What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 [1 ed.] 0520242270, 9780520242272

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WHAT IS CINEMA? VOL. I by ANDRE BAZIN

foreword by JEAN RENOIR new foreword by DUDLEY ANDREW essays selected and translated by HUGH GRAY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles, California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. London, England

© 1967,2005 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bazin,Andre. What Is Cinema? / by Andre Bazin, with

a

with a foreword by Jean Renoir, new foreword by Dudley Andrew,

essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-24227-2 (v I : alk. paper)

I. Motion pictures.

I. Title.

PN 1994.83513

2005

2004049843

791.43-dc22

Manufactured in the United States or America

15

14 13 12 11 10 12 1J 10 9 8 7

09 08 07 6 5 4 3

The paper used in this publication meets the minimui

1997) (Permanence of Paper). e

requirements of ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992 (R

FOREWORD by

Jean Renoir

IN THE DAYS when kngs were kings, when they washed the feet of

the poor and, by the simple act of passing by, healed those alicted with scrofula, there were poets to conirm ther

belief n

t her great­

ness. Not infrequently the singer wa s greater than the obj e ct of his

s inging . This is where Bazn stands vis-a-vis the cnema. But that

par t of the story has to do only with what lies ahead. What is going on now s smply the assemblng of materials. Civlization is but a sieve through the holes of which here passes the discard. The g ood

remains. I am convnced that in Villon's day poets aboun d ed on

the banks of the Seine. Where are they now? Who were they? No one nows. But Vllon is there stll, large as lfe.

Our chldren and our randchild ren will have n nvaluable

source of help n sortng trough the remains of the past. hey

wll

have Bazn alongside them. For that king of our tme, the cinema,

has likewise its poet . A modest fellow, sickly, slowly and prematurely

dying , he it was who gave the patent of royalty to the cnema just as

the poets of t h e pst had crowned their kings. That kng on whose brow he has placed a crown of glory is al the reater for havng been stripped

by

him of the falsely glittering robes that hampered v

Foreword its progress. It is, thanks to him, a royal personage rendered healhy, cleansed of its parasites, ined down-a king of quality-that our grandcldren wll delight to come upon. nd in that same moment they wll also discover its poet. 1'hey will discover Andre Bzn,

d iscover too,

as I have discovered, that oly too often,

the singer

has once more rsen above the object of his song. There is no doubt about the inluence that Bazin wll have in the years to come. His writings wll suvive even if the cinema does not. Perhaps future generations wll only know of its existence through his writngs. Men wll try to imagine a screen, with horses gallopng across it, a close-up of a beautiful star, or the rolling eye of a dying hero, and each wll interpret these hings in his own way.

But they wll all agree on one thng, namely, the high quality

What is Cinema?

of

This will be true even should these pages-saved

from the wreckage-speak to us only of an art that is gone, just as archaeoloical remains brng to light he objects of cults that we are ncapable any longer of mainng. There is, then, no doubt as to Bazin's luence on the future. Let me say however that it s for his inluence on hs contemporaries that I hold hm so deep in my afections. He made us feel hat our

trade was a noble one much in the same way that the sants of old persuaded the slave of the value of his humanity. It is our good fortune to have Hugh Gray as he translator of these essays. It was a diicult task. Hugh Gray solved the problem

by allowng hmsef to become mmersed n Bazn-something that called for considerable strength of personality. Luckly alike for the translator, for the author, and for us, Bazin and Gray belong to the same spiritual famly. Through the pages that folow they nvite us, too, to become its adopted cildren.

vi

CONTENTS

Foreword

to

the 2004 Edition

IX

Introduction The Ontology of the Photographic Image

9

The Myth of Total Cinema

17

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

23

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

41

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

53

Theater and Cinema

76

Part One

76

Part Two

95

Le Journal d'un cure de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson

125

Charlie Chaplin

144

Cinema and Exploration

154

Painting and Cinema

164

Notes

173

Index

179

FOREWORD TO THE 2004 EDITION By Dudley Andrew

. THE TOUCHING foreword with which Jean Renoir graced this translation of What is Cinema? thirty-five years ago, he cojures up

IN

civilization's murky past and its murkier future. When history has had its devastating way, he writes-when noisy people, problems, and events have eroded and passed through the "sieve" of memory into oblivion-there will still remain those rock-hard fomulations of great poets, which outlast even the subjects that· occasioned their verse. Bazin's essays are such gems. Bazin is indeed cinema's poet laureate, or better, its griot. Full of praise poems and aphorisms, his essays emblazon cinema's history and its possibilities in lapidary language that remains unmatched in both precision and luminescence. Yet Bazin would have laughed at this precious gemological metaphor, as his Preface to Qu' est-ce que le cinema? makes clear. The bulk of what he had produced cane out in newspapers and pamphlets, he said, useful mainly to fuel the ireplace. "The history of criticism being already such a minor thing, that of a particular critic ought to interest no one, certainly not the critic him­ self except as an exercise in humility." Yet in the last year of his life he sifted through the nearly three thousand items he had written for publication in order to ind those key pieces (sixty-ive of them) that ix

What

is

Cinema?

signaled something larger than the particular exigency under which they were penned. Each selection addresses the question which-in homage to Sartre's great essay on literature-he posed as title to his four-part collec tion : What is Cinema? "

"

Was it this presumptuous title that tempted Glen Gosling, an editor at the University of California Press, to envisage an English transla­ tion of Bazin? He had been looking to follow up Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art, which he had brought out in 1957. Gosling worked out of the Los Angeles office, where he often r an into Hugh Gray, who was on Film Quarterly's editorial staf. Gray had been a scriptwriter in both England and America before he began teaching aesthetics at UCLA, a position that included service with Film Quarterly. It was his knowl­ edge of Bazin's writings and of Bazin's reputation in France that led to the project. A generation older than Bazin, Gray nevertheless shared his philosophical orientation, evident in the theological defense he makes in his introduction. An elegant conversationalist and stylist, he was sensitive to Bazin's clever prose, which he strove to deliver in graceful English. 1 It's not clear how much of Bazin's original Gray proposed to in­ clude, but Gosling surely meant to keep the volume sleek, restricting it mainly to articles dealing with ilms familiar to Americans. They set­ tled on ten essays taken from the twenty-five that make up the first two of the four volumes Bazin had laid out. After surprisingly good sales, Gray was encouraged by Ernest Callenbach to prepare What is

Cinema? Volume I, sixteen more pieces selected from the forty that comprise the last two volumes of the original French. While any exci­ sion may seem sacrilegious, Bazin's French publishers would in fact cut nearly the same amount when they brought out their single volume ''�dition deinitive" in 1981.2 His modesty notwithstanding, Bazin might well have bristled at this streamlining. In his own short preface he justified the inclusion of brief pieces on forgotten short subjects (like Death Evey Atenoon and Gide) which Gray found expendable and are no longer to be found in the French collection.3 He claimed they serve as supporting x

Foreword to the 2004 Edition

stones to help bear the weighty theoretical ediice. Nor did he want to fold them into one of the longer essays (though "Evolution of the Lan­ guage of Cinema," "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," and C i n ema and Painting" are indeed compilations). The i di osy n c �a sies "

and imperfections of some of the essays, he felt, are what give them character and, as is the case with concrete, a certain tensile strength. Here Bazin gives away his secret: he regards his own essays the way he feels a critic should treat ilms, elaborating their lofty narrative and thematic problems, yet attending sympathetically to the contingencies and impurities that made them itting expressions in their historical moment. As a medium, cinema begs exactly such double vision: the nature of photography ties cinema's huge ambitions to historical and material circumstances. Thus cinema shaped not only Bazin's thought about his vocation but also his very manner of thinking.

I. No one understood this better than Eric Rohmer, who had prepared a brilliant review of Qu'est-ce que Ie cinema? for Cahiers du Cinema only to see it published as a eulogy when it came out just weeks after Bazin's death.4 Entitled "Andre Bazin's

'Summa,'''

Rohmer's title in­

vokes Thomas Aquinas, suggesting a magisterial command of a di­ verse set of questions, organized hierarchically and ans wered from irst principles. Rohmer appeals to Bazin's organization of the four lit­ tle tomes: Volume One treats cinema's internal life principles-its "ontology" and its "language"; Volume Two approaches cinema from the outside as : surveyor might, triangulating its situation on the cul­ tural landscape amongst the other arts; Volume Three turns to patently contextual issues, subtitled as it is "Cinema and Sociology"; Volume Four is reserved for a case study of neorealism, the most important de­ velopment in sound cinema and a movement that ratiied and con­ tributed to his understanding of the medium. Rohmer insists that Bazin did not hastily impose this order from xi

What is Cinema? his deathbed, searching for the main threads of a life's output. Rather, he carried a lucid design with him throughout his career, a design that progressively expressed and clariied itself in contact with whatever history brought him. Serge Daney would vividly ratify this point: Bad cineastes have no ideas; good cineastes have too many. But the great cineastes have just one idea. Such an obsessive idea stabilizes them on their way, yet guides them into ever new and interesting landscapes. And what about great critics? The same would hold true for them, if there were any. . . . [All critics fade in time] except for one. Between 1943 and 1958 Andre Bazin was that one . . . [His idee ixe was] to show that before signifying it or resembling it, cinema embalmed the reaP The hundreds of ilm reviews that Bazin patiently wrote year after year were animated by his fixation with cinema's specifically photo­ graphic capability. History thereby validated the coherence of a theo­ retical line; yet-and this is crucial-history also extended that line. For, in the Sartrean vocabulary of those times, Bazin held that "cin­ ema's existence precedes its essence" because "contingency is also a necessary quality of ilm."6 New films, no matter of what quality, led Bazin to new fomulations about crucial features of the medium. Rohmer can make Bazin sound quite like Gilles Deleuze, as a thinker obsessed with creating new concepts. Rohmer says, "The purpose of each new article is not to complete or clarify a thought that was par­ tially expressed elsewhere or even to ofer more convincing examples. Rather, it adds, it creates a new thought whose existence we had not suspected. It gives life to critical 'entities,' just as the mathematician gives life to numbers or theorems." But where Deleuze would cham­ pion self-generating mathematical (and ilmic) systems, Bazin, at least as Rohmer portrays him, unswervingly developed a realist system. Like "Euclid's straight line," photographic reference serves as this sys­ tem's irst axiom: from it, the theorist may derive corollaries and far­ flung hypotheses. xii

Foreword to the 2004 Edition

Bazin formulated this principle as early as 1943 while irst turning out movie reviews in a mimeographed student newsletter. Twenty-five years old, rebounding from having just been blocked from teaching because of a stammer, he announced to his friends that he could fore­ see making a life writing about ilm; he aimed to produce a histoy and an aesthetic founded on the social psychology of this popular medium. Where did Bazin acquire the inspiration and the conidence to project a full-blown reorientation of ilm theory?7 He had as a model the "little school of the spectator" that Roger Leenhardt had composed in the thirties for Esprit, the Personalist journal that would soon disseminate Bazin's most prominent essays. Leenhardt, a socially committed intellectual and cineaste, claimed a realist aesthetic that Bazin found the only signiicant approach to modern (i.e. sound) cin­ ema. It was to Leenhardt and to Franrois Truffaut that in 1958 Bazin dedicated his collected works: the irst man representing his heritage, the second his legacy. Leenhardt met Bazin frequently at the cine-club of the Maison des Lettres that Bazin helped found in 1942 near the Sorbonne. One of their discussions concerned Andre Malraux's "Sketch for a Psychology of the Cinema," which appeared in Verve's "wartime issue," previewing the celebrated 1947 Psychology of Art. Bazin, who belonged to a Malraux study group at the Maison, was deeply taken with this dashing scholar, already a Resistance legend. Just after the war the two men jousted over the "cinematic language" that Malraux deployed in Espoir, released in 1945, although inished in 1939. Mal­ raux graciously conceded that Bazin provided by far "the most ingen­ ious and attentive" response to his ilm. Then there was Jean-Paul Sartre, another legend of the Occupation years, who from time to time would show up clandestinely at Bazin's cine-club to see-what else-German silent films! Sartre's Being and Nothingness appeared at just this moment, but it was his earlier Psy­ cholog y of the Imagination (1940), with its phenomenology of paint­ ing and photography, that Bazin immediately bought and annotated.S Although Bazin adopted from his intellectual heroes a set of con­ cerns and a style of thinking and writing, he seldom took up their poxiii

What is Cinema?

sitions. One can feel both Sartre and Malraux hovering at the borders of "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," yet this magnificent es­ say is all Bazin. It is one of the most far-reaching and suggestive es­ says ever written on t he image; his oeuvre can hardly be imagined without it.9 A pearl secreted within him throughout the Occupation, the essay received a first chance at publication when in 1943 the art historian Gaston Diehl commissioned Bazin to contribute to an ambi­ tious special issue of Conluences called Les PobLemes de La pein­ ture.JO He was surely proud to be included alongside Cocteau, Stein, Desnos, Rouault, Matisse, and Braque, and within the bravely leftist series Conluences that was struggling to make it through the war in Lyon. In fact, Bazin had a lot of time, perhaps as long as a year, to re­ ine his contribution, since the publishing house that printed Conlu­ ences by day also brought out the Resistance publication Temoignage Chretien by night. Two weeks before D-Day, the publishing oice was raided by the Gestapo, and its director sent off to his death. With the press shut down, and with several of the projected contributors having gone into the active Resistance, Diehl and Rene Tavernier (editor of Conluences and father of ilmmaker Bertrand Tavernier) detemined to hold the issue till the war's end. By 1945 Bazin had honed his eight pages to perfection and had

started to elaborate their consequences. More than a gem to be ad­ mired, and more too than just a supporting stone, it became the corner­ stone of his view of what cinema was and could be. And yet "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" behaves strangely as cinema's foundation. First of all, it concentrates on photography and seldom mentions cinema. (The final, startling sentence about cinema, which mimics the conclusion of Malraux's "Sketch," was added by Bazin in 1958.) Secondly, the essay's memorable opening deflects inquiry away from ontology to ontology's nemesis: "If the plastic arts were put un­ der psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out

to be a fundamental factor in their creation." Apparently, to understand "what cinema is," at least in the milieu of Sartre, one must understand not the ontology so much as the psychology at play behind the experixiv

Foreword to the 2004 Edition

ence of images, an experience that Malraux was just then demonstrat­ ing to be more cultural than personal. At one time-for instance in an­ cient Egypt-human beings evidently believed in the ontological identity of model and image. But few in our Western culture believe this anymore. Images today are thought to serve symbolic and aes­ thetic functions, not magical ones; they signify what is important to culture and they do so in styles that display values. Nevertheless, even sophisticated or decadent cultures have been fascinated by the possi­ bility of duplicating appearances and thereby preserving what natu­ rally decays in time. Hence Bazin's conclusion: "If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance or, if you will, of realism." The invention of photography in the nineteenth century constitutes the "most important event" in this history: a shift in the material, onto­ logical basis of images forced a reconiguration of aesthetics and psy­ chology in the ever-variable "balance between the symbolic and realism. " The tension between these terms, which traditionally mark the limits of the functions of images, exists both in photography and in painting but in diferent ratios. This tension also separates the two traditions that vie for dominance in Bazin's view of the evolution of the cinema, between those ilmmakers "who put their faith in the im­ age and those who put their faith in reality. " Bazin is often prematurely accused of being a proponent of a real­ ist style; but realism to him is not primarily a stylistic category. It is an automatic effect of photographic technology drawing on an irra­ tional psychological desire. As he points out, for a long time after the birth of photography, oil painting remained superior in producing like­ nesses. "A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model . . . but it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith . . . . Hence the charm of family albums. " The way an image comes into being, then, sways the way we take it in, so that in a psychological rather than a stylistic sense photography "satis­ ied our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the makxv

What is Cinema? ing of which man plays no part." Exactly what Bazin thinks about this "appetite for illusion" is debatable. The photograph recovers the fetish character that the image lost in Western culture years ago: by virtue of the impression of its unique pattern of reflected light on emulsion, the object photographed haunts the photo from which it is absent in both space and time. Bazin's mar­ velous litany of analogies flows easily from this intuition: the photo­ graph as fingerprint, as holy shroud, as death mask, as the veil of Veronica, and so forth. We accept and even venerate these leavings not because they look like the originals, but because they were produced by direct contact with the objects they call up. Bazin never returned to photography as a subject, but treated it as an essential string in the ge­ netic code of cinema, a medium which is "the achievement in time of photographic objectivity."ll That part of the genetic code contribute4 by photography to cinema's identity explains the virtual absence in Bazin's corpus of any discussion of animated cartoons, an image mode that shares cinema's exhibition technology but that-certainly in his day-was produced by the work of human hands in distinction to the automatic images of photography. 12 Animation constitutes a prime test case, for its recent lowering can be traced to the intersection of artistic imagination with computer algorithms. Animation serves cultural functions that are both tradi­ tional (the cartoonist imitates or distorts nature just as artists always have) and futuristic (rotoscoping and now digital processes replace photography or wildly manipulate it). In this, cinema's second century, the rise of animation might spell the fall of the photographic image. This is the claim of Regis Debray's Vie et mort de ['image, a grand synthesis that Bazin would have had to contend with were he at work today.13 Debray posits photography (including Bazin's theories about it) as the core of the modernist period ( 1820-1980), which followed the classical age during which oil painting held cultural power. Today the digital has lodged itself at the heart of postmodern im­ age culture. Inhuman, cold in their perfect technical reproducibility, digital images not only can ignore the artist, they can ignore all reality xvi

Foreword to the 2004 Edition beyond the monitor. Cinema may appear to have freed itself from the artist by serving as a decal of visible reality; but by the same token, digital video has freed the image from photography's dependence on a pre-existent reality. The video world appears now utterly self­ contained, auto-referential, and immediate. 14 We live with video in our living rooms and oices; the computer or V monitor has become a sorcerer's apprentice, a piece of furniture that takes up an immense share of our inner space and time, crowding out whatever "we" might have been. On the other hand, Bazin's lm spectators were led by the "little lashlight of the usher moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream [toward] the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen. " In the great volume of a dark theater the spectator gazes at and reflects upon images that relay a world that is both elsewhere and present in its visual trace. The videosphere has changed all that. No longer do we pass from the im­ age to its referent. No longer, for instance, do law courts readily accept photographic evidence, since digitization encourages the indefinite manipulation of the image, until its relation to the natural world is suspect or obliterated. Images in the videosphere have no need of a source. Eveything we see may be animation.

II. What might Bazin have said of this new step in the evolution of image culture? He would surely have addressed it as a step likely to demote cinema as the medium of our time. Would he have seen it as a regres­ sion to idolatry, as Debray does, one that makes the video image prized for itself and its instant effects rather than as a double of an ab­ sent world existing somewhere outside the theater? Bazin was primed to deal with such issues. His film theory begins as an anthropology of shifting image cultures, indebted as we have seen to the influential ideas of Malraux and parallel with the slightly earlier notions of Walter Benjamin concerning photography's relation to the arts. And xvii

What

is Cinema?

yet, unlike Debray, Malraux, Benjamin, McLuhan, and others who make long-range speculations about the media, Bazin refused to be­ lieve that shifts in technology automatically initiate shifts in the thought and behavior of a culture. In Bazin's view, technology afects culture only ater being itself triggered by something like the cultural will. His detractors in the seventies pronounced Bazin an "idealist," since he seemed to posit an independent life of the spirit, one that ef­ fects material changes, including the invention of technologies. And indeed he was interested in asking why cinema came to be invented only in the nineteenth century when so many of its principles were un­ derstood earlier. Bazin entertains the notion that culture must itself be cultivated by the arts in speciic ways until the taste for a technology (like photography) becomes overwhelming enough to promote and re­ ward inventive tinkerers. The historical research of Peter Galassi and Jacques Aumont on the pre-photographic realism in paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,15 not to mention the growing cultural history of the period emphasizing the expansion of popular taste in such things as visual toys and illustrated journalism, sustain Bazin's desire to complicate the formula of change. Bazin's idealism, then-if idealist he be-is paradoxically impure, for no ilm theorist, except perhaps Deleuze, has been more attentive to the historical, material peculiarities of the medium and its products. Both men had a penchant for taxonomy. Bazin could write "The Evo­ lution of the Language of Cinema" only when, like Darwin, he felt completely familiar with countless species, including dominant strains, freaks or oddities, and organisms that were dying out. For Bazin, ilms are suspended in a cinema culture deined by the rules and expecta­ tions of genres, so that each film can be identified by the types of reg­ ulations it serves or thwarts. In one of his most clever essays, "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," Bazin applied the characteristics he identiied in "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" to the mi­ nor genre of the children's ilm. In this case, the genre was not treated as an evolving organism but as a constant human impulse: people of all eras and cultures have entertained children with fabulous tales. Bazin xviii

Foreword to the 2004 Edition

reasoned that in the cinema certain laws-or, more precisely, certain limits-of montage promote or defeat the effect of "the marvelous "

aimed at by the genre. One cannot, for the sake of eloquence or con­ venience, cut into the space of the marvelous without turning it into standard cinematic spectacle. While watching a conjurer work, the spectator at a live magic show stares without blinking in an effort to note the moment when reality is tricked: were a ilmmaker to shoot the trick from multiple angles, editing it for the best view, who would be­ lieve in the magic? Films of magic and fairy tales are two sub genres of the marvelous where rules of editing derive from a relation between psychological and aesthetic factors. Rules governing other genres follow. Some, like -

restrictions of shot changes in slapstick comedy, seem relatively stable across time; others-for instance the prohibition against reconstructed events in newsreels-are less permanent. At certain times in lm his­ tory audiences were convinced by reconstructions, eith�r because they were g ullible or because reconstructions served an intermediate func­ tion between reportage and ictionalized history Today's docudramas, .

which show up on television within months of the sensational issues they represent, are a contemporary example of this mixed form. However, even were we to discover all the laws of cinema that govern its more timeless generic functions, we would scarcely have answered the driving question "What is cinema?" Moreover, we would have characterized cinema only insofar as it takes up cultural functions (fairy tales, physical comedy) that pre-existed it. W hen it comes to understanding what cinema has added to cultural history ,

,

Bazin is certain that only local l aws prevail and that, whatever cinema is, it evolves in contact with shifting cultural needs and situations. Cinema's stable photographic axiom, together with the few corollaries demanded by stable genres, interacts in myriad ways with history, and does so in an e volutionary manner. And so the bulk of Bazin's reviews and essays tacitly trace this in­ teraction. His "Evolution" accumulates evidence not from cinema as an abstract potential, but from the mu ltipl e species of ilms that have xix

What is Cinema?

lourished and survived. The thickest branch on this evolutionary tree has grown in the United States, from the proscenium fraiing of the earliest ilms and even of slapstick, to the narrative space pioneered by Grifith, to the invisible, psychologically motivated editing of the Clas­ sic Hollywood style. European alternatives pushed the silent ilm to a level of great graphic eloquence either through what Bazin termed de­ formation of "the plastics of the image," in the case of German ex­ pressionism, or through the muscular montage by which the Soviets ripped realistic images out of spatial and temporal continuity to de­ velop strings of metaphors and other igures that permit discursive complexity. The era in which he wrote, from the outset of the Second World War up to the New Wave, saw an important evolution away from what he described as the eicient representation of clever scenar­ ios and toward the carving of stories out of a deeper, thicker, more complex space. Using his intuitions about the variable ratio of space to script, Bazin traced the Darwinian struggle for survival of many species of lm, often isolating conflicting impulses in a single movie, such as M. Hulot's Holiday. 16 The richness of Bazin's conception of cinema stems from the in­ terpenetration of style and matter that he so ingeniously observed and more ingeniously described in the hundreds of ilms he treated. Be­ cause of the photographic axiom, cinema-more than the other arts­ adjusts itself to, and is altered by, the projects it is asked to take up. When the Second World War brought new material to represent, the cinema responded with an enlarged set of codes (particularly govern­ ing the documentary) and with new technologies of representation. When a trend developed after 1945 to adapt irst-person novels (ilm noir, La Symphonie pastoale [1946], Le Silence de la mer [1947], and of course Le Jounal d'un cure de campagne [1950]), sound and im­ age relations needed to be radically readjusted to deliver subjectivity, relection, and perception in subtle ways. Bazin became the leading theorist of these post-war developments, elaborating Alexandre As­ truc's famous 1948 plea for "la camera-stylo," that is, for an approach to cinema as supple as a writer's approach to his or her projects.17 xx

Foreword to the 2004 Edition Bazin's "Evolution of the Language of Cinema" concludes by sug­ gesting that the new realist impulse in cinema has made the ilmmaker the "equal of the novelist": the ability to carve stories out of complex space invites the spectator to view the world as inlected-but not ut­ terly dominated-by the consciousness of the artist. Space remains partly independent of the artist who delivers it to us. Hence we are permitted (and sometimes encouraged) to look beyond the artist's or­ ganization of things to the complexity of the world, to the "mystery" and "ambiguity" that outlast every view of it. Cinema reveals to the anxious and alert spectator a world alive with possibilities that ask for recognition and response. In cinema, aesthetic issues lead immediately to moral ones. The values Bazin found in the cinema-including the discovery of nature, the mystery of human expressions and motivations, and fresh approaches to tired arts-derived from a personal and Personalist phi­ losophy that sustained him throughout a life of relative deprivation and constant illness. These same values would bring down on him the scorn of his opponents, few of whom could impugn the man or his mission, but many of whom needed, in their eras, to argue for differ­ ent values and thus for a different cinema. This would be true at his own journal, Cahiers du Cinema, which repudiated him along with his friends and admirers, Truffaut and Rohmer, when the momentous events of May '68 politicized the critical landscape in Paris. Sometimes one can best measure the strength of a thinker by the vehemence of the attacks he or she is subject to Andre Bazin occa­ sioned such a stream of virulent responses after 1968 that his thought .

must have weighed heavily on those needing to throw off that weight so as to undertake a kind of thinking proper to their generation. His opponents, who grew in number in the post-New Wave era, worked in a culture dominated by television. In noisy journals, conferences, and classrooms, they competed with other ilm scholars hoping to have the kind of efect on cinema that Bazin had been able to claim with such apparent ease, in what was more clearly the age of cinema. W riting before the assimilation of "cinema studies" into the academy, writing xxi

What is Cinema?

without needing to display or defend his methodology; wntmg even before the era of the extended exegesis (his 1950 Orson Welles stands among the irst monographs on a director), Bazin was the champion of those who wanted cinema to break from th e stranglehold of conven­ tion. He proved to be a modest champion, but behind him rode the vainglorious knights of Cahiers du Cinema. As Serge Daney lamented jealously, "The generation of the New Wave was certainly lucky, for they really knew how to make enemies. "18 The post-1968 Marxists had to turn against the complacency and conidence of what was by now

not the new wave but a receding wave of critics, many of whom had become professional ilmmakers. Since Bazin had given his followers such conidence, Bazin had to be taken down. Of course not just anyone could be proclaimed champion of a cause. It required more than intelligence and an engaging style; more too than a passion for cinema; it required a speciic cultural back­ ground with an attendant agenda. This, as much as anything, his later critics targeted. Because it was tied to a dated discourse, Bazin's thought could be diminished by being exposed as determined; the con­ sequences of his beliefs could be circumscribed by the historical situa­ tion that engendered them. Bazin simply had to be removed as an impediment to the post-1968 political agenda at Cahiers du Cinema . .

.

at least until that agenda in turn fell out of favor and Bazin's name could be re-invoked, often reverentially. In any case, even during its Marxist period, those in charge at Cahiers maintained much of the Bazinian heritage. This is particularly

visible in the writings of Serge Daney, the most important igure ater Bazin to work at this most influential of ilm journals. Daney's criti­ cism ever urged the "morality of style." His many essays on television, written in the eighties at Liberation, take up the kind of thinking about images in video culture that Bazin had brought to such a level of so­ phistication for cinema. Most pertinently, Daney and Bazin share an instinct and an ability to track the crucial shifts of their respective im­ age cultures from within, by observing symptoms in the visual phe­ nomena they so obviously loved to write about. And then there is the xxii

Foreword

to

the 2004

Edition

matter of style. These men knew how to write so that the words them­ selves produce ideas hard as rocks, words that are dense enough, grave

enough (that is, with suicient gavity) not to loat off but to anchor a po in t of view, a way of thi nking a personality ... let us say it, an auteur. Dudley An d rew April 2004 ,

1. Gray signals the difficulty of translating Bazin in a note to the last line of "Umberto D" in Volume II, a line he nevertheless fails to properly bring across. A more accurate translator, however, might not have relayed the texture of Bazin's French so well. Occasionally Gray's limits run into the wall of fact, as when on p. 47, he has Bazin attribute Alexandre Astruc's Le Rideau Cramoisi to Albert Lamorrisse. This is Gray's gaff, not Bazin's.

2. Bazin

1997,

at

Work, edited by Bert Cardullo, came out from Routledge Press in

effectively doubling the number of pieces from Bazin's original that

are now available in English.

3. "Death Every Afternoon" has at last been translated, appearing in Ivone Margulies' Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press,

4.

2002).

Eric Rohmer, "Andre Bazin's 'Summa,''' in The Taste for Beauty (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,

1989).

5. Serge Daney, "Andre Bazin," Cine-Jounal vol I 1983-1986 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema,

6. Rohmer,

1998), 41.

103.

7. For a fuller discussion of Bazin's biography, see my Andre Bazin (New York: Oxford,

1978);

for a fuller summary of his positions, see my "Andre

Bazin's 'Evolution' " in Peter Lehman, Deining Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers Press,

1997)

where parts of this essay were irst formulated.

8. I recently discovered a single sheet of folded paper inside Bazin's per­ sonal copy of Sartre's L'[maginaire, on which he had typed several key points appearing in the "Ontology" essay.

9. Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes' a Chambre claire both seem indebted to the "Ontology" essay, virtually reproducing key

xxiii

What is Cinema? phrases, though neither cites it. Stanley Cavell's The World iewed main­ tains an explicit dialogue with Bazin.

10. Letter from Gaston Diehl to Sally Shafto, 8 June 1998. I am grateful to Shafto for sharing her thoughts about this correspondence.

II. This translation amends Gray's formulation on p. 14, "Cinema is objectiv­ ity in time." One needs constantly to return to the original. 12. In fact, on three occasions he wrote brief notes on cartoons. In an ingen­ ious book, a Lettre volante: quatre essais sur Ie cinema d'animation (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997) Herve Joubert-Laurencin theorizes animation in the wake of Bazin.

13. Regis Debray's ie et mort de l'image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 14. Dehray, 413.

15. Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photog­ raphy (New York: MOMA 1981). Jacques Aumont, " The Variable Eye," in Andrew, ed., The Image in Dispute: Painting and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1987).

16. Bazin, "M. Hulot et Ie temps" in Qu'est ce que Ie cinema? This ine essay remains untranslated.

17. Alexandre Astruc, " The Birth of a New Avant-garde, La Camera-Stylo," in Peter Graham, ed., The New Wave (New York: Doubleday, 1968).

18. Serge Daney, "Apres Tout" in La Politique des auteurs (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1999),5.

xxiv

INTRODUCTION By Hugh Gry

IT IS NEARLY ine years since Andre Bazin died, but the critical

insight that illuinates his writings has not rown dim with the years. It continues to shne forth n its very personal way, and the argu­ ments trough which he difused it ofer a brlliant example of a combination of the critical spirit and the spirit of synthesis, each

operating wih equal force. Bazin's thought, whle rooted n a ich cltural tradition, produces conclusions that at tmes are forcefuly expressed in terms drawn from contemporary scienc-an ambiva­ lence wich contributes markely to his style and as markedly to

the -problems of a translator. Scattered. among allusions drawn from literatre,

poetry,

philosophy,

cheistry, electricity, geology,

and religion are psychology,

analoies

and physics.

from

Indeed,

here are moments when one pictures Bazin as a poet in dungarees. Then again there are moments when one is aware of the teacher he was trained to be, was deied the opportunity to be (inside the classroom), yet has succeeded in being both in France and abroad. Those who, so to speak, had the good fortune to sit at his feet, tell s that what remans on paper is but a fragment of

is wondrous

discourse.

1

What Is Cinema? ndre Bazin was horn on April 18, 1918, at Angers. He received

his e arly schooing at La Rochelle, where he was taken at he age of ive .

Destined

for he t eaching prof es si o n, he en tered training col­

lege irst at La Rochelle and subsequently studied at Versailes.

hen, in 1938, he transferred to the �cole Normale Superieure at St.

Cloud. He comple ted is studies there with a brlli ant qualifying

examination but, because of a stammer, was eventually refused a t e a ch ing post. is in te ns e interest in ilms seems to date from his early days in

the army, to which he was called in 1939. Guy Leger, is then

comp ani on n arms, recounts that from the very outset Bazin tended to ce nt er his

nterest on sp eculative questions rel ating to s tudy of he true value of the

lm. "He was are ady attracted to th e

cinematoraphic image as well as to the historical and social aspecs of cinema. At th at time, when the world seemed to be going to

extremes in anoth e r direction, we tu rned to motion pictures as an escape f r o m the ' ph o ny war.''' What Guy Leger here says concer n­ ing their co mmon interest is a f oresh ado w n g of w hat was repeated c onstan tl y throughout th e years by everyone who knew and s hared his interest in t h e cinema. "What had been for me up t o then only a

p as ti me now began to appear, under the t utel age of Andre, a prod­ uct of h e age of th e image, something that needed to

s avor

study f

o ne was

its true lavor and under s tand its real signiicance; to make

ou t its t ue lanu age and to discover it s objective laws."

nother friend, the critic P. A. Touchard, said of him e arl y . in their acquaintance that he found Bazin deeply impressive not oly for his charm and his generos i ty of spirit but for his pro di ious c apacity for critical an a l ysis as well as for an intense p oet ic sensi­ blity . "No one," says T ou ch a rd, "had a g reat er command of words than this man who s tamm ered when h e spok e-and who had like­ wi se

a fantas tic appetite for t h e

consump tion of scientiic, philo­

sophical, and abstract terms. Yet he was in no sense a pe dant,

r em ai ni ng ever in c ommand o f th e app ropri ate use of all these t erms . "

2

Introduction Ding he war he was

a memb er of an organization-he

Mais on des Lettres-wich was founded to take care of young stud ents whose regular scholastic routine he war had disturbed .

here he founded a

cine-club

developed out of meetings at

which

wich he deied the Nazi forces of occupation and he Vichy gov­ en m ent by showin g lms they had banned for political reason s .

His p assi on for the cinema, we are told and can readly believe, was part of his passion for culture and truth, allied to a moral auhority

which gave him the

com mand

over others hat he exercised over

himself-not o l y th rou ghou t a l ong

inner

spiritual conlict but also

through o ut a lifel on g hero ic stu gle with the disease that was to

take hm of at the height of hi s intellectual powers . It has i ndeed been said hat he was s om e thing of a mystic, lth ough

one wold

rather inclne t o think of him nstead as a poet very much of is

capacity ch aracteristi c of best in others, wel described

time. lways too there was in him that great teachers to bring out what was

by

To uch ard as a "Socratic capacity to make those who talked t o

hm seem i ntelli gent to themselves ." Indeed one mi gh t call him he Aristotle of

the cinema

and his writing its

Poetics.

At the end of the occup ati o n he was ap poi nted lm citic of Le

Parisien Libere. hus began his fo m al life as a public citic nd

wih it the develop ment of a typ. of reviewing of ilm s the like of which h a d not up to hen existed. One of his s ingular achievements was to

be

able, without any concessions to popularzing, to make

his insihts understood on ll levels. It was s aid of him at the time that in ten years he would become the outstanding French lm citic.

It

took hm less ime than that. To us, his most commonly

known association is with Les Cahiers du Cinema which under hs direction became one of the world's mo st distinguished lm pub­ ications.

Meanwle his other ilm acivities mltiplied , among hem an

apponment as drector of cultral s evices

at he Instiut des

Hautes etudes Cinematoraphiques. He was thu s app ointed to a schol at last. At a ime when the word

ilmology,

now wel esta-

3

What Is Cinema? ished, did not e i s t, "by is own efots Bmn created," s ays Jen­ ouis Telenay, "a cnem atorap ic culture." Nor can one ade­ quately estimate he actul efect of h is work on he cinema itsef.

"ndre staggered me," Tellenay continues, " at tis tme by his nowledge of a subj ect which one day , ll unsusp ected by us, wold become

a

veritable dis cipline

to

be aditted into he hlls of

he Sorbone."

as

Tellenay is here referrin g to the Institute of Filmoloy,

it

cme to be known, the phlosophy of wich was irst set forth by Cohen-Seat in his Essai sur les principes d'une philosophie du

cinema ( 1 958 ) .

To hose who h old that the intelect, as represented

in

the

works

of Bazin, divides man from his fellows and separates him of from

who knew theoretician, this intel­

the world, one need oly ofer the verdict of a man

Bn ntimately-Alexandre Astruc. "his lectual,

this

i d e al ist , tis believer, was considerably closer to the

realities of lfe and to his fel low man than those who r ej e ct the approach to life of a Bazin." Fran; oi s Tffaut, whom he befriended

nd whom he helped "probably more han anyone else," found that even to be scolded by B azin was a del ight , " su ch a generate in

his

rare moments of in d i gn ation . When

never s aid, 'how wrong I was,' only 'how

right

h eat did he it was over, one

he i s ! how terriiC!' "

Robet Bresson, s u s u l igly perceptive, ponts out a marked characteristic of Bazin's method. "He had a cuious way of taking

of from what was false to arrive ultim atel y at what was true. " In a sense he was following in this, possibly quite deliberately, the old scholastic

method :

to . state the thesis and to follow the statement

with a deial before proceedin g to the proof. However

each essay i s vitualy a scientiic demonsration,

as

you

Eric Rohmer

points out n his assessment of the rst volume of Qu' est-ce

cinema? "These pages, each relatng to nevetheless pat of the now reveled to us. Nor

unfolding

of

n

see it,

individual

a meth odi cl plan

que Ie

case,

are

which is it was

is there the sightest doubt but that

so conceived fro m the beinng, rather than being the outcome of

4

Introduction

a series of aftehouhts. hile loic n is unfolding raher than cronology is his aim, it is strangely siniicant hat he volume opens with an article on The Ontology of the Photographic Image, which is one of his earliest p i e ces It is his scientiic aspect of is work that I would like to dwell on without underesimang he at of it," Rohmer says. E ach essay and ndeed the whole work itsef its perfectly into the patten of a mathematical demonsraion. Without any doubt, the whole body of Bazin's work is based on one central idea, an frmation of the objectivity of the cnema in the sme way as ll geometry is centered on the properties of a straight ne. Nor does he attempt to it his basic prnciples at ll costs into some ien system of aesthetics. They derive solely from is own thining The system folowed by critics before him was, usualy, to start with a denition of art and then to try nd see how lm itted into it. Bazin rejects ll the commoly accepted notions and pro­ poses a radicl change of perspective." Many ight expect that this "theoretician," i s "intelectul" would be among those who deplore the passing of the silent lm as the coming to an end of an t. Not so. For im, sound came not to destroy but to fulll he testament of cinema. This is a position hat follows direcly from his central theme of he objectivity of cinema and leads him to reject, at least by mplication, those who in the middle wenties were in search of pure cinemaor as Sadoul calls it, "the mth of pure cinema." Hence his preoccupation with adap­ tation as it relates both to theater and to the novel, nd indeed to the relation between cinema nd paintng. No one, to my knowledge, has chalenged Bazin's stature s a citic but some other critics have had their moments of disaree­ ment with him. Notable among these is Jean Mitry, another re­ spected iure in the relm of lm history and aesthetics, whose two­ volume study Esthetique et psychologie du cinema has recently appeared. lthough throughout this work he praises Bzn more oten than he condemns him, he does n fact chaleng--a nd by no means altogether unjustiably, it would seem to me-the central .

"

.

5

What Is Cinema? concept of Ban' s criticl structure, namely the objecive reity of he ic image, as wel s Bazin's arguments on deep-focus pho­ toraphy. he reader wll see how often this use of he camera is refered to, nd in how many contexts, from a discussion of he ms of Renoir to an examnation of he tue role of montage. In "The Evolution of the Lanuage of Cnema" Bain speaks of he im age as being evaluated not according to what it adds to

relity but what it reveals of it. Tis Mi try challenges, refusing to accept the argument that because the camera automaticlly reis­ ters a given " reality" it gives us an obj ective and imparti al image of that reality. What the camera reveals, Mitry argues, is not the reality in itsef but a new appearance correlated to the world of things-what indeed one may cal a camera-perception which, ir­ respective of the wll of the cameraman, produces a certain "sere­ gation of space," that is to say, a res tructuring of he real so that it can no longer be considered "objective and immediate." It is ikewise o n his theory of lm objectivity that Bazin bases his refusal to aree that the essence of theater resides, as Henri Gouhier puts it, in the physical presence of the actor, thus setting it apart from cinema in one very basic respect. As a corolary of this famed argument, Bazin holds that the cinematic image is more than a reproduction, rather is it a thing in nature, a mold or masque. It is n is are a hat I mysef ind hm diicult to follow. Here for once perhaps he goes beyond the realm of fact into the brlliantly created world of the "ben trovato." Of his exuberant enthusiasm for the cinema, however, no better expression is to be found than his description of the ilm b ro ught back from the Kon-Tii expedition. The style of it is quintessential B azin. But whle there is the ubiquitous paradox, for once no scien­ tiic terms are pressed into sevice. One feels so clearly in reading it the vivid presence of the raft, the "lotsam" against which he fauna of the Paciic rub shoulders, their actions recorded in a ilm "snatched from the tempest"-a photoraphic record not so much 6·

Introduction

of things but of the danger which the camera shared-a lm whose very faults are witness to its authenticity. If I were asked to name the most perfectly wrough t pi ece of

lm criticism that I have ev er read I wo ul d unhesitatin gly name the essay on the style of Robert Bresson. Furthermore, tr. i s e ssay con­

tains what for me is an uforgettable summing up of the adaptation of a novel

to the screen. Concerning the way Bresson handled

Jacques Ie fataliste, the novel from which Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was derived, Bazin writes : "The sound of a windshield

wiper against a p age of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Raciian dialogue." To this phrase I would apply the one B azin used to describe his own delight in the work of Charlie Chaplin. I n reading it one experiences "the delight of . . . recognizing perfection." Today at last, due in no smal part to ndre Bazin, the cinema is b eing widely recognized as a serious and important ield of study. Too m a n y for t o o long, notably in t h e United States , h ave prefered to think of it si m pl y as an avenue of e s ca pe par excellence from a high-pressure life, for which we are ever seeking-a new world, as it were, to live in. But such so-called p aths of escape, pleasant as they are to wander in, are in reality each but a cul-de-sac. The more we see the screen a s a mirror rather than an escape h atch , the more we will be prepared for what is to come. Automation, we are told, will wipe the sweat from the brow and straighten the back of an Adam hitherto condemned to labor. Then will come he ultimate confrontation that man has so long avoided on the grounds that he must irst live before he can philosophize. The cinema i s capable, in t h e right hands, of playing an increasingly import a nt role in this

confrontati o n . For he l p i n g us to understand how or why this can be

so, Andre B azin may rightly be acclaimed a true visionary and guide. Supremely he is one of the few who have genuinely h elped to answer the question irst asked by Canudo, Deluc, and the other pioneers of lm aesthetics and lmology-What is cnema?

hose of us who i n his footsteps are likewise concerned to an7

What Is Cinema?

swer this question and who must therefore reach out, as he did, beyond he screen to the realms of history, philosophy, literature, psycholoy, sociolo y in search of the answer, and in he process

add another dimension to the hmanities, are particularly in the debt of is preceptor.

nd now I have certan other debts to pay, irst of all to Ma­ dme Janne Bazin who n every negotiation concerned with his undertaing has been graciousness itself. In addition I wish to acknowledge that without the generous h elp of Jean Renoir, of whose geius Bzin was an ardent and outspoken admirer, and of my colleaues Drs. Madeleine Korol and Gabriel Bon n o I would n ot have been able to render many diiclt passages into Engish. I am grateful also to one of my students, Senor Markowiz of the Argen­ tne, who assisted me in comparing my Enlish with the Spaish translation. Finally, I am also deeply indebted to the special num­ ber of Cahiers du Cinema dedicated to Andre Bazin for the facts and impressions there re cord e d by is friends. ,

TH E O NTO LO GY O F TH E P H OTO G RA PH I C I MAG E

IF THE plastic ats w ere put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in heir creation. The process might reveal that at he origin of paint­ ng and sclpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued eistence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisied a basic psycholoical need in man, for death is but the victory of ti me To preserve, artiicilly, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the low of tme, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of deah by preseving lesh and bone. The rst Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned and petried in sodium. But py ram ids and lab inthine coridors ofered no cetain uarantee against lti­ mate pilage. Other forms of nsurance were therefore sought. So, near the sarcophagus, al ongside the corn th at was to feed the dead, he Egypti ans placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummies which might replace the bodies if these were de stroyed It is this religiou s use, hen, that lays bare the p rmo rial function of stau.

