83n14, 83n23, 262 Sloan, Amy, 250 Sloane, Everett, 255 Smith, Al, 210, 230n6 Smith, Iain Robert, 13, 22n50 Snow, Michael, 27, 175, 177 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 229 Spengler, Volker, 31 Spielberg, Steven, 125, 247 Spione (1928), 117, 138, 147n37, 147n39 Spurrin-Calleja, Giuseppe Maria, see Calleia, Joseph Stam, Robert, 11, 12, 15 Starr, Mike, 222 Stellvertreter, Der. Ein christliches Trauerspiel, 119 Stewart, James, 191, 200, 213, 230n13 Stewart, Kristen, 152, 162, 166 Stranger than Paradise (1984), 8 Strätz, Ursula, 31 Strictly Ballroom (1992), 238–241, 243, 266n13 Studio Relations Committee (SRC), 214 Sud (1999), 175 Sukowa, Barbara, 31 Summer Hours (2008), see Heure d’été, L’ (2008) T Talbott, Gloria, 45 Tammany Hall, 207, 210, 213, 216, 230n6 Tarantino, Quentin, 247 Téchiné, André, 115n37, 166, 168n16

278 

INDEX

Temps retrouvé, d’après l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust, Le (1999), 173 Testud, Sylvie, 180, 193, 264 Thieme, Thomas, 126 Thin Man, The, 210, 213, 219, 232n29 Third Man, The (1949), 117, 147n41, 147n42, 148n47, 251 This Boy's Life (1993), 246 This Gun For Hire (1942), 231n23, 244 Thomsen, Christian Braad, 28, 29, 32, 63n4, 63n7, 63n8, 64n29 Thomson, Pat, 238 Thoreau, Henry David, 50, 263 Tin Drum, The (1959), see Blechtrommel, Die (1959) Titanic (1997), 247 To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962), 78 Tornabene, Salvatore H., 228 Toubiana, Serge, 151 Touch of Evil (1958), 260 Toute une Nuit (1982), 179 Trotta, Margarethe von, 44 Truffaut, François, 89, 196, 204n41, 204n43 Tukur, Ulrich, 126 Turturro, John, 220, 234n46 Tuttle, Frank, 213, 216, 231n23 Twilight (2008-2012), 166, 168n18 Tzioumakis, Yannis, 7, 17, 21n26, 21n27, 23n72 U UFA, 4, 37 Ullmann, Liv, 152 Unfinished Woman, An, 219, 232n32

V Valentin, Barbara, 31, 53, 77, 112 Vampires, Les (1915-16), 152 Velvet Goldmine (1998), 69 Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 119 Verevis, Constantine, 11, 13, 15, 21n42, 22n50 Verfremdungseffekt, 30, 31, 145 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 118, 119 Vernehmungsprotokolle (Interrogation Protocols), 121 Vertigo (1958), 19, 173–202 Vigo, Jean, 19, 88, 96, 105, 107, 112 Vivre sa vie (1962), 3, 20n17, 33–35, 41, 64n29, 114n13 Vries, Marius de, 240 W Walden, 50 Walken, Christopher, 247 Walsh, M. Emmet, 208 Warhol, Andy, 27, 31, 175 Welles, Orson, 18, 20, 148n47, 249–252, 254, 255, 258–260, 268n40 Wenders, Wim, 65n38, 123, 219 Weston, Celia, 76 West Side Story, 262 What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), 246 Williams, Guinn, 216, 223, 264 Williams, Sammy-Art, 208 Wilson, Robert, 132 Wise, Robert, 262 Wolf of Wall Street, The (2013), 246, 248

 INDEX 

Wolkenphänomen in Maloja, Das (1924), 152 Written on the Wind (1956), 38, 72 Wyman, Jane, 42, 43, 54, 55, 69, 71, 263

Z Zavattini, Cesare, 124 Zeffirelli, Franco, 245 Zinnemann, Fred, 219, 232n32 Zischler, Hanns, 157

279