A Companion to François Truffaut 9781405198479, 2012042143

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A Companion to

Edited by

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

A Companion to

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

François Truffaut

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

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

Andrew and Gillain

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

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

A Companion to

François Truffaut Edited by

Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain

jkt_9781405198479.indd 1

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

22/1/13 07:55:56

A Companion to François Truffaut

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

A Companion to François Truffaut Edited by

Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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

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Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Preface Filmography Part I

La Planète Truffaut

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

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2. Truffaut and His “Doubles” Martin Lefebvre

23

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

71

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

105

Part II

125

Style and Sensibility

5. Flashes of Happiness Alain Bergala

127

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

137

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

153

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

173

9. The Ecstatic Pan Phil Powrie

184

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10. The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance Adrian Martin

205

Part III

219

The Making of a Filmmaker

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

221

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

242

13. Truffaut–Hitchcock Jonathan Everett Haynes

265

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

283

15. Cain and Abel: Godard and Truffaut Michel Marie

300

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

317

Part IV

Truffaut and His Time

333

17. Growing Up with the French New Wave James Tweedie

335

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

356

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

375

20. Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan Kan Nozaki

388

Part V

401

Films

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

403

22. Jules et Jim … et Walter Benjamin Dudley Andrew

420

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

434

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

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

454

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

469

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

489

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

507

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

517

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

530

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

546

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

561

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

571

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

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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

Notes on Contributors

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

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

Notes on Contributors

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

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

Notes on Contributors

xiii

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

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

Preface

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

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Preface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filmography

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

Part I

La Planète Truffaut

1

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

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

d:

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

q:

Before that you had not seen any of his films?

d:

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

q:

What were the circumstances?

d:

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

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

Nothing is gratuitous?

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

The New Wave and Modernity q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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q:

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

d:

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

Les 400 Coups q:

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

d:

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

Figure 1.1

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

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Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew

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

Like Jacques Demy playing one of the policemen?

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

Figure 1.2

11

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

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

The camera is never still.

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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

And how does Monika relate to 400 Coups?

d:

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

q:

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

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

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Tirez sur le pianiste q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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

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

d:

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

q:

What about the raincoat she wears?

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

For me, the continuity is total.

q:

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

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

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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d:

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

q:

How do you explain this terrible failure?

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

And the visual depiction is pretty direct.

d:

Absolutely shocking.

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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

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

d:

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

q:

Searching for “les traces de la civilisation.”

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

You mean the sweeping camera around the statue?

d:

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

La Politique des Auteurs q:

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

d:

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

Interview with Arnaud Desplechin, Part I

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

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

d:

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

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q:

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

d:

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

Notes 1

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

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Truffaut and His “Doubles” Martin Lefebvre

Figure 2.1

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

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

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

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Figure 2.3

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

Figure 2.4

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

Figure 2.5

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

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25

Figure 2.6

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

Figure 2.7

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

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

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Figure 2.9

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

Figure 2.10

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

Figure 2.11

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

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Figure 2.12

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

Figure 2.13

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

Figure 2.14

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

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Figure 2.15

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

Figure 2.16

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

Figure 2.17

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

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.18

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

Figure 2.19

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

Figure 2.20

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

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Figure 2.21

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

Figure 2.22

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

Figure 2.23

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

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

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

Figure 2.25

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

Figure 2.26

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

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Figure 2.27

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

Figure 2.28

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

Figure 2.29

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

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.30

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

Figure 2.31

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

Figure 2.32

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

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Figure 2.33

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

Figure 2.34

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

Figure 2.35

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

Truffaut and his “Doubles”

Figure 2.36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tirez sur le pianiste r

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

La Peau douce r

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

La Mariée était en noir r

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

Baisers volés r

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes 1 2 3 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 3.1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. 4. 5. 6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

It did make money.

d:

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

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

You think that Truffaut was in tune with all this?

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

Truffaut the Outsider q:

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

d:

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

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q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

“Resolutely Scandalous” d:

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

q:

Even L’Argent de poche.

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

French Cinema vs. Hollywood q:

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

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

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

q:

I believe it was two months.

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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q:

When Scottie tries to dress Kim Novak up.

d:

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

Scripts, Voice-over, and Music q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

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d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

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

Le Bel Objet q:

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

d:

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

q:

It is very personal.

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

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

Was it Drucker?

d:

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

q:

Yes, the paintings are all inside.

d:

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

q:

But you have maps on the wall.

d:

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

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

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

d:

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

q:

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

d:

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

q:

Those paintings came through him.

d:

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

q:

That’s a great point.

d:

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

Part II

Style and Sensibility

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Flashes of Happiness Alain Bergala

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6

Truffaut and the Photographic Cinema, Fetishism, Death Junji Hori

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 6.1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 6.2

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

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

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

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

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Figure 6.3

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 6.4

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

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

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

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

The Ecstatic Pan Phil Powrie

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ecstatic Pan

Table 9.1

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

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

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

DP

Upward pans

Film length (minutes)

Ratio

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

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

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

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

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

1972 1973 1975 1976 1977

Glenn Glenn Almendros Glenn Almendros

27 41 27 36 35

94 112 96 101 114

3.5 2.7 3.6 2.8 3.3

1978 1979 1980 1981 1983

Almendros Almendros Almendros Lubtchansky Almendros

25 24 41 31 33

90 91 126 101 106 average

3.6 3.8 3.0 3.3 3.2 3.6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes 1 2

3

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

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

The Ecstatic Pan

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

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

10

The Untimely Moment and the Correct Distance Adrian Martin For Cristina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part III

The Making of a Filmmaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 11.1

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

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

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

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

Figure 11.2

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

Figure 11.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes 1

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

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

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

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Certain Tendencies of Truffaut’s Film Criticism Richard Neupert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13

Truffaut–Hitchcock Jonathan Everett Haynes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideally, two lovers should never separate.

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

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

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

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

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

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

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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31

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

14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 14.1

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

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

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Figure 14.2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the epilogue, Ferrand is forced to modify the scene where the son murders his father because the father, Alexandre, has in reality been killed in an accident on the ridge road in Nice, under circumstances very similar to those of Deborah Kerr in Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) – one of Godard’s favorite films around the time of A Bout de souffle. Someone suggests to Ferrand that he could have Alphonse, the son, shoot Alexandre in the back, because the actor had to be replaced after his death. Ferrand adopts the suggestion, adding, “Shooting his father in the back, that will be much more violent!” – Now recall that request Truffaut had written to criticize his friend Godard about that line at the very end of A Bout de souffle. Furthermore, this murder, committed from behind with a revolver in plain daylight, had been staged by Godard at the end of his second feature-length film, Le Petit Soldat (1963), when Bruno Forestier assassinates the law professor who is a member of the National Liberation Front. More generally, Godard must have hated the largely festive atmosphere of the shoot that Truffaut is glad to depict, and not without nostalgia. As Ferrand says, “An entire era of the cinema is going to disappear along with Alexandre. We’ve abandoned the studios; films are being made in the streets, without stars and without scripts. People won’t be making films like Je vous présente Paméla anymore,” which didn’t stop François Truffaut from directing Le Dernier Métro in a studio a few years later, and with very big stars. It proves more interesting to compare Pierrot le fou (1965) with La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), if only because Godard and Truffaut each used Jean-Paul Belmondo in a distinct way: he was “Godardized” to the extreme in Pierrot le fou, and “Truffauldized,” feminized, in La Sirène du Mississippi, creating a near-opposite effect. Yet in both cases, one finds themes of romantic passion and its destructive violence, two different reflections on the French “star system,” and two very personal adaptations of noir detective novels – the first little-known (Lionel White’s Obsession, for Pierrot le fou), the second more famous (William Irish’s Waltz into Darkness, for La Sirène du Mississippi). With the Belmondo case in mind, we can imagine that collaboration/competition of these two directors would ultimately take place on the privileged terrain of the person of an actor, the young Jean-Pierre Léaud, with this struggle mediated by Jean Eustache who also used Léaud (Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus in 1969, La Maman et la putain in 1973). When Léaud played the young Antoine Doinel in 1959 he was only fifteen years old (he was born in 1944); he would become the lovesick teenager of Antoine et Colette in 1963, then make but a brief appearance two years later in Pierrot le fou, as an audience member in the cinema. It was not until Masculin féminin in 1966 that Godard committed a veritable kidnapping of actor and character, as he was wont to do. Antoine Doinel suddenly became the young Paul, in love with Madeleine, a pop (“yéyé”) singer played by Chantal Goya with equal amounts of innocence and perversity. Under Godard’s whip, Léaud would give birth to an entirely new kind of character, a rather monstrous hybrid, a Godardian version of a Truffaldian creature. Godard accentuates his awkwardness, his shyness, his aggressiveness, as well as the entire dimension of the character’s adolescent misogyny. Then he violently kills off

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the character in a highly elliptical epilogue, before bringing him back to life in Made in U.S.A. (1966), and yet again in La Chinoise, where he becomes a Marxist-Leninist student in love with the young Véronique. With Léaud in mind, we can interpret the project of Baisers volés as a desire to reappropriate the actor by his original creator. Truffaut, conceiving this film in total opposition to the spirit of the time, intended to rescue his young actor from the antiestablishment topics of that era, whereas Godard would once again have him hold forth dogmatically in 1968’s Le Gai Savoir. Baisers volés is a reactive manifesto based on a desire to insert cinematic creation into a certain lineage of French culture, which explains the film’s multiple references to the universe of René Clair, a filmmaker then under violent attack from the dominant film establishment. In a way, Jean-Pierre Léaud would end up unwillingly crystallizing the Truffaut–Godard rivalry throughout the seventies, the years of the great rupture, as each of the two directors attempted to monopolize the actor and claim Léaud as his own exclusive creation – Godard from Le Gai Savoir through Détective (1984) and finally Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma (1986) (in which Léaud plays Gaspard Bazin, adorned with a fake mustache), and Truffaut with his four Doinel films, including Domicile conjugal (1970) and L’Amour en fuite, and later with Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) and La Nuit américaine. Moreover, we can interpret the character of Alexandre in Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain as a radicalized synthesis of Truffaut’s use of him as Antoine and Godard’s use of him as Paul (Masculin féminin) and Guillaume (La Chinoise). Alexandre combines all the distinguishing traits: dandyism, awkwardness going hand-in-hand with seduction, provocativeness, logorrhea, etc. But Eustache pushes the maniacal elaboration of the young Alexandre’s obsessions much further than Truffaut and Godard had dared to do, including his neuroses, his madness, and his near-suicidal process of self-destruction. There is, however, a sequence in La Nuit américaine that bears a strong resemblance to Eustache’s film. When Alphonse (Léaud) locks himself in his room after being abandoned by Liliane, Julie comes to comfort him. He tells her, in a tone very similar to Alexandre’s in La Maman et la putain, “You know, Julie, I’ve discovered something terrible, that one can fall desperately in love with someone whom he despises, whose every gesture, every word, he detests. … In any case, between me and girls, it has always ended in disaster. I believed for too long that women were magical.” Alphonse and Alexandre speak in precisely the same tone, “recto tono,” with a diction completely specific to Jean-Pierre Léaud. As we briefly indicated at the beginning of the chapter, in the early seventies, Truffaut and Godard were in two very different positions. The latter was at the height of his career at the beginning of 1968. His fifteen feature-length films had crowned him as the great iconoclast of the New Wave. His international notoriety was at its peak. All the European television networks wanted to produce for him. He received invitations from the top American universities. And then Godard made every effort to demolish the pedestal that he himself had constructed film by film, interview after interview. He strove to dissolve his own name, the sign of “JLG” itself, into the “Dziga Vertov collective,” using the pseudonym of Soviet director Denis Abramovitch to

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mask his own identity, the Franco-Swiss filmmaker who was insulted by the Situationists and saddled with the title of “stupidest pro-Chinese filmmaker.” He continued to make new films every year, feature-length movies by the Vertov Group, from British Sounds (1969), Lotte in Italia (1970), and Vladimir et Rosa (1970) – which were scarcely distributed, and only seen by a few hundred people – through to Tout va bien and its two miscast stars, Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. His creativity, however, was impeded by the serious car accident that he suffered in 1971. Numéro Deux (1975) marked a new departure towards a more experimental mode of expression, integrating video. The two large-scale television series Six fois deux (1976) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1979) are in a way realizations of the dream of Godard the communicator, for he had always said he wanted to work for a national television network, to film the news, the Tour de France, and the finals of the World Cup. But this dream was cut short, as Godard greatly underestimated the power of the media and its ability to censor through its method of distribution. Sauve qui peut ( la vie), produced by Marin Karmitz, was an attempt to recover his 1960s’ audience, and he was largely successful thanks to Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, and Jacques Dutronc. With this new feature-length film, Godard hoped to “save what he could” of his status as a “star director,” which he himself had badly damaged in the preceding decade. The trajectory of his former friend François Truffaut was nearly the opposite. After Baisers volés (1968), the third opus in the Doinel series (dedicated to the Cinémathèque Française and to the return of Henri Langlois as its director), and then the fourth, Domicile conjugal, two years later, Truffaut launched one of his most ambitious and personal films, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, adapting a Henri-Pierre Roché novel for the second time, and offering Jean-Pierre Léaud a leading role that was rather different from the character he played in the Doinel series. Admittedly, Claude bears some resemblance to Antoine Doinel, but he is a seducer and a bohemian artist who accumulates female conquests. He thus has much more in common with “le homme” of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes than with the shy, unfortunate lover in L’Amour à vingt ans (1962) or the tormented, suicidal adolescent of Masculin féminin. After the national and international success of La Nuit américaine, awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Truffaut was able to direct a very personal adaptation of the journal of Adèle Hugo, offering the title role to Isabelle Adjani, the period’s great female acting hope who had just scored a triumph in Claude Pinoteau’s prizewinning La Gifle (1974). Then came L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), one of his major successes, followed by La Chambre verte (1978), one of his profoundest works. Finally, the decade was capped with the popular and critical triumph of Le Dernier Métro. It was thus obvious in 1981, as France was ushering in a new president and, with that, a new era, that the French filmmaker dominating the French media world was no longer Jean-Luc Godard but François Truffaut, his eternal rival. Another face of the confrontation between our two brother-enemies manifests itself in their very bodies, even in their distinctive voices. Like their role models Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and Jean Cocteau, Truffaut and Godard did not hesitate to step

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in front of the camera. Truffaut gave himself the lead role in three major films: L’Enfant sauvage (1970), La Nuit américaine, and La Chambre verte. Doctor Itard, the director Ferrand, and Julien Davenne, the journalist specializing in obituaries, represent three very different sides of his personality: there is the pedagogue, the master director of actors, especially children; there is the classical metteur en scène of traditional films, striving to steer the his ship to port in spite of all of the incidents that threaten a film shoot, the most dire of which is of course the sudden death of his star actor; and lastly there is the fetishistic chronicler, obsessively attached to the memory of his late wife and his dearest friends, all deceased, most of them in the trenches of World War I. As for Truffaut’s voice, it delivers an extensive commentary throughout the story of Claude’s romantic misadventures in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, reading entire sections of Henri-Pierre Roché’s original text. Whereas the voice of Jean-Luc Godard reads the text of “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe in Vivre sa vie. And it accompanies the adventures of three amorous companions in Bande à part, lending a poetic touch to this very nostalgic story, clearly influenced by the universe of Raymond Queneau’s Loin de Rueil. In Le Mépris, the director portrayed is Fritz Lang; Godard merely plays his humble assistant, setting up takes while chasing after the extras. He prompts the “married woman” to whisper as she recounts the episodes in her romantic trajectory between lover and husband. But the director himself whispers when it is his turn to speak in the voice-over narration of 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (1966): “Her [Elle], that’s Marina Vlady. She’s an actress. She’s wearing a dark blue sweater with yellow stripes. She’s Russian. Her hair is deep chestnut or pure brown. I don’t exactly know.” In the collective project Loin du Vietnam (1967) and in his short feature titled Caméra-oeil in homage to Vertov, Godard depicts himself beside a large Mitchell camera and wonders aloud about the impact of a political film. In France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, Godard’s voice shouts at the two children in a “pedagodical terrorism” (to cite Serge Daney). Godard plays Uncle Jeannot in Prénom Carmen (1983). He grants himself the burlesque role of “the idiot” in Soigne ta droite (1987). His voice and his image dominate and structure the eight episodes of his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998). Finally, Godard makes the leap into self-portraiture with JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (1995). This film could be seen as his own version of La Chambre verte, his cinematic necropolis.

“François Is Perhaps Dead. I Am Perhaps Alive.” Earlier I brought up that brief, typically Godardian letter published at the time of Truffaut’s death in 1984, “Tout seul.” In order to save face and appease his guilty conscience, Godard returned to the years of his youth, years in which he and Truffaut wrote together, when they were both talented young critics. This posthumous reconciliation occurred over successive phases. It was first manifested in the foreword Godard agreed to compose for the publication of François Truffaut’s correspondence;

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this must have involved a certain amount of masochism on Godard’s part, as the book included Truffaut’s aforementioned brutal response to Godard’s aggressive letter about La Nuit américaine. Truffaut writes to Godard: “I’m sending back to you the letter you wrote to Jean-Pierre Léaud: I read it and think it’s obnoxious. And because of that letter I feel the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my opinion, you’ve been acting like a shit.” Truffaut then denounces Godard for setting yourself up as the eternal victim, like Cayatte, like Boisset, like Michel Drach; the victim of Pompidou, of Marcellin, of the censors, of the distributors with their eager little scissors, whereas in reality you’ve always contrived to have things work out just the way you want them to and when you want them to, and, above all, you’ve always contrived to uphold your pure and incorruptible image, even if it should be to the detriment of defenseless people.21

In 1988, fifteen years had passed since this letter, and, most of all, Truffaut had died at fifty-two years of age in 1984. In his foreword to François Truffaut: Correspondence, Godard opens by recalling the era of their collaboration: The article in Arts, no. 719, from 22 April 1959, which read “We have won,” and then, a little further on, ended with “… for if we have won a battle, the war is not over.” I wrote that article, as pleased as Athos was at one of D’Artagnan’s exploits. Our victory was the fact that Les 400 Coups had been selected to represent France at the Cannes Film Festival.

He continues: It was a good time to be alive. And the fame that lay ahead had not yet begun to weave the shroud of our happiness. For the war was a lost cause, precisely because of the hopes we invested in it. … Why did I quarrel with François? It had nothing to do with Genet or Fassbinder. It was something else. Something which, fortunately, had no name. Infantile. I say fortunately, because everything else was becoming symbol, the sign of itself, a mortal decoration: Algeria, Vietnam, Hollywood, and our friendship, and our love of reality. The sign, but also the death of that sign. … François is perhaps dead. I am perhaps alive. But then, is there a difference?22

It is also worth recalling that François Truffaut’s notoriety, between 1954 and 1959, was immeasurably greater than that of Jean-Luc Godard, taciturn and nearly unknown before A Bout de souffle. After the death of the auteur of La Peau douce, Godard would transform his old friend, who had always resisted the slightest reconciliation, into the great French critic, and as usual, he was not subtle about it: There was Diderot … Baudelaire … Elie Faure … Malraux … then François … There was never any other art critic. François was French. … He died of it … Cinema being international first and foremost … He slipped out of his own skin on the sly … quietly … Without Uncle Jean [Cocteau] to help him pass through the mirror … his books being his only passport … tons of books … too much information … it went to his head … you go

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see Father Alfred [Hitchcock] to be absolved … one more book … both were completely stunned by it … etymologically between the real and the imaginary … We will inevitably meet them again.23

And the obsessive Godard reprised this image of Truffaut as a great art critic, the equal of Elie Faure, Baudelaire, and Malraux, in his Histoire(s) du cinéma in the nineties. He devoted a large section of one of his eight chapters to the auteur of Les 400 Coups, reciting his famous litany: “There was Diderot, Baudelaire, Elie Faure, Malraux, and then François …” So there was, in the eyes of Jean-Luc Godard, one very great French critic who came after André Bazin, and that was François Truffaut; but there could only be one great auteur of the New Wave, and that was Godard himself. Translated by Liam Andrew with Madeline Whittle

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

François Truffaut, Interview, Cahiers du Cinéma, 315–316 (October 1980): 30. Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004). Jean-Luc Douin (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard, dictionnaire des passions (Paris: Editions Stock, 2010), pp. 399–406. Jean-Luc Godard, foreword to François Truffaut, Correspondence, 1945–1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. ix–x. Jean-Luc Godard, “Tout seul,” Cahiers du Cinéma (December 1984), republished in Le Roman de Francois Truffaut (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), p. 37. Throughout the chapter, quotations from Godard retain his characteristic punctuation, separating words or short phrases as if they were images. Nothing has been deleted from the original. Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard: An Investigation into his Films and Philosophy (NY: Crown Publishers, 1970), pp. 168–174, trans. Ciba Vaughan from the second French edition (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1968). Jean-Luc Godard, “Apprenez le François,” L’Avant-scène Cinéma 48 (May 1965), trans. Tom Milne in Godard on Godard (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 211. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 245. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2013), p. 109. Gilles Cahoreau, François Truffaut, 1932–1984 (Paris: Editions Julliard, 1989) p. 280. Antoine de Baecque, Godard: Biographie (Paris: Grasset, 2010), p. 572. Douin (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard, dictionnaire des passions, p. 404. Jean-Luc Douin and Alain Rémond, “Godard dit tout,” Télérama ( July 12, 1978). Both these letters from Godard and from Truffaut appear in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, pp. 362–363. De Baecque and Toubiana, Trufffaut: A Biography, p. 78. Truffaut to Jean Collet, 1974, in François Truffaut, Correspondence 1945–1984, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990), p. 403.

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Francois Truffaut, in Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, p. 168. Francois Truffaut, in Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard, p. 168. Truffaut in Collet, Jean-Luc Godard, pp. 168–170. Michel Marie, Comprendre Godard: Travelling avant sur A Bout de souffle et Le Mépris (Paris: Colin, 2006). Truffaut to Godard, in Truffaut, Correspondance, 1945–1984, pp. 385–386. Godard, foreword to Truffaut, Correspondance, 1945–1984. This complex paragraph reads in French: “L’article de Arts, n° 719, du 22 avril 1959 qui disait ‘Nous avons gagné’ et puis, un peu plus loin, se terminait par: ‘… car si nous avons gagné une bataille, la guerre n’est pas finie.’ J’avais signé aussi heureux qu’Athos d’un succès de D’Artagnan. C’était la présentation à Cannes des 400 Coups, représentant officiel de la France. … Ce temps-là était le bon. Et la gloire future n’avait pas encore tramé le deuil du bonheur. Car la guerre était perdue d’avance, à cause, n’est-ce pas, de l’avance, justement que nous avions sur elle. … Pourquoi me suis-je querellé avec François? Rien à voir avec Genet et Fassbinder. Autre chose. Heureusement demeurée sans nom. Idiote. Demeurée. Heureusement, alors que tout le reste devenait signe, décoration mortelle, Algérie, Vietnam, Hollywood, et notre amitié, et notre affection du réel. Signe, et chant du signe. … François est peutêtre mort. Je suis peut-être vivant. Il n’y a pas de différence, n’est-ce pas.” Godard, “Tout seul.” This passage is translated in Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), p. 481.

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Friction, Failure, and Fire Truffaut as Adaptive Auteur Timothy Corrigan

With some historical irony, the most celebrated auteurs in film history have regularly relied on adaptations as a way to appropriate the aura of literary signatures and to creatively reinterpret both the letter and spirit of literary texts. Some filmmakers, in fact, have had a particularly complex relationship not only with those literary letters and spirits that precede them but especially with the materiality of those texts as books or other physical objects. From François Truffaut and R.W. Fassbinder to Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion, this engagement with the material burden of books often expands as a vexed engagement with historical and cultural materialities of many sorts, including the physical hierarchies of cultural distributions, the fabric of inscriptions, and the machines of production – a vexed engagement that Truffaut playfully dramatizes in La Nuit américaine (1973).1 Indeed, calling attention to the material dimension of adaptation suggests a chain of relations that are especially important in Truffaut’s work: as material encounters, these adaptations appear as “events” in which the literary text is reenacted by the filmmaker, less as the product and projection of a creatively Romantic author (as so commonly assumed) and more as an adaptive ritual into which the filmmaker tends to dissipate. Rather than amounting to the commonly hailed triumph of auteurs as successful textual enunciators, these auteurist engagements with literary materials frequently signal, paradoxically, the potential destruction or compromise of expressivity itself. With Truffaut particularly, the fiery friction of that material encounter threatens to consume or transform the illuminating auteur in the ritual event he mediates, transforming him into a kind of haunted agent of another author and another text. With specific references to a selection of Truffaut films, from Les 400 Coups (1959) to La Chambre verte (1978), I argue here how and why this combustible and haunted auteur becomes so pertinent to contemporary film and media cultures, cultures in which authorship now appears vastly more complicated and nuanced than it did A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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when Truffaut proclaimed, in the 1950s, the emergence of auteurism as a key to cinematic value. The larger implications or goals of this look at Truffaut and his adaptations are to draw attention away from some of the usual, and frequently reductive, assumptions and generalities about auteurism and to relocate and redefine those questions in terms of the more specific and distinctive practices and dynamics of Truffaut as both auteur and adaptor. Writing about Truffaut’s famous interlocutor, Hitchcock, and his relationship with screenwriters and scripts, Thomas Leitch points out that “the adaptor is the paradigmatic collaborator whose function explodes the claims of any single filmmaker to complete authorship by revealing that all filmmakers are collaborators … Not all filmmakers are directors, not all of them are auteurs, but every one of them is an adaptor.” For Leitch, therefore, “one of the great opportunities adaptation study offers is the possibility of nominating alternative authors whose collaborative contributions recast the whole idea of authorship as more complex than the choice of a single controlling collaborator would suggest.”2 In fact, I would extend this claim to argue that a more collaborative and confrontational dynamic for auteurist practice hardly undermines the importance of the filmmaker as auteur. Rather, it opens a rich and varied field in which to explore the individual proclivities and pathways whereby adaptive filmmakers mobilize themselves – consciously or not – through the event of adaptation. Following this lead, my position here reflects my broader interests in the friction generated between different critical or theoretical models: in this case the friction produced between auteur theory and adaptation studies, a friction that ideally draws out specific limits, possibilities, and transformations that enrich both. With Truffaut as my touchstone, my strangely ideal examples are several seemingly unremarkable and not particularly successful adaptations, from his version of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1966) to his film La Chambre verte, based on Henry James’ story “The Altar of the Dead.” A critical centerpiece in contemporary adaptation studies, notions of intertexuality do not, I believe, do justice to the specific intricacies of my reading of adaptive auteurism in these films. Models of intertextuality emphasize the many textual layers and sources that inform and shape any film and certainly film adaptations (as materials, stylistics, or cultural contexts). Thus, Robert Stam productively focuses and richly expands the play of intertextuality in his elaborate and informed analysis of Jules et Jim (1962) as that film reverberates through Truffaut’s social and artistic life, adapting, performing, and transforming Truffaut’s biography, Henri-Pierre Roché’s source novel, twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality, ideas of friendship, the erotics of bibliophilia, and translation process itself.3 In his study of intertextuality in the French New Wave, with a more textually centered model of intertextuality, T. Jefferson Kline offers a sophisticated overview of the continual allusions to literature and books in these films as acts of repression and displacement. For Kline, these films institute a complex and highly mobile configuration of meanings, memories, and associations. The specific mobility of their presence derives most of all from the feature of repression that hovers over literature in general in these films. Filmmakers … may invoke one text to displace and/or repress another, thereby sublating literature into

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figures not reducible to semiotic components. It is often through such intertextual elements that French new wave film will tend to move meaning “elsewhere,” into forms other than the ones that seem to be in evidence. In this sense, the texts screened come to function as screens in the sense that Freud gave the term, as a memory “behind which lies a submerged and forgotten” phrase, event, or, in this case, text. In this sense too, screening (out) seems always to involve a double movement away from and toward the object (of desire).4

Stam’s detailed cultural map of a single film and Kline’s broad psychoanalytic perspective regarding the double movement of textual adaptation in the French New Wave certainly demonstrate the complex play of adaptation in the films of perhaps the most renowned auteur cinema in film history. Yet, I am more interested in the individuated, allegorized, and often subversive figures that a filmmaker like Truffaut enacts as both an auteur and an adaptor, an adaptive auteur who acts less as a vehicle for various textualities and intertexualities than as corporeal and expressive agent who both engages and consumes texts as part of a specific cinematic event in which loss and failure become the definitive features of the adaptation ritual.

The Failure to Adapt: Antoine Doinel and Honoré de Balzac Let us recall that extraordinary sequence in Les 400 Coups when Antoine Doinel consecrates his secret obsession with the novels of Honoré de Balzac. In Antoine’s tiny, cell-like bedroom sanctuary, reading Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu suddenly erupts as an epiphanic event, triggering a moment of reenacted expression for the young boy as he hears in the writer’s language a voice that echoes his own feelings and experiences. With this inspiration in hand, he responds to a school assignment – notably an assignment with a directive that underlines its last word “to describe a serious event that involved you personally” – by reappropriating word for word the final triumphant scene from Balzac’s novel as oddly but accurately his very own personal experience. When a strict and fussy schoolteacher committed to rote writing exercises discovers his plagiarism, Antoine is immediately denounced and exposed as a failure. For the chastened and bewildered Antoine, however, there was nothing wrong with stealing Balzac’s text since he was simply rewriting and reenacting what he recognized as his own voice and creative longing. Balzac’s phrase, “Eureka! At last I have found it,” spoken by the dying grandfather at the conclusion of the novel, signals for Antoine his recognition that Balzac is his lost father, a displaced literary father who, through the event of this reading and rewriting, gives birth to Antoine’s own creative energy. On cue, that evening Antoine acts out a secret ritual acknowledging this transformative bond by lighting a candle in a small homemade shrine to Balzac, a candle that shortly after bursts into flames when the curtains surrounding the little sanctuary catch fire from the candle. In the familial anger and social confusion that follows, the illogic of the parents’ punishment fits perfectly the logic of Truffaut’s

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birth as an auteur and future as an adaptor of literature: the parents take Antoine to a film – and not just any film, but the 1958 New Wave masterpiece Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1961). Made by Truffaut’s colleague and fellow writer at Cahiers du cinéma Jacques Rivette, and still in production at the time that Les 400 Coups appeared, Paris Belongs to Us and the event that surrounds its appearance in Truffaut’s film become, on the one hand, a futuristic vision of a new generation of filmmakers usurping their father figures in boulevard cinemas and, on the other, a kind of metaallegory whereby the appropriation and adaptation of literature, as well as the crisis, failure, and loss that it generates, reappears as a movie that briefly harmonizes a family on the verge of collapse. From the ritualistic flames of his sanctuary in which he remakes Balzac’s language as the text and voice of his own writing, Antoine discovers and creates the films of the French New Wave, including his own, as a future event. In one of the foundational manifestos for auteurism and the French New Wave, Balzac prophetically appears eleven years earlier in Alexandre Astruc’s celebrated 1948 essay “The Birth of the New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” a work that announces the possibility of a new cinematic writing able to adapt and transform traditional literary forms. In a powerful, if lengthy, central passage, Astruc dramatically describes this new age of cinematic expression: To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it. … After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or the means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo (camera pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. … It can tackle any subject, any genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, ideas, and passions lie within its province. I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes lived today, he would write novels.” With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16 mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode [sic] would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.

Just as Antoine turns to Balzac in Les 400 Coups as his inspiration, Balzac becomes, for Astruc, a touchstone for identifying the force of literature and the distortions of conventional adaptations in diluting that force, witnessed in those adaptors “that construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological and metaphysical overtone.” The resulting adaptations may, like Antoine, recognize the complexity and subtlety of Balzac’s novels but severely

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underestimate the ability of the cinematic to assimilate great literature as part of its distinctive powers, and so, in these lame adaptations, “Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place.”5 At the beginning of this postwar New Wave, however, a filmmaker, like a writer such as Balzac, “is capable of expressing any kind of reality” and of articulating what Antoine, Balzac, and presumably Rivette regard as the “eureka” of insight when the individual articulates both lived and literary realities through the new language of cinema. With the camérastylos of this “new avant-garde,” Balzac’s cinematic sons and daughters can, according to Astruc, reclaim and reenact the powers and visions of their literary fathers and mothers by figuratively and formally stealing that language and reincarnating it as a transformative adaptation of the literary by the cinematic. Linked across the work and figure of Balzac, Antoine Doinel thus becomes a kind of reincarnation and agent of Astruc’s foundational “New Wave” statement whereby to adapt literature is to transform both the literature and its now doubled author as a ritualistic event that at once transgresses and transcends. While Antoine’s fiery ritualistic homage may in part identify him as an Oedipus searching for a father (that prominent theme throughout Les 400 Coups), that ritual also figures him as a version of two other mythological figures: Prometheus, the hero who stole the fire of creativity from the gods, and the phoenix who rises again and again from the flames of its own destruction. The form of Antoine’s rebellion is often, as for Prometheus, that of theft, stealing, and forgery, and that the defiantly creative Antoine frequently seems to be playing with fire subtly reinforces a connection in which Prometheus’ theft of the fire becomes associated not only with inspiration and imagination but also with human destruction, loss, and sacrifice. Many of Antoine’s thefts, moreover, frequently seem to be about acquiring the means or metaphors of expression: he steals pens, stories, typewriters, his mother’s handwriting, and, and as one of many acts of rebellion associated with his unquenchable cinephilia and its relation to maternity and femininity, a photo of actress Harriet Andersson (in Ingmar Bergman’s 1952 Monika) from a cinema’s display case. Like Antoine’s many other mishaps, these thefts of the material and language of writing often fail and lead to his repeated downfalls, yet, like the phoenix, he always manages to rise from the ashes of these failures in order to literally rewrite and readapt himself in this film and again in the multiple Doinel films that follow. In a subtle way that follows Antoine’s life through the Doinel cycle of films and through Truffaut’s career as an adaptive auteur, fire thus becomes an emblem of a simultaneously creative and destructive force defined by rituals of theft, failure, self-sacrifice, and reenactment.6

Reenacting Authors and Books Well documented in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s biography, Truffaut the writer and filmmaker was not simply an avid reader but a reader for whom words and authors permeated his life and assumed a massive philosophical, psychological,

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aesthetic, and, in a distinguishing way, material significance throughout that life. Beginning as child for whom the reading of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers acted as a kind of literary sanctuary while he hid in the metro during the bombing of Paris in 1944, Truffaut continued throughout his life to immerse himself in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, voraciously reading writers from Balzac and Tolstoy to Proust and Cocteau. As one biographer notes, “he would read and re-read his books and they were filled with notes and underlined passages, which showed he applied the same sustained, meticulous attention to the works he read as to the films he watched over and over again.”7 As an extraordinarily resonant observation about the future thematic links between literature, writing, and filmmaking, de Baecque and Toubiana point out that in his youth, “reading was always the best way of forgetting a mother who ‘could stand me only if I was silent,’”8 a remark that would later be incorporated into the dialogue of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) and suggests a complex psychological relationship between immersive reading and loss. That these immersions and losses consistently tend to merge the sexual and the literary thus deepens and expands Stam’s keen observation that, for Truffaut, “literary love … is palimpsestic.”9 From an angle that would be replayed in so many future films, the absent or alienated bodies of his mother and, later, female lovers becomes, for Truffaut, displaced and reenacted within and through the materiality of books and reading as ritual. A reader for whom reading was a necessity, for whom books and libraries provided escape from domestic and social restrictions, oppressions, and losses, Truffaut would become a filmmaker gravitating to adaptation as a vaguely illicit cycle of desire for literature and the literal as refuge and hideaway.10 The year 1951 is one of the most significant in this formation of Truffaut as reader and adaptor, when he first encounters Jean Genet, one of literature’s renowned thieves, with whom Truffaut would identify and bond for many years on both a personal and professional level. In those early years, Genet introduced Truffaut to novelists William Irish, David Goodis, Henry Farrell, and Charles Williams, crime and detective fiction writers whose work he later adapted in films such as La Mariée etait en noir (1967) and Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972). Indeed it is tempting to see in this profound if shortlived bond with Genet an intricate relationship with the literary world and criminal perfidy in which, like Antoine Doinel, an intense devotion to the material of words represents a faith in an alternative creative world through which one could flee the restrictive commonplaces and clichés of the normative and live in an imaginary space of continually recycled desire. As a tamer and more accessible version of Genet’s dramatic spaces, books and literary worlds appear to provide Truffaut (and later his cinematic characters) with a physical and material sanctuary toward which he could flee his isolation and alienation, and which he could repeatedly inhabit as the other bodies of a reincarnated self. Following the literary line from Genet to Genet’s philosophical champion, JeanPaul Sartre, Truffaut would, in 1974, become absorbed in Sartre’s autobiographical Les Mots (The Words), which was published in 1964 just when Truffaut was preparing his adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. Rereading that work in 1971, he writes to Liliane

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Siegel that “we have a greater or lesser need for a given book depending on the period of life we are going through,” which in 1971 was the time Truffaut was preparing the script for the adaptation of Roché’s Les Deux Anglaises et le continent and was fully absorbed in biographies of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.11 In his reading and rereading of Les Mots, Truffaut might well have recognized in Sartre’s youthful fantasy of books as the resurrected bodies of ghostly authors his own evolving drama of identification with the material of books as the ghostly bodies of the authors. For Truffaut, Sartre, and Genet, these writers “were not dead … They had metamorphosed into books” and their souls “haunted the works.”12 Against this backdrop and with some irony, Truffaut’s landmark 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” is interesting less as a generational attack on a “tradition of quality” with its early call for an auteurist cinema than as an intricate polemic about the auteur as an adaptor whose agency reincarnates a source text (regardless of textual or media differences) as an act of failure and sacrifice. In this polemic, Truffaut’s central complaint targets a tradition of adaptation exemplified in the work of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost whose “scenarists’ films” “rehabilitated adaptation by upsetting old preconceptions of being faithful to the letter and substituting for it the contrary idea of being faithful to the spirit – to the point that this audacious aphorism has been written: ‘An honest adaptation is a betrayal.’” For Truffaut, “the success or failures of these cineastes is a function of the scenarios they chose” and their defensive claims for a “psychological realism” through which a literary source becomes casually translated into mid-twentieth-century notions of verisimilitude demonstrates little interest in the real hauntings that attracted Truffaut to books.13 At the heart of Truffaut’s famous denunciation is the unfortunate willingness of scenarists like Aurenche and Bost to assume and accept a cinematic reduction of a literary text to the so-called spirit of that work of literature and so to be meekly satisfied with creating a cinema of “equivalences,” reductive substitutions that testify to a fundamental lack of faith in the filmmakers to reincarnate literary material according to the textual integrity of the original author. For these adaptors, a work of literature offers “filmable scenes and unfilmable scenes, and that instead of omitting the latter,” “it is necessary to invent equivalent scenes, that is to say, scenes as the novel’s author would have written them for the cinema.” “What annoys me about this famous process of equivalence,” Truffaut argues, “is that I’m not at all certain that a novel contains unfilmable scenes, and even less certain that these scenes, decreed unfilmable, would be so for everyone.” For those proponents of a dubious cinema of quality, adaptation is “invention without betrayal,” forgetting, as Truffaut reminds them, “that one can also betray by omission.” Being “faithful to the spirit” for these filmmakers means a “suppleness of spirit, a habitually geared-down personality as well as a singular eclecticism,” a geared-down personality that contrasts markedly with an auteur’s bold struggle and engagement with the literal text of an adaptation, an adaptation by “a man of the cinema.”14 Later, in a 1958 essay “L’Adaptation littéraire au cinéma,” Truffaut offers a slightly more flexible model of adaptation, but one that insists

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even more emphatically on the figures of the author and auteur as the ultimate measure of an adaptation: To oppose fidelity to the letter against fidelity to the spirit seems to me to misstate the fundamental problem of adaptation. If, indeed, there is any problem. No rule is possible; every case is particular. … In other words, betrayal of the letter or of the spirit is tolerable if the filmmaker interests himself in one or the other and if he succeeds in doing 1) the same thing, 2) the same thing, but better, 3) something else, but better. Not admissible are dulling down, shrinking down or sweetening down. Thus, there are neither good nor bad adaptations – more, there are neither good nor bad films. There are only auteurs of films and their politique which is necessarily irreproachable.15

Only the active presence of the auteur as a “man of cinema” can, in short, assert itself to reenact the body of the literary text as the lost expression of the original author, recovering a version of adaptive fidelity as a kind of reincarnation of the auteur as textual agent.16 With the shadow of André Bazin visibly hovering over Truffaut’s position here, authorship and auteurism become the primary interface for Truffaut’s polemics about adaptation as a ritualistic reenactment that significantly complicates any straightforward position on the three figures of the authored text, the auteur, and the adaptation.17 In “Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest,” appearing the same year as Astruc’s essay, Bazin points out that the primacy of the author/auteur should be recognized as a relatively recent aesthetic phenomenon and, for the cinema especially, a broader conception of creativity may be more relevant to the event of filmmaking: “The ferocious defense of literary works,” Bazin argues, “is to a certain extent, aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception of the ‘author’ and of the ‘work,’ a conception that was far from being ethically rigorous in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally defined only at the end of the eighteenth.” With the twentieth century and its new forms of mechanical reproduction, we witness “the birth of the new aesthetic Middle Ages, whose reign is to be found in the accession of the masses to power (or at least their participation in it) and in the emergence of an artistic form to complement that accession: the cinema.” For Bazin, the consequences are especially significant for adaptation: “All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the notion of the author himself will be destroyed.” Sounding a bit like Walter Benjamin here, he argues that “the aesthetic energy is all there, but it is distributed – or, perhaps better, dissipated – differently according to the demands of the camera lens.” With film adaptations, there is “the refraction of one work in another creator’s consciousness,” a refraction that retains, redirects, and disperses the original work and author through the agency and action of an auteur.18 While less pronounced or elaborate than Bazin’s position, Truffaut’s version of this subtle and daring argument appears as the strained figure of the adaptive auteur as dissipated presence: like Antoine Doinel, the figure of a triumphant

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failure whose insistent encounter with and demand for a faith in the literal becomes a ritual of self-sacrifice to the materiality of the original word. Reviewing Abel Gance’s La Tour de Nesle in 1955, Truffaut acknowledges the shortcomings of that film as the kind of brilliant failure that paradoxically defines the meaning of an auteur who risks failure in the name of self-sacrifice: “The question now is whether one can be both a genius and a failure. I believe, to the contrary, that failure is a talent. To succeed is to fail. I wish to defend the proposition that Abel Gance is the failed auteur of failed films. I am convinced that there is no great filmmaker who does not sacrifice something.”19 If faith in the word defines the strong auteur, that faith also implies, in this twist on auteurist expression, a necessary and inevitable failure to adequately adapt, a productive failure that again and again drives a movement of a redemptive repetition: to create more Antoine Doinels, to act as the agent for more interviews with other auteurs, and to film more literature as cinematic adaptations.20 This is a faith that invariably must acquiesce to the inevitable failure of the living auteur to fully retrieve in actuality the dead author and his words except as a recurrent ritual. Because of the embodied agency of these ritualistic repetitions, these forms of adaptation (especially for Truffaut’s work as auteur) can be productively understood as rituals of reenactment. Reenactment has normally been discussed in relation to documentaries, particularly as practiced in contemporary documentaries such as Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988). Yet the model seems especially suggestive here not only as it can reformulate adaptation as a kind of embodied recreation of an original event but also, as theorized by Ivone Margulies and Bill Nichols, as it foregrounds the ritualistic value and fantasmatic power of adaptation as reenactment. For Margulies, reenactments offer a ritualistic form of “exemplarity.” “Inflected by a psychodramatic (or liturgical) belief in the enlightening effects of literal repetition,” she says, “reenactment creates, performatively speaking, another body, place, and time. At stake is an identity that can recall the original event (through a second-degree indexicality) but in doing so can also re-form it” as a recognized value.21 Complementing this liturgical and reformative value for reenactment, Nichols emphasizes the psychoanalytic movement and “fantasmatic power” of reenactments as the creation of a textual haunting. For him, reenactments “retrieve a lost object in its original form even as the very act of retrieval generates a new object and a new pleasure.” Encountering reality in this way, the “viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique,” whereby a “specter haunts the text” with its “fantasmatic power.”22 However different they may be, these models of reenactment are not mutually exclusive, and together they condense and crystallize a significant direction in Truffaut’s efforts as an adaptive auteur. To ritualistically recreate and revalue a literary text is an event that reincarnates the original literary enunciation, even as it loses the original in a gesture of vanishing that then haunts the cinematic text in which the agency of the auteur engages and dissipates the specter of authorship itself. In this context, perhaps Truffaut’s most oblique and inverted adaptation is his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, a literary event and performance in which

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one author/auteur acts as the agent for the work of another auteur/author through a dialogic exchange. An ironic reversal of the traditional path of adaptation, this book of words reincarnates a body of films located across the career and presence of the filmmaker Hitchcock. In his preface, Truffaut notes that, like many Romantic conceptions of authorship, Hitchcock defines his films and those films in turn define him as a continually evolving articulation that ceased only in death: “In the case of a man like Hitchcock, who lived only through and for his work, to cease activity was tantamount to a death sentence.” With his death, his funeral becomes, for Truffaut, a powerfully symbolic moment that dramatizes a loss in which the auteur disappears (“there was no coffin”), only to be resurrected now in Truffaut’s book. If Hitchcock the auteur has vanished, for Truffaut, his ghostly presence is climactically reclaimed through his films and the dramatic reconfiguration of those films in the dialogue of the two auteurs that is the book that follows. Appropriately, in his postmortem preface to the second edition, Truffaut announces Hitchcock’s resurrection by quoting the words of a renowned French writer/filmmaker reflecting on the writings of another renowned author whose books famously redeemed the lost events of his own life: The man was dead, but not the film-maker. For his pictures, made with loving care, an elusive passion, and deep emotions concealed by exceptional technical mastery, are destined to circulate throughout the world, competing with newer productions, defying the test of time, and confirming Jean Cocteau’s image of Marcel Proust: “His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers.”23

Across the events of textual loss, authorial death, and historical change, Truffaut the auteur would continue, throughout his career, the recollection of Antoine’s original crisis in Les 400 Coups in which he failed and triumphed through the flames of Balzac. Fascinated by the materiality of books and the machines of writing – from typewriters to printing presses to newspaper offices – Truffaut the auteur (like his alter-ego Antoine with his “search for the absolute”) rewrites and reenacts the material of literature with the machinery of film, just as he rewrites Hitchcock’s films with the words of a book. For the auteur to adapt literature here means to commit to a literal reading that becomes a cinematic projection. In this ritualistic reenactment that is adaptation, the auteur becomes the faithful agent of the literal while knowing that that faith must be sacrificed as it is incorporated into the light of the cinematic and in the flames of the auteur’s triumphant loss. As if by candlelight, an auteur reading books disperses the literal word across a wavering page; as if writing with light, the cinema recreates that dispersive experience as an immolation and multiplication where words fly like imagistic ashes from the flame. For Truffaut, the event of adaptation means subjecting the agency of the literary author to the agency of the cinematic auteur, subjecting the material of words to immateriality of light as a flame. A promethean artist, the adaptive auteur ignites a flame as he writes with light and so incorporates and engulfs the material of words, like a phoenix, as a resurrected and renewed body of images.

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A Lover of Books, Lost in the Flames of Films Like the transition from reading to comprehension as a rearticulation, adaptation implies belatedness as loss, dramatizing an inevitable representational failure and loss within the event of consumption and reproduction itself. In its broadest terms, this loss is an emotional, psychological, cultural, and historical loss of an original event, text, or experience, and both the loss and the implicit longing for or recollection of that original experience has underpinned some of the best work in contemporary adaptation studies. For the auteur, the challenge, as Truffaut suggests, is to make that failure a triumph. For Truffaut, this tension within and drama of adaptation becomes allegorized and dramatized repeatedly as the loss of love (of a mother, of a lover), a loss mapped as serialized fantasies of women written in a book that aspires to be a film. In so many Truffaut films about fidelity and infidelity, the flames of love and the ashes of lost love become – with obviously troubled politics – paralleled by the strain and seemingly inevitable failure of a protagonist to adapt others and books to his passion and desires. In love as in adaptation, that failure might be described as enflaming both women and words as images of desire within the agency of the lover and author/auteur. Just as Truffaut’s protagonists repeatedly love and lose, the adaptive auteur reads book after book through the light of a consuming candle and then must burn each book through the light of cinema, serialized projections of his losses. Acting out again and again a passion for books and lovers that, as Bazin would say, dissipates into the event of cinema, Truffaut’s films become ritualistic allegories and performances of romance, reading, writing, and filmmaking, continually driven to recreate lost loves and lost books within the haunting flames of reenactment. An adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel Jules et Jim luxuriates in references to the material of books, letters, and translations (including, as a most appropriate metaphor, Goethe’s Elective Affinities), to linguistic accents and the sexual and verbal play of fidelity and infidelity. At one point, Jules remarks to Jim, “words change meaning from one language to another when they change gender,” and letters sent, missed, and lost remind one lover that “the paper is like your skin.” In the concluding days of this literary ménage à trois, in which the exchange of books marks the exchange of Catherine between the men, Jim admits, “We have failed in everything.” At the Studio Des Ursulines in the final days of their saga, Jim watches newsreels of Nazi’s burning books, shortly before Catherine drives Jim and the car off a bridge to their death and subsequent cremation. Polymorphous love and desire become inseparable here from the textualities of books and reading, both activities marked by a consuming passion to translate and adapt that moves relentlessly towards loss, failure, and death. In the concluding fires of books and lovers, there is strangely both the horror of destruction and the residue of a redeeming passion that, for better and worse, ignited those fires. An English-language film with Austrian star Oskar Werner, made while writing his Hitchcock book, the 1966 Fahrenheit 451 is doubtless Truffaut’s most transparent adaptation of a literary classic, his most fiery exploration of the disappearance of

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books, and, in my opinion, his most stunning cinematic failure. The hero, Montag the fireman, notes at the beginning of the film that “books disturb people. They make them anti-social”; and Montag’s transformative obsession with books is repeatedly and viscerally represented with shots of his reading, when, for instance, his finger follows lines on the page of David Copperfield. Especially in this film but consistently in Truffaut’s other work, reading promises remembrance or a way to retrieve the losses of the past: “I’ve got to read,” Montag says, “I’ve got to catch up with remembrance of the past.” In the end, however, books are salvaged only through their incorporation in individuals who memorize specific books, transubstantiating the material of books into the material of human bodies. Late in the film while books burn, the fire chief ruminates, “Who can explain the fascination of fire?” a remark that significantly complicates the observation of those reincarnated human books whose agents explain that “we burn the books, so that no one can take them from us.” The 1977 L’Homme qui aimait les femmes begins with death of the passionately promiscuous but faithfully sincere lover and writer Bertrand Morane, whose funeral is attended by a parade of former partners, one of whom observes that now “one funeral is like another.” The summation of a life pursuing women is reenacted through the film as the book he is writing about his relentless and often fetishistic conquests, a connection almost casually associated with the sexual escapades of his unfaithful mother and her detailed written lists of her affairs. Like those lists, Bertrand observes about his own writing, “Isn’t this book I’m writing nothing but a detailed list” of sexual encounters? Repeated shots of Bertrand’s writing at his typewriter surrounded by his library overlap with images describing his visual obsession with female legs, stockings and gestures. An adaptive auteur of another sort, he logically and inevitably makes love to the editor of his book L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, a book in the film that then proleptically becomes the film itself. At the concluding funeral, all those women “are writing the last page,” the voice-over of his editor remarks and wistfully observers that, through the serial multiplication of women and lovers, Bertrand believed “in quantity he might find happiness.” With neither closure nor happiness, however, his ironic salvation is the concluding close up of a book that is also the movie: “From all these women in his life there is something that will endure, a token of remembrance, a rectangular object, 320 bound pages. We call that a book.” Indeed, this longing for the dream of an impossible cinematic adaptation of lovers and books crystallizes, slightly earlier in the film, when at the press, Bertrand asks the technician setting the pages if he can change a word: for “red dress” he substitutes “blue dress,” and the word change changes the image on screen of a girl in a dress, first red then blue. Within the material technology of book production and film production, this seemingly minor moment acts out adaptation as the projection of the author’s desire for a perfect equivalence of word and image, an ironically unrealizable fantasy of an adaptive lover/author/auteur – like the film itself. Finally, there is Truffaut’s 1978 film La Chambre verte whose excruciating protagonist Julien Davenne (played by Truffaut) refuses the world of the living for the textual world of writing obituaries and creating sanctuaries of fidelity, at first to his lost love and then to an expanding litany of dead friends and acquaintances. An adaptation of

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Henry James’ “The Altar of the Dead,” this film unites the anxiety of loss, a faith in writing as the preserve of those losses, and the light of flames that illuminate texts and images only in the end to consume them. Like the flames that set Antoine’s Balzac sanctuary and altar ablaze in Les 400 Coups, here Davenne’s altar is, metaphorically, a writing desk around and on which the memories of lovers and the images of writers burst into flames like the combustible obituaries he writes for a newspaper. In the final sequence, a conflagration as illumination erupts in his private sanctuary for lost loves, and as the blaze destroys Davenne and the memorial images that surround him, a close-up focuses on a burning photo of Henry James who, as Davenne acknowledges, taught him “to respect the dead.” Here the auteur meets and confronts the author within the flames that consume the literal within the cinematic.24

The Flame of the Candle While Truffaut prepared to adapt James’ “The Altar of the Dead” (an adaptation whose alternate titles included The Mountain of Fire and The Last Flame), he read, at the suggestion of the translator of James’ story, Aimée Alexandre, Gaston Bachelard’s La Flamme d’une chandelle, which, according to his biographers, “made quite an impression on Truffaut.”25 In this extended meditation on the flame of a candle, Bachelard reflects on that mesmerizing flame as dream, as destruction, as devotion, as illumination, as consumption, as firings of the imagination. For him, “dreaming through the flame unites what one sees and what one has seen. The dreamer knows the fusion of imagination and memory, open to all the adventures of the dream. … From that moment, the dream of the flame, so singular and unitary in principal, becomes an expanding multiplicity.”26 For Truffaut, I extrapolate, that flame of the candle on the desk becomes the auteur’s dream of adaptation through which the literal becomes the sign of loss, through which Truffaut and perhaps other auteurs must continually recreate and multiply themselves not as authorial presences but as visionary agents whose devotion to fidelity and the literal means always submitting themselves and their work to the friction of adaptation as the triumph of failure.

Notes 1 Simone Murray is one of the few writers about adaptation who has explored the material and commercial machines of film adaptation. See especially her The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2011). 2 Thomas Leitch, “Hitchcock and His Writers: Authorship and Authority in Adaptation,” in Jack Boozer (ed.), Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), pp. 79 and 76. 3 See Robert Stam, François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

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T. Jefferson Kline, Intertextuality in the New French Cinema (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 4. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” in Timothy Corrigan (ed.), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 159 and 161. Stephen Pyne’s Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) provides a breathlessly broad and engaging history of fire as social force and emblem, including its role in twentieth-century Europe as “Fire in the Minds of Men.” Jean Gruault, Ce que dit l’autre (Paris: Julliard, 1992), pp. 276–277. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 19. Stam, François Truffaut and Friends, p. xiv. By 1980, Truffaut’s symbiotic relationship with literature and film would result in Le Dernier Métro, a film that one reviewer would claim was the best novel of the year. See de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 359. See de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, pp. 282–284. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), p. 64. François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 225. Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” pp. 226–229. François Truffaut, “L’Adaptation littéraire au cinéma,” La Revue des lettres modernes: cinéma et roman: éléments d’appréciation, 36/38 (1958): 243–244. Truffaut’s faith in the dead and their dead texts would, until recently, have a difficult time finding a place in contemporary auteur or adaptation studies. The 2011 collection True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) has, however, reclaimed fidelity as a term that has been too easily dismissed by both postmodernism and cultural studies. In particular Dudley Andrew’s contribution, “The Economies of Adaptation,” provides a rich framework in which to measure the dynamics of fidelity as an adaptive movement located at the intersection of a network of vertical and horizontal texts. In the context of Truffaut’s adaptation, a vertical activity based on faith in the original or authentic source becomes a temporality that always involves death and loss. Dudley Andrew made a similar point in his essay “Adaptation”: “Like Bazin, Truffaut looked upon adaptation not as a monolithic practice to be avoided but as an instructive barometer for the age. The cinema d’auteur which he advocated was not to be pitted against a cinema of adaptation; rather one method of adaptation would be pitted against another. In this instance adaptation was the battleground even while it prepared the way for a stylistic revolution, the New Wave, which would for the most part avoid famous literary sources.” In Timothy Corrigan (ed.), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 269–270. André Bazin, “Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest,” in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 22–26. See also Bazin’s “De la Politique des auteurs,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 137–155. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 34.

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Especially for an adaptive auteur, cinematic self-expression, like Michel Foucault’s notion of an authorial self, “is now linked to sacrifice.” See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Donald F. Bouchard (ed. and trans.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 117. Ivone Margulies, “Exemplary Bodies in Love in the City, Sons, and Close Up,” in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 220. Bill Nichols, “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 35(1) (Summer 2009): 73. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, trans. Helen G. Scott (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 12. In a sentence that reverberates through many of Truffaut’s films but especially La Chambre verte, Dudley Andrew notes in his discussion of the religious heritage of fidelity and adaptation, “Film adaptations are icons of canonical literary creations.” See Andrew, “The Economies of Adaptation,” p. 33. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 337. Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme d’une chandelle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961), p. 12.

Part IV

Truffaut and His Time

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Growing Up with the French New Wave James Tweedie

When he won the Best Director award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival for Les 400 Coups (1959), a twenty-seven-year-old François Truffaut heralded the breakthrough of a new generation of filmmakers. Within a couple of years, Truffaut and a band of strangers to the studio system found themselves on the fast track to canonization. Already well known, even notorious, as a critic, he made the most rapid transition from a bomb-thrower railing against the French film establishment to a charter member of the new system organized around the key figures of the New Wave and the hybrid art and genre films they championed. This chapter will focus on the intersection of biography and aesthetics in the directors who quickly emerged into maturity with the onset of the New Wave and regularly represented tales of lost youth. At the same time, these filmmakers were the pioneering figures in a movement that advertised its newness but soon lost faith in the foundational modernist aspiration of “making it new”; this chapter is also about the lost youth of the New Wave itself. Over the course of his career, Truffaut became, for critics and his fellow directors alike, a symbol of that last burst of youthful energy and, eventually, as the 1960s and 1970s wore on, the aging, maturation, or exhaustion of the New Wave. While others occupied the intellectual center of the critical movement centered at the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma – the older and more conventionally educated figures of André Bazin and Maurice Schérer served as mentors for the young critics – Truffaut drove the agenda with his polemical force and raw, unconstrained energy. He was the original “young Turk” at a journal that eventually became a home for critics who prized an alternately illuminating and crude passion for cinema over careful, reasoned (and, in its less illustrious examples, flat and lifeless) argumentation. Truffaut remained an impassioned and impetuous figure to the very end of his brief career as a full-time critic. At once shockingly young and belated, new to the institutions of cinema and latecomers to a medium invented six decades before, Truffaut and the other directors A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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of the French New Wave were both the youthful, avant-garde personalities they performed in public and late modernists. This condition of belatedness, I will suggest later, is intimately connected to their concern on screen with youth and its premature vanishing; and they link the qualities typically associated with the youth film – a celebration of innocence, naivety, energy, and the unflagging pursuit of lost causes – with the brand of modernity associated since the late nineteenth century with cinema. The films of François Truffaut and his compatriots in the New Wave are some of the key manifestations of a youthful period in postwar France and its lingering fascination with the unexhausted possibilities of film. But over the course of his career – and especially in his films about children, adolescents, and cinema itself – he reveals the limitations of the broader French modernization project, a second modernity that no longer aligns itself with its industrial predecessor and no longer accepts the fundamental premise that guides Truffaut’s work on the page and screen. Cinema and youth are intimately linked through their shared dynamism and ambivalent relationship to tradition, he suggests, though by the end of the 1960s that formula becomes increasingly unsustainable, as young people were going elsewhere for pop entertainment and even Truffaut’s films strive for efficiency and clarity rather than unbridled energy. The totality of his career provides one of the clearest examples of a paradox that in the second half of the twentieth century develops into a defining feature of film art and theory: how can cinema remain modern when it belongs as much to the past as the future, when it has become, despite the quixotic efforts of Truffaut and the directors of the French New Wave, a tradition in its own right?

The Young Critic and the New France André S. Labarthe’s characterization of the “New Wave” as the “young French cinema” makes explicit the links between the modernist aesthetic glimpsed in the films, their youthful stars and protagonists, and the biographies of the artists themselves, most of them belonging to a demographic cohort whose formative experiences fell after World War II.1 But youth emerged from the darkened salles in this period and attracted the attention of key trendsetters and policymakers. One of the most unsettling and vital developments in postwar French social, economic, and cultural life was the unprecedented role of youth in the national imagination. The origins of the phrase “Nouvelle Vague” – the newsmagazine L’Express coined the expression to describe the generation that came of age after World War II, in the relative affluence of the postwar economic boom – suggest that a young French cinema existed within a network of related phenomena across French society. “The New Wave Is Here!” blared the headline introducing a report on one of the period’s extensive polling projects designed to understand the particular desires and aspirations of young people raised alongside the other progeny of the postwar baby boom and enveloped by the suddenly prosperous French economy.2 The phrase “New Wave” became a signature slogan of L’Express and its editor, Françoise Giroud, whose verbal portraits of French

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youth in La Nouvelle Vague immediately established the conventional wisdom about its subject.3 Young people also occupied the thoughts and resources of governmentsponsored research teams from the Institut français de l’opinion publique (IFOP) and the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), the more “bureaucratic” counterparts to magazines selling the attention of a precisely defined demographic of consumers. For government officials, especially the ministers with portfolios in “youth and sports” and “national education,” the baby boom posed immediate practical problems: how would an education system designed for elite families accommodate both a demographic explosion and a more general expansion of access to students from a broader range of classes? The result was the accelerated construction of new buildings and campuses over the course of the 1960s, and a concomitant rise in the number of students and faculty. Youth was not only an obsession at Cannes and in the pages of Cahiers; it was the target of the period’s most urgent sociological inquiries and acts of state. Corporate strategists and experts in the new science of marketing also identified the youth demographic as a cohort of voracious consumers with the capacity to make or break a brand and drive the broader French economy. The latest trends in design and culture were valuable engines of the French miracle, and young families moving into suburban high-rises were a key market for the burgeoning industrial sector focused on efficient, modern design. As the 2010 exhibition titled “Mobi Boom” suggests, the youth movement across French society was accompanied by an “explosion of design” that helped revolutionize the mise-en-scène of everyday life and blurred the distinction between private consumption and public space.4 Young people found themselves surrounded by an object world as fresh and “booming” as the population itself. That new “system of objects,” to use Baudrillard’s phrase, had ushered in a historically new relationship between young people and their material environment.5 If the films of the French New Wave were, with very few exceptions, almost entirely concerned with the present, they reflected the dominant mentality of the time, for the past was being uprooted and radically reorganized, while the future was being reinvented by a new generation of youth and a range of institutions purporting to act on their behalf.6 The French filmmakers who emerged in this period were aware of their almost immediate transformation into another commodity in the cultural marketplace. In his memoirs, Claude Chabrol describes the advent of the New Wave as a bizarre product of artistic innovation and the marketing practices becoming increasingly prevalent at the time: In 1958 and 1959, my buddies at Cahiers and I, having moved into directing, were promoted like a new brand of soap. We were “the nouvelle vague.” … But if the popular press spoke so much of us it was because they wanted to impose a formula: De Gaulle equals renewal, in the cinema like elsewhere. The general arrives, the Republic changes, France is reborn!7

The young generation that grew up in the 1950s and reached its late teens in the mid1960s discovered a world manufactured for them and increasingly incompatible with

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the formulas inherited from the seemingly distant age of the early twentieth century. The New Wave was eventually forced to reconcile its reverence for an enduring but outdated conception of cinema and the reality that even the most marginalized elements in the film industry could rapidly become a commodity in their own right. Driven by this profound sense of alienation from both history and the present, young people also created the boldly politicized subcultures that rebelled against the nation under development in the 1960s, the conglomeration of state and corporate power that Lefebvre dubbed the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”8 Small-scale rebellions and petty criminality are the primary plotlines explored in New Wave cinema, and those films rarely amount to a vision of political emancipation with the magnitude and ambition of the student movements of the late 1960s. But their manifest discontent and rejection of traditional symbols of authority voice many of the same concerns about a society being uprooted and modernized in the span of a decade. While the schoolboy Antoine Doinel finds himself adrift in a 1959 classroom with a curriculum and code of decorum straight out of the nineteenth century, in 1966 a group of university students in Strasbourg – products of the generation of Doinel but now a few years older and cured of his adolescent cinephilia – would (mis)allocate official funds for the publication of a Situationist-inspired pamphlet on “The Poverty of Student Life.” “The student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman,” they declared.9 Caught within an increasingly technocratic university, a factory for the mass production of specialists and functionaries, young people faced a choice between acquiescence and genuine militancy. But they would not be radicalized by indulging in the “phantasmic compensation” provided by the “opium of cultural commodities.” “Art is dead,” they wrote, but the student remains “the most avid consumer of its corpse, now preserved and distributed in cellophane packaging in supermarkets.” This bazaar, stocked with cultural merchandise, is the student’s “natural element.” Although cinema provided a means of documenting the epochal transformations of the postwar boom in France, the vision of cinema advanced by Cahiers critics in the 1950s (or their counterparts at more Left-leaning journals) did not survive an increasingly pervasive attack on cultural consumption that made few distinctions between art and commerce or cinema and junk food (or a new brand of soap).10 If cinema seemed diametrically opposed to tradition in the eyes of the Cahiers critics in the 1950s, a new generation of young Turks viewed film as yet another tool of oppression, as a medium that subjected its viewers to the worst influences of the culture industry’s state and corporate masters. The earliest films of the New Wave, especially the work of Truffaut, stage a confrontation between youth and institutional authority, with young protagonists, a force of centrifugal energy, pitted against the constraints of teachers, policemen, and other representatives of the established order. Before it became an acceptable contribution to French cultural life, the New Wave presented the condition of young people exposed to a burgeoning consumer culture, the sexual revolution reanimated by the birth control pill, and an unprecedented intermingling of corporeal and exogenous desires managed by advertising and popular culture. One of the enduring problems

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encountered in histories of the French New Wave is how to situate filmmakers like Truffaut in relation to the period’s various and competing conceptions of youth, from the demographic categories produced by the state to the marketing profiles emanating from the corporate world to the intellectual and artistic counterculture. Truffaut and his contemporaries at Cahiers and elsewhere in the French film scene were forced to locate themselves within a society fascinated with newness across a wide range of cultural and economic practices, from furniture to fashion design to literature. While the filmmakers of the French New Wave, especially the former Cahiers critics, were often outsiders to this official education system, they were among the most vocal participants in the nationwide inquiry into the status of contemporary youth. Rohmer, a former lycée instructor, began his filmmaking career in educational television, with films produced for the Institut Pédagogique National, RadioTélévision Scolaire and other institutions investigating the pedagogical capabilities of visual media.11 The work of Truffaut and the other New Wave directors, including, in short order, the fiction films of Rohmer, would constitute another form of education about the youth of France in the late 1950s and 1960s. Observing an obsession with  youth in both officialdom and the anti-bureaucratic intellectual avant-garde, both corporate entities interested in restoring order and dissidents campaigning on campus, the New Wave filmmakers created their counterpart in the realm of moving images, a young French cinema. The New Wave represents the simultaneous refashioning of French cinema and of the Republic itself; its twin subjects are at once old and rehabilitated, as the films of the Cahiers group in particular veer within the span of a few scenes or frames from an embrace of the persistent and emerging cultural order to a radical rejection of the status quo and the France under construction in the 1960s. Truffaut was one of the first New Wave directors to “make it” on the domestic and international stage, and he was among the first of his generation to pass away and provide historical closure to his career (unlike, for example, Godard, Resnais, and Rivette, who continued to reinvent themselves and retrospectively reframe their work for several decades). But with his early assault on the existing French film industry, his triumphant early films, which blazed a trail for the New Wave, his seemingly haphazard adoption of political causes, and his conversion to being a less adventurous classical filmmaker during the height of 1960s and 1970s revolt, Truffaut remains the most vexing and paradoxical case. Ever since he emerged into the film world as a critic, Truffaut has been characterized by his critics as a conservative figure, initially by rivals at journals like Positif and Premier Plan and more recently by film theorists and historians like Geneviève Sellier. Truffaut’s writing and extramural activities made him an astonishing number of enemies in the French studios and rival magazines, an unlikely path to financial reward and career advancement in a profession accessible only through long periods of apprenticeship and the cultivation of connections within the ranks of insiders. From his first articles penned for short-lived journals and then for Cahiers and Arts, his  writings are laced with attacks on other critics deemed inadequate in their knowledge of cinema or their taste in films. From his first days as a ciné-club organizer at Cercle Cinémane, he shored up the group’s unstable finances through false

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advertising – in one bald-faced fabrication, he promised that Jean Cocteau would attend a post-screening discussion of Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930) and only revealed the bad news after the tickets had been purchased and the cash box assiduously removed from the premises. His early career is a tale of extravagant ambition with an almost comically inadequate understanding of how to realize it, at  least within the existing rules in the French film industry. While it enhanced his notoriety, Truffaut’s flurry of personal attacks and professional faux pas was a formula for success only for someone with nothing to lose and no other avenue for realizing his abiding childhood ambition of working in film. His recurring narratives of youth are intimately related to this biographical experience, especially his development into a filmmaker who rejects the already foreclosed path of apprenticeship and charts a course outside the regnant structures of authority. Youth is reimagined not as an exercise in subordination but as one of the primary engines of social change, as a window of radical possibility when an existing order characterized by its capacity for exclusion is overturned by a generation of the excluded themselves. Truffaut is one of the emblematic figures of this systemic valorization of youth and innovation across the French political and cultural spheres, as well as the disintegration of an existing social order and its partial replacement by the logic of the market. Truffaut’s youthful (and in many cases, juvenile) film criticism illustrates the era’s promise of liberation, the dangers of shock deployed for the sake of publicity, and the inherent drawbacks of cinephilia, an approach to the medium that foregrounds the idiosyncratic taste and limited experience of an individual viewer. In The Films in My Life, Truffaut emphasizes the visceral, titillating appeal of cinema in his earliest memories, especially in his account of the sexual escapades occurring in darkened theaters in the restricted environment of Paris under occupation. He writes that an informant revealed the extraordinary quantity of underwear scattered throughout the theatrical space where audiences ostensibly paid rapt attention to the entertainment or art on screen: “I hardly need to add that these sixty little weekly panties – we never failed to check the exact number – made us dream in a direction that had little to do with the art of cinema or the ideas of Bazin.”12 Despite the heady influence of Bazin and his protégé’s unquestionable knowledge of film history and talent as an analyst of mise-en-scène, Truffaut’s postwar criticism often indulges in the same kind of childish fantasy that helped spark his original interest in cinema. His criticism thrives under the dictum that “cinematography is the art of petty details,”13 and, as he suggests in the even broader formulation of a 1951 letter to Eric Rohmer, “cinema is the art of the little detail that does not call attention to itself.”14 Aside from the more obvious task of assessing the quality of films for his readers, Truffaut’s principal charge was to call attention to those details. This acute awareness of overlooked objects and bodies often meanders into a fetishistic obsession with the fragmented female body that reveals more about Truffaut than the film under review. Marilyn Monroe’s “bosoms heaving with joy” and presumably missing undergarments provoke sentence after sentence of description in his review of Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), while he feels compelled to add the gratuitous observation that a character in The Quatermass Experiment (Val Guest,

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1955) doesn’t matter because “she isn’t pretty.”15 Truffaut also manages to combine his twin obsessions with the erotic dimensions of popular cinema and the rarefied intentions of auteurist art when he argues that a three-minute scene in Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) – the moment when “Elina Labourdette, all dressed up, seated in a chair, raises her bare legs one after the other in order to better slip over them those silky pre-nylon stockings, and her garment is then covered with the ingenious raincoat”16 – reveals a more powerful and unrestrained sexuality than openly lurid or pornographic films (see Figure 2.15). Truffaut once again provides ample evidence, convincingly marshaled by Sellier in Masculine Singular, that the New Wave critics and directors were often more fundamentally misogynistic than their counterparts in popular media.17 Truffaut’s “art of petty details” is frequently entranced by images too freighted with sexism to be “petty” and too commonplace, too reminiscent of the stag film or the pinup to qualify as art, at least as Truffaut elsewhere defines it. If Truffaut remains a problematic critic because his reviews frequently lapse into retrograde political positions, his written work retains its value in those moments when it seizes upon the simultaneously minor and profound details that together constituted the quotidian revolution of the “Trente Glorieuses.” Not merely an idiosyncrasy of Truffaut, this inordinate attention to seemingly trivial details was central to the methodology of film criticism at Cahiers. For Rivette, the great directors were able to achieve a “dilation of expressive detail,” including both objects and the infinitely complex gestures of the human body.18 The cinephile’s response to those details was insistently individual and helped underscore the insularity of the most extreme forms of cinephilia. Yet the purpose of film criticism for Rivette, Truffaut, and their colleagues was to direct the reader’s attention to these dilated moments and the objects on display, as though beholding the object would lead to the revelation of a hidden truth. Truffaut’s cinephilia is not merely a phenomenon of the bourgeois individual reasserting his dominance over the material world. He also realized that French society was undergoing a transformation in the domain of everyday life, and he often responded by piecing together an incoherent patchwork of the most modern and traditional, rebellious and conservative responses. Rather than focus exclusively on the more familiar brand of sensation in Douglas Sirk’s films – their star power or their melodramatic narratives – he identifies in their bright blue rooms and steel gray airplanes a profound change in the aesthetic register of daily existence in the United States. In Sirk, Truffaut sees “the colors of the twentieth century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics.”19 In Written on the Wind (1956), in the movies of Douglas Sirk, and in Hollywood cinema more generally, Truffaut frames in terms of mise-enscène what more ideologically oriented critics would view through the lens of the political economy of postindustrial society. Other French directors of the 1950s, including Resnais in Le Chant du styrène (1958) and Tati in Mon Oncle (1958), would emphasize the central role of plastics in postwar French modernization; and as Edward Dimendberg suggests, they trace the ideological implications immanent in the widespread adoption of plastic, though that ideology was obscured by shiny,

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colorful surfaces and the everyday functionality of the object.20 Douglas Smith adds that its chameleon-like quality, its capacity to assume the shape of a spectacular or throwaway object, its ubiquity and obscurity make plastic the perfect figure of the era’s entry into the postwar global order. He writes, “Ideology, through the vehicle of myth, imitates nature in order to go beyond it, molds itself to resemble the natural object, shrinkwraps the innocent word in a transparent film of connotations that serve to mystify the truth of economic exploitation and social inequality. In these terms, ideology is plastic and plastic is ideology.”21 When Truffaut identifies the modern era as an “age of plastics” and sees in Sirk one of its most unmistakable representations, he launches into a literally materialist analysis of the condition of an age marked by the instability of a material culture. And while he introduces this remark as an observation about the visual dimension of a particular film and concludes with an assessment of the picture’s relative quality, Truffaut here begins to draw connections between his critical obsession with mise-en-scène and the world undergoing an unprecedented transformation in the domain of quotidian culture. It also reveals that Truffaut’s fascination with American cinema never translated into support for the ongoing process of Americanization. Instead, Truffaut attempts to separate the two, with cinema imagined as a medium distinct from the industrial and political structures of the society that produced it. One could advocate for American films and directors while still resisting the encroachment of other crystallizations of material culture emanating from the United States; one could celebrate the beauty of Hollywood starlets without succumbing to the temptation of the styrene’s song. The transformation of urban life in France, the inauguration of an age of plastics, the economic modernization begun under the aegis of the Marshall Plan: these were large-scale, long-term revolutions without identifiable, immediately precipitating events, but they were unmistakably present in the everyday lives of the young demographic cohort known as the Nouvelle Vague. This group emerged into early adulthood at a moment when the urban environment of Paris and other major French cities was being reconceived as a space dedicated to the efficient flow of traffic and information rather than preservation of history and memory; when interior design was revolutionized by the development of mass-produced brands that reframed interior space as a zone of innovation rather than age-old heirlooms; and when popular culture, especially in the form of cinema and pop music, was reinventing the image and soundscape of the city. The generation gap that separated French youth in the 1950s from their elders was largely the result of their radically different conceptions of the mise-en-scène of everyday life, with the New Wave adapting to a world where the sets and sounds could change with the whims of fashion and the seemingly permanent features of the material world – buildings that stand for decades or centuries, works of art preserved inside a museum, monuments to heroic figures from the past, streets that also bear their names – were balanced by a shocking level of impermanence. The world resembled the movie studios frequented by Truffaut as a critic rather than the museums that he often shunned. In this sense, Truffaut the “hussard” and writer for right-wing publications like Arts coexisted with a perceptive observer of a world increasingly incompatible with the nostalgic, retrospective vision of the conservative

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intellectuals of his time. Truffaut recognized that he lived in an age of plastics. If he failed to articulate a comprehensive vision of the contemporary historical situation, if his preferred mode of discourse was the review of the individual film or conversation with a single director, those strictly limited and occasional pieces open onto some of the most complex and vexed social issues of his time, especially when they begin to examine the changing attitudes of youth and the unprecedented material transformation taking place all around them.

A Young Director and a Young Cinema Having attacked an older generation of filmmakers in words, in a display of serial audacity that few critics since have matched, Truffaut directed a remarkable first feature that translated his often unformed and scattershot challenges into bolder, more eloquent images. Critics immediately recognized that Les 400 Coups had realized something latent in the director’s earlier writing, and they linked it explicitly to the youthful verve that had previously manifested itself only in language. In the previous year, Pierre Billard had identified a cohort of promising directors in a prophetic article titled “40 Under 40: The Young Academy of French Cinema.”22 But Truffaut launched this young cinema onto a wider domestic and international stage. Variety’s account of the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 highlighted the role of “boy directors” who, despite their youth and relative anonymity, managed to “dominate” the proceedings and generate the most excitement in the theaters.23 France-Soir greeted the monumental festival success of Truffaut’s debut feature with language that prioritized the age of the filmmaker and teenage actor: “A 28-year-old director: François Truffaut. A 14-yearold star: Jean-Pierre Léaud. A triumph in Cannes: The 400 Blows.”24 Paris Match placed the events at Cannes under the rubric of a “festival of child prodigies.”25 Truffaut and Léaud were among the most famous of those prodigies, both domestically and abroad, with Léaud gracing the cover of the house journal of the young generation, L’Express. Once a pen-wielding militant against the “Tradition of Quality,” once a critic who advanced that agenda by making his own headlines in Cahiers and Arts, Truffaut suddenly became a media phenomenon in himself. He served as a convenient symbol in the mass media in France because he underscored the undeniable fact that youth was occupying a prominent position in the French national consciousness, and his mere presence on the page and airwaves upheld the more questionable thesis that they were also ascending to positions of significant authority. That premature equation of youth with power or New Wave cinema with cultural dominance persists in many accounts of Truffaut’s career, and it marks one of the key fissures in historical accounts of that flowering of French cinema. Does Truffaut the young director become the kind of institutionalized figure he previously despised? If so, when? And at what point do the “boy directors” become a new generation of “quality” filmmakers and “papas”? When does the New Wave become an old cinema? Les 400 Coups established Truffaut’s reputation as a chronicler of the lives of adolescents in contemporary

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Paris, and his subsequent Antoine Doinel films would treat their eventual maturation into adulthood; but with a protagonist in his early teens fighting against some of the most entrenched and hierarchical institutions of French society, from the school to the family to the police, those films situate themselves squarely against the key disseminators and enforcers of political and corporate power. On the basic level of narrative development and the affective affiliations of his protagonists, Truffaut nearly always envisioned himself on the side of an eternal youth pitted against the traditional seats of influence in French life. Because Truffaut opened his feature career with a tale that closely paralleled his own brushes with authority and scrapes with the law, the director’s own age and biography were an essential element in the reception of his films and a key source of his own credibility as an antiestablishment figure. Despite the equally significant differences between his own childhood and that of Antoine Doinel, the mythology of the director and the fictional character developed in tandem, with Jean-Pierre Léaud becoming an alter ego for Truffaut. Over the course of five films starring Léaud, Truffaut traces the development of this increasingly fictionalized character through adolescence and young adulthood, through school and incarceration, military service and family life. This young protagonist launches one of the most influential movements in film history and then grows up with the New Wave. And in both his precocious adolescence and his fledgling maturity, Léaud begins to embody the history of the New Wave itself in films by other directors from France and abroad: in Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966), Week-end (1967), and Le Gai Savoir (1969) he represents the political radicalization of youth and, in retrospect, the ingenuousness of the early New Wave, including its intellectual and motivational leaders, especially Truffaut; and in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Ni nabian jidian (What Time Is It There?, 2001) and Visage (Face, 2009), Léaud crystallizes the promise of this momentary alignment of youth and modernity, a promise that was eventually disavowed in France and that returns periodically in the form of nostalgia for the New Wave but remains a vibrant possibility in the work of Tsai and other artists outside of France. In Tsai’s work we glimpse a New Wave that remains aligned with the young cinema that overwhelmed the international film community in the late 1950s and 1960s, a movement untainted by compromises and the devastating charge of selling out. In Tsai’s films we see a New Wave that traveled around the world but remains dynamic because it retains its association with the young Doinel and Truffaut, because it never quite grew up. Almost as soon as its achievements were recognized in France, however, critics and rival filmmakers began to herald the premature death of this still nascent movement, and even the founding figures of the New Wave harbored some doubts about the desirability of a cinema founded on the experience of youth. Jacques Lanzmann asks in the pages of Arts (one of Truffaut’s major launching pads as a critic), “Does the young French cinema have its future behind it?”26 In the early 1960s Positif pursues an aggressively anti-New Wave stance with attacks on their amateurish productions and aesthetic and political immaturity.27 And Jean-Pierre Melville suggests that the New Wave was never a coherent movement and was therefore incapable of fading away or imploding or doing anything at all: “Everybody was a director: actors, intellectuals,

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playboys, journalists – everybody! And now most of them have gone back to what they were doing before. The nouvelle vague doesn’t exist anymore and it never existed.”28 At about the same time, Truffaut attempts to defend an embattled New Wave by distinguishing between the relative wisdom of the directors and their adolescent protagonists. In a review of Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962), he writes that “everyone is interested in youth, everyone is preoccupied with it, everyone has his own idea about it”; but he maintains that few have matched Rozier’s unique combination of immersion within and distance from the youth culture of his time: “If for no other reason, the new wave had to come in order to portray characters fifteen and twenty years old – a gap of only ten years between them and the directors, just right for the directors to have gained some perspective without losing along the way the accuracy of tone that is an end in itself.”29 That gap of a decade – roughly equivalent to the difference in age between Truffaut and Léaud – makes all the difference, he suggests, because the New Wave in cinema was less a genuine youth movement produced by the members of “le baby boom” itself than a look backward at youth by a slightly older cohort who recognized their own belatedness, their own liminal position between two generations and eras in French history. New Wave directors born in the first half of the twentieth century found themselves suddenly in command of the camera, in a position of unexpected authority, at a moment when the rejection of authority in the name of la jeunesse had sparked cultural uprisings around the globe. This dialectic of youth and maturity was present from the earliest days of Truffaut’s fledgling interest in film, when his copious files dedicated to favored directors suggested both a childlike fascination with the medium and a desire to master it, to translate his visceral excitement into a more powerful and commanding form of knowledge. After multiple failures in traditional proving grounds such as school, a teenage Truffaut launched into a series of forays into mainstream intellectual life, from eloquence contests to journalism at magazines like Elle and eventually Cahiers and Arts. But even in his speeches to the Club du Faubourg as a teenager in 1950, Truffaut impressed the audience because he seemed both young and too advanced for his age. He appeared “twenty years older” to one audience member, a former senator, while another observed that “your mental age is at least double your physical age.”30 From Antoine Doinel to the ensemble of schoolchildren in L’Argent de poche (1976), Truffaut’s young protagonists are always far more knowledgeable than they appear. They embody a confusion of the usual hierarchy between innocence and experience, ingenuousness and sophistication, naivety and knowledge. They are never quite childlike, despite their age; but they also maintain many of the broader cultural associations of youth and sincerity, openness to possibility, the promise of the future. To view Truffaut’s career as an account of the progressive march of generations, with impetuous young people earning their wisdom over time, requires a fundamental redefinition of those key terms, for his child and adolescent heroes are never as innocent as they appear to be and their seniors never have a monopoly on enlightenment. Truffaut’s career was repeatedly framed in the generational terms borrowed from critics at Cahiers, and, of course, after his attack on cinematic “papas,” by Truffaut

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himself; but that age-based system of value is overturned altogether when Truffaut releases Jules et Jim (1962), a literary adaptation and historical film set at the turn of the twentieth century. Bernard Dort seizes upon its embrace of the modern past and its departure from the relentlessly contemporary orientation that dominated the first years of the New Wave. He writes, “Instead of an elderly man’s account of a dreamily remembered youth, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim is the film of an old man gambling on old age. A film of a New Wave which, with the help of a star, winks allusively at ‘old fogeys.’”31 Jean-Pierre Melville argues that the “failure of La Peau douce in 1964 [and especially of Fahrenheit 451 in 1966] will allow him to become an adult who will finally know life, thanks to the truly negative experiences of moviemaking, those that enrich even more than they impoverish.”32 When describing Truffaut’s political turn in defense of Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, which resulted in a series of street protests and conflicts with the police, Truffaut’s longtime friend Georges Kiejman writes, “When I saw him bolting in front of me, he seemed the adolescent from The 400 Blows and I remember thinking at the time that no matter what age he would live to, he would remain an eternal adolescent.”33 After a few years as (together with Godard) one of the two prime movers of the early New Wave, Truffaut and each of his new films from the late 1960s onward became symbols of precisely the sort of authority and prudent, sensible direction that he once decried on a daily basis in print, while their fundamental association with youth was rediscovered at regular intervals. From the first years of his career onward, Truffaut divided critical opinion between those who saw him and the young characters on display in his films as crystallizations of the broader youth movement of the time and those who saw him and his work as representations of its diametric opposite, as old-fashioned cinema tinged with nostalgia for youth. Rather than represent a generation in France, Truffaut’s films are engaged in a fundamental redefinition of the meaning of youth itself, as the characters in his films resist their usual positions within a cultural continuum that aligns them with the future and their elders with the past.

Belated Modernism Truffaut began his feature filmmaking career with one of the most stunning credit sequences ever devised: his mobile and jittery camera circulates by car through the streets of the eighteenth arrondissement, with the Eiffel Tower, the emblem of nineteenth-century modernity, occupying the gravitational center of these movements; and in a famous act of arrogance and bravado, Truffaut’s credit for mise-en-scène is displayed on the pig iron girders of the tower itself, a claim to the mantle of modernity by an artist of a young generation working in the signature medium of  the twentieth century (Figure 17.1). In Baisers volés (1968) Truffaut again inscribes his own credit over a shot of the Eiffel Tower, but here the image is a picturesque postcard rather than the graffiti-like traces of a wild child on the loose; it is shot in pleasing color rather than a black and white that harks back to the origins of film;

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Figure 17.1

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

Figure 17.2

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

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and it offers an always already domesticated vision of Paris and its grandest monument, a site of memory rather than a space open to discovery and reappropriation (Figure 17.2). By constantly returning to the characters and locations of his earlier work, Truffaut seems almost to invite the comparisons and predictable dismissals that would greet his later work, especially the films that star a maturing Jean-Pierre Léaud or a new generation of children. But this compulsion to return to the problem of youth and the process of growing up – at least a third of his twenty-seven films are concerned with this topic, including his first short, Les Mistons (1957) – suggests that they remained a major thematic obsession throughout his career. Rather than construct a stage upon which he enacts his own decline, rather than invite a comparison between his lesser late-career films and his early masterpieces and therefore fall into a trap of his own construction, Truffaut’s later films are themselves meditations on one of the fundamental questions posed by the New Wave and the medium of film: what happens, Truffaut asks, when something defined by its youth and novelty, something like the generation that came of age in the 1950s,

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like the New Wave, has to re-imagine itself without the essential quality of newness? And what happens when cinema can no longer claim the mantle of innovation that defined the medium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The quintessential New Wave director, the embodiment of the youth of an era, an advocate for cinema’s continued modernity even a half-century after its invention, Truffaut eventually becomes one of the key figures to contemplate the condition of cinema as an old medium. Truffaut’s virtuoso credit sequence of Les 400 Coups combines his interests in the aesthetic possibilities of mise-en-scène, the position of the film’s young protagonist in the historic space of Paris, and the monument that the camera seems to gravitate toward and revolve around: the Eiffel Tower. In under three minutes, the film displays the stylistic abandon that would reappear in Godard’s A Bout de souffle (1960), and the jumpy image ventures far afield from the “quality” cinema Truffaut had previously denounced in the pages of Cahiers. But it also adopts the tower as its center of attention, as an almost literal framing device for the film and for the camera that appears to home in on it through the maze of trees and buildings. This icon of nineteenthcentury modernity and its dream of a vertical city, supported by the strength of iron and made possible by the twinned sciences of architecture and engineering, then disappears from the screen as the narrative joins Antoine Doinel in a confining classroom, where an unfair punishment relegates him to even more cramped quarters in the corner. If the first images of the film are a celebration of energy and movement and the technology that makes them possible – including the modern medium par excellence, cinema – the second scene halts that dynamic opening in its tracks. The boys are still in their seats; the camera is fixed, immobile, inert. The assignment at hand is a dictation, as the students are required to transcribe “Le Lièvre,” a banal, Bartleby-like act of copying a prescribed text, the opposite of the excitement of discovery and movement that drives the opening sequence. The film does not begin with the total repudiation of tradition, though Antoine Doinel does embody a form of rebellion. It initially pits Antoine against the institution of the school and eventually against the family and the state (and in that sense against the full array of ideological state apparatuses that Althusser would identify as the key forces used to reproduce and reinforce the existing order).34 But rather than align the young generation, imagined as the locus of possibility itself, with a presentist or futureoriented vision of a world under construction and to come, Les 400 Coups identifies Antoine with the Eiffel Tower, with cinema, and with a particular and, by the tail end of the 1950s, already aging manifestation of modernity. The opening sequences of the film are at once conservative and youthful, but in ways that defy the traditional associations of those terms: they reject the most entrenched and powerful French social institutions – ones that Truffaut sometimes defended in print but that almost always ostracized him, especially before his success as a director – and construct an homage to the emblematic structure of the industrial age. If Truffaut can be characterized as a nostalgic that is only because he regrets the passing of a modern age whose icons were iron towers and the larger-than-life images projected through the new medium of cinema.