.

9

What Is Cinema? ary, nam ely , the presev a ti on of life by a representation of life. Another m afestation of the same kind of thing is the arrow­ pierced clay bear to b e found in prehis toric caves, a maic identity­ substitute for the living aimal, that will ensure a suc c essful hunt. The evolution, side by side, of art and civilzation has relieved the plastic arts of their maic role. Loui s XIV did not have h i msef embalmed. He was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun. Civilization cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It can only sublimate our concen with it to the level of rational thinking. No one b el ieves any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to p reserve him from a second spiritual death . To day the making of images no longer sh a res an an­ thropocentric, u titarian pupose. It is no longer a ques ti on of sur­ vival afte r death, but of a l arger concept, the cre atio n of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own te m p oral des tiny . "How vain a thing is painting" f underneath our fond admiration for its wo rks we do not discern man's primitive need to have the last word in the arument with death by means of the form that endres. If the hi s tory of the plasti c arts is less a matter of their aesthetic han of their psych ol ogy hen it wll be seen to be essen­ tiall y the story of resemblance, or, if you will , of realism. Seen in his s oci ol ogical perspective photography and cinema would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritu al and technical crisis that overtook modern painting around he middle of he last century. Andre Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beinnings of which were irst manifest at the Renaissance and which found its completest expression n baroque painting. It is true that painting, the world over, has stuck a varied balance between t he symbolic and realism. However, in the if­ teenh century Western painting began to tum from its age-old concern with spiritual realities expre s se d n th e form proper to it, 10

The Ontoloy of the Photographic Image towards an efort to combine this spiitul exp ression with as com­ plete an imitation as pos s ible of he outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the d iscovey of the irst scientiic and already, in a sense, mechaical s ystem of reproduction, na mely , p erspecti ve : the camera obscura of Da Vinci fore sh ad owe d the camera of N iepce . The artist was now in a posi­ tion to crea te the llusion of three-dimensional sp ace within which thi ngs appe ared to exist as our eyes i n re ality s ee t h em .

Thencefoth painting was torn between two ambitions : one, pi marily aes the tic, nam ely the express io n of spiritu l reality wh ere­ in the s ymbol transcended its model; the oth er, purel y psycholoi­ cal, n a m e l y the duplication of the world outside. The s atis f a c ti o n of tis appe ti te fo r ill usi o n merely seved to increase it tll, bit by bit, it con s u med th e pl as tic arts . How ever , s i n ce p e rsp e ctive had oly solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was

forced to continue the search for some w ay of iving dramatic e xp r e s sion to the moment, a i n d of p s y ch ic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobili ty of b aro que art. * The reat artists, of course, h av e always been able to combine the two tendencies. Th ey have allotted to each its pr oper pl ac e in the hierarchy of thi ngs , ho l d in g reali ty at th eir command and mo ld­ ing it at wll i n to the fabric of thei r art. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are faced wi th tw o essenti al l y di fere n t p h e nom en a and these any obj e ct iv e critic must v i ew s ep a r atel y f he is to un­ ders tan d the e v olu tion of the pi ctori al . The need for llu sion has no t ceased to trouble the heart of p ainting since the sixteenth century. It i s a p urely mental need , of itself nonaesthetic, the o rigi ns of wh ich must be sought in the procli vity of the mind towards magic. However, it is a need th e pull of w hi ch has been strong enouh to have seriously up s et the e quilibiu m of the pla s tic ats. " It wou l d be interesting from this point of view to study . in the illustrated magzines of 1 8 9--1 9 1 0, the rivalry between photographic reporting and the use of drawings. he latter, in pa rt icu l a r, satisied the baroque need for the dramatic. A feling for the photographic document developed only gradually.

11

What Is Cinema? he qurrel over realism in t s tems from a isundersandng,

psycholoicl; be­ tween true realism, he need that is to ive siiicant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception amed at fooling the eye ( or for that matter the ind ) ; a pseudorealism content n other words with llusory ap pearances * Th at is why medieval art never passed through this crisis; siml­ taneously vividly realistic and hihly spiritual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical develop­ ments. Perspective was the oigin al sin of Westen p ainting It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumiere. In achiev­ ing the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the p l asti c as from their obsession with ikeness. Painting was forced, as it tuned out, to ofer us illusion and this il lu si on was reckoned suicient unto t. Photoraphy and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries hat satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with reaism. No matter how s i llful the painter, his work was lways n fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intevened cast a sh adow of doubt over the image. Again, he essential factor in the tr ans ition from the baroque to p hotogr aphy is not the per­ fecting of a physical process ( photography will l on g remain the infeior of painting in the reproduction of color) ; rather does it lie n a psycholoical fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for llu sion by a mechanical reprodu ct ion in the maing of which man plays no pat. The solution is not to be fo und n he result achieved but n the way of achievng it. t from a cofusion between he aeshetic and the

.

.

* Perhaps the Communists, before hey attach too much impotance to ex­ pessionis t ealism, should stop talking about it n a way more suitable to the ighteenth entury, before there were such thngs as photography or cin­ e ma . Maybe it does not elly matter if Russin painting i s second·rate pro­ vided Russia ives us irst-rate cinema. Eisenstein is her Tintoretto. t There is rom, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the lesser p lastic arts, the mold i ng of death masks for example, which likewise involves a cetan automatic process. One ight cosider photography n his sen se s a molding, he taking of n imp e ssion , by the manipulation of l ight . 12

The Ontology of the Photographic Image his is why the colict between style and

ikeness

is a relatively

modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before he inven­ tion of the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating objectivity of Chardin is in n o sense that of the photorapher. he netee n th

century saw he real beiings of the cisis of realism of which Picasso is now he mhical central igure and which put to the test at one and the same time the conditions determining the formal existence of the plas tic arts and their socioloical roots . Freed from

he "resemblance c o mple x , " the modern panter abandons it to the masses who, henceforth, identfy resemblance on the one hand with photography and on the other wih the knd of p ai nting which is related to photograp h y .

Originality in p hoto g r aphy as distinct from oriinalit y in paint­

ing lies in the essen tially objective character of pho toraphy . [Bazin

here makes a poi nt of the fact that the lens, the basis of photogra­

phy, is in French called the " obj e ctif, " a nuance that is lost in

English .-TR. ] For the irst tme, between the o r i gi n a ti n g object

and its reproduction there inte r ve n es only the instrmentality of a no nl ivin g agent. For the irst time an i m a ge of the world is formed

automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The per­ sonality of the photographer enters into the proceedings oly in his selection of the obj e ct to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind . Alth ough the inal result may relect some­

thing of his personality, this does not play the same role as is pl ayed by th at of the painter . All the arts ar; based on the presence of m an,

oly p hotography derives an advantage from his absence .

Photography afects us like a pheno menon in nature, like a l ower

or a snowlake whose vegetable or eartly oriins · are an insep­

arable part of their b e a ut y .

his prod u ction by auto m atic means has radically afected our psychology of he image . The objective nature of photoraphy con­ fers on it a quality of credibiity absent from ll other picture­ maki ng. In s pi t e of any objections our critical spirit may ofe r , we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced ,

13

What Is Cinema?

actu al ly re-prese nt ed, set before us, that is to say, in time nd space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this trans fer ence of re ality from the thing to its reprodu ction. * A very fai fl drawng may actually tell us mo re about the model but despite the promptings of our critical nteligence it wil never have the irrationl power of he ph ot ograp h to bear aw ay our ­

faith.

Besides, p ainti ng is, afte r al, an ferior way of m aing ike­ an ersatz of the pro ce ss es of rep roductio n . Only a p h oto gr aph ic lens can ive us the ind of mage of the object hat is c apabl e of satisfyng he dee p need man has to substitute for it s om ething more th an a mere approxim ation , a ind of decal or transfer. The p h o togr a phic image is the obje ct itself, the obj ect freed from the condition s of time and space that govern it. No m a t ter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the i m a ge may be, it shares, by virtue of the very proc es s of its becoming, he being of the model of which it is the reproduction ; it is the model . Hence the cham of fam ily albums. Those rey or sepia shadows, phantolike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional famly portraits but r ather the dis turbi ng presence of lives h alted at a set mo me n t in their dura t i on, freed from their des tiny ; not, however, by he presti ge of at but by the power of an i m p a s s ive mechaical process : for photor aphy does not create eternity, a s art does, it embalms time, re s cuing it simply from its proper corup tion . Viewed in this pe rsp ective, the cnema is objectivity in time . The lm is no lo n ger content to preserve the o bj ect, enshrouded as it we re n an instant, as he bodies of insects are p res erv ed ntact, out of the distant past, in amber. The lm delivers b aroque t from nesses,

­

* Here one should really examne the psychology of relics and souvenis which likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality stemming from the "mummy-complex." Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud of Tuin combines the features alike of relic and photograph.

14

The Ontology of te Photographic Iage

its convulsive catal eps y . Now, for the irst time, the im age of tings is ikewise the image of their duraion, change mummied as it

were. Those categories of resemblance which determine the species

photographic image likewise, then, determne he ch a racter of its aes th eti c as distinct from that of painting. < The aesthetic q u alitie s of pho to r ap h y are to be s o ugh t in i ts

the realities. It is n ot for me to separate of, in the objecti ve world, here a rel ecti on on a damp sidewlk, there the ge s tur e of a chld. Oly the impassive lens, stripping its object of ll th os e ways of seeing it, th o s e piled-up preconceptions, that spiritu al dust and gime w i th which my eyes hav e covered it, is a bl e to present it in al l its virginal purity to my attention and cons equen tly to my love. By the power of pho­ tograp hy the n atu ral image of a world th a t we neither know nor can see, n a tu r e at last des m ore than imitate at : she im i t ates the

power to

lay

bare

complex fabric of the

,

artist.

P h o to grap h y can even surpass art in creative power. The aesth e tic world of he painter is of a diferent ind from that of t h e Its boundaries enclose

a substantialy and essen­ o bject in its ef share a common being, after the fashion of a inge rprint. W h e re fo re, p h o t ograph y actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of p r ovi d ing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inling of tis whe n they looked to the photoraphic p l ate to provi d e them with the ir monstrosities and for this reason : the surrealist does not consider his aeshetic purpose a nd the m ech anic l efect of the image on our i m agi natio n s as hings a p ar t. For him, the logical distinction between w h at is im­ ' ainary and what is real tends to d i sappear . Every image is to be

world about him.

ti al l y diferent microcosm. The p hotor ap h as such and the

.

• I ue the term categoy h e e in the sense a t t ached to it by M. Gou h i er in his book on the theater in which he distinuishes between the dramatic and the aesthetic categories. Just as dramatic tension has n o atistic value, the er­ fection of a reproduction is not to be ide nti ed with eauty. It constitutes ra ther he prime matter, so to se ak , on wich the artistic fact is recorded.

15

What Is Cinema? seen as an obj ect and every obj ect as an image. Hence photoraphy ranks high in he order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hllucination that is

also a fact. The fact that s u re list painting combnes tricks of

visual decep ti on with meticulous attention to detail substantiates

s.

So, photoraphy is clearly he most important event n the his­ tory of pl astic arts. Simultaneously a

liberation and

a fuillment,

it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession

with relism and allowed it to recover its aes the tic autonomy.

I m press ionis t re al ism,

ofe ring

science

as

an

opposite extreme from eye-deceivng tickey.

alibi,

is

at

the

Oly when form

ceases to have any imitative value can it be swalowed up in color. So, when form, n the person of cezane, once more regains pos­ session of he canvas there is no longer any question of the illusions of the ge om etr y of p ers p ect ive

.

The painting, being cofronted in

the mechanically produced image wih a competitor able to reach out b e yon d b aroque resemblance to the very identity of the model,

w as compeled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal's con­ denation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photoraph allows us on the one hand to admire

n reproduction something that

our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a hing in itself whose relation to sometng in nature has ceased to be the justiication for its existence. On the other hand, of course, cnema is also a language.

16

TH E MYTH O F TOTAL C I N E MA

PAADOXICALLY enough, the impression l eft on the reader b y Georges Sadoul's amirable book on the orii ns of th e cinema is of a rever s l, n sp ite of the author's Marist iews, of the relations beween an economic and techical evolution and the imaination of those carrying on the search. The way things happened seems to call for a reversal of the historical order of causality, wich goes from the econoic frastructure to the ideoloical superstucture, and for us to consider the b as i c technical di scover i es as fortunate accidents but essentialy second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors. Th e cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had o f it existed so to speak fully armed in their minds, as if in some pla t o ni c heaven, and what s t rik e s us most of all is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help ofered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers. Fuhermore, the cinema owes vi rtu ally no t h ing to the scientiic spirit . Its begetters are n no sense savants, except for Marey, but it is siiicant that he was oly interested in analyzing movement and not in reconstructing it. Even Edison is basicaly only a do-it­ yoursef man of genius, a iant of he concours Lepine. Niepce, Muybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny, even Louis Lumiere hmself, are ll monomaniacs, men driven by an impulse , do-it-yorsef men or

17

What Is Cinema?

at best inge n iou s industialists. As fo r the wonderful, the sublme E. R eyn aud , who can de ny that his animated drawngs are the result of an un r e m itti n g p ur suit of an idee ixe? ny accou nt of the cin­ ema th at was drawn merely fr o m the technical inventions that made i t possible w old be a poor one indeed. On the contray , an app ro xim ate and c o mp li c ate d isualization of an idea i nv ai abl y precedes the industrial d i s c ov ey which al o n e can open the way to its p racti cl use. Thus f it is evident to us today that the cnema even at its most elementary stage needed a trans parent , lexible, and resistant base and a d ry s en s i tive emulsion cap abl e of receiving a n i m a ge instantlyeveryting else b e i n g a matter of setting in order a m ech ai s m far less compl icated than an eighteenth-century clock-it is clear that all the deinitive stages of the inventi on of the cinema had been reached before the r equ i s i te conditions had been uiled . In 1 877 and 1 8 80, Muybridge, thanks to the ma g in ative ge nero sity of a horse-lover, m an a ged to construct a large complex device which enabled him to make from the im age of a gallop in g horse the irst series of cine m a tographic pictures. However to get this result he had to be satisied with wet collodion on a glass pl ate, th at is to s ay , with jus t one of the three necessary ele m ent s­ n amel y instantaneity, dry emulsion, lexible base. fter the dis­ covery of gelatino-bromide of s lv er but before the appearance on the market of the irst celluloid re els , Marey had made a genuine camera which used lass plates. Ev en after the appearance of celu­ loid strips Lu mi ere tried to use p ap er im. Once more let us consider here oly the nal and complete fom of the photographic cinema. The synthesis of si mpl e m ovements s tu died s cie ntiically b y Plateau had no need to wait upon the in­ dustrial and economic developments of the ineteenth century. As Sadoul c o rre ctl y p oi nts out, nohng had stood in the way, from a nti qu i ty , of the m anu fac tu r e of a ph en akistos cope or a zootrope. It is ue hat here the labors of that genin e savant Plateau were at the oriin of the many inve n tio ns that made the popul ar use of his discovery p os sibl e . But whle, with the photorapic cnema, we 18

The Myth of Total Cinema have cause for some astoishment that the discovey som eh ow pre­ cedes he techicl conditions necessary to its existence, we mus t here explain, on the other hand, h ow it was that the invention took so long to emerge, since ll the prerequisites had bee n assembled

nd the persistence of the image on the retin a had been known for

a long time. It ight be of so m e us e to poi nt out that although the

two were not nece s sa rily conected scientiically, the

eforts

of Pla­

teau are p retty well c ontemporary with those of N i cephore Niepce, as f he atten tion of res ear ch ers had waited to concen it sef with

synhesizi ng movement untl ch em is try quite independ ently of op­ tics had become concerned, on its p art, with the auto matic ing of the image. * I emphasize the fact that this historical coincidence c a n app ar­ enly in no way be explained on gr o und s of scientiic, economic, or ndustrial evolution. The photographic ci ne ma could j us t as wel have gr fte d itself onto a phenaistoscope fore see n as long ago as the sixteenth century. The delay in he i nven tion of the latter is as disturbng a phenomenon as the existence of the precursors of the

former. But if we examine their work more closely , the

direction of t he ir

research is m anfest in th e instruments themselves, and, even more ndeiab l y , n heir wri ti ngs and commentaries we see that these precursors were indeed m o re like prophets . Hurrying p as t the vari* The frescoes or bas-eliefs of Egypt indicate a desire to nalyze rather than to snthesize .movement. As for the automatons of the eigh teenth century their relation to cinema is like the relation of painting to photography. What­ ever the tuth of the matter and even if he automatons from the time of Descartes and Pascal on foreshadowed the machines of the nneteenth cen­ tury, it is no diferent from the way that trompe-l'oeil in painting a ttested to a chronic taste for likeness. But the technique of trompe-l'oeil did nothing to ad­ vnce optics and the chemistry of photography; it conined itself, if I can use the expression, to "playing the monkey" to them by anticipation. Besides, j ust as the word indicates, the aesthetic of trompe-l'oeil in the eighteenth century resided more in illusion than n realism, that is to say, in a lie rather thn the tuth. A statue painted on a wall should look as if it were standing on a pedestal in spae. To some extent, this is what the e arly cinema ws aming at, but his operation of cheating quickly gave w ay to n onto­ genetic realis.

19

What

Is

Cinema?

ous stopping places, should

have halted

he very

irst of which materially speaking

them, it was at the very height and summit

that most of them were amng. In their magnations they he cinema as a total and complete

representation of real i ty ;

saw they

s aw in a tice the reconstuction of a pefect llusion of the outside world n sound , color, and relief. As for the latter, the ilm i sto rian P. Potoniee has even felt justiied in maintaining that it was not the discovery of photora­ phy but of stereoscopy, which came onto the market just slightly before the irst attempts at animated photoraphy in 1 8 5 1 , that opened the eyes of the researchers. Seeing people immobile in space, he photoraphers realized that what they needed was movement if their photographs were to become a p ic tu re of life and a faifl copy of nature. In any case, th ere was not a single inventor who did not try to combne sound and reief with anima­ tion of the image-whether it be Edison with his knetoscope made to be attached to a phonoraph, or Demenay and his talking por­ traits, or even Nadar who shortly before producing the rst photo­ graphic nterview, on Chevreul, had written, "My dream is to see the photoraph register the bodily movements and the facial ex­ pressions of a speaker whle the phonograph is recording his speech" ( February, 1 8 87 ) . If color had not yet appeared it was because the irst experiments with the three-color pr o ces s were slower in coming. But E. Reynaud had been p a i nting his little igurines for some tme and the rst ms of Melies are colored by stencilling. There are numberless writings, all of them more or less wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than a total cinema hat is to provide that complete illusion of life which is still a long way away. Many are familiar with that passage from L';ve Future n which Vlliers de l'Isle-Adam, two years before Edison had beun his researches on imated photography, puts into he inventor's mouth he folowing description of a fantastic achievement :

"

. . the vision, its transparent lesh

ph o togr ap h ed

n

color and wearing a spanled

2l

miraculously

costme,

danced a

The Myth of Total Cinema

ind of popular Meican dance. Her movements had the low of lfe itself, thanks to the - process of successive photoraphy which can retan sx inutes of movement on microscopic glass, wich is sub­ sequently relected by means of a poweful lampascope. Suddely was heard a lat and unnatural voice, dul-sounding and harsh. The dancer was sngng the alza and the ole that went with her fandan­ go. "

The guiding mth, then, inspng he invention of cnema, is the accomplishment of hat wich doinated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the neteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world n its own image, an mage unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema n its cradle lacked al the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to. If the oriins of an art reveal something of its nature, hen one may leitimately consider the slent and the sound m as stages of a technical development th at little by little made a relity out of he oiinal "myth." It is understandable from this point of view that it would be absurd to take the slent lm as a state of pimal perfec­ tion which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color. The primacy of the image is both histoically and technicaly accidental. The nostalia that some stll feel for the silent screen does not go far enough back into he cldhood of the seventh art. The real primitives of the cinema, existig only in he mainations of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete itation of nature. Every new development added to he cinema must, para­ doically, take it nearer and nearer to is orins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented! It would be a reversal then of the concrete order of causaity, at least psycholoically, o place he scientic iscoveries or he indus­ il techniques hat have loomd so large in its development at he 21

What Is Cinema?

source of th e cinema's invention. h o se who had the least coni­ in the future of the ci ne m a were pr ecisely the two i ndus tial­ ists Edison nd Lumiere. Edison was satisied with just h is kneto­ scope and f Lumiere judiciously refused to sell his patent to Meies it w a s undoubtedly because he hoped to make a large proit out of it for himself, b u t oly as a p lay t h ing of w h ich the pubic would soon tire. As for the real savants such as Marey, they were oly of indirect a s si s tanc e to the cinema. They had a sp eci ic purpose in nd and were s atis i e d when they had accomplished it. The fa n a ti cs , the madmen, th e disinterested pioneers, capable, as was Berard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a few seconds of sh aky images, are n e ith e r industrialists nor savants, just men obs essed by th eir own i m agii ngs . The cinema was born from th e convering of these various obsessions, that is to say, out of a myth, the mth of total ci nem a . This likewise adequately exp l ai ns the d el ay of Plateau n applying the o p tic al principle of the pers is tence of the mage on he r eti na, as also the continuous p rogress of the s ynth e s es of mo ve­ ment a s c omp ared with the s t ate of p h oto raphic techniques. The fact i s hat each alike was dominated by the i m aination of the century. Undo ubte dl y there are other ex am pl e s in the his tory of te ciques and inventions of the conve rgence of res e arch , but one must distinuish between those which come as a result p recisel y of scientiic evolutio n and industial or mlitary requirements and tho s e which quite cle arl y prece de them. Thus, the myth of I ca us had to wait on the intenal combustion enine b efo re descending from the platoic heavens. But it had dwelt n th e soul of everyman snce he rst tho ught about birds. To some extent, one could say the sme hing about the mh of ci nema , but its for eru nners prior to he ineteenth century have oly a remote conecti on with the myh which we share today and which h as p ro mpte d the apper­ nce of the mech anicl arts that characterize today's wo rld . dence

22

TH E EVO LUTI O N O F TH E LA N G UAG E O F C I N E M A

the slent lm h ad reached its artistic peak. The de sp a r of i ts eite as th e y witnessed the d i s m anti ng of this ideal city, whle it may not have been justiied, is at least understandable. As they folowed heir chosen aesthetic pah it seemed to them that the cinema had devel oped into an t most perfectly ac commodate d to the "exquisite embarrassment" of silence and that the realism that B Y 1928

sound would bring could only mean a surrender to chaos . In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to d es troy but to fulll the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created b y the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution. In other words, did th e years from 1 92 8 to 1 9 3 0 actually witness the b i rth of a new cinema? Ce r tnl y, as re gard s ed iting, history does not actu lly show as wid e a breach as m ight be expected between the slent and the sound lm. On the contrary there is discernible evidence of a clo s e relations h ip between certain directors of 1 925 and 1 9 3 5 and especi ally of the 1 940's through the 1 95 0's . Compare for example Erich von Stroheim and Jean Renoir or Orson Weles, or again Carl Theodore Dreye r and Robert Bresson. These more or less clear-cut aities demonstrate irst of ll llat the gap separating he 1 920's 23

What Is Cinema? and he 1 9 3 0's can be bridged, and secondly that certain cnematic vlues actu lly cary over from he slent to he sound m and ,

above ll, hat it is less a matter of setting silence over against

sound han of contrasting certan falies of styles, cetain basicaly diferent concepts of cnematographic expression

.

Aware as I am that the lmitations mposed on his s udy restict

me to a simpiied and to that extent efeebled presentation of my arument, and holding it to be less an obj ective statement than a working h ypoth esis , I will disti nuish , n the cinema beween 1 920 and 1 940, beween two broad and opposing trends : hose directors who put ther faith n he mage and those who put their faith n

reality. By "image" I here mean, very broadly sp eakng, everythng

that the representation on the screen adds to the object there repre­

sented. This is a complex heritnce but it can be reduced essen­ tially to two categories : those that relate to th e plasti c s of the image and those that relate to he resources of montage, which, after al, is simply the ordering of images in time. Under he heading "plastics" must be included the style of he sets, of the make-up, and, up to a point, even of the perfomance, to which we naturaly add he lighting and, inaly, the framing of the

shot which ives us its composition. As regards montage, deived iitially as we ll know from he masterpieces o f Griith, we have

the statement of Malraux n his Psychologie du cinema that it was

montage that gave birth to lm as an art, setting it apart from mere animated p h otograph y , in short, creating a language. he use of montage can be "nvisible" and tis was generlly he case in the prewar classics of the American screen. Scenes were broken down just for one purp ose, namely, to analyze n episode according to the material or dramaic loic of he s c ene It s s .

loic which conceals the fact of the nalysis, the mnd of he sp ec­

tator quite naturally acceptng he viewpoints of the drector which are justiied by the georaphy of the action or he siftng emphasis

of dramatic interest. But the neutral quality of tis "invisible" editng fls to make use of th e full potential of montage. On he oher hand these p oten24

The Evolution of the Language 0/ Cinema tialities known

are

as

clearly

traction . In cre ati ng

ing

evident

from

the

three

processes

generally

parallel montage, accelerated montage, montage by at­

a sense

of the

p arallel montage, Griith s uc c ee d e d s i mul tan e it y of two actions ta i n g

in convey­ place at a

geographical distance by means of alternating shots from each. In L a ROlle Abel Gance created the illusion o f the steadily increa sing speed of a locomotive without ac t u ally u s i ng an y im a ge s of speed

(indeed the wheel could h ave been tur in g on one spot) simply by multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing length. F i n al ly there · is " mon t a ge by attraction," the creation of S. M. Eisenstein, a n d n o t so easily described as the others, but which may be roughly deined as the ree nf o r c i n g of the meaing of one image by association with another im age not necessarily pat of the same episode-for e x a mp l e the ireworks dis pl ay in The General Line following the image of the bull . In this extreme form, montage by att r a c ti on was rarely used even by its creator but one may c ons i d er a

as very near to it in principle the more commoly used ellipsis,

which are the throwing of the mlk o v erl o w i n g in H. G. Clouzot's Quai des or/evres. There are of course a v ari e ty of possible combinations of these three processes. Whatever these may be, one can say that they sh are that trait in common which cons t i tu t es the very deinition of montage, namely, the creation of a sense or meaning not o bj e c ti v e l y contained in the images themselves but derived exclusively fro m their juxta p osition. The well-known experiment of Kuleshov with the shot of Mozhu­ ex am p l es at the foot of

comparison, or metaphor,

of

stockings onto a chair

a bed, or

khin in which a smile was seen to change its signiicance according to the image that

p re cede d it,

sums

up p erfectly

the

p roperties

of

montage.

by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not show to it. U n d o ub t ed ly they deived at least the greater part of the constituent e l eme n ts from the reality they were de­ scribing but the inal sig nii c ance of th e ilm was found to reside in the ordeing of these elements mu c h more than in their obj ec ti v e content. The substance of the narrative, whatever the realism of the in d ivi d u al Montage as used

us the event ; it alluded

25

What Is Cinema? image, is born essentialy from these relationships-Mozhukhn plus dead child equal pity-hat is to say an abstract reslt, none of the concrete elements of which are to be found in the preises ;

mai dens plus appletrees in bloom equal

h op e The .

combinations

are

inite. But the oly thing they have in common is the fact that hey s ugges t

idea

an

by

means

of ideas. Thus between the

of a metaphor or by an association scenario properly so-called, the ultimate

object of the recital, and the image pure and simple, there is a relay

s t ati o n , a sort of aesthetic "transformer."

The

m e ai ng is not in

the

image, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto the ield of consciousness of

the spectator. Let us sum up. Through the content s of the image and the re s ources of montage, the cinema has at i ts disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to im po se its nterpretation of an event on the spectator. By the end of the silent m we can consider this arsenal to h ave been full. On the one side the Soviet cinema carried to its ltimate consequences the theo ry and p ra c tice of montage while the German school did every ind of violence to he plastics of he image by way of sets and lighting. Other cinemas count too besides the Russian and German, but whether in France or Sweden or the United States, it does not appear that the lanuage of cinema was at a loss for ways

of saying what it wanted to

say.

If the art of cinema consists in everyting that plastics and montage can add to a iven reality, the silent lm was an t on is own. Sound could oly play at best a subordinate and supplemen­ tary role :

a counterpoint to the visual image. But this possible

enhancement-at best only a inor one-is likely not to weigh much in comparison with the additional bargain-rate reaity intro­ duced

at the

s ame time by sound.

Thus far we have put forward the view that expressioism of montage and image constitute the essence precisely on tis generally accepted notion days,

such as

26

And

it

is

from slent

F. W. Murnau, and Robet impication cast a doubt. In their lms, montage

Erich von Stroheim,

Flaherty, have by

of cinema. that directors

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema pl ays no part, unless it be the negative one of inevitable elimination

where reality superabounds . Th e camera cannot see everythi n g at once but it m akes sure not to lose any

p art

of what it chooses to see.

What m atters to Flaherty, confronted with N ano ok hunting the

seal, i s the relation b etw een Nanook and the a ni m al ; the actual

length of the waiting period. Montage could suggest the time in­ volved . Flaherty however conines himself to showing the actual w aiting period ; the lenth of the hunt is the very substance of the

image, its true object. Thus in the ilm this epis od e requires one set­

up. Will anyone deny that it is thereby much more movng than a montage by attraction? Murnau is interested not so much in time dram ati c space.

Montage

plays no

more

as

in the reality of

of a decisive

part

in

Nosferatu than in Sunrise. One might be inclned to think that the plastics of his image are expressionistic. But this would be a super­ icial view. The composition of his image is in no sense pictorial. It adds n o th ing

to

the reality, it does not deform it, it forces it to

reveal its structural depth , to bring out the preexisti ng relations wh ich become constitutive of the drama. For example, in Tabu, the arrival of a ship from left screen

ives

sense of des­ any way on he

an immediate

tiny at work so that Murnau has no need to cheat in

uncomproising realism of a lm whose setti ngs are completely naturl.

But it is most of all Stroheim who rej e ct s

p ho t ographi c

ex­

pressioism and the tricks of montage. In his lms reality lays i tself bare like a suspect confessin g under he relentless examination of the commissioner of police. He Take a close

look

has one sim p le

rule for direction .

a t the world, keep o n doing s o , a n d n t h e end it

wil lay bare for you al its cruelty and its uglines s

imagine

as a

matter of fact a

lm

.

One could e a s i ly

by Strohem co m po s e d of a single

-

shot as lo n g lasti n g and as close-up as you like. These three lirec­ tors do not exhaust the possibilities. We would u n doubte d ly ind

scattered among the works of others elem ents of nonexp ressionistic cinema in which montage plays no parteven including G ri ith .

27

What Is Cinema? But hese examples suice to reveal, at the very heart of the silent lm,

a cinematoraphic at he very opposite of that which has

been identiied as "cinema par excellence," a lanuage he semantic and syntactical unit of which is n no sense the Shot; n which the

image is evaluated not according to wh at it a dds

to

reaity but what

it reveals of it. In the latter art the slence of the screen was a

drawback, that is to say, it deprived reality

of

one of its elements.

Greed, like Dreyer's Jeanne d'A rc, is already virtualy a talking lm. The

mo ment

th at you cease to maintan that montage and the

plastic composition

of

the im age are the very essence of the lan­

uage of cinema, sound is no longer the aesthetic crevasse dividng two radically diferent aspects of the seventh art. The cinema that is believed to have died of the s oundtrack is in no sense "the cinema."

The real dividing line is elsewhere . It was operative in the past and continues to be through thirty-ive years of the history of the lan­

guage of the ilm. Having challenged he aeshetic nity of the silent lm and divided it of into two opposing tendencies, now let us take a look at the history of the last twenty years .

From 1 9 3 0 to 1 940 there seems to have grown up in the world,

originating largely in the United States, a common form of cine­ matic la n gu a ge It was the triumph in Hollwood, during that time, .

of ive or six m ajor kinds of lm that gave it its overwhelming

( 1 ) American comedy ( Mr. Smith Goes to Washing­ ton , 1 9 3 6 ) ; ( 2 ) The burlesque lm ( The Marx Brothers ) ; ( 3 ) The

superiori ty :

dance and vaudevlle ilm ( Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the Ziegield Follies ) ; ( 4 ) The crime and gangster lm ( Scarface, I A m a

Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Informer ) ; ( 5 ) Psychological

and social dramas ( Back Street, Jezebel ) ; (6 ) Horror or fantasy ilms (Dr. Jekyll and

Mr.

Hyde

,

The Invisible Man, Frankenstein ) ;

( 7 ) he western ( Stagecoach, 1 9 3 9 ) . During that time the French

cinema

undoubtedly

ranked

next.

Its

superiority was

radualy

mafested by way of a trend towards what might be rouhly

28

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

call ed stark somber realism, or poetic realism, in which four n ames s t an d o u t : J a cqu es F e yd e r , Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, a n d Julien Duvivier. My i ntenti on not being to draw up a l i s t of pize-winners, is little use

there Itlian th a t

ilms for

in dweling on the Soviet, B iti sh , German, or

which t h e s e years were . l e s s signiicant than the ten

were to folow. In a n y case, American an d French production suiciently clearly indi c a te that th e sound ilm , p ri or to World War II, h a d reached a well-balanced stage of m a tu ri ty First as to content. Major varieties with cl e a rl y deined rules capable of pl eas in g a worldwide pu bl ic , a s w el l as a cultured elite, p ro vi d ed it was not i nh e r e n tl y hostile to the cinema. S ec on d l y a s t o form : w ell de i n e d s t yl e s o f photography and edi tin g perfectly a d ap te d to their s ubject matter ; a com pl e te har­ mony of mage an d sound. In s e ei n g a g ai n tod ay such il m s as Jezebel by William Wyler, Stagecoach by J ohn Ford, or Le Jour se [e v e by Marc el Carne, one has the feeling th a t i n them an art has fo u n d its perfect b al a n ce , its ideal form of ex pre ssi o n , and r ec ip r o­ c all y one admires them for dram atic and moral theme s to which the cinema, while it m a y not have created them, has gi v e n a gr an d eu r , an a r ti s tic efectiveness, that the y would not otherwise have had. In sh ort here are all the characteristics of the rip enes s of a classical .

-

,

art. quite aware that one can justiiably argue that the original­ ity of the postwar cinema as c o mp ar e d with that of 1 9 3 8 d e ri v e s from the growth of c e r t a in national schools, in p articular the daz­ zl in g d i spl ay of the Italian c i ne m a and of a native Engl is h ci nema freed from the inluence of Hollwood. From this one m i gh t con­ clude th at th e re aly important phenomenon of the years 1 9401 95 0 i s the i ntr o d ucti o n of new blood, of hitherto un ex pl o r e d themes. That is to s ay, the real r ev o l u t i o n took place more on the level of subject matter than of s tyl e Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanis m and only secondaril y a style of Ilm-making? Then as to the s t yle itself, is it not es s e nt i a ll y a form of sef­ efacement b efo re reality? I am

.

29

What s Cinema? Our ntention is certaily not to preach he glory of form over

content. Art for at s sake is just as hereical in cnema as elsewhere, probably more so. On he other hand, a new subject mater de­ mands new form, and as good a way as any towards un derstanding what a lm is trying to say to us is to now how it is sayng it. Thus by 1 93 8 or 1 939 the talng lm, paricularly n France an d in the United States, had reached a level of classical pefection as a reslt, on the one hand, of the maturing of dfferent kinds of drama developed in part over the past ten years and in p art inherited from he s l en t �. and, on he other, of the stabilization of techical progress. The 1 930's were he years, at once, of sound and of pan­ chromatic m . Undoubtedly studio equipment had continued to improve but only in matters of detail, none of them opening up new, radical possiblities for direction. The oly ch anges in tis situation snce 1 940 have been in photography, thanks to he in­ creased sensitivity of the lm stock. Panchromatic stock tuned isual vlues upside down, ultrasensitive emulsions have made a modiication in their stucture pos s ible. Free to shoot in the studio wi th a much smaller aperture. the operator could, when necessary. eliinate the soft-focus background once considered essential. Stll there are a number of examples of the prior use of d e ep focus, for example in the work of J e a n Renoir. his had always been possible on exteriors, and iven a measure of sil, even n the studios. Anyone cold do it who really wanted to. So that it is less a ques­ tion basically of a technical problem, the solution of which has admittedly been made easier, than of a search after a style-a point to which we will come back. In short, with panchromatic stock n common use, with an understanding of he potentials of the micro­ phone, and with the crane as standard studio equipment, one can really say that since 1 9 3 0 ll the techical requirements for he t of cinema have been available. Since the determining technical factors were practically elimi­ nated, w e must look elsewhere for the signs and principles of the evolution of lm lanuage, that is to say by chalenging the subject matter and as a consequence the styles necessary for its expression. '

o

30

The Evolution of the Language of

Cinema

B y 1 93 9

the cinem a had arrived at what geo r aphers call he of a river. By th is is me ant that ideal mathe­ matical cuve which results fro m th e requi site a m ount of er os i on . Having reached this equilibrium-prole, the rive r lows efortlessly from i ts source to its mouth without further deepening of its bed. But if any ge ol og i c al movement occurs which raises the erosion level and modiies the height of the source, the water sets to work agan, seeps into the surrounding la n d , goes d eeper , burrowing and digi ng . Sometimes when it is a chal k bed, a new p atte rn is dug across the plan, almost nvisible but found to be c o mplex and wnd­ ng, f one foll ow s the low of the water. equilibrium-proile

The Evolution of Editing since the A dvent of Sound In 1 9 3 8 there was an almost universal standard pattern of editing. If, somewhat conventionally, we c all the ind of silent ilms based on the pl astics of the i ma ge and the artiices of montage, "ex­ pressionist" or "symbolistic, " we can describe t he new form of s t or y­ teling " anal y tic" and " d r a m a tic . " Let us suppose, by way of review­ in g one of the elements of the experiment of Kuleshov, that we have a table covered with food an d a h u nry tramp. One can magine that in 1 9 3 6 it w o uld have been edited a s folows : ( 1 ) Fll sh o t of the actor a nd the t able . ( 2 ) C am er a moves forward into a close-up of a face e x pre s s ing a m ixtu re of a m azeme nt and lon gin g . ( 3 ) Series of clos e-u ps of food. ( 4) Back to full shot of person who starts slowly tow ard s the camera. ( 5 ) Camera pulls s lowly back to a three-quarter shot of the actor seizing a chicken wng. hatever v ari ants one could think of for this sc ene , they would all h ave certain points in common : ( 1 ) The veisilitude of space n which he posiion of the 31

What Is Cinema?

actor is always determined, even when a close-up elinates the decor. ( 2 ) The pupose and the efects of the cutting are exclusively dramaic or psychological. In other word s, if the scene were played on a stage and seen from a seat ia he orchestra, it would have the same meaning, the e pisode would continue to exist objectively. The changes of point of view provided by the camera wold add nothing. They would present the reality a little more forcefully, irst by alowing a better view and then by pu tting the emphasis where it belongs. I t is true that the stage director like the lm director has at his disposal a margin within which he is free to vary the intepretation of the action but it is only a margin and allows for no modiication of he inner loic of the event. Now, by way of contrast, let us take the montage of the stone lions in The End of St. Petersburg. By sillful juxtaposition a group of sculptured lions are made to look like a single lion getting t o its feet, a symbol of the aroused masses. This clever device would be unthinkable in any ilm after 1 9 3 2 . As late as 1 9 3 5 Fritz Lang, in Fury, followed a series of shots o f women scandalmongering with shots of clucking chickens in a farm­ yard. This relic of associative montage came as a shock even at he time, and today seems entirely out of keeping with the rest of the ilm. However decisive the art of Marcel Carne, for example, in our estimate of the respective values of Quai des Brumes or of Le Jour se {eve his editing rema ins on the level of the reality he is analyzing. There is only one proper way of looking at it. That is why we are witnessing he almost complete disappearance of opti­ cal efects such as superimpositions, and even, especially in the United States, of the close-up, the too violent impact of which would make the audience conscious of the cutting. In the typical American comedy the director returns as often as he can to a shot of the characters from the knees up, which is said to be best suited to catch the spontaneous attention of the viewer-the natural point of balance of his mental adjustment.

32

The Evolution of the Language

of

Cinema

use of m ont a ge ori gi nated with the silent mov i es . or less th e p art it plays in Griith's lms, for ex ample in Broken Blossoms, bec au se with Intolerance he h a d al re ady intro­ d u c e d that synthetic c o nc e pt of montage which the Soviet cinema was to carry t o its ultim ate conclusion and w h i c h is to be found again, al t h o ugh less exclusively, at the end of th e slent era. It is understandable, as a matter of fact, th a t the s o un d i m ag e , far less lexible than the v i s u al im a ge , would carry montage in the direction of realism, in c reasi n gly el i m i n a ting b o th pl a stic expr e ss i on ism a n d th e s y mb ol ic rel ation betwe en im a ges. Thus around 1 93 8 l m s were edited, a lm os t without exception, according to the sa m e p rin ci p l e . The story was unfolded in a s e rie s of set-ups n um b er i n g as a rule abou t 600. Th e characteristic proce­ d u r e was by shot-reverse-shot, that is t o say, in a d ial o gue scene, the c a me r a followed the o r d er of t h e text, alternating the c h ar ac te r shown with each s p ee ch . It w a s thi s fashion of ed i ti n g , so admirably s uita bl e for t h e best lms made between 1 9 3 0 and 1 9 39, that was challe n ge d by the shot in d ep th introduced by Orson Welles and William Wyler. The in l uence of Citizen Kane c an n o t be overes ti mated . Thanks to the depth of ield, . Actualy th i s

This is more

whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining mo­ ti onle s s .

