French literature on screen [1 ed.] 1784995177, 9781784995171

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French literature on screen

French literature on screen Edited by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 7849 9517 1  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

For Olympia, in memoriam

Contents

List of illustrations page ix Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgements xiv 1 Introduction: screening French literature 1 Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer 2 The spectacle of Monte Cristo 12 Jennifer L. Jenkins 3 Adultery and adulteration in film versions of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary 32 Colin Davis 4 For the first time on screen together: Madame Bovary and Les Misérables in 1934 48 Dudley Andrew 5 The Americanization of Victor Hugo: Darryl F. Zanuck’s Les Misérables (1935) 72 Guerric DeBona 6 From heterotopia to metatopia: staging Carmen’s death 90 Phil Powrie 7 From the Recherche on film toward a Proustian cinema 107 Steven Ungar 8 Otto Preminger’s Bonjour, Tristesse: a tale of three women, if not more 130 R. Barton Palmer 9 Adapting Pagnol and Provence 150 Jeremy Strong 10 Maigret on screen: stardom and literary adaptation 165 Ginette Vincendeau 11 The making and remaking of Thérèse Desqueyroux: one novel, two films 183 Susan Hayward

viii Contents 12 Elle (2016), rape, and adaptation 211 Homer B. Pettey Select bibliography 230 Index 241

Illustrations

All illustrations are frame enlargements except as otherwise noted. 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2

3.3 4.1–4.5

5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2

Arabesque interior of the Count’s stately manor in Monte Cristo (1929) page 20 Balloon arrival of the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo (Jim Caviezel) in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) 26 Charles Bovary (Jean-François Balmer) cuts the wedding cake in Madame Bovary (1991) 37 Emma (Valentine Tessier) with reins in hand, Charles (Pierre Renoir) next to her, and her abandoned work in the foreground in Madame Bovary (1934) 39 Flaubert (James Mason) before the court in Madame 43 Bovary (1949) Use of Griffith techniques of cutaways and close-up in Les Misérables (1934). 4.1. Boy tossing coin. 4.2. Cutaway – Valjean (Harry Baur) about to cover coin with his boot (unconsciously). 4.3. Close-up reaction shot – boy pleads for the return of his coin. 4.4 Cutaway – Valjean realizes coin is under his boot. 4.5 Close-up – In despair, a tearful Valjean fails to return the coin 51–53 Cosette (Marilyn Knowlden) looking like Shirley Temple 79 The very British Charles Laughton as Javert in Toland’s half-shadow, half-light 85 The labyrinthine staircases of The Loves of Carmen (1948) 95 The cross-wired labyrinth of the flies in Karmen Gëi (2001) 97

x Illustrations 6.3

The killing storeroom in which Joe (Harry Belafonte) confronts Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) in Carmen Jones (1954) 97 6.4 The killing closet in Saura’s Carmen (1983). 98 7.1 Swann (Jeremy Irons) with Odette (Ornella Muti) in Swann in Love (1984) 116 7.2 Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) at the beach in a grainy amateur film from La Captive (2000). 119 7.3 Simon’s (Stanislas Merhar) silhouetted head appears on the screen of his projected film of Ariane and Andrée in La Captive 121 7.4–7.6 Adjoining baths with Simon watching Ariane, then both touch the glass partition 124 8.1 Elsa (Mylène Demongeot) under the covers with swimsuited Raymond (David Niven) and daughter Cécile (Jean Seberg) prodding Elsa to join them at the beach 136 9.1 César (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Ateuil) foregrounding the expansive landscape of Provence in Jean de Florette (1986) 161 10.1 Jean Gabin as Maigret with the ubiquitous, iconic pipe in Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959) 172 11.1 Visual historical accuracy in the mise-en-scène with Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) in period outfit from Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012) 188 11.2 Narrative structure and duration of interior monologues, silence and music in Thérèse Desqueyroux 191–192 11.3 Graph of Thérèse Desqueyroux Part One: vertical numbering 0–8 refers to duration in minutes; horizontal to the narrative sections (1–5) 193 11.4 Graph of Thérèse Desqueyroux Part Two: vertical numbering 0–8 refers to duration in minutes; horizontal to the narrative sections (6–11) 193 11.5 Mise-en-scène of Thérèse’s letter to Anne 205 12.1–12.3 In her revenge fantasy, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) strikes her would-be rapist with a ceramic ashtray, cut to bloody assailant, and her final unleashing of multiple blows in Elle (2016) 219 12.4 Michèle’s satisfaction with her revenge fantasy 220

Notes on contributors

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. In his biography André Bazin (new edition 2013), he extends Bazin’s thought in What Cinema Is! (2011) and in the edited volume, Opening Bazin (2012). Committed to aesthetics, hermeneutics and history, he published Film in the Aura of Art in 1984, then focused on French film and culture in Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005). He also co-edited The Companion to François Truffaut (2013). For these publications, he was named Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is principally in the field of twentieth-century French literature, thought and film, with interests including ethics, ethical criticism, Holocaust literature, recent fiction, and the connections between philosophy, fiction and film. His most recent books are Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (2010), Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence (2012) and Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing (2018). Guerric DeBona, OSB, is Professor of Homiletics and Communication at Saint Meinrad School of Theology. He is author of Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010). His publications on literature, film, and religious communication have appeared in Cinema Journal, Journal of Film & Video, Literature/Film Quarterly, as well as in several anthologies. Susan Hayward is Emeritus Professor of Cinema Studies at Exeter University. She has written extensively on French cinema. Her publications include, French National Cinema (1993 and 2nd edition 2005), Luc Besson (1998), Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign (2004), Les Diaboliques (2005), Nikita (2010), and French Costume Drama of the 1950s: Fashioning Politics

xii

Notes on contributors

in Film (2010). She is the founder of the journal Studies in French Cinema which she co-edited with Phil Powrie (2000–10). She is also the author of Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (currently in its fifth edition). Jennifer L. Jenkins is Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she teaches film, literature and archival studies. Her recent book, Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest (2016), explores regional image-making in the southwest borderlands of the US. In 2017, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to repatriate a number of midcentury 16-mm educational films about Native peoples of the Southwest by recording new narrations by Native community members, a process termed ‘tribesourcing’. She is the Director of the Bear Canyon Center for Southwest Humanities, an NEHfunded regional research centre. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Film Studies programme. Palmer is the author, editor or general editor of nearly fifty volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects, including Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s (2010) and Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (with Robert Bray, 2009). He has also edited The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh (with Steven Sanders, 2010), Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter (with David Boyd, 2011), ‘A Little Solitaire’: John Frankenheimer and American Film (with Murray Pomerance, 2011), The Philosophy of Michael Mann (with Steven Sanders and Aeon Skoble, 2013), and Film Noir: Classical Traditions and International Noir (with Homer B. Pettey, 2014). Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. With R. Barton Palmer, he co-edited two volumes on film noir for Edinburgh University Press: Film Noir (2014) and International Noir (2014). He also co-edited Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze for State University of New York Press (2017). His most recent books are Rule, Britannia! Biopics and British National Identity (co-edited with Palmer, 2018) and Cold War Film Genres (2018). Phil Powrie is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Surrey. He has published widely on French cinema. He is the co-author of Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (2007). His most recent books are French Cinema (editor, 4 volumes, 2014), Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English (co-editor, 2016) and Music in Contemporary French Cinema: The Crystal-Song (2017). He is the chief general editor of the journal Studies in French Cinema. Jeremy Strong is Professor of Literature and Film at the University of West London. Co-chair of the Association of Adaptation Studies (2010–16), he



Notes on contributors

xiii

is widely published in the field and is a member of several editorial boards. He is the author of Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture (2011), James Bond Uncovered (2018) and the novel Mean Business (2013) Steven Ungar is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Collegiate Fellow at the University of Iowa, with joint appointments in French, Comparative Literature, and International Studies. His book-length publications include Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005, with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave appeared in August 2018. Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She has written widely on popular French cinema and European cinema and is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound. Among her books are Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (2000), Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (2003); La Haine (2005), The New Wave, Critical Landmarks (with Peter Graham, 2009), A Companion to Jean Renoir (with Alastair Phillips, 2013), and Brigitte Bardot (2013).

Acknowledgements

First of all, we would like to acknowledge the acumen, insights, analysis, and especially the patience of our outstanding contributors. They represent the finest in film research and scholarship, many of whom have stood out for years as experts in the field of French film. Moreover, they are always willing to take new forays that will open up the field. Their essays for this collection will serve as major contributions to the study of French literature and film, as well as to the practices of cinematic adaptations. We thank them wholeheartedly and feel proud to have them as colleagues in this collection. Homer B. Pettey would like to express his admiration and sincere thanks to Professor Jennifer L. Jenkins for her support and assistance with this project. When other contributors – now unnamed, yet still anathema – dropped out, she willingly took on a major assignment for this collection. To her, he remains in great debt, and that debt remains on a daily basis. He would also like to thank his old friend William Johnsen, who, even without being a film scholar, might know more about French cinema history than the vast majority of the up-and-coming scholars in the field. He would like to thank his newly acquired friend of the past few years, Susan Hayward, for her generosity, her invaluable insights, and for her very warm friendship. She defines the best in the academy. He would also like to thank Allan Arffa, Carter Burwell, and Chip Johannessen for their continued friendship and for letting him join in their antics. Finally, as always, he would like to thank the Harvard Lampoon for its ridiculous inclusion of him among its members and for remaining a beacon of hope in an all-too-serious world. Barton Palmer is grateful to the College of Art, Architecture, and the Humanities at Clemson, especially Dean Richard Goodstein, for continuing support of his research projects, including this one.

1

Introduction: screening French literature Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer

French literature on screen relies upon investigations of the processes of artistic, cultural, and industry adaptations. The French film industry has always cherished the national heritage of classic literature and has adapted to the screen the works of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust. Hollywood has also been keen on adapting these authors’ seminal works, often adapting a French cinematic version of the novel. So, too, has the British film industry sought out French classics for its costume dramas on the big and small screen. Both British and American studios have been intrigued by the possibilities that classic and popular French literature offers for their audiences, as Les Misérables (2012) has proven with stage and screen revenues nearly seven times production costs.1 Twentieth-century figures from what was once considered popular literature now are also included in the expanding category of classical French literature, among them François Mauriac, Georges Simenon, Marcel Pagnol, and Françoise Sagan. French literary adaptations of its own tradition became a serious cinematic enterprise with the Pathé Film d’Art series, beginning in 1908, as Susan Hayward explains: Indeed, some of the earliest films were adaptations of novels by Zola and Hugo (as the films of Guy and Zecca at the turn of the century attest). In some respects the Film d’Art and its imitators (Pathé’s SCAGL) made more prestigious and packaged more attractively a practice already in existence (albeit on a smaller scale). In other respects, it did represent a bold new departure and fixed one of the great traditions of performance (stage actor as screen star). In this way, the cultural capital of literary adaptations/costume films was doubled by the advent to the screen of the famous stage actors Le Bargy, Harry Baur, Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt, Albert Dieudonné and Gabrielle Robinne (to name but a few) … There were sound economic reasons, closely allied to the Americans’ taste for this genre, for investing (quite substantially) in these films – national cinema not just as conveyor of myth, but as an exportable commodity.2

2

French literature on screen

English-language screen adaptations of French literature evince the complexity of the relationship between the two texts, the two media, as well as opening up new avenues to explore studio decisions to contract and distribute this particular type of ‘foreign’ cinema to American and British audiences. In many respects, the ‘foreign’ quality of masterworks of the French literary canon remains their appeal over the decades from the silent era to the present. ‘Foreign’ from studio standpoints includes heritage settings for nineteenth-century costume dramas, especially in the 1930s with David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935), A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935), and Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939), alongside the American versions of French classics with prominent stars, such as Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee, 1934), Fredric March in Les Misérables (Richard Boleslawski, 1935), Greta Garbo in Camille (George Cukor, 1936), Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), and the nutty Ritz Brothers’ musical comedy of The Three Musketeers (Alan Dwan, 1939). In France, the interwar period of the 1930s proved to be a boon for literary adaptation, in particular the Marseille trilogy of Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936), all based upon the works of Marcel Pagnol and Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938) from Zola’s famous naturalist novel of animalistic sexual attraction and murder. The very birth of narrative cinema pays homage to French literature on screen, with Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) having its basis in Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (1865), in which Baltimore arms manufacturers and mavens construct an enormous cannon, a space-gun, to send a projectile with three crew members to land on the moon, and Verne’s sequel, Autour de la lune (1870), in which the three crew members encounter a series of scientifically based misadventures and successfully return to Earth. Alice Guy-Blaché, often credited with the very first cinematic adaptation of a novel, directed Esméralda (1905), a short, ten-minute version of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris. This process of adapting French literature to the screen continued throughout the silent era. Jacques Feyder directed L’Atlantide (1921), based on Pierre Benoit’s novel Carmen (1926), itself based on Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, and he also directed an adaptation of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in 1928. Germain Dulac adapted what is often considered the first serious feminist film, unlike Alice Guy’s comical Les Résultats de féminisme, entitled La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922) from Denys Amiel’s work. In 1926, Jean Epstein directed a version of George Sand’s 1837 novel Mauprat, best known today for its brief glimpse of a first-time actor, Luis Buñuel. Both popular novels and classic French literature found adaptations in the silent era. Louis Feuillade’s five-part serial Fantômas (1913–14) was based upon Pierre Sylvestre and Marcel Allain’s commercially popular novels. Jacques Baroncelli directed silent versions of Balzac’s Père Goriot (1921) and Maeterlinck’s La Légende de la Soeur Béatrix (1923). Silent director

Introduction 3

Albert Capellani produced for Pathé a four-part version of Hugo’s Les Misérables (1912), as well as an adaptation of Zola’s L’Assomoir (1909). André Antoine directed silent adaptations of classical French works for Pathé in the post-World War I era, among them adaptations of Hugo’s Quatre-Vingt-Treize (1915), Dumas’s Les Frères corses (1916), and Zola’s La Terre (1921). Edwin S. Porter directed a sixty-nine-minute adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1913). Dumas’s The Three Musketeers received great popularity as a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle in 1921, in which Louis Delluc produced a far more faithful stylistic version of the novel than Henri Diamant-Berger’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921–22). In his analysis of both films, Delluc proposed a theory of adaptation: That is not, as some seem to believe, because of Douglas’s violent charm and publicity. It’s because the French version, concerned about detail, about historical minutiae, about the patient touching up of each and every individual and milieu, has almost completely sacrificed the rhythm of the novel. The American version is only rhythm: Fairbanks admits freely that there are few characters as devoid of interest in themselves as d’Artagnan. He lives only through his reactions to events, through his outbursts and caprices, through his rhythm finally, since Dumas – a murky storyteller, a summary psychologist, a historian of shoddy details – is a master of rhythm. The adapter is right to see only that to film in the novel.3

Delluc’s assessment of the adaptation process deserves notice for its foresight concerning how the translation from book to screen requires insight into particular characteristics that propel plot and action. The post-World War II period followed, with numerous film adaptations of popular French works, most significantly Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur (1953), based on Georges Arnaud’s work, and Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1951 novel, Celle qui n’était plus; he also adapted Prévost’s Manon (1949). Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956) was based upon André Devigny’s memoirs of Vichy state confinement. The Art House movement propelled many successful French classical and popular adaptations to further financial gains when released to American and international audiences, such as Max Ophuls’s Madame de … (The Earrings of Madame de …, 1953) from Louise Leveque de Vilmorin’s novel of belle époque Paris; Journal d’un curé de campagne (Robert Bresson, 1951) closely following the structure of Georges Bernanos’s 1936 novel; and Marcel Carné’s 1953 Thérèse Raquin, a contemporary retelling of Zola’s famous novel of adultery, murderous passions, and subsequent paranoia. Jacqueline Audry transformed Colette’s novels for the screen, including Gigi (1948) and a film version of Sartre’s Huis clos (1954). Christian-Jaque, during the postwar years, made adaptations of classical French works, such as Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1948) and Zola’s Nana (1955). Alexandre Astruc applied his own concept of caméra-stylo, the elevation of the construction of directorial

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French literature on screen

vision as narrative, to his adaptation Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1962). French noirs achieved considerable recognition during this period, incorporating memorable cinematic experiments, among them the long silent heist sequence in Jules Dassin’s 1955 adaptation of Auguste Le Breton’s novel Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi) and the hauntingly disturbing lighting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (Diabolique, 1955). These French noirs could very well extend to the various reincarnations of Inspector Maigret with Jean Renoir’s La Nuit de carrefour (1932), starring his brother Pierre, three films with Jean Gabin as the famous detective, and the French television series with Bruno Cremer (1991–2005). The nouvelle vague also ushered in new, freer cinematic adaptations, especially of popular literature. While British Hammer horror films achieved popularity in France, Georges Franju’s 1960 film version of Jean Redon’s psychological horror novel, Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face), found critics and censors less than enthusiastic; in fact, the film’s American version was cut drastically. Two film adaptations in the late 1960s of journalist Joseph Kessel’s works received favourable and disappointing reviews in France. Luis Bruñel’s highly regarded Belle du jour (1967), winner of numerous awards including the Venice Golden Lion, catapulted Catherine Deneuve to international stardom, while Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) suffered greatly from its nationalistic sentiments about World War II resistance fighters against Vichy, coming after the radical shift in politics of May 1968. French art historian Rose Valland documented in Le Front de l’art (1961) the extraordinarily dangerous subterfuge of railway and French resistance fighters and their eventual reclamation from the Nazis of the modernist masterpieces, which John Frankenheimer filmed as an astonishing action film that involved the actual collision of real locomotives in The Train (1964). The release of adaptations of classical and popular French literature has continued since the late 1960s, as evident from Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring, 1986), based upon Marcel Pagnol’s rural Province novels, and Bertrand Tavernier’s La Princesse de Montpensier (2010), which recaptures the romantic atmosphere of Madame de La Fayette’s novella of 1662. Previously, Tavernier had relied upon descriptions from Alexandre Dumas’s Une fille du Régent, novel and play, to provide the historical feel for Qui la fête commence (1975), which revealed a political world of avarice, conspiracies, and degradation that reflected much of the gauchiste analysis after 1968. That spirit of leftist politics interjected into French cinema waned during the 1970s when period films emerged that focused upon class and social structures of the past, as Naomi Greene maintains: By the 1980s, it is true, films seem to grow both less confrontational and less experimental in their approach to the past. Even as the gauchiste spirit of the 1970s disappeared from view, French cinema began to witness a resurgence of