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Like the other cinephiles-turned-directors who emerged from the offices of Cahiers, Truffaut scatters allusions to other films and filmmakers throughout Les 400 Coups and his subsequent work. But in almost every instance the cinema is associated with youth, innocence, exploration, and possibility rather than the decrepit tradition he identified with the “cinema of quality.” In Les Mistons Truffaut shows the eponymous mischief-makers ripping down a poster of Jean Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans colliers (1955), the work of what Truffaut dubbed the “old wave.” In Les 400 Coups cinema has been rejuvenated, and like the actors and craftspeople claiming their positions on the set, the medium has been appropriated by the children of the New Wave. We see Antoine and his friend playing hooky from school and receiving their education at the movie theater; we see the Doinel family enjoying one of their few moments of bliss on the road to and from the movie theater; we see Antoine (and Truffaut himself in a brief cameo) in a rotating amusement park ride that recalls the fairground origins of cinematic spectacle and, like a proto-cinematic device, spins still bodies into motion; we see students scampering away from their oblivious gym teacher in a scene lovingly adapted from Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933); and as a crowd of children take in a marionette show at the Luxembourg Gardens, we encounter our mirror image in Truffaut’s ideal spectators, the kids who cringe in horror and squeal with delight. Truffaut’s budding cinephiles respond to puppets on stage or shadows on a screen with a sense of visceral pleasure and loss, with the same excitements and terror of anticipation that characterized the camera movements and editing in the sequence centered on the Eiffel Tower. In “The Script of Delinquency,” Anne Gillain argues that Antoine is nurtured by the city, “a maternal space which shelters the child, protects his games, hides and feeds him.”35 And the cinema is one of the key sites that allow him to escape the imprisoning atmosphere of home and school, shield himself from the surveillance of state and parental authority, and indulge in playful fantasy. Overlapping and complementary forces, cinema and the city magnify the possibilities inherent in the other, and each is imagined in Les 400 Coups in a state of perpetual youth. As the Antoine Doinel series unfolds over the succeeding two decades, however, Truffaut not only charts the passage of his protagonist into adulthood, he also develops a style of cinema consistent with Antoine’s hard-earned maturity, an efficient mode of narration and visual storytelling. In the process, he eliminates most of the exuberantly drifting sequences that seem to exist outside the narrative framework and reverse the usual hierarchy of values in narrative cinema. What matters for Antoine, and what in many instances interrupts the smooth progression of the narrative – his long, aimless walks around town; his trips to the movies with his family and with René; the silent mutiny of nearly the entire class against the gym teacher – are these extended dilations centered on inconsequential actions. Entertainment, gags for their own sake, and scenes of joy become the film’s center of attention for a time, and cinema becomes an exercise in pure mise-en-scène. While most of the key narrative events are associated with the quotidian and extraordinary traumas in Antoine’s life, and those small- and large-scale events range from the countless attempts to rein in his natural enthusiasm to his eventual arrest and imprisonment, the flashes of a cinema beyond narrative emerge from a less constrained, more dynamic conception

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of time and space. Antoine’s seemingly brief glimpses of freedom, a few hours or a day, a stolen moment here and there correspond to a rupture in the familiar patterns of cinematic storytelling, like the paradigmatic instance centered on the Eiffel Tower that inaugurates the interlaced careers of Truffaut and Antoine Doinel. What changes between the glorious debut of 1959 and the final installment of the series, L’Amour en fuite in 1979, is the gradual elimination of these eruptions of jubilation and the steady narrativization of everything. Released in 1968, Baisers volés is dedicated to “la Cinémathèque Française d’Henri Langlois,” the institution’s longtime but embattled director whose firing by André Malraux sparked a protest among French and international cinephiles and contributed to the carnivalesque atmosphere of political and cultural protest in that monumental year. Truffaut had earlier dedicated Les 400 Coups to Bazin, and the influence of his deceased mentor is evident in the film’s attention to the reality of family and urban life at the time. Despite the fact that it was included as a show of solidarity with Langlois rather than in memory of the recently departed, the dedication in Baisers volés reads more like an elegy since the film itself no longer pays tribute to the New Wave style cultivated in the seats of the Cinémathèque and then the city streets. As both his subjects and the New Wave grow older, both the B-movie energy of Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and the cinema of empty moments fall by the wayside, and what remains is the type of movie that had previously horrified Truffaut: the well-made film distinguished primarily by its quality rather than its raw and uncontained energy. And when the turmoil then evident on the streets of Paris enters the family melodrama it does so on the television screen, which now serves as one of the film’s primary conduits to reality. The couple remain in the same city, but they are worlds away from the Paris confronted and reclaimed by the young Antoine Doinel. When L’Amour en fuite concludes this cycle by replaying memorable scenes from the other Doinel films, it betrays an impulse to return to an earlier and presumably more innocent and productive stage in the life of the hero, the career of its director, and even the history of cinema. This familiar narrative of decline – the account of Truffaut’s career that foregrounds his work as a young director and suggests that he eventually grew complacent after his early success – overlooks the role of two types of film that remain important to Truffaut and maintain the spirit of his earliest work: first, films about children, especially L’Enfant sauvage (1970) and L’Argent de poche, allow him to revisit the spirit of the adolescent Antoine Doinel rather than the maturing character seen later in the series; and second, his elegiac film about cinema, La Nuit américaine (1973), contrasts the cynical world of film production with a utopian ideal of cinema that seems incompatible with the reality unfolding behind the scenes. Shot at Studios de la Victorine in Nice, the film developed out of Truffaut’s fascination with that particular location, with the sound stage that distills the setting down to the key details of a street and the façades that line it, the extra posing as a passerby, the steps down to a métro station, the stray car or bicycle. The studio dates back to 1919 and so in using it Truffaut recaptures the grandeur of film in its first quarter-century and rekindles some of the original ambitions for cinema, including the desire for a perfect, mechanical recording of the

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world and the often contradictory desire to remake reality, to analyze and shape it, even if that process intervenes in the direct relationship between the camera and its subject. From its inception cinema was used to document everyday life, as in the early Lumière films, and to manipulate and augment it. That dialectical relationship between the real and the false is nowhere more evident than in the architecture of the studio, the artificial setting that was the sine qua non for early Edison films created in the Black Mariah and that later cultivated a cinema of mise-en-scène championed by Truffaut the critic. That dialectic between reality and artifice is present in the title of La Nuit américaine, which alludes to the fundamental acts of reinvention and manipulation, including the transformation of day into night through the simple intervention of a filter, that subtend the production of the vast majority of films. Making a movie is like “a stagecoach journey into the far west,” says Ferrand, the director of the film within a film. “At the start you hope for a beautiful trip. But shortly you wonder if you will make it at all.” It also contains elements of magic, as when a brief mention of the possibilities of cinema inspires images of a car crash and a blanket of snow made from soap sprayed on the ground. The exuberance of the young Truffaut and Antoine Doinel, who fed their love of cinema by stealing photographs from the entryway to a theater, reappears in the innocent, utopian affection for movies that energizes La Nuit américaine, including a dream sequence in which a young boy reaches through an iron grill and purloins publicity pictures from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). In describing his motivation for the film, Truffaut says, Foremost in my mind was the Charles Trenet song “Moi, j’aime le music-hall” where he  enumerates with kindness and humor all the popular singers of the day, though they’re his competitors. I shot Day for Night in the same spirit, my intent was to make the audience happy on seeing a film in the making, to infuse joy and lightheartedness from all the sprocket holes of the film. “Moi, j’aime le cinema.”36

Despite the financial exigencies and individual foibles that always affect the production of a film, what appears on the screen is magical, Truffaut suggests. What we see in the movie theater is always a young cinema. La Nuit américaine provoked a vehement response from Godard, who attacked this naivety in Truffaut’s depiction of the production process and in essence made official the end of his professional and personal relationship with Truffaut. The world of film production presented in that film is unconscionably false, he writes in a letter to Truffaut. Using the most direct possible language, he continues, Probably no one else will call you a liar, but I will. It’s no more of an insult than “fascist,” it’s a critique, and it’s the absence of a critical view such films leave us with – those of Chabrol, Ferreri, Verneuil, Delannoy, Renoir, etc. – that I object to. You say: films are big trains that go along in the night, but who is taking the train, in what class, and who is the conductor with the management’s “stool pigeon” by his side? Such people make film-trains as well. And if you don’t mean the Trans-Europ, then maybe it’s the train to the suburbs, or the Dachau–Munich train, a station that you can be sure you won’t see in Lelouch’s film-train.37

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In addition to the scathing tone of the attack, this letter is remarkable for the way it  mobilizes and transvalues a metaphor that once crystallized the excitement and possibility of cinema just after its invention. At once a phenomenon of motion and a machine that transforms perception, the train was one of the privileged subjects for early filmmakers, including the Lumière brothers.38 In Godard’s eyes the train – and its vision of modernity – is now inextricably associated with striking public workers and the horrors of Dachau, in whose aftermath the innocence of modernity is impossible to restore. As Godard continues to make radical, politicized, aggressively unpleasurable cinema in the 1970s, his “film-train” has spurned the pure adrenaline rush of rapid movement or the unsettling allure of panoramic perception.39 The Godard of the 1970s was eager to leave the history of film behind and explore whatever medium and form – and in this period analog video and dialectical montage were his favored modes of experimentation – can usher in a new era in art and history. Truffaut’s extensive response includes a series of equally personal attacks on Godard and a vigorous defense of popular cinema. Truffaut had manned the barricades to support Langlois and the Cinémathèque and actively participated in the protests, and he had sold copies of left-wing literature to protest government censorship, though his other political activities were limited to the causes of cinema, free speech, and children’s rights, even in the explosive years of the mid- and late 1960s. But that choice of favored political movements reveals a great deal about Truffaut: he maintained a faith in the possibilities inherent in youth and dedicated himself to protecting them from abusive institutions; and he believed above all in cinema, not only because of its artistic and entertainment value, but also because when the state, the school, and the family fail to nurture the children in their care, the movies and their social settings – the theater, the ciné-clubs, the café, the press – offer an alternative way of reinventing collective life. There is, again, an unavoidable element of naivety in this model, especially when film is mobilized to support the very institutions that Truffaut opposed. But it would be a mistake to characterize Truffaut’s belief system as apolitical or regressive and reactionary, a common perspective on his career. Instead, I think it makes sense to view Truffaut as a late modernist, as someone whose values were aligned with the world that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world of the Eiffel Tower and the invention of cinema. As an artist, he was among the keenest observers of the postwar modernization projects occurring in parallel with his own adolescence and continuing over the course of his life; as an individual, he found himself increasingly out of step with the world being actualized in front of him. For a young man educated at the movies and mentored not by teachers and parents but by key figures in the film world, cinema was a place to learn about sex and politics, hope and disappointment, all within the context of a communal experience of the medium. He resisted the development of both television and militant cinema in the Godardian mode precisely because they radically undermined the combination of idiosyncratic, cinephilic experience and shared, collective encounters with a common reality made possible by theatrical cinema.40 For Truffaut, film actualizes all its potential when it both moves the spectator in unanticipated ways and locates those

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sensations within the context of the crowd, the anonymous others present in the theater (with their clothes on or off ). In the heyday of French cinephilia in the 1950s, film was surrounded by a vibrant discourse of cinema, and the screening could be just the beginning of a large and more rewarding discussion of art and its implications. That was Truffaut’s vision of cinema and society, and if some of his films fail to live up to the promise of his early breakthroughs, that is perhaps because they were designed not only as discrete works of art but as attempts to restore the movies to their position of centrality in French culture life. Yes, Truffaut’s belief in cinema is tinged with nostalgia and naivety; but it also reflects a commitment to an idealistic model of cinema, with culture serving not as a platform for social elites and intellectuals, but as the centerpiece of a collective life possible in few other French institutions. When other New Wave filmmakers reached a more mature phase of their careers, they recognized, like Godard, that cinema could be as corrupt and oppressive as other centers of ideological and economic power; or they assumed a comfortable position within the art house or commercial film worlds. Truffaut, on the other hand, was exceptional in his refusal to relinquish that foundational idea of cinema, even when everyone around him had grown up, given up, and moved on to a mode of filmmaking that seemed more consistent with the times. Truffaut appeared years older than his chronological age as a teenager, but in his later years his films bear traces of the past, of an age when cinema was a paragon of mass modernity and when the tumultuous atmosphere of ciné-clubs and Cahiers placed films at once on a pedestal and at the center of animated debates about the medium and its possibilities. In that sense, Truffaut, a famously incoherent and opportunistic polemicist as a critic and one of the New Wave directors most often accused of selling out, may have been the only one of that illustrious cohort to pursue a singular vision of cinema from the beginning to the end of his career, to maintain a sense of utopian possibility even when the society around him realized that such dreams were only figments of a child’s imagination and the impossible fantasies of the silver screen.

Notes 1

See André S. Labarthe, Essai sur le jeune cinéma français: comment peut-on être martien (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1960). 2 Françoise Giroud, “La Nouvelle Vague arrive!” L’Express, 328(3) (October 1957): 1 and 18–19. 3 See Françoise Giroud, La Nouvelle Vague: portraits de la jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). 4 This exhibition is memorialized in Dominique Forest (ed.), Mobi Boom: L’Explosion du design en France, 1945–1975 (Paris: Editions Les Arts Dédoratifs, 2010). 5 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996). 6 In their contemporaneous inquiry into the different representation of heroes in New Wave and more mainstream French films, Claude Bremond and his colleagues argue that a relentless focus on the present is one of most distinctive features of the new cinema. See Claude Bremond, Evelyne Sullerot, and Simone Berton, “Les Héros des films dits ‘de la nouvelle vague,’” Communications 1 (1961): 146–7.

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10

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Claude Chabrol, Et Pourtant Je tourne (Paris: R. Laffont, 1976). Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 68. The full title of this collectively authored pamphlet is “On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy.” An English translation is available online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141 (accessed November 8, 2012). The ongoing tensions between technocratic officialdom and students reached a boiling point in 1968 when Minister of Youth and Sports, François Missoffe, was confronted by Daniel Cohn-Bendit at the dedication of a campus swimming pool. Cohn-Bendit asked why the government was indifferent to the sexual frustration of students living in forced segregation from their boyfriends and girlfriends; Missoffe suggested that Cohn-Bendit cure his discomfort by diving into the pool; Cohn-Bendit deemed this reply “fascist” and all too typical of the Gaullist government. For a discussion of Rohmer’s work in educational films, see Darragh O’Donoghue, “Cinema and the Classroom: Education in the Work of Eric Rohmer,” Senses of Cinema (April 2010). Truffaut, Introduction to Bazin, Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance (F. Ungar, 1981), p. 12. Quoted in Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 22. Quoted in Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or, The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 85. Quoted in Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 79. While Laura Mulvey draws her primary examples from classical Hollywood cinema, she could have found ample corroboration of the sadistic dimensions of the male gaze in Truffaut’s early criticism. See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16 (3) (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Quoted in Dixon, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, p. 6. Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Jacques Rivette, “On Imagination,” trans. Liz Heron, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 105. Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 149. Edward Dimendberg, “‘These Are Not Exercises in Style’: Le Chant du Styrène,” October 112 (Spring 2005), pp. 63–88. Douglas Smith, “‘Le Temps du plastique’: The Critique of Synthetic Materials in 1950s France,” Modern & Contemporary France 15 (2) (2007):140. Pierre Billard, “40 moins de 40,” Cinéma 58 (February 1958). “Boy Directors, Some Ex-Film Critics, Dominate French Entries at Cannes,” Variety (May 20, 1959), p. 15. Quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 134. Quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 134.

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26 Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p, 171. 27 See, for example, Robert Benayoun, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Originally published in Positif 47 ( July 1962). 28 Eric Breitbart, “An Interview with Jean-Pierre Melville,” Film Culture 35 (Winter 1964–5): 18. 29 Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 324. 30 Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 54. 31 Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 182. 32 L’Express, October 28, 1966. 33 Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 241. 34 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 35 Ann Gillain, “The Script of Delinquency: François Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups,” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 149. 36 Press kit for Day for Night. Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 295. 37 Jean-Luc Godard to François Truffaut, in Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray (eds), François Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945–1984, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 383. 38 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Press, 1979); and Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 39 See Keathley, Cinephilia and History. 40 While Godard’s militant films, including the newsreel-like “Ciné-Tracts” from 1968, were also developed with a collectivity in mind, they began with a fundamental critique of cinematic reality and filmed entertainment and mark their departure from Truffaut at that point.

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Bad Objects Truffaut’s Radicalism Sam Di Iorio

François Truffaut frequently stated that he was not a modern filmmaker, but it would be a mistake to see his work as old-fashioned, or, worse, conventional.1 In the 1970s, critic Jean-Louis Bory claimed he had been “recuperated by the system,” an idea which is particularly damning not because of the link it forges with the establishment, for Truffaut had never opposed working within the profession, but because of the passiveness the word “recuperation” implies.2 The real problem with this position is that it suggests that Truffaut’s films are complicit with both the ideology of France’s social mainstream and its aesthetic practices. This argument tends to reinforce its claims by comparing his work with that of Jean-Luc Godard: the latter is inevitably regarded as a paragon of the engaged artist, and the former’s story is reduced to a slow climb to box-office glory. The following pages are positioned against this binary model. Rather than repeat the standard opposition between margins and center, I argue that Truffaut’s films occupy a non-consensual third space within the landscape of French cinema, a space which is equally removed from mainstream fare and the more radical experiments of auteur-oriented features. Truffaut might have embraced his reputation as a cinéaste du centre, but the films themselves are traversed by darker, more antisocial currents which complicate their broad appeal. While they contain a dissatisfaction with the world as it exists which is as strong as the one animating the work of any politically engaged filmmaker, their signs of contestation are intermittent, despairing, and above all, relentlessly hidden. There is a duplicity to Truffaut’s cinema, one which transforms even the most innocent films into what we might call bad objects. The qualifier has nothing to do with their value, of course. Nor do I entirely mean, as Naomi Schor did when she used this phrase, to reference their present-day worth to the academy.3 Rather, they are bad on an operational level: they do not function as

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

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promised, and what they say is often different from what they actually do. This ambivalence has complicated their reception. Recovering the subtexts of these bad objects requires a certain amount of excavation. My analysis replaces three films from the middle of Truffaut’s career within the discourse of their time. On the surface, La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), L’Enfant sauvage (1970), and La Nuit américaine (1973) have little in common: the first is a romantic thriller, the second a period drama about education, and the third, a backstage look at the art of filmmaking.4 Nevertheless, all three belong to the late-sixties, early-seventies turning point that remains French cinema’s most militant period. When they are viewed together within this context, their individual segments form a narrative arc. The story can be read in two ways. On the one hand, Truffaut’s work conceals a thorny defense of representation which is resolutely engaged with post-1968 debates about cinema’s relationship to contemporary life; on the other, the films he directed between 1969 and 1973 are also successive attempts at detachment: in its own way, each one turns away from society and towards a self-contained and, eventually, ill-fated aesthetic world. The curious thing about Truffaut’s engagement, then, is that it is also a form of retreat. This article examines how a tension between dialogue and withdrawal lies at the heart of his cinema, beneath the surface attractions which make it so difficult to see.

La Grande Illusion Surfaces are an important part of Truffaut’s eighth feature, La Sirène du Mississippi. The film was an expensive production with an even-keeled glossiness underwritten by international locations, a sprawling narrative, and the glamorous reputations of its stars, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, who were then at the height of their fame. Truffaut’s point of departure was Cornell Woolrich’s noir love story Waltz into Darkness, but while he retained the author’s premise – a man leaves everything to  follow the woman who betrayed him – he took great liberties with his source material, altering the ending, moving the story from nineteenth-century New Orleans to present-day locations in France and Réunion, and softening the divisions between the protagonists so they could move beyond the categorical outlines of the hapless innocent and the siren who leads him astray. Like the novel, however, Truffaut’s film is set in motion by deception. Tobacco heir Louis Mahé thought he had married Julie Roussel, a woman he had encountered through the personal ads, courted by mail, and proposed to without ever meeting. He soon learns, however, that his wife is someone else entirely. The real Roussel was murdered on a freighter, the Mississippi, en route to Mahé’s Réunion estate, and another woman, Marion Vergano, stole her identity, married Mahé, emptied his bank accounts, and vanished. Eager for justice, Mahé and Roussel’s surviving sister put a private detective on Vergano’s trail, but it is Mahé himself who finds her by chance in the South of France. She confesses to everything at gunpoint, and, when she asks Louis to kill her, he realizes he is still in love.

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Contrary to either’s expectations, they run off together, and live in ragged bliss until the detective reappears. Mahé kills him to prevent Vergano’s arrest and, forced to flee, the fugitive lovers run first to Lyon and eventually, with the police closing in, to a shack in the woods near Grenoble. As the money runs out, their relationship crumbles. Louis thinks they should slip over the Swiss border together, but Marion begs him to let her leave alone. When he refuses, she begins feeding him rat poison. He discovers this, tells her he knows what she is doing, and accepts dying for her. Staggered by his devotion, she breaks down and says she loves him once more. In the final minutes of the film, the bond between them is restored, but its implications are unclear: staying together might help them survive, but it might just as easily kill them. In what Luc Moullet described as “probably the most beautiful final shot in the history of French cinema,” the lovers head off hand in hand through the deep snow, without a clear sense of where the border is, or whether salvation will come.5 La Sirène du Mississippi’s story of a love affair is also a reflection on a primary critical issue in late-sixties French cinema: the relationship between representation and reality. If Godard raised this issue through the Brechtian confrontations of 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (1967) and Jacques Rivette filtered it through the theatrical allegories of L’Amour fou (1969), Truffaut inscribed it in a space which is more prosaic and more improbable than those of his peers: the personal ads. By opening with a close-up of a newspaper and the sound of overlapping voices reading out the classified profiles, he sets the theme of self-representation at the outset of his film. “I think people who place personal ads are idealists,” Louis later tells Marion, framing their five-line autobiographies as utopian environments in which life can be envisioned as what it should be rather than what it is.6 This split between idealized self and authentic being becomes the film’s template for identity: the former is immediately visible, and the latter always concealed. This is especially true of the protagonists. Louis and Marion exist first as images: he is one of the richest men in Réunion and she a beauty so striking that “anyone who has encountered her remembers her.”7 Their hyper-visibility ensures that their movements are closely followed both in town, where they are the subject of gossip and speculation, and at home, where breakfasts on the veranda and walks around the estate are a private spectacle tracked by the attentive eyes of their servants. Rather than approach Louis and Marion as individuals, the film portrays them as living signs of glamour and success. Louis’ family name, Mahé, is also the brand name printed on each pack of his factory’s cigarettes. When he weds Marion, he adds her portrait to these packs, as if to reinforce their marriage with a second ceremony that joins them as commodities. From the beginning, and especially when they are alone together, the couple cannot see past their own appearance. Marion admits that Louis’ presence awes her into silence, but Louis goes further and turns his wife into an icon: “You are adorable,” he tells her over and over again. “Do you know what ‘adorable’ means? It means ‘worthy of adoration.’”8 Initially, by setting out a world in which interactions between individuals are governed by civic rank and physical look, La Sirène du Mississippi establishes a network of social relations based on flatness. This level field is complicated, however, by

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protagonists whose personalities are rooted in unfathomable psychological depth. The notion that Louis and Marion are images is consistently accompanied by reminders of another world below the surface. The film strengthens the interiority of its protagonists by showing them engaged in absorptive activities – reading, dreaming, letter-writing – from which viewers are inevitably excluded: we are never able to access Louis’ correspondence with the real Julie Roussel, we never know how he interprets his bedside copy of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, and if we see Marion wake up screaming and gasping for air, we never learn the contents of her nightmare. This is the main difference between La Sirène du Mississippi and Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut’s first attempt at a film about an enduring romantic relationship between adults. The earlier film is relentlessly confessional: Jules, Jim, and Kate are able to confide in each other, they can reveal their true feelings, they have a capacity for unqualified sincerity. In Louis and Marion’s relationship, motivations remain ciphers and communication is relentlessly compromised by the problem of theater. When Marion attempts to explain her feelings for Louis, she does so in a recording booth, via microphone, and the setting underscores that confession is inevitably performance. Time and time again – from the self-fashioning of the personal ads to the spectacle of a life lived in public in Réunion, from the mise-en-scène of temptation in the nightclub where Marion plays hostess to her stagy foreplay with Louis – La Sirène du Mississippi frames existence as show business. Because of this, the film’s most important questions concern authenticity. Since the relation between what is presented and what is felt is hopelessly unclear, how can you tell what is real? At the end of the film, using a line which recurs throughout Truffaut’s work, Marion suggests an answer: “I love you Louis. You might not believe me, but unbelievable things can be true.”9 Since she delivers this line after learning he knows she’s been poisoning him, it is indeed difficult to believe her. Nevertheless, Louis says that he does, and when he takes her in his arms, Truffaut’s argument becomes clear: truth is not a matter of reason, it is a matter of faith. Faith preserves the tenuous bond between protagonists whose differences are sublimated rather than resolved. When the film ends, characters who are continually outdistancing and catching up to one another have been brought into an uncomfortable and volatile balance. The couple is teetering as they head off into the snow, but neither lets go of the other’s hand. This final scene dovetails with a beginning that is also built around the idea of balance. At the end of the opening credits, Truffaut inserts a clip from La Marseillaise (1937) and dedicates his film to its director, Jean Renoir. Since the origins of the Ile de la Réunion’s name can be traced to the French Revolution, this clip has a narrative function. Arguably, however, it is more important for what it symbolizes. Truffaut’s dedication is not a neutral homage; it defends an approach to Renoir’s work which he had been developing for over a decade. In 1957, he had published a short piece about La Marseillaise in Cahiers du Cinéma which stated that the film’s genius lies in its evenhanded treatment of its subject: “Renoir mixes together all and sundry, arguing for every cause with that objectivity, that generosity, that intelligent authority, which no one has ever denied him. He is above the fray.”10

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These influential lines frame both film and director as incarnations of cinematic equilibrium, and in doing so they reaffirm the approaches to Renoir that Cahiers adopted during the 1950s. In their reading, the idea that his films strike a balance between a variety of perspectives – as Truffaut would later affirm, all thirty features “revolve around the well-known line from La Règle du jeu …: ‘You understand, the most terrible thing on this earth is that everyone has their reasons’” – leads to the conclusion that the director is inherently impartial.11 Renoir becomes a totalizing figure, a passionate nonpartisan whose work was able to hold together viewpoints and approaches which were often irreconcilably opposed. Ten years later, however, slightly before Truffaut began work on La Sirène du Mississippi, the review revised its stance. The 1960s saw Cahiers slowly abandon both the principles (auteurism, cinephilia, mise-en-scène) that Truffaut’s generation had worked so hard to impose and the relationship to cinema which had led to their development in the first place. For this reason, rather than envision either the movies in general or Renoir’s work in particular as separated from the contemporary world, they began to set both in relation to the social realities of the present. One of the places they developed this argument was an essay which returned to La Marseillaise. In 1967, Cahiers editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli took advantage of the release of a restored version of the film to revisit Renoir’s work and its reputation. While recognizing the significance of Truffaut’s earlier reading, he argued that its  “humanist” tendency to push Renoir towards transcendence was completely wrongheaded, especially as far as La Marseillaise was concerned. This film, he reminds his readers, was initiated by the French Labor Unions and the Front Populaire.12 It was not only a quintessentially engaged project, it was a work of propaganda in which narrative and form militate equally for revolution. For Comolli, the film sketched a  simple, powerful idea: authentic political cinema is possible. Renoir’s feature, he wrote, shows us … that works of propaganda are not necessarily awkward and brainless. … This immediately provokes a debate about whether political cinema can act intelligently or, conversely, whether intelligent cinema can act politically. Such a debate could not be more timely since it seems that, with Godard, Allio, and a few others, French cinema is finally setting off in this very direction.13

La Marseillaise thus provides a prescient template for the politically engaged line the Cahiers adopted towards the end of the sixties. Led by Comolli and Jean Narboni, the review adopted a rhetoric of struggle in which their severe discontentment with the organization of contemporary life was mitigated, first, by the conviction that progressive change was possible and, second, by the belief that films and film theory had a role to play in this larger revolution. It is this position which begins to emerge in that 1967 encounter with Renoir. When Truffaut returns to La Marseillaise in 1969, then, the film is less a canonical reference point than the site of a generational conflict. It is important to point out, however, that Cahiers remained committed to Truffaut’s films (and to La Sirène du

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Mississippi in particular) throughout the sixties.14 Similarly, although Truffaut did not agree with its political direction, he remained a steadfast supporter of Cahiers during this period. Nevertheless, he had felt targeted by Comolli’s article, and at the level of ideas his intransigent presentation of Renoir at the outset of La Sirène du Mississippi reads as a deferred response to an interpretation he refused to accept.15 This response is extended within the film by a second decision lying halfway between affable in-joke and passive–aggressive vengeance. Truffaut singles out the inspector who chases down Louis and Marion – the one Louis violently murders, the one Marion remembers with a one-line eulogy: “That’s one less bastard,” the one they find themselves running from even after his death – by naming him Inspector Comolli.16 The detail is significant to the extent that it distinguishes between the brain of the detective/critic, whose machinelike pursuit of his objective leaves him incapable of mercy, and the more poetic temperament of the protagonists, who are all heart.17 The differences between these two character types are so extreme that they manifest themselves in the smallest details: style of dress, ways of talking, even forms of motion. If Truffaut derisively envisioned Comolli’s progress as a programmatic and ultimately fatal advance towards Marion, his sympathies lie with the more impulsive, erratic movement of his fugitives. It was a distinction that held true in the real world: at the end of the decade, his work spurns the cinema’s press towards revolution in order to head somewhere quite different. It is still difficult to say exactly where. Part of the ambiguity has to do with Truffaut’s tendency to hide things. La Sirène du Mississippi brandishes images of harmony and centrism, but these multiple assertions of balance also operate as screens. Beneath the reconciliations of the film’s love story lies a more radical tale of withdrawal. Within the narrative, it is the characters who flee. Louis and Marion’s relationship is predicated on the ever-widening distance separating them from others. The couple runs the gamut of marginal positions, alternately living parallel to the mainstream, as what Louis calls “parasites,” and above its laws, as murderers. Marion literally wears her difference on her sleeve: when Louis worries that her feathery Yves Saint Laurent coat might be “a little eccentric,” the adjective is well chosen, since the object marks her distance both from the norms of Lyon’s cultural center and from Paris, the center of France, a city she has never visited.18 Forever out of place, the couple’s horizons gradually shrink as they slip from house to apartment, apartment to shack, and shack to empty, snow-covered field. This physical withdrawal from signs of civilization is doubled by a second, less tangible movement away from contemporary life. Despite their differences, Godard, Rivette, and the critics at Cahiers all viewed cinema and world as fundamentally connected. For them, the terms “representation” and “reality” were bound together by a tension which, for Cahiers in particular was fortified by moral obligation, by the idea that one of cinema’s primary duties lies in interrogating how images and sounds function within society.19 La Sirène du Mississippi provides a fascinating corrective to this position: it not only denies this connection, it offers a story in which the sociopolitical “realities” of the present are wholeheartedly abandoned. This abandonment, however, is neither an endorsement of the status quo nor a surrender to mindless

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entertainment. For Truffaut, it is the equivalent of a militant gesture. Like his colleagues, he was working from dissatisfaction with the social order and told a story of outsiders who refused to conform. In his case, however, the rejection of society is an outgrowth of profound pessimism. Here, no political transcendence is possible. Instead of struggling for change, Truffaut’s film opts for an almost sociopathic fugue. On every level, La Sirène du Mississippi shuns the world and takes refuge in representation. Truffaut prepares this action from the beginning. As Jean-Pierre Oudart points out, the story is packed with politically resonant details – the colonial setting of Réunion, Louis’ position as a factory owner, the financial problems which tear apart his relationship with Marion – but since it refuses to attach these points to an ideological line, they come to reinforce the film’s remove from politics.20 This is not a film, in other words, in which factories, colonies, and economic realities matter. Instead, what matters is cinema: at a moment when France’s era of fanatical movie-going was ending, Truffaut offers a film de cinéphile, a relentlessly allusive work whose elements signify in terms of aesthetic precedents. Marion and Louis’ relationship is conditioned by the ones in well-known pictures like Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) and The Devil is a Woman (1935), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and They Live by Night (1949), Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964), as well as relatively forgotten films like Byron Haskin’s The Naked Jungle (1954), which also centers on the stormy relationship between a virginal plantation owner and his mail-order bride.21 As La Sirène du Mississippi progresses, the game of references expands and intensifies, until the final ten minutes become a feverish tangle of quotations which shifts the narrative’s register. If the film starts as a thriller, it ends as a fairy tale: first, Marion is a beautiful princess locked inside a shack (the one he used in 1960 for Tirez sur le pianiste) by an ogre, Louis, who sleeps with the key around his neck and La Peau de chagrin near his bed. Immediately afterward, Louis becomes Snow White poisoned by Marion, the wicked witch. And after that, they become each other: their conflict about the poisoning plays off their initial confrontation in the South of France, but this time it is Marion who threatens to kill Louis and Louis who accepts dying. These over-determined reversals climax with an end that returns to the beginning. Balance is not the only thread uniting the start and close of Truffaut’s film. While it opens with La Marseillaise, the last shot in the snow alludes to a different feature by Renoir, La Grande Illusion (1937). Made just before La Marseillaise, this earlier film ends with another couple, escaped prisoners of war Maréchal and Rosenthal, fleeing over the Swiss border. A few years after his film was released, Truffaut came back to this image, which he linked to Renoir’s title. In a short essay, he explained what that title meant to him: All one has to do, really, is listen to the last few lines of dialogue, when Maréchal ( Jean  Gabin) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) prepare to go their separate ways in the snow at the Swiss border: maréchal: We need to finish this fucking war. … Let’s hope it’s the last one. rosenthal: Aw, you’re fooling yourself ! [tu te fais des illusions]

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La Grande Illusion is thus the idea that that war was the last one, but it also refers to the illusion of existence, the illusion each person entertains about the role they play in life. I’m convinced La Grande Illusion could have been called La Règle du jeu, and vice-versa.22

Truffaut’s interpretation mixes cynicism with acceptance: he acknowledges Rosenthal’s view that it is naive to think that society can put an end to war, but he also suggests that Maréchal’s faith in illusions is a fundamental part of being alive. For better or for worse, living is predicated on a reconciliation with illusions. This reconciliation becomes the moral of Truffaut’s fairy tale. Since the drives pushing Louis and Marion are mercurial and obscure, since their “real” intentions remain unknowable, since immediately after they declare their love, they are ready to head in different directions, they must build their connection to one another on an ideal of a relationship, that is, on the ideal image each harbors of their partner. That representation – their grand illusion – is stronger and more reliable than reality, just as the film itself finds sanctuary in a web of cinephilic references which come to replace the social issues it excludes. Perversely, then, La Sirène du Mississippi implies that it is only by withdrawing into illusion that one is able to arrive at authenticity. Rather than strike a balance between the poles of a dichotomy, the film heads so far in one direction that it ends up rejoining the other. On the one hand, as we have seen, Louis and Marion forge their intimate bond by coming to terms with appearances. On the other, the film’s extreme withdrawal from social issues eventually opens onto premises for a counter-society. In accepting their partner, what the couple assents to is not the amorous connection alone but also the more general idea that others are necessary to existence. Or perhaps not even others. Just one other. Truffaut’s solution is extremely humble: rather than dream of an ideal world which could replace the systems and structures Marion and Louis leave behind, he ends by simply imagining the possibility of a connection. For the protagonists, it is this shared faith in representation, one which has nothing to do with political causes, which forms the basis of the social contract. The final allusion to Renoir, in fact, allows Truffaut to close with a promise of deliverance. Renoir’s film does not end when Rosenthal tells Maréchal, “Tu te fais des illusions”; it is only over when the two men, another mismatched couple fleeing hostile pursuers, cross the border and regain their freedom.

The Reluctant Schoolmaster While La Sirène du Mississippi was preoccupied with extremes, Truffaut’s next feature, L’Enfant sauvage, advocated restraint, discipline, and reason. Set in the late eighteenth century and inspired by real events, it tells how a boy who had spent the first ten years of his life cut off from human contact was integrated into the social world. Truffaut himself played Jean Itard, the doctor who took responsibility for the boy’s education. With a housekeeper, Madame Guérin, Itard attempts to teach his protégé – Victor – to

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walk upright, dress himself, speak, read, and write. Although the two educators encounter setbacks, they make progress and retain hope that disciplined instruction will enable Victor to lead a normal life. The narrative here plays straight to consensus: while recognizing that the process of shaping an individual is painful, the film nevertheless presents it as necessary. Truffaut relentlessly and, given his on-screen role, personally defends the benefits of civilization. “When we leave this film,” television host Pierre Dumayet told his viewers, “we are proud to know how to read.”23 It is important to recognize, however, the extent to which this middle ground is itself a position of combat. Truffaut’s feature is released at the beginning of a decade in which institutions of social regulation – schools, hospitals, courtrooms, prisons – were being violently contested by prominent figures (Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Fernand Deligny) who rejected the normative assumptions at their core. When the film appeared, critics tied its story to ongoing public discussions about the purpose of education and the nature of adolescent psychology.24 And yet, even though it chooses a side, it seems less engaged with specific social issues than with aesthetics. While it is rarely framed in these terms, L’Enfant sauvage should also be read as an allegory. Where La Sirène du Mississippi affirmed the power of representation, this next film goes further and advocates for a particular kind of cinema. Its clash between culture and barbarity is also a confrontation between two styles of filmmaking, and Truffaut’s support of civilization should be seen as an intervention in contemporary debates about the function of the moving image. Although the idea for the project dates back to 1964, he made the film at a moment when his chosen profession as a director of commercially distributed narrative fiction, a field which had long been dominant both as an industrial model and a cultural force, was being called into question. In the wake of the 1968 uprisings, many of Truffaut’s colleagues – most visibly Jean-Luc Godard but also Chris Marker, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Jean Eustache – changed their approaches and moved away from ideas they had accepted ten years earlier: that true cinema is governed by the singular authority of an auteur, that the essence of the medium lies in personal expression.25 The various alternatives they explored – exercises in collective filmmaking, interrogations of class consciousness, long-duration improvisations, silence – represent a “savage” cinema to the extent that they position themselves against the “civilized” traditions of the industry. Here, the always-dubious term “savage” takes its meaning not from some extra-European primitivism but from a phrase which returned to prominence during the sixties: grève sauvage (wildcat strike), a form of protest which erupts outside the systems that unions and political parties set in place for the expression of grievances. These post-1968 films also emerge from an aggressive rejection of structures. Although the era’s prominent calls for a “complete reorganization of [the cinema’s] means of production and distribution” went unrealized, the rise of social activism in France did broaden the appeal of militant projects, aid the development of alternate circuits of exhibition, and democratize access to equipment and materials.26 Whether it designated the radical Ligne rouge’s Oser Lutter, oser vaincre (1968) or Jean-Marie

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Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Othon (1969), this new cinema emerged from a desire to transform the act of movie-going by encouraging a critical relationship between a film, its audience, and the world outside the venue of projection. When L’Enfant sauvage was released, Truffaut had publicly distanced himself from what he called the “fashions” which followed May 1968.27 The film he made reiterates this stance, doubling its defense of civilization with stylistic choices anchored in tradition. Aesthetically, what Truffaut proposes is a work turned backwards towards the past. In the first place, that past is his own. He spoke of the project as a return: I was sort of reliving the production of Les 400 Coups while shooting the film. It was at this time that I initiated Jean-Pierre Léaud into filmmaking, that I taught him what the essence of cinema was. As a result, the decision to cast myself as Doctor Itard had more meaning than I initially thought. … Up to L’Enfant sauvage, when I had children in my films I identified with them, and here, for the first time, I identified with the adult, with the father, so completely that at the end of the shoot I dedicated the film to Jean-Pierre Léaud, because this shift, this transfer, had become completely obvious to me.28

These lines envision L’Enfant sauvage as a mature appraisal of the proving grounds of Truffaut’s youth. If on one level Itard is Truffaut and Victor represents Léaud, on another, the on-screen sessions between teacher and student are father-to-son lessons about what he calls “the essence of cinema.” Indeed, as Jean-Pierre Rehm has indicated, the blackboard and the table Itard uses are metaphors for the movie screen.29 But what’s playing? The second return the film makes is towards cinema’s own past, a past Truffaut believed was grounded in narrative fiction. The natural enemy of this past is, of course, the present: “There’s a certain kind of modern cinema,” he later argued, “that strives to kill the notion of characters and situations. This doesn’t interest me at all. I’ll always stay true to the kind of films that brought me to cinema. Even if I’m the only director left who believes in telling a story, I’ll never stop telling it.”30 As cinematographer Nestor Almendros affirmed, Truffaut wanted his film to have an old-fashioned look.31 At a moment when commercial productions had almost completely shifted to color, he insisted on black-and-white stock and built the shots around fades and iris shots which evoked Griffith and Dreyer, visually tying them to monuments of film history. Truffaut reinforces this antiquated style with a conventional structure built around linear chronology, unified action, and a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each scene of L’Enfant sauvage feeds directly into the larger narrative, and Truffaut’s presence before the camera is a physical reminder that this narrative is placed under his authority. The film’s fidelity to the past is accompanied by a visceral argument for the director as pedagogue, as the source of knowledge and traditions which it is his responsibility to communicate to the young. What makes L’Enfant sauvage especially compelling, however, is that its engagements seem anything but categorical. This is a film which chooses civilized cinema over savagery, yet in doing so, it also raises doubts about its choice. In the last scene, Victor returns to Itard’s home after briefly running away. The doctor welcomes him

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back, but when sending him off to rest, he reminds him that “in a little while we’ll go back to our exercises.”32 The look the boy returns to Itard in the final iris shot is all the more haunting because it is completely blank. The central questions – Can he learn anything more? Does he feel anything? Is it morally right to put him through this process? – remain unanswered, undercutting Itard’s positivist belief in education with strong reservations about its actual power. Rather than end in triumph, the reunion with Victor is limned with an image of two solitary figures – teacher and student – caught in a ritual which neither controls. Truffaut later regretted the ambiguity of this ending and seemed disturbed that his film lent itself to the idea that it might have been better to leave Victor on his own or that the doctor’s defense of civilization was a mistake.33 Nevertheless, the fact that this interpretation is possible hints at deeper divisions within the work itself, divisions which have to do with the education the film provides. Ultimately, L’Enfant sauvage is unable to reconcile theory and practice. On the one hand, Itard’s pedagogy is a philosophy of connection. The lessons he gives insist on the continuities between hearing and speaking, word and object, object and sign. “Victor is you,” Itard tells the boy, who has just written the letters of his name. “You are Victor. Do you understand?”34 The message is reassuring: there is a direct link between representation and reality, between the characters on the blackboard and the child who stands in front of them. This solidity of reference implies the existence of an ordered world structured by laws and conventions as logical as the ones which govern the Vivaldi concerto on the soundtrack. These rules, however, are undermined by the disarray of experience. Itard lives in a world where understanding is rare, justice unpredictable, and the “wonders of Paris” a sham. The film might endorse civilization, but it refuses to accept society, a term associated with the brutes, con artists, and lollygaggers who come to the Institute for Deaf Mutes for a glimpse of the “wild child” and leave disappointed by his refusal to play the part. Instead, as in La Sirène du Mississippi, Truffaut’s sympathies lie with characters who keep the majority at a distance: learning can only take place once Victor is relocated to Itard’s property at Batignolles, a liminal terrain separated from the brutality of country towns and the exploitation of the city. Although the film defends education, it also questions the validity of the life which awaits once the education is complete. In hesitating between attraction and aversion to the world, L’Enfant sauvage becomes, quite literally, a film of thresholds. Its preference for intermediary states is visible within the narrative: the story’s decisive events – Itard’s decision to care for the boy, Victor’s first word, his escape, his return – are shot through a succession of windows, doorways, gates, and sills which, in framing an action, also maintain their distance from it. The film’s rejection of savagery is akin to an existential choice: while accepting responsibility for its consequences, Truffaut remains aware of its contingency, of the fact that he could be wrong. And since the story ends before Victor’s education is complete, final judgment is eternally deferred. Rather than categorically choose one side over the other, the film remains within the interval, a space which blends engagement and doubt, a space associated with both pedagogy and cinema.

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These fields exist at a slight remove from life, and as Jean-Pierre Rehm asserts, the distance is a measure of their cruelty: The cinema [is] a harsh school: while allowing one to escape from ignorance, the school itself aims at self-preservation so that, once lessons are finished, it can remain a window, a seat between two worlds which permits the contemplation of a lost liberty, the one belonging to the birds and the rain left behind on the other side of the frame.35

If cinema is indeed a window for Truffaut, the transparency of the glass pane matters far less than the amount of protection it affords. L’Enfant sauvage positions film and classroom as cellular territories which, in bordering others, can remain closed in upon themselves and permeated with a sense of nostalgia for the past. It is only within this space that Itard and Truffaut manage to create a sort of family and envision the possibility of fulfillment, if not complete happiness.

A Patricide Despite their significance, the cellular vision of representation in La Sirène du Mississippi and L’Enfant sauvage remains, at best, implicit. Between 1970 and 1973 Truffaut made three more pictures – Domicile conjugal (1970), Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), and Une Belle Fille comme moi (1972) – which worked from the same convictions. But it was not until La Nuit américaine that he developed the earlier films’ melancholic gesture of withdrawal most completely and linked it directly to cinema. This 1973 feature takes place on the set of a “difficult but not exceptional” film, the based-on-a-truestory melodrama Je vous présente Paméla.36 The narrative moves back and forth between “fictional” scenes from its cautionary tale – a woman abandons her husband for his father and suffers the consequences – and the eventful story of its production. The textured world of the backstage narrative is presented as richer and more detailed than Je vous présente Paméla’s dime-novel yarn, and yet both belong to the same genre: the family drama. Like the characters they play, the stars are figures in crisis. One actress, Séverine, drinks to deal with her son’s leukemia; another, Stacey, has an unexpected pregnancy; Alexandre, an older actor, nurses Cocteau-inspired dreams of adopting his boyfriend; the young hero, Alphonse, turns to his costar Julie after his fiancée leaves him; Julie collapses after she cheats with Alphonse on her husband, Dr Nelson, who had abandoned his own wife and children to marry her and save her from depression. Their concatenated troubles are held in check by the more stable world of the production team, where private life is concealed and group cohesion is the rule. This cohesion is ensured through professional hierarchies: the script girl teaches the intern, the assistant director coaches the extras, the producer, Bertrand, is not afraid to remind technicians of their duties. These hyper-functional and dysfunctional families counterbalance each other, and at the end of the film, Bertrand sends off both groups, cast and crew, with a hearty “Goodbye, my children! Drive carefully!”37

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At best, however, Bertrand is only a grandfather to this coterie of talent (“The producer,” he affirms, “should stay in the shadows”).38 The father figure, the one around whom Je vous présente Paméla’s fictional narrative, the actors’ emotional lives, and the crew’s professional careers cohere, is the director, Ferrand, a role once again played by François Truffaut. Ferrand drives the project and guides the lives of his employees, presiding over marriages, arbitrating breakdowns, giving counsel to lost sheep. As a director, he becomes the physical incarnation of Truffaut’s Renoir, for his total involvement with cinema ends up placing him so far above the fray that he needs a hearing aid to interact with those around him. This distance from others is intellectual (Ferrand’s concerns are different from those of his crew), but it is also physical, for as both Godard and Claude Chabrol noted, the director is “the only one who doesn’t fuck” during the shoot.39 This celibacy makes him less God than priest, or, to extend the image slightly, a country priest whose nightmares of cinematic trespass (his recurrent dreams involve a child stealing lobby cards from Citizen Kane) carry distant echoes of the anguished self-interrogation of Bresson and Bernanos’ protagonist. Like the nameless curé, Truffaut’s director becomes an incarnation of purity who tends to cinema as if it were the divine. But the country priest’s despair and clumsiness belong to the young; Ferrand is an adult whose youthful anxieties are kept in check by a firm commitment to his profession and a sense of responsibility to his employees. It is in this sense that he fully assumes his role as leader, shepherd, and father. Like L’Enfant sauvage, La Nuit américaine’s parallel world is governed by benevolent paternalism. It is telling, in this regard, to see how the film handles challenges to authority. One  challenge in particular has tended to escape critical analysis. Hidden in plain sight at the end of the film is one of the most symbolically loaded crimes in Truffaut’s filmography. Ferrand’s shooting schedule concludes with the climax of Je vous présente Paméla, the scene in which Alphonse’s character, Paméla’s husband, takes revenge on his own father for stealing his wife and shoots him in the back in a public square. The crime, a patricide, is doubly significant: on one level, it can be read as a challenge to the paternalist structure of the production, on another, its assault on the family unit, the building block of social organization, makes it a revolutionary gesture which had particular relevance in early-seventies France.40 What Truffaut stages, in other words, is a son’s revolt against the crimes of his father. His treatment of this event is fascinating. More than any other scene in the film, the murder is obsessively surrounded with markers of fictionality. In the first place, La Nuit américaine goes to great lengths to underscore that this death is staged: we see the actors and the crew carefully preparing the sequence, and when filming starts the images of Je vous présente Paméla’s narrative events are always intercut with shots of the technicians to prevent them from being confused with the “reality” of the shoot. Furthermore, since Alphonse’s threatening actions – moving towards the victim, pulling out the gun, firing, running away – are only performed when he is prompted by Ferrand, they are mercilessly stripped of agency. The murder is not an insurgent act, it is the fulfillment of the director’s desire to wrap shooting on schedule. Accordingly, its meaning is systematically minimized: we see Alphonse pull out the

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gun several times, and hear a number of shots, but we see the victim fall only once. As soon as he does, Ferrand calls, “Cut!” and the actor playing him gets up. Death, in this context, is simply an illusion. While a murder takes place in La Nuit américaine, its meaning is so violently foreclosed that the event is consigned to a separate world, a world of pure fantasy, or rather, pure cinema. The separation is actually audible: the soundtrack to this scene replays the baroque score used at the film’s halfway point, under a monologue in which Ferrand takes stock of his production: “Je vous présente Paméla is on the right track now,” he muses, “the actors are at ease with their characters, the crew is solid, personal problems have been resolved: cinema reigns supreme.”41 In Truffaut’s film, then, the fantasy of rebellion is enveloped by and dissolved within a vision of cinema which overpowers and subsumes everything in its path. It is this vision which Ferrand tries to communicate to Alphonse: “Films are more harmonious than life, Alphonse. There are no traffic jams in films, there is no dead time. Films move forward like trains, you understand, like trains in the night. And as you know, people like you and me are only meant to be happy in our work, in our cinematic work.”42 This well-known comparison between films and trains is foreshadowed by Truffaut’s mid-sixties interviews with Alfred Hitchcock: “For me,” the older director tells him, “it’s obvious that the sequences of a film can never stand still, they must carry the action forward, just like a train that moves forward with each rotation of its wheels, or more exactly, just as a rack-and-pinion train pulls itself up the side of a mountain notch by notch.”43 Ferrand’s speech develops the metaphor, letting Hitchcock’s ideas about narrative contaminate the production itself so that the lines in La Nuit américaine become the most complete expression of the ideas sketched out in La Sirène du Mississippi and L’Enfant sauvage: filmmaking is a closed universe in which everything is richer, more organized, more perfect than it is in the real world. Representation is preferable to reality. Again, however, not just any representation. Although Truffaut framed La Nuit américaine as a response to the public’s questions about how films are made, his film is less a presentation of what a filmmaker does than an argument about what cinema is.44 In a brilliant analysis, Jean-Michel Frodon stresses that, contrary to appearances, the work the director offered his audience in 1973 was “‘filmed politically,’” and furthermore, “since Truffaut was such a lucid director, [it was] filmed very deliberately against the cinema which emerged from May 68.”45 That system of parallel practices – the political modernism of Godard, the engaged documentaries of Marker, the collective improvisations of Rivette – is completely irrelevant here, reduced to a nagging joke that equates politics with pornography, a subject which jibes poorly with Ferrand’s ecclesiastical allure. Rather than imagine a cinema which breaks with the existing system, Truffaut develops what Frodon calls a “deliberately and aggressively consensual” vision of the medium, which is presented as a familiar accumulation of cables, rails, clapboards and ideas: the studio is a dream factory, the star’s life a litany of glamour and depravity, the movies are magic.46 No. They are more than magic. That word is linked with Alphonse, who spends part of the film desperately asking his colleagues, in a line cribbed from Audiberti,

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whether women are magic.47 Cinema here is something more specific: it is thaumaturgy, it is endowed with the power to heal. In La Nuit américaine, Je vous présente Paméla’s patricide is not rejected, it is absorbed and forgiven within the fragile paradise of the film set. This environment becomes a unifying space outside of politics and apart from the mainstream where young and old, men and women, a French production team, American financers, and an English insurance agent, are able to live together. The film’s dedication to Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and a still from Griffith’s 1912 one-reeler An Unseen Enemy, push the reconciliation further: this work is not only a vital link between Hollywood and Europe, it assures continuity between contemporary practices and the silent era. The approach builds from the last shot of La Sirène du Mississippi; here as well, Truffaut’s film freezes the Brownian motion of its social, professional, and historical elements into a tentative stasis, achieving a resolution of opposites which rises above the divisions of everyday life. Given the amount of acclaim La Nuit américaine received, it is easy to imagine that the film always occupied a position of power, that it was a successful director’s calculated attempt to reinforce the norms of his industry by erasing the production of his militant adversaries from his image of filmmaking. It is important to recognize, however, that within the film, Ferrand speaks from the position of the defeated. Truffaut made this feature after two successive failures, and his fears that his connection to audiences was eroding seem reflected in its conclusion. When one of the actors, a Hollywood legend, dies during the shoot, Ferrand asserts that “an entire era of cinema is going to vanish [with him.] We’re abandoning the big studios, films are being shot in the streets without stars and without scripts. We won’t make films like [ours] anymore.”48 Although, as Frodon notes, Ferrand seems to fear nothing less than the arrival of the New Wave, Truffaut’s film is not a period piece.49 Instead, what the director alludes to are the films the New Wave inspired, the militant documentaries, collectively signed features, and radical experiments in improvisation which appeared and gained leverage at the end of the sixties. The cinema Ferrand defends is stopped short, in other words, by a confrontation with the modern practice of Truffaut’s radical peers. Rather than aggressively counterattack, La Nuit américaine capitulates, and in this sense it should be read not as a celebration of a medium but as a burnt offering to its memory. In retrospect, then, what La Sirène du Mississippi, L’Enfant sauvage, and La Nuit américaine trace is the grandeur and decadence of an understanding of representation. The fact that Ferrand was wrong about the future of cinema changes nothing, since the melancholy distance this film establishes between itself and the present, the idea that its approach to filmmaking was out of sync with society, became a fundamental part of Truffaut’s work for the rest of his career. The films he went on to make are marked not by the past per se but by the steady encroachment of the dead and an insatiable hunger for enclosure, if not outright entombment. This profoundly antisocial current is most noticeable in La Chambre verte (1978), where the protagonist rejects others and dedicates his life to the memory of the dead, but it is equally present in Adèle H.’s single-minded withdrawal into unrequited love, the morbid obsessions of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), the sequestered grandmother (and, more generally, the anachronisms) in

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L’Argent de poche (1976), Antoine Doinel’s intractable a-sociability in L’Amour en fuite (1979), the murder/suicide which closes La Femme d’à côté (1981), and the dark, claustrophobic environments of Le Dernier Métro (1980) and Vivement dimanche! (1983). The idea that Truffaut’s later work makes a melancholic turn toward the catacombs is also a missing piece in the narrative of his relationship with his friend and nemesis, Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1990s, films like JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (1995), 2x50 Ans de cinéma français (1995), and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) reiterate the mournful, solitary relationship to cinematic tradition that underpins the second half of Truffaut’s career. The two figures handle these themes differently – Godard adopts a critical relationship to history, Truffaut’s approach is a lover’s discourse – but their use of a similar emotional platform and, especially, a common canon of filmmakers, unites work which tends to be seen, at the filmmakers’ own request, as worlds apart. With the passing of time, the dispute separating the two seems less interesting than these unexpected points of contact. The further we advance into Truffaut’s work, the more its meaning changes. His films conceal engagement behind detachment, but its relatively conservative engagement is in turn more complex than it appears. In rejecting radical change, the films reject social complacency and, to some extent, society itself. Underneath their respect for tradition lies a repudiation of contemporary life which becomes the radical, dystopian counterpoint to political modernism. It is on this level that Truffaut rejoins his peers, for like the work of Godard, or the other modernist auteurs he kept at a distance, his films are anything but vehicles for ideologies of consensus. If they are sometimes seen that way now, it is due to the disputes and posturing of their era. Rather than surrender the films to their staid reputations, it seems more productive to bypass intentionality and circumvent the old divisions in order to lend them a greater measure of what Barthes once called “availability,” an availability which could recognize the currents of dissatisfaction, inscrutability, and anti-humanism which run beneath their surface.50 The eventual purpose of such a project would not be to reform Truffaut’s bad objects, but to increase their subversive power by linking them with peers (Godard, Garrel, Eustache) and successors (Desplechin, Grandrieux, Hansen-Løve) so that they might fully assume their place within the unsettling, seditious heritage of the late 1960s.

Acknowledgment Many thanks to Phil Watts and Dudley Andrew. This article was supported by a PSCCUNY Research Award.

Notes 1

On Truffaut and modernity, see Jean Narboni, “Entretien avec François Truffaut,” Cahiers du Cinéma (May 1967): 70; Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 141 and 197.

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“ramass[é] par le système.” Quoted in François Truffaut, Correspondance (Renan: 5 Continents/Hatier, 1988), p. 464. All translations are my own. Naomi Schor, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. xv. In the original French title, Mississipi is spelled with one “p”. “Probablement le plus beau plan final de l’histoire du cinéma français.” Luc Moullet, “La Balance et le lien,” Cahiers du Cinéma ( July–August 1988): 32. “Je trouve que les gens qui utilisent les petites annonces sont des idéalistes.” François Truffaut (dir.), Mississippi Mermaid (1969; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD, 01:10:39. “Tous ceux qui l’ont approchée se souviennent d’elle.” Truffaut, Mississippi Mermaid, 01:20:07. “Vous êtes adorable. Tu sais ce que ça veut dire, adorable? Ça veut dire ‘digne d’adoration.’” Truffaut (dir.), Mississippi Mermaid, 00:32:10. “Je t’aime Louis. Peut-être que tu ne me croies pas, mais il y a des choses incroyables qui sont vraies.” Truffaut (dir.), Mississippi Mermaid, 02:00:18. Variations on the line also appear in Jules et Jim (where it is delivered with sincerity) and L’Amour en fuite (where it is laden with irony). Carole Le Berre affirms that Truffaut borrowed it from Henri-Pierre Roché’s Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. Le Berre, François Truffaut au travail (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004), p. 52. “Renoir brasse ici tout un monde, plaidant pour toutes les causes avec cette objectivité, cette générosité, cette domination intelligente que nul ne lui a jamais contestées. Il est au-dessus de la mêlée.” François Truffaut, “La Marseillaise,” Cahiers du Cinéma (Christmas 1957): 75. “Tournent … autour de la célèbre phrase de La Règle du jeu … ‘Tu comprends, sur cette terre, il y a une chose effroyable, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons.’” François Truffaut, “Présentation,” in André Bazin, Jean Renoir (Paris: Editions Gérard Lebovici, 1989), p. 11. Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar point out that the project’s origins lie more specifically with the French Communist Party. Andrew and Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 146. “Nous montre … que la propagande n’est pas forcément maladroite et bête. … Le débat soulevé dès lors, c’est celui de la possibilité pour un cinéma politique d’être intelligent, ou pour un cinéma intelligent de faire acte politique – débat on ne peut plus actuel, puisqu’il semble bien qu’avec Godard, Allio et quelques autres, ce soit décidément de ce côté-là qu’enfin le cinéma français s’engage.” Jean-Louis Comolli, “Des Migrations exemplaires,” Cahiers du Cinéma (December 1967): 25. Antoine de Baecque affirms that Jean-Pierre Oudart’s review of La Sirène du Mississippi was a pretext for the journal’s split with their publisher, Daniel Filipacchi. de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: Histoire d’une revue, tome 2. Cinéma, tours et détours: 1959–1981 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991), pp. 219–224. See de Baecque, Histoire d’une revue, tome 2, pp. 134–135. “Ça fait un salaud de moins.” Truffaut (dir.), Mississippi Mermaid, 01:24:29. This was not the only film in which Truffaut demonstrated an aversion to critics. Inspector Comolli’s logical counterpart is Daxiat in Le Dernier Métro, which also stars Catherine Deneuve, who once again plays a character named Marion. “Un peu excentrique.” Truffaut (dir.), Mississippi Mermaid, 01:34:51. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma (October 1969): 11–15.

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Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Rêverie Bouclée,” Cahiers du Cinéma (October 1969): 51. Truffaut mentioned many of these sources in interviews. See Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 250. “Il suffit de bien écouter les dernières phrases du dialogue, lorsque Maréchal (Jean Gabin) et Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) vont se séparer dans la neige à la frontière suisse: ‘Maréchal: Il faut bien qu’on la finisse cette putain de guerre … en espérant que c’est la dernière. Rosenthal: Ah, tu te fais des illusions!’ La Grande Illusion c’est donc l’idée que cette guerre est la dernière, mais c’est aussi l’illusion de la vie, l’illusion que chacun se fait du rôle qu’il joue dans l’existence, et je crois bien que La Grande Illusion aurait pu s’appeler La Règle du jeu (et inversement).” François Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), pp. 103–104. “En sortant de ce film, on est fier de savoir lire.” Quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Folio, 2001), p. 526. On the French reception of the film, see de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, pp.  525–526. For an American response, see Harriett R. Polt “The Wild Child,” Film Quarterly, 24(3) (Spring 1971): 42–45. See collectively realized projects like Loin du Vietnam (1967) and the Ciné-tracts (1968); SLON’s On vous parle series (1968–1973); the Dziga Vertov Group’s Vent d’est (1969); Eustache and Barjol’s Le Cochon (1970); Rivette’s Out 1 (1971). “Une restructuration complète de ses moyens de production et de diffusion,” in Eric Losfeld (ed.), Le Cinéma s’insurge: états généraux du cinéma, Vol. 1 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1968), p. 1. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, pp. 478–479 and 535–540; Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 261. “Pendant que je tournais le film, je revivais un peu le tournage des 400 coups pendant lequel j’initiais Jean-Pierre Léaud au cinéma, pendant lequel je lui apprenais au fond ce qu’était le cinéma. Si bien que la décision de jouer moi-même le rôle du docteur Itard est un choix plus profond que je ne l’ai cru sur le moment. … Jusqu’à L’Enfant sauvage, quand j’avais eu des enfants dans mes films, je m’identifiais à eux et là, pour la première fois, je me suis identifié à l’adulte, au père, au point qu’à la fin du montage, j’ai dédié le film à Jean-Pierre Léaud parce que ce passage, ce relais, devenait complètement clair pour moi.” François Truffaut, interview by Aline Desjardins, in Aline Desjardins s’entretient avec François Truffaut (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1987), p. 62. Jean-Pierre Rehm, “L’Enfance à la fenêtre,” Cahiers du Cinéma ( July–August 2003): 29. “Il y a un certain cinéma moderne qui ambitionne de tuer cette notion de personnages et de situations. Cela ne m’intéresse absolument pas. Je m’accrocherai toujours à la forme de cinéma qui m’a amené au cinéma. Si je devais être le seul à raconter une histoire, je m’obstinerais toujours à la raconter.” Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 313. Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 511. “Tantôt nous reprendrons les exercices.” François Truffaut (dir.), The Wild Child (1970; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD, 01:23:25. Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, pp. 266 and 335. “C’est toi, Victor. … C’est toi Victor, tu comprends?” Truffaut (dir.), The Wild Child, 01:12:59. “Le cinéma [est] la rude école d’où s’évader de son ignorance alors même qu’il vise, au terme de son apprentissage, à se préserver comme fenêtre, siège entre deux mondes d’où contempler la liberté perdue, celle des oiseaux et de la pluie que l’on a délaissés de l’autre côté du cadre.” Rehm, “L’enfance à la fenêtre,” p. 29.

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“Difficile mais pas exceptionnel.” François Truffaut, La Nuit américaine (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2000), p. 7. “Au revoir mes enfants, bonne route!” François Truffaut (dir.), La Nuit américaine (1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Pictures, 2008), DVD, 01:49:19 “Le producteur doit rester dans l’ombre.” Truffaut, La Nuit américaine, p. 23. Quoted in Truffaut, Correspondance, p. 423. On Chabrol, see Richard Brody, “Et tu, Claude?” The New Yorker (online only), April 20, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/ online/blogs/movies/2011/04/et-tu-claude.html (accessed October 12, 2012). See, for example, the connection Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw between traditional family structures and capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972). “Je vous présente Paméla me semble enfin lancé sur de bons rails, les acteurs sont à l’aise dans leurs personnages, l’équipe est bien soudée, les problèmes personnels ne comptent plus. Le cinéma règne.” Truffaut, La Nuit américaine, p. 74. “Les films sont plus harmonieux que la vie, Alphonse. Il n’y a pas d’embouteillage dans les films, il n’y a pas de temps morts. Les films avancent comme des trains, tu comprends, comme des trains dans la nuit. Les gens comme toi, comme moi, tu le sais bien, on est fait pour être heureux dans le travail … dans notre travail de cinéma.” Truffaut, La Nuit américaine, p. 89. “Pour moi il est évident que les séquences d’un film ne doivent jamais piétiner, mais toujours aller de l’avant, exactement comme un train avance roue derrière roue, ou, plus exactement encore, comme un train ‘à crémaillère’ gravit le chemin de fer de montagne cran par cran.” François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut: édition définitive (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 57. Truffaut made a similar point in 1960: “le film est une locomotive qui doit avancer coûte que coûte parce qu’on fait sauter les rails derrière son passage. Si la voie, devant, est obstruée, tant pis! Il faut passer quand même.” Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux, p. 11. Truffaut, La Nuit américaine, p. 9. “‘filmé politiquement,’ [et] très consciemment de la part d’un metteur en scène aussi lucide, contre le cinéma issu de Mai 68.” Frodon, Le Cinéma français, p. 446. “Délibérément, agressivement consensuel.” Frodon, Le Cinéma français, p. 446. Le Berre makes the connection. See Le Berre, François Truffaut au travail, p. 36. “Toute une époque du cinéma va disparaître [avec lui]. On abandonne les studios, les films se tourneront dans les rues, sans vedette et sans scénario. On ne fera plus de film comme [le nôtre].” Truffaut, La Nuit américaine, p. 103. Frodon, Le Cinéma français, p. 445. “Disponibilité.” Roland Barthes, “Sur Racine,” in Œuvres complètes, tome I: 1942–1965 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), p. 986.

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

Everyone knows that Truffaut “loved women.” This is obvious from his films – including one obligingly called L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977). Over three decades, he provided French cinema with a series of memorable heroines. Off-screen, the fact that Truffaut was a serial Don Juan, conducting affairs with practically all his leading actresses, is not mere gossip, as confirmed by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s massive and well-documented biography François Truffaut.1 When not centering on his alter ego Antoine Doinel ( Jean-Pierre Léaud), Truffaut’s films showcase central female protagonists who are frequently invoked as “magical,” the definitive incarnation of this type being Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig) in Baisers volés (1968). Indeed Truffaut’s filmography is a roll-call of the most beautiful actresses in postwar French cinema: Seyrig, Bernadette Lafont, Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Bisset, Isabelle Adjani, Fanny Ardant, to name the most famous. At the same time, the viewer cannot help notice the ambivalent and downright negative role Truffaut’s most prominent women play: while beautiful and alluring, they are negligent mothers (Les 400 Coups, 1959), murderous wives, serial killers, and ruthless mistresses (La Peau douce, 1964; La Mariée était en noir, 1967; Une Belle Fille comme moi, 1972; La Femme d’à côté, 1981), suicidal and deadly muses (Jules et Jim, 1962), crazed lovers (L’Histoire d’Adèle H., 1975), treacherous schemers (La Sirène du Mississippi, 1969), etc. True, there are also demure fiancées/wives, such as Colette (Marie-France Pisier) in Antoine et Colette (in L’Amour à vingt ans, 1962), Christine (Claude Jade) in Baisers volés and Domicile conjugal (1970), Léna (Marie Dubois) in Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), Sabine (Dorothée) in L’Amour en fuite (1979). But these are not the ones that stay in the mind and, not coincidentally, they are not played by the major stars. To attain true star status in the Truffaut universe, women need to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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This ambivalent situation is further complicated by comparison with fellow New Wave filmmakers. If Chabrol is known for his aesthetics of cruelty – Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) – and Godard for his aesthetics of romantic cool – A Bout de souffle (1960) and Vivre sa vie (1962) – then Truffaut must be characterized by his aesthetics of tenderness, often ascribed to the influence of one of his mentors, Jean Renoir. Thus in Truffaut’s films we rarely find grotesque Chabrol-style bourgeois or cynical hoodlums as in Godard, but a gallery of fallible human beings. Even his most cynical womanizers “have their reasons.”2 But again, embedded in this sweetness and light is a heart of darkness, a viciousness which is principally embodied by the female characters. Herein lies the “Truffaut paradox” which this chapter explores, with reference to Truffaut’s biography, to the context of the New Wave, and to three emblematic stars in the Truffaut universe: Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Bernadette Lafont.

Autobiography and New Wave Cinephilia As brilliantly analyzed by Anne Gillain in her book François Truffaut: le secret perdu,3 Truffaut’s films can be read as reworking aspects of his life in respect of what she calls a psychological “matrix” in which the determining role was played by his mother. As is well known, the young Truffaut was neglected by his mother and stepfather, and he was initially brought up by his grandmother. Later, when they took him back, Truffaut’s parents frequently left him alone while they lived their lives. Feeling unloved, he developed an ambivalent relationship with his distant and alluring mother, compensating with petty delinquency and cinephilia – as fictionalized in Les 400 Coups. Gillain argues that this “matrix” crystallized in this first feature and then developed through his entire career, configured in the central couple of an immature young man with a fixation on a mature, and crucially unattainable woman – for example, the characters played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Delphine Seyrig in Baisers volés, André Dussolier and Bernadette Lafont in Une Belle Fille comme moi, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jacqueline Bisset in La Nuit américaine (1973), Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve in Le Dernier Métro (1980) – a couple sometimes caricatured in the comic vision of a very small man with a hugely tall woman, as when we see Léaud in the street with a very tall woman (Carole Noe) in Baisers volés. This chimes with a remark by one of his editors that Truffaut did not like casting male leads taller than himself.4 While Gillain’s analysis is very convincing, it would be wrong to ascribe Truffaut’s cinematic treatment of women only to biography. His films are not simple reflections of his life, and they are filtered through other powerful influences, both cinematic and cultural. If Renoir provided a model for Truffaut’s benign humanism on screen, when it comes to women, Bergman and Hitchcock may be more relevant figures. Antoine (Léaud) and his friend René famously steal a picture of Harriet Andersson in Summer With Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953) in Les 400 Coups, symbol of a “new” and “more natural” sexuality on screen – itself in part influenced by Renoir, as in Smiles of a

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Summer Night (Bergman,1955) – a depiction which the New Wave filmmakers would emulate. Indeed their films, contrasting sharply with the French “Tradition of Quality,” moved new sexual behavior center stage. A study released at the time shows5 the typical “Mademoiselle Nouvelle Vague” – both on- and off-screen – to be “modern” in one essential way: she was not a virgin – putting an end to age-old stereotypes such as the ingénue, the “loose woman,” and the spinster. Bergman’s women were often portrayed in natural settings – such as the women in Wild Strawberries (1957) – thereby linking their femininity to “authenticity,” like Renoir in Partie de campagne (1936). But equally, Truffaut’s worship of Hitchcock brought in a different set of representations, tied to studio aesthetics and Anglo-American puritan values (even though Hitchcock was a Catholic): see Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954), Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest (1959), and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). Here was the “cool blonde” with bleached hair tightly set, smart couture clothes, and a distinct link to death. Truffaut, famously, admired Hitchcock for his ability to film murder scenes like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes. This admiration was accompanied by a love of American “hard-boiled” thrillers and pulp literature, in the tradition of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics who put “the prestige of French highbrow culture behind their enthusiasm for Hollywood”6 and popular American culture in general, with, in Truffaut’s case, a penchant for the bleakest writers (David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Charles Williams). It is between the contrasting models of cinematic femininity that inspired Truffaut that one can gain some understanding of the paradoxical nature of his women. We also need to turn briefly to wider sociocultural factors. The New Wave – and thus Truffaut – emerged at a time of unprecedented change in France, and the films bear witness to this process. Women moved onto the public sphere through employment and new legislation (for instance, gaining the vote in 1944). In short, they started liberating themselves from the oppressive patriarchal, Catholic morality of prewar France, a change heralded by Simone de Beauvoir’s breakthrough feminist essay Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). It was also a period when young women came to the fore in French cultural life as never before, a phenomenon explored by Susan Weiner in her book Enfants terribles.7 Yet these changes by no means took place all at once. On the one hand, female sexuality was far from “free” in the context of lack of contraception and the illegality of abortion, and on the other patriarchal gender relations endured. New Wave directors filmed young, modern women who were frequently their partners in real life, but the modernity of these women was often one of surface. Traditional myths of femininity had not entirely vanished in a cinema that was still essentially a male construct. The New Wave cinema, aesthetically innovative as it was, was still, as in the title of Geneviève Sellier’s groundbreaking study, a cinema in “the first person masculine singular.”8 It is no accident that the two New Wave films that construct radically different female subjectivities – Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) – are, respectively, scripted and directed by women, Marguerite Duras and Agnès Varda. In Truffaut’s films, as in those of Godard and Chabrol, we find, under free and seductive new types of gender relations, a classic construction of femininity as “other,” from a male-structured point of view. Truffaut was a product of these conflicting personal, cultural, and social

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forces. To illustrate these contradictions, I will take a closer look at his use of Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Bernadette Lafont.

Jeanne Moreau: The Femme Fatale of the New Wave Jeanne Moreau emerged as the first true “New Wave actress” – before the New Wave proper, in the accepted use of the term – in Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and Les Amants (1958), and triumphantly as Catherine in Jules et Jim (1962) in which she plays a woman who lives in a sexually free ménage à trois with two friends, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre).9 A friend and lover of Truffaut, Moreau came to embody the ideal New Wave woman in her combination of the sensual and the cerebral. She offered an image of Parisian sophistication and amorous passion, performed with great charisma in a naturalistic style. She also displayed commitment to the new auteur cinema. As she told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965, “Making films is no longer a way of acting, it is a way of life.”10 She was, therefore, the typical woman of the New Wave – part of the modern intellectual elite from whose ranks the new filmmakers and their spectators were drawn, in the same way as in Jules et Jim she appears as the natural companion of the two artistic men. Moreau’s women were alluring because they were cultured, and in this sense she was “equal” to the men. Jules et Jim, however, shows how this image of “modern” femininity is also perceived as deadly. Interestingly, the best-known images from the film show Catherine– Moreau as radiant. In an often reproduced photograph, she runs along a bridge, dressed in boys’ clothes, with cloth cap and painted moustache, exhilarated, an image of androgynous youth and fun. Other familiar pictures show her with head thrown back, flashing her devastating smile, or with a cigarette defiantly stuck in her mouth, provocative and sexy – or riding with the two men on bicycles, or again with them on the beach; all are images of blissful happiness. In most commentaries on Jules et Jim, these sunny images dominate, obliterating the second half of the film which details Catherine’s descent into neurosis (grounded in biology: her failure to conceive Jim’s child) and her lethal effect on all around her. Deliberately driving her car off a bridge and into a river at the end, she kills herself and Jim, making Jules a widower and her daughter motherless. Catherine’s duality – life-giving yet deadly – is corroborated by Truffaut’s admission that for him Catherine–Moreau was both “a luminous memory” and “a turn-of-the-century bitch who sleeps around.”11 This is, of course, the core of the femme fatale who, as Molly Haskell said, “is almost invariably a male invention, the projection – and prisoner – of a director’s or writer’s fears and fantasies, and probably a means of satisfying his own self-destructive urges.”12 At this point we recall that Jules and Jim both fall in love literally with a projection (a slide of a statue), a point reprised during their first actual encounter with Catherine, when Truffaut subliminally stops the flow of the film to freeze Moreau’s face. The two men transparently represent Truffaut’s split alter ego (especially as he professed great admiration for Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of the autobiographical novel on which the film is

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based). The primitive statue with whose image the men fall in love is evidently an emblem of an “eternal” femininity to which they masochistically cling, even as Catherine carries a small bottle of vitriol, betrays, divides, and makes the men suffer, constantly changes her mind, and eventually kills. This casts a different light on her song “Le Tourbillon de la vie,” one of the most beguiling moments in the film, in which Moreau, singing a man’s words about a “femme fatale who was fatal to me,” anticipates the film’s ending. Moreau’s incarnation of the Truffaut-style femme fatale continues, in more ferocious and overtly Hitchcockian fashion in La Mariée était en noir. Here the point of reference is no longer a European novel but an American hard-boiled thriller by Cornell Woolrich (a.k.a. William Irish), in which a woman kills five men in revenge for their murder of her husband on her wedding day. Accompanied by Bernard Hermann’s haunting, Vertigo-style music, this is Truffaut’s second Hollywood pastiche, but it somewhat lacks the nostalgic charm of his first one, Tirez sur le pianiste (based on David Goodis). Apart from the fact that the story of La Mariée était en noir, as Bertrand Tavernier pointed out,13 does not work in the French context, since the original plot was based on the ability of the murderess to cross state lines, this is an uncomfortably dark parable, albeit with moments of black humor. La Mariée était en noir casts Moreau as a dark avenging angel opposite a gallery of pathetic, idiotic, or arrogant men, with nothing in common other than “hunting and women.” It is possible to see the film as a critique of these men and their sexism, as argued by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram.14 The first and fourth “victims,” respectively played by Claude Rich and Charles Denner, are caricatures of the dragueur, the womanizing Frenchman, as is their friend, played by Jean-Claude Brialy. The second and third men, played by Michel Bouquet and Michel Lonsdale, are, respectively, vulnerable and ridiculous, while the fifth man (Daniel Boulanger) is a comical crook. There is a kind of pleasure in seeing them get their comeuppance, compounded by the brilliance of the performances, especially those of Bouquet and Lonsdale. Moreau’s grim determination, however, is totally out of proportion with the initial crime (revealed mid-film to be accidental). Seeing her coolly watch Michel Bouquet – the most sympathetic of the men – die in agony at her feet after she has poisoned him confirms her gratuitous cruelty but also the Hitchcockian in Truffaut – indeed, the greatest homage for Truffaut was that Hitchcock complimented him on that scene.15 While the spectator may admire Moreau’s cunning and enjoy her anger, the fact that she uses her sexuality as her unique weapon, impersonating a series of female stereotypes (“distant princess,” schoolteacher, painter’s model, prostitute) betrays the film’s perspective. The camera regularly showcases her legs, another fetishistic Truffaut motif, and her breasts. It is only at the end of the film that we understand a stack of pictures of her seen over the opening credits. These pictures turn out to be photos taken by the police of the painting Fergus (Charles Denner) made of her. Here then is a graphic representation of the Truffaut paradox: in one image he indicts the male obsession with, again, a fantasy of femininity (we see earlier that Fergus painted Julie before he had met her) and reinforces women’s guilt: Julie–Moreau is on trial as much, if not more, than the men, and what is on trial is her – literally deadly – sexuality.

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In a classic process she has been demonized so that she can be “legitimately” punished – in the chilling ending, she simply vanishes in the same jail that imprisoned the crook. Truffaut perhaps unwittingly confirmed this ambivalence: he said that he conceived La Mariée était en noir as a “tribute to Jeanne Moreau [and a] gift to the woman he loved and who had become a close friend,” yet also admitted that hers was a “thankless part.”16 Indeed, the color cinematography by Raoul Coutard (unlike his glorious black-and-white images in Jules et Jim) makes Moreau almost ugly, in heavy makeup and unflattering wigs. Truffaut’s women as embodied by Moreau thus entertain a paradoxical relationship to modern femininity. She is worshipped as an actress, and her characters are “strong” in appearance, yet they are reduced to an unchanging femininity; her “luminous” women are murderers.

Catherine Deneuve: The Blonde Mermaid of the Post-1968 Years Truffaut’s tribute to Hollywood and to “powerful” female sexuality took a different turn as he moved away from the New Wave and into the post-May 1968 era, casting Catherine Deneuve as his new femme fatale in La Sirène du Mississippi, another Cornell Woolrich adaptation. A strange, obsessional “film noir in color,” La Sirène du Mississippi is dedicated to, and pays overt tribute to, Renoir: a quote from La Marseillaise (1938) opens the film and an evocation of La Grande Illusion (1937) closes it with Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo wading in the snow like Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio in Renoir’s classic film. Yet it is also, and primarily, another tribute to Hitchcock, with references to Psycho (1960) and especially to Vertigo. Deneuve plays Julie–Marion, the mysterious, ravishing blonde wife of tobacco tycoon Louis Mahé (Belmondo), who met her through a lonely-hearts column. After a brief idyllic period in the tropical paradise of the island of Réunion where Mahé lives, Julie disappears with his fortune. It soon emerges that she impersonated the “real” Julie, who was murdered by her mysterious accomplice Richard, whom we see only once, briefly in the distance – the film thus transferring guilt entirely onto the Deneuve character. Destroyed by Julie’s disappearance and treachery, Mahé hires a private detective to track her down, Comolli (Michel Bouquet), who soon departs for France. After being treated for depression in a clinic, Mahé accidentally finds Julie – now known as Marion – working as a “hostess” in a cabaret on the Côte d’Azur, similar in this to Scottie ( James Stewart) in Vertigo who finds Judy (Kim Novak), a more “vulgar” version of the blonde Madeleine also played by Novak. They renew their relationship. Totally under her spell, Mahé kills Comolli, who has caught up with Julie–Marion, and escapes with her, first to Lyon and, after a brief return to Réunion for more money, to the Alps. In a chalet surrounded by snow, she tries to kill him with rat poison, while reiterating their mutual love. Unlike Moreau, who was (re)molded by and for the New Wave, Deneuve, by the time she made La Sirène du Mississippi, was a major popular star, from such films as

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Les  Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) and Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967). In La Sirène du Mississippi, Truffaut offers his own variation on her persona as the “ice maiden,” a glamorous blonde whose cool surface nevertheless hides a passionate sexuality – evidently close to Hitchcock’s heroines.17 The mise-en-scène of La Sirène du Mississippi dwells on Deneuve’s extraordinary beauty, packaged in her (then) characteristic impeccable grooming: her long blonde hair, her smooth skin and perfect body – seen several times topless – her fabulous clothes (by Yves Saint Laurent), unruffled even when she and Mahé are a couple on the run. Attention is drawn to her clothes also through plot devices, such as her desire for, and acquisition of, a magnificent black coat with feathers. The more beautiful she looks, the more treacherous she is. Although, unlike Moreau, she is not killed or incarcerated in the end, thanks to Mahé’s undying love, the film is replete with extremely violent images, almost of symbolic rape: for instance, Mahé forces her trunk open and at one point burns her lace underwear one piece at a time in the fire. As Deneuve cleverly perceived, “If one looked at [Truffaut’s] films from this perspective, with a degree of attention, for instance La Sirène du Mississippi, one would see how sexually violent and explicit they are.”18 Contrary to La Mariée était en noir and its relentless trajectory, and contrary to the action-driven “couple on the run” plot of American B-movies and thrillers that nominally serve as models for these narratives, La Sirène du Mississippi stages a succession of static sequences marked by changes in location (Réunion, Antibes, Aix-enProvence, Lyon, the Alps) that are grounded in Mahé’s compulsion to repeat his masochistic relationship with Julie/Marion. She “confesses” to him when he catches up with her (in the same way as Julie in La Mariée était en noir literally confesses in church), offering a narrative of childhood deprivation, but her continued opacity and unpredictability, and her subsequent actions, put her words into question. Despite the fact that the film is built around her, we have no access to her subjectivity and are left only with a cardboard cutout of the pulp novel femme fatale, opposite an inexplicably masochistic male, made all the more unconvincing by Belmondo’s inappropriate casting (the star’s reported deep unease with his role is palpable in the film19). Like Jules et Jim and La Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi contains many moments of overt quotation, pastiche, and mise en abyme (such as when Mahé “realizes” he is being poisoned by looking at a newspaper cartoon of the witch and the poisoned apple in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), which could suggest internal critique. Nevertheless, the equation of Julie/Marion with the witch remains. Given that La Sirène du Mississippi was made in the immediate post-May 1968 period, as women made further inroads towards liberation from male oppression, it is interesting that Truffaut chose this violent and sexist American crime story. In this respect, what are we to make of the fact that Truffaut insists we see the headline in the France-Soir newspaper reporting Comolli’s murder – that women at last are given the pill? Since earlier we saw Deneuve make passionate love to Belmondo immediately after the murder (following a period of “frigidity”), is it too far-fetched to see this as Truffaut obliquely translating anxieties about impending real female sexual freedom to the narrative of his film? Truffaut’s later films undoubtedly soften these features, and Le Dernier Métro plays on a subdued, heritage version of Deneuve’s ice maiden, while still fitting Anne

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Gillain’s “matrix”: Marion Steiner (Deneuve) successfully runs a Parisian theater during the German Occupation, because her Jewish husband, the former director, is in hiding in the cellar. One of the young actors she recruits, played by Gérard Depardieu, disrupts this equilibrium. The two are attracted to each other in an ambivalent relationship that will be actualized in one brief but passionate sexual embrace in her office. The more mature Deneuve superbly embodies the cool, unattainable woman in charge. Marion’s fur coats, couture clothes and high heels contrast with the younger look of Bernard Granger (Depardieu) with his working-class cap and leather jacket. As Depardieu put it in an “imaginary” letter to Deneuve, “People have had fantasies about us two since Le Dernier Métro. There is a taboo between us. You are a classy bourgeois idol; I am a peasant’s son.”20 Le Dernier Métro shows a maturing and softening of the Truffaut femme fatale, now also shown in relation to a less vulnerable man: Depardieu indeed cuts a significantly larger figure and evokes a more secure masculinity compared with Léaud or the men in La Mariée était en noir and even La Sirène du Mississippi. Yet, the narratives of Truffaut’s two Deneuve films position her as an unattainable, and threatening, female presence – literally in La Sirène du Mississippi, metaphorically in Le Dernier Métro. Despite the softening that took place between the two films, continuity is underlined by the fact that Deneuve is called Marion in both films and that the last lines of La Sirène du Mississippi – “Love brings both joy and suffering” – are repeated verbatim in Le Dernier Métro, even if it is as part of the play-within-the-film. In this heritage film the mood is celebratory rather than vindictive, but the ambivalent view of the strong woman remains.

Bernadette Lafont: Truffaut’s Carnivalesque Woman Among Truffaut’s major actresses, Bernadette Lafont is both central and marginal. She is the star of his first short film, Les Mistons, shot in 1957 when she was nineteen; it was also her first film, and beyond ballet classes she had little stage experience. The film proved groundbreaking for her and for Truffaut, and as such she occupied a special place in his life. However, in other ways her marginality to his filmic universe is signaled by the fact that she did not appear in any of his films between 1957 and 1972, when they made Une Belle Fille comme moi together. Although this was in part due to the vagaries of the film business (a 1959 Truffaut–Lafont project entitled Temps chaud did not come to be made21), this absence can also be related to her image. Endowed with a particularly sensual physique, Lafont represented both a popular class identity and an earthy sexuality that in retrospect we can see set her apart from Truffaut’s customary heroines. She resembled neither the cool – remote, cerebral – classy heroines played by Moreau, Deneuve, and later Fanny Ardant, nor the bland, “cute” girls epitomized by Claude Jade in the Antoine Doinel series. In Les Mistons, Lafont plays an erotic fantasy figure for a group of young boys. Against the summer heat in the Nîmes area where the film was shot in August 1957, Truffaut’s voice-over details how “Bernadette” on her bicycle enflames the sensuality of the boys (the mistons), while

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her relationship with “Gérard” (Gérard Blain, Lafont’s husband at the time) provokes their jealousy. The camera captures Lafont’s sex appeal in the bucolic landscape and the boys’ obsession with the “mystery” of female sexuality, fixated on her billowing skirts and, less romantically, the saddle of her bike. In the fifteen years between Les Mistons and Une Belle Fille comme moi, Lafont pursued a busy though slightly erratic career mostly in auteur films. However, whereas “core” New Wave actresses such as Moreau and Anna Karina illustrated a shift in the representation of female eroticism from the body to the face, Lafont, with her curvaceous figure, played more blatant sex objects who were, not coincidentally, of more modest origins.22 This is clear in such films as Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s L’Eau à la bouche (1959), in which she plays the sassy maid against the bourgeois women played by Alexandra Stewart and Françoise Brion, and in Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes, where, among the shop girls, she emerges as truculent and spirited in contrast to the ironically aloof Stéphane Audran and the waif-like Clothilde Joanno. Lafont’s sensual image was to take a simultaneously more burlesque and feminist slant in two films of the late 1960s that can be seen as precursors to Une Belle Fille comme moi, namely La Fiancée du pirate (1969) and Les Stances à Sophie (1971). Directed by Nelly Kaplan with overt surrealist influence, La Fiancée du pirate is a controversial milestone in French women’s cinema. In it, Marie (Lafont) avenges her downtrodden mother, and herself, by using her sexual power over the men of the village, mocking and humiliating them. Les Stances à Sophie, directed by Moshé Mizrahi, is based on a novel by feminist writer Christiane Rochefort. It is a humorous yet acute critique of the oppressiveness of bourgeois marriage for women seen from the point of view of the rebellious Céline (Lafont). Shot in the feminist heyday of the early 1970s, Une Belle Fille comme moi reprises some of these themes, in particular a woman’s transgressive use of her sexual power. According to Lafont, Truffaut offered her the part of Camille because “he was convinced that I could now carry the weight of a film … after he saw me in La Fiancée du pirate.”23 The latter film is far from being considered unproblematic by feminists. While Françoise Audé condemns it harshly, in particular because “the glorification of one woman is counterpointed by the degradation of other women,”24 Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet are more positive about the way “the joyfully anarchic Marie … uses her sexuality to expose society’s hypocrisy and claim her independence.”25 For them, Marie is the locus of a “carnivalesque fantasy” that leaves the repressive village society in chaos but provides her with freedom.26 Truffaut’s film has obvious similarities with La Fiancée du pirate in its narrative, notably the use of sexuality as a weapon against men, but it is even more ambivalent in its sexual politics. In part this is to do with his source material. As with La Mariée était en noir and La Sirène du Mississippi, Truffaut for this film nods towards the Hitchcockian thriller by adapting an American crime novel, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me by Henry Farrell, published in 1967. As Annette Insdorf puts it, “Despite the fact that [La Mariée était en noir and Une Belle Fille comme moi] are adapted from different novels … Julie and Camille can be seen as two faces of the literal femme fatale that Truffaut often presents: Kohler (colère-anger) killing for revenge and Bliss killing for pleasure.”27 Truffaut claims, however, that he had been attracted to the novel because it had made him laugh uncontrollably.28 And

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indeed, adopting much of the comic tone of Farrell’s novel, the film is, uniquely in his filmography, an outright farce – one reason, no doubt, for its lukewarm reception, in France and elsewhere, its caricatural characters and occasional coarseness sitting uncomfortably with the director’s normally subtle, light comic-romantic tone. Une Belle Fille comme moi is set in the South of France in and around the town of Béziers. It tells the story of Camille Bliss (Lafont), narrated through a series of flashbacks embedded within her long interview with a young sociologist, Stanislas Prévine29 (André Dussolier in his first film role), who is writing a thesis on women murderers. Equally up for laughs are Camille’s past as an abused child, her murder of her father, and her mutually exploitative relationships with four men: her half-witted alcoholic husband, Clovis (Philippe Léotard), the second-rate singer Sam Golden (Guy Marchand), the crooked lawyer Murène (Claude Brasseur), and the mad, Catholic rat-catcher, Arthur (Charles Denner), all of them quite closely modeled on the novel’s characters. Throughout most of the film Camille is in jail, accused of having killed Arthur by pushing him off a church tower. She blatantly manipulates the naive Stanislas, who predictably falls in love with her, despite the warnings of his quiet friend Hélène (Anne Kreis – a Claude Jade look-alike) who transcribes the tapes of the interviews. He works hard to prove that she did not kill Arthur, through a typical Truffaut cinematic ploy, as discussed by Anne Gillain.30 Camille is set free and she becomes a famous singer, her avowed ambition throughout the film, despite her blatantly limited talent; the smitten Stanislas woos her but, as she proceeds to seduce him in her flat and they roll into bed, Clovis erupts into the bedroom. In the fight that ensues, Camille kills Clovis and then tampers with the evidence so that Stanislas is accused of the murder and arrested. The film ends with Stanislas in jail, the longsuffering Hélène patiently waiting for his release in a building next to the prison. Bernadette Lafont dominates Une Belle Fille comme moi from beginning to end, both as its main character (Truffaut deleted several secondary characters from the novel) and through her irrepressibly energetic performance. As picked out in the trailer, she runs throughout the film, usually fleeing some chaotic situation her mischief has created. Her loudness, vulgar speech, and disrespect for propriety, her outrageous behavior and revealing clothes, her manipulation of men through sex, all make her fit in the mold of the “unruly woman” of the carnivalesque tradition.31 But whereas Tarr and Rollet, following Kathleen Rowe, see a liberating potential for the unruly woman of comedy, here this potential is less clear. It is true that Camille is an engaging character, especially compared to Truffaut’s other “bad” women. As a woman serially abused by ghastly men, her revenge seems justified, and Lafont’s ebullient, high-voltage performance contributes to her appeal. In addition, references to her unhappy childhood and stay in a children’s home evoke Les 400 Coups and should position the spectator unproblematically on her side. Yet, one has to disagree with Annette Insdorf that in this film “Truffaut permits the woman to tell her own story – as the title makes clear – and she controls all the characters and events,”32 a view shared by other critics.33 It is true that Camille ostensibly narrates her own story, and that her voice (on and off camera) is prominent on the soundtrack. It is also true that Camille-Lafont has a Renoiresque “natural” sensual aura,

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comparable, for instance, to Catherine Rouvel in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959). Her unbridled sexuality as well as her insolent and “untrained” speech evoke Brigitte Bardot. Yet she is not allowed Bardot-like agency, and, like a Hitchcock heroine, she is carefully controlled and manipulated through a male point of view and, to start with, that of the director. The film is doubly framed by a male bookshop owner musing about why a book on “women murderesses” including her case was mysteriously not published, and then through Stanislas’ interview of, and gaze at, Camille. In Truffaut’s work, Stanislas is one in the long line of shy, immature men who idolize women, and it is no surprise that the director considered playing the part himself.34 Camille’s interviews are conducted in the courtroom, and when we first see her, she enters through the accused box – a symbolic gesture (and departure from the novel) that signals that the film will be “judging” her sexuality and its dramatic consequences, despite Truffaut’s assertion that in her case, “it is not a question of judging but understanding.”35 Indeed, the fact that a number of critics have seen the film as “the portrait of a bitch” (Don Allen)36 or a “little bitch” (Georges Charensol)37 cannot simply be put down to these writer’s misogynist construction. The film explicitly inscribes this point of view when the quiet Hélène, countering Stanislas’ garbled psychoanalytical explanations for Camille’s misconduct, retorts, “Isn’t she simply a bitch?” The film’s construction of point of view throughout shows discrepancies between what Camille says and what she does, and here the “truth” of the images contrasts with the lies of her language – thus again impending identification with her. By contrast, La Fiancée du pirate, but also the male-directed Les Stances à Sophie, unequivocally construct a female point of view, focalizing action through the Lafont character’s gaze. Beyond their comic mode, both these films are also concerned with a serious critique of oppressive masculinity; in Une Belle Fille comme moi, the male characters are grotesque but a side show, and Camille is ultimately constructed as an oddity, the object of the gaze, not its originator. Truffaut called Camille a “female hooligan” (voyou femelle38) and compared her to the wild child Victor, the hero of his 1970 film L’Enfant sauvage. But the male wild child rises into a “noble” form of culture through language while Camille’s “progress,” achieved through her dubious singing talent and sexual manipulation, seems to lack redeeming value. One scene shows her insisting on watching commercials on television. This may be meant to mock the adverts, but the film thereby also equates her with a cultural form seen as utterly debased – in the novel the same scene shows Camille at least watching a program. Furthermore, the male wild child is in a state of wildness because of his lack of contact with civilization, not because of his masculinity as such, whereas Camille’s wild nature is – as is common with representations of female delinquents – entirely equated with her sexuality. The feminist investment in the figure of the carnivalesque woman is based on the notion that her reversal of traditional power structures, comic as it is, enables women’s true abilities and talent, normally repressed by patriarchy, to come to the surface and express themselves. But if these abilities are themselves seen to be fraudulent or second-rate, the liberating potential of the carnivalesque woman is thereby diminished. On the level of star image, in Truffaut’s universe the sensual energy and populist aura that Lafont exudes

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does not bestow on her either the Hitchcockian glamour of the ice maiden (Deneuve) or the Renoiresque prestige of the “authentic,” intelligent beauty (Moreau). Now, many years after his death, François Truffaut has become canonized, and for good reasons. Beyond their charm and freshness, and in some cases brilliance, and their innovative naturalistic mise-en-scène, his films – like those of Renoir – can be seen as charting the evolution of French society over three decades. There is a danger, however, in this canonizing process, of lacking a critical distance and erasing the historicity of the films. In a retrospective French piece celebrating his work, Truffaut’s films are discussed as “belonging to an obsessive struggle for the liberation of women,” of being “films in which the second sex occupied the first place.”39 While women frequently occupy “the first place” in Truffaut’s films, when they do so it is almost invariably as bad girls, thieves, and murderesses. Renoir and Bergman may have been models for Truffaut, but Renoir’s humanism and Bergman’s showcasing of complex femininity are countered – beyond the playfulness of pastiche – by the violence and misogyny of American hard-boiled fiction and Hitchcock thrillers. The darkness in Truffaut’s films has been frequently analyzed as evidence of melancholia and existential despair. But he was also steeped in the French postwar masculinist culture and its cinematic translation to the new auteur cinema. It cannot be coincidence that in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of women’s power on the social scene was paralleled in his cinema by the greater lethal power of his female protagonists.40 The brilliance of Moreau, Deneuve, and Lafont may make us forget the true nature of their parts, but the playful and seductive surface should not blind us to the misogyny that runs through many of the films – indeed, we should recognize the fact that this negative streak is also at the heart of their enduring appeal.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). As the character of Octave, played by Jean Renoir, famously says in Renoir’s film La Règle du jeu (1939). Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991); trans. Alistair Fox, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Claudine Bouché, in de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 299. Madeleine Chapsal, “Vérités sur les jeunes filles,” L’Express, October 20, 1960, in Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 146. Thomas Elsaesser, “Two Decades in Another Country,” in Chris Bigsby, Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe (London: Elek, 1975), p. 210. Susan Weiner, Enfants Terribles: Youth & Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945–1968 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Sellier, Masculine Singular. For an extended discussion of Jeanne Moreau’s star image, see Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000).

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Jeanne Moreau, in “Jeanne la sage,” interview by Michel Delahaye, Cahiers du Cinéma ( January 1965): 161–162. Cited in Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Fascination, Friendship, and the ‘Eternal Feminine’” (unpublished paper). Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Bertrand Tavernier, Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 25 (Spring–Summer 1978). Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 333. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 325. For an extended discussion of Catherine Deneuve’s star image, see Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 374 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, pp. 372–373. Gérard Depardieu and Olivier Dazat, Lettres volées (Paris: J-C Lattès, 1988). De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 227. For a detailed analysis of class differences in the New Wave cinema in relation to gender, see Sellier, Masculine Singular. Bernadette Lafont, La Fiancée du cinéma (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1978), p. 138. Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles, cinéma d’elles: situations de femmes dans le cinéma français 1956–1979 (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981), p. 98. Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet, Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 54. Tarr with Rollet, Cinema and the Second Sex, p. 167. Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 105–106. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, pp. 425–426. Stanislas’ name is occasionally spelt “Previn.” Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 158. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Insdorf, François Truffaut, p. 106. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 133 and 135–36. Anne Gillain offers a more subtle analysis of point of view and narration in the film; Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, pp. 160–161. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 428. Insdorf, François Truffaut, p. 110. Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), p. 161. Georges Charensol, Les Nouvelles littéraires, September 18–24, 1972, cited in Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 153. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 426. Marine Landrot, “Anniversaire Truffaut,” Télérama 2857 (October 13, 2004). It is telling that, by contrast, Truffaut’s last film, Vivement dimanche! (1983), made at the time of a retreat in feminism and based on another Charles Williams novel, is a playful pastiche which showcases the “good” woman played by Fanny Ardant.