Dram atic efects

fo r

which we h a d f ormerl y relied

on

mon t age were crea t e d out of the movements of the actors w i th i n

a

fr am ewo r k . Of co u r s e Welles did not invent the in-depth shot more th an Griith i nv ent e d the close-up. ll the pioneers us e d it and for a very g o od reason. Soft focus oly a pp eare d with montage . It was not oly a technical must consequent upon the us e of i m ages in juxtaposition, i t was a l ogi cal consequence of m ontage , its p l a s tic equivalent. If at a g iv e n moment in th e action the direc­ tor, as in the s cen e i m a gi ned above, goes to a cl o s e - up of a bowl of ixed

any

fruit, it follows naturally that he also isolates it in space th rough the f oc u s i n g of the l e n s . The soft focus of the background conirms

is of oly an accessory of the s tyle of

therefore the efect of montage, that is t o say, while it

the

essenc e of

the

the storyteling, it is

33

What

Is

Cinema?

photography. Jeau Renor had already c le arl y understood this, as we see from a

s t a tem ent of his made in 1 9 3 8 j us t after he had made La Bete zumaine and La Gra n de illusion a n d just p rio r to La R egie du jeu: "The more I learn about my trade th e more I inclne t o direction in depth relative to t he screen. The b e t ter it works, th e less I use the kind of set-up that shows two actors facing the cam­ era, like two well-behaved subjects p o s in g for a stll p o rtrai t . " The tuth of the matter is, that if you are looking for the precursor of Orson Welles, it is not Louis Lumiere or Zecca, but rather Jean Renoir. In his ilms, the s e arc h af te r c o mp o s i t i o n i n de p t h is, in efect, a patial replacement of montage by f requent p an i n g shots and entrances. It is based on a respect fo r the continuity of dra­ matic space and, of course, of its duration. To anybody with eyes in h is head, it is quite evident that the o n e- s ho t s e quenc es u s ed by Welles in The Magniicent Ambersons are in no sense the purely passive r e c or di n g of an action shot within the same framing. On the contrary, his refusal to break up the action, to ana l yz e the drmatic ield in time, is a p os i tive action the results of which are far superior to anythi n g that could be achieved by the classical "cut." ll you need to do is compare two f r am es shot in depth, one from 1 9 1 0, the other from a l m by Wyler or Weles, to u n de rs t and j ust by l o okng at the image, even apart from the context of the lm, how diferent their functions are . The fr aming in the 1 9 1 0 lm is intended, to al nten ts and purp o s e s , as a s ub s titut e for the issng fo u r th wall of the theatrical stage, or at l e a s t in exterior s hots , for the best vantage point to view the acti on , whereas in the second case the setting, the lighting, and the camera angles give an enti rely diferent reading. Be tw e e n them, director and c a m eram �n have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard, planned down to the last detail. The clearest if not the most oriinal exam­ ples of thi s are to be found in The Little Foxes wh ere the mise-en­ scene takes on he severity of a working drawing. ( Welles' pic­ ures are more diicult to analyze because of his ba ro qu e excesses. ) Obj ects and char ac ter s are related in such a fashion that it is im34

The Evolution of th e Language of Cinema p ossible for the s p e c tator to miss the si gn i i c a n c e of the scene. To ge t th e s a m e

r e s u l ts

b y way of m o n t a g e

would have necessitated a

detailed succession of shots . What we are

s a yi n g

then is that the se q uence

of shots "in

dep t h "

of t h e contemporary director does not exclude the use of mon tage -how could he, wi tho u t rev e rti n g to a primitive babbing?-he ma k e s it

or

an

in te r al

part of his

" p l a s t ic . "

The storytelling

Welles has the

of

Wyler is no less exp lici t than John Ford's but theirs

ad v a nt age over hi s that it does not sacriice the speciic efects that

can

be derived from unity of i m a ge in space and time . Whether an

episode is analyzed bit b y bit or presented in its ph y s ic a l entirety c an o t surely re m a in a m atter of indiference, at least

n a

work

with some p re tensions to style. It would obviously be absurd to deny that montage has added considerably to l angu age ,

but this has h app ened

the progress of lm

at the cost of other values, n o less

denitely cinematic.

This is w hy d e p th of ield is

not

ju s t a s to ck in trade of the

g ai n

in the ield of direction-a

cameraman lke the us e of a se rie s of ilters or of such-and-such a style of l i ghti n g , it is a capital

dialectical s te p forward i n th e h istory of ilm Nor is i t

just

language.

a formal s tep forward . Well used, sh oo tin g in

d ep th is not j u st a more economical, a s i mpl er ,

a more subtle w ay of ge t ting the most out of

and at the same time a s c ene . In a dd i ti on to

afe c ting the structure of ilm l anuage, it aiso afects the relation­

ship s

of

the m inds of the

spectators to the im age ,

and in c o n s e ­

quence it nluences the i nte rpr e t ati o n of the s pecta cle . It wo u l d lie o u t si de the s c op e of this

articl e to

analyze the

psychological modalities of these relations, as also their a e s th etic

consequences,

but it migh t

be e nou gh here to note, in g e n e r al

terms :

( 1 ) That depth of focus brings t he spectator into a relation with

the image closer to that which he enjoys with real i ty . Therefore it is

correct to say that, in depe n de ntly of the contents of str uc tur e is more relistic ; ( 2 ) That it implies, consequently, both a m ore

the image , its active mental

35

What Is Cinema?

attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribu­ tion on his part to the action in progress. While analtic al montage oly calls for him to folow his guide, to let his attention follow along smootly with th at of the director who wll choose what he s houl d see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of person al choice. It i s from his attention and is wll that the mean­ ing of the mage in part derives. ( 3 ) From the two preceding propositions, which belong to the relm of psychology, there folows a third wich may be d es cribe d as metaphysical. In analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. Some other form of analysis is undoubtedly possible but the n it would be an­ other m. In short, montage by its very nature rules out am biuity of expression. Kuleshov's experiment proves th is per absurdum in iving on each o c c a s i on a precise me an i ng to the expression on a face, the ambiguity of which alone makes the three successively exclusive expr e s s io n s possible . On the oher hand, depth of focus rentroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image f not of necessity-Wyler'S l m s are never ambiguous-at least as a possibility. Hence it is no exaggera­ tion to say that Citizen Kane is unthinkable shot in any other way but in depth. The uncertainty in which we ind o u rs el ves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the lm is built into the very design of the image. It is not that Weles denies himself any recourse whatsoever to the expressionistic procedures of montage, but just that their use from time to time in between one-shot se q uences in d ep th gives them a new meaning. Formerly montage was the very stff of cinema, the texture of the scenario. In Citizen Kane a series of superimpositions is contrasted with a scene presented in a single take, constituting another and deliberately abstract mode of story­ telling. Accelerated montage played tricks with time and space while that of Weles, on the other hand, is not trying to deceive us; it ofers us a contrast, condensing time, and hence is the equivalent 36

Te Evolution of the Language of Cinema for example of the French imperfect or the English frequentative tense. Like accelerated montage and montage of attractions these superimpositions, which the talking ilm had not used for ten years , rediscovered a possible use related to temporal reaism in a lm

without montage.

If

we have dwel t at some length on Orson Welles it is because

the date of his appearance i n the ilmic irmament ( 1 94 1 )

marks

more or less the begiing of a new period and also because his case is the m ost spectacular and, by virtue of his very excesses, the most sigiicant. Yet Citizen Ka ne is part of a general movement, of a vast stirring of the geoloical bed of cinema, conirming that everwhere up to a point there had been a revolution in the language of the screen. I could show the same to be true, although by diferent meth­

ods , of the Italian cinema. In Roberto Rossellini's Paisa and A llemania A nno Zero and Vittorio de Sica's Ladri de Biciclette,

Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of lm realism in

its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of the efects of montage. As in the ilms of Welles and n spite of colicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality. The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the chld in

A llemania

Anno Zero is the exact opposite of th at of Kuleshov with the close­ of Mozhukhi n . Rossellini i s concerned to preserve its mystery. We should not be misled by the fact that the evolution of ne o ­

up

realism is not manifest, as in the United States, n any form of revolution in editing. They are both aiming at the same results by diferent methods . The means used by Rossellini and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determ i n ed to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the

continuum of reality. The

dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute lm o f the life of a man to whom nothing ever happe n s . The most "aesthetic" of the neorealists, Luchino Visconti, gi ves j ust as clear a picture as Welles

37

What Is Cinema? of the basic am o f his drectorial art in La Terra Trema, a lm most entirely comp os ed of one-shot sequences, thus clearly s h ow

­

ing his concern to cover the entire action n i n te rm i n a b l e deep-focus

pnng shots. However we c a n ot pass i n review all the ilms that have shared

in this revolution in lm l angua ge snce 1 940. Now is the moment to attempt a s ynth esi s of our relections o n the subject. It seems to us that the decade fro m 1 940 to 1 9 5 0 m a rk s a de­ cisive step forward in t he development of the langua ge of t h e ilm.

If we have ap p e are d snce 1 9 3 0 to have lost s ight of the tre n d of the silent ilm as illustrated p a rti cu l arl y by S trohe m , F. W. Murnau, Robert Fl a her ty, and Dreyer, i t is for a p urp ose It is not that this .

tre nd seems to us to have been halted by he t al k ng

lm.

On the

contrary, we believe that it represented the ichest vein of he so­ c lle d silent ilm a nd , precisely b e c au s e it was not a e s the ti call y tied to mon tage, but was i n dee d the only te nden cy that looked to the

reaism of sound as a natura l d ev elop m en t On the other hand it is a fact that the t alin g

lm

.

between 1 9 3 0 and 1 9 40 owes it vi r tu ally

noth ng s ave f or the glorious and r etro sp ectiv ely p rop h e ti c excep­

tion of Jean Renoir. He alone in his searchings as a director pri o r to

La R egie

du jeu

for c e d himsef to l ook b a ck b ey on d the resources

p rovid e d by m o nt a ge and s o uncovered the secret of a ilm form hat wold permit everything to be said wi tho u t

chopping he

wo r ld up into little fragments, that would re ve al the hidden

mean­

n gs in p eo p l e and things without disturbing the u nity natural to hem.

It is not a que sti on of th e reby b el i t tl in g the lms of 1 9 3 0 to 1 940, a criticism that would not s t and up in the face of the number

of masterpieces, it is si m p l y a n a tte mp t to e st a bl i s h the notion of a

dialectic proress, the highest e xpr es si o n of which was found in the

lms of the 1 940's. Undo u b te d l y , the talkie sounded the knell of a

certain aesthetic of he lanu age of lm, but only wherever it h a d uned its back on its vocation in the service of reaism. The sound

38

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

p rese rve the essential s of montage, n am el y and th e dramatic analysis of action . What it turned its back on was m et aph or a nd s y m b ol in exchange for the il l us i on of ob j ect i v e presentation. The expressionism of mon tage has virtualy d i s app e ar e d but th e rel ati ve realism of t h e kind of c u t ti n g that lourished around 1 937 i m pl i e d a congenital limitation which escaped us so long as i t was pe rf e c t l y suited to its subject m a tter. Thus American co me dy reached its p e ak w i th i n th e f r a m ewor k o f a form of editing in which the r e al i s m of the time pl ayed no p art. De pe n de n t o n l oic for its e fe cts, like vaudeville and pl ay s on words , entirely conventional in its moral and so cio l o i cal conten t, A m e ri c a n co m e d y had everthi n g to gain, in s tri c t ine-by-ine prore s si on, from the r h ytm i c resources of classical editing. Und oubte dly it is p ri mar ily with he Stroheim-Mumau t re nd­ almost totally ecl ip s e d from 1 930 t o 1 940-that the cinema h as more or less co ns ci ou sly l i nked up once more ov er the last ten years . Bu t it has no intention of l i m iti ng itself simply to keeping L, i s trend alive . It d ra ws from it the secret of the re ge n er at i o n of re a l i s m n storytelling and thus of becoi n g c apable once more of binging together real time, in which th i n gs exist, along with the duration of the action, for which classical editing had insidiou sl y substituted mental and abstract time . On th e other hand, so far from wiping ou t once and for ll th e conquests of montage, tis reborn realism ives them a b od y of reference and a m eaning . It is o nly an in­ cre as ed real is m of the i mage that can support the abstraction of montage . he stylistic repertory of a director such as itch cock , for example, ranged from the ower iherent in the basic do cument as such, to superimpositions, to large close-ups. But the close- ups of Hitchcock are not he same as those of C. B. de Mile in The Cheat [ 1 9 1 5] . They are j ust one type of iure, among others, of h i s style. In oher words, in he silent days, montage evoked w h a t the direc­ tor wanted to say; in the editin g of 1 938, it descib ed it. Tod a y we can say that at l ast the director wites n mm. The i m a g-its ilm n ev e rth e le s s did

d i sco n ti nu ou s de s c ri p ti o n

39

What

Is Cinema?

plastic c om p osi t io n and the way it is set in time, because it is found e d on a much higher deree of realism-has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of m o difyi ng it from with­ in. The lm-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and he playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.

40

TH E VI RTUES AN D LI M ITATI O N S O F M O NTAG E (Montage lnterdit. Crin Blanc. Le Bailon Rouge. Une Fee

ps

comme les autres. )

THE CREATIVE originality of

A. Lamorisse was aready app arent n

Bim, Ie petit ane. Bim and perhaps Crin Blanc are the only two real

cildren's lms

ever

made.

Of

course

there

are

others­

although not as many a s one would expect-that are suited to a variety of young age groups. The Soviet Union has made special eforts in this Qeld but it is my feeling hat ms like Lone White

Sails are already aimed at young adolescents. The attempts of J. Arthur Rank at specialized production in tis area have failed both aestheticaly and comercially. In fact, anyone wishing to set up a lm library or to compile a series of programs for young chldren would be hard pressed to nd more than a few shots, of unequal merit, and a certain number of commercil lms, among them some cartoons, the inspiration and the subject matter of which were sui­ ciently childlike;

n

p articular, certain adventure ilms.

It is not,

however, a matter of specialzed production, just of lms intelliible to those on a mental level under fouteen. As we know, Ameican lms do not often rise above this level. The s ame is true of the animation ilms of Walt Disney.

It is obvious that lms of this sort are in no way comparable to 41

What Is Cinema?

children's literature properly so called, and of which here

how

not

a great deal.

any­

is

Before the disciples of Freud came on the

scene, J .-J. Rousseau h ad already noted that this literature was not without ofense. Segur is

a

Fontaine is

La

mitted that the

of

cynical moralist, the Countess

a

diabolical , sadomasochistic grandmother. It is now

ad­

Tales of Perrault conceal higly unmentionable

s ymbols and o ne must concede that it is diicult to counter the arguments of he psychoanalysts . ll he same,

it is

certaily not

necessary to employ psychoanalysis to discover the delicious

and

terrfying profundities that are he source of the beauty of A lice in

Wonderland an d the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. These auhors

had a

capacity for

dreaming

hat

was equal

in ind and

intensity to that of a chld. There is nothing puerle about hat imaginary world. It was pedagogy that invented harmless colors for children, but to see the use they make of them is to ind your gaze iveted on green paradises peopled with monsters. The

authors

of

genuine cldren's iterature,

then,

are

oly

rarely and indirectly educators . . . Jules Verne is perhaps the oly one. They are poets whose imagination is privileged to remain on the dream wavelength of childhood. That is why it is always easy to argue that ther works are in a

way harmful and really only suitable for rownups . If what we mean by that is that they are not edifying, his is true, but it is pedagogic point of view, not an aesthetic one. On the

other

a

h and,

the fact that adults enjoy them even � erhaps more than children is a proof of their authenticity and value. The artist who works spon­ taneously for children h as attained

a quality of uiversality.

Le Bailon Rouge is already perhaps a little on the ntellectul side and to that extent less childlike. The symbol appears n clearer outline in the myh ,

like a watermark.

Neverheless, to compare it wih

Une Fee pas comme les autres is to bring out, to a

marked

degree,

the diference between poetry th at is valid both for rownups children and the childlike things suitable only for chldren.

42

and

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

But it is not from this point of view that I wish to discuss them. This article is not strictly speaking a critical study and I shll refer oly incidentally to the artistic qualities that I consider belong to th es e works. My intention will be, on the basis of the astoishnly siniicant example that th e y provide, to m a k e a simple anlysis of certain ules of montage as they relate to cinematic expression, and more specically still, of its aesthetic ontology. From this point of view, on the co n tr ary , the similarities of Bailon Rouge and Une Fee ps comme les autres could very well have been premeditated. Both are mavellous d emo n str atio n s, in exacly op p o s i te ways , of the vrtues and the liitations of montage. I s h al begin with the im by Jean Tourne and show what an extraordinary illustration it is of the famous experiment of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhuhin. As we know, he naive ambi­ tion .of Jean Tourane is to make Disney pictures with live anmals. Now it is quite obvious that the human feeings we at­ tribute to animals are, essentially at any rate, a projection of our own awareness . We simply read into their looks or into their be­ havior hose states of mind that we claim they possess because of certain outward resemblances to us, or certain pattens of behavior which seem to resemble our own. We should not disregard or un­ derestimate this perfectly natural tendency of the human mind, which has been harmful only in the relm of science. Indeed it is worth noting that today science, as a result of experiments carried out by distinguished nvestigators, has rediscovered a measure of truh in anthropomophism. An example of this is the language of bees which, as tested and interpreted by the entomologist Von Frisch, goes far beyond the ldest analogies of he most unre­ pentnt anthropomorpist. In any event, the margn of error is rea t er on the side of Descartes and is aimal-machine than of Bufon and his half-human animals. But over and above this ele­ mentary aspect, it is quite evident that anthropomorphism derives from a fo m of analogical knowledge that psychological investiga­ tion cannot explain, still less refute . Its domain extends t h e n fro m 43

What Is Cinema?

mo r al i ty ( the fable s of La Fontaine ) to the ighe s t form of reli­ iou s symbolism, by way of every region of magic and poetry.

You and no t

cannot therefore condemn anthropomorphism take into consideration the level it

out

of hand

One is f o r c ed to

is on .

admit ho w ever that n the case of Jean Tourane it is

on the lowest level. At once the most s cientiic ally unsound and the least aestheti­ cally ad ap ted , if is work can claim any indulgence, it is on the grounds th a t i ts q u ant itat i v e i mpo rt anc e allows us to a stag ge ring extent to exp l or e the comparative possiblities of anthropomorphism and mon t a ge . Thus the cinema can actually m ul tiply the static nterpretations of p hoto r ap hy by th o se that derive from t h e jux­ taposition of shots . For it is v er y imp orta n t to note tamed,

o ly

that Tourane ' s

anim als are not

gen tled . Nor do t hey ever actualy do the h ing s they

seem to be doing. When they do, it is by

a trick, either with a h and artiicial paw like a marionette on a string. ll Tourane's ingenuity and talent lies in is ability to get the animals to stay put in th e positions in which he has placed them for the duration of the take. The environment, the dissimulation, the commentary are al re a d y suicient to give to the b ea r i ng of the ofs cree n guiding th e m , or a n

aim al an almos t hum a n quality which, in turn, the illusion of montage underlines and magniies to such an extent that at times it makes the impression almost co m p l et e . In

p rotago nis ts

having done

thi s

way, without the

a nyth i n g b eyo n d rem aini n g

perfec tly

still

in front of the camera, a whole story i s bult up with a large num­ ber of characters in co mp l i c ated relationships-often so c ompl ex

that the sce n ar i o is cofused-and

all

with a wide

v ar iety of

charac­

teristics. The apparent action and the m e aning we attr ib u te to it do

not exist, to all intents and purposes, pior to the as s emb ling of the

in the form of frag m ented scenes out of w h ich the set­ ups are general ly composed . I wll g o further and say th a t, i n the ci rc umsta nce s , the use of m ont age was not j ust one way of making this lm , it was th e only way. Actually if Tourane's ani m als were as intelli gent say as o-Tin-Tin and able to do for them s e lves, as a

lm, not even

44

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage result of trai ni ng , the bulk of the things

that montage here credits them with doing, he focus of the ilm would be rad ic al ly altered. We would no lo nger be concerned wi th the story but rather with he skll of th e animals. In other words, it would pass from being s o me th i n g imainary to something real. Instead of delighting in a iction, we would be ful of admi r a ti on for a well-executed v aud e ­ ville turn. It is m o ntage , that abstract creator of meaning, which preserves the state of ure al i ty demanded by the s pe ctac le . The opp o s ite is true o f s h al l prove it, th a t this

lm

Le Ballon Rouge. It is my view, and I

o u gh t not to, nor ca n it, owe an th ing to

montage . This is all the more of

a

p ar ad ox since t he zo o mop h i s m

of the balloon is even more an afa ir o f he

ima gi n at io n

than the

anthropomorphism of th e animls. L a m ori s s e' s red balloon ac tu ally does go th ro u gh

the

move m e n t s in front of the camera that we see

on the

screen. Of c ou rs e there is a t r i ck n it, but i t is not one that

ou t of

r e al ity

b e lo n g s to cinema as such . Illusion is cre a te d itself. It is

here,

a s i n c o nju r i n g ,

so me th i n g concrete, and does not derive

from the potential extensions created b y montage .

What does it m atter, y ou w i l l say, p rovided the result is the s a m e -i f ,

for ex a mp l e,

we are made to a cc ep t on t h e screen the

e x i s t e n ce of a b a l l o on that c a n follow its master like a little d og? It

m a tt e r s

to th is

extent, that w i th monta g e the m agic

b a ll o o n

would

exist only on the screen, whereas th a t of Lamorisse se nds us back to

real i ty. Per h a p s we s h o u l d d i gr e ss by

n ature

cally speaking. In its an a r tii c e

here

for a

m om e nt

and point out that

montage is not some th i ng absolute, at least p s y ch olo i ­

original, s impl e

form, people d i d

not

see it as

any m o re than did t h os e pe opl e at the irst s h ow i ng of

Lumicre's il m w h o rushed to the back of

the

room when he t r a i n

entered the s t at ion at Ciotat. But the habit of cinema- g oi ng h as gradually alerted a u d i e nce s and today a sizable po r t i on of the pub­ lic, if yo u asked the m to c o n c e ntr a te a l i ttle, would be a b le to distinguish be tw e en real s c e n e s and those created by montage. It i s a fact t h a t other devices such as p r oc e ss shots m a k e it possible for 45

What Is Cinema?

two objects, say he star and a tiger, to be seen together, a p roim­ wich f it were real might c ause some problems . The llusion here is more complete, but it can be detected and in any case, the impotant hing is not whether the trick can be spotted but wheher or not trickey is used, j u s t as the beauty of a c op y is no substitute for the authenticity of a Vermeer. Some will object that here is trickery in he hndlng of Lamorisse's balloon. Of course there is, oth erwise we would be watching the documentary of a m i racle or of a fakir at work and hat would be quite another ind of ilm. Balon Rouge i s a tale told n lm, a pure cre ation of the nd, but the important thing about it is that this story owes evering to the cinema pre ci sely because, essentially, it owes it n othin g . It is very easy to imagine Bailon Rouge as a literay tale. But no matter how delightfully written, the book could never come up to he lm, the charm of which is of another ind. Nevetheless, the same story no m atter how well lmed might not have had a greater measure of reality on the screen than in the book, s uppo s i ng hat Lamorisse had h ad recourse either to the illusions of montage or, failing that, to process work. The ilm wold then be a tale told i mage by image-as is the story, word by word-instead of being what it is, namely the picture of a story or, if you prefer , an imai­ nary documentary. This expression seems to me once and for all to be the one that best deines what Lamorisse was attempting, namely something like, yet diferent from, the lm that Cocteau created n Le . Sang d'un pOCte, that is to say, a documentary on the imaination, n other words, on the drem. Here we are then, caught up by our thinking in a series of paradoxes. Montage which we are constantly being told is the essence of cinema is, in this situation, the iterary and anticnematic process par excellence. Essential cinema, seen for once in its pure state, on the contrary, is to be found in straighfor­ ward photographic respect for the uity of space. Now we must take our analysis a little farther, since it might with rcason be pointed out that while Bailon Rouge owes nothing ity

46

Te Virtues and Limitations oj Montage e s sentially

to

mo nt a ge ,

it

5 00,000

Lamorisse spent

dep ends on it accidentlly . For,

if

francs on red balloons, it w a s because he

Si ilar l y , the hors e several horses, all looking the

wanted to be sure he wou l d not lack doubles.

Crin Blanc was

doubly a m yth snce

same, al more or less wld, h ors e . Tis observation wll

w ere

shown on the screen as a single

alow us to

gi ve an even more precise

deinition of an essential law of lm stylistics .

It would be a be t rayal of Lamorisse's il ms , for example Le

Rideau

eramoisi, to

events

th e y p ortr a y are p artialy true .

call them works of pure iction. Their beiev­

abii ty is undoubtedly ied in with t heir d o c um en tar y value. The Cm arue, th e lives of

the

The

countryside

of the

horse-breeders and the i sher m e n , the

h ab i t s of the herds, constitute the basis for the story of Crin Blanc, providing a irm

and unshakable su pp o rt for

the myth. But it is

prec i sel y on th is reality that a dilectic beloning to the realm he mainary, and i n tere sti ngly symbolized by the

use of

of

doubles

for Crin B l a nc, is fou nd ed. Thus Crin Blanc is at one and the same time a real horse that grazes on the salty gras s of the Cam arg u e

and a dream horse sw m min g eternally at the side

of

little Folco. Its

cinematic r eal ity cold not do with out its d ocu me n tary re al it y , but

f it is to become a tuh of th e imagination, it must die and be born agai n of r eali ty itsef . Undo ub tedl y, the shooting of the lm c all ed for a va riety of skills . he li tl e boy that Lamorisse chose had never been

near

a

horse , yet he had to be taugh t to ride bareback. A n u mbe r of scenes were shot vrtualy without he help of trick work with a considerable disregard for

very

r electi o n is enouh to show that if

realy the tuth,

s uccess flly

and

ce r t ai nl y

real dangers . Yet a moment's

wh at

we see d ep i cted had been

created in front of th e camera, the lm

wold cease to eist because it woul d cease, by the same token, to

is that finge of trick work, that

m argi n of

subterfuge de manded by the loic of the story that all o ws what is i m ai nary to nclude what is real and at the same time to sub s ti tute for it. If here had oly been one wild ho re painflly subj ect ed to he debe a mh. It

47

What Is Cinema?

mands of the camera, the lm would have been just a tour de force, an exhibition of successful training like Tom Mx and his white horse. It is clear what we would lose by this. If the ilm is to fulill itself aesthetically we need to believe in the reality of what is h appening while nowing it to be tricked. Obviously the spectator does not have to now that there were three or even four horses * or that someone had to pull on a cotton thread to get the horse to turn its head at the right moment. All that m atters is that the spectator can say at one nd the same time that the basic material of the ilm is authentic while the ilm is also truly cinema. So the screen relects the ebb and low of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it pla ns to substitute. That is to say, the tale is bani of an experience that the imagination transcends. Correspondingly, however, what is imaginary on the screen must have the spatial density of something real. You cannot there­ fore use montage here except within well-deined limits or you run the risk o f threatening the very ontology of the cinematographic tale. For example, a director is not alowed to dodge the diiculty of showing two simultaneous aspects of an action by simply usng shot-and-reverse-shot. Lamorisse in the scene of the rabbit hunt has shown that he clearly understood this. The horse, the boy, and the rabbit are all in the same shot together. However he came near to making a mistake in the scene of he capture of Crin Blanc when the boy is letting himself be dragged along by the horse. It is · of no consequence that the horse we see dragging Folco in the long shot is a double for Crin Blanc, nor even that for that dan gerous shot, Lamorisse had himself doubled for the boy , but I am embarrassed that at the end of the se q uence when the horse slows down and inally * In the s ame way, apparently, in-Tin-Tin owes his cinematic existence to several Alsatians who look like him and are all trained to do all the tricks that "only R i n -Tin-Tin" can do on the screen. Evey one of these actions has to be completed in reality and without recouse to monta ge, th e latter being used only in a seconday sen se , n order to contribute to the maginary power of the myth of some very rel dogs, all of whoe qulities o-Tin-Tin possesses.

48

The Virtues and Limitations 0/ Montage stops, the camera does not show us, so that we are in no doubt abou t

it, that t h e horse a n d child a r e in physical proximity. Th is could have

been done in a panning shot or by pull ing the camera b ac k . This s i mple

in retrospect h ave auth entica ted all that the horse dodges a problem, albeit at thi s stage of the action with less h arm­ ful results, and thereby interupts th e l ovel y spatial low of the

precaution ary shot would

had preceded it. To show two separate shots of Folco and

act ion . *

" Perh aps I shall m ake myself clearer by giving an example. In an o t h e wise

medi ocre E n gl ish ilm, Wh ere No Vultures Fly, there i s one u n forgettable se que nce . The i l m reconstucts the stoy of a young cou ple in South Afr ic a duri n g the war who founded a nd organ ized a g a m e reserve . To th is end, hus· band and w i fe , together w i th t h e i r child, live d in t h e h e a r t of the bush. he seq u e n ce I h ave i n mind starts out i n the most conventional way. Unknown to i t s parents, t h e . c h i l d h a s wandered away from the camp and has fou n d a lion cub that h a s been tem poraril y abandoned by its mother. Un aware of the

d a n ger, i t picks u p the cub and takes it along. Meanwhile the l ioness, ale rted e i t h e r by the n oise or by the scent of the chil d , turns back towards its den and stats along the path taken by the unsuspect i n g c h i l d . She foll ows close b e h ind him. Th e l i t t l e group comes w i t h i n si;ht o f the camp at w h i ch poin t the d is­ tract e d p a re n t s see t h e c h i l d and the lion which is undoubtedly about t o sp ring at ' n y m o m e n t o n the i m p rudent k i d n apper. H e re let u s i n te rru p t the s to ry f o r a m o m e n t . Up t o t h i s point everything h a s been s h o w n i n para l l el m o n t age and t h e somewh at n a i ve attempt at suspense has seemed quite conve n t i o n al. Then suddenly, to o u r h o r ror, the d i rector abandons his m o n t a ge of se p a ra te s h o t s t h a t h a s k e p t t h e prot agonists apat and gives us instead parents, c h i l d , a n d l i oness al l i n the s a m e ful l shot. Th i s s i n g l e f r a m e i n which trickery is out of the quest ion gi ves i m med i ate and retroactive au thenticity to t h e ve ry b a n al mont age that h as p receded i t . From then on, and always in the same ful l shot, we see t h e father order his son to stand sti l l-the l i o n has h a l ted a few y ards away-th en to put the cub down on the ground and to stat fow a rd a gain without hurry i n g . hereupon the l i o n comes quietly foward, picks up the cub a n d moves of i n t o t h e bush w h i l e the ovejoyed parents rush towards the child.

It is obvious th a t, considered from t h e p o i n t of v i e w o f a rec i t a l , this seq u e n c e woul d h ave had the same simple meaning i f i t h ad been shot e n t i re l y i n m o n t age or by process work . B u t i n neither event w o u l d t h e scene h ave un­ fol d e d before t h e camera in its ph y s i c a l and spatial reali ty. Hence, i n spite of the c o n c rete nature of e ach shot, i t wou l d h ave h ad the i mpact only of a story an d not o f a real event. The re woul d have been n o dife rence be tween the SC' n c �s sh ot and t h e c h a p t e r in a novel which recou nted the same i m a g i n a ry e p i so d e . Hence the dramatic and moral values of the e p i sode would be on a very medioc re level . On the other hand, the i n al framing which involve d put­ ting t h e ch aracters i n a re al situation carries u s at once to the heights of cin­ e m atographic e motion. Naturally the feat was made possible by the fact that the l i o ness was h alf tamed and had been living before the iling n close con-

49

What Is Cinema? If one

forced

me that

oneself at

one

could

this

point to deine the probl e m , it seems

set up the f o l l ow in g

pri n cipl e as a law of ae sth etics. " When the essence of a scene demands the si m u l t aneou s presence of two or more factors in the action, m ont a ge is ruled out . " It can reclaim i t s r ight t o be used, however, whenever the i m p o rt of the ac ti on no longer depends on p h y s ic al contiguity even though this may b e implied. For e x a mple , it was all r igh t for Lamorisse to show, as he did, the head o f th e horse in close-up, turning obedi­ ently in he boy's direction, but he sh ou l d have s h own the two of the m in the same frame in the p rece ding s h o t . It is in no sense a question of being obliged to revert to a s i ngl e shot s equ e n c e or of giv i n g up r es o u r ce ful ways of exp re ss i ng things or c o nve n i en t ways of varying the shots . O ur concern here is not with the form but wi th the n a tu re of the re ci tal of events-or to be more pr eci s e with a certain nterdep en d ence of n ature and form. When Orson Welles deals with certain scenes in The Magniicent A m bersons in a si n gl e shot whereas in Mr. A rkadin he uses a inely b r oken- d o wn montage, it is only a ch ange of style and in no essen­ tial w a y alters the subject m att e r . I wo ul d even s a y that Hitchcock's Rope co uld just as well have been cut i n the classic way wh ateve r artistic i m po rt an ce m ay be c or rec tl y attached to the way he actu­ ally handled it. On the o th e r hand it is inconceivable that the famous seal-hunt scene in Nanook s h o ul d not show us hunter, hole, nd seal all i n the same shot. It is simply a qu es t i o n of respect for the sp a ti al unity of an event at the moment when to split it up w oul d c hang e it from something real into something i maginary . Flah e rt y as a ru l e understood this, except in a few places where, as a consequence, there is a f ail u re of consistency. While the pi c ture of N anook h un t i n g seal on the rim of an ice hole is one of the loveliest to

­

tact with the family. This is not the point. The question is not whether the child really ran the risk it seemed to run but that the ep i s ode was shot with due respect for its spatial un i ty . Realism here resides in t he homogeneity of space. Thus we see that there are cases in which montage far from being the esse n c e of cinema is i ndeed its negation. The s ame scene then can be poor l i teratu re or great cinema according to whether montage or a full sh ot is ued.

so

The Vrtues and Limitations of Montage n al cinem a , the scene of t he struggle ith the alligator on a ishng line n Louisiana Story, ob vi ousl y montage, is weak. On the other hnd, the sce ne n the same lm of an allig ato r catchng a heron, photoraphed in a single paning sho t, is admirable. However, he reciprocal fact is al so true. That is to say, to restore reaity to a re citl of events it is s u ici ent f o ne of the shots, suitabl y chosen, b ri ngs together those ele ments p re vio us l y sep­ arated of by montage. It is n ot easy however to state ofhand to what ind of subject or in what circumstances this applies. I wll coine myself, p rudentl y , to j u st a few ind ications . First of al, it is n aturaly true of all d o cum e n tar y lms, the obj ect of wich is to present facts which would cease to be i nt eresti n g if the episodes did not actu ally occur in front of the camera, that is to say in documen­ tary lms that appro xim ate to repo rting . Newsreels may also be included up to a p oi nt . The fact that reconstructions of actual events were acceptable in the earliest d ay s of t h e cinema is a clear indic ation that there has been an evolution in the atti tu de of the general publi c . The s ame rule does not apply to didactic documentaries, the purpose of which is not to rep ort but to explai n an event. Of course in these, too, there is a place for sequences of the rst type of documentary. Take, for example, a documentary about conj uring! If its object is to show the extraordnary feats of a great ma s te r then the lm must pro cee d in a series of individual shots , but if the ilm is required subsequently to explan one of th e se tricks, it becomes necessary to edit hem. The case is clear, so l et us move on! A m uch more i nt eres t ng example is that of the iction lm, rang­ ing from the fa iry tale world of Crin Blanc to the m iJ dly rom anti­ czed type of documentary such as Nanook. It is a qu es tion then, as we have said above, of ictions that do not d e riv e their full signii­ cance or, at most, only d eriv e thei r val u e , fro m th e i nte grat i o n of he re al and the imainary. It is the aspects of tis r eal ity that dictate the cutting . Fnally, in he c as e of narrative ilms that p a r al lel the nov el or

51

What

s Cinema?

he play, it is probabl e

that cert ain kinds of action are not adapted develop ment . The expression of concrete the abs tr act time of montage as Citizen

to montage for their ful

duration conlics with

Kane nd Ambersons so well illustrate . Above ,all, certain situations

can oly be

said

to exist cnematorapically to the extent that their

spatial uity is established, especially comedy situations that a re

based on the relations betwe en hu m an b eings and things . As in Bailon Rouge, e v ery kind of trick is permissible except m on t a ge . The p ri m i tive slapstick comedies, especialy h os e of Keaton, and the lms of Ch ap li n , have much

to teach us on this score. If sl ap ­ stick co medy succeeded before the days of Griith and m ontage, it is because most of i ts gags derived fr o m a comedy of space, f ro m the relation of man to thi n gs and to the surrounding world. In The Circus Chapln is tuly in the lion's cage and both are enclosed witn the framework of the s creen .

52

I N D E F E N S E O F M IX E D C I N E M A

A B A CKWAD

reve als

gl a n ce over the ilms of the past 1 0 o r 1 5 years q u ickl y

one of the dominant fe a tu re s of the ir

evolution is he th e y have gone for th eir material to the heritage of literature and he stage. Certainly i t is n ot only j u st now th at the cinema is benng to look to he no v el and the play fo r its mateial. B ut its present appr oach is dife rent. The ad aptatio n of Monte Cristo, Les Misera­ bles, or Les Trois Mousquetaires is not in t h e same category as hat that

increasingly

si gn i ica n t

extent to which

of Symphonie pastorale, Jacques Ie fataliste, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Le Diable

au

corps, or Le Journal d'un cure de cam­

pagne . l e x a nd re Dumas and Victor Hugo smply serve to

supply the lm-maker with characters and a dventures large l y i ndepend ent of their l i t e ra ry framework. J avert or D 'r t agnan have become pat of a mythology existing outside of the novels . Th e y e njo y in some measure an autonomous e x is tence of which the orii n al works are n o l on ge r an ything more than an accidental and almost superluous maifes t atio n . On th e other hand, lm-makers continue to ad apt novels that are sometimes irst-rate as novels but which they feel justiied in tre a ting simply as ver y detailed lm s y nops es . Film­ makers likewise go to novelists for ch aracte r , a plot, even-and is is a frther s t age-for atm ospher e , as for example from Simenon, or 53

What Is Cinema? he p o e ti c

atmosphere found in Pierre Very. B u t here a ga i n , one can ign o re the fact that it is a boo k and just c ons id e r the w ri ter a particularly p ro l ix scenarist . Th i s is so true that a great number of American crime novels a re clearl y written w i th a double purpose in view, namely with an eye on a Hollwood adaptation. Furher­ more, respect for crime iction when it sh ow s any measure of orii­ nality is becoming m o re and more the rul e ; liberties c an n o t be taken wih the author's text with an e as y conscience. B ut wh en Robert B resso n says, b efore making Le Journal d'un cure de cam­ pagne in to a lm, that he is going to follow the book page by page, even phrase by phras e , it is c le a rly a q u es t io n of something quite diferent and new values are involved. The cineaste is no lo nger content, as were Cornelle, La Fontaine or Moliere before hm, to ra nsack other works. His method is to b rng to the screen vi r tu ally unaltered any work th e excellence of which he decides on a priori nd how can it be otherwise when this work derives from a form of literature so h igh ly developed that the heroes and the meaing of their actions depend very clo s ely on the s tyle of he author, when they are intim ate ly wrapped up with it as in a microcosm, the laws of which, in themselves rigorously determined, have no v alidi ty outside that world, when the novel has renounced its ep ic l ike sim­ pl icity so that it is no longer a matrix of myths but rather a locus of subtle interactions between style, psychology, morals, or meta­ physics. In he theater the direction of this evolution is more evident stil. Dramatic iterature, like the novel, has always alowed itsef to sufer violence at the hands of the cnema. But who would dare to compare Laurence Olivier's Hamlet to he, in retrospect, ludicrous borrowings that the ilm d art made once upon a time from the repertoire of the Comedie Fran�aise1 It has always been a tempta­ tion to the lm-maker to ilm theater since it is al read y a spec tacle; but we know what comes of it. nd it is with good reason hat he term "lmed heater" has b ecome a commonplace of criticl op­ probim. he novel at least cals for some measure of creativity, in .

-

'

54

In Defese of Mixed Cinema

is ransition from page to screen. The theater by contrast is a false fiend ; its llu sory likeness to the cinema set the latter en route to a dead end, luring it onto the slippery slope of the merely facile. If the dramatic repertory of the boulevards, however, has occasionaly been the source of a goodish lm, that is only because the director has taken the same kind of libety with the play as he would with a novel, retanng n fact only the characters and the plot. But there agan, the phenomenon is radiclly new and tis seems to mply respect for the theatrical character of the model as an inviolable principle. The lms we have j ust referred to and others the titles of which will undoubtedly be cited shortly, are both too numerous and of too high a quality to be taken as exceptions that prove the rule. On the contrary, works of this kind have for the last 1 0 years si gnposted the way for one of the most fruitful trends of contemporary cinema. "9a, c'est du cinema!" "That's really cinema!" Georges Altmann long ago proclaimed from the cover of a book dedicated to the gloriication of the silent ilm, from The Pilgrim to The General Line. Are the dogmas and hopes of the earliest lm criticism that fought for the autonomy of the Seventh Art now to be discarded like an old hat? Is the cinema or what remains of it incapable of surviving without the twin crutches of literature and theater? Is it in process of becoming an art derived from and dependent on one of the traditional arts? The question proposed for our consideration is not so new ; st of all, it is the problem of the reciprocal inluence of the arts and of adaptations in general. If the cnema were two or three thousnd years old we would undoubtedly see more clearly that it does not lie outside the common laws of the evolution of the arts. But cnema is only sixty years old and already its historical perspectives are prodigiously blurred. What ordnarly extends through one or two civilizations is here contained within the life span of a sngle man. Nor is i s the prncipal cause of error, because tis accelerated ss

What Is Cinema? evolution is in no sense contemporary with that of the other arts. The cinema is young, but literature, theater, and music are as old as history. Just as the education of a child derives from imitating the adults around hm, so the evolution of the cinema has been ilu­ enced by the example of the hallowed

arts. hus its history, from

the beginning of he century on, is the result of determinants spe­ cic to the evolution of all at, and likewise of efects on it of the arts that have already evolved. Agan, the confused pattern of this aesthetic complex is aggravated by certain sociological factors. The cinema, in fact, has come to the fore as the only popu1ar

art

at a

time when the theater, the social art par excellence, reaches oly a p rivileged cultural or monied mnority. It may be that years of the cinem a will be reckoned

n

the

past 20

i ts overall history as the

equivalent of ive centuries in literature. It is not a long history for an art. but it is for our critical sense. So let us try and narrow the ield of these relections. First of ll let it be said that adaptations which the modern critic looks upon as a shameful w ay out are an established feature of the history of art. Malraux has pointed out how much the paint­ ing of the Renaissance was originally indebted to Gothic sculpture. Giotto painted in ful relief. Michelangelo deliberately refused any assistance he might have had from oils, the fresco being more suit­ able to a style of p aintng based on sculpture. And doubtless this was a stage quicly passed through on the way to the liberation of "pure painting." But would you therefore say that Giotto is inferior to Rembrandt? And what is the value of such a hierarchy? Can anyone deny that fresco in full relief was a necessary stage in the process

of

development

and hence

aestheticaly justiied?

What

again does one say about Byzantne miniatures in stone enlarged to the dimensions of a cathedral tympanum? And to tun now to the ield of the novel, shou1d one censure preclassical tragedy for adapt­ ing the pastoral novel for the stage or Madame La Fayette for her indebtedness to Racinian dramaturgy? Again, what is true techni­ cally is even tuer of hemes which turn up in ll kinds and varieties

56

In Defese 0/ Mxed Cinema

of expression. This is a co mmonplace of literary istory up to he eighteenth century, when the n otion

of plaiarism appe ared for the tme. In he Mid dl e Ages, the great Christian themes are to be found alke n theater, panting, staned-glass wndows, and so on. Doubless what mi sl e ad s us about the cinema is that, in contrast to what usualy happens in the evol uti onar y cycle of n art, ad apt a­ tion, borrowing, and iitati on do not appear in the e a rl y stages. On the contrary , the autonomy of the means of exp res si o n , and he: originaity of subject matter, have never be en reater than they were n he rst twenty or trty years of the cinema. One would expect a nascent art to try to imitate its elders and then, bit by bit, to work out its own laws and select its rightful themes . One inds it less easy to understand that it should place an increased volume of experience at the service of material foreign to i ts geius, as f its c apacity for invention was in inverse pr op o r t io n to its powers of expression. From here to the position that this paradoxic al evolu­ tion is a form of decadence is but a step; and one that criticism did not hesitate to take upon the advent of sound. But his was to misunderstand the basic fa cts of th e istory of lm. he fact that the cinema app eared after the novel and the theater does not mean that it flls into line behind them and o n the same plane. Cinema developed under socioloical conditions very diferent from those n which the traditional arts exist. You might as wel derive the hal-musette or bebop from classical choreography. The irst lm-makers efectively extract ed what w as of use to them from he at with which they were about to wn their p ublic, name­ ly the crcus, the p r o v inc i al theater, and the music hall, which pro­ vided s l aps tick ilms, especially, with both techique a nd actors. Everyone is famliar w i th the sayng attri b uted to Zecca when he discovered a certain Shak e sp e a re . "What a lot of good stuf that character passed up ! " Zecca and his felows were n no danger of being inluenced by a l iterature that neither they nor their audience rea d . On the oth er hand they were greatly iluenced by th e popu­ lar literature of the time, to which we owe the sublime Fantomas, rst

57

What Is Cinema?

one of the m asterpie ce s of the screen . The ilm gave a new fe to

the

conditions

out of

which came an authentic and great popular

at. It did not spurn the humbler and despised forms of

of the fairround, or of the p enny

he th eater ,

dreadful . True , the ine gentle­

A cademy and of the Comedie Fran;aise did make an efot to adopt this chld that had been b rough t up in he p rofession of its parents, but th e falure of th er eforts only emph as zed the fut ity of this unnatural enterpris e . The misfortune of Oedipus nd Hamlet meant abou t as much to he cnema n its early d ays s " or anc e stors the Gauls" do to Negro elementary school ch ild re n n the African bush . Any inte res t or charm hat these early lms h ave for us s on a pr with those pagan and naive int erpret atio n s p ractic ed by savage tribe s that h ave g obbled up their missionries. f the obvi­ ous bo rrow i ngs in France-Hollywood unash am edly p i llag e d he techniques and personnel of th e Anlo- Saxon music hall-from what survived of he popular theater, of the fairrounds, or the men of he

boulevard, did not create aesthetic disputes, it was primarily be­ cause as yet there ws

no

lm criticism p roperl y so called.