Introduction 5 conventional historical genres like lavish spectacle films and literary adaptations of French classics. But although such films clearly harked back to earlier tradition, they also suggested just how much attitudes toward the past had changed. For one thing, they showed that the Annales approach to history, its concerns with the unknown corners of the past, its focus on the lives of ordinary people, remained strong.4

For example, Patrice Chéreau remains best known for his adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s La Reine Margot (1994), with Daniel Auteuil and Isabelle Adjani, and its graphic depictions of the mass extermination of French Protestants during St Bartholomew Day Massacre of 24 August 1572. In some respects, Chéreau inherited French cinema’s fascination with this tale, as evident from the two film versions from 1910 and 1914 and Jean Dréville’s 1954 adaptation with Jeanne Moreau in the title role. In the spectacle of death of the massacre, Chéreau’s camera passes over the terrain of murder without stopping on any particular figure in order to create ‘un mise à mort’ that provides a global vision of death, geographically and sociologically.5 Fascination with Romantic literature of adventure, from Dumas and Hugo in particular, began with Georges Méliès’s Les Mousequetaires de la reine (1908) and continued with La Reine Margot and Philippe de Broca’s adaptation of Paul Féval’s 1858 novel Le Bossu (1997).6 In his 1917 review of André Antoine’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Les Frères corses, Émile Vuillermoz praised not only the film’s discipline and vision, but also its artistic experimentation, in which Dumas himself plays a role that creates a self-reflection on the synthesis of the work of literature and process of film: Within this frame, a second framework of action develops. Dumas becomes an actor in the drama, watches himself perform, finds himself in the residence of Lucien de Franchi, enjoys the fine story of a vendetta which in turn becomes incarnate before his eyes, sees himself in the chamber of Louis Vincennes. Here there are subtleties and ingenuities of editing that confirm the infinite suppleness of cinematographic technique and its astonishing attribute – which one could call ‘symphonic’ – of combining chords of impressions and writing a kind of visual counterpart for several instruments. It’s the plastic formula of simultanéism which torments Guillaume Apollinaire.7

While uncertain whether or not the policier-loving audience would respond to this new vision of cinema, Vuillermoz seemed sure that very soon film would be writing its own poetry. In twentieth-century France, there always existed a close cultural connection between literature and the screen, despite literary denouncers such as Marcel Proust opposing this new media. In The Past Recaptured, Proust dismisses any connection between the novel and the cinema as a fraudulent dream of the bourgeoisie, especially in film’s imprecise depiction of reality: Car tous ceux qui, n’ayant pas le sens artistique, c’est-à-dire la soumission à la réalité intérieure, peuvent être pourvus de la faculté de raisonner à perte de

6

French literature on screen vue sur l’art, pour peu qu’ils soient par surcroît diplomates ou financiers, mélés aux ‘réalités’ du temps présent, croient volontiers que la littérature est un jeu de l’esprit detiné à être éliminé de plus en plus dans l’avenir. Quelques-uns voulaient que le roman fût une sorte de défilé cinématographique des choses. Cette conception était absurde. Rien ne s’éloigne plus de ce que nous avons perçu en réalité qu’une telle vue cinématographique.8 (For all those who, not having an artistic sense, that is to say, submission to interior reality, may be equipped with the faculty of reason as far as one can see, if furthermore they be diplomats or financiers, involved in ‘realities’ of the present day, believe gladly that literature is a mental game destined to be eliminated more and more in the future. Some wished that the novel were a kind of cinematic parade of things. That concept was absurd. Nothing could be further from what we have perceived in reality than this cinematic view.)9

Proust’s condemnation of cinema’s reliance upon external appearance for its reality remained his attempt to establish the novel as the only transcendent vehicle to achieve the true reality of human imagination and interiority. Obviously, Proust spent little time in the cinema and had little real experience with how intertitles of silent film, along with emotive close-ups and cutaways to symbolized objects, registered as much of human memory as did his madeleines. Certainly, Proust did not attend the Phono-Cinéma Théâtre at the Paris Exposition of 1900, which included projected images with phonographic cylinders with voices of prominent stage performers, including Sarah Bernhardt; nor did Proust attend the 1902 Gaumont ‘Chronophone’ system at the Société française de photographie.10 Like so many of his antiquated constructions of the world, Proust’s view of the cinema and its weak – if any – potential, was fortunately not shared by other prominent French authors. Roger Martin du Gard was originally asked by publisher Gaston Gallimard to write the film script for Madame Bovary. In chapter XI of the third part of Les Thibault, Martin du Gard includes a scene of Antoine and Rachel having a sexual encounter in a private box at the cinema, during which they watch silent news reels – Aux grandes manoeuvres and L’Avenir du Service Renseignements (Grand Manoeuvres and The Future of Intelligence Service) – and a silent Western with a young heroine fleeing from thirty or so Native Americans on horseback, before leaping atop a fast-moving train, concluding the evening with scenes of ‘un savage tam-tam’ (frenzied dance) in the main feature, L’Afrique inconnue, which induces in the audience ‘la volupté tendue jusqu’a l’angoisse’ (a tense sensual delight near anxiety).11 Martin du Gard was brought into the arena of cinema through the efforts of his friend André Gide, who in 1929 formed La Société d’études et de réalisation pour le film parlant, which also included Jules Romain and André Maurois. As Dudley Andrew recounts, in 1933 Martin du Gard produced a scenario, paid for with Rothschild money, of Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine which eventually

Introduction 7

Jean Renoir took over as his own, thereby souring Martin du Gard both to adaptation and cinema in general: The labor, he wrote, is frustrating, often demeaning, and not even so well paid as people might imagine. The cinema might someday become a medium through which authors might narrate stories of real social and aesthetic worth, but in 1933 this seemed a distant hope, and not one worth much time or imagination.12

Not the Proustian rejection of film, but still Martin du Gard’s experience with the industry would be a familiar one for many authors during the age of classic French cinema. Such disillusionment was also felt by Saint-Exupéry, whose 1931 novel Vol de nuit became the basis for MGM’s Night Flight (1933), which involved an extremely protracted legal battle between the author and MGM. Both Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit and his Courrier sud greatly influenced Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which tells a tale obviously adapted from Saint-Exupéry of the hazards and bravery of airmail delivery over the Andes. Fascination with film continually infected French authors. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiographical The Words, he celebrates his mother’s foresight in taking him to the cinema, the experience of which he found compelling: ‘Du noir et du blanc, je faisais des couleurs éminentes qui résumaient en elles toutes les autres et ne les révélaient qu’à l’initié; je m’enchantais de voir l’invisible’. (Of black and white, I made the prominent colours which subsumed in them all of the other colours and only revealed them to the initiated; I rejoiced in seeing the invisible.)13 Sartre also mentions going to see with delight silent film serials, among them, ‘Zigomar et Fantômas, Les Exploits de Maciste, The Mystères de New York’.14 Working for Pathé during the war years of 1943–44, Sartre wrote the scripts for Jean Delannoy’s Les Jeux sont faits (1947) and for a never-made project entitled Typhus, which found some echoes in Yves Allégret’s The Proud Ones (1953). He also produced the original, but not the final, script for John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion (1962). Roland-François Lack’s admirable study of the cinematograph within French literary works comments upon Sartre’s cinematic interests and relates Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s inclusion of a nostalgic moment of attending an afternoon at Georges Méliès’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Mort à credit (1936), a trip to the cinema in Octave Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), viewing avant-garde cinema in Robert Brasillach’s Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1936), and attending Von Stroheim’s Greed and Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage in Brasillach’s Les Sept Couleurs (1939).15 Film functions as a key piece of the prosecutor’s crucial evidence against the accused Meursault in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, the moral linchpin being the relationships between sex, death, and cinema. In the courtroom, with Marie on the stand, the prosecutor explores Meursault’s conscience post-matricide by having Marie reveal what his actions had been following the interment of his mother. After insinuating that the sexual liaison between

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Meursault and Marie began just following the burial, the prosecutor presses Marie for details of that time, inferring that Meursault acted without conscience, and with a malevolent disdain for his mother’s death: Le procureur qui feuilletait un dossier lui a demandé brusquement de quand datait notre liaison. Elle a indiqué la date. Le procureur a remarqué d’un air indifferent qu’il lui semblait que c’était le lendemain de la mort de maman. Puis il a dit avec quelque ironie qu’il ne voudrait pas insister sur une situation délicate, qu’il comprenait bien les scrupules de Marie, mais (et ici son accent s’est fait plus dur) que son devoir lui commandait de s’élever au-dessus des convenances. Il a donc demandé a Marie de résumer cette journée où je l’avais connue. Marie ne voulait pas parler, mais devant l’insistance du procureur, elle a dit notre bain, notre sortie au cinéma et notre rentrée chez moi. L’avocat général a dit qu’à la suite des declarations de Marie à l’instruction, il avait consulté les programmes de cette date. Il a ajouté que Marie elle-même dirait quel film on passait alors. D’une voix presque blanche, en effet, elle a indiqué que c’était un film de Fernandel. Le silence était complet dans la salle quand elle a eu fini. Le procureur s’est alors levé, très grave et d’une voix que j’ai trouvée vraiment émue, le doigt tendu vers moi, il a articulé lentement: ‘Messieurs les jurés, le lendemain de la mort de sa mère, cet homme prenait des bains, commençait une liaison irrégulière, et allait rire devant un filmcomique. Je n’ai rien de plus à vous dire.’ Il s’est assis, toujours dans le silence.16 (The prosecutor, who leafed through the dossier before him, asked her brusquely about when our liaison occurred. She indicated the date. The prosecutor remarked with an indifferent air that it seemed to him that was the day after the death of my mother. Then he said with some irony that he did not wish to insist upon a delicate situation, that he understood Marie’s scruples, but (and here his tone became harsher) that his duty demanded him to rise above such proprieties. Then, he asked Marie to sum up that day when we first had sex. Marie did not wish to speak, but before the prosecutor’s insistence, she described our bathhouse meeting, our trip to the movies, and our going back to my place. The advocate general said that following Marie’s official statements, he had consulted the movie schedule for that date. He added that Marie herself should say the film that we saw at that time. With a soft voice, indeed, she indicated that it was a film with Fernandel in it. Silence pervaded the courtroom when she had finished. The prosecutor rose, very seriously and with a voice that I found quite moving, extended his finger toward me and spoke slowly and articulately: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, the day after his mother’s death, this man went to the baths, began a sexual relationship, and went to laugh at a comic film. I have nothing more to say.’ He sat down, and the same silence pervaded the courtroom.)

As Vincent Grégoire contends, attending a comic film reinforces the prosecution’s case against Meursault’s ‘la culpabilité morale’ (moral sin) and his ‘insensibilité’ (insensitivity) in his disregard for his mother. Moreover, Grégoire plays out the logic that Camus suggests for this absurdity of accusing Meursault on such specious grounds.17 Camus’s sceptical use of film in

Introduction 9

L’Étranger as society’s condemnation of immorality aligns with his fundamental view of the absurdity of life. Here, film has attained relevance to human existence – that is, emotions and its view of humanity somehow correspond to reality; in fact, the use of such cinematic evidence for Camus points to socially constructed teleology of the screen as replication of an emotional landscape. That kind of unreality certainly corresponds to Proust’s unconvincing pronouncements and to social denigration of cinema in general. This latter point fits with Camus’s view of societal constraints as demanding ultimate answers for human existence, of which there are none, and for ultimate conclusions about human behaviour, whose complexities eschew any categorization. Still, the cinema makes, as it has so often, a convenient target for social censorship, as so many French authors have recognized. Hence, their contributions to the continual progress of film. François Mauriac contributed to the screenplay of Franju’s version of his Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962). Marcel Pagnol, of course, wrote and directed his Marseillaise trilogy. Marguerite Duras, the novelist and director, is still best known outside France for her film script of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). Le nouveau roman found cinematic expression in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s most celebrated script, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). Julien Green, an American-born French author, wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Léviathan (1962). Contemporary French literary authors frequently construct film versions of their own works. Jean-Christophe Grangé co-wrote with director Mathieu Kassovitz the screenplay adaptation of his popular novel, Les Rivières poupres (2000), which made forty million dollars in profits at the box office globally. Clearly, French cultural infatuation with film and its authors’ pursuit of new expression in the visual medium offer a sound historical basis for this project. Theoretical concerns about the interdependent relationship between literary and film texts, the status of the ‘author’, and the process of interpretation will be addressed in these essays, as will dialogical, intertextual, and transtextual approaches to both fictional and screen texts. Mainstays of adaptation theory for the past ten years, these theories have advanced beyond the strictures of literary studies and fidelity arguments that viewed film texts with derision for being supplements or mere copies of the classical work, and the equally dismissive film studies arguments against ascribing any literary attributes to cinematic art. Adaptation studies, then, once found itself in the crossfire of literary and film studies at the intellectual and institutional levels, but no longer. In this volume, theoretical concerns will be placed in relation to current scholarly perspectives on performance of the self, the staging of history and political engagement, spatial and temporal rituals of culture, the theatre of sexuality, the actor’s body as encoded site of meaning, and strategies for textual production and exhibition. Cultural designations of class and gender, so much a part of the literary tradition of France, find expression in film by means of elaborate mise-en-scène, décor, costumes, and representations of the arts of the time.

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Cultural adaptation, then, relies upon binary visual cultures: not just the time period as envisioned imaginatively in the novel, but also modern culture’s filmic reconstruction of a previous period. In this sense, the negotiations between the written and the cinematic, both distanced from the actual culture, present another binary form of adaptation. Ekphrastic representation of visual culture in the novel is an adaptive process for the reader/viewer in the same way that cinematic re-presentation of a period’s visual culture is an adaptive process for the audience. In a similar manner, negotiating tensions between visual cultures reflects the distance of class separation and manipulation that occurs in gender politics. Crucial moments in French history draw parallels between political upheavals in the novel and coeval crises in French society during film production, another form of adaptation. Grounding literary and screen texts within their historical contexts offers insights into another interrelationship and intersemiotic of multiple texts. Several historical periods come into play with a screen adaptation: the past moment enlivened by the literary and screen texts; the eras in which film adaptations were made; and the contemporary reception of these previous historical times. These intersections form a metahistorical conception of adaptation whereby creation, distribution, and reception interact and transform the literary and screen texts. Aesthetic issues arise in dual close readings of the literary and film texts. Textual issues also come into play, such as how films convey literary conventions – epistolary narrative, irony, subjective perception, polyphony. The literary and film texts chosen for analysis also reveal how central conventions and thematic concerns offer paradigms for the process of adaptation. Aesthetic issues also pertain to the production of these texts, especially the adaptation strategies that brought classical French literature to a global audience. In keeping with the diversity that is fundamental to French literary and film analysis, we wanted to include a variety of textual and interpretive approaches, whether examining single films, multiple films on one novel, or several topical films related to an author. Gender, sexuality, class, politics, and social conventions become fundamental issues for many of the interpretations of these works of literature and cinema, as do relevant contexts – commercial, archival, financial, ideological, technological, and aesthetic – for determining methods of investigating texts. We find the multiplicity of these scholarly approaches mirrors the complexity, diversity, and vitality that is classical French literary adaptation.

Notes 1 Box Office Mojo claims the production budget at $61 million, the domestic box office at $148 million, and the total worldwide box office at $441 million, with a first weekend gross of nearly 20 per cent of the production costs. 2 Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 98–9. 3 Louis Delluc, ‘Prologue’, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 289.

Introduction 11 4 Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 23. 5 Violette Rouchy-Lévy, ‘L’Image des protestants dans La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 154 (April–June 2008): 170. 6 Julianne Pidduck, La Reine Margot (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 30. Pidduck cites Pierre Guibbert’s ‘Le Film de cape et d’épée’, CinémAction 68 (1993) for a lengthy list of swashbuckers throughout French cinema’s history. 7 Émile Vuillermoz, ‘Before the Screen: Les Frères corses’, in French Film Theory and Criticism – 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 134. 8 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, XV, Le Temps retrouvé (Deuxième partie) (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), p. 27. 9 All parenthetical translations are ours. 10 Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 12–13. 11 Roger Martin du Gard, Oeuvres complètes, Volume I, Les Thibault, preface by Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 995, 999. 12 Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret – Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 156–7. 13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 105. 14 Sartre, Les Mots, p. 104. 15 Roland-François Lack, ‘First Encounters: French Literature and the Cinematograph’, Film History 20.2 (2008): 133–4, 135, and footnote 12. 16 Albert Camus, L’Étranger, ed. Ray Davison (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 85–6. 17 Vincent Grégoire, ‘Le Rôle et l’importance du cinéma dans les oeuvres d’Albert Camus’, French Review 75.2 (December 2001): 330.