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Truffaut in the Mirror of Japan Kan Nozaki

French cinema has always exerted a strong attraction on the Japanese. Before World War II, French films enjoyed a good reputation in Japan, occupying a separate place alongside the increasingly pervasive Hollywood productions. In the postwar period, this predilection, far from being renounced under the American occupation, was reinforced, with the influx en masse of French films that had been undistributed during the war: Carné, Clair, Duvivier – considered uncontested masters of the seventh art – marvelously represented French elegance and delicacy, in the eyes of their Japanese admirers. Japan’s “Francophile” inclination, deeply rooted in its culture and mentality, allowed the New Wave to be welcomed by the Japanese public without too much difficulty: French culture was so highly esteemed that the novelties coming out of it had to be worthy of attention. Furthermore, towards the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the desire for renovation intensified in Japanese society, especially among the youth, from a political as well as cultural perspective. In the world of cinema, young directors such as Oshima, Yoshida, and Shinoda made their dazzling debuts during this period, each trying in his own way to reexamine the traditional cinematic aesthetic embodied by their elders, Ozu, Naruse, and Kinoshita. Critics, in tune with this movement, accentuated their own avant-garde position renewing the discourse on cinema, which henceforth was wide open to new currents of thought and of contemporary art. The films of the New Wave seemed made for them. While the films of Malle, Resnais, and Godard immediately provoked numerous controversies, those of Truffaut, considered to be less problematic and more personal, drew less criticism. Over the years Truffaut’s real importance was established in the Japanese public itself, thanks especially to the work of a couple critics who were completely behind the director. My goal is to show how they contributed to a better understanding of Truffaut’s films, while trying to tease out the peculiarities of their Japanese reception.

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

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Let me mention two methodological issues as I begin. First, there is the pitfall of essentialist explanations threatening anyone who studies cultural reception. Researchers sometimes give in to the temptation to resort to “essential” Japanese notions, referring to “Zen” Buddhism or to “Noh” theater and the like. They hope to clarify the characteristics of the Japanese reaction in the light of such notions but overlook the fact that for the contemporary Japanese, “Zen” and “Noh” long ago became very exotic. Any argument supported by immutable traditional values risks being remote from the reality of today. Secondly, I will not cite box office data nor dwell on the success (or not) of Truffaut’s films in the Japanese market. Undoubtedly his commercial success has remained rather modest when taken in relation to the “megahits” of big-budget Hollywood offerings. The key thing is that while the majority of those hits are quickly forgotten, the films of Truffaut are still present and continue to be discussed in Japan. What process allowed this director to achieve such a profound and lasting impact?1

A Vulnerable Director The French organize a film festival in Japan each June, and in 1959 Julien Duvivier led the delegation. The Japanese idolized Duvivier. For a quarter-century his films had been acclaimed, virtually all of them being selected to the famous “Top Ten” of the journal Kinema Junpo, from Le Paquebot Tenacity (1934) to L’Affaire Maurizius (1954). So Kinema Junpo naturally took advantage of his visit and devoted several pages to an interview with this master they venerated. In the interview, one question posed by a journalist particularly stands out: “What do you think of the young French directors and their new trend?” Duvivier condescendingly replied, “I believe that Chabrol, Truffaut, Molinaro, Vadim are good. In any case, we need to wait another twenty years before reaching a verdict, just as we do for wine.”2 This exchange shows that the Japanese press was already conscious of a renewal taking place in France. Louis Malle’s first film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958), had reached Japan the year before and was felt to be a prefiguration. Soon after Duvivier’s departure, two new films received an exclusive release: Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Chabrol’s Les Cousins (1959). This confirmed it: clearly something new was happening in France. The Japanese press seized on the name “New Wave.” Japanese journalists began to use the phrase in articles devoted to these two films. In 1960, Godard and Truffaut made their debuts in Japan. A Bout de souffle (1960), together with Les 400 Coups (1959) were both released in March. This simultaneity naturally led critics to compare them. Right away they highlighted the contrast between the two young directors, Godard the impetuous iconoclast and Truffaut the nostalgic confidant. Thus was formed an image of Truffaut, nearly a cliché that did not necessarily work in his favor, for while acknowledging his value, critics did not fail to find fault with the regrettable absence of a political dimension in the young director. Thus,

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in his account of Les 400 Coups published in Kinema Junpo in 1960, Susumu Okada, a Francophile and great defender of the New Wave, remarked that “Truffaut is too concerned with himself and does not want to be engagé.”3 Although he recognized the remarkable freshness of his style, Okada went so far as to declare that “Truffaut must be very selfish, strongly attached to himself.” And so this account of the film ends by reproaching the personality of its author. We must not forget that at this time the Japanese press, including film reviews, was generally very much on the Left, convinced that those who make cinema ought to demonstrate their political position. Okada’s deployment of the Sartrean adjective shows the parti pris of his article. This is why Truffaut quickly became the target of socialist critics. Akira Iwasaki, an eminent figure in leftist film criticism, confessed his disappointment over the works of the young French generation. According to him, the directors of the New Wave, which moreover he took to be nothing more than an instance of media branding without any reliable artistic basis, were simply displaying the eccentric and ultimately rather reactionary attitude of French youth in relation to contemporary society. His acerbic critique extended to the level of their technique as well. Iwasaki wondered whether these young directors knew how to lay out a precise shooting script before filming, since their films were filled with “shots” that lacked both meaning and effect. And it was Iwasaki who fiercely attacked the mise-en-scène of Les 400 Coups, which he characterized as exhibiting “a shocking clumsiness.”4 An even more abusive review came out in Eiga Hyoron (Film Review), which was quite influential at the time with a more ambitious editorial direction than Kinema Junpo. Their key critic, Shigechika Sato, famous for his aggressive style and for his passion for all forms of “underground” cinema, denigrated the French school in this way: As a matter of principle I have no respect for any arts that do not call into question an artist’s motivations. The New Wave has quickly dissipated, because French directors, unable to free themselves from the constraints of artistic tradition, remain content with their dramas of interiority. The art of a puny kid like Truffaut makes me feel nothing other than nostalgia for a time when people contented themselves with anthropocentric ideas inherited from the nineteenth century.5

Sato, in the same article, sang the praises of Buñuel and Hitchcock to the detriment of our director, claiming them to be audacious artists, freed of their “interiority,” in contrast to the “timorous” Truffaut. However, we find this detractor of Truffaut in blatant and embarrassing contradiction when in the 1964 list of the ten best films, which Eiga Hyoron published each year following the model of its rival Kinema Junpo, he put Jules et Jim (1962) in second place.6 “Rarely,” he noted, “have an author and his work achieved such harmony.” And he expressed this emotion, even while repeating the pejorative term used previously: “I cannot help but feel moved by the fact that Truffaut, this puny kid, has succeeded in creating such an original work, one so uniquely his own.”7 This attitude, at the very least paradoxical, was far from being singular, for it was widely shared by those who wrote about Truffaut at this time. Consider the case of a

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female writer, Midori Yajima: her article “Towards the Stop Motion” was published in Eiga Hyoron in June 1965 and is one of the first synthetic essays to propose a coherent reading of Truffaut’s cinema. The way she detects the recurrent themes in his films – vehicles, faces, hands – is highly nuanced. However, at the end of her analysis, she changes her tone and accuses the director of “romanticism” and “anthropocentrism,” thus following in the steps of Sato. The conclusion: “We like these films: it is thanks to their nostalgia. When we are not lacking in energy, we prefer Le Mépris [Godard, 1963] or Une Femme mariée [Godard, 1964].”8 Thus, we see that with regard to Truffaut, the Japanese critics quickly forged a series of hasty concepts, which they persisted in applying to him, in spite of the indisputable sympathy and esteem that they had for him. It was as if they loved Truffaut but had to curb their affection. For the critics of this period, to show oneself to be susceptible to the charms emanating from his films was practically to confess one’s weakness. As soon as one tried to make a declaration of love, some countervailing mechanism was automatically activated, and one wound up flinging harsh words at the vulnerable director.9 In hindsight, we can understand that this vulnerability was proof of the great originality of Truffaut’s films, so rich in sincere expression and devoid of ideological pretense. A change in the climate of film criticism would be necessary for the Japanese to learn to truly love Truffaut.

An Exemplary Friendship In April 1963, Truffaut visited Tokyo on the occasion of the third French film festival in Japan. He participated in a roundtable, with two Japanese directors, Kon Ichikawa and Yasuzo Masumura. Truffaut was very polite, especially towards Ichikawa, whose The Burmese Harp (1956) he had previously reviewed in glowing terms.10 Ichikawa launched the debate right away by giving his opinion of Les 400 Coups as well as of Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray (Sundays and Cybele, 1962), whose director, Serge Bourguignon, was also present. According to Ichikawa, despite their obvious good qualities, these films were too marked by a negative assessment of reality. “The French cinema seems to me to exclusively treat reality’s more somber side, without showing any vision of the future.”11 Truffaut became very thoughtful, chewing his nails and starting to smoke. Finally, he replied, What Mr. Ichikawa has just said, I had never thought of that. What interests me is only the living beauty of the cinema. In my opinion, there are only two kinds of films: those that are living and those that are dead. However pessimistic the subject, one can make a living film out of it, can breathe life into it. Then it will be a good film. Otherwise, it is a dead film. I have never thought otherwise.12

Asked to cite examples, Truffaut added that the films of Kurosawa and of Ichikawa were living, while, “frankly,” Ozu’s seemed dead to him.13 Ichikawa, despite Truffaut’s

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compliments, did not surrender to this argument. Masumura, for his part, spoke of the “fatalism” that weighed on French cinema. The discussion ended abruptly, the meeting clearly a failure. Fortunately, Truffaut had another encounter, which would be much more fruitful for his career in Japan, this time with a young student who served as his interpreter during his stay. His name was Koichi Yamada. It was he who would occupy a key position in the reception of our director in Japan. The two men hit it off right away, and reestablished their friendship when Yamada went to Paris in 1965 with a scholarship from the French government. Truffaut introduced him to his Cahiers friends. Yamada collaborated on the journal and wrote articles on Japanese directors. After a four-year stay, Yamada returned to his native country and began to write and translate actively. At each release of a Truffaut film in Japan, it was Yamada who subtitled the dialogue. The two men corresponded diligently with one another: you can read around thirty of their letters published in Truffaut’s Correspondance. Antoine de Baecque emphasizes that their friendship ended by taking “a very moving and precious turn during the last months of Truffaut’s life.”14 Indeed, in a letter to Yamada, written on September 9, 1983, the eve of his brain operation, Truffaut expressed his unwavering confidence in his Japanese friend, and in the tone of a testament wrote, “My morale is high, but should things turn out badly, I want to convey to you my thanks, my affection and my desire that you will always be my representative-translator-friend-alter ego – my Japanese brother in a word.”15 These lines suffice to demonstrate what the Japanese critic represented for Truffaut. We must now try to understand what Yamada’s work represents for lovers of cinema in Japan. Yamada’s first book, published in 1971,16 contains an important text: “What is Criticism?” is a moving profession of faith directed against the narrowness of the then still-predominant politicizing or avant-garde criticism. Yamada begins by establishing the fact that “without the artwork, criticism cannot exist.” And he wonders, “Is it to resolve this fundamental inferiority complex and to put on airs of autonomy that criticism makes it imperative to find only faults in a work, to demolish it, to deny it? Is it congenitally predestined for this task?” In opposition to such impoverishing criticism, Yamada dreams of a more positive style, “in pursuit of endless cinematic pleasure, which should be amplified limitlessly”; such criticism should shape a field of discourse, free and multiple, between those who make films and those who watch them: a criticism rid of its complexes, that dares to declare: “That which is beautiful is beautiful.”17 In short, Yamada reasserts the dimension of love, which had been cruelly cut out of the current of critical ideas in the 1960s. In 1978, he published Tomo yo Eiga yo (My friends, my films),18 memories of the period when he was associated with the members of Cahiers in Paris: a precious account of the New Wave on the eve of May 1968, with Truffaut and Godard as principal characters. Then came a series of translations of books by Truffaut: Les Films de ma vie (published in two volumes in 1979), L’Argent de poche (1979), Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (1981), Le Journal du tournage de Fahrenheit 451 (1986), La Nuit américaine (1988). No one in Japan had ever seen a critic who so perfectly embodied a foreign director. Yamada’s meticulousness is legendary. He had

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been able to ask Truffaut question upon question: one can count around thirty posed in a single letter, dated September 15, 1976 alone! The director’s patience is admirable: he is always at the disposal of the translator, ready to respond to everything, without ever losing his jovial tone. His clarifications considerably enriched each translation. Yamada used footnotes diligently, citing Truffaut’s responses and adding extracts from articles and other books that clarify the author’s comments. A single example will suffice to convey the extraordinary result of this process. In Les Films de ma vie, at the end of his text on Louis Malle, Truffaut writes, “It deals less with women today than with women in general, those of Flaubert and those of Giraudoux. Les Amants may be the first film à la Giraudoux.”19 The exchange between Yamada and Truffaut concerning this passage does not appear in the Correspondance. But in the note concerning “giralducien” from the Japanese translation, we can read these lines that Truffaut sent to Yamada: between you and me, I have seen this film several times and in the end it has dropped down in my estimation. But at the time when I wrote this text, I was captivated by the veracity of the characters. … In giving an account of Giraudoux’s characters, we often say that they are like men before original sin. I believe that I used the adjective giralducien in that sense.20

Japanese readers thus had the privilege of witnessing the dialogue of two friends, while drawing from it precious information. With its attractive layout and photos, this Japanese version of Les Films de ma vie is a model book on the cinema, instilling in its readers the idea of “cinephilia,” a central notion of the New Wave and the films of Truffaut. Yamada’s translations initiated the Japanese into the rites and customs of Cahiers cinephilia. Truffaut said that “of our band of fanatics, Rivette was the most completely fanatic” since, for instance, on “the first day Le Carrosse d’or [Jean Renoir, 1952] was in the theater, he remained in his seat from two in the afternoon until midnight.”21 In 1979, when Yamada made this text available, neither Le Carrosse d’or nor any of Rivette’s films was available in Japan. Thanks to his translation, Yamada brought intact all of Truffaut’s passion for the cinema, and gave us a wild desire to see all of the films mentioned. “I am a little embarrassed to have given you so much work with a book that was not written in the best French. I am certain that your translation will be much better than the original and I am sure that, thanks to you, I am going to have an excellent reputation as a writer, in Japan!”22 Indeed, thanks to Yamada’s efforts, Truffaut has come to be considered as a veritable “writer of cinema,” a notion the latter had proposed in characterizing André Bazin.23 And the crowning achievement was Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock: the book, translated under the title Hitchcock–Truffaut: The Art of Cinema,24 met with a success beyond all hopes and became a huge best seller, despite its large format and its rather high price. In the “translator’s postscript” of Hitchcock–Truffaut, Yamada admits that he was able to borrow numerous original photos from Truffaut’s private collection, under pretext of making “the best edition of this book in the world.” Four years of labor

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resulted in a book of absolute richness, illustrated with 500 photos and including the preface from the American edition (Yamada used Truffaut’s French original for this), a postscript specially written by Truffaut for Japanese readers (with his manuscript reproduced on an entire page), and abundant notes that cite the author’s letters. Yamada had successfully taken on the challenge of producing a book at once serious and immensely beautiful, not to mention that it benefited from his marvelous translation. As for Les Films de ma vie, Yamada worked with co-translator Shigehiko Hasumi, who would become a highly influential film and literary critic and be named president of the University of Tokyo. Hasumi also knew Truffaut very well, and they thus made an unbeatable pair. While proceeding with their translation work, Yamada and Hasumi wrote a great deal themselves. Armed with solid knowledge of contemporary French thought and with a style of writing that was at once sibylline and enchanting, Hasumi quickly became the figurehead of the New Criticism in Japan. Rejecting the ideology of “depth,” Hasumi emphasized “surface” experience and pointed out the “cruelly ethical” character of Truffaut’s films. According to him, movement in Truffaut, lacking any psychological justification, tends to transform itself into pure duration, in which the characters are left in suspense without managing to find a way out.25 One of the fundamental concepts of Hasumi’s thinking, “cinematographic memory,” which invites one to watch a film as a tapestry of voluntary and involuntary quotations of films from the past, particularly favors the reading of Truffaut’s films. As for Yamada, he never stopped pleading the cause of his French friend, attesting to the value of each new film and laying out an analysis that could be both biographical and thematic. He defined the world of Truffaut as “fictitious autobiography, where real life and the cinema reflect one another as in a mirror.”26 The notion of the “incapable man,” which Yamada discerned in his films, threw new light on the character of Antoine Doinel who, until then, had left the Japanese public a bit perplexed, because of the apparent eccentricity of his behavior. Jean-Pierre Léaud began at last to achieve popularity in Japan, especially among young people who felt close to this exemplary “antihero.” According to George Steiner, “to translate is to understand,”27 and through these translations, and the critical works that accompanied them, the Japanese came to better understand Truffaut. More important, these publications taught a love of cinema. The case of Shohei Chujo gives evidence of this. A child prodigy, Chujo debuted as a film critic at the age of fifteen in a highly specialized journal, Kikan Film (Film Quarterly), publishing long articles on the experimental work of Toshio Matsumoto or on Godard’s Le Vent d’est (1970). He quickly tired of being a militant critic, though, and all but lost the energy to go to the cinema. However, around 1978, an encounter with the books of Yamada and Hasumi “revived” him: “From the works of these two critics, I drew a lesson that was as simple as it was encouraging, that the cinema is something to be watched freely and seriously.”28 After several years, Chujo became the author of a book on modern directors. It goes without saying that Truffaut held a privileged place in it. After the decline of the political Left and of dogmatic political activism,29 the repression that had weighed on our director gradually lifted. Thanks to the work of

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Yamada, Hasumi, and other critics of the 1970s, the cliché of a selfish and nostalgic director was replaced with the portrait of an extremely conscious and independent auteur. Creator of constantly renewed cinematic forms, he was “an anxious and sincere moralist who never stopped doubting himself.”30

A New Generation The critical activities of his two friends, Yamada and Hasumi, had a powerful effect, while the films of Truffaut himself, after a relatively “empty” period, had regained their strength in the 1970s and succeeded in attracting even more spectators. In 1974, La Nuit américaine (1973) was selected number three in Kinema Junpo’s “Top Ten” nearly ten years after La Peau douce (1964) had ranked fourth in the 1965 list. The Japanese public also very much liked his next films: L’Argent de poche (1976), Le Dernier Métro (1980), and La Femme d’à côté (1981). The huge success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) increased the director’s popularity even more. After that his general presence in Japan went well beyond the sphere of cinema, influencing various artists: Juichiro Takeuchi, a renowned playwright, published a script in 1985 titled Le Journal d’un homme amoureux, the Japanese title for L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), while in 1986 Maki Asakawa, a famous singer, recorded an album called La Nuit américaine. The death of the director in 1984 prompted publications in his honor. All the daily papers recounted his career. Kinema Junpo, as well as Eureka (a journal of literature and ideas), each devoted a special issue to him. Here, directors as different as Nobuhiko Obayashi, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, and Kazuki Omori spoke with passion about “their” Truffaut, while celebrities like painter Masuo Ikeda, stage director Yukio Ninagawa, and novelist Natsuki Ikezawa expressed their attachment to him, each in his own way. The special issue of Lumière, the quarterly film journal that Hasumi founded in 1985, was particularly rich, with a very long selection entitled “Truffaut’s Last Interview.” It comprised an assembly of comments gathered by Yamada and Hasumi, from 1982 to 1983 in Tokyo and in Paris. In return for their longstanding friendship and support, Truffaut was generous with his confidences. On the subject of La Sirène de Mississippi (1969), the two Japanese critics asked him if the tree trunk on which Belmondo and Deneuve sit was not a “quotation” of an American film by Renoir, The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). Truffaut, stunned by this insight, acknowledged that it was indeed a voluntary “quotation,” the scene having been improvised precisely because of the striking resemblance of the trunk with the one in Renoir’s film. And he recalled that the dialogue of this scene was also a quotation, this time from Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), which he had loved at the age of thirteen. Confessing his youthful enthusiasm for that film, he mentioned that the immense respect that he had for Cocteau began right then since Cocteau wrote its dialogue. Face-to-face with his Japanese friends, who were equally passionate about the cinema, Truffaut became an inexhaustible fount of anecdotes.

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One cannot help but think of that other interview that Truffaut gave in 1980 for Cahiers du Cinéma, when his relations with the journal had been deteriorating for a long time, as de Baecque and Toubiana point out.31 In fact, there is a remarkable difference in tone between these two interviews, since one reflects a stubborn coldness in the editorial offices at Cahiers with regard to the director while the other bathes in cinephilic delight. Hasumi was undoubtedly correct in saying that in Paris Truffaut must have felt ill at ease because of the intransigent sectarianism that reigned there: Positif did not tolerate him because he was from Cahiers, while the Cahiers critics were cold towards him for having broken with Godard.32 So it was a pleasant surprise that in “Truffaut’s Last Interview” the director spoke of Godard without any resentment or irony. He expressed his huge admiration for Godard as a colorist, comparable to Matisse or to Miró, and declared that it was for want of a similar talent that he had had to opt for another route, “avoiding loud colors in favor of dark ones” and seeking “a formal unity” particular to him.33 When we realize that Hasumi was a fan of Godard, we can see that the standard scheme pitting Godard against Truffaut to the detriment of the latter scarcely works in Japan for the two were considered simply the most stimulating directors of modern French cinema. The publication of Truffaut: A Cinematic Life by Yamada in 1991, the synthesis of years of work, renewed Japanese interest in the director. At the same time, the 1990s saw the increasing popularity of a new generation of directors and critics fed on the films of the New Wave and the books of Yamada and Hasumi.34 Truffaut’s films, supplemented by the cluster of publications on him, played an important pedagogic role for the young Japanese who wanted to get to learn about cinema. Because they contain an entire network of allusions to film culture, Truffaut’s films are particularly apt to invite young people to discover the inexhaustible richness of the world of cinema. Familiarizing themselves with Truffaut’s body of work, and coming to know this marvelous man, presented so engagingly in the books by Yamada, young spectators learned how to confront their lives, sustained by the love of cinema. In his biographical study, Yamada emphasizes the importance of the themes of love and education in Truffaut, and notes that with L’Enfant sauvage (1970), these two terms become “synonymous.”35 We could say that for the Japanese cinephiles of today, it was Truffaut who became “synonymous” with these two allied notions. A good example of illustrating this point is the novelist Kazushige Abe. Having obtained a diploma from Japan’s School of Cinema, Abe wrote a novel titled Amerika no Yoru (which translates as La Nuit américaine)36 at the age of twenty-six and received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1994. Since then, he has been laureate of different literary prizes and is considered today one of the best representatives of contemporary Japanese fiction. His first novel had for its hero and narrator a young film student, an admirer of Bruce Lee but also a tireless reader of Proust and Cervantes. To become a “particular being,” different from others, is his life’s sole purpose. He invests all his energy and imagination in more or less insane endeavors, whether kung fu-style physical exercise, or taking on the role of the fool for an amateur film, endeavors that all end in failure. Shaken in his convictions and isolated from his

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friends, one day he has the idea of re-watching La Nuit américaine alone in his room, on videocassette. The film sparks “a fundamental evolution” in his life: he vows that from then on he will no longer be content to read and to watch films as before but will write a book himself, shoot a film. It is the director of La Nuit américaine who urges him on this path, having had the courage to announce the fictional nature of cinema in the very title of his film, instead of concealing it as Hollywood filmmakers do. Through this audacious gesture Abe’s hero glimpses the possibility of an artistic work that might transform day into night “everywhere in the world,” and overturn the normal conditions of life, introducing the dimension of genuine “madness.” At the end of the novel, the hero experiences a premonition of “a new story” he will write in the future.37 And so, in this novel, recognized as a masterpiece of “Japanese pop fiction” (or the “postmodern Japanese novel”), Truffaut’s film plays a rather unexpected role: La Nuit américaine, this time detached from its usual context of passion for cinema or elegy to the work of the crew, serves here to catalyze the desperate hero in his headlong search to reverse his situation. No guarantee is given that he will successfully complete the work vaguely announced at the end. However, the originality of interpretation of the film is undeniable. We understand that there is always reason to watch and re-watch Truffaut’s films, for they can conceal unexpected subversive ideas likely to stimulate and encourage those who aspire to a radical change in their existence. From young “vulnerable” filmmaker to audacious guru, in Japan Truffaut keeps appearing under multiple avatars. In April 2004, a major retrospective took place in Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s most noted fashion centers. The success was such that the festival was extended through October. Yamada continues to publish books about his friend: two new translations have been announced, Truffaut’s Correspondance and Ecrits sur le cinéma which comprises Les Films de ma vie and Le Plaisir des yeux. Moreover, all of Truffaut’s films are currently available on DVD, including Domicile conjugal (1970), which never had a theatrical run, having been shown only during the retrospective. In fact, one might call Domicile conjugal Truffaut’s “cursed film” in Japan. The distributors had not dared to buy it, because of the character of Kyoko, who falls in love with Doinel. “The hero ends up abandoning the young Japanese woman in favor of his wife. Probably, this is why your distributors have completely steered clear of this unlucky film.” This was the explanation Truffaut gave.38 But for the Japanese, it was not Kyoko’s failure but rather the way her Parisian life was described that was the problem. Dressed in a kimono and living in a studio apartment decorated with red paper lanterns, her character seemed so grotesquely caricatured that the Japanese had difficulty accepting her.39 However, the film has proved capable of “rehabilitation” today. Kyoko’s hyperbolically exotic features are commensurate with the immense desire to escape felt by Doinel, who, always unstable and unreliable, has just become a father. Nor is Kyoko merely a doll-like figure with an unbearable smile. When she converses with the friend with whom she shares the studio, the ill-mannered tone of the Japanese she uses is at odds with the elegance of her clothes. We see that her appearance is a trap she sets, and one into which the careless Doinel has fallen.

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Finally, although Doinel does not even have the courage to say goodbye to her, it is she who takes the initiative and abandons him in the restaurant, leaving a break-up note. In a close-up of we see what it reads: “Fuck off.” What is extraordinary is the fact that this note is written in Japanese, and is therefore incomprehensible to Doinel who has no access to the subtitle. Moreover, the double meaning of this message must escape all non-Japanese spectators, for “fuck off ” is the literal translation of the Japanese title of Godard’s A Bout de souffle. So Truffaut took a chance on a gag that, meaningless for the majority of his spectators worldwide, was addressed only to the Japanese. This inside joke could only be thought ineffective as “market strategy,” which always targets the largest possible audience, thus puzzling and moving us Japanese at the same time. Admittedly, we always find the clichés in this film a bit too heavyhanded. But one feels that Truffaut does not take them seriously and is having fun by winking at us. And in fact, the Japanese have begun to come around to Truffaut’s game. Those who have recently discovered this film have expressed rather positive impressions; from my monitoring of discussions on the Internet, it appears that many find Domicile conjugal “funny” without being too offended by its excessive japonisme. Yamada has often emphasized that Truffaut’s films, far from achieving flawless perfection, always have a shaky, unsteady side. Would not this be the reason that they continue to be so vivid and stimulating? In other words, the cinema of François Truffaut is never closed on itself: it “appeals” to its spectators, sometimes a bit awkwardly, as in the case of Kyoko’s note in Domicile conjugal. But even his clumsiness winds up touching us, for we understand that it is an essential human component of the director’s universe. The bonds of affection that tie the Japanese to François Truffaut will remain forever close and deep.

Notes 1

Laurence Alfonsi’s Lectures asiatiques de l’œuvre de François Truffaut (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000) adopts a sociological point of view and devotes many pages to the immediate reactions of the Japanese press, as taken from reviews in the daily papers. My study emphasizes instead the role played by film critics, by their books and their translations which, in my view, constitute the conditions of “reception” in the full sense of the word. 2 “Impressions of the French Film Festival,” Kinema Junpo 236 ( July 1959): 66. ( Japanese article titles only are translated.) 3 “Foreign Films,” Kinema Junpo 259 (May 1960): 87. 4 “Round Table on the New Wave,” Kinema Junpo 258 (April 1960): 58. 5 Eiga Hyoron (October 1963), reprinted in Shigechika Sato, Matsuriyo Yomigaere! [Festival, Revive!] (Tokyo: Wides Shuppan, 1997), p. 66. The association of Truffaut with a “child” was made all the more easily since the Japanese title of Les 400 Coups is Otona wa wakatte kurenai (Adults won’t understand). On the modifications of the Japanese titles, see Alfonsi, Lectures asiatiques de l’œuvre de François Truffaut, “Cahier central,” document A. 6 “Top Ten 1964,” Eiga Hyoron (March 1965): 22–23. In this “Top Ten” elected by a vote of the journal’s collaborators, Jules et Jim was chosen as the best film of 1964, followed by Godard’s Le Mépris.

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7 “Top Ten 1964,” p. 24. 8 Eiga Hyoron ( June 1965): 50. 9 The case of Tadao Sato, one of the greatest film critics in Japan, author of around one hundred books on cinema, and currently Dean of the Japan Institute of the Moving Image, is also very telling of the reticence of Japanese critics at this time with regard to Truffaut. Although he had put Jules et Jim in first place in his 1965 rankings in Eiga Hyoron, Tadao Sato did not want to grant any serious importance to its director. According to him, Truffaut’s mentor, André Bazin, was already “too attached to the technical aspect of cinema and very lacking in political thought.” He believed that Truffaut (and Chabrol) inherited this fault. See his book Nouvelle vague igo (After the New Wave) (Tokyo: Chuko Shinsho, 1971), p. 67. On the reception of Bazinian theory in Japan, see Kan Nozaki, “Japanese Readings: The Textual Thread,” in Dudley Andrew (ed.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 324–329. 10 This article, which appeared in 1957, was not retained in the first edition of Les Films de ma vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). In 1979, at the time of the publication of this book in Japanese, Truffaut, “following a friendly and encouraging suggestion from Yamada,” decided to restore it, to comprise one chapter along with three other articles on Japanese filmmakers: “In Praise of Japanese Cinema.” See Truffaut’s postscript to the Japanese translation of Les Films de ma vie, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tazawa Shobo, 1979), p. 272. 11 “Looking at Current Directors,” Kinema Junpo 339 (May 1963): 37. 12 “Looking at Current Directors,” p. 38. 13 “Looking at Current Directors,” p. 40. 14 “Yamada Koichi,” in Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds.), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2004), pp. 419–420. 15 Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray (eds.), Francois Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945–1984, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 566. 16 Koichi Yamada, Eiga ni tsuite Watashi ga shitteiru 2, 3 no Kotogara (Two or three things that I know about cinema) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1971); the book, renamed Ciné Bravo 2, is included in the pocket collection of the Keibunsha edition (Tokyo). 17 Yamada, Ciné Bravo 2, p. 30. 18 Published by Hanashino Tokushu Press (Tokyo), the book has since been reissued several times; today it is available in Heibonsha’s pocket collection (Tokyo). 19 François Truffaut, The Films in My Life (New York, Simon and Shuster, 1978), p. 315. 20 Truffaut to Yamada, in the Japanese translation of Les Films de ma vie, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tazawa Shobo, 1979), p. 37. The English translation reads simply: “Les Amants may be the first film à la Giraudoux.” The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (London: Allen Lane, 1980), p. 315. There are no notes, nor any accompanying photos. The academic austerity of the English book contrasts sharply with the attractive presentation of the Japanese translation. 21 Truffaut, Les Films de ma vie, Vol. 2, p. 335. 22 Truffaut to Yamada, in François Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945–1984, p. 625. Here we find a rather significant distinction: it was Yamada’s books that definitively established the transcription of “François Truffaut” in katakana (syllabary used to transcribe foreign words into Japanese); until then its spelling had been variable with several possibilities used. 23 In “André Bazin nous manque,” the foreword to the French edition of Dudley Andrew’s book on Bazin, Truffaut writes: “Si, plutôt que de Bazin critique, je préfère souvent parler de Bazin ‘écrivain de cinéma’, c’est qu’il ne s’agissait pas pour lui d’un job. … C’était un

400

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38

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plaisir qu’il éprouvait, un plaisir et une nécessité liés à sa vocation pédagogique.” [If, rather than speak of Bazin as a critic, I often prefer to speak of Bazin as a ‘writer of cinema,’ it is because for him, it was not a matter of a job. … It was a pleasure that he felt, a pleasure and a necessity linked to his educational calling.] Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Editions de l’Etoile, 1983), p. 10. Published by Shobunsha Publishers (Tokyo) in 1981, the book grew into a new expanded edition in 1990; since then, it has been reprinted numerous times. See Hasumi’s article on Truffaut, “Temptation of a magnetic power of films,” in Cinema, Writing of Temptation (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1983; repr., 1990), pp. 180–214. Koichi Yamada, Truffaut, a Cinematographic Life, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, “Heibon Library” collection, 2001), p. 303. George Steiner, “Understanding as Translation,” chapter 1 in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Chujo Shohei, Chujo Shohei Only Lives Twice (Tokyo: Seiryu shuppan, 2004), p. 31. The Asama-Sanso incident in 1972 marked the decline of the leftist movement in a spectacular manner. The members of the United Red Army took a hostage and entrenched themselves in a lodge at the base of a mountain. The operation led by the police was aired live on all of television channels for more than ten hours. At the end the hostage was released, at the cost of two policemen’s lives. After the arrest of the guilty parties, the police discovered in their hideout the bodies of twelve former members of the Red Army, dead as a result of a “purge” within the group. Yamada, Truffaut, a Cinematographic Life, p. 315. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), p. 713. Koichi Yamada and Shigehiko Hasumi, “Before Truffaut, After Truffaut,” Lumière, 2 (Autumn 1985), p. 63. “La Dernière Interview de Truffaut,” Lumière 2 (Autumn 1985): 14–15. Note also that Yamada and Hasumi had already published a number of interviews with Truffaut over the years. For Japanese readers, the translation of Truffaut par Truffaut by Dominique Rabourdin in 1994 and that of Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut by Anne Gillain in 2006 had come to supplement the knowledge that they had acquired through preexisting “domestic” interviews. We can cite Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama as representative directors of this generation. Both participated in a film seminar organized by Hasumi at Rikkyo University. Yamada, Truffaut, a Cinematographic Life, p. 130. Published by Kodansha in 1994, the work was reprinted in their pocket collection in 2001. Kazushige Abe, Amerika no Yoru (Tokyo: Kodansha, pocket collection, 2001), pp. 181–186. In 1971, the screenplay of this film was translated in an anthology, Truffaut and Lelouch, published in the context of the series “World Filmmakers” by Kinema Junpo publications. Asked to furnish his screenplay, Truffaut wrote a letter to the editorial offices and explained his film’s bad luck; see Truffaut and Lelouch, p. 246. Yamada gave a precious account of this film. According to him, Truffaut exactly represented “the behavior of a young Japanese girl whom he had met in Paris.” Yamada himself knew this “model” for Kyoko’s character. For him, it is the blunt “realism” in the description of this girl that is unbearable in certain scenes. See Koichi Yamada, François Truffaut Eiga Dokuhon (François Truffaut reader) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2003), p. 287.

Part V

Films

21

Directing Children The Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness Angela Dalle Vacche For Manuela and Carlo Filiaci

A child’s eyes register fast. Later he develops the film. … Jean Cocteau1

Children on the Screen In his essay on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” French critic André Bazin (1918–1958) writes, “It is not for me to separate off … here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child.”2 Intriguingly, this sequence of sidewalk, reflection, and childhood suggests an attraction between the lens of the cinema and childhood, the space of the street and reflective thought. This sentence replaces a previous phrasing by Bazin that, in 1945, explicitly referred to the trembling of the leaves during the Lumières’ Le Repas de bébé (1895).3 Fourteen years after the original publication of Bazin’s “Ontology,” François Truffaut dedicated his very first feature film, Les 400 Coups (1959), to the memory of his mentor, who died of leukemia in 1958. Why, between 1945 and 1958, did Bazin make room for a child and eliminate the subtle motions of nature in early cinema? Which particular film or theoretical insight or meaningful event made Bazin change his sentence? Whereas the precise circumstances of this revision remain speculative, it is well known that the theme of youthfulness punctuates Italian neorealist cinema: the children at Don Pietro’s execution in Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945); in his Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Alfonsino – a Neapolitan kid in an oversized uniform – steals the shoes of an African American GI, and a screaming infant appears in the Po Valley episode; and, finally, the A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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thin adolescent Edmund Kohler wanders among the ruins of Berlin in Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948).4 Along with the great Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica is another neorealist “father” figure of the French New Wave.5 In Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), De Sica explores the friendship of two young boys. Shoeshine was mostly shot in a studio: a melodrama with chiaroscuro expressionist lighting, frequent high and low angles, and not much street life. At the same time, Shoeshine’s subject could fit Cesare Zavattini’s neorealist formula of the found story at the bottom of a daily newspaper. Shoeshine’s temporal framework is the immediate aftermath of World War II when, in the chaos of daily life, two kids caught for a minor crime end up in a jail filled with harsher juvenile delinquents. Again, in terms of subject – rootless children falling into petty theft – the similarities between Shoeshine and Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups are obvious. Shoeshine’s object of indictment is the past in the guise of Fascist authority figures. In contrast to Rossellini’s penchant for improvisation, natural locations, and hardly any script, Shoeshine pitches a convoluted plot of adults’ manipulations against the two boys’ dream of riding their favorite horse into the future. Called “Bersagliere” – the name of an Italian infantry division always on the run – the galloping horse, with the two kids grabbing his neck and holding on for their lives, underlines the power and desire of early childhood’s imagination. But this leap of faith into the unknown, or this gesture of belief about tomorrow, does not hold up. At the end of Shoeshine, the older, Pasquale, betrays Giuseppe because he rides the beloved horse with another companion. Even worse, Pasquale accidentally kills his former best friend. Needless to say, a perceptual trauma, in the guise of a loss of trust, is at the core of Shoeshine. Both Italian neorealism and the French New Wave are cinemas of children, subjectivity, perception, and self-consciousness. In other words, postwar European films stage the tension between Self and Other through either an irrational fusion or a traumatic gap between individual hopes and life’s realities.6 As receptive and still unformed as they are, children, much more than adults, are quite inclined towards extreme belief and extreme rebellion. Thus, children either tend to invest themselves in an impossible ideal or they end up in trouble after rejecting all the rules.7 Notwithstanding Shoeshine’s studio sets and fatalistic trajectory, Bersagliere’s speed does anticipate the youthful energy and the accelerated tempo of postwar cinema in France, with unexpected jump cuts, fluid long takes, light cameras, and plenty of arrogance. Why should one write again about Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, a film which is so wellknown? In neorealism, issues of perception are subsumed into questions of unity and disunity of the body politic. In Les 400 Coups, Truffaut situates self-consciousness in childhood by predicating the rise of this new sense of self on the struggle for authenticity in writing. One can easily note a major qualitative leap as far as subtlety of treatment between Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups and previous films about childhood, such as René Clément’s Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952) and Morris Engel’s and Ruth Orkin’s The Little Fugitive (1953). These two films are important transitional texts, but still classical coming-of-age stories, and, as such, they are unable to achieve the daring and loose unraveling of Les 400 Coups. In Truffaut’s film, after much fun and

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humiliation, secrecy and selfishness, the acquisition of a child’s self-consciousness stems from his situation in space, and it coincides with his first serious discovery of boundaries, barriers, and choices. At the end of Truffaut’s film, a memorable long take at eye level shows Antoine Doinel ( Jean-Pierre Léaud) running free for one minute and twenty-two seconds after escaping from a juvenile detention center. Truffaut’s fourteen-year-old boy is shown in full length and in profile, so that his posture resembles a typical motion study by Eadweard Muybridge. All of a sudden, this scientific iconography turns into one of the most startling film endings ever accomplished in freeze-frame. Indeed, Les 400 Coups’ original title was supposed to be “Antoine has run away,” but Truffaut went well beyond the portrayal of motion and freedom. For the very first time, he showed to the rest of the world the reflective thought, fear, and loneliness behind a child’s face.8 Doinel’s final and direct address to the viewer across the fourth wall seals a narrative based on silent routines, telling details, and an eloquent use of objects. Thanks to Truffaut’s skillful directing, the untrained, yet intuitive Jean-Pierre Léaud develops the character of Antoine Doinel from a schoolboy running carelessly across the city of Paris to a person who learns that total freedom does not exist. What is the nature of children’s power on screen and what can adult viewers learn from it? Or, put another way, where does the stubborn strength shared by children and the cinema come from? In Les 400 Coups, with his famous sequence of the puppet theater in the Luxembourg Gardens – a long take in close-up of little faces – Truffaut dwells on the spellbound expressions of these miniature theatergoers who confuse the real and the imaginary during a production of Little Red Riding Hood.9 For this young and happily screaming audience, the cop is as exciting as the wolf. Unaware of the social conventions defining good and evil, this public is genuinely open and innocently amoral. From thrills to chills and vice versa, children love fairy tales with extreme ups and downs between fear and rescue.10 This naive and primitive belief that something can be transformed into its opposite, this perceptual stance of unthinkable reversals is – like cinema – radically modern, because of its sensorial overstimulation. Thus, Bazin and Truffaut were, respectively, quick to theorize childhood in relation to the screen and to take children to be the most natural and restless nonprofessional actors available. In other words, thanks to their lack of self-consciousness in front of the camera, children are born actors, so that Léaud’s first major performance for Truffaut is comparable to a photographic negative which evolves into a positive image by the end of the film, but one with enough depth to raise questions. Both Truffaut and Léaud experienced a childhood with no innocence because of family issues, so that it is all the more ironic that their intertwined lives as adults, respectively in front of and behind the camera, relied so much on a cult of innocent youthfulness. Their shared search for a lost utopian origin found an outlet through the screen. In a more general sense, by returning us to the ground zero of childhood through the nonjudgmental vision of the camera eye, the cinema can engender fresh emotions, while it can also open us up to existential discoveries, ranging from curiosity towards otherness to the acceptance of differences. The direction of children in cinema aims at turning spectators into desiring, flexible, and intuitive beings, in clear

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contrast with the mature, well-centered, rational, and all-knowing adults whose skepticism or discriminating eye might impede the redeeming powers of imagination and the healing transformation of memories.

Children in De Sica’s Shoeshine In 1952 Bazin devoted a full essay to De Sica’s work with nonprofessional actors. Well aware that Shoeshine is not De Sica’s strongest film, Bazin writes about De Sica’s “inexhaustible affection for his characters,”11 and how this director “infuses into his actors the power to love that he himself possesses as an actor … We find in De Sica the humanity of Chaplin, but shared with the world at large.”12 In other words, for the Neapolitan De Sica, the whole world is an extended and warm family. Thus, in Shoeshine, little Giuseppe relates to Nannarella as if she were his girlfriend, sister, or daughter. She is not just a favorite playmate, the way René is for Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, but someone the boy protectively accompanies across the street and with whom he plans subsequent meetings, as if there were an emotional commitment between the two. What is at stake here is a trustworthy complicity that is much stronger than just sharing the same shelter. When De Sica’s two boys look out of the police van taking them away, they see Nannarella grow smaller in the distance like an abandoned wife. In contrast, Antoine Doinel’s view from the police van yields a deserted, dark, and rainy Parisian street. This lonely point of view suggests a way of looking, ready to become more introspective. De Sica directs by miming what the children are supposed to do. For the neorealist director, acting is relational and, therefore, social. De Sica was famous for performing the action in front of the children before each sequence, and for telling them with painstaking precision how to move, as well as when and where to stand in relation to each other. As far as the casting for Shoeshine, De Sica started from his observation in real life of two destitute kids: I met two of them: Little Monkey and Big Hat. Little Monkey slept in an elevator in Via Lombardia, but he had a grandmother who loved him very much; it was this family warmth that saved him. Big Hat however was nobody’s child, completely alone in the world with his fat head deformed by rickets; later he committed robbery and ended up in jail. At that time they were two young boys – twelve or thirteen years old – and they made up a kind of bizarre association. They worked in Via Veneto (Little Monkey with a cape on and nothing else except for a pair of torn shorts), they shined shoes fast and furiously and then, as soon as they had put together two or three liras, they’d run up to Villa Borghese to rent a horse. Later, in laying out the treatment, Zavattini, would bring the horse character to poetic fruition but, at the bottom of it all, there remained Little Monkey and Big Hat’s real and peculiar horseback rides.13

Whereas Truffaut’s Antoine is an oddball, a lonely and nocturnal flâneur who does not really do anything for René, his one friend, the boys in Shoeshine constitute a kind of family with a distinct collective character. One wonders why De Sica did not just

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cast Little Monkey and Big Hat to play themselves for his film. Bazin’s answer to this is that the film needed thought and depth. So the director should choose a nonprofessional performer – child or adult – with an introspective nature in mind. Casting does not work when it becomes about matching some actual reality or reinforcing a stereotype. André Bazin explains: It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its meaning, for in art, at the source of all realism, there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved. The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are repeatedly told that it consists in selection and interpretation. That is why up to now the “realist” trends in cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or ideological. In France, “naturalism” goes hand in hand with the multiplication of novels and plays à thèse. The originality of Italian neorealism as compared with the chief schools of realism that preceded it and with Soviet cinema, lies in never making reality the servant of some a priori point of view.14

For Bazin, De Sica’s direction begins with his intuitions about nonprofessional child actors and the love and trust he develops with them, which, in the case of Shoeshine, created an affectionate atmosphere suffusing the kids in their relation to each other and in their mutual attachment to their horse, Bersagliere. Bazin’s emphasis on De Sica’s warm personality is not enough to explain the casting of Franco Interlenghi in the role of Pasquale, before looking for the right kid to play Giuseppe. According to Rinaldo Smordoni (Giuseppe), Franco was chosen not only because he came from a poor neighborhood and played in the street but especially because he looked handsome. By casting against the physiognomic type of the destitute, De Sica’s plan was to make his appealing screen presence clash with his character – a hungry kid – and his role as the accidental killer of Giuseppe. And in fact, suspended between his good looks and evil actions, Interlenghi would move on to a lifelong acting career.15 Smordoni, also a street kid from the neighborhood, was cast after Interlenghi and put on trial for a while in order to establish how much visual chemistry he had with his peer. It is, however, by paying attention to the discreet pictorial compositions of De Sica’s images that it is possible to make sense of Bazin’s definition of neorealism as that which only knows “immanence.” Immanence, here, means that depth must come out from what reverberates on the surface and through the actors’ bodies when they are together within the same shot. Thanks to the casting of Shoeshine, ethics and aesthetics intersect in De Sica’s direction of actors. De Sica discovers and develops his characters through his nonprofessional actors’ innate behavior, just as their fictional roles grow out of relational situations rather than clashing physical types. Enough trust or love had to exist between the director and his performers, so that appearance would not be in conflict with immanence – that is, the feeling of a spiritual match between the external and the internal registers. The director’s love had to be reciprocated by his actors, who appreciated his kindness for years after the shooting. It is worth noting that during the shooting, the children stopped attending school, and

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that De Sica encouraged them to play together in whatever free time they had. This carefree approach made them bond even more. Because attraction between the two boys needed to be subtle, it was important to engage two actors who looked far more attractive than the scruffy Little Monkey and  Big Hat, without even worrying who would impersonate whom. This was to avoid caricature or the grotesque potential of a naturalistic approach based on the mere flat transfer of reality. For the surrogate street-family to look believable, the casting required kids whose physical pairing could slip from street brotherhood to family with barely a hint of sensual intimacy. De Sica gives us a medium shot of the boys sleeping together in Bersagliere’s stable, and another medium shot of Giuseppe lying next to Pasquale on a rough mattress as they wonder about their future after the arrest. In a word, De Sica underscores the boys’ familiarity with one another when they are in constricted spaces. Their ease with such physical proximity is a by-product of the crowded, chaotic spaces of daily life in general in post-World War II Italy. De Sica knew this would be the case. Neorealist casting is hardly concerned with naturalistic accuracy; instead, it aims to increase an intuitive grasp of the real under the surface of appearances.

Les 400 Coups During the months of September and October 1958, François Truffaut (1932–1984) published his casting call in France-Soir and then auditioned several hundred children. Jean Domarchi, a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, recommended the son of an assistant scriptwriter, Pierre Léaud, and the actress Jacqueline Pierreux. During the casting interview, Truffaut was struck by the fourteen-year-old’s emotional intensity and his extreme self-confidence, and so he chose Jean-Pierre Léaud over twelve finalists. Clearly, this kid was a nobody who wanted to become a somebody. As soon as Léaud had seen the announcement in the newspaper, he ran away from his boarding school and rushed to Paris half-knowing that this would be “the” turning point in his life. It was the intuition of a calling. Truffaut and Léaud clicked. It was “love at first sight.” The younger the children are, the more they can be the way animals are, in the sense that neither children nor animals are conscious that they exist. Very young children live fully in the present tense, without having yet experienced any sense of becoming in time, or choosing in space.16 Instead of relying on overall pictorial compositions the way De Sica did, Truffaut worked with minutiae and made sure that his child actor would use every part of his body, from the way he sits like a pile of dirty clothes at his school desk to his bent neck suggesting guilt when the teacher grabs him by the collar of his jacket. As an unwanted child, Antoine Doinel is scarcely present to himself, because he does not know what he is: Antoine has no self-awareness, while Léaud is not selfconscious in front of a camera. From pretending to be innocent to pretending to be someone else, an adult instead of a child, a female instead of a male, the step is short.

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Two well-known episodes stand out: Antoine playing with an eyelash curler in front of his mother’s vanity mirror and Antoine trying to help a pretty woman capture her dog in the street until a flirtatious adult male replaces him. Role-switching here fuses itself with play-acting in such a way as to convey the character’s yearning for an ideal yet impossible self. These superficial metamorphoses, however, signal his failure to achieve that sense of self-esteem and responsibility which would lead to real change and maturity. But no child can achieve these two goals without love, and Antoine receives neither care nor affection. The theme of being absent to oneself climaxes when Truffaut turns Léaud/Antoine into a cinephile. We see him sneaking into the dark of the movie theater, a safe environment where he can match his absence from himself with moving images that are, like him, absent presences. Without an authentic life, Antoine finds one at the movies. Truffaut often shrouds his actor’s physical behavior in emotional complexity, as in one long sequence when Antoine sets the dinner table in silence. A well-known devotee of Alfred Hitchcock’s mental image, Truffaut has learnt to turn his framing into a thinking space inclined towards a spectator who is often, but not always, more knowledgeable than the character. In this sequence, and in order to channel the spontaneous plasticity of his nonprofessional performer, Truffaut relied on a charged mise-enscène of objects and on Léaud’s way of handling things in the confined space of the Doinels’ lower-middle-class apartment. After setting the table, Antoine clumsily pushes aside the tablecloth to do his homework. The elongated CinemaScope frame increases the sense of clutter, and it focuses the drama instead of distributing it. Léaud is so self-absorbed in a mindless routine of self-alienation that he performs within this small space and right in front of the filming camera as if he were not even there. He is completely indifferent to what is around him. Nothing about what he does ever matters to anyone – except that, in the eyes of his neglectful parents, everything the child touches is either stolen or filthy. The dirty dishes and cutlery feel contaminated by his presence, like the curtains on which he wipes ink from his hands. Other props convey Antoine’s sense of himself as abject, most memorably the greasy, smelly paper at the bottom of the trash which he disposes of at the bottom of the back stairs. Despite his extreme emphasis on detail for Les 400 Coups, in his direction of acting, Truffaut encouraged Léaud to improvise and so to develop his character from his ordinary way of being. After all, Léaud’s escapades in real life were comparable to Doinel’s behavior. Truffaut filmed in the streets of Paris, where fact could blend with fiction and fiction would adjust to fact. The distance between acting and lying may seem small at first, but sincerity on the screen does not necessarily need to match sincerity in real life. For example, Léaud was a bad student, just like Antoine Doinel. Such a lucky coincidence, however, could have easily turned into a naturalist cliché with no depth later on. It was Truffaut’s attention to the dialectic of behavior and spoken language that ensured complexity, the antithesis of stereotyping through physical appearance. To be sure, one lie after another, Antoine’s spiral of deception reaches a grotesque peak when he tells his teacher that his mother is dead. Instead of informing his performer about his lines at the very last minute to keep the delivery spontaneous,17 for this particular episode, Truffaut told Léaud to think about what he was saying

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ahead of time. All of a sudden, a child’s self-consciousness about lying was useful to make the verbal exchange between the teacher and the pupil look artificial, awkward, yet appropriate, and, of course, memorable. Here the paradox is that the allegedly “spontaneous” child becomes so self-conscious about his acting that his lie comes out as a murderous fantasy against the “bad” mother. Truffaut relies on handwritten, mechanical, and literary languages to underline Antoine’s lack of self-consciousness. As he stands behind the blackboard, Antoine defaces the classroom wall by composing a rhyme to turn his punishment into a selfmocking verse about his own degraded role as a literary author. He can only copy a famous text with his own name in the third person. Here his words come from the alienating point of view of an invisible witness, as if he were already dead. Just like a trace pointing only towards the past, the rhyme written on the wall is an action of defacing that he must literally erase. This means that he has to efface his own name after writing about himself as if he were not there. Later on, at home, unable to embrace a minimum moral standard, he decides to imitate his mother’s handwriting to produce a false note for the school principal. Yet this time he makes the mistake of copying René’s name instead of writing his own on a fresh piece of paper. These small episodes built on gestures of self-denial underline Antoine’s search for self-consciousness and a more personal language for feelings and thoughts. Needless to say, neither the school system nor his family help him in his search: after going to the movies with his parents, he talks by imitating his father’s misogynist remarks about women; and when he is at school, instead of his own sentences filled with lies, the only other sad linguistic alternative is a daily menu of mandatory exercises – repeating foreign words, taking dictation from famous texts, and memorizing poetry. Straight copying or his inability to distinguish between the first and the third person do not lead him out of trouble until he reads Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu (The Search for the Absolute, 1834). This is the story of a chemist who dies before announcing his discovery about the origin of life.18 Such an extreme title seems to offer Antoine the ultimate solution to all his school difficulties. He decides to memorize his favorite Balzac passage and use it during his French assignment. Antoine turns mechanical competence into creative performance, but the teacher declares him a plagiarist. Indicatively, when choosing something valuable to steal, it is a typewriter that comes to mind, a mechanical writing machine. After all, writing something based on his own thoughts and feelings is the “absolute” and unattainable goal that the title of Balzac’s short story spells out: when does a child understand being alive and alone and what is the origin of creativity at the heart of life?

Humans and Insects In Les 400 Coups, Truffaut directs his actors by calibrating stillness and motion, mise-en-scène and chance. Antoine’s challenge is to learn the boundaries between himself and the world around him. As soon as he arrives at the edge of the sea, his

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linear trajectory curves around, thus allowing Truffaut’s zoom to bounce into the close-up of Antoine’s freeze-frame. This ending triggers a series of mutual acknowledgements between actor and character, actor and spectator, actor and director. The freeze-frame puts the boy under glass like an insect, while Antoine’s vulnerable expression defeats Truffaut’s entomological gaze. The relationship between Truffaut and Léaud is not egalitarian, although, from time to time, it becomes dialectical. More than once, high-angle framing and deep focus turn Truffaut’s children into unpredictable insects running inside the urban network. This happens during the hilarious gym class with the kids disappearing behind the teacher’s back. When René takes his friend home, Antoine looks minuscule next to a huge wooden horse which Truffaut frames from above to underline their extreme contrast in scale. During a sequence in an amusement park, Antoine looks like a fly stuck to flypaper inside a spinning rotor where acceleration beats gravity, and exhilaration mixes with pain. He struggles to turn himself upside down, but manages only to reach the fetal position. Suddenly the rows of spectators observing him from above are seen from his point of view, from the inside out, until their faces dissolve, disfigured into a dizzying blur. For once relinquishing his directorial gaze, Truffaut himself joins his young actor inside the rotating drum which, looked at from the outside in, resembles the zoetrope. Why did Truffaut stage this archeology of cinema and place himself right there onstage within it? Inside the rotor he gives up the all-knowing gaze of high-angle shots and occupies the same spatial environment as Léaud, for the sake of the equality of bodies, director and actor alike. The laws of physics make no distinction among hierarchies of living creatures: neither age nor power count. Everything submits to this centrifuge in what amounts to an equalizing scientific experiment with director and actor serving as commensurable organisms. All living beings are as important as insects for the span of a sequence, but unequal power relations are unavoidable in daily life, from the classroom to the family and to the street. This haunting asymmetry between self-conscious and mindless beings, humans and nonhumans, teachers and rebellious animal-like children, reoccurs throughout Truffaut’s work. In Jules et Jim (1962), Jules studies bugs he can fully control because they are dead and stored in little boxes. In L’Enfant sauvage (1970), the pedagogue, Doctor Itard (played by Truffaut himself ), and his object of study, a wolf-child, struggle to develop authority and trust on the part of the adult toward the adolescent, self-respect and affection from the youth towards a fatherly figure. The relationship works better outdoors during long walks. On those occasions, the promise of a twoway encounter benefits from a living space that is both natural and open. Just like freedom, pure love does not exist, or if it does, its reciprocity depends on impurities. In La Chambre verte (1978), the protagonist compares mounds of corpses from World War I to piles of dead insects. Julien Davenne, the protagonist of that film, played by the director himself, is a widower. Obsessively attached to the photographic portrait of his dead wife, he builds a shrine around it. Perhaps it is because he feels guilty, having survived the war, that Davenne believes himself worthy of the present only if he links everything to the dead, who, in turn, become idols of

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perfection. To be sure, he embodies the great divide separating life before and after the First World War, an historical event that marks the end of what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” and the triumph of mass culture. Most importantly, this divide is about the loss of the sacred, the bankruptcy of everlasting values, and the rise of serialization and doubt about origins, roots, and rituals.19 While his wife’s portrait, set inside a forest of glowing candles, never changes, time goes by and Davenne’s health deteriorates. To compensate for a general sense of disappointment in the present and the future, he determines to let himself die an absolute and lonely death of starvation and fever. La Chambre verte is about a man who gives up altogether on life’s imperfections and compromises. From the birth of the rambunctious New Wave cinema in Les 400 Coups, Truffaut lands on the worship of the still photograph in La Chambre verte. Whereas the movie theater was the site of freedom and belief for Antoine, the shrine to the dead in La Chambre verte, with its stained glass windows and votive candles, has become but a crypt. A single faithful worshipper comes to share Davenne’s sterile nostalgia for the past. What happened? The only possible answer is that beginnings are more open than endings. Perhaps death is so difficult because it can only amount to a final balance sheet which cannot be changed later. At best this balance sheet is passed on to another of those still living. The nonhuman nature of temporality haunts Truffaut’s cinema: Antoine Doinel is a child-adult who never becomes an adult, while the child-wolf is an animal-child who skipped childhood altogether, who struggles to become an adult. Is not the fugitive child in the freeze-frame at the end of Les 400 Coups the image hidden inside the photographic portrait of Davenne’s wife? Despite his constant running away, JeanPierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel remains timeless. Thus, when this character reappears again and again – always through Léaud – in L’Amour à vingt ans (1962), Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970), and L’Amour en fuite (1979), the story’s external circumstances change but the actor’s basic screen-persona does not. Did this half-filial, half-brotherly bond with Truffaut enhance or limit Léaud’s career, considering that the nonprofessional child performer became an international star who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jerzy Skolimowsky, and Glauber Rocha? Possibly aware that his attachment to Antoine Doinel had become a bit of an obsession, Truffaut wondered aloud whether he had turned Jean-Pierre Léaud into a puppet: I felt that the cycle as a whole was not successful in making him evolve. The character started out somewhat autobiographical, but over time it drew further and further away from me. I never wanted to give him ambition, for example. I wonder if he’s not too frozen in the end, like a cartoon character. You know Mickey Mouse cannot grow old.20

Léaud aged physically, or externally, inside Truffaut’s cinema, but the director expected his performer to remain a child at heart and preserve an awkward sense of marginality in his acting style. Reflecting recently on Les 400 Coups, Robert Lachenay,

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Truffaut’s best childhood friend and the inspiration for the character of René, compared Léaud’s Antoine with Chaplin’s tramp, Charlot.21 This parallel between the tramp and the street kid is something Truffaut also suggests in his essay “Who is Charlie Chaplin?” where he links children’s energy to sprinting: He was a nine-year-old vagrant hugging the walls of Kensington Road, as he wrote in his memoirs, living “… on the lowest levels of society.” … In his chase films for Keystone, Chaplin runs faster and farther than his music hall colleagues. … In recent years there has been serious study of children who have grown up in isolation, in moral, physical, or material distress.22

These two iconic figures – Charlot and Doinel – are special cases in the history of the cinema because their stardom grew within a serialized saga, which means that their respective fictional characters were intertwined with an episodic permanence, or the paradox of a time that passes but does so without changes. True, Léaud does age as Antoine Doinel, but the child of Les 400 Coups is still alive in his older, wrinkled face. On the other hand, by defying the static view of an icon or myth, Chaplin reinvented his role without ever betraying Charlot, his original character. Taken together, Charlot and Doinel would like to prove that aging happens only on the surface, while their deeper screen-personas or the essence of their innermost being, their souls, in a metaphorical sense, are timeless.23 It is also true, however, that Chaplin’s self-reinvention does not find an adequate match in Léaud’s more predictable character. The latter floats in a sort of impure childhood or charming immaturity. From film to film Truffaut’s direction of acting underlines Léaud’s awkwardness, if not failure, with women, objects, and life in general: from the experience of first love, to marriage, to divorce, and to life alone. According to Bazin, only the present moment counts for Charlot,24 whereas, I would argue, Antoine Doinel, as an adult, is always either too soon or too late. Out of synch with the rest of the world, just like Chaplin, Doinel is creative, witty, intellectual, and sensitive. Yet, in complete contrast to Chaplin, Léaud is never in full control of his roles or in complete charge of his career. An overachiever, Doinel is more vulnerable than the tramp who gets it wrong, but remains invincible. Perhaps the past defeats the future at the very end of Truffaut’s career. But what about the freeze-frame at the end of Les 400 coups, with its epitaph-like impact? Is it about entombment or rebirth? It may be argued that the human face as the privileged portal to the soul is just a Christian trope, but there is no doubt that, in all cultures, language is the gateway to the distinction between Self and Other, reflective thought and moral awareness. It is this kind of verbal consciousness that makes a difference between a human and an insect. So let us contrast the mute timelessness of the last shot of Les 400 coups with the equally famous sequence when Doinel answers the questions of an unseen female psychologist. It is well-known that Léaud completely improvised this one and only intensely verbal sequence in Les 400 coups. In contrast to the rest of the film, here it is language that links freedom to choice, self-consciousness to boundaries, childhood to maturity, and aging to the future. Animals may communicate

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with each other in a nonverbal fashion, but they only understand the instinct to survive,25 whereas whatever makes up the human experience is based on a capacity for language and self-expression, even when the latter enters into self-delusion or the manipulation of others.

The Search for the Absolute And it is for literature that Antoine, the delinquent schoolboy, yearns. During his desperate search for a better language, Antoine’s discovery of Balzac’s The Search for the Absolute signals the child’s need for some theological grounding. Antoine’s trust in the cinema and in Balzac stems from his intuition that there might be something deeper or missing: perhaps not just an identity of his own but also the elusive links across being human, feeling worthy of oneself, and having a soul. In the wake of Antoine’s sprinting all over Paris, the speed of the New Wave influenced Spanish film culture, West African cinema, Cinema Novo in Brazil, and various new waves in Eastern Europe, as well as the later magisterial use of children in Iranian cinema. Equally committed to the use of childhood on screen as a way of reinventing film language and using Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups as inspiration, Victor Erice’s El Espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) structures an entire narrative around a little girl’s point of view; here, Ana Torrent’s innocence mixes with political danger, while the suspense of her accidental discoveries turns into a sense of endless wonder about the mysteries of the world. And so a comparable valuing of interiority, trust, and intuition propels Victor Erice’s analogies between childhood and imagination, cinematic illusion and spirituality in The Spirit of the Beehive. The film elaborates love at first sight between a little girl and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as depicted in James Whale’s eponymous film (1931). In an interview conducted in 2000, the director explained that he first met little Ana at her school. He asked her if she knew who Frankenstein was. “Yes,” Ana answered, “but I never met him in person.” After such a reply, Erice chose her for the role. To this day, he remains in touch with Ana, checking on her from time to time because he worries that performing in his film may have shortened her childhood, in the sense of imposing too much discipline over play.26 During the actual shooting, he felt obliged to give his fictional character Ana’s real name, since the six-year-old was so inexperienced that she felt awkward thinking of herself through two different names. Indeed, as the film concludes, she tries to reconnect with Frankenstein’s spirit by calling out her own name in real life and in Erice’s fiction: “It is me, Ana!” Irrationality and belief coexist with self-consciousness and individuality in her mind. With the window of her room open onto the mysteries of the night, Ana connects with the unknown. Speaking her own name is an assertion not about loneliness or egotism but about the spiritual value of the imagination. Do these nonhuman, animal-like film characters, Antoine and Ana, have souls? Do they acquire souls through the reality of being “natural” child-performers who do not

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impersonate but play themselves inside out on the screen in clear contrast with trained actors developing a role from the outside in? The question of the soul’s existence is more than a Catholic or a spiritual issue; it is an aesthetic and a philosophical one as well, because it has to do with the elusive depth of interiority. After all, cinematic projection is born out of still photographs, which are animated into the complexities of life at twenty-four frames per second. No wonder that, as a result of these deceiving, impure origins, the cinema is populated with creatures that share an ambiguous placement between the real and the imaginary, presence and absence. This is why spirits, ghosts, vampires, and monsters punctuate film history, and in The Spirit of the Beehive, they compete for attention with insects. The latter are the indefatigable bees of Ana’s father, who also resembles an alien being – obliged, as he is, to wear a special suit with gloves, a hood, and a screen in front of his face in order to work around his beehives. In comparison to the bees’ frantic motion and deafening buzz, a surreal slowing down of pace occurs as soon as the traveling projectionist arrives in the deserted and totally silent town square to transform the town hall into a makeshift movie theater. Ana’s very first screening is such an intense experience that an American horror classic becomes an opportunity to befriend a nonhuman being. Played by the huge Boris Karloff, the monster of Frankenstein is a child-murderer and the target of a whole town’s revenge. Erice’s camera probes the darkness of the hall until it rests on the fully lit screen on which the monster meets little Maria by a lake. Like a child, but playing with his lethal hands, he cannot quite distinguish good from evil either. Intrigued by how a plucked flower floats in the water, he unwittingly kills the innocent Maria, thrown into the lake as if she were another blossom. As the screening of the film unfolds, Ana’s father wonders why so much restless work goes on, day after day, inside each honeycomb. His scientific study of insects becomes metaphysical: what is this “spirit of the beehive”? What is the being within tiny creatures, including insects and children, whose endless energy makes them so helpless and so strong at the same time? By raising this question through Ana’s father, perhaps the director was inspired by Truffaut, whose Les 400 Coups was released one year before Erice graduated in filmmaking and involved himself in Spain’s New Wave movement, El Nuevo Cine. Should we hear in the buzzing sound of the father’s beehive the street anarchy of Antoine Doinel, the boy who sprints across Paris but gets nowhere? The power of action and the exhilaration of speed cannot by themselves explain the motivation of laborious insects and of disobedient children. Why go on moving, and why turn the cinema towards animals and children to revel in the hypnotic power of their energy? Much in the story of Ana and Frankenstein’s monster relates to Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, but Erice’s film describes an unsettled, isolated family where the gestures of the mother are melancholic but still nurturing, while the resilience of the father is protective, although severe. Despite this fundamental difference in terms of parental figures, one particular sequence with Ana and her sister, Isabel, seems to derive from Truffaut’s film, because it cites Antoine’s creative behavior with found objects. After one night alone in the street, at dawn, he is so famished that he steals a

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bottle of milk. Eager to be rid of the evidence, he throws the bottle down into the sewage system through a grate at street level. The noise of the glass shattering allows him to experience an unusual range of sounds. In a similar fashion, Ana and Isabel play a special game that involves placing their ears on the iron surface of the railway track. They listen to the rumble of the quickly approaching but invisible train. An acoustic dimension of hidden spaces fills the mise-en-scènes of both films with magic and wonder. Given the word “spirit” in Erice’s title, many details explore the tension between religion and science, humans and animals. For example, a puppet monkey sits next to a Catholic religious image on Ana’s night desk, a lit candle in between. Surrounded by such things, Ana interrogates her sister about the stuff of which the monster might be made: after all, he does seem to have arms and legs like everybody else. By contrast, in Les 400 Coups, Antoine is stripped of human dignity by police procedures of anthropometry, a discipline that expanded during the nineteenth-century in the wake of Darwinism. An object to be catalogued through fingerprints and mug shots, the child becomes as vulnerable as an insect under foot. Who or what should be treated as human? The norm stems from artificial constructs and stratified knowledge that stands in the way of new perceptions. In Ana’s classroom, the teacher invites one student to stand on a stool and place a pair of cardboard eyes on a male silhouette made of movable anatomical components. Perhaps a monster, perhaps a father figure, this image of masculinity is unfinished, and so open to the children’s creative imagination. The movie theater is also a site of imagination in both Les 400 Coups and The Spirit of the Beehive, operating differently in each. Whereas Antoine must sneak into the theater, Ana experiences the cinema much more openly. Truffaut shows the posters and the box office of the movie theater in Antoine’s neighborhood, but he does not film a projected movie; whereas Erice manages to film Ana with a handheld camera from the floor, recording the exact moment when she “meets” the monster for the very first time. Her expression and posture in the theater are different from Antoine’s. Amidst an audience of both old and young spectators, she sits on the edge of her chair, her body leaning towards the screen and her mouth slightly open. By contrast, Antoine is shown alone in an empty theater, his expression disclosing just a hint of awe and guilt towards whatever moves on the screen in front of him. Truffaut allows us no glimpse of the images running on the screen, making the cinema appear more forbidden than fascinating. Antoine imitates the gangsters and the tough guys he has seen on screen whenever he argues with his peers, while Ana aims to become neither the Frankenstein monster nor one of his victims. She simply wants to see him again and again. And the more she wishes to do so, the more she calls for him in her own name. After encountering the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster at the movies, Ana happens upon a wounded soldier inside an abandoned shed. Chased there by the local police, this fugitive may be a fleeing Republican fighter still wandering in the countryside, despite the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. This second encounter is one that occurs in real life with a persecuted, yet dangerous man. It binds her even more to her first fictional friend, the cinematic monster. To be sure, she is convinced that

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this mysterious bleeding man is the “spirit” of the creature who has come back to her. Ana’s fusion of soldier and monster is encapsulated in the silent gesture of her offer of an apple. Erice claims the sacred to be nothing but the power of objects to transfigure themselves into signs of something else. As an object, Ana’s apple is so steeped in her daily life that it becomes unforgettable in its modesty. Traditional symbol of temptation shared by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, here the apple is a simple offer that escalates to the rank of a spiritual gesture.27 For while the conflicting factions and ideologies of the civil war are irrelevant to her, Ana’s offer of an apple is a gift which links one person to another, one spirit to a child. Ana’s belief in the screen spells out the power of children’s imaginations to turn the most stereotypical images – the clichés of the Hollywood horror genre – upside down, and to make us all look at a monster in a desiring way. Through Ana’s eyes, the monster created by Frankenstein becomes a friend worthy of care and respect. This is exactly why André Bazin, in his “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” wrote, “Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.”28 When directed with the care and respect of Truffaut and Erice, children exhibit their natural lack of self-consciousness, ignoring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary to forge new and unexpected bonds of togetherness – just as can happen in photography, the child of the encounter between light and matter. Erice brings us close to an intuition of the sacred through a little girl. Through her, one recognizes one’s own minuscule yet indispensable role in a broad, unknown universe. Far from cosmic fusion, extraterrestrial or out-of body experiences, this sense of profound belonging is also a form of moral responsibility, where self-consciousness may produce self-esteem and reciprocity. These are exactly the qualities of individual and social awareness missing for too long from Antoine Doinel’s life of abuse and neglect. He has no links to anyone or to anything. Perhaps this is why Truffaut underlines Antoine’s self-containment in the photographic ending of Les 400 Coups, where his special isolation refuses the mediocrities of adulthood, but also cuts him off from change and motion. Similarly unique, but with an opposite valence, Ana’s apple in The Spirit of the Beehive constitutes a sacramental gesture of communion. It is telling that in the postwar Italy of Shoeshine, animal locomotion is all that the children can find to let them experience the speed of the modern and the dream of freedom. But freedom comes at a destructive price, for in De Sica’s narrative, it takes a deadly fire during the projection of a film to allow Giuseppe and Pasquale to escape from the prison. A double-edged trope of authority and rebellion, fire erupts from Antoine’s shrine to Balzac, that symbol of the boy’s need for seriousness and depth in a world of superficial compromises. In contrast, for Erice, fire radiates hope. Isabel and Ana keep a box of matches in secret and, in the evening before they fall asleep, they enjoy lighting a candle in their room. The Spirit of the Beehive may have been overseen by a director in a fatherly role, yet even this form of adult power seems weak in comparison to the hopeful warmth projected by his child protagonist. This is

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also why Erice’s film is shot in a cinematography of warm light with golden and nurturing tones, evoking the miracle of the honey produced by thousands of busy and mindless bees.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9 10

Jean Cocteau, cited in Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 19. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 15. Hereafter cited in the text as “Ontology.” André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Gaston Diehl (ed.), Les Problèmes de la peinture (Lyon: Confluences, 1945), pp. 405–411. On Truffaut and Germany Year Zero, see Pasquale Iannone, “Germany Year Zero,” The Senses of Cinema 51 (2009): 1. One of the links between Truffaut and De Sica is the latter’s film I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944), which deals with the impossibility of divorce in Catholic Italy and a child caught between his two alienated parents. In Art and Illusion, second edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 99, Ernst E.H. Gombrich writes, “In the world of the child there is no clear distinction between reality and appearance. He can use the most unlikely tools for the most unlikely purposes – a table upside down for a spaceship, a basin for a crash helmet. For the context of the game it will serve its purpose rather well. The basin does not represent a crash helmet, it is a kind of improvised helmet, and it might even prove useful. There is no rigid division between the phantom and the reality, truth and falsehood, at least not where human purpose and human action come into their own. What we call culture or civilization is based on man’s capacity to be a maker, to invent unexpected uses, and to create artificial substitutes.” Besides neorealist cinema and the New Wave, children’s perception is an important topic in Stan Brakhage’s “From Metaphors on Vision” in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), pp. 120–128, where the American avant-garde filmmaker eulogizes the primitivist fantasy of an “untutored eye.” On Brakhage and how he differs from Bazin’s use of childhood in his “Ontology” essay, see Marjorie Keller, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986). Also worth checking is William C. Wees, “Review of The Untutored Eye,” Film Quarterly 2(3) (1989): 62–63. Notwithstanding the fact that Truffaut’s inspiration for Les 400 Coups is autobiographical, it is important to be aware that a large debate on children was going on in postwar France. The fifties bear witness to Gilbert Cohen-Seat’s filmologie movement, a way of studying cinema open to child psychology and other kinds of scientific approaches. Involved with filmologie, Henri Wallon was a prominent specialist on the child’s perception and juvenile delinquency. Historically, this theater is associated with Grand Guignol which started in Pigalle around 1897 and specialized in naturalistic horror shows or amoral entertainment for the masses. Paul Thomas, “Small Change,” Film Quarterly 30 (3) (Spring 1977): 43.

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11 André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” What is Cinema?, Vol. 2, p. 69. 12 Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” pp. 72–73. On De Sica’s legacy in recent Italian cinema, see Silvia Francesca Caracciolo, “Il Nuovo Documentario Italiano: Il Caso Fabio Caramaschi” (Phd thesis, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, 2009–2010). In her thesis, Caracciolo discusses Caramaschi’s direction of child-actors in Residence Roma, questo albergo non è una casa (2001), Dietro Palla o Dietro Porta (2004), and Solo Andata: Il Viaggio di un Tuareg (2010). 13 Vittorio De Sica, “Gli anni più belli della mia vita,” Tempo, 16(50) (December 16, 1954), pp. 18–22. Excerpt reprinted as “Nella Basilica di San Paolo,” Tutti di De Sica, ed. Orio Caldiron (Rome: Ernesto Carpintieri Editore, 1984), pp. 8–13. For this citation, see p. 11. 14 Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” p. 64. Emphasis added in line two of this quotation. 15 Franco Interlenghi is one of the protagonists in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953). 16 On children and cinema, see Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Ugo Casiraghi and Davide Turconi (eds), L’infanzia nel cinema: bambini e ragazzi sugli schermi del mondo dai Lumières a Ferreri (Ferrara: n.p., 1980); Pol Vandromme, Le Cinéma et l’enfance (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1955); Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and the Cinema (London: Reaktion Press, 2008); Richard Ford, Children in Cinema (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939); Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003). 17 This last-minute method is part of the self-reflexive narrative of Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (1973), a film about making a film. 18 This episode in La Comédie humaine ends with Balthazar Claes dying before declaring the solution to the scientific mystery he had worked on all his life. 19 The loss of the sacred is a theme running throughout Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 20 Truffaut, interview with “Cinéscope,” 1980, on François Truffaut (dir.), Love on the Run (Irvington, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2003), DVD. 21 Robert Lachenay, commentary on François Truffaut (dir.), The 400 Blows (Irvington, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2009), Blu-ray. 22 François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 61. 23 Ivone Margulies, “Bazin’s Exquisite Corpses,” in Dudley Andrew (ed.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 186–199. 24 André Bazin, “An Introduction to the Chaplin Persona,” in What is Cinema? trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 25–35. The second section of this essay is titled “What Makes Charlie Run?” – a question that supports the idea that Chaplin is a precursor of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, always on the run. 25 Akira Mizuta Lippitt, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wild Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 26 “Víctor Erice in Madrid, an interview with the director,” on Victor Erice (dir.), The Spirit of the Beehive (Irvington, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2006), DVD. 27 On the sacramental use of objects in Rossellini’s Open City, see Jonathan David York, “Open Spaces, Liminal Places: The Deployment of the Sacred in Open City,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 10 (3) (Summer 2010): 16–24. 28 André Bazin,“The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” p. 15.

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Jules et Jim … et Walter Benjamin Dudley Andrew

Benjamin’s Ambivalence at the Cinema More and more I return to cinema’s most heady moment, the New Wave, because there, if anywhere, this art stands up as an intermediate form that bridges three centuries, two distinct functions of art, two modes of storytelling, and two very different sets of morals. Unknown to the nineteenth century, perhaps to lose definition in the twenty-first, cinema will forever be recognized as the key cultural phenomenon of the hundred years in between. It is precisely its “in-between” status, most clearly visible during the New Wave, that I hope to characterize, even to celebrate. Walter Benjamin recognized as well as anyone the transitional status of cinema, taking it as the heir of nineteenth-century written narrative and of a vastly expanding industry of popular pictures (cartoons, postcards, and so forth). In the 1930s it was patently the preferred entertainment of the masses, and yet authorities were still in a position to control it – and to control the masses through it. Benjamin’s enthusiasm for cinema was not unlike that of Eric Rohmer’s two decades later: cinema’s rapport with its public appeared so natural and self-regulating, Rohmer would call it “classic.”1 To Benjamin cinema revived the healthy practice of storytelling that had been demoted by two centuries of the novel. Where the latter might be thought to germinate in the alienated brain of a creative genius locked away in the privacy of his or her study and to culminate in the privacy of the reader’s room, storytelling accentuates social literary exchange. Storytellers pride themselves on artistry, technique, agility, and wit, as they pass down cultural experience that has been represented through narrative. In the evolving life of the culture they address, storytellers inflect their tales to make them relevant to current concerns. The story, unlike the novel, is taken to be an ongoing part of social life rather than a gem treasured away in a private or even public library. A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Cinema could be thought to approach this glorified characterization of storytelling if only because of its prolixity and mass appeal. Several thousand films a year find millions of waiting spectators, who keep track of them mainly through their genres and stars, seldom through the names of authors, directors, or other creative forces responsible for them. Those “creative forces” themselves – producers we most often call them – monitor the popularity of their products and let stars and genres fluctuate with taste. Standard tales and current events, often clumsily reworked and entwined, guarantee the perpetuation of the narrative form and presumably contribute to the health of the society that weekly is entertained and instructed through it. This analogy to the storyteller derails, however, when it collides with cinema’s industrial status and with its accompanying class divisions. Where the storyteller comes out of the society addressed, film producers (studio magnates or governmental bureaucrats, as you choose) invariably represent a class and interests at variance with the masses watching their movies. Hence the danger Benjamin forecast of a fascist use of the cinema which is “rendering politics aesthetic.”2 Benjamin stood ambivalent before the cinema because it both represented and failed to represent the authentic culture of the people. He may have been happy that it diminished both the individual creator and the sycophant class of critics kowtowing to artistic genius, which was the legacy of bourgeois art forms like the novel and painting, yet he could never be complacent about the venal producers of popular culture and the vile way they profit financially and ideologically from controlling mass images. Just as the illusion of the movies depends on a shutter that makes the image alternately present and absent, so Benjamin’s essay on the work of art holds out and retracts the value of the technologically produced picture. His hesitation (or is it oscillation?) seems in tune with his personal qualms about his own vocation as a writer and with his public qualms about the vocation of the humanist in modern times. Benjamin was drawn to activities that in effect hold out art and then retract it, activities that stand just to the side of art and make use of it, such as translation, collecting, storytelling, surrealism, criticism, and photography. His famous declaration that the aura of art had been dispersed in the mass culture of capitalism is a self-declaration about the plight of the intellectual since Baudelaire’s day. In fact it is a declaration of the bankruptcy of authority and of authorship in a world that had come off the gold standard in finance and had abandoned Latin and Greek as educational sine-quibus-non. All the same, Benjamin took himself for a genuine author in search of authentic experience in this age, an author committed to precision, analysis, and direction who found himself lost (happily or anxiously) not in the singular aura of the image but in the multiplicity of its attractions, its meanings, and its uses. In front of the cinema, in front of the mass of viewers who felt free to entertain in their own way what passes before them on the screen, Benjamin had to feel rather useless. (As an intellectual himself, he never considered writing films.) He claimed that the masses were experts at the movies and that his own clerical caste had become, therefore, worse than useless in relation to both.3 Writers and intellectuals may have lorded it over images in previous times, but in our century, images are apt to lunge out of every writer’s zone of control.

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The Virulent Modesty of the New Wave I take Jules et Jim (1962) to bring into focus the world and concerns of Walter Benjamin through the period of its setting, through its innumerable cultural references, and through the allegory of its design. The characters of Jules et Jim represent the new type of demoted intellectual whom Benjamin had in mind, who fail – gloriously, no doubt – to capture a life force that continually escapes every zone of control imaginable. This is the crowning film of the New Wave ascendancy, standing as a supremely confident expression of an art form at the height of its ambition. Herein lies the paradox: how can one square Benjamin’s authorless popular cinema with New Wave auteurism? The New Wave after all began as a critical and historical approach to a medium that Benjamin believed had no use for either critics or historians. And yet he would surely have condoned their determination to resuscitate a moribund film culture, restoring to the movies their former naturalness and their concern with contemporary mores. What seems troublesome – and curious – is that the New Wave revolt was carried out in the name of the auteur. This drama is wellknown: under the sign of the author, Cahiers du Cinéma forced open the claustrophobic institutions of literature that held hostage both the cinema and a genuinely popular culture.4 The guerrilla war waged by Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer stands out as a superb spectacle when seen at first light in 1954. The armies take their positions. Decked out in gaudy uniforms, the regnant forces parade cumbersomely in the open. We know they will be picked off by the sniping young critics who have posted themselves strategically about. Traditionally one recounts the legend of this overthrow as the defeat of nobly born metteurs en scène (supported by a phalanx of scriptwriters) at the hands of backwoods partisans of auteurism, who recruited the speed of images flying like arrows from their longbows to penetrate the heavy armor of literature worn by the establishment. Benjamin would surely have supported a revolution aimed at something as patronizing as the cinéma de qualité, but the founding premise of the insurgents, the “auteur policy” that strutted as such a radical idea, he would just as surely have deemed retrograde. The paradox of this “retrograde revolution” lies in the peculiar opposition of “auteur” to “literature.” In fact it is seldom recalled that while the New Wave attacked the establishment for trafficking in literary adaptation, they flew a literary banner of their own. In the devastating coup de grâce of “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” Truffaut aimed the caméra-stylo of Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1950) at the heart of the Aurenche–Bost team which had scripted a version of the same novel a few years before which had not been faithful to the original.5 Truffaut proved incontestably that the sanctity of the vocation of the author and of the mission of art had utterly bypassed standard cinema in passing from Georges Bernanos to Bresson and from literature to a cinema prepared to mature in bringing this novel to the screen. Truffaut called on Bernanos just as Godard called on D.H. Lawrence, Malraux, and Sartre.6 They used their literary heroes to shame the cinema of their day, which

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had traduced these and all great novelists, but equally to protect their rearguard in a quiet defensive war against another, less evident enemy: the disorganized, unaccredited, and unnumbered images beginning to pour out of television screens in France as elsewhere. Their mission was to topple an outdated literary cinema without giving the field over to the uncouth, proliferating common image. Television, supported by an explosion of advertising and press photography, threatened to drown French culture in devalued images, and the New Wave, on the brink of inheriting that culture, grabbed onto well-known authors to buttress their position. When they began to make films, the New Wavers invented stylistic strategies to retard the image entropy they could sense all around them. The famous freeze-frame that ends Les 400 Coups (1959) signifies exactly this anxiety, as Raymond Bellour has pointed out,7 for it attenuates something average, meditating on a picture of a mere moment on a beach. This snapshot of an anonymous boy (a nonprofessional) taken by the open sea sometime late in 1958 was held out to a country tired of studio shots of Gérard Philipe in nineteenth-century costume. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s face, in vérité, ascended to the universal status of the literary. And the character he played, Antoine Doinel, would have approved, for in the solitude of his cramped bedroom he had lit a candle in homage to Balzac. Truffaut raises Doinel’s little life to the stature of Balzac’s in the closing freeze-frame, an icon to which film history has forever after lit its own candle.8 In its adolescent ascendancy the New Wave explicitly promised to free the flow of images that had been log-jammed in the good-taste of the establishment; but as auteurists opposed to the bad taste of an indiscriminant TV culture, they also tacitly promised to direct – that is, take responsibility for – images that were if anything held more precious than ever. The openness of the New Wave to contemporary culture – and to spontaneous modes of seeing – stands in tension with the more classical desire to halt the passage and the passing of images, by attaching them to a worthy and accountable source. Even in this, its quintessential moment of triumph and ambition, the cinema hesitated between an old and a new sensibility, as had Walter Benjamin twenty-five years earlier when he wrote with such ambivalent fascination about this medium. At its outset Jules et Jim hardly seems hesitant, opening as it does in the first years of the century with unfettered expectations. But in the passage from one world war to intimations of another, its characters experience disappointment and dissolution. When Jim tells Catherine near the end, “We thought we could invent love; we thought we were pioneers; but we failed in everything,” he could as well be speaking of the failure of modernity and of the cinema, its mouthpiece. In fact, Truffaut adopts a tone far quieter than either the haughty bravura of the belle époque or the self-pity of the 1930s, a modest tone suitable for what he always took to be a modest art, the cinema as impure purveyor of popular narrative and imagery. The rise of the cinema happily marks the decline of an outdated artistic nobility. Although serious artists have been tempted to employ it for the most recondite of designs (Léger, Man Ray, Duchamp, Cocteau, and others picked up cameras as they might clay or paint), the cinema, tied as it is to photography and the novel, found

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itself congenitally casual. This at least was Truffaut’s view – Truffaut, who at the very time Jules et Jim premiered, and then often thereafter, sniped at the heavy-handed pretentions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy. “See how meaningful I am,” Antonioni’s shots seemed to say to him, “how perfectly and artfully composed.”9 Truffaut championed a swifter, more natural cinematic expression, one that unashamedly appeals to audiences and, in the process, mixes styles without apology. The art of this century, he believed, should not try to substitute for religion, the way the art of the nineteenth century had and the way Antonioni’s up-to-date painterly modernism did in the 1960s; it should be content instead with its intermediate, dilettantish status. After all, as early as 1936 Walter Benjamin had already proclaimed originality to be an illusion, and he had blasted the cult of artistic genius that Antonioni’s interviews would later project. We should wait for no genius today to peer through the heart of things and thereby redeem us, especially in cinema. What, then, of the auteur? Truffaut had spent a decade identifying them: men and women of cinema capable of bringing into momentary focus – for our pleasure more than our instruction – the small human values and issues that circulate around us. Auteurs, he well understood, are the progeny of nineteenth-century novelists. Those novelists today would have been filmmakers, spurning fawning adaptations in their quest to produce representations as swift and sharp as the postwar age, novels so relevant to the sensibility of the times they would have been popular, in just the way the New Wave films were popular. If Truffaut seems occasionally to diminish the scope of cinema, it is only because he had the highest regard for modesty. With this in mind, let me heretically raise Truffaut up over Antonioni and, for the sake of argument, over his cohort of the time, Godard, by lifting the meek Jules above the overreacher Jim.

The Art of Life and the Life of Art Jules et Jim bears the weight of two autobiographies, that of Henri-Pierre Roché (1880–1961), its septuagenarian author (and the Jim of the tale), and that of François Truffaut, the twenty-nine-year-old director who so resembles the timid Jules. The credits and exuberant first section are as full of crazy exploits as was the life of the rambunctious Truffaut at the birth of Cahiers du Cinéma. The pugnacious articles he shot off for that journal, his tender rapport with André and Janine Bazin, his adulation for a hero like Roberto Rossellini for whom he tried to set up numerous projects that never got off the ground … this was a time of infinite hope, a communal hope shared by his compatriots at Cahiers and renewed, daily it seems, at the Cinémathèque Française. That belle époque of cinephilia spilled across 1958, the year Truffaut and Chabrol and Rivette found funding for their first features. But three years later Truffaut sensed himself a professional with duties, many of which were distasteful and thankless. By 1961 he could predict that the cinema would be fickle like the character Catherine, would frequently withhold its favors, or would favor others; yet

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in the manner of Jules he was determined to live with the consequences of his youthful obsession, witnessing the aging of his love, watching the cinema become more willful and cruel as the years passed. Both Truffaut and his character Jules stand in awe of ungoverned energy, whether seen as that of images or of woman. Both fight the temptation to tie down what they know to be valuable only when free. Jeanne Moreau’s character, Catherine, who has the first word, off-screen in the dark, will later emerge in the flesh out of a statue. She will appear and disappear across the film and across three decades, the very image of the fleeting image that words, and particularly writing, can never grasp. The credits effectively reproduce this conundrum, as names are laid across a burst of short scenes, some picturing the characters played by the actors listed, others indicating an infinite reservoir of life from which this tale draws. Jules et Jim conducts us on a journey from exhilarating, unrestricted imaginative energy to the disappointment of rule-bound plot and limited interpretation. Few films dare to so highlight this continuous descent. We are dropped from a dizzying cyclone of shots, governed only by a rapid-fire narration, to a series of quick illustrative clips, and then into the diegetic mode where short scenes elaborate the carefree life of the principals. This tumble of scenes rests for a moment when Catherine is introduced, only to bounce downhill again, kicked by her impulsiveness as the trio cavorts in Paris, abruptly moves to the sea, and more abruptly returns. With cruel irony, Jules thinks to have pinned her down in marriage at the very moment that the Great War breaks out in a barrage of images that fully upsets the plot he had scripted for himself. Jules et Jim then continues its dangerous path downward toward age and death.10 The narrator tells us in a conclusion that restates the perpetual battle between the freedom of the image and the authority of the word that “Catherine had always wanted her ashes thrown in a high wind from the top of a hill … but it was not permitted.” Elemental and volatile, Catherine is associated with fire and water, both of which threaten to consume her in the story (when she leaps into the Seine, and when the flame she sets to old love letters spreads to her dress). In one of the film’s densest images, she pours vitriol – liquid fire – sizzling down a drain. Jules and Truffaut would capture, without domesticating, the elemental power of this woman and the evanescence she, like the image, represents. They continually frame her, then let her go. Imperceptibly at the ends of several scenes, and flagrantly on one occasion, Catherine’s image is frozen into a photographic pose to be held in eye and mind, to be remembered, as though she were being returned to the statue from which she emerged. In the preterite tense of its earnest yet casual narration Jules et Jim adopts the tone of photography, whereby life can be understood on the run when clicked off and admired in its most telling instants. Truffaut has been reproved for accentuating the nostalgia that he and many believe to be congenital to the cinema. He films knowing that nostalgia is a characteristic of the emulsion of celluloid. Although consumed by time and loss, Jules et Jim – the film as well as its title characters – is without morbidity, for loss instigates the soothing arts of preservation. When Catherine jumps in the Seine, Jim, we are told, memorizes the instant, translating

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it the next day into a sketch. The daily experiences of these friends stream effortlessly into Jim’s novel, a novel that Jules gladly translates into German. Jules draws the face of his German lover on a table that Jim then tries to purchase from the café owner. They value the life of their sketches as much as the life they sketch. How apt, then, that their encounter with Catherine should be heralded by that statue on an isle in the Adriatic, and that the visit to the statue should have been provoked at a further artistic remove, in the lantern slide Albert projects for them. Paintings (including thirteen by Picasso11) crop up, as do plays and novels and innumerable tales (a tale about a Chinese king, about a wounded soldier – Apollinaire evidently – about the shape of the earth, about a woman on a ship). When Thérèse recites the litany of her lovers (a litany she plans to publish for the tabloid The European Edition of the Sunday Times Magazine) she illustrates in words what her puffing locomotive figuratively showed us early in the film: the thrill of motion and its utter inconsequence. This travesty of the film’s main theme must be measured against Catherine’s song “Le Tourbillon de la vie” that, dead center in the film, spins like a centrifuge to precipitate meaning out of incessant change. As its earliest critics recognized, Jules et Jim projects a metaphorical argument between the love triangle that rules the plot and the circular patterns of its style. The triangle is wittily figured throughout the film, most memorably in the scene by the beach when, one after the other, Catherine, Jules, and Jim throws open the shutters to collectively greet the glorious dawn in Euclidian form. The complexity and lasting feeling of the film, however, come from the incorporation of these triangular motifs within sweeping camera movements. The fabled lyricism of Jules et Jim flows not only from the movement of characters (on bicycles along a sinuous country road, Jim rolling over and over with Sabine in the grass, Jules and Sabine imitating a horse and cart on the porch) but also from the graceful curve of objects (the café tables Jim hopes to purchase, rocking chairs, fishbowls, oval portraits) and of course from unforgettable dizzying camera spins (twice when Thérèse puffs her cigarette backwards). An elegant figure unites the sharp triangle and forgiving circle: the large hourglass that appears at critical moments, measuring out the lives of characters who would savor every grain of sand that falls, measuring the hundred minutes we have been allotted to share with them all.12 Embraced by the expansive frame of the cinemaScope lens and the generosity of Georges Delerue’s luscious score, the film’s abundant characters, art forms, figures, and events wind down toward death but not toward oblivion. Jules makes sure of that. He survives as the loving witness to the reckless life he shared with Catherine, who went beyond him in extremity, who needed to find out what is “au-delà … ,” and who plunged with Jim from the broken arch of a bridge as Jules, helpless, watched and remembered. In her boundless leap toward the immediate, Catherine stands opposed to Jules, a figure of modesty and mediation, an entomologist tending the species in his pond. Truffaut had the highest estimation for modest, careful observation, raising it to a precept of knowledge, where it sits somewhere between the more agonistic intellectual endeavors of originality (Catherine) and discovery ( Jim).13 More sure of his taste than of his inventiveness, Jules never leaves Catherine once he has glimpsed her

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image. He even compromises his youthful passion just to remain within the penumbra of her florescent sexuality. Keenly affected by all that passes around him, he accepts the most contradictory of situations, then mills them into the language of memory. In the film’s final sequence Jules is released from the burden of his attachment to Catherine. He saunters down the hill from the cemetery seeming light-of-foot, but looking toward a bleak future in Europe. The narrator’s nonchalant voice removes us to an even further point in time, that of the composition of these (seemingly autobiographical) reflections. Because of this distance, and because it pursues its characters across their full adult lives, Jules et Jim legitimately adopts an air of bittersweet wisdom. Would such wisdom have been possible without the Great War that interrupts the zaniness of an utterly spontaneous existence? Undercutting the upbeat adolescence of the belle époque, it also punctuates with cruel irony the consummation of Jules’ pursuit of Catherine. For out of their bed tumbles a flood of violent images, wildly juxtaposed, spread out surreally on the cinemaScope frame, and accompanied by ghastly sounds. Abandoned on the Eastern front, Jules retreats to a corner of a bunker to write. No longer the self-possessed flâneur, he writes now in the face of futility, with no hope that his letters will be delivered, but he writes all the same, like a spider suspended above danger on the threads of the words his pen exudes. Only from the distance of reflection and only in the grace of style can one talk of value and perhaps of wisdom. Ever after Jules will renounce force, tending only to what he has gathered around him, his wife and child, his garden and pond. In this he has been praised for his tolerance but belittled for his meekness … just what is said of Truffaut when the inevitable comparison to Godard crops up. Was Truffaut not too accommodating to his material and too ingratiating to his audience ever to make a movie of the strength of La Chinoise (1967) or Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980)? Look at their manners of treating the material they adapt. Truffaut prefers impure transpositions, an “intermediary form, alternating dialogue and reading out loud, a sort of filmed novel … a cinematographic book rather than the pretext of a literary film.”14 Godard wastes no time on intermediary forms. Inspired by Maupassant in Masculin féminin (1966) or by Shakespeare in King Lear (1987), Godard does not allow these authors to speak recognizably, let alone directly. Truffaut on the other hand genuinely wants us to be acquainted with the narrator of Roché’s Jules et Jim. He wants Roché’s sensibility to seep into his film, enlarging himself in the process.15 He wants to turn his life into a novel composed largely of other novels he has read.16 And if this effort reminds us of a A la recherche du temps perdu, we should note with satisfaction that the character, Jules, is modeled directly on Marcel Proust’s German translator, Franz Hessel.