It

was

likewise because such rei nc ar n ati ons by the se so-called inferior arts did not shock anybody. No one felt any cal to d efe nd them ex c ept the interested p arties who had more nowledge of th ei r trade than t he y had of n olo gical pre con c ep t i ons . When the cinema acually began to follow n he fo ots teps of the th eater, a link was restored, after a centu ry or two of evolution , with dramatic forms that had been vrtualy abandoned. Did those same learned historians who know about farce

nd

o ut

n he

everyting

there is

sxteenth century ever m ake

what a resurgence

of

vitality

it

it

to

be known

their business to

had between 1 9 1 0 and 1 9 1 4

at h e Path6 and Gaumont Sudios and under the baton of Mack

Senn ett? It would be e quall y easy to demonstrate that the same process occrred in th e case of the novel. The seial lm adopting the popular techniqu e of th e feuileton revived he old forms of the conte. I e xperienc ed this p e rs on lly when seeng once agn 58

In Defese

of Mixed Cinema

Feullade's Vampires at o ne of tho s e gaheri ngs wich my fiend Heri Langlois, the drector of the C nem atheque Fran�ase, nows how to organize so wel. That night oly one of he wo projectos was w oring. In addition, the print had no subtitles and I i m a ine that Feuilade imself would h ave had diiculty in trying to recog­ nize the murderers . It was even m o ney as to which were the good uys and which the bad. So iicult was it to tell who w as which that th e apparent villains of one reel turned out t o be the victims in the next . The fact that the lights were turned on every ten minutes to ch ange reels s ee med to m ul tipl y the epis o des . Seen under these conditions, Fe u llade ' s chef d'oeuvre reveals th e a e sth etic principle that lies b eh ind its charm. Every interruption evo ked an "ab" of disappointment. and ev e ry fresh start a sigh of h op e for a s o l ution . This story, the meaning of which was a co mplete mystery to the audience, held its attention and carried it al ong p u rel y and simply by the tension created in the telng. here ws no que s t ion of preexisting action bro ken up by nte rvls, but of a p ie ce unduly nteup ted , an inehaustible s prng , the low of wh i ch was blocked by a mysteio us hand. Hence the u nb e ar able tensi on set up b y the next episode to follow and the axious wait, not so much for the events to come as for the continu ation of th e teing, of the restart­ ing of an nterrupted act of creation. Feuillade himself proceeded in the sme way in making his lms. He had no i dea what would happen next and lmed step by step as he morni ng 's inspration came. Both the author and the spectator were n the s am e si tuation , namely, hat of the ing and Scheherazade; the r ep e a t e d intevals of darkness in the cine ma par allel ed the sep aratin g of of the Thou­ s and nd One N ights . The "to be contnued" of the true feulleton as of he ol d serial lms is not j u st a device extri ns i c to the story. If Scheherzade had told ev erhing at one sitting , the King , cuel as any m audience, woul d have had her e x e cuted at dawn. Both storyteler and lm wan t to test he power of their magic by way of inteuption , to know the tea si ng sense of waitng for the continua­ ion of a tale hat is a substitute for eveyday living which, in is

S9

What

Is

Cinema?

tun, is but a break n the continuity of a dream. So we see that the so-called original purity of the primitive screen does not stand up under exaination. The sound ilm does not mark the threshold of a lost paradise on the other side of which the muse of the seventh art, discovering her nakedness, would then start to put back he rags of which she had been stripped. The cinema has not escaped a universal law. It has obeyed it n its own way-the only way possi­ ble, in view of the combination of technical and socioloical r­ cumstances afecting it. We know of course that it is not enough to have proved that he greater pat of the early ilms were oly either borrowed or pillaged n order to justify thereby the actual form of that adaptation. De­ prived of his usual stand the champion of pure cinema could still argue that intercourse between the arts is easier at the primitive level. It may very well be that farce is indebted to the cinema for its rejuvenation. But its efectiveness was primarly visual and it is by way of farce, irst of al, and then of the music hall, that the old traditions of mime have been preserved. The father one penetrates into the history of types, the more the diferences become clear, just as in the evolution of animals at the extreities of the branches deriving from a common source. The original polyvalence having developed its potential, these are henceforth bound up with sub­ tleties and complexities of form such that to attack them is to com­ promise the whole work itself. Under the direct inluence of archi­ tectural sculpture Raphael and Da Vinci were already attacing Michelangelo for making painting a radically autonomous art. here is some doubt that this objection could stand up under a detailed discussion, and that evolved forms do not continue to act on one another; but it is true that the history of art goes on develop­ ing n the direction of autonomy and speciicity. The concept of pure art-pure poety, pure painting, and so on-is not entirely without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as dficult to dene as it is to combat. In any case, even f a certan mixng of the arts remains possible, like the mixing of genres, it does not necessar60

In Defese of Mixed Cinema

ily follow that they are all fortunate mixtures. There are fruitful cross-breedings which add to the qualities derived from the par­ ents; here are attractive but b arren hybrids and there are likewise hideous combinations that bring forth nothing but chimeras. So let us stop appealing to precedents drawn from the origin of the cn­ ema and let us take up again the problem as it seems to confront us today. While critics are apt to view with regret the borrowings made by cinema from literature, the existence of a reverse process is as accepted as it is undeniable. It is in fact commoly agreed that the novel, and particularly the Americn novel, has come under the inluence of the cnema. Let us leave to one side books in which the inluence or direct borrowings are deliberate and so of little use for our purpose, as for example Loin de Rueil by Raymond Queneau. The question is whether or not the art of Dos Passos, Caldwell , Hemingway, or Malraux derives from the technique of the cinema. To tell the truth, we do not bel ieve it for a moment. Undoubtedly, and how could it be otherwise, the new way of seeing thn g s pro­ vided by the screen-seeing things in close-up or by way of story­ teling forms such as montage-has helped the novelist to refurbish his techical equipment. But even where the relationship to cine­ matic techiques is avowed, they can at the same time be chal­ lenged : they are simply an addition to the apparatus available to the writer for use in the process of buldng his own particular world. Even f one admits that the novel has been somewhat shaped by the aesthetic gravitational pull of the cinema, this inluence of a new art has unquestionably not been greater than that of the the­ ater on literature during the last century. The inluence of a domi­ nant neighbor on the other arts is probably a constant law. Certain­ ly, the work of Graham Greene seems to ofer undeniable p roof of this. But a closer look reveals that his so-called ilm techniques-we must not forget that he was a ilm critic for a number of years-are actually never used n the cinema. So marked is this that one is constantly asking oneself as one "visualizes" the author's style why 61

What Is Cinema? lm-makers contnue to deprive

themselves

of a

techique that

cold be so useful to them. The originality of a ilm such as L'Es­

poir by Malraux lies in its capacity to show us what the cinema

wold be if it took its nspiration from the novels "inluenced" by

What should we conclude from this? Surely that we should rather reverse the u sual theory and study the iluence of

the cinema.

modern literature on ilm-makers. What do we actualy mean by "cinema" n our present context?

If we mean a mode of expression by means of realistic representa­ tion, by a simple registering of mages, simply an outer seeing as opposed to the use of the resources of introspection or of analysis in

the

style

of

the classical novel, then it must be pointed out that the

English novelists had lready discovered in behaviorism the psycho­ logical justications of such a techique. But here the literary critic

is ulty of mprudently prejudgng the true nature of cnema, based on a very supericial deinition of what is here meant by reality. B ecause its basic material is photography it does not follow that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of appearances and the psychology of behavior. While it is true that it reies entirely on the outside world for its objects it has a thousand ways of actng on the appearance of an object so as to eliinate any equivocation and to make of this outward sign one and oly one inner reality. The tuth is that the vast majority of images on he screen coform to the psychology of the theater or to the novel of classical analysis. They proceed from the commonsense supposi­ tion that a necessary and unambiuous causal relationship exists between feelngs and their outward manifestations. They postulate that all is in the consciousness and that this consciousness can be known.

If, a little more subtly, one understands by cnema the tech­

niques of a narrative bon of montage and change of camera posi­ tion, the s ame statement holds true.

A novel by Dos Passos or

Malraux is no less diferent from those ilms to which we are accus­ tomed than it is from a novel by Fromenin or Paul Bourget.

62

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

American novel belongs not so much to the age of cinem a as to a certain vision of the world, a vision iluenced doubtless by man's relati on s with a technical civilization, but whose inluence upon the cinema, which is a fruit of this civilization, has been less than on he novel, in spite of the alibis that the lm-maker can ofer the novelist. Likewise, in gong to he novel he cinema has usualy looked not as one might expect to works in which some have seen its iluence lready operating, but, in Holywood, to Vi ctori an litera­ ture and n France, to Heri Bordeaux and Piere Benoit. Better . . . or worse . . . when an American director tuns his attention on some rare occasion to a work b y Hemi nway, for example For Whom the Bell Tolls, he treats it in the traditional style that suits each and every adventure story. he way things are, then, it woul d seem as if the cinema was fty years behind the novel. If we mantain that the cinema lu­ ences the novel then we must suppose h at it is a questi on of a p otenti al i m age, exi s ti ng exclusively behind th e m agnf yin g glass of the citic and seen only from where he sits. We would then be talkng about the iluence of a nonexistent cinema, an idel cinem a , a cinema that the novelist would produce if he were a lm­ maker; of an imainary art that we are still awaiting. And, God knows, this hypo th e si s is not as sily as it s ound s . Let us hold on to it, at least as we do to those imaginary values wh ich cancel one another o u t follo win g on the equation that they have helped to solve . If the apparent inluence of the cinema on the novel has led the minds of some otherwise sound critics astray, it is because the novel­ ist now uses narrative techniques and adopts a standard of evalua­ tion of he facts, the ainity of which with the ways of the cinema are undoubted, whether borrowed directly, or as we p r e fer to think, of a cetain aesthetic convergence that has simultaneously pol a rize d several contemporary forms of expression . But in this process of iluences or of resemblances, it is the novel which h as proceeded Acualy, he

63

What Is Cinema?

most loically along the pathways of style. The novel it is that has made he subtlest use of montage, for example, and of the reversal of chronology. Above al it is the novel that has discovered the way to raise to the level of an authentic metaphysical sigicance an almost mirror-like objectivity. What camera has ever been as exter­ naly related to its object as the consciousness of the hero of Albert Cmus' L'Etranger? The fact of the matter is that we do not know f Manhattan Transfer or La Condition humaine would have been vey dfferent without the cnema, but we are certan on the con­ trary that Thomas Garner and Citizen Kane would never have eisted f it had not been for James Joyce and Dos Passos. We are itnessng, at the point at which the avant-garde has now arrived, the maing of ms that dare to take their inspration from a novel­ like style one miht describe as ultracinematographic. Seen from this anle the question of borrowing is only of secondary impor­ tance. Th e m ajo rity of the ilms that we have presently in mind are not adaptations from novels yet certain episodes of Paisa are much more indebted to Hem i ngw ay ( the scenes in th e marshes ) , or to Saroyan ( Naple s ) than Sam Wood's For Whom The Bell Tolls is to the original. By contrast, Malraux's ilm is the close equivalent of certan episodes in L'Espoir and the best of the recent English ilms are adaptations of Graham Greene. In our view the most satisfac­ tory is the modestly made Brighton Rock, which passed almost unnoticed while John Ford was lost in the sumptuous falsiication of The Fugitive (The Power and the Glory). Let us therefore see what the best contemporary lms owe to the contemporry novelists­ something it would be easy to demonstrate up to the appearance especially of Ladri di Biciclette . So, far from being scandalzed by adapt ations, we shall see in them, f not alas a certain augury for the progress of cinema, at least a possible factor in this progress, to the extent, at least, that the novelist transforms it. Perhaps you may say that this is all very true about modem novels, f the cinema is simply recouping here a hundredfold what it has already lent to the novel, but what is the arument worth when the ilm-maker pre64

In Defese of Mixed Cinema tends he is taking is nspi r ation from

G ide

or Stendhal? And why

not from Proust or even from Madame de La Fayette? And indeed wh y not? Jacques Bourgeois in an a rticl e in La Revue du Cinema has made a brilli ant analysis of the aities between A La Recherche du temps perdu and cinem atic forms of expres s i on. Actu a ll y, the real problems to be faced

in

d is c ussi n g the

heories of s u c h adaptations do not belong to the real m of aesthet­ ics . They do not derive from the cinema as an art form but as a sociological an d industrial f act .

The drama of a d ap t a ti on is the

d r ama of poplarization. A provincial pubicity bl u rb on La Char­

treuse de Parme described it as taken from "the famous cloak-and­ dagger novel. " We sometimes get the truth from ilm s a le s m e n who have never r e a d Stendhal. Shall we therefore conden the ilm by Christian J acque? Yes, to the extent that he

has b een f lse to the

e ssen c e of the novel and wherever we feel that this b etrayal was

not inevitable. No, if we take into consideration irst of all that this adaptation is above the average ilm level in qu a lity and secondly that, ll thngs considered, it p rovi d es an enchanting introduction to Stendhal's work and has certainly increased the number of its read­

ers. It is nonsense to wax wroth about the indignities practiced on literary works on the screen, at least in the name of literature. After

ll, they cannot ham the originl n the eyes of those who know it, to it. As fo" th ose wh o are un­

however ittle they appro xim ate acquainted with the ori gi nal

,

one of two things may happen ; either

they wil be s atisied with the lm which is as good as most, or t h ey

will want to know the origin al, with the resulting ga i n for literature. This argument is supported by publishers' statistics that show a rise in the sale of literary works fter they have been adapted to the screen. No, the truth is, th a t culture in general and iterature in

parti cul ar have nothing to lose from such an enteprise. There now remains the cinema, and I personally feel th at there

is every reason to be concerned over the way it

is too often used in

relation to our iterary capital because th e lm-maker has every­ thing to gain from id eli ty. Alr ead y much more higly developed,

65

What Is Cinema?

and catering to a relatively cultured and exacting public, the novel ofers the cinema characters hat are much more complex and, again, as regards the relation of form and content, a irmness of treatment and a subtlety to which we are not accustomed on the screen. Obviously f the material on which the scenarist and th e director are w o rking is in itself on an ntellectual level higher than that usual n the cnema then two things can be done. Either this diference in level nd the artistic prestige of the original work serves as a guarantee, a resevoir of ideas and a cachet for the lm, as is the case with Carmen, La Chartreuse de Parme, or L'ldiot, or the lm-makers honestly attempt an integral equivalent, they try at least not simply to use the book as an inspiration, not merely to adapt it, but to translate it onto the screen as instanced n La Symphonie Pastorale, Le Diable au corps, The Fallen Idol, or Le Jo u rn a l d'un cure de campagne. We should not throw stones at the image-makers who simplify in adaptng. her be· trayaI as we have said is a relative hng and there is no loss to literature. But the hopes for the future of the cinema are obviously pinned to the second group. hen one opens the sluice the level of the water is very little higher than that of the canal. When someone makes a m o f Madame Bovay n Holywood, the diference of aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average American lm being so great, the result is a standard American production that has only one tng wrong with it-that it is stll c lled Madame Bovay. And how can it be othewise when the iteray work s brought face to face with the vast and powefl cinematographic industry : cinema is the great leveler. When, on the other hand, thanks to a happy combination of circumstances, the lm-maker plans to treat the book as something diferent from a n-of-the-mill scenario, it is a little as f, n that moment, the whole of cnema is raised to he level of literature. Ts s the case wih the Madame Bovay and Une Partie de campagne of J ean Renoir. Ac tualy, these re not too vey good examples, not because of the quity of the lms but precisely because Renoir is more faiful to 66

In Defese of Mixed Cinema the spi ri t than the letter . What strikes us about the idel ity of Renoir is that paradoxicaly it is compatible with complete inde­ pendence from the o rii n al . The justiication for this is of course that the geius of Renoir is certainly as great as that of Flaubert or Maup a ss ant . The phe n ome non we face here is co m p a r able then to the translation of Edg ar Allan Poe by Baudelare . C ertai nly it wou l d be b ett e r f all directors w e re men of genius ; presu m abl y then there would be no problem o f ad aptatio n . The critic is oly too fo rtu n at e f he is c o nfro nted merely wi th men of tale nt . This is enough however on w hich to establish our thesis. There is nothing to prevent us from d r ea ming of a Diable au corps directed by J e a n Vigo but l e t u s co n gr atula te ourselves that at l e a st we have an adaptation by Claude Au t ant-L ar a . Faithfulness to the work of Radiguet has not only forced the screenwriters to ofer us inter e s t ing and relatively complex characters, it has incited them to lout s om e of the moral convention s of the cinema, to take certa i n isks-prudently calculated, but who can blame them for thi s-w i th p ublic prejudices. It has widened the intellectual and moral hori­ zons of the audience and prepared the way for other lms of qual­ ity. Wh at is more, this is not all ; a n d it is wrong to present idelity as f it were ne c e s saril y a ne g ative enslavement to an al i en aesthet­ ic. Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own-language not the image is its m aterial, its inti m ate efect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a lm on the crowd in a d a rkene d cinema-but precisely for these reasons the di ferences in aesthetic stucture make the search for equivalents an even m or e delicate matter, nd thus they require all the more power of invention and i magination from th e lm-maker w h o is trul y attempting a res embl ance . O n e migh t suggest that in the realm of lanuage and style c inem atic creation is in direct ratio to ideli ty . For the same reasons that rend er a word-by-word translation wothless and a too free tran sla­ tion a m atter for condemnation, a good adaptation should result in a restor ation of the essence of the le tter and the spirit. But one nows how n ti mate a possessio n of a lanuage and of he geius

67

What Is Cinema?

proper to it is required for a good translation. For example, taing the well-known simple past tenses of Andre Gide as beng speci­ cally a literary efect of a style, one might consider them subtleties hat can never be translated into the cinem a. Yet it is not at al

certain h at Delanoy in is Symphonie pastorale has not found the equivalent. The ever-present snow caries with it a subtle and polvalent symbolism that quietly modies the action, and provides it as it were with a permanent moral coeicient the value of which is not so dfferent after all from that which he writer was searching for by the appropriate use of tenses. Yet, the idea of surrounding this spiritual a dventure with snow and of inoring systematicaly the summery aspect of the countryside is a truly cinematographic discovery, to which the drector may have been led by a fortunate un derst a ndin g of the text. The example of Bresson n Le lournal d'un cure de campagne is even more convincing; his adaptation reaches an almost dizzy height of idelity by way of a ceaselessly cre­ ated respect for the text. Alfred Beguin has rightly remarked that the violence ch a ra c ter i s t i c of Bernnos could never have he same force in literature and cinema. The screen uses violence in such a customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency, which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional. Genuine idelity to the tone set by the novelist calls thus for a kind of conversion of the violence of the text. The real equivalent of he hyperbole of Bernanos lay in the elipsis and litotes of Robert Bresson's editing. The more impotant and decisive the . literary qualities of the work, he more the adaptation disturbs its equilib­ ium, the more it needs a creative talent to reconstruct it on a new equilibrium not indeed identical with, but the equivalent of, the old one. To pretend that the adaptation of novels is a slothful exercise from which the true cinema, "pure cinema," can have nothing to gain, is critical nonsense to which all adaptations of quality give the lie. It is those who care the least for idelity in the name of the so­ called demands of the screen who betray at one and the same time both literature and the cinema. 68

In The efective idelity of a Cocteau or

Defense of Mixed

Cinema

Wyler is n ot evidence of a

backward step, on the contrary, it is eviden c e of

a

development of

ci nematographic in te ll igence . Whether it is, as with the a u thor of

Parents terribles, the astonishingly perspicacious mobi lity of the camera or, as with Wyler, the asceticism of his editing, the re ii n g down of the ph oto r ap h y , the u se of the ixed · cmera and of deep

Les

focus, their success is the result of outst a nd i n g mastery ; moreover it is

evidence

of an i nventiveness of express ion which is the exact

opposite of a passive record in g of th eat er . To show respect for the

theater it is not nough to pho t ogr aph it. To create theater of any wothwhle ind is more di icu lt than to create c i nem a and this is what the maj oity of adapters were trying to do up to n ow . There is a hundred times more cinema, and better ci n ema a t

that, i n one ixed shot in The Little Foxes o r Macbeth than in all the exte rior travelling shots, in al the natural s e t tn gs , in all the geo­ rap hic l exot icism , n ll th e shots of the reverse side of the set, by

means of which up t o now the screen has ingeniously attempted to

make us fo rge t the stage. Far from being a sin of decadence , the maste rng of he theatrical re pertoire by the cinema is on the con­ trary a p roof of m atu ri ty .

In

short, to adapt is no longe r to betray

but to resp ect . Let us t ak e a comparison from circumstances in th e

mateial order. In

orde r to attain tis high level of aesthetic idelity,

it is e ssenti al that the cinematographic form of exp res si o n make proress comprable to that sep arating Hamlet from

in

the ilm

the ield of optic s . The distance

d'art is · as great as that separating

the comple i ties of the modem lens from the primitiv e condenser of

the maic lantern. Its imp osing complexity has no other purpose han to compensate for the distortions, the aberrations, the difrac­

tions , for which the glass is resp o nsibl e-th at is to say, to re nd e r the camera obscura as o bj ective as possible. The transition from a the­ atrical work to the screen demands, on the aes theti c level, a s cien­ tiic knowledge, so to speak, of ideli ty comparable to th at of a c am er a operator in his photo raphi c rende ri ng .

It

is the termination

of a pr oressi on and the be in n in g of a rebirth. If the cinema to day 69

What Is Cinema? is capable of efectively taing on the realm of the novel and the theater, it i s pimarily because it is sure enough of itself an d m a ste r

enough of its means so that it no lo nger need asset itself i n the say it can now asp ire to idelity-not the illusory id elity of a replica-through an intimate understanding of its own true aesthetic structure wh ich is a prerequi site and necessary condi­ process. That is to

tion of respect for the works it is about to make its own. The

mltipication of adaptations of literary w orks which are far from cinematic need not disturb the critic who is concerned about the puity of he seventh at; on the contrary, hey are the uarantee of its progre ss "Why hen," it will be asked by hose nostalic for cinema with a capital C, independent, specic, autonomous, free of al com­ proise, "should so much art be placed at the service of a cause that does not need it-why make u n au then ti c c opie s of n ovel s .

when one can read the book, nd of Phedre when ll you need is to

go to the C o me di e Fran�aise? No matter how s atisfyi ng the adapta­

tions may be, you cannot arue that they are worth more than the oriinal, especially not of a ilm of an equal artistic quality on a theme that is speciiclly cinematographic? You cite Le Diable au corps,

The Fallen Idol, Les Parents terribles, and Hamlet. Wel

nd good. I can cite in return The Gold R ush, Potemkin, Broken Blossoms, Scarface, Stagecoach, or even Citizen Ka n e

,

all master­

pieces which would never have eisted wihout the cinema, irre­ placeable additions to the patrimon y of at. Even f the best of adaptations are no longer naive betrayals or an unworthy

pr o s ti t u

­

tion, it is still true that in them a reat deal of talent has gone to waste. You speak of progress but progress which can oly re nd er he cinema sterle in makng it an anex of literature. Give to he heater nd to the novel that which is thers and to the cnema that which can never belong elsewhere." This last objection would be valid in theory if it did not over­ look historical relativity, a factor to be counted when an art is in fll evolution It is quite true that an oriinal scenario is preferable .

70

In Defese of Mixed Cinema to an a d apt at i on, all else being equal. No one dreams of contes ti ng this. Yo u may cal Charlie Chap li n the Moliere of the cnem a , but we would not s acri i ce Monsieur Verdoux for an adaptation of Le Misanthrope. Let u s h ope , then, to h ave as ofte n as possible lms like Le Jour se leve, La Regie du jeu, or The Best Years of Our Lives. But th e se are platonic wishes, attitudes of m i n d that have no bearing on the actual evolution of the cinema. If th e cinema tuns more and more to literature-indeed to p anting or to dr a m a-it is a fact which we take note of and attempt to understand because it is very likely that we cannot nluence it. In such a s itu a ti on , f fact does not absolutely make r i ght , it requires the critic at least t o b e fav orabl y pre d i spo se d . Once more, let us not b e misled here by drawing an an alogy with the other arts, es peci al y those w hos e evolution towards an individualistic use h as .m ade virtu aly i nd e pendent of the co nsum er. L autr! a m ont and Van G o gh p r o du ced ­

their creative work whle either misunderstood or ignored by ther

m i ni mum num­ ber, and it is an mmense minimum, of p eople who fr equ ent the cnem a here and now. Even when th e ilm-maker afronts the pub­ lic taste there is no justication for h is audacity, no j u s tii c atio n except insofar as it is possible to adit hat it is the spectator who isunderstands what he should and someday will like. The oly possible co nte mp ora ry comparison is with architecture, s ince a house has no meaning except as a habitation. The cinema is like­ wise a functional art. If we take anoth er system of reference we must say of the cinema that its exi stence p recedes its essence; eve n n his most adventurous extrapolations, it is this eistence from which he critic must take his pont of dep artur e . As n h isto ry, and with approximately he same reservations, the veriication of a ch ange gees beyond real ity and already pos tul ates a value judg­ ment. Those who damned the sound lm at its birth were u nwi lling to amit precisely is, even when the sound lm h eld the incom­ p arabl e a dvantage over the silent lm th at it was replacing it. Even f this critical pram atism does not seem to the reader contemporaries .

Th e cinema canot exist

without a

71

What

Is

Cinema?

sfic iently wel-founded, he must nevertheless admit that it justiies in us a certain humility and thoughtful prudence when faced with any sign of evolution in the cinema. It is in this frame of mind that we ofer the explanation with w h i ch we would like to end this essay. The mastepieces to which we customarily refer as examples of true cinema-the cinema which owes nothing to the theater and literature because it is capable of discovering its own themes and lanuage-these masterpieces are probably as admirable as they are nimitable. If the

Soviet cinema no longer ives us the equiva­

lent of Potemkin or Hollywood the equivalent of Sunrise, Halle­ lujah , Scarface, It Happened One

Nigh t

,

or even of Stagecoach it is

not because the new generation of directors is in any way inferior to the old. As a matter of fact, they are very largely the s ame people. Nor is it, we believe, because economic and political factors of production have rendered their inspiration sterile . It is rather that genius and talent are relative phenomena and only develop in rela­ tion to a set of historical circumstances. It would be too simple to explain the theatrical failures of Voltaire on the grounds that he had no tragic sense ; it was the age that had none. Any attempt to prol ong Racinian tragedy was an incongruous undertaking in con­ lict with the nature of things . There is no sense in asking ourselves what the author of Phedre would have written in 1 740 because he whom we call Racine was not a man answering that identity, but "the-poet-who-had-written-Phedre. " Without Phedre Racine

is an

anonymity, a concept of the mind. It is equally pointless jn

he

cinema to regret that we no longer have Mack Sennett to carry on the reat comic tradition. The geius of Mack Sennett was that he made his slapstick comedies at the period when this was possible. As a m atte r of fact, the quality of Mack Sennett productions died before he did, and certain of his pupils are still very much alive ; Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, for example, whose rare appear­ ances these past ifteen years have been only p aiful exhibitions in which nothing of the verve of yesteryear has survivd. Only C h ap

­

ln has non how to span a rd of a centuy of cnema, nd tis

72

In Defese of Mixed Cinema

becaus e his geius was truly ex cep tion al . But a t the price of w h at reincarnations, of w h at a total renewal of is in �p ir a tio n , of his style and even of h is character ! We n o te here-the evidence is over­ whelming-that s tra n ge acceleration of aes the ti c continuity which characterizes th e cinema. A write r may repeat himsef both i n mat­ ter and form over half a century. The tle nt of a lm-maker, if he does not evolve wih his at, l s ts no more than ive or ten years . This is why ge n ius , less lexi bl e and less c o ns ci ou s than tlent, has freq uent moments of extraord n y falure; for · example, Strohem, Abel Pudovn. Cetly the causes of these p ro fou n d dis­ agreements between the tist nd his at, whi ch cruely age genius and reduce it to nothng more th a n a sum of obs e s s ion s and use­ less megalomaia, are multiple, and we are not going t o a nalye them here. But we wold lke to take up one of them which i s d irectl y re l a te d to o ur p upo se . Up till about 1 9 3 8 th e black-and-white cinem a made continuou s progress . At i rs t it was a te ch i c al prore ss- a r tiic i al li gh t i ng, p an ch r om a ti c emulsions, travelling s h o ts , sound-and in conse­ quence an erichng of th e . means of expression-cl ose-up, mon­ tage, parallel mont age , elipsis, r e-f ra m i n g, and so on . Side by s i d e with his r api d evolution o f th e l an gua ge and in strict interde­ p e nden ce on it, ilm-makers d is c o ve re d ori in al themes to which the new at gave substance . "That is cinema ! " was s i m p l y a reference to this phen om e n on , which dominated the irst thirty years o f the il m as art-that marvelous accord between a new te ch iqu e and an unpre ce de nted m e s s a ge . This ph en o m e no n has taken on a great variety of forms : he st a r, reevaluation, the rebirth of the epi c , of the Commedia dell'A rte, and so on. But it was di re ctl y at tr ib u t abl e to tec h ni c al p rore s s-it was the novelty of e xpr e ss i on wh ich paid the pr i ce for new themes. F or thity ye ars the histor y of cin­ ematoraphic techique, in a broad sense, was bound up i n practice with the devel opm e nt of the scenario. The reat directors are irst of all creators of form ; f you w i s h , they are rhetoricians. This in n o sense means that they supported the th e oy of "art for art's s ake, " G ance,

73

What Is Cinema? but simply that

n the

dialectic of fom and content, form was then the

determining factor in the same way that perspective or oils turned the pictorial world upside down. We h ave only to go b ack 1 0 or 1 5 years to obseve evidence of

the aging of what was the patrmony of the t of cnema. We have

noted the speedy death of certain types of l m, even m aj or ones

like the sl apstick comedy, but the most characteistic disappearance is undoubtedly that of the str. Cetan actors have always been a

commercial success with he public, but this devotion h as nothing

n common with the socioreligious phenomenon of which Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo were the golden calves. It ll seemed as if he area of cinematic hemes had exhausted whatever it could

have hoped for from tecnique. It was no longer enough to nvent

quick cuttng or a new style of photography, n order to stir pe­ ple's emotions. Unaware, the cinema had passed into he age of the s cenario. By this we mean a reversal of the relationsip between

m atter and fo rm Not that form has become a mat te r of indifer­ ence, quite the opposite. It had never been more rigorously deter­ mined by the content or become more necessary or a matter of .

greater subtlety. But all this knowledge that we have acquired oper­ ates against the intusion of form, rendering it virtualy invisible

before a subject that we appreciate today for its ow n sake and

concening which we become more and more exacting. Like those rivers wh i ch have inally hollowed out their beds and have only the strenth left to cary their waters to the sea, without adding one single

rain of

sand to their banks,

equilibrium-proile.

The d ays

the cinema approaches its

are gone when it was enough to

"make cinema" in order to deserve well of the seventh art. Whle we wait until color or stereoscopy provisionally return its primacy to fom and create a new cycle of aesthetic erosion, on the surface cinema has no longer anything to conquer. There remains for it oly to irrigate its banks, to insi nuate itself between the arts among

which it has so swiftly carved out its valleys, subtly to invest them, to inltrate the subsoil, n order to excavate invisible galleries. The

74

In

Defese of Mixed Cinema

time of resurgence of a cinema newly independent of novel and theater wll return. But it may then be because novels wll be witten drectly onto lm. s it awaits the dialectic of the h is to y of at which wil restore to it his desrable and hyp oth eticl auton­ omy, the cinema draws into itself the formidable resources of el ab­ orated subj ects am as sed around i t by neihb oring arts during the cours e of he centuries. It will make th em its own because it has need of th em and we expeience he desre to rediscover them by way of the cinema. This bei ng done, cinema wll not b e a substitute for them, rather wll the opposite be true. The succes s of med he ater helps the theater j ust as he adaptati on of the n ovel serves the purpose of literature . Hmlet on the screen can oly ncrease Shakespeare's public and a pat of this public at leas t wll have the taste to go and hear it on the stage. Le lournal d'un cure de campagne, as seen by Robert B res s on, increased Bernanos' readers tefold. he tuth is h ere is here no competition o r substitution, rather the adding of a new d imens ion that the arts had gradually lost from the time of he Reform ation on : namely a pubic . ho wil complain of that?

TH EATER AN D C I N E MA Part

WHILE CRITICS often

One

draw attenti on to the resemblances between the cnema and he novel, "lmed theater" stll frequenly passes fr heresy. So lo ng as its a dvocates and i ts p rim e examples were the statements and the p l ay s of Marcel Panol it was reasonable enou gh to e x plain his one or two successes as lukes resulting from an unusual combination of crcum s ta nce s "Flmed theater" was bound up with recolections, n retrospect so farcical, of the ilm d'art or the oulevard hits in the "style" of Berthomie u . ( Note : Unique, an incomprehensible exception at the threshold of the talking lm, stands the unforgett able Jean de la lune. ) The w arti me failure of he screen adaptation of that ad i ra bl e play Le Voyageur sans baggages, the subject of wich would seem to have been suit­ abl y cinematic, apparently clinched the matter for the opponents of "lmed theater." It took a un of recent successes, from The Little Foxes to Macbeth by way of Henry V, Hamlet, and Les Parents terribles, to show that the cnema is a valid medium for a wide v .ety of dramatic w orks . Tuflly speaing, those prej u died against lmed theater would not hav e so m an y examples from th e past to point to if the .

76

Theater and Cinema-Part One question were conined to lms hat were avowedly adaptatio n s of plays. There is then some justicaion for lookng over he histoy of ilms not accor di n g to titles but on the basis of their dramatic

structure and direction.

A

Brief Historical

Note

le the critics were b u s y damnng lmed course, they were at he same

th eate r without re­ t im e show e ri ng prais e on certain

forms of cnem a that a closer analysis would have r ev e al e d to be

the very embodiment of th e art of the dram a . Their vision ob s cure d

by the ilm d'art

and its ofspring, the c u stom s w ere

letti ng by,

stamped as "pure cinema," various examples of cinematographic

heater begi nnng with American comedy. If you look at his com­

"theatrical" than the adap­ tation of any boulevard or Broadway play. Bult on comedy of dialoue and si tu a tio n most of the scenes are nteriors while he ed i ti ng uses the device of s h o t and rever se s h o t to point up he dialoue. Here one should pe rh aps expound on the s o cio l o gical b a ckground that made possible the bril l iant development of the American com edy over a d ecade. The efect of th is I ?elieve would be to conirm the existence of a w o r k i n g relationship between the­ a te r and cinem a . The cinem a had, so to speak, dis en s e d th eater

edy closely you will see hat it is no less ,

-

-

-

from any need for p i o r c.istence. There was no such need since the

authors of this is

these

plays could sell them directly t o the screen. But

a purely accidental phenomen on historically related

combination of s oc i o l o gi c al

to

a

and economic conditions now seem­

in gly on th eir way out. For he past ifteen years we h ave seen,

long

with

the decline of a cetain type of American c o me dy

increasing nu mb er of lmed Br o adway c omed y su cces s e s

,

an

.

In the realm of psychological drama and th e drama of manners,

W yl er h ad

no

h e sitation in taking he p l ay

by

Lllian Heman, Te

77

What Is Cinema?

sto ck and barrel, and brining it to the screen virtually in its theatrical e ntirety . Actualy there has never been any prejudice against l med theater in the Uited States . But the cir­ c u m s tance s of p r o ductio n in Ho ll w o o d , at le a st up to 1 940, were n o t the same as in E u rop e It was a m atter there of a cinemato­ graphic heater rest ri cte d to certain speciic genres and at least duing the rst de c a de of sound, of borr owng ittle fro m the stage. Th e pre se nt crisis n sc re e n material in Hollwood has sent it look­ ing for help more fre quentl y to written theater. But in American comedy the theater, albeit nvisible, was alw ays po tenti ally here. * here is no question that we in Europe can lay no claim to n achi evem e nt comparable to the A meric an comedy With the excep­ tion of the special c a s e of M arc el Pagnol, which needs a special study, boulevard c ome dies h ave f ail ed lamentabl y on the screen Filmed theater, however , does not b e gin with s ou n d Let us go a l i t tle farther back, speciicaly to the tim e when the ilm d'art was Little Foxes, lock,

.

.

.

.

demonstrably failng. Th at was the heyd ay of Melies who saw the

ci ne m a as basically nothing more th an a rei ne me nt of the mavels

of the theater. Special efe c ts were for him si mply a f u r th er evolu­

tion of conjurng. h e greater part of French and American come­

dians come from the music hall or from the boulevard the ater One need only look at M ax Lind e r to see h ow much h e owes to his t h ea tri c al experience. Like mo st comics of hi s time he plays drectly .

*

In h i s book of reminiscences cove rin g 5 0

ye a rS o f cinema, e n titled The

Pub lic Is A lways R ight, A do l ph Zukor, creator of the st ar system, also tells us how the cnema in Am e r i c a even more than in France use d its nascent aware­ ness to plunder the th e ate r . Realizing that the comercial fu tu re of the cinema depended o n the qu a li ty of the subject m at t e r and he prestige of the cast, Zukor bo u g h t up as many ilm a d ap tation righ ts as he could and e n tice d big names away from t he theater. His s al ay scales, relatively h igh for the ti me , did not however always overcome the reluctance of the actors to become a p ar t of this despised i n d u s t y with its fairg round lavor. Vey soon, afte r the break with the theater, the phenomenon of the "star" peculiar to the c ine ma e m e rged, the public c h o s e its favo ri tes from among the f amous theater n ames, nd th i s elect rapidly acqu ired a gl o y with which stage fme coul d not be compared. Simil arly, the earlier theatical scenrios were ab andone d in favor of stories adapted to the new mtholoy. Still, it was by copy in g he the ater that he

stat had ben made.

78

Theater and Cinema-Part One

to the audience, winks at them and calls on them to witness his embarrassment, and does not shrink from asides. As for Charie Chaplin, apart from his indebtedness to the English school of ime, it is clear that h i s art consists in perfecting, thanks to the cinema, his sil as a music-hal comic. Here he cinema ofers more han the theater but only by going beyond it, by relieving it of its imperfections. The economics of the gag are governed by the dis-, "· tance between the stage and the audience and above al by the length of the laughs which spur th e actor to protract is efect to the p oint of their extinction. The stage, then, eggs him on, f o r c es him i n deed to exagg: rate Only the screen could allow Charlie to attain mathematical perfection of situation and gesture whereby the mai­ mum efect is o btained in the minimum of time. When one sees again the realy old s l ap stic k lms, the Boireau or Onesime series, for example, it is not oly the acting which st ri kes one as belo ni ng to the theater, it is also the stucture of he story The cinem a makes it p ossib l e to carry a simple situation to its ultimate concl us i ons which on the stage would be re s t ri cted by time and space, that is, to what ight be called a l ar v al stage. What makes it p os sible to believe that the cinema exists to discover or create a new set of dramatic facts is its capacity to transform the­ atrical situations that otherwise would never have reached their maturity. In Mexico there is a ind of salamander capable of repro­ duction at the larval s t age and which develops no further. By inj e ct­ ing it with hormones, scientists have brought it to maturity. In ike fas hio n we know that the continuity of aim at evolution presented us with incomprehensible gaps until biologists discoverei the laws of paidomorphasis f rom which they learnt not only to p l ace em­ bryonic forms n the line of evolution of the spe c i es but also to reconze that certan ndividuals, see m ingly adult, have been halted in their evolutionary development. In this sense certain types of theater are founded on dramatic situations that were con· genitally at rophied p rior to the appearance of the cinema. If theater is, as Jean Hytier says it is, a metaphysic of the will, what is one to .

.

79

What

Is

think of

Cinema? a burlesque like Onesime et Ie beau voyage-where an

obstinate d etermin a ti o n to

pr oce ed n

o f the most ludicrous obstacles , with a n ot too clearly explained sort of h o ne ymo on tip which ceases to m ake any sense after certain e arly mishap s , borders on a ind of metaphysical in s a nity, a deliium of the wil, a c ance r­ ous r e genera ti o n of action from out of i ts e lf aganst al reason. Has one ev e n th e ri gh t here to use the te rmi no l ogy of the psy­ choloist and speak of wil? The m ajo ri t y of these burlesques are an e ndl e s sl y protracted ex p res s io n of something that cries from within the character. They are a ind of phe no me n oloy of ob s tin a cy . The do m e s t ic Boireau wll contnue to do the h ousework till t he house coll aps es in ruins. Onesime, t h e mi g ra to r y spouse, wll continue on h i s honeymoon tip t o the point of em ba rk in g ,for the horizo n in his wicker trunk. The actio n here no l o nge r calls for · pl ot , ep i so d es , rep e rc u s si on s , misunderstandings, or sudden reversals . It unfolds i mplac a b l y t o the poi n t at which it d e str oys itself. It proce ed s un­ swervingly towards a k in d of rudimentary catharsis of catastrophe l i ke a small child r eckl e s s l y inlati n g a rubber balloon t o the p o i nt where it e xpl od e s in his face-to ou r r e l i e f an d po s s ibl y to h i s . For the rest, when one examines the h i s to ry of the charac te r s , situations, and routines of classical farce it is i mpo ss ibl e to avoid the conclusion that slapstick cinema gave it a sudden and dazzling r eb irth . The "lesh and blood farce," on i ts way out since the seven­ teenth century, survived, highly spe c i al iz e d an d tr ans f orm ed , o ly in the ci r cus and in certain inds of m u s i c hal. That is to say pre c i se l y in these places where the Hollwood pr o d uce r s of slap­ stick lms went for their actors . Th e routines of this genr e com­ b in ed with the resources of the cinema added widely to their tech­ ical repe rto ry . It made possible a Max Linder, a B uster Keaton, a Laurel and Hardy, a C hap l i n . Between 1 9 03 and 1 9 20 it r each ed a p e a k unique in its history. I am referring t o the tradition of farce as spite

i t has been pepetuated since the days of Plautus and Terence and

even

in clud ing

the Commedia dell'A rte wi th its speci al themes and

techniques . Let me take 80

ju s t

one example. The "vat ro ut ine " tu rn s

Theater and Cinema-Part One

up spontaneously in an old Max Linder around

1912

or

1913

in

which we see the sprightly Don Juan seducer of the dyer' s wfe forced to take a header into a vat full of dye to escape the venge ance of the cheated husband .

In a

case like this there is no question

of

iitation, or of inluence o r of a remembered routine, just the spon­ taneous lining up of a genre with its tradition .

The Text! The Text! It is cler from these few recollections from the past that the relations between theater and cnema are much older and closer than is gen­ eraly thought to be the case and that they are certanly not limited to what is generlly and deprecatingly called "ilmed theater." We have also seen that the nluence, as unconscious as it was unavowed, of the repetory nd traditions of theater has been vey m arked on that class of lm considered purely nd specicaly cnematic . But the problem of the adaptation of a play as we generally use the term is something diferent again. We must begin, before going any furher, by distinuishing between theatrical reality and dra­ matic reality. Drama is the soul of the theater but this soul sometimes inhabits other bodies . A sonnet, a fable of La Fontaine, a novel, a m can owe their efectiveness to what Heri Gouhier c alls "the dramatic categories." From this point of view it is useless to claim autonomy

for the theater. Either that, or we must show it to be something negative. That is to say a play cannot not be dramatic while a novel s free to be dramatic r not. Of Mice and

M en

is s multaneously a

novel and a model tragedy. On the other h and, it would be very hard to adapt Swann's Way for the theater. One would not praise a play for its novel-like qualities yet one may very wel congratulate a novelist for being able to structure an action. Nevertheless, i f we insist that the dramatic is exclusive to b e81

What Is Cinema?

ater, we

must concede its imense inluence and also that the

cinema is the least likely of the arts to escape this luence. At his rate, haf of literature and three quarters of the existing lms are branches of theater. It is equally true that this is not the . way to state the problem. The problem oly came alive by virtue of he incanation of the heatrical work not in the actor but in the text. Phedre was written to be played but it also exists as a work and

as a tragedy for the student as he labors the year round at his classics. "Armchair theater," having oly lacking as theater, but it

t r ary Cyrano

is

maination

to rely on, is

nevertheless stll theater. On the con­

de Bergerac or Le Voyageur sans baggages as lmed

are not, in spite of the text and of a generous dose of spectacle into the bargain. If it were permissible to take just one single action from Phedre, to reconstruct it according to the requirements of the novel or of cinematic dialogue, we would ind ourselves back

with

our earlier

hypothesis, namely of the theatrical reduced to the dramatic. Now while, metaphysicaly speaing,

there is

nothing to prevent one

from doing this, there are a number of historical and purely prac­ tical arguments against it. The simplest of them is a salutary fear of the ridiculous, while the most forceful is our modern attitude to­ wards a work of art which demands respect for he text and for the rights of authorship, and which is morally binding even after the author's death . In other words, only Racine has the right to make an adaptation of Phedre. But here , over and above the fact that even so there is no uarantee that

it wold be any good (nouilh

hmself adapted Le Voyageur sans baggages) there is also another fact to consider. Racine happens to be dead. Some will hold that the situation is not the s ame during an author's lifetime, since he can himself revise his work and remodel

his material.