2

The spectacle of Monte Cristo Jennifer L. Jenkins

As a serialized, episodic publication, Alexandre Dumas père’s novel Le Comte du Monte Cristo (1844–45) employs spectacle as a narrative and structural device. Written at the same time as the popularization of photography in France, the novel evokes many of the same set-pieces and subjects as the early work of Nadar and Daguerre: still-life images of orientalist exotica; landscapes of implied significance; documentary images of architecture of the empire; and portraits of social types. Dantès’s story ranges from ‘old empires of the East … to new empires of the West’,1 while he adopts an array of societal characters in his quest for vengeance. If we accept Jonathan Crary’s suggestion that subjectivity is both the form and content of the imaginative response to technological transformation in the 1830s,2 then Dumas’s novel is highly au courant. Edmond Dantès’s studied campaign of revenge and retribution unfolds through iterations of his subjectivity. Dantès’s plural and sequenced performances – as sailor, son, suitor, betrayed, prisoner, student, escapee, Count of Monte Cristo, Lord Wilmore, Abbé Busoni, avenger, stock speculator, surrogate parent, confessor, and mastermind – all radiate from a fundamental understanding that the self is fluid and formed by expediency. That is, adaptable. Each new guise develops out of the last, adapting to the immediate circumstance in which Edmond finds himself. The photographic adaptation of object to image follows a similar process of creation and re-creation that provides an apt metaphor for the transformation of Dantès into Monte Cristo. Dumas’s tale adapts well to cinema, for visual storytelling developed in complexity as the cinematic medium evolved. The adventures of Edmond Dantès provided narrative spectacle that was matched by advances in camerawork and editing in each decade of the cinematic century. As a time-based revelation of a latent image, the spectacle of Edmond Dantès develops in a series of identities or portraits by way of the alchemy of revenge in both text and cinema. In the 1840s, when Monte Cristo was being written, photography, drama, and fiction were all reconceptualizing the very nature of spectacle and perception. As Daniel A. Novak reminds us, ‘photography had its origins in theatrical



The spectacle of Monte Cristo

13

spectacle and spectacular technologies of illusion: Louis Daguerre ran a panorama theater at the same time that he popularized photography’.3 Tableaux vivants, popular on public stages and in private drawing rooms alike, employed spectacle to recreate in suspended animation iconic scenes from mythology, popular literature, the Bible, or easel art.4 Dumas’s novel is in fact structured by such a series of spectacles: just in the first half, we find the arrival of the Pharaon in Marseille; the Catalan village where Mercédès lives; the encounter with Napoleon; Dantès’s imprisonment in Chateau d’If; Abbé Faria’s tutelage of Dantès; the hidden treasure of Monte Cristo; carnival, public executions, and in the underground network of Luigi Vampa in Rome; the purchase, decoration, and staffing of the Count’s homes in Paris and Auteuil.5 These episodes might be listed sociologically: the spectacle of commerce, ethnicity, power, punishment, education, wealth, crime, and affluence, respectively. Once the revenge plot comes to the fore in the second half of the novel, the frame narrows, so to speak, to the psychological and causal aspects of the Count’s plan. The earliest theatre adaptation of the novel, written by Dumas and his frequent collaborator Auguste Maquet,6 followed hard upon the serial publication of the story. Mid-nineteenth-century theatrical melodramas bridged literacy and class communities, drawing even larger audiences than Dumas’s customary feuilletons, a publication format that spoke ‘surtout à la classe moyenne et au grand public. Les illettrés se font lire à haut voix la tranche du jour.’ (Above all to the middle class and general public. The illiterate had the latest issue read out to them in loud voices.)7 In keeping with the fashion, the first staged performances of Dumas’s narrative alternated dramatic scenes with tableaux vivants: snapshots, if you will, of events of the novel that could not be staged for reasons of narrative or financial economy. Thus, even in this early transformation from page to stage, narrative condensation occurred. This first stage adaptation mounted five acts and eleven tableaux, indicating that both animated and still representations of the events of the novel compelled audience enthusiasm. The French tabloid Le Coureur des spectacles reported in February 1848 that ‘Trois milles personnes, parmi lesquelles douze cents arrivent dès le matin, se present aux portes du Théâtre-Historique, pour voir Monte Cristo. Et la salle n’en tient pas tout-a-fait 2,000! Si cela continue, il faudra le Champ-de-Mars.’ (Three thousand people, among them twelve hundred who came that very morning, presented themselves at the doors of the Théâtre Historique to see Monte Cristo. And the hall only holds 2,000 at most! If this continues, it will have to [move to] the Champs de Mars.)8 Such enthusiasm was not limited to France. Four months later, in London, the popular success of the French Théâtre Historique travelling company’s production caused a nativist riot in the Drury Lane Theatre on both nights of its attempted staging.9 The London Observer printed a letter from the director of the Théâtre Historique complaining that their simple attempt to bring to the stage the works of Alexandre Dumas was met with ‘numerous

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obstacles and perplexities in the department of the Lord Chamberlain as well as a formidable amount of opposition out of doors from English actors and authors’.10 The disruption spread indoors, as well, with partisan audiences singing the British national anthem when French actors took the stage to perform,11 and audience members reportedly wearing pro-British-theatre placards in their hatbands.12 Local resistance within the arts community was born of professional jealousy and a firm belief that England was the only country with a legitimate stage tradition; the less chauvinist general public turned up to see Dumas’s rollicking adventure story brought to life. Such adaptations – and their reception – relied upon theatrical, staging, and lighting effects, and the hot-blooded extratheatrical press to create and attract an audience. The melodrama of the Dantès story soon became associated with visual and performative spectacle, both on and off stage. It was not a far reach to the moving image, once the technology to shoot and project fiction films became available in the late 1890s.13 Moving image adaptations of Le Comte de Monte Cristo are legion, perhaps as many as two hundred versions, ranging from early silent films to Italian, Spanish, Egyptian, and US television series and telenovelas. In 2004–5, a manga-based anime series, Gankatsu-ou, set Dumas’s storyline in the intergalactic year 5053 with Japanese voice-over, episode summaries in French, and a hybrid Asian-Bourbon Steampunk aesthetic. Cinema adaptations of the novel, as with translations, tend to embrace the adventure-thriller aspects of this long narrative, moments of spectacle and melodrama being the most ‘adaptogenic’.14 The basic revenge plot anchors all screen versions, while means of evening the score differ by historical period. A group of silent film adaptations present the story from US and French perspectives, experimenting with photographic media as well as textual adaptation. The earliest extant film is believed to be the 1908 US Selig Polyscope production, begun late in 1907 in Selig’s Chicago studios and completed at year’s end in California locations, variously reported as Laguna Beach, Echo Park, and the Venice lagoon. Directed by Francis Boggs, the fourteen-minute silent film followed Dumas and Maquet’s stage adaptation, presenting five acts with curtained intervals in between.15 The interior scenes are highly theatrical, with proscenium staging and fixed camera long shots. William Selig’s biographer reports that, ‘Like Selig’s production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Monte Cristo was clearly a prestige production, intended to expand the nickelodeon’s audience by attracting admirers of the book and play.’16 The most notable scene of this rarely screened film is an exterior sequence: Dantès’s emergence from the sea after being thrown as a corpse from the Chateau d’If.17 Erish reports that this scene was the main reason the production moved to southern California, since Lake Michigan was inhospitable to winter filming. Selig also hoped to escape the notice of the courts, which had levied an injunction against the use of his motion picture equipment after his conviction for infringement of Edison’s patents. Erish claims that Selig’s venture into beachfront cinematic realism, and his choice to intercut



The spectacle of Monte Cristo

15

it with interior scenes of contemporary theatrical realism, created a new film language in the second decade of cinema: [Selig] and Boggs shared a radical vision of how the inclusion of such a realistic moment in Monte Cristo amidst an otherwise artificial theatrical presentation might have a transformative effect on the audience and cinema in general, attracting new spectators and thus equipping Selig with the financial resources and prestige he needed in order to persevere.18

The resulting film delivered the sea-emergence scene, source of the tagline ‘The world is mine!’,19 and marked the beginning of Selig’s California operation.20 Condensing the expansive Dumas novel into fourteen minutes (a single thousand-foot reel, the distribution standard of the day) necessarily entailed significant narrative licence and adaptation. What can be discerned from press reviews of the day and Erish’s description of the surviving print is that Boggs relied heavily upon the outline of Dumas and Maquet’s stage version, while further condensing it to key scenes of spectacle. Perhaps as a result, the film was distributed with a ‘three-page synopsis provided in Selig’s release bulletin in unison with the film [to be read aloud at screenings] to clear up ambiguities of the screen story’.21 This cinematic exhibition of 1908 reverted to the originary textual adaptation of reading aloud from the feuilleton: ‘Les illettrés se font lire à haut voix la tranche du jour.’ Thanhouser Film Corporation, a lesser-known but no less prolific prestige studio in New Rochelle, New York, specialized in literary adaptations in the silent era.22 Drawing upon theatrical actors and production values, Thanhouser produced Shakespeare titles and popular novel adaptations such as The Vicar of Wakefield, Silas Marner, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and, in 1917, A Modern Monte Christo.23 A fast-paced gallimaufry of The Adventures of Dolly, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe, with a pearl-rich oysterbed and a Wright Brothers-era airplane, the film adapts the revenge plot to the twentieth century by making the Dantès character a doctor accused of killing a patient for money, and recasting the contested son of his beloved as a little girl (Helen Badgely, age nine, doing her own stunts in a storm at sea). The Moving Picture World accurately reported: ‘As a story with rapidly tumbling incidents, A Modern Monte Cristo is a fast-told drama. Lively situations of wide diversity include a shipwreck; the marooning on a [sic] island of the man seeking vengeance and the little daughter of his enemy; an aeroplane rescue, and pearl-fishing in diving outfits.’24 Laurence Reid, in Motion Picture Mail, acknowledged the durational constrictions of film, commending Moore and Lonergan’s economy of storytelling: ‘in their modernization of Dumas’s idea, those connected with its production have used just the underlying theme of the novel, namely, revenge, and provided a vivid, colorful tale and one almost as elaborate in presentation as the transference of the original story might be to the screen’.25 With temporal updating and an action-packed script, Reid notes that the film escaped being ‘boresome’. Even the New York Dramatic Mirror was willing to allow that

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‘The incident of the rescue of the little girl by the men in an aeroplane is very well done and interesting. This picture will suit the patrons of a theatre catering to average patronage.’26 While it is easy to chuckle at the spectacular inclusion of an ‘aeroplane’ in an early silent adaptation, the Monte Cristo narrative is elastic enough to accommodate the mechanics of modernity. (The 2002 film, for example, employs a hot-air balloon and voladores to introduce the Count to his guests upon his arrival in Paris.) Indeed, as with the photographic metaphor, developing modernity is the very theme and substance of the novel, and thus the form and content of its celluloid scions. The pictorialism of early cinema lent itself to the serial tableau structure of Dumas’s narrative. Shot with fixed cameras, the interior scenes of Emmet J. Flynn’s 1922 adaptation Monte Cristo27 for Fox occur within an implied or literal proscenium frame. The exterior scenes are also captured by a fixed camera, placed so that a painterly landscape perspective frames the action. Such framing serves as a metonym for the book as object, reminding spectators that the narrative displayed within the frame began within the covers of the novel. This strategy, while in one sense simply a result of the technology of the day, nonetheless acknowledges adaptation as the fundamental aesthetic of this narrative presentation: from page to stage to screen. Flynn’s 1922 John Gilbert vehicle was well financed by Fox and produced in the wake of D.W. Griffith’s spectacle-rich Intolerance (1916). The first US production of Monte Cristo to enjoy wide distribution, thanks to the Fox network of cinemas, this adaptation combined lavish period interiors with beachfront location shooting, fulfilling US audience expectations for historical drama. Based on a nineteenth-century English-language stage adaptation by Charles Fechter and reworked into a scenario by Bernard McConville, this film was marked as a prestige project by its stars, John Gilbert and Estelle Taylor. The southern California coast provides a variety of exterior locations that fulfil the pure spectacle of Dumas’s plots. The most striking of Flynn’s setups appears midway through the film in the spectacle of imprisonment in Chateau d’If. When, seven years into his imprisonment, Dantès (John Gilbert) meets Abbé Faria (Spottiswoode Aitken), the lives of prisoners 34 and 27 find purpose. Some of Dumas’s most eloquent passages describe Edmond’s psychological process, moving through ‘tous les degrés du malheur’ (all the stages of woe)28 from pride to doubt to hunger for companionship to asceticism to fury to ‘agonie morale’ (moral agony) (Dumas 1:190) to equanimity in his resolve to die, and finally to ‘indicible joie’ (inexpressible joy) (Dumas 1:196) at the perceived sound of another prisoner scratching in the night. Flynn constructs a complex sequence of shots and cuts among the two men’s cells – both framed with proscenium elements – and a cutaway set of the tunnel between them. The tunnel cutaway looks a bit like an ant-farm29 in long shot but provides increasingly tight shots that enable narrative cross-cutting to shape the incremental approach of the two prisoners. In Monte Cristo, this trio of settings creates a kind of implicit triptych while the suspense of their tunnelling builds.30 Five years



The spectacle of Monte Cristo

17

before Abel Gance would burst the frame by using three cameras and a triptych of screens for his Napoléon, Flynn predicts such composition with this sequence. Once the two prisoners meet, Abbé Faria provides Edmond with a liberal and practical education. This dual intellectual and physical enterprise occurs over fourteen years, according to the title cards, although Dumas’s Faria claims he can teach Edmond all he knows in two years. The passage of time is telegraphed by the growing and greying of Dantès’s hair and the reduction to rags of his prison clothes. Devolution of appearance through cross-dissolves accompanies the growth of his mind, a narrative device that mimics the developing of a photograph in both negative and positive image and would also be used in screen adaptations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Faria’s death affords Edmond an opportunity for escape and presents filmmakers of all eras with a set-piece of suspense. Flynn’s spectacle of escape and excavation of the treasure follow the text quite closely. The escape sequence cross-cuts between the jailers’ discovery of Dantès’s absence and blue-tinted day-for-night shots on the ramparts of the Chateau d’If, with guard and officers wearing the distinctive period bicorn – an odd visual reference for soldiers who have incarcerated Dantès for being a Bonapartist.31 Once clear of the rocks, Dantès’s funereal baptism and rebirth from the sea is nearly as treacherous as in Boggs’s 1908 version. A notable eye-level underwater sequence shows Dantès’s body sinking to the sea floor and then rebounding as he struggles from the shroud. The shot composition and action remind us of the moonshot capsule’s aquatic re-entry in Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la lune (1902). Dantès swims left to right in perfect Lumière-style diagonal movement in frame before crawling ashore like some evolving sea creature – which of course, he is. Flynn places Gilbert midframe on the beach in a slightly high-angle long shot, while waves crash against the rocks behind him at regular five- to seven-second intervals. A medium close-up on Dantès follows a title card, which reads, ‘Now on to Monte Cristo and the world is mine!’ – echoing the earlier film but not the novel. In this repetition, the prior cinematic Monte Cristo becomes the source text, and fidelity is to screen rather than page. This is also the moment of Edmond’s fidelity to Faria’s bequest and his own future. The penetration of the sea cave and the discovery of the treasure lead Flynn’s Dantès to exclaim that he will become the ‘avenger’. The scene in the treasure cave became so iconic that the 1922 Texas State Fair boasted a diorama showing Dantès among the casks of jewels and coins.32 In the film as in the diorama, Edmond wears his prisoner’s rags and shaggy hair and beard, the novel’s episode of intervention by the smugglers having been elided. Thus Edmond’s figure also evokes images of Robinson Crusoe as his filmic persona develops. When Edmond appears at Caderousse’s tavern as Abbé Busoni, his first false portrait appears. Consisting of surplice, tricorn, and prominent eyepatch,

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the costuming might suggest Dantès’s mono-visionary focus on vengeance. In this episode we find the displacement and condensation common in film adaptations: Caderousse (rather than Bertuccio) becomes the observer of Villefort’s burial of his living child with Madame Danglars. (Monte Cristo’s servant Bertuccio undergoes the most drastic reimaginings in cinema adaptations: either his role or his name or his origin story is adjusted freely by screenwriters.) Caderousse’s story, told in tinted flashbacks, becomes the key to Dantès’s revenge upon the Crown Prosecutor, while Caderousse’s own greed spells his demise. John Gilbert’s Dantès works through his revenge by counting off his enemies, with title cards indicating one–two–three, but finds himself ultimately only wearied by his revenge. He finds solace in Haydée, but his visage has aged and devolved – again, like that of Dorian Gray. The Alhambra Theatre in Los Angeles, an exotic and Orientalized venue in its own right, advertised the film with two taglines: ‘One-Two-Three’ and ‘The World is Mine!!’ The ad copy details the adaptation process: ‘a picture like this … that is standard, as sterling and as well-known as the family Bible; a story that took twenty long, laborious years to put into twelve big volumes, but now, thanks to that marvel, the motion picture, has been fused into two hours of never-to-be-forgotten enjoyment’.33 Variety reported in March 1922 that the film was doing well nationally, and – in a notable reprise of the success of the stage version in Paris – was playing well in the Tremont Temple in Boston, ‘(2,400 capacity, auditorium type of house, .55–$1.10). Second week showing over $7,000 under low operation cost.’34 Henri Fescourt’s 1929 silent Monte Cristo,35 only recovered and restored in this century, is the crown jewel of cinematic adaptations to date. Fescourt borrowed dramatic structure from the theatre adaptation whilst employing visual techniques and some cast members from German Expressionism and French Surrealist film.36 As an adaptation, Fescourt’s version closely follows the novel, with the notable excision of the Roman Luigi Vampa episodes. The naturalism of the acting, impressionism of the exterior scenes, and the avant-garde special effects place this film at the pinnacle of French silent cinema with Abel Gance’s Napoléon of the same year. Fescourt stages the narrative as a melodrama, a genre that Susan Hayward has linked to the avant-garde during the silent period of French cinema: Melodrama as a sentimental narrative was perceived by the avant-garde as a perfect vehicle for the psychological expression of subjectivity. Subjectivity now became not just a question of point of view, but also included the implicit notion of voyeurism and speculation (of the other) as well as the issue of desire, and the functioning of the conscious and unconscious mind.37

Fescourt’s adaptation embraces – or perhaps establishes – tropes of voyeurism and subjective speculation beyond, as Hayward astutely argues, mere point-of-view shots. From the time he encounters Albert de Morcerf, Monte Cristo functions in the film as ‘the psychological expression of subjectivity.’