Adapting Life to Literature and Literature to Film “Translation” and “adaptation,” as cultural practices and as private virtues, admirably suit Truffaut and his projects. They also suit the cinema, a medium Bazin believed oxymoronically to be essentially impure, that is, without essence, the premier

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medium of Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction.17 The author of “The Task of the Translator” would have seen in Truffaut and in the character of Jules some of the passionate diffidence of the flâneur, a name Benjamin resuscitated to describe his  close friend and collaborator, the same Franz Hessel. With evident pride and affection, and surely with a great deal of identification, Benjamin entitled his review of Hessel’s 1928 Spazieren in Berlin, “Le Retour du flâneur.” Long before ever meeting Benjamin, Hessel had been Roché’s unassuming German friend, playing Sancho Panza to Roché’s dashing Don Quixote as the novel and the film would have it.18 Jules’ eyes were “round with wonder and brimming with humor and tenderness,” Roché writes.19 Oskar Werner’s physiognomy as much as his gestures “translate” this personality to the screen. When it came to women, Hessel, we are told, was sincere but maladroit; a Ganymede figure, he served as confidant and consoler more than as wooer. Truffaut shows him most at home in the rustic chalet where he meticulously chronicles the habits of insects. Perhaps such personality traits are prerequisites for translation, where respect and generosity coax the spirit of a text one cares about into the open where others can meet it.20 A translator is first of all a consummate listener, a consoler and a confidant of the original. Hessel was known as one who instinctively recognized genius. He understood Picasso in the early years and he gave Proust to the German-speaking world. But he was most at home with female genius, and his devotion to Helen Grund, the Catherine of the film, was legendary. She came into his life as in the film, just after a trip Hessel and Roché took to Greece where they had indeed been stunned by the smile of an Attic statue. Grund, a student of Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), had heard of Hessel in Germany before she met him at the Dôme café on her first visit to Paris.21 By all accounts she was a very modern woman and passionate to the core. Hessel immediately gave over to her his entire life. In the film, Jules’ absolute allegiance to Catherine undermines his modernity, particularly in comparison to Jim who remains committed to a free, rather off hand existence. Like Hessel, Jules exhibits the regressive traits that Benjamin associated with “the collector.” Where the flâneur maintains a distant, casual, optical relation to the world, the collector is essentially haptic, caressing his acquisitions, never so happy as when surrounded by just them, to the point of suffocation. Jim, sauntering along the Rhine or leaping out a window to freedom, is modern in comparison. With neither the faith nor the ambition to pursue an old-fashioned dream of becoming a novelist, Jim takes up flânerie. “What should I become?” he had queried his old professor, Sorel, after the war. “Un curieux,” he is told. “That’s not an occupation.” “Not yet an occupation,” Sorel replies. “Travel, write, translate … learn to live anywhere. Start right away. The future belongs to the curious.” The future, that is, belongs to the unattached, and to those who will increasingly define themselves by their patterns of consumption. Henri-Pierre Roché, libertine, art dealer, traveler, was content to be forgotten behind all the exciting people he knew in Paris and New York: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Brancusi, as well as Gertrude and Leo Stein. An art student for a time at the Ecole des Beaux Arts at the turn of the century, he was an habitué of  chic cafés, writing his first published essay about one of the first grand cafés,

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“La Closerie des Lilas.” There he met Paul Fort, “le prince des poètes,” and some of the “free women” of the day, who eventually included Beatrice Wood, Helen Grund, Marie Laurencin, and innumerable others. Jules et Jim dramatizes the excitement of a world in the process of erasing borders and leveling values in the interest of free interchange. Roché himself was a diplomat and art dealer, moving around Europe and then to Washington and New York to exchange ideas, trade agreements, paintings, and money. His peripatetic characters translate German, French, and English phrases for each other. They coexist as Catholic, Protestant, and Jew because religion, like everything else since Einstein, has been relativized. Among intellectuals, and particularly among the avant-garde, mobility has outrun the laws that formerly kept it in a controlled arena. One senses this acutely in the realms of art and love, which at the outset of the century escaped the taboos and the hierarchies by which they once were ordered. Sheer color and line now mock the titles attached to paintings by the Fauves and Cubists. And Catherine, Jim sighs, had “wanted to invent love.” They saw themselves as pioneers in a new age. “But pioneers must be humble,” Jim continues, owning up to something he should have learned from Jules. “Let’s face it, we failed in everything.” In the end Jules outlasts the others not only because he is humble but because, despite his vaunted modernity, he adheres to certain absolutes. It is he who stops the merry-go-round of free love by designating a taboo: “Pas celle-là, Jim,” he declares on the landing outside his apartment as they prepare to meet Catherine for a night on the town. Truffaut went so far as to burn this interdiction into the emulsion as a scripted subtitle even in the French version of the film. Catherine – “celle-là” – is declared unexchangeable, irreproducible, absolutely different; she is sheathed in an aura. And because of this she turns those who love her not into moderns but into the servants of her regality. “You speak of her as though she were a queen,” Jim says. Jules responds, “But she is a queen,” one who makes them a gift of her presence from time to time. She will be cruel and faithless while demanding fidelity. Jules gives her his life.

Adoration, Translation Jules’ obeisance before Catherine, like Hessel’s before Proust or Truffaut’s before this novel, amounts to a conflicted response to modernity. Humiliation attends the translator, whose work always comes up less than what it serves. Yet translation may be the name for something rare, something like friendship that, as the narrator says toward the end, happily “hasn’t an equivalent in love,” whose exclusions, obsessions, and self-destruction, the film and Jules finally put to rest. Aptly, the idea of the translator remains a hybrid of the old and the new. A form of artistic reproduction akin to the photograph, translation makes original writing promiscuously available, in a somewhat degraded form. Sentiments and experience are perhaps exchangeable from culture to culture and language to language. The film in fact puts this question up front when Jules asks Jim about the odd gender of certain

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nouns in French and when Catherine translates – with a key embellishment – a passage from Goethe’s Elective Affinities. The translation of books, like the sampling of art and of sexual partners, occurs in a culture of consumption where values come from reception rather than production. Exchanging partners and texts seems free and unproblematic in the modern period, at least until Catherine appears. But when Catherine arrives, the mobile translator surrenders freedom and attaches himself to that which he believes to be beyond him, to the magic of a creative impulse, an image with an aura. Catherine’s absence from the film’s title casts her as imagistic pretext for the literary response to life that the title characters, Jules and Jim, insist upon. Her dramatic suicide plunge testifies to her recognition that what counts is Jules’ watching her selfdestruction, watching and then writing. And if we concur with the order of names in this title (“Jim et Jules, alors?” tries Thérèse upon meeting them. “Mais non, Jules et Jim!”), it is because our century must be concerned with Jules over Jim, with Sancho Panza over Don Quixote, with the modest servants of literary transaction over the romantics who dream of original creation. In our agnostic and fluid century, Jules too becomes an anachronism, since modernity itself remains vulnerable to history. “I wanted my film to mark the end of an epoch,” Truffaut said. “This is the end of people like Jules and Jim, the end of intellectuals. Books are being burned.”22 Catherine, true to her elements, plunges a final time into water and then is consumed by flames in the crematorium. Who can forget in this context the loss of modernism’s great prophet and critic, Walter Benjamin, who killed himself rather than enter an era where his precious library would no longer matter if it survived the pyre. Franz Hessel, it must be mentioned, died the same year, 1940, broken in health from his internment in Les Milles, a camp the French set up for Germans, and then, soon enough, Jews. And so Jules et Jim confounds every hasty definition of the modern. Insofar as Catherine represents image, instinct, and the life force of the unpredictable, she seems to bear within her the ethos of the New Wave, a movement dedicated to countering the old-fashioned literary cinéma de qualité with inventive, robust, and absolutely fresh mise-en-scène. The first reviews of the film defended Catherine as a modern woman, and defended as well the film’s audaciously modern treatment of her. Yet even then the enfant terrible Truffaut confessed about himself that “by temperament I am not modern at all, and am more interested in recovering ideas from the past. I have the impression,” he went on, “that there was a time when cinema was unbelievably vibrant and spontaneous: I run after this, after a lost secret, rather than toward the future.”23 The irony of course is that the medium to which Truffaut devoted himself and in which he searched for that secret came to displace the books that hide the secret.24 All three characters watch their world, a world of writing, go up in flames on a movie screen, and a very special screen it is, that of the Studio des Ursulines, a Mecca since the twenties for avant-garde cinema, the theater where, among other films, Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou premiered in 1928. By 1934 such screens controlled the tempo of culture. Yet today this movie theater, and movie theaters in general, are themselves in

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danger of becoming sites of nostalgia. And so Jules et Jim, precisely by insisting so strongly on the resources of the medium of cinema, may appear quaint rather than audacious, while the image culture that it contributed to has in recent decades drowned it within a deluge of chromatic pixels. Jules et Jim emerged out of a belle époque of French cinema, and many believe Truffaut to have gone into decline afterward. The sedateness of some of his later work, its propriety, seem to long for an exuberance that may have been lost with Catherine. But Jules et Jim had already staged this decline, had predicted the end of the era and possibly the end of cinema. The twenty-nine-year-old director here absorbed the distance of his seventy-four-year-old source, and imagined himself in something like La Chambre verte (1978). Let me close by conjuring up La Chambre verte, by Truffaut’s own admission his most personal work. Once more candles are lit, not to an effigy of Balzac, but this time to “his dead,” to photographs of Maurice Jaubert whose music we hear as we watch, to Henry James, whose stories this film adapts, and to others on whose identity Truffaut necrologists can speculate. This funerary use of photography recalls the first sentence in André Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?: “If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation.” Truffaut felt most at home in this glory age of photography, the age of Henry James, this turn of the century when cinema took wings from both photography and fiction. Through James he understood the end of a sensibility he relished and projected. He was content to be its acolyte, translating, adapting, lighting candles to one way of life while glimpsing a different future already born. He was ready to stake his life on the importance of common servitude to the commonplace. Like Bazin, perhaps like Benjamin, and certainly like Franz Hessel and Jules, Truffaut set the highest ambitions for the commonplace. Amid millennial images all around us that gaudily project the hard edges of the twenty-first century, I have deliberately invoked the timid image of François Truffaut who could think of that future only by thinking of the century past and of the cinema that has conveyed us from one to the other.

Notes This essay originally appeared in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). A few alterations have been made to that version. 1

Eric Rohmer’s first major essay for Cahiers du Cinéma, “Vanité que la peinture,” deals explicitly with cinema’s classicism. It has been translated in the collection of his essays, The Taste for Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 242.

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Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” p. 234. Dudley Andrew, “1954, January: Cahiers du cinéma publishes Francois Truffaut’s vitriolic manifesto against French Cinema,” in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 993–1000. François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 226. See also my entry “1954, January: Cahiers du cinéma publishes Francois Truffaut’s vitriolic manifesto.” See my “Introduction” to Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images (Paris: La Difference, 1990), p. 113. The cover of Alan Williams’ important history of French film carries this shot. See Williams, Republic of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Jean Gruault, Truffaut’s scriptwriter, recalls these snipes at Antonioni vividly in “Le Roman de François Truffaut,” Cahiers du Cinéma’s memorial issue (October 1984). Joseph McBride has linked the dramatic structure of Jules et Jim to that of The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). See his Persistence of Vision (Madison: Wisconsin Film Society Press, 1968), p. 64. Truffaut was utterly attached to this film as Jean Gruault mentions in “Le Secret perdu, ” Le Roman de François Truffaut (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), p. 88. For a list of these paintings, see Martin Lefebvre in this volume, truffaut and his doubles. Many of these formal elements Roger Greenspun pointed out in an outstanding early review of the film that has continued to guide my view of it: Greenspun, “Elective Affinities,” Sight and Sound 32 (2) (Spring 1963): 78–82. In a telling admission, Truffaut said, “Je crois énormement en … la modestie des apparences, même si on doit l’appeler ‘fausse modestie,’ j’aime bien la ‘fausse modestie.’” (“I have enormous belief in … the appearance of modesty, even what one should call ‘false modesty’; I really like ‘false modesty.’”) Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 132. In another place he said, “The filmmakers I like have in common a modesty,” and also, “From the beginning I said right out loud that I was not an innovator,” Cahiers du Cinéma 190 (May 1967) and 316 (October 1980) respectively, translated in Dominique Rabourdin (ed.), Truffaut by Truffaut, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Abrams, 1987), pp. 200–201. Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 128. See François Truffaut, “Henri-Pierre Roché revisité,” in Henri-Pierre Roché, Carnets: les années Jules et Jim (Marseille: André Dimanche, 1990), p. xvi. Cahiers du Cinéma’s necrological issue is aptly titled “Le Roman de François Truffaut” (October 1984). The cover photo shows Truffaut holding a still camera, thus linking in a single image Truffaut, photography, and the novel. André Bazin, “Pour un cinéma impur,” translated as “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” in Bazin, What is Cinema?, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For more details concerning the historical background behind the fictional characters of the novel and film, see “Pierre, Franz, Helen,” in Henre-Pierre Roché, Carnets, pp. xxv– xxxiii. See also Carlton Lake and Linda Ashton (eds), Henri-Pierre Roché: An Introduction, exhibition catalog (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, 1991).

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Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim, trans. Patrick Evans (New York: Avon, 1967), p. 9. Truffaut spoke of his desire not to displease the old friends of Roché who might be able to locate Roché, to feel him in and through the style of the film. Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 132. 21 For an abundance of information on Franz Hessel, see Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999). For a full discussion of the interwined lives and fictions of the characters of the film, see Robert Stam, Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 22 Truffaut, introduction to Jules and Jim, by Henri-Pierre Roché. (New York: Avon, 1967). 23 Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 141. 24 Four years after Jules et Jim Truffaut would pit a remnant of living books (readers) against  a world characterized precisely by TV antennas, the world of Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

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In Jules et Jim (1962), the eponymous characters travel to a sculpture garden on an island in the Adriatic in search of an ancient statue. The men soon find what they are looking for: a carving of a woman with an enigmatic smile. Both Truffaut’s camera and the film revolve around the sculpture, whose image first captivates Jules and Jim when they see it in a slide show at the home of a friend. This sculpture prompts both men to fall in love with a woman because of her resemblance to it, much like the figure in the Botticelli painting that causes Proust’s Swann to become obsessed with the unsuitable Odette. The object of both friends’ passion is Catherine, played by Jeanne Moreau. Like the sculpture, Catherine is one of a kind, exuding an aura that draws people to her while simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length. The sculpture is from another time and another place, and the fascination it holds for the men is inextricably bound up with the temporal and geographical excavation they must perform (or, at least, imagine) in order to access it. A preoccupation with the past, and exoticism, are fused in Jules and Jim’s idolatry of this woman, which is as archeological as it is erotic.

The Frozen Image In their amorous adventures prior to meeting Catherine, the friends display the characteristics of the aficionado, or collector, of women. Jules carries around photos of prize specimens, which he shows to Jim in a café. These women, mounted and framed in photos like the insects in Jules’ display case, are objectified in much the same way as the woman named Denise introduced to Jim in a bar as “the thing” (“la chose”): “a beautiful object” (“un bel objet”). Tapping on her head, the man introducing her A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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announces that “it’s empty inside” (“c’est creux là-dedans”); she is, he says, “pure sex.” (“le sexe à l’état pur”). Catherine, of course, is different: “Not this one, Jim” (“pas celle-là, Jim”), Jules warns, as his words appear redundantly on the screen in white lettering like intertitles that cannot wait for the intervals between scenes, or subtitles that do not translate, but merely repeat. In the next scene, Jules tells Catherine how to pronounce Jim’s name, in an aural equivalent of the reflexive subtitle. Catherine appears to halt the cycle of objectification, being, as Dudley Andrew puts it, “declared unexchangeable, unreproducible, absolutely different: she is sheathed in an aura.”1 Not content with reproductions, the collector will settle for nothing less than a true original. For Walter Benjamin, an aura is “the unique phenomenon of a distance, no matter how close it may be,” and indeed, although she becomes intimate with Jules, Jim, and their mutual friend Albert, even marrying Jules and having a child with him, Catherine nonetheless seems to elude the men’s grasp.2 She is exoticized, forever outside their scope of experience. She may consent to marriage and motherhood, but she is never fully domesticated (literally, brought home). There is always a distance between Catherine and those who try to get close to her. She may dress as a man on occasion, but she represents some eternal feminine essence, just as the slave costumes that Jules and Jim don for a party at the beginning of the film belie their status as members of the leisured classes with the time, money, and cultural capital to write novels and dabble in entomology. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has described the film’s “profound ambivalence” toward women, noting that it “mobilizes the masculine structures of seeing on which the cinema is based.”3 Despite its narrative assertion of Catherine’s absolute difference from other women, the film undermines this point stylistically in the scene in which Catherine’s histrionic facial expressions are captured in freeze-frame. Attempting to attract the men’s attention as they play dominoes during the first vacation the trio take together, Catherine says, “Before meeting the two of you, I never laughed. I  always made faces like this. But now that’s finished. Never again. Now I’m like this.”4 To illustrate her “before” mood, Catherine strikes facial poses that look alternately pensive, anguished, and melancholic, each expression in freeze-frame. To show her “after” state of mind, she looks coquettish, joyful, like a starlet on a photo shoot, like a young Marilyn Monroe standing before the cameras as her skirt billows over an air vent. Catherine announces her poses, framing them with her words, as the subtitle framed Jules’ warning to Jim a few scenes earlier as he cautioned, “Not this one, Jim.” Conversely, Catherine is effectively saying, “this one,” and “that one,” using deictics to indicate her emotional state before and after meeting Jules and Jim. Whereas Jules’ admonition to Jim insisted on preserving Catherine’s aura, Catherine’s commentary-with-clips dissects her aura, at once destroying it and extending it as she captivates the men with her charm, thereby creating new pin-up opportunities for smitten Moreau fans. The film is certainly playing along with Catherine’s own ironic pantomime dissertation on the fetishization of women, but at this and other moments Truffaut’s camera nonetheless lingers lovingly on Moreau’s face without a trace of irony: the freezeframes can also be read from the perspective of the film’s narrator ( Jules from a temporal distance?), who captures key moments that he will later revisit in the

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Figure 23.1

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

museum of his mind. The freeze-frames thus recreate the aura that has been stripped away by the mechanical reproducibility of film itself.5 As Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram point out, “the prolonged and repeated close-ups of Catherine’s face that recur from her first scene and almost to her last, and – more markedly – the freezeframes that immobilize her in time … both share in and draw the spectator’s attention to  the process of male idealization of women.”6 This manner of exhibition exalts Catherine, but it also deadens her. When her expressions are caught in freeze-frame, Catherine is not just fetishized but exoticized, isolated, and put on display like the Adriatic statue that first attracts Jules and Jim’s attention. It is no accident that we learn of her English parentage, and of her job teaching Shakespeare, while she is masquerading as a man: the suggestion is that she performs national identity as she performs gender.7 She wants to be free-floating, drifting between a German and a Frenchman, between Germany and France, finally living on the border between the two. As Andrew observes, “Jules et Jim dramatizes the excitement of a world in the process of erasing borders and leveling values in the interest of free exchange. … [Roché’s] peripatetic characters translate German, French, and English phrases for each other. They coexist as Catholic, Protestant, and Jew because religion, like everything else since Einstein, has been relativized.”8 Even relativity, however, is relative. In order to coexist as equals, people must occupy similar positions in the cultural hierarchy. Catherine is ultimately unable to experience the same sexual freedom as a man, try as she might, because the possibility of “correcting for gender” only exists if women and men are on an equal footing in the first place. Similarly, the exoticized setting with which Catherine is explicitly associated suggests a context of unequal, rather than free, exchange. Although it is important to avoid an oversimplified conflation of issues pertaining to gender and “race,” Jules et Jim does suggest at the very least an analogy between the construction of gender identity and the construction of national identity. When Catherine, Jim, and Jules are walking along the Seine, Jules asks Jim, “Who wrote ‘woman is natural, and therefore abominable’?” To which Jim replies, “It was

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Baudelaire, but he was referring to women from a particular world, and a particular society.” Jules responds, “Not at all; he was talking about women in general.”9 Characteristics that Jim attributes to women of a different milieu, women “from a particular world, and a particular society” – far from “here,” in other words, whether “here” is defined in terms of geographical location or of social class – Jules would ascribe to all women. This alternation between “other” and “all” women suggests a slippage between discourses of sexism and exoticism.10 Catherine’s avatar is first introduced to Jules and Jim, and to viewers, in a slide show with pedagogical overtones, and is thus inflected with an ethnographic veneer. When we first see Catherine herself, shots of her head from the shoulders up (recalling the Adriatic statue, actually a bust) show her straight on and in profile in a series of zooms and jump cuts accompanied by the same documentary-style voice-over, by Michel Subor, that introduced viewers to the statue on the island (this technique also recalls the display, in truncated sections, of the statue in the slide show). All these techniques, combined with the use of freeze-frame later in the film, endow Catherine with a museological quality. The brisk voice-over and the (limited, but striking) use of jump cuts so abrupt as to resemble a collage recall the presentation of statues and artifacts in Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s anticolonial documentary Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), made the same year that Henri-Pierre Roché published the novel on which Truffaut’s film is based. Martine Beugnet has noted the parallels between the Resnais and Marker film’s content and its form, whose disparate shots from a range of sources “highlights the impossibility of adhering to a unilateral perspective – the dogma of progress, development, and the ‘civilizing mission’ – on which are founded the Western world and its expansionist project.”11 Similarly, Truffaut’s use of  freeze-frame, with its attendant undermining of linear temporality, subtly calls into question the discourse of the “march of progress” on which the notion of the primitive (and thus, ultimately, exoticism) is predicated. The fact that the statue that so intrigues Jules and Jim is situated in a sculpture garden may be said to reinforce further the film’s preoccupation with cultural boundaries and the sedimentary layers of history. It is not difficult to imagine Catherine and Jim’s ashes being scattered in this garden, or another like it, such as the one in which the trio are first united. Michel Serres has noted a historical link between gardens and graveyards, produced by the tendency in agrarian cultures to erect “architectural cities on top of necropolises, gardens on top of cemeteries, and sculptures on top of bodies.”12 This succession is reinforced in a later sequence, when Jim revisits the battlefields where he fought in the war. He is shown gazing at a war memorial, an enormous sculpture of soldiers in battle (presented in a series of jump cuts that recall the Adriatic statue and Catherine’s first appearance in the film); this scene is followed by a traveling shot of a military burial ground, and then a shot of Jim walking among the rows of white crosses. Exoticism conflates geographical and temporal distance in what Johannes Fabian calls “allochronism.”13 Allochronized cultures are deemed to be frozen in time, condemned never to change, like statues, standing (literally) immobile on the threshold of modernity. Exoticized images are like funeral masks, preserving not the living but the dead. Serres further observes that statues arise from the

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desire to designate boundaries: “Cadavers become stones or boundary markers, and the latter become statuary. … A garden rises up around its statues, boundaries and roots of its site.”14 Marking boundaries is also, ultimately, the point of exoticism, and gardens are an apt metaphor for the nurturing of the primitive, the cultivation of the uncultivated. The invocation of exoticism in Jules et Jim is a particular feature of the film that is not present in Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel, and it is perhaps for this reason that this aspect of the film has been overlooked by many critics. The voice-over in Jules et Jim announces that the statue is located on an Adriatic island, which is often mistakenly referred to by reviewers of the film as a Greek island, when in fact it would be one of the islands off the Balkan Peninsula (part of what today would be Croatia, Montenegro, or Albania). The persistent mislocation of the island in the film to Greece perhaps stems from the fact that it is a Greek island in the novel, which Truffaut and fellow screenwriter Jean Gruault changed to “an island in the Adriatic.” In the book, Jules and Jim are visiting the Greek isles when their friend Albert, who “knew even more Greek than Jules,” shows them a picture of a statue, “a goddess being abducted by a hero.”15 In Truffaut’s film, the friends first view a slide of the sculpture in Paris, and Albert is not introduced as an aficionado of Greek culture – whereas in the novel, Jules says of Albert, “He’s married to … Hellas.”16 The sculpture is not described as a statue of a goddess, and there is no indication, either visual or narrative, that the other sculptures in Albert’s slideshow might be Greek. The slideshow format, an anachronism in a belle époque-era private apartment that is otherwise very modestly furnished, bestows an atmosphere of ethnographic pedagogy on the proceedings. “That one is more exotic,” Albert enthuses about one sculpture (“Celle-là est plus exotique”). In the novel, Albert merely shows the men his “collection of sketches and photos,” which does not have the same pedagogical connotation.17 Commentators who displace the island to Greece are in fact reinstating the statue to its location in the novel. Although the vague location referred to in the film as “the Adriatic” is situated at the intersection of cultures and religions that includes parts of Italy, Dalmatia, and the former Yugoslavia, it is the Balkans with which it is most strongly identified. The metonymic replacement of “Adriatic” with “Greek” in the critical imagination performs an elision of the Balkans (site, significantly, of the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered World War I), and thus of the orientalist associations linked to the region. According to Maria Todorova, “by the beginning of the twentieth century … Balkanization not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.”18 Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden describe Balkanism as a “variation on the orientalist theme,” noting that “there is little doubt that the Balkans, either Byzantine or Ottoman, represented a cultural and religious ‘Other’ to Europe ‘proper.’”19 The replacement of the Balkans with ancient Greece glosses over assumptions of exotic alterity with the veneer of “our” heritage. Croats/ Yugoslavs are “Eastern European” or “Balkan,” whereas “we” (whoever “we” are) can trace “our” cultural values back to the glorious age of Athenian democracy and

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culture (an identification made possible, Martin Bernal has contended, by suppressing the Afro-Asiatic origins of classical antiquity).20 The statue with which Jules and Jim become enamored is not presented in the film as a statue from classical antiquity; it is not the kind that Brigitte Bardot resembles in Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) or the kind that populates the shopping arcade in the Nantes of Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961); instead, the sculpture that so beguiles the friends is implicitly compared to the exotic trinkets in Gilberte’s room that invoke the belle époque vogue for japonisme and chinoiserie in bourgeois domestic décor and decorative arts. The props and decoration used are all the more significant given the otherwise sparse furnishings in this as in many other New Wave films. This decorative minimalism is attributable both to the rebellion of New Wave filmmakers against the opulent costume dramas that preceded them, and, more practically, to the shoestring budgets with which they were working. The carving of a many-headed figure looming obtrusively above Jim’s head as he writes to Catherine once they have embarked on an affair invites comparison with the Adriatic sculpture. The African/Oceanic bust is polycephalic, a symbol perhaps of Catherine’s fickle nature, but it is also a Janus-like figure facing different eras simultaneously, as the film looks back to the belle époque and forward to both World War II and, implicitly, Algeria.

The Whirlwind of Life The geographical disjuncture performed by exoticism is mirrored in the temporal displacement of the film’s World War I-era setting. The fact that Jules et Jim is a costume drama, combined with the fact that the sound is entirely postsynchronous, imposes a certain sense of belatedness on the viewing experience. Belatedness informs the film in many ways. On a narrative level, it is apparent in the characters’ emotional entanglements, the way that their feelings are not in sync with each other. Catherine almost prides herself on loving, and being loved, at the wrong time. Her love is like displaced affect in a dream, which does not match up with the manifest content. Her words begin the film like an incantation, providing a sense of things to come: “You said ‘I love you,’ I said ‘wait’; I was going to say ‘take me’ when you said ‘Go away’” (Tu m’as dit ‘je t’aime’; je t’ai dit ‘Attends.’ J’allais dire ‘prends-moi’; tu  m’as dit ‘va-t-en’). This haunting, rhythmic refrain, which announces the film’s central emotional conflicts, seems at first to inhabit a dreamlike space outside the diegesis, from which it casts a spell on the film. We eventually “come round” to the words’ meaning in the song Catherine sings much later on, “Le Tourbillon de la vie” (The whirlwind of life), which describes the vicissitudes of an on-again, off-again relationship: We became acquainted, we became reacquainted, We lost sight of each other, then lost each other again, We found each other, then separated, In the whirlwind of life.21

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Like the ancient sculpture with which Jules and Jim become obsessed, Catherine’s opening voice-over seems to come from another time, another place: as a voice-off, it is so far off that there is no apparent space to link it to. Catherine’s voice hangs over the film, seeping into the sounds and images that follow in its wake, infusing them with a profound sense of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwardsness.” Belatedness thus adheres to the film from its earliest moments (making it always already belated), and continues to inform the characters’ relationships throughout. Jim and Catherine miss each other at a rendezvous because of a misunderstanding about the time (see Figure 2.11); we see the café clock counting down the minutes after Catherine was due to meet Jim, and then we see her arrive after Jim has left. Much later, when Jim first sees Catherine after the war, the voice-over informs us that Jim has “the impression that he had arrived at their rendezvous at the café extremely late.”22 Significantly, it is this lack of synchronization that prompts Jim to become aware of his feelings for Catherine – feelings that will not be reciprocated until it is too late. Three years older than Jim, Catherine feels that she is too old for him. When Jim suggests that he and Catherine spend a few months apart from each other, she asks, “Are you suffering? Well, I’m no longer suffering. Because we must not both suffer at the same time. When you stop, I’ll start up again.”23 Because they desire each other at different times, the characters end up mirroring one another’s feelings of unreciprocated longing; Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram deem “the mobility and intermittence of desire [to be] at the heart of the film.”24 When Catherine falls pregnant with Jim’s child, their letters repeatedly cross in the post, always out of step. It is as though the characters are living on different temporal planes. The multiple layers of time traversed by the central characters throughout their emotional vicissitudes are rendered metaphorically in the film’s many allusions to archeology. During their first trip together, to the coast, Jim, Jules, and Catherine pretend to be archeologists searching for a lost civilization. They unearth and pocket discarded objects (cans, cigarettes, broken china) that they find buried in the sand. This is an apt image for a film preoccupied with the return of the past. Jules, Jim, and Catherine are what Agnès Varda might call les glaneurs et la glaneuse, gleaners sifting through the flotsam of another age and making it part of their own; or they might be collectors, whose ambition, according to Benjamin, is to “renew the old world.”25 In A Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin used the combined metaphors of the collector, the archeologist, and the museum curator to describe the workings of memory: [Memory] is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. … The matter itself is merely a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the sober room of our later insights.26

The dead city of the past that Truffaut unearths in Jules et Jim is the belle époque, period of playful abandon in the lives of the film’s central characters and in the

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collective cultural life of the French. The edifice of frivolity comes crashing to the ground as Jules and Catherine decide to settle down together, and war breaks out: it is the end of an era. For the French, World War I was the foundational historical trauma of the twentieth century. Of course, the war was represented in fiction films and in newsreels even as it was unfolding, and certainly long before Truffaut began making films. But the war’s retrospective representation in a film shot in 1961 enacted, by virtue of its belatedness, the very trauma it evoked. World War I is the worldhistorical event that prompted Freud to write his first essays on the pleasure principle and the death drive, both manifestations of the compulsion to repeat. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, begun in 1919 and published in 1920, Freud invokes the belated reactions of shellshock victims to the traumatic events they suffered and witnessed in the war.27 The nature of trauma is that the damaging event does not register until later; in its historical guise, it involves “the deferred recognition of the significance of traumatic series of events in recent history.”28 However, the belated artistic representation of the war in Truffaut’s film, while mimicking the structure of trauma, does not reproduce its effects. This aesthetic repetition would comprise an instantiation of the pleasure principle as Freud describes it: “The artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and yet can be felt by them as highly enjoyable.”29 In a 1966 interview, Truffaut repeatedly invoked the “remove” (“recul”) between the writing of Roché’s autobiographical novel, which was published when its author was seventy-four years old, and the events it depicts, which took place when Roché was a young man. Truffaut acknowledges that the dramatic scenes in which Catherine threatens Jim with a gun and jumps out a window must have been very painful to experience as they were unfolding, but adds that with a distance of fifty years, these same events seemed “marvelous”: “It’s not that he was lying to himself; it’s because of the distance. So the film needed to have just such a distance.”30 The pleasure derived from the artistic representation of traumatic events is also a component of what Dudley Andrew describes as the “soothing arts of preservation” depicted in Jules et Jim.31 While telling Jules and Albert about a soldier who died in the war after writing passionate love letters to a woman he barely knew, Jim mentions “a series of photos that I have of him. If you look at them quickly, it looks like he’s moving.”32 Andrew notes the characters’ many attempts to transform the minutiae of their lives into works of art: Jim’s drawing of Catherine jumping into the Seine and his autobiographical novel; Jules’ translation of Jim’s novel into German and his drawing of a woman’s face on a café table.33 Jules and Jim are acting not only as artists, but also as archeologists of their own lives, at the very least ensuring their place in posterity, and so making the job easier for archeologists of the future. Jules’ insect collection provides a visual analogy of this drive to preserve and display life, which is also apparent in the way the film “fixes” moments through freeze-frame, so that their beauty is preserved for time immemorial, as Bazin writes, “enshrouded in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber.”34

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In a 2000 interview with Serge Toubiana, Jeanne Moreau invoked cinema’s capacity to halt the march of time: “Cinema is truly wonderful, because the way it stops time allows it to cancel out everything, even death.”35 But cinema has the peculiar ability both to stop time, resurrecting the dead, and to make us acutely aware of time’s passage. As if to exemplify this dual function, in the scene where Jim is first reunited with Jules, Catherine, and their small daughter, Sabine, after the war at what is described as their “chalet near the Rhine,” the two men both exclaim that the other has not changed. “So, no one’s changed,” Catherine observes drily, as they enter the house. Raoul Coutard’s camera pans from a shot of the friends through a window across a wall bearing a clock and a painting of a little girl, reminding us of the passage of time and of the birth of Jules and Catherine’s daughter in the intervening years. As the camera sweeps past these objects and comes to rest on the doorway through which the characters enter the house, the exaggerated sound of an aggressively ticking clock suddenly comes out of nowhere, in case we missed the point. The emphasis placed on the (round) clock in this scene also draws our attention to the film’s use of circles as a motif symbolizing history’s cyclical structure – “the whirlwind of life.” Some of the film’s most celebrated scenes revolve around circles: the trio riding bicycles, wheels spinning along a country lane; Thérèse puffing on a cigarette while pretending to be a steam train as the camera circles around her in a 360-degree panning shot, first in Jules’ room, and then in a later scene in a café; the round table on which Jules sketches a Picassoesque drawing of a woman’s face; the Ferris wheel shown immediately after the scene with the statue on the island; and the two symmetrical, wrought-iron, head-size spirals decorating the balcony overlooking Jim’s garden that frame Catherine’s head in close-up when we see her for the first time, and which are mirrored in the ornamentation of the rocking chair in which Jules sits following his most emotional scene with Catherine.

Newsreels: Fiction Meets History On a material level, belatedness manifests itself in the film’s use of newsreel footage of the war immediately following the scene where Jules and Catherine, together in bed, announce their engagement to Jim on the telephone (Figure 23.1). The juxtaposition of eros and thanatos reinforces Freud’s comments about the repetition compulsion, a result of the imbrication of the erotic instinct and the death drive, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Great War was, according to Pierre Sorlin, “the first war to be extensively filmed for huge national audiences.”36 Yet, aside from some notable exceptions (Abel Gance’s 1919 J’Accuse, Raymond Bernard’s 1932 Les Croix de bois, and Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion spring to mind), Sorlin argues that French cinema has, on the whole, been remarkably silent on the subject of the war.37 Even the filming of newsreels, he notes, was an activity in which “France was especially backward,” lagging behind other warring countries by several months.38 The presence of such footage in Truffaut’s film thus marks a somewhat belated

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reappearance of an already belated medium. Moreover, as Annette Insdorf has pointed out, the newsreels belong to a different temporality from the rest of Truffaut’s film: “Documentary footage of World War I which was shot at silent speed is cut into sound speed, resulting in a jerkiness that detaches us by making the war appear ‘unreal’ compared to the ‘reality’ of our story, particularly since the inset conveys how movies looked at the time.”39 The fact that the footage is stretched to cinemaScope ratio (2:25:1) from its 1:33:1 original further distances the viewer from the war images, making them look slightly distorted. The newsreel images that flash across the screen do indeed seem to exist in a world apart from the film, severed from their original context like the “torsos in a collection” about which Benjamin wrote. The war footage is a cinematic intertext that both enriches and complicates the film’s other layers of meaning in much the same way that the literary intertexts do. T. Jefferson Kline has noted the complexity of the relationship between the film’s two principle literary intertexts (apart from Roché’s novel), arguing that one (Goethe’s Elective Affinities) acts as a screen for the other (Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus de l’Ille). In the latter, an evil statue implied to be the double of a young virgin symbolizes the perceived duality of feminine sexuality as both innocent and threatening; in the former text, a man’s homosocial relationship with another man is disrupted by a woman, who replaces that other man in his affections. Kline uncovers a mise en abyme of repression: as Goethe’s text depicts the repression of homoeroticism, the Truffaut film’s privileging of Goethe’s tale, via repeated and explicit reference to it, over Mérimée’s story, represses the theme of doubling (and thus, by implication, homoeroticism). Kline links the conflict or “battle” between the literary intertexts to the film’s use of war footage: “This celluloid footage ‘pasted over’ Truffaut’s ‘own’ film is an exact replica at the plastic level of the intertextual screening of one text (Mérimée) by another (Goethe) – a move itself metaphorized at the level of content by the Franco-German conflict represented in these scenes.”40 It could be added that the film’s use of war footage also acts as a screening device to mask other, fresher wounds. For the general public, newsreel images are substitutes for direct experience of the war, manufacturing what Alison Landsberg has called “prosthetic memories.” The cinema, Landsberg writes, is “a site in which people experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a past that was not actually theirs. In this sense, the cinema … provide[s] the occasion for individual spectators to suture themselves into history.”41 Viewers of Jules et Jim in 1962 and thereafter would experience just such a mimetic encounter with a past that was not their own, and which would be accessible to them only through books, films, and – in an option no longer available, of course – stories told to them by their grandparents. Prosthetic memories, Landsberg elaborates, are “privately felt public memories that develop after an encounter with a mass cultural representation of the past” and which, “like an artificial limb, often mark a trauma.”42 It does not take the multitude of mutilés de guerre who haunted France for decades after the Great War, in person and in the signs urging passengers to make room for them on public transport, to grasp the aptness of Landsberg’s analogy. It is important to note, however, that viewers who experience the phenomenon of  prosthetic memory do not experience the originary trauma as victims but as

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empathetic witnesses. Truffaut’s film may also, therefore, be considered an example of what Dominick Lacapra calls “secondary memory,” which “is the result of critical work on primary memory … typically by an analyst, observer, or secondary witness such as the historian.”43 By incorporating newsreel footage of the war, Truffaut’s film performs the critical work of a secondary witness. The belatedness of the film’s recounting of events would thus amount to a working-through, “which involves interpretation and critical distance,” rather than an acting-out, or “compulsive repetition of the past.”44 Near the end of the film, Jules witnesses Jim and Catherine’s murder–suicide, and we witness his act of witnessing. This witness-as-witnessed structure allegorizes the dynamic of secondary memory. At the same time, the belatedness of the events depicted inevitably invokes the Algerian War. Just as Truffaut was finishing postproduction of his film in 1961, the infamous massacre of October 17 took place, in which up to two hundred war protesters were killed by French police and scores of people were dumped, unconscious, into the Seine. When the film premiered in January of 1962, it would have been hard not to think of those bodies floating in the river while watching the scenes in which Catherine jumps into the Seine and, finally, plunges her car into the river; it would have been difficult not to draw comparisons with the war in which France was then embroiled. With Jules et Jim, the two historical traumas – World War I and the Algerian War – resonate with one another like Baudelairean correspondances. It has often been argued that acknowledgment of the deep wounds caused by the Algerian War was displaced by emphasis transferred to earlier historical traumas. Benjamin Stora, for example, has suggested that France’s “deep involvement with World War II served in part to ‘cover up’ its participation in the Algerian War”;45 Anne Donadey further wonders whether “the emphasis on World War II in French public life … is not due in part to a displacement, a ‘Freudian slip’: what is being silenced (the Algerian War) resurfaces as an excess of speech about a previous war.”46 In Truffaut’s film, World War I, not II, is the site of this displacement, although the film ends as World War II looms, with footage of book burnings in Germany and the stark image of Jim and Catherine’s ashes serving as a graphic harbinger of the death camps. The impending war glimpsed in these images would be a replay, of sorts, of World War I. The structure of return thus established would be repeated, we may infer, in the Algerian War, which, while in no way conflatable with World War II, nonetheless echoes many of its traumatic effects in the French cultural imagination. Through devices such as the use of newsreels, the visual motif of circles, and the narrative emphasis on cycles and belatedness, Jules et Jim hints at the spectral presence of unresolved conflicts that have come back to haunt the French, suggesting that “one war can hide another.” But Truffaut’s film does not just look backward; it, too, has an afterlife. It is also an artifact, an exotic object glinting in the sedimentary layers of film history, waiting to be dusted off and recontextualized for a new era. In 2001, Jules et Jim, or at least a fragment of it, resurfaced in the body of another film. A whole generation of viewers was introduced to Truffaut’s film while watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain as Amélie sits in a cinema watching the scene in which a bug

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appears to crawl into Catherine’s mouth as she and Jim kiss. This errant bug, so symbolic of both Jules’ interest in entomology (and thus a symbol of Jules himself ) and the fly in the ointment that makes Jim and Catherine’s love impossible, would later be excised from digitally remastered versions of the film, just as Jeunet’s film digitally erased graffiti, pollution, and (according to many critics) ethnic diversity from its Parisian locations. Yet despite attempts to subject film to historical cleansing, history finds ways of coming back to haunt. Beyond its enduring popularity in its own right, Jules et Jim maintains a spectral presence in twenty-first-century cinema, as we contemplate it, pace Benjamin, in the sober room of our later insights.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Dudley Andrew for his helpful suggestions, and to the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support during the period in which the ideas for this essay developed.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

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Dudley Andrew, “Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin,” in Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 47. Also, in this volume, Andrew, JULES ET JIM … et walter benjamin. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 222. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Fascination, Friendship, and the ‘Eternal Feminine’, or the (Discursive) Production of Cinematic Desire,” in The French Review 66 (6) (May 1993): 944–945. “Avant de vous connaître tous les deux, je ne riais jamais. Je faisais toujours des têtes comme ça. Mais, c’est fini. Plus jamais ça. Maintenant c’est comme ça.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 72. On gender as performance see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). Andrew, “Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin,” p. 47. “Qui a écrit ‘la femme est naturelle, donc abominable’?”; “C’est Baudelaire, mais il parlait des femmes d’un certain monde, et d’une certaine société”; “Pas du tout; il parlait de la femme en général.” The quotation is actually “La Femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable,” from Charles Baudelaire, Mon Cœur mis à nu (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 677. I make this point in “Cléo’s Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave,” Yale French Studies 118/119 (November 2010), special issue on “Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture,” eds Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman. Martine Beugnet, “Du Film d’art à l’art du film,” in Cinémaction, 122 ( January 2007). The French original: “souligne l’impossibilité d’adhérer à la perspective unilatérale – le dogme

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du progrès, du développement et de ‘mission civilisatrice’ – sur laquelle se fonde le monde occidental et son projet expansionniste.” Michel Serres, Statues: le second livre des fondations (Paris: Editions F. Bourin, 1987), p. 65. In the original French: “les villes architecturales sur les nécropoles, les jardins sur les cimetières, et les œuvres sculpturales sur les corps. ” Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Serres, Statues, p. 75: “Les cadavres se changent en pierres ou bornes et celles-ci en statuaire. … Un jardin s’organise ou naît autour de ses statues, bornes et racines de son site.” Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim, trans. Patrick Evans (New York : Avon Books, 1967), pp  57–58 ; the original French: “savait le grec encore mieux que Jules”; “une déesse enlevée par un héros.” Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules et Jim (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 75. Roché, Jules and Jim p. 57. In the original French, “Sa femme, c’est la Grèce,” Jules et Jim, p. 74. Roché, Jules and Jim, pp. 57–58. In the original French: “collection de croquis et de photos,” Jules et Jim, p. 75. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3. Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” in Slavic Review 51 (1) (Spring 1992): 3. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). “On s’est connus, on s’est reconnus / On s’est perdus de vue, on s’est r’perdus de vue / On s’est retrouvés, on s’est séparés / Dans le tourbillon de la vie.” “l’impression qu’il arrivait au rendez-vous du café avec un gros retard.” “Tu souffres? Et bien moi je ne souffre plus. Parce qu’il ne faut pas souffrir tous les deux à la fois. Quand tu cesseras, moi je m’y mettrai.” Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 75. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” in Illuminations, p. 61. Cited in Carlo Salzani, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 197. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1967), pp. 28–29. Dominick Lacapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 8. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 37. “merveilleux”; “C’est pas qu’il se mentait à lui-même; mais c’est ce recul. Alors le film devait être fait avec ce recul-là.” François Truffaut (dir.), Jules et Jim, DVD extra. Andrew, “Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin,” p. 40. And Andrew, JULES ET JIM … et walter benjamin. “une série de photos que j’ai de lui. En les regardant vite on croit le voir bouger.” Andrew, “Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin,” p. 40. And Andrew, JULES ET JIM …et walter benjamin. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13 (4) (Summer 1960): 8. “C’est vraiment magnifique, le cinéma, parce que ce temps arrêté, ça annule tout, même la mort.” Truffaut (dir.), Jules et Jim, DVD extra.

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Pierre Sorlin, “Cinema and the Memory of the Great War,” in Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 13. Pierre Sorlin, “France: the Silent Memory,” in Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, p. 118 and passim. Sorlin, “France: the Silent Memory,” p. 120. Annette Insdorf, Francois Truffaut, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 87. Original emphasis. T. Jefferson Kline, Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 190. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 14. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, pp. 19–20. Lacapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, pp. 20–21. Lacapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, p. 186. Anne Donadey, “‘Une Certaine Idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (eds), Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 223. Donadey, “‘Une Certaine Idée de la France,’” p. 217.

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

“What was that?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’on entend là?”) This disconcerting phrase from La Peau douce (1964) is exclaimed by a guest of Lachenay during dinner, regarding little Sabine who is not yet asleep, as she hums to herself in her room. Her voice, noticed by this family friend, will serve as the pretext for Lachenay to go and cuddle with his daughter, and then lock himself away in an attempt to phone his mistress; but note that the mother herself does not seem to have heard her child. It is always a question of the mother’s hearing … just as, when, at the end of the film, exiting the elevator door in the lobby of her building, Franca Lachenay sets out to assassinate her husband right as he is attempting to reach her on the telephone, we, the audience, hear – if we are attentive – one last ring of the telephone coming from her apartment. Did she pick up on it? Did she pretend not to hear it? Did she mistake it for a generic telephone ring that was not hers (at the time, unlike today, phone ringtones were standardized and identical)? There is no way to know, and no need for us to decide. In this Truffaut film especially, there are many distinct sounds that we hear clearly and precisely, yet to which the characters seem to pay no attention; must we infer that these sounds tell us their fate – as is often the case when heroes of films seem not to observe their surroundings? The list of mechanical sounds is extensive: many clicks of switches that turn lights on and off (the scene in the hotel room in Lisbon, the flurry of lights in Lachenay’s apartment), the creaking of the hotel door, an electric doorbell on the porch of the building, the ticking of a Norman clock in a provincial restaurant, the tick-tock of an alarm clock, a steam train’s whistle, the churning of the propeller of a plane, a coin being dropped into a payphone, the winding of the film in a camera (another sound that has gone extinct!), the triggering of the display on the pump at the gas station, etc. …

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

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Moreover, in a sequence at the restaurant at the Val d’Isère, we hear a warning sound that is very French and to which no one in the film pays attention: the howling of the public alert sirens when they are tested at noon on the first Wednesday of every month. La Peau douce is distinctive for carefully incorporating a considerable number of visual inserts of objects, mechanical devices, appliances, and so forth: the display of a countdown clock which shows the remaining time for crossing a crosswalk, dials, dashboards, elevator buttons, matchbooks, ticket dispensers … One is tempted to give a psychological significance to this profusion of details: it could reflect the anxiety and agitation of the characters. I am increasingly averse to this way of theorizing the mise-en-scène of cinema as the art of representing the mental through the physical – representing, that is, the invisible, silent interior of the spirit and the heart through the audible and visible exterior of bodies and things. No, cinema is not an art of psychology. Let us limit ourselves to saying that in La Peau douce there is an urban, physico-mechanical world that is very present (nature plays only a small role here: a mournful wind when Desailly runs into Dorléac at the exit of an exercise club) and that this physico-mechanical world exists in a little world of sonic and visual inserts on its own scale, parallel to the story of the main characters. Do not forget that there is a small, well-behaved little girl whose fate is much more heart-rending than that of these pathetic adults, a fate which one might sometimes say is not given any more attention than an insert. (When Mrs Lachenay decides to murder her husband she will not be stopped by the thought of her daughter.) La Peau douce was produced five years after a film that was very high-profile at the time, which was in my opinion as important for Godard as for Truffaut: Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), where the inserts and close-ups of hands, an obligatory subject for this director, are legion and tell us about a world that exists on its own scale. We know the importance of hands in Bressonian cinema. The two pairs of hands that caress each other in the credits of Truffaut’s film let him apply to love a style in the Bressonian manner of filming, but they are also somewhat the equivalent of what a novel might express as “their hands touched,” rather than as “the man touched the woman’s hand.” It is a way of filming – or of speaking – that dispossesses the characters and gives an autonomy to their hands, their organs, their impulses, their acts. Another trait of the Truffaut film – for which this film is very different from Pickpocket – is that the incisive, tense nature of the sequences without music is often contrasted, staggered, by the presence in other scenes of orchestral music by Georges Delerue that is, on the contrary, nostalgic and doleful, the film drawing its tension from its refusal to choose between nostalgia and agitation. Often, sound emerges “all of a sudden” from its opposite, from a kind of passivity. “All of a sudden,” “now”! We must ask what bee has stung the genial man played by Jean Desailly at the beginning of the film to throw him into such a panic at the idea of missing his plane and justify the film – with its piercing music, its breathless montage, its inserts of objects to punctuate the passage of time – mobilizing all its means of dramatization to reinforce the urgency with which this lecturer prepares to take off for Lisbon. Of course, an analyst of the script will say that this delay (caused initially by the premonitory suicide of a man in the metro) was necessary to bring about the

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exceptional situation during which Lachenay meets Nicole, the flight attendant, and falls in love with her: just before takeoff they have to roll the stairs to the plane back just for him because he is tardy, and it is she who personally welcomes him at the entrance of the plane, as if he were the only man in the world. Urgency becomes the face of destiny … The psychoanalyst will say that the film additionally requires, on the part of the flight attendant’s character, at least two Freudian slips in quick succession: in the elevator at the Lisbon hotel, she presses “8” (her floor) before Jean Desailly has pressed the “3,” and thus offers him a “trip to heaven” (“subida al cielo,” as in the title of the 1951 Buñuel film), in harmony with her profession. This is not enough, as she also drops her bags for him to pick up, after which she gives herself over to his admiration, hurrying towards her room under his gaze. Another Freudian slip that precipitates the conclusion comes towards the end of the film, this one committed by Lachenay when he drops a receipt for the photo shop that has developed the compromising negatives. But beyond the need to create the conditions for love at first sight for these characters, under the guise of a temporal experiment, is there not also the question of an inherent feeling of urgency? Would this feeling not arise naturally out of the fear that the elation they engender might disappear? The script of La Peau douce is only a simulation of a fatal spiral, for the tragic enormity of the ending does not follow from the logic of the events themselves but from the premise that the wife, Franca, has a murderer inside her, ever ready to spring into action. Jean-Pierre Richard, the co-screenwriter (who also plays the role of the man who flirts with the wife in the street), relates that the details of this assassination were drawn entirely from a news story. And yet, the news, as we know, often hinges on a character whose seemingly unexpected actions are out of proportion with his motives: an entire family assassinated by a father, broke and mythomaniac, on the verge of being found out; the affair of the Papin sisters (who were the subject of several films); and the case of Violette Nozière, who killed her mother and father for no particular reason, inspiring a work by Claude Chabrol. At the movies, I am occasionally annoyed by the ease with which a certain calculated process operates. It has me contemplate some ordinary man or woman who does nothing but act “normal” or “nearly normal” and then shows them committing the worst imaginable atrocity whose notorious celebrity mocks the banality or  insignificance of what preceded it. One example among a thousand: Gus van Sant’s Elephant. Are we supposed to be distressed to listen to the rote playing of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or to register the chatter of easy-going teenagers because we know that the hopeless pianist is about to assassinate these normal young people? But here in La Peau douce, I am struck instead by the way urgency asserts itself right from the start, and how this urgency finally crystallizes in murder. This is not the only such case for Truffaut: sometimes, in his most charming films (these are not my favorite) he adopts a hasty and dramatic tone for a scene that could just as easily become mere comedic material: thus, in Baisers volés (1968), we have the

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act of adultery in flagrante delicto when Jean-Pierre Léaud is taught detective techniques by Harry Max. An ordinary illegitimate couple is surprised in the bed of a hotel room, and with the help of music and montage (as well as a violent reframing shot) what could have been nothing more than slapstick comedy becomes frightening and almost tragic. The betrayed husband – or wife – could spring into the scene, and we would once again find ourselves confronted with dead bodies in the middle of the film, without feeling any sense of shock. This would be a long way off from the stolen kisses and the turmoil at the back of the shop with the beautiful wife of the shoe salesman, and Doinel would have no choice left but to leave the film. But it seems that Truffaut wanted to protect his Antoine Doinel to the end, to save him from any unhappy fate or excess, even if, several times – at the end, for example – Truffaut causes his protagonist to brush up against the tragedy that he reserves for other characters, for other films. In La Peau douce, when Desailly, who has lost mistress and spouse all at once, and who has not succeeded in reaching his wife, stops hurrying and sits down at his usual table at the Val d’Isère restaurant (identifiable from the mountaineering photos on the wall, the low ceiling, the clientele of regulars), it is his wife who is in a hurry and he who seems liberated, lacking the drive to control time, he who can let go and open his newspaper while waiting for his food, as he would do every day. It is always fascinating to compare Hitchcock and Truffaut, because the latter always admirably understood – and engaged – the former, and yet at the same time Truffaut’s cinema claimed to be, in many respects, the opposite of Hitchcock’s. Indeed there is a great deal of urgency in the films of Truffaut (as is also the case in the works of one of his favorite filmmakers, Max Ophüls) while there is a lot of – how to put it – non-urgency in Hitchcock. Hitchcockian suspense rests, in fact, on the use of many kinds of inertia and resistance: social inertia that requires people to conform to the behavior of a group or a social convention – for instance, compelling a man being pursued by the police to linger at a charity party (Young and Innocent, 1937); the inertia of the ritual of the classical concert (the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956); the inertia of a school class forced to chant a popular song in The Birds (1963) while outside the crows prepare to attack; the inertia of a body paralyzed by a cast like James Stewart in Rear Window (1954); the inertia of concrete reality itself. In the magnificent chase scene near the end of Torn Curtain (1966), the fake bus full of fake passengers in front, which will allow Paul Newman and Julie Andrews to make it back to the West, must avoid going too fast so as not to alarm the East German police (while not letting the real bus overtake them from behind!), and it is up to the audience to be anxious for the characters to come through the predicament, all while the action on screen slows down. In this regard, we have in La Peau douce a long Hitchcockian sequence, with the absurd and interminable soirée in Reims where Desailly falls into the clutches of Daniel Ceccaldi. What is odd about this suspense, when Pierre Lachenay does not succeed in meeting up with Nicole, is that it does not involve a matter of life and death, as in Hitchcock, but of a bourgeois affair, and thus it shows the ridiculous, mediocre,

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and humiliating nature of the implicated characters. It is as if the stretched-out timeframe were a synonym for wear and tear, for submission to the banality of life, for decline in general. In Truffaut, the real world tends to have absolutely no inertia – and this is what prevents me from fully subscribing to many of his films, as I do to most of the works of Lubitsch or Guitry, which I still recognize as being superior. The inertia of the real – which has long been intensified by that of the film equipment (at a time when microphones were not wireless and when cameras were not moved or carried so easily) – is something to which I am particularly sensitive in cinema, whether in action films (taking the form of material obstacles or simply the amount of time required for things to happen) or in films by auteurs such as Andreï Tarkovski, Federico Fellini, Alexandr Sokurov, Jacques Tati, Yashujirô Ozu, Bruno Dumont, Marguerite Duras, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Manoel de Oliveira, films where there are seasons, nightfall, or the first rays of dawn, a smoldering cigarette, a staircase being ascended, people saying goodbye. On the other hand, I am less affected when this inertia seems to be conferred primarily by the mise-en-scène, the fixedness of the camera, and the length of the shots, which seems to me to be the case with Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, Chantal Akerman, and others. In La Peau douce, this inertia, in dialogue with the Truffaldian urgency, is in some way represented by Jean Desailly himself. Here we are dealing with neither a twirling, unstable, agitated, and charming adolescent (I speak of Antoine Doinel, who, like later characters “à la Léaud,” often played these days by Louis Garrel, always got on my nerves, except in Les 400 Coups, 1959) nor yet a compulsive, rapacious, and talkative seducer, like the nervous Charles Denner in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), but instead a forty-something guy with a meek demeanor, for whom the physical world itself is slowing down. Earlier on I mentioned a crucial scene in the film, when an elevator (in which the wife is descending) and a telephone (receiving the call of the husband, which comes “too late” or nearly so) cross paths, and it is the elevator that prevails. In fact it turns out that the elevator and the telephone are perhaps at the origin of the language of cinema. Indeed the telephone, and its predecessor the telegraph, in making possible an immediate interaction from a distance, inspired parallel montage, without which cinema never would have gone very far: we see this in certain short films by Griffith and his contemporaries at the very beginning of the 1910s. At the same time, the elevator/staircase pairing inspired a new link in space-time within the double form of the continuous and the discontinuous. The elevator, which in its electric form had developed considerably since 1889 (its hydraulic version having been crucial to the proposal to build the Eiffel Tower), is indeed inevitably joined to the idea of the staircase, as it represents the “continuous” of that for which the staircase is the “discontinuous.” Wherever there is an elevator, there is necessarily a staircase (the reverse is not true). Meanwhile, the dialectic of the continuous and the discontinuous, of which Zeno of Elea’s aporia on Achilles and the turtle is the ultimate theoretical expression, is at the heart of the language of cinema, with its fascinating tool of montage, a discontinuous cutting intended to create continuities, and capable of prolonging the duration that it cashes in on.

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As for the telephone, it represents the immediate connection of different places, a “montage” from one being to another without the limitation of distance; but the elevator recalls the inertia of the real, without which the magic of montage would be no more than a fruitless spectacle. Indeed, of all the means of locomotion that heroes of cinema might take (perhaps along with the tram and the escalator), it is the one that is best suited to counter their urgency with the unperturbed and impassable regularity of its mechanics. … It is useless to tell an elevator to “get a move on!” Indeed, in my opinion, part of the fascination that fiction cinema provokes exists in the dialogue between that which is possible in the screen, by the screen and on screen (overcoming the limits of space and time, merging the most contrary of dimensional scales) – the world of possibilities that I call the cinematic real – and that which is possible and accessible to the characters themselves, the diegetic real. In this dialogue, the telephone ends up giving the characters, as it gives us in everyday life, limited access to the magic of the cinematic real – while the elevator reminds us that these characters require material time to pass through space and to meet physically, along with the idea of an incompressible time.1 The rushed Pierre Lachenay at the beginning of the film was able to precipitate the course of events with the magic of the telephone, and with a phone number written on a matchbook. … But his fate is written in two elevator rides that nothing can accelerate or slow down: an ascent to the eighth floor with the woman who is taking him with her (and those few non-contractible seconds, that passive time, might be his only taste of the eternity of the perfect moment, of heaven); and a descent, that of the wife, who is holding a shotgun, and who does not want to take (or hear) his call. Translated by Liam Andrew with Madeline Whittle

Note 1

See my article, “Le Gorille et la fourmi,” Trafic 67 (1995), pp. 7–8.

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La Peau douce A Psychogeography of Silky Cinephilia Tom Conley

The wager of the words that follow is that first, the readers and authors of this Companion to François Truffaut are no doubt, as Truffaut himself also was, cinephiles; and second, that Truffaut’s films show us how much cinephilia plays a constitutive role in the psychogeographies of our everyday lives. The chapter will argue that the form and style of his cinema allow viewers to think of the films at once in a restricted measure – as chronicle, narratives, genres in an archive of film history – and, more broadly, as a medium that engages reflection on how we experience the world in which we live. The films inspire us to think of the major and minor events of our lives, indeed, to reflect on where we happen to be, where we think we are “coming from,” and moreover on how, even more, the institution of cinema shapes our relations with the world at large.1 The often circumstantial, personal, autobiographical character of Truffaut’s features invites spectators to consider how cinema fashions perception and experience through what it does with what would otherwise be the passing or even innocuous, repetitive “sequences” or what Henri Lefebvre often called the “constrained time” of everyday life. The points will be essayed through study of a sequence from La Peau douce (1964), a feature that has been appreciated as a first sign of the director’s move away from the heady aesthetic of the New Wave that, at the moment of its production, was felt to be declining. In their informative and inspiring biography, Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana indicate time and again just how much Truffaut was a child of Balzac and Proust.2 Resemblance of the titles of their masterworks says much. The author of Les Illusions perdues, a keystone to La Comédie humaine and a cherished writer for the filmmaker, inspired much of the project of A la recherche du temps perdu. Truffaut may have intuited that time and illusion lost for Balzac’s ill-destined heroes led Proust, by  virtue of his obsessive and even fetishistic relation with writing, to compose a sequel of time and self regained.3 Balzac’s third-person autobiography of Lucien de A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Rubempré, the protagonist of Les Illusions perdues who travels from Tours to Paris to witness the dashing of his dream, became a figure vital to the project of self-discovery that Proust engineered through A la recherche du temps perdu. In most likelihood, Truffaut identified with these two authors whom he assumed to be “psychogeographers” of the milieus in which they lived. For Truffaut cinema added new and other ways to discover and deploy literature in a similar quest. A child growing into World War II and its aftermath, he found untold creative force, de Baecque and Toubiana remind us, in the films that the United States exported to France to colonize the postwar imagination and dominate the international market. Early on and with impish delight he did things other with dominant cinema. He turned it in the direction of the unsettling effects of the literature and films that had shaped him. In moving to and fro from one medium to another, and with self-consciousness of the kind that marked his literary masters, Truffaut too became a psychogeographer.4 In their study the biographers note that from early on and up to his death Truffaut squirreled away all sorts of documents detailing where and how the seventh art was affecting him. Amassing copious correspondence, leaving more copious notes and sketches, Truffaut invited posterity to see how much film and literature shaped the itinerary of his life. For the filmmaker, all these note cards, all these names, all these titles, all these dates were a world populated with figures, writers, filmmakers, movies and memories – whose company helped him to cope with solitude and to flee real life. And so Truffaut never stopped augmenting and enriching his dossiers – intimate journals, love letters, friendly or professional correspondence, clippings, articles, news items, bills, medical prescriptions. He kept everything. And all these archives were carefully arranged in the offices of the Films de Carrosse, his production company, his Bluebeard’s Castle.5

The biographers then add that Truffaut went everywhere in search of the many masters he esteemed, and that all were, as they put it, “autant de pères, de repères possible” (fathers, as much as possible points of reference). Turning persuasively from surrogate fathers to geographical markers, they indicate that he spun a good deal of his life around an absent center, a void he carried in the name-of-the-realfather whom he refused to recognize.6 The protracted relation with an absent paternity, they suggest, slaked his desire to wander and to wonder who or what he was and where he was going.

Cinephilia, 1960 Yet Truffaut’s psychogeography is partially ours: it cannot be countenanced without reflection on cinephilia and on the fact that it belongs to one and all, to the filmmaker and spectator, and that, within the historical scope of Truffaut’s writings and films, it is indebted to a collective passion manifest in France in the 1950s and early 1960s.7

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Truffaut everywhere admitted that he was a cinephile, indeed that the darkened room of the theater during the Occupation (where he saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Le Corbeau thirteen times) was a home of his own. His love of film was born equally of his childhood passion for Romantic and modern French literature. It cannot be far in spirit from Jacques Rancière’s limpid recollection of how it was when American films were flooding the French market. It was a brouillage, a mix of admitted judgments. First off, a mix of places: a singular diagonal drawn between cinemathèques where the memory of an art and the moviehouses of remote places in the city where despised American films were being shown, where in every event cinephiles recognized their treasure in the intensity of a western pursuit, of a bank robbery, or of the smile of a child. Cinephilia tied the cult of art to the democracy of diversions and emotions by challenging the criteria with which film was being admitted into elite culture. It affirmed that the greatness of cinema resided not in the metaphysical elevation of its subjects or the visibility of its visual or plastic effects, but in an imperceptible difference in the manner of putting traditional stories and emotions into images. We called this difference mise en scène without knowing what it meant. Not knowing what we love and why is, they say, passion itself. It is also the path toward a certain wisdom [une certaine sagesse].8

Rancière emphasizes that postwar cinephilia called into question dominant categories of art, especially where modernism had celebrated its devotion to itself in opposition to mercantile (or now, in the hyphenated stenography of commerce, market-based) aestheticization of modern life. In 1960 a sacrosanct modernity – immaculate Proust, faultless Joyce, eternal Eliot, etc. – teeter-tottered when, in the thick of political turmoil and incipient globalization, aesthetic purity became a dubious honor. Cinephiles did not deride great art but returned to “more intimate and more obscure ties between the works of art, the emotion of the story and the discovery of the splendor that the most ordinary spectator could draw from the illuminated screen in a dark room.”9 Included, he notes, were details that had flaked off the films in which they figure: a head leaning out of a window, headlamps in the nights, glasses clinking on the zinc of a bar …10 The emotive flush that came with this experience, and that recurred upon reflection over time, brings the cinephile of the 1960s back to an unassailable contradiction. There may be untold pleasures experienced in viewing commercial American film, as with, for Rancière, Lin McAdam’s hell-bent pursuit of his enemy brother in Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950) or the end of Colorado Territory (Raoul Walsh, 1949) where the camera tracks in on the coupled hands of Wes McQueen and Colorado, whom a sheriff and his posse have tricked and gunned down with sadistic joy; yet these did not jive with consciousness about workers’ struggles against exploitation. Overtly political films of the time failed to satisfy cinephiles who were finding guilty pleasures in postwar Hollywood film: in the same breath they admitted, yes, in its manifold composition film is indeed the seventh art; yes, it is an “ideological apparatus,” a product of industry; yes, because crafted from different media it is  multiple and of nearly infinite variety; and yes, it shunts politics into the field of

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aesthetics. Truffaut’s politique de l’auteur was founded perhaps on a more commonly shared politique de l’amateur. Adds Rancière, The politics of the amateur confirms that cinema belongs to all those who, in one manner or another, have traveled within a system of gaps [écarts] that its name avails and that each of us can be authorized to plot [tracer], between one point or another of this topography, a singular itinerary that enhances cinema as a world and as knowledge.11

The philosopher draws the lines of a psychogeography of cinema that captures the contradictions that the cinephile of the 1960s had experienced but did not have perspective enough to acknowledge.

A New Geography In this respect La Peau douce is symptomatic of a turning point where cinephilia, sentience of space, and political aesthetics are in stir. In their biography, de Baecque and Toubiana distinguish between Truffaut’s first three features, which belong to the “new wave” (1958–1962), and those of the “slow years” (1962–1967). After Jules et Jim (1962) the director “feels isolated,” in solitude, mired in familial crisis (his marriage with Madeleine Morgenstern was nearing an end) and professional difficulties (because of renewed attacks on the New Wave and growing estrangement from longstanding friends). “Truffaut elects to fold more and more into his own universe, which only causes the void about him to deepen.”12 When he begins collaborative work on the adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) Truffaut finds his compass. He conceives the plan for his interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, and at the end of 1962, traveling to Tokyo where he meets Alexandra Stewart, he has a fantasy that will inspire Domicile conjugal (1970). Upon his return he conceives La Peau douce, a definite break from the film of his adolescence, where psychogeography and cinephilia converge. Inventories of Truffaut’s cinema have called this feature a commercial and aesthetic flop. Drawn from a number of clichés and faits divers, the scenario, coauthored with Jean-Louis Richard, was written in the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes after having been inspired by insignificant but vital détails taken from fetishistic reverie: the acoustic image of lovers’ teeth striking each other during a protracted (hence “French”) kiss the adulterous lovers are sharing in a moving taxi; the electric static heard when a woman, wearing silken hose, crossing her legs (be it casually or strategically, no matter), causes two surfaces to slide and rub against one other. The biographers add that in order to “situate La Peau douce in Truffaut’s biofilmography the avenue of the fait divers must be taken as a ruse”13 deviating the viewer from elements of personal facture. The protagonist, Pierre Lachenay ( Jean Desailly), named after Robert Lachenay, a longstanding friend and professional colleague of Truffaut, is a professor specializing in Romantic and modern novels (Balzac and Stendhal); he is editor of a

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journal titled Ratures, a graphic reminder of the New Wave aesthetic that Truffaut championed to put high-minded literature under erasure, or sous rature. The domestic scenes are shot in Truffaut’s split-level apartment on the rue du Conseiller-Collignon. The narrative, the biographers conjecture, doubles Truffaut’s own guilt over his own adultery and many of his “aventures sentimentales,” especially his relations with Liliane David, Marie-France Pisier and Françoise Dorléac, the stunning mannequin and actress to whom the camera is ceaselessly attracted14 and whose “soft skin” inspires the film’s title (see Figure 2.35). A personal network of covert secrets becomes a series of collective names and places available for “redistribution” or, in Rancière’s idiolect, shareable, of aesthetically democratic disposition. Details that strike the cinephile’s fancy may well establish a topography of connections, displacements, and deviations. The events of the narrative never quite take place where they are said to happen, and when they do they seem to be in often recognizably disjoined spaces. Geographical connections are real, much in the mode of Italian neorealism in which features were shot on location, but they seem to belong to an “ordinary” and highly coded cartography of non-places (lieux quelconques) of France in 1963 that are also, albeit mutely, en sourdine, sites rife with film memories. In the exposition that follows Lachenay leaving the subway, ascending the public stairwells of Montmartre, and crossing a street within the confines of a crosswalk, the icon of the passage clouté, equipped with “walk” and “don’t walk” panels that had not existed five years earlier, begs reminiscence of La Règle du jeu ( Jean Renoir, 1939) and A Bout de souffle ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).15 Orly Airport, where two decisive sequences take place, on cursory view a “non-place” par excellence, offers the viewer of 1963 a glimpse on a brave new world of commercial aviation. It returns the film amateur to the image of the grim reaper at the end of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) and especially the sequence of A Bout de souffle in which, in an interview, novelist Parvelescu (played by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville), responding to Patricia Franchini’s question “What is the greatest desire of your life?”, proclaims that it is to “devenir immortel, et puis mourir” (to become immortal and then die).16 The Val d’Isère restaurant, the familiar and welcoming place where Lachenay meets his destiny, brings the viewer to the rue de Berri adjacent to the Champs-Elysées (a locus amoenus in New Wave cinema). But beyond its cultural resonance, the setting allows the viewer to reflect on the character, in his difficult situation, who might wish, like Renoir’s Schumacher, to be elsewhere, perhaps on the snowy Alpine slopes of eastern France shown on the posters that grace the walls of the dining room. Alert or topographically informed spectators (such as Truffaut’s biographers) notice that Nicole’s apartment is on the rue du Télégraphe in the twentieth arrondissement, or that the sequences taken inside of the corridors of the Hôtel de Lisbonne were in reality shot at the famous Lutetia in Paris. Areas that seem off, “là-bas,” out there, indeed the sites that recall what Balzac and Proust described and decried as la province, are those where the lovers are equally out of place. Reims, the city where Lachenay is welcomed to deliver a presentation of Marc Allégret’s film that includes an interview with Gide in his last days, is never identified with its rémois landscape, its great cathedral, or the common fact that over centuries the kings of France were crowned in its choir.17 Yet, because it is the place where

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cinema celebrates the memories of Gide, by stretch of the democratic imagination, it might belong to a stratigraphy of associations. Could it be that an uneasy relation with Marc Allégret, a target of Truffaut’s vitriol in his early essays on cinéma de qualité, is mellowing through recognition of the director via a common admiration for Gide?18 (see Figure 6.1). Would the quotations of the late words of one of the cofounders of the Editions Gallimard be related to a cutaway shot of the medieval battlements of the old city taken from a plane approaching Lisbon early on in the film? The aerial view of the sole and only antique site in the film reminds us (perhaps with allusion, too, to Rossellini’s 1954 Viaggio in Italia) that the world is layered, much like the palimpsests of the early Christian and Moorish eras of which Gide’s Michel, the dubious protagonist of L’Immoraliste, was an expert reader. Would the passing shot signal that an archeology of cinema informs an otherwise classical variant on a liaison dangereuse? A vrai-lieu of the film, what de Baecque and Toubiana call the “most intimate sequences of the film,”19 the first episode with which the shooting began (on October 21, 1963), takes place in a country inn called La Collinière, in reality L’Auberge des Saisons at Vironvay near Louviers (on the outskirts of Rouen) in southern Normandy. A viewer immediately identifies the site with the Château de Solognes, to the southwest, which in La Règle du jeu Renoir called “La Colinière.” There, characters in amorous frenzy (including the domain’s well-named owner, Robert de la Chesnaye, whose name in Renoir’s film is nearly identical to that of Truffaut’s childhood friend Robert Lachenay, and to a character in the first sequence of Feuillade’s Les Vampires, 1915) become trapped or, by way of metaphor, choked to death in collets à lapin (rabbit snares). In La Peau douce the isolated inn becomes the site where, in close-up, the haptic eye of the camera and the protagonist’s hands in close-up touch Nicole’s thighs (ostensibly those of Françoise Dorléac) and remove the silken sheath covering them. Reported to have been executed on location with a team of six technicians,20 the shots, which register with fetishistic delight the silky skin for which much of La Peau douce is remembered, could have been filmed anywhere.21 As much as it deals with the relation of people to places in both real and cinematic realms, La Peau douce crafts its style from the accelerated tempo that marked Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and Jules et Jim. In his press release Truffaut wrote that until this feature he thought with each earlier feature he had been putting a new boat to sea and, during the shooting, navigating the craft between dangerous rocks and shallows, hoping that the planning and shooting would be free of storm and tempest. The painterly metaphor of a vessel at risk of perdition gives way to that of a moving train cutting across the countryside – the conveyance that brings the narrator of Alfred de Vigny’s epic poem “La Maison du berger” to the remote cottage, a “pearl of lyric” that could easily be confused with La Colinière, a mode of transport that “would obtain wonderful, regular, harmonious travel, free of chaos, without switching errors.” Improvisation, the force of Truffaut’s previous invention, would “oil the machinery” and “add a car without either deviating or slowing down the rhythm.”22 In the film, different metaphors, those of the airplane and automobile, replace the train. A geography of changing velocities intervenes, turning “harmonious travel” into disquiet over connections barely made and sorely and, ultimately, mortally

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missed.23 Rapid shifts, swishes, and jump cuts offer staggered montages of movement within a new infrastructure of transport where highways and networks of air travel turn the train, a mode of displacement at the origin of classical cinema, into distant (and, thanks to Truffaut’s press release, present) memory.

The Gas Station In this context the seemingly innocuous sequence in the filling station bears a unique signature drawn from a groundless experience of everyday life. Having admitted that Paris is not where they can meet (it is moche, he says), Lachenay and Nicole are en route to Reims. Shifting gear, the sequence draws attention to a unique psychogeography of cinema. It registers an ineffable moment of “filling up” at a service station, an episode that, outside of film, might qualify for oblivion. Set in a place that film (or,  in his paintings, Edward Hopper) has best valorized because it turns what is inconsequential into something of consequence, the episode is at first sight an  intermezzo, a moment of calm shared among travelers anxious to reach their destination. In this feature it becomes a site where fetishism relates to the broader (and more democratic) experience of film. The couple are on the road. At the wheel (seen in profile), wearing a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses, Lachenay drives ahead while stealing glances at his paramour in her beauty. Having ogled Nicole’s legs in stockings, he prefers not to see them obscured in the snugly fitting blue denim she is wearing. They drive into a gas station to refuel. Compliant with his penchant for admiring her in a skirt, unbeknownst to him, while the attendant services the car, Nicole exits and rushes to the ladies’ room to change clothes. She emerges in stunning grace, and straight away they head off. Along the way, the sight of the poster announcing Lachenay’s presentation (“Avec André Gide”), which immediately preceded the sequence, comes into view adjacent to a directional arrow indicating the road to Reims. Composed of fifty shots that span two minutes and forty-five seconds, the episode appears to be of little narrative consequence, apart from Nicole’s change of clothes which whets Lachenay’s desire to behold her soft skin.24 Averaging a bit more than three seconds each, the shots seem odd in respect to the long takes in similar settings in the neorealist tradition, where the ambiguities and tensions of everyday life had come forward through the effect of empirical time matching that of the duration of the take itself. Here a play of gazes is set in an accelerated and disjointed passage of time. At first glance the ordinary viewer sees homage rendered to Hitchcock because the tension is centered on Lachenay’s gaze. We first see him in profile, driving, wearing a new pair of glasses, eyes glued to the road, turning toward the camera to admire Nicole. The car (in which the camera, after recording the gazes of the two lovers from the front is now aiming forward from the back) bears right and enters a gas station under the marquee signed “AZUR.” Lachenay stops by the pumps, asking the attendant to fill it up (“Le plein, s’il vous plaît, avec super”). While the attendant is pumping gas,

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Lachenay’s eyes wander in distracted anxiety to follow trucks that pass to the right and to the left. Immobile, sitting in the passenger’s seat, seen frontally from across the windshield, Nicole stares blankly. Is she reflecting on the imbroglio in which she finds herself ? Is she anticipating bliss in a sojourn in a regional hotel? Or is she developing a strategy for changing her clothes to please her lover? During the fueling she leans over to grab her valise – displaying for the spectator the sight of a rump that Lachenay would wish to see – and exits the car, quickly strutting to the station. After he notices that his lady has vanished, Lachenay looks about nervously. His brow suddenly unfurrows when he sees Nicole emerging from the toilets, now dressed in an elegant skirt and walking toward the car, which she immediately enters. Reassured, once he has paid the attendant he starts the engine, and they drive away. A dissolve ends the sequence when the car is seen leaving the station mixed with a view of the oncoming bifurcation at whose juncture the poster (now maculated by a graffito that spells “STA”) and the arrow indicating the route to Reims are to be seen. The shots recording Lachenay gazing in nervous disquiet are punctuated by ten extreme close-ups, none of them taken to suggest the point of view of anyone in the sequence. In a loosely alternating montage we see a hand remove the nozzle of the pump hose from its rack on the pump; the hand opens the lid covering the filling pipe, it unscrews the cap, inserts of the nozzle into the tank, and, after filling, gives the nozzle a jiggle and removes it from the hole; the hand screws the cap onto the pipe connection, closes the lid, and returns the nozzle and hose to its rack on the pump. While Lachenay is gazing about the camera records four times, each in extreme close-up, the gasoline counter that goes from the figures of a former sale (fifty francs for forty-eight liters) to blank slots and then a line of zeroes before, three more times, it takes account of the accruing cost and volume of the gasoline being pumped into the car. The cinephile asks what the shots might “mean.” In the vein of Hitchcock, they might be “mental images” that cause a relation to become the object of an image in which perception, action, and affection are reframed and transformed.25 A loosely cross-cut montage makes clear that the couple, en escale, are in an unstated or unconscious relation with two columns of numbers (that run from zero to fifty and from zero to forty-eight). The sequence appears to be meshing an array of gazes from points of view within and outside of the film. At the same time it takes place in a  matrix of cinematic forms that are being laconically and subtly rewritten. The stopover at the gas station initially alludes to the topography of film noir, neorealism, and the road movie. It could be what Rancière calls the necessary lull or pause for reflection in a continuum of action; it could also invite association with the symbolic forms of the same films where speed, fret, and worry over expenditure of energy are on the mental dashboard of characters on the run.26 In this sequence, the erotic pleasure of the close-ups celebrating Nicole’s cool beauty is displaced. And so also is a commonplace to which the film almost alludes in the world of television and publicity. In their advertising campaigns of the early 1960s gasoline conglomerates frequently sold their products by staging an attractive woman at the wheel of a car, alertly entering a gas station, stopping to refuel, where a uniformed attendant, responding to her request, fills her up. He removes his nozzle from the tank as she

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turns around, smiling at him, thanking him for good service rendered (“You expect more from Standard, and you get it”).27 In this sequence the pump calls attention to the gaze. The camera’s obsessive attention to the erasure and then, instantly, to the increase of numbers registered on the pump records in slight differential invites an alternative calculation: Would the initially infinitesimal gap between cost and volume that widens as the numbers mount signal what is happening to the lives of the lovers? Or would the bit-by-bit consumption of a limited surface area of energy, like Raphaël de Valentin’s wild ass’s skin in La Peau de chagrin, be a sign of death deferred? A roadside non-place where Balzac, symbolist poetry, oil, and cinema are mixed becomes the stage for conflict of unresolved emotions.

A Montage of Affect The montage seems to fit in a skein in which cutaway shots (many of the kind first seen in Jules et Jim) accounting for the machinery of the lovers’ affective and physical transport make cinema an implicit element of the narrative. Their iteration, that in Hollywood or practically any other national tradition would be considered superfluous or fastidious, is remarkably effective because they both locate and disperse the metaphors that carry the narrative. The attention drawn to the gas pump, following the close-up of Nicole’s knee adjacent to the two buttons of the analog radio on her side of the dashboard, broadens the scope of the fetish-fantasies – two lovers’ clacking teeth, the electric static of a woman crossing her legs wearing silky nylons – said to be at the origin of the film. The marks are everywhere. Just before Lachenay enters the car to drive away, his upper body is poised next to two one-liter cans of motor oil on the upper edge of the pump that read “Gel.” Are the two cans analogous to the couple on the top of their world? Do they signify that Lachenay and Nicole are in  a  gelid state? If so, what is the viscosity? Is the name of the non-place, “Azur,” reminiscent of what in his poem of the same title Mallarmé gave as that which could never be seen through the windows of his eyes? When a thumb (we cannot tell if it is Lachenay’s or Nicole’s) presses the starter button of the Citroën, is it a departure or merely a shot indicating how it might be pushing our buttons? Could it be the analogue to the fasteners of Nicole’s garter belt that Lachenay fondles and twitches in a blissful crepuscule at La Colinière? Could the erasure of the number from the previous sale on the gas pump, in the startling “ching-ching” sounded when it is turned on, be related to ratures, the name of Lachenay’s publishing firm? Would the effect be tied to the similar rature in the cockpit of the airliner when it arrives at Orly and is turned off, displaying all the needles of the many dials falling back to zero? The variety of answers to these questions makes clear the nature of the indirect discourse in which the spectator is involved, as Truffaut and other adepts of Hitchcock know well, but in an accelerated continuum and in a particular psychogeography of experience in which film, space, and everyday life are mixed. as What happens at the Azur Station appeals to the ordinary spectator and engages une politique de l’amateur,

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mastered so well by Truffaut in this film and others whose narratives are crafted through appeal to cinema and literature. To say that in La Peau douce Truffaut rehearses his relation to Hitchcock, or to argue that the film is indelibly linked to Truffaut’s own situation in 1963, would not do honor to the appeal the film makes to its spectators. The psychogeography that is implied in the film, with or without allusion to Hitchcock, broadens the horizon of its experience, its tempo, and its relation to the time and space of its creation. It builds a psychogeography from cinephilia without relapse into self-consciousness, narcissism, or self-congratulation. Recalling Rancière, we can say that film bears witness to the democratic character of the aesthetic on which modern literature and cinema are based.

Appendix 1

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

15 16 17 18

Shot (MLS) of a poster. Fade-out in black from MLS of man having just affixed a poster announcing Lachenay’s lecture, “Avec André Gide,” on a signboard at a bifurcation to the left of an arrow indicating that road to Reims is to the right. (44:55–45:07) Fade-out in black. (45:07–08) Shot (CU) of Nicole seen from left in passenger’s seat in the car. (45:08–10) Cut to Lachenay (CU), driving, then looking right and glancing down. (45:10–12) Cut to Nicole’s knee (CU) and dashboard displaying radio dials. (45:12–13) Cut to Lachenay (CU) looking (as in shot 4). (45:13–15) Cut to Nicole (as in shot 3). “Pourquoi tu me regardes?” (45:15–17) Cut to Lachenay driving (as in shot 6), remarking that he hasn’t seen her in jeans. (45:17–18) Cut to Nicole’s knee and pan up to her face. “Ça t’ennuie?” (45:18–23) Cut to Lachenay, in profile, driving (as in shot 4). He admits preferring to see her in a dress, asking if she has carried any in her baggage. (45:23–28) Cut to Nicole (as in shot 9), responding, “Oui, bien sûr.” (45:28–30) Cut to Lachenay, driving (as in shot 10). “C’est bon.” He says he must stop for gas. (45:30–34) Cut to Nicole (as in shot 10) looking away and indicating that a station is ahead. (45:34–35) Cut to a two-shot (MCU) from the back seat. It registers the car turning right and entering the Azur filling station. He engages the lower gear and stops. (45:35–36) Cut to Lachenay (MS) exiting car by the gas pumps. He walks forward and asks the attendant to fill it up (“Le plein, en super”). (45:46–54) Cut to a hand (ECU) opening the lid to the gas compartment. (45:54–57) Cut to Nicole (MCU) seen frontally from across the windshield, seemingly lost in thought, staring forward. (45:57–59) Cut to attendant’s hand removing nozzle from gasoline pump. (45:59–46:00)

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19

Cut to the counter display (ECU) on the pump, which obliterates numbers from a previous sale and enters zeroes next to indications of price and volume of gas. (46:00–02) Cut to the hand (ECU) removing the nozzle from the pump and then opening the gas tank. (46:02–05) Cut to the counter (ECU) registering the sale. (46:06–11) Cut to Nicole (MCU), thinking (as in shot 17). She turns and bends over the seat to look for something in the back. Shot ends displaying her rump (in CU). (45:11–18) Cut to Lachenay (MS), seen backside from across the car, looking at the landscape. (46:18–20) Cut to Nicole in car (MS), now observed from Lachenay’s point of view, seeing what was begun to be seen in shot 22. (46:20–26) Cut to Lachenay (as in shot 23), who seems to look outward. (46:26–27) Cut to Nicole (as in shot 24), turning forward and exiting the car, her back side seen in the frame through the car window, as she struts toward the station with an object in her hand. (46:22–38) Cut to the counter (ECU) that reaches thirty-nine francs and thirty-seven liters. (46:38–40) Cut to a pan right (MLS) across the gas pumps that follows a beer truck driving right (toward Reims?). (46:40–44) Cut to Lachenay (MCU), ostensibly watching what we have seen in shot 28, looking right and then turning his head to the left. (46:44–46) Cut to a pan left (as in shot 28) following a semi-truck pulling a long construction pylon. (46:46–48) Cut to Lachenay (MCU), sidelong, looking – or trying to look – at something. (46:45–50) Cut to the counter (as in shot 27) reaching the final figures of the sale: fifty francs and forty-eight liters. (46:50–52) Cut to pump nozzle (ECU) being extracted from the car’s gas tank. (46:53–54) Cut to Lachenay (MCU), hearing the rattle of the pump, lifted from distraction, turning toward the attendant (off ) to acknowledge with his gaze that the tank is filled. (46:54–55) Cut to the attendant’s hand (ECU) setting the nozzle into place on the side of the pump. (46:55–56) Cut to a shot (MS) of the attendant and Lachenay who opens his wallet. (46:57–58) Cut to the attendant’s hand screwing the gas top on to the tank and closing the lid of the compartment. (46:59–47:00) Cut to Lachenay (as in shot 36) extracting franc notes from his wallet while the attendant is closing the lid to the tank. Lachenay peers down into the car. (47:00–02) Cut to a shot of the empty front seat of the Citroën. (47:02–03) Cut to Lachenay (MS) reacting to what he sees (or does not find) while paying the attendant who takes the fifty-franc note. “Voilà!” Lachenay looks back and

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

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45 46 47

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forth nervously in search of Nicole and walks forward while exchanging thanks with the attendant. (47:08–15) Cut to Lachenay (MCU) looking, in search of Nicole, almost at the camera, in the direction of the gas station. (47:15–17) Cut to the left side of the station (LS) where the toilets are located on the side. No one is in view. (47:17–23) Cut to Lachenay (MCU) looking. (47:23–27) Cut to Nicole (MLS), having exited the toilet, turning and walking to the right. The camera pans right to follow her, now dressed in a skirt, as she approaches the car. (47:27–33) Cut to Lachenay (MCU), staring, then smiling, at what we have just seen in shot 44. (47:33–34) Cut to Nicole (MS), strutting forward, the camera panning as she moves into the foreground and opens the passenger’s door of the car. (47:34–39) Cut to Lachenay (MS), seen across the right corner of the front of the car, entering. Behind him on top of the pump sit a pair of liter cans of oil whose labels read “Gel” below the “Azur” emblem. The camera pulls back to register Lachenay entering while, also visible behind the windshield, Nicole smiles. They close the doors of the car in unison. (47:39–43) Cut (jump) to a finger pressing the starter button next to the key inserted and “on.” (47:43–44) Cut (jump) to the car (MLS) exiting the station. The camera pans right as the Citroën drives down the highway past a triangular stop sign. (47:44–53) Dissolve to a shot from the back seat of the car (MLS) driving down the road. Nicole recognizes the poster emerging into view, on which a graffito (“STA”) has been sprayed. “Regarde l’affiche, là!” The car accelerates en route to Reims.