Andre Gide did this recently although in an opposite

direction, namely from novel to screen with Les Caves du Vatican. At le�st

he

can keep an eye on the result and guarantee the adapta­

tion. A closer examination however shows that this is a matter

82

Theater and Cinema-Part One r athe r of jurisdiction than of aesthetics. In the irst place talent, and stll less geius , are not to be found everwhere, an d nothing can guarantee that the original and the a d aptati on wll be of the same

standard even if they are the work of the

same author. Further­

more, the usual reason for wanting to make a ilm out of a contem­

porary play is its commercial success in the the ater. In the course of

its successful un, the text, as tried out, has become crystalized so

to speak as to its essentials and it is this text that th e lm audience'

wll be looking for. So here we are, by way of a more or less honorable detour, b a ck at our respect for the written text. Fnally it may be argued that the reater the dramatic quality of

a work the more diicult it is to separate of the dram atic from the

theatrical element, a synthesis of the two having been achieved in the text. It is sigiicant that while novels are often dramatized , a novel is rarely made from a play. It is as if the theater stood at the

end of an irreversible process of aesthetic reinement. Stictly sp e akin g one could m ak e a play out of Madame Bovary or The Brothers Karamazov. But had the plays come irst it would be impossible to derive from them the novels as we know them.

In

other words, when the drama is s o much a part of the novel that it cannot be taken from it, reciprocally the novel can only be the reslt of a process of induction which in the arts means p urely and simply a new creation. Compared with the play, the n ovel is ol y

one of the many possible syntheses derivable from the simple

dra­

matic elem ent I am comparing for the moment novel and theater but there i s evey reason t o suppose th at the arument applies with greater .

force to the cinema. For we have one of two th ngs to choose from. he lm is ei th er he photographed play, text and al, in which case we have our famous "lmed theater. " Or the p lay is adapted to the

requrements of the cinema and we are back with the composite that we spoke of above and it is a question of a new work. Jean Renoir drew his inspiration for Boudu sauve des eaux from the play by Rene F a u ch o i s but he made a superior thin g of it, which in all 83

What Is Cinema?

o ri gi na l . * This is, incidentally, an e xce p t ion that deinite l y proves the rule. However one app r o aches it, a play whether classic or modern is unassailably protected by its text. There i s no way of ad ap ti ng the te x t without d i sp o sing of it a n d substituting something else, which may be better but is n o t the play. This is a p r a c ti ce , for that m atter, restricted of necessity to second-class authors or to those still l ivi n g , s ince he m asterpieces that time has hallowed demand, as a postu­ l ate, that we respect their texts . The expeience of the last ten years bears this out. If the p r ob ­ lem of ilm e d theater h as taken o n a new lease of aesthetic life it is thanks to lms like Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth among the classics, and among c ontemporary works ilms l ik e The Little Faxes by Llli an Hellman and Wyler, L es Parents terribles, Occupe-toi d'A melie, R ope. Jean Cocteau had written an adaptation of Les Parents terribles prior to the war. When he to ok up the project again in 1 946 he decided to go back to the orignal text. As we shal see, a little later he also vrtually p reserv ed the original stage set­ tngs. Whether it has been in the United States, En gla n d , or France, both with the classics and the contemporary plays, the evolution of med theater has been the s ame. It has been charac­ te rze d by an i n cre asi ngly exacti ng demand for idelity to the tex t as o rii n ally written. It is as i f al the various experiments of the so u n d ilm had co nv e rg e d on this point. Previously the irst concern of a ilm-maker was to d is uise the theatrical origins of his model, to adapt it and to dissolve it in c in ema. Not oly does he seem to h ave abandoned this attitude, he makes a p o i n t of emphasizing its theatrical character. It co ul d not pr o babilit y eclipsed the

the essentials of the the the ater, thes e are already embodied in the text. The text determines the mode and style of the pro d u ct i on ; it is al re ad y potentialy the thebe othewise from the moment we preserve

text. Conceived wih a view to th e potentialities of

*

84

He took no less a libety with La Carosse du S. Sacrement by Memee.

Theater and Cinema-Part One ater. There is no way at one and the same time of being faithful to it and of turning it aside from the direction it was supposed to go.

That Theater Which 1 Cannot A b ide!

Hide

We shal ind a conirmation of tis in an example borrowed from

perhaps, be creating a method of teachng literature through cinema. I refer to Le Mede­

classical theater. It is a lm that may stll,

havoc in French schools and lycees and which pretends to ofer cin

malgre lui. It was brought to the screen, with he help of

a

doubtlessly well-intentioned teacher, by a director whose name we wll not disclose . This ilm has a dossier, as laudatory as it is de­ pressing, from professors and headmasters of lycees who are de­ lighted by its ine qualities. In re a l ity it is an unbelievable collection of al the faults guaranteed to make an end of lm and theater

with the a real forest, opens with an nterminable

alike, to say nothing of Mol iere himself. The irst scene, bundles of wood, set in

travelling shot through the underbrush, destined obviously to allow us to enjoy the efects of sunlight on the underside of the branches before showin g us two clownlike characters who are presumably gathering mushrooms

and whose stage costumes,

in

this setting,

look like nothing s o much as grotesque disguises. Real settings are used

as

much

as

possible

throughout

the

lm.

The

arrival

of

Sganarelle for a consultation is seized upon as an opportuity to show

us a smal country manor house of the seventeenth century.

And what of the editing? In the irst scene it moves from m edium full-shot to full-shot, cross cutting with each piece of dialogue. One has the feeling that f the text, much against the director's will, had not dictated the length of lm, he would h ave presented the low of dialogue in that speeded-up form of editing we associate

with Abel

G ance . Such as it is, the editing sees to it that the students, through the use of shot-and-reverse-shot n close-up , miss noth ing of he

85

What Is Cinema?

iing of the cast from the Comedie Fran;aise, which nquestion­ ably takes us back to the heyday of the ilm d'art. If by cinema we understand liberty of action in regard to space, and freedom to choose your anl e of approach to he action , then lming a play should give the setting a breadth and reality un­ attainable on the stage. It would also free the spectator from his seat and by varying the shots give an added quaity to he acting. Faced with productions of tis ind, one must agree hat every arument against lmed heater is a valid one. But the problem is not with the production at ll. What was actually done was to nject the power of "cinema" nto the theater. The oriinal drama and the text even more so h ave been turned out of house and home, so to speak. The duration of the action on the stage and on screen are obviously not the same. The dramatic primacy of the word is thrown of center by the additional dramatization that the camera ives to the setting. Finaly and above ll, a cetain artiiciality, an exaggerated transformation of the decor, is totaly incompatible with that realism which is of he essence of the cnema. he text of Moliere oly takes on meaning in a forest of painted canvas nd the same is true of the acting. he foolights are not the autun sn. If it comes to that, the scene of the bundles of wood could be played in front of a curtain. It no longer cals for he foot of a tree. This failure is a good example of what may be considered he major heresy of ilmed heater, nmely the urge "to make cinema." By and large this is responsible for the majority of adaptations of successful plays. If the action is supposed to take place on the Cote d'Azur, the lovers, instead of chatting n a nook of a bar, will be ' kissing at the wheel of an American car as they drive along he Corniche against a back projection showing he rocks of he Cap d'Antibes. As for editing, the contracts of Raimu and Femndel being the ' same will assure us of a reasonably equal number of close­ ups favorng now one and now the other. Besides, the preconceptions of the public in these matters seve to conrm those of the lm-makers. People in general do not ive 86

Theater and Cinema-Part One

to the cinema. For th e m it means vast dec or , ex­ at least a ii­ mum of what they call cinema, th ey feel cheated. The cnema must

much hought

teri ors ,

and plen ty of action. If they are not iven

be more lavish than the theater. Every actor must be a somebody

of poverty or meaness in the everyday surounding so h e y say, to a lop . Obviously then, a director or a pro d ucer who is wiling to challenge the p ubli c p reju d ice in hese m atters needs courage . Espe ci all y f hey do not have too much

and any int

contributes ,

fith in what they are doing. The heresy of lmed theater is rooted

an ambivruent c o mplex that cinema has ab out the the ate r . It is an iferiority complex in the presence of an older and more li terar y art, for wich the cinema proceeds to overcompensate by the "su­ periority" of i ts techique-which in turn is istaken for an aes­ thetic superiority.

in

Canned or Supertheater? Would you ike to see and Les When the director traveing shot in the

like Henry V

these errors disp r oved? Two successful ilms Parents terribles wil do the job p erfectly . of Le Mdecin malgre lui o pen ed on a forest, it was

with the naive and perhap s us swallow the u fotunate scene with the b un dl es of wood ke a sugar-coated pil. He tried to ive us a little envronment of reaity, to ive us a ladder onto the stage . His awkward tricks had, ufotu nately , he opp osi te efect. hey underined the ure ity of both the characters and the text. Now let us see how Laurence Olivier s u cc e ed ed in resolvng the dialectic between c inem atic realism and theatical convention. His lm uso b egins with a trav elling shot, but in tis case its purpose is to plunge us into the theater, the courtyard of an Eizabethan inn. He is not pretending to m ake us forget the conventions of the heater. On the co ntr ry he afrms them. It is not with the play unconscious hope that it would help

87

What

Is

Cinema?

Henry V that the lm is immediately and directly concened, but

with a performance of Henry V. This we know from the fact that the peformance here given is not supposed to be an actual one, as when the play is iven i n the theater. It is supposed to be taking place in Shakespeare's day and we are even shown the audience and the backstage areas. There is no mistake about it, the act of faith usually required of a spectator as the curtain rises is not needed here for the enjoyment of the spectacle . We are not in the play, we are in an historical ilm about the Elizabethan heater, that is to say, we are present at a ilm of a nd that is widely accepted and to which we are quite used. Our enjoyment of the play how­ ever is not of the kind we would get from an istorical documen­ tary. It is in fact the pleasure to be derived from a Shakespearean perfomance.

In other words the aesthetic strategy of Laurence

Olivier was a trick to escape from the "miracle of the curtain," that is, from the need for the usual suspension of disbelief.

In making his lm out of a play by showing us, from the open­ ng, by a cinematic device that we are concerned here with heatri­ cal style and conventions instead of trying to hide them, he relieved relism of that which makes it the foe of theatrical illusion. Once assured of a psychological hold on the complicity of the spectator, Olivier cold then perfectly well allow himself the switch n pic­ torial style to the battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare invited it by his deliberate appeal to the imagination of the spectator ; here again Olivier

had

dficult

to

a perfect excuse. justify

f

the

This

lm

recourse

was

just

to a

the

cinematic,

reproduction

of

the play, inds its justiication in the play itself. Naturally he stll had to honor his promise and we now that he did tis . Let us simply remark here that the color, which may eventually come to seem an essentially unrealistic element, helps to justify the transi­ tion to the realm of the imaginary and once there to m ake it possi­ ble to accept a continuity which p asses from miniatures to a realis­ tic reconstruction of the battle of Aincourt. Never for one moment is Heny V really "lmed theater." The ilm exists so to speak side 88

Theater and Cinema-Part One by si de with the theatrical presentation, in front

of and behind he stage. Both Shakespeare and the theater however are tuly its pris­ oners , hemmed in on ll sides by cnema. The boulevard theater of today does not appear to make quite such obvious use of the conventions of theater. The "Theatre Libre" and the theories of Antoine might even lead one to believe in the existence at one time of a "realist" theater, a ind of pre­ cinema. * This is n llusion that no longer fools anybody. If there is

such a thing, it is again oly sometng h at relates to a system of less

obvious c onv entions, less explicit but just as such thing as a "slice of l ife" in the theater. In

absolute. There is

no

any case , he mere

fact that it is exposed to view on the stage removes it from every­ day existence and turns it into

so meth ing

seen as

it were in a shop is pro­ foundly modiied b y the conditions under which we obseve it. Antoine might decorate the stage with real jonts of meat but, unlike the cinema, he could not show a whole lock of sheep pas sing by. If he wanted to plant a tree on the stage he had irst to uproot it window; It is in a m eas ure part of the natural order but it

and in any case h e had to ive up any idea of show i ng th e entire * A comment here might not come amiss. We must irst of all recogize that melodrama and drama stirred up a realist revolution at the very core of the theater : the ideal stendhalian spectator ires a revolver at the traitor n the play ( O rson Welles was later to do the opposite on B roadway and turn a machinegun on the orchestra stalls ) . A hundred years l ater, Antoine will stage a realist text by way o f realist m ise-en-scene . If Antoine subsequently made ilms it was not just a coincidence . The fact is that if one goes back a little into history, one must agree that an elaborate attempt at " theater-cinema" had already preceded "cnema-heater." Dumas ils and Antoine were the pre­ cursors of Marcel Pagnol . It could very well be that the renissance in theater spurred by Antoine was greatly aided by the existence of cinema, which had taken upon its own head the heresy of realism and limited the theories of Antoine to a reasonable and efective reaction aganst symbolism. The choice that the Vieux Colombier had made during the revolution of the Theatre Libre ( leaving realism to the Grand Guignol ) , reassertng the value of stage con­ ventions, ight not have been possible without the competition of the cinema. It was a pefet example of competition which, whatever happens, bas inally laughed drmatic realism out of cot. Nobody cn preten d today that even the most ourgeois of boulevard d ramas is without its full sh are of theatrical conventions.

89

What Is Cinema?

realy is tree stll deives from the Eizabethan placrd he end is oly a signpost. If we bear these undoubted tuhs in mind we will then adit hat he lming of a melodrama lke Les Parents terribles presents problems very little dife ren t from lm i n g a classic play. hat we here cal re alism does not at al pl ace he play on he s am e footing as he cinema. It does not do away with the foolights. To put it si mply , the system of conven­ tions that goven the pro du ct io n and hence the text are, so to speak, at the nitil level. The conventions of tr agedy with their procession of odd-loong prop erti es and thei r alexandrines are but masks and cothurni that conm nd e mp h as ize the bsic convention which s theater. Cocteau was wel aware of this when he med h is Parents terribles. A g ai n, since his play was markedl y realist, Cocteau the lm-maker understood that he mus t add nothing to the setti ng, that the ole of the cinema was not to multipl y but to inten sfy . . . f the room of the pl ay became an ap artment in he lm , hanks to the screen and to the camera it wold feel even more cramped than the rom on the stage. What it was essential to bri n g out w as a sense of p eo ple being shut in and li ving n close p ro xi i ty. A s i n l e ray of sunliht, any other than electic light, w o uld have de stro ye d that delica te l y balanced a nd inesca pable coexistence . The crowded coach too may travel to the other end of Paris, to Madeleine's house. We leave it at the door of one ap artme n t to discover it at the door of he other. We do not have here the ex a mple of the classical editing short-cut but a p o sitive part of the direction, which the cinema did not i mpose on Cocteau and who thereby went beyo nd the express ive p ossibliti es of the theater. The latter, being re­ s t rict ed cannot therefore p rodu ce the same efect. A hu ndred ex­ ampl es cold be adduced to conirm the r esp e ct of th e camera for the s tage setting, its concern bei ng oly to increa se the efectiveness · of he s etti ngs and never to attempt to interfere with heir relation to he characters of he play. ll the annoyances of theater are not so easily disp o s e d of. Having to show each room in succession and forest. So which n

,

90

Theater and Cinema-Part One meanwhle to lower the curtain is

without doubt a po i ntless im pos i­ that is responsible for

tion. hanks to its mobility, it is the camera

he rel uity

of time and p lace . The theater needed the ci ne m a before it could freely express what it had to s ay nd Les Parents

terribles could be sh on to be a tra ge d y of an ap artment n which a

door left ajar cold take on more sigiicance han a monoloue on

a bed. Cocteau never lets his work down, his respect for what are

b ein g the reater in prop ortion as he is tho s e h appeings which are not es sen­ tial. he function of the cinema is to reve l , to bring to ligh t cetain detals that the stage would have l e ft un treated. he problem of he decor h avin g been solved, the most diilt one still remaned, namel y the editing. Here Cocteau gave pro of of his i ngeious im aginati o n. The notion of "shot" is in�lly dis pose d of. There rem ai ns henceforth only the que s tion of framing the leet­ ing crystallization of a reality of whose environing p res e n c e one is ce aselessly aware. Cocteau likes to tel how he thought his lm through in 1 6mm. "T hou g h t it throu gh" is right. He would h ave been hard put to direct it in anthin g less than 3Smm. What is important here is for the spectator to have a feeli ng of being t otally present at what is goi ng on, not as in Welles' p ictures ( or in Re­ nair's ) th ro u gh depth of focus but by vitue of a d iab ol i c speed of vision wh ic h seems for the irst time to be wedded h er e t o the pu re rhythm of attention. Un doubtely al go od editing takes this i nto the essential requirements

able to s ep arate them from

consideration. he tr ad i tional device of shot-reverse-shot di v ide s up

the di loue according to an elementay syntax of i nte res t .

he clos e-up of a telephone hat ings at a p ath etic moment is the equivl ent of a concentration of atte ntion . It see m s to us h oweve r hat nomal editing i s a compromise between hree ways of po ssibly anlzing reality. ( 1 ) A purely logical and

descriptive analysis ( the weapon used ( 2 ) A psychological an a lysis from wihin the ilm, n am ely one that its the point o f view of one of he potagoi s ts in a iven s i tuatio n . An ex am pl e of th i s would in the crime lying beside t h e co p s e ) .

91

What Is Cinema? be the lass of milk that may possibly be poisoned which Ingrid Bergman has to drink in Notorious, or the ring on the inger of

( 3 ) Finally a psycho­ logical analysis from th e point of view of spectator interest, e i ther a

Theresa Wright in The Shadow of a Doubt.

,

spontaneous interest or one provoked by the director thanks pre­ cisely to this analysis. n example of tis would be the handle of a door turning unseen by the criinal who thinks he is alone. ("Look out," the chldren used to shout to the Guignol whom the poiceman is about to suprise. ) hese three points of view which combined together constitute the synthesis of cinematoraphic events in most ilms are felt to be unique. Actualy they imply at once a psychological heterogeneity and a material discontinuity. They are basicaly the same as those peddled by the traditional novelist-wich, as we know, brought down the wrah of

I.-P.

Sartre on the head of Fran;ois Mauriac.

The importance of depth of focus and he xed camera n the ms of Orson Weles and Wiliam Wyler springs from a reluctance to fragment things arbitrarly and a desire instead to show an image that is uiforly understandable and that compels the spectator to make his own choice. lthough he remains faitful to the classic pattern of cutting­ his

m ncludes a fair number of shots above medium-Cocteau

gives it a special sigiicance by using, practically exclusively, shots from category number three above. Logical and descriptive analysis togeher with points of view of the actor are virtually eliminated. There remain those of the witness. The subjective camera naly becomes a reality but in an opposite sense, that is to s ay not as in The Lady in the Lake, thanks to a puerile ind of identiication of

he spectator and the character by means of a camera trick but, on the contrary, through the pitiless gaze of an invisible witness . The camera is at last a spectator and nothing ehe. The drama is once more a spectacle. It was indeed Cocteau who said that cinema is an event seen rough a keyhole. The mpression we get here from the keyhole is of an nvasion of privacy, the quasi-obscenity of "view-

92

Theater and Cinema-Prt One

ng." Let us take "exterioity." It de

is

a

highly signiicant example of this position of

one of the inal shots of the picture when Yvone

Bray, po i soned, is withdrawing bacwards

into her

own room,

her eyes on he busy roup around he happy Madeleine . he cme ra plls

back to

accompany her. But the movement of he

camera, no matter how great the temptation, is never cofused with the subjective viewpout of "Sophie." The shock of the traveling shot would be certaily more violent f we were

in

he

position of

the actress and were looing wih her eyes. But Cocteau carefuly avoided is false move. He keeps Yvonne de Bray "as bait" and plls

b a ck,

retreating

to show not that she

a little, behind her. he purpose of the shot is is looking, not even her ge, it is to see her

actually looking. It is

privlege of

done doubtless over her shoulder as is the

cfuema-one

which Cocteau hastens to restore to the

theater. He thus retuned

to

the pru ciple of audience-stage relations.

Whle the cnema allowed him to seize upon the drama from many angles, he deiberately chose to adopt the vi ewp o nt of the spectator,

the one denominator c o mm o n to stage and screen.

So Cocteau maintains the essentially theatrical character of his play. Instead

on

of

trying like so many others to dissolve it i n cinema,

the contrary he uses the resources of the camera

underline, to coirm the structure

of

to

point up,

to

the scenes and their p sycho­

logical corolries . The specic help given here by the cinem a can oly be descibed as an added measure of the theatrical.

As

a result he j oins ranks with Laurence Olivier, Orson Weles,

Wyler, and Dudley Nichols . This is borne out by an analysis of

Becomes Elec­ d'A melie where Claude

Macbeth, Hamlet, The Little Foxes, and Mouning tra, to s ay nothing of a lm like Occupe-toi

Autant-Lara does wih vaudeville something comparable to what

Olivier does with Henry V. ll these very characteristic successes of he past fteen years illustrate a parad ox . One

is

no longer adaptng

a subject. One is staging a play by means of cinema. The problem

93

Wat Is Cinema? of "caned" theater, wheher it is a naive or n impudent quesion,

has certaily taken on a new lease of lfe as a result of hese recent successes. We have ied to see how it happened. Now, more ambi­

tious

94

hn ever, will we be able to nd out wh?

TH EATER AN D C I N EM A Part

Two

THE LEITMOTIV of those who despise lmed theater, their inal and

apparenly nsuperable argument, continues to be the unparaleled pleasure that accompanies the presence of the actor. "hat is spe­ ciic to theater," writes Heni Gouier, in The Essence of Theater, "is the impossibility of separating of action and actor." Elsewhere he says "he stage welcomes every illusion except that of presence; the actor is there in disuise with the soul and voice of another, but ,

he is nevetheless there and by the same token space cals out for

m and for the solidity of his presence. On the other hand and nversely, the cinema accommodates evey form of reality save one -he physical presence of the actor." If it is here hat he essence of heater lies hen undoubtedly the cinema can in no way pretend to ny parllel wih it. If he writing, the style, nd the dramatic structure are, as they should be, rigorously conceived as the re­ ceptacle for the soul and being of the lesh-and-blood actor, ny atempt to substitute he shadow and relection of a man on the

screen for the man himself is a completely vain enteprise. here s

no answer to this argument. The successes of Laurence Oivier, of Welles, or of Cocteau can only be chllenged-here you need to be

9S

What Is Cinema?

bad faith-or considered inexplicable. They are a challenge both to citics and phlosophers. Altenatively one can oly explain them by casting doubts on that commonplace of theatrical criticism "the rreplacable presence of the actor."

n

The Concept of Presence At his point cetain comments seem called for concernng the . con­

cept of "presence," since it wold appear that it is this concep t, as understood ior to the apperance of p hotograph y, that the cinema ch allenges . Can the p h otographic image, especially the cinematographic mage, be likened to other images and in common with them be regarded as h aving an existence distinct from the object? Presence, naturally, is deined in terms of time and space. "To be n the presence of someone" is to recogne hm as existing ontem­ poraneously with us and to note that he comes within the actual range of our senses-n the case of cinema of our s ight and in radio of our hearing. Before the arrival of photoraphy and later of cinema, he plastic arts (especi lly potraiture ) were the only inter­ mediaries between actual physical presence and abs ence . heir justiication was their resemblance which stirs th e im aginati on and helps he memory. But photoraphy is someting else again . In no sense is it the image of an object or person, more correctly it is its traci n g . Its automatic genesis di stinguish es it radically from the other techniques of reproduction. The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in li ght-to a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere resemblance, namely a ind of identity-the card we cll by hat name being o ly conceivable in an age of photoraphy. But pho­ toraphy is a feeble tecique n he sense hat its instantaneiy compes it to capture time oly pieemel. The cnema does some96

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

hing srangely paradoxical. It makes a molding of the object as it eists n tme and, fthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object. The ineteenth century with its objective techiques of visual and sound reproduction gave birth to a new category of images, the relation of which to the reality from which they proceed requires very stict deition. Even apart from the fact that the resulting · aesthetic problems cannot be s atisfactorly raised without is ntro. · ductory philosopical inquiry, it would not be sound to treat the old aesthetic quesions as f the categories with w ich they deal had in no way been modied by the appearance of completely new phenomena. Common sens-perhaps the best phlosophical guide in this case-has clearly understood this and has nvented an ex­ pression for the presence of an actor, by adding to the placards anouncing his appearance the phrase "n lesh and blood." Tis means that for the man in the street he word "presence," today, can be ambiguous, and hus an apparent redundancy is not out of place in his age of cinema. Hence it is no longer as certain as it was that there is no middle stage between presence and absence. It is kewise at the ontoloical level that the efectiveness of the cinema has its source. It is false to say that he screen is incapable of putting us "in the presence of" the actor. It does so in the same way as a mrror-one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of the person relected in it-but it is a mirror with a delayed relec­ ion, the tn foil of which retains the image. * It s true that in the • Television naturally ds a new varint to the "pseudopresences" result­ ing from the scientic tecniques fo r reproduction created by photography. On the little screen duri ng live television the actor is actually present in space nd ime. But he reciprocal actor-spectator relationship is incomplete in one irection. The sectator ees without being seen. There is no re tun low. Televised theater, therefore, seems to share sometng both of heater and of cinema: of heater because e actor is present to the viewer, of c ine m a because the spectator is not preent to the actor. Nevetheless, this state of not being present is not uly n ab sene . The television actor has a sense of the mllions of ears nd eyes vitually present and represented by the electronic cmera. s abstrct presene is most noticeable when the actor lufs is

97

What Is Cinema?

die on the stage and th a t we have the privlege ivng n he biorapical tme of the actor. In he m about Manolete however we are present at the actual death of the famous matador and while our e motion may not be as deep as f we were actualy p res ent in the arena at that historic moment, its nature is the same. What we lose by way of direct witness do we not recap­ ture hanks to th e artiicil proiity provided by p hotor api c enlargement? Every th ing takes place as f in the tme-space perime­ ter wich is the deiion of presence. The cinema ofers us efec­ ivel y oly a me asure of dration, reduced but not to zero, while th e increase in the space factor reestablishes the equilibrium of he psy choloic al equaion. the ater Moiere cn

of

Opposition and Identiication n honest ap p raisal of

the respec tive pleas ures derived from the­ ater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more direct a bout hem, forces us to adit that the delight we experience at the end of a pl ay h as a more upfting, a nobl er, one might per hap s say a more moral, efect th an he s atisf action which folows a goo d lm. We seem to come away wih a better conscience. In a cet ain sense it is as f for the mn n the audience ll th eater is "Co rneili an . " From tis point of view one could say that in the best ms s omei ng is issing. It is as if a cetain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic shot crc uit, deprived us n the cinema of a certain tension which is a deite part of thea ter. No matter how sight tis diference it undoubtedly eists, even between the worst charity production in the the ater and th e most brilliant of Olivier's ilm adaptations. There is no thing banal about lines. Painfl enough n the heater, it is intolerable on television since the spectator who can do noting to help him is aware of the unnatural solitude of the actor. In he theater in similar circumstances a sot of understanding exists wih the audience, which is a help to n actor in rouble. This knd of reciprocal relationship is mosible on television.

98

Theater and Cinema-Prt Two

is obsevation nd he sival of the theater after fty years of

cnema, nd the propheci es of Marcel Panol, is p ratical proof enough. At he s orce of he isenchantment wich folows the lm one cold doubless detect a process of depersonalzation of the spectator. As Rosenranz wrote n 1937, in Esprit, n an article profoundly oiginal for is period, "The characters on the screen are quite naturlly obj ects of identiication, whle those on the stage re, rather, obj ects of mentl opposition because their real pres ence · gives them an o bj ective r e ality and to ranspose them into b e ing s in an mainay wold the wil of the spectator has to intevene ac­ tively, h at is to say, to wll to trasform ther physicl reaity into an abstraction . Tis abstraction being he reslt of a p rocess of he ntelligence that we cn only ask of a person who is fully conscious." A member of a lm audience te nds t o identify hmsef with the lm's hero by a psycholoical process, the result of which is to turn he audience into a "mass" and to render emotion uifom. Just as in algebra f tw o numbers equal a third, then they are equal to one another, so here we can say, f two individuals identfy hem selves with a third, hey idenfy themselves with one another. Let us compare chous irls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they s atisfy an u ncon s ci ous sexul des re and when th e hero joins them he satisies the desire of the spectator in he p rop ortio n to wh i ch the latter has identied imsef with he hero. On he stage the irls excite the olooker as th ey would in rel lfe. he result is that there is no identiication wih the hero. He becomes inste ad n object of jealosy and envy. In other words, Tarzan is oly possible on he screen . The cinema clms he spectator, he theater excites im. Even when it appeals to the lowest nstincts, he theater up to a cetain pont stnds in the way of the cr eati on of a mass men t al­ ity. * It stand s in he way of any collective representation n the ps ycholoical sense, since theater cals for an active i ndividual con­ sciousness whle the m reqres oly a passive adhesion. * Crowd and solitude e not antinomis : the audience in a movie house is made up of solitay ndividuals. Cowd should be tken here to mean the opposite of n orgnic comity feely ssembled.

99

What Is Cinema?

views shed a new light on the problem of the acor. They him from the o ntoloic al to the psychological level It is to the exte nt to which the cinema encourages identication with he These

transfer

.

hero that it colicts with the heater. Put his way the problem is

no l onger basically insoluble, for it is a fact that he cne m a has at

i ts

d is posal mens which favor a passive position or on the oher hand, means which to a greater or lesser degree stimulate he con­ sciousness of he spectator. Inversely the theater can nd ways of lessening he psychological tension between spectator and actor. Thus th eat er and cinema will n o longer be sep ar ated of by n unb ri dgeable aesthetic moat, they would simply tend to give ise to two attitud es of ind over which the director maintains a wide control Examined at close quaters, the pleasure derived from the the­ ate r not oly difers from that of the cinema but also from that of the novel. The reader of a novel, ph ysically alone like the man in the dark movie house, identies hmself with the character. * That is why after rea ding for a lo n g while he also feels the same intoxica­ tion of an ilusory ntimacy with he hero. Incontestably, th ere is in the p l eas ure derived from cinema and novel a sef-satisfaction, a concession to solitude, a sort of betrayal of action by a refusal of .

social responsibility.

The analysis of tis ph enome n on mi ght indeed be undetaken from a psychoanalytic point of view. It is not si ii c ant that the psychiatists took the term catharsis from Aristotle? Modem p e da g oi c research on psychodrama seems to h ave provided fruit­ ful nsights nto the cathartic process of theater. The ambiguity existi n g in the chld's mind between play and reality is used to get him to free imself by way of improvi s ed heater from the re­ pr es s io ns from which he sufers. This techique am ounts to creating a ind of vaue theater in which the play is of a se rious nature and the actor is his own audience. The action that develops on these *

1 00

Cf. Cl. E. M agny, L'A ge du roman am ericain, ed. Du Seuil .

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

ccsi os is not one that

is divided of

by

footlights,

which

are

undoubtely the arcitectural symb ol of he censor that separates

us from the stage. We delegate Oedip us to act in our uise and

on the oher side of a wal of r--h at iery frontier beween fantasy and re ity wh i ch ive s ren to Dionysiac mons te r s wle prote cting us from them. * These sacred beasts wll not cross his b arri er of light beyond which t h ey seem out of place and even sacrleious-witness th e disturbing atm osp h ere of aw e which sur­ ronds an actor stll m a de up, like a phosphorescent ight, when we vis it im n his dressing room. There is no p oi nt to he arument that the theater did not always have fooihts. These are only a symbol nd there were o th ers before them rom the c o t h u rn u s and mask onwards. In the seventeenth centry the fact hat yong noble s s at up on he stage is no deial of the role of he footights , on the contrary, it coirms it, by way of a privileged vi ol ati on so to speak, just as when tod ay Orson Weles s catters actors arond he audi tori u m to re on the audience with revolvers . He does not do away with the footlights, he just crosses them. The ules of the game are lso made to be broken. One e xp e s some p l a yers to cheat. t With regard to the obj e c tion based on presence and on that lone, the heater and the cinema are not b as iclly n c oict . What is realy n dispute are wo p sycholo icl modaities of a perplace him

• Cf. P. A. Touchard, Dionysos. ed. Du SeuU. t Here s a nl exmple proving hat presence does not constitute theater except in so fr as it is a matter of a perfomance. Everyone either at his own

or someone else's expense has non the embarrssment of being watched without nowng it or n spite of nowing it. Loves who kiss on public benches ofer a spectacle to the psserby, but hey do not care. My concierge who has a feeling for he mot juste says, when she ees them, that it is like being at the movies. Each of us hs sometimes found mself forced to his annoyance to do something absurd before other people. On hose occasions we experience a sense of ngy shame which is the very opposite of the atrical exhIb i tionism . Someone who looks through a keyhole is not at he heater; Cocteau has ightly demonstrated n Le sang d'un o e te ht he was aready at the cinema. nd nevetheless there ae such hings as "shows," when he protagoniss are present to us in lesh and blod but one of the two pties is ignorant of he fact or goes rough with it eluctantly. Ts is not "play" n he thearical

p

ene.

101

What Is Cinema?

fonance. The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness of the presence of audience and actor, but oly as related to a peformance. The heater acts on us by virtue of our participation

in a theatrical action across the footlights and as it were u n d er the protection of thei r censorship. The opposite is true in the cinem a .

lone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through haf-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe. There i s nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves i n imagination with the moving world before us, whi ch becomes the world . It is no lon ger on he phenomenon of the actor as a person physically p resent that we should concentrate our analysis, but rather on the ensemble of conditions th at constitute the theatri­ cal play and depive the spectator of active participation. We shall see that it is much less a question of actor and presence han of man and is rel ation to t he decor .

Behind the Decor The human being is all-important in the theater. The drama on he screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramaic efect. Some lm masterpieces use man only as an accessory, ike n exr a, or in contepoint to nature wh i ch is the true leading character. Even whe n, as in Nanook and Man of A ran, the subject is man's stuggle with natre, it cnnot be compared to a theaical action. he mainspring of the action is not in man but nature. Satre,

I thi nk it was, said, in the theater

As Jean-Paul

he drama proceeds from

he a ctor, in the cinema it goes from the decor to man. is reversal of the dramatic low is of decisive importance. It s bound up with the very essence of the mise-en-scene. One must see here one of the

1 02

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

consequences of photoraphic realism.

Obviously,

f the cinema

m akes use of nature it is because it is able to. The camera puts. at the disposal of the director all the resources of the telescope and the

microscope. The last strand

of a

rope about to snap or an entire

army maing an assault on a hill are within our reach . Dramatic causes and efects have no longer ny material limits to the eye of the camera. Drama is freed by the camera from aU contingencies of time and space. But his freeing of tangible dramatic powers is stil oly a secondary aesthetic cause, and does not b asi caly explain the

reversal of value between the actor and the decor. For sometimes it

actually

happens that the cinema deliberately depives itsef of the

use of settng and of exterior nature-we have already seen a per­ fect instance of this in Les Parents terribles-wle he theater in contrast uses a complex machinery to

ive a feeling

of ubiquity to

the audience. Is La Passion de Jeanne d'A rc by Carl Dreyer, shot

entrely in close-up, in the vir tuall y invisible and in fact theatrical settngs by Jean Hugo, less cinematic han Stagecoach? It seems to

me hat q ua ntit y has nothing to d o wjth it, nor the resemblance to certain theater techniques . The ideas of an

at i re ctor

for

a

room

in Les Dames aux camelias would not noticeably difer whe th e r for a ilm or a play. It's true h at on the screen you would doubtl e ss have some close-ups of the blood-stained handkerchief, but a skill­ ful stage production would also know how to make some play

wih

he cough and the handkerchief. ll the close-ups in Les Parents terribles are taken directly from the theater where our attention

wold spontaneously isolate

hem.

If

lm

drection

from theater direction because it llows us scenery "nd makes

be

a

a

only

dffered

closer view of he

more reasonable use of it, there w oul d

no reason to continue wih he theater and Panol would

tue prophet. For it is obvious

that

relly be a

the few square yards of the

decor of Vlar's La Dase de la mort contributed as much to the drama as he island on wich Marcel Cravene shot his excellent

lm. The fact is hat he problem lies not in

he decor

itself but in

103

What Is Cinema? its nature and function. We must therefore trow some light on an essentially theatrical notion, hat of the dramatic place. There can be no theater without architecture, whether it be the cathedral s quare , the arena of Nimes , the p alace of the Popes, the trestle stage

on a fairground,

the semicircle of the theater of

Vicenza that looks as f it were decorated by Berard

n a delirium,

or the rococo amphitheaters of the boulevard houses. Whether as a perform ance or a celebration, theater of its very essence must not be confused with nature under penalty of being absorbed by her

and ceasing to be. Founded on the reciprocal awareness of hose taking part and present to one another, it must be in contrast to he rest of the world in the same way that pl a y and reality are opposed, or concern and indiference, or liturgy and the common use of thi ngs . Costume, mask, or m ake-up , the style of the language, the f oo tligh ts

,

all c ontribute to this distinction, but the clearest sign of

all is the stage, the architecture of which has vaied from time to time without ever ceasing to mark out a privleged spot actually or v i rtual l y distinct from nature . It is precisely in virtue of this locus

dramatiells t h at decor exists . It serves in reater or less degree to set

the place apat, to specify. Whatever it is, the decor constitutes the wals of this three-sided box opening onto the auditorium, which we call the stage. These false perspectives, these fa:ades, these arbors, h ave nother side which is cloth nd nals nd wood. Evey­ o ne knows that when the actor "retires to his apatment" from he

yard or from the garden, he is actualy gong to his dressng room to take of his m ake-up . These few square feet of light and illusion are s ur roun ded

by

machinery

and

lanked

by

wings,

the

hidden

labyrinths of which do not interfere one bit with the pleasure of the spectator who is playing the game of theater. Because it is only part of the architecture of the stage, the decor of the theater is thus an area

mateially enclosed,

limited,

circumscribed,

the

coveries of which are those of our collusive imagnation.

oly

dis­

Its appearances are turned inward facing the public and the

1 04

Theater and Cinema-Part

Two

footlights. It exists by virtue of its reverse side and its absence from

anything beyond, as the painting exists by virtue of its frame . * Just

as the picture is not to be confounded w i th the scene it represents and is not a window in a wall . The stage and the decor where the

action unfolds constitute an aesthetic m icrocosm inserted perfo rce into the universe but essentially distinct from the N ature which s u rrounds

it. It is not the same

with cinema,

the b asi c principle o f which is

:

denial of any frontiers to action. The idea of a locus dramaticus is not only alien to, it is essen­ tially

a contradiction

of the concept of the screen. The screen is not

a frame like that of a picture but a mask which alows oly a part of

the action to be seen. hen a character moves of screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own

capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us. here are no wings to the screen. There could not be withou t de­ stroying its speciic illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a

face the very center of the u niverse. In contrast to the s t age the space of the screen is centrifugal. It is because that ininity which

he theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none

* The ideal historical example of this theory of theater arch itecture and its relations to the stage and the decor is p rov i de d by the Pallad i u m w i t h the extraordinary Oly m p ic heater of Vicenza, making of the a n c i e n t mphi­ theater op e n to the sky a purely architectural tl'ompe-l'oeil. The re is not a s i n gle element, including the entrance to the auitorium, w h i c h i s n o t an airmation of its e s se n tiall y architecturl nature. Built in 1 5 90, inside an old b a r rac ks donated by the town, outwardly the Olympic heater appe ars to b e j u st red-brick walls, t h a t is, a purely u t ili t ari an p i ece of a rc h i t e ct u re which one mi gh t descibe as amophous n the sense in which chemi sts dis tingu i sh between the amorphous s t ate and the cry stal state of the s ame body. The vis­ itor going in by what appears to be a hole in t h e wall c an no t bel ieve his eyes when he inds hi mself all of a su d de n n the extraordi nary hollowed-o ut grotto which constitutes the semicircle of the theater. Like t hos e blocks of quartz or am e thyst which outwardly lok l i ke comon stones wheres inside they are a co mp os i te of pure cystal, secretly o i e n ted i nward, the theater of Vicenza i s conceived ac cord ing to he laws of n aesthetic a n d articial space polarized . exclusively towrds the enter.

105

What Is Cinema?

oher than the hmn soul. Enclosed in this space the actor is at the focus of a wo-fold concave mirror. From the auditorium and from

the decor here converge on im the dim liht s of conscious human

beings an d

of

th e footlights themselves. But the ire with which he

bus is at one that of his inner p a ss ion and o f that focal point at which he stands. He ights up in each member of is audience an

accomplice lme. Like the cean in a sea shel the dramatic ini­ ties of he

human heart moan and beat between the enclosing walls

of he th eatri c al sphere. This is why ti s dramatury is in its e ssence hman. Man is at once its cause and its subject .

On th e screen man is no longer the focus of the drama, but wll become eve n tu ally the center of the uiverse. The mp act of is action may here set in moion a n iiitude of waves. The decor that surrounds hm is pat of the s o li dity of the world. For this

re a s o n he actor a s such can be absent from it, b ecause mn in th e world enjoys no a priori p r iv lege over animals and thngs. However

th e r e is no reason why he should not be the mains pin g of the drama, as n reye r' s leanne d'A rc, and in

hs respect

the cinema

m ay very wel imp os e itself upon the theater. As actions Phedre or King Lear

are no

less

cnemat ogapi c han th e atri c al ,

and he

vis ible death of a rabbit n La Regie du jeu afects us j u st as deeply as that of Agnes' little cat about which we are me rely told .

But if Racne, Shak espea re, or Moliere cannot be brought to the

cinema by just pla ci ng them before the camera and the micro­ phone, it is because the

h andling

of the action and the s tyle of he

dialoue were conceived as echoing through the architecture of the

auditorium. hat is s p eciic al y theatical about these tragedies is not their action so m u ch as the hu m an , that is to s ay the verbl, priority given to t hei r dramatic structure. The problem of lmed

theater at le ast where the classics are concened does not consist so

much n transposng an action from he stage to th e screen as n

tr ansp o s ng a text ritte n for one dramaturgical system into an­

oth e r

while at the same time re t ai i ng its efectiveness. It is not lm adapa-

therefore essentially th e action of a play which resists

106

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

tion, but ab ove and beyond the ph ases of the i ntriue (which it

enough to adapt to the realism of the screen ) it is the verbal fom whi ch aesth eti c contingenci es or culural p rej u dices obige us to respect. It is tis which refuses to let itsef be captured n he win do w of he screen. "The the ater," says B au del ai re , "is a crys tal chandelier." If one were called upon to ofer in co mp aris on a symbol other than this artiicial cry stal -like obj ect, billiant, int1­ c ate , and crclar, which refracts the li gh t which plays around its center nd holds us prisoners of its aureole, we miht s ay of the cnema that it is the little lashliht of the u sh er , movi ng like an unce rt ain comet across the night of our waking d re am , the difuse space without shape or frontiers that surounds the s cre e n . The story of the falures and recent successes of theater on lm wll be fond to be that of the ab ility of directors to retain the drmatic force of the play n a medium that relects it or, at le a st, he abiity to ive his dramai c force enouh re s on an ce to p erm it a m audience to perceive it. In oth er words, it is a matter of n aesthetic that is not c oncened with th e actor but with decor and editing. He ncefoh it is clear that lmed the ater is � asically des ­ ined to fal whenever it tends in any maner to become s impl y the photo raphng of sceic rep re s enta ti o n even and p e rh a p s most of ll when the camera is u s ed to try and make us forget the fo oights nd the backstage area. he dramatic force of th e text, instead of being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the cinematic ether. is is why a lmed play can s h ow due re sp e ct to the text, be wel acted n lik ely s ettings , and yet be c omplete ly wohless. This is what happen ed, to t ake a convenient example, to Le Voyageur sans baggages. The play lies th ere before us appar­ enly true to itself yet drained of evey oun ce of energy, like a battery dead from n unnown shot . But over and b e yond the aestheic of he de cor we see clearl y both on th e screen and on he stage h at in the l ast anal ys i s th e p ro bl em before us is that of realism. his is the problem we Iways end up wih when we are de ling wi h cnem a .

wold be e as y

1 07

What Is

Cinema?