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Fescourt includes a two-second flashback shot of the silhouetted figure of Napoleon in a blue-tinted scene as Danglars gripes to the tavern crowd about the stop at Elba. From the image of Bonaparte on a cliff looking out over the sea, the scene cuts to an insert of a page from the novel: ‘En ce temps-là, époque de l’exil de Napoléon à l’île d’Elbe, les passions politiques étaient déchaînées entre royalistes et bonapartistes. Ce n’étaient que complots, dénonciations, représailles.’ (Back then, the period of Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba, political passions raged among royalists and Bonapartists. It was nothing but conspiracies, denunciations, and retaliation.) Dantès’s search for the cave in this film avoids the sea, instead using the Calanque geology to hide the cave.38 The treasure appears in a hillside cavern in terrain similar to that of the Lascaux region of the Dordogne and the Cosquer area of southern France. By using a landbound cave, Fescourt avoids a second sea-baptism for Dantès and implicitly links him to early Man. As he reinvents himself, Dantès has the privilege of self-nomination – a privilege granted only to Adam. Thus the link to the earth as his place of renewal/revival erases the man of the sea and births the man of the earth. The sequence of the cave is shot in dappled light against the rock formations, and the treasure itself appears in a tight interior shot. The ‘2ème Époque’ of the film is utterly dedicated to the revenge plot. A title card asserts that ‘Grâce à son immense fortune, Monte Cristo voit bientôt toutes les portes s’ouvrir devant lui. Sa vengeance approche terrible et sans merci’ (Thanks to his immense fortune, Monte Cristo soon saw all doors open to him. His vengeance grew terrible and merciless). Dantès’s revenge upon Fernand Mondego, Danglars, and Crown Prosecutor Villefort batters the three-person God of Louis Philippe’s Monarchie de Juillet: the military, the haute bourgeoisie, and the law. The means of revenge upon Mondego, who conspired with Danglars and stole Edmond’s sweetheart Mercédès, will occur through the Mondegos’ son, Albert. (Millennial readers wonder if Albert is in fact Edmond’s son, given the hasty marriage following his arrest and the affinity between the younger and older man. If true – and Dumas is primly agnostic on the issue – the melodramatic irony would be all the greater.) Rather than the Roman ‘Mazzolata’ episode, Fescourt’s Dantès has Italian boatmen drug, kidnap Albert de Morcerf (Pierre Batcheff, also of Un chien andalou in the same year), and bring him to a Xanadu-like pleasure palace on the island of Monte Cristo. Albert awakens to find the Count in satin pyjamas and bejewelled turban: the aesthetic of Fescourt’s Monte Cristo is decidedly Orientalist, drawing upon the grand paintings of Delacroix and Gérôme. Fescourt displays this episode as a dream sequence from Albert’s point of view, with a full roster of camera tricks to represent Albert’s altered state of consciousness and the ‘Ali Baba’ aspects of the Count’s domain. Such avant-garde techniques as cross-dissolves of abstract sea waves and arabesque architectural elements superimposed upon a medium close-up of the sleeping Albert emphasize the degree to which subjectivity rules the

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Figure 2.1  Arabesque interior of the Count’s stately manor in Monte-Cristo (1929)

narrative. The columns resolve into the forest-like chamber of the Count’s palace, dwarfing the Count and his guest with opulence (Figure 2.1). The architectural shots serve as a kind of visual scrim over images of a trio of musicians and then of Albert as he struggles to consciousness. Slowly the Count comes into focus, wearing a satin turban with jewelled ornaments, ropes of pearls, and a heavily pearl-encrusted, high-collared tunic and trousers of a style that mark his embrace of Orientalism.39 He tells the dumbfounded Albert, ‘Je vis à ma fantaisie dans cette île dont je porte le nom’ (I live my fantasy on this island whose name I bear). Haydée (uncredited) appears in Poiret-style harem pants, reminding contemporary audiences of the designer’s Orientalist influence on theatre and opera, notably Scheherazade. Since Haydée’s storytelling will ultimately condemn Mondego for the massacre at Janina and her own enslavement, the visual reference to Scheherazade is pointed. Dumas identifies Haydée as Greek, although she is ensconced in a Turkish-style oda: ‘Haydée fit signe à la suivante de relever la tapisserie qui pendait devant la porte, dont la chambranle carré encadra la jeune fille couchée comme une charmant tableau’ (Haydée signalled the servant to raise the tapestry that hung before the door, which framed the reclining young woman like a charming tableau) (Dumas 1:720). The drawn-curtain revelation of Haydée en tableau again emphasizes the role of spectacle in the construction of Monte Cristo, even in his most



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intimate spaces. While most films forgo the domestic scenes with Monte Cristo’s freed slave for reasons of censorship, budget, or narrative economy, Dumas’s text overtly indicates the role of spectacle in these moments and suggests that Monte Cristo alone is an objective spectator. Indeed, Jean-Marie Salien suggests that Dantès consciously chooses to surround himself in Orientalist motifs to establish an otherness that compels Dumas’s Paris to attend. This aesthetic allows Dantès, then, to expose the crimes of his adversaries by applying language reserved for the Other to Mondego, Danglars, and de Villefort: ‘Les référents et les signes du langage du Dantès … sont inversés, car les signes n’invoquent plus les référents logiques mais leurs contraires … les mots “inférieure” et “esclave” … sont en effet des insultes que, de concert avec sa protégée [Haydée], Dantès destine à ses rivaux.’ (Dantès’s referents and linguistic signs are reversed, for the signs not only invoke direct meaning but the opposite … the words ‘inferior’ and ‘slave’… being in effect insults that, together with his protegée, Dantès meant for his foes.)40 By adopting an Orientalist aesthetic, Dantès upends French chauvinism about the East and reveals his adversaries to be worse than any imagined Turk or Arab. Fescourt’s film follows this sentiment quite closely. After securing a reunion with the Count in Paris, Albert (who never seems to equate cause and effect) drinks exotic liquor with Count and, after another avant-garde sequence of revolving and binary split screen, split screen merge, and abstract cross-dissolve,41 awakens on the Italian shore. This entire episode on the island relies upon photographic and cinematographic technique to reveal the beginnings of the Count’s plan. Fescourt’s choice to privilege Albert’s consciousness allows for the Count to emerge from Albert’s haze like a developing image. The avant-garde effects all derive from handmade interventions in photographic enlargers, again linking Monte Cristo’s spectacles to both form and content of the photographic process. The Count’s entry into Parisian society occurs on 21 May at 10 p.m. – not at an intimate breakfast at Albert’s garçonnière as in the novel, but at the evening interval of the opera. Monte Cristo ‘meets’ the three betrayers, as well as Mercédès, Maximilien Morrel, the son of his former employer, and, as promised, Albert. The entire sequence is tinted in rose sepia, as if to approximate gaslight, and Fescourt uses multiple cameras to shoot the ballet from the stage and the crowd from and in the boxes, and intercuts among shots of the ignored dancers on stage, the increasingly restive crowd, and inserts of various timepieces as the moments tick toward ten o’clock. The box curtains part, and the turbaned and formally clad Count and the heavily draped Haydée seat themselves in proscenium-arched box in a portrait for the crowd to consume. At the interval Albert leads the Count through the crowd to meet the Morcerfs. Fescourt combines an overhead pan, a reverse tracking shot, and slow, nearly handheld camera work to show the effects of the Count’s progress through the crowd.

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Albert’s misguided challenge of Monte Cristo offers another set-piece of nineteenth-century spectacle. A pistol duel, while more static than a swordfight, nonetheless provides grand staging, dramatic tension, and smoke effects that clear to reveal the survivor. Fescourt uses blue-tinting to evoke the dawn appointment. The truly dramatic scene precedes the duel, however, as the Count practises shooting in his maison gallery. Shooting equally well with both hands, the Count aims and fires at a playing card pinned at the vanishing point of the de Chirico-inspired hallway, visually invoking the bleak impermanence of humans in the architectural world of Surrealism. The film approximates the ending of the novel, as Fescourt’s Monte Cristo retreats into the fantastical atmosphere of the arabesque palace on the island. Sealing the notion that for Dumas Orientalism functions as an indictment of French chauvinism, the final title card reads: ‘Désormais l’âme penchée vers le Bien, Monte Cristo allait chercher l’oubli de ses souffrances dans l’amour d’Haydée, au milieu des féeries de l’Orient.’ (Hence, with his soul leaning toward Goodness, Monte Cristo sought ease from his suffering in Haydée’s love, amid the enchantments of the East.) The closing frame is a rooftop view across domes and minarets, a common Orientalist image in commercially produced photographs for the home viewer. In this final image, Fescourt combines the photographic and social ideal of Monte Cristo. The 1934 Reliance Pictures production, the first sound adaptation of the narrative, emphasizes the revenge story and ends with an astonishingly choreographed courtroom scene. In this film, directed and co-written by Rowland V. Lee, British star Robert Donat is joined by 1930s Hollywood regulars Sidney Blackmer, Louis Calhern, and Raymond Walburn as the malefactors. The novel’s Catalan Mercédès (Elissa Landi) is now a French haute bourgeoise, thereby recasting the Edmond–Mercédès love story as a class conflict and aligning Edmond’s rise to captain of the Pharaon with his social ascendancy. The Chateau d’If section occupies a substantial part of the first half of the film, as the spectacle of Dantès’s imprisonment, education, and escape had by then become a set-piece of the filmic narrative. Abbé Faria’s chamber displays a full array of hieroglyphics: a chronometer, a Raphael Madonna, a Zodiac, a world map, and quotations in original languages – all of which Dantès will learn under Faria’s tutelage. Dantès’s entry into Parisian society is effected by a ball in honour of Fernand Mondego, complete with ‘Albanian pageant and a series of tableaux’. While participating in standard 1930s spectacle, the ball sequence also looks back to the early stage versions of the novel. In the novel, the Morcerfs host the summer ball, as Albert explained: ‘ceux qui restent à Paris dans le mois de juillet sont de vrais Parisiens’ (those who stay in Paris in July are true Parisians) (Dumas 2:162). Thus Dumas literally turns up the heat on Dantès’s betrayers when the Count first re-encounters them. Screenwriters Lee, Philip Dunne, and Dan Totheroh cede the ball to Monte Cristo’s control, affording him the timing and Orientalist trappings that will expose Mondego’s actions at Janina. In this film, the Count hosts the ball to honour Mondego (Sidney



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Blackmer), hero of Janina, and presents tableaux of Ali Pasha’s court in order to exact his revenge. Acrobats and odalisques march into the ballroom in ranked formations familiar to audiences of 1930s musicals. The signature girls-n-gams sequence here appears as a tableau of Ali Pasha’s harem, populated by ingenues identified by the onscreen crowd as Mondego’s mistresses. During the third tableau, that of Ali Pasha’s murder, Haydée (Eleanor Phelps) rushes the stage to correct the record, exposing Mondego as the murderer who sold her father to the Turks and her and her mother into slavery (read: prostitution). The double exposure, if you will, of Mondego’s treachery and Dantès’s true identity rely upon an adjustment of vision. The mechanics of the tableaux vivants place the figures in unfamiliar perspectives, thus revealing hitherto unseen aspects of their characters. This process leads to a late-night encounter with the Count, affirmation of Dantès’s true identity, and the requisite swordfight. Like the escape from the Chateau d’If, swordplay quickly became an expected element of any film of a Dumas novel, and of all productions of The Count of Monte Cristo. Both episodes present the male body as spectacle and seem to privilege the female gaze as Dantès’s form endures a dunking in the sea and strenuous exercise with épées. The film does not acknowledge its textual source overtly, as for example a number of its contemporaries do with a hand-opening-a-book insert for the opening or closing credits. However, the Count keeps a dossier on each of the three malefactors. Each book cover appears as an insert when vengeance is secured, and the Count turns the book face down. In this way, Lee’s Monte Cristo counts off his enemies just as Flynn’s silent film used title cards one–two–three to mark Dantès’s progress to justice. The truly spectacular sequence of this film occurs in the final act in the courtroom during Dantès’s trial for: Bonapartist treason; the murder of Abbé Faria; class mobility; poor choices of companions; and telling the truth at the wrong time, as de Villefort (Louis Calhern) denounces: ‘Know him for what he is – traitor, spy, doubtless murderer, companion of thieves, patron of bandits, impostor, and criminal at large before his king.’ This multifaceted description emerges while de Villefort wheels Dantès around the courtroom in a mobile witness box, even spinning the box for emphasis at the ends of declarations. Lee shoots over Dantès’s shoulder, tracking his movement and panning the spectators; when the camera position shifts 180 degrees, Dantès provides the centre foreground of another tracking shot that pans the jury. When Dantès rises to defend himself, the positions reverse and de Villefort occupies the panoptic box. Only at the height of his counterevidence does Dantès tow the witness box to face the jury; in his final pronouncement against de Villefort, Dantès shoves the box in disgust toward the seated spectators. This action Lee shoots from a distance and slightly above: the high-angle long shot invokes none of the spectatorial sympathy that the intimate, over-the-shoulder and medium close-ups of Dantès conveyed. With de Villefort thus exposed, the third dossier is closed and the visual metonym closes the book on Dantès’s foes.

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A short closing coda finds Mercédès and Dantès (inexplicably) sitting in a tree, while Albert and Valentine de Villefort seek them in the forest. Their return to an Edenic state (albeit in empire clothing) underscores the Hollywood sense of an ending. The message is that domesticity has been restored, Albert is reunited with his (spiritual if not real) father, and that Albert and Valentine are the next generation of true lovers. This tidy and very Anglo-American solution abjures the novel’s ending, in which the Count leaves France for the East with Haydée, and Valentine awakens from a Romeo-and-Juliet style false death to be reunited with Maximilien Morrel. This latter union is critical to Dumas’s moral vision, as the daughter of Crown Justice de Villefort – and more importantly the granddaughter of Bonapartist Noirtier – joins with the son of the honest ship owner who knew Edmond’s value. Neither young person has bourgeois pretensions, and their characters transcend the corruption they have witnessed. The novel’s closing image suggests an Odyssean departure for Edmond Dantès: ‘sur la ligne d’un blue foncé qui séparait à l’horizon le ciel de la Méditerranée, ils aperçurent un voile blanche, grande comme l’aile d’un goéland’ (on the dark blue line that separated the horizon from the Mediterranean, they noticed a white sail, large as a gull’s wing) (Dumas 2:772). Depression-era Hollywood needed a localized, domestic resolution, and found it in Dantès’s reunion with Mercédès and Albert’s union with Valentine, their felix culpa reinforced by the Eden/Arden forest setting. Lee seems to nod to a French source with the film’s closing line, ‘You find your own tree,’ perhaps an oblique echo of Candide’s maxim, ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ Classical Hollywood embraced the spirit if not the letter of the Monte Cristo story, producing swashbuckler epics under the Monte Cristo aegis in every decade from the 1930s to the 1960s. In 1940, Rowland V. Lee directed a sequel, The Son of Monte Cristo, using the sets from his 1939 production of The Man in the Iron Mask, with barely disguised commentary on the rise of Fascism in Europe. During World War II, the novel’s political intrigue of royalist, bourgeois, and upstart usurper provided a ripe formula for embedded commentary on the situation in Europe. While not outright propaganda, the film adaptations of the 1940s examined spying, betrayal, resistance, colonialism, and elite corruption under the guise of the tensions between the July Monarchy and the Bonapartists. US productions didn’t blink at naming French colonialist abuses, using Devil’s Island as a stand-in for the Chateau d’If in The Return of Monte Cristo (1946). The story moved onto the small screen in 1956 with a half-hour television series in the contemporary spirit of Zorro – and influencing subsequent hour-long itinerant dramas such as Maverick, Paladin, and even Route 66.42 The millennium saw new iterations of the narrative, with the 1999 French–Italian co-production of a four-episode miniseries starring Gérard Depardieu that aired on Bravo in the US, and the 2002 US–UK–Irish coproduction, starring Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce. The Depardieu version, written by Didier Decoin and directed by Josée Dayan, hews closely to the



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novel, although it, too, cannot resist a full scene with Napoleon.43 The only screen version directed by a woman, this Monte Cristo runs to over six hours and indulges in all of the iterations of Dantès’s character on the way to becoming the Count, allowing Depardieu multiple exercises in ventriloquy and masquerade. There are also ample instances of the male body as spectacle, as Depardieu substantively inhabits the role. That said, this Dantès is more emotionally nuanced, blending pity and empathy with cool revenge, making him a rounder character than in many adaptations. The Chateau d’If episode is over and done in less than twenty minutes. Faria offers Edmond little in the way of tutelage. Edmond’s escape follows the familiar pattern of underwater camerawork, although Edmond surfaces with Faria’s sharpened crucifix as his weapon and talisman. Made for television as it was, the adaptation is more televisual than cinematic, using the standard small-screen vocabulary of cuts and low and high angles to telegraph meaning. The development of Edmond as Count is not a matter of cinematic methods, but an episodic sequence of appearances of Dantès costumed as priest, banker, and Count. When Dantès arrives at Marseille in the guise of the Count after a year in the East to acquire ‘raffinement’, he wears the turban and Oriental costume that indicate his time in the East. Bertuccio (Sergio Rubini) secures a great house and decorates it à la Turque, maintaining at least a backdrop of Orientalism during Dantès’s revenge-time in Paris. The greater part of the series is devoted to Dantès’s feats of strength: boat racing, reviving frogs through chemical experimentation. This version, too, concludes with a reunion with Mercédès on the south coast, although Albert has left for a military career. This conclusion places the Dayan version firmly in the romance gene, eschewing Dumas’s adherence to melodrama in the Count’s departure with Haydée for the East. The 2002 Hollywood film directed by Kevin Reynolds (Robin Hood, Waterworld) develops as a prince and the pauper brother-battle steeped in class envy by Mondego (Guy Pearce) against Dantès (Jim Caviezel). The film begins with the Elba episode as prologue to Mondego’s resentment: Napoleon summons Edmond alone, although they both brave the English soldiers and storm the beaches of the island of exile. Fernand enters the world of the film seething with privilege and entitlement. The doubling of Edmond and Fernand imposes a post-Freudian cast on the plot, with both Mercédès (Dagmara Dominczyk) and a Black King chess piece as pawns in Mondego’s game. As Dantès explains to Napoleon, the chess piece is held by whoever has won something and is ‘king of the day’. Mondego’s pathological sense of self-worth drives the narrative, as Dantès can never carry the day if noble blood has any currency. The Chateau d’If episode, typically a duet between Dantès and Faria, is marked by a bravura performance by the prison governor Armand Dorleac (Michael Wincott), an invented character who finds prison management dull and marks each prisoner’s intake anniversary with a beating. His louche sarcasm about all things civil service will later be echoed by Mondego as