Notes 1

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3

4

Institution is meant here not entirely as an apparatus, a megalith, or a discipline but, rather, as institutio, a formative process, in the early modern reflection, as in “L’Institution des enfans,” Montaigne’s chapter of the on the shaping of children. See his Essais I, xxvi. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard/ Folio, 2005). See especially pp. 16, 49, and 130, where, in pages devoted to his early years, Balzac and Proust are noted in the same breath. Truffaut’s sympathy for those possessed with an imperious need to write is examined in T. Jefferson Kline’s study of L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975) in Unraveling French Cinema: From L’Atalante to Caché (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); it surfaces in La Peau douce (whose title and plot could be a variant on La Peau de chagrin) when Lachenay, in a first intimate conversation, shares with Nicole his admiration for Balzac, whom he recalls having been a typographer in the later 1820s and who soon after declared that he would write “one novel per month.” Psychogeography examines the vagaries of mental mapping and the ways that it pertains to subjectivity. Early studies include Merlin Coverley, Psychogeogaphy (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006) and Howard E. Stain and William E. Niederland (eds), Readings

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in Psychogeography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). Two recent works that attest to the confluence of cinema, autobiography, and mental mapping are Marc Augé’s Casablanca: Movies and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and his recent (and yet untranslated) Une Double Vie (Paris: Editions Payot, 2011). De Baecque and Toubiana, “Avant-propos,” François Truffaut, rev. edn, p. 14 . This passage does not appear in the English translation of the biography published by the University of California Press in 2000, since the avant-propos is not included. See de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 246–247 or in French, François Truffaut, rev. edn, p. 481. Here the biographers reconstruct the discovery of Truffaut’s real father. Further, recall the classroom scene in Les 400 Coups in which the English teacher begs the question – “Where is the father?” – addressed both to the film and to the director’s life. Solitude, which is said to have haunted Truffaut, would be related to a sense of rootlessness. Guy Rosolato has noted that solitude is doubly bound as torture (supplice) and serenity (sérénité) when a subject’s desire carries “an acceptance of a relation with the unknown (relation d’inconnu), which can be composed of both an “unknown known” and an “unknown unknown,” in La Portée du désir ou la psychanalyse même (Paris: PUF, 1996), pp. 105 and 112; and also, throughout La Relation d’inconnu (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). The title and historical frame of Antoine de Baecque’s La Cinéphilie: invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1945–1968 (Paris: Fayard, 2003) are telling. Cinephilia is born with the end of World War II, and its creative drive owes to invention, the film-events that critics, spectators, and filmmakers crafted from what befell them. It includes the teacher of French cinema, too, whose implicit mission is to impart cinephilia in the confines of the classroom. Jacques Rancière’s remark applies as much to the filmmaker as the spectator, in Les Ecarts du cinéma (Paris: Editions La Fabrique, 2011), p. 8. (Here and elsewhere all translations from the French are mine.) The reader of these lines wonders if “a certain wisdom” is what Rancière sets in counterpart to Truffaut’s famous anathema (of 1954) of a certain tendency of classical (hence pre-modern, because Truffaut revived the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) French cinema. Rancière, Les Ecarts du cinéma, p. 9. These words chime with those of Jean-Louis Schefer in L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1982), an intensely personal reflection on the ways that the war and its aftermath drew children and adolescents into the inner worlds of cinema. His “ordinary man” or practitioner of the cinema of everyday life became, notes Raymond Bellour, a model for critics of the same generation, in Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009), p. 16. Rancière, Les Ecarts du cinéma, p. 13. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 371. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 396. De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 397. In La Règle du jeu Octave tells Christine that her aviator friend André Jurieu is a man of such volatile passion that when he is in the air he is at one with himself but that on the ground he would be unable to get from one side of a crosswalk to another. At the end of A Bout de souffle Michel Poiccard collapses and dies within the perimeter of a passage clouté at the intersection of the rue Campagne-Première and the Boulevard Raspail. Parvulescu’s response to Patricia’s (Jean Seberg’s) question – that he “wanted to become immortal and then to die” – bears posthumously on Truffaut, who left a legacy of documents

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for his biographers to collect and interpret. This treasure trove for the reconstruction of the director’s life and work indicates that perhaps Truffaut, author of the original treatment of A Bout de souffle, wanted “mourir, et puis devenir immortel.” 17 The biographers report that the Reims episode was shot at Suresnes (on the periphery of Paris) and that the hotel where Nicole and Lachenay are briefly lodged was at the Hôtel Michelet at the Place de l’Odéon in the sixth arrondissement (de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 401). That in the film Reims is not Reims betrays Truffaut’s penchant for celebrating the locations of France and their history in his earlier cinema, especially Les Mistons and Les 400 Coups, a point I take up in Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 18 The biographers note a change of heart in 1974 when, in preparing Les Films de ma vie, a collection of his writings of the 1950s, Truffaut decides to put aside his polemical items aimed against Delannoy, Autant-Lara, Clément, and Allégret (de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 616). A first softening is felt in the “Avec André Gide” sequence of La Peau douce. 19 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 400. 20 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 400. 21 The close-up, taken in a moment when the narrative leads the lovers to momentary bliss and pastoral calm, further situates Truffaut in a broader context in which fetishism figures in the affective topography of the film. After first noticing Nicole while in transit to Lisbon, Pierre is drawn to her feet when she changes her shoes behind the curtain separating the first-class cabin from that of the crew. In the hotel in the Lisbon sequence, a long tracking shot in a corridor, following Pierre as he returns to his room, catches sight of dozens of shoes that clients have set outside of their doors in order to have them polished. The shot implies (but never insists) that Pierre finds himself subject to a force of attraction. At the same time, its psychogeography brings the viewer back to the celebrated sequence in La Règle du jeu in which the guests at La Colinière wake up to discover that their shoes have not been polished. 22 Quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut (rev. edn), p. 400. 23 Maximilian Le Cain’s elegant study of connections that are barely made and ultimately missed in La Peau douce locates the tension of the film in its displacements. His attention is drawn to Truffaut’s “mapping of the narrative onto movement in space and to a “duel between desire and subjective experience of space.” See “Love in Flight: Truffaut’s La  Peau Douce,” Senses of Cinema 33 (2004): 1–7, http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/ feature-articles/la_peau_douce-2/ (accessed October 28, 2012). Here the muted presence of cinematic memories, less immediately obvious than in Truffaut’s earlier work, is  especially unsettling because the nature of their relation with the film itself can be appreciated in any variety of ways. 24 See the appendix. In the Fox Lorber “World Classic” DVD, the sequence begins from a fade-out (45:07–45:08) from a shot of a man affixing a poster to a panel at an intersection where an arrow pointing to the right indicates the way to Reims on Route N31. The forty-nine shots that follow, all marked by straight cuts, run from 45:08 to 47:53, when a dissolve overlays a shot of the car driving away from the gas station onto a track, taken in the car itself, as it approaches the intersection where the poster comes into view. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 202. Deleuze notes that each term – say, the gas counter – refers to other terms in “a customary series such that each can be ‘interpreted’ by the others.” They are “marks” that fit in a network but that can be autonomous and by being so “unmark” the

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meaning. “It is thus very important that the terms be entirely ordinary so that any one of them can first of all be detached from the series” (emphasis added). They cannot be called symbols, like the handcuffs in The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935), but they can be close to them. Together, adds Deleuze, they constitute the two signs of the mental image that is indeed a “relation-image,” an image that allows us to discover relations that refer to a function of clairvoyance (p. 205). The details recording the fueling can be appreciated as “marks” insofar as they are of weak or moderate symbolic potential. 26 In Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001) on Anthony Mann, esp. p. 84. 27 In a brilliant variant in Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942), when downed flyers Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, and Arthur Kennedy, racing across the Netherlands to evade Raymond Massey and a phalanx of Nazis, come to a halt, they jump out of the car to check the tank. Reagan sticks a long branch into the tube and discovers that it is dry. To which Flynn quips, “This is the first time I’ve run out of gas with a bunch of guys in the car!”

26

La Peau douce François Truffaut’s Passionate Object Hilary Radner

Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana describe François Truffaut’s La Peau douce (1964) as an “extremely personal film.”1 Yet, it seems less closely associated with the director than the series beginning with Les 400 Coups (1959) that focuses on the life of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, clearly standing in for Truffaut himself ).2 This chapter explores why La Peau douce, the fourth feature film in his career, comes under the rubric of “un film personnel,” as defined by Francis Vanoye.3 Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of creativity, I aim to demonstrate that for Truffaut, cinema was a “passionate object,” serving, on the one hand, to sustain a set of constraining obsessions, while, on the other, providing a space for the development of “the unconscious freedom necessary for creative living.”4 The importance of La Peau douce lies in the way that it demonstrates why cinema by its nature, that is, in its dispositif,5 served as this “passionate object” for Truffaut; the film is a beautiful illumination of the way his entire corpus constitutes a “cinema of the self,” a uniquely personal enterprise that allowed him to elaborate an idiom that defined his being as such.

Revising the Romantic Melodrama Described by Robert Stam as following “the schema” of “the classic wife-plus-lover on the side,” the narrative of La Peau douce seems lifted directly from sensationalized newspaper stories of the day.6 Truffaut, indeed, points to two as particularly important sources, the first described as “the famous ‘Jacound affair’ in Geneva,” the second, “Nicole Gérard’s shooting of her husband in a restaurant in the Rue de la Huchette.”7 Pierre Lachenay (played by Jean Desailly), middle-aged, successful, married, and something of an intellectual celebrity, is temporarily infatuated with a young woman, Nicole A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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(Françoise Dorléac), a glamorous if flighty airline attendant. Pierre realizes his mistake and decides that he wishes to return to his wife, Franca (Nelly Benedetti). Before he has the opportunity for reconciliation, Franca, overcome by rage and a sense of betrayal, kills him, firing at him point blank with a shotgun as he sits at his midday meal. Only the flight attendant escapes the deadly consequence of Pierre’s ephemeral passion. He dies; his wife, facing life imprisonment, has committed a kind of virtual suicide. Their young daughter, Sabine (Sabine Haudepin), abandoned, is condemned to travel the difficult path towards adulthood alone, without the support of her two parents. With its focus on the costs associated with passionate love, the film echoes the canonical romantic melodrama or tragedy, hearkening back to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra but also to the tradition, even more pointedly, of nineteenth-century Verismo opera, emphasizing “realism” and the depiction of ordinary (as opposed to aristocratic) individuals. At the time of its release, Bosley Crowther, influential critic of the New York Times, dismissed the film as a setback for the young director who, after his initial promise, appeared to have resorted to the cinematic clichés he had so vehemently condemned only a few years earlier.8 Crowther compared the film to the melodramas of classical Hollywood: “It has all the old familiar set-ups of domestic serenity in conflict with secret assignations that eventually explode in pain and shame, all of the old romantic concepts of the spontaneity of a back-street love, and all the old implications of relentless morality.”9 Yet, unlike the traditional romance, the film does not encourage the viewer to understand passionate love as meaningful or noble. While the heroines of Fannie Hurst’s novels, as adapted by John Stahl or later Robert Stevenson, to which Crowther refers in his review, find a raison d’être in their beloveds’ attentions, the lovers in La Peau douce are not worthy of what John Donne termed “canonization,” in the title of his famous poem. The couple does not portray that exemplary passion, in which the lovers can “die by it, if not live by love.”10 The romantic melodrama glorifies the couple whose union transcends time and place; in La Peau douce, as Anne Gillain points out, the protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, “remains, from the beginning to the end, alone.”11 Importantly, Pierre is unable to express his feelings for Nicole except through a telegram, which he never sends.12 Later in the film, she questions him about why he cannot say the words, “I love you”: nicole: pierre: nicole: pierre: nicole: pierre:

Pierre, you love me? Yes Why do you never say it to me? [silence] Because you are not the type, to say those things? Is that why? Yes, that’s it precisely.”13

Searching for an explanation, Nicole suggests that perhaps he is not the “type” (we assume she means the sort of man who would declare his love) and he agrees – by his own admission, Pierre is not the stuff of a romantic hero, who affirms his lover through the magnificence of his passion. And, yet, the viewer has seen him write

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those very words, marking out their importance by addressing Nicole formally – “Je  vous aime.” – “I love you.”14 He reads these lines to himself (with the viewer listening to his mind’s inner voice) as the music swells, in a telegram that he never sends. His “love” can only find expression in her absence, in his solitude, in writing as the representation of an emotion rather than the emotion itself. His actual exchanges with Nicole present themselves as nothing more than a few brief episodes in a furtive and sordid affair; their one night and day together is spent at a chic country resort seemingly populated by adulterous husbands accompanied by their lascivious mistresses, clad in nearly identical blouses of leopard skin patterning. Nicole comments knowingly on their fellow diners and what she perceives to be their concupiscent natures, heightening the aura of illicit sexual complicity that envelopes the couple. Franca, as the wife, claims legitimacy in an attempt to authorize her emotions (she, not he, is the one betrayed); however, in the end, she fares no better. The film does not invite the viewer to see Franca’s fate as the consequence of a great, if uncontrollable, love. Her attachment to her husband plays itself out as a sign of her psychological instability, manifested in abrupt mood swings in which she is alternately angry and submissive. She seduces him in an attempt to win him back, only to turn on him in anger when, while availing himself of her sexually, he remains firm in his resolve to separate from her. Franca offers him a painting by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita that he had given her, an object of monetary and aesthetic value, which they both cherish, in a vain attempt to retain him at her side. The painting, a possession that is personally meaningful to the couple but also exemplifies their safe “bourgeois” taste, becomes a premise whereby each member performs a gesture of goodwill – in which Franca and Pierre pantomime a drama of unselfishness that barely dissimulates the essential narcissism that motivates each – Pierre’s desire to leave the presence of his wife as quickly as possible at any cost, and her equally powerful wish to retain him at her side regardless of his feelings for her. With her husband’s departure, Franca collapses onto the bed, the scene of their recent sexual intimacies, in despair, but a despair that requires a sleeping pill, that of a hysterical and overly emotional ordinary woman. Her pain is not inspired by a grand and tragic passion but by a need to possess her husband in a world in which art, objects, and a marriage to a successful man serve to confirm her position as a member of a particular class. The soundtrack, however, suggests another story. The music crescendos in lush mellifluous tones as Franca turns away from the door that she has just slammed behind her departing husband, recalling the romantic melodramas of classical Hollywood. Indeed, Crowther describes the film’s music as “in the spirit” of the 1941 Back Street with Charles Boyer.15 To the left of the frame, a photograph depicts the couple in happier days, a hunting rifle or shotgun slung over Franca’s shoulder, an ominous proleptic symbol of the tragedy to come.16 As she continues in one vertiginous camera movement back to the bed, the scene of her husband’s ultimate act of bad faith, a clock begins to tick loudly. The film cuts quickly to Pierre in a shop surrounded by clocks. Unperturbed, calm, and collected, he looks briefly across the way to a sign that advertises luxury apartments under construction. He puts on his glasses to peer more clearly, envisioning a new life to come with his mistress; we come to understand this when he later visits this site with her. Though the film returns to

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Figure 26.1 Photofest).

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

Franca, the clock, or metronome, continues ticking away, evoking the passage of time that will lead to the inevitable fate that awaits the couple as doomed figures in a romantic drama. In this moment, the film encourages the viewer to be moved by Franca’s pathos, standing in stark contrast to Pierre’s indifference. Truffaut commented: “What interests me the most is the character of the betrayed wife: she is always made the unattractive character; here she is portrayed in the most anti-conventional way possible; she is the equivalent of Jules in Jules and Jim.”17 Franca remains, nonetheless, a complex figure, who is only momentarily sympathetic, and at other times frightening and repellant, but never the typically passive and thinly described “wife” who serves as the impediment to true love in films such as Back Street. “Franca” as a name operates in symmetry with “Frank,” the name of the pilot with whom Nicole had had an affair before meeting Pierre. In each case, the rejected lover appears more attractive, more appropriate, and more passionate than the poorly matched Nicole and Pierre. Each, Franca and Frank, however, are also marked by a kind of violence: Frank almost rapes Nicole, while Franca slaps her husband, verbally abuses a man who attempts to pick her up, and finally murders Pierre (Figure 26.1).

A Critique of Middle-class Domesticity The profound ambivalence that the film evinces towards the romantic ideal extends to the life that Pierre and Franca abandon in their unreasoning pursuit of passion. Both are obsessed and unable to adjust to the ambivalence of contemporary life: Franca in her inability to look the other way in the tradition of the good wife; Pierre

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in his resolve to pursue what he already knows to be a futile infatuation. The life that all three, Pierre, Franca, and Nicole, reject, a life of emotional compromise, if perhaps the path to survival, holds little promise for fulfillment. Truffaut explains that the film offers “an anti-poetic vision” of “love,” that functions as a “polemical response” to Jules et Jim, which precedes it.18 The characters are not so much victims of a magnificent passion as caught in the circumstances of their lives. The claustrophobic interiors, the small apartments, hotel rooms, and cars in which the drama unfolds are crammed with luxurious objects that seem to impede the characters’ very movements, an effect enhanced by Raoul Coutard’s virtuoso cinematography and emphasized by the way that objects rather than characters often occupy the foreground of the shot.19 Anne Gillain comments, “We are plunged from the first moment into a mechanical, automatic and inhuman universe.”20 This is a world primarily of things that serve to define and constrain the characters’ lives. The couple’s residence, a chic Parisian apartment, resembles an exquisite museum, filled with books, paintings, photographs, and artful furnishings that enshrine their life together, a mausoleum that testifies to the emotional emptiness of the marriage. Their very movements are regulated; with a graceful but unerring precision that approaches the mechanical, they turn off the lights in tandem as they proceed to the bedroom, each gesture calibrated and controlled, the result of years of common life. The couple live within an environment of rigid scrutiny and routine; even their bedroom affords a degree of privacy only when a painted shutter is rolled down to separate it from the lounge. Before commencing his meal at the restaurant where he is shot, Pierre phones his wife’s friend Odile, who is also sitting down to her midday repast with her own husband. The film encourages the viewer to imagine a city of couples all sitting down to dine together at the same hour. This is the world that Pierre offers Nicole (and which she refuses) when he asks her to marry him and move into an apartment with him, the layout of which he describes in detail, mapping their future life together, and which resembles nothing so much as the life that he has just abandoned with Franca. Nicole flees quickly, irrevocably breaking the bond between her and Pierre with surgical precision by revealing that their continued relationship (after their initial one night stand in Lisbon) was nothing more than a futile attempt to prove to herself and to Pierre that she was something more than the superficial creature that she appeared to be, to gain his good opinion as a person of consequence. The sole moment of optimism with regard to this doomed relationship occurs just before the evening in Lisbon in which Nicole initially succumbed to Pierre’s pursuit, as though only the anticipation of romance conveys authentic feelings. After encountering Nicole in the hotel elevator, recognizing her as the attendant on his recent flight from Paris, Pierre phones Nicole from his darkened hotel suite, the camera lingering in the dark, as if fatigued by the earlier rapid cutting.21 When, finally, she agrees to meet him the following day, he turns on the lights, revealing a startlingly spacious set of rooms, the camera following as he illuminates each corner before throwing himself in a uncharacteristically exuberant movement onto his bed, his arms expansively propped behind his head. For once he seems freed from the world of objects, which recede into the background.22

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Franca too rejects the world of bourgeois regularity. When she finds a set of photos taken by her husband, the visible proof of the affair that he has consistently denied, she refuses her role as the well-behaved wife and picks up the instrument of her husband’s murder, a double-barreled shotgun, clearly a visual appropriation of the masculine prerogative. The largeness of the gun underlines how out of place it is in the urban modern world. Franca belongs to the category of “strong” and “independent” women characteristic of Truffaut’s films. Like the female lead in Jules et Jim, Catherine ( Jeanne Moreau), who directly precedes her in Truffaut’s corpus, Franca is also one of the “lethal, phallic mothers who literally kill men.”23 In her tirade against a man who harasses her on the street as she returns home, the photographs in her hand, retrieved from the shop where Pierre had left them to be developed, she rejects the role of long-suffering lover so frequently allocated to the romantic heroine. In a break with the prototypical French drama that revolves around une grande passion, such as Mayerling (Anatole Litvak, 1936), the woman does not simply represent death and the impossibility of a love outside of death, she becomes the agent of death itself; however, this death is a petty and sordid end to a meaningless life. Typically, the great romantic films of the 1960s of international scope, such as Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), offer up literature (and by extension art) as the means by which the fates of the lovers – here Yuri (Omar Sharif ) and Lara ( Julie Christie) – including their often untimely deaths, are justified and reclaimed for posterity. Their adulterous and ultimately tragic affair, resulting in the couple’s separation and the loss of their daughter, is redeemed by the so-called Lara poems, which earn them (in particular, Yuri, as the author) a degree of immortality. In contrast, Pierre Lachenay leaves nothing behind. The journal that he edits bears the title Ratures, meaning “crossing-outs,” “deletions,” or even “mistakes.” Pierre’s writing and intellectual accomplishment are merely part of the persona he creates for the public world, what Anne Gillain calls the false self, drawing upon British objects relations theorist, D.W. Winnicott, to whose ideas we will return.24 His introduction to a documentary on André Gide (Avec André Gide, Marc Allégret, 1952) concludes with a tired quotation from the great man: “Believe those who seek truth; mistrust those who find it; mistrust everything, but do not mistrust yourself.” This quotation highlights his own emptiness and the distance between him and the controversial writer/philosopher with whom he affects a vague friendship and understanding.25 Following his brave statements about Gide, Lachenay pretends he does not know Nicole, even when she is harassed by a passerby, because of his embarrassment in front of the man who had invited him to give the talk and whom he leaves waiting for him on a street corner as he drives off to find Nicole, further emphasizing that he is nothing more than a hollow sham.26 Art offers no consolation here and, indeed, when Lachenay discusses Balzac, during their first evening together, as Nicole listens raptly, he elaborates on the novelist’s failure as a businessman rather than his accomplishments as a writer – as well as on the great man’s philandering and betrayal of his own wife. Nicole’s intensity – she is obviously mesmerized by Lachenay’s knowledge and sophistication – distracts the

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Figure 26.2

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La Règle du jeu ( Jean Renoir, 1939, La Nouvelle Édition Française).

viewer, who momentarily overlooks the oddity of Lachenay’s seductive strategy, that of displaying his knowledge of and interest in the marital infidelities of a great writer, pointing to his own position as a potential adulterer. Rather that offering “art” as the ultimate recompense, the romantic prize, La Peau douce emphasizes the rules of the game, in which “love,” like money, can be gained and lost, as part of the elaborate social rituals that define the mores and ways of life of a particular group, or class, at a particular moment in history. References to the film La Règle du jeu ( Jean Renoir, 1939), which Truffaut described “as the greatest film in the history of cinema,”27 punctuate La Peau douce, culminating with the death of Pierre. Also a tale of adultery that ends with a tragic shooting, in which André Jurieu (Roland Toutain) is killed by a two-barreled shotgun like Lachenay, La Règle du jeu indicts the conventions and self-indulgent concerns of prewar French society; while La Peau douce reflects upon the middle-class of the postwar period, it is no less severe in its views of the rules and petty social norms of this milieu. Jurieu dies, as did Marianne’s lover in Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne, on which Renoir’s film draws, because he is mistaken for someone else, an ironic comment on Lachenay, who is intrinsically never the man he appears to be, one of T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men,” but who has also come to regret his affair and his decision to leave his wife. The resort to which Pierre takes Nicole, La Colinière, is the name the estate of a principal character in Renoir’s film, the Marquis de la Chesnaye (sometimes “la Cheyniest”).28 The surname of the central figure in La Peau douce, Lachenay, phonetically echoes that of the Marquis – la Chesnaye. Working along the same lines, Geneviève (Mila Parély), la Chesnaye’s mistress, wears a leopard skin coat and hat (see Figure  26.2), a motif echoed by the mistresses who populate Truffaut’s updated version of La Colinière.

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While these women cannot afford fur, the patterns of their blouses mimic the appearance of the genuine article worn by Parély. These particular references highlight the film’s dimension as a comedy of manners that takes a turn for the worse, a social satire that faithfully records the interiors and rhythms of bourgeois life in the 1960s, so much so that Truffaut summarized the film as “a documentary powerfully dramatized.”29 These details, borrowed from Renoir’s film (there are others, and also references to other films and directors), as one example in a larger system of citation that characterizes Truffaut’s oeuvre as a whole, also point to the very personal quality of this film, as an occasion on which Truffaut offers tokens of affection and respect to those filmmakers he considers to have been his mentors, a sentiment that will receive its fullest expression in La Chambre verte (1978).30 Thus, Robert Lachenay (the given name of the marquis in La Règle du jeu was Robert) was the name of Truffaut’s childhood friend,31 with whom he remained close until his death, the intertwining of names from his life and the film he loved illuminating Truffaut’s deep investment in La Peau douce.

Cinema: A Passionate Object At the heart of this story of adultery and betrayal lies neither social satire nor film history; rather, the core of this complex and multivalent narrative devolves from Truffaut’s investment in cinema as a passionate object that gave meaning and shape to his various and diverse concerns. Truffaut himself offered a number of reflections on the film’s genesis and production, stressing that the film was not autobiographical but that the filming of La Peau douce had been arduous because it coincided with difficulties in his marriage with Madeleine Morgenstern culminating in their separation on January 1, 1964. (The film wrapped on December 30, 1963.) He also added that he used his own apartment on rue du Conseiller Collignon to film the scenes between the couple at home, a “sin” against good taste, in his own words, that drew attention to the parallel between the events of his own life and those portrayed in the film.32 This double movement, whereby Truffaut masks the personal preoccupations that inform his oeuvre (by finding a conduit for his concerns outside his own life – here, newspaper accounts of the day) but also reveals them (by using his own apartment as the scene of the couple’s life and disputes), is a characteristic of Truffaut’s creative processes. Film was not a straight recounting of his life – an autobiographical process – rather, it offered a mechanism whereby personal experience, too terrible to apprehend fully, might be understood and managed, ensuring the director’s own psychic survival. In the context of the significant and sustained professional and emotional support offered to him by Madeleine Morgenstern, as well as his repeated infidelities throughout the marriage, the film offered a fantasy of punishment, a form of selfchastisement and retribution for the guilt on which he was unable to act except through art. Rather than eliciting sympathy for its protagonist, the film condemns

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him to a violent and brutal end, one that the film encourages the viewer to feel that, somehow, he deserves. Stam, thus, describes La Peau douce as a film that “had been made ‘against’ the philandering Lachenay character.”33 Truffaut himself remarks that Desailly’s character was an unrewarding one,34 and elaborates in a later interview: The principal character is a kind of Monsieur Bovary. … He only does monstrous, hypocritical things. It shocked a lot of people. But for me The Soft Skin is about the same thing as The 400 Blows. It shows a character caught in an ever-tightening web of circumstance. The audience could accept that kind of behavior from a child but not from a well-dressed, middle-aged man, responsible for his actions.35

This plea for punishment and, paradoxically, forgiveness extends to the wife and the mistress, who are at least treated with a greater degree of kindness by the camera, and, above all, in terms of casting, with the two female leads, both vital and charismatic, standing in stark contrast with the limp and unphotogenic Jean Desailly.36 While Lachenay admits to his wife, Franca, that he does not hate her – rather he reserves this sentiment for himself (“It’s me I hate.”37), Robert Stam notes that “in real life murderers are overwhelmingly male”; in contrast, “in Truffaut’s films … they are almost invariably female, reflecting perhaps both guilt and resentment towards women.”38 The film, then, expresses, by proxy, Truffaut’s own dismay at actions that he could not control but of which he appeared to disapprove deeply – at least through the vehicle of this film. At the same time, the film gives voice to a resentment directed against the victimized wife, who, if not the agent, remains the cause of his distress and who, in the film, literally kills the hapless husband. Cinema enabled Truffaut to live the impossible position of being neither with nor without the women in his life. “Neither with you nor without you” was the phrase used by Mathilde (Fanny Ardant) to describe the nature of her relationship with her lover Bernard (Gérard Depardieu), the phrase that she utters at the moment in which she shoots both herself and him in Truffaut’s La Femme d’à côté (1981). This phrase, “neither with nor without you,” might be said to sum up the difficulties of the director’s own relations with women, harking back to his unhappy childhood and problems with his parents; cinema offered him the means of perpetuating a position in which he was neither with nor without those he loved. While La Peau douce does not offer art as means of romanticizing and legitimating passion in terms of its protagonist and story, the film, nonetheless, fills a compensatory function for the director himself. In a sense, Truffaut, through his films, proves himself the artist that his central character, Lachenay, was not. Though Truffaut did not immortalize his lovers through the traditional medium of poetry, his films as works of art could be said to justify the death-dealing passions of which they are both the consequence and the representation. While the story may be banal, and was dismissed as such by various critics when the film was initially released,39 the film is not and much of the film’s power derives from the way in which it manages to capture and immortalize the two actresses. In the case of Françoise Dorléac, who was rumored to be Truffaut’s mistress in 1964 and who would die tragically a few

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years later, the film “fixes” her, arrests her in all her youth and charms, an image ever available, but never present, a flickering shadow. The nature of cinema as an art form that revolves around an image that is both present and absent (neither with nor without), in which a viewer is both engulfed and at a safe distance from the object of his fascination, was ideally suited to represent the concerns of a subject whose own relations were marked by a similar ambivalence. Filmmaking also permitted Truffaut to explore the perverse dimensions of his relations with women. Most obviously in the case of Dorléac, cinema immortalizes her as an image, an intangible play of light, which, particularly with time, becomes more real, more permanent than the human being that this image represents; however, her status as an image allows the director, and the viewer, as well as the male protagonist as their proxy, to control her, to subject her to a form of literal fetishization through the systematic fragmentation of her body by the camera.40 Psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan explains that “in its narrowest meaning, the fetishism in a male perversion entails a displacement of sexual desire away from the whole identity of a woman to some accessory or garment, some object ancillary to her being – a shoe, a corset, a garter belt, a whip, a slipper, a bath robe.”41 In the context of Truffaut’s oeuvre, Anne Gillain draws the analogy between fetishism as a perversion and visual fragmentation, which serves a similar function and which “isolating a part of the woman’s body in order to eroticize it, deflects the threat that it represents.”42 On the plane, before he has met her, Pierre carefully scrutinizes Nicole as she changes from her flat shoes to her pointed-toe black slingback pumps, with tiny “kitten” stiletto heels, her face and body hidden by a curtain, leaving only her ankles and feet visible to him. As if to emphasize the point, later in the film, as they embark on their one excursion together, he lets her know that he disapproves of her jeans, but appreciates the skirt into which she changes and which reveals her stocking-clad legs, legs that he will later caress, carefully removing the nylons (which he had purchased for her earlier that day) while she sleeps, calling her his little girl, “ma petite fille” (Figure  26.3).43 This preoccupation with stockings, for example, extends to other films, such as La Mariée était en noir (1967), in which a character records the sound of his fiancée crossing her legs, wearing nylon stockings, reaching its apotheosis, perhaps, with L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), in which the protagonist causes his own death in an effort to gain a better view of a young nurse’s stocking-clad legs.44 If the origins of the fetish lie with the desperate guilt that his newly discovered sexuality arouses in the adolescent, this primal object may be “extended and elaborated” in adulthood and “the original fetish may be joined by other fetishes,” as was the case with Truffaut throughout his oeuvre.45 Fundamentally, fetishism counters the terrible realization in certain male subjects, throughout their lives, that “when the full sexual identity of the woman is alive, threatening, dangerous, unpredictable, the desire she arouses must be invested in the fetish,” because “fetish objects are relatively safe, easily available, undemanding of reciprocity,” while allowing the subject to explore and control the less intimidating dimensions of sexual desire.46 The complex systems of referencing that animated Truffaut’s work with regard to his favorite films and directors provided a correlative that mirrored his equally

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Figure 26.3 La Peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964, Les Films du Carrosse. Courtesy of Photofest).

sustained and intricate sexual fantasies designed to satisfy his desires while affording protection from the threat of the female body. In an interview, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac’s sister, emphasized the erotic investment film represented for the director: “François made love stories in which sexuality was always present … if his films are looked at attentively from that specific angle … you can see just how sexually violent and explicit they are.”47 Significantly, Truffaut transposed scenes originally conceived for Dorléac in La Peau douce to La Sirène du Missippi (1969) to be played by Deneuve, who had replaced Dorléac in the director’s affections, following Dorléac’s death, notably a sequence in which Deneuve appears naked to the waist, breasts to the wind.48 He would play out this scenario again more explicitly in another later film, Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), which centers on the experience of a young man who has affairs with two sisters in turn, the elder of whom dies very young, the younger of whom abandons him, as did Deneuve.49 Film afforded a dispositif through which Truffaut evolved a system whereby he sought to defend himself against a sexualized femininity that was simultaneously irresistible and dangerous, the camera providing an instrument whereby the female body might be safely reproduced and controlled. Anne Gillain explains that in La Peau douce, “This dividing up of the feminine body reflects the fragility of the protagonist, his inability to comprehend in its totality the physical reality of the woman.”50 In this film, then, as in many others, through the main character, Truffaut reveals his own concerns, preoccupations that were facilitated by cinema as a particular visual narrative form and social institution in which fetishism plays a pivotal role, particularly in terms of the treatment of the female body.51 In La Peau douce, the threat evoked by the feminine body, implicitly recognized through fetishistic, thus defensive, strategies, is explicitly given life and voice through

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the character of Franca, whom New York Times critic Vincent Canby described as “the only person in the film who possesses true passion”52 – a passion that asks for too much, that promises to consume the male subject in a world not of his making, and that will result ultimately in the death of the protagonist. If, in an act of potential expiation for his own well-documented infidelities, Truffaut directs Franca as the wife to kill the philandering husband (Bernard in La Femme d’à côté was also unfaithful), he does not let her off easily either – she, like many of his heroines, was as dangerous to herself as to her lover, finding closure and release only through death, both that of those close to her and her own, metaphoric in this case. According to his biographers, the unusual intensity of Truffaut’s attachment to the cinema, as well as his difficult relations with women and the complexity of his heroines, derive from his early pre-cinematic experiences, his traumatic childhood. Anne Gillain underlines that, for Truffaut, film was a means of overcoming and moving beyond the conditions of his birth and early years, while at the same time allowing him to remain “stuck” within an unresolved oedipal configuration, in which he is never able to submit to the law of the father and reproduce the family by taking the place of the father.53 The particularities of Truffaut’s childhood – an illegitimate birth, a father whom he never knew – are well known; raised by a wet nurse and his grandmothers, he was already a young boy when he went to live with his mother and stepfather, the secret of his adoption hidden from him for many years.54 His relations with his mother, while never good, deteriorated during his adolescence. Though the tensions lessened with the years, that she died without ever seeing her granddaughters, testifies to the unresolved conflicts between her and her son.55 Gillain explains that these murdering women in Truffaut’s films are avatars of the primal mother (the mother of Truffaut’s childhood) and express the child’s refusal to pardon her (for whom the woman stands in) with regard to the acts of psychic violence that she committed in these early and formative years.56 Franca, then, in her choice of weapon, incarnates the implacable rage (a crime of passion) that the child wishes to visit upon the mother, whose infidelities and failures he will never forgive, that he in turn visits upon himself as a means of mitigating the unbearable guilt that such a wish engenders. She is the dangerous mother who will kill again and again and whose “real” murder at the film’s conclusion serves to give metaphoric depth to the “soul murder” of the child earlier in his life, which he deems unpardonable. In film, Truffaut found “a system of representation” that gave aesthetic substance and structure to his own troubled psychic life and in so doing made it bearable. What sets Truffaut apart from the young Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s cinematic avatar, his sosie, whose early years form the subject of Les 400 Coups, was his ability to use cinema as a means of forging a productive and creative relationship with a past that nonetheless held him captive in a manner that had particular consequences for his relations with women. In this way, though his motivations originate in his own biography, despite his protestations to the contrary, Truffaut is also a child of his time. It was a period in which a range of filmmakers (many of whom he critiqued and from whom he sought to distance himself, such as David Lean in films like Ryan’s Daughter, 1970), used cinema to interrogate the tenets of passionate love, called into question by psychoanalysis

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and the long sexual revolution, which had challenged the status of monogamous heterosexuality and the hypocrisy of a culture deeply marked by a tradition of male promiscuity. Vincent Canby, thus, describes La Peau douce as “an exploration of a man’s attitude towards love.”57 In Truffaut’s case, his unrequited and unresolved relationship with his mother gave form to this exploration and interrogation. This unrequited obsession, also manifested through his difficulties in maintaining a sustained relationship with a single woman, marked his engagement with the cinema initially as a viewer, then as a critic, and finally as a director. Cinema, then, ultimately permitted him, ironically, to give expression to an enduring love through art, which he was unable to achieve in life itself. La Peau douce is, thus, a personal film in the profoundest sense of the word because of the crucial role that cinema generally, and filmmaking more particularly, played in the life of Truffaut. Though La Peau douce is an autobiographical film (in that it incorporates many details from Truffaut’s own life), this dimension of the film does not explain its distinctive qualities. Indeed, as Francis Vanoye points out, screenwriters routinely draw upon their own experiences to flesh out their screenplays.58 Rather, his cinema was personal because for Truffaut, it had a particular function as a psychic “object,” an aspect of his art explored initially by Anne Gillain in François Truffaut: le secret perdu, drawing on the theories of Donald W. Winnicott.59 In a further elaboration of the idea of the transformational object put forward by Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, a contemporary psychoanalyst and literary scholar, develops the concept of the “passionate object,” explaining that “passionate object relations initially change the individual not through the mutative effect of introjection and insight, but rather through existential alteration to the subject’s being, brought about by immersive engagement with the object at a deeply unconscious level of mutual effect.”60 Specific to “passionate object relations” is the capacity “to transform the negative energy of obsession to the positive energy of passion,”61 as was the case for Truffaut with regard to cinema as he moved through childhood, adolescence, and finally maturity. Winnicott observed that children learn to master their relations with the external environment (the “world”) with the support of what he called “transitional” objects, having both a psychic and phenomenological status, which are “used to assist the self in moving forward toward deployment of the self ’s idiom in the object world.”62 Distinguishing the transitional object from the “transformational object,” Bollas notes, “The particular way that an individual gives form to his lived experiences, the way he constructs his internal and external worlds, involves unconscious communication as an aesthetic.”63 The formal or aesthetic properties of the unconscious are most clearly evidenced in what Bollas calls the choice or, perhaps, more properly, the creation of a form of the transformational object, the passionate object. Drawing on Bollas, film and literary scholar Alistair Fox explains with regard to the films of Jane Campion, There are not one, but two human aesthetics … that inform the choice and use of objects. The first human aesthetic involves the infant’s choice of an object that can assist him or her to tolerate the state of being separate from the mother. The second human aesthetic concerns the child’s discovery that it is possible for objects to “speak the self.”64

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In this second aesthetic lies the origin of the “transformational object,” and its potential avatar, “the passionate object,” or “integral object … where its integrity allows the individual to be nourished by its usage.”65 La Peau douce demonstrates how cinema functions as a “passionate object” for Truffaut, in which the cinema enabled him to create, out of a deeply written pathology that marked all his relations to women, a work of art, which has allowed these same women a degree of immortality, the capacity to remain forever young and desirable. His relations to cinema underline a fundamental aspect of the New Wave, less routinely addressed, that highlights film’s role as an expression of the affective as well as intellectual identity of the filmmaker. Emphasizing the highly emotional investment that cinema represented for him, in a 1962 letter to Alexandre Chambon, Truffaut proclaims, “The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession or a diary. … The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.”66 Following another line of thought, with regard to La Peau douce specifically, he mused to an interviewer: “I have thirty or so films in my head about love, and I will make them over the next forty-five years.”67 Thus, for Truffaut, film is about love – “other topics don’t interest me.”68 This topic will inform his cinematic corpus. Cinema itself as an experience, through it function as a passionate object, was also, for Truffaut, an act of love – a moment that comes as close as possible to uniting a self that is by its nature fragmented. Bollas comments, “We are not in continuous unbroken discourse with our self, but, rather, constantly breaking the textures of inner experience with the movement of nothingness, with abrupt questions, diversions, turning points, ruptures, and elision, and these are part of the pattern of the inevitably tattered fabric of being.”69 Bollas then attributes to the self a double movement of cohesion (a centripetal force) and dispersal (centrifugal force), through which it encompasses the intensities and even traumas of lived experience. He remarks, “A theory of wakeful unconscious life, then, suggests a continuous simultaneous oscillation between psychic intensities (cohesions) and their disseminations (fragmentations).”70 The passionate object generates a set of compensatory strategies that seek to remedy this fragmentation, in the words of Bollas, the self as “a complexity that knows no unity.” For Bollas, “the place of the subject is the intersection of forces that, taken together, constitute a continuous questioning of one’s being.”71 At the same time, a passionate object contributes to that very disunity through a subsequent generation of effects and meanings, predicated upon the object’s distinctness, its difference from the subject itself. Cinema, for the cinephile turned director, such as Truffaut, as a passionate object that is both consumed and produced, offers the subject a means of engaging with a self deeply divided through this double movement as both his “self ” and “other,” recognizing its integrity while preserving its distinctiveness. La Peau douce displays the paradox of Truffaut’s genius, and its darker side, accounting, at least in part, for the initial unenthusiastic reception of the film and its subsequent relative neglect.72 Typically, Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram describe the film as offering “an unrelenting portrayal of human nature at its worst,”73 while David Nichols claims that “this somber, almost cold tale of middle-class adultery is probably

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Truffaut’s least loved film.”74 Truffaut commented in 1966 that La Peau douce “was the least romantic of all [his] films.”75 He characterized the film as a very clinical study and it was considered disappointing. And it was, because the principal character was not as attractive as an adolescent. No one wanted to forgive him anything. The malaise of a man caught in a complicated situation was so strongly expressed that it embarrassed the spectator.76

He explained, speaking again of La Peau douce, “I saw that it was depressing, that it was a film that ‘descended.’ … A film that ‘descends’ is rarely loved, I mean a film presenting a situation that deteriorates, it is contrary to the idea of exaltation that we expect from a show.”77 In contrast with his more sentimental and uplifting films about sympathetic individuals, in La Peau douce Truffaut offers a harsh criticism of himself and the uneasy bargain that he makes with his lingering obsession with a mother whom he was neither with nor without; nonetheless, in so doing, he creates a compelling work of art, heralding a new generation of filmmakers for the decades that follow, including Philippe Garrel and Maurice Pialat.78 In spite of their variable successes with audiences, Truffaut continued to make films that “descended,” works that in later years would be singled out by critics and fellow cinephiles as among his best. In 1999, Dave Kehr opined, speaking of Truffaut, “The work that stands up best today is invariably the darkest: ‘The Soft Skin’ (1964), ‘Two English Girls and the Continent’ (1971), ‘The Story of Adèle H.’ (1975), ‘The Woman Next Door,’ (1981), the surpassingly strange ‘Green Room’ (1978).”79 For Truffaut, as well as for these directors and film devotees following in his wake, cinema served as a vehicle for what Bollas calls “mental freedom,” which he defines as “the urge to free-associate and to disseminate one’s wishes and needs through a chain of ideas with no terminal point but with aesthetic intelligence.”80 For Bollas, “mental freedom … is a form of desire that supports but supplants the specific desires driven by instinctual life…” to the point that its “dissemination reflects the desire to elaborate the idiom of one’s being.” 81 Extending this idea in the context of Truffaut’s oeuvre, we might say that a process of “dissemination” or inspiration (of pursuing a set of associations arising out of a set of remembered incidents – a couple in a taxi – a couple on an elevator – newspaper items, as was the case with La Peau douce82) is followed by the writing of a screenplay and subsequently the production of a film (as one in a never ending series of films about love) as moments of cohesion. The double movements of dissemination and cohesion that advance the realization of the film afford the director/writer the opportunity “to elaborate” the cinema “of one’s being,” with cinema, then, a complex and multifaceted iteration of what Bollas defines in linguistic terms as an idiom. La Peau douce illustrates the complexity of the creative act in which a multiplicity of forces comes together. Truffaut himself explains, “I work a great deal with real material but it is 20 percent autobiographical, 20 percent taken from newspapers, 20 percent taken from people I know around me, and 40 percent pure fiction.”83 Thus he describes the various sources for the film: human interest stories in newspapers, his

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desire to film man and woman together in an elevator observing each other, an image that he may have seen or imagined of a man and a woman in a taxi, their teeth clinking as they furtively embrace thinking about their respective spouses and children – but also finally his own circumstances in his own marriage, his own apartment.84 The film as a creative act is generated through dissemination, subsequently re-formed through the impulse towards cohesion (as a corollary to the process termed “condensation” by Freud in his discussion of dream-work),85 only to be subjected to an inevitable procession of fragmentation through the imperatives of interpretive experiences on the part of an audience, whether naive or critical – as exemplified in the particular analytic trajectory traced by this chapter with regard to La Peau douce. Cinema was an obsession for Truffaut, as both a viewer and a creator, a moment of cohesion and focus in an otherwise chaotic and fragmented tangle of conflicted and changing emotions, in particular with regard to the women in his life. He describes himself in 1955: “I lived for the cinema and preferred films to books, watching them at a rate of sixteen or twenty a week.”86 Indeed, he often described the effect of the cinema as a “drug.”87 This obsession served to protect him against the vicissitudes of his own difficult relations with himself and others. In a letter to Helen Scott, a dear friend and colleague, he explained that the film’s title, La Peau douce, literally “soft skin,” didn’t “mean anything special.” “It has a light erotic or romantic scent.” Having a “thick skin,” however, is “holding out against life’s misfortunes.”88 Here, through a thought process governed by indirection, Truffaut reveals how this film is about those who, through force of circumstance, were unable to “hold out against life’s misfortunes,” whose struggle for psychic survival leads to self-destruction. His remark also serves to highlight the director’s own battles. To reduce Truffaut’s work to its pathology does, however, a great disservice to his genius. The choice of a passionate object that enables the subject to move beyond obsession and survival, creating an aesthetic, a personal idiom, that is not merely idiosyncratic but that continues to speak to viewers beyond his or her immediate circle, testifies to the will to life and health that lies at the heart of what it means to be human – coming as close to a universal “act of love” as is possible within the constraints of everyday existence.

Notes 1

Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Knopf, 1999; reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 206. 2 Francis Vanoye, Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios (Paris: Nathan, 1991, reprinted Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), p. 208. Anne Gillain, “Jean-Pierre Léaud et le cycle Doinel,” in Les 400 Coups: François Truffaut (Paris: Nathan, 1991), pp. 19–24. 3 Vanoye, Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios, p. 207. Vanoye describes these films as “a  kind of film that one would describe, if not as autobiographical, at the least as ‘personal.’” [Un type de film que l’on qualifiera, si non d’autobiographique, du moins de “personnel”] Popular New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby refers to the phenomenon as “personal cinema,” referencing, among other films, La Peau douce. Vincent Canby, “Film View; Why ‘S.O.B’ Deserves to be S.R.O,” New York Times, July 12, 1981.

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6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

Christopher Bollas, in “Preoccupation unto Death,” Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 89, 70. Introduced by Michel Foucault in the 1960s, the terms dispositif was borrowed by film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry to describe the way in which film is not only a medium but also a set of relations predicated upon the conditions of production and reception (in the largest sense of these terms) that define cinema as an ideological and socio-psychic institution. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movie and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 531–542; and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 299–318. Robert Stam, François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality and Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 102. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, pp. 201–202; Colin Crisp, “La Peau douce,” in François Truffaut (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), p. 73. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: New Wave and Pulp Fiction: ‘Soft Skin’ Directed by François Truffaut,” New York Times, October 13, 1964. See also Robert Benayoun, “L’Ultra-vieillot,” France Observateur, May 21,1964. Crowther, “‘Soft Skin.’” John Donne, “The Canonization,” in Poems of John Donne, Vol. 1, ed. E.K. Chambers (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), pp. 12–13. “Lachenay demeure, du début à la fin, solitaire.” Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 80. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 75. nicole: Pierre, tu m’aimes?

pierre: nicole: pierre: nicole: pierre: 14

15 16

17

18

19

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Oui. Pourquoi tu ne me le dis jamais? [silence] Parce que ce n’est pas ton genre, de dire ces choses-là? C’est pour ça? Oui, c’est ça exactement.

The use of “vous” – a verb form reserved for formal communication and for groups of more than one person – emphasizes the importance and almost literary, or even “official,” nature of the telegram. In later discussions, such as the one in the car mentioned above, Lachenay and Nicole address each other as “tu.” Crowther, “‘Soft Skin.’” The photograph appears from the very beginning of the film, flitting across the screen as though signaling that the tragedy to come was always already in place, inevitable. In this scene, however, the viewer can clearly see it, recognizing the couple in it, perhaps for the first time. “Ce qui m’intéresse le plus, c’est le personnage de la femme trompée: on en fait toujours le personnage ingrat, ici elle est considérée de la façon la plus anticonventionelle possible, elle est l’équivalent de Jules dans Jules et Jim.” François Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” in Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 156. “La Peau douce est une histoire d’adultère très réaliste, qui donne de l’amour une image antipoétique, l’inverse en quelque sorte de Jules et Jim, comme une réponse polémique.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p 156. Gillain, François Truffaut, pp. 71–72.

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“Nous sommes plongés d’emblée dans un univers mécanique, automatique, inhumain.” Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 71. Anne Gillain points out that the film comprises close to 900 shots, La Mariée était en noir, only 400. Gillain, François Truffaut, pp. 71, 150. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 77. Stam, François Truffaut, p. 208. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 74. “Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.” André Gide, Ainsi soit-il ( Journal 1939–1949) (Paris: Souvenirs/Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), p. 1233. Marc Allégret, who directs the film, from which the viewer sees a brief sequence, was Gide’s former lover. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 78. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 35. Gillain, François Truffaut, 79, n.1. François Truffaut, quoted in Charles Thomas Samuels (1979), “François Truffaut,” in Ronald Bergan (ed.), François Truffaut: Interviews ( Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), p. 71. Truffaut references other directors, such as Sacha Guitry, in this film, many of whom will reappear in La Chambre verte as photographs in a grotto that the main character dedicates to the memory of the dead. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, pp. 18, 390. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 69. See also François Truffaut in Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray (eds), François Truffaut: Correspondance (Renens, Switzerland: 5 Continents, 1988), pp. 245, 252. Stam, François Truffaut, p. 180. “Le rôle de Desailly est un rôle d’ingrat.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 158. François Truffaut, in Sanche de Gaumont (1969), “Life Style of Homo Cinematicus,” in Bergan (ed.), François Truffaut: Interviews, p. 47. Possibly, Truffaut’s masochistic chastisement of his stand-in allows the director/screenwriter to maintain a certain precarious balance in his relationship with Madeleine Morgenstern that will continue all his life. See de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 394. “C’est moi que je déteste.” Stam, François Truffaut, p. 110. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 71. The subject of film and fetishism has been a significant source of debate in cinema scholarship. See, for example, Ben Singer, “Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz,” Cinema Journal 27 (4) (1988): 4–22. Here the term is used in its clinical sense as defined by practicing psychoanalysts, such as Louise J. Kaplan in Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 21–22. Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 34. “[Le fétichisme], en isolant une partie du corps de la femme pour l’érotiser, écarte la menace qu’il représente.” Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 79. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 79. For a discussion of fetishism in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, see Gillain, Truffaut, pp. 252–265. Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 39. Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 39.

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Catherine Deneuve, quoted in de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 257. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 414, n.71. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 284. “Ce morcellement du corps féminin reflète la fragilité du héros incapable appréhender dans sa totalité la réalité physique de la femme.” Gillain, Truffaut, p. 80. For an extremely influential discussion of the relations between cinema, the representation of women and fetishism, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1989 [1975]), pp. 14–26. Vincent Canby, “Truffaut’s Clear-Eyed Quest,” New York Times, September 14, 1975. Gillain, François Truffaut, pp. 22, 28. Gillain, François Truffaut, pp. 11–26; de Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, pp. 3–28. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 142. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 83. Canby, “Truffaut’s Clear-eyed Quest.” Vanoye, Scénarios modèles, p. 207. Gillain, François Truffaut. Bollas, “Preoccupation unto Death,” p. 82. Bollas, “Preoccupation unto Death,” p. 87. Bollas, “Preoccupation unto Death,” p. 75. Christopher Bollas, “A Separate Sense,” in Cracking Up, p. 43. Alistair Fox, “Conclusion,” in Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2011), p. 221. Bollas, “Preoccupation unto Death,” p. 87. François Truffaut, quoted in de Baecque, and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 110. “Des films sur l’amour, j’en ai une trentaine dans la tête et ces trente films je les réaliserai dans les quarante-cinq années à venir.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 155. “Les autres sujets ne m’intéressent pas.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 155. Bollas, “Dissemination,” in Cracking Up, p. 59. Bollas, “Dissemination,” in, pp. 59–60. Bollas, “A Separate Sense,” p. 40. The work of Anne Gillain and of Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana are notable exceptions. See Gillain, “Impostures,” in François Truffaut, pp. 57–83; de Baecque and Toubiana, “The Soft Skin,” “The Thick Skin,” in Truffaut, pp. 201–205, 205–207. Diana Holme and Robert Ingram, “The Genre Films,” in François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 96. David Nicholls, François Truffaut (London: B.T. Batsford, 1993), p. 39. “C’était le moins sentimental de tous les films. …” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 161. François Truffaut quoted in Gaumont, “Life Style of Homo Cinematicus,” p. 39. “J’ai vu que c’était déprimant, que c’était un film qui ‘descendait.’ … Un film qui ‘descend’ est rarement aimé, je veux dire un film présentant un situation qui se dégrade, c’est le contraire de l’idée d’exaltation qu’on attend du spectacle.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 164. I am indebted to Adrian Martin for this observation. David Kehr, “A Poet of Darkness Who Longs for the Light,” New York Times, May 16, 1999. Bollas, “Dissemination,” p. 63. Bollas, “Dissemination,” p. 63.

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Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” pp. 149–165. “Je travaille beaucoup avec du matériel réel, mais il est 20% autobiographique, 20% pris dans des journaux, 20% pris dans la vie des gens que je connais autour de moi, 40% de fiction pure.” Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 154. Truffaut, “1964: La Peau douce,” p. 151 passim. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 69. Truffaut, quoted in Gillain (ed.), “La Peau douce,” pp. 149–165. François Truffaut, trans. Katherine C. Foster, “Henri-Pierre Roché Revisited,” afterword to Jules et Jim, Henri-Pierre Roché, trans. Patrick Evans (London: Marion Boyars, 2006), p. 244. François Truffaut, In the Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 4. Gillain, François Truffaut, p. 17. “Le titre ne veut rien dire de spécial. Il a un léger parfum érotique et romantique. … Avoir la peau dure, c’est résister aux malheurs de la vie.” Truffaut, François Truffaut: Correspondance, p. 258.

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An Unsettling Passage From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte Carlos Losilla Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) begins with a rupture: of the body and of the film itself. The body belongs to Claude, a French boy from an affluent family comfortably settled at the start of the twentieth century. While he swings from a trapeze in the garden of his house before his mother and a group of children – whom we never see again – the rope breaks, Claude falls to the ground, and he grasps his knee in pain. What is remarkable about this opening scene is the way Francois Truffaut, director of the film, composes it: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Shot of the mother reading with background cries of the children. Wide-angle pan of Claude and his young audience. Pan of the children’s faces cheering him on. Shot of Claude, face down, hanging from the bar by his feet. Extreme close-up of the rope as it begins to break. Second shot of Claude head down trying to right himself. Another pan of the children’s heads, this time cut short before the end of the group. Rapid shot of the startled mother rising from her seat. Quick shot of the rope breaking. Quick shot of Claude’s body falling; quick shot of a girl screaming. Quick shot of Claude, already on the ground, shouting in pain, bending his knee and covering it with his hand. Quick shot of the mother, now standing. Rapid pan of the group of children – in reverse direction, as if leading back to Claude. Extreme close-up of Claude’s hand on his knee. Extreme close-up of the broken rope, swaying.

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

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16. 17.

Close-up of the mother running toward her son. Long shot of the group rushing to help Claude.

Such an abundance of framings apparently corresponds to the speed of the narration, as if the meticulous decomposition of the scene should find its echo in the velocity of its syntax – a velocity that at moments even obstructs the viewer’s perception of what is actually occurring. All of this, to what end? Why this performance of a directorial style never to reappear in the film? Why Truffaut’s emphatic, ostentatious, and laborious stressing of an event that, at root, lacks great importance to the story? Or does it? In the following scene, Claude lowers himself on crutches down the stairwell of his house into the living room. Here he first meets Anne Brown, an English girl who is the daughter of his mother’s visiting friend and who will become Claude’s symbolic healer at the outset of his sentimental life. After speaking to Claude of her sister Muriel during an outing to a museum, the girl points to his walking stick. “I don’t think you need this anymore,” she says. To our surprise, Claude obeys, hands her the cane, and ascends the stairwell without apparent difficulty. Despite first appearances, however, this scene signals less the culmination of Claude’s healing than his initiation into adult life. And in that moment, that precise moment, if we have seen the film often enough, the association in our minds with the first sequence flashes like a lightning bolt. Claude has passed from childhood to youth, from the severe protection of his mother and the company of children into a freedom where he might travel through life unhobbled – free of crutches, independent, and in the open. But this metamorphosis has had its price: Claude had to first pass through an episode of pain so that a new world may then open itself to him. The literal and symbolic wound of his knee immobilizes the boy so as to later permit him freer movement. Thus Truffaut’s construction of the opening sequence: his eagerness to wound the scene itself, to show everything in a style that is both vertiginous and deconstructive. The resulting collage of shots disassembles the screen-space to the point of dilating it, of converting it into a succession of moments wrenched from the flow of time. At its core, then, this opening scene – along with the rest of the film – originates from a belief in time as the foundation of the cinematic act. While the time that belongs to life itself must lead inexorably to death, the time of story (of narrative) endeavors to suspend that relentless and unstoppable course; indeed it is the struggle between the provisional and the definitive that obsessed Truffaut.1 In the final scene of the film, Claude visits the Rodin museum alongside a gaggle of schoolgirls. Once again among children, as in the film’s first moments, Claude has now left youth far behind to enter the long senescence of old age. Fifteen years have passed since his last meeting with Muriel and now he means to find among the throng of young girls the one who most resembles her, who might be the daughter she had with another man. No longer carrying a walking stick, the elderly Claude does, however, wear eyeglasses. These glasses will help him find his target; but they also symbolize a new crutch, a new change of status. By the film’s end he has lost the liberty he once gained on the museum steps when he left his walking stick (the crutch of childhood) behind. Contemplating his face in the reflective window of a taxi, Claude

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speaks to himself: “But what is it with me today? How old I look!” And then he disappears through the museum’s exit, lost in the shuffle of children as if he were simply another schoolboy. By one measure, then, the time belonging to life has led him to old age, the deterioration – this time irreversible – of the body, and his departure from sight through a door that closes after him ominously. By another measure, however, the time of story has returned him to childhood and to youth, to the camaraderie of children and the memory of Muriel, so that all is confused, all belongs to the same current of life, all times coincide in one. Even the shattered découpage of the first scene gives way to the fluidity of a camera that passes from Claude’s point of view onto the schoolgirls and finally to the Rodin sculptures. Life persists on its course but time may heal itself – if only for a brief, illusory instant, illusory once there are neither wounds to be nursed nor rites of passage to be braved. And all belongs to the suspended time beyond which one cannot go except toward death.

Truffaut’s Proustian Obsessions In the press dossier distributed at the release of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, Truffaut declared that the film’s protagonist was “like a young Proust in love with the Brontë sisters.”2 Beyond an act of off hand literary showmanship, the remark speaks to a profoundly Proustian spirit at the film’s core. That ambiguous “time regained” of the final scene owes much to the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu; and even the sentimental divide of the protagonist across two women – more Albertine and Gilberte than the Brontë sisters – likewise draws from the intricate construction of Proust’s oeuvre. But it is the concept of temporality that remains primary, so that Truffaut, by way of Proust, even helps himself to the philosophical legacy of Bergson. For Henri Bergson, the acknowledged inspiration behind A la recherche du temps perdu, time is not composed of isolated moments as if it were a matter of separate, stagnant compartments. Instead, time is pure duration. Instants are something man-made, something we concoct to grant us an idea of time, which is itself an elusive, not to say ungraspable, phenomenon. Thus the overstated decomposition at the film’s opening: the incisions administered to time which will signal the injury of the moving-beyondchildhood. Truffaut’s Proustian obsessions can be seen throughout, and from the very beginning, of his work. Already Les 400 Coups (1959) employs the frozen image (of Antoine Doinel at the film’s terminus) and the immobilization of the instant to signify a change of state. The use of the iris transition, which will become a recurring motif in Truffaut’s work, manages a cinematic delimitation of space to indicate a certain temporal petrification. And in La Chambre verte (1978) – released at the end of the same decade as Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, a momentous decade that finds its true finish in the last of the Doinel films, L’Amour en fuite (1979) – Truffaut returns to kindred Proustian thematics by way of Henry James and the figure of the ghost.

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A mélange of James’ stories “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Friends of the Friends,” and “The Beast in the Jungle,” La Chambre verte poses a metaphysical conundrum: the ghost as the absence which makes itself present, a temporal disruption between the world of the living and the dead, which is to say, the appearance of an absence that slips through the crevices of time. The temporal continuity maintained in the film is so natural that it must break all natural laws; yet this continuity requires the imposition of a logical imperative. Julien Davenne (played by Truffaut himself ) must attend to only one need: with single-minded zeal he means to cover the absence of his dead wife. Yet his solution is a telling paradox, for it returns the woman to life in the present – the green room and later the chapel – but also to her past life. As such, she no longer exists in the temporality of life but only in the time of story – a temporality of representation which Julien constructs and which requires a conclusion to attain its fullest sense. Thus Julien must chase his own death to round out the collection of candles that represent his dead loves. Beyond the superficial tributes to Henry James (whether in the motif of the carpet or the missing jigsaw lacuna), La Chambre verte also allows us to glimpse Truffaut’s own trajectory. For if Claude in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent lives a life mirrored by his own narrative (to reveal the absence of love), Julien’s life self-destructs so that only story is left: story which is pure absence precisely because of its promise of eternal life. Story annihilates life with words and representations.3 Or rather, story grants eternal life, yet a life that is not life itself but its simulacrum – as in the final assimilation of Claude’s body into the crowd of schoolgirls. Where, then, might this transmutation occur? How might this explosion materialize, as in the form of a ghost? We have already mentioned Anne’s role of initiator when, like Jesus, she commands him to rise up and walk. But before this, when Claude appears with his crutches and sits before her for the first time, a revelation arises. Anne lifts the veil that covers her face, permitting Claude the act of discovery. Claude speaks of a certain nakedness he perceived in the young lady; and in this act of discovery he experiences the revelation of love. The time of life is stilled and sent into that of fiction, of passion, and into the fascination with which another body might coruscate. Anne will lead him into the time of story and, its close relative, the time of love. Muriel, by contrast, will show herself to be more secretive (as of a secret) in her offering to Claude. As in Madeleine/Judy of Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo (1958) – a film which Truffaut so much admired – the two sisters are essentially one. But in Truffaut’s film the pair first show themselves to be two alternatives, easily confused between each other, and then later to be two bodies, not so much interchangeable as interreplaceable. Thus, after the separation of the trio, Claude will never again see Anne and Muriel together. This schism is particularly suggestive for it means that the time of love, and hence the stilling of time, becomes impossible after the appearance, and intrusion, of sex. In Vertigo nothing will be the same once Scottie has seen Madeleine’s naked body, once he has undressed her after her suicide attempt. In a carefully constructed shot of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent – constructed statically and pictorially as if it were a Roman mural – Claude places his hand on Anne’s chest. He does so with a palpable disaffection while the pair remains almost shameless before the

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camera. And there the catastrophe begins: the flood of emotions that will lead to separation and death. While the glow of love detains time, making it eternal, the glare of sex fractures the flow of time, as in a sudden blast. From this understanding comes two of the most deservedly famous shots of the film. One is the traveling shot – traveling slowly with the river’s flow – that discreetly spies on Claude and Anne after their decision to live for a time in a riverside house. Their relation has not yet been sexually consummated, and Truffaut films their cohabitation from the outside. He does not dare to intrude on – and thereby profane – their corporeal space. He thus follows them from afar, encircling the couple with a distant, implacable continuity. The other famous shot is that which fills the screen with red after Claude has deflowered Muriel. The literal red of the blood is also the red of violence. The fury of the sexual act threatens the innocence of the preceding, purely visual contact with which the beloved has been apprehended, which is itself none other than the process of falling in love. The distant traveling alludes to the experience of waiting before the beloved’s touch and the freezing of time as in a spell; the intense red, by contrast, is like the bringing-within of the unbearable carnality of the body – a carnality that exists in life’s nadirs and only shows itself in moments of pure expression, just as Muriel, upon learning of the relation that has brought her sister and Claude together, is shown to vomit. This somatic act is filmed from the back of the lavatory, the implosion of an interiority made exterior. For Truffaut, there is no middle ground. The distant gaze makes time stop; intimate touch destroys time. But how to experience the flow of time? Only by way of absence, in the solitude of the ghost that returns to wander in a nonexistent, interstitial space. If Anne revealed her face through the veil, then gave her breast to Claude’s hand, and finally surrendered her body in the riverside cabin, the codes of seduction for Muriel will be very different indeed. Claude sees her precisely as an absence – an absence which takes its initial form in the family room’s empty seat during Claude’s stay in England with the mother and two daughters. Only progressively is Muriel revealed. At first she wears a bandage over her eyes, and so one can contemplate her body but not the totality of her face. In this scene Claude is denied the gaze which he most desires to see, the woman who has most made him wait, who has become a ghost of incomplete presence. And Muriel will always be such an absence. She will always be a ghost between two worlds: between Claude and her family, between France and England, between visibility and sightlessness, between life and death. When, obliged by social pressure, Muriel and Claude agree to separate for a year (a separation that then becomes much longer), she falls into a trance-like state of pain, vanishing into the negation of being. Truffaut once called this retreat from life, so typical of many of his characters, a “way of the cross.”4 In church, Muriel’s agitated breathing evokes sexual desire, but also the rasps of death. She walks along the streets reciting in solitude the letter she has sent Claude. In these peregrinations she seems a specter lost in the world of the living. When she receives the letter that announces the break that her beloved proposes, she faints in the garden of her house like a straw doll, again in that borderland that separates the existent from the vanished. After this collapse she begins to talk to

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Figure 27.1

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

herself, to talk to Claude’s absence in imaginary dialogues that negate her social presence and convert her into a split being, both speaker and hearer. In her room, flanked by a painting of the crucifixion and a prie-dieu, she paces and then vanishes again. In bed she rustles, seized by violent convulsions, as if possessed. These somatic states, belonging neither to life nor death, keep Muriel in a permanent half-sleep utterly unrelated to the experience of love that once fixed time. It is love without sex – another liminal and tremulous condition – but also love without love: love that has known love and now sees only the desperate singularity of its absence.

Not Alone but with a Ghost … So there is something of Muriel in Julien Davenne – that other character hovering between the living and the dead, stuck, like Muriel, in the non-place of constant agitation and unease. Truffaut uses his own body, small and nervous, to take on a character who moves with unusual speed, whose every act is performed with the haste that grants him the possibility to live every day with the dead, to experience neither time nor the stilling of time but instead a fluidity constantly held in the peculiar temporality of narrative. Unlike Claude, Davenne would never stop before a mirror to let the signs of his age surprise him, precisely because he shares his daily life with the resolute work of death. How do the stories of Muriel and of Davenne – two death-inhabited lives – resemble one another? To approach this question we must begin with a contradiction – one expressed by their distinct cinematic exits. In the last scene of La Chambre verte Davenne literally disappears: after his collapse he is swallowed by the lower part of the frame. Muriel, by contrast, vanishes between two trains to leave Claude alone at the railway station, or rather, to leave him not alone but with a ghost. And the

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subsequent shot reveals an image of stilled time that is both idealized and disquieting. It is not a flashback showing how the three met (as may be expected), but rather an enigmatic scene, almost a hallucination. The two girls smile and throw stones from the far side of a hillock; Claude stands behind them, watching them with a severe expression as if he were not there at all. In this shot it seems Claude is the ghost, the figure whose presence is absence – at root a mental representation of his feeling before the absent Muriel (for after her departure she will only materialize in a letter that declares she is pregnant with his child). In La Chambre verte, however, when Davenne disappears from the frame, Cécilia must step forward and, as if dead in life, she lights the final candle and speaks his name. Now entrusted to close the time of the story, she is like Claude who will close Muriel’s by reading her letter. “This paper is your skin,” it reads. “This ink is my blood and I press hard so that it enters.” The figures, whether made of candles or words, must be finished by others, must be vampirized by that effect of blood that is nothing more than a light filling the screen: the red of the bed sheets in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent or the flickering of the candle flames at the end of La Chambre verte. Muriel’s story ends in the very bed that she stains, found behind her disappearance between the trains. Davenne’s story ends among the candles he has cared for with monastic zeal, swallowed by the depths of his own abyss. Both stories, however, propose a disquieting hypothesis. If narrative time must also end, must close in on itself, then what is story but another death – a death that turns the world into a museum of specters? No, the time of the story cannot reach a close, since it is recyclable in other beings. But its sentence is precisely in, and to, this infinitude. The word, be it spoken or written, proposes its condition of eternity and permanence, of a loop that ceaselessly passes from one thing to the next. In La Nuit américaine (1973), Ferrand (Truffaut himself, in his role as the director of the film-within-a-film) tells Alphonse (none other than Jean-Pierre Léaud, as if it could not be otherwise) that “movies are like trains in the night.” Yet in truth he is speaking of that speed of the image that, in Truffaut’s case, is also the speed of the word, above all, that of the word. Many times the scenes in Truffaut’s films end abruptly. They end when what has happened has barely had time to happen – in the very middle of the action, as if the act of filming itself, like one of his characters, might faint at any moment. And the same is true for the spoken word. Truffaut’s words are always swift, whether in voice-over or spoken from a letter – its own form of epistolary off-screen space – since each word must quickly give up its place to the next, reincarnated in another. Truffaut’s films, then, are also literature, or a cinematic form of filming literature so that only Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet attain human voice, or human writing, with such all-consuming passion – at once respectful to the image in and with its autonomy yet anxious to transform that very autonomy into a form that is itself wholly cinematic. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, letters become the road-marks of pain and absence. Claude declares his separation from Muriel in writing – a separation on which he has decided unilaterally – and it is her mother who first reads the letter, reciting it aloud so that the moment Muriel receives the words they already float in the room without being uttered. The letter makes the girl’s collapse, filmed from a

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distance, more melodramatic, as if it were the words themselves, hovering outside the shot, that have caused her to faint. The missive then remains on Muriel’s nightstand, her hand entering the frame to take hold of it and repeat snatches of it, the girl trapped in an abandoned, absent gaze. Next it is Muriel’s turn to write to Claude. We see only her face and hear the words on the soundtrack. But her lips and expression quiver, physically overwhelmed by what she is writing. They whisper and feel the letter with an internal convulsion passed through to the shot like an electric current. In the clipped scene that follows, of the domino game with Anne, Muriel recites some of her letter once more. Her words are not meant for her sister, but for that haze of unwritten language to which the letter that she will never send ultimately belongs. In time the letter grows into an interminable litany which will possess Muriel and reduce her to illness and immobility after a second collapse. “I know your letter by heart,” Muriel tells Claude – part of this unprinted literature – while at that very moment she tirelessly rereads it. What – or rather, where – is the origin of that literary voice, that transformation of existence into sound that we never see spoken from any lips? In one way, her body, her movements and gestures and even her life itself, have been transmuted into the letter received and the letter never-sent, into an imaginary correspondence that might only circulate in her own interior. A virtual dialogue engulfs her. She is taken under by an epistolary narrative whose only end is illness and torment. And in the moment when Muriel reaches her terminus so that “life is made of fragments that do not meet,” the bond that keeps her tied to life breaks, and she withers irretrievably. While the receipt of Claude’s letter was filmed from afar, her second collapse is not even filmed. It occurs outside the frame, beyond the image where Anne reads a book to her mother in the living room. The printed story of Anne’s book clashes with the story never to be written and detonates like an explosion. “I thought that I had finished with that, but no,” Muriel says with closed eyes. “It still controls me.” And then, in French: “Either I will have all of Claude or none at all. If so, let death take me.” This passage from English to French, already present in the scene of the domino game, expresses both Muriel’s divided self and the confusion of her amorous discourse. In her delirium she does not rightly know if she is speaking to Anne or to Claude. And the invocation of death is precisely the result of this short circuit. It is the result of the exploded shards of language that have become unbridgeable fragments, disjointed sentences, and the impossibility of story to be a true link with the world of the living. This undoing has brought Muriel to the very threshold of death. In the convulsive agitations of her sleep, words no longer exist; there are only the guttural sounds of suffering. But the impossibility of story does not mean its disappearance. Story hovers, remains suspended, makes itself present in its absence. The traveling narrative of the letter which moves from the lips of Claude’s mother, who reads it before it is sent from Paris, to Muriel’s invisible thoughts in England becomes a crazed speech mixing the spoken and unspoken, the written and unwritten, even the filmed and un-filmed. In this way Truffaut discovers the cinematic equivalent of the interior monologue, a form that once seemed exclusively literary. For Truffaut has freed the interior

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monologue from the voice-over – as in the voice above a human figure – and transformed it into an overflow of words springing from that which should remain written on paper yet belongs to an off-screen space never narrated in the story, an off-screen space that invades the screen with its absent-presence. Thus Truffaut films the final shot of Muriel’s passion and madness from afar, placing the camera in the night’s rain, behind the imposing window of the house. The camera placement is of course symbolic of the separation and distance within the story; but it also symbolizes the distancing of the story from itself. After this moment the narrative cannot press forward but must return to its point of departure. Muriel says, “I will not continue writing this diary for Claude; it is monotonous; if I do so, it will be for me.” Does her declaration change the status of what we have heretofore heard? Did her fragments, spoken over the image, originate from her diary? Or were they drafts of her unwritten letters? Perhaps they were both at once: an incessant murmuring that is nevertheless supremely literary; language that is transfigured from the quotidian to the poetic becoming an embodiment of both. Indeed an unresolved ambiguity pervades this memorable sequence. Muriel’s withdrawal into herself supposes that healing will in fact come through a fight against the exteriorization of her feelings, an exteriorization that can only become therapeutic when it becomes rational – coherent under the laws of language understood as an instrument of communication. And so Muriel approaches the window, the camera, and the viewer to arrive at a final rebuke. She denies her gaze. Yet removing her glasses and rubbing her eyes, she must confront the real. “I will never marry,” she says. In the following scene, another letter slips beneath the door of Claude’s apartment. And again it is the mother who reads for us, closing the circle of politesse that has concealed the lovers’ unconsummated passion – “passion” understood both as desire and as a via crucis. For Truffaut, literature is something that can either redeem or annihilate. Story may knit one back into the flow of life – as the film’s final shot does for Claude; but story may also take one to the brink of death – as it does to Muriel between one letter and the next.

Blanchot and Truffaut There is in Maurice Blanchot something that strongly resembles this time-withouttime that is the narrated word but that could similarly be the image which narrates, and so cinema itself. And there is in Truffaut a meditation on this tyranny of story that, in one form or another, carries and provokes the disappearance of the subject. In L’Entretien infini, Blanchot writes of “a neutral voice that speaks the work from out of this place without a place where the work is silent.”5 In continual movement, story passes from Claude to Muriel, possessing the young lady and then returning to its point of departure as if nothing had happened. The closing of this circuit suppresses the demoniacal potential of story, as if it had not manifested itself in illness and delirium. Yet that oscillation between speech and silence is story itself, an oscillation that

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can never be fully exteriorized, and so its condition is movement and invisibility, what Blanchot calls “the oblique voice of misfortune or of madness.”6 Misfortune and madness are very often the destiny for Truffaut’s characters, victims of their own hypernarrativity, characters who narrate without revealing their true selves; they must display yet always succumb to their need to hide – to hide “the one who cannot recount because she bears – this is her wisdom, this is her madness – the torment of the impossible narration.”7 Truffaut’s cinema thus identifies story with death because its impossibility paralyzes, but also because the uncontrolled torrent of words that it provokes must inundate the subject. And if no love can achieve its full meaning until it has become story – until it has become what is known as a love story – then that same narrativity must annihilate love, drowning it in a sea of subjects and predicates, sentences that will never manage to cohere so that “it is time itself that, instead of losing itself in events, sets itself to write.”8 In this understanding, then, time is both the only carrier of story and the road that leads inexorably to death. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent the natural time of life suffers the interference of the time of story, driving Muriel to the gates of absolute desperation. In La Chambre verte, however, story will become, definitively, image – a transmutation of story into image that, at root, attempts to deny to life the passage of time. Instead, it proposes a time-of-eternity in which the living and the dead coexist in the non-place of narration, which is, in turn, nothing else but the act of recollection. In both films, however, that same temporality of story will equally, in time, be drained of itself. The result of this temporal emptying-out will be pure absence, time without time, “the presence of things, before the world exists, their perseverance after the world has disappeared, the stubbornness of that which remains when everything vanishes and the dumbfoundedness of what appears when nothing exists.”9 From literature to film, story remains trapped between word and image, unearthing the dark side of the Bazinian doctrine of impure cinema. Before the optimistic vision of film as the assimilation of the “formidable resources of elaborated subjects amassed around it by neighboring arts during the course of the centuries”10 – that is, in essence, a defense of adaptation – Truffaut’s later films propose a confrontation or collision between image and story. Each ultimately – and reciprocally – struggles to contain the other, the results of which can only be states of extremity: love or absence, life or death, or the most telling result – the death-in-life that is the frozen image or the printed word. Truffaut’s later films repeatedly arrive at this terminus through the recurrence of still photographs or published books. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, a photograph of a young Muriel triggers Claude’s desire, presented to him just when he leaves his crutch to walk on his own accord. The maturity of the character is related, then, to a static image he must put into movement just as, reciprocally, the image has set in motion a romantic curiosity in him. The same photograph will reappear, so to speak, at the end of the film when Claude searches among the schoolgirls for Muriel’s hypothetical daughter. In this instance, however, the photograph appears in extradiegetic form or – to compare it with the letters – in an off-screen space that is like an

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un-filmed flashback. Now it is an image without a place, a ghost that has traveled through the time of story to show itself before it disappears once more. This infatuation with the image – with a memento or medallion – is of course a cliché of the sentimental love story. Yet Truffaut identifies this recurring motif with death, a death held in abeyance yet ultimately inevitable, the promise of which becomes pervasive. From the moment that Claude sees the photograph, Muriel passes into his consciousness and is interiorized there as the unattainable object of desire. Then she must pass through the various stages of absence – the empty chair, the bandage on her eyes – until Claude arrives at her, seduces her, and later crushes her with the letter declaring a break, only to finally reconstitute her in the frustrated attempt of the final anamnesis. The circuit of love and melancholy springs from and returns to immobility in the same way that death-in-life dominates the beginning and end of the couple’s relation – whether in Claude’s paralysis after his fall from the trapeze or the frozen image in the taxi window at the film’s end. And the trajectory that leads from this beginning to the end is nothing but death put in movement and ever ready to alight and fix itself upon the instant. While Muriel crosses her via crucis of love, Claude establishes himself as an art dealer and drifts like a zombie between women and paintings. In this interlude he moves between adventures characterized by their fleeting, instantaneous nature – indeed one of his lovers is, significantly, a photographer – as if he were moving between snatches of life that remain hermetically separate. It is not strange then that the mother’s reading of Muriel’s letter is followed quickly, and without clear motivation, by a conversation regarding the canvasses in Claude’s studio. This quick conjunction gives the paralysis of the love story its formal corollary and socially accepted endorsement: the madness of desire dissolved and distilled into artistic object. Through their repeated invocation of the paralysis wrought by the transfiguration of art, Truffaut’s films long to surpass these inherent limits of fixity. They long to perforate their own skin, the skin of celluloid, with the living ink of the camera. In La Chambre verte, Julie Davenne – as well as the entire family to whom Julien dedicates his existence – only appears in a photograph. This recurrence of photographs in Truffaut’s cinema betrays a related fetish for disappearances; yet it is a fetish that works in favor of the image. The alchemical substitution cinema works is the implantation of death which is also a reflection of life. The gaze of the camera frozen on Antoine Doinel at the end of Les 400 Coups, or Antoine’s altar dedicated to a photograph of Balzac, are enough to illustrate this obsession that dates from the beginning of Truffaut’s career. Indeed, among the portraits that populate the chapel Davenne dedicates to the deceased are those of Mark Peterson, who acted as Mr Flint in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent; Henry James, the very author of the stories on which the film is based; the actor Oskar Werner, who worked with Truffaut in Jules et Jim (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966); the musician Maurice Jaubert, who provided several compositions to the soundtrack; Oscar Wilde, whose relevance is clear through The Picture of Dorian Gray, itself a story of paintings and death-within-life; and even Marcel Proust, of whom Blanchot, speaking of A la recherche du temps perdu, will say is “the shadow of the narrator-cum-character of the book.”11

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This gallery of artists introduces a register of intertextuality with respect to the film and even – especially – its maker. These are men and women who, in some way, have formed part of the life and films of Truffaut in the same way that he, in turn, forms an intrinsic part of La Chambre verte. For Truffaut cannot be seen as the actor who happened to be cast as Davenne but as the only one who could have logically given him life. In this film Truffaut takes the conception of the cineaste to such a point that he is fused with and becomes one with his character. It is not Truffaut acting as Davenne, but Truffaut possessed by him – or Davenne reincarnated in Truffaut: once again the absence of the Jamesian character filled by the presence of his maker. Passing from Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte Truffaut moves from the Hitchcockian device of the man split between two women (who may as well be the same) to the man divided between the living and the dead. But Davenne transforms this place between into something much more expansive. While Claude measures the geographic distances between his own body and that of Anne or Muriel, Davenne will ceaselessly measure himself in relation to death itself. He moves closer and closer before finally surrendering to it – an obsession for the deceased that drives him to necrophilic perversion for he must not only move toward her but toward all who populate his life and no longer exist. Before the impossibility of reincarnation, he will give the dead their own incarnated space, which is first a room in his house but later an entire edifice and chapel. And in the middle – or rather, acting as medium – a woman who is truly alive. Cécilia still feels and still loves and so will give Davenne the contrary reference with which he might measure his distance from death. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent changing circumstances dictate the configuration of the love triangle; yet in La Chambre verte Julien and Cécilia choreograph their own movements – a choreography that culminates in a final climax of disappearance and substitution. Davenne dies in Cécilia’s arms. Now it is Cécilia who must see the final ceremony through. She lights the missing candle and so completes the Great Work – the final death that had heretofore not come into being. Cécilia utters his name, Julien Davenne, puts the candle in its place, and disappears from the frame. Only the fire’s glow remains, continually consuming and reigniting itself.

Spelling the Death of Present Desire The name thus annihilates the person. Language is death; the image embalms. But what can we say of the work of art? In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, the novel Claude finally writes from his own experience detains and fixes the ephemera of the letters that come and go, the prolix verbiage. After its passage through the printing press – a process of mummification that appears so often in Truffaut’s films – the flux of life is embalmed, set still in the shop window of a bookstore. This mythos around the printed book in Truffaut’s films is ambiguous: on the one hand, the book

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celebrates the circuits of wisdom and experience; on the other, the book is the death of the feeling, halting the circulation of passion, turning feeling into a question of sender and receiver, shunting the free and floating word onto the eternally printed page. Hence, in Fahrenheit 451 the passage from the book to the man-book (l’hommelivre) is like an innovation to liberate the word so that it may once more become an object of pure transmission. And so Davenne’s work is not a novel, not even letters; instead, it is an entire mise-en-scène that passes from word to image. The photographs, the memories, the static images can only acquire life when they form part of a theater within which they produce the representation of death, a simulacrum of Christ’s resurrection. La Chambre verte opens and closes with two absences: the shot of a lace curtain that occludes Davenne’s window, which he will traverse as a ghost, and the shot of the burning candles that depend on Davenne’s own disappearance. Canvas and light, screen and flickering shadow. Cinema’s primary tools, they work its magic. In the first scene, Davenne expels a priest from a vigil because religion is incapable of truly bringing the dead back to life – a task that only Davenne can perform through his ritual invocation. Once again it must be Truffaut who interprets Davenne, for the metteur-en-scène is he who organizes the images to celebrate a resurrection of the life that the camera has killed. In the initial credits, Truffaut plays Davenne in World War I. Moving toward the spectator, surrounded by documentary images of the war’s death and destruction, he peers into the camera as if ready to dive into the world of shadows so as to redeem them and return them to the light of day. But this resurrection supposes a decomposition of the body for the recomposition of the scene. The invocation of the dead’s presence brings them to life but erases the living. The work, as Blanchot will say, is also a “dis-work” – an undoing. The last candle – the completion of the figure – likewise supposes the omnipresence of death that continues its unbending task. Davenne’s chapel is like Claude’s book, or that of Bertrand Morane in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), or the diary of Adèle Hugo in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), or even Ferrand’s film in La Nuit américaine. All of these works replace the language of desire with its representation. Truffaut’s cinema in the seventies is like a silent progression of death, a progression that eventually must overtake the filmmaker himself. But what does this persistent, tireless invocation of death signify? What is the nature of the trajectory limned from Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte? It would seem that the earlier film invokes death in the form of ghosts who survive themselves as much as they survive their beloveds (as with the Claude–Muriel pair in relation to Anne); while in the latter film death establishes itself as, and radiates from, the form and matter of image itself. Furthermore, if one views La Chambre verte from a certain perspective, one sees the return of all the earlier film’s characters and settings. They appear, aged and embalmed, as if upon a shadow-painting drowned in the penumbra that surrounds the brightness of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent or that of the crucial scene of Muriel’s passion in which death plans to arrive in secret, without our seeing it, only to reemerge and stalk the latter film. But this darkening is of a piece with a larger shift. For while the first film concludes with the end of World

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War I, La Chambre verte begins ten years after the war’s finish. It is as if the latter were a continuation and Claude had been transformed into Davenne upon the invocation of Muriel’s child photograph – an intrusion of the past in the first film that in the second has countlessly multiplied itself and become an onslaught. Indeed the spectator cannot take a step inside La Chambre verte without crossing myriad frozen images, engulfed by the exasperating eternity of time-out-of-time. It is as if the entire film occurs in an extended timeout (in almost the athletic sense of the term) when all expectancy loses its hope. Yet is this not what life is, according to Truffaut – simply a prolonged wait before death? Hence both the need to live with the dead so as to learn from them and the paradox caused by the impossibility of ever truly crossing that threshold. One is stuck in a state of perpetual tension, longing to unite fragments that will never come together. There is something in this understanding that echoes the “il y a” of Lévinas: “There is no longer this, nor that, there is not ‘something.’ But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.”12 And there is in Truffaut an encapsulated energy that compresses life and contains it until death, an energy that consumes itself in a shrunken space, bashing against its walls, rushing everywhere without finding liberation, and leaving in its wake such an excess of thought that only more thought can come of it. Much like the wasteful expenditures of Bataille, Truffaut’s encapsulated energy opposes the distillations of capitalism and, as such, becomes its negation: an economy of life that values more what is squandered than what is saved. Yet this economy may never expand its force; it is perpetually hemmed in by its own expressive limitations, by both language and image that form the capsule in which this vital energy remains held. The energy remains enclosed in a combustion coming from the continuous friction felt inside the capsule, a combustion without release or flue. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, Claude and the two sisters always appear enclosed in that bubble of energy that can only find liberation through sex and death so that life becomes an ongoing inner fire – all-devouring, without pause, and without escaping its own immolation. Seated in the grass, Claude tells Anne and Muriel of his suicide attempt as a teenager. We first see them immersed in a strange game, hurling and spinning one another before they freeze in the exact position released – filmed by Truffaut from a distance as was Muriel’s collapse. When the two women trap Claude he remains paralyzed and the camera moves away from the trio toward the mother: an instance of the order and restraint of that energy that always stays contained in itself, repressed in a nervous and expectant quietude. Then, seated on the grass, in a shot where we see all three characters, Claude begins to tell of his adolescent adventure with death. But before he begins he asks to change his place, saying he wants to see both of their faces when he tells the story. This denial of being in-the-middle, restricted, corresponds to another scene. Under the rain and taking refuge in a cave, Anne and Muriel rub their bodies against Claude, playing “squeeze the lemon,” bringing him warmth. Claude is always between Anne and Muriel; the energy is always enclosed and the friction, spark, and fire can only light itself through the explosive freedom of story. But ignition also requires a closed

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circuit. Claude’s suicide had in its scenography a bed on fire, in which his body lay vanishing with open veins. Once again the evocation of flame and blood are both held captive in words. This scene in turn echoes that of La Chambre verte in which the room Davenne has dedicated to his wife catches fire. It is as if the enclosed energy from Claude’s suicide attempt explodes and the repressed fire appears in the very mise-en-scène, leading Davenne to discover the chapel that will ultimately house the candles in commemoration of his dead. Again, these candles are themselves that same fire constrained – ordered and enclosed, minuscule yet interminable. These flames are representation in miniature of the great fire of life that will lead Davenne to death. It is in this room where the isolated meetings between Davenne and Cécilia occur and hence the room where the possibility of love presents itself. But it is also where the prospect of love is repeatedly frozen, drawn back on itself, and emptied so as to provoke death by asphyxia. The energy saturates by its very re-concentration. One might invoke the famous dream analyzed by Freud – “Father, can’t you see I’m burning!” – to explain the apparition of the ghost who demands her right of recognition, a right she claims even if it spells the death of present desire. The time of story appears to lack a terminus, instead possessing a circularity that ends by doubling back on itself. The representation and the image, as well as literature and the word, intercept the flux of the real. The time of death does not affect the dead in isolation; instead, it extends through life as a shadow, as an “existence” that denies the exuberance of the “existent” (Lévinas once again). All that might constitute excess remains constrained by the seductive power of art, which, like Medusa’s gaze, fascinates and freezes at once. And what of language? In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, the jumping from French to English and vice versa provokes ruptures of functional communication that also interrupt the feelings of love. In La Chambre verte, Julien and Cécilia are not the only characters incapable of communication: the enigmatic figure of the deaf-mute child must too be accounted for. Indeed we never know exactly why he is there, but there is no question that he performs a fundamental role. His relation to Davenne seems much the same as that between Victor and Dr Itard in L’Enfant sauvage (1970), another story of a solitary man in charge of a child who cannot speak. Nevertheless, the child in La Chambre verte maintains a connection with inanimate objects that reflects not only his own but also Davenne’s communicative incapacity. The boy is the witness to, and eventually the involuntary destroyer of, the photographic plates of the war; he is a thief of store-window wigs; he is like a duende, a mythical imp who does not belong to this world but wants to set it in motion and negate all immobility. He even tries to reconstruct Julie after Davenne’s attempts – as when he asks for a wax reproduction of his wife only to receive a grotesquerie – end in vain. Through its absence in the case of the child, language reveals its incapacity to capture the breadth of the gaze. And so Truffaut suggests that the overflow of language can only meet the response of order and control; again he finds himself trapped in a contradiction – like a sea of energy that cannot generate surf – between the need to speak, to tell, and the futility of doing so.

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It is not surprising then that Truffaut turns to Henry James for La Chambre verte – James, the master both of self-repression and the transmutation of life’s unstoppable flux into the closed construction of story. Yet James’s stories always display in their very seams those surpluses which the Work must suppress in order to construct itself. James recognizes in his novels that the “multiplication of touches had produced even more life than the subject required, and that life, on other conditions, in some other prime relation would still have somehow to be spent.”13 In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, we are told of Anne’s last words: “My mouth is full of dirt.” This final, layered utterance means that the end of existence is also the end of speech, the act of silencing oneself before the impossibility of formulating words. But the imagery also evokes the body buried alive, she who must limit her speech to the unintelligibility of impossible speech. In La Chambre verte, Davenne belongs to that class of life which must ceaselessly interrupt itself because it cannot speak if it is not through death and the death of language. Jean-Pierre Léaud and François Truffaut: two actors who are not actors but icons – the former mechanizing his gestures through a rhythm of immobility while the latter neutralizes his through the excision of any silences or caesurae. Neither of the two speak; they stammer, one by misspeaking and the other in endless prolixity, one in slowness and the other in haste. Both break through language to arrive at what Barthes conceived of as the fragmentary excess of amorous speech.14 And both have someone to whom they can bequeath this excessive discourse – someone who must enlarge it through a gesture of sacrifice. Muriel’s concession to Claude will be to the restrictiveness of convention (she will marry, but not to Claude); Cécilia’s to Davenne will be in speaking the beloved’s name so that he may be reborn beyond her. She christens the altar of candles as “Julien Davenne,” but only once he has died. Throwing aside language yet keeping hold of story, both Les Deux Anglaises et le continent and La Chambre verte reveal themselves to be tributes to stillness that nevertheless long to surpass its very limits. Such a paradoxical relation describes not only the interplay between story and language but also that between image and shot. The image tends toward paralysis, the shot toward its release – few filmmakers have succeeded in bringing this tension to film as powerfully as Truffaut. The written missives, for instance, form a simple image, but the shot obliges them to move through the circulation of speech. The candles remain still, but the duration of the shot foregrounds their quiver. This is why, in any one of the many books about Truffaut, when we contemplate the frozen stills we always feel the lack of the before and the after, and in a manner so very different than with other directors. One could say that for Truffaut the pictorial finds itself crosshatched by the literary; the pictorial requires narrative circulation to breathe, to be invested with life. The paradox resides in that, once this carousel is set to spin, the result is a blockage that wishes to break free from itself but cannot. It must instead be trapped in an eternal half-sleep of existence, not unlike the suspension of meaning found in the disquiet between love and its impossibility. Davenne fights for the survival of the dead in La Chambre verte, but his project is equivalent to the negation of the living. When he discovers that the widower of

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the  first scene will remarry, Davenne recoils in dissent; he remains behind glass like a ghost while his friend moves down the staircase with his new wife. The very mise-en-scène is charged with their contrary attitudes: the blocked stasis of the glass and the forward extension of the stairwell. When Davenne discovers that Cécilia was once his best friend’s lover – that his friend “betrayed” him precisely after losing his wife – this knowledge breaks his only tie to the outside world. Davenne then manifests the symptoms of a neurotic; he rejects any and all transitions, even change itself.

Quivering Tributes to Stillness What then do we see in the journey traced from Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte? What separates the boy who falls from a trapeze at the start of the first film from the man who rises from the dead at the beginning of the second? At the close of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, Claude leaves us through the threshold of an exit; at the beginning of La Chambre verte, Davenne comes toward us through the passageway of the undead – contrary and contradictory movements that nevertheless trace a journey that is continuous. Moving away and moving towards; the longing to trap the ephemeral; the irises that close around a vanishing image in the earlier film, as if wanting to preserve the movement of the shot and prevent its erasure or the obsession for presence–absence in the latter film – with its tombs, portraits, candles – in search of that survival, that intermittent continuation of life found only in those who live in and with death, in those who have died yet have not entirely left. Fear, at root, of disappearance. Fear that the passion of life will not leave its trace. Was modernity – the modern project – itself a passion of this type? Was it that il y a of Lévinas which during a time flickered and in the decade of the seventies began slowly to go out, to fade, to be extinguished? These two films by Truffaut situate themselves at the interval of a double disappearance – during the last blazes not only of classicism but also of modernity itself. The two films are the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of this process, a process which betrays a range of absences – of time in its conversion into story or of love in the domestication of its language or of the dead through a range of fetish objects. Meanwhile, none other than Hitchcock, a filmmaker so dear to Truffaut, will shoot his last film, Family Plot (1976), where a false clairvoyant brings to stage invented images of the deceased. And Steven Spielberg, avatar of a new American cinema, uses none other than Truffaut himself to personify this practice that puts other possible worlds into contact with our own. The remaining-in-suspension, or the being-inbetween, the cult for a ghostly classicism transformed into a modernity, will quickly meet the same fate as Truffaut’s cinema in the 1970s. From Les Deux Anglaises et le continent to La Chambre verte something shuts off – the invisibility of the absence which makes itself present, but also the attempt, by other means, to extend classicism to the modern canon. If modernity rushed towards

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its own terminus by fantasizing the death of cinema, Truffaut flickers out in films kept always at the threshold between the living and the dead, the classical and the modern – films always trapped in that stasis which, seen today, implodes as a plenitude of meaning and a loss of aura. Existence, the terrible insistence of the image not to disappear without leaving its trace. Translated by Joshua Sperling

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 375. Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work (London: Phaidon, 2005), p. 154. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). First published as L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Cyril Neyrat, François Truffaut (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), pp. 60–61. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 385. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 387. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 497 n.4. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 35. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 328. Originally published as La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). André Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 75. Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, p. 36. Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), p. 58. The original: “Il n’y a plus ceci, ni cela; il n’y a pas ‘quelque chose.’ Mais cette universelle absence est, à son tour, une présence, une présence absolument inevitable.” De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: J. Vrin, 1981 [1947]), p. 94. Henry James, “Preface to Roderick Hudson,” in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. Colm Toibin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 19. Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

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The Structural Role of Intervals in L’Argent de Poche Alain Bergala

The Social and Political Dimension of a Children’s Film L’Argent de poche is situated at the crossroads of two types of films in Truffaut’s oeuvre: linear films about childhood, centered on one omnipresent character (Les 400 Coups, 1959), L’Enfant sauvage (1970), and films with a more scattered screenplay structure, treating a small community (the courtyard of the apartment building in Domicile conjugal (1970), the film production unit of La Nuit américaine (1973). In 1973, two years before L’Argent de poche was shot, Fellini had made Amarcord, narrating, in the form of a puzzle, the story of a community in a small Italian town. Even though Truffaut’s style is very distant from the Italian filmmaker’s, some of the reminiscences from Amarcord can be detected in Truffaut’s film (the movie theater as meeting place for the social group, first sexual stirrings, etc.). Truffaut used to claim that L’Argent de poche was not autobiographical but that it mixed personal memories with various anecdotes that had been told to him (the little girl who screams “I am hungry” to everyone in the apartment courtyard) or stories he had found in newspapers (Little Gregory’s fall from which he recovers unscathed). Among his personal memories, he affirmed, “What happens in the summer camp really happened to me: word for word, image for image. Including the meeting at the stadium with the ‘bicycles behind motorbikes’ race.” By a curious compensatory logic, Truffaut, who clearly refused to follow the “fashion” set by the political films of the early seventies, nevertheless sprinkled L’Argent de poche (a film both for and featuring children) with overt references to politics – more than in any  other film in his oeuvre. In the scene that takes place in the movie theater, for instance, the screenplay calls for little more than a series of light-hearted antics: Julien’s ploy to sneak into the movies; Nicole recounting of her failed date to Madame Richet; A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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the schoolteacher’s flirtations with a man. Yet here Truffaut includes newsreel footage from the most serious political question of his generation – the Algerian war – by presenting the voices of [heads of state] Houari Boumedienne and Giscard d’Estaing in counterpoint to his own fiction. Let us not forget that Truffaut, apparently the least politicized (along with Rohmer) of the Nouvelle Vague, was the only filmmaker of that group to sign the 1960 Manifeste des 121 in support of the “right to insubordination.” The teacher’s final speech calling for a counter-politics of children as a social class may seem surprising in a film by Truffaut, who hated films with a thesis or with overly explicit “conclusions.” But in this case the cause he supports is a children’s cause which personally affected him deeply and whose supporters were all too rare at the time. After the Algerian war, the Langlois Affair and Cannes 68, the only cause that would drive Truffaut to overcome his extreme reluctance to hold forth on public political positions was that of unhappy or mistreated childhood. In 1979, three years after L’Argent du poche, he would make a declaration at UNESCO on the occasion of “The Year of Childhood,” a declaration that is highly surprising owing to its concretely political tone.