The Screen and the Realism of Space The realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic nature. Not oly does some mavel or some fantastic thng on the screen not undermine the reality of the image, on the contrary it is its most valid justiication. llu sion in the cinema is not bsed as it is in he heater on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism of hat which is shown. ll trick work must be pefect n ll mateil respects on the screen. The "nvisible man" must wear pyjamas and smoke a cigarette. Must we conlude from this that the cinema is dedicated en­ tirely to the representation f not of natral reality at least of a plausible reality of which the spectator admits the identity with nature as he knows it? The comparative falure of German ex­ pres sionism would seem to conirm this hypothesis, since it is evi­ dent that Caigari attempted to depart from realistic decor under the iluence of the theater and painting. But this would be to ofer an oversmpliied explanation for a problem that clls for more subtle answers. We are prepared to admit that the screen opens upon an artiicial world provided there exists a comon denomi­ nator between the cinematographic image and the world we ive in. Our experience of space is the structural basis for our concep t of the universe. We may say n fact, adapting Henri Gouhier's formu­ la, "the stage welcomes every illusion except the illusion of pres­ ence," hat "the cnematographic mage can be emptied of all real­ ity save one-the reality of space . " It is perhaps an overstatement to s a y "al reality" because it is diicult to imagne a reconstruction of space devoid of all reference to nature. The world of the screen and our world cannot be juxta­ posed. The screen of necessity substitutes for it snce he very con1 08

Theater and Cinema-Part

Two

cept of uiverse is spatially exclusive. For a time, a ilm is the Uiverse, the world, or if you like, Nature. We wll see how the ms that have attempted to substitute a fabricated nature and an

artiicial world for the world of experience h ave not ll equally

succeeded. Adittng the failure of Caligari and Die Nibelungen we then ask ourselves how we explain the undoubted success of Nosferatu and La Pssion de Jeanne d'A rc, the criterion of succ�s

being that these lms have never aged. Yet it would seem at irst sight that the meth ods of direction belong to he same aeshetic faly, and hat viewing the varieties of temperament and period, one cold group these four ilms together as exp ressionist as distinct from reaist. However, if we examine them more closely we see that

there are cetain basic diferences between them. It is clear in the

case of R. Weine and Murnau. Nosferatu plays, for the greater pat of the time, against natural settings whereas the fantastic qualities o f Caligari are derived from defonities of lighting and decor. The case of Dreyer's Jeanne d'A rc is a little more subtle since at rst sight nature plays a noneistent role. To put it more drectly, the decor by Jean Hugo is no whit less artiicial and theatrical than the settings of Caligari; he systematic use of close-ups and unusual

angles is well calculated to destroy any sense of space. Regular cneclub goers know that the ilm is unfalingly ntroduced with the famous story of how the hair of Falconetti was actually cut in the interests of the

lm

and li kewise, the actors, we are told, wore no

make-up. These references to history ordinarily have no more than gossip value. In thi s case , they seem to me to hold the aes thetic secret of the ilm ; the very thing to which it owes its continued survival. It is precisely because of them that the work of Dreyer

ceases to have anthing in common w ith the theater, and indeed

one might say, with man. The greater recourse Dreyer has exclu­ sively to the human "expression , " the more he has to reconvert it again into Nature. Let there be no mistake, hat prodi gious fresco

of heads is he very opposite of an actor's lm. It is a documentary

of faces . It is not impotant how wel the actors play, whereas the

1 09

What Is Cinema?

pocmarks on Bishop Cauchon's face and he red patches of Jean d'Yd are an ntegral part of the action. In this drama-throuh-the­ microscope he whole of nature palpitates beneath every pore. he movement of a wrinle, the pursing of a lip are s e ismic shocks nd he low of tides, the lux and relux of his human epideris. But for me Dreyer's briiant sense of ci n em a is evidenced in the exterior scene which every other director would assuredly have shot in he studio. The decor as bult evoked a Middle Ages of the theater nd of m i iatu res . In one sense, no thi ng is less re alistic than this tribunal in the cemetery or this drawbridge, but the whole is lit by he l i ght of the sun and the ravedigger throws a spadeful of real ea rth into the hole. * It is these " s e co n dary " d et a i ls , appare n tl y a e s t he t ically at odds with the rest of the work, which give it its truly cinematic quality. If the p arad ox of th e cinema is rooted in the dialectic of con­ crete and abstract, f ci n em a is committed to communicate oly by way of what is real, it becomes all the m ore i mp ort nt to discern those elements in ilming which conirm our sense of natural reality and those which destroy that feelng . On the other hand, it cetaly arues a lack of p erc eptio n to deive one's sense of reality from these accumulations of factual detail. It is possible to argue that Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an ei n en tly realistic lm, though e ve r yth in g about it is stylized. Everything, except for the rarely n o t ic e abl e sound of a windshield-wiper, the murmur of a waterfall, or t h e rushing sound of sol e s ca pi ng from a broken vase. These re the noises, chosen p r e cis ely for their "ndiference" to the action, th at uarantee its re a l ity. The cinema being of its essence a dramaturgy of Nature, there can be no cinema without th e setting up of an open space in place of the uiverse rather than as part of it. The screen canot give us * This is why I consider he gravey ard scene in Ham let and the de ath of Ophelia bad istakes on Olivier's part. He h ad here a chance to introduce SUD and soil by way of countepoint to he settng of Elsinore. Does the actual shot of the sea during the sol iloquy of Hamlet show that he had sensed he need for th is? he idea, excellent in itself, is not well handled technically.

1 10

Theater and Cinema-Part Two he llusion of

his feeling of sp ace without caling on cert an natu­ rl urantees. But it is less a quesion of set co nsucti on or of rcitectre or of mmensiy than of is ol ating he aeshetic catalyst , wich it is sficient to introduce n an initesiml dose, to have it mmediately ke on the reality of nature. he concrete forest of Die Nibelungen may wel pretend to be n ite expnse. We do not believe it to be so, whereas the remblng of just one branch in he wind, and the sulight, would be enouh to onjre up ll the fores ts of he world. If this anlysis be wel fou nded , then we see that he b asic aestheic problem of lmed the ater is indeed hat of the d eco r . The ump c ard hat the director must hold is the reconvers i o n into a window oto the world of a space oriented tow ard an nte rior imension only, namely the closed and convenionl area of the heaticl play.

It s tot in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet th at the text seems to be

rendered supeluous or its strenth dmii she d by

directorial inter­ stil less n Weles' Macbeth, but p ar a doxicaly in the s tage productions of Gaston Baty, to the pre ci se extent th at t hey go out of heir way to cre ate a cinematoraphic space on the stage ; to deny hat the s e ttings have a reverse side, hus reducing the sonor­ ity of he text smply to the vi brati on of the voice of the actor who is left wi hout is " resonance box" ike a vioin th at is no th in g else but strings. One would nev er deny that the essential thing in the heater is he text . The latter conceived for he antropocenic expres sio n proper to the stage and having as its function to bring nature to it c anot, without lo sn g its raison d'etre, be used n a space ransparent W! lass. he p roblem then that faces the lm­ m a ke r is to gi ve his decor a ramatic opaqueness whle at the same me relec ting its natural reaism. Once this p arad ox of space has b ee n dealt wih, the director, so far from h esi t ati ng to bring theati­ l conv e ntions nd faithfulness to the text to the screen wll ind msef now, on the contrary, c ompletely free to rely on them. From hat pont on it is no longer a matter of unning away from

pretations,

111

What

Is

Cinema?

those things which "make theater" but in he long run to acknowl­ edge their eistence by rejecting the resources of the cinema, as Cocteau did

n Les Parents terribles nd

Weles in Macbeth, or by

putting them in quotation marks as Laurence Olivier did in Henry

V. The evidence of a retun to lmed heater hat we have had

du ring the last ten years belongs essentilly to the history of decor and editing. It is a conquest of realism-not, certainly, the reaism of subject matter or realism of expression but that reaism of space without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema.

An A nalogy from Play-Acting This proress in ilmed theater has oly been possible insofar as the opposition between the m did not rest on the ontoloical categoy of presence but on a psychology of "play. " In passing from one to the other, one goes from the absolute to the relative, from antinomy to simple contradiction. Whle the cinema cannot ofer the spectator the community feeling of theater, a certain knowledge of direction wll allow him inally, and this is a decisive factor, to preserve the meaning and force of the text. The grafting of the theatrical text onto the decor of cinema is an operation which today we know can be successfl . There remains that awareness of the active opposi­ tion existing between the spectator and the actor which constitutes the "play" of theater and is symbolized by scenic architecture. But there is a way of reducing even tis to the psychology of the cine­ matic. The reasoning of Rosenkrantz concerning opposition and identi­ ication requires in efect an important correction. It carries with it, still, a measure of equivocation. Rosenkrantz seems to equate identi­ ication with passivity and escape-an accepted fact n his time be­ cause of the condition of the cnema but less and less so in its pres­ ent stage of evolution. Actually the cnema of myth and dream s

1 12

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

now

oly one v ariety of p r o du ction and one that is less and less frequ e nt One must no t co fu s e n ac c i d e nt al and historical so­ ci al condi tio n with n un al te rable p sycho lo gic al one-two activ­ ities, that is to say, of the spectator's consciousnes s that c onverge but are not p art of o ne another. I do not i de ntiy equally with .

Bresson's cure. The oly denominator common to my attitude to these two heroes is that I b el ieve hat they really , ex ist, that I cann ot refuse, except by s tayi n g away from the ilm, to share their adventures and to live t h e m hrough with them, inside their u niverse , a niv ers e that is not metaphorical and iurative but spatialy real. This interior s h ai n g do es not ex cl ude n the second ex ample a con s ci ou snes s of m ys elf as di s tnc t from the person from whom I ch os e to be alienated i n the irst ex ampl e These factors ori gin atin g in the afective order are not the oly ones that argue again s t p ass ive identiication; lms like L'Espoir or Citizen Kane re quire n he spe ct ato r an intell ectu al al ertne ss in co mp a ti bl e with p as si vity The most that one can suggest is that the p sych ol ogy of the cin em ator ap hic mage ofers a natural inc line l e adi n g towards a sociology of the hero charactezed by a p as s ive identiication. But i n the arts as in morals, inclines are also made to be cli mbe d While the contemp or ay m an of the th eater often ties to le ss e n the sense of theatricality n a pe for mance b y a kind of rea l is m in th e production-just as those who love to go to the Grand Guigno l play at be in g fighte ne d but hold on at the very height of the horror to a deli cious aw areness of being fooled-the lm re ctor discovers on hi s side means of exciti ng the awa reness of the spectator and of pr ovoking him to r el e c t ion This is so me th n g wich would set up a c onlict at the very heart of the identication. This private one of consciousness, this self-awareness at the heiht of illusion, creates a ki nd of pri v ate footli gh ts In lmed theater it is no longer the microcosm of the play which s set over aganst nature but the spectator who is co nsc ious of hmself. On the s cre en Hamlet and Les Parents terribles cannot n or s ho u ld th ey escape from the l aws of cinematic percep ti on ; Elsinore and "La R oul otte re all y eist but

Tarzan

an d

,

,

.

.

.

.

.

"

1 13

What

Is

Cinema?

I pass hro ugh the m uns e en, reJ O Icmg in th at e quivo c al freedom

which cetain dreams allow us. I am w aling but moving back­

wards. Ctaily the possibility of a state of ntellectul s ef-aw areness at he m om e nt of psychological identiication should n ever be con­ fused with that act of the wll which constitutes the ater, and that is

why it is foolis h t o id en tfy stage and screen as Pagnol does . No

matter how conscious of m ys elf , how intelligent a ilm can m ake

me, it is not to my wll that it appe al soly at mo st to my good

wil. A lm calls for a certain efort on my part so th at I may understand and e njoy it, but it does not dep end on me for is

ei s tence . Nevertheless it would cetaily seem, from expeience,

th at he marn of awareness allowed by he cine ma is enouh to

e stab l is h an a ccep tabl e equ iv alent to the pl easure given by heater,

at least eno u gh to preseve what is essential t6 the rtistic vlues of

the play. The lm, whle it cannot pretend to be a complete subsi­ · tute for the s tage p erform an ce, is at least capable of assung he he ater a valid artistic e xi stence and can ofer us a co mparable

pleasure. here can never be question of a n hing more hn a complex mechaical ae s th e tic where the original theaicl efec­

tive nes s is almost never directly appi ed, rather it is preseved, re­

co nstituted, and transmitted h anks to a system of circuits, as in Henry V, of ampliicatio n as for example in Macbeth, of induction

or interference. The true med theater is not the phonoraph, it is its Martenot wave.

Moraliy hus he practi c e ( cetain ) like he heory ( possible) of succes sl

med heater reveals the reasons for former filures. Sraighfor­ w ard animated photography of he ater is a chlish error recog­

d as such these thity years and on which here is no pont in

1 14

Theater and Cinema-Part Two insising further. The heresy of ilm adaptation has taken longer to

It will connue to have its dupes but we now know aesthetic imbos that belong neither to ilm nor to h eater, to that "lmed theater" justly condened as the sin agast he spit of cinema. The tue solution, reveled at last, consists n relizing hat it is not a matter of transfering to the smoke out.

where it leads-to

screen the dramatic element-an element interchangeable betwee� one t and anoherof a theatrical work, but inversely the theatri­ cal quaity of the drama. The subject of the adaptation is not that of the pl a y , it

is he play precisely in its scenic essence. This truth,

apparent at last, wll llow us to reach a conclusion conceing

hree prop ositions seemngly paradoxical at rst, but wich on re­ lection are seen to be quite evident.

( l ) Theater an A id

to

Cinema

he irst proposition

is that so far from being a coruption of the contrary to erich and elevate it. Let us rst look at the matter of theater. It is alas only too cet ain that the level of ilm production is intellectually much b elow , if not that of current dramatic p roduction-thnk of Jean de Letraz nd Henry Bensten-at least of he iving heritage of theater, even f oly because of its great age. True, our century s no less that of cinema, med theater serves on

Charlie Chaplin han was the seventeenth century that of Racine

nd Moi�re, but after ll the cinema has only haf a centuy of iteratre beind it wle he theater has we nty-ive . What would he French theater be ike today f, as is the case with the cinema, it had nohing to ofer but the production of the past decade? Snce he cnema is undeniably passing through a crisis of subject matter it s not isng anng by empl oyng screen writers like Shake­ speare or even Feydeau. Let us not labor the subject. The case s oly to cler. However, he ferioity is less evident in the ream 1 15

What Is Cinema? of fo r m . If the cinema is a major at with its own laws and lan­ guage, what can it gan by sub mit ting to the laws and langu a ge of nother art? A great d e al !

A nd

pr ec i s ely to the extent to which,

laying a s i d e all its vain and p u eril e tr i ck s , it is seriously concerned

to subordinate itself and render a service. To justify thi s pont of view compl e tely, one should real ly discuss it within the framework of the aesthetic history of iluence in art in ge n e ra l . his would

almost certa ly reveal, we feel, that at some stage in ther evolu­ tion there has been a denite c o mm erce be twee n the t echn i qu e of

the various ats .

Our

p rej ud ice ab ou t "p ure at" is a critical devel­

opment of r elativ el y re cent ori gin. But th e auth ori ty of these prece­ dents is not ind i spens ab le to

our

arument. The at of direction, the

m ec h a nic s of which in relation to certain major lms, as we have

h ad to explain e arl ier, more even than our the oret ic al h yp o th es es ,

supposes on the part of the director a grasp . of the l an gu age of cine m ato gr aph y e qu ll ed only by his nowledge of what th eater is. If the ilm d'art f a i l ed where Olivier and Cocteau have succeeded, it is i rst of a l l because they have at the ir d i s p osal a mu ch more developed means of expression, but the y also know how to use it

more efect i ve l y than th e i r contemporaries. To say o f Les Parents terrib les th at it is p e rh aps an excellent lm b ut that it is not cinema

because it follows the play step by step is critical nonsense. On the

contrary, it is precisely fo r this reason that it is cinema. It is Topaze

by Marcel Pagnol-in its most recent s tyle-whi ch is not cinema,

pre cise l y because it is no longer theater. There is more c i nem a, and great cinema at that,

n

Henry V alone th an

in 90 % of orignl

s c r ipts . Pure poetry is cetaily not that wh ich h as no th n g to say,

as Cocteau has so wel dem onstrated :

po e try given by the Abbe Bre mond

al the exa mpl es of pure

llustrate

the exact opposite.

La Fille de Minos et Pasiphae is as iformative as a bith certiicate. There is likewise a way, u nfo rtu n ate l y not y et pra ctic e d , of re ci ti ng this poem on the screen which would be pure cinema b e c aus e it woul d respect, n he most inteligent way, its rue theatrical value. The more the cinema intends to be faitful to the tex t and to its

1 16

Theater and Cinema-Part Two theatrical requirements, the more of necessity must it delve d eep e r nto its own l anuage . The best translation is hat which demon­

strates a close intimacy with the geius of both lanuages and, likewise , a mas te ry of both.

( 2 ) The Cinema Will Save the Theater hat s why he cinema wll ive back to the h eater unstintnly what it took from her, if it has not already d one so. For f he success of lmed th e ater supposes that dialectical proress

had

been made w i h he cinemati c form, it m p lies boh reciprocally and a fortiori a reevaluation of the essentially theatr i cal . The idea ex­

ploited by Marcel Pagnol according to which the cinema wil re­

place the theater by "caning it" is comp l etel y false. The scree n cannot replace t h e stage a s the piano h as supplanted the clavichord.

nd to begin with, repl ace the theater for whom? Not for he m­ going pubic hat long ago d e s er ted the theater. he divorce be­

tween p ublic and theater does not d ate , so far as I know, from th at historic evening at the G rand Cfe in 1 89 5 . Are we t al ki ng hen

about the privileged nority of culture and wealth which ac tu aly makes up the theater audiences? But we see h at Jean de L6traz is not bankrup t and hat the visitor to Pais fr om he provi nces does

not cofuse the breasts of Fr an�oise rnoul that he bs s e en on he

screen with those of Nathalie Nattier at he Plais-Royl, lhouh

the latter may be covered by a brassiere; but they are there , if I

may say so, "in he lesh." b! he rreplaceable presence of the actor! As for he "serious" theaters, say the

M arin y

or the Fran�ais,

it is cl early a question of a pubic hat, for he most part, does not go to the cinema and, for he ohers, of people who go to boh without cofusing the pleasure to be derived from each. The fact is,

f any round has been taken over it is not the teritoy of he

hea!icl spectacle as it exists, it is much more the taking over of

1 11

What Is Cinema?

he place abandoned long ago by the now-defunct foms of popular theater. So f ar from being a s eious rivl to he stage, he cne m a is n process of iving back, to a pubi c that had lost it, a taste and feeng for heater. * It is poss ible that canned heater had something to do at he tme wih the isappearance of touring o mpanies from he road. hen Marcel Pagnol makes a lm of Topaze, there is no doubt about is intentions, n amely to make is play avilable to he prov­ inces with a "Paris cast" at he pice of a cinema seat. It is often he same with the boulevard plays. Their successfl un ished , he m is distibuted to those who were nable to see the play. In those areas where the Baret touring comp anies p efomed wih a s econd rate cast, the ilm ofers at a vey resonable price not oly the orii nal cast, but even more magniicent sets But his ilusion was re ally successful for only a few years and we now see provin cial tours o n he r oad again, the better for their experience. The public they have recaptured, made blase by the cinema and its lamorous ca sting and its luxurious sets, has, "come to," as hey say, and is lookng for something that is, more o r less, th eater . But the popularizing of Paris successes is stll not the ulti mate end of the theatrical revival nor is it the chief merit of the "competi­ tion" between screen and stage. One ight even say that this im­ provement in the situation of the touring compaies is due to badly med theater. It is the defects of these lms that have nally turn ed the stomachs of a section of the pubic and sent them b a ck into the heaters. -

.

­

• he case of the Theatre Nationale Populare ofers another unexpected and paradoxical example of suppot for the heater by the cinema. I presume that Jean Vilar would not dispute the undoubted help s enteprise gets fom the ilm fme of Gerard Phlipe. Actually in doing his the cinema is only paying back to the heater a pat of the capital it borowed some foty years ago in the heroic peiod when the infant ilm industry, an object of contempt, had recourse to stage celebrities who could provide the artistic discipline and prestige it needed before it could be taken seriously. Certainly the situation was soon enough reversed. The Sarah Behardt of the years between the was went by the name of Greta Garbo and it is now the theater hat is illing o ad­ vertise the nme of a ilm sr on its marqes.

118

Theter and Cinema-Part Two

It was the same situation with r egard to photography and pant­ freed p a inti n g from w h a t was a esth e t ic a l ly least e ss ential to it : likeness and anecdote. T h e high st a n d a r d and the lower cost of photography and the ease with which pictu res are taken, has a t last contributed to the due ev al u a tion of p ai ntin g and to e s t a blis hin g it u n a l te rab l y n its proper place. But this is n ot the end of the beneits derived from their coeistence. The photora­ phe rs have not j ust served as the hel ots of th e p ai n te rs . At the same time, as it b ec a m e more conscious of itself, painting absorbed so me­ hng of pho to raph y . It is Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renor and Manet, w h o have understood from the inside, and n essence, he n atre of the ph otor ap hic phenomenon and, propheticaly, even the cine m atorapic phen o meno n . Faced with ph oto rap h y , the y opposed it in the oly valid w ay , by a dile ctical eni ch ing of pictoi al tecique. The y understood the laws of the new i mage better han the ph otor aphers and wel b efo re the mo v i e-m ake rs , and it is hey who rst applied them. Nevertheless this is noi all and p h otograp h y i s in process of rendei ng services to the p l as tic arts that are even more decisive stll. Their ields henceforth cl e arl y known and deliited, the auto­ matic image mul tip l ies and renews our n ow le dge of the pi c tori al image . Mlraux has said what needed t o be said on tis. If painting has be en able to b ec om e the most individual of arts, the most onerous, the most ndependent of all c ompr om ise while at the same time the most a ccessible , it is thanks to color photography. he same pro ce s s applies to th e theater; bad "caned theater" hs help ed true the ater to become aware of its on laws. The cinema has likew is e contibuted to a new concept of theatrical production . These are results henceforth irly established. But there is a hird result whi ch goo d lme d th e ater pe mi ts us to l ook for, namely the remarkable increase in breadth of und ers t andin g of the ater among he ge neral p ublic . hat then is a ilm like Henry V? First of ll, it is Shake spe are for everybody. Furt h ermo re , and su­ premely, it is a blazing igh t thrown onto the dramatic poetry of ing. Ph o t o gr a p h y

119

What Is Cinema?

Shakesp eare-the most efective and brilliant of theater lessons. Shakesp eare emerges from the process twice himsef. Not oly doe s the adaptation of the play multiply his po tenti al audience n the s ame way that the a d apta ti o n of novels makes the fortune of pub­ lishers, but also, the public is far better p repared than before to enjoy the stage pl ay . Laurence Olivier's Hamlet must ob viousl y increase the audience for Jean-Louis B arrault's Hamlet an d sharpen he critical sense. Just as there is a diference that can never be b rid ged between the nest modern reproduction of a painting a nd the plea sure o f owing the oriinal, s eei ng Halet on the screen canot take the place of a performance of he pl ay b y, say, a group of Enlish students. But you need a genuine education in theater to appreciate the real-life performance by amateurs, that is to be able truly to share in what they are doing. S o · the more successful the lmed theater, the deeper it probes into the essence of theater, the better to serve it, the more clearly i t wll reveal the u nb ridge able uf between stage and screen. It is, on the contrary, the caned theater on the one h a nd and mediocre popul ar theater on the o ther th at give rise to he cofusion. Les Parents terribles never misleads its audience. There is not a sequence in it that is not more efective than its stage counterp at, while there is not one which does not I allude by implication to that indeinable pleasu re hat I w oul d have had from the real thing. There is no better propaganda for the real theater than well-ilmed the ater . These ruths are henceforth ndis­ putable and it would have been ridiculous of me to h ave spent so much time on them if the myth about ilmed heater did not stll survive too frequently n t he fom of prejudice, of misunderstand­ ing, and of inds already made up. .

( 3 ) From Filmed Theater to Cinematographic Theater My la st

argument,

I

realize, will be the boldest.

So far we

have

cosidered he heater as an aeshetic absolute to which the cinema 1 20

Theater and Cinema-Part Two can come close in a more or less satisfactory fashion, but oly in

ll

circmstances and under the best posible conditions, as its humble

servant. However, he earlier part of our study allowed us to see in slapstick the rebirth of dramatic forms that had practically disap­

peared, such as farce and the Commedia dell'A rte . Certan dra­ matic si tua tio ns , certain techniques that had d e gener at ed n the course of time, found again, n he cinema, rst the sociological

nourishment they needed to survive and, stil better, the conditions

favorable to an expansive use of their aesthetic, which the theater had kep t congeitally atrophied. In maing a protagonist out of space, the screen does not betray the spirit of farce, it simply ives to the metaphysical meaning of Scarpin's sick its true di mens io n s ,

n amel y those o f the whole universe. S lap s t i ck is irst and foremost,

or at least is also, the dramatic expression of the t yran ny of things,

out of which Keaton even more than Chaplin new how to create a tragedy of the Object. But it is true that the forms of comedy create someting of a special p r obl em n the history of ilmed theater,

probably because laughter allows the audience to b ecome aware of itself and to use this to experience a measure of the opposition that theater creates between actor and audience. In any case, and th at is why we have not gone farther into the study of i t , the grafting

together of cinema and co m e d y- theate r h a pp e n e d

s p on t an eou sl y

and has been so perfect that its fruit has always been a c c ep ted as the product of pure cinema.

Now that the screen can w elco me other kinds of theater besides

comedy without b etr ay in g them, there i s no reason to suppose that

it cannot likewise g i v e the theater new lfe, employng certain of the

stage's own te chniqu e s . Film cannot be, indeed must not be, as we

have seen, simply a pa;adoxical modality of theater production, but stage stru c t u res have their i mpor t anc e and it is not a matter of

indffe rence whethe r Julius Caesar is played in the rena at Nimes

or in a studio; but certain dramatic works, and by no means the least of them, have sufered in a very ma terial way these thirty to

ifty ye ars from a ' discord between contemporary taste and the style

of the staing that

they call for. I am thiing

particularly of

121

What Is Cinema?

tragedy. There, the handicap we sufer from is due especially to he isappearance of the race of traditional tragedians of the old schoo l the Mounet-Sulys and the Sarah Bernhardts, that is, who disappeared at the begiing of the century like prehistoric crea­ tures of the secondary p eiod. By a stroke of irony, it is the cinema that has p r e s erved their bones, fosslized in t h e ilms d'art. It has become a commonplace to attribute their disappearance to the cinema and for two converging reasons : one ' aesthetic, the other socioloical. he screen h a s certanly modiied o u r feeling about verisimilitude in nterpretation. It is enough to see one of the little lms of Bernhardt or Bargy to understand that this type of ac to r was still trussed up to all intents and purposes in cothurnus and mask. But the mask is simply an object of laughter while a close-up can drown us in a tear, and the megaphone is ridiculous when the microphone can p roduce at w ill a roar from the feeblest vocal chords. Thus we are accustomed to the inner naturalness which oly allows the stage actor a slender marin of stylization beyond verisimlitude. The sociological factor is probably even more deci­ sive. The success and efectiveness of a Mounet Sll y was undoubt­ ely due to his talent but helped on by the consentng complicity of the pUblic . It was the phenomenon of the monstre sacre which is t o day diverted almost exclusively to the cinema. To say that t h e classes at the Conservatory do not produce any more tragedians doesn't by an y means imply that no more Sarah Bernhardts are being born, only that their gfts and the times do not consort wel . Thus, Voltaire wore out his lungs plaiarizing the tragedy of the seventeenth century because he thouht hat it was only Racine who had died when actualy it was tragedy itsef. Today we see not the slightest diference between Mounet-Sully and a ham fro m the p rovinces because we could not recognize a tragedian of the old school when we saw one. Oly the "monster" survives in the ilm d'art for a young man today. The sacred quality has departed. In the circumstances it is not surprising that Racine's tragedy is in a period of eclipse. Thanks to its conservative attitude, the -

-

1 22

Theater and Cinema-Part Two

Comedie Fr n; ai s e . is in he fortunate po s ition of being able to gurantee him a re as o n able fe, but no longer a triumphal one. · Furthermore, this is only because of an inte restin g ilterng-through of traditional values, their delicate ad apt atio n to modem tastes, and not by a radical renewal s trai ght out of he peiod. As for ancient tr age d y , it is paradoiclly to the Sorbone and to the archeoloicl enthus i as m of students that it ow e s he fact that it moves us once more . But it is impotant to see in hese experments by amateurs an ex tremely radical reaction agai n st the actor's the ater .

Thus, is it not n atu ral to think that f the cnema has c ompl etely to its own adv a n tage he aesthetic and the s ocio loy of the sacred monster, that it might re tun hem f th e theater came look­ ing f or hem? It is reasonable e no u gh to d r eam wh a t an Ahaie cold have b e en with Yvonne de Bray and Jean Cocteau di rec ting ! But doubless it w o u l d not be just he s tyl e of the interpretation of tragedy th a t would ind its raison d'etre once more on he screen . One cold wel im a gi ne a correspo nding revolution on the stage which, without c e as ing to be faithfl to the s p irit of he th e ater , wold ofer it new forms in kee pi ng with m od e m taste and e sp eci ally at the level of a reat mass audience. Film th e ate r is waiti ng for a Jean Cocteau to make it a cinematoraphic theater. Thus not oly is th ea t e r on lm from now on aesthetically fonded in truth and fact, not oly d o we n o w that hencefoth here are no plays th at cannot be brought to the screen, whatever their s tyl e , p rovi d e d one can visualize a reconversion of stage space in accordance wih the da ta . But it may als o be hat the only possible m o d e m theatrical pr od uc tion of cetain c l a s si c s would be on the s cr ee n . It is no ch a nce m atter that some of the best m­ makers ar e also the best stage drectors . Weles and O l i vie r did not tuned

* Trium ph is p rec is e l y what Henry V is, thanks to color ilm. If o ne were searching th roug h Phedre for an example of cnematic potentiality, the re ­

cital of Theramine, a verbal remini sence of the tragicom edie a mach ines, considered as a dramatically l i ter ay p ie ce, d ramaically out of place, would ind, visually, a new r a is o n d'etre on he scren.

1 23

What Is Cinema? come to the cinema out of cymclsm, snobbery, or ambition, not even, like Panol, to popularize theatrical works. Cnema is for hem only a complementary form of theater, he chance to produce heater precisely as they feel and see it.

1 24

LE JOURNAL D'UN CURE DE CA MPA GNE AN D TH E STYLI STI C S O F R O B E RT B R E S S O N

IF The Diary of a Country Priest impresses us as a masterpiece, and

tis with an almost physical impact, if it moves the critic and he uncritical alike, it is primarily because of its power to stir the emo­ tions, rather than the intelligence, at their highest level of sensitiv­ ity. The temporary eclipse of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was for precisely the opposite reason. This m could not str us uless we had, if not exactly analyzed, at least tested its intellectual struc­ ture and, so to speak, understood the rules of he game. le the instantaneous success of Le Jounal is undeniable, the aesthetic principles on which it is based are nevertheless the m ost paradoxical, maybe even the most complex, ever m anifest n a sound l m . Hence the refrain of those critics, ill-equipped to under­ stand it. "Paradoxical," they say,

"incredible-an unprecedented

success that can never be repeated." Thus they renounce any at­ tempt at explanatio n and take refuge

n he perfect alibi of a stroke

of genius . On the other hand, among those whose aesthetic prefer­ ences are of a kind with Bresson's and whom one would have unhesitatingly thought to be is alies, there is a deep sense of disappointment in propotion as they expected greater acts of dar­ ing from m .

1 25

What Is Cinema?

Frst embarrassed, then irritated by the realization of what the director did not do, yet too long in accord with him to be able to cbange heir views on the spot; too caught up in his style to recap­ tre their intelectul viriity which would have left the way open to emotion, hey have neither understood nor liked the lm. hus we ind the citical ield divided nto two extreme roups. At one end hose least equipped to understand Le ]ounal and who, by the same token, have loved it all the more without knowing why; at he other end those "happy few" who, expectng som ething diferent, have not liked it and have failed to understand it. It is the strangers to he cnema, the men of letters, amazed that they cold so love a lm and be capable of freeing their minds of prejudice, who have understood what Bresson had in mind more clearly than anyone else Adittedly Bresson has done his best to cover his tracks. His avowal of ideity to the oriinal from the irst moment hat h e embarked on the adaptation, is declared intention of following he book word-for-word conditioned us to look for just that and the lm oly seve s to prove it. Ulike Aurenche and Bost, who wre pre­ occupied with the optics of the screen and the balance of their drama n its new form, Bresson, instead of building up the inor characters like the parents in Le Diable au corps, eliminated them. He prunes even the vey essentials, giving an impression as he does so of a idelity unable to sacriice one sinle word without a pucker of concen and a thousand preliminary twinges of remorse . . Again this puning is always n th e interest of simpliication, never of addition. It is no exaggeration to say h at if Bernanos had written the screenplay he would have taken greater liberties with his novel. He had, indeed, explicitly recoized the right of the adaptor to make use of his book according to the requrements of the cinema, the ight that is "to dream his stoy over." However, f we praise Bresson for his idelity, it is for the most nsidious ind of idelity, a most pervasive form of creative license. Of course, one clearly canot adapt wihout ransposing. In that .

1 26

The Sylistics of Robert Bresson

respect, Bernanos was on he side of aesthetic common sese. Literal translations are not the faithful ones. he changes hat Aurenche and Bost made to Le Diable au corps are almost ll entrely justied n p ri n cipl e . A character on he screen and he same character as evoked by the novelist are not identical. Valery condemned the novel for being ob li ged to record that "the Marquise had tea at ive o'clock." On his side, the novelist miht , in turn pity the ilm-maker for having to show the marquise actually at th e table. It is for is reason hat the relatives of he heroes n Radiguet, peripheral in the novel, appear important on the screen. The adaptor, however, must be as concerned with the text as with the characters and with the threat of heir physical presence to he balance of the stoy. Havng transformed the narrative into visuals, the ilm-maker must put the rest into dialoue, ncluding the exist­ ing dialoue of the novel altho u gh we expect some modiication of the latter-snce spoken as witten, its efectiveness and even is meaing will normally evaporate. It is here that we see the paradoxicl efect of he textual ideity of Le Journal. Whle the characters in the book are presented to the reader n high relief and wile their i nevitab ly brief evocation by he pen of the cure of Ambricourt never gives us a feelng of frustration or of any lim its being put both to their existence and to our knowledge of their ex i stenc e, Bresson, in the process of showing them to us, is forever hurying them out of si gh t . In pl ace of the powerfully con­ crete evocations of the novelist, the lm ofers us an increasingly impoverished mage which escapes us because it is hidden from us and is never really developed. The novel of Bemanos is rich n picturesque evo catio ns , solid, concrete, strikingly visual. For example : "The Count went out-s excuse the ran. With every step the water oozed from his long boots. The three or four rabbits he had shot were lumped together in the bottom of his game-bag in a horrible-looking ittle pile of bloodstained mud and rey hair. He had hung the string bag o n th e 1 27

What Is Cinema?

wll and as he taked to me I saw xed on me, through the ntr­ twining cords , a stil limpid and gentle eye . " Do you fe el you have seen ll this somewhere before? Don't bother to look where. It was probably in a Renor im. Now com­ p are this scene wih the other in which the count brings the two rabbits to he presbtery-admittedly this comes later n the book but the two could have proitably been combined, thus iving them a s tyle in common-and if you stll have any doubts, Bresson's on admi s sion wll remove them. Frced to throw out a thrd of his nl cut for the exhibitor's copy he ended, as we now, by declaring with a delicate touch of cynicism hat he was delihted to have had to do so. Actu all y , the oly "visual" he relly cared about was the bl ank screen at the nle, which we will discuss later. If he had really been faithful to the book, Bresson wold have made q ui te a diferent ilm. Determined thouh he was to add nothing to the original-already a subtle form of betrayal by omission-he m ight at least have chosen to sacriice the more iter­ ary parts for the many passages of ready-made m mate, al that cried out for visualization. Yet he systematicaly took the opposite course. When you compare the wo, it is the lm hat is iteray while the novel teems with visual material. The way he handles the text is even more revealing. He refuses to put into d ialogue ( I hardly dare to say "m dialogue" ) those passages from he novel where the cure enters in his diay the report of such-and-such a conversation. Here is a i rst discrepancy, since Bemanos at no point uarantees that he cure is giving a word for word report of what he heard. he odds are that he is not. In any event, s uppo s ing he is, and that Bresson has it n ind to p res e v e, along with the obj e c tive image, the subjective ch aracter of s omethi ng reme mb ered , it is still true that the mental and emo­ tional impa ct of a line that is merely read is very dfferent from that of a spoke n line. Now, not oly does he not ad ap t the dialoue, however cir­ cumspectly, to the demands of a perform ance, he goes out of his 128

The Sylstics of Robert Bresson

way, on the contrary, whenever he text of the novel has the rhh m and balance of tue di l o ue, to prevent the actor from brinng out hese qualities. Thus a good de al of excelent dramatic d ial oue is hrown away because of the lat monotone in which the director insists hat it be deivered.

Many

compiment ary things

have been

said

about Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, very little about the adaptaion. The criics have, to al intents and puposes, treated the m s f it was made from an oiinal screenplay. he outstanding quality of the dia­ logue has been attibuted to Cocteau, wh ose reput ati on has little need of such praise. This is because they have not reread Jacques Ie fataliste, n which they would have found f not the entire script, at least he evidence of a subtle game of hide and go seek, word for word, with the text of Diderot. Wile it did not make one feel one ou ght to go back to verfy the fact at close quarters, the modern version left one with the i mpre ssi o n hat Bresson had taken liberties with the story and retane d simply the situation and, if you like, a certain eighteenth-century lavor. Since, in addition, he had iled of two or three writers und e r him, so to speak, it was reasonable to suppo s e that he was that many steps away from he o ri gin al . How­ ever I recommend fans of the Dames du Bois de Boulogne and aspiring scenarists aike to take a second look at he lm with hese considerations in mnd. Without i nte nding in any way to detract from the decisive pat pl a yed by he style of the direction in the success of the m , it is important to examine v ery clos ely he fou nd ation s of this success, namely a marvel ou sly suble inter­ play-a sot of counterpoint between faifness and ufaihful­ ness to the oriinal. It has been su gge s te d in criticism of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, with equal proportions of good sense and misunderstand­ ing, that the psychological make-up of he ch aracters is out of key with the so ciety n which hey re shown ·as livng. Tue, it is the mores of he time that, n the novel of Diderot, justify the choice of 1 29

What

Is Cinema?

the revenge and ive it its efectiveness . It is true again that this same revenge seems to the modern spectator to be something out of the blue, something beyond his experience. It is eqully useless on the other hand for those who defend the ilm to look for any sot of social justiication for he characters. Prostitution and pandering as shown in the novel are facts wih a very clear and soid contem­ porary social context. In the ilm of Les Dames they are all he more mystfying since they have no basic justication. The revenge of an injured istress who forces her ufaithfl lover to marry a luscious cabaret dancer seems to us to be a ridiculous gesture. Nor can the fact that the characters appear to be abstractios be ex­ plained by deliberate cuts made by the director during the ing. They are that way n the script. The reason Bresson does not tel us more about his characters is not because he has no desire to, but because he would be hard put to do so. Racine does not describe he color of the wall paper n the rooms to which is characters retire. To tis one may answer, of course, that classical tragedy has no need of the ibis of realism and hat this is one of the basic diferences between the theater and he cinema. That is true enough. It is also precisely why Bresson does not derive his cinematoraphic abstraction simply from he bare episodes but from the countepoint that the reality of the situation sets up with itself. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Bresson has taken the isk of transferring one realistic story into the context of anoher. The result is that these two examples of realism cancel one another out, the passions displayed emerge out of the chracters s f from a chrysalis, he action from the twiss and us of he plot, nd he tragedy from he trappings of the drama. The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to tum it nto Racnian dialogue. Obviously Bresson is not aiming at absolute realism. On the other hand, his styized treatment of it does not have the pure abstract quality of a symbol. It is rather a strucured presentation of the abstract and concrete, that is to say of he reciprocal interplay of seemingly incompatible elements . The rin, 1 30

The Sylstics of Robert Bresson

the murmur of a waterfall, the sound of earth p o uri n g from a broken pot, the hooves of a horse on the cobblestones, are not there just as a contrast to the simpliication of the sets or he co nve ntion of he costumes, stll less as a contrast to the literay and anacro­ nistic lavor of the dialogue. hey are not needed e i th e r for dramatic antithesis or for a contrast in decor. hey are there deliberately as neutrals, as forein bodies, like a rain of sand that g e ts into and seizes up a piece of mach inery If the a rbi trarness of their choiCd resembles an abstracion, it is he abstraction of he concrete n­ teral hey are lke ines ran across an mage to arm its trans­ parency, as the dust aims the ransparency of a diamond ; it is impurity at its purest. Ts in te raction of sound and decor is rep e ated in the very midst of elements which seem at irst to be c ompletel y stylized. For example, the two apartments of the women are almost totally un­ frnished but this c al cl ated bareness h as its expl a n ation That he frames should be on the w all s hough the p ainti n gs have been sold is undoubte dly a deliberate touch of realism. The abstract white­ ness of the new apament is not ntended as pat of a patten of heatrical expressioism. he apatment is w h it e because it has just been repainted and the smel of fresh pant still h angs about. Is there any need t o add to his list he elevator or the concierge's telep h one, or, on he sond track, the umult of male voices hat follows the face-slappng of Agnes, he t ex t for whi c h reads totally conv entionlly wle he sond quliy of it is absolute pefec­ .

.

.

tion.

I have referred to Les Dames in discussing Le Jounal because

it is mportant to point out the profound similarity beween the

mechanics of their respective adaptations. The style of Le Journal indicates a more systematic searching, a i gor hat is amost unbearable. It was made under very diferent techical conditions. Yet we shll see that the procedure was in each case b asiclly the same. In b oth it was a matter of getting to the heat of a story or of a ram a, of a ch ievn g he most rigorous 131

What Is

Cinema?

form of aesthetic abstraction while avoidng expressionism by way of an interplay of literature and realism, which added to its cine ­ matic potential while seemng to negate it. In any case, B resson's faithfulness to his model

is th e alibi of

liberty in chains. If h e

is

f aihf u l to the text tis is because it serves is pupose better than

taking useless liberties . Furthermore, this respect for the letter is, in the last analysis, fr more thn an e xqu is i t e embarrassment, it is a d ial ec tical moment in the creation of a style. So i t is pontless to complain th at paradoxicly B resson is at one

and t h e same time the slave and the master of his text becau se it is

preci s e l y from h i s s e e i ng contradiction that he gets his efects.

Henri Agel, for example, describes the ilm as a page of Victor

Hugo rewritten in the style of de Neval. But s u rel y one could

imagine poetic results bon of this monstrous couplin g, of unex­

pectedly revealing lashes touched of by a translation made not just

from one language into another ( ike Malarme's translation of Poe ) but from one style and one content nto the style of another artist and from the material of one art transposed nto the material of another.