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he falls into dissipation and debauchery. Both men’s attitudes nod toward that most famous of French prisoners, the Marquis de Sade. Abbé Faria (Richard Harris) exhibits a robust presence in this film, emerging from the cell floor like an autochthon and embarking on Edmond’s physical and mental education. In addition to literacy, culture, economics, history, and science, Faria tutors Edmond in unarmed combat and swordplay. Newton’s Third Law accounts for Edmond’s quest for vengeance: every action requires an equal and opposite reaction. Dorleac functions, apparently, only to provide Dantès with a threshold crossing into the world of adventure: snagged by his prison keys, Dorleac is carried into the sea with the ‘corpse’. They surface together and engage in a struggle that marks the end of the Chateau d’If episode and Dantès’s first act of revenge upon a tormentor. Eschewing the multiple guises that Dumas’s protagonist adopts as he inhabits the Monte Cristo role, Reynolds’s film focuses on the spectacle of the Count’s arrivals and departures. Reynolds commends writer Jay Wolper’s script as ‘thematically true to the book’ and ‘better than the book’, which he views as ‘verbose’.44 All Paris is invited to the ‘Chateau de Monte Cristo’ (as we read on the invitation card), an estate far grander those of his foes. The Count himself arrives by balloon amid a shower of fireworks and steps nonchalantly out to mutter ‘Greetings’ (Figure 2.2). Reynolds then shoots the Count like a figure on the cover of a romance novel: in a low-angle shot, his hair and signature long velvet coat billowing behind, striding down the chateau steps to greet the crowd. In this first twenty-first-century adaptation, the tools of digital cinema contribute to the scale of the Count’s activities, with CGI backdrops and settings to extend the Count’s domain. Despite the visual opulence, this adaptation of Dumas’s tale strips the primary cast

Figure 2.2  Balloon arrival of the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo (Jim Caviezel) in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)



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down to Albert, Mercédès, Jacopo (Bertuccio), and the three principal malefactors and their wives. The Luigi Vampa Roman episode remains, chiefly to serve as the means of the Count’s entry into the lives of the Mondegos. Thus Reynolds presents a highly linear progress of revenge. This choice removes the intricacy of Dantès’s vengeance, streamlining the trajectory toward a final conflict with Mondego – in a wheatfield with mobile camera and orbital movement around the actors. The climactic scene plays as family romance, with Albert torn between his two fathers until Mercédès arrives to stop a swordfight between Albert and Edmond (a removal of the duel to the climax of the story) and to confess that Albert is Edmond’s son, affirming what readers have suspected for over 150 years. Mondego’s dissipation is nearly complete, and only elitist resentment gives him the will to shoot Mércèdes and the strength to attack the calmer and healthier Dantès, who is clearly ‘king of the day’. Director Kevin Reynolds used a two-camera setup for the final showdown scene, set in a wheatfield, with close and wide angles to cut between: We’ve got one [the wide angle] which is a Steadicam … which is whizzing across the top of the wheat to give it a certain frenetic quality, and the other is handheld from the other end of our set. … I used a 45-degree shutter and under-cranked the camera to accentuate the action.45

The editing in this sequence is at the twenty-first-century pace of a car chase, with action revolving and cutting from close to wide on the rhythm of the sword clashes. The revolving camera hints at the rolling witness box of the 1934 film, although the final antagonist here is Mondego rather than de Villefort. Clearly Le Comte de Monte Cristo is a narrative suitable to adaptations in time period, cultural locus, and indeed to the conventions of cinema genres from action to melodrama to romance. The elasticity of the episodic structure and the timelessness of the revenge plot support all manner of translations to varying cultural norms. In the 1950s, Egypt produced two cinema versions of the story emphasizing the trickster nature of the Count.46 As noted, a recent anime web series based on a Japanese graphic novel sets the story in the intergalactic future and casts the narrative as a Bildungsroman of the exceedingly ‘Emo’ Albert, under the tutelage of the Count – who bears a resemblance to a post-Anne Rice Lestat. Now, two decades into the twenty-first century, we may anticipate a global and multiracial adaptation that would fully realize Dumas’s text, which was both. The tale has a life of its own and develops onscreen as the technologies of the moving image and revenge adapt to new generations.

Notes 1 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘The Informatics of Revenge: Telegraphy, Speed and Storage in The Count of Monte Cristo’, Weber Studies 14.1 (Winter 1997): 6.

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2 ‘Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation… . The disintegration of an indisputable distinction between interior and exterior becomes a condition for the emergence of spectacular modernizing culture and for a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of aesthetic experience.’ Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 12–13. 3 Daniel A. Novak, ‘Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage’, Victorian Studies 59.1 (Autumn 2016): 37. 4 For an overview of tableaux vivants from the eighteenth century forward, mainly in England and America, see Robert M. Lewis, ‘Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America’, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 36 (April 1988): 281. 5 Curiously, the novel of Le Comte de Monte Cristo contains scenes that would appear as some of the earliest subjects of cinema: boats on waves (Lumières); Catalan dancers and the cine-portrait of the ‘great man’ (Edison); the progressive ageing of Dantès and Abbé Faria; treasure chambers; and transformations (Méliès). 6 Maquet is generally credited with the adventure plotting, while Dumas developed the dialogue and prose texture. 7 Fernande Bassan, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton et Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870)’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 22.1/2 (Fall–Winter 1993–94): 101. All parenthetical translations are mine. 8 ‘Nouvelles’, Coureur des Spectacles, 6 February 1848: 2, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k5545297v/f1.image.r=coureur%20des%20spectacles%20 monte%20cristo (accessed 13 September 2018). 9 Victor Emeljanow, ‘The Events of June 1848: The “Monte Cristo” Riots and the Politics of Protest’, New Theatre Quarterly 19.1 (2003): 23–32, https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X02000039. 10 ‘Drury Lane Theatre’, Observer, 18 June 1848, www.newspapers.com/ image/258961645 (accessed 27 August 2017). 11 ‘Drury Lane Theatre’, Observer, 18 June 1848. 12 Emeljanow, ‘The Events of June 1848’. 13 Oddly, there seems to be no surviving evidence of Monte-Cristo as a subject of magic lantern shows, either as a slide-set with readings, or as a public performance. Adaptations of popular novels were common in lantern circles, but Dumas appears to have been too common and too popular. My thanks to Artemis Willis for her help and input on this subject. 14 Thierry Groensteen (ed.), La Transécriture: pour une théorie de l’adaptation, Colloque de Cerisy, 14–21 August 1993 (Québec: Editions Nota Bene, 1998), p. 270; quoted in Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 15. 15 This description, apparently from original distribution materials, defines the major plot points for the production: ‘A complete performance of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO filmed as a stage play with curtains between the five acts: Act I. “The Sailor’s Return”, Act II. “Twenty Years Later”, Act III. “Dantès Starts on His Mission of Vengeance”, Act IV. “Dantès as the Count of Monte Cristo”, Act V. “Dantes Accuses His Enemies”, and “finis” at the end’. Available intermittently in streaming video from: www.fandor.com/films/the_count_of_monte_cristo.



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16 Andrew A. Erish, Col. William N. Selig: The Man who Invented Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 77. 17 ‘Selig cinematographer Tom Persons recalled shooting the film: “Our great scene was to show Edmond emerging from the sea, shaking his white whiskers, and saying ‘The world is mine!’ [We] found the right man at last – a hypnotist in a dime museum – and after we had seen him work we knew he had nerve enough for anything”.’ Programme notes, 19 May 2005, Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress’s Moving Image Research Center: www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/ pickford/2005-archive.html. The surviving one-reel film was preserved by the American Film Institute at the LOC Motion Picture Conservation Center. 18 Erish, Col. William N. Selig, p. 78. 19 This exclamation, repeated in the 1922 Fox production, does not appear in the novel. Dantès does not crawl immediately from the sea, but is picked up by smugglers and, several chapters later, finally sets foot on Monte Cristo. Once he is alone and on the brink of finding Faria’s treasure, he finds access more appealing than world domination: ‘Et maintenant, s’écria-t-il en se rappelant cette histoire du pêcheur arabe que lui racontée Faria, maintenant, Sésame, ouvre-toi!’ Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, intro. François Taillandier (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, Livre de Poche Classique, 2015), 2 volumes, 1: p. 305. Subsequent citations to this edition will be made parenthetically. [‘And now,’ he cried, recalling the story of the Arab fisherman told him by Faria. ‘Now, open Sesame!’] 20 Erish, Col. William N. Selig, p. 80. 21 Erish, Col. William N. Selig, p. 79. 22 Thanhouser Film Corporation was active from 1909 to 1919, during which time it produced over a thousand films. 23 A Modern Monte Christo, Thanhouser-Pathé Gold Rooster, directed by W. Eugene Moore, screenplay by Lloyd Lonergan, performed by Vincent Serrano, Thomas A. Curran, Boyd Marshall, Gladys Dore, and Helen Badgley (New Rochelle, NY: Thanhouser Film Corporation), 1917. Title cards within the film Anglicize ‘Christo’, although publicity materials and newspapers do not. 24 Moving Picture World, 3 February 1917. Cited in www.thanhouser.org/tcocd/ Filmography_files/ind68nnf7.htm (accessed 13 September 2018). 25 Review by Laurence Reid, Motion Picture Mail, 3 February 1917. Cited in www.thanhouser.org/tcocd/Filmography_files/ind68nnf7.htm (accessed 13 September 2018). 26 F.T., New York Dramatic Mirror, 27 January 1917. Cited in www.thanhouser.org/ tcocd/Filmography_files/ind68nnf7.htm (accessed 13 September 2018). 27 Monte Cristo, directed by Emmet J. Flynn (Fox, 1922), with John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman, and Roy D’Arcy, www.kanopy.com/product/monte-cristo (accessed 3 December 2017). 28 Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, intro. François Taillandier (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, Livre de Poche Classique, 2015), 2 volumes, 1: p. 186. Subsequent citations to this edition will be made parenthetically. 29 The formicarium, invented by Charles Janet, was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition Universelle in 1900. 30 Tom Gunning identified the relation between parallel editing and technologies of modernity as integral to the aesthetic movement from cinema of attractions to narrative cinema in the transitional period (1907–13). As such, narrative suspense

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both drove and was created by cross-cutting. ‘Appearing as it does during the period of film’s intense narratization, in which character psychology begins to motivate narrative action and the spatial and temporal relations between actions are no longer restricted to the clear linearity of the chase format, parallel editing typifies, without exhausting, the systematic nature that cinematic narration begins to display around 1908’. Tom Gunning, ‘Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology’, Screen 32.2 (Summer 1991): 187. 31 Few filmmakers have been able to resist the spectacle of Napoleon on Elba, despite the fact that a firsthand encounter between Dantès and Bonaparte does not occur in the novel, but is only narrated after the fact. Flynn incorporates the episode following Captain Leclère’s death, allowing for a display of Dantès’s obedience to his ship’s master and a vignette of Napoleon by a window that overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea. 32 ‘“Monte Cristo” Greets State Fair Crowds’, Exhibitors Herald, 25 November 1922: 58. 33 Motion Picture News, September–October 1922 (emphasis mine). 34 ‘Film Trade Stimulated Last Week in Boston’, Variety, 24 March 1922: 46. 35 Monte-Cristo, directed by Henri Fescourt, produced by Louis Nalpas, written by Henri Fescourt (based on the novel The Count of Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père), cinematography by Henri Barreyre, Maurice Hennebains, Gustavo Kottula, Julien Ringel, edited by Jean-Louis Bouquet, with performances by Jean Angelo, Lil Dagover, Gaston Modot, Jean Toulout, Henri Debain, Pierre Batcheff, Robert Mérin, Bernhard Goetzke. Running time: 218 mins. Available on DVD in a restoration achieved 1999–2006 by ZZ Productions from an incomplete version held by the GosFilm Archive in Russia, a short, partially tinted version held at the Archives Françaises du Film and preserved by the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, and a Pathé-Rural copy in private hands. Distributed in a two-disc set by Diaphana (Paris), 2008. 36 Lil Dagover, gaunt and somnambulic in Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari a decade earlier, appears much healthier as Mercédès in this film. Pierre Batcheff, who appeared in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (also 1929) appears here as Albert de Morcerf. 37 Susan Hayward, French Cinema’s Classical Age 1895–1929 (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 115. 38 The Cosquer cave, accessed by an underwater tunnel near Marseille harbour, contains Palaeolithic cave art and may have been known in Dumas’s time. The Lascaux cave was first discovered in modern times in 1868, and the cave art published in 1901. 39 Jean-Marie Salien makes the point that Dumas, in the source text, evokes Orientalism as both a popular mode of the times and as a more subversive means of Dantès exposing French hypocrisy. Salien traces this position to Dumas’s status as a person of colour in nineteenth-century France: ‘Toutefouis, il se peut bien que Dumas, petit-fils d’une esclave noire de Saint-Dominque (Haïti), fils d’un général mulâtre qui essuya un traitement indigne aux mains de Napoléon, écrivain qui connut le dénigrement pour son origine raciale, se soit indigné contre l’intolerance et qu’il ait pris le parti d’attaquer.’ [However, it may well be that Dumas, grandson of a black slave from Santo Domingo (Haiti), son of a mulatto general who endured disgraceful treatment at the hands of Napoleon, writer who



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experienced denigration for his racial origin, was outraged at intolerance and committed to attacking it.] Jean-Marie Salien, ‘La Subversion de l’orientalisme dans Le comte de Monte-Cristo d’Alexandre Dumas’, Études françaises 36.1 (2000): 181. 40 Salien, ‘La Subversion de l’orientalisme’: 189. 41 Dziga Vertov also employed such techniques in another of the great films of 1929, Man with a Movie Camera. The binary merge of vertical split screen may have first been used in the ‘Looney Lens’ series of shorts, in Silly Skyscrapers (1924) by Fox News cameraman Al Brick. 42 The Count of Monte Cristo ran for a total of thirty-nine episodes in 1956, with the first twelve episodes shot at Hal Roach Studios with obvious Californian settings standing in for Italy and Spain, and the remaining twenty-seven episodes shot at production company ITC’s Elstree Film Studios in Hertforshire, England. Notable to viewers of a certain age is star George Dolenz, father of Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, whose TV series debuted exactly a decade later. 43 The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Josée Dayan (1998; NY: Winstar TV & Video, 1999), DVD. 44 The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Kevin Reynolds (2002; Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Video, 2002), DVD. Director commentary. 45 The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Kevin Reynolds, director commentary. 46 Amir al-Antikam [The Prince of Revenge], directed by Henry Barakat (Cairo, 1951).

3

Adultery and adulteration in film versions of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary Colin Davis

Chaque nuit pourtant, il la rêvait; c’était toujours le même rêve: il s’approchait d’elle; mais quand il venait à l’étreindre, elle tombait en pourriture dans ses bras. (Flaubert 1972: 406) Every night, he dreamed about her; always it was the same dream: he came nearer; but when he went to embrace her, she turned to putrid flesh in his arms. (Flaubert 2003: 323)1

What does Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary know about film in general, and in particular about its future screen adaptations? The trivial answer is of course: nothing. Flaubert could have had no conception of the twentieth-century form of cinema, let alone of the fact that his novel would become one of the most filmed works in the Western canon. In her indispensable study Madame Bovary at the Movies, Mary Donaldson-Evans lists eighteen screen versions of the novel, and this number has increased in recent times.2 Yet even though Flaubert certainly lacked foreknowledge of the future, the suggestion of this chapter is that his novel contains a profound, pre-emptive reflection on the desire, adulteration, and infidelity which constitute film adaptation. At the core of Madame Bovary is a simple, almost banal tale of provincial adultery. Emma Rouault marries the dull medical officer Charles Bovary, becomes bored and dissatisfied, has two lovers, gets into debt, and finally takes her own life when her situation becomes unbearable. The novel revolves around issues of reality and illusion, reading and misreading, representation and misrepresentation. The theme of Emma’s adultery is linked to other forms of transgression, misdirection and delusion, which reach into the very heart of Flaubert’s aesthetic achievement. The novel is deeply concerned with the breaking of rules, codes, and conventions. An early indication of this is given in the opening pages of the novel through the famous description of Charles Bovary’s hat. On his first day at a new school, Charles brings with him an unusual headpiece: C’était une de ces coiffures d’ordre composite, où l’on retrouve les éléments du bonnet à poil, du chapska, du chapeau rond, de la casquette de loutre et du



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bonnet de coton, une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression comme le visage d’un imbécile. Ovoïde et renflée de baleines, elle commençait par trois boudins circulaires: puis s’alternaient, séparés par un polygone cartonné, couvert d’une broderie en soutache compliquée, et d’où pendait, au bout d’un long cordon trop mince, un petit croisillon de fils d’or, en manière de gland. Elle était neuve; la visière brillait. (Flaubert 1972: 4) It was one of those hats of the Composite order, in which we find features of the military bear-skin, the Polish chapska, the bowler hat, the beaver and the cotton nightcap, one of those pathetic things, in fact, whose mute ugliness has a profundity of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and stiffened with whalebone, it began with three big circular sausages; then, separated by a red band, there alternated diamonds of velours and rabbit-fur; after that there came a sort of bag terminating in a cardboard polygon, embroidered all over with complicated braid, and, hanging down at the end of a long cord that was too thin, a little cluster of gold threads, like a tassel. It looked new; the peak was gleaming. (Flaubert 2003: 4)

Critics have cleverly, ingeniously even, analysed the symbolic significance of the different components of this hat.3 More to the point, though, Jonathan Culler has insisted on the complex play with the reader in this passage and elsewhere in the novel. In Culler’s words, ‘The cap, one might say, is, in its excessiveness, a parody of a symbolic object, in that by throwing down a challenge it calls into play interpretive operations that are inadequate to the task it appears to set.’4 The Balzacian demonstrative ces (‘une de ces coiffures’, ‘une de ces pauvres choses’ (‘one of those hats’, ‘one of those pathetic things’)) suggest familiarity: we all know that kind of thing. But the following description takes us far into unfamiliar territory, and this has nothing to do with failings in our French or inadequate knowledge of nineteenth-century hat design. We are presented here with an impossible object, one which cannot be visualized or represented as an image. All of the films discussed later in this chapter bypass the opening chapter of Madame Bovary, which describes Charles’s schooldays, early adulthood, and first marriage; and in consequence, none attempts to represent Charles’s impossible hat. By omitting the unrepresentable, it is as if the filmmakers have understood that Flaubert’s novel is also deeply unfilmable. The point I want to underline here is that the description of Charles’s hat is an aesthetic enactment of what, thematically, will appear in the novel in the story of adultery. To commit adultery is to break a promise of fidelity, to appear to comply with and then to deny a bond of trust. Flaubert’s novel does precisely this when it implies a relationship of familiarity with its readers (‘it was one of those hats’) but then flouts that relationship by proceeding to describe something utterly unfamiliar and unimaginable. This breaking of trust foreshadows the theme of adultery and is itself, I would suggest, an adulterous moment implanted early in the text: the novel betrays us, as Emma will betray Charles.