A Film Built on The Interval A figure haunts L’Argent de poche: that of the interval. At the time of its release, Truffaut was criticized for having made L’Argent de poche a work of unanimity.1 If that is indeed the case, then all should converge upon a singularity, as in the film’s opening sequence when flocks of children rush toward the same school; or during the final credits when the schoolchildren gather inside the frame to face the camera. But this appearance of togetherness that opens and closes the film is misleading. For the figure that structures L’Argent de poche is not at all an array of spokes pointing toward a center. Rather it is the figure of the interval that serves as the basic structure for most scenes. As presented by this film, life is essentially composed of intervals, some more painful than others, some harder to shorten, to close, than others. Still, it is often the sudden contraction of an interval between two characters that produces, provisionally, a moment of deep happiness.

The Game of the Reel The film’s primary interval, structuring the majority of its scenes, is the interval that separates a child from his mother or father. Ever since Freud, the distance between the infant and the mother has been known to be of decisive importance for symbolic instruction. In his Essays on Psychoanalysis Freud explains how the “first” game played by an eighteen-month-old boy – in fact his own grandson – helped to confirm his symbolic theory.

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The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. […] He was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o o”, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word “fort” [“gone”]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play “gone” with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. […] What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o”. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. … The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement: the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.2

This “game,” which relates directly to the distance between the boy and his mother, to her disappearances and returns, and to the mastering of separation-anxiety in relation to her, is a game built upon the notion of the interval. There is the interval between the child and the mother, as well as that between the child and his toy, measured by a string which can be increased and shortened at will. The cinema, which is the art of arranging figures in space, is often the art of calibrating the interval between two figures. In L’Argent de poche, whose topic is childhood itself, Truffaut builds the majority of scenes upon this structure of an interval that may or may not be reduced, or reabsorbed, according to whether we are in a joyous, comical, carefree scene or in a scene that somehow bespeaks the misfortune of unbridgeable intervals and of unassuagable distress.

Child-adults and the Reversal of Roles The two principle figures of the film – Patrick and Julien – exist in symmetry with one another: Patrick has only one parent left, his father, anchored at home by his paralysis, and so the child, in place of the parent, will explore the world around this fixed point. Patrick is the one who traverses the interval between the home and the world, who runs the errands, who maintains social ties. As for Julien, he has only his

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mother (although, we will discover, in extremis, the presence of a grandmother), and she too is stuck indoors, languishing inside her shack and her alcoholism. And so Julien is left alone to traverse the interval between the home and the world, to bring back the bottles of wine, and so on. These two boys occupy a role usually reserved for an adult, that is, being responsible for interacting with the world. And in a certain sense, these parents are the ones to be looked after by the boys: for, immobilized in their homes, they exist in a position of infantile dependence. Truffaut was haunted by this twin structure of one fixed point (a character who cannot leave the house) and another who is mobile and thus plays the role of the wooden reel with the string in the game invented by Freud’s grandson. In this structure we also recognize the blueprint for Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where James Stewart, his leg in a cast, is immobilized in front of his window, forced to travel across the interval between his apartment and the façade of the building across the courtyard by way of sight (with the aide of optical instruments: binoculars, telephoto lenses); by way of sound (the telephone that puts him in aural proximity of the murderer); or by way of other characters (his fiancée and his nurse) who will accomplish acts remotely in his place. Known for his great admiration of Hitchcock, Truffaut would structure two films on this premise. Le Dernier Métro features a Jewish theater director who, in order to evade deportation, hides in the cellar of his own playhouse, yet nevertheless continues to direct the drama by proxy, his wife closing the interval between him and the world (both the world of the theater and the real world outside). And Truffaut’s last film, Vivement dimanche!, sends Fanny Ardant from place to place on behalf of Jean-Louis Trintignant, stuck in his company’s back-office until his innocence can be proven. What is at play between Patrick and Julien in L’Argent de poche is at once the pattern of symmetry and of the interval. Even while both share common traits, the two characters are condemned never to meet for any length of time. Their encounters throughout the film are subject to the logic of an unresolved interval. This interval is, first of all, one of looking. At the film’s outset Patrick is in a position to observe Julien’s actions from afar, without him knowing he is being watched. Then the narrative forces their paths to cross. The interval between the two characters is reduced momentarily by a haphazard meeting, though inevitably it expands again just as quickly. In the scene where Patrick helps Julien learn his lesson, the voice of Julien’s vicious mother stymies this first and only attempt at voluntary proximity. Then, in the scene where the two boys meet in the street, Julien flees after stealing the hood ornament from the Mercedes, thus lengthening a double distance (both spatial and moral) between himself and Patrick: the two resemble each other, but Patrick is on the side of the law. In the scene where Julien comes out of the grocery store with six wine bottles, he rejects Patrick’s gesture of friendship and goes off on his own. In another scene where the two again encounter each other, Patrick has a personal mission that makes him purposefully stay away from every boy: he is on his way to declare his love for Madame Riffle with his bouquet of flowers. Ultimately, the relation between Julien and Patrick is the story of an interval that refuses to contract, a distance between two characters who at first seemed destined to meet and to join in

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friendship. The failure of their ever truly meeting, manifest spatially in the film by the ineluctable and ever-present interval between them, formally contradicts the criticism of excessive gentillesse that greeted the film upon its release. Julien, who is by far the most isolated, solitary character of the film (as he has no one to whom he can reveal the reason for his being different), will, curiously, be given his own mission to accomplish, when he is asked by a man on the street to close the interval between him and a woman in her apartment (by delivering a letter) – a woman whom the man desires yet from whom he is visibly kept apart by social norms. This scene, which is barely a dramatic situation – in the sense that it requires almost no scripted elaboration – operates solely on the following paradox: he who is condemned to suffer the most unhappy intervals with others – with others without exception – ends up being the right agent in helping two anonymous characters, less unhappy than he is, in closing the interval that separates them.

A Double Exclusion This is a film where the interval between the look (of desire, of longing) and its object plays an insistent role. We know that the gaze, while giving the illusion of access to its object, allows for nothing but an illusory satisfaction. Indeed, the very condition of the gaze rests on an interval between the subject and that which is desired at a distance. This is also, quite precisely, how Roland Barthes defined the image in relation to desire: “The image is that from which I am excluded.” Patrick experiences his love for Madame Riffle (“he doesn’t know,” said Truffaut, “if she’s his mother, his fiancée, or his mistress; surely she’s a bit of each”) through his gaze and through his exclusion. One of the most beautiful moments of invidia in the film comes in the scene when Patrick, who is motherless, looks on as if in a dream, while Madame Riffle gently kisses her son before he leaves for school. Watching this kiss, Patrick experiences the poignancy of a double-exclusion: first, from what he does not have (a mother to kiss him) and, second, from what he is too young to know (the love of a woman not just as a mother but as a woman). This scene is itself a reprise of the scene where Patrick freezes upon seeing Madame Riffle bend over her son outside the schoolyard but then walk away down the sloping street. How sadly ironic that one boy, ignorant of his blessed fortune, should refuse precisely that of which the other, Patrick, has greatest need: as sketched in this scene when Laurent – motivated, doubtless, by the shame that being so mothered would provoke before an audience of his peers – forbids his mother from accompanying him further into the schoolyard and so demands that she take her leave. The image as “that precisely from which I am excluded” is given objective presence in the form of the advertising poster for the sleeper train on the wall of the Riffle residence (Figure 28.1). Patrick fantasizes about this image, where a woman’s smile invites a man to close the minuscule gap that still remains between their bodies. Patrick clearly prefers to take refuge in the imaginary representation of a reality that “conforms

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Figure 28.1

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

to his desires.” And so, during the scene in the cinema when he must choose, in real life, between two girls to kiss, he chooses neither, lest he close the gap that still separates him from the world of women and his passage into adulthood.

Desire and Chance We must wait for the film’s final sequence at the summer camp for Patrick to find the strength to close that interval , in reality, by kissing a girl for the first time. But this event follows the rules set out by an almost Byzantine game of intervals (Truffaut would have called it “Lubitschian”). Patrick and Martine’s meeting occurs at first through three instances of eye-contact, that indispensable interval from which love is born. The two first notice each other on the train; then in the bleachers of a stadium where bicycles race behind motorcycles (the two devices joined wheel to wheel so that any interval between them, any loss of speed on the part of the cyclist, would be fatal); and finally Patrick and Martine trade glances during the inevitable hike that, as the school song goes, “wears our soles thin.” At the cafeteria, it will then be necessary to construct a system in which the community of children may mix according to both chance and desire – two forces that play upon each other like the negation of a negation. To recapitulate this intricate sequence: when Martine leaves to go to the bathroom, she puts an even greater interval between the pair, who have until then been together in the same cafeteria but at different tables, observed by the other children whose presence renders all intimacy impossible. Then a girl teases Patrick, joking that Martine left so he would follow to kiss her. Possessed by a desire even stronger

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than his fear of the other children’s mockery, Patrick seizes on this chance to exit, thus lengthening the interval between him and the group while closing the interval which separates him from Martine. In their respective perambulations Truffaut pays homage to The Navigator, where Buster Keaton and his young lady manage to barely miss each other, sometimes by a margin of mere seconds, despite their being alone aboard an empty ship. In the same way, Martine and Patrick search for one another but find their paths condemned, as if by a mischievous God, never to cross, to miss each other in extremis at every turn, yet all within the view of the spectator who can see both children within the frame. When Martine returns to the cafeteria, her entrance corroborates the failure of their encounter, suggesting the irreducibility of the interval that separates them. But another boy expels her yet again, sending her as if she were a billiard ball out of the refectory and into the halls where Patrick continues to wander. Now their paths do cross, this time halfway up the very stairwell that once kept them apart. Faced with such obstinate forces (their desire to find each other, the coaxing of the other children, the aleatory persistence of their wanderings), forces which conspire precisely to close the interval across which they had established their imaginary love-at-a-distance (much as Patrick was always wont to do until that very moment), the two children at last give each other their first kiss.

The Game with The String Two rather optimistic sequences refer directly to the jubilation Freud’s grandson felt when he closed the gap with his now famous toy. In a sequence that could almost be a direct adaptation of Freud’s anecdote in the form of a gag, little Sylvie separates herself from her parents by persisting in her headstrong recalcitrance regarding her old, disgusting purse. Once they have left for the restaurant without her, she meticulously locks herself inside the apartment, symbolically throwing the key to the bottom of the goldfish bowl. She then proceeds to the window which looks upon the building’s inner courtyard to broadcast the most primitive and infantile of distress signals: “I’m hungry!” she screams through a megaphone. As if by dint of a miracle, all her needs will be met thanks to the mobilization of the indignant neighbors: she will eat and she will be looked upon with compassion. Quite bizarrely, this satisfaction – at once concrete and symbolic – comes by way of a complex series of maneuvers involving strings. Effectively, a system of “lifelines” worthy of a high-risk alpine expedition orchestrates the courtyard’s energies, so as to permit her to procure a basket full of food. By the end of the sequence, the interval that she voluntarily extended between herself and her real parents finds itself more than symbolically satisfied by her neighbors. We thus see that her overt demand (“I’m hungry!”) obscured another, more narcissistic, need: that everyone should pay attention to her and that her parents should regret their obstinacy. Then there is the bravura of the set piece composed as an elegant, almost musical, variation around the figure of the interval: Little Gregory’s fall from the window.

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On a dramatic level, the sequence is set up by the scene when Little Gregory’s mother asks another, older child, Richard Golfier, who lives across the hall on the same floor as the schoolteacher, to bring her son back home for her. It is during the course of this initial separation from his mother (the first represented in the film, that is), that Little Gregory will discover Monsieur and Madame Richet’s apartment. The sequence of Gregory’s fall begins with a printed notice: that the elevator, which serves to close the interval between the ground floor and the upstairs apartments, is out of service. This anomaly allows Little Gregory to make a detour through the Richet apartment, which, thanks to the prescience of the screenplay, he has already visited. Truffaut takes the opportunity to have Nicole, Little Gregory’s mother, and Madame Richet make each other’s acquaintance, thus priming the story for the later rendezvous between Nicole, an abandoned single mother, and the man in the personals column. Arriving home after this visit next door, Nicole realizes her pocketbook is missing. She leaves Little Gregory alone in the apartment and returns down the stairwell whence she had come to search for the missing object (in just the way, as she told Madame Richet, Little Gregory’s father had done, when he disappeared on an errand for matches). As she descends the stairwell, Nicole widens the interval between her and her son at each turn. Meanwhile, Little Gregory finds himself engrossed in another situation, wherein a different interval must be resolved, that between himself and the cat. Once the child has finally caught the pet, trapping it on the window ledge, he tries, like Freud’s grandson, to toss this living toy out where it belongs (two stories down). Unable to see where the cat has landed (in fact on the window ledge immediately below), Gregory climbs onto the ledge and topples from a great height before the horrified gaze of a group of neighbors, who peer up in stunned and communal silence, as if they dare not wake an acrobatic sleepwalker from his trance. In two seconds Gregory has closed the interval between himself and his mother who by this time has reached the ground floor. The radicality of the solution found by her son to rejoin his mother is not lost on Nicole, whose shock causes her promptly to faint. Even more gifted than his predecessor – Freud’s famous grandson – Little Gregory places himself in the role of the toy itself. And he finds an inspired way to symbolize, instantly and twice-over, its projection: in his perfectly clear expression, “Gregory go boom,” and through a game in which he is completely absorbed – and which is a tremendous find for Truffaut. For Gregory plays the Freudian “fort” – “da” with a piece of wire from the awning his fall has just knocked over onto the street, kicking it, and thus extending the interval by a meter; then coming closer again, till he touches it, then sending it off again with another kick. Through this stunning shortcut, Gregory has enacted the very game he just played between himself and his mother.

On the Interval as a Recurring Figure Once attuned to this underlying structure, we notice other sequences similarly built on the figure of the interval.

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In the schoolyard, the teacher discovers that the interval between her and a recalcitrant student is precisely what allows the latter to perform Harpagon’s monologue from Molière with the gusto he previously lacked, this time before an audience composed solely of his peers. Perched on the shoulders of a friend, a student peers through binoculars to spy on the ablutions of a naked woman. On Sunday, the schoolteacher and his wife take a walk, passing Richard and his father in a café, then the schoolteacher looking for her date, and then running into two young girls collecting money to fight cancer; the girls then bring us back to Gregory’s mother who is about to meet her date at the café. The camera widens a spatial interval to contain all these characters, only the better to collapse it at the scene’s end. Lacking the pocket money to pay for a seat at the movies, Julien cleverly manipulates the interval between the theater’s entrance and its emergency exit so as to sneak in without paying. At the cinema, a newsreel about Algeria is heard, while we see the schoolteacher, whose boyfriend caresses her knee. This entire sequence is predicated on the interval between sound and image. When Julien declares to his grammar teacher that he does not have his book and does not care, he is expelled to the adjacent hallway, using the interval to filch money from the coat pockets of his classmates. Julien flirts dangerously with the interval between his body and the passing cars. Truffaut builds a sequence on the spatial interval between Patrick’s apartment and the adjacent cinema’s projection room – and in the latter, between the sound of the projected film and the image of life. In the movie theater, the “pick up” is at first a question of closing the interval between the boys and the girls. The precocious Bruno masterfully orchestrates a set of slight place-changes, calibrating the shifting intervals (which are as psychological as they are spatial) between himself and the two girls at his side. Helping his wife in labor, Monsieur Richet proves unable to maintain the necessary distance to be able to photograph the birth properly. The same Monsieur Richet pompously explains to his wife the importance of keeping the correct distance between the baby and the mother’s breast, a distance he claims will in turn determine the child’s adult relations to women. Julien’s nocturnal roving is the result of an interval that has become irremediable between him and his evil mother, who has kicked him out of the house. And finally, the scene where the interval is increased by the articulation between the stakes of the scripted drama (the infirmary) and what we actually see through the highly choreographed visual detour of the narration (the nurse racing across the courtyard).

This persistent construction of L’Argent de poche around the figure of the interval was surely imposed on Truffaut by the topic itself: childhood and the difficulty (at turns comic and painful, and Truffaut wished to capture both) of finding one’s right place in

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the world, one’s proper distance in relation to others. We have no way of knowing for certain if Truffaut was aware of the structural omnipresence of this pattern within his film. But as a powerful abstract schema, the figure of the interval helps him rise above the syrupy naturalism and unanimisme of which critics accused him during the period of L’Argent de poche. Naturalism consists of filming things in themselves, one by one, in their naturalness, rather than filming the relation of things between themselves, or what is at play between things, within the intervals that separate them from each other. And an aesthetic of unanimity consists in characters disingenuously engineered to seem diverse so as to end on a note of their “natural” togetherness. None of the above is found in L’Argent de poche, where the amicable, lighthearted appearance of the film is but a testament to Truffaut’s tact in not playing up the profound biographical fissure at the root of his creation – a fissure that can nevertheless be perceived through the omnipresence of a fundamentally unbridgeable interval in the universe of these children. Truffaut resists manifesting overt pathos by lending his film a gentle and apparently sunny look. Above all, with this film, Truffaut refused “to use childhood” in order to create pathos, even if the topic affected him in a profound and personal way. Nevertheless, he is far from having made a film that could be called reconciled. Translated by Joshua Sperling

Notes This chapter was first published as part a brochure, “L’Argent de poche,” in the series Cahiers de notes sur… by the association Les Enfants du Cinéma. In the initial section on its context, Alain Bergala refers to the same moment in the film that is described by Arnaud Desplechin (see Gillain and Andrew, interview with arnaud desplechin: part i), when a difficult current political discussion concerning Algerians in France enters the fiction of the film via a television news program that happens to be on. 1 Unamisme refers to an early twentieth-century French literary movement, of which Jules Romains was chief spokesperson, in which art aims to express the collective feelings of a social group. 2 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 8–9.

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

It is impossible to choose. Paulo, Oliveira’s Don Juan Pourquoi “aimait” à l’imparfait? Bertrand Morane, Truffaut’s Don Juan Both François Truffaut and Domingos de Oliveira were born in the thirties, the first in 1932 in Paris, the second in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro. Domingos de Oliveira lives in Rio; his recent film, adapted from his own play, Todo mundo tem problemas sexuais (Everybody has sexual problems, 2008), screened widely in Brazil. Oliveira has worked as a writer, actor, and director in theater as well as in cinema. His first film, Todas as mulheres do mundo (All women of the world, 1966), has become a cult movie among Brazilian scholars and students of cinema. This is the film that I want to compare to Truffaut’s L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) through the myth of Don Juan. Both directors love women. Lacan1 in the seminar on “The Object Relation” claims that Don Juan truly loves women and is not a mere seducer and deceiver. Both directors are accomplices of women, and in these films we find a proliferation of beauties. Jean Rousset2 asserts that there are three invariants in the myth of Don Juan: inconstancy, a group of women, and death. In many of Truffaut’s films we could say that, looking for The Woman, he found the famous “silent stone guest” of the myth: the dead father, Doña Ana’s father, who would destroy him in the end. Just after L´Homme qui aimait les femmes he directed La Chambre verte (1978), a movie in which the man worships the memory of his wife who died soon after they were married. Pascal Bonitzer3 considers this to be one of the most beautiful films of Truffaut. One amazing scene relates deeply to the myth of Don Juan: the scene where the main character, played by Truffaut himself, arranges A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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for the creation of a wax effigy of his dead wife but becomes very upset by what he sees and immediately orders the sculptor to destroy it. Interestingly, the film that Oliveira made following Todas as mulheres do mundo is Edu, coração de ouro (Edu golden heart, 1967). The protagonist shuns any commitment and drifts around Rio de Janeiro meeting women, cheating on his fiancée, and arriving nowhere. It is as if in their later films both directors reassert their main concern: Truffaut goes beyond the erotic drive to reach a deadly jouissance, whereas Oliveira returns to his motto, “It is impossible to choose,” the inconstancy invariant of the myth. The impossibility of the couple leads Truffaut repeatedly to associate love and death as he does in Jules et Jim (1962), La Mariée était en noir (1967), La Peau douce (1964), L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), and La Femme d’à côté (1981). Both our films are narrated by their Don Juan characters. They tell their stories in voice-over. Both write. The French film starts with the burial of Truffaut’s Don Juan and the last sequence of the film is his burial again. All the women on his list stop in front of the coffin to scatter some earth, one by one. Oliveira’s film begins with a Christmas singles’ party at his Don Juan’s apartment and ends with a birthday party for the character’s one-year-old son. The French character, Bertrand, is writing his memoirs, whose title is suggested by his last girlfriend, the one who supported the publication of his book. Instead of The Womanizer, she would call it L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. When he asks why the use of the “imperfect past” (aimait), she says, “It’s a question of sonority: not only does it sound better but it also suits your narrative style. You are very narrative. You are not afraid of telling a story.” And when he does start to tell his own story, a potentiality of meaning opens up. Truffaut respects the two aspects of myth, narrative, and structure. For him even the death of the character can be joyful when it is required by the logic of the myth. He said that internally he thought about this film of a womanizer and he associated it with films where the man is a killer. This time he just had the look of a murderer.4 For both of the filmmakers with whom I am concerned, myth is a cinematic dispositif. In psychoanalysis, myth is a theoretical dispositif. Oliveira’s Don Juan, a journalist, is also writing a novel “sort of autobiography” in his spare time. He also tells his story in flashback, to his friend Edu, whom he meets by chance in the street. In psychoanalysis, everything starts with a subject who tells his own story. Truffaut’s Bertrand just wanted to make sense of a contingent and traumatic set of events by means of a narrative. But as Marcel Duchamp said of the “creative act,” art is the difference between what we intend to say but could not transmit in its entirety and what we do not intend but which nevertheless comes out unexpectedly: en plus. Art is the difference between a lack and a surplus. And very much like a psychoanalytical process in which the subject always discovers “afterwards,” Bertrand only discovers what prompted him to write his story après-coup, after he has written “the end,” when his book is being printed. He wrote it because of one woman, the one he loved, the one who left him. He wrote because of the loss of Vera. Truffaut’s Don Juan is a man of loss – just like Peter Handke’s Don Juan, who lost someone he loved, perhaps a son, perhaps a wife.5 Handke claims that this, above all, attracts women. They may desire the fetishized penis of a partner, but they love in him the castrated lover.

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Our Brazilian Don Juan, Paulo, also tells Edu how he extricated himself from the role of the eternal seducer or, better, how he fell into a trap named Maria Alice. In the prologue to the film we see Edu thinking, talking to himself about how impossible it is to choose one woman among all the others. Anxiously he repeats, as if it were a mantra, “It’s impossible to choose.” He points here to the vicissitudes of the love encounter from the masculine side. Either he wants to keep the fantasy of the possibility of having all the women of the world or he wants to find The Woman, who would be the sum of all the qualities of all women: spectacular lover, critical reader, amorous mother. Well, Paulo found in Maria Alice three in one, the very incarnation of his notion of ideal femininity. She reads his manuscript and does not approve of it. He becomes even more in love with this clever and sincere woman. Through her, he could enjoy all women on earth because he cannot possess them all individually. All myths appear as versions. So to us, it is less a question of finding a true Don Juan myth in these two films than of trying to grasp how each filmmaker has used the mythological machine. Our mission is to investigate how the Don Juan myth has been appropriated, or else profaned, which is the same thing. In opposition to Aristophanes’ idea that in love the subject is looking for the other half, Lacan writes, “To this mythical representation of the mystery of love, analytic experience lets us substitute the search by the subject not for the sexual complement, but for the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being and that he is no longer immortal.”6 Given that we do not find anyone who will complete what is lacking, women, in Lacanian logic, look for the supplementary jouissance in love.

Beginnings The first image of the Brazilian film is of the Greek god Eros. The prologue presents a collage of images and sayings on the theme “Love or freedom?” How can we fall in love and renounce all other women? We hear the voice of Edu, Don Juan’s best friend, rambling about how love castrates individuality, induces weakness, and above all, how, at the bottom of this Pandora’s box, lies women’s independence. Marriage leads to unfaithfulness; he is afraid women will cheat on him. This first image evokes the impasse of love, the impossibility of choice. Psychoanalysis, when faced with the issues of contradiction and impossibility, resorts to myth. Freud resorts to its narratives. Lacan looks to the relation between mythical narratives; to account for some contradictory or impossible real, he reads Oedipus and Totem and Taboo, not as separate stories, but in opposition. That is how he constructs the formulas of sexuation.7 On the male side, there is a formal contradiction between the necessary existence of an exception to the paternal law and the rule of the phallic universal that creates “man.” Paulo meets Edu by chance in the street and, when he is asked about “women,” Paulo answers that he has a story: using falseta, an old-fashioned word indicating

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“falseness” or “lie,” he claims that one woman had set a trap for him. He goes on to tell his story in flashback, in New Wave style: in black and white, with handheld camera, editing the footage with many ellipses, making use predominantly of natural light, traveling shots taken from peculiar angles, imprecise focus, freeze frames. Paulo proceeds to tell Edu how he met Maria Alice. So the prologue situates the problem on the side of men: should they pursue all women or one? But men do not know that all women are not-all, meaning that they do not themselves subscribe entirely to the phallic law. Men have the Totem and Taboo myth but Lacan claims that women participate in a radically different logic from that of men. With women, two and two make five. There is supplementary jouissance. There is an irrevocable imbalance between the sexes, according to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. And what if the symmetrical movement of women’s legs can restore the lost harmony to the world? So muses Truffaut’s Don Juan in vain. The viewer is thrown back in time to a bachelor’s party in Rio de Janeiro, a crowded and animated Christmas gathering where the mood is one of “love is in the air.” A group throws darts at a collage of various images of movie stars, heroes, and femmes fatales that covers the front door. Paulo picks up a dart and is about to throw it when he is told to stop because someone is arriving. Another woman appears on the screen. It is she, Maria Alice, the fiancée of a friend. Maria Alice replaces the images of cinema divas. Ah, the contingency of the amorous encounter! As soon as he sees the “woman of the other,” he falls in love. For Paulo, the amorous condition requires that the woman belong to another man. In Encore, Lacan conceptualizes the space of sexual jouissance as a compact space, one that is ruled by the Other. Men and women have different ways to relate to the Other. Contingency is the logical mode of this encounter: women as open set. The entrance of Maria Alice into Paulo’s life was by way of the front door of his apartment in Rio de Janeiro. He almost literally hit her with a dart. But it was he who was hit by Eros. Let us say they entered into a certain space and let us take this space as compact.8 In this mythical space of jouissance, there is a necessity of infinity on the male side. On the woman’s side there exists the possibility to turn this infinitude into a finitude. Paulo immediately loves her smile and her eyes. He shows her the apartment, where almost every wall is covered by collages. She starts to play with his dog. Then, when the time comes to exchange presents, he improvises, giving his dog to her and a child’s toy to Leopoldo, her fiancé, the same toy that children will be playing with at the party that closes the film. When Leopoldo says they have to leave soon, Paulo cunningly locks the front door and hides the key in order to remain longer in the presence of this fascinating woman. While Leopoldo asks for a hairpin to open the door, Paulo dances a waltz with his newfound beloved. He tells her a story about another party in which people stayed till New Year’s Eve. To this she responds that Leopoldo is a handyman and will open the door in a minute. Paulo indicates that this one is not going to be so easy. As an open set, the woman is susceptible to contingency. Paulo wants her on his list but he does not know that she has the power to make his list finite. She will not accept being a One-more. She places herself as the One-less missing on his list. There will be

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billiards, cards, the bottle game, and last but not least, the game of the “chick/prick,” invented by Cousin Barbara. The first scene of the L’Homme qui aimait les femmes is that of the burial of our Don Juan, Bertrand Morane: a myriad of women, younger and older than the fortyish Don Juan, arrive, and they all toss a little earth on top of the coffin. Among the women present is an observer, the one who comments on the story, his last lover, the woman who loved his book and convinced the board of editors to publish it. In the publishing house, she was the only woman in a group of men. She says that Bertrand would have appreciated the spectacle of his own funeral. She is an exception to the group. She is the only one who knows of all the others thanks to his book. She remembers Bertrand’s famous words: “Women’s legs are compasses which circle the globe, giving it its balance and harmony.” As Lévi-Strauss claimed, the main objective of myth is to account for contradictions or to supply a logical model to overcome them.9 Here are some recurrent themes in myths that provoke questions: life and death; the infinite and the finite; sexual difference. Sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, a trauma, an open question – something that resists every attempt at symbolization. The mythical duality par excellence is the same duality that structures all psychic life: Eros and Thanatos. At the end of Tirso de Molina’s version of Don Juan, the title character enters the church where the commander is buried. He sees on the stone effigy the inscription, “The traitor will be revenged.” Don Juan makes fun of this but the effigy speaks and tells him that it wants to be invited to supper. Don Juan, overconfident and fearless, invites the stone guest to his home. His valet is horrified but Don Juan insists that he is not afraid. After supper the stone guest asks him, in turn, to dine. Don Juan shows up at the cemetery. The dinner is served on a black table in the crypt; they eat tarantulas and end the dinner with a fricassee of fingernails. Then, the statue asks to hold Don Juan’s hands. Immediately he is thrown into his tomb and dies. In Le Séminaire, livre IV, “Object Relation,” Lacan takes Don Juan as a searcher for The Woman. Lacan suggests that he encounters her in the stone guest, who is the commander, Doña Ana’s father, and hence the dead father. Lacan says that this is “a beyond” of The Woman. In the story of Oedipus it is necessary for him to kill his father to have access to his mother. In Totem and Taboo it is necessary for the brothers to kill their father in order to gain access to the women they desire. The common denominator of both stories is the dead father and the relation of this death to enjoyment. The impossibility that emerges from the opposition between the two stories is transformed into Lacan’s formulas of sexuation.

Erotic Drive, a Mythical Being? The first shot of Oliveira’s film is a reproduction of the god Eros. Now there are many versions of the birth of Eros; either he is born of himself or he is born of two sexuated beings. Eros, in one guise, is born of Chaos; hence, to return to nothingness,

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to chaos, continues to be one of the aspirations of the human being, one of the psychoanalytical drives. “The doctrine of the drives is, so to speak, our mythology. … Drives are mythical beings, spectacular in their indetermination.”10 Bittersweet, Eros’ complexity reveals itself poignantly when we remember that he moves across various periods and types of Greek mythical narrative. This Eros born of Chaos is quite distinct from the Eros who was Aphrodite’s son by Ares, and whose ancestry is immersed in loss. For Aphrodite was born as a consequence of the castration of Uranus by his son Chronos: from amidst the surge of foam around the testicles and sperm cast into the ocean she emerged from the sea with the noble mission of uniting sexed beings. This duality of Eros points to the duality in the drive. In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,11 the opposition of creation and destruction is elaborated, Eros and Thanatos. The first Eros seems to incarnate the “nostalgia for a lost unity” whereas the orphic Eros is double: he is male and female, with two pairs of eyes that can see in all directions, besides having many heads. For Freud, this return to the inanimate is the ultimate aspiration of the death drive, Thanatos. But Thanatos does not exist as a deity in Greek mythology. For Freud, this return to the inanimate is the ultimate aspiration of the death drive, Thanatos. But Thanatos is at best a daemon, or minor deity, in Greek mythology, compared to Eros. Therefore Eros – in the duplicity of this tradition – anticipates and covers the dualism of the drive that Freud postulates. Eros is double; he both engenders and he decomposes; he is the “weaver of myths,” the mythoplokos, who, through his ingenuity, weaves seductive nets, traps; but he also ultimately brings on the reverse of mythic composition for he represents a primordial force that aims at the suppression of all tension and longs for Nirvana. If we turn to Don Juan, Lacan mentions him first in the fifties.12 Referring to Don Giovanni of Mozart, he presents Doña Ana as a privileged woman to the extent that she is linked to her dead father. Don Giovanni brings out what is beyond The Woman: the encounter with death. But Doña Ana’s fixation on the man who killed her father maintains her division: she cannot be the object of love of Ottavio because of the impossibility of mourning her dead father. Lacan always looks to the Don Giovanni of Mozart when he comments on the myth. In this version, out of the mille e tre women of the Italian list, Don Giovanni interacts with three of them: Doña Ana, Elvira, and Zerlina. The opera starts when Don Giovanni, having seduced Doña Ana, is confronted by her father who has come to her aid and then demands a duel. Don Giovanni kills him and escapes. His wife, Elvira, joins Ana and Don Ottavio in their pursuit of Don Giovanni. As for Zerlina, she is set to marry Masseto but is seduced by Don Giovanni’s words and nobility. This naive descendant of Tisbea and Maturina is fascinated by the noble serpent.13 She is about to consent but, fragile bird that she is, she thinks about her fiancé. Meanwhile, Doña Ana carries her dead father inside her: she is like Jocasta married to the son, in Oedipus Rex; she is the forbidden woman after the  murder of the father. Finally there is Elvira, with her sacrificial temperament coupled with an infinite capacity to forgive, who makes a quintessential masochistic wife. She is the one who hears Don Giovanni sing the famous Mozart aria, “Mille e tre.”14 For her part, Zerlina, with her proverbial contradictory feelings of desire and guilt, of fatal attraction and revulsion, is associated instead with the hysteric.

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Bertrand’s Mille e Tre Truffaut’s Bertrand has three main women: Mother, Delphine, and Vera. His mother retains the record of her love affairs, which he once discovered looking through old boxes in the house. He found lots of love letters, photos, and a list of her affairs with names and dates. “Isn’t the book I am writing a detailed list of my love affairs?” he asks himself. When he was an adolescent, Bertrand’s mother used to walk around him half-nude, “not to excite him but to prove to him that he didn’t exist.” He could not move; the only thing he could do was to read. Then she would ask him to put the letters to her lovers in the mailbox, but he would throw them away. Truffaut uses the same actress who plays his mother to play a prostitute in a shot in which Bertrand comments on how women walk in the streets. Delphine could well be a transformation of Zerlina. Bertrand goes to have dinner in a restaurant by himself and sees a beautiful woman with a boring husband. She acknowledges his glances and moves seductively to the bathroom, displaying herself. Bertrand loves women’s skirts flowing like fluff up the stairs, Aphrodite “moving like seaweed” in the foam and waves of the sea. When they leave, he follows the couple in his car and then phones her imploring her to come down for a few minutes. (“It is impossible to say no to you,” says one of his lovers.) They end up making love in her car in the parking lot. She enjoys making love in precarious places, risking discovery, as in a doorway, in a park, in her car. Is Bertrand, then, a slave to Delphine’s fantasy? After all, Don Juan is always obedient to women’s fantasies, capable of responding to feminine desires, “docile” in the way he adapts himself to what women want, one after the next. Yet the Don Juan type is “captured” by what Lacan calls an open set. Women as not-all can be counted, and the womanizer feels condemned to continue adding to his lista numerosa. After having succumbed to the most complete abandonment, Delphine suddenly ruffles her hair and says, “Is this at all reasonable?” Evidently sexual jouissance puts color in one’s cheeks, but in the case of Delphine it became so intense that Don Juan had to drive her car furiously to let the wind cool her face before she could return to her husband. How does Delphine situate herself in all this? Is she on the list or not? One-less? Only one? Is Delphine a hysterical woman? Such women want to be the only one, an exception, and thus are inscribed on the male side of sexuation. In a very comical sequence they make love in the fitting room of an expensive clothing store. A fashion show is taking place just outside. In many Don Juan stories there is the exchange of clothes as in a game of identity and appearance: the hero dresses in the clothes of Leporello, his valet, when he wants to seduce Zerlina. Semblance veils nothing. Indeed the veil may be considered the first semblance. Does her jealousy make her a hysteric? Jealous, when walking in the street, she asks if Bertrand likes the girl they have just passed. When he answers yes, she hits him in the stomach. She seems to live with the myth in her head. She tells him how pitiful he looked with his newspaper the day they met. What do you prefer, she asked, to read or to kiss me? “I always invited her to go to my place but that was too easy for her complicated being,” recalls Bertrand.

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Delphine will go to prison after shooting but failing to kill her husband. Bertrand will go out with many women. There is one absence at Bertrand’s burial and one absence in Bertrand’s book: Vera, the only woman whom he has truly loved and the one who has left him. In the stunning sequence that is surely the film’s key moment, Truffaut’s fabulous mise-en-scène has them meet in the strangest place, between two doors. Sometimes women think they are off the list when they are on it. Even though Doña Ana, the commander’s daughter, the one whom Don Juan first had and who tries to find him again, is on the list, she thinks of herself as off it. Having the “myth in her head,”15 she is still trying to inscribe herself in it. Bertrand is in a hotel in Paris, invited by the publishing house to talk about the details of the publication of his book. He gives his key to the porter when he sees the woman of his life, Vera, and then he pulls back. Trying to avoid her, he crosses the room, but she has seen him and goes through another door, a sort of saloon door, to meet him. So there they are in a room between two doors, face to face, with a lamp and a counter separating the two sides, man and woman, feminine position, masculine position. This occurs suddenly; it is improvised and contingent. Vera needs to talk. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, women’s jouissance is not circumscribed by the phallic function; hence they experience other kinds of jouissance, among them that of speech. The need for amorous talk is typically identified as a feminine characteristic par excellence. He wants to leave but she insists on staying. He is visibly overwhelmed by her presence. The female praying mantis devours the head of her male partner while mating with him, and other females also kill the male. It happens among spiders and scorpions. Spiders like the black widow have become symbols of the femme fatale. The surrealists were obsessed with the praying mantis because of its many contradictions, including the way she joins love to death. And what a presence Vera is, dressed up as a movie star, in long gown with a dramatic scarf around her neck, extremely elegant and feminine. Even the check-room where they find themselves is elegant, with high-class men’s clothing behind them. Bertrand is equally well-dressed, as for some fancy dinner. He tells her he is afraid of not having anything to say, just as he is afraid he will not be able to write another book. Lacan invented a parable to explain anxiety: imagine an enormous praying mantis approaching you while you are wearing a mask without knowing what kind of mask it is. If you happen to be wearing the mask of a male praying mantis without knowing it, you have reason to feel anguish. This is the limit. What causes anguish is the object you might be without knowing it. The “not-all” is not the infinity of Eros as union, or universal fusion; instead it is right next to you, between two doors, as Lacan puts it so well in Encore. After meeting Vera at the hotel, Bertrand phones Geneviève, saying he has to add one more chapter to his book because he had not included the most important woman of all. He now realizes that he wrote the book because of this very woman. Geneviève tells him to write another book. He is fragile, vulnerable, and insecure but he says he trusts her. Our Don Juan does not write out of lust but out of sorrow for a lost love.

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Paulo’s Mille e Tre Paulo too has three main women: Barbara (the cousin), Rita, and Maria Alice. After the Christmas party, Paulo steals Maria Alice from Leopoldo. The film is structured in six chapters: “The Encounter,” “The Conquest,” “Living Together,” “The Trouble,” “Reconciliation,” “Revelation.” After the conquest of the other man’s woman, he proceeds to break up with all his lovers. Here our Don Juan assumes the comic side of love, the semblance, the actor. He is walking in the streets with Neusinha and tells her he won a scholarship and must go to Mexico to study the great people, the Aztecs. He is lying but speaks the truth in another sense: Maria Alice is the Other; for him she can be as different as an Aztec. He ends his relationship with Ismênia, a married woman. To Florinda he says he can no longer handle what she has been doing to him, dating his friend Edu as well. When he goes to say goodbye to his beautiful movie star, she is on the set of the film The Sheik; he arrives dressed as for a Carnival ball, with an Arabian veil over his face. In these short takes we sense the comic dimension of desire. Maria Alice breaks up with Leopoldo at her home. In a beautiful scene she is sitting at her dressing table with her back to the camera. We see her through the mirror. He is very understanding. “Living Together” is the name of the following sequence. He goes on to describe his life with Maria Alice. He writes and asks her to read his manuscript. “So what do you think?” he asks. “I think it is very bad,” she replies. We see him back at his typewriter in a shot very similar to that of Bertrand, our French Don Juan. The difference here is that Paulo is relating to a woman when he writes, as opposed to the solitary and melancholic Bertrand. Cut to a short scene of Maria Alice and Paulo playing snooker. She says women both want and do not want to be independent. We see a bed and hear the couple’s voices coming from it. She says she has just seen a falling star. Now we see them in bed and he looks at the sky and says it is not a falling star because it moves too slowly; perhaps it is a satellite. She answers that she has already made a wish. When he demands to know what it is, she hesitates before telling him that one day she hopes to marry in church. His eyes show our Don Juan very worried. They dance on a terrace of the house, the rooftops of Rio in view. Then we see them at the night club he used to party at before dating her. He meets a couple of friends. They all dance and have fun. When he inquires of one of them about a mutual friend, Aristide, asking if he is still separated from his wife, he hears: “Oh didn’t you hear that he committed suicide?” Paulo now becomes jealous when he sees Maria Alice dancing with her former neighbor, and he demands that she go home with him. She does not want to leave, so they solve their little quarrel playing odds-or-evens. He wins and she insists no further: a deal is a deal. This represents decision by chance. In the streets of Rio they drink till the morning. He has given her flowers and they are lighthearted and happy. The key section of the film, “The Trouble,” expresses the subjective split of this Brazilian Don Juan. Maria Alice tells him she wants to visit her newborn nephew in Curitiba, south of Rio. Just as he protests, he receives a phone call from his cousin

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inviting him to a party: her friends want to meet him. A parallel sequence follows, alternating Maria Alice and Paulo. She is at the airport and he at the party. The cutting between the two scenes fully expresses the division Paulo feels inside himself: either mille donne or just one, the unique woman. Before taking the plane, Maria Alice tells him that they could have a son someday. He says he is too young, while she claims it is she who is young. Maria Alice takes the plane to São Paulo from where she will get a flight to Curitiba. He arrives at the party. First, he has a sauna with his cousin Barbara and her friend. “Cousin Paulo,” she says, “I drank too much yesterday, I have a hangover.” They kiss. Her friend caresses Paulo as well. … The hot sauna ends with the two women throwing cold water on him. Then he approaches a group of women who are playing cards and asks if he can join them. One says, “I knew I would end up playing cards with my cousins.” When Maria Alice arrives at the airport, the plane she thought to be taking at six o’clock is in fact scheduled for eleven at night. There is already a guy ready to offer her company while she waits. Meanwhile, at the party the friend of Paulo’s cousin says “weird” things to him such as, “There is no doubt that woman is not the natural mate for man. During a tragic seismic phenomenon man lost his natural female self and perhaps in this cosmic event woman also lost her natural male. These two species, essentially different, still live together nowadays in an abnormal symbiosis.” Oliveira’s dialogue here is quite Lacanian in laying out the radical imbalance between the sexes. Paulo answers that one day he will go back to literature to write a romantic novel with bugs as characters (like Jules in Jules et Jim). He then sees a mysterious gorgeous woman he does not know: Rita, an actress from Argentina. Meanwhile, in São Paulo … Maria Alice, strolling around the city, is followed to a café by a guy. Back at the party, the women suggest to Paulo that they play the “bottle game.” In Portuguese, this is called “the truth game,” a suggestive name. Cousin Barbara asks Paulo what criteria he would use if he had to choose one woman to be his wife. “The difficult thing is not to choose one but to give up all the others,” says he. In São Paulo the stranger asks to sit with Maria Alice for a moment and then recounts the story of his affair, which ended when the woman stopped loving him. Maria Alice happens to look like this woman. He realizes this is a common pickup line, but this time it is true. He claims they loved each other and were happy, but even if she loved him once it does not mean she has to love him forever. Moreover, when they were together, he did not enjoy the relationship as much as he should have. So here is his advice to Maria Alice: at each moment give to the others the best and the largest share of your love and tenderness because no one travels twice along the same path. This scene is shot in a very lyrical way with a stationary camera. This anti-Don Juan speaks of being abandoned by a woman with whom he was in love, reminding us of Bertrand and Vera, the love that did not work out, something devastating to them both. Meanwhile, Paulo continues playing the truth game: “What attracts you most about love? What is your favorite thing about love?” “Women.” “If you could now choose one of us which one would you choose?” “All.” “How do you suggest life might become more dignified?” “Suicide,” he cries. Back with Maria Alice, we see

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hergive up on the trip to Curitiba because, suddenly, after the stranger’s story, she misses her man. But Paulo is hardly thinking of her, as he is engaged in a hilarious game that Cousin Barbara says she has just invented: the chick game, or “pinto” game, which in Portuguese means the “prick” game. “Do you accept being the prize?” Cousin Barbara asks Paulo. “The woman who wins does whatever she wants with you. And if you win, you will do whatever you want with yourself.” She explains the rules. A great many mugs have been set upside down around the house. One of them hides the chick. You have to turn these over one by one to see if you get the prize. With everyone’s eyes closed, Cousin Barbara hides the chick, the “pinto,” the small live animal. Now, for Lacan the phallus is a signifier, the main signifier of desire. In consensual heterosexual intercourse admittedly the woman wants the “pinto,” but much more than this she wants the phallus as a signifier of desire, desire for the one who speaks – her man – to say something of her Being and decipher her jouissance so as to make her Other for herself. Here the film’s use of the myth of Don Juan is at its peak: even though the number of women is finite, any woman is susceptible to become Paulo’s mistress. Who will win the prize? With only two mugs left, Paulo is about to overturn one but utters the famous phrase, “I cannot choose,” asking Rita to take his turn. When the mysterious actress turns her mug over and gets the chick, they all laugh. What do you want from me? This is the quintessential question of desire, given that desire is always a question. There is no positive meaning to what a “man” could be: it is the lost signifier. There can be no possible identification with a positive phallic signifier, no identification which would prompt a phrase such as this: “I am the phallus that is convenient to a woman” because of castration. There is no ideal identification with the masculine role because of castration. So when we read on the male side of the formula that we are all subject to the law of castration, the implication is that men are precisely in search of the lost part of themselves, so as to recuperate it. Such ideas are in the air when, in the following scene, with Rita playing the guitar on Paulo’s couch, he tells his friend, “I looked at her very hard in order to see if I could refuse, but she was so gorgeous I could not resist.” In fact he was unable to ask himself if he wanted what he desired. Rita had been married three times, had attempted suicide, and had lost a fortune gambling. Is she too afraid of being One-less, so that for her the only thing that counts is to be a Onemore on the list? When Maria Alice comes home she finds Paulo literally with his pants down enthralled by Rita. She slaps him, packs her bags, and leaves. Eventually, she comes, back, and Paulo writes her a beautiful love poem. When he asks her to promise that she will never go to bed with another man, she replies she doesn’t like everlasting promises. “Another trouble” arises, the death of Leopoldo not long after he has had dinner with Paulo and Maria Alice. Maria Alice mourns his death intensely because she had remained close to him. Eventually she emerges from her sadness, even going to the beach. Paulo calls her a “sunny” woman. He is so happy that her mourning is over that he agrees to marry in church, just as she had wanted.

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Endings Bertrand is with Geneviève in Montpellier because his book is being printed there. They are in the car. Driving, she declares his book to be a testimony to the relations of man and woman in the twentieth century. But he rejects this buddy-buddy aspect believing the love game to be indispensable, to which she answers that there will always be games but the rules are changing. When Bertrand is run over by a car in Montpellier it is because he became distracted, staring at women’s legs. Even in the hospital he gazes at the nurse’s legs while he is dying. Here Truffaut follows to the letter the logic of the myth. The last scene of Todas as mulheres do mundo is a children’s party when Cousin Barbara and all her friends come to Paulo and Maria Alice’s home. Paulo has brought together the friends from his first bachelor party, the first scene of the film, as well as his women friends from the party at his cousin’s house. Everyone can plainly see that Paulo has fallen in love and managed to keep that love alive, and that Maria Alice got it all: the phallus through Paulo and the phallus through the children they had. Truffaut’s mise-en-scène expresses the other, tragic side of love in the key scene when both Don Juan and Vera are devastated by love’s failure. In a hotel, a non-place, a place of transition, they have to face the fact that they lost in the love game they played. Our Don Juans have opposite temperaments. Solitary, melancholic, with a cold relationship with his mother, Bertrand is the reverse of Paulo, who is gregarious, extroverted, and enjoys a close relationship with his cousin. Another contrast between the two Don Juans: Bertrand is the one who chases women as opposed to Paulo who is chased by them. In the key scene mentioned above, Paulo is the prize of the love game they play. Any woman at the party could become his mistress. Here Oliveira follows to the letter the logic of the myth. In both films love is a game of illusion and performance, achieving a precarious and transitory harmony. Bertrand represents the dark rainy side of love in contrast to the bright sunny side interpreted by Paulo. As Truffaut once said, in love we desire the absolute, but life forces us to face the ephemeral.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV: la relation d’objet, 1956–57, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 429–430. Jean Rousset, Le Mythe de Don Juan (Paris: Armand Colin, 1978), p. 155. Pascal Bonitzer, Cahiers du Cinéma 288 (May 1978):40–42. Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 366. Peter Handke, Don Juan raconté par lui-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI: les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964 (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 229. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XX: encore, 1972–73, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 75. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XX, p. 11.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La structure des mythes,” in Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1966), pp. 227–255. Sigmund Freud, Leçon XXXII, Nouvelle Suíte des leçons d’introduction à la psychanalyse, trans. André Bourguignon (Paris: PUF, 2010), p. 112. Sigmund Freud, Au-delà du principe de plaisir (1920; repr., Paris, PUF, 2010), pp. 69–96. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV, pp. 429–430. Zerlina is an avatar of Tisbea, the peasant girl seduced by Don Juan in what is taken to be the first play dramatizing the story, The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra), by Tirso de Molina, which dates from c.1616. Then, just months before Mozart’s masterpiece premiered, this peasant girl was named Maturina in a highly successful one act opera by Giuseppe Gazzaniga called Il Don Giovanni o sia el convitato di pietra with a libretto by Giovanni Bertati. Charles Gounod, Don Juan de Mozart (1890; reprinted, Paris: Garamont-Archimbaud,1984). Geneviève Morel, “L’Hypothèse de compacité et les logiques de la succession dans le chapitre 1 d’Encore,” La Cause Freudienne 25 (September 1993): 99–106.

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

The Self-Questioning Signature This chapter will look at L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) as a privileged instance of the self-effacing, obliquely disruptive, reflexive aesthetics that characterize Truffaut’s cinema. My choice of an intermedial approach, hinging on the intersection between film and literature, to address this issue should come as no surprise. Although an original story, written by Truffaut in collaboration with Suzanne Schiffman and Michel Fermaud, the film’s subject is the writing of a book containing the protagonist’s story. More importantly, its mode of address presents this story as literature, by means of a complex network of flashbacks and voice-over narrations that comment on and make sense of the fragmentary present-tense action scenes. As well as a film, this method resulted in an actual novel, or cinéroman, this time authored exclusively by the director under the same title of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, thus giving material form to the literary aim of the cinematic enterprise: a book. In both media, the reality of this achievement is stressed in emblematic closing lines: “But of all the women that crossed his life, something will remain, a trace, a witness, a rectangular object, three hundred and twenty bound pages, it is called a book.”1 In fact, the acts of writing and reading, as well as the book object itself, permeate the form as much as the content of so many Truffaut films that intermedial relations have become a natural route for their critical assessment. These are often viewed in the light of his highly autobiographical and fervently auteurist project, dating back to his early Cahiers days, according to which every film “resembles the man who has made it.”2 Indeed, at first sight, Truffaut’s films would seem to cohere with the romantic understanding of intermedial relations as an all-pervading impulse, whose ultimate aim is the blurring of boundaries between art and life. Thus, Truffaut has A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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been described, “unlike his friend and contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard,” as “consistently committed to his highly formal themes of art and life . . . rather than venturing into radical political critiques of film forms and film imagery.”3 This chapter, however, proposes an alternative view that locates in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes a disruptive clash between the cinematic and the literary dynamics that exposes the artifice required to weave a coherent film narrative, as well as the voracious borrowings resorted to by Truffaut in order to authenticate the fiction of the autobiographical auteur. The result is a self-reflexive and self-questioning mode of address which, if not openly confrontational in the manner of Godard, is nevertheless bound to elicit spectatorial discomfort. Needless to say, this view departs from celebrated studies, such as the wonderfully researched François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation by Robert Stam,4 focusing on two Truffaut adaptations of Henri-Pierre Roché’s novels, Jules et Jim (1962) and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971). The book is a song of praise to the cross-pollination between film and literature that allowed Truffaut’s “transtext” to connect with the “sexual modernism” and the historical avant-gardes between the two world wars. Though not an adaptation, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes deserves an individual chapter in the book, under the pretext that Truffaut’s fascination with Roché’s personality as a womanizer led him to include in the film details related to him, such as the woman hired by Truffaut to type Roché’s journals, who refused to complete the job because of the manuscript’s obsessive sexual contents. With the suggestive subtitle of “The (Various) Men Who Loved (Various) Women,” Stam’s chapter thus establishes a direct link between the film’s anecdotes and the biographies of Roché and Truffaut, even describing the latter’s real mother as “a many-man woman, at least in Truffaut’s conception of her” who “gave birth to a many-woman man.”5 Autobiography, conveyed by a seemingly harmonious mingling of film and literature, is indeed a tempting line of approach, one that Truffaut himself – in his copious writings, interviews, multiple acting roles, and cameo appearances – never ceased to fuel, by drawing attention to himself and his own life as the origin of his works. Suffice it to quote the memorable opening of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, showing the funeral of Bertrand Morane, the first-time writer and inveterate womanizer who leads the film. As the hearse carrying his corpse rolls slowly past the series of cars from which his former lovers disembark, one single pedestrian briefly salutes it by lifting his cap, then walks away. This pedestrian is Truffaut himself in a brief cameo, clearly intended to establish from the outset the identity between the film director and the unfortunate writer, whose mission he inherits to tell the story in audiovisual, as well as written, form. Whether or not there are any physical similarities between him and Charles Denner, in the role of Betrand Morane – and many insist there are – Truffaut makes sure of sporting a similar outfit, including his favorite brown leather jacket that constitutes the hallmark of his protagonist throughout the film, so as to reinforce the mirror effect. The autobiographical approach seems even more inescapable owing to the repetition of leitmotivs from film to film that prompted Truffaut specialist Annette Insdorf, for example, to state that “The Man Who Loved Women . . . affirms the continuities and

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the autobiographical nature of Truffaut’s cinema,” as it focuses on a character that “builds upon the first actions performed by Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows.”6 As a result, like Stam, she does not hesitate to identify the ruthless mother in both films with Truffaut’s own. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana even find “a manifest evidence” of this parallel7 in the line Truffaut lifts from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress to open his cinéroman, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes: “It seemed that Joey never had any success with his mother.”8 De Baecque and Toubiana seem to see no contradiction between this view, deriving from Truffaut’s self-assessment, and their own detailed account, two pages later,9 of how Truffaut actually based most of the film on the private life of his co-scriptwriter, Michel Fermaud, himself a notorious cavaleur (womanizer) like his protagonist. That such cues are often misleading, and in fact contrary to what the film and its associated literary tales are meant to convey, is what my analysis will attempt to demonstrate, by embracing a prism that neatly separates the man from the auteur, and this from his oeuvre. The romance of Truffaut’s life is a most fascinating one, full of details that undeniably feed into his films, not least the love for reading, referred to in Morane’s childhood scenes, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, in direct relation to his real mother, who, according to Truffaut, could only tolerate him “in silence.”10 But these details, if enlightening of Truffaut’s life, obscure the actual contribution of his films which is precisely, I wish to argue, a most refined expression of a filmmaker’s discomfort with the burden of authorship. Rather than celebrating intermediality as the ultimate accomplishment of the fusion between art and life, I will therefore focus on the juncture of film and literature as the site of a crisis, a shortcoming in narrative means that requires other, metaphorical procedures to fill in a gap which is at the very core of Truffaut’s creativity. I will look at this insufficiency as a symptom, stronger here than anywhere else in his work, of what I call “the Truffaldian malaise.” Permeating both the form and the content of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, this malaise exposes a crack in his auteurist project from which emerges the self-questioning signature of his impure cinema.

The Death of the Author The effort to merge the film auteur with the literary author is consistently noticeable throughout Truffaut’s films and writings. In this he was nothing but exemplary of his generation of critics-cum-filmmakers who, in line with Astruc’s idea of caméra-stylo, were in search of cinema’s mode of writing. Thus Truffaut’s very first manifesto in defense of cinematic authorship, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1954, is notable not only for its romantic mythologizing of the director as the almighty creator of a film but for positing the “man of cinema” as the one who can write his own films. “Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt,” he said about his French pantheon, “are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of

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them themselves invent the stories they direct.”11 However, as I point out elsewhere,12 a direct consequence of the politique des auteurs was medium specificity, albeit only in the form of an unattainable utopia, through which the metteur-en-scène would ascend from the status of a mere technician to that of an artist. The logic here is clear, for the more a film is contaminated by other media the weaker becomes the trace of individual creation – and it is for no other reason that Bazin’s uncompromising defense of “impure cinema” entailed his mistrust of auteurism as championed by the young Cahiers writers in the 1950s. My argument here is that mixed media, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, weakens authorship almost to the point of effacing the autobiographical auteur. One should not forget that this is in every respect a film of the 1970s, as announced in its opening credits – “Montpellier, Christmas 1976” – thus located on the verge of a postmodern era which would see literature turning to cinema in search of substance only to find a cinematic language reflecting on its own narrative depletion. As Ropars-Wuilleumier formulated it, in her assessment of the structuralist view of cinema as language: Cinema’s references to writing, made either by filmmakers or theorists, are contemporary to an epistemological shakeup which, because it touches precisely the territory of meaning, had its strongest effects on literature and linguistics. The years 1960–1970, which have seen the establishment in theory and practice of the idea of cinematic writing, are also those where the concept of the word and the definition of literary writing were completely overturned.13

A literary text that writes itself into film as it unfolds, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes finds its source precisely in the doubt about both film and literature as conveyors of meaning, which results in an unresolved, borderline outlook that a critic once expressed in the following terms: Seen by some as a misogynist catalogue, by others as a mature, detached examination of an unsympathetic character’s fatal passion for largely indifferent females, either way [L’Homme qui aimait les femmes] irritates by its overwrought sense of literary-style paradox, by its insistence on eccentricity as its source of humour, and by its haphazard and gratuitous form.14

Unfairly negative though it is, this comment accurately summarizes some key features of the film, which, combined, characterize what I have termed “the Truffaldian malaise”: the dubious gender representation; the inconsequential serial style; the protagonist’s failure to elicit empathy; the paradoxical speed of the literary-style narrative; the dislocated humor. The conclusion that such a “gratuitous” form achieves no more than the viewer’s “irritation” would seem, nonetheless, at odds with Truffaut’s customary attachment to narrative cinema, aimed to enable, rather than prevent, the spectator’s enjoyment. It is for no other reason that his films have been generally perceived as aesthetically, as well as politically, conservative, hence extraneous to the consecrated understandings of modern cinema. They would resist, for example, the Bazinian modern model, hinging on the idea of cinema as a “window on the world,”

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as there is hardly any room for documentary-style realism in Truffaut’s highly staged mise-en-scène. Stam prefers to connect him to the modernism of the historical avantgardes, as represented by surrealists such as Jean Vigo and Luis Buñuel, even though, as a “conservative figure,” he “was not in any way an official member of the 1960s counterculture.”15 Indeed, the Truffaldian aesthetics has little in common with that of his outspokenly antiestablishment contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard, and was even at the heart of a much-publicized rupture between the two directors in 1973.16 There is no denying that Godard’s uncompromising self-reflexive mode of address, littered with Brechtian alienation effects and other disruptive elements deemed “antibourgeois” in those days, could not be further removed from Truffaut’s viewer- (and reader-) friendly storytelling techniques. However, it would be mistaken to see L’Homme qui aimait les femmes as devoid of elements purposely aimed at subtly thwarting cinematic illusionism. In her attempt to define the film’s narrative construction, Gillain acutely remarks that Truffaut “deserves the title of ‘king of the invisible flashback’ that he had given to Lubitsch and Buñuel.”17 I would say, along the same lines, that, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, he also proves to be the “king of invisible anti-illusionism,” given the way he manages to naturalize the film’s metadiscourse. In fact, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes gives ample evidence that Truffaut is a man of his day, aware and in full command of the critical tendencies then in vogue, including psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and semiotics, as well as the rise of linguistics as a means to assess, among other things, the crisis of literature and its move towards a self-questioning cinema. In fact, a careful look will reveal the film to be only cinematic through citation and only literary through authorial denial, both of which are distancing devices camouflaged under a sleek, seamless montage. The emblematic opening sequence, portraying the burial of the literary author that triggers the retrospective of his career as a cavaleur, places the film from the start in an intertextual, self-reflexive register that references other posthumous cinematic narratives. The obvious source here is Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), which famously opens on the corpse of a scriptwriter floating on a swimming pool, while his own voice-over narration unleashes the flashback of his failed writing career. More curiously, the author’s symbolic demise, in Truffaut’s film, resonates with Roland Barthes’ famous 1968 post-structuralist article, “The Death of the Author,” a revolutionary text that was at the very origin of the critical deconstruction of the auteur politics in the 1970s. One particular passage bears an uncanny resonance with the film: Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic views of his predecessors, that [his] hand is too slow for his thought or passion. … For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.18

What follows Bertrand Morane’s death is precisely this: the birth of the “modern scriptor,” whose hand is “cut off from any voice.” In his funeral, the first narrative voice introduced to the viewer is that of Bertrand’s editor, Geneviève, that is, a woman who takes over from the male writer the creative function. Her voice, however, is not personal, but

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Figure 30.1

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

representative of all the women attending the ceremony, as she imagines his point of view from the grave looking at what “he liked most about us”: the legs. This is followed by the citation of a sentence she had read in his novel, which is pronounced by Bertand’s own posthumous voice: “Women’s legs are compasses which circle the globe in all directions, giving it its balance and harmony.” There follows a flashback of his love affairs, distributed in no particular chronological order so as to indicate their collective equivalence. This social narrative voice is further signified by the fascinating motif of an automated hand, entirely in tune with Barthes’ hand “cut off from any voice,” whose recurrent presence in the film is inseparable from the question of gender, as they are, without exception, female hands. Particularly worthy of note are the hands of the typist who retypes Bertrand’s manuscript and those of the agile linotypist who transfers it to the pages of a book (Figure 30.1). The latter, reflecting Truffaut’s long-standing fascination with press machinery from Les 400 Coups (1959) to L’Amour en fuite (1979), are the subject of extended closeups, stressing their mechanical, repetitive movements as if they had a life of their own, disconnected from a brain. Thus the novel simply emerges from a multitude of social voices through the filter of unconscious hands, working as mere “scriptors,” or “author functions,” as Foucault would define the deceased author, just after Barthes, in 1969.19 That the automated hand threatens the literary author with castration and death is made clear in the scene of Bertrand’s nightmare, in which he appears as a caricature mannequin placed in the window of the lingerie shop, where one of his coveted women, the middle-aged female shop assistant, works. The assistant’s perfectly manicured but visibly wrinkled hands run over Bertrand’s body, dressed in a dinner suit (Figure 30.2), and then lift the end of his trousers to attach one of his socks to a suspender belt. During this operation, which recalls Bertrand’s own experience of seeing the shop assistant dress a female mannequin in old-fashioned underwear, he is the object of derisive gazes and giggles from his lovers, crammed together on the outside of the window. He wakes up with a jump as the telephone rings, and the camera captures the framed picture of a male hand gripping an object placed threateningly behind his head (Figure 30.3).

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Figure 30.2

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

Figure 30.3

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

Apart from fitting awkwardly in the diegesis (and I will return to this in the next section), these automated, murderous hands send the film back to the citation mode, this time commenting on a certain crime genre which bloomed in the silent film period (the nightmare scene is completely devoid of sound). Automated, often murderous body parts, such as the transplanted hands of the tragic hero, in Orlacs Hände (Robert Wiene, 1924), constituted a common figuration of the evil double in the cinema of the 1910s to 1920s. Fritz Lang’s obsession with hands, famously his own when it came to close-ups of them, added a faceless auteurist signature to his films, in particular the early ones. In his Metropolis (1926), Rottwang, the Machiavellian scientist who creates a mechanical clone of his deceased lover, has a prosthetic hand in a black glove representing his demonic side (Figure 30.4). A similarly mysterious

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Figure 30.4

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

Figure 30.5

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

hand in a black glove appears in Truffaut’s Baisers volés (1968), attached to the figure of a man who hires a detective agency to find the whereabouts of his magician male lover (Figure 30.5). The gloved hand is confirmed as a favorite motif in a brief passage of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes where the editor Geneviève holds the proofs of Morane’s book with one of her hands hidden in a brown leather glove. The automated hand, in this film, is just one of the many expressions in Truffaut’s oeuvre of a fetishist taste for body fragmentation, in tune with what psychoanalysts call

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Figure 30.6

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

“partialism,” or the sexual attraction to specific body parts. An epitome of this is the plaster replica of a severed female hand that is revered, as a memento of his dead wife, by the necrophiliac protagonist of Truffaut’s La Chambre verte (1978), played by the director himself (Figure 30.6). as In L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, the obsession with hands is one of the narrator’s symptoms of paraphilia, which encompasses partialism, as shown in the attraction to legs and breasts as well as hands; agalmatophilia, or the attraction to statues, mannequins, and immobility in general, as seen in the nightmare scene; nasophilia, or the attraction to noses (more of which in the next section); necrophilia; and other abnormal focuses of sexual arousal. Needless to say, the origin of such an erudite catalogue of perversions is more likely to be found in literary and scientific sources than in Truffaut’s real-life experiences. As a visual motif, on the other hand, this constitutes the irrefutable proof of his affiliation to historical modernism, most notably, as pointed out by Stam, to surrealism, whose famous recourse to automatic writing gave unbridled expression to unconscious authorial processes such as dreams, invariably charged with fetishist imagery. A famous example of such in the cinema is the severed hand infested with ants in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist landmark Un Chien andalou (1929), a film replete with partialist imagery. The same is true of the duo’s subsequent collaboration, L’Âge d’or (1930), apropos of which Dudley Andrew defined “the hands and its fingers, more than the brain, [as] the nerve center of the surrealist body.”20 Elaborating further on the motif of the severed hand in surrealist art, Andrew points to its reemergence in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) in the form of a pair of pickled hands in a jar of brine. This is kept as a sexually-charged relic by Père Jules, Michel Simon’s exquisite incarnation of an “Id-figure and Surrealist godfather”21 to the newlywed protagonists. Andrew takes the opportunity to remind us that Vigo’s “spirit (or fever) was invoked by Truffaut to help resurrect French cinema.”22 L’Homme qui aimait les femmes certainly testifies

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to this heritage; however, surrealist modernity, in this film, comes disguised in a classical narrative package that leaves the spectator stranded between humor and unmotivated eccentricity, as Geoff Andrew keenly observed in the review quoted earlier.

Malaise and the Phallic Women Given that, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, hands and other disturbing insets are invariably woven into a smooth narrative flow, they are hardly perceptible as such, remaining insufficient to cause veritable narrative disruption. However, these obscurely humoresque, surrealist additions are responsible for a general malaise that can ultimately lead to the viewer’s “irritation,” as noted by Geoff Andrew, because they make no obvious contribution to narrative progression. For example, the long nightmare episode has no soundtrack, no retrospective explanation, and bears no consequences for the diegesis, leaving a question mark as to its function. The estrangement this may cause is accentuated by the various unpleasant attributes reserved for the female cast, which incessantly undermine their star code and, as a result, prevent immediate empathy. As ever, one should be cautious about Truffaut’s seductive cues, when he states that the film is about a legion of stunning beauties, including “numerous wonderful Montpelliéraines” that Bertrand Morane had in his arms.23 Without exception these “beauties” are spoiled by the addition of a grotesque touch, including aged or unattractive body parts (such as the wrinkled “hands of death” described above), gigantic spectacles, exaggerated hairdos and headscarves, big noses and a collection of unflattering outfits that the 1970s so lavishly produced. A lot has been said about the camera’s fixation on female legs as corresponding to Truffaut’s most famous fetishism, but here too estrangement seeps in, leaving little room for voyeuristic satisfaction on the part of the viewer. What do we actually see of the “compasses that circle the globe in all directions”? Just their lower half, emerging from loose, knee-length, ordinary skirts, with feet stuck into austere, mediumheight, thick-heel black shoes, further secured with straps, that do not even remotely compare with the pointed stiletto-heel shoes associated with the fetishist prototype. Such an aesthetic choice is more easily explained as a literary rather than cinematic (or visual) fantasy, one springing directly from nineteenth-century novels, in which men were beguiled by the mere sight of female shins. They are thus anti-cinematic par excellence, as they systematically dislocate visual pleasure to the realm of literary fantasy. Morane himself is a nostalgic type, more inclined to imagine than to actually see, as evidenced in his dialogue with the lingerie shop assistant when he states that the miniskirts “can’t get any shorter now, so they’ll have to get longer.” Another device that ends up frustrating the viewer’s expectations is the supposed multiplicity of women who turn out to be mere replicas of the protagonist’s indifferent mother, the overall prevailing model that lends her face and body even to the image of a prostitute (both played by the same actress). The ceaseless movement of their legs supplies the film with the rhythm of a vicious circle, the false dynamism

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of a repetitive replay leading nowhere. Here we touch on another treacherous feature of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes: the “paradoxical” speed that the reviewer above attributes to literary style. Much has been said about the haste with which this film is narrated, a feature generally seen as corresponding both to the character’s personality as a coureur de jupons (skirt chaser)24 and to his desperate urge to retell his sexual experiences in written form.25 In principle, this should contribute to spectatorial engagement, in line with action cinema’s reliance on chases, racing cars, and running characters, which highlight the medium’s unique prerogative to reproduce real-life movement as a means to enhance illusionism. L’Homme qui aimait les femmes also opens its flashback narrative with a typical car chase: obsessed by a pair of legs he sees in a laundry shop, Bertrand simulates a car accident in order to obtain the woman’s address, then races from Montpellier to the neighboring Béziers to meet her. But the apparent speed, intended to supply the story with a climactic telos, in fact hides a disruptive device derived from the fact that many stories are started, but none completed, as they correspond to nothing but the amateur writer’s clumsy exercises in turning his fantasies into literature. Even if Bertrand is on the brink of suicide, violently crashing his car against a column in order to get hold of the owner of a dazzling pair of legs, when he finally meets her, she turns out to be the wrong person, one, moreover, with legs hidden in an ugly pair of white trousers. The disruptive power of this discovery is accentuated by the fact that the spectator suddenly notices that something has gone horribly wrong with the dazzling Nathalie Baye, thus becoming aware of the real actress behind her screen persona. Bertrand, however, seems entirely unconcerned with a discovery that nearly cost his life and does not take a minute to forget all about this case and embark on other, equally frustrating, chases. Such developments can only be plausible if understood as the result of the to-ings and fro-ings of the protagonist’s amateur writings, which are nothing but those of the narrator (or scriptor), himself struggling with the simultaneous production of a novel and a film. As we know, narrative interruption is the self-reflexive device par excellence, intended to break the fable’s varnish of reality in order to unveil the reality of the medium. This is precisely what happens when all the women coveted by Bertrand turn out to have something odd and off-putting about them, including enormous spectacles, an object that Mary Ann Doane once described as “one of the most intense visual clichés of the cinema.” In her words: “The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality and undesirability; but the moment she removes her glasses (a moment which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itself linked with a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the very picture of desire.”26 Doane is referring to the so-called classical mode of storytelling – more specifically, to the character of Bette Davis in the film Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) – meaning that, in resorting to the same device, Truffaut moves again to the register of citation that turns the act of wearing glasses into a self-reflexive trick. His revered Hollywood filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, was an expert in weaving into perfectly seamless narratives all sorts of distancing, often intellectualizing supplements to his beauties, which scared men away from them. A good example can be found in Vertigo (1958), where Midge, the designer of aerodynamic female brassieres, wears huge glasses that are in direct relation

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to the impotence of her beloved detective Scottie. Bertrand, however, as a nostalgic, diminished version of the classical hero, does not have any particular objection to women with glasses (that is, to their agency as bearers of the gaze), though he does suggest to the pretty blonde from the car-hire agency that a smaller frame would suit her better. More significantly he discourages a lover, whose prominent nose he compares in the mirror with his own, from undergoing a nose job, thus allowing for this obviously phallic attribute to compete with his, off-putting though it clearly is. That this woman will be the first to show up at his funeral with a bandaged nose only adds to the male– female lack of synchronicity and mutual satisfaction that cuts across the entire film. Even the feather scarf – especially ordered by Truffaut as a replica of the one designed by Yves Saint Laurent for Catherine Deneuve in La Sirène du Mississippi (1969) – sported by Leslie Caron, in the role of Bertrand’s greatest love,27 is displayed as a veritable wall between the two. The bulky scarf, which forces the actress to stretch her neck in order to speak over the feathers, is behind, we suspect, his sudden urge to run away from her after a chance encounter. Be it through glasses, trousers, noses, or wrinkled hands, the fact remains that some strange, undesirable attribute of the women he meets sends Bertrand immediately running after another, thus continuously disrupting the narrative flow and sending the story back to the realm of literary imagination. Truffaut proclaimed that L’Homme qui aimait les femmes was primarily a homage to Charles Denner, whom he discovered during the shoot of La Mariée était en noir (1967).28 However, unlike the benevolent presentation of the actor in the previous film, a painter and womanizer elegantly dressed in fashionable outfits, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes a gloomy brown was reserved for him as representative of Morane’s world, starting with the leather jacket and spreading over his own dark skin, lips, eyes, thick eyebrows, even his surroundings, including the nondescript apartment furniture and the leather seats of his car. “I wouldn’t mind if a film could be entirely brown, rather than having parts in brown, parts in blue and parts in red,” commented Truffaut in relation to this film, reiterating his aversion to the increasing encroachment of color in the cinema.29 Brown is, however, just part of the grotesquerie that pervades the film, contributing comical but macabre touches in tune with the character’s depicted obsolescence and imminent death. I would not go as far as characterizing Bertrand as “unsympathetic,” as Geoff Andrew did in the Time Out review, but his shortcomings as a cinematic seducer, alongside his hesitations as an amateur novelist, certainly discourage the viewer from taking sides. Carole Le Berre establishes a link between Bertrand’s compulsive character and the malaise experienced by Truffaut when filming sex scenes. This, she says, was aggravated by Charles Denner’s excessive modesty, as he “absolutely refused to be filmed in bed with a woman, or even to take off his shirt,”30 hence the need to create ellipses and send Denner to chase somebody else after a few minutes with a lover. Whether this sense of decency resonated with Truffaut’s own is irrelevant to my analysis; however, the choice he made to avoid sexual consummation in the film substantiates my point that he purposely contravened the teleology inherent to cinematic dynamism in order to restrict the story to the confines of self-reflexive literary imagination. Only this would explain why a serial womanizer would turn to the sedentary activity of obsessive writing as an advantageous replacement for the false dynamism of amorous adventure.

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Autofiction and the Emancipated Spectator The psychoanalytical approach to Truffaut’s oeuvre is one that the director never ceased to encourage as pertinent to his own life. His films practically lead the critic by the hand towards his obsession with the mother figure, his fixation on female legs, and his attachment to childhood and the child’s point of view. L’Homme qui aimait les femmes even contains a kind of user’s manual in the form of a memorable scene at Bétany press in whichTruffaut chooses two of his filmcritic friends, Roger Leenhardt and Henri Agel, to compose the board of readers who discuss Morane’s manuscript. Naturally, they agree that its best pages are those retelling the author’s childhood miseries as an only son rejected by his glamorous mother. Completing a perfect trap for critics inclined to autobiographical interpretations, the film reinforces the sense of a “real” child at its base through flashback passages of a teenage boy who strongly resembles the adult Bertrand Morane, which are shot on black-and-white stock to highlight their documentary authenticity. Because, in the company of his mother, the boy is not allowed any activity except reading, provided he make no noise when turning the pages (something Truffaut also attributes to his own life experience), his vision of the mother is reduced to that of a seated subject looking at his object from waist down. Needless to say, it is reading that awakens his sexuality, as he discovers in his mother’s letters all about her multiple love affairs. That this traumatic experience will lead the adult Morane to develop his fetishist partialism is signified through montage and point-of-view construction, for example, when Bertrand watches women from a laundry conveniently located in a basement whose street-level window cuts off their bodies at the knee (a mode of framing so relished by Truffaut that he reused it until his last film, Vivement dimanche!, in 1983). Even dead, Bertrand will continue to have a partial, childish vision of women, indicated by the shot of female legs that surround his grave. Not satisfied with providing an array of visual and narrative cues to a self-referential, psychoanalytic reading of his film, Truffaut stresses in the opening page of the ensuing cinéroman that a “common denominator of Bertrand’s love affairs” is encapsulated in the already quoted phrase of Bruno Bettelheim from The Empty Fortress: “It seemed that Joey never had any success with his mother.” With this, he garners the critics’ unanimous agreement that Bertrand’s childhood and mother are no other than his own. However, if this may constitute a key to Truffaut’s life, it certainly does not explain his cinematic aesthetics, as the following example illustrates. Among the many episodes Fermaud contributed to the script there is one about the babysitter hired by Morane to look after a nonexistent baby, only to hear from the hero, in Denner’s jocular deep voice: “L’enfant, c’est moi!” (I am the child!). This hilarious self-reflexive quip should suffice to make the critic think twice before adopting the autobiographical approach, or at least query how a film director, imprisoned in the partial visual field and reduced subjectivity of a child, would be able to come up with

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such a sophisticated, self-ironic scene, in my view one of the film’s best. It would seem more plausible to see this style as stemming from a cultivated intellectual with a keen interest in education, sexuality, and childhood that resulted in veritable masterpieces, such as Les 400 Coups, and well-researched film essays, such as L’Enfant sauvage (1970) and L’Argent de poche (1976). Moreover, these topics were not only Truffaut’s personal interests but were generally popular in his time, a fact which was marked by the pervasiveness of psychoanalysis. What the aesthetic choices in the film actually demonstrate is a lack of autobiographical data capable of turning Bertrand’s constant pursuit of women into a dynamic film story. Instead, the character’s imagination remains imprisoned, until his death, in the static position of a reader, which is also that of the spectator. Needless to say, the latter corresponds to the position of the film narrator (whoever this is), whose self-reflexive inscriptions come, as we have seen, in the form of extensive borrowings from other films and literary sources. Autobiography, in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, is thus nothing other than autofiction. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to read the narrator’s self-confessed spectatorial position as passive. In this sense, Truffaut’s oeuvre runs radically contrary to the Lacanian psychoanalytic readings that presided over 1970s’ film theory, which described the classic film spectator as a passive voyeur regressing to the infancy of the mirror stage. Today, with the fading of psychoanalytic master narratives and the rise of the embodied spectator in film theory, other approaches have become available which may prove better suited to explain Truffaut’s particular kind of modernism. Jacques Rancière, for example, has dismissed the idea of modern art as that which elicits critical spectatorship on the basis of the Brechtian pedagogical model, describing instead what he calls the “emancipated spectator” as follows: Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation. … We do not have to transform spectators into actors, and ignoramuses into scholars. We have to recognize the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action is the spectator of the same story.31

Would there be a better definition for Bertrand Morane than a man whose action is to watch his women pass by, albeit from his grave, in the form of his own literature turned into film? Because all Truffaut films are imbued with a passionate, though at times contradictory, belief in reading as equivalent to cinephilia, they acknowledge spectatorship as an action in its own right that does not need to be transformed into critical or participatory behavior. This is how they succeed in naturally developing their self-questioning, deconstructive power that is felt, not as an aggressive exposition of the reality of the medium, but rather as a vague malaise. This, I believe, is where the quiet, subversive power of his films lies and is what has secured their afterlife and inexhaustible interest to this day.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Stephen Shennan and Dudley Andrew for their helpful reading of this chapter.

Notes 1 François Truffaut, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 78. 2 Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 72. 3 Gerald Mast, “François Truffaut,” in Christopher Lyon (ed.), The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Vol. 2 (London: Papermac, 1987), p. 543. 4 Robert Stam, François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 5 Stam, François Truffaut and Friends, p. 197. 6 Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 173. 7 Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 647. 8 Truffaut, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, p. 7. The English edition of Bettelheim’s book actually says, “It seemed that Joey simply never got through to his mother.” Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (London: The Free Press, 1967), p. 241. 9 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 649. 10 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 47. 11 François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema (1954),” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 16. 12 Lúcia Nagib, “The Politics of Intermediality,” in Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (eds), Impure Cinema: Intercultural and Intermedial Approaches to Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 13 Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Le Temps d’une pensée: du montage à l’esthétique plurielle, ed. Sophie Charlin (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2009), p. 220. 14 Geoff Andrew, “L’Homme qui aimait les femmes,” Time Out ( July 23, 2011). Available online at: http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/72785/the-man-who-loved-women.html (accessed November 12, 2012). 15 Stam, François Truffaut and Friends, p. ix. 16 De Baecque and Toubiana, François Truffaut, p. 586 ff. 17 Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 253. 18 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 146. 19 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 789–821. 20 Dudley Andrew, “L’Age d’or and the Eroticism of the Spirit”, in Ted Perry (ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 129. 21 Andrew, “L’Age d’or and the Eroticism of the Spirit,” p. 134. 22 Andrew, “L’Age d’or and the Eroticism of the Spirit,” p. 134. 23 Truffaut, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, p. 7. 24 Carole le Berre, François Truffaut au travail (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004), p. 227.

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25 Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 268. 26 Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Film and Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 428. 27 Le Berre, François Truffaut au travail, p. 228. 28 Truffaut, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, p. 7. 29 Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 365. 30 Le Berre, François Truffaut au travail, p. 232. 31 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 17.

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The Elegist François Truffaut inside La Chambre verte Philip Watts

“The Cult of the Dead” In 1979, Serge Daney concluded that for all their formal innovation and in spite of having launched a revolution in world cinema, the films of the New Wave, and François Truffaut’s in particular, were really an elaborate cult of the dead.1 Daney, who had Truffaut’s La Chambre verte (1978) in mind when he made this trenchant claim, intended to challenge the widespread notion that Truffaut and the New Wave had embodied France’s postwar rush to modernize. For Daney, writing ten years after May 1968, nothing had a more complicated relationship with France’s fixation with newness after 1945 than this group of films.2 Along with a very real desire to create a new film language, along with their staging of a rising youth culture, along with their reliance on the technological innovations in cinema, the films of the New Wave remained in constant dialogue with archaic forms and historical processes. Eric Rohmer’s obsession with classical form, as exemplified in his 1955 article “Le Celluloïd et le marbre,” Jacques Rivette’s staging of classical tragedies in his films, from Paris nous appartient (1961) to Out 1 (1972), Godard’s reinvention of The Odyssey in Le Mépris (1963), Jean-Daniel Pollet’s exploration of Greek and Roman ruins that same year in Méditerranée (1963), Alain Resnais’ meditations on memory in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), Agnès Varda’s recourse to Hans Baldung’s Death and the Maiden (1517) while filming Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) – these are a just a few examples of what might be termed the New Wave’s resistance to postwar society’s imperative to modernize.3 Within this movement, no filmmaker created a greater tension between innovation and archaisms, between contemporary France and remnants of the past, between what Dudley Andrew has identified as spontaneity on the one hand and elegy on the other, than François Truffaut.4 Even before he had directed his second A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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film, Truffaut, in an article introducing the New Wave to the French public, warned against the “dangers” of France’s enthusiasm for young directors. Artists need to age, wrote the twenty-eight-year-old Truffaut, or they will eternally make the same film, and the public needs to abandon its enthusiasm for youth and welcome filmmakers such as Hitchcock, von Sternberg, and Fritz Lang, who did their best work late in life. Truffaut’s article reveals the anxieties of a young filmmaker determined not to fade away after the triumph of his first film, but it also points to an interest in the complexity of late style and a desire not to become a victim of fashion.5 In spite of the very real economic imperatives of keeping his production company afloat, Truffaut attempted, throughout his career, to make films where the characters, culture, technological references, and stories were slightly out of step with their times. Characters such as Antoine Doinel – Truffaut calls him a “young man of the 19th century,”6 a friend calls him a “vieux maniaque” – the incessant references to film history, the prominent place given to nineteenth-century literature and to plots built around the resurgence of the past, and his regular production of period dramas, all these elements reveal a filmmaker intent upon producing narratives in dialogue with the past and whose main mode of expression might best be characterized as elegiac. What Daney identified as a cult of the dead in Truffaut’s films takes the form of a lament for a person or moment that is irretrievably lost but that continues to haunt the present. Elegy is the genre that relies on narratives of suffering and, as Paul Veyne wrote about Roman poetry, it is a genre that seems to remove this suffering from history and even from the progression of a story. Elegiac poems “do not present the episodes of a love affair – beginnings, declaration, seduction, a falling out. Time does not pass at all.” Elegy remains, according to Veyne, “a poetry without action, with no plot leading to a denouement or maintaining any tension.”7 It may be precisely this elegiac voice in Truffaut that has led some critics to dismiss his films as retrograde, conservative, and hopelessly nostalgic. My contention, however, is that if elegy is a genre that seeks to step out of time, as it were, Truffaut’s recourse to elegy must nonetheless be understood as a part of his films’ reflections on the aesthetic, political, and historical forces of their period. Truffaut’s untimeliness does not remove these films from the present in which he was working. On the contrary, the detour through the past becomes an effective tool in Truffaut’s reflections on the present. Since his early films, Truffaut has been saddled with the reputation of being a somewhat traditional filmmaker, too desirous of a wide audience, too close to the cinéma de qualité he had reviled as a young critic. The relative lack of interest for Truffaut’s movies among film scholars working in the United States today (as opposed to the overwhelming interest in all aspects of Godard’s films) confirms this general impression. The result has been to obscure the extent to which Truffaut’s films attempted, in their own way, to speak to the debates of his times. My argument is that Truffaut’s fascination with the past is hardly comforting; rather, he treats it as an object of contention, a source of tension that troubles the relations individuals have to one another, to institutions, and to the rules that govern private and public worlds. The sense of

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loss that pervades his films, their madness, their flight out of the present upsets the easy flow of economic and sexual exchange necessary for the smooth functioning of the film’s narrative. Nowhere is this more evident than in his 1978 film, La Chambre verte. La Chambre verte, first conceived in 1974 and ultimately shot and distributed in 1978, is a deeply elegiac film. Its plot, its form, and even the historical context all turn around questions of loss, of grief, and of unending remembrance. The story of La Chambre verte is set in 1928. Julien Davenne (François Truffaut) a journalist and a veteran of World War I, keeps a “green room” in his house dedicated to the memory of his beloved wife who died ten years before the film begins, shortly after the end of the war. When this green room catches fire, Davenne, with the help Cécilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye) – who, for her part, is mourning a man who turns out to be Davenne’s former friend – builds a chapel devoted to the memory of his wife and of his dead friends. The final sequences show Cécilia and a dying Julien together in the chapel filled with candles and with photographs of his dead friends, what Henry James, in a story that served as the film’s source, called “the silent rollcall of his Dead.” Truffaut’s film is relatively faithful to James’ 1895 supernatural tale “The Altar of the Dead,” and Truffaut must have been attracted to a character overwhelmed by what James calls “his feast of mourning.” This said, Truffaut and his scriptwriters made several significant changes in his adaptation, all of which go in the direction of emphasizing the elegiac. First, in transposing the story from London to a village in the east of France, Truffaut also changed the profession of his protagonists. In James’ story, the woman lives from her pen, whereas in La Chambre verte, it is Davenne who is the journalist, and specifically one who writes obituaries. What is more, he writes them for a moribund journal, The Globe, whose readership is slowly dying off. He is thus tied to loss and to grieving several times over – through the loss of his wife, through his job as a writer of obituaries, and through his employment by a journal that is about to close down. In the adaptation, Truffaut and his screenwriter, Jean Gruault, also added the character Georges, the mute boy who recalls Victor from L’Enfant sauvage (1970) and serves as a mirror image of sorts for Davenne. Truffaut and Gruault made two other significant changes that I will focus on in this paper, for these changes point to the film’s attempt to engage with contemporary debates about the status of the image and about the legacy of violence in the twentieth century. First, whereas the altar of the dead was entirely composed of votive candles – “a passion of light” – in James’ story, in La Chambre verte the dead are represented primarily by photographs. Second, whereas James’ story takes place in London at the end of the century, Truffaut’s shifts his story to the east of France and, more significantly, to the years following World War I, as if, taking his cue from Freud’s 1917 essay, he had wanted to tie personal melancholy to a national mourning associated with war. Through Davenne’s cult of still images and in the trauma of war, La Chambre verte reveals not just the timelessness of what Daney called the “cult of the dead” but the cultural work of Truffaut’s films around questions of narrative, memory, and the politics of the 1970s.