Let

us look a little more closely now at Le Journal and see what

in it h as not really come of. While not wishing to praise Bresson for all his weak spots, for there are weaknesses, rare ones, which work

to his disadvantage, we can say quite d eiitel y that they are all an integral part of his style; they are s imply that kind of awkwardness

to which a high degree of sensibility may lead, and f Bresson h as any reason here for self-congratulation, it is for having had the

sense to see in that awkwardness the pice he must pay for some­ thing more important. So, even f the act ng in general seems poor, except for Laydu ll the time and for Nicole Lamral some of it, this, provided you like the lm, wll only appear to be a inor defect. B ut now we have to explan why Bresson who directed his cast so superbly in Les A nges du peche and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne seems to handle them in his lm as amate ui sh l y as any tro with a camera 1 32

The Stylstics of R obert Bresson

who has roped n his aunt and he famly layer. Do people re lly

imagne that it was easier to get Maria Casares to play d own her talen� than to handle a roup of docile amateurs? Certainly some scenes were poorly acted. It is dd however that these were by

no

means the least moving.

The fact is that this lm is not to be measured by ordinary standards of acti ng. It is imp ortant to remember that the cast were al either amateurs or smple beginners . Le Journal no more approx :

imates to Ladri di Bicicle tte than to L'Entree des artistes. Actually the only ilm it can be likened to is Carl Dreyer's Jeanne d'A rc . The

cast is not beng asked to act out a text, not even t o l i v e it out, j ust to speak it. It is because of this that the passages spoken of-screen so perfectly m atch the passages spoken by the characters o i -scree n . There i s n o fundamental dffe rence either in tone o r style. This plan of attack not oly ules out any dramatic i nte rp re t a t io n by the actors but also any psychological touches either. hat we are asked to look for on their faces is not for some leeting relection of the words but for an uinterrupted condition of soul, the outward reve­ lation of an interior destiny.

Thus this so-called badly acted ilm leaves us with the feeling of having seen a galery of portraits whose expressions could not be other than they were. In thi s respect the m ost characteristic of all is de

Ch an t al

in the confessional . Dressed in black, withdrawn into

the shadows, Nicole Lamiral alows us only a glimpse of a mask, h al f lit, haf in shadow, l i ke a seal stamped on wax, al bl urred at the edges . Naturally Bresson, like Dreyer, is oly concerned with the coun­ tenance as lesh, which, when not involved in playing a role, is a man's true imprint, the most visible mark of is soul. It is then that the countenance takes on the di gnity of a sign. He would have us be concerned here not with the psychology but with the physiology of eistence. Hence the hieratic tempo of the acting, the slow am­ biguous gestures, the obstinate recurrence of certan behavioral pat­ terns,

the unforgettable dream-like sl o w motion.

Noth i ng purely

133

What

Is Cinema?

accidental could h app en to these peopleconrmed as each is n

his own way of life, essentially concerned either against the ilu­

ence of grace, to continue so, or, re sp o n di n g to race, to throw of the deadly

Nessus-mantle of the old

Adam .

There is no development of character. Their n ne r colicts, the

various phases of th e ir struggle as they wrestle with the Angel of the Lord, are never outwardly revealed.

hat we see is r ather a

concentration of sufering, the recurrent spasms of chldbirth or of a snake sl oughi n g of its sn. We ch a ra cte rs bare.

c an tly s a y that Bresson strips is

Eschewing psycholoical analysis, the lm outside

n consequence ies the usual dramatic categories . The succession of events is

not constructed according to the usual laws of dramaturgy under which the passions work towards a soul-satisfyng clmax. Events do ndeed follow one another according to a necessary order, yet within a framework of accidental happenngs . Free acts and coinci­ dences are intewoven . Each moment in the ilm. each set-up, has its

own due measure, alike, of freedom and of necessity. hey all move in

he same direction, but separately like iron lings drawn

to he

overall surface of a manet. If the word tragedy comes to one's pen,

it is in an opposite sense since we c an only be dealing here with a tragedy freely willed. The transcendence of

he Benanos-Bresson the transcendence of desti ny as he ancients under­ stood it, nor yet the transcendence of Racinian passion, but the transcendence of race which is something each of us is free to

u niverse is not

refuse. If nevertheless , the concatenation of

events and the causal ei­

ciency of the ch aracters involved appear to operate just as riidly as in a traditional dramatic structure, it is because hey are responding to

an order, of prophecy ( or perhaps one should say of Kirke­

gaardian

"

rep eti tion ) that is as diferent from fataity as causaity

is from analogy.

he patten of usual sense, rather

1 34

"

the lm's unfolding is not that of tragedy n the in he sense of the meieval Passion Play, or

The Sylistics of Robert Bresson of the Way of the ross, e ach sequence being a station along that road. We are iven the key to this by the di aloue n th e hut between the wo cures , when the one from Ambricout rev eals that he is spi r itu lly attracted to the Mount of Oives. "Is it not enou h hat Our Lord should have r anted me the r ace of letting me now to day, hrough the words of my o Id teacher, that nothing, through out a l etei ty , can r emo ve me from he pl ac e chosen by me from al eternity, hat I was he p rison er of is Sacred Passion?" Deah is not he preordned end of our nl agony, oly its conclusion and a deiverance. Hencefoh we shal now t o what divine o rd n an c e, to what spiitUl rh ythm he sfferings and ac­ tion s of the cure resp on d . T hey are the outward representation of his agony. At which pont we should ndicate the nalogies with Chri s t that abound towrds the end of the im , or th ey may very well go unoticed. For ex ampl e , the two fantng it s during the night; the fal in he mud; the vomitings of wne and blood-a remarkable synthesis of po weful c omp a ri s o ns with he fall s of Jesus, th e Blood of the Passion, th e s ponge with v inegar on it, and the d eilin g spittle . These are not ll. For he veil of Ve r o ica we h ave the cloth of Seraphita ; then inally the death in the attic-a Golgoth a with even a good and a bad hief. Now l et us immediately put aside th ese comparisons, the vey e num erati on of wh ich is necessarily deceptive. Ther aes th etic w eigh t derives from their h eolo ic al value, but both defy expl ana­ tion. Bresson like Bernanos avoids any sot of s ymb ol ic alusion and so none of the situations, despite ther o b vious p ar al el to the Gospel, is created precisely because of that p ar allel . Each caries its own bioraphical and individual m eai n g . Its Chistlike res em­ blance comes second, through b e n g p rojecte d onto the higher plane of analoy. In no sense is it tue to say th at the lfe of the cure of Ambicout is an imitation of its divine model, rather it is a rep eti tio n and a picturing forth of that l i f e . Each bears his own cross and each cross is di fe ren t , but all are the Cros s of the Passion. The sweat on the brow of he cu re is a bloody sweat.

better stll,

1 35

What Is Cinema?

So, probably for the irst time, the cinema gives us a lm in which the oly genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements are those of the ife of the spirit. Not only that, it also ofers us a new dramatic form, that is speciicaly reliiousor better stll, speciically theological ; a phenomenology of salvation and race. It is woth noting that through playng down the psychological elements and keeping the dramatics to a minimum, Bresson is left to face two inds of pure reaity. On the one hand, as we s aw, we have the countenance of the actor denuded of al symbolic ex­ pression, sheer epidermis, set in a surrounding devoid of any arti­ ice. On the other hand there is what we must cal the "iitten relity." Indeed, Bresson's faitfulness to the text of Bemanos, is refusal, that is, not only to adapt it but also is paradoxicl concen to emphasize its literary character, is pat of the same predeter­ mned approach to the direction of his actors and the selection of his settings. Bresson treats the novel as he does his characters. The novel is a cold, hard fact, a reality to be accepted as it stands. One must not attempt to adapt it to the situation in hand, or manipulate it to it some passing need for an explanation; on he contrary it is something to be taken absolutely as it stands. Bresson never condenses the text, he cuts it. Thus what is left over is a part of he original. Like marble from a quarry the words of the lm continue to be part of the novel. Of course the deiberate emphasis on heir literary character can be interpreted as a search after atistic stylization, wich is the very opposite of realism. The fact is, how­ ever, that in this case the reality is not the descriptive content, moral or intellectual, of the text-it is the very text itsef, or more properly, the style. Clearly the reality at one stage removed of the novel and that which the camera captures directly, cannot it or grow together or become one. On the contrary the efect of their juxtaposition is to reairm their diferences. Each plays its part, side by side, using the means at its disposal, in its own setting and after its own styl e . B ut it is doubtless by tis separating of of elements 1 36

The Sylistics of Rob ert Bresson

which bec au se of ther resemblance would appear to belong to­ ge th e r, that Bresson m anages to eliinate what is accidental . The ontoloical conlict b e tween two orders of events, occur r ing si mul­ taneously, when confronted on the screen reveal their single com­

mon measure-the soul.

Each actor says the same things and the very d i s p a r i ty between their expressions, the substance of what they say, their s ty le

,

the

to

kind of ind iference which seems to goven the relation of actor tex t ,

of

word nd v i sa ge , is the surest guarantee of their

c

l o s e com­

pl icity This l a n gu age which no lips could speak is, of necessiy, .

from th e soul.

It i s u l ik el y that there exists an wh e re in the whole o f

Fr ench

ci n e m a , p erh ap s even in all French literature, many m o ment s of a

more int e n s e beauty than in the medallion scen e between the cure and th e countess. Its beauty does not derive from the a c ti n g nor

from the psychological a n d dramatic values of the dialogue, nor indeed from its intinsic m eaning

.

he true dialogue that punctu­

soul in des p ai r is, of its ver y nature, inefable. he decisive cl ashes of th e ir spiritual

ates th e struggle between the inspired prie s t and a fencing-match escape us.

Their words

announce, or p repar e

he

way for, th e iery tou ch of race. There is nothin g here then of th e

low of

words that usuall y goes w i th a conver si on , while the over­

powering s ev e ri ty of the d i alo gu e, its r i si n g

tension and

its inal

calm leave us w it h the con vi ct ion that we have been the privi leged witn esses of a su p en at ural storm . he words the m s e lves are so much dead w e ight , the echo of a s i l e n ce that is the tue dialoue between these two s oul s ; a hint at their secret; the opp o site side of the coi n , if one dare to say so, of the Divine Countenance. hen later he cure r efu se s to come to his own defense by

p r o d uci ng the

countess' letter, i t is not out of hmility or love of s uf e r i n g. It

is

rathr becaus e no t a ngible evidence is worthy to play a p at e i ther

in his defense or his · indictment. Of its n atu re the evidence of the

cou n tes s is no more ac c ep tabl e than that of de Chantal , and none has the r igh t to ask God to bear wit n es s

.

1 37

What Is Cinema? The techique of Bresson's direction canot adequately be judged except at he level of his aesthetic intention. Inadequately as we may have so far described the latter, it may yet be that he highly astoishing p ar ad ox of the lm s now a little more evident. Actually the distinction of havn g set text ove r aganst mage for he irst tme goes to Melville n his Silence de la mer. It s notewohy that his reason was likewise a desre for idelity. However, the stucture of Vercors' book was of itself unusual. In his Journal B ress on has done more than justify Melvlle 's experiment and shown how well warranted it was. He has carried it to its inal conclusions. Is Le Journal just a slent m with spoken titles? The spoken word, as we have seen, does not enter into the image as a realistic component. Even when spoken by one of the characters, it rather resembles the recitative of an opera. At irst sight the lm seems to be somehow made up on the one hand of the abbreviated text of the novel and illustrated, on the other hand, by images that never pretend to replace it. ll hat is spoken is not seen, yet nothing that is seen but is also spoken. At worst, critical good sense can re? ro ach Bresson with having substituted n illustrated radiophoic mon­ tage, no less, for Bernanos' novel. So it is from his ostensible corruption of the art of cinema hat we begin f we are to rasp fully Bresson's oriinality and boldness. In the irst place, if Bresson "retuns" to the silent lm it is certaily not, despite the abundance of close-ups, because he. wants to tie in again with theatrical expressionism-that fruit of an irmity-on the contrary, it is in order to rediscover the diity of the human countenance as understood by S trohei m and Dreyer. Now f there is one and only one quality of the slent ilm rreconcil­ able of its very nature with sound, it is the syntactical subtlety of montage and expression i the playing of the l m , that is to say that wich proceeds in efect from the weakness of the silent lm. But not al slent ilms want to be such. Nostalia for a silence that wo u l d be the beign procreator of a visual s y mboli sm unduly con1 38

Te Stylstics of Robert Bresson fuses the so- c aled pmac y of he mage with he t u e vocation of he cinema-which is the p rim acy of he object. The ab sen ce of a sound track for Greed, Nos/eratu, or La Passion de Jeanne d'A rc means some ng quite other than the sle nce of Caligari, Die Nibelungen, or Eldorado. It is a frustration not the fondati on of a form of expression. The former ims exist n spite of her slence not because of it. In this sense the nvention of the s ound track is j ust a fotuitous scientiic phenomenon and not the aesthetic revolu: " tion people always say it is. The lanuage of m, like he lnguage of A e s op, is ambiguous and n sp ite of appearances to the contrary, he history of cinema before and after 1 928 is an unbroken continu­ ity. It is the stoy of the relations between express io nism and rel­ ism. Sound was to destroy expressionism for a while before adopt­ ng it in its tun. On he other hand, it be came an i mmediate part of the c ontinued devel o pme nt of realism. P arado xi c lly enouh it is to the most theatrical, th at is to say to the most talkative, forms of the sound ilm that we must look today for a resrgen ce of the old symbolism whle he pre-talkie r ealism of a Strohei m has in fact no f o ll owi ng Yet, it is evident h at Bresson's undertaing is somehow related to the work of Stroheim and Renoir. The separating of sound and of the i mage to which it relates c ann ot be nderstood without a searcing examination of the ae s th et ics of realism in sound. It is just as mistaken to see it as an llustration of a text, as a comme nt ary on an mage. Their par­ llelism maintans that division which is present to our senses. It con tin ues the B ress oi an dialectic between abstraction and reaity thak s to which we are concerned with a sinle reality-that of human souls. In no sense does B resson return to the expressionism of the silent lm. On the one hand he excludes one of the com­ ponents of relity n order to rep r oduc e it, deliberately stylized on a sound track, partilly independent of the image. In other words, i t is as f the nl rerecording was c ompose d of sound directly re­ corded with scupulous idelity and a text p o s ts n cro iz ed on a monotone. But, as we h ave p oin ted out, tis text is itsef a sec ond .

139

What Is Cinema?

reity, a " cold aesthetic fact." Its realism i s i ts of the mage is pi m aril y its realit y, an d th e precisely the c olict between the two .

st yl e ,

whil e

the st yle

s tyl e of the ilm is

Bresson disposes onc e and for all of that commonplace of criti­ cism a cc o rding to which image . and sound should

one an oth e r . The mo st

moving

m om e nt s

n

never duplicate

t h e lm a re those n

which text a nd im age are say ng the same thin g , e ach however in its own way. T h e s ound never seves si m p l y to fll o u t what we see. It strenthens it and multiplies i t j ust as the echo chamber of a v i oli n echoes and m ul tiplies the

vibrations of the strings. Ye t his meta­ it is n ot so mu c h a resonance

phor is dialectically in adequ ate snce

that the mind per ce ive s as someting hat d oes not match, as when

a col o r is not p roperly s up eri mp os e d on a drawing. It is h ere at the e d g e that the event reveals its tr ue s i giica nce . It i s because the i l m is e n t i r e l y s tructured on this relationship that , t ow a r d s the end, he ima g e s take

on

s uc h emotional power. It would be

look for its devastating beauty simply the

individual

in

in

v a in to

wh a t is explicit. I doubt if

fr am es in any other ilm, tak e n separatel y, are so

d e c ept ive . Their frequent lack of pla stic composition, the awkward­

ne s s

and

sta ti c qua l i t y of the actors com p letely m islead one as t o

their value n the overall lm. M o reov e r , his a ccr e t i o n

of efective­

ness is not due to the e d iti ng . The value of an im age does not

depend o n what precedes or follows it. They accumulate, rather, a st at i c enery, like h e p ar ale l leaves of a condenser. Between tis and the sound track dife re nc e s of aeshetic potential are set up, the tension of which becomes unbearable. Thus the im ag e - t ext re l a ti on ­ sh ip

moves

towards its climax, the la t ter h av ing

the

advantage.

T h us it is th at , quite naturally, a t the command of an i mp eri o u s

logic,

there is no th in g more hat the image h a s to communicate

except by disappearing. Th e spectator has been l ed , step by step, towards th a t ight of the se nses the only e xpre s si o n

li gh t on a blank

screen .

of which

is a

That i s whe r e he so - c all ed silent ilm a n d its l ofty re al i s m i s headed, to the disappearance of t h e image and its r e pla ce me n t 1 40

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson sim ply by the text of the novel . But here we are experimenting with

an

irrefutable

cinema.

aesthetic ,

Just as the

with

a

sublime

achievement

nbaud is language at the h i gh e st state, the and handed back

of

pure

of images

blank page of Mallarme and the silence

screen , free of to literature, is the triumph of cinematographic

reaism. The black cross on the white screen, as awkw a r ly drawn as on the average memoial card, the only race left by the

"assump­

tion" of the image, is a witness to s o m eth ing he reality of which ii

itself but a sign. With

Le Journal cinem atographic adaptation reaches a new

stage. Up to now, il m tended to substitute for the novel in the uise

of

its

aesthetic

translation into

another lanuage .

Fidelity

meant respect for the spirit of the novel, but it also meant a search for necessary equivalents, that is to say, it meant taing into ac­

agan the more

count the dramatic requirements of he th e ater or direct efectiveness

of the cinematographic im age .

concern for these things will contnue to

be the

Unfotunately,

ge n e r al rule. We

must remember h owever that it was through their application that Le

Diab le au corps and a Symphonie pastorale turned out so well. the

According to the best opinions, ilms like these are as good as books

on

wh ich they are modelled.

of th is formula we might also note the e x i s tence that made by Renoir for Une Partie de cam pagn e or Madame Bovary. Here the problem is In the m argi n

of the free adaptation of books such as

way. The ori ginal is just a source of inspiration . is here the temperame ntal ainity betwee n i l m-maker and n ovel ist, a deeply sympathetic un derstand i n g . Instead of p resent i n g itself a s a substitute, the ilm i s i n tended t o take its pl ace alongside

solved in another Fidelity

the book-to m ake a pair with it, like twi n stars . This assum pti on, applicable only where there i s

genius, does 110t exclude the p ossibil­

ity that the ilm is a reater achievement th an its literary model , as

n the case of Renoir's The R iver. Le Journal however is something else aga in.

I ts d i alectic be-

141

What Is Cinema?

anlysis , to a no qu estion a translation, no matter how faithfl or i nteigent . Stil less

twee n i dei ty and creation is red ucible , in the last

dialectic beween the c nem a and literature. There is here of

is it a question of free inspiration with the ntention of mang a

duplicate. It is a questi on of building a secondary work with he

novel as founda tion . In no sense is he lm "comparable" to the

novel or sp e ak

" w or th y "

m ltipl ied

of it.

It i s

a n ew

by the cinem a .

aestheic creation, the novel so to

The only p roced ure in any way com par able of wich we have ny ex m p l e s are lms of p a ntngs . Emmer or lan Resn as re

similrly faithful to the ori n l , their raw igly

develop e d

material is he already

work of the p ai nter; the reaity with which they

are co nc en ed is not the subject of the p aintng but the painting

i ts elf, n he sam e way as the text of the novel is Bresson's reality.

But

he idelity

o f Alain Resnais to Van G o gh is but

the

pior

cond i tio n of a symbiosis of cinema and painting. That is why, as a le, pa i nte rs fail ut t erl y to understand the whole p roce du re . s e e these lms

as

nothing more th an an inteigent,

If you efe cive , and

even a vluable means of p o pul a ri zi ng paintng-they cetaily are th at too-you know noh in g of their aesthetic bioloy.

This comparison with ilms of p a int in gs, however, is oly p ati ally valid since these arc conined f rom the ou tset to the realm of inor

aeshetic works. They add some th ng to the p anti ngs , the y pro l on g

their existence, they release them from th e coines of their frames but they can never pre tend to be the p a i n ting s themselves. *

Re s nai s

Van Gogh of lain major work which

not replace.

Th ere

it

he a

is a minor m a s terp i ece taken from

makes use of and ex p l a i ns in

are two re a sons for this

d e t al

con genital

but does

limitation.

First of all, the photographic reproduction, in pro j ec tion, cannot

pretend to be a substitute for the original or to share its id entity .

If

it c o ld , then it would be the better to destroy its aesthetic auton­ omy, since ilms of pai nt ings stat of precisely as the ne g a tion of " At least up t o the time of IJe Mystere Picasso which, as we shall see, may inval i d ate this ciicism.

1 42

The Sylstics of Robert Bresson

hat on wich this aesthetic autonomy is based, he fact that the paintings are crcumscribed in space and exist outside time. It is because cinema as the t of space and time is the contrary

of

paintng hat it has someting to add to it. Such a contradiction does not eist between he novel and the

m. Not oly are they both narrative arts, hat is to say temporal

s, but it is not even possible to maintain a prioi that the cine­

matic image is essentialy iferior to the image prompted by he ritten word .

In al probabity the opposite is the case. But this is

not where he problem ies. It is enough f the novelist, like the ilm­ maker, is concened with the idea of ufolding a real world. Once we accept these essential resemblances, there is nothing absurd in

yng to ite a novel on m. But Le Journal has just provd to us hat it is more fruitful to speculate on her diferences rather than on their resemblances, hat is, for the existence of the novel to be airmed by the lm and not dissolved nto it. It is h ardly enough to say of tis work, once removed, that it is in essence faitful to the orinal because, to ben wih, it is the novel. But most of all the resulng work is not, cely, better ( that ind of judment is meannless . . . ) but "more" than the book. The aeshetic plea­ sure we derive from Bresson's m , while the acknowledment for it goes, essentilly, to the genius of Benanos, includes al that the

novel has to ofer plus, n addition, its refraction in he cinema. fter Bresson, Aurenche and Bost are but he Violet-Ie-Duc of cinematorapic adaptation .

1 43

C HAR LI E C HAPLI N

Charlie is a My thical Character Charlie

is a m yth ical igure who rises above every adventure n whi ch he becomes inv olve d Fo r th e ge neral public, Charlie exists as a person before and after Easy Street and The Pilgrim. For hundreds of illions of peopl e on this planet he is a hero like Ulysses or Roland in other civilzations-but with the dffe rence that we now th e hero es of ol d through literary works that are complete nd have deined once and for all, their adventures and their various manifestations. Charlie, on the other hand, is always free to appear in another lm. The living Charlie remains th e C:­ ator and uarantor of Charlie the char acter .

.

But What Makes Charlie R u n ?

But the continui ty and co h ere nce o f Ch arl i e s aesthetic existence can oly be experi enced by way of the ilm s that he inhabits . The public r ecognizes him from his face and especi al y from his little trapezoi d al moustache and his duck li ke waddle rath er than fr o m his dress which, here agan, d oe s not make the monk. In The Pil'

-

144

Charlie Chaplin

grim we see m dressed oly as a convict and as a clergyman and

in a lot of lms he wears a tuxedo or the e l e ga nt cutaway coat of a

mllionaire . These physical "marings" would be of less than no imp ort a n c e if one did not perceive, more i mportantly, the in t e rior constants that are the true constituents of the character. These are however less easy to deine or describe. One way would b e to examne his reaction to a particular event, for example his complete absence of ob st i n acy when the world ofers too strong an opposi­ tion. In such cases he tries to get ro u n d the problem rathe r than

solve it. A temporary way out is enough for him, just as if for him there was no such thing as the future. For ex a mpl e in The Pilgrim he props a r oi n g- p i n on a shelf with a bo t tl e of ilk that he is

going to need n a minute or two. Of course the rolling-pin falls onto his head . While a provisional solution always seems to s atisfy im he shows a fabulous in genuity in the ii mediate circumstance .

He is never at a loss in any si tu atio n . There i s a s ol u ti on for every­ thing even though the world ( and especially things in it rath er than he people ) is not made for him.

Charlie and Th ings The utilitarian fu n cti on of th i n gs relates to a human order of things

itsef utitarian and wich in turn has an eye to the future. In our world, hngs are tools, some more some less eicient, but all i­ rected towards a speciic purpose. However, they

do

not serve

Charlie as they serve us. Just as human society never accepts him even provisionally except as a result of a misunderstanding, every time that Charlie wants to use something for the pu rpos e for which

it w as made, that is to say, withn the framework of our s o ci et y ,

either he goes about it in an extremely awkward fashion ( especially at table ) or the things hemselves refuse to be used, almost it would

seem deliberately. In A Day's Pleasure the engine of the old Ford

1 45

What Is Cinema?

stops every time he opens the door. In One A .M. his bed moves so that he cnnot lie down. In The Pawnshop the works of the alarm clock that he had j u s t taken to pieces start m ov in g around on their own like worms. But, conversely, things which refu s e to serve him the way they seve us are n fact used by him to much better purpose because he pu ts them to multifarious uses ac co rd in g to his need at the moment. The street l amp in Easy Street serves the function of an anaes th eti s t' s mask to asphiate the terror of the neighborh ood . A little later a cast-iron stove is used to nock the man iat , whereas the " fun cti onal " truncheon only ives him a slight snin g in the ears. In The A dventurer a b li n d transforms him into a l am pstand , nvisible to the police. In Sunnyside a sh i rt seves as a tablecl oh , as sleeves, as a to w el , and so on. It looks as if things are oly wlling to be of use t o him in wa ys that are purely margnal to the uses a s signe d by society. The most b eau tifu l ex ampl e of these str ang e uses is the f amo u s dance of the rolls which contribute to a sudden ou tb u rst of highly unusual ch oreography. Let us look at another characteristic gag. In The A dventurer Ch arli e hinks he has disposed of the warders pu rsuin g him, by p el ting them with stones from the top of a cli f . The warders are ac t u ally lying on the ground more or l es s unconscious . Instead of seizing the oppo rtuni ty to put daylight between himself and them, he amus es himself by throwing more s ton e s , p ebbl es this time, by way of reiing on the operation. hle he is doi n g this he fails to notice that ano ther warder has arrived behind him and is w atchi ng him. As he reach es for another stone his hand touches the wrden's shoe. His reaction is s om ethin g to mavel at. Instead of tryng to run away, which would in any case be useless, or h avin g sized up his desperate pi ght, h andi ng himself over to the oic er, Charie covers th e ill-met shoe w ith a hand ful of dust. You laugh and your neighbor lau ghs too. At rst it is all the same l augh ter. But I have "listened in" to this gag twenty times n di ferent theaters. When he audience, or at l eas t pat of it, was made up of intellectuals, students for exmple, there was a second wave of lau ghter of a aro u nd unpredictably

1 46

Charlie Caplin

dfferent ind. At th at moment he h al oriinl l au gh ter but with a

laughter, relected

s e rie s

of the mnds of

was no longer illed with

th e

of e c h o e s , a second w ave o f

he spect a t ors

s if from

invisible wlls of an abyss. These echoed efects are

the

not always

audible ; irst of al they d ep e n d on the audience but most of all

b ec ause Charlie's gags are often of su ch short d ra tio n that th e y llo w j u s t eno ugh t i me fo r you t o " ge t it," n or are th e y followed by a time lag hat gives you a chance to think ab out them. It is th e opposite of he technique caled for n the theate r by the l a u h t e r from the ho u s e . l th ou gh he was brought up in th e school of the music hal, Charlie h a s rened down its comedy, refusing in any way to pnd er to the public. This n ee d for sim plicity and efective­ ness r equ ires of the gag he greatest el lip ti cal claity, and once he has acieved his he refuses t o elab orate on it. he techique of Charlie's gags n atur all y cals for a s tu d y to itself, which we c an n ot undertake here. Suicient perhaps that w e have made it clear that th ey have attained a nd of inal p e rfec ­ tion, the highest degree of style. I t is stupid to treat C h a rl ie as a clown of g en iu s . If there h ad never been a cinema he would un­ doub tedl y have been a clown of genius, but th e cinema has al low e d hm to raise th e c ome d y of circus and music hal to the h ighest aes thetic level. C h apl i n needed the me dium of the cinema to fre e comedy compl etel y from the limits of space and time i mp o s ed by the stage or the circu s arena. Thanks to the c a mera , the evolution of the co m i c efect which is being presented, all the whle with the gre a test claity, not only does not need b oosting so that a whole aud ie n ce can enjoy it, on the contrary it can now be rened down to the utmost deree ; thus the macinery is k ep t to a minimum, so th at it becomes a high­ p re cision mechanism capable of respondng ns t antl y to the most delicate of spri n gs .

It is signii c ant , furthermore,

s ee n over and over again

wi th

hat the best Chapl i n

ms can be

no loss of pleasure-indeed

the very i s the case. It i s doubtless a f a ct that the satisfaction de­ ived from ce rta i n gags is nexhaustible, so deep do e s it ie, but it is opposite

1 47

What

Is Cinema?

uthe more ow e

sup re me l y tue th at comic form and aesthetic vlue

n o th i n g to surprise.

The l a tt e r is exhausted th e irst time

around and is replaced by a much more subtle p l e a su re , namely the deligh t of anticipating and recogn izing perfec t i o n .

Charlie and Time Whatever the f a c ts above opens up

,

one can clearly see that the gag referred t o

u nder the nitial comic shock a s p i r i tu a l abyss

which induces in the spectator, w i th ou t

givi ng

him a

a n a l yze it , that delicious v ert i go that quicly modiies

chance to the tone of

C h arl ie caries go i n g b e y o n d the

the laughter it provokes. The reason is that

surd l en th s his basic p ri nc ip le of n ev e r

to ab ­ actual

moment. Having got rid of his two wardens, thanks to his capacity

to exploit the terrain and wh atever objects are to hand, once the danger is p ast he i m me di ately sto p s thi nk i n g about building up a

reserve s t o re of s up pl e me n t a r y prudence. The consequence is n o t long d el a ye d

nd an

But this time i t is so seriou s th at Charlie is not able to i m m e d i at e solution-rest assured that he soon wil-he can­ .

not go beyond a relex action and the pretence at improvisation. One second, just time enough for a gesture of dismissal and tr e a t , in illusion, will have been efaced by the

no one, however, s tupi d l y c o fu se

an eraser.

Let

b e ari n g of

Ch arl ie

the

deri s o ry stroke of

Ch arl i e s '

ges ture

with that of an ostrich b u ryin g its head in he sand. Th e whole

refutes this ; it is sheer improvisation,

unlimited

i m a i n a t i o n in the face of danger. The swiftness of the threat,

h owever, a n d above all its brutal nature in co n t ra s t to the euphori­

ous condition of t h e mind in which

it

ta k es c o n sci ou s shap e , does

not allow h i m, this time, to es c ap e immediatel y. Besides who can

tel-because of the surprise it ives to the warden wh o was expect­ ing a gesture of that 148

frac tion of

fe a r

i f his action wll not in the end allow him

-

a s e co nd hat he needs to m a ke his escape? Instead

Charlie Chaplin

of solving the problem Charlie has no recourse other th an to pre­ tend things are not what hey seem. As a matter of fact this gesture of brushing aside danger is one of a number of gags pecul i ar to Charli e . Among these sh ould be included he celebrated occasion when he camolages himself as a tree in Shoulder A rms. "Camoulage" is not really the right term. It is more properly a form of miicry. One might go so far as to say that the defense relexes of Charlie end in a reabsorption of time by space. Driven nto a corner by a terrible and unavoidable danger, Ch arie hides behind appearances like a crab burying itself in the sand. And tis is no mere metaphor. At the opening of Th e A dven­ turer \'e see the convict emerging from the sand in which he was hiding, and burying himsef again when danger returns. T he painted canvas tree in which Charlie i s hiding blends in with the trees of the forest n a way that is quite "hallucinating," One is reminded of hose little stick-like insects that are indiscerni­ ble in a clmp of twigs or those litle Indian insects that can take on the appearance of leaves, even leaves that caterpillars have nibbled. The sudden vegetable-like immobility of Chrlie-th e-tree is like an insect playng dead, as is his other gag in The A dventurer when he pretends to have been killed by a shot from a warden's un. But what distinguishes Charlie from the insect is the speed with which he returns from his condition of spatial dissolution into the cosmos , to a state of instant readiness for action. Thus, motionless inside his tree he lattens out, one after the other, with swift precise move­ ments of his "branches, " a le of German soldiers as they come within range.

The

Swift Kick Characterizes the Man

It is with a smple and yet sublme gesture that Chrlie expresses his

supreme detachment from

hat

biographical and

social

world in 1 49

What

Is Cinema?

which we are plu n ge d and which, fo r us, is a ca u s e for reret and uneasiness, na mel y that remarkable backward ick

wh i ch he em­ ploys to disp o s e alike of a banana p eel , the head of G ol iath and, more i deal l y still, of every bothersome thought. It is s in i i c a n t that Charlie never icks straight ahead. Even when h e icks his partners in the pants he m an a ges to do it whle l ooki ng he other way. A c obble r would expl an that this was because of the p o i nt s of his outsize shoes. However, p e rh ap s I m ay be llow e d to i no re th i s p i e ce of supericial re ali s m and to see in the style and frequent and very personal use of this backward kick the relection of a very vit al appro ach to thi ngs . On the o h e r hand, Charlie never liked, if I may dare to say so, to app ro a ch a problem head on. He prefers to t ake it by supri se with his b ack t r n e d . On the other hand, especially when it s eems to h ave no p re c is e purpose, a s i m ple gesture of revenge for example, this back-kick is a perfect e xpres s i on of his constant determination not to be attached to the past, not t o d ra g an yth ing al ong behind hm. his ad mirable gesture i s f uth ermo re c ap ab l e of a thousand nuances ra nging all the way from p eevi s h revenge to a gay "I'm free at last," excep t, that is to say, when he is not sh ang of an nvisible thread attached to his leg.

The

Sin of Repetition

is use of the mechaicl is he price he is forced to pay for is nonadherence to the noml sequence of events and to the function of tings. Since for im hings have no future in the sense of being planned to serve an end , when Charlie is involved with an object for some time he quicly contracts a s ot of mechanical cramp, a surface condition n which the oriinal reason for what he is d o ing is forgoten. is fortunate inclination always serves im wel. It is the basis for the famous gag in Moden Times wh en Charlie, working on the assembly line, con tinu es spasmodiclly to tigh ten 1 50

Charlie Caplin

we obseve it in a mo re subtle fom . the big to ugh is c has i n g hm round the room Charlie shoves the bed between th e m . There then follows a s e rie s of f e i nts in the c o urs e of which each moves up and dow n his side of the bed. After a wh i l e , in s p i te of the co ntinu e d d an ger , Charlie becomes used to this te mp o r ary defense tactic, and instead of contnuing to direct is m o v e me n ts by the m ov e m e n t s of his a d v e r s a r y , ends by runing up a n d down on his own side as if t h e gesture were sbicient of its elf to ward of al danger forever. Naturally, no matter how stu­

manary b ol t s ; in Easy Street, When

pid the other

man

have Charlie un

might be,

al he

h a s to do is

to

swit ch rhthm, to

riht into is arm s . I am c on i d ent that in all

Charie's p i ctures here is not on e where tis mechanical m ovement

does

not end badly

for him.

In

mov e ment is n a sense Charlie's t io n . His in d ep e n d e n c e of th ings in t ime in the shape of s o m e thi ng whi ch continues u n de r its initial beng, su ch as you or I, is

other words , m echanization of

ori g i na l

sin, the ceaseless tempta­

nd events c a n o n ly be projected m echaical,

like a

force of inertia

i m p e t u s . Th e ac t i v i t y of a social

p l an ed

with f o re sig h t and as it develops,

it s direction is c h ec k ed by c o n st n t reference to the reality t h a t it is

concened to shape. It aheres hroughout to th e evolution of th e

event of wh ich it is b e c o mi n g pat. Charlie's activity o n the con­ tray is co m p o s e d of a su c c e s s i on of s epa rate nstants suicient to

e a ch of which

is

the evil thereof. Then laziness supevenes nd

to ofer the solution p ro p e r to a previ­ ous and spec i ic moment. The capital s in of h ar lie , nd he d o es not hesitate to m ke us laugh about it at is own expe n se, is to

Ch a rli e continues hereafter

p roj e c t

nto time a m o d e of being th at is suited to o n e i n s ta n t , and h at is what is meant by " r ep e titi o n ." I think we s hould also include n this sn of r e p etiti o n the c ate­ goy of well-known gags in which w e see a joyous Charlie brought to order by reality, for example the famous gag n Modern Times when he wants to bahe and dives into a river that is ittle more thn a foot deep or again, at the beinning of Easy Street when, c onv rt ed by love, he wlks out of a room nd f al s on his fae on 151

What Is Cinema? the st w ay . Subject to a more prec ise check , I w ould be willng

to suggest that every tme Chrie

m kes us lau gh

at his own exp ense

and not at that of other pe op le, it s when he has been mpu dent eno u gh , one way or another, to presume that the future will resemble the past or to

j on

naively n the g am e as played b y society and to

have fih n its elaborate machiney for buldng the future . . . its moral, religiou s, socil and political machiney.

A Man beyond the Realm One

of the

most characteristic aspects

of the Sacred

of Charie's freedom n

spe ct to the demands of so ciety is is total

nfference

re­

to the

category of thngs held s acred . Naturlly by sacred I here mean, rst of all, the various social aspects of the religious life. Chrie's old lms add up

to

the most fomidable nticlericl indictment

magnable of p rovincial p u ritan society n the United States. One has oly to recll The Pilgrim nd the incredible faces of those

deacons, sacristans, and sharp-featured,

too thy ,

b igo te d females,

the solemn and anular Quakers. The world of Dubout is a worl d

of cild's play alongside tis social caricature worthy of Daumi er.

But

he principal stren h of this p or trai t derives from he fact

that

the acid which h as e tched this engraving is in no sense anticlerical­

sm.

It is rather what ought to be · caled a radical a-leicism, nd

his keeps the lm within he bounds of what is accept abl e . There is

no sacrlegious

intent .

outit. But h ere

No clergyman could take ofense at C ha rl i e' s

is s om eti ng worse here, n am ely a sot of nulify­

ing of wh at ev er justiication there is for such people, their beliefs

and their behavior. Charlie has absolutely nothing against them. He can even preten d to go th r ough the Sunday ritual, to pantomime

the sermon for their pl eas ure or to remove the suspicions of the police. It is almost as if he had introduced a Negro dance into the ritual. In one blow, ritual and faithful re relega te d to a world of

1 52

Crlie Capln the absurd, reduced to the condition of ridiculous, even of obscene

objecs, by beng depr ived of all me ing . By way of a derisory

paradox he oly actions throuhout he ceremony that make any

sese re in fact Charlie's gestures when he tests the weiht of he

colecion-bag, rewarding he generous with a sm il e and the mean

with a ron. nothr ex mpl e is the way he 'retuns severl times

after his sermo n to bow to is audience like a conte nted vaudevlle actor. Nor is it a matter of chance that he on e spectator who enters "

into he game nd applauds is a snotty-nosed urcn who has spent the enire seice,

in

spite

of is mother's remonstrances, ly­

watcng. However, here are other rituals besides the religious. Society approves a h ous and forms of acceptable behavior which are a sot

of permanent liturgy that it peforms n its own honor. This is p arti cularly true of table maners. Charlie never reall y manages to master the use of his fe and fork. He re ularly gets his elb ow among the plates, splls his soup on his pants and so on. The hih spot srely is when he is msef a w aiter, as in The Rink. Reiious

or not, he sacred is everwhere present in the ife of society and not o nly n the magistrate, the policeman, the priest, b ut

ritul as sciated with e an g, with p rofessional relai o ns

,

n

he

and pubic

tran spotation . It is he w ay hat society retains its cohesion as f

within a manetic ield. Unknowingly, ev ery minute of our time we adj ust to tis framework. But Ch rl i e is of another metal. Not oly

does he elude its rasp, but the very category of the sacred does not eist for hm. Such a hing is, to him, s i nco nceivable as the color of a pink geraium is to someon e bon bind.

To put it more precisely, a good part of Charie's comedy is bon of the eforts he makes ( to it the needs of a temporary situa­ tion ) to imitate us, as for ex ampl e when he forces hmsef to eat

politely, even with deicacy, or wh en he adds a touch of derisive coquetry to his dress.

153

C I N EM A AN D EXPLO RATI O N

IN HIS little book Le Cinema au long cours (Filming in Far-O} Lands ) , Jean hevenot has raced he development of the lm of exploration from its successful beinings , around 1 928, th rough the period of its decline, between 1 9 3 0 and 1 940, to its rebirth

following

World War

II. The implic ati ons

of

this evol ution

are

worth studying.

was after World War I, hat is to say in 1 9 20, some ten years fter it was lmed by Ponti ng d uri ng the heroic exp edi tion of Scott to the South Pole, that With Scott to the South Pole revealed to h e lm-going public those polr landscapes which were to cons titute he maj or success of a series of ilms of whi ch Flahety'S Nanook ( 1 922 ) is still he outstanding ex ampl e . Not long aftewards, very lkely because of the success of the rctic ms, a tpe of pro duc­ tion appeared which we might categoize as " tropic al and equa­ torial." The be st nown are those med n frica, and n particular La Croisiere Noire by Leon Poirier, Cimbo, and Congorilla-the irst dating from 1 926, and the last two lmed between 1 92 3 and 1 927, but oly shown pubicly n 1 92 8 . In these irst travel-ilms-in­ he-grand-maner w e alread y see what are the chief values of this category : an auhe ntically poetic qu ality which does not age and is adirably exempied n Nanoo k . But this poetry, especill y n It

1 54

Cinea and Exploration th ose ms qUlity .

shot n the South Seas, began to take on n exotic Moana, vually n enoraph ic document, to

From

Tabu, by way of White Shadows, we are aware of the radul

fomation of taing

over a

a

mtholoy. We

far-of cization

see he Westen nd as it were nd intepretng it after its own

fsion.

n French iterature those were he days of Pal Mor and , of

Mac Orlan , and of Blaise Cendrars. The new mystique of the

ex­

by he new media of commication, nd wich one ight re asonabl y cll "instant exotiism," was most tpi­ clly expre ssed n a m made n the erly days of sond. It lng otic, iven a new fe

the whole erth onto he screen

in

a

jigsaw

of

visul images and

sounds and was entitled Melodie der Welt. Made by Wlher Rutt­

of a new at form. outst andng exceptions, the exotic m went into a decine characterized b y a sh ameles s search fter he spect aclar and the se ns at ion l. It was not enough merely to hunt the ion, the lion must irst gobble up the bearers. In L' Afrique vous parle a Nero gets eaten by a croco dile . n Trder Hon nother Ner o i s ch arged by a rino ceros . On tis occasion he chase appeared to be s t aged , but he same ntention ws clerly here. hus th ere came into eistence he mh of an fica inhab­ ited by savages and wld beasts, he cnaion of which was man,

it was one

of the itil succ es ses

Thencefoward, with a few

Tarzan and King Solomon's Mines. Since World War II we have witnessed a deiite retun to dcment ary authenicity. he cycle of exo ticism reached its climax n absurdity. To da y the public demands hat what it sees sh ll be

believable, a fa i th that can

be tested by he other meia of ifoma­ ion, n amely, radio, bo o ks , nd the daily press. he rebh of the m of exploration is basicaly due to a re­ newed nterest in exploraion, he m ysique of which may vey well n out to be s om etin g quite oher than he old exoticism s m ay be seen for ex mpl e n Rendez-vous de jullet. It i s is new pont of dep are wich ives to he present 1 55

Wat Is Cinema?

expeditions their style and their direction. hese deive n he st place from the character of today's exploration wich is for he most part either scientiic or anthropoloicl. le sesationalism s not absolutely excluded it is nevertheless subordnated to the objectively documentary pupose of the expedition. he reslt is that he sensational is virtully eiminated, for it is rarely possible, as we shal see, for the camera to be a witness o he most danger­ ous moments of an expedition. By way of ompensation, he psy­ chological and human elements move nto the foreround. There re two occasions when this is particularly ue. The irst s when the behavior of the members of the expedition and ther reacions to the task in hand constitute a ind of anthropology of an explorer, the experimental psychology as it were of an advenurer. The sec­ ond is when the people under study are no longer treated as a species of exotic aimal, and who peforce must be fully described so that they may be better understood. Futhermore the mm is no longer the oly, nor even probably the pncipal instrument for bringing the realities of the expedition before the public. Today it is usually accompanied by a book or shown during a series of lectures, irst at the Sale Pleyel, then n a few scattered cities throuhout France. These wll be folowed by radio and television versions. And al of is for the very good reason that, economics aside, a lm cannot cover every m of an expedition, not even its principal material aspecs. Besides, his tpe of lm is conceived as an llustrated lecture, where the presen� and the words of the speaker-witness constantly complement and au­ thenticate the image on the screen. At which point let me cite a ilm that runs counter to this evolu­ tionary trend and futhermore is proof enough hat he docu­ mentary-ilm-by-reconstruction is dead. The ilm in question is an Engish Tecnicolor lm, Scott of the A ntarctic, the French title of which is L'A venture sas retour, which . retels the story of the expe­ dition of Captain Scott in 1 9 1 1 and 1 9 1 2 . It is ostensibly the very expeition shown n With Scott to the South Pole. 1 56

Cinema and Exploration Let us st rell he heroic and moving character of this under­

tng. Scott set out to conquer the South Pole wih revoluti on y but

s yet expemental e quipment ; a few

" cate rpll

ars , " some

p onies , and dogs . The machines were he irst o l et him down.