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Madame Bovary is a work which reflects on multiple aspects and practices of fidelity and infidelity. This is most obvious through the theme of adultery, but it also appears in other aspects of the text. We see an early example in the description of Charles’s impossible hat; a later example occurs in the final chapters of the novel, after Emma’s death. In his grief, Charles becomes the person he believes Emma wanted him to be: Pour lui plaire, comme si elle vivait encore, il adopta ses prédilections, ses idées; il s’acheta des bottes vernies, il prit l’usage des cravates blanches. Il mettait du cosmétique à ses moustaches, il souscrivit comme elle des billets à ordre. Elle le corrompait par delà le tombeau. (Flaubert 1972: 403) To please her, as though she were still alive, he adopted her predilections, her ideas; he bought patent-leather boots, he took to wearing white cravats. He waxed his moustache, he signed bills just as she had done. She was corrupting him from beyond the grave. (Flaubert 2003: 320)

Here, Charles betrays himself by trying to be faithful to an image he believes his dead wife would have had of her ideal husband. In the process he colludes with her adultery because he concedes that he is not – and he aspires to become – the man she desired. And this collusion goes a step further when Charles encounters Rodolphe, now that (having discovered Emma’s correspondence with Léon) he can no longer deny his wife’s infidelity. He sees in Rodolphe the man Emma loved, and whom he would have wanted to be: ‘Il aurait voulu être cet homme’ (Flaubert 1972: 409) (‘He so wanted to have been this other man’ (Flaubert 2003: 326)). The reflection on adultery is at its most cutting here: Charles almost approves of Emma’s infidelity by trying to become her posthumous creation, and by longing to be the man she passionately loved. Madame Bovary, then, knows a great deal about fidelity and infidelity, betrayal, deception, disappointment, frustration, and the near inevitability of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the reality of others. In this respect, the novel anticipates its own reception, including its adaptation into film. The question for filmmakers is: what would it mean to be faithful to this novel, when the work itself knows so much about infidelity, both as theme and aesthetic practice? How can you adapt a text which signals itself as unfilmable, and which repeatedly breaks the contract of trust with its readers? Should one film the story of a bored housewife who commits adultery, runs up debts, and kills herself, or attempt to remain true to the dark, deceptive aesthetic of the novel, which assaults any sense of what it means to remain true? Is the most important aspect of Madame Bovary its relatively simple story, or its massively complex textuality? In what follows, I refer to three films, all of which have the title Madame Bovary, all of which are distinguished works in their own ways, and all of which were made in different historical and cultural contexts: the version directed by Jean Renoir in 1934, in the first decade of sound cinema; Vincent



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Minnelli’s 1949 version, made in postwar Hollywood; and Claude Chabrol’s ‘heritage cinema’ version of 1991.5

From Chabrol to Renoir Of the three films, the two which remain closest to Flaubert’s novel are those by Chabrol and Renoir. This may be in part because, being made in French for predominantly French-speaking audiences, their viewers are more likely to know and respect the source material. Much of the dialogue in both films is taken straight from the novel, and Chabrol’s version uses a voice-over with a script which is again based principally on Flaubert’s text. Prior to making Madame Bovary, Chabrol was not associated with film versions of canonical literary works. By contrast, many of Renoir’s films were adaptations, with a particular predilection for classics of the nineteenth century. By 1934, he had already made film versions of Zola’s Nana and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, and later in the 1930s he would film Maupassant’s ‘Une partie de campagne’ and Zola’s La Bête humaine. Given his association with the nouvelle vague, it is perhaps surprising that Chabrol adopts a much more reverential attitude toward Flaubert’s novel than Renoir. Indeed, he expresses an almost excessive devotion and fidelity to the text. He claims to want to make a film governed by the idea of ‘absolue fidélité’ (absolute fidelity) to Flaubert’s novel,6 and to aspire to identify with Flaubert to the point of making the film the French author would have made if he had produced Madame Bovary for the cinema.7 Chabrol wants his story of adultery to remain unadulterated in its passage from text to screen. Omissions, alterations and interventions are of course inevitable. Viewers and critics have disagreed about the suitability of Isabelle Huppert to play Emma;8 like other screen versions, Chabrol’s film omits the opening chapter of the novel which describes Charles’s early life, and it passes very briefly over the final chapters which portray the aftermath of Emma’s suicide. As a consequence of this latter choice, in order to retain Charles’s famous line ‘C’est la faute de la fatalité!’ (Flaubert 1972: 410) (‘Fate is to blame!’ (Flaubert 2003: 326)), the timing and sense of this simultaneously ironic and sad utterance must be fundamentally changed. In Flaubert’s novel, Charles makes the statement some time after Emma’s death, when he has been corrupted by her from beyond the grave. Now that he can no longer maintain any illusion about Emma’s adultery, he encounters Rodolphe and delivers to him the line which the narrator describes as ‘un grand mot, le seul qu’il ait jamais dit’ (Flaubert 1972: 410) (‘a grand phrase, the only one he had ever uttered’ (Flaubert 2003: 326)). Rodolphe, though, finds him ‘bien débonnaire pour un homme dans sa situation, comique même et un peu vil’ (Flaubert 1972: 410) (‘soft-hearted for someone in his position, comical even, and slightly despicable’ (Flaubert 2003: 326)). In Chabrol’s film, Charles uses the words immediately after Emma’s death,

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looking backward and addressing the other witnesses to her demise (Homais, Bournisien, and Canivet, the doctor).9 Here, it is a spur-of-the-moment comment made in the first moment of grief rather than, as it is in Flaubert’s novel, a kind of act of forgiveness toward one of the men with whom Emma had betrayed him, coming after months of mourning and reflection. In order to retain Flaubert’s famous phrase, the film necessarily (given that it will not depict Charles’s later life and death) changes its context and meaning. Chabrol’s film is an impressive achievement, with high production values, a careful re-creation of nineteenth-century provincial life, and strong performances, especially from Isabelle Huppert as Emma and Jean-François Balmer as Charles. Despite changes such as the one discussed in the previous paragraph, it sticks closer to Flaubert’s text than the other versions considered here. It is an earnest (perhaps a little too earnest) attempt to film the unfilmable. This can be indicated by the fact that it attempts to put on screen something which would appear to be unvisualizable. I said earlier that none of the three films attempts to depict Charles’s hat. Another seemingly impossible object in the novel is the pièce montée from Charles and Emma’s wedding. This is how it is described in the novel: A la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’orange; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. (Flaubert 1972: 33) At the base, to begin with, there was a square of blue cardboard representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades and stucco statuettes all around, in little niches decorated with gold paper stars; then on the second layer there was a castle made of Savoy cake, encircled by tiny fortifications of angelica, almonds, raisins and segments of orange; and finally, on the upper platform, a green field with rocks and pools of jam and boats made out of nutshells, there was arrayed a little Cupid, perched on a chocolate swing, its two poles finished off with two real rose-buds, just like knobs, on the top. (Flaubert 2003: 27)

Perhaps wisely, neither Renoir nor Minnelli attempt to reproduce this piece of confectionery. Renoir’s film (or at least the surviving version of it) omits the wedding entirely,10 and in Minnelli’s the celebration descends into something resembling a rowdy saloon punch-up, with Charles defending his new wife with his fists before whisking her away. Following his desire to remain true to Flaubert’s text, Chabrol nevertheless makes a brave stab at putting the pièce montée on screen. But because it is such a dizzyingly complex (I would suggest unrepresentable) object, he compromises by showing it only partially and fleetingly. It is brought on in the background, at first partly masked by Charles and Emma, then partly off-screen as Charles cuts



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Figure 3.1  Charles Bovary (Jean-François Balmer) cuts the wedding cake in Madame Bovary (1991)

into it (Figure 3.1), and finally hidden behind Charles’s mother’s hat as she leans over to talk to Emma. In Flaubert’s novel, the object is offered to the acclaim of all those who are present: it is described as ‘une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris’ (Flaubert 1972: 33) (‘an elaborate confection that drew loud cries’ (Flaubert 2003: 27)). In Chabrol’s film its presence is almost apologetic. It appears, but it is glimpsed more than seen, as if the film knows that to make it fully visible would disclose the distance between Flaubert’s imaginary dessert and Chabrol’s visual realization. And this marks the limit of Chabrol’s drive for fidelity. Wanting to stay as close as possible to the novel, his work finds that its loving proximity cannot overcome the residual distance between text and film. Being faithful here approaches becoming over-reverential, bringing with it a blindness toward something essential in the novel: its disruptive, ironic, self-undermining impulse, as it uses the theme of adultery not just to show the secret desires of bored housewives, but also the slippery, transgressive nature of texts which promise their readers a familiar, assured world whilst delivering nothing of the kind. Like Charles’s hat, the pièce montée offers itself for our contemplation, but also perhaps scoffs at our credulity if we accept its invitation. Just as Emma cannot remain faithful to Charles (or to Rodolphe, from whose desertion she recovers, or to Léon, with whom she rediscovers the platitudes of marriage), Flaubert’s text does not remain true to its reader, and Chabrol unavoidably traduces the work to which he claimed the most devoted fidelity.

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Renoir’s version of Madame Bovary is less reverential in its treatment of its source material and at the same time closer to some of its aspects. By 1934 Renoir was not yet heralded as the great filmmaker that he would later become in the eyes of admirers and film scholars. He was, though, beginning to acquire a reputation as one of France’s leading directors. He had made a number of films in the silent era, and in the 1930s he embarked on a period of remarkable creativity and productivity which would culminate in what many regard as his masterpieces, La Grande Illusion and La Règle du jeu. Madame Bovary was his sixth film of the decade. Many of Renoir’s films were based on novels, and he enjoyed both the discipline and freedom brought by adaptation. Referring to his version of Maupassant’s ‘Une partie de campagne’, he describes how his source imposes only a framework which then allows him to embroider as he wishes. He even goes so far as to praise plagiarism as one of the great drivers of Western literature.11 Renoir’s theory and practice of adaptation position his films in a complex space which combines fidelity and infidelity to their sources: they honour the literary works to which they refer but are not bound to them in a relationship of dependence or subservience. This licence to modify material from the source text, combined with a sense of the potential of film to create unique spectacle and effects, can be seen in a sequence from early in Charles and Emma’s marriage. In this scene we first see Emma standing at an easel whilst Lheureux tries to tempt her to buy a scarf; Charles enters silently and takes the scarf from Lheureux as he leaves the room; Charles presents the scarf to the delighted Emma, and then pleases her even more by telling her that he has bought a carriage. He opens the window at the centre of the frame to reveal the carriage waiting outside; as the camera remains static, Charles and Emma exit the house and appear outside the window; they climb into the carriage and ride away, with Emma driving and her abandoned art work visible in the foreground (Figure 3.2). The sequence consists of only three shots, the second lasting for over a minute and third lasting for nearly two minutes. It combines elements from the novel but does not correspond to any single passage. Moreover, we can see here that Renoir is perfecting his own skills as a director. The filming lacks the fluid camera movement and deep focus of his later, most distinguished work. But other important elements of his mature style are on show here, such as the long takes, the precise framing and the careful orchestration of character movement. The sequence is full of significance and suggestion, as Christopher Faulkner emphasizes: ‘Certainly the carriage suggests Emma’s (potential) mobility, her ability to travel, potentially to escape, but in this shot it is also contained by the frame of the window. In brief, the way in which this moment is handled brilliantly conveys the tension between the pull of Emma’s desires and the real inescapability of her present circumstances.’12 In short, this is a magnificent sequence which announces both respect for the source material and the director’s claim to be a virtuoso artist who is every bit the equal of Flaubert.



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Figure 3.2  Emma (Valentine Tessier) with reins in hand, Charles (Pierre Renoir) next to her, and her abandoned work in the foreground in Madame Bovary (1934)

This aesthetic of necessary infidelity is proclaimed from an early stage of the film, indicating that Renoir has perfectly understood a key aspect of Flaubert’s novel. Like Chabrol and Minnelli, Renoir omits Charles’s early life and begins the story with his first encounter with Emma when he goes to treat her father’s broken leg. This is followed by a scene which, again, combines elements from the novel, but makes different use of them. The scene is particularly significant because it revolves around loyalty, trust, and promises. Charles’s mother and his first wife are shown arguing, and Charles sides with his wife; she then expresses jealousy about his feelings for Emma and makes him promise not to visit her again. Shortly afterwards, his first wife dies, and Charles returns to Père Rouault’s farm and later marries Emma. The fact that he is forced to choose between his wife and his mother indicates a conflict of loyalties in which it becomes impossible to remain faithful to all parties. Charles is forced to side with one of the women, and therefore to forgo his duty to the other. He then makes a promise to his wife which he does not keep once she is dead. This raises the general question of whether a promise is annulled by the death of the person to whom it is made. Charles clearly thinks so, but the wording in the film is categorical, even if the promise is made reluctantly. His wife asks him to swear not to

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return to Les Bertaux, and he replies, ‘C’est bon, ça va, je te le jure.’ (All right, that’s fine, I promise you.) The brilliance of this scene is that it uses aspects of Flaubert’s text to sketch a theory of film adaptation which concedes the inevitability of disloyalty. Just as the description of Charles’s hat implicitly makes a contract with the reader which it does not intend to keep, Charles’s oath to his wife and Renoir’s indebtedness to Flaubert are set up in order not to be kept. Without that transgression, there would be no story (Charles would have been unable to marry Emma) and no film (Renoir would have been unable to make Madame Bovary). An important difference between Chabrol’s film and Renoir’s is that Renoir’s requires much more knowledge of the source text. Chabrol’s Madame Bovary provides us with all the information we need to understand what is going on; Renoir’s does not. Renoir’s film, for example, jumps straight from Charles’s fumbling indication to Père Rouault that he would like to marry Emma to scenes of the couple’s married life. A reader unfamiliar with the story might be confused by this, since no explicit reference is made to their betrothal and marriage. But is Renoir responsible for this elliptic, disjointed style, or is it a result of an editing process which he regretted, and which falsified his intentions and desires? It is certainly the case that we do not see the film that Renoir intended to make. The currently available version is around 100 minutes long, but before its commercial release an earlier cut was shown which was nearly twice as long. Renoir preferred the longer version and only agreed to cuts under pressure from distributors. The footage removed from the longer version was destroyed, and we do not know precisely what it contained.13 So when I said earlier that Renoir’s film does not portray the pièce montée from Charles and Emma’s wedding, I can say that with confidence only of the surviving edit. It is entirely possible that Renoir did in fact film the wedding and the pièce montée in particular. We might regret that the fuller version is not available. Alexander Sesonske ends his inconclusive discussion of the film by suggesting that any real assessment of Renoir’s success could ‘only follow on the recovery of the complete film’.14 However, this was not the first time that one of Renoir’s films was cut beyond his wishes, and it would certainly not be the last. The film as we have it is incomplete, adulterated; crucially, though, it is a work which knows that adulteration is an aspect of filmmaking, and of film adaptation in particular. In echoing this, Renoir’s film shows an insight into the broken world of Flaubert’s novel which is more astute than any fastidious reproduction of the story could ever match.