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Life Stilled Truffaut incessantly filmed still photographs: the pinup at the beginning of Les 400 Coups (1959) and the freeze-frame at the end, the slides of sculptures in Jules et Jim (1962), the incriminating pictures of an adulterous relationship discovered by Franca Lachenay in La Peau douce (1964), the director Ferrand’s dream of stealing publicity stills in La Nuit américaine (1973). Photographs play different roles in Truffaut. They can further the narrative or they can immobilize it, as in the end of Truffaut’s first film, but they are almost always tied to a larger reflection on the power of the moving image, on the fascination it exerts on the spectator, and on what Ludovic Cortade has identified as a desire in Truffaut to suspend his films, that is both to stop them in their tracks and to leave open the possibility of further fictions.8 This sort of suspense seems very much at work in La Chambre verte, a film that is littered with photographs of the dead. When we first enter Davenne’s green room, we see him seated, a spectator in a museum of grief, contemplating the pictures of his wife that hang on the room’s wall. Later, after he has built his altar, Davenne lines the walls of this chapel with pictures of his dead wife, but also with a number of pictures of Truffaut’s friends and literary and artistic idols: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, the composer Maurice Jaubert (whose music Truffaut used for La Chambre verte), and the writers Jacques Audiberti, Raymond Queneau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, and, of course, Henry James. The pictures are emblems of memory, aesthetic forms through which Davenne attempts to stop time, to preserve and retain the memory of his friends and lover. It is through photographs that, as Davenne tells a grieving friend, “our dead can continue to live.” And it is through photography that Truffaut’s previous films “continue to live.” As much as any film, La Chambre verte accumulates references to early films, not as an instance of nostalgia but rather as a way of placing itself as part of a historical and technological process which leads to the very film we are watching. In this sense, the still images force us to interpret the film not as distant from the present but integral to it. The photographs of the dead in La Chambre verte are what help make the film a work of art in the present. The self-conscious use of still images in moving pictures is an old problem that was given new life in the 1970s as writers, theorists, and filmmakers questioned the status of the still image in relation to the movies. A year after Truffaut’s La Chambre verte came out, Roland Barthes wrote La Chambre claire, a work that in tone and in its relation to photography as a technology of contemplation seems very close to Truffaut’s film.9 By the late 1970s, Barthes had become Europe’s foremost elegist, intimately tying his writing to reflections on love and death and the making of photography the surface on which to carry out this reflection. For both Truffaut and Barthes, photography is intimately tied to death: the death of his wife and his friends for Davenne, the death of his mother for Barthes. Photography becomes the object of an intense affect, precisely because of what Barthes identified as its referentiality. This is what Barthes famously, and scandalously at the time, labeled the “ça-a-été” quality that attaches itself to any photograph. Indeed, one of the most striking developments in Barthes’

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essay comes in the final pages when he states that if society has been so committed to developing sociological theories of the photographic image it is in order to “tame” the realism of photography. For, Barthes claims, certain images when looked at for what they really are can only lead us to madness. Photographic realism is a “sibling of madness.”10 A photograph, for Barthes, is the undeniable proof that a moment has irremediably past and exists only in memory. To look at an image in this way is to encounter an unbearable aspect of life that can only lead to madness in the present. In a sense, this is precisely the narrative development of Truffaut’s film, the story of a man driven mad by the incessant contemplation of photographs. Was Barthes thinking of Truffaut when he wrote his book on photography?11 Can one hear an echo of the title La Chambre verte in Barthes’ La Chambre claire? And should we hear an echo of Barthes’ Le Plaisir du texte (1973) in the title of Truffaut’s collection of essays Le Plaisir des Yeux (1987), especially given Barthes’ final paragraphs in that book on the pleasure of sound at the movies?12 We know that Barthes had a contentious relation to film and that he wrote about photography against cinema. But we also know that he went to the movies and wrote about cinema his whole life and that one can make connections between Barthes and Truffaut. We know, for instance, that Barthes was thinking of André Bazin when he wrote La Chambre claire and that Barthes’ essay takes a position on the referentiality of photography that was similar to the position Bazin had made famous in his 1945 “Ontology of the Photographic Image.”13 Barthes even cites Bazin dead-center in La Chambre claire. Was he also thinking of Truffaut? For instance, was he when he chose Daniel Boudinet’s Polaroid of a green room as the frontispiece of his book? Or when he cited Godard’s famous dictum, “Not a just image, just an image” (Pas une image juste, juste une image), was he then?14 And, turning the question around, might Truffaut have remembered Barthes’ “The Third Meaning,” an essay on still photograms in Eisenstein, when making La Chambre verte? Surely he must have, since that essay appeared in the July 1970 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, alongside a long essay by Serge Daney and JeanPierre Oudart on Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage. Curiously, in 1978 Barthes even played a small role (the writer William Makepeace Thackeray), in André Téchiné’s biopic about the Brontë sisters, a film that starred two actresses who had worked with Truffaut, Isabelle Adjani and Marie-France Pisier. Though evidence of their intersection may be tenuous and circumstantial, Truffaut’s film and Barthes’ essay both unquestionably reinvest the image with an aesthetic aura and ask it to perform the work of grieving that for both men is the work of art. Both tie photography to elegy and assign to it a role radically different from the one that Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, had given to the still image in his 1965 essay on photography as a middle-brow art.15 In Truffaut’s film and Barthes’ essay, the photographs are, in part at least, images that could figure in a family album – Davenne’s wife and friends, Barthes’ mother in the picture of the “winter garden.” They are, in both cases, images that Bourdieu would have identified as belonging to the process of socialization of the individual as a member of a family. Nothing, however, could be further from Bourdieu’s analysis of family photographs as symptoms of what he called the “regularities of behavior” than the narratives of passionate love that Truffaut

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and Barthes are telling about their images. Nothing could be further from Bourdieu’s theory of middle-class integration than the attempt by both Truffaut and Barthes to tie the photographic image to a form of grief that spills into madness. In his introduction, Bourdieu had specifically opposed what he called the “activity of the amateur photographer” to the “image of artistic creation.”16 Truffaut’s film and Barthes’ essay turn this proclamation on its head. Amateur photography, banal pictures of friends and family, become the site of extraordinary attention and excessive emotion. The most trivial image in both these works becomes the object of the work of art’s principal investment of affect and narrative. Truffaut’s self-consciously untimely film may thus be reacting to a more general anxiety at work in the 1970s, especially on the Left, about the normalizing force of images and mass communication. It is precisely at this time that Raymond Williams described how television must be understood as a “flow,” that is the incessant unfolding of one image into another and one program into another without place for the distinction of art or the attention of the pensive gaze.17 And this “planned flow” creates a viewing experience in which films, commercials, even trailers for other films all blend together so that, in the end, the experience of watching becomes what Williams calls “a single, irresponsible flow of images and feelings.”18 The consequences for Williams were radical: an inability to differentiate between programs (the idea of the “discrete” narrative event is no longer valid in television); an inability to disconnect from the television (“We can be ‘into’ something else before we have summoned the energy to get out of the chair”19); and the “paternal” and “authoritarian” use of the technology in order to socialize individuals and, when necessary, implement repressive policies. Williams was not a cultural pessimist, and he saw the possibility for what he called the “young radical underground”20 to use televisual technology in order to develop alternatives to capitalist society. Still, for Williams, by 1974, television had brought a new relation to images, one whose most salient feature was the machine’s ability to turn the viewer’s attention into a distracted and undifferentiating gaze. It is the repressive and normalizing potential of this flow of images that critics and filmmakers on the Left in France attempted to resist. One might think, for instance, of Jacques Rivette’s 1971 film Out 1, a 743-minute opus maximus originally commissioned by the state-run television company, the ORTF (the Office de RadiodiffusionTélévision Française), but which, one need hardly add, never screened on French television. Even though Rivette’s film is rigorously structured, with each of the eight episodes linking two characters and recalling the episode that immediately precedes it, it is nonetheless a relentless questioning of narrative flow and of the circulation of capital that keeps narratives flowing, and this not just because of its inordinate length but because it is structured around the impossibility of two rival Parisian theater troupes successfully staging two tragedies by Aeschylus. What Out 1 shows us, instead of the tragedies themselves, is a series of sequences of actors improvising, preparing, rehearsing, transforming, and being transformed by, the original material. We also follow the troupes as they try to obtain funding for their productions – one of the two troupes is invited to stage Aeschylus at a festival for the “moderate avant-garde” in Gascogny, an invitation it ultimately refuses. Out 1 is a complex and compelling film,

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and I certainly do not want to reduce it to just one meaning, but among the many doors this film opens is its relentless desire to put into question the value and the naturalness of producing narratives in theater, film, and television. Certainly, questioning the ties between the smooth functioning of capitalism and the flow of cinematic and televisual narrative is at the heart of Godard’s political films of the 1970s. In Ici et ailleurs, his 1974 film about the Palestinian revolution, Godard most explicitly theorizes what might be called an anxiety about the flow of images. The premise of this film is the difficulty of making a pro-Palestianian film after the massacres of Palestinians in Jordan in September 1970. Ici et ailleurs may be a work of committed cinema, but it is equally a melancholic reflection on the passage of time, the inability of the filmmaker to be in the present required by politics, and the incessant replacement of one image by another. One of Godard’s theses in this film is that “l’image d’après chasse celle d’avant” (literally, “the later image chases the earlier one” off the screen), and Godard includes a long sequence in which actors in a studio enact this replacement, this chasing away of images, in front of a video camera. Godard ties this reflection on what he calls the “uninterrupted chain” of cinematic and televisual images to a critique of capitalist production as well as to a violent critique of Israel. It is within this framework of one image chasing another that Godard puts together his infamous sequence in which an image of Lenin is “chased” by an image of the Popular Front, which is chased in turn by an image of Hitler, which is itself chased by an image of Golda Meir. Critics may have been right to call this juxtaposition of images “monstrous.”21 Certainly, Godard’s anti-Zionism was one more reason for Truffaut to distance himself from his former friend. The two men had famously exchanged hostile letters in 1973, Godard calling Truffaut a sellout after the success of La Nuit américaine, and Truffaut rebutting that Godard’s militant politics were a cover for his contempt for others. It is not impossible, in this context, that the character Massigny in La Chambre verte, to whom Davenne reacts so violently (even after Massigny’s death), is a fictional transposition of Godard. But along with this autobiographical interpretation of Truffaut’s film, along with Truffaut’s hostility to Godard and presumably to Ici et ailleurs, one might also point out that the two directors share a common ground in their suspicion of a poetics of narrative flow that was reasserting itself in France, especially on television, after the period of experimentation that had followed May 1968. La Chambre verte can thus be understood as screening a melancholy detachment from the poetics and economics of mainstream narrative movies, even as it participates in the codes and the circuits of distribution of commercial cinema. Even though Truffaut knows that his resistance to a society of publicity, of politicians, and of the unending flow of undifferentiated images can never take the form of Godard’s political radicalism, La Chambre verte offers the possibility of an alternative. For all their differences, Truffaut and Godard are reacting to what they perceive as a surfeit of images, an overabundant flow of spectacle, and what in 1967 Guy Debord had identified as the spectacle’s “laudatory monologue” to itself. In La Chambre verte, this strange, untimely, and unpopular film, Truffaut stages his refusal to use the image as an instrument of socialization or even normalization. Indeed, throughout his career,

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Truffaut would struggle to position his cinema against what he understood as the “banalization” of the image.22 By 1978, we find Truffaut condemning the domination of color in film, for instance. Color, Truffaut states in a 1978 interview, “has done as much damage to cinema as television. It is necessary to fight against too much realism in the cinema, otherwise it’s not an art.”23 “Art,” for Truffaut, is precisely a way of resisting what some saw as the tendency of cinema and photography to produce banal images, that is, images without affect. Truffaut wants to keep open this disruptive quality of art and of cinema, this ability to redirect our attention and to challenge the obviousness of the visible. At the same time, of course, one should not overemphasize the radicalness or even the marginality of this project since Truffaut himself always tried to make commercially successful films, regularly used television in order to sell his films, and vaunted the pleasure of Hollywood cinema. Beginning with Le Dernier Métro (1980), Truffaut’s first original production after La Chambre verte, his producers eagerly sought funding from television networks, and did so thereafter with all subsequent films. What is more, by the 1970s Truffaut has been embraced by Hollywood and was happy to return the embrace. In 1978, the year of the release of La Chambre verte, Truffaut enthusiastically endorsed the New Hollywood of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), of Richard Dreyfuss, John Travolta, and Barbra Streisand; it was a relationship that was consummated when Truffaut accepted the role of Claude Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).24 Truffaut films of the time, and La Chambre verte in particular, thus appear both to resist and to embrace the normalizing forces of consumer society, and they do so from the inside, from Truffaut’s central position in world cinema and from films that seemed to willingly espouse the rules of the game. This is what Sam Di Iorio, in his chapter in this volume has called the “non-consensual third space” between mainstream cinema and the avant-garde.25 This was not an easy position to occupy, but it is one that makes his films worth rediscovering as aesthetic works that were in a complex dialogue with other films and with foundational debates about narratives and images.

There Is No “Holiday from History” Elegy is most often a private, domestic genre in which the poet is bound to the past by the chains of passionate love, and Truffaut could have certainly avoided all references to public and historical events La Chambre verte (just as James does in his short stories). Instead, he chose to situate his film in the years following World War I. Truffaut himself had insisted the story be “directly linked to the memory of the First World War,”26 and the film ties together personal loss and the massacres of the war in a way that forces us to understand this film in relation to larger historical forces. Just as La Chambre verte opens onto theoretical debates about the status of the image, so too does it engage with historical events in a way that has too often been overlooked.

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In one of the many startling moments of La Chambre verte, Julien Davenne shows his collection of slides to the mute boy who lives in his house. After a few slides of insects, which are of no interest to the boy, Davenne shows him scenes of World War I, some of which are particularly gruesome. “Elles sont très belles,” Davenne says of his images of dead soldiers in the sand, a bombed-out church, a severed head, a corpse hanging from a tree. The photograph is, once again, a marker of memory, and in this case of the disaster of war. Indeed, in its opening credit sequence the entire film is placed under the sign of World War I. The film opens with documentary footage of World War I, and throughout the film we encounter a number of visual motifs of the war: in one scene in an auction house Davenne sees mortar shells that have been turned into vases, in another a wounded veteran passes through the frame in a wheelchair, one of the journalists at The Globe is a decorated amputee, and plaques commemorating the war dead are evident in the journal’s offices. Even the soundtrack can be tied to loss brought on by war. For the music of La Chambre verte, Truffaut turned to Concert flamand, the work by Maurice Jaubert, a composer who had written the scores for films such as Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) and Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se lève (1939) but who met an untimely death at the age of thirty-six during the battle for France in June 1940. As for Julien Davenne, he is the lone survivor of an artillery unit that fought on France’s Eastern Front. Davenne is a living ghost of this war. Indeed, the opening credits of the film are constituted of images of Davenne in the uniform of the poilu superimposed on newsreels of World War I, of soldiers in trenches, artillery fire, then finally, as the credits end, of the wounded and the dead strewn in the mud of the battle fields. Several of the combat sequences that Truffaut uses in La Chambre verte are lifted from the 1963 documentary about World War I titled 14–18 – images of exploding shells, of soldiers leaving their trenches, and of French soldiers laying what appears to be barbed wire or telephone wire during a battle. Even the opening image of Truffaut as a poilu is modeled on a recurring image from the film 14–18.27 What is more, in putting together the opening sequence of La Chambre verte Truffaut was reacquainting himself with earlier collaborators, for 14–18 was written and directed by two acquaintances of Truffaut, Jacques Laurent (credited in the film as Cécil SaintLaurent), the erstwhile editor of the journal Arts and one of the leading members of the postwar literary movement known as the Hussards, and Jean Aurel, who, for his part, had hired Truffaut to write for Arts and went on to assist Truffaut in the editing of several films, including Jules et Jim, and in writing L’Amour en fuite (1979), La Femme d’à côté (1981), and Vivement dimanche! (1983).28 What then are we to make of the place of World War I in Truffaut’s films? Why does he turn to the war of 1914–1918 at the end of a century that was not lacking in other wars and other disasters? To answer this question, we might begin by looking at one of Truffaut’s first encounters with World War I, his laudatory review of Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory. Truffaut praises Kubrick’s film for debunking “the usual heroic history of World War I,” but he also uses the review to criticize the French military authorities who had refused to allow Kubrick to make his film in France and who had promised to censor it if it were to be released in Paris.29 What is

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more, Truffaut writes that Kubrick, had he wanted, might also have found examples of “military abuses in more recent wars”: the war of 1940, the war in Indochina, “with all its scandals,” and the war in Algeria, “about which, after Henri Alleg, Kubrick could have more strongly and more usefully asked ‘the question.’”30 The mention of Henri Alleg’s La Question in a film review is noteworthy. Henri Alleg was a communist journalist at Alger Républicain who had been imprisoned and tortured at the hands of French paratroopers in Algiers in 1957. To cite Alleg’s testimony in a 1958 review of Paths of Glory is to draw parallels between military abuses of power in 1917 and 1957. It is to situate oneself quite clearly against France’s military practices in Algeria. At the very least, this reference to Alleg seems to signal Truffaut’s distance from the Hussard movement, known not only for its nostalgia for Pétainism in the 1950s but also for its strong support of France’s claims on Algeria, of the OAS, and of the use of torture. I do not necessarily recommend doing so, but one need only read Cécil Saint-Laurent’s novel Les Passagers pour Alger (1960) to see the extent to which the Hussards were apologists of the practice of torture by the French in Algeria. Les Passagers pour Alger is a roman-fleuve sympathetic to the French colons and intent upon justifying the French presence in Algeria. In one key scene, French paratroopers in Algiers arrest the daughter of a French professor of history who has ties to the FLN. She is subjected to a process of simulated drowning during which she reveals the information the paratroopers are seeking. This scene is the occasion for the novel to make the claim through its narrative that torture works – the victim here reveals information that will lead to further arrests and prevent a terrorist attack – that torture is much less violent than the bombs planted by the FLN, and that torture, tout compte fait, is, as the French lieutenant tells the woman as she is recovering, no worse than undergoing the drill at the dentist’s office.31 Les Passagers pour Alger, written by Jacques Laurent, director of the journal Arts, where Truffaut began his career as a writer, proposes one of the most explicit apologies for torture ever to make its way into the pages of a French novel. So, a first conclusion concerning Truffaut and World War I might be that this war serves Truffaut as a way of engaging the present, of engaging with the politics of the present – with torture and abuses by the military in the late 1950s – though in an indirect way, or to cite Michael Rothberg, in a “multidirectional” way.32 A film about the violent repression of insubordination during World War I becomes an occasion for Truffaut, as it had for Kubrick, to open his thought to contemporary violence and to articulate his opposition to injustices in the present. Even the question of censorship of Kubrick’s film has contemporary resonances, for the same committee that censored Paths of Glory in 1958 also had a hand in censoring films such as Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ critique of the devastating effects of French colonialism. Truffaut was particularly incensed at the censorship imposed upon films and books during the Algerian war.33 Two years before signing the 1960 Manifesto of the 121 in support of the young French men who refused to serve in the military in Algeria, his brief review of Kubrick’s film about World War I took the form of a timely intervention into contemporary French politics.

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As it turns out, World War I is the historical traumatism that most frequently shows up in Truffaut’s films. In Vivement dimanche! a shady movie theater run by a local gangster is playing Paths of Glory. In Le Dernier Métro the play that the theater troupe produces under the Occupation is set during World War I. And, of course, the war makes a significant appearance in Jules et Jim. In around the thirty-second minute of the film, the two men head to battle, and Truffaut inserts documentary footage of the war into his fictional narrative. We learn that Jules and Jim have been drafted in the armies of warring nations and that, above all else, they are afraid of killing each other. Several things stand out in this four-minute sequence. First, the war sequence in the film is wholly absent from Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel. This is what Roché writes about the five years during which Jules and Jim are separated by war: “Three days before he was due to arrive, the war broke out; it separated them for five years. All either could do was to let the other know, by communicating through neutral countries, that he was still alive. Jules was on the Russian front. There was little likelihood of their encountering one another.”34 The voice-over narrative, the letter-writing sequence, the war scenes, indeed the entirety of the war sequence in Truffaut’s film was added for the screen adaptation by Truffaut and his team. This is what Robert Stam has called the “amplification” of the war in Truffaut’s film, an amplification that emphasizes nothing so much as the “inane brutality” of the war.35 The war sequence itself is carefully crafted to emphasize this brutality. The first part of the four-minute sequence shows French soldiers being taken prisoner by the Germans, as if Truffaut had wanted to make sure that there could be no patriotic recuperation of this documentary footage. The second aspect of the sequence is the intensity of the shelling. In less than one minute there are twelve rapidly succeeding shots of explosions, the effect of which is to erase all reference points – national or strategic – to the bombings, as if nothing remained of the war but sheer massacre. As Stam says, “Truffaut’s antiwar feelings of the 1960s are made to resonate with the antiwar feelings of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s.”36 So much so that Truffaut will borrow the rapid editing techniques of the historical avant-garde to display the useless violence of war. What is more, the voice-over narration of Jules et Jim was recorded in the fall of 1961 with actor Michel Subor who, the previous year, had played the role of Bruno Forestier in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, a film that would be censored in September 1960 for its evocation of torture during the Algerian war and only released in 1963. To this chain of echoes and cross-referencing between World War I and the present in which the films were made, one could add that in recalling World War I in Jules et Jim Truffaut is also evoking the past of European anarchism and perhaps even the figure of Miguel Almeyreda – the father of Jean Vigo, the editor of the anarchist publication La Guerre Sociale, a supporter of Jean Jaurès’ pacifism in 1914 and an ardent opponent of World War I. It was because of his advocacy of an immediate peace with Germany that Almeyreda was imprisoned in France in 1917, where he died either by suicide or by murder. And indeed, the traces of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante that we encounter in La Chambre verte – Maurice Jaubert’s score, the role played by Jean Dasté as Davenne’s editor – may very well be another way of recalling Vigo’s father and the memory of World War I.

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But are these references political? Do these resonate with political choices faced by a contemporary audience in 1962, the year of Jules et Jim, or in 1978, the year of La Chambre verte? One might object to the creation of such resonances by claiming that Truffaut’s films are precisely not about the present and that he seems to be systematically withdrawing from the politics of his time. After all, we might be tempted to lump La Chambre verte in with the nostalgia films that were all the rage in the 1970s, films such as Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974), Liliana Cavani’s Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter 1974), George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby (1973), or Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (1970). Truffaut first began developing his project for La Chambre verte in 1974, the annus mirabilis of the mode rétro in France. We might also recall that mode rétro films, as Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson both described them, were historical films that replaced working-class struggles with nostalgia and that replaced history with what Jameson called an appetite “for all the styles and fashions of a dead past.”37 By 1978, the year La Chambre verte was released, France is beginning to enter a decade in which the dominant culture of the West triumphantly proclaims the end of ideology, the end of history, the rule of consensus, the replacement of old ideological struggles by the free hand of the market, and the substitution of the public sphere by a television driven entirely by mercantilism. There is no doubt that Jameson saw mode rétro films as a cultural development of the new triumph of global capitalism. What is more, the commemoration of World War 1 could be taken as an attempt to create a consensus within French history. As the historian Antoine Prost wrote in his 1977 study, the monuments that sprung up throughout France after the war were not jingoistic affairs, nor even celebrations of victory, but rather they were cults of Republican France that emphasized mourning and suffering and that had the effect of creating a national consensus around the sacrifices of the combatants. “The republic cult of the war dead” was, Prost writes, France’s “civil religion.”38 In this context, to display the violence of World War I as Truffaut does in the opening sequence of La Chambre verte, is seemingly to adopt a consensual position around a Republican “cult of the dead.” This interpretation, however, dismisses too quickly the multiple directions of La Chambre verte. The wager that Truffaut made with his films was that they always remain between two cultures, between commercial cinema and the avant-garde, between Hollywood and Godard, between a modernizing society rushing to pave over the conflicts of its past and the imperative that the work of art remain open to tensions and contradictions. The contemplative force of La Chambre verte, the violence of this film, its elegiac tone, its reference to the debilitating effects of a war that inaugurated the twentieth century, the archive of disagreements about World War I that it draws upon, its implicit references to other wars and other conflicts, and the descent of Davenne into madness, all remind us that Truffaut’s films neither sink into nostalgia for some ideal past nor easily align themselves with the dominant opinions of their times. To place a film under the sign of World War I in 1978 is also to evoke the horrors of the century and a century of horrors. It is to open this intimate film to the place that wars and massacres have held in modern times and to remind viewers, in 1978 and today, about the illusions of its holiday from history.

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15

Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 1 (Paris: POL, 2001), p. 219. My thanks to both Dudley Andrew and Sam Di Iorio for their comments on this paper. I am particularly indebted to Sam Di Iorio’s idea that Truffaut’s films inhabit a non-consensual third space between mainstream cinema and the experimental avant-garde. In the last few years, several books on the postwar modernization of France all point to tensions between specific films made in the 1950s and 1960s and the increasing technocratic modernization of France. See Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Godard et la société française des années 1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). On Varda, see Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7 (London: BFI, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 17. François Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987), pp. 12–19. Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux, p. 23. Paul Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 50–51. On the still image in Truffaut and in film more generally, see Ludovic Cortade, Le Cinéma de l’immobilité (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008). Ludovic Cortade rightly makes the link between the still image at the end of Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups and Barthes’ reflections on photographs in La Chambre claire. See Cortade, Le Cinéma de l’immobilité, p. 46. The tie between Barthes and Truffaut’s 1978 film seems even more compelling. Roland Barthes Camera lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 115. Barthes La Chambre claire (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980), p. 176. In fact, we know that Barthes did not see Truffaut’s film but that he was aware of and drawn to “La Chambre verte.” In his memoirs about Roland Barthes, Eric Marty mentions that one night, shortly after his mother’s death, Barthes wanted to see Truffaut’s film but that Marty, worried that Barthes was too depressed, convinced him to see a “particularly inept” comedy by Christian Gion. That night, Marty concludes, “I discredited myself.” Eric Marty, Roland Barthes: le métier d’écrire (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 97. My translation. Le Plaisir des yeux was published after Truffaut’s death, but according to the editors of the volume, Jean Narboni and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut had chosen the title before he died. On the ties between Barthes and André Bazin, see Colin MacCabe, “Barthes and Bazin: The Ontology of the Image,” in Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed.), Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 71–76. See also Adam Lowenstein, “The Surrealism of the Photographic Image: Bazin, Barthes and the Digital Sweet Hereafter,” in Cinema Journal 46 (3) (Spring 2007), pp. 54–82. Roland Barthes Camera lucida, p. 70. La Chambre claire, p. 109. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middlebrow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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16 Bourdieu, Photography: A Middlebrow Art, p. 5. 17 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 86. 18 Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, p. 92. 19 Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, p. 94. 20 Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, p. 133. 21 Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), p. 50. See also Gilles Deleuze’s conclusions that these images must be understood as “not an operation of association, but of differentiation,” in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 179. 22 Truffaut “Charlie Chaplin, un homme comme les autres” in Le Plaisir des yeux, p. 71. 23 Ronald Bergan (ed.), Francois Truffaut: Interviews ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), p. 119. 24 François Truffaut, “Renaissance du cinéma américain,” in Le Plaisir des yeux, pp. 32–38. 25 Sam Di Iorio, bad objects: truffaut’s radicalism. 26 Truffaut in a letter to Jean Gruault ( July 21, 1974), quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: a Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 338. 27 As Anne Gillain notes, Truffaut emphasized the subjectivity of this sequence by giving a blue tint to the black-and-white images of the documentary footage. Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 267. 28 On Jacques Laurent and the Hussards, see Nicolas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Postwar France (Oxford: Berg, 1996). 29 François Truffaut, The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 116. 30 Truffaut, The Films of My Life, p. 117. 31 Cécil Saint-Laurent, Les Passagers pour Alger, Vol. 1 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1966), pp. 261–272. 32 Michael Rothberg Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 33 In a brief essay, Noël Herpe has pointed to the “evolution” of Truffaut’s positions on censorship, from mild endorsement of Hollywood production codes to a denunciation of the French state’s censorship of Jules et Jim and Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse. See Noël Herpe, in Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de la Martinière, 2004), pp. 83–84. It is worth noting that Truffaut was already denouncing state censorship in France in 1958. 34 Henri Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim, trans. Patrick Evans (New York: Avon, 1967), p. 69. The French original reads “Trois jours suivant, la guerre éclata et les sépara pour cinq ans. Ils purent tout juste se faire savoir par des pays neutres qu’ils étaient encore en vie. Jules était sur le front russe. Il était probable qu’ils ne se rencontreraient pas.” Roché, Jules et Jim (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1958), p. 89. 35 Robert Stam, François Truffaut and Friends (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 88–89. 36 Stam, François Truffaut and Friends, p. 89. 37 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 286.

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38 Antoine Prost “War Memorials of the Great War: Monuments to the Fallen” in Jay Winter (ed.), Republican Identities in War and Peace (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 36. See also Antoine Prost Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française 1914–1939 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977). In his three-volume work, Prost begins by telling his reader that he first had the idea of writing on veterans of World War I when he was a soldier in the French army during the Algerian war of independence. On commemorations of World War I, see also Daniel J. Sherman The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). Sherman’s study has the advantage of revealing political and ideological differences that Prost’s work obscures.

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

The title of Henry James’ story “The Altar of the Dead” appeared in Francois Truffaut’s list of prospective productions in the early 1970s; incipient versions of a script with that name had already been routinely exchanged between Jean Gruault and Truffaut since 1974. The idea of adding a few elements from “The Friends of the Friends” to this story comes later, as does importing James’ strange perspective on human relationships dramatized in “The Beast in the Jungle.” Carole Le Berre lays out eight successive versions of the screenplay of La Chambre verte (1978) between 1974 and the beginning of shooting, in 1977.1 Of course, the film draws its inspiration from other sources as well, near the top of which would be Henry James’ personal fidelity to his first fiancée long after her early death, and also, though Jean Gruault never mentioned it, the story of Auguste Comte and Clotilde de Vaux. Then there are literary parallels that can also be detected, from Gautier’s Spirite to Marcel Proust’s Albertine disparue. However, Truffaut’s film seems close enough to “The Altar of the Dead” that one could, at first sight, consider it as a simple, and quite faithful, filming of James’ short story. This pertains not only to the story’s developments and episodes but also to important parts of the dialogue that seem directly transferred from the mouth of James’ Stransom to that of Truffaut’s Davenne – something the director had done already with Jules et Jim (1962) and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971). From this perspective, the film seems to belong to the director’s series of literary adaptations, in which the circulation of words from text to film appears to be the main point, and sometimes even the real subject, of the film. However, La Chambre verte’s relation to its sources is deeper than the simple importation of episodes and dialogue. The notion of fidelity is misleading enough to allow us to imagine Truffaut using it to conceal from the spectator the ultimate intimacy of his film’s subject, which is revealed as well as hidden by a particular stylistic treatment that combines lyricism and distance. Considering its style, one might readily classify A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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La Chambre verte somewhere between L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975) and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent and never suspect that La Chambre verte was one of the films closest to Truffaut’s biography as well as to his way of conceiving cinema.

“A Handwritten Letter” Truffaut admitted clearly and patently the biographic dimension of La Chambre verte. Truffaut averred, “This film is a handwritten letter. If you write manually, the letter won’t be perfect, the writing may be a little less neat, but it will be you, it will be your handwriting.”2 The director also acknowledged the “intimate dimension” of La Chambre verte without delving into details, except in mentioning the numerous dead friends he was suddenly remembering at this moment of his life and in alluding to his grandfather’s profession of funerary marble-worker, whom he used to watch as he worked at a cemetery.3 These anecdotes are insufficient to establish a biographic source for the film or to argue for some biographic intention behind the treatment. Indeed, after its release and box office failure, Truffaut tried to deny that he felt any special intimacy with this film. Trying to gain an audience, Truffaut was even willing to transform the way he characterized the story, describing La Chambre verte as a novelistic love story.4 Despite this desperate attempt to enlarge its audience, Truffaut was disconsolate, rebaptizing La Chambre verte, “La Chambre vide” (the empty room) in a letter to François Porcile.5 Today La Chambre verte still retains a strange and mysterious reputation Many spectators express their uneasiness with this movie, often attributing the problem to Truffaut’s manner of playing Julien Davenne. His acting has been likened to that of Bresson’s “models.” As was the case with L’Histoire d’Adele H., the audience also seemed frightened off by the film’s morbid atmosphere, with the main character sliding down the road to madness. In his letters to Gruault, Truffaut expressed his fear of being identified with Julien Davenne. In order to avoid this he suggested that they change Davenne’s profession from that of an entomologist who makes documentaries to that of a journalist. He did not want the spectators to consider him, the filmmaker, as Davenne, nor to think about cinema when watching La Chambre verte.6 Actually, the film seems both to draw spectators in and to hold them at arm’s length, just as it tries, by an analogous process, both to tell and to hide a secret (something Julien Davenne does, by the way, when he talks to Mazet in the film’s first sequence). Under close scrutiny, however, this film, is packed with François Truffaut, even though it is set before his birth, far from his beloved Paris, and is utterly devoid of the usual romantic themes his previous films famously explore. The memorabilia scattered everywhere in the décors serve as a constant index of the film’s director. Surprisingly, the spectator seldom sits alongside Julien in the green room that gives the film its title; we see only a few pieces of the collection Davenne is supposed to have accumulated to honor his late wife. Instead we are guided by the story to the

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chapel where mementos of Julie Davenne are mixed with photographs Julien has assembled to keep present in his life the dead people he loved or wants to honor, many of them belonging to cinema and literature. Pascal Bonitzer has accurately categorized the mementos covering the walls of the chapel (as well as the film’s set) into those coming from Davenne’s fictional past, those coming from cinema, and those coming from Truffaut’s personal memories.7 In Davenne’s green room before it burns, then later in the cemetery and in the chapel, Julie Davenne is presented to us via a few photographs and some objects. Still, the frequent appearance of her portrait in profile throughout the film creates a feeling of familiarity with this character, although we know her only through her widowed husband. Also present within the memoriabilia is Henry James: photographs from the Davennes’ honeymoon, which, as we guess from their costumes, must have taken place in a sunny country, remind us of the importance of Italy in James’ work (in “The Beast in the Jungle,” for instance). Another James reference can be gleaned from the scene in which Julien puts an amethyst ring on the finger of his dead wife, whose hands had been cast in plaster, thus uniting his life with her death. James had concocted just such a scene in his 1874 tale “The Last of the Valerii.” Very soon in the diegesis, we notice a contamination between the worlds of Davenne and Truffaut. Among the objects ordained with the power of the memento are the puppets hanging in the auction room, near the place where Cécilia narrates the circumstances of her father’s death. Cécilia characterizes the puppets as Italian, and declares, “I’m sure you think you’ve already seen them somewhere.” Indeed, no cinephile could fail to recall Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), where these puppets appear in the Naples episode. Their presence urges us to consider almost everything on the set as being of potential significance derived from prior use, and specifically a previous cinematographic existence. By displaying them in La Chambre verte, Truffaut imports a part of their story into his film, just as Julien brings his friends’ pictures into the chapel. In a slightly different manner, during Georges’ escapade, the boy shatters the hairdresser’s window with a stone and steals a mannequin’s bewigged head: this was a scene Truffaut said came from Buñuel’s Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, 1955).8 There may be significant differences in atmosphere and meaning between Buñuel’s film and La Chambre verte, but what matters is Truffaut’s desire to use Buñuel as an authority, a tutelary presence. Just a few years before shooting, he had been present on Buñuel’s set during the making of Tristana (1970).9 By far the film’s fullest concentration of cinematographic memories is reserved for the strange chapel Julien builds for his wife and for “his dead.” Among the pictures hanging on the walls are those of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Becker, whose films may not be directly or thematically related to Truffaut’s work, but who appear as patron saints in this world. Their presence discreetly helps the spectator find the proper stylistic tone with which to approach La Chambre verte since they signal Truffaut’s tastes during his period as a critic. Between 1954 and 1960 he wrote at least four articles about Becker’s films.10 Cocteau’s immense influence on the critics who wrote for the Cahiers du Cinéma is well known. Truffaut himself acknowledged the importance of

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Les Enfants terribles on his vision of cinema,11 and he took part in the production of Cocteau’s last film, Le Testament d’Orphée (1960).12 All this would take us quite far from Julien Davenne, unless we assimilate character to director, something Truffaut encourages (despite his worry on this score) by introducing into the chapel so many memories from his own films. On the chapel’s walls are photographs of his former actors: Jeanne Moreau and her sister; Oskar Werner; Oscar Lewenstein, who produced La Mariée était en noir (1967); and Mark Peterson, who plays the part of Mr Flint in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. Annette Insdorf noticed that Davenne identifies the photo of Peterson as “Jardine,” a name that in fact refers to another character, played by Marcel Berbert in La Sirène du Mississippi.13 This gives this photo real density, for in La Sirène du Mississippi Jardine is Belmondo’s secretary, who is obsessed with statistics and expresses his feelings mainly through figures, as if unable to speak them aloud, while Mr Flint in Les Deux Anglaises is an old man who lives near Mrs Brown’s house and delicately separates Claude and Muriel without squelching their budding romance when he learns that they see each other at night against Muriel’s mother’s wishes. Now, Jardine is described in La Chambre verte as a perfect mediator, which is to say, someone in the mold of Mr Flint’s character. Thus Truffaut uses the double reference of this photograph to pay tribute to all those who have taken on the small parts in his films, often played by amateurs (including several members of the crew in La Chambre verte, such as Marcel Berbert himself ). Truffaut does not want any of them forgotten. This may also be why so much attention is focused on the character of Paul Massigny. Called Acton Hague in James’ story, in the first drafts of the screenplay this character was treated mainly as a public figure involved in politics; only later was he given a backstory in which he had had a love affair with Cécilia. Anne Gillain treats this character as a palimpsest, seeing in Paul Massigny something of Jean-Luc Godard.14 This hypothesis can be confirmed by going back to the notorious and devastating letter Truffaut sent to Godard in 1973, which concludes with Truffaut praising “little men” who, unlike Godard, really do care about people; among these he names Rohmer, Queneau, and Audiberti, whose portraits (except for the still living Rohmer) he deliberately included in the chapel.15 Many reviewers have noted the images of Henry James and Maurice Jaubert, in part because the dialogue comments on them directly. The camera even stops in front of these special images, highlighting the film’s credits, as it were, since these men provided the film’s story and its music. The shot of Jaubert’s photograph is surely one of the most solemn moments of the film, illuminated as it is by the candles of the chapel whilst the composer’s own brilliant Concert flamand rises on the soundtrack. All these pictures can be organized in four concentric circles spreading out from Davenne to Truffaut, from the intra-diegetic to the extra-diegetic, from the fiction of the film ever nearer to its director. In the furthest circle, the pictures cover every period of Truffaut’s life and career, from his youth as a critic to his present-day life as a director. A few intimate images appear in the chapel, without any apparent direct link either to the film or to the cinema: writers, such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, and Audiberti; composers, such as Shostakovich; personal friends, such as Louise de Vilmorin and Aimée Alexandre (who translated “The Altar

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of the Dead” at Truffaut’s request, thus initiating the film we are watching). These “real characters,” suspended as in a gallery on the chapel’s walls, are not there only as mementos, or as winks aimed at the cognoscenti; Truffaut calls on them to give the spectator a glimpse into his world. They guide us in our understanding of the chapel and of the film itself, as metaphor.

A Magic Lantern for a Dark Film La Chambre verte is considered a dark film, quite different from many of the director’s pictures. Indeed, most of the sequences of La Chambre verte are shot or happen during the night. Very few of them take place outdoors, and fewer still by daylight. Truffaut was cautious about shooting those of his films which are located in the past during the daytime because of problems with the accuracy of light and color (although this self-imposed resctriction did not prevent him from shooting large parts of Les Deux Anglaises et le continent on location in Cornwall and in the French countryside). Many interior sequences in La Chambre verte are lit only by a lamp or candles: in Julie’s room, in Genevieve Mazet’s funeral room, in the chapel – obviously – and even in Davenne’s parlor, where the main character watches a magic lantern projection with the mute boy, Georges. Very often, characters look at an image or an artifact while they themselves are immersed in deep obscurity, their faces scarcely illuminated by at most a few candles, so that one cannot help think about the audience’s own situation. The movie theater evokes a slight feeling of danger, of the possibility of an accident that might occur during our lonely contemplation, something that Truffaut described as particular to his own childhood relationship to the cinema, writing, “I saw my first two hundred films on the sly. … I paid for this great pleasure with stomachaches, cramps, nervous headaches and guilty feelings.”16 In La Chambre verte, two violent accidents (the fire in the green room and Georges’ nighttime escapade) also express this relationship with the cinema. The magic lantern sequence is central to the film as a literally conceptual sequence. At first, Georges and Julien intently look at the projection of insects drawn on glass plates. Julien is unable to say anything to the mute boy, apart from commenting on the precision and the realism of the sketches. After a few minutes, Georges fetches new photographs that Julien has recently bought and inserts them into the projector. These, all taken from the Great War, are especially dramatic and graphic: dead soldiers hanging from trees, a hospital devastated by an explosion. Julien does not describe the images to the boy, but relates the stories of these men, narrating the events that took place before and after the pictures were taken. These images recall the film’s first frames, where Julien is shown as a soldier lost in the battlefield, a dead man walking amongst many others. But the significance of this sequence is that it probes Truffaut’s relationship to images by setting documentary starkly against fiction. Both Julien and Georges choose fiction, preferring images capable of evoking stories to self-explanatory pictures.

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The complete sequence builds up the idea of devotion to cinema. Davenne becomes so involved in this moment that only the voice of Madame Rambaud can break the enchantment. Adult and adolescent share in this magic, the only time in the film where two characters truly watch something together. This sequence returns Truffaut and us to L’Enfant sauvage (1970) – to the situation of adopted parenthood and education – but it remains primordially a celebration of movie-going as a soothing atmosphere emerges within the darkness of a tormented story. That the film’s true subject is cinema should be evident from the very beginning of the film, when Julien Davenne appears like a lost shadow in those images from the war: Julien, just like Truffaut, exists as a figure projected on a screen, a trace of light. In the chapel, too, the cinematographic apparatus is figured in the association of pictures and candles. The chapel exists as a “film’s site,” to use Christian Metz’s vocabulary, meaning the manner in which the film designs itself as a movie. He denominates as “reflexive constructions” the diegetic moments in which “the film talks about itself, or about cinema, or about the spectator’s situation.”17 According to Anne Gillain, “this chapel is along with the ‘rotor’ of Les Quatre Cent Coups the most beautiful metaphor of cinema in all Truffaut’s work.”18 One could object that, as Metz demonstrates in his text, such reflexive devices are common and have existed in cinema from its very beginnings. In this case, however, the spectator is literally caught within the chapel and driven to contemplate the image in a relentless, even violent, way. One can sense the chapel’s cinematic importance when Cécilia first enters it. This sensitive young woman is guided by the hero, and seems intent on giving the moment overtones of a mystical marriage. Moving at the rhythm of Jaubert’s musical score, the camera travels forward until it reaches the gate in front of the altar of the dead, recalling the opening of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) when the tracking camera comes to rest on the “No Trespassing” sign. A jump cut now brings us Davenne’s hand as it opens the gate to let the woman in.19 One feels driven into the heart of the cinematographic process, even into the heart of the camera. Circular motifs in the architecture become a metaphor for the lens; indeed, as the sequence progresses, both characters seem to become the lens as well. Although this camera movement is dwelt on in a spectacular, even hieratic way, it is not unique in the film. In the green room, for instance, another traveling shot takes us from Davenne to the room’s walls, full of pictures, ending in a still frame of Julie’s portrait as it appears on her grave. Such a stylistic device, repeated several times during the film, points to what Davenne requires from the other characters: they have to become cinema, just as the clandestine people of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) become books. To accomplish this metamorphosis, Julien Davenne and Cécilia both need to abandon the world of the living. Considering the sharp alternatives that the film forces on the viewer, one can understand the strong reactions La Chambre verte elicited. The diegesis is founded on oppositions between day and night, interior and exterior, life and death. From beginning to end, Julien Davenne prefers the dead. His choice, as radical as it is violent, requires the strength to tear himself from life. Neither Georges nor Cécilia seem attractive enough to keep Julien among the living; on the contrary, they follow him even when his obsession seems on the verge of turning into madness.

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Like Julien, who orders a wax statue of Julie, Georges has to steal a wax mannequin from the hairdresser’s window, as if this robbery could regain for him Julien’s trust after the episode of the broken glass plates. For her part, Cécilia finally agrees to become the keeper of the chapel in order to light the candle for Julien when the day of his death arrives. The film celebrates, in a ceremonious way, exile from life and the renunciation of desire and love. One wonders, then, how Truffaut, whose main themes from Jules et Jim onward precisely revolve around love, desire, and women, could have claimed La Chambre verte as his most intimate movie. The best way to understand this is to consider La Chambre verte through its relationship to the films that precede and follow it. Anne Gillain rightly emphasizes the proximity between La Chambre verte and L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977),20 but one could easily extend the likeness to L’Histoire d’Adèle H., another portrait of an obsessionnal character. Julien’s curious domestic configuration reminds the spectator of L’Enfant sauvage, just as the importance of fire calls for a comparison with Fahrenheit 451.21 Considering the period setting of La Chambre verte, and the treatment of obsession as an illness that takes over the characters’ bodies, one should also remember Jules et Jim and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent. Even Ferrand’s dreams from La Nuit americaine (1973) seem to return during Georges’ escapade, when the policeman’s hand falls sternly on the boy’s shoulder, something that also echoes Antoine’s capture after the theft of the typewriter in Les 400 Coups. La Chambre verte discreetly quotes and summarizes a great deal of Truffaut’s oeuvre, including his written work as a film critic.

An Aesthetic Autobiography Truffaut scatters enough clues throughout the movie to make his intention apparent: from start to finish, La Chambre verte testifies to a life devoted to cinema. Of all his work, this film could be considered his aesthetic autobiography and a portrait of the artist. From the numerous portraits it includes, La Chambre verte draws on the power of stillness. Julien Davenne remains the same whatever may happen. Unlike other of Truffaut’s protagonists, who change in the course of the films in which we find them (compare Julien Davenne with Dr Itard from L’Enfant sauvage, for instance), Julien is as eternal and immutable as a painted figure. If we agree that Julien is an artist figure, his existence as a living person is treated as far less important than the work he accomplishes. This stillness surrounding him seems so strong as to constitute the dramatic crux of the screenplay. One might explain this as related to the dichotomy between life and death we have already mentioned. And it is true that Julien is overwhelmed by anger at the sheer idea of Cécilia or Mazet taking up some new life after the deaths of the people they cared about. In his own case, he feels not anger but guilt when he so much as contemplates a future. Indeed, his own death seems voluntary, self-willed, since it occurs at the exact moment at which he is tempted to break his own rules. Julien’s commitment to his dead is nearly abstract; he is shown locked in a relentless conceptual project.

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The coherence of this changeless portrait, and even its opacity, establishes Julien Davenne’s stature and image. He is more than simply a “cinema man”; he lends his body to a rigorous conceptual challenge, and in the process he is asked to personify Truffaut’s conception of his own work. The film thus seems to exemplify rather than to express Truffaut’s way of world-making. According to Nelson Goodman, making a world requires that one select and separate (and therefore eliminate) elements, before organizing them and showing, through this organization, the rule that produces this world’s specific coherence. “Works of art … characteristically illustrate rather than name or describe relevant kinds,” writes Goodman, clearly indicating that works of art use connotation instead of denotation, and do not appeal to anything else than themselves to demonstrate their purpose.22 Goodman’s formulation fits Julien Davenne’s life and radical project especially well. His obsession measures up to that of Stransom in James’ short story. At the end of that written story the hero walks into his chapel and stares before him at the candles. “He shifted this and that candle; he made the spaces different; he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap. There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross reference. … Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure.” Clearly “The Altar of the Dead” and La Chambre verte are deeply linked. Both exemplify artistic creation as world-making. And such world-making should remind us of the “politique des auteurs” that Truffaut and his companions at Cahiers du Cinéma invented during the 1950s. The author, according to their theory, is to be understood as emerging from the coherence of his work, which is determined by intertextuality, the echoes one can recognize from one film to another. This conception, which can be considered formalist, places special emphasis on the recurrence of motifs and the persistence of themes. Therefore Hitchcock becomes, in Truffaut’s pantheon, the absolute incarnation of the author, forever exploring the same moral obsessions as well as stylistic figures. Such a definition of the author’s role induces a quite classical conception of the work of art, opposed to what Umberto Eco has termed “the open work.” In the “politique des auteurs” coherence plays the crucial role. Each film is less important than the relationships discovered among films, and the movement that led the author, and then the spectator, from one movie to another. This definition must have determined Truffaut’s conception of his own oeuvre. From the middle of the 1960s onward, Truffaut talked about his own work comparing one film to another, insisting on their likenesses, and even thinking of them as a single egg, smooth and closed. Surely within this egg one has to include Truffaut’s written texts as well as his films; indeed, one should even include his life, since he himself admitted that he “had often been accused of preferring cinema to real life, and that, even as an adult … found it difficult to change.”23 Compare this remark to the 1963 article Truffaut titled “Rossellini Prefers Real Life”;24 the comparison insists that in Truffaut’s world, life is the opposite of cinema, therefore cinema needs the author’s life to be made as a gift, or rather as a sacrifice. Truffaut and Davenne stand in the same place, situated inside their work.

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As consistent as their respective oeuvre may appear, the difference between Hitchcock and Truffaut lies in their respective enunciative positions, and in the distance between their respective films and the directors who made them. The author as conceived by the “politique des auteurs” remains close to the Latin root of auctor, which does not emphasize creation but rather the ability to be responsible for every element of something, in this case every element of a film, and every film of the oeuvre. To claim a director as an author often seems evident when one watches the oeuvre, after the films are finished and have been screened for the public; but this becomes a much more difficult enterprise when the term is applied to work in progress. The tension between the work as project and the work as finished product gives to La Chambre verte its tragic atmosphere. In more precise terms, Julien Davenne is paradoxically trying to accomplish a project that can exist as a work only when it has been accomplished, or, to refer to a striking element in the dialogue, when “the figure is finished.” The film points out this contradiction between reception (Truffaut as critic, looking back to the history of cinema) and production (Truffaut as director, looking forward). Trying to be an author implies, in this system, accepting a certain devotion to death. One has to choose, and the choice implies a complete and eternal commitment. Death becomes, within this film, a strange metaphor for the cinema, because both are permanent and both can be considered as radically cut off from the world. It seems that in Truffaut’s imagination, to make films requires the same commitment as to be the chaplain of the chapel: cinema demands a cult, a ritual celebration. It insists on complete sacrifice, and La Chambre verte tells the story of this self-sacrifice. At the same time it tells the story of a classical author haunted by modernity.

Notes 1

Carole La Berre, François Truffaut at Work, trans. Bill Krohn (London: Phaidon, 2005), pp. 236 and 240. 2 Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 339. 3 Truffaut in Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 373. 4 De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 342. 5 François Truffaut to François Porcile, in François Truffaut: Correspondance, 1945–1984, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 477. 6 Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1993), p. 125. 7 Pascal Bonitzer. “François Truffaut’s La Chambre verte,” in David Wilson (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma, volume 4: 1973–1978. History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 305. 8 Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon Francois Truffaut, p. 372. 9 François Truffaut, “Buñuel, the Builder,” in The Films in My Life, trans. L. Mayhew (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), pp. 61–68. Originally published as Les Films de ma vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), pp. 272–281.

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10 François Truffaut, The Films in My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 177–186. 11 François Truffaut, Le Plaisir des yeux: écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma,1987), p. 73. 12 De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 152. 13 Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 285. 14 Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 273. 15 Truffaut to Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945–1984, p. 390. 16 De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 22. 17 Christian Metz, L’Enonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1991). 18 Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 274. 19 This jump cut is no editing accident. The scene is filmed as a ritual in which the characters agree to participate. They move solemnly, not “like thieves,” to borrow the expression Truffaut used in La Nuit américaine. 20 Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu, p. 275. 21 In Les 400 Coups, Antoine Doinel dedicates an altar to Balzac that later bursts into flame, and in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. Adèle carries around her own personal altar to celebrate Lieutenant Pinson. 22 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 11. 23 Aline Desjardins, Aline Desjardins s’entretient avec François Truffaut, rev. edn (Paris: Ramsay, 1987), p. 42. 24 Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 273.

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Le Dernier Métro An Underground Golden Coach Jean-Michel Frodon

It is a banal paradox that the most successful film of an acclaimed director should become his least recognized work among movie buffs and film historians. This phenomenon only increases in the case of Le Dernier Métro (1980), because of François Truffaut’s strategic and mythological position in French cinema. It would be more accurate to say: those who have accorded this film so modest a place are the ones who in the United States and other countries have followed its director’s career “from a French point of view,” meaning those whose relation toward cinema has been largely shaped by Cahiers du Cinéma, by the New Wave, and by the original postwar Parisian cinephilia that enjoyed worldwide influence in cultures all over the planet, and of which Truffaut was both an icon and an active ambassador. But Le Dernier Métro’s paradoxical reception becomes more original when one acknowledges that it is actually based on the crossing of this first mythological representation with a second one, with which it apparently has nothing in common – though, as we will see, they actually had a lot in common. This second mythology concerns the attitude of the French during World War II, and even more the representation of this period (and of French behavior) as reshaped in subsequent decades.

The Sweet Smell of Success, and the Weird Distortion of Historical Backgrounds In September 1980, the French release of Le Dernier Métro was an incredible public success, one that went far beyond reasonable expectations, and in a situation where success was actually a matter of life and death for Truffaut’s production company, Les Films du Carrosse, after the commercial failure of La Chambre verte (1978) and A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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the unsatisfying results of L’Amour en fuite (1979). That the company was at risk meant that Truffaut’s position was at risk, that he was under the threat of losing the independence to work as he wished that he had carefully built up during the previous twenty years. Truffaut’s answer to this threat was not only the most expensive but, to some extent, the most daring film of his career. There is also some irony in the fact that Le Dernier Métro would later be dubbed a compromising, middle-of-theroad product. This occurred after Truffaut’s triumph, January 31, 1981, when the film received no fewer than ten Césars (the French Academy Awards), something that had never happened before, and has not happened since; and keep in mind that the other nominees that year were such gentlemen as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Maurice Pialat, and Claude Sautet.1 Riding these awards, Truffaut’s film went on to be an international success. Today, almost everyone has forgotten that Le  Dernier Métro was not at all an easy project, production-wise, and that it was originally refused by two major distributors, AMLF and UGC.2 The cost of the movie, the presence of two major stars, Deneuve and Depardieu, for the first time together on screen, and the commercial success enhanced by the Césars would transform the perception of Le Dernier Métro from a daring work into that of a conventional crowd pleaser. In a (not so) surprising twist, radical critics demanding stylized re-interrogation of film language united with mainstream critics against the film. This was a rather long process. The month of the film’s release, September 1980, turns out also to be the month Cahiers du Cinéma finally met again with Truffaut after their thirteen-year divorce, a clear sign of the journal’s return to the life of cinema following a long period of theoretical/political experimentation. This process, by the way, paralleled Godard’s trajectory, as he went through a similar shift at exactly the same moment with the appropriately titled Sauve qui peut ( la vie).3 Nevertheless, most Cahiers followers later joined the adversaries of Truffaut’s film, along with other exigent cinephiles. These radicals were curiously in sync with another trend led by right-wing or middle-of-the-road conformist critics who pretended to regret that Truffaut was no longer the flamboyant rebel of the 1950s – in fact, they were taking revenge on him for the original, and successful, path he had invented for himself. All these reactions have to do with expectations about filmmaking in the wake of the New Wave, or in memory of what the New Wave meant, or was supposed to mean. This generally negative response then met another sort of suspicion, concerning the film’s specific rapport with the Occupation period. When Truffaut initiated the project for Le Dernier Métro in 1979, its subject was hardly an attractive one. Indeed its particular period setting was one of the reasons it was refused by producers and distributors; even after its triumphant premiere at Le Paris, the owner of this ChampsElysées theater, the aeronautic business and media mogul Marcel Dassault, refused the film a commercial run. In the United States, Andrew Sarris attacked Le Dernier Métro for compromising with the distorted French representation of their attitude during the Occupation, while in France many believed it to be inappropriate or tiresome to bring up the question of resistance and collaboration again. Actually, Truffaut was a few steps ahead of a broad movement that would assiduously re-interrogate the

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period and the complex attitude of the French toward it; this re-interrogation was popularly conveyed in cinema through “la vague rétro” of the 1980s. Truffaut thus helped open out what Marcel Ophüls had initiated with Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1969), a film he cared a lot for and which he helped to achieve theatrical release after it had been censored by French television. Of course the two periods we are discussing, the Occupation and the New Wave, are quite separate. But those who created the New Wave had lived through the Occupation as children or teenagers. They had experienced the shame of the defeat and of the exodus – it would take still one more generation to openly acknowledge the extent to which the strident critics of the 1950s (Truffaut, Godard, Rivette) were actually attacking their parents’ generation when they went after the stiff academic style of the “old French cinema” and opposed to it the vitality of American filmmaking and acting. Serge Daney became the leading analyst of this political– generational phenomenon, which had long been at work without ever being explicitly mentioned. So, Le Dernier Métro shows up at a very specific moment, when distant echoes from the New Wave uprising could still affect its reception, especially for those who never accepted that great change. At the same time the more radical political aesthetic of the post-May 1968 period, though vanishing, felt it could still demand a revolutionary gesture from Truffaut; and finally, this is also the very moment when the relation of the French to the German Occupation was in a process of complete reevaluation, under the influence of Ophül’s documentary, and of the translation in 1973 of Robert Paxton’s crucial book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, which re-launched the historical inquiry into the period, including Henri Amouroux’s popular radio programs and André Halimi’s documentary, Chantons sous l’Occupation (1976),4 about the questionable behavior of artists during the années noires.

Holes and Dark Sides Several decades later, a varnish of respectability covers Le Dernier Métro, which is widely remembered as a gentle and innocuous decorative historical movie or a sentimental star vehicle. This more recent “pacification” of the film is astonishing, since a clear-eyed look at Truffaut’s nineteenth feature suggests quite the opposite; it is an incredibly complex and disturbing work. Of course, Truffaut’s credo as a director has always led him to deal with complexity and disturbance while never explicitly displaying either. In fact the film is a composition of distortions and illusions which elaborates an immense field of meditation related to the deepest issues, in its mix of sentimental, historical, and detective subplots. Nor can this composition be considered classical in the least – Le Dernier Métro would have been instantly dismissed by any studio executive during Hollywood’s Golden Age for its incomprehensible scenes and incoherent editing, without mentioning the problematic issues it brings up.

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A close examination of its storytelling indicates how “full of holes” it is, with plenty of gaps, loose connections, unexplained situations. One of the most moving yet obscure scenes occurs when Marion Steiner visits the Kommandantur and is received by an admiring Wehrmacht Officer, who presses her hand to the point of hurting her. Unexplained, unrelated to any other event before or after, this scene is typical for Truffaut, who generates emotions from registers other than the purely narrative. In the book she dedicates to what she calls Truffaut’s “lost secret,”5 Anne Gillain accurately describes other bizarre situations that help build Truffaut’s multilayer cinematic narration, addressing various parts of the viewer’s mind and emotions, far beyond the straight cause–effect organization of facts. And even when there are factual explanations for the actions that occur on screen, these are seldom sufficient – they express far more than what they show or literally mean. Carole Le Berre’s François Truffaut at Work6 describes the two major stages and processes that allow the film to reach effects well beyond its narrative: writing and editing. In the writing stage Truffaut accumulated elements from various sources, including his personal memories and those of co-scriptwriter Suzanne Schiffman, and then shaped this into a construction that intertwined what at first were two quite distinct projects, one dedicated to the world of the stage and the other to the Occupation. The scripting became even more complicated after late input by other collaborators, particularly when, just before shooting, Truffaut asked playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg to rewrite Lucas Steiner’s dialogue. All of this is very unusual for Truffaut who, in most of his features, would ask a single scriptwriter (generally Claude de Givray, Jean Gruault, or Jean-Loup Dabadie) to establish the solid architecture of a narrative on which he would then elaborate. Then would come the second moment, the editing, when, as Le Berre underlines, Truffaut “[removed] many explanatory or setup scenes, thus making the circulation of sentiments among the characters much less explicit.” She goes on to provide an extensive list of the “missing” sequences.7 All this could only have been done with the greatest deliberation on Truffaut’s part. After all, at this mature moment of his career, having been prolific both as a critic and as a director, he possessed a rare understanding of cinematic storytelling processes and effects. So the various holes, shifts, and destabilizing aspects are carefully aimed to culminate in the film’s daring conclusion, invented only during the shooting, and replacing the much more conventional ending originally scripted. This final hospital scene, with its bizarre transition from super-stylized, almost experimental cinema, to conventional staged theater, strongly reaffirms what is at stake in Le Dernier Métro. It discloses that all along the film has been meant to be driven by two sets of comparisons: first, by the mirror relation between the artificiality of life and the artificiality of spectacle, and second, by the distinction between the artificiality of theater and that of cinema. As always with a director who hated to be categorized, one cannot sum up a film like this with any set of given topics, no matter how complex and subtle. Nevertheless, Truffaut’s systematic interrogation of representation, together with the film’s complex relation toward illusion, is surely at work throughout. This is clearly evident during the film’s very first minutes, both

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in the title song, the popular “Mon Amant de Saint Jean” (about false love, and the acceptance of deception for the sake of love), and in the undisguised use of the film set as a “film set” in the first street scene. It is embarrassing that people criticize Truffaut for the use of the studio in Le Dernier Métro, arguing that he now replicates what he once condemned in French cinema as misleading, facile, and conformist, whereas what he actually does here is utterly different, and indeed adopts an ironic stance toward the fabricated realism of la qualité française.8 Of course, twenty-five years removed from his notorious attack on the complacency operating within the French studios, he hardly cares to renew an argument. By 1980 he is in a completely different place. Another defining aspect of Le Dernier Métro is its rather simple way of giving definition to each character, especially when this is compared with the complexity and delicacy Truffaut employs in filling out the characters of most of his other works. As was the case with La Nuit américaine (1973), Le Dernier Métro is built around many characters, and great richness results from this multiplication.9 Such an unusual number of characters, this “troupe” effect, reminds us that this film was meant to be part of a grand trilogy dedicated to the world of spectacle and entertainment, the first installment being La Nuit américaine and a final one to be called Agence Magic about a music hall, that Truffaut failed several times to develop. To conceive such a trilogy inevitably involved working with an array of characters in a kind of collective dimension that is quite unusual for a director famous for intimacy and singularity. Given the context of this show-world trilogy, it is misleading to say that Le Dernier Métro is about theater or that La Nuit américaine is about cinema: for Le Dernier Métro concerns spectacle in constant and often paradoxical dialogue between two of its forms, cinema and theater.10 To build that dialogue between two artifacts requires simplification, and this justifies the decision to build characters not “as in real life” but, precisely, as fictional characters. Simplification may indeed be a problem, but it need not diminish the intensity or richness of oppositions; and Truffaut solves it by providing each character with a secret, a “dark side,” starting from Marion Steiner’s double secret (to hide her husband, whom she loves, in the theater basement, and to love and desire Bernard Granger). Beyond her lie hidden male and female homosexuality (the Jean Poiret and Andréa Ferréol characters), black-market traffic, a clandestine tobacco plantation, underground resistance, a sham love affair, etc. Everyone and everything has a secret. This even applies to Daxiat who evinces sincere admiration for Lucas Steiner and has a crush on Marion, which helps make the actor Jean-Louis Richard turn Daxiat into a very ambiguous and almost androgynous figure and probably the most complex character in the film, despite his being an anti-Semitic journalist and the only obvious “bad guy” in the movie.11 The two leads, Marion and Bernard, do exhibit a certain complexity, but this is the result of a combination of simple elements. The fact that Bernard Granger “comes from Grand Guignol,” a kind of show where every effect is underlined and pushed to the extreme, partly signals this general approach, since it is very clear that, despite what Granger thinks, it’s not at all a problem, quite the opposite.

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An Apparently Simple Film Freighted with Heavy Questions The marvelous accomplishment of Le Dernier Métro is to have unobtrusively assembled a huge quantity of truly deep questions through apparently “flat” elements, somewhat in the manner of a cubist painting that builds its complex representation by overlapping plain color surfaces. Each of these questions might be considered to be rather simply formulated, but the way they echo one another conveys an immensely intricate world of interrelations, without making the audience aware of it. The multiple questions Le Dernier Métro raises fall into three overriding categories: philosophical, aesthetic, and political. Philosophical issues include the relation with death, with desire and forbidden desire (including the incest taboo, but not only that), the relation with identity (and more specifically with Judaism), the notions of visible and invisible, of transgression, stigmata, body and soul, and so on. Aesthetic questions include cinema’s rapport with the novelistic, the relation between cinema and theater, the very idea of spectacle as a whole (with Truffaut insisting that the film is about the – questionable and often horrible – Anglo-Saxon motto “The show must go on,” which may be true but is so very limited), and, of course, relations between popular and “high” culture, and between classicism and modernism. The political issues the film raises concern history, and specifically the Occupation period together with the mythical representation that the French leaders and populace have built of it; in this category, one must also include the politics of art mentioned within the film (“We read all the newspapers, but only the entertainment pages”) as well as that taken up by the film itself, its relation to the “system,” the political system as well as the industrial system, and its relation to the star system and public success, seen here as a matter of life and death. These political issues were meaningful in a specific way when the film came out, a moment still under the influence of post-1968 radical thought.12 They remain important still, and will remain so tomorrow, though in a rather different light and for different reasons.

Marguerite Duras and the Jewish Question To sum up: Truffaut has made a nearly cubist composition of multiple topics by combining a series of simple elements, while linking each to some secret or dark aspect, and then leaving holes or gaps between them so that the topics circulate while everything is kept from being too readily resolved. Inevitably, numerous cultural and personal references become swept into such a structure, particularly because of Truffaut’s near obsession with citation, as well as because of his unconscious incorporation of things, texts, and people he encountered in his wide-ranging life. One influence, thus far unnoted and unacknowledged as far as I can tell, is Marguerite Duras, someone Truffaut knew very well though he was not particularly

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close to her. “Steiner,” the surname of the Jewish theater director of foreign origin, hiding in his own basement, and therefore also the name of his wife, may be a rather common German name, yet it seems striking that it is also the name of the “heroine” of two short films by Duras released in 1979, when Truffaut was writing Le Dernier Métro: Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) and Aurelia Steiner (Vancouver). Surely this is a coincidence. But then why does Truffaut give his main male character played by Depardieu a name, Granger, that also comes from a film by Duras – her first, Nathalie Granger (1972)? With Duras in mind, connections of all sorts can be felt at several levels. A minor one, for instance, can be recognized in the last sentence of Le Dernier Métro, “[Love is] a joy and a suffering,” which echoes the famous repeated line in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), “You kill me/You make me feel good.” But let’s go straight to the most significant connection between Truffaut’s film and Duras’ work: the topic of the Holocaust, and the fact and meaning of being Jewish. Truffaut had discovered in 1968 that his real father was a Jew, a dentist named Roland Lévy living in the city of Belfort, in the east of France, to whom he had never spoken. Moreover, Suzanne Schiffman, his co-scenarist, also came from a Jewish family, and brought to the film the episode of Rosette, the young girl, hiding her yellow star under a scarf to attend a stage play, since this was what Schiffman herself had actually done during the war, while her father did hide in an attic, more or less like Lucas Steiner.13 It was the “Jewish dimension” that pushed Truffaut to ask Jean-Claude Grumberg to rewrite his film’s dialogue just as filming was about to commence and just after he had seen onstage Grumberg’s play L’Atelier. Grumberg added the famous scene where Lucas Steiner puts on a fake nose and, in front of a mirror, asks, “What is it to look Jewish?” Truffaut is said initially to have pitched the project of the film to Suzanne Schiffman and Marcel Berbert as a combination of The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959) and To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).14 The Jewish issue is just one element, but a crucial one, in Lubitsch’s film, where it combines with masks, wigs, and other devices of false appearance – including a scene with a false nose which is echoed in Le Dernier Métro, in a very Lubitschean way, in the scene with Marion’s wig.15 “What is it to look Jewish?” echoes the Shylock scenes in To Be or Not to Be, and Truffaut, with the help of Grumberg, manages to get at the Shakespearean question of identity via Lubitsch who re-dramatizes it by asking this question (“What is it to look Jewish?”; “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”) in the context both of a theater and of the Final Solution. Now, Duras’ two Aurelia Steiner films likewise address the impossibility of representing the extermination as she builds a heartbreaking incantation to the dead, aimed first at Aurelia’s family but also at the Six Million. Through the absence of any possible representation, and by showing only empty images of the Seine River in Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) or of the silver screen’s “white rectangle” in Aurelia Steiner (Vancouver), she nevertheless invokes the camp appelplatz, “the white rectangle of Auschwitz.”16 This fact of the impossibility of representation being at the very heart of representation (theater, cinema) may not be “the issue” or “the key” of Le Dernier Métro

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(I am convinced such ultimate explanations do not exist), but it is its driving force, its internal motor. And of course this also relates to the title of the play the characters are rehearsing and performing, La Disparue (“the vanished one,” which echoes Hitchcock’s 1938 The Lady Vanishes, if you like, not to mention Antonioni’s L’Avventura from1960).

The Story of Jean and François There is no point in imposing the film’s reference to Duras on the skeptical reader, though I am convinced it makes sense. There are many other trails to explore, including the one Anne Gillain set out on with a Freudian travel guide in hand. It is the strength and richness of great works of art to attract many influences and to legitimate many interpretations. There remains one major and unavoidable reference that has to be called up front and center – surely the most important one, and not only for Truffaut. This is the Jean Renoir reference. As with that of Duras, this influence too remained unacknowledged by Truffaut. But this time it has caused a problem, leaving an unpleasant shadow over Le Dernier Métro, a shadow directly related to Carola ou les cabotins, the stage play Renoir composed in 1957. The play is set in a Paris theater during the Occupation, more precisely in the dressing room of a famous actress during and immediately after a performance. Four men revolve around the lead female character. The most important is a German general who was her lover ten years before and who then abandoned her but who now wants to reignite their relationship. The second is a young member of the French Resistance who is on the run, and who fell for her when he saw her onstage before the war and now risks being caught by the Gestapo agents just so he can meet her and get her autograph. Then comes the arrogant director of the theater, who is also its main actor and her official lover. Finally, we have the Gestapo colonel who manipulates sentiments and loyalty to reach his goals. Outside this core one is introduced to several secondary characters, most of them working in the theater. Truffaut, who was so very close to Jean Renoir his whole life, knew this play quite well. Renoir told him and Jacques Rivette about it in their long interview with him for Cahiers du Cinéma’s “Renoir” special issue late in 1957,17 an issue where an excerpt of Carola ou les cabotins is even reproduced.18 In fact, Truffaut was instrumental in getting L’Avant-Scène to publish Carola ou les cabotins in 1976 even though the play had never been staged. Three years before that, Renoir had tried to film the play, but then had had to step back because of bad health. The project was completed for television by his friend the producer (and former actor from The Southerner, 1945) Norman Lloyd, with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer in the leading roles.19 In their biography of Truffaut, de Baecque and Toubiana describe Leslie Caron as having been shocked by how close Le Dernier Métro was to Carola ou les cabotins. She said: They have so many points in common that Ginette Doynel20 and I were very surprised; we thought he [Truffaut] could at least have given credit to Jean Renoir. When he came

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to see me the first time after Le Dernier Métro, I told him very frankly that I thought there were resemblances with Carola. He was indignant, and took my comment as a reproach. And we didn’t see each other again for a year and a half.21

Should Truffaut have mentioned Carola ou les cabotins? It’s arguable. Although they share an overall framework (a Paris theater during the Occupation), Norman Lloyd’s weakly directed work hardly brings Le Dernier Métro to mind. The two stories are quite different and became increasingly so over the course of Truffaut’s scriptwriting; Carole Le Berre’s patient examination of successive versions of the script brings this out.22 Yes, Carola ou les cabotins may have influenced Truffaut, and, yes, he could have mentioned it in the credits as a friendly gesture, but, first, Le Dernier Métro is so clearly a Truffaut film, distinct on so many levels, that the relation pales; and second, there exist far deeper and more important relations between Renoir and Truffaut. Unquestionably, Le Dernier Métro is one of the best works to signal what genuinely unites them, and to evoke the real significance of their rapport – beyond surface similarities – as the two finest incarnations of what can be called “French cinema.” At the same time, Le Dernier Métro demonstrates the differences between Jean and François. These deeper issues are far more important than pointing out where one thing or another may have been borrowed. When speaking to Rivette and Truffaut about Carola ou les cabotins in 1959, Renoir presented it as a kind of sequel to La Grande Illusion (1937): a psychological portrait of decent and rather sentimental people in a wartime situation. It is true that Le Dernier Métro can be related to La Grande Illusion, since both are studies of “types” (and also, ironically, because of their titles), yet Truffaut’s film includes significant quotations and references to other Renoir films. For instance, the theme of the relation between life and spectacle comes directly from Le Carrosse d’or (1952), the film from which Truffaut took the name of his production company. Then there are the many references to La Règle du jeu (1939) that Carole Le Berre has unearthed,23 as well as one she does not mention that I find to be the most significant of all: the strange presence of a skeleton in the room when Marion and Bernard finally make love, which directly quotes the “Danse macabre” from Renoir’s masterpiece. But what Renoir and Truffaut really have in common at base – something that can be felt all through Le Dernier Métro – is a fundamental moral stance, in their lives as in their films, in favor of relativity over anything absolute. Truffaut capsulized this stance when, in 1980, the year of this film, he affirmed that he belonged to the “extreme center,”24 while Renoir had voiced something quite similar in La Règle du jeu: “Everyone has his reasons.” This motto of Renoir’s applies just as well to the way the characters are constructed in Le Dernier Métro, with Truffaut paying attention both to their “simplicity” and their share of darkness. They “belong to the extreme center” in their modest, non-heroic attitudes. They “are people who compromise,”25 Truffaut acknowledged, while worrying that the audience might not accept this. After the political extremism of the 1970s, Truffaut boldly embodies a middle-of-the-road position, morally and politically,

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which, however, by no means implies a middle-of-the-road aesthetic, quite the opposite, in fact. This anti-extremist yet fully engaged filmmaker believed in the complexity of life and refused simplification as a fatal dead-end, whether in film or in politics. Truffaut here is in perfect accord with what I once described as the principal characteristic of French cinema, as opposed to Hollywood: its non-mythological, non-legendary manner of storytelling, not “bigger than life” but life-size, modest, and therefore a potentially disappointing representation of reality.26 This is exactly how Truffaut described Le Dernier Métro when he tried to explain its success: My film first of all conveys the idea of tolerance and compromise. At the beginning it made me unhappy because I know that the best movie characters are those who want to reach a goal and do reach it. … In Le Dernier Métro, the characters cannot accomplish their ideas; they constantly have to compromise. Once the film was finished, I realized it was probably the film’s main asset. That is why everyone identifies with the film. Because in real life, most of time one does not fulfill his dreams and has to go along with compromises.

Yes, a lot of people did take the middle rail on this Métro, though such centrism is seldom what audiences prefer, as Truffaut knows better than anybody else. Such a non-heroic posture, this preference for relativism that includes failures and compromises, finds its justification in the pre-World War II films of Renoir, of which Truffaut is the chief and most accomplished successor. This “idea of cinema,” whatever occasional success it may achieve, is destined to remain a non-dominant form, an honest but asymmetrical response to Hollywood’s outsized heroic genres.

Renoir’s Moral Position in a Post-Holocaust World Truffaut is Renoir’s best son, the truest follower of the low-key, tolerant, open-minded idea of cinema. But something happened between the time when Renoir embodied this approach and the moment when Truffaut restated it. That something was World War II and, more specifically, what was to be called, a few years after Le Dernier Métro, the Shoah.27 In relation to the event of the war, the film finds itself split down the middle. At the first level Truffaut remains true to Renoir’s lesson regarding war, in this case meaning the German Occupation. One might say that (as opposed to To Be or Not to Be, for instance), Le Dernier Métro is not an anti-Nazi film. It refuses to play up to any easy anti-German feeling, though this would be readily accepted by audiences worldwide (including in Germany) in the postwar period. On the contrary, his bad guys are French. For, since “Doctor Dietrich” had shot himself before Marion could meet him, the only Germans we see in the film are the admirable Lucas Steiner and the daft, sentimental officer played by István Szabó. Thus, in general, Le Dernier Métro in not more anti-German than La Grande Illusion.

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Nevertheless, because of the war, Truffaut had to confront something different, something unassimilable to Renoir’s relativism, and this is the Holocaust. Renoir never acknowledged the specificity and gravity of this event (on this aspect Carola ou les cabotins is very significant), believing to the end in a possible reconciliation between former enemies. Like so many of his generation, he did not single out the destruction of European Jews for special attention among all who suffered in the global tragedy of World War II. In this Truffaut feels very different; though he never uttered any explicit statement about it, he could not help but betray emotions stemming from the irreparable horror and human shame of an event like no other. A deep melancholy spreads its darkness over the whole of Le Dernier Métro. This melancholy is surely associated with Truffaut’s intimate concern with death, which can be traced at least to L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975) and certainly to L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977). Lucas Steiner sequestered in the theater can be said to take his place with Bertrand Morane, whose funeral opens L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, Julien Davenne, who buries himself in La Chambre verte, Bernard Coudray, at whose tomb La Femme d’à côté (1981) begins, and Julien Vercel, stuck in the basement of Vivement dimanche! (1983). While this death obsession surely has many motivations, including the vanishing of “a certain idea of cinema,” the idea he lived and fought for, it most strongly relates to the Holocaust. And that is something that cannot be dismissed in relativity. The insistence of the “Jewish question” throughout the entire film opposes its global relativism, like a dreadfully sad basso continuo haunting it, quite like Lucas Steiner haunting his own theater from its basement. In this sense, one could dub Le Dernier Métro, with its complex meditation on the relation between life and representation, as Le Carrosse d’or in the time of the Shoah. That such a paradoxical work of art should become an immense commercial success and bring Truffaut not just an enormous audience but professional recognition crowned by his triumph at the Césars is most rare, particularly for a film that manages to raise a number of complex issues and to do so without fanfare. Only a master could bring off a drama set in wartime while not resorting to a rhetoric of heroism and while acknowledging the pervasive, unbearable tragedy of the Holocaust.

Notes 1

Concerning the significance of this ceremony, both in Truffaut’s career and in French cinema at the beginning of the 1980s, see Jean-Michel Frodon, Le Cinéma français, de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2010), pp. 610–623. 2 One person who has not forgotten is Marcel Berbert, the production director of Les Films du Carrosse, who had worked with Truffaut since Les 400 Coups and who plays himself as the Théâtre Montmartre accountant in Le Dernier Métro. He recalls the difficulties in financing the film; see Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 360. 3 The US title, Every Man for Himself, loses almost all of the sense of the original, and it distorts the universal meaning of the word “life” into a selfish motto. 4 Truffaut wrote a strong defense of this film in the press.

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Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: le secret perdu (Paris: Hatier, 1991), pp. 99–113 ; trans. Alistair Fox, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Gillain’s psychoanalytic approach drives her to build a global explanation of Le Dernier Métro around the incest taboo, something I believe renders a true but partial account. Carole Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, trans. Bill Krohn (London: Phaidon, 2005). Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, p. 283. Even the “documentary” shots of the Paris subway in the opening of the film are not documentary at all, but come from a fiction film, Georges Franju’s La Première Nuit (1958). Truffaut worried about the simplicity, or flatness, of the characters, wondering if it was something the public would accept. See Anne Gillain (ed.), Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 399. La Nuit américaine is actually also about two kinds of spectacle – that is, two kinds of cinema: the kind of cinema being shot within the diegesis (the making of Je vous présente Paméla) and another kind of cinema, Truffaut’s own mise-en-scène. This represents a more subtle opposition than, let us say, Hollywood filmmaking versus Godard’s radicality as laid out rather didactically in Tout va bien (Godard, 1972), which was made at the same time. The opposition between these two films and their directors crystallized a fierce conflict. To be absolutely complete, we must not forget that there is a “flat” bad guy in the film, but he is scarcely a character: the French Gestapo cop played by Richard Bohringer. There is, for instance, a clear (and arguable) connection made by Truffaut between the fascist Daxiat’s “everything is political” attitude and the use of the same attitude by leftists during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The line, “Everything is political,” an attitude Truffaut hated, is uttered by a prostitute in Baisers volés (1968). Despite these personal connections, it has become clear that the decisive Jewish dimension of the film came when Truffaut read a book he once thought to adapt, Sarah Gainham’s Night Falls on the City, a story of love and betrayal set in wartime Vienna. The book, published in 1967, was translated into French in 1971. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 351. Truffaut was a huge admirer of Lubitsch, and an expert on his work. In this case he knew perfectly well what he was referring to. See Jacques Mandelbaum, “Recovery,” in Jean-Michel Frodon (ed.), Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, trans. Anna Harrison and Tom Mes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 17–33. Marguerite Duras, Les Yeux verts (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987), pp. 110–111. Jean Renoir, interview by François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, in Cahiers du Cinéma 78 (December 1959): 54. The title role at the time was designed for Danielle Darrieux with Paul Meurisse as the German general. Cahiers du Cinéma, 78 (December 1957): 55–58. Carola ou les cabotins was broadcast in the series Hollywood Television Theater on WNET, Channel 13, New York, on February 3, 1973. Ginette Doynel was co-screenwriter of Le Carrosse d’or – and of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) – and producer of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Renoir, 1959). Her name inspired Jean-Pierre Léaud’s character as a fictional double for Truffaut in his autobiographic pentalogy.

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De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography, p. 351. Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, p. 270. Le Berre, François Truffaut at Work, p. 270. “Interview with Francois Truffaut,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires (September 17, 1980). Gillain, Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut, p. 392. Jean-Michel Frodon, La Projection nationale: cinéma et nation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998). Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah was released in April 1985.

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

For now the winds are against me, as I strive to compare two films that are, on the face of it, scarcely comparable. I begin with a simple idea based on little foundation aside from my impressions:1 Le Dernier Métro is a reworking of La Nuit américaine. In other words, the former is not a film about the Occupation, nor is the latter about cinema: both are about “the cinema according to Truffaut.” Hitchcock taught Truffaut many things, including a classical sense of mise-en-scène and the cohesiveness of a body of work, and thus the power of revealing oneself as auteur – hence the significance of the master’s fleeting appearance in each of his films. Truffaut learned something else as well, crucial to me: that from one film to the next, genuine cinema can result from working with a motif or a dramatic form that links an element of representation (for instance a fall from a roof, a monument, a cliff ) to narrative substance (the resolution of an enigma at the end of the story). The model of this might be a musical order (variations, let us say, such as different possible arrangements of notes in a theme) or it might be more artisanal (setting to work again and again to improve the form). Truffaut expressed this idea clearly in “Leçon de cinéma,” in a celebrated discussion with Jérôme Prieur and Jean Collet: some scenes are reworked and re-presented from one film to the next in order to increase their effectiveness, to refine their form.2 This is just what occurs in the two films I have taken up.

A Few Differences In many ways the two films are opposites.3 La Nuit américaine is about cinema; it is a diurnal film, full of exteriors, and contemporary (released in 1973, a line in the film places the action in 1972), which essentially corresponds to a general conception of A Companion to François Truffaut, First Edition. Edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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cinema (a contemporary art en plein air). On the other hand, Le Dernier Métro, shot in 1980, is about a theater between 1940 and 1945, and it is nocturnal, full of interiors, with two layers of costumes (those of the Occupation and those of the theater). This itself evokes a certain conception of theater: that is, old and set in an auditorium. In the former, Truffaut himself plays the director Ferrand; in the latter he disappears, leaving the role of Lucas Steiner to Heinz Bennent. The look and style of the films are likewise very different. Pierre-William Glenn’s camera in La Nuit américaine maintains a generous frame (often having to display the entire cast and crew on a large set) and “white” colors (since we are in the South of France). Nestor Almendros’ camera in the Le Dernier Métro uses a tighter frame, shooting in more confined spaces, keeping closer to the actors and using a color scheme of “hot” shades (red, orange, yellow) over a black background (the night, the inside of the theater, the darkness of the cellar). This constriction of the image and of space in the latter film accompanies a paring down of the narrative, a reduction of the number of characters and extras, and a reinforcement of the connections between them. As a result, the technicians are less numerous (no director of photography, cameraman, continuity girl, intern, makeup artist … ), and the cast of La Disparue (the play put on in Le Dernier Métro) is smaller than that of Je vous présente Paméla (the film shot in La Nuit américaine). Notably absent in Le Dernier Métro are characters who are attached to others, like the production manager’s wife or the star’s husband. This is because the subject is not the same. In La Nuit américaine, Truffaut hopes to treat cinema as a grand art (majestic décor, important financiers, complex machinery, difficult techniques) while also paying homage as much as possible, and with obvious volition, to the “little hands” that make a film (the makeup artist, the intern, the props master, the stunt double, the cameraman). This is very post-1968, as Truffaut shows what is normally hidden, shining a light on the humble and the low-ranking. Indeed, La Nuit américaine is very deliberately a metafilm: cinema displaying cinema, in a fashion recalling American musical comedy (though without the zaniness of Hellzapoppin’). There is a clear preference for the backstage (showing things that go wrong, like the aging actress fallen from glory who drowns her sorrows in alcohol, or the little cat who does not want to drink the milk …), the minor setbacks (the tardy actor, the pregnant actress, the numerous mishaps), and the catastrophes (the loss of an entire reel, the death of the male lead). Everything is dominated by the double metaphor of the orchestra and the machine, brought out in the credit sequence. The cast and crew are like an orchestra that needs to tune, practice, and play harmoniously in the midst of all kinds of technical and human setbacks. Cinema is like a machine made of several specialized pieces that must be assembled one after the other in order to finally function together: the image of the camera rolling, or of the editing table where a double ribbon of film unwinds, is what ultimately advances the film “like a train in the night.” References that come to mind include Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952) and its backstage, with a pinch of 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), given its director’s worries; we could also think of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, from 1955 (the constant flirtations) or All These Women, from 1964 (the complications brought on by romances). The American reference (present in the title and the character of Hollywood actress Julie Baker) is

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signaled right away by the prefatory homage to the Gish sisters, taken from Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912). Truffaut’s film is listening to – and responding to – the question, “What is a film shoot?”; it replies by showing a director bombarded from every direction, constantly hindered by myriad incidents that come up day after day. He also appears as a kind of orchestra conductor, a super-production manager charged with tuning all of the violins and overcoming every mishap; he even appears in the form of a magician who sometimes blows his tricks, sometimes makes them, or sometimes reveals his techniques.

A Fragmented Film The increase in cast members (which shows that cinema is a big machine) and the multiplication of incidents causes the film to break apart into a series of sketches. This fragmentation is congruent with the plot of the film they are shooting ( Je vous présente Paméla), whose subject is even leaner: a young newlywed (Alphonse, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) introduces his wife Paméla ( Jacqueline Bisset) to his parents ( Jean-Pierre Aumont and Valentina Cortese). The father-in-law and daughter-in-law fall in love and run off together. From the middle of the shoot right to the end, the film goes from incident to incident until the final debacle, and a tracking shot from a helicopter shows the crew as it disperses on the depthless set of the Victorine studio. We can sense a taste of bitterness, of spoiled pleasure, of dashed momentum, of missed reunion (for example, the livewire props manager who refuses to drive the assistant who has no car). The cocktail party offered by the male lead runs low on champagne, and in any case is motivated by his desire to adopt his boyfriend. One of the most successful scenes in Je vous présente Paméla concludes brutally, with the announcement of the male lead’s accidental death on his way to the Nice airport, a homage Truffaut makes to the death of Françoise Dorléac.4 Seen this way, there is more than a hint of La Chambre verte (1978) in La Nuit américaine. One of the (fairly obvious) dramatic motivations of the film is the instability of the objects and people, and thus the game of appearance and reality. Nobody escapes it, or almost nobody: the big star – an alcoholic womanizer, twice married – is a homosexual; the highly professional continuity girl has nothing against having an escapade in the shrubs; the sage wife provides the depressed actor with a soldier’s rest; the insurers insure nothing and the actors do not honor their contracts. The grand opening scene, arduously reshot until finally “in the can,” is irreparably lost by the laboratory and compromised by the death of the main actor; a cat no longer likes milk; a female intern prefers some guy over her work. Naturally the film’s marivaudage serves to advance the script (by diversifying relationships among characters) and to take us behind the scenes to glimpse everyone’s actual behavior; it also plays another role, which is not necessarily more profound: that of showing that cinema is made in the image of life, and so is unstable. Or more precisely: life is like cinema as it is being made, unpredictable, ever changing; it is a succession of accidents and meetings that

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are sometimes happy or successful, but the circumstances and the moments unravel very quickly, whether for better (love is finally found, pleasure is shared, or the scene is completed) or for worse (love or life is lost – or the scene is completely ruined). We could push this parallel even further: when it comes to Truffaut life seems quite like cinema, with all its fits and starts, its quick turning points, and its miracles which allow for chance encounters within the enclosure of the film shoot. Deep down, for Truffaut, is it not that making cinema brings about the possibility of meeting extraordinary, superb women with whom you fall madly in love and suddenly leave everything, as the father of Alphonse does with his daughter-in-law? So that life can resemble these stories, where people fall in love with no other consequence than romantic intoxication, no other bond but affect and sensuality, no other consideration beyond immediate happiness. Behind the nostalgia, bitterness, and disenchantment of La Nuit américaine, one can sense in Truffaut the desire to believe in a miracle and in rapture through love at first sight, as if cinema is charged with fulfilling our desire to watch reality yield directly to pleasure. In this way the magic of cinema lies not in procuring the illusion of reality, but instead in suppressing it, on behalf of the instantaneous fulfillment of desire. From this point of view, La Nuit américaine is at once explicit and censored. It is explicit in its nearly all-pervasive seduction (marivaudage), slightly tempered by the makeup artist who in fact does find a life partner on the shoot and by the cuckolded husband who forgives his delicate wife. It is censored in that Ferrand, the director played by Truffaut, is unscathed in all this romantic circulation. Celibate, entirely dedicated to his work, preoccupied day and night by the shoot, his sleep is only clouded by a recurring nightmare (a famous scene: as a child, by night he steals some photos of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from in front of a cinema). He neither gives nor receives an advance. It is only right that one night, while he is working tirelessly on the next day’s scene, a young stranger comes to the hotel to propose her services but he refuses in the name of the urgent work to be done. Though we know about the relations that Truffaut sometimes fostered with his actresses, Ferrand takes care to leave such a burden to the other characters. Under this light, the film appears rather archaic, even paternalistic. But if we wanted, we might note some traces of his desire in the admiration given to Jacqueline Bisset in certain shots; in close-ups or promotion photos, or when she slowly climbs up the ladder on the outdoor set, or when, filmed full-length or from behind in a negligée that hides nothing, she sits in front of her mirror repeating her lines of dialogue for the next day.

Two Intriguing Scenes In La Nuit américaine there are at least two strange moments: the very first scene, and the scene in romantic costumes. The opening, a coat of arms for the entire film, is set at the metro stop, with its intricate circulation of extras and vehicles. Using a lateral traveling shot then tracking forward, the camera follows as Alphonse–Léaud exits

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the metro and approaches Alexandre ( Jean-Pierre Aumont) to slap him. This scene is repeated with a couple of slight variations three times in succession, The first time there is ambient noise, as if it were a completed and projected film, up until a strong “Cut!” immediately takes us through montage to Ferrand–Truffaut. The second time, we hear the off-screen voice of Ferrand or his assistant providing instructions to the extras, vehicle drivers, Alphonse, and the cameraman. The final time, the voice-over is replaced by symphonic music on the soundtrack, telling us, the audience, that everything is rolling and the film is really beginning. The general principle of the film is thus exposed: one must arrange numerous details with great precision to obtain something in cinema, and this does not happen with the wave of a magic wand but rather through hard work, repetition, multiple attempts, and special effects (the slap is halted at a finger on the cheek). But that is not the most important part. What is strange in this repeated scene is that the first presentation comes off as if we were in an ordinary fiction film, particularly because it is impossible to determine if the set is real or fictitious. From the outset we sense the careful regulation of the extras, including their organized contrived dispersal; but we cannot know whether the metro entrance is a real one or a reconstruction, or if the building and café in the background are genuine or fake. The second take is required in order to reveal the limited façade of the set and the filming equipment (the spotlight, the crane …); we are at the Studios de la Victorine in the midst of a shoot, and not in Paris in a completed work of fiction; we are in fabricated settings, not in the outside world. We must come back to this. The second strange episode brings Alphonse–Léaud and Julie–Bisset together for a brief dialogue. In Je vous présente Paméla, we know there is to be a scene in costume, but nothing tells us why: is it for a play, simply for disguise, or for a masquerade ball? Early in the film, Ferrand has the props master show him a fake candle that lights up the face of its holder. Later on, the continuity girl congratulates herself for salvaging the period costumes that the props master had inadvertently sent back before the scene had been filmed. And then, out of the blue, Julie and Alphonse meet up in Film 2 ( Je vous présente Paméla) at night, side by side, in nineteenth-century costumes, in front of a velvet curtain, gilded mirrors, and candles. Using a continuous take with dialogue the director stole from his actress the day before, she declares that, having thought about it, she prefers solitude to love. Nothing in Je vous présente Paméla justifies this theatrical scene between Alphonse and Julie – neither before, during, nor after. In Film 1 (La Nuit américaine), Bisset is starkly framed instead: this scene comes just after Julie has been forgiven by her husband for sleeping with Alphonse, who had bluntly announced the matter to him. Her dialogue (“I’ve decided to live alone. Life is rotten”) is made up of her own words, uttered after having learned of Alphonse’s betrayal and the way it might affect her marriage. After his blunder, Alphonse is quite embarrassed to find himself now face-to-face with Julie for this very romantic scene. It is made up of a brief dialogue (Alphonse makes do by responding that life is not rotten) and a short, straight lateral traveling shot, with the two actors sitting down in the foreground, separated by the fake candle that Julie is holding, while Alphonse gently caresses her face. The scene is shot twice (Ferrand demands a second take), alternately showing the attentiveness of the crew and the intimacy of the exchange

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between the two actors. This is an uncanny moment: Alphonse, who has just lost his girlfriend (she told him quietly and blankly that it was over between them), is admiring the beauty of Jacqueline Bisset, whose face is gently mottled by soft lighting. The miracle lies in the existence of such beauty and pure intimacy right next to a large, attentive, and silent crew. A moment owing at once to pure fiction (romanticism) and to the filmmaking apparatus, where Alphonse, in admiring Julie as she withdraws into herself, stands as the delegated representative of Ferrand, of Truffaut, and of us the spectators. But the mystery remains: why is this incredibly romantic theater scene so disconnected from the rest of the plot in Je vous présente Paméla? This passionate scene leaves no cinders (no failed takes, no retakes, no commentary, no technical problems) yet it is still jeopardized and then invalidated by its second take, when the producer (played by the burly Jean Champion) bursts onto the set, insisting on interrupting things, while the assistant and then the continuity girl try to contain him so as not to ruin the take. Extremely distressed, he finally announces that Alexandre has died en route to the airport. The magic of the scene instantly dissipates, giving way to stupor. Here the announcement of Alexandre’s accidental death plays the role of Ferrand–Truffaut’s “Cut!” in the first scene. It ruptures the illusion, suddenly shifts the register: magic gives way to consternation.

A Few Similarities Now let’s move on to Le Dernier Métro. Beyond its contrasts with La Nuit américaine, we can note some obvious common elements. This time a new play is being staged (La Disparue), and in difficult conditions. But the conditions here are not simply anecdotal: they are due in large part to the political situation (the Occupation). Still, the problems of the production are also economic (power outages, the need to stock up) and above all, human (one of the actors has joined the Resistance while another is on the make for every part she can find). These three sets of problems intersect in the personage of Lucas Steiner, the Jewish metteur-en-scène and manager of the theater who must hide in the cellar while he continues to (indirectly) direct the rehearsals. Here, just as in La Nuit américaine, marivaudage affects the entire cast at work. The lead actor, Bernard Granger (played by Gérard Depardieu), naturally impetuous, cannot stop himself from flirting with women; the acting director is homosexual; the attractive costume designer (played by Andréa Ferréol), who curtly and vigorously fights off Bernard Granger’s advances, is in reality fragile and lesbian; and the ambitious debutante (Sabine Haudepin) plays all kinds of self-serving games. We are clearly in the realm of Marivaux’ Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard. Le Dernier Métro contrasts with La Nuit américaine in that it does not spare the director (played by Heinz Bennent): he is very much in love with his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve), but by pushing her to improve her acting in a love scene with Bernard Granger, he risks losing her. Though the double subject of marivaudage and the work of a director are similar between the two films, Le Dernier Métro is much narrower in scope than La Nuit américaine,

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both in its narrative and in its spatial layout. On the narrative side, the characters are far less numerous: eliminated from the technical crew is everyone with a specifically cinematic role (producer, director of photography, cameraman, makeup artist, continuity girl and intern …); then certain characters are merged into one (whereas in La Nuit américaine, there is an assistant, a props master, and a production manager, in Le Dernier Métro, one man – played by the rotund Maurice Risch – does everything). In addition, the problem confronting the director is no longer an abundance of accidents, questions, delays, setbacks, or romantic intrigues; instead it rests squarely on the German occupiers who threaten to close the theater or buy out or sabotage the play. Everything is rolled into the character of the theater critic, the collaborator Daxiat, played by the remarkable Jean-Louis Richard, none other than Truffaut’s actual co-scriptwriter on La Nuit américaine. The nearly entirely French cast also contributes to this re-centering (Deneuve, Poiret, and Depardieu in lead roles); only the theater director maintains a foreign accent to justify his position as a persecuted Jew in France. The references to the actual film world are likewise pared down: while Jean-Pierre Léaud is brought back from Truffaut’s previous films, this is not the case for Depardieu, here used by Truffaut for the first time; plus, Truffaut removes himself from the cast. In La Nuit américaine, we do glimpse Marcel Berbert, the actual administrator of Les Films du Carrosse, but only briefly as an insurance broker in parallel with the figure of the producer, while in Le Dernier Métro Berbert plays the full role of the theater’s administrator (bringing the fictional theater close to Truffaut’s production company): this is another element of re-centering. To be sure, while Jean-Louis Richard may appear in earlier Truffaut films, it is only in passing silhouettes; he does not play the same referential role as Léaud does when we find him in Le Dernier Métro.5 As for the film’s spatial design, within the theater it is strongly articulated (the dressing rooms and offices, the corridors, the stage and the house, the cellar). Other spaces are rare (two hotels, a cabaret, a restaurant, a church, a printing shop, a ruined building through which the collaborator attempts to escape, and a hospital): each of these is used but once and for a specific scene. Several ideas are consolidated in these spaces. The first is the web of relationships among the characters which are more intimate, intense, and coherent, with marked personalities, more determined while less flirtatious. The second is the director’s investment in the actors’ performances, which he is constrained to imagine and to follow, without any direct intervention but with a tension that does not flag or change from the very first run-throughs all the way to the premiere. As a result, the staging is intellectualized (Lucas is forced to imagine, without being in contact with the actors) and focused on the acting. In the earlier film, the role of Ferrand – constantly encountering pitfalls of all kinds, forced to organize details in haste – is one of constant actions that are fragmented, almost fetishized, until that role is finally reduced, by his film’s powerful rhythm and cadence, to serving the function of a super-production manager or a one-man band (which follows the musical metaphor of the production as a symphony). Meanwhile Lucas becomes ever more cerebral, isolated in his cellar, reduced to silence, as he rediscovers the power of being the idea man, the precision engineer. In Le Dernier Métro the

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machinery of cinema is gone (and the machinery of theater is never referenced), ceding its place to the issues of staging and diction. In this way the theater becomes a metaphor for mise-en-scène in general, a concentration on acting and its fine-tuning. This spatial re-centering together with the simplification of the dramatic line has visible aesthetic consequences in the camerawork of Nestor Almendros and in the set design of Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. We find ourselves in smaller, more confined spaces (the hallways of the theater, the box seats …), with much tighter compositions on the actors, allowing us to register more feeling and sensuality. Visually, as well, the color scheme is warm, with a dominance of yellow-orange that renders both indoor and night scenes so palpable. Plastically, Le Dernier Métro is clearly more intense and more successful than La Nuit américaine.