Then by derees the poies died of exhaustion. By now h ere were not enough dogs to serve the needs of he expedition and he ive

men on the inal stage from ther las t camp to the Pole were obiged to pull their own supply sledges, a round trip estimated at approi. m ately 1 2 5 0 m les . They reached ther objective oly to nd that mndsen h ad pl ante d the Nowegian lag there a few hours be­

fore. The retun trip was one l ong agony ; the last three suvivors,

the ol for their lamps exhausted, froze to death in the r tents. Three months later, their comrades from the base camp found them and

were able to reconstuct their Odyssey, thanks

to

a diary kept by

the leader and to some exp osed photor aphic pl ates .

Th is nd e t ak ng of Captain Scott marks pe rh aps the irst, albeit

unfortunate, attempt at a moden scientic expedition. Scott fail ed

where Amundsen succeeded because he tried to do something out­ s ide the established and well-tried techniques of a polar expe di ti o n. Neverheless his ufortunate "caterplla rs" are the fo reunners

of

the "Weasels" used b y Paul-Emile Victor and Liotard. It also pro­ vides the rst exm ple of a practice which is n ow common, nam ely, the provis ion for a cnematic repot s an inte g ral p t of the expe­ di tion itsef. heir cameraman, Pon t i ng ,

whose

lm was the irst

ever to be made of a Pol ar exp e d iti on , had his hands frostbitten while reloading ' without gl oves in a temp er ature of - 3 0 D C . While

Panting did not accompany Scott on th e l o ng trek to the pole, his

lm of he voyage south, of th e preparations for the expedition , of

fe at he base cmp, and of the traic en ding of the expedition remain at once a mov i ng testimony to the adventre, and th e arche­ type of

ll ms

of this ge re .

England is understandably proud of Captain Scott and naraly w ant to pay tribute to him. Yet, for my pat

I

would

h ave never

seen a mor e boring and ridiclous u n d ert aing han Scott of the 1 57

What

Is

Cinema?

A ntrctic. Here is a m so laishly nd careuly made that it must

have cost as

much as the oinal expedition

at wich it ws made, 1 947-1 948,

it

is also

.

Consideng the time

a Tecicolor

master­

piece. The suio recosucti os revel a mastey of trick work nd

suio mitaion-but to what prpose? To imitate he nitable, to recosuct hat which of its very nature can oly occur once, namel y isk , adventure , death. Cetaily the scenario is no help. Scott's fe and death are told with an amost p ed anti c formaity. I

wll n ot dwel on he morl of the story , which is nothng but a Boy

Scout moral raised to the diity of a national flure of the m do es not ie there, but in ique, nd for two reasons. First of

institution. The real

its out-of-date

tech­

ll the lm takes no account of the scientiic iformation

conceng polar exploration whi ch the man

n

the street now has

at is comand. He deives this competence from newspaper re­ pos, fro m radio, television, and cinema. To draw a paralel n educ ai onal terms, one miht say of thi s lm hat it ofers scientiic fomation on a ram mar

-

s ch o ol

level to high-school gr adu ates.

This is u fotna te, when the am is n educati onal one . Admittedly Scott's expedition was indee d one rather of exploration, its scientiic aspect being itle more than tentative, and as it turned out, un­ successful. For his very reason the producers sh ould have been

conc ern ed to explain at greater l ength the ps y ch ol o g i c al context of he adven tur e

.

To anyone seeing Greenland by

M arcel

Ichac a nd

Lngu epin at the cinema across the way, Scott would appear n obsti n ate fool. Admittedly the director, Charles Frend, took pains in a number of ufortunately heavily didactic scenes to de s crib e he

social, moral, and techni cal sur oundi n gs out of which th e expedi­

ti o n was bon, but he does so for an England of 1 9 1 0. Wh at he

should have done by way of some storytelling device or o th er was

to draw a paralel with our own times, because this is what he audie nce wil nstinctively do. Secondly, and this most importantly,

the prevalence of objective reporting fol ow i n g World War II de­ ned once

1 58

nd for all what it s that we r equ ire from such repots.

Cinema and Exploration Exoticism wih ll is romantic and spectaular seduction has iven way to a taste for the criticl handling of he facts for her own

Pontng's m of he expedition is ancestor to boh Kon Tiki and Greenand, h at is o say to he shoroings of he one and o sake.

the determination to make n ehaustive report

eident n he

oher. he s mple sn apshot of Scott and his four comp ions at he

pole, which was discovered in their baggage, is fr more srng

hn the entire Technicolor feaure b y Ch rles Frend . he extent to which is m is a poinless underting is even more evident wh en one discovers hat it ws made

among he

glaciers of Noway and Switzerland. The reization that h ese set­

ings, lthough th ey may ber som e resemblance to he ntarcic,

are neverh eless not the ntrctic, is enouh of itsef to destroy ny sense of drama wih which he subject wold othewise be charged . If I had been in harles Frend's position I would have done my best to include some shots from he P ontng m. It wold be just a

matter of plann g he scenio. Thus by includin g some of he stark reities of the oriinl, h e lm wold have taken on a

men­

ing wich it now completely lacks. By back

compaison,

n Greenland

what

Marcel

Ichac

nd Lanuepin

brought

can be considered as an example of one of the

wo contr asting foms assumed by records of co ntemp o r y exp ei­

tions, of whi ch With Scott to the South Pole is the forebear. he

preparations for P.-E. Victor's e xpe d ition took into ac c o unt , doubt­

less, certain likely risks but trie d to anticipate th em as far as possi­

ble. Cinematography was added as a suppl eme nt ay sp eci al sevice.

Strictly speaking the sequence of he ilm could have been planned before he exp editi on set out as were the day-to-day activities of the members of th e expedition. Th e director n any case was free to use

hs equipment as he saw it. He w as there as an oicil winess , so to speak, along wih he meteoroloist or ge oloi st . The lm by Th or Heyerdahl on the other hnd is n example of

1 59

Wt Is Cnea? noher nd of repoing, where he m s

not an nteral

pt of

he expedition. Kon Tiki mnages to be he most beautful of lms wle not beng a ilm

at ll.

Like those moss-covered stones that,

suviving, allow s to reconsuct buldings and statues hat no longer eist, he picures hat are here presented are the remains of

n ished creaion about which one hrly dares to dream. et me explain. Most people are falir ih he extraordinary adven­ res of

a

and Swish scientists conry to he generl hoy,

smll roup of yong Nowein

who hd decided o prove ha,

Polynesia iht well have ben poplated by sea iraions from

en parts ws for

point

of

he Peruvin

to prove miht have Our amateur navigators

coast. The best way

them to simulate he operain s it

crried out thousands of years ago.

heir been con­

stucted a sot of rft from he oldest docmentary formation hey cold ind on the mehods employed by he Indins hem­ selves. The rft, not being provided with any mehod of steeing, drifted like lotsam and was carried l ong by the trade winds to Polynesian atols, a distance of approxmately fabulous

expedition

should

have

4500 m les

succeeded

.

he

That this

after hree

solitary

months and in he teeth of hf a dozen stoms is someng to rejoice the spirit, and to be inscribed among present-day mirales. It reminds one of Melville and Conrad. The travellers brought back from their jouney a book of he highest interest and a colection of

delihfully hmorous drawings. ready by

1 952

Neverheless,

it ws

evident al­

that there could be no witness to the stature of the

enteprise comparable to the movie camera. It is precisely his fact hat provides he critic with food for relection. Our friends did have a camera. But hey were amaters. heir

knowledge of how to handle it was no better thn yours or ine. Besides they had clearly no intention of putng heir m to a commercial use-as certain happy facs prove. For example, they operated their camera at silent speed, that is to say at 1 6 frames per

second, while sound projection call s for 24 frames per second.

te

result was that evey oher frme had to be dupicated and the lm

1 60

Cinema and Exploration in consequence i s more jerky than the p rojection n provincil cinemas back in 1 9 1 0. Fuhemore the quaity of he lm is not

helped

by

erors of exposure nd by the subs equent el argem ent to

3 S mm.

But is s

by

no mens he worst of it. In no sense was the

mang of a lm, even s a sidelne, an interal pat of the enter­

prise, whle the shooing conditions were s bad s

hey could

possibly be. What I me an by his is that as he l ay here crled p on he edge of he rt at ea level, it was as f he cameramn,

whoever he

chnced

to be, and the cmera were smply of a piece .

Naturlly enouh, there cold be no traveng shots, no doly

shos,

nd scarcely a chnce to get a ll shot of the "vessel" from he itle

rubber boat boncng on the waves asten. Fnlly, nd most m­ potant of ll, whenever someng of sigicance occurred,

he

onset of a stom fo r ex ample , the crew were too busy to boher

about uing a cmera. The reslt was hat or amateur m­

makers simply wsted endless reels ng her pet parot and he raions provided by he Ameican rmed forces. But when n excit­

ing moment rives, say a whale hurlng itself at he rft, the foot­ age is so shot hat you have to poces s it ten mes over n the

opicl pnter before you n even spot what s happeng.

Yet somehow Kon Tiki s n adirable

and

ovewheing lm.

hy? B ecause he mking of it is so totlly idenied wih he

acion hat it so impefectly nfolds ; becase it is itsef an aspect of

nd rembing images are as it were he he actors n the rama . Does he ller

he advenre. hose luid

objectivzed

memoy of

whle, that we cn barely see refracted in he water, interest us

b ecaus e

of he raity of the beast and of the mpse we get of it,

si ght as it is? Or rather is it because the shot was tken at he very

moment when a capricious movement of the moster miht wel have nihlated he raft nd sent camera an d cameraman seven or eiht housand meters into the deep? he answer is lear. It is not so much the photoraph of

he

whle hat interess us s the photo­

raph of he danger. Neveheless , he fact remins hat we can

161

Wat Is Cinea? never feel truly saisied wih just the premature ins of a m hat was never completed. One is thus set dreamng of the photoraphic splendor of he lms of Flahety. Tk, for example, of the shos of

the basing sharks of Man of A ran loaing drowsily on he Iish waters. But if

we

relect a little futher we ind ourselves cauht

inextricably n a dilemma. hat we see is not after ll as impefect as ll that, nd for the reason that it does not falsify the conditios of the experience it recounts. For a lm

n 35m

with operating

room enough to make a coherently edited work it would have been necessary to buld a dfferent nd of raft, and to make it-why not-a boat ke any oher. But the fauna of the Paciic nuding at the raft was there precisely because it had all the chracteristics of losam. An engine and propeller would have put them to ight. A marine paradise instantly desroyed by science ! The fact of the

matter is that tis knd of m can actualy achieve

a more or less

successful comproise between the exigencies of the action and he demands of repoing. A cnematorapic witness to an event is what a man can seize of it on lm while at the same tme being part of it. How much more moving is is lotsam, snatched from the tempest, than would have been the faulless and complete repot ofered by an organized m , for it remans tue that this m is not made up oly of what we se--its faults re equally witness to its auhenticity. he missing documents are the negative impints of the expedition-its inscription chiseled deep. It is equaly tue that here are many missing ps of he m A nnapuna, by Marcel Ichac, especialy hose out of which the

cmax shold have been built, namely he inal ascent by Herzog, Lachemal, nd Lionel Teray. But we know why hey are missing. An avalanche snatched the camera from the hands of Herzog. It also dragged of is loves. Thereafter we iss he scene of the ree men as they depat from Camp Two, and plunge into he mist, and only pick up he story

36

hours later as hey come out of

he clous, after beng blinded twice and with ther imbs frostbit­ ten. he modem Opheus of s scent to a hell of ice could not

1 62

Cinema and Exploration preseve

he

camera's sight of it. But then bens he long Calvy

of he descent, with Herzog and Lachemal strapped like mumies to

he

backs of her Sherpas. This time· the camera is there like the

veil · of Veroica pressed to the face of h uman sfferng. Undoubt­

edly

the written account by Herzog is more detailed and

the

more

fihfl of ilms-the oly one that n register at ny heiht, and ight up to the very m o ment of death. But who can fail to s ee the diference between memoy nd that objective image th at ives it eternal substnce? complete. Memory

is

most

1 63

PAI NTI N G AN D C I N EMA

FILMS ABOUT paintings, at least those that use them to create some­ hing he structure of wich is cinematic, meet with an identical objection from painters and t critics like. Of such are the short ms of Emer; Van Gogh by Alain Resnais, R. Hessens, and Gaston Diehl; Pierre Kast's Goya,' and Guernica by Resnais and Hessens. Their objection, and I myself have heard it from the very lips of an Inspector General of Drawing of the Department of Education, is hat however you look at it the ilm is not true to the painting. Its dramatic and loicl uity establishes relationships that are chrono­ logically false and otherwise ictitious, between paintings often widely separated boh in time and spirit. In Guerrieri Emmer actu­ lly goes so far as to include the works of diferent painters, a form of cheating hardly less reprehensible han the use by Kast of frag­ ments of Goya's Caprices to bolster the editing of his Misfortunes of War. he same is ue of Resnais when he juggles wih the periods of Picasso's development. Even should the ilm-maker wish to conform to the facts of art history, he instrument he uses would stil be aesthetically at odds with hem. As a lm-maker he fragments what is by essence a synthesis while himself working towards a new synthesis never en­ visioned by he painter.

1 64

Painting and Cinema One might cone ones e lf here simply to asking what the j usti­ cation for this is, were not a more serious pro ble m involved. Not oly is the lm a betr ayal of the painter, it is also a b etray al of the

painting and for his reason : the viewer, believing that he is seeng

he picture as p ante d , is actully l o oi ng at it through the instru­ mentlity of an art form th at p r ofo un d ly changes its nature. his

was true from the irst of black and white . But ev e n color ofers no solution. No one color is ev e r faihfully reproduced; stll less, there­

fore,

is any combination of colors . On the other hand, he sequence

of a lm i ve s it a uity in time that is horzontal and, so to sp eak ,

geograpical, whereas time in a pai nti ng , so far a s the

noti o n ap­

plies, develops geologicaly and in dep th . Finally and above all-to

use a more subtle arument that is never employed though it is the most mportant of ll-space, as it applies to a

paintng,

is radicaly

esroyed by the screen. Just as footlights and scenery in the he­ ater seve to mark the contrast between it and he real world so, b y its srrounding frme, a panting is separated of not oly from

relity as such but, even more so, from the reality that is repre­ sented n it. Indeed it is a mistke to see a picture frame as h av i ng

merely a decorative or rhetorical function. The fact hat it empha­

sizes he compositional qUality of the paintng is of secondary m­ potance. The essential role of the frame is, f not to create at least to emphasize the dfference between the microcosm of the picture and the macrocosm of the natural world in which the p aintin g has come to take is place. This explains the baroque compleity of he traditional frame whose job it is to establish somehing that cannot be

geometiclly

established-nmely

he

iscontinuity

between

he painting and the wll, that is to say between he painting and reity. Whence deives, as Ortega y Gasset has wel stated, the prevlence evewhere of he glded frame, because it is a mateial hat ives the maximum of relection, relection b ei ng hat qu ality of color, of ight, having of itsef no form, hat is to say pure foless color.

In other words the frme of a painting encloses a space th at is

1 65

What Is Cinema? oiented so to speak n a diferent direction. In contrast to natural space, the space in which our active experience occurs nd border­

ing its outer limits, it ofers a space he orientation of wich s nwrds, a contemplative rea opening solely onto the interior of

he pining.

he outer edges of the screen re not, as he techicl jargon wold seem to inply, he frame of he lm mage. They are he edges of a piece of masing hat shows only a poion of reality. The pictre frame polazes space nwards. On he contrary, what he screen shows us seems to be pt of something prolonged ndei­ nitely into the iverse.

A

frame s centripetal, the screen centrf­

ugal. hence it folows that if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen wihin he picture frame, that is f we show a sec­ tion of a paintng on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its mits and is presented to the imagnation as with­ out any boundaries.

Without losing its oher characteristics the

paintng thus takes on the spatial properties of cinema and be­ comes pat of that "picturable" world that lies beyond it on al sides . It is on his illusion that Luciano Emmer based his fantasic aesthetic reconstuctios, which have seved as a starting point for the eisting ms of contemporary at, notably for Alain Resnais'

Van Gogh. Here he director has treated the whole of he artist's ouput as one large paintng over which the camera has wandered as freely as

n

any ordinary documentary. From the "Rue d'rles"

we climb n hrough the window of Van Gogh's house and go right up to he bed with the red eiderdon. Resnais has even risked a reverse shot of n old Dutch peasantwoman enteng her house. Obviously it s easy to pretend that ms made is way do

violence to the very natre and essence of painting and hat it s better if Vn Gogh has fewer adrers even

f

they fail to let

on

what exactly hey adire about hm. In short, the argument is that it is a strange method of cltural dissemnation hat s based on he desruction of is very object. s pessiisic oulook, however, 1 66

Painting and Cinema does not bear close exaination either on pedagoicl or, stil less,

on aesthetic rounds. Instead of compling that the cinema cannot ive us painins

as they realy are, should we not raher marvel that we have at last found an open sesame for the masses to he treasures of he world of at? As a matter of fact here can be tully

DO

appreciaion or

aesheic enjoyment of a painting without some fom of pior initia­

tion, wihout some form of pictorial education hat llows he spec�·. tator to make hat efort of abstracion as a result of which he can

clearly disinguish between he mode of existence of he pnted surface and of the world hat srrounds hm. Up to he nineteenh ceny the eroneos docine hat pant­

ng was smply a wa y of reproducing the world outside provided the uinstructed wih

an

oppotuity to

beieve

hemselves

n­

structed and, thereafter, the dramatic episode nd he morl tale multiplied the occasion. We are well aware that this is

which

seems

to

me

the

s

no longer the case to day, and it is decidng

factor in favor

cinematographic eforts of Luci no Emmer,

of

the

Hei Storck, lain

Resnais, Pierre Kast and others-namely that they have found a way to bing the work of t wihin the range of everyday seeng so h at a mn needs no more hn a pair of eyes for he task. In oher words no cultural background, no initiation is needed for nstant enjoyment-and one iht add, perforce , of a paining presented

as a phenomenon in nature to he ind's eye by way of the suc­ tural fom of he lm. he painter should reze that this is n no

sense a retreat from ideals, or a way of doing spiitul violence to

his wo rk, or a retun to a realistic and anecdotl concept of paint­

n g. his new mehod of popularizing paintng is not directed in any essential way against the

subjt

matter and in no sense at ll

against he form. Let he painter paint s he wishes. he attivity of

he m-maker remais on he outside, reisic of course bu-nd his is the reat discovery hat should make evey painter happy-a reaism once removed, folowng upon the abstracion ha I is the

1 67

What Is Cinema? panng. Thanks to the cinema and to the psychological properties of he screen, what is symboic and abstract takes on he solid relity of a piece of ore.

It shold therefore be clear, from now on,

that the cinema not only far from compromising or destroying he ue nature of another art, is, on the contrary, n he process of

saving it, of bringng it to generl attention. More hn with any oher art, panter and public are far apat. Uless, therefore, we are going to cng to a kind of meanngless mandarnism, how cn we fal to be delihted that pinting wll now become n open bok to

he masses and without the epense of creang a whole clture. If suh economy shocks he cultural Malthusians let them relect that it cold also spare us an artisic revolution-hat of "realsm" which

hs its own special way of making pantng avalable o the people. What of the purely aestheic objections? As distinct from the pedagogicl aspect of the misunderstandng

that

question, these derive

demnds

from

the

clearly from a

m-maker

something

other th an what he has n mind. Actualy Van Gogh nd Goya re not, or are not exclusively at least, a new rendeing of the work of hese two painters. Here the role of he inema is not the subordi­ nate and didactic one of p h otor aphs

n

n album or of a lm

projected as part of a lecture. These ms are works n their own right. They are their own jstiication. They are not to be judged by comparing them to the panings they make use of, rather by the anatomy or rather the istology of this newbon aesthetic creature, fruit of the nion of painting and cnema. The objections I raised earier are in reality a way of ivng deiion to the new laws following upon s mating. he role of cnema here is not hat of a sevant nor is it to betray he panting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The lm of a panting is n aeshetic smbiosis of screen and paining, as is he ichen of he algae and musroom. To be annoyed by tis is on behaf of heater and music.

1 68

s

idiclous as to condemn he opera

Painting nd Cinea It is neverheless true that s new fom has about it smething

deitely of our time, and wich he raditional ompison I have

j us t made does not tke nto account. Fms of pantings re not imaion lms. What is paradoxical about them is hat hey use an

ready completed work suicient unto itself. But it is precsely because it substitutes for he pnting a work one deree removed rom t, proceedng from something already aestheticlly formu­

lated, that it throws a new ight on the original. It is perhaps to the

extent hat he . is a complete work and as such, seems therefore.

to betray the pinting most, hat it renders it in reity he reater sevice.

I must prefer Van Gogh or Guernica to Rubes or to he m From Renoir to Picasso by d'Haesaerts which aims only at being nsuctive or critical. I say s not only because the freedom that Resnais has llowed himself . preseves he ambiguity, the poly­ vlence characteristic of ll ly creative works, but also and su­ premely because tis creation is the best citic of he orinal. It is in pling he work apat, in breang up its component pats, in making an assalt on its very essence that the m compels it to

deliver up some of its hidden powers. Did we relly now, before

we saw Resnais' ilm, what Vn Gogh looked lke stripped of his

yellows? It is of course a risky business and we see how dangerous rom those ilms of Emer which are less efective. The im-maker uns a risk, through articil and mechical drmatization, of giv­

ng us n anecdote nstead of a panting. One must lso take into account, however, that success depends on the talent of the drector and on how deep is s understanding of the picture. There is also a certain type of literary criticism which is likewise

a re-creation-Baudelaire on Delacroix, Valery on Baudelaire, Mal­ raux on Greco. Let us not blame the cinema for human foibles and sns. Fms about p ainting, once the prestige that comes from sur­

prise and discovery has faded, will be woh precisely as much as he men who make them.

1 69

N OTES

S O U R C E S AN D TRAN S LATO R ' S N OTE S

THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGAPHIC IMAGE From Problemes de

la

Peinture, 1 945

THE MTH OF TOTL CINEMA From Critique, 1 946

p. 1 7, Concours Lepine. Annual exposition of inventions, at which awards are given to en­ courage French atisans and inventors. Frst orgaized in 1 903 by an association of inventors and manufactures, following an earlier ex­

position inauurated by Louis Lepine. p. 1 9 , image on reina.

he notion of the retention of the image on the retina seems now to be discarded in favor of a new theoy giving greater importance to the part played by the brain.

p.

20, P. Potoniee.

he dream of creating a living human being by meas other than · natural reproduction has been a preoccupation of man from time

immemori al : hence such myths as Pygmalion and Galatea. Serious medieval natural philosophers such

s

Ibertus Magnus ( master to

Aquinas ) concerned themselves with the possibility . he creation of the homunculus is a recurent theme in literature and has appeared in such ilms as The Go/em . It was doubtl ess a kind red dsire that

173

What Is Cinema? led early viewers of the lm to exclam, "It is life itself," such

the mp a ct of the sup reme fom of trompe-l'oeil.

p. 20, Cherel. Chevreul, the subject of the interview, was a French chemist

1 88 9 )

.

ws

( 178-

who invented a theoy of colo r from which the Impressionist

painters drew inspration. EVOLTION OF HE ANGUAGE OF CINEMA A compos ite of three articles : the irst

ritte n

anniversay booklet, Tweny Years of Film

for a Venice Festival

( 1 952) ;

the second "d­

iting and Its Evolution," A ge Nouveau, No. 92, July, 1 955 ; and the

1 950

third in Cahiers du Cinema, No. 7,

HE IRTUES AND IMITATIONS OF MONTAGE From Cahiers du Cinema,

p.

43,

1 953

and 1 957

Jean Tourane.

of

Director who made actors out

played human

rol e s .

animals in stories in which they

He made two short ilms, Saturnin Ie poete, the

h ero of whi ch was a duck, and Le Lac aux fees,

fe aturn g

rabbis, a

fox, a goat , and so on. He later made a feature ilm in the sme style, Une Fee ps comme les autres.

IN DEFENSE OF IXED CINEMA Fro m Cinema, un oeil ou vert sur Ie monde p.

65,

Madame de La Fayett e .

French woman of letters

( 1 63-1 693 ) ,

author of La Princesse de

Cleves and of Memoires-an interesting account of the French court.

THEATER AND CNEMA

(Part 1)

From Esprit, June, 1 95 1 . p.

79,

Boireau and Onesime.

he former is a character taken

from

a comic paper-a maladroit

clown round whom a famous e arly serial was built. he latter

he central i ure of an earlier p.

79,

critic of contempory French

study of Andre Gide.

ws

seril.

Jean Htier.

A pene tra t i ng

1 74

coic

literaure, auhor

of

a

Notes p . 8 1 , Heri Gohier.

A profess or at the Sorbo nne, well-known authoriy on he theater;

author of L'Essence du theatre and Le Theatre

et I'exstence.

TAER ND CINA (Part II) From

Esprit, July-Aust,

1 95 1

p . 104, Christian Berard.

A French painter ( 1 902-1949) whom Louis Jouvet nd Jean C­

teau persuaded, wih some ficulty, to undeke desing heater sets. He designed ses for

La

Vou humaine ( 1 930) and La Machine

inlernal ( 1 934) . He lso created the ses for Cocteau's m a Bele

et la

bete. Hi s llustraios of the works of mbaud are wel nOWD.

p. 1 1 4, Mtenot waves. "Nme of a radio-electical nswnent which was an advance on the heren. It

s

o ne of many electro-phoic sments on which, at

will, the player may make notes whose origin is to be traced to electro-magnetic vibrations ultmately converted into sound waves by some form of loudspeker."Groves' Dictionay

p.

01 Music, Vol.

2.

1 1 8 , Jean Vlar.

Well-known French actor, fo rmely director of the Theatre N aion ale Popuiaire, which ives open-air pefomances n Provence n the

summer, between reular seasons

n

Paris.

JOURNL D'N CURE DE CAPAGNE ND E SYLE OF ROBERT

From Cahiers

BSSON du Ciema,

No. 3 , 195 1

p. 1 2 6, line 9 .

Does Bzin realy mean "those happy few," sarcastically,

or

has is

memoy failed him when he actually meant "is band of brohers"? p. 1 29,

A

Jacques

Ie

lataliste et

son maitre.

novel by Diderot ( 1 7 1 3- 1 7 84 ) , the Encyclopedist. he novel is in

the line descending from Rabelais by way of Cevantes and Laurence Sterne, with

Shandy.

acnowledged borrowings from the latter's Trstram

1 75

What Is Cnema?

p.

1 34, " . . . the deadly Nessus-mantle of

Here is

a

remarkable example

of

the old

m."

Bzin's c ap aciy for

compression.

I n one adj ctival phrse he combines pagan and Chistin legend.

Nesus

ws

he centaur

who gave Denira, wife of

Heracles,

a poisoned

garment wih which she unwittingly causd he death of her husband ,

ths avenging Nessus'

own deah

at the hans of Heracles.

p. 1 34, ierkegaard ian repetition." A notion involved in ierkegaard ian religious eistentilism. It in­ "

volves inding what has been lost. It bears some comp aris o n to he Platoic view of the truth s "recollection," but is diferent

temporal perspective involved. Recollection is oriented to repetitio n to the future . p. 1 43 ,

s

to the

the

pst.

Viollet-le-Duc.

French architect and author ( 1 8 1-1 879) and restorer of anc ient

churches and buildings, such as Notre Dame and La Sainte Chapelle. His d oc t ri ne was that a b uil din g should be res tored less according to the condition in which it was found than aco rd i ng to the architec­

tonic princi pl es from which its foms derived. he conclusions drawn by him and his disciples were frequently criti c ized less for heir own

sake than because their appl ic atio n would not llow for any alterna­ tivs. CHALIE CHAPLIN

From D . O.C., 1 948 CNEA AND XPLOATION

A combi n ation of two articles that appeared in France-Observateur in April, 1 953, and Januay, 1 956.

p.

1 56, Sal le Pleyel.

A well-nown Paris concert-hall ( named after the Austrian compser )

often used for the sh owi ng of travel lms.

PAINNG AND CINEMA Source unknown; not gi ven in French edition

176

INDX

I N D EX

humaine, La, 34 Bim, Ie petit ine, 41 Boireau, 79 l.

Adventurer, The, 146 f. A friqu e vous parle, L', 1 5 5

B2te

A lice in Wonderland, 42 A llemania A nno Zero, 37

Bordeaux, Henri, 63 Bost, Pierre, 1 27, 1 4 1 Boudu sauve des eaux, 8 3 Bourgeois, Jacques, 65 Bourget, Paul, 62 Bresson, Robert, 7, 2 3 , 54, 6 8 , 7 5 ,

Agel, Henri, 1 3 2

ltmann, Georges, S 5 Andersen, Hans Christian, 42 Anges du peche, Les, 1 32 A nnapura, 1 62 Antoine, nr6, 89 Anoul, Franioise, 1 1 7 Astaire, Fred, 2 8 Astuc, lexande, 4 . Aurenche, 127, 143 Autnt-Lara, Claude, 67 , 9 3

Back Street, 28 Bailon ouge, Le, 42 f. Barault, lean-ouis, 1 20 Baty, Gston, 1 1 1 Baudelaire, Charles, W 7 , 1 69 Beuin, AHed, 68 Benoit, Piee, 63 Berard, Cristian, 1 04 Bergman, Ingrid, 92 Benanos, Georges, 68, 75, 1 26 l. Benhardt, Sah, 1 1 8 n., 1 23 Benstein, Hery, 1 1 5 Bethoieu, A., 76 Best Years of Our Lives, The, 7 1

1 25 f.

Brighton Rock, 64 Broken Blossoms, 3 3 , 7 0 B roth e rs Karamazov, 8 3

BufoD, G. L. L., 4 3

Cabinet o f D r . Caligari, 1 09, 1 3 9 Caldwell, Erskine, 6 1 Camus, Albert, 64 Cnudo, R., 7 Cane, Marcel, 29 . . 32 Casares, Maria, 1 3 3 Caves d u Vatican, Les, 82 Cendrars, Blaise, 1 5 5 cezanne, Paul, 1 6 Chaplin, Charlie, 7, 52, 7 1 , 7 2 , 7 9 f . , 1 1 5 , 1 2 1 , 1 44 l. Chardin, 1 3 Chartreuse de Parme, Le, 65 l. Cheat, The, 3 9 Chevreul, M . E., 20 179

What s Cinema? Cinbo, 1 54

Circus, Th e, 5 2 Citizen Kane, 3 3 , 3 6, 3 7 , 52, 64, 7 0 , 113 Clouzot, H. G . , 25 Cocteau, Jean, 46, 69 , 8 4 , 90 f., 9 5 , 1 0 1 n . , 1 1 2, 1 1 6, 1 23 , 1 2 9 Condition h um a in e, La, 64 Congorilla, 1 54 ConeiIIe, Pierre, 54, 9 8 Cravene , Marcel , 1 03 Crin Blanc, 41 f. Croisiere Noire, a, 1 54 Cyrano de Bergerac, 82 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 1 1 , 60 Dam es du Bois de Boulogne, Les, 7 , 53 , 1 1 0, 125, 1 29 f. Danse de la m ort, La , 1 03 Daumier, Honore, 1 5 2 Day 's Pleasure , A , 1 45 Degas, Edgar, 1 1 9 D e lacrox, Eugene, 1 69 Dellanoy, Jen, 68 Delluc, Louis, 7 Demeny, 1 7 D e Mille , C . B . , 3 9 De Neval, 1 3 2 Descartes, Rene, 1 9 n., 4 3 D e Sica, Vittorio, 37 Diable au corps, Le, 53 , 66 f. , 1 26, 127, 1 4 1

Dide rot, Denis, 7, 1 29 f. Diehl, Gston, 1 64 D isney, Walt, 4 1 , 43 Dos Passos, John, 6 1 f. Dr. Jeyll and Mr. Hyde, 28 Dreyer, Carl heodore, 2 3 , 2 8 , 3 8 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 6 , 1 09 f., 1 3 3 , 1 3 8 Dumas, Alexandre, 5 3 Duvivier, Jean, 29 Eay Street, 1 44 f. Edison, Thomas, 1 7 I. Eisenstein, Sergei, 12 n., 25 Eldorado, 1 3 9 Emer, Luciano, 1 42, 1 64 I., 1 66f. End of St. Petersburg, 32 Entree des A rtistes, L', 1 3 3

1 80

Espoir, L', 82, 1 1 3 Etranger, L', 64 Eve f u tu re, L', 20

Fallen

Ido l, The, 66, 7 0

Fan tomas, 57

Fauchois, Rene, 8 3

Fee p a s comme les aUlres, Une, 4 2 f. Fen andel, 8 6 Feuillade, Louis, 5 9 F eydeau , Enest, 1 1 5 Feyder, J acques, 29 Flahety, Robert, 26, 3 8 , 1 62 Flaubet, Gustave , 66, 67 For Whom th e Bell Tolls, 63 f. Ford, John, 29, 35, 64 Frankenstein, 28 Frend, Charles, 158 I. Freud, Sigmund, 42 F rom en ti n , 6 2 Fuy, 32 G ance, Abel , 25, 26, 72, 85

G arbo, Greta, 74, 1 1 8 General Line, The, 25, 55 G ide, ndre, 65, 68, 82 Giotto, 5 6 Gold R ush, The, 70 Gouhier, Heni, 6, 1 5 , 8 1 , 9 5 , 1 08 Goya, 1 64 Grande illusion, La, 34 Greco, EI, 1 69 Greed, 2 8 , 1 3 8 Greene, Grahm, 6 1 f . G reenland, 1 58 I. Griith, D. W. , 24, 25, 27, 3 3 , 52 G uernica, 1 64 I. G uerrieri, 1 64 Hallelujah!, 72 Hamlet, 55, 59, 69 I. , 75, 76, 84, 9 3 , 1 1 0 n. , 1 1 1 , 1 1 3 Hellman, Lillian, 77, 84 Heminway, Enest, 61 I. Henry V, 76, 84, 87, 8 8 , 9 3 , 1 1 2, 1 14, 1 1 6, 1 1 9 f., 123 n. Hessens, R. , 1 4 Heyerdahl, hor, 1 59 Hitchcock, Afre, 3 9, 5 1 Hugo, Jen, 103 , 109

Index Hugo, Victor, 53, 1 3 2 Hier, Jen, 7 9

51 Lumiere, Louis, 1 2 17 f., 34, 45

Louisiana Stoy,

1 A m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 28 Iehac, Marcel, 1 5 8 , 1 62

Idiot, L', 66 Informer, The, 2 8

Intolerance, 3 3 Invisible Man, The, 2 8

I t Happened One Night, 72 Jacque, risian, 65 lacques Ie fataliste, 7 , lean de la lune, leanne d'A rc,

53 , 1 29

76

See La Passion de Jeanne d'A rc lezebel, 28, 29 Joly, 1 7 Jour se /eve, Le, 29, 32, 7 1 lournal d'un cure de campagne, Le, 53, 54, 66, 68, 75, 1 2 5 f. Joyce, James, 4 Kst, Piere, 1 64 f. Keaton, Buster, 52, 72, 80, 1 2 1 King So lomo n 's Mines, 1 55

Kon Tiki, 1 5 9 f.

Kleshov, Lev , 25, 3 1 , 36, 37, 43

a Fontaine, Jean de, 42, 44, 54, 8 1

L adri di Biciciette, 3 7 , 64, 1 3 3

L a Fayette, Madame Marie- M a delene de, 56, 6 5 Liral, Nico le , 132 f. morisse, Albert, 4 1 f. ng, Fiz, 32 nglois, Heni, 59 arel nd Hardy, 80 Lautreamont, Comte de, 7 1 e Bn, Charles, 1 0 eger, Guy, 2 e roy , 1 7 Ure, Jean de, 1 1 5 f. Liner, Max, 7 8 f. Little Foxes, The, 34, 69, 76, 84, 93 Lloyd, Harold, 72 Loin de R ueil, 6 1 Lone White Sails, 4 1

,

Mac Orlan, Pierre, I S S

Macbeth, 69, 76, 84, 9 3 , I l l , 1 14 Madame Bovay, 66, 8 3 , 141

Magniicent A m bersons, The, 34, 50, 52 Mallarme, Stephane, 1 3 2, 1 4 1 Malrax, nre, 10, 24, 56, 6 1 f., 1 19, 1 69 Man of A ran, 1 02, 1 62 Manel, Edouard, 1 1 9 Man hattan Transfer, 64 Marey, E. J., 1 7, 22 Mx Brothes, 28 Maupassant, 67 Mauiae, FranOis, 92 Medecin malgre lui, Le, 85, 87 Melies, Georges, 20, 7 8

Melodie der Welt, 1 55 Melville, Jean-P ie rre , 1 3 8 Memee, Proser , 84 n . Michaelangelo, 5 6 , 60 Misanthrope, Le, 7 1 Mserables, Les, 53 Misfortunes of War, 1 64 Mity, Jean, S Mix, Tom, 48 Moana, 1 55 Moden Times, 1 50 f. Moliere, 54, 7 1 , 85, 9 8 , 1 06, Monsieur Verdoux, 7 1 Monte Cristo, Count of, 5 3 Morand, Paul, 1 55

1 15

MoshuUn, 25, 26, 37, 43 Mounel-ully ( Jean-Sully

M ounet ) ,

1 22 Mourning Becomes Electra, 93 Mr. A rkadin, SO Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 28

Mumau, F. W., 26, 3 8 , 39, 1 09 Muybridge, Eadwerd, 1 7 , 1 8 Mystere Picasso, Le, 1 42 D. N ad ar, 2 0 Nanook, 27,

50, 5 1 , 1 02, 1 54

Nattier, N athaie , 1 1 7 Nibelungen, Die, 109 f., 1 3 9

181

What Is Cinema? Niep ce, N ice phore , 1 1 , 12, 17, 1 8 Nosferatu, 27 , 1 09 , 1 3 9 Notorious, 9 2

Recherche du temps perdu, A la, 65 Regie du jeu, La, 34, 3 8 , 7 1 , 1 06

Occupe-toi d'A melie, 84, 93 Oedipus, 5 8 Of Mice and Men, 8 1 Olivier, Laurence, 54, 87, 8 8, 95, 9 8 , 1 1 0 n . , I l l , 1 1 2, 1 1 6, 1 2 3

Renoir, Auguste, 1 1 9 Renoir, Jean , 6, 2 3 , 29, 30, 34, 3 8 , 66, 67, 83, 128, 1 3 9, 1 4 1 Resnais, Alain, 1 42, 1 64 f. Reynaud, Emle, 1 8, 20 Rimbaud, 1 4 1 Rin-Tin-Tin, 4 , 4 8 Rink, The, 1 53 River, The, 1 4 1 Rohmer, Eric, 4 Rope, 5 1 , 84 Rosenkrantz, 99 f., 1 1 2 Rossellini, Robeto, 3 7 Roue, La, 25 Rogers, Ginger, 28 Rousseau, I .-J . , 42 Rubens, 1 69 Ruttmann, Walher, 1 55

O ne A .M., 1 47 Onesime, 79 f. Ortega y Gasset, Jse, 1 65

Panol, Marcel, 76, 7 8 , 89 n., 99, 1 0 3 , 1 1 4, 1 1 6 f . , 1 24 Paisa, 37, 64 Palissy, Berard, 22 Parents terribles, Les, 69 f., 7 6, 84, 85, 90 f. , 1 03 , 1 1 2, 1 1 3 , 1 1 6, 1 20 Partie de campagne, Une, 66, 1 4 1 Pascal, Blaise, 1 9 n. Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La, 2 8 , 1 03 , 1 06 , 1 09, 1 3 3 , 1 39 Pawnshop, The, 1 4 6 Philipe, Gerard, 1 1 8 n . Picasso, Pablo, 1 3 , 1 64 Pilgrim, The, 55, 1 4 f. Plateau, J. A. F., 1 8 Plauus, 80 Poe, Edgar Allan, 67, 1 32 Poirier, eon, 1 54 Ponting, H. G . , 1 54 f. Potem k in, 70, 72 Potoniee, P., 20 Power and th e Glory, The, 64 Premieres desillusions, Les, 66 f. Proust, Marcel, 65 Pudovkin, V. I., 73

Quai des Brumes, Le, 32 Quai des Ortevres, Le, 25 Queneau, Raymond, 6 1 Racine, Jen, 7 , 72, 82, 1 06, 1 1 5, 1 22, 130 Radiguet, Raymond, 67 Raimu, 8 6 Rank, J. Athur, 4 1 Raphe1, 60

1 82

Rembrandt, 56 Rendez-vous de juillet, 155

. Sadoul, Georges, 17 Sang d'un poete, Le, 46, 1 0 1 n.

Saroyn, William, 64 Sae, I.-P., 92, 1 02 Scarface, 28, 70, 72

Scott of the A ntarctic, 1 57 f. Segur, Comtese de, 42 Sennett, Mack, 72 Shadow of a Doubt, 92 Shakespeare, 57, 75, 88, 1 06, 1 1 5, 1 1 9 Shoulder A s, 149 Silence de la mer, 138 Stagecoach, 28, 29, 70, 72, 1 03 Stenhal, 65 Storck, Heni, 1 67 Stroheim, See Von Strohem Sunnyside, 146

Sunrise, 27, 72 Symphonie pstorale, La, 53, 6 6 f., 141 Tabu, 27 , 1 55 Tales of Perrault, 42 Taran, 1 55 Tellenay, ois, 4 Tene, 80

Idex heveDo, Jen, 1 54 Thomas Garner, 64 TiDtoretto, 12 D. Topaze, 1 1 6 t. Touchard, P. A., 2, 1 0 1 n. Tolouse-Laurec, Heny de, 1 1 9 Tourne, Jean, 43 f. Trader Hon, 1 5 5 Trois Mousquetaires, Les, 53 Tffaut, Fran�is, 4 Valentino, Rud olph, 74

Valey, Paul, 1 27, 169

Vampires, Les, 5 9 Van Gogh, 7 1 , 1 42, 1 66 l. Vermeer, 46 Vene, Jules, 42 Vey, Pierre, 54 Victor, P.-E., 1 57 l. Vigo, Jean , 67 Vilar, Jean, 1 0 3 , 1 1 8n Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Auust, comte 0, 20

Violet-Ie-Duc, Eugene, 143 ViscoDti, LuchiDo, 37 Voltaire, 72, 122 Von Frisch, 43 Von Stroheim, ich, 2 3 , 26, 27, 38, 3 9 , 7 3 , 1 3 8 l. Voyageur sans oggages, Le, 76, 82,

1 07

Weine, R., 1 09 . Welles, Orson, 23, 3 3 f., SO, 89 D., 1 0 1 , I l l , 1 23 Where No Vultures Fly, 49 D. While Shadows in the South Ses, 1 55 With Scott to the South Pole, 1 54, 1 5 7 Wood, Sm, 64 Wright, Teresa, 92 Wyler, Wlliam, 29, 3 3 f., 69, 77, 84

95; --

Zavattini, Cesare, 37 Zecc, Ferdinand, 34, 57 Zukor, Adolph, 7 8

1 83