Minnelli’s Flaubert Of the three films discussed here, Minnelli’s Madame Bovary takes the greatest liberties with Flaubert’s novel. There are a number of reasons for this. Made in English for a broad popular audience, there was less risk of



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offending French-speaking literary purists who might feel a cultural attachment to the great source text. As a Hollywood melodrama, it needed to follow reigning conventions concerning matters such as characterization and spectacle: Jennifer Jones’s beautiful and flighty Emma acts and is dressed more like a cinematic Southern Belle than a nineteenth-century Normandy farm girl.15 And then there was the Hays Code, to which I shall return. Some features of the Renoir and Chabrol films are shared by the Minnelli version. All of them begin with Charles’s first meeting with Emma, and therefore omit reference to the first chapter of the novel; all of them also cut or severely reduce any depiction of events in the final three chapters of the novel which follow Emma’s death; and all of them use, and exult in, some of the great scenes and set-pieces of the novel, such as the Vaubyessard ball, the comices agricoles, Emma’s final encounter with Rodolphe, and her deathbed. Otherwise, however, Minnelli’s version shows none of Renoir’s and Chabrol’s textual dependency on Flaubert or general sense of fidelity to his characters and themes. Here, the balance in adaptation between constraint and opportunity has swung decisively toward the latter. This can be seen, importantly, in the portrayal of Charles. In the versions of Renoir and Chabrol, no attempt is made to make Charles – played with distinction respectively by Pierre Renoir (the director’s older brother) and Jean-François Balmer – into an attractive character. Viewers, like readers of Flaubert’s novel, might find him moving because he embodies a heartbreaking combination of limited intelligence, love and trust; but his blinkered understanding of reality also makes him, at least in part, the author of his and Emma’s downfall. He is complicit with the world which gives Emma no chance of happiness. In Minnelli’s film, the casting of Van Heflin as Charles brought important changes to the character.16 Van Heflin’s screen persona was attractive and charming, even if not heroic. One of his best-known roles subsequent to Madame Bovary was in the great Western Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens, and starring Alan Ladd in the title role. In that film he plays a caring, brave husband who defends his family and community whilst also befriending the laconic former gunfighter, Shane, despite his wife’s attraction to him. There is something of that role already in his portrayal of Charles Bovary. Van Heflin’s Charles is a more obviously endearing character than in Flaubert’s novel or other film versions. Whereas Flaubert’s Charles, followed by Renoir and Chabrol, asks for Emma’s hand indirectly through her father, in Minnelli’s version he proposes to her himself; and later he fights to defend her when their wedding gets rowdy. Minnelli’s Charles, as played by Van Heflin, is by no means a dynamic, intelligent character, but unlike his equivalents in Flaubert, Renoir and Chabrol, he understands his limitations. This is epitomized in the sequence concerning the operation on Hippolyte. Both Renoir and Chabrol follow Flaubert (albeit with some differences of emphasis) in showing how Charles is egged on by Emma and Homais to undertake a pioneering operation

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designed to cure Hippolyte’s club foot. The operation seems to have gone well, but matters take a grave turn when Hippolyte’s leg turns gangrenous and has to be amputated. Chabrol in particular does not spare us the horrible sight of Hippolyte’s rotting foot. The episode illustrates Charles’s impressionability (he operates because others push him to do so) and his incompetence. He is a moderately effective medical officer, not a brilliant, life-changing surgeon. The crucial alteration in Minnelli’s version of this episode is that, at the final moment, Charles decides not to go ahead with the operation. He knows that he does not have the talent or the ability to make a success of it. Understanding his own limitations, he also effectively saves Hippolyte’s leg. He doesn’t cure the club foot, but he doesn’t enforce an amputation either. Charles emerges from this not as the foolish marionette of other people’s (Emma’s and Homais’s) desires, but as a kind of mitigated hero: at the very least, he has the courage to recognize his own limitations and to act according to them. This portrayal of Charles is evidently inflected by the ideological context in which the film was made. Flaubert’s novel raises and then radically refuses to resolve questions of blame and responsibility: is Emma a selfish, wanton woman who deludes herself and others, or a victim of a social context which gives her no possibility of fulfilment, or is she both? Is Charles a benighted idiot whose stupidity brings about the ruin of himself and his loved ones, or a loving husband who deserves better treatment than he receives, or is he both? Minnelli’s version of the story appears to give simpler, polarized answers: Charles may not be the most brilliant or dynamic of men, but he knows his limitations and he loves Emma sincerely; he is the victim, and the blame is all hers. His heightened insight is underlined by his clear intimation and implied knowledge of Emma’s adultery. In Flaubert’s novel Charles resists any insight into his wife’s infidelity until after her death, when he finds her correspondence with Léon which makes it undeniable. In Minnelli’s film, Charles finds Rodolphe’s letter announcing his desertion of Emma; he burns it, insistently reassuring her that he has not read it, but his very insistence of course implies that he understands its significance, which is in any case made unmistakable as his wife repeats the name ‘Rodolphe’. And after she has taken the fatal arsenic, he tells her that he knows where she has just been (i.e. with Rodolphe), and he can guess where she has been in Rouen (i.e. with Léon). He knows about her infidelity. He knows, and he forgives. He has benefited from what Stam calls ‘a kind of patriarchal upgrading’.17 Blame and responsibility can now be duly apportioned: Charles has been as caring, loving, and tolerant as it is possible to be; Emma has betrayed him and their child, and she receives the punishment which is due to her. The final shot of Charles’s story shows him riding back to Tostes with his daughter in his arms, holding her in a tender, protective embrace. They are damaged – ‘ruined’ even, as the voice-over informs us – by Emma’s wanton behaviour, but a man’s love for his unfaithful wife, and a father’s love for his daughter, survive.



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This moralistic account of the work may nevertheless miss its real interest. The film follows the outline of Flaubert’s novel fairly loosely, using the skeleton of the plot without any sense of being bound to specific aspects of action or characterization. Whereas Chabrol fetishizes fidelity, Minnelli does not worry about it in the least. At the same time, however, his film is a profound reflection on Flaubert’s novel, and in particular on its ethics. This is made clear through what is perhaps the most striking aspect of the film – that is, its introduction of Gustave Flaubert as a character and narrator. After the publication of Madame Bovary in serial form in 1856, Flaubert was put on trial for outrages against public and religious morality. Minnelli’s film is framed by a fictional version of the trial. The film opens with Flaubert (played by James Mason) listening to the prosecutor’s concluding remarks and then undertaking a defence of his novel (Figure 3.3). At the end of the film, after Emma’s death and the final shot of Charles holding his daughter, we return to the trial. As Flaubert concludes his defence, an intertitle appears on screen to inform us that Flaubert was acquitted and that his novel lives forever, ‘like truth itself’. ‘Flaubert’, here, is as much of a fictional character as Emma and Charles. The historical author of Madame Bovary did not actually speak at the trial. The important point, though, is that this framing device raises the issue of the morality of Emma’s story, and of the novel and the films which portray

Figure 3.3  Flaubert (James Mason) before the court in Madame Bovary (1949)

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it. Minnelli’s Madame Bovary begins with the words of the prosecutor who accuses Flaubert of failing, in his novel, to blame Madame Bovary or to find her guilty of her crimes. In his response, Flaubert insists that the novel promotes forgiveness and understanding. These are, he insists, religious and moral principles: forgiveness is, he says, ‘among the moral sentiments’, and if his novel depicts vice, it is ‘for the sake of understanding it, so that we can preserve the virtuous’. When the trial is brought back on screen at the end of the film, Flaubert reiterates these points: his book promotes truth not immorality, and it is blasphemous to maintain that men have power over truth. Flaubert argues that the depiction of immorality is not itself immoral. Emma’s actions are not to be condoned, but she is not a monster: she is a product of her upbringing and society, and understanding her serves the purposes of both morality and religion. The powerful resonance of this framing device comes from its implicit but unmistakable reference to the so-called Hays Code, properly known as the Motion Picture Production Code, which set guidelines for the production of films in the United States from the 1930s until the 1960s. The Code recognized that, if films could be agents of moral improvement, they could also be morally corrupting when not properly regulated. It therefore established standards for what could and could not be shown: religion must not be mocked, for example, and the sanctity of marriage must be upheld.18 With a vociferous anti-clerical character in Homais, a blinkered, idiotic priest in Bournisien, and an adulterous woman at its centre, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary would hardly seem ripe for a Hollywood treatment in the 1940s. Minnelli’s film was inevitably shaped by what he could and could not portray. The scene early in Emma and Charles’s courtship where Emma extends her tongue to lick the final drops of liqueur in her glass is depicted by both Renoir and Chabrol, hinting at Emma’s as yet unrealized sexual appetites. But the episode was judged to be too suggestive for Minnelli’s film, and hence it does not appear.19 Even so, by showing Emma as a vivacious, attractive woman frustrated by her limited options in a tawdry world, the film risks condoning her infidelity. The only outright condemnation of her comes from the loathsome Lheureux who puts profit before all else, and who thereby plays an important part in Emma’s downfall. By framing Emma’s story with scenes from Flaubert’s trial, Minnelli’s film launches a robust defence of its own morality. The closing intertitle, which proclaims Flaubert’s acquittal to be ‘a triumphant moment in the history of the free mind’, urges us to see the film in the same light. As Donaldson-Evans puts it, ‘Minnelli thus cleverly shamed the censors into giving their stamp of approval, for who would want to be associated with the losing prosecution team? Who, in the name of a loosely defined “morality,” would want to suppress the truth?’20 The framing trial instructs us how to read Minnelli’s film. Whether or not it can decisively inflect our understanding of the work is another matter. Is the film really a beacon of religious and moral probity? Minnelli’s film can be criticized for excising the radical ambiguities of Flaubert’s novel, for



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making Charles a much more attractive character and less deserving of his treatment by Emma and thereby for endorsing an oppressive patriarchal frame, for creating an Emma who is ‘more neurotic than sexy’,21 and as a result of all these factors for taking a more clearly critical, simplistic position on adultery. These may have been the necessary conditions for making the film in Hollywood in the 1940s. Even so, differing responses to the film suggest that viewers’ sympathies and judgements are not so easily controlled, and the film’s moral lesson may not be so neatly circumscribed.22 And the introduction of the trial plays a crucial role in the meaning of this film. It establishes a direct parallel between the censorship faced by Flaubert in 1857 and the censorship faced by Hollywood filmmakers in the 1940s. In making this parallel, the film calls for a defence of art and its often-ambiguous morality, and its right to freedom of expression in face of forces attempting to curtail it.

Conclusion In adaptation studies, fidelity to the source text is now rarely used as a criterion for judging the success of a film. We should now be ‘beyond “fidelity”’, as Stam puts it.23 Stam goes on to insist that, ‘just as any literary text can generate an infinity of readings, so any novel can generate any number of adaptations’.24 Madame Bovary demonstrates this better than almost anything. In this context, Chabrol’s claim to be absolutely faithful to Flaubert’s novel seems surprising, even quaint and outdated. The three films discussed here all have quite different relations to their source. Chabrol’s ultra-faithful version depends heavily on the novel, but does not require knowledge of it to make sense on its own terms; Renoir’s film, at least in the version that has come down to us, appears to assume that we are familiar with Flaubert’s novel, otherwise it would quickly become incoherent; and Minnelli’s film refers to Flaubert’s work, but takes the greatest liberties with it. Most importantly, each of the films constitutes a sustained reflection on what it means to adapt a novel into the medium of film. Crucially, each of them implicitly acknowledges a central question of film adaptation: what is it that the filmmaker should attempt to emulate, the story or its textual and aesthetic complexity? The theme of adultery perfectly encapsulates this issue. Adultery is a form of transgression which takes place within established codes and frameworks and pushes against them without entirely overturning them. This tension between respecting and breaking frames summarizes Flaubert’s relation to his readers, and the filmmakers’ relation to his novel as they translate it into a different medium. Renoir, Minnelli, and Chabrol represent three forms of fidelity and infidelity. The achievements of each of them are bought at the price of a necessary departure from their source. Madame Bovary has been filmed so many times because it is a radically indecisive, open work. It contains, holds together, innumerable possibilities without resolving them into the stable moral message that the upholders of

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the Hays Code would have wanted. It offers itself for adaptation whilst also withdrawing from it, always withholding something, requiring ever more versions because none is quite satisfactory. The novel anticipates this essential elusiveness of the desired object when it depicts Charles’s attempt to cling onto the memory of Emma after her death: ‘Une chose étrange, c’est que Bovary, tout en pensant à Emma continuellement, l’oubliait; et il se désespérait à sentir cette image lui échapper de la mémoire au milieu des efforts qu’il faisait pour la retenir’ (Flaubert 1972: 406). (‘It was peculiar that Bovary, though he thought continually of Emma, began to forget her face; and he was in despair as he felt the image slipping from his memory no matter what he did to keep hold of it’ (Flaubert 2003: 323).). As quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, the passage goes on to describe how Emma falls to dust when Charles tries to embrace her in his dreams. Emma Bovary, like the novel in which she appears, cannot be held fast. She is forgotten as she is recalled, she vanishes as she is approached. This beautifully summarizes the novel’s relation to its adapters. What Flaubert’s novel knows about film is that even the most loving and faithful adaptation misses the source. Adaptation is a practice of adultery. The novel predicts this, allows it, and perhaps even forgives it.

Notes 1 In this chapter, quotations of the novel are from Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, Livre de Poche, 1972). For translation I have used the translation by Geoffrey Wall, Madame Bovary (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Because of the frequency, they occur parenthetically within the chapter. Translations from other French sources, however, are my own. 2 See Mary Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), p. 16, which refers to screen adaptations made between 1932 and 2000. More recent additions include Madame B (2013), directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Gemma Bovery (2014), directed by Anne Fontaine and based on Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel. This chapter refers to Donaldson-Evans’s rigorous Madame Bovary at the Movies on a number of occasions. I should say from the outset that Donaldson-Evans’s book is by far the most thorough study of the topic of screen adaptations of Madame Bovary, and its influence on the current chapter is pervasive. 3 Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 92. 4 Culler, Flaubert, p. 92. 5 In this selection of films, I follow three out of the four choices made by Mary Donaldson-Evans (Madame Bovary at the Movies, pp. 16–17), for essentially the same reasons: general availability and my own language competence. Robert Stam also examines the same three films in Literature Through Film, Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 144–90. 6 This comment of Chabrol’s is quoted to him in his long conversation with the Flaubert scholar Pierre-Marc de Biasi; see Claude Chabrol, ‘Un scénario sous



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influence’, interview with Pierre-Marc de Biasi, in Autour d’Emma (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 23. Chabrol warns Biasi that he shouldn’t believe everything he has read (‘Un scénario sous influence’, p. 24). He nevertheless repeatedly defends his fidelity to Flaubert’s text even on points where he omits or cuts aspects of it; see, for example, ‘Un scénario sous influence’, p. 38: ‘[Je] voulais rester au plus près du texte de Flaubert, ne rien ajouter à ce que contenait vraiment le texte, et surtout ne pas remplacer les significations du roman par des interprétations particulières, forcément partielles et partiales. Mon parti pris a été de respecter au maximum les données.’ (I wanted to remain as close as possible to Flaubert’s text, to add nothing to what the text really contained, and most of all not to replace the meanings of the novel by particular interpretations which would be necessarily partial and biased. My resolution has been to respect what is given.) 7 Chabrol, ‘Un scénario sous influence’, p. 106. 8 See Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies, pp. 107–9. 9 Chabrol discusses this alteration in ‘Un scénario sous influence’, p. 33. He explains that he wanted to retain the well-known quotation even though he did not depict what happened to Charles after Emma’s death. He was, he says, ‘assez content’ (quite happy) with the means he found of including the passage ‘très naturellement’ (in a very natural way) in his film. 10 As I shall explain later, the version of Renoir’s film which is now available has been severely cut, and it is not known precisely what was in the longer version. 11 Jean Renoir, Entretiens et propos (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1979), p. 144. 12 Christopher Faulkner, Jean Renoir (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), pp. 65, 68. 13 Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 143–4. 14 Sesonske, Jean Renoir, p. 164. 15 Donaldson-Evans compares one of Emma’s dresses to those worn by Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and notes that the two films had the same costume designer; see Madame Bovary at the Movies, p. 80. See also Cheryl Krueger, ‘Being Madame Bovary’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 31.3 (2003): 167. 16 Donaldson-Evans observes that the producer David Selznick, to whom Jennifer Jones was under contract and whom she married in 1949, thought Van Heflin to be too handsome for the part; see Madame Bovary at the Movies, p. 73. Minnelli refers to this in I Remember it Well (London: Angus & Robertson, 1975), p. 205. 17 Stam, Literature Through Film, p. 174. 18 For an invaluable discussion of Minnelli’s film in the context of the Madame Bovary trial and the Motion Picture Production Code, see Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Lolita’ (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 17–46. See also Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies, pp. 71–2. Minnelli discusses the problems with getting the script approved in I Remember it Well, pp. 201–4. 19 Krueger reports this in ‘Being Madame Bovary’, p. 167, referring to Minnelli’s I Remember it Well, p. 204. 20 Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies, p. 84. 21 Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake, p. 41. 22 Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies, p. 97. 23 Stam, Literature Through Film, p. 3. 24 Stam, Literature Through Film, p. 4.

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For the first time on screen together: Madame Bovary and Les Misérables in 1934 Dudley Andrew

In the winter of 1934 two highly anticipated titles premiered just weeks apart on Paris screens: Jean Renoir’s Madame Bovary (13 January) and Raymond Bernard’s Les Misérables (3 February). Evidently they were so different in style and tone that virtually no one remarked on this coincidence at the time. But from what did that difference stem? The styles of the directors or of the books they took on? My brief is to use these adaptations to examine style and tone, turning this actual coincidence into a potential encounter. Nothing like an encounter had occurred seventy years earlier, when the novels came out in close succession (1857 and 1862). Madame Bovary was Gustave Flaubert’s first published book, made famous thanks to the scandalous trial it immediately underwent. Detailing the sordid affairs of a mediocre bourgeois woman suffocating in a provincial area that neither she nor the novel ever leaves, its celebrity seems its only point of contact with Les Misérables, the most lionized book of the century by the nation’s most famous writer. Victor Hugo – poet, playwright, novelist, political commentator – was working at the height of his powers and influence. Unlike the constricted geography of Madame Bovary, Les Misérables sweeps across France from south to north and involves all social classes in an exhilarating cry for liberation and justice written in a tone that makes these seem within reach. For the record, Flaubert, with his cultivated and discriminating aesthetic judgement, found Les Misérables overblown and false, an ingratiating spectacle without depth, whereas Hugo recognized the importance of Madame Bovary and congratulated its author when he received a copy Flaubert sent him. Still, Hugo was surely too busy to pay it much attention, too involved, even though in exile, in completing, then rolling out his blockbuster as well as in working for the social causes Les Misérables abetted. He surely didn’t think of Flaubert as a rival. Their books seemed to be different species – except to the booksellers, who stocked plenty of copies of both. And yet the intervening decades changed those novels into titles which stood out and stood together, lifted from history and into the core canon



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of French literature, where both are still listed as among the ten or even half-dozen greatest masterpieces in the language. As such, and as different as they may be, they have had a place beside each other in all good French homes; students the country over have read, discussed, and been examined on them. And so when sound film had definitively saturated the country in the early 1930s, these novels imposed themselves as ripe for adaptation. At a moment when Hollywood was running roughshod over a particularly weak French industry, Jean Valjean and Emma Bovary appeared as heroes, and not just of their respective novels. What could be more appealing to a national audience than hearing exalted actors speak the language of Hugo or Flaubert and on actual French landscapes? To their presumably sure-fire domestic reception could be added educated viewers everywhere on the planet, ensuring sizeable export potential for French classics everyone had heard of.1 That their titles alone could guarantee an audience had already been proven by Albert Capellani’s Les Misérables of 1913 and Henri Fescourt’s of 1925, both immense successes. Raymond Bernard and Jean Renoir may have had thoughts about the political economy of French cinema at the coming of sound and even about the political philosophies critics had extracted from the books they were adapting, but they couldn’t have foreseen the actual political hurricane wrecking Paris just as their films were born. Renoir’s film opened four days after the Russian-born French financier and embezzler Alexandre Stavisky had been pursued by the police into the Alps where he allegedly killed himself, precipitating a full-scale governmental scandal followed by demonstrations that culminated in the 6 February riots, the deadliest the Third Republic endured in its sixty-year rule. Renoir later attributed the commercial failure of his adaptation to such bad timing. ‘People had other things on their minds,’ he said, ‘and the theater should have been closed down.’2 But Georges Wakhévitch, the set designer, disagrees. He maintains that Madame Bovary should have been released in the director’s cut he had been privileged to see, and in two parts shown in two different theatres, just as would happen a dozen years later for the initial run of Les Enfants du Paradis.3 In their comments Renoir and Wakhévitch both conveniently neglect their rival, Les Misérables, which opened the very week of the Stavisky riots to an enormous audience and did so in three first-run theatres, each showing a different part. In short, Les Misérables found itself absolutely timely. In Mists of Regret, I recount the astounding conjunction of the film’s premiere and the violent confrontations around the city.4 The first audience was reported to have cheered the film’s final section in which students a century earlier erected barricades against a corrupt government. Meanwhile outside the movie theatre, blood would soon be flowing on some of those same streets once more. Tellingly, the 11 February issue of the weekly magazine Pour Vous featured seven pages of graphic photographs of the violent events, followed by four pages devoted to Les Misérables. Robert de Beauplan, the magazine’s chief editor, covered the riots himself, and he wrote the enthusiastic