Magic and Communion One can also find a certain correspondence between La Nuit américaine and Le Dernier Métro, or more precisely, a symmetry. At the beginning of La Nuit américaine, a purportedly fictitious scene becomes documentary when we see it as a rehearsal on a constructed set. In Le Dernier Métro, the final scene is just as strange. Bernard Granger has left the cast to rejoin the Resistance. Marion later finds him in a hospital, injured. In one quick link and without warning, we are transported from the hospital to the theater, and directly into a new play being directed by Lucas Steiner after the Liberation. The process is quasi-Hitchcockian:6 it recalls the link shot at the end of North by Northwest (1959) that takes the heroes from Mount Rushmore, where they are about to die, to their couchette after they have just been married. During the curtain call, the audience insists that Lucas Steiner – hiding in his box – come up onstage: Marion places herself between him and Bernard Granger, highlighting the bipolarity of her love, in a mocking reflection of Jules et Jim (1962). While the first scene disillusions us in La Nuit américaine (showing the work necessary to construct a complicated shot), the last scene in Le Dernier Métro is magical,7 and is so on many levels: the director, who was hidden and silent throughout all the rehearsals, is called onto the scene by the audience’s ovation, two men openly share the love of a magnificent woman, and we no longer know if we are in a fiction, in a theater, or in reality. We feel the same way in the final scene of the play the troupe had performed, La Disparue, which ends with the line “C’est une joie et une souffrance,” for these sentiments can be attributed both to the characters and to the actors who utter and accept them, existing in between a scripted dialogue and an actual declaration of love, in a Renoir-like homage8 to the ambiguity of theater and genuine passion. We have to take that uncanny scene in nineteenth-century costumes from La Nuit américaine as the original form of La Disparue: a mixture between play-acting and love, sincerity and representation, obedience (of actors) and risk (the director’s pairing of a beautiful woman and a good actor), and as a pure representation of the nature of mise-en-scène, acting, and the power of emotion.

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While La Nuit américaine ends in dispersion (“So, I guess we’re out of work”), dissolution, and even desertion (the final movement of the camera above the deserted set), the end of Le Dernier Métro is jubilant: the war is over but the theater carries on, for the cast remains united, and success is on its way, the actors and director acclaimed by a delighted and faithful audience. So the end of Le Dernier Métro is truly the exact opposite of the earlier film, for it displays communion: of the characters (Marion in between Bernard and Lucas), of the actors and the director, of cast and audience, of effort and reward, of talent and pleasure. In suppressing the machinery of cinema and its technicians, Le Dernier Métro likewise makes possible the final communion of the actors with the audience, for they share in the emotion of the moment and the applause it engenders. From this point of view, Le Dernier Métro is the happy-end version of La Nuit américaine. It is not possible here to examine one by one all of the elements reclaimed and transformed from one film to the other: the substitutions,9 redeployment, displacements, illusions, shot transpositions, dialogue, and people – not to mention the confessions and silences. We noted only a few of these: Jean-Louis Richard as screenwriter, extra, and actor; Catherine Deneuve as actress, as an actress’s sister, and as soulmate; Marcel Berbert as an extra, as an actor, and as the link between the theater of Le Dernier Métro and Les Films du Carrosse. From the core of such conjunctions, I take away two things. First, for me Le Dernier Métro is a (successful) remake of La Nuit américaine, its reworking achieved in a manner that is at once more symbolized (less to the first degree) and more real, more displaced (in period, in its actors) and more central (in its representation of the director’s position). And then, second, there is the desire to see cinema, thanks to its magic, substitute itself in daily life for the blinding and overwhelming love for women. The metafilmic dimension in Truffaut only masks a deeper fluctuation – between romantic exaltation and artistic disappointment, between professional investment and affective risk-taking, between responsibility and nonchalance, between magic and stopgap solutions, between successful creation and labored citation, between erasure and acknowledgement – everything about “le commerce des femmes” being magical and volatile, as Montaigne had it.10 The idea is not that truth lies in the theater, or that life is a theatrical representation complete with roles and masks (an idea borrowed, somewhat flatly, from Renoir) but, instead, that Truffaut treats cinema as an opportunity for love at first sight, for the magical transformation of each and every life (beginning with his own). Wanting to annihilate the drag of the ordinary, he lines up on the side of the magic of encounters, and of the unceasing ever-renewed possibility of reinventing l’amour fou, something that could occur every time a new film was in the works. Desire, as inscribed in the cinema, was both confirmed and contradicted in Truffaut’s life: it was confirmed by his ardent passion for his actresses but contradicted by his daily, obsessive, compartmentalized organization, when his job and his schedule would strictly cordon off that passion. It is the films that are the remakes, not life. Translated by Liam Andrew

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Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10

Evidently Vincent Canby had the same intuition as I when, in reviewing Le Dernier Métro in The New York Times on October 12,1980, he lined it up against La Nuit américaine. My own essay was written in complete ignorance of his brief review. See “Leçon de cinéma,” a two-part, two-hour television program directed by José Maria Berzosa, May 5 and May 12, 1983. For historical information on the shooting of the two films, see Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 294–299 for the former and pp. 353–361 for the latter. Françoise Dorléac, sister of Catherine Deneuve, starred in La Peau douce (1964), a story of adultery with a highly transposed autobiographical tone. In Le Dernier Métro, Truffaut goes so far as to remake a design on the legs of Catherine Deneuve identical to the one on the legs of Françoise Dorléac in La Peau douce. Taken together, this creates a paradox. La Nuit américaine, a contemporary film, resorts to actors who reference a cinema of the past ( Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Valentina Cortese, Jean Champion). Le Dernier Métro, a costume film, uses actors who reflect modernity, or at least the current state of cinema at the time (Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve). This is certainly one of the reasons that the former (set in 1972) has aged much more than the latter (set in 1942–1945). It also evokes Alain Resnais, especially 1977’s Providence (or even 1993’s Smoking/No Smoking), in its switching between the diegesis and the declared artifice of the set. Recall that in La Nuit américaine, Alphonse–Léaud passes the time by asking his colleagues if women are magical. It is clear that Le Dernier Métro owes much to Renoir and his play Carola ou les cabotins. I will only bring up one: in Je vous présente Paméla, Jacqueline Bisset is named Paméla Baker, which is her actual last name, Bisset being her stage name. Michel de Montaigne, “De trois commerces,” in Les Essais, 3, ch. 3.

Index

Entries for figures are given in italics. 8½ (Fellini), 585 14–18 (now known as Over There, 1914–18) (Aurel), 554 Abe, Kazushige, 396–397 abortion, 42, 181, 377 A Bout de souffle (Godard), 14, 38, 156, 301, 307, 308, 310, 398 Abramovitch, Denis, 311 Académie Française, 304 Academy Awards, 244, 257, 312 A Cause, a cause d’une femme (Deville), 175 Adam and Eve, 417 adaptation, xxi, 317, 330nn.16, 17 Truffaut, 73, 245, 249, 285, ch. 16 passim, 380, 427, 531, 548 see also cinéma de qualité Adieu Philippine (Rozier), 345 Adjani, Isabelle, 155, 164, 166, 176, 312 Aeschylus, 551 Agel, Henri, 67, 542 Agence Magic, 575 Akerman, Chantal, 452 Aldrich, Robert, 245, 257 Alexandre, Aimée, 329, 564 Alfonsi, Laurence, 398nn.1, 5 Algeria, 9, 314, 555 Algerian War, xvi, 139, 439, 444, 508, 516n.1, 555–556 Alger Républicain, 555

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul/Angst essen Seele auf (Fassbinder), 111 Alleg, Henri, 555 Allégret, Marc, 139, 458, 474, 486 Allégret, Yves, 248, 459, 467 Allen, Don, 186, 215, 250, 385 Allio, René, 360 All That Heaven Allows (Sirk), 71, 96 All These Women (Bergman), 585 Allyson, June, 255 Almendros, Nestor, 157, 159, 165, 166, 185, 187, 189, 198, 237, 365, 585 Almeyreda, Miguel, 556 Althusser, Louis, 348 Amarcord (Fellini), 507 American cinema, 116, 153–156, 158, 162, 167–168, 170, 206, 208, 210, 212, 456, 580 Truffaut and, 21, 114, 153, 222, 247, 342 see also new American cinema American Graffiti (Lucas), 557 Americanization, 342 Amiel, Vincent, 187, 300 AMLF (film distributor), 572 Amour de jeunesse, Un/ Good-bye First Love (Hansen-Løve), 212 Amouroux, Henri, 573 anarchism, 305, 556 Andersen, Hans Christian, 285 Andersson, Harriet, 179, 255, 321, 376

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

Index

Andrew, Dudley, xix, xx, 151n.25, 239n.6, 252, 330nn.16, 17, 331n.24, 372n.12, 400n.23, 435, 436, 441, 538, 546 Andrew, Geoff, 539, 541 Andrews, Julie, 451 Angel Face (Preminger), 159, 170, 171 animals, 93, 132, 224, 236, 408, 413–414, 415, 416 anti-Semitism, 86, 119, 250 Antoine et Antoinette (Becker), 214 Antoine et Colette, 36, 51–52, 62–63, 69nn.44, 46, 70n.47, 133, 139, 182, 189, 191, 195, 211–212, 291–292, 375 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 13, 15, 17, 35, 113, 206, 424 Aoyama, Shinji, 400n.34 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 37, 151n.27, 159, 426, 549 Aragon, Louis, 307 archeology, 440, 459 Ardant, Fanny, 39, 46, 155, 169, 183, 375, 382 Aristophanes, 519 Artaud, Antonin, 240n.26 Arts (journal), 36, 64, 139, 202n.9, 242–243, 245, 249, 251–258, 314, 339, 342–345, 554, 555 Asakawa, Maki, 395 Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Malle), 255, 378, 389 Assassins et voleurs (Guitry), 245 Assayas, Olivier, 206 Astruc, Alexandre, 223, 273, 320–321, 324, 532 Atkinson, Michael, 35 Aude, Françoise, 383 Audiberti, Jacques, 37, 38, 45, 47, 50, 66n.12, 162, 369, 549, 564 Audran, Stéphane, 383 Audry, Jacqueline, 303 Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 586, 588, 593n.5 Aurel, Jean, 554 Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) (Duras), 577 Aurelia Steiner (Vancouver) (Duras), 577 Aurenche, Jean, 223, 248–249, 252, 323 Auriol, Jean George, 45 Autant-Lara, Claude, 243, 248, 252, 467n.18 auteur, 96–97, 271, 317 New Wave and, 188, 386, 422–423 politique des auteurs, 20–22, 207, 280n.2, 284–287, 297n.20, 457, 533, 568–569 Truffaut and, xvii, 37, 45, 174–175, 244, 248, 254, ch. 16 passim, 424, 530, 532

595

see also “death of the author” autism (and infantile autism), 98, 106, 237 Auzel, Dominique, 196 avant-garde, 223, 321, 336, 430, 531, 556 Avec André Gide (Allégret), 139, 458, 474 Aznavour, Charles, 15, 290 baby boom, 336–337, 345 Bachelard, Gaston, 329 Back Street (Stevenson), 471, 472 Bad and the Beautiful, The (Minnelli), 303 Badlands (Malick), 158, 215 Baecque, Antoine de, xviii, 141, 240, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 257, 300, 302, 304, 305, 309, 321, 322, 372n.14, 375, 392, 396, 454, 455, 457, 459, 466nn.6, 7, 469, 487n.72, 532, 578 and Guigue, Arnaud, eds: Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, 187, 188, 190, 255, 300 and Toubiana, Serge: Truffaut: A Biography, xviii, 240n.18, 243, 466n.6 Baisers volés, 8, 38, 39, 47–61 passim, 66nn.12, 15, 70n.47, 77, 86, 133–134, 155, 174, 177, 189, 191–192, 200–201, 214, 233, 291, 295, 302, 311–312, 346–347, 350, 375–376, 450–451, 536–537, 582n.12 Baldung, Hans: Death and the Maiden, 546 Balkans, 438 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), 50, 69n.43 Balzac, Honoré de, xxi, 6, 7, 70n.47, 151n.28, 175, 290, 298n.48, 322, 454 La Comédie humaine, xxi, 419n.18, 454 Les Illusions perdues, 454, 455 La Peau de chagrin, 359, 362, 462, 465 in Les 400 Coups, xix, 36, 152n.32, 319–321, 410, 414, 417, 423, 499 La Recherche de l’absolu, 319, 410, 414 Bande à part (Godard), 308, 313 Bardèche, Maurice, 250 Bardot, Brigitte, 254, 255, 258, 385, 439 Baricco, Alessandro, 91 Barthes, Roland, xxi, 97, 106, 140, 148, 371, 504, 511, 534, 535, 549–551, 558nn.11, 13 La Chambre Claire, 549, 550, 558n.9 Bassiak, Boris, 158 Bassiak, Danielle, 38 Bataille, Sylvia, 292 Bateson, Gregory, 90–91, 99 Baudelaire, Charles, 72, 73, 266, 314, 315, 421, 437, 444, 445n.9

596

Index

Baudrillard, Jean, 337 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 485n.5 Baye, Nathalie, 304, 312, 540, 548 Bazin, André, 7–8, 221, ch. 11 passim, 283–288, 296n.9, 297n.16, 324, 327, 335, 399n.9, 403, 405–407, 427, 431, 533, 550 Bazin, Florent, 240 Bazin, Janine, xv, 295n.1, 424 Beauvoir, Simone de, xvi, 69n.42, 377 Beck, Julien, 230 Becker, Jacques, xix, 39, 65n.4, 212–214, 216, 244, 249, 532, 563 Beethoven, Ludwig van: Moonlight Sonata, 450 Belle de jour (Buñuel), 381 Belle Epoque (Truffaut and Gruault), TV series, 61 belle époque, 423, 427, 438, 439, 440 Bellour, Raymond, 71, 140, 207, 276–277, 423 Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, 71, 74–80, 90, 94, 97–98, 466n.10 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 68–69n.40, 111, 114–115, 155, 162–163, 233, 289, 309–310, 381 Benedetti, Nelly, 167, 169, 470 Benjamin, Walter, 324, 412, ch. 22 passim, 428, 435, 440, 443, 445 Bennent, Heinz, 585, 589 Bennett, Joan, 255 Berbert, Marcel, 39, 61, 67n.19, 564, 577, 581, 590 Bergala, Alain, xx Bergman, Ingmar, 12–13, 113–114, 134, 138, 157, 166, 179, 376–377, 386, 585 Bergman, Ingrid, 266, 279 Berlin Airlift, 222 Berlin Film Festival, 258 Bernal, Martin, 439 Bernanos, Georges, 248, 368, 422 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 412 Bettelheim, Bruno: The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, 237, 532, 542, 544n.8 Beugnet, Martine, 437 Biarritz festival, 223–226 Bibliothèque du film (BIFI), xviii, 14, 22n.4, 105–106, 107 Bigger Than Life (Ray), 170, 245 Big Heat, The (Lang), 249, 250 Billard, Pierre, 343

Birds, The (Hitchcock), 155, 265, 269, 451 Bisset, Jacqueline, 39, 46, 55, 375, 376, 586, 587, 588–589, 593n.9 Bitsch, Charles, 38, 225 Blackmail (Hitchcock), 276 Blain, Gerard, 139, 253, 383 Blanchot, Maurice, xvi, 76, 497–500, 501 Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), 206 Blue Angel, The (von Sternberg), 362 B-movies, 253, 308, 381 body, xix, xx, 18, 41, 42, 80–85, 111, 155–156, 169, 179, 183, 187, 238, 254–256, 293, 341, 408, 491–493, 501, 538 face, 11, 20, 58, 82, 96, 118, 149, 161, 166, 247, 378, 383, 411, 413, 416, 435–436, 492–493 female, 91, 292, 308, 340, 381, 478–479, 539 hands, 81, 91, 236, 449, 456, 459, 535–538, 539, 563 spectator, xx, 74–79, 97–98 Bogart, Humphrey, 167 Bogdanovich, Peter, 271, 281n.12 Bohringer, Richard, 582n.11 Boisset, Yves, 314 Bollas, Christopher, 481–483 Bond, James, 162 Bonitzer, Pascal, 517, 563 Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger), 170, 310 Bonnafons, Elizabeth, 185 Bonnaterre, 234–235, 241n.38 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 162, 272, 281n.14 Bory, Jean-Louis, 356 Bost, Pierre, 223, 248–249, 252, 258, 280n.2, 323, 422 Botticelli, Sandro, 434 Boudinet, Daniel: Polaroid (photo), 550 Boudu sauvé des eaux (Renoir), 205, 287, 288, 289, 291, 298n.48 Boulanger, Daniel, 379 Boumédienne, Houari, 508 Bouquet, Michel, 379, 380 Bourdieu, Pierre, 550–551 Bourgeaud, Nelly, 163 Boyer, Charles, 471 Brakhage, Stan, 418n.7 Brancusi, Constantin, 428 Brasillach, Robert, 250 Brasseur, Claude, 384 Braunberger, Pierre, 283

Index

Brecht, Bertolt, 308 Brechtian, 177, 358, 534, 543 Bremond, Claude, 353n.6 Brenez, Nicole, 214 Bresson, Robert, xix, 11, 35, 46–47, 206, 223, 225, 248, 250, 254, 285, 309, 422, 449, 532, 562 Brialy, Jean-Claude, 38, 244, 307, 379 Brion, Françoise, 383 British Sounds (Godard), 312 Broca, Philippe de, 38, 307 Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, 323, 491, 550 Brooks, Peter, 419n.19 Bruno S., 238 Buñuel, Luis, 113, 128, 224, 309, 390, 534, 563 Burch, Noël, 206 Burmese Harp, The (Ichikawa), 391 Cahiers du Cinéma, 276, 302–303, 353, 360–361, 392, 422, 424, 563, 572 personnel, 35, 69n.41, 212, 223, 239, 243, 252, 259–260, 267, 300–301, 335, 337, 396, 408 philosophy, 45, 119, 158, 170, 226, 248, 250–251, 255–256, 257, 271, 273–274, 282n.20, 284, 296n.9, 297n.16, 338–339, 341, 360–361, 377, 568 “Renoir” special issue, 297n.16, 578 “Truffaut” memorial issues, xxi, 301, 432nn.9, 16 see also Truffaut, François: criticism, his: and Cahiers du Cinéma Cahoreau, Gilles, 304 Caméra-oeil (Godard), 313 Campion, Jane, 317, 481 Canby, Vincent, 480, 481, 484n.3, 593 Cannes Film Festival, 66n.14, 225, 231, 232, 257–258, 259, 302, 307, 314, 335, 337, 343, 508 Cargol, Jean-Pierre, 205, 232 Carné, Marcel, 12, 123, 388 Carnivalesque, 382–386 Carol, Martine, 255 Caroline chérie (Pottier), 45 Caron, Leslie, 541, 578 Casagemas, Carlos, 41 Cassavetes, John, 10, 214 Cavell, Stanley, 120, 215 Cayatte, André, 314

597

Cazalis, Anne-Marie, 306 Ce Gamin, là (Deligny), 232 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 91 censorship, 111, 250, 312, 314, 352, 554–555, 556, 559n.33, 573 Cercle Cinémane, 339 Cervantes, Miguel de, 396 César Award, 572, 581 Cette Sacrée Gamine/Naughty Girl (Boisrond), 253 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, 452 Chabrol, Claude, 7, 38, 66n.17, 118, 154, 178, 225, 267, 282n.20, 337, 351, 376, 389 Chabrol, Claude and Rohmer, Eric: Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, 266, 270, 273–274, 276 Chambon, Alexandre, 482 Champion, Jean, 589, 593n.5 Champs-Elysées, Les, 458, 572 Chantons sous l’Occupation (Halimi), 573 Chaplin, Charles, 115, 260, 406, 413, 419n.24 Charensol, Georges, 385 Charlotte et son Jules (Godard), 309 Charlotte et son steak, see Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak (Rohmer) Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 281 Cheyenne Autumn (Ford), 139, 582 Chiens perdus sans colliers (Delannoy), 139, 349 Chion, Michel, xix, xx, 80, 171 Christian-Jaque, 252 Christie, Julie, 39, 474 Chujo, Shohei, 394 Cinéastes de notre temps (film series), 281, 295n.1 Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, 245 ciné-clubs, 64, 222, 227, 245, 254, 339, 352–353 cinéma de qualité, 35, 93, 117, 221–223, 243, 248–249, 251–252, 255, 257, 280n.2, 323, 343, 345–346, 348–349, 377, 422, 430, 459, 547, 575 see also Truffaut’s published writings: “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” Cinema Novo, 414 CinemaScope, 155, 171, 246, 247, 254, 409, 427, 443 Cinémathèque Française, xviii, 8, 22, 22n.4, 64, 225, 241n.43, 251, 260, 296, 302, 306, 312, 346, 350, 352, 424 cinéma verité, 209, 230 Cinémonde (periodical), 45, 245, 246

598

Index

cinephilia, 5, 6, 45, 138, 249, 321, 353, 360, 376–378, 409, 424, 455–457, 466n.7, 571 Ciné-tracts (Godard), 303, 355n.40, 373n.25 Citizen Kane (Welles), 138, 143, 351, 368, 566, 587 Clair, René, 5, 21–22, 222, 311, 388 classical Hollywood, see American cinema Clément, René, 467 Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda), 66, 377, 546 Clerval, Denys, 188, 189 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg), 395, 553 Cluny Brown (Lubitsch), 213 Cluny-Palace Théâtre, 306 CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie), 258 Cocteau, Jean, xix, 21, 37, 114–115, 212, 223, 225, 248, 250, 312, 314, 322, 326, 340, 367, 395, 403, 423, 532, 549, 563–564 Cohen-Séat, Gilbert, 418n.8 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 354n.10 Cold War, 222, 249 Colette, 248 Collaboration, wartime, 86, 572 Collet, Jean, 37, 63–64, 185, 203, 301, 584 Colorado Territory (Walsh), 456 color, 13, 42, 46, 147, 157, 159–160, 162, 163, 167, 172, 187–188, 341–342, 346, 365, 380, 396, 541, 553, 565, 585, 591 Combat (newspaper), 320 commedia dell’arte, 40–44, 67n.28, 68n.29, 294 Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque Française, 296n.9, 302 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 69n.41, 296n.9, 360–361 Comte, Auguste, 561 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 232, 236 Conley, Tom, xix, xx Connery, Sean, 162 Coppola, Francis Ford, 305 Corrigan, Timothy, xxi Cortade, Ludovic, xix, 143, 549, 558n.9 Cortese, Valentina, 38, 47, 66n.13, 586, 593n.5 Cossacks of the Kuban (Pyryev), 249 Cottin, Jacques, 66n.17 Coutard, Raoul, 155, 157, 158, 187, 188, 189, 209, 380, 442, 473 Cozarinsky, Edgardo, 213 Crawford, Joan, 246, 256 Cries and Whispers (Bergman), 166

Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The (Buñuel), 179, 563 Crisp, Colin, 242 Crowther, Bosley, 470–471 Cubism, 20, 40, 42, 119 Cukor, George, 116, 249 Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), 212 Dabadie, Jean-Loup, 39, 574 Dalio, Marcel, 289, 362, 380, 475 Dalle Vacche, Angela, xix Dalmais, Hervé, 187 Daney, Serge, 80, 144, 149, 174, 206, 207, 304, 313, 546–548, 550, 573 Dani, 54, 69 Daniel, Jean-Pierre, 231 Daquin, Louis, 222 Darbon, François, 70n.47 Darrieux, Danielle, 582 Dassault, Marcel, 572 Dasté, Jean, 61, 236, 287, 556 David, Liliane, 458 Davis, Bette, 540 Days of Heaven (Malick), 158 deafness, 36, 83, 84, 503 Dean, James, 243 “death of the author,” 271–272, 532–539 de Baecque, Antoine, see Baecque, Antoine de de Beauvoir, Simone, see Beauvoir, Simone de de Bettignies, Louise, 37, 65 Debord, Guy, 552 de Broca, Philippe, 38, 307 Decaë, Henri, 189 Degas, Edgar, 157, 160 De Gaulle, Charles, xvi, 337 Delannoy, Jean, 248, 284, 303, 351, 467n.18 Delerue, Georges, 39, 93, 149, 193, 196, 199, 203n.45, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 426, 449 Deleuze, Gilles, 58–59, 70n.49, 89, 97, 230, 232, 364, 374n.40, 467n.25, 559n.21 Deligny, Fernand, 227–232, 233, 240nn.20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 241nn.30, 31, 32, 364 Demoulin, Huguette, 229 Demy, Jacques, 10, 38, 254 Deneuve, Catherine, 39, 61, 68–69n.40, 111, 113, 116, 121, 155, 162, 168–169, 375–376, 380–382, 386, 387n.17, 479, 541, 572, 590, 592, 593n.4 Denner, Charles, 63, 120–121, 379, 384, 452, 531, 541, 542

Index

De Palma, Brian, 270, 281 Depardieu, Gérard, 61, 121, 167, 169, 376, 382, 572, 577, 590, 593n.5 Desailly, Jean, 80, 308, 449, 452, 457, 469, 477 Descartes, René: Discours de la méthode, 320 De Sica, Vittorio, 404, 406–408, 418n.5 Desplechin, Arnaud, viii, xv, xvi, xx, 77, 81, 371 d’Estaing, Giscard, 8, 508 Détective (Godard), 311 Détective (journal), 56, 69, 307 detectives, 6, 86, 118, 295, 310, 322, 451, 541, 573 Deux de la vague (de Baecque), 300 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (Godard), 313, 358 2×50 Ans de cinéma français (Godard), 371 Devil is a Woman, The (von Sternberg), 362 Diary of a Chambermaid, The (Renoir), 284, 395 Diary of Anne Frank, The (Stevens), 577 Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield, 328 Diderot, Denis, 314, 315 Di Iorio, Sam, xvi, 553 Dimanche à Pekin (Marker), 254 Dimendberg, Edward, 341 dissociation (identity disorder), 82–86, 89, 92, 94–96 Doane, Mary Ann, 540 Doctor Zhivago (Lean), 20, 474 documentaries, 10, 67n.18, 69n.43, 122, 222, 230, 238, 271, 309, 325, 370, 437, 443, 476, 501, 533–534, 542, 554, 556, 559n.27, 565, 582n.8, 591 Doinel, Antoine (character), 35, 69n.45, 297n.27, 149, 319–321, 344, 348, 394, 397–398, 405, 408–414, 451 links to other films, 38, 46, 48–63, 67n.18, 69n.44, 92, 109, 145, 147, 161, 199, 287, 289, 312 Doinel series, xix–xx, 13, 54, 134, 191, 268, 349–350 traits, 100, 134, 144, 152n.32, 173–174, 183, 201, 216, 291, 322, 345, 349, 408, 417, 547 and Truffaut, xix–xx, 46, 68n.36, 136, 153, 174, 182, 197–198, 344, 412, 480 see also Léaud, Jean-Pierre Domarchi, Jean, 408 Domicile conjugal, 38–66 passim, 99, 109, 129, 133–134, 139, 147, 152n.32, 173–174, 189, 190–191, 291–292, 375, 397–398, 457, 507 Donadey, Anne, 444 Donen, Stanley, 158 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 35, 248, 250, 251, 303

599

Don Juan, 517–518, 519, 521–522, 523, 524, 527, 529n.13 Donne, John, 470 Dorléac, Françoise, 39, 155, 167, 168–169, 278, 308, 375, 458, 459, 470, 477–479, 586, 593n.4 Dort, Bernard, 346 Douchet, Jean, 16, 18, 38, 225 Douin, Jean-Luc and Rémond, Alain: “Godard Tells All,” 304 Doynel, Ginette, 297n.27, 578, 582n.20 Drach, Michel, 314 dreams, 11–12, 64, 74–75, 114–115, 168, 288, 329, 439, 484 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 35, 309, 365 Dreyfuss, Richard, 553 Dubois, Bernard, 186 Dubois, Julien, 69n.45 Dubois, Marie (pseudonym of Claudine Huz), 15–16, 66n.12, 375 Dubost, Paulette, 131, 287 Duchamp, Marcel, 423, 428, 518 Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers, 322 Dumayet, Pierre, 364 Dumont, Bruno, 452 Duras, Marguerite, xvi, 377, 452, 576–578 Durgnat, Raymond, 158, 206 Dussolier, André, 376, 384 Dutronc, Jacques, 312 Duvivier, Julien, 222, 253, 388, 389 Dziga Vertov Collective, 271, 302, 303, 309, 311, 373n.25 Ecole des Beaux Arts, 428 Ecran Français (journal), 138, 221, 222, 224, 227 Edison, Thomas, 351 Editions Gallimard, 459 Edu, coraçao de ouro/Edu golden heart (de Oliveira), 518 education, 72, 106, 130, 144, 195, 223, 224, 227–228, 230, 232, 233, 337, 339, 349, 354n.11, 357, 364–366, 396, 400n.23, 421, 543, 566 Ehrenzweig, Anton: The Hidden Order of Art, 74 Eiffel Tower, 39, 81, 346, 348–349, 350, 352, 452 Eiga Hyoron (journal, Tokyo), 390–391, 399n.9 elegy, 350, 397, 546–547, 550, 553 Elena et les hommes (Renoir), 284 Elephant (Van Sant), 450

600

Index

El Espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), 414–418 Eliot, T.S., 456, 475 Elle (journal), 245, 345 El Nuevo Cine, 415 Eluard, Paul, 69n.42 emotion, xviii–xix, 12, 19, 73–80, 90, 92, 97–99, 106, 120, 160, 167, 187–188, 194, 196, 208, 211, 213, 243, 274–275, 326, 405, 409, 484, 551, 574, 592 En Cas de malheur (Autant-Lara), 252, 258 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The (Herzog), 205, 237, 241n.42 Enlightenment, The, 234, 237 Ensayo de un crimen, see Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The Epstein, Jean, 74, 87, 97 Erice, Victor, 414–418 Eros, 155, 167, 442, 519–522, 524 Esprit (journal), 227 “Estates General of the French Cinema,” 303 Et Dieu … créa la femme (Vadim), 254 ethnography, 224, 437–438 Eureka (journal, Tokyo), 395 Europa ‘51 (Rossellini), 247 Eustache, Jean, 3, 5, 7, 66n.17, 118, 310, 311, 364, 371, 412 exoticism, 397–398, 434, 437–438, 439 Exposed (Toback), 210 Ezra, Elizabeth, xx Fabian, Johannes, 437 Fahrenheit 451, 13, 47–66 passim, 83, 128, 153, 177, 180, 189, 195, 265, 272, 302, 308, 322, 327–328, 346, 392, 457, 501, 567 Family Plot (Hitchcock), 505 Farrell, Henry, 322 Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (novel), 322, 383–384 fascism, xvii, 250, 354n.10, 404, 421, 582n.12 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 111, 154, 314, 317 Fauchois, René, 285 Faulkner, William, 35, 117 Faure, Elie, 6, 105, 314, 315 Faust (Murnau), 237 Fellini, Federico, 35, 113, 452, 507 femme fatale, 41, 158, 162, 171, 378–379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 524 Fermaud, Michel, 530, 532, 542

Fernand Deligny, à propos d’un film à faire (Victor), 240n.28 Ferrer, Mel, 578 Ferreri, Marco, 351 fetish and fetishism, 47, 68n.36, 137-8, 141–146, 149, 150n.19, 151n.20, 178–179, 191, 246, 255–256, 275, 340–341, 435–456, 457, 460, 467n.21, 478–479, 487n.51, 499, 537–538, 539 Feuillade, Louis, 239 fiction, xviii, xxi, 6, 44, 71–77, 83, 89, 96–99, 122, 344, 365, 407, 409, 483, 531, 565 film noir, 154, 155, 158, 170, 171, 173, 308, 380, 461 filmologie, 418n.8 films maudits, 225, 266 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 35 Flamant, Georges, 287 flâneur, 406, 427–428 Flaubert, Gustav, 119, 151n.28, 285, 393 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 435 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), 555 Fonda, Henry, 11, 170 Fonda, Jane, 312 Ford, John, 208 Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock), 66n.17 Fort, Paul, 429 Foucault, Michel, 232, 331n.20, 364, 485n.5, 535, 557 Fouchardière, Georges de la, 285 Foujita, Léonard Tsuguharu, 50, 471 Four Hundred Blows, The, see Les 400 Coups Fowles, John, 165 France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (Godard, Miéville), 312–313 France-Soir (journal), 343, 381, 408 François Truffaut: Portraits volés (Pascal and Toubiana), 206 Franju, Georges, 222 Frankenstein (Whale), 414 Frankenstein’s monster, 414–417 Franz Ferdinand, archduke, 438 French Cancan (Renoir), 284, 291 French cinema, 16, 109, 113, 114, 116, 243, 251–253, 256–257, 258, 357, 442, 580 see also cinéma de qualité French Film Office, 269 French Republic, 306, 557 Freud, Sigmund, 74, 76, 90, 142, 319, 440–441, 442, 444, 450, 484, 503, 508–510, 513–514, 519, 522, 548, 578

Index

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 441, 442, 522 Totem and Taboo, 519, 520, 521 Friendly Persuasion (Wyler), 257 Frodon, Jean-Michel, xxi, 369, 370 Front Populaire, 227, 251, 360, 552 Fuller, Sam, 38, 281n.11 Gabin, Jean, 17, 109, 258, 289, 362, 380 Gabler, Hedda (character), 157 Gainham, Sarah: Night Falls on the City, 582n.13 Gance, Abel, xix, 118, 119, 285, 325, 532 Gardner, Ava, 167 Gargallo, Germaine, 41 Gargonne, Jean, 70n.47 Garrel, Louis, 452 Garrel, Philippe, 3, 6, 119, 371, 483 Gautier, Théophile: Spirite, 561 Genet, Jean, 69n.42, 226, 314, 322–323 genre, 73, 87, 96, 153–154, 162, 222, 320, 421 “hard-boiled,” 377, 379, 381, 386 science fiction, 153, 308 see also melodrama Gérard, Nicole, 469 Germania anno zero (Rossellini), 221, 224, 404 German Occupation, xix, xxi, 71, 86, 177, 178, 227, 250, 340, 382, 456, 556, 572–573, 574, 576, 578, 579, 580, 584, 585, 589 Giant (Stevens), 243 Gide, André, 37, 248, 252, 458–459, 474, 486n.25 Gilda (Vidor), 251 Gillain, Anne, xvii, xix, xx, 155, 163, 198, 236, 243, 349, 376, 382, 384, 387n.33, 470, 473, 474, 478, 479, 480, 486n.21, 534, 559n.27, 564, 566, 567, 574, 578, 582n.5 François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu, xvii, xix, xx, 376, 481 Giraudoux, Jean, 285, 393 Giroud, Françoise, 336 Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, 138, 370, 586 Givray, Claude de, 38, 574 Glenn, Pierre-William, 188, 189, 585 Godard, Jean-Luc, 108, 118, 225, 271, ch. 15 passim, 339, 352, 364, 564, 572 “Apprenez le François,” 302 criticism, 187, 202n.10, 361 filmmaking, 38, 156, 355n.40, 552 “Tout seul,” 301, 313, 315n.5 see also Truffaut, François: rapport with Godard

601

Godden, Rumer, 285 Godfather, The (Coppola), 553 Goebbels, Joseph, 250 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Elective Affinities, 43, 196, 327, 430, 443 Golden Coach, The, see Le Carrosse d’or (Renoir) Gombrich, Ernst E.H., 418n.6 Goodis, David, 322, 377, 379 Goodman, Nelson, 568 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 303 Gorky, Maxim, 285 Goya, Chantal, 310 Grahame, Gloria, 167, 247, 256 Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma (Godard), 311 Grand Guignol, 418n.9, 575 Great Gatsby, The (Clayton), 557 Great War, see World War I Greece, 20, 428, 438 Greek Mythology Achilles, 452 Aphrodite, 522–523 Chaos, 521–522 phoenix, 162, 321, 326 Prometheus, 321 Greenaway, Peter, 35, 317 Greene, Graham, 67n.17 Greene, Naomi, 248 Greenspun, Roger, 432n.12 Greer, Jane, 167 Greetings (De Palma), 281n.11 Griffith, David Wark, xix, 365, 452 Gruault, Jean, 61, 107, 116, 154, 165, 205, 225, 233, 432n.9, 438, 548, 561, 562, 574 Grumberg, Jean-Claude, 574, 577 Grund, Helen, 428–429 Guattari, Felix, 230, 232, 241n.31, 364, 374n.40 Guigue, Arnaud, 190, 300 Guitry, Sacha, xix, 21–22, 141, 243, 249, 250, 452, 486n.30 Halliday, Jon: Sirk on Sirk, 95 Handke, Peter, 518 Haneke, Michael, 5, 35 Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine, see commedia dell’arte Hasegawa, Kazuhiko, 395 Haskell, Molly, 378 Hasumi, Shigehiko, 212, 394–396, 400nn.33, 34 Haudepin, Sabine, 470, 589

602

Index

Hawks, Howard, 4, 117, 206, 208, 212, 250, 251, 257, 285, 309 Hayden, Robert M. and Milica Bakic-Hayden, 438 Haynes, Jonathan Everett, xviii Hays Code, 213 Hayward, Susan, 256–257 Head, Edith, 168–169 Hedren, Tippi, 168 Hellzapoppin’ (Potter), 585 Hemingway, Ernest, 35 Hepburn, Audrey, 169 Hermann, Bernard, 379 Herpe, Noël, 246, 559n.33 Herzog, Werner, 205, 237–238, 241n.42 Hessel, Franz, 41, 427–429, 430, 431 Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais), 187, 308, 377, 389, 546, 577 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 307, 313, 315, 371 “Hitchbook,” see Truffaut’s published writings: Hitchcock Hitchcock, Alfred, 22, 73, 74, 114–115, 153, 222, ch. 13 passim, 294–295, 369, 568 see also Truffaut, François: Hitchcock and Hitler, Adolph, 95, 552 Holden, William, 244 Holmes, Diana and Robert Ingram, xvii, 192, 195, 197, 201, 202n.5, 203n.28, 379, 436, 440, 482 Holocaust/the Shoah, 86, 109, 131, 351, 352, 577, 580, 581 Homer: Odyssey, The, 546 Hopper, Edward, 460 Hori, Junji, xxi Hossein, Robert, 243 Hugo, Victor, 165, 193 Huillet, Danièle, 35, 495 Huppert, Isabelle, 312 Hurst, Fannie, 470 Hussard literary movement, 342, 554–555 hypnosis, 71, 74–75, 80, 83, 87, 90, 97 I bambini ci guardano/The Children Are Watching Us (De Sica), 418n.5 Ichikawa, Kon, 391 Ici et ailleurs (Godard), 151, 552 I Confess (Hitchcock), 273, 274 identity, 72, 83, 86–87, 135, 165–166, 176, 193–194, 200, 277, 290, 325, 358, 382, 414, 431, 436, 478, 482, 523, 531, 576–577

IDHEC (L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques), 231, 256 Ikeda, Masuo, 395 Ikezawa, Natsuki, 395 Il Conformista (Bertolucci), 557 imagination, 74–77, 83, 91, 93, 98, 406 character, 160, 321, 414, 416–417, 541, 543 literary and creative, xix–xx, 222, 274 national, 69n.42, 336, 444, 455 Truffaut, 71–85, 92, 100, 154, 168, 288, 353 Imitation of Life (Sirk), 94 Impressionism, 157, 158, 160, 163 improvisation, 114, 186, 272, 288, 294, 364, 369, 370, 404, 459 “impure cinema,” 498, 532, 533 Indochina war, xvi, 555 infancy, 75, 81, 481, 508, 510 infant and language, 71, 76–79, 193, 205 see also autism Ingram, Robert, see Holmes, Diana and Robert Ingram Insdorf, Annette, xvii, 383, 384, 443, 531, 564 Institut Pédagogique National, 339 Interlenghi, Franco, 407, 419n.15 Internet, 70n.55, 243, 398 Irish, William, see Woolrich, Cornell and Woolrich, Cornell: Waltz into Darkness Israel, 552 Itard, Jean, 231, 233 character, 37, 39, 64, 106–108, 130, 144, 193, 233–238, 313, 363, 365–367, 411, 503 It Happened One Night (Capra), 67n.17 It Should Happen to You (Cukor), 249 Iwasaki, Akira, 390 J’ Accuse (Gance), 118, 119, 442 Jacound affair, 469 Jade, Claude, 39, 55, 375, 382, 384 James, Henry, xxi, 37, 65n.8, 276–277, 329, 431, 491–492, 499, 500, 504, 548–549, 553, 561, 563–564 “Altar of the Dead, The,” 65n.8, 318, 329, 492, 548, 561, 568 “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 492, 561, 563 What Maisie Knew, 276–277 Jameson, Fredric, 557 Jansenism, 266, 274 japonisme, see exoticism Jarmusch, Jim, 452

Index

Jasset, Victorin, 239 Jatobá, Luiza, xx Jaubert, Maurice, 37, 117, 499, 554, 564, 566 Jaurès, Jean, 556 Jaws (Spielberg), 111, 553 “Jean Renoir le patron” (Rivette) (TV program), 295n.1 Jeanson, Henri, 248 Jesus, 492 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 444–445 Jeux interdits/Forbidden Games (Clément), 404 JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (Godard), 313, 371 Joanno, Clothilde, 383 Johnny Guitar (Ray), 115, 128, 139, 308, 362 Jollivet, Simone, 38 Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Tanner), 232 Jones, Jennifer, 213 Journal d’un curé de campagne (Bresson), 45, 422 Judaism, 83, 86, 95, 121, 131, 176, 250–251, 309, 382, 429–430, 436, 510, 576–577, 581, 582n.13, 589, 590 Judex (Feuillade), 66n.17 Jules et Jim xvii, xx, 13, 16–20, 36–44, 48–52, 59–62, 66n.10, 67n.28, 81, 83–84, 88, 92, 121, 135, 139, 143–144, 150n.10, 151n.25, 154–159, 167–168, 171–172, 174–175, 178, 189, 195–199, 203nn.28, 37, 245, 265, 270–272, 278, 286, 302, 318, 327, 346, 359, 372n.9, 375, 378, 380–381, 390, 398n.6, 399n.9, 411, chs 22–23, 457, 459, 462, 472–474, 518, 526, 549, 554, 556–557, 561, 567, 591 Catherine (character) in, xx, 38–44, 50–52, 59–60, 66, 10, 67n.28, 88, 92, 135, 143–144, 151n, 25, 157–158, 174–176, 195–198, 270, 327, 378–379, 423–431, 434–445, 474 “Le Tourbillon de la vie” (song), 42, 88, 379, 426, 439 Jurgens, Curt, 254 Jutra, Claude, 229, 241n.30 Kaplan, Louise, 478 Kaplan, Nelly, 383 Karina, Anna, 140, 278, 383 Karloff, Boris, 415 Karmitz, Marin, 312 Kast, Pierre, 222, 303 Keathley, Christian, 45

603

Kehr, Dave, 483 Kelly, Grace, 266, 377 Kiarostami, Abbas, 35 Kiejman, Georges, 346 Kikan Film (journal), 394 Kinema Junpo (journal), 389, 390, 395 King Lear (Godard), 427 Kinoshita, Keisuke, 388 Klarsfeld, Serge: Memorial (book), 86 Klee, Paul: This Star Teaches Bending (painting), 54 Kline, T. Jefferson, xvii, 318–319, 443, 465n.3 Kollwitz, Käthe, 428 Korean War, 222 Korhinta/Merry-Go-Round (Fabri), 257 Kreis, Anne, 384 Kubrick, Stanley, 35, 554–555 Kundera, Milan, 184, 185, 188, 192, 196, 200 Kurosawa, Akira, 391 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 212, 400n.34 Kurutta kajitsu/Crazed Fruit (Nakahira), 256 Labarthe, André S., 295n.1, 336 La Bête humaine (Renoir), 109, 285, 287, 289 Labourdette, Elina, 45, 341 la caméra-stylo, 273, 320–321, 422, 532 Lacan, Jacques, 69n.42, 106, 107, 110, 230, 517, 519–527, 543 LaCapra, Dominick, 444 La Cérémonie (Chabrol), 69, 178 La Chambre verte, xx, 13, 36–63 passim, 65nn.5, 8, 70n.52, 83, 84, 85, 92, 112–113, 118, 128, 137, 148, 152n.35, 174, 175, 180, 186, 189, 199, 201, 206, 214, 215, 287, 289, 294, 312, 313, 328–329, 331n.24, 370, 411, 412, 431, 476, 486n.30, ch. 27, 538, ch. 31, ch. 32, 571, 581, 586 La Chartreuse de Parme (Christian-Jaque), 252 Lachenay, Robert, 36, 70n.51, 138, 141, 150n.4, 150n.19, 221, 245, 255, 283, 290, 412–413, 459, 476 Lachenay, Robert (pseudonym), 36, 45, 245, 255, 256 La Chienne (Renoir), 287, 291 La Chinoise (Godard), 309, 311, 427 La Collectionneuse (Rohmer), 178 Lacombe Lucien (Malle), 557 Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (De Sica), 70n.50

604

Index

Lady Vanishes, The (Hitchcock), 578 La Femme d’à côté, 13, 54, 57, 60–63, 66–67n.17, 77, 91–94, 96, 109, 113, 120, 128–129, 132, 134–135, 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 167–171, 174–182 passim, 186, 189, 199, 206, 207–208, 209–210, 215, 293, 371, 375, 395, 477, 480, 518, 554, 581 La Femme de l’aviateur (Rohmer), 67 L’ Affaire Maurizius (Duvivier), 389 La Fiancée du pirate (Kaplan), 383, 385 Lafont, Bernadette, 193, 375, 376, 378, 382–385, 386 La Gazette du Cinéma (journal), 225, 226 L’Âge d’or (Buñuel), 538 La Gifle (Pinoteau), 312 La Grande Bouffe (Ferreri), 215 La Grande Illusion (Renoir), 251, 287, 291, 295, 362, 363, 380, 442, 579, 580 La Jetée (Marker), 458 La Maman et la putain (Eustache), 7, 181, 310, 311 La Mariée était en noir, 38–63 passim, 66–67n.17, 68n.36, 84, 127, 145–146, 174–178, 186, 189, 190, 196–199, 266, 290, 295, 322, 375, 379–380, 383, 478, 486n.21, 518, 541, 564 La Marquise d’O (Rohmer), 179 La Marseillaise (Renoir), 139, 289, 295, 296n.9, 298n.44, 359–360, 362, 380 la mode rétro, 557 L’Amour à vingt ans (Truffaut, Ishihara, Ophüls, Wajda, Renzo Rossellini), 312 L’Amour en fuite, 8, 46–63 passim, 66–67nn.17, 18, 69n.45, 70n.47, 99, 144, 147, 152n.34, 174, 177, 182–183, 189, 190, 216, 265–266, 291, 302, 350, 371, 372n.9, 375, 491, 535, 554, 571–572 L’Amour fou (Rivette), 358 L’Amour l’après-midi (Rohmer), 67 Lancaster, Burt, 167 Landsberg, Alison, 443 Lang, Fritz, 222, 249, 285, 308, 313, 536, 547 L’Anglaise et le duc (Rohmer), 178 Langlois, Henri, 8, 244, 259, 301, 312, 346, 350, 352 Langlois Affair, xvi, 8, 296n.9, 312, 346, 350, 352, 508 L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais), 66n.17, 168, 546 “la nouvelle avant-garde,” see avant-garde La Nouvelle Vague, xxii, 6–7, 20–22, 95, 108–109, 118–119 123, 154, 155, 168, 188, 223, 225, 229, 243, 260, 271, 282n.20,

304–305, 311, 315, 320–321, ch. 17 passim, 377, 378, 383, 387n.22, 388–390, 392, 404, 414, 420, 422–423, 430, 439, 458, 482, 546, 573 film style, 19, 38, 158, 186, 318–319, 330n.17, 376–377, 423, 439, 520 see also Cahiers du Cinéma La Nuit américaine, xvii, xxi, 16, 36–63 passim, 65n.4, 66n.15, 66–67n.17, 67n.20, 69n.45, 70n.52, 81, 83, 130, 132, 137, 138, 146, 153, 174, 176–177, 180, 185–186, 189, 190, 195, 203nn.45, 46, 208, 210–215, 289, 290, 297n.26, 298n.49, 303, 309, 311–313, 317, 350–351, 357, 367, 368–370, 376, 395, 419n.17, 495, 501, 549, 552, 575, 582n.10, ch. 34 La Nuit du Carrefour (Renoir), 179 Lanzmann, Jacques, 344 La Parisienne (journal), 245 La Peau douce, 36–62 passim, 66n.10, 68n.34, 70n.47, 80, 93–94, 98, 114, 130–139, 142, 146, 154–156, 167–171, 175–179, 189, 203n.37, 208–209, 210, 213, 215–216, 268, 278, 290, 302, 308, 346, 375, 395, ch. 24, ch. 25, ch. 26, 518, 549, 593n.4 La Pointe courte (Varda), 254 la politique des auteurs, see auteur La Première Nuit (Franju), 582n.8 la qualité française, see cinéma de qualité Larcher, Jérôme, 187 La Religieuse (Rivette), 302, 559n.33 La Revue des Lettres Modernes (journal), 245 La Revue du Cinéma (journal), 226 L’Argent de poche, 5, 7, 8, 38–39, 53, 60–61, 63, 66n.10, 67n.18, 109–110, 112, 121, 129, 132, 134, 139, 147, 175, 189, 205, 232, 233, 288–289, 292, 345, 350, 370–371, 392, 395, ch. 28, 543 La Règle du jeu (Renoir), 36, 65n.4, 246, 283–295 (ch. 14), 298nn.49, 53, 360, 363, 458–459, 466n.15, 467n.21, 475–476, 475, 579 L’Arroseur arrosé (Lumière), 66n.17 La Sirène du Mississippi, 10, 15, 16, 39, 49, 56, 62, 66nn.10, 12, 68n.40, 83–84, 92, 99, 111, 113–115, 121, 123, 134, 139, 142, 144, 146, 171, 154–157, 161, 164, 169, 171, 174–178, 180, 183, 189, 231, 233, 266, 287–290, 294, 296n.9, 310, ch. 18, 375, 380–383, 395, 541, 564 La Symphonie pastorale (Delannoy), 252

Index

L’Atalante (Vigo), 236, 302, 538, 554, 556 La Tour de Nesle (Gance), 325 La Traversée de Paris (Autant-Lara), 252 Laudenbach, Philippe, 173 Laurencin, Marie, 429 Laurent, Emmanuel, 300 Laurent, Jacques (a.k.a. Cécil Saint-Laurent), 45, 554–555 “la vague rétro,” 573 L’Avant-Scène (series), 302, 578 La Vie est à nous (Renoir), 287 L’Avventura (Antonioni), 164, 578 Lean, David, 480 L’Eau à la bouche (Doniol-Valcroze), 383 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 60, 192, 197, 314, 343, 394, 593n.5 as actor, 17–18, 183, 408–409, 413, 504 as Doinel, 182, 228, 310–311, 405, 408–409, 413 other film work, 310–311, 344 see also Truffaut, François: rapport with Léaud Le Ballon rouge (Lamorisse), 257 Le Berre, Carole, 72, 80, 99, 137, 149, 158, 184, 187, 200, 201, 372n.9, 541, 561, 579 François Truffaut au travail, xviii, 574 Leblanc, Maurice, 60 Le Blé en herbe (Autant-Lara), 252 Le Carrosse d’or (Renoir), 37, 247, 284, 289, 291, 293, 297n.27, 393, 571, 579, 581, 582n.20 Le Chagrin et la pitié/The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophüls), 573 Le Chant du styrène (Resnais), 341 Le Cheval d’orgueil (Chabrol), 305 Le Cochon (Barjol/Eustache), 373n.25 Le Comte de Monte Cristo (Autant-Lara), 203n.42 Le Corbeau (Clouzot), 456 Le Coup du berger (Rivette), 254 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir), 67n.17, 288, 291–292, 297n.19 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe ( Jean Renoir), 160, 298, 385, 582 Le Dernier Métro, xxi, 16, 37–61 passim, 65n.4, 68n.36, 72, 83, 85, 113, 120–121, 131, 132, 176, 177, 178, 179, 189, 190–191, 287, 293, 298n.45, 310, 312, 330n.10, 371, 372n.17, 376, 381–382, 395, 510, 553, 556, ch. 33, ch. 34 Le Diable au corps (Autant-Lara), 249 Lee, Bruce, 396

605

Leenhardt, Roger, 38, 67, 225, 532, 542 Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain ( Jeunet), 444 Lefebvre, Henri, 338, 354n.8, 454 Lefebvre, Martin, xix, xxi Le Fleuve, see River, The (Renoir) Le Gai Savoir (Godard), 303, 311, 344 Le Genou de Claire (Rohmer), 178 Léger, Fernand, 423 Leitch, Thomas, 318 Le Jour se lève (Carné), 554 Lelouch, Claude, 351 Le Mépris (Godard), 156, 183, 210, 303, 308, 313, 391, 398n.6, 439, 546 Le Moindre Geste (Daniel, Deligny, Manenti), 229, 230, 231, 240n.28, 241n.32 Le Monde du silence (Cousteau), 257 Le Mystère Picasso (Clouzot), 257 L’Enfance-nue (Pialat), 6, 214 L’Enfant sauvage, 3, 37, 38, 60, 61, 63, 77, 83, 85, 92, 98–99, 105–107, 121, 130, 131, 144, 180, 186, 189, 195, 203n.45, 205–206, ch. 11 passim, 287, 288, 289, 313, 350, 357, 363–367, 369, 370, 385, 396, 411, 543, 550, 567 Lenin, Vladimir, 552 Léotard, Philippe, 384 Le Paquebot Tenacity (Duvivier), 389 Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (Eustache), 310 Le Petit Soldat (Godard), 142, 310, 556 Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (Renoir), 291 Le Plaisir (Ophüls), 181 Le Pont du Nord (Rivette), 305 Leprohon, Pierre: Renoir, 296n.8 Le Quadrille (Rivette), 306 Le Repas du bébé (Lumière brothers), 403 Le Roman de François Truffaut, see Cahiers du Cinéma: “Truffaut” memorial issues Le Rouge et le noir (Autant-Lara), 252 Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (Demy), 254 Les Amants (Malle), 254–255, 378, 393, 399n.20 Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (Rohmer), 179 Les Assassins du dimanche ( Joffé), 253, 262 les Batignolles, Commune of, 63, 366 Les Blessures assassins (Denis), 69 Les Bonnes Femmes (Chabrol), 168, 282n.20, 376, 383 Les Corsaires du Bois de Boulogne (Carbonnaux), 253 Les Cousins (Chabrol), 389, 178

606

Index

Les Croix de bois (Bernard), 442 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson), 45–47, 93, 341, 395 Les Deux Anglaises et la continent, 13, 16–19, 36–62 passim, 66n.10, 66–67n.17, 98, 111, 120, 142, 154, 155, 156, 157–161, 164, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180–181, 183, 189, 192, 199, 206, 210, 214–215, 312–313, 323, 367, 479, ch. 27, 531, 564 Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray/Sundays and Cybele (Bourguignon), 391 Les Enfants terribles (Melville), 564 L’Espion (Lévy), 66n.16 Les Films du Carrosse (company), 37, 39, 113, 186, 289, 571, 581n.2, 590, 592 Les Lolos de Lola (Bernard), 69n.45, 186 Les Mistons, 37, 60, 61, 65n.2, 66n.17, 68n.36, 139, 178, 189, 193, 223, 230, 288, 292, 347, 349, 382, 383, 467n.17 Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Demy), 381 Les Parents terribles (Cocteau), 225 Les 400 Coups, xv, 3–7, 9–13, 16, 36, 38, 46–70 passim, 81, 82, 85, 100, 114, 134, 137–138, 145–148, 151n.20, 152nn.32, 35, 155, 173–175, 179, 184, 186, 189–191, 197–199, 202n.10, 203n.37, 205, 223, 228–229, 232–233, 236, 247, 259, 277, 283, 286–289, 291–292, 301–302, 316n.22, 317–319, 326, 329, 335, 343, 346–350, 365, 375–376, 384, 388–390, 398n.5, ch. 21, 423, 452, 466n.6, 469, 477, 480, 491, 499, 507, 532, 453, 549, 558n.9, 567, 570n.21 Les Salauds, vont en enfer (Hossein), 243 Le Sang d’un poète (Cocteau), 340 Le Secret perdu, see Gillain, Anne: François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu Le Signe du lion (Rohmer), 168 Le Soleil dans l’oeil (Bourdon), 66n.16 Les Stances à Sophie (Mizrahi), 383, 385 Les Statues meurent aussi (Resnais, Marker), 437, 555 Les Vampires (Feuillade), 459 Le Testament d’Orphée (Cocteau), 139, 564 Le Trou (Becker), 216 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 502, 503, 505 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 106, 521 Lévy, Roland, 577 Lewenstein, Oscar, 37, 564 L’Express (journal), 336, 343

L’Histoire d’Adèle H., 13, 52, 60, 62, 66n.10, 70n.47, 99–100, 107, 112–113, 115, 147–148, 152n.32, 154–157, 164–167, 171, 174–176, 180, 189, 193, 215, 375, 465n.3, 501, 562, 570n.21, 581 L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, 38–63 passim, 66n.10, 66–67nn.17, 19, 68nn.34, 36, 133, 141, 172, 174–175, 180, 189–190, 193, 214, 287, 312, 322, 328, 370, 395, 452, 478, 486n.44, 501, 517–518, 521–524, 528, ch. 30, 567, 581 Liberation, 250, 253, 591 Libération (periodical), 123, 174 L’Immoraliste (Gide), 459 Lipkin, Steven, 243, 259 Little Fugitive, The (Engel and Orkin), 404 Litvin, Liliane, 69n.46 Living Theatre, 230 L’Ivresse du pouvoir (Chabrol), 178 Lloyd, Norman, 578, 579 Locke, John, 236 Lodger, The (Hitchcock), 275, 276 Loft (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), 212 Loin de Rueil (Queneau), 313 Loin du Vietnam (Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Varda, Godard, Marker, Resnais), 241n.32, 313, 373n.25 Lola (Demy), 439 Lonsdale, Michel, 379 Losilla, Carlos, xx Losique, Serge, 303 Lotte in Italia (Groupe Dziga Vertov, Godard, Gorin), 312 Louis Delluc award, 255 Lubitsch, Ernst, xxi, 110, 116, 131, 181, 212–213, 452, 512, 534, 577, 582n.14 Lubtchansky, William, 189 Lucas, Hans, see Godard, Jean-Luc Lumière (journal, Tokyo), 395 Lumière brothers, 21, 249, 260, 351, 352 Lupin, Arsène (character), 60 Lure of the Wilderness (Negulesco), 250 lyricism, 18, 20, 153, 154, 171, 172, 185, 212, 215–216, 237, 426, 526, 561 MacGuffin, 270 Made in U.S.A. (Godard), 311 magic lantern, 44, 565 Mailer, Norman, 41

Index

Malick, Terrence, 158 Malige, Jean, 189 Malle, Louis, 254–255, 388, 393 Malraux, André, 8, 108, 228, 314–315, 350, 422 Malson, Lucien, 233 Manenti, Josée, 229–230 Manet, Edouard, 160 Manifeste des 121, xvi, 508 Mankiewicz, Joseph, 153 Mann, Delbert, 257 Mannoni, Octave, 237–238 Man Ray, 423, 428 Ma Nuit chez Maud (Rohmer), 164 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Hitchcock, 1934), 155, 451 Man Who Never Was, The (Neame), 245 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 303 Manxman, The (Hitchcock), 273 Marchand, Guy, 384 Margonne, Jean, 70n.47 Marguerite de la nuit (Autant-Lara), 243 Margulies, Ivone, 325 Marie, Michel, xvii, xviii, 187 Marivaux: Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, 589 Marker, Chris, 118, 227, 229, 231, 232, 241n.32, 364, 369, 437, 555 Markham, Kika, 39 Marnie (Hitchcock), 162, 272, 278–279, 362 Marsac, Laure, 164 Marshall Plan, 342 Martin, Adrian, xx Marty (Delbert Mann), 257 Marty, Eric, 558n.11 Mary, Philippe, 243, 249 Masculin féminin (Godard), 310–312, 344, 427 Masques (Chabrol), 178 Masson, Alain, 206 Masumura, Yasuzo, 391, 392 Maté, Rudolph, 251 Matisse, Henri, 19, 93, 119, 307, 396 Matsumoto, Toshio, 394 May 1968, 230, 232–233, 241n.32, 271, 296, 302, 303, 354n.10, 355n.40, 357, 364, 365, 369, 380–381, 392, 546, 552, 573, 576, 585 see also Langlois Affair Mayerling (Litvak), 474 McBride, Joseph, 432n.10 Méditerranée (Pollet), 546 Meir, Golda, 552

607

melodrama, xix, 43, 94–95, 118, 153–156, 158, 170–171, 197–198, 469–472 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 38, 153, 344, 346, 458 memory, xx, 12, 39, 65n.5, 82, 89–90, 96–97, 130, 179, 319, 394, 440, 443–444, 549–550, 553, 556 Menzer, Ernest, 309 Mérimée, Prosper: La Vénus de l’Ille, 443 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 240n.27 metaphor, 19, 71, 77, 80–85, 89, 96–100, 172, 187, 365, 369, 426, 459, 566, 569 Metropolis (Lang), 536 Metz, Christian, 78, 270, 277, 566 Meurisse, Paul, 582n.17 Miller, Claude, 39 Minnelli, Vincente, 158 Mirbeau, Octave, 285 Miró, Joan, 396 mirrors/doubling, xix, 35–36, 43, 44–48, 58, 61–63, 82, 235–236, 349, 409, 574, 577 mise-en-scène, 12, 21–22, 37, 44–45, 64, 83, 93–94, 98–99, 116, 243–244, 248–249, 260, 342, 346, 381, 449, 456, 582, 584 Mitchum, Robert, 159, 167 modernism, 67n.28, 156, 159, 171–172, 210, 221, 369, 371, 424, 430, 456, 531, 534, 538, 543, 576 modernity, 6–9, 107, 167, 290, 336, 344, 346, 348, 352, 353, 371n.1, 377, 423, 428–430, 437, 456, 505, 539, 569, 593n.5 Modiano, Patrick, 71, 85–91, 94, 95, 98 Quartier perdu, 71, 87–89, 92 “Moi, j’aime le music-hall” (Charles Trénet song), 351 Molière, 515 Molina, Tirso de: The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, 521, 529n.13 Molinaro, Edouard, 389 Monet, Claude, 157, 160, 161 Monika, see Summer With Monika (Bergman) Mon Oncle (Tati), 66n.17, 341 Monroe, Marilyn, 45, 255, 256, 260, 340, 435 Montaigne, Michel de, 592 Montand, Yves, 312 Montfajon, Marie-Jeanne, 47 Montmartre, 56, 60, 63, 152n.34, 228, 458, 581 Moravia, Alberto: Il disprezzo, 308

608

Index

Moreau, Jeanne, 17, 37–39, 41, 44, 81, 113, 143, 157, 196–198, 200, 255, 375–383, 386, 425, 434, 435, 442, 474, 549, 564 Morgenstern, Madeleine, 67n.18, 457, 476, 486n.36 Morin, Edgar: Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire, 224 Morricone, Ennio, 209 Moullet, Luc, 187, 210, 358 Moussy, Marcel, 228 Mozart (Hartl), 66nn.14, 15 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 522, 529nn.13, 38 Mulvey, Laura, 94–95, 140, 141, 277, 354n.15, 487n.51 Mummy’s Hand, The (Cabanne), 256 Murder! (Hitchcock), 272 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais), 168 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 14, 118, 119, 237, 250 Musée Rodin, 142–143, 490 Musset, Alfred de: Les Caprices de Marianne, 475 Muybridge, Eadweard, 405 Nadeau, Maurice, 320 Nagib, Lúcia, xx Nakahira, Kô, 256 Naked Jungle, The (Haskin), 362 Narboni, Jean, 245, 304, 360, 558n.12 narrative, xviii, xx, 5, 38, 62–64, 85–87, 92, 94, 96, 154, 156, 157, 159, 165, 168, 187, 210, 216, 320, 349–350, 365, 367, 420–421, 439, 495, 504, 518, 531–534, 547–548, 551–553, 574, 585 Narrow Margin, The (Fleischer), 247 Naruse, Mikio, 388 Nathalie Granger (Duras), 577 National Film Board of Canada, 229 naturalism, 4, 5, 6, 288, 407, 516 Navigator, The (Crisp, Keaton), 513 Nazis, 40, 44, 95, 139, 157, 176–178, 250, 327, 468n.27, 580 neorealism, 222, 224, 404, 407, 458, 461 Neupert, Richard, xix Never Let Me Go (Daves), 249 new American Cinema, 6, 153, 505 Newman, Paul, 451 newspapers, 245, 483, 507 in fiction films, 43, 122–123, 138, 576 newsreels, 7, 298n.43, 441, 442 in Truffaut films, 44, 159, 327, 444, 554

New Wave, The, see La Nouvelle Vague N’Guyen, Thi Loan, 39 Niagara (Hathaway), 45, 340 Nichols, Bill, 325 Nichols, David, 482 Ninagawa, Yukio, 395 nomadism, 230 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 377, 591 Nosferatu (Murnau), 237 Notorious (Hitchcock), 276, 279, 281, 301 nouveau roman, 86 Nouvelle Vague (post-war youth), 253, 336–339, 342, 377 Nouvel Observateur Le (journal), 105–106, 110 Novak, Kim, 168, 377, 380 Now, Voyager (Rapper), 540 Nozaki, Kan, xv Numéro Deux (Godard), 312 OAS (Organisation de l’armee secrète), 555 Obayashi, Nobuhiko, 395 Objectif, 48, 49, 224–226 Occupation, xix, xxi, 71, 86, 177, 178, 227, 250, 340, 382, 456, 556, 572–574, 576, 578–579, 580, 584, 585, 589 Oedipal attachment, 68n.39, 76, 160, 321, 480 Oedipus, 321, 521 Okada, Susumu, 390 Oliveira, Domingos de, ch. 29 passim Oliveira, Manoel de, 452 Omori, Kazuki, 395 On Dangerous Ground (Ray), 162 opera, 470, 522, 529n.13 Ophüls, Marcel, 573 Ophüls, Max, xix, 133, 181, 222, 285, 451, 532 Orientalism, see exoticism Orlacs Hände (Wiene), 536 Orr, John, xix ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française), 303, 551 Oscar award, see Academy Awards Oser Lutter, Oser Vaincre (Thorn, Groupe Ligne Rouge), 364 Oshima, Nagisa, 388 Othello (Yutkevich), 257 Othon (Straub, Huillet), 365 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 362, 372n.14, 550 Oury, Jean, 230 Out 1 (Rivette), 373n.25, 546, 551

Index

Oyû-sama/Miss Oyu (Mizoguchi), 79 Ozu, Yasujirô, 35, 388, 391, 452 Pagliero, Marcel, 243 painting, 19–20, 39–44, 50, 54, 67n.22, 69n.43, 119, 122–123, 157, 159–161, 166, 193–194, 256, 286, 423–424, 471, 576 Paisà (Rossellini), 225, 403, 563 Palme d’or (Cannes), 257 Papin sisters, 50, 56, 69n.42, 450 Parély, Mila, 475–476 Paris, 64, 70n.55, 226–227, 322, 342, 408 in Truffaut films, 11, 40, 63, 81, 129, 131, 157, 160, 167, 177, 234–235, 346–348, 350, 361, 366, 378, 406, 409, 458, 460, 467n.17, 473, 582n.8 Parisien Libéré (newspaper), 225, 227, 239n.10 Paris Match (journal), 343 Paris nous appartient (Rivette), 66n.16, 168, 320, 546 Parti communiste français (PCF), 222 Partie de campagne (Renoir), 160, 206, 287, 289, 291, 292, 377 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 154, 208, 210–212, 214–215, 306, 412 Paths of Glory (Kubrick), 139, 554–556 Pauline à la plage (Rohmer), 178, 179 Paxton, Robert: Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, 573 perception, 71, 74–76, 78, 96, 98, 99, 352, 404, 416, 418nn.7, 8, 454, 461, 490 in infants/amodal perception, 12, 78–81, 83, 87, 90–91 Perceval le Gallois (Rohmer), 67 Perret, Jacques, 285 Persona (Bergman), 166 Pétain, Maréchal, 291, 555 Peterson, Mark, 499, 564 Petrarch, 307 Petrie, Graham, 186, 187 Philipe, Gérard, 423 Piaget, Jean, 76, 106 Pialat, Maurice, 3, 4, 5–7, 19, 109, 110, 118, 214, 483, 572 Picasso, Pablo, 20, 39–44, 67nn.22, 28, 105, 119, 426, 428, 442 see also commedia dell’arte Pichot, Ramon, 41 Pierreux, Jacqueline, 408

609

Pierrot le fou (Godard), 156, 162, 310, 362 Pinter, Harold, 165 Pisier, Marie-France, 39, 375, 458, 550 Pixérécourt, R.-C. Guilbert de: Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt, 237 Place de Clichy, 63, 195, 302 Play Time (Tati), 66n.17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 266, 313 Poiret, Jean, 575, 590 Poitrenaud, Jacques, 303 Pompidou, Georges, 314 Popular Front, see Front Populaire Porcile, François, 562 Portiere di notte (Cavani), 557 Positif (journal), 339, 344, 396 Pougny, Jean, 49 Powrie, Phil, xxi Pravda (Godard), 303 Prédal, René, 202n.10 Premier Plan (journal), 339 Preminger, Otto, 153, 158, 170, 245, 249 Prénom Carmen (Godard), 313 Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak (Rohmer), 306 Prieur, Jérôme, 584 Prokofiev, Sergei, 37 Prost, Antoine, 557, 560n.38 Proust, Marcel, xx, 37, 73, 89, 90, 93, 122, 130, 322, 326, 396, 427–428, 429, 434, 454–456, 458, 465n.2, 491, 499, 549, 564 A la recherche du temps perdu, 427, 454, 455, 491, 499 Providence (Resnais), 593 Psycho (Hitchcock), 380 psychoanalysis, xvii, 175 255, 325, 469, 480–481, 518–528, 534, 537–358, 542–543 psychodrama, 153, 169–171, 174, 325 psychogeography, ch. 25 passim Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), 212 Quatermass, Xperiment, The (Guest), 340 Queneau, Raymond, 37, 45, 549, 564 Radio-Télévision Scolaire, 339 Radiguet, Raymond: Le Diable au corps, 249 Radner, Hilary, xx Rancho Notorious (Lang), 308 Rancière, Jacques, 456–457, 458, 461, 463, 466n.8, 543

610

Index

Ray, Nicholas, 21, 113, 118, 153, 158, 170, 257, 308 realism, 5, 7–12, 15, 19, 58–59, 72, 74–75, 77–78, 81, 83, 93, 100, 122–123, 168–169, 180, 183, 192, 195, 200, 222–223, 230, 258–259, 286–289, 291, 321, 325, 350–352, 355n.40, 358–359, 361–363, 369, 400n.39, 407–408, 443, 452–453, 458–459, 470, 483, 503, 533–534, 540, 549–550, 553, 568, 575, 580, 587–588 Rear Window (Hitchcock), 73, 130, 132, 162, 273, 274, 377, 451, 510 Rebatet, Lucien, xvii, 244 Rebecca (Hitchcock), 162, 276 Rehm, Jean-Pierre, 365, 367 Reisz, Karel, 165 religion, 192, 424, 429, 438, 501, 557 Remains to Be Seen (Weis), 256 Rémond, Alain, see Douin, Jean-Luc Renoir, Claude, 283 Renoir, Jean, xix, 214, 223, 226, 248, 250–251, ch. 14 passim, ch. 19 passim, 442 Carola ou les cabotins (play), 293, 578–579, 581, 582n.19, 593n.8 see also Truffaut, François: rapport with Renoir Renoir, Pierre, 283 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 292 Repulsion (Polanski), 381 Residence Roma, questo albergo non è una casa (Caramaschi), 419n.12 Resistance movement, 293, 572, 578, 589, 591 Resnais, Alain, 6, 108, 118, 154, 168, 206, 222, 245, 281n.5, 339, 341, 364, 388, 546, 572, 593n.6 Reynolds, Debbie, 256 Rhapsody (Vidor), 251 Rich, Claude, 379 Richard, Jean-Louis, 38, 450, 457, 575, 590, 592 Rimbaud, Arthur, 225 Rinland, Bernard: Infantile Autism, 237 Risch, Maurice, 590 River, The (Renoir), 296n.9 Rivette, Jacques, 7, 38, 107, 154, 164, 187, 223, 225, 244, 286, 295n.1, 298n.52, 303, 306, 320, 321, 339, 341, 358, 361, 364, 369, 393, 424, 546, 559n.33, 573, 578–579 Road to Life, The (Ekk), 227 Robe, The (Koster), 247

Robiolles, Jacques, 38 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 37, 41, 141, 154, 156, 157, 161, 378, 424, 427, 428–429, 433n.20, 441, 531 Jules et Jim (novel), 18, 41, 154, 157, 159, 318, 327, 424, 427, 436–438, 441, 531, 556, 559n.34 Les Deux Anglaises et la continent (novel), 18, 155, 210, 312–313, 323, 372n.9, 531 Rochefort, Christiane, 383 Roeg, Nicolas, 189 Rohmer, Eric, 7, 38, 45, 47, 109, 118, 154, 164, 178, 179, 206, 225–226, 239, 245–246, 303, 306, 339, 340, 354n.11, 420, 422, 431n.1, 508, 546, 564 Rollet, Brigitte, 383, 384 Romains, Jules, 516n.1 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 533 Rope (Hitchcock), 247 Rosolato, Guy, 466n.6 Rossellini, Roberto, 10, 22, 112–114, 120, 122, 212, 223, 248, 250, 251, 285, 306, 308, 309, 404, 424, 568 Rothberg, Michael, 555 Rothman, William, 275–276 Rouch, Jean, 230, 241n.30 Roud, Richard, 309 Rouger, Jean-Henri, 303 Rouquier, Georges, 254 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 232, 236 Rousset, Jean, 517 Roustang, François, 74–75, 90 Rouvel, Catherine, 385 Rozier, Jacques, 345 Russell, Jane, 256 Ryan’s Daughter (Lean), 480 Sabotage (Hitchcock), 155 Saboteur (Hitchcock), 273 Sadoul, Georges, 222 Saint, Eva Marie, 168, 377 Saint-Hilaire, Etienne Geoffroy, 198 Saint-Just, 242 Saint-Laurent, Cécil, see Laurent, Jacques Saint Laurent, Yves, 115, 361, 381, 541 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xvii, 69n.42, 222, 322–323, 422 Sato, Shigechika, 390, 391 Sato, Tadao, 399n.9 Sautet, Claude, 572

Index

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard), 302, 304, 312, 427, 572 Scarface (Hawks), 45 Schefer, Jean-Louis: L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma, 466n.10 Scherer, Maurice, see Rohmer, Eric Schiffman, Suzanne, 39, 154, 225, 231, 530, 574, 577 Schor, Naomi, 356 Sciuscia/Shoeshine (De Sica), 404, 406–408, 417 Scorsese, Martin, 4, 20, 117, 270 Scott, Helen, 43, 44, 69n.43, 269, 270, 272–273, 278, 484 Seberg, Jean, 169 Second World War, see World War II Secret défense (Rivette), 164 Sellier, Geneviève, 255, 339, 341, 377 Selznick, David O., 276 Sennett, Mack, 294 Serre, Henri, 17, 18, 158, 378, Serres, Michel, 437 sex/sexuality, xx, 17–18, 41, 53, 82, 111–112, 121, 135, 155, 159, 179, 183, 185, 206, 254–255, 268, 279, 322, 340–341, 352, ch. 19 passim, 436, 478–479, 492–494, 519–521, 531, 541, 542 Seyrig, Delphine, 59, 281n.5, 375, 376 Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), 155, 250, 266 Shakespeare, William, 270, 291, 427, 436, 470, 577 Shanghai Story, The (Lloyd), 203n.41 Sharif, Omar, 474 Shattuck, Roger, 236, 241n.38 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 414 Shinoda, Masahiro, 388 Shoah (Lanzmann), 583 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 564 Shylock, 577 Siegel, Liliane, 323–324 Sierck, Hans Detlef, see Sirk, Douglas Silence, The (Bergman), 166 Simenon, Georges, 285 Simon, Michel, 538 Singin’ in the Rain (Donen), 256, 585 Siodmak, Robert, 222 Sirk, Douglas, 71, 94–96, 98, 341–342 Situationists, 312, 338 Si Versailles m’etait conté (Guitry), 250 Six fois deux (Godard), 312

611

Skin Game, The (Hitchcock), 276 SLON (La Societé pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles), 231, 241n.32, 373n.25 Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman), 376–377, 585 Smith, Douglas, 342 Smoking/No Smoking (Resnais), 593n.6 Smordoni, Rinaldo, 407 SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français), 49, 53 Snows of Kilimanjaro, The (King), 247 Snow White, 362 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (cartoon strip), 381 Society of Filmmakers, 303 Socrates, 276 Soigne ta droite (Godard), 313 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 452 Solo Andata: Il Viaggio di un Tuareg (Caramaschi), 419n.12 Sombre (Grandrieux), 206 Some Came Running (Minnelli), 308 Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, 519, 522 Sorlin, Pierre, 442 Southerner, The (Renoir), 223, 284, 578 South Sea Sinner (Humberstone), 247 Soviet cinema, 222, 249, 407 Spanish Civil War, 416 Spielberg, Steven, 270, 505 Stalin, Josef, 222 Stam, Robert, 67n.21, 318–319, 322, 469, 477, 531–532, 534, 538, 556 Star Wars (Lucas), 553 statues, statuary, 20, 144, 151n.25, 184–185, 198, 200, 203n.37, 232, 378–379, 425–426, 428, 434, 436–439, 442, 443, 521, 538, 567 Stein, Gertrude, 428 Stein, Leo, 428 Steinbeck, John, 35 Steiner, George, 394 Stendhal, 252, 457 Stern, Daniel, 71, 75–80, 82–83, 87, 89–91, 96–97, 99 Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, The, 75, 76 Stevens, George, 243 Stevenson, Robert, 470 Stewart, Alexandra, 383, 457 Stewart, Garrett, 152n.35

612

Index

Stewart, James, 380 Stora, Benjamin, 444 Straub, Jean-Marie, 35, 105–106, 495 Streisand, Barbra, 553 Studio des Ursulines, 139, 327, 430 Studio Parnasse, 254 Studios de la Victorine, 350, 588 style, xxi, 74, 77, 80, 83, 87, 94–96, 98–99, 154, 167, 171, 197, 208, 210, 285, 294, 349–350, 364–365, 424, 426, 520, 561, 585 Subor, Michel, 158, 437, 556 Sudden Fear (Miller), 246–247, 256 Summer With Monika (Bergman), 12–13, 66n.17, 138, 151n.20, 179, 376 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 170, 534 Surrealism, 224, 421, 427, 524, 534, 538–539 surrealist style, 383, 415, 427, 539 Swamp Water (Renoir), 250, 284 Szabó, István, 580 Tacchella, Jean-Charles, 138, 222 Takeuchi, Juichiro, 395 Tanner, Alain, 232 Tarkovski, Andreï, 452 Tarr, Carrie, 383–384 Tati, Jacques, 66–67n.17, 341, 452, 532 Tavernier, Bertrand, 379 Taylor, Elizabeth, 251 Téchiné, André, 550 Télérama (journal), 304, 305 television, 302, 311, 312, 339, 423, 551–552, 553, 557, 573, 578 in films, 52, 59, 96, 112, 128–129, 350, 364, 385, 461, 516n.1 Truffaut, 61, 352, 553 temporality, xxi, 40, 82, 85, 89–92, 96, 130, 412, 434, 437, 439, 442–443, 490–492, 494, 498, 548 Temps chaud, 382 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 550 Thanatos /Death Drive, 159, 441, 442, 521–522 theatricality, 95, 149, 178, 243, 248–249, 257, 288–289, 291–294, 352, 533–534, 588, 592 Themroc (Faraldo), 205 They Live By Night (Ray), 162, 362 Thin Blue Line, The (Morris), 325 Thomson, David, 154 Tierney, Gene, 256 Tirez sur le pianiste, 5, 14–16, 21, 48–61 passim, 66n.12, 80–85, 88–89, 93, 98, 111, 135, 146,

153, 187, 189, 190, 193, 194, 203n.37, 266, 287, 290, 295, 308, 350, 362, 375, 379 To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch), 577, 580 To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock), 267 Todas as mulheres do mundo/All women of the world (Domingos de Oliveira), 517–522, 525–528 Todo mundo tem problemas sexuais/Everybody has sexual problems (Domingos de Oliveira), 517 Todorova, Maria, 438 Tolstoy, Leo, 322 Toni (Renoir), 179, 288 Torn Curtain (Hitchcock), 272, 451 Toubiana, Serge, xviii, 214, 243, 244, 245, 251, 252, 257, 304, 321, 375, 396, 442, 454, 455, 457, 459, 469, 532, 558n.12, 578 Touchez pas au Grisbi (Becker), 249 Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (Godard), 306 Toutain, Roland, 475 Toute la ville accuse (Boissol), 253 Tout va bien (Godard), 303, 312, 582n.10 Tradition of Quality, see cinéma de qualité trauma, 480, 521 in films, 84, 145, 349, 441, 443–444, 542, 548, 556 national/historical, xxi, 404, 441 Travail et Culture, 224, 227, 306 Travolta, John, 553 Trénet, Charles, 351 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 164 Triple Agent (Rohmer), 178 Tristana (Buñuel), 563 Truffaut, Eva, 38 Truffaut, François actor, 37–38, 237–238, 313, 363, 411, 494, 500, 553, 562 Bazin, rapport with, 6–8, 111, 122, 221–232, 246, 252, 254, 283–287, 293–295, 297n.19, 324, 335, 340, 350, 399n.23, 403 cinephilia, xv, 10, 38, 46–48, 54, 58–59, 64–65, 65–66n.8, 123, 138, 141, 212, 239, 255–256, 260, 283, 340–341, 349, 362–363, 454–458, 461, 466n.7, 482, 543, 571–572 criticism, his, 64, 252, ch. 12 and Cahiers du Cinéma, xvi, 21, 35, 36, 45, 158, 207, 223, 239, 242–252, 256, 259–260, 267, 273, 282n.20, 284, 296n.9, 300, 302–303, 304, 335, 339, 359, 360–301, 396, 424, 572, 578

Index

father, his own, 71–72, 86, 236–237, 266, 376, 466n.6, 480, 577 Hitchcock and, xviii–xx, 10, 15, 38, 73, 112–114, 120, 130, 132, 153–156, 162, 164, 168, 180, 212, ch. 13, passim, 280n.5, 294–295, 369, 376, 377–381, 385, 451, 463, 510, 569 mother, his own, xv, 36, 46–47, 68n.37, 84, 155, 183, 249, 322, 376, 480-481, 531–532, 542 Nouvelle Vague, position in, xix, 35, 38, 66n.16, 99, 109, 117, 123, 154, 158, 168, 186, 230, 253–254, 260, 304–305, ch.17 passim, 370, 380, 422, 454, 457, 458, 482, 546–547, 572–573 politics, xvi–xviii, 6, 8, 50 108–109, 205, 222, 232, 244, 250–251, 296n.9, 302, 309, 339–340, 340–344, 346, 348, 352, 356, 361–365, 369, 389, 399n.9, 457, 507–508, 533, 552, 557, 573, 576, 579 rapport with Godard, xvii–xix, 14, 136, 139–140, 142, 154, 156, 158, 187, 225, 296n.9, ch. 15 passim, 351–353, 356, 371, 389, 396, 427, 534, 552 rapport with Léaud, 63, 83, 153, 161, 236, 238, 365, 405, 411–412 Renoir, rapport with, 21, 36, 37, 65n.4, 66–67n.17, 112, 139, 153, 157, 162–163, 206, 212, 226, 243, 245–246, 255, ch.14 passim, 351, 359–363, 368, ch.19 passim, 395, 459, 475, 578–581, 592 Truffaut’s production concerns and style cinematography, xviii–xx, 4, 11–12, 14, 19–21, 69n.43, 106–115, 149, 154–155, 157, 159–163, 181, 184–201, 209, 237, 340, 346, 365, 380, 442–443, 452, 456, 473, 566, 585, 591 costuming, 40–42, 161, 168–169, 171, 309, 378, 381–382, 397, 435, 439, 563, 585–588 direction of actors, 8, 10–11, 21, 37, 80–81, 110–112, 115–119, 132, 177, 187, 214, 231, 238, 243–244, 247, 254, 285, 288–289, 294, 405–413, 500, 562, 591 documentary, 8–9, 10, 67n.18, 69n.43, 86, 87, 122, 230, 237–238, 271, 289, 309, 351, 370, 409, 437, 442–443, 474, 475–476, 483, 501, 507, 533–534, 542, 554, 556, 559n.27, 562, 565, 582n.8, 591 editing, 9, 19, 20, 47, 80, 81, 91–92, 130, 131, 152n.35, 158, 163, 167, 181, 187, 208, 209, 211, 237, 294, 437, 449, 451, 452, 460–461,

613

462–465, 473, 520, 534, 542, 554, 556, 566, 570n.19, 573, 574, 588 mise-en-scène, 12–13, 21–22, 37–38, 44–45, 47, 58, 64, 83, 87, 93–94, 98–99, 110, 116, 157, 167, 203, 243, 285, 337, 341, 346, 348, 368, 390, 430, 449, 505, 524, 534, 584 music/sound, 10, 14, 72, 76, 79, 81, 88–89, 93, 106, 116, 118, 129–130, 133, 141, 149, 158, 163, 171, 185, 187, 193, 195, 197–198, 203, 209–213, 226, 237, 253, 268, 281, 285, 342, 351, 379, 413, 431, 449, 451, 471, 499, 513, 544, 549, 554, 564, 566, 575, 584–585, 588, 590 scriptwriting, 13–15, 17, 20, 73, 80, 87, 98, 106, 117, 154, 187, 205–206, 251, 579 spontaneity and surprise, 72, 156, 186, 201, 237, 239, 270, 288–289, 423, 460, 466n.8, 505–506, 546, 568–569, 576 voiceover narration, xv, 8, 14–15, 18–20, 40, 47, 51–52, 65–66, 82, 85, 116–118, 158, 160, 170, 180, 190, 192–193, 195–196, 200, 230, 232, 269, 307, 313, 328, 382, 437–438, 440, 495, 497, 518, 530, 534, 556, 588 Truffaut’s published writings François Truffaut: Correspondance, xvii–xviii, 313–314, 392–393, 397 Hitchcock (1967), same as Hitchcock/Truffaut (1983), 118, 245, ch.13 passim, 281n.11, 325–326, 393 Le Plaisir des yeux, 245, 397, 550, 558n.12 Les Films de ma vie, 245, 392–394, 340, 397, 399nn.10, 20, 467n.18 “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français,” 119, 221, 223, 242, 247–250, 267, 280n.2, 301, 323, 422, 466n.8, 532–533 Truffaut’s themes and subjects autobiography, xix–xx, 9–10, 138, 340, 424, 507, 531, 541, 543, childhood and adolescence, xix, 7, 9, 36, 46, 55, 60–61, 63, 69, 72, 85–87, 90, 106–107, 110, 117, 127–128, 132, 134, 136, 138, 151, 153, 184, 221, 245, 277, 305, 344, 364, 381, 384, 402, 403–420, 427, 456–459, 476–477, 480–481, 490–491, 507–509, 515–516, 532, 542–543, 565 classicism/modernism, xix, 5, 6–9, 12, 20, 11, 116, 158, 171, 206, 208–210, 212, 223, 285, 313, 339, 423–428, 145–149, 156, 159, 166, 171, 173–174, 179, 199, 208, 221, 290, 336, 341, 346, 348, 352, 370–371, 424, 428, 430, 456, 506, 533, 569, 576

614

Index

Truffaut’s themes and subjects (cont'd) Doinel cycle, 144–147, 149, 154, 172–174, 177, 182, 191–192, 343–344 homosexuality, 179, 250, 252, 443, 575, 586, 589 literature and writing, xix, xxi, 6, 118, 160, 177, 182, 192–195, 247–249, 287, 290, ch.16, 322, 377, 414, 422, 427–428, 455–456, 458, 463, 495–498, 530–535, 541–542 nostalgia and the past, xxi, 7, 9, 36–37, 69, 75, 82, 85, 87–89, 92–93, 130, 135, 143, 147, 155, 159, 161, 170, 181–184, 193, 206–207, 241, 251–252, 254, 294, 308, 328, 334–337, 342, 344, 346, 353, 365, 367, 370, 384, 390–391, 394, 404, 410, 412–413, 425, 430–431, 434, 440–441, 443–444, 449, 480, 492, 502, 518, 522, 547, 549–550, 553, 555–557, 563, 587, 593 painting, xix, 19, 39–44, 50, 54, 67, 69, 105, 119, 121–123, 157, 159–161, 185, 192, 224, 237, 256, 286, 379, 421, 426, 429, 432, 434, 442, 460, 471, 473, 494, 499, 501, 576 photography and photographs, xxi, 13, 36–37, 42, 45, 47, 49–51, 55–56, 58, 65–67, 69, 91–92, 106, 112, 132, 137–152, 161, 163–164, 185, 193, 199, 222, 272, 274, 294, 351, 378, 403, 405, 411–412, 415, 417–419, 421, 423, 425, 429, 431–432, 445–446, 471, 473–474, 485–486, 498–499, 501–503, 515, 548–554, 558–559, 563–565, 585, 590 women, attitudes toward, xvi–xvii, 15–17, 45, 59, 118, 132–133, 141–145, 155, 166, 168–169, 173, 175, 178–179, 185, 190–192, 197–198, 200, 216, 255–256, 266, 278, 311, 327, 370, ch.19, 393, 425, 435–437, 474, 477–482, 517, 523–524, 531, 587, 592 Truffaut, Janine, 36, 46 Truffaut, Laura, 38, 67n.18 Truffaut, Roland, 36, 71–72 Tsai Ming-Liang, 344 Tuna Clipper (Beaudine), 255 Turning Point, The (Dieterle), 244 Tweedie, James, xix Two for the Road (Donen), 169 Typhon sur Nagasaki (Ciampi), 245 UGC (distribution company), 572 Unanimisme, 508, 516

Un Chien andalou (Buñuel), 430, 538 unconscious, 74–77, 82, 90, 243, 461, 469, 481–482, 535, 538, 576 Under Capricorn (Hitchcock), 273–274 Une Affaire de femmes (Chabrol), 178 Une Belle Fille comme moi, 38–64 passim, 66n.15, 84, 85, 121, 131, 174, 178, 189, 193, 290, 322, 367, 375, 376, 382–385 Une Histoire d’eau (Godard/Truffaut), 301, 306–307 UNESCO, 508 Une Femme coquette (Godard), 306 Une Femme est une femme (Godard), 158, 309 Une Femme mariée (Godard), 308, 391 Un Film comme les autres (Godard), 303 United Artists, 233 Universal Studios, 271 University of Tokyo, 394 Unseen Enemy, An (Griffith), 138, 370, 586 Vadim, Roger, 254, 259, 389 Vanoye, Francis, xix, xx, 469, 481, 484n.3 Van Sant, Gus, 452 Varda, Agnès, 254, 377, 440, 546, 558n.3 Variety (newspaper), 343 Vaux, Clotilde de, 561 VE day, 222 Véga, Claude, 59, 150n.4 Venice Film Festival, 225, 255, 257, 258 Vent d’est (Godard), 303, 373n.25, 394 Vénus aveugle (Gance), 118 Verdugo, Elena, 255 Vernet, Marc, xxi Verneuil, Henri, 296, 351 vertigo, 88, 90, 98 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 20, 114, 115–116, 158, 162, 164, 270, 362, 377, 379, 380, 492, 540–541 Vertov, Dziga, 303, 313 Vestire gli ignudi/Clothe the Naked (Pagliero), 243 Veyne, Paul, 547 Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini), 221, 223, 308, 459 Victor, Renaud, 232 Vidor, Charles, 251 Vietnam, 230, 314 Vigny, Alfred de, 151n.28, 459 Vigo, Jean, xv, 117, 212, 223, 236–237, 287, 302, 534, 538, 556 Vilmorin, Louise de, 51, 564 Vincendeau, Ginette, xvii, 68n.35, 249 Vinneuil, François, see Rebatet, Lucien

Index

Violette Nozière (Chabrol), 178 Violette Nozière murder case, 450 Visage (Tsai Ming-Liang), 344 Vivaldi, Antonio, 196, 203n.45, 366 Vivement dimanche!, 16, 38–61 passim, 65n.4, 85, 132, 139, 149, 173–174, 176, 178, 183, 186, 189, 191, 293, 298n.53, 371, 387n.40, 510, 542, 554, 556, 581 Vivre sa vie (Godard), 139, 150n.10, 156, 278, 302, 313, 376 Vladimir et Rosa (Godard), 312 Voici le temps des assassins (Duvivier), 253 Vollard, Ambroise, 40 Voltaire, 287 von Sternberg, Josef, 141, 547 voyeurism, 112, 132, 156, 162–163, 165–166, 178, 256, 274, 279, 293, 539, 543 Wallon, Henri, 228, 418n.8 Walsh, Raoul, 208 Walz, Eugene P., 245 Watts, Philip, xx Week-end (Godard), 301, 309, 344 Weiner, Susan, 377 Welles, Orson, 35, 37, 65–66n.8, 138, 222–223, 225, 244, 312 Werner, Oskar, 17, 37, 38, 45, 47, 49, 51, 65n.8, 66n.15, 158, 327, 378, 428, 499, 549, 564 What Time Is It There?/Ni nabian jidian (Tsai Ming-Liang), 344 White, Lionel: Obsession, 310 White Dog (Fuller), 281 Wilde, Oscar, 37, 499 Wilder, Billy, 107–108, 116, 170 Wild Strawberries (Bergman), 377 Willemen, Paul, 45 Williams, Charles, 173, 322, 377, 387n.40

615

Williams, Raymond, 551 Winchester 73 (Anthony Mann), 456 Winnicott, Donald W., 474, 481 Woman on the Beach, The (Renoir), 255, 284 Woman Under the Influence, A (Cassavetes), 214 Wood, Beatrice, 429 Wood, Robin: Hitchcock’s Films, 281n.12 Woolrich, Cornell, 322, 377, 379 Waltz into Darkness, 49, 357 World War I, xx, 37, 84, 118, 136, 157, 313, 411–412, 423, 425, 427, 438, 439, 441–444, 501, 548, 553–557, 565 World War II, 71, 86, 285, 336, 404, 408, 439, 444, 455, 466n.7, 571, 580–581 Written on the Wind (Sirk), 341 Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock), 11, 170, 266, 271, 274, 276 Wyler, William, 257 Yajima, Midori: “Towards the Stop Motion,” 391 Yamada, Koichi, xv, 392–398, 399nn.10, 22, 400nn.33, 39 Yoshida, Yoshishige, 388 Young and Innocent (Hitchcock), 451 youth, 153, 253–254, 256–258, 335–348, 352, 405, 546–547 films, 40, 46, 63, 84, 182, 322, 336, 338, 340, 343–351, 365, 378, 411, 477–478, 491 Yutkevich, Sergei, 257 Zamour, Françoise, xx Zavattini, Cesare, 404, 406 Zeno of Elea, 452 Zéro de conduite (Vigo), 236, 349 zoetrope, 411 Zucca, Pierre, 39