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review as well, as though the spectacle of the film and that of politics belonged to the same world and should comment on each other. Aside from the ball and the scene at the opera, there is little spectacle, political or otherwise, in Madame Bovary, yet its producer, the publishing magnate Gaston Gallimard, had every right to anticipate its success. Robert Aron, Gallimard’s brilliant assistant and the film’s admittedly inexperienced production supervisor, always fumed over the failure of Madame Bovary, placing the cause in the cuts demanded by small-minded exhibitors. The fact is that while Gallimard had significant funds available for its production, he had no distribution office; nor did he command a single theatre. Even if the great man had not lost interest in what was for him something of a diversion, it would have been difficult to release Renoir’s alleged full cut in two parts. Pathé, on the other hand, owned the most important movie houses in Paris and in France’s other cities, and so could orchestrate the simultaneous release of the three parts of Les Misérables, making it possible for spectators to experience all five hours, start to finish, in a single day, though at the cost of three tickets. The extraordinary conditions of the appearance of these outsized adaptations on screens in a Paris being rocked by political turmoil do not fully account for their reception nor for their place in cultural memory. Raymond Bernard’s film was a hit and is generally thought the most solid of all the adaptations of Hugo’s novel. Renoir’s film didn’t recover from its disastrous opening weeks and is appreciated by only some of the director’s many admirers. It doesn’t project the emotion and contagious spirit of so many of his works, including ostensibly minor ones. It’s as if the sluggish Charles Bovary (played by Renoir’s brother, Pierre, to a tee) had sapped the film’s energy. Scorning embellishments, Renoir’s cool, often ironic tone feels closer to Flaubert’s than to what is found in standard cinema. The score, composed by Darius Milhaud, is elegant but restrained and modestly orchestrated. Les Misérables, on the other hand, brandishes its embellishments and inflates its melodramatic scenes with canted angles, expressive lighting, dramatic compositions, and overbrimming musical accompaniment. The renowned stage actors Charles Dullin and Marguerite Moreno (playing the Thénardier couple) contort their faces till these express their twisted souls, as they maliciously torment the vulnerable waif Cosette. Bernard permits himself every angle in order to heighten suspense, as in the scene toward the end of Part Two when Jean Valjean is lured to the Thénardiers’ where a gang intends to rob him. The confrontation becomes violent and is overheard by Epinone and Marius in the room next door, and is watched from outside the house by Javert and his police and by Gavroche perched in a tree. Bernard shows himself a disciple of Griffith not just in the way he cuts this scene for maximum drama, but, as Geneviève Sellier has noted, in the alternating montage that structures both the large units of this massive tale and many of the individual sequences that comprise it. Languorous establishing landscape shots of great beauty (Valjean as a vagabond, for instance) can



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quickly be brought to heel in the shot-counter-shot rendering of confrontations, as when the young boy confronts this vagabond for stealing his coin. Again like Griffith, Bernard uses cutaways (to the coin under Valjean’s boot) or close-up reaction shots (of the boy and then of Valjean, ashamed and starting to weep) to wring maximum drama from this and all scenes (Figures 4.1–4.5). Bernard is ‘un directeur à l’américain’5 and, like the best large-scale American movies, his Les Misérables held its audience thanks to its completely legible moral design and an effective architecture of emotion that at strong moments spills into Arthur Honegger’s score. At once absorbing and uplifting, entertaining yet high-minded, Bernard’s version stands in a direct line leading from Victor Hugo’s incomparable novel straight to Les Mis. That no silent version of Madame Bovary had been ventured already says something about this novel’s difference from Hugo’s. For Les Misérables, a melodramatic spectacle of tremendous amplitude, had been illustrated and staged from the first year it was published, and then a great many times thereafter. Hugo, together with his brother, managed what was effectively a franchise; moreover, true to his humanitarian ideals, the magnanimous author often gave away his theatrical rights so that the work he had produced could uplift spirits everywhere and without restraint.

Figures 4.1–4.5  Use of Griffith techniques of cutaways and close-up in Les Misérables (1934). 4.1. Boy tossing coin

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Figures 4.1–4.5 (Continued)  4.2. Cutaway – Valjean (Harry Baur) about to cover coin with his boot (unconsciously). 4.3. Close-up reaction shot – boy pleads for the return of his coin



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Figures 4.1–4.5 (Continued)  4.4 Cutaway – Valjean realizes coin is under his boot. 4.5 Close-up – In despair, a tearful Valjean fails to return the coin

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Everywhere indeed! Hugo didn’t know that a mere dozen years after his death, and two years after its invention, the Lumière cinematograph would introduce him ‘on screen’ in Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des misérables (1897). In The Novel of the Century, David Bellos claims this to be the very first time literature came to the aid of cinema, the first adaptation, even if it consisted only of a quick-change artist rapidly transforming himself into a series of roles written by Hugo.6 So, this brief clip was little more than a curtain call, but a dozen years thence, when film exhibition began to stabilize with the nickelodeon, both major American production companies, Edison and Vitagraph, put out Les Misérables in competing serials of four reels each.7 Edison’s we know were exhibited three weeks apart in auturmn 1909. It’s not clear if they or Vitagraph ever bundled the reels for a single screening. It would have lasted just over an hour. Longer forms were soon in coming; Capellani’s four-and-a-half-hour version would be followed by at least twenty-five other full-length adaptations, counting five Japanese, five South Asian, and three Brazilian, beyond those in French and English. Nor does this include television, radio, animation, games, and – by far most important and plentiful – plays. Plays – staged versions – were paramount to what was in effect a Les Misérables franchise. Those 1909 films, for example, were said to mimic a highly successful vaudeville sketch, ‘The Bishop’s Candlesticks’, written in 1901 and on stage in 19098 when the rival film versions were surely rushing to capitalize on it as well as on a wave of interest indicated by three separate theatrical productions of the novel in 1906. The number and variety of its dramatic renditions point to Les Misérables’s essential difference from Madame Bovary. For up to the moment of our concern, 1933, there had been but two attempts to bring Flaubert’s work to the stage. The first presented itself in 1890, exactly a decade after the author’s death, the legal limit of automatic copyright in France at the time.9 But Flaubert’s executors (his dutiful niece Caroline and her husband) successfully fought the adaptation because the play script in question was so patently impoverished, it would have demeaned the author’s reputation and harmed sales of his original. They called upon ‘le droit moral’ provision that has existed in France since 1793. Then In 1905 William Busnach, a prolific impresario with a string of adaptations from novels to his credit, accepted the challenge of his doctor to stage Madame Bovary, which he dissected into seven key scenes. Hearing of this project, major literary figures such as Huysmans, Henry Bataille, and especially the novelist Lucien Descaves, strenuously objected. The critics would prevail by poisoning the marketplace, as no theatre in Paris would take on the finished work (André Antoine, by far France’s most influential producer – famous for his realism to boot – categorically refused). Busnach, however, came to an agreement with a theatre in Rouen where it played briefly. It never travelled beyond Flaubert’s native city. This surely would have pleased Flaubert, since he had consistently forbidden derivatives of his exquisitely verbal artefact. He never allowed any edition to feature illustrations of Emma, Charles, Rodolphe, Léon, and Humeau,



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for these were his verbal creatures alone. No flesh-and-blood actors should incarnate what were, in his view (and that of his legions of admirers), entirely literary figures. The first memorable (i.e., highly reviewed) stage version had to wait until 1936, two years after Renoir’s film had paved the way. One of the giants of French theatre, Gaston Baty, delved inside the heroine in twenty scenes. Baty lifted Emma’s romantic aspirations above the realist details with which Flaubert had tied her down; he deployed lighting, music, and a chorus of women who moved behind gauze while they spoke – and sometimes chanted – to Emma.10 Since then, directors and actresses have occasionally ventured other such experiments, particularly in recent years. But the point is clear. Flaubert’s rigour and authority have intimidated adaptors. So too has the novel’s style. The opposite of a melodrama, Madame Bovary’s paltry plot, its aversion to ‘animation’, thwarts any kind of flow other than the verbal flow that on stage only a straight oral reading might be able to supply. More than copyright protection, it was Flaubert’s language – this novel made of nothing but words – that kept the silent cinema from exploiting the name of its heroine. But with the coming of sound, when no one yet knew what the talkies might be able to handle, the temptation was there.11 Gaston Gallimard, flirting with the cinema, and more than flirting with Valentine Tessier, a famous stage actress who coveted such a film role, took a chance on a new avenue for literary experience when Flaubert’s publisher offered him the novel at the outset of 1933.12 While always constituting the basis for a high proportion of fiction, adaptations had immediately filled up the production schedules of studios in Paris once sound established itself in 1930 and 1931. But dramatic works, not novels, were raided first, since play scripts could effectively be considered scenarios; they were already broken down into convenient scenes of about the proper length; they presumably contained well-written dialogue; and they had been conceived to take place on a stage. This last point was crucial because it greatly reduced the technical and logistical issues that attended shooting outdoors, given the size (and weight) of blimped cameras, as well as the placement or hiding of microphones that in any case had extremely limited range and directionality. During the silent era, many French masterpieces had thrived on location shots, but these were now terribly cumbersome to bring off and always courted the risk of random noise intrusion, particularly before looping and mixing technologies became common. The journals and newspapers were full of debates over the new dominance of ‘filmed theatre’; the majority of intellectuals were certain that the art of cinema had been set back a decade and at just the moment when its achievements in narration, lighting, and camera movement had made silent movies such as Sunrise, Napoleon, Lonesome, and The Passion of Joan of Arc a mature and beguiling young sibling of the established arts. Naturally there had also been quite a few novels adapted in the first years of sound. André Gide understood the attraction for novelists when, right after he heard about The Jazz Singer, he thought of forming a production

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company with his friend Roger Martin du Gard, to bring his famous La Symphonie pastorale to the screen.13 But he soon realized that the logistics of shooting with sound made this completely impractical even for his récit, since this Alpine tale depended on an outdoor setting. And so no one in France could imagine attempting something on the scale of a major nineteenthcentury literary masterwork until 1933. By then equipment had improved, as had crews, and, most important, actors. It took a few years for the stentorian thespians who had immediately crowded onto newly outfitted sound stages to learn to dial back their deliveries and to direct their voices in such a way as to be picked up by the microphone while seeming to address not the audience in front of the screen – i.e. the camera – but their interlocutors with them on the set, the camera being an unseen witness. The French would incubate several masters of this muted acting technique over the decade. Jean Gabin developed into the most important of these by far, but even such stout tyrants of the theatre as Gabriel Gabrio, Pierre Alcover, Pierre Renoir, Harry Bauer, and to some extent Raimu learned to restrain their histrionic gestures and vocal dynamics, permitting strong directors to orchestrate homogeneous pictorial and sonic tones in the style we now call poetic realism. In Mists of Regret I argued that the mastery of unified effects within an englobing atmosphere (the hallmark of this style) owed much to the adaptation of short novels, récits. Among the first of these in the sound era were the policiers penned by Georges Simenon. And so it means a great deal that the stars of the films under examination here, Pierre Renoir and Harry Bauer, had both prepared themselves for the challenging roles of Charles Bovary and Jean Valjean by playing Inspector Maigret (the first in Jean Renoir’s 1932 La Nuit du carrefour, the second in Duvivier’s 1933 La Tête d’un homme). These modest, moody films featured an intimacy of performance and locution that lured the spectator to enter the screen and the story. And so, even when Hugo and Flaubert, not Simenon, were at stake, both of these actors approached their roles with quiet and effective obliquity. They pulled the audience in. The terms of comparison, then, involve not just novel and film, but theatre as well. And here the multi-art and illustrious backgrounds of the two directors made them obvious choices to direct these projects. Raymond Bernard was the son of one of Paris’s most prominent playwrights, Tristan Bernard, and so grew up in and around the theatre. Indeed, his career was set in motion when as a youth he was given a starring role opposite none other than Sarah Bernhardt in his father’s hit, Jean Doré, first on stage in 1913, then in the 1915 film version.14 As assistant to the young Jacques Feyder and then on his own, he directed adaptations of his father’s plays and short novels, before teaming up with novelist Henry Dupuis-Mazuel, whose well-funded company Societé des Films Historiques, bankrolled two grand historical frescoes: The Miracle of the Wolves and The Chess Player. Incidentally, Dupuis-Mazuel next approached Jean Renoir with another



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epic, La Tournoi, probably because Renoir had already made a period piece, Nana, adapted from Zola. Coming into the sound era, both our directors must have felt prepared at least for the scale of the large nineteenth-century novels that were presented to them in 1933. Bernard’s position was superior. He was just coming off a huge success (second place in the Pour Vous poll of 193215) with Les Croix du bois, taken from the great World War I pacifist novel by Raymond Dorgulès; this prestige production from France’s largest studio, Pathé Natan, premiered with the president of the Republic in attendance.16 Its critical and box-office triumph tempted Pathé to put its unmatched financial and technical resources behind Bernard for the first sound version of France’s biggest novel. Renoir, who was born two years after Bernard (and would die two years after him as well) could boast an even more famous father. His autobiography dwells touchingly on an inaugural moment, when his nurse Gabrielle took him to the puppet theatre at the Tuileries Garden. A fascination with theatre developed that is plainly visible in many of his films. His older brother Pierre entered the conservatory of drama when Jean was just twelve and within three years was a member of the Odeon troupe led by André Antoine. In a single decade Pierre had worked both with the lions of the popular boulevard theatre and with the rigorous Louis Jouvet who would be his lifelong friend and associate at L’Athénée where, among dozens of plays, they staged Jean Giraudoux season upon season. One can only imagine the discussions about text and mise-en-scène, about acting, and about direction that took place between the Renoir brothers and among their mutual friends, including prominent authors. Pierre was frequently paired at L’Athénée with the actress who became his mistress, Valentine Tessier. Indeed, it was when this couple amicably split up that Gaston Gallimard became intimate with Tessier, whom he had known for many years. And it was, by most accounts, in large part to please her that he founded the SFC, a film production company, adjacent to his publishing house.17 Although he had been great friends with Renoir’s father, Gallimard did not immediately pick Jean Renoir to direct Madame Bovary; it was to have been Jacques Feyder, just back from working with Greta Garbo in Hollywood. Feyder, however, claimed he couldn’t imagine the forty-two-year old Tessier in the title role (perhaps wanting that to go to his wife, Françoise Rosay, though she was about the same age).18 In choosing Renoir, Gallimard lost the services of one of his most trusted novelists, Roger Martin du Gard, who had allied himself with Feyder. Martin du Gard, soon to win the Nobel Prize, had been dallying with cinema ever since the arrival of sound, egged on by his closest friend, André Gide. His two major screenwriting projects, Madame Bovary and La Bête humaine, were both ultimately consigned to Renoir, who swept away all prior conceptions so he could start from scratch on the adaptations. Renoir may have worried that the kind of adaptation Martin du Gard was at work on would ‘novelize’ what was already France’s purest novel.

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This is definitely the case in the latter’s La Bête humaine script, drafted around the same time. Martin du Gard updates Zola’s book to World War I and jumps about in space and time, using various cinematic transitions to build a narrative arc. Counter-intuitively, Renoir approached Madame Bovary from a theatrical angle, treating it as a suite of scenes whose every snippet of dialogue is crucial. As it turned out, most critics and historians believe that its commercial and critical failure can be attributed to the lack of dramatic momentum this produced. Renoir seemed to treat all scenes as if they were equivalent in status, providing few cues to jolt the audience as to how and what to feel. Flaubert’s dialogue is used, but not his descriptive or ‘free indirect’ prose.19 Only the music provides the sense that a narrating consciousness is evaluating and delivering Emma’s experiences. It has been suggested that the careful framing comes from Emma’s own sense of her world, not from Renoir/Flaubert placing her in revealing compositions. She’s the one who paints pictures, who daydreams while looking longingly out of windows, who shuts herself in her room, closing the door, who hesitates in the foyer before running upstairs or out of the door. Renoir lets her frame herself, in a version of free indirect discourse.20 My point is not that Renoir turned the novel into a play, but that his belief in the power of theatre, evident in the theatrical dimension of his first sound films, kept him from and orchestrating the action – overseeing it – as Bernard did for Les Misérables. Bernard was right to do so, since Victor Hugo took full advantage of authorial omniscience to sew incidents and characters far and wide into a moral pattern on which he expansively commented for scores of pages. Flaubert, we know, worked to disappear within his novel, letting the world – Emma’s world – represent itself, so to speak. Renoir aimed for something close to this. The drama of Emma Bovary is one she herself played out on the provincial stage of Normandy, in its small town, the countryside around it, and Rouen. Renoir was primed to allow her to put the spectator into that world. His earliest films, On Purge Bébé, Boudu sauvé des eaux, and Chotard & Cie come directly from plays, while the novel, La Chienne, had been an experimental effort that eschewed description and narration altogether. Composed entirely of dialogue, La Chienne looks on the page like a play script. Indeed, Renoir’s former collaborator, Dupuis-Mazuel, had adapted it for the stage (a seemingly simple task). Renoir skipped seeing the play but was clearly intrigued by the original’s theatricality, signalling this by adding a famous prologue consisting of puppets over which the photographs of the principle players are superimposed. La Chienne’s subject (the artistic and romantic pretentions of a bourgeois trapped in a confining marriage) probably made him confident that he could deliver a direct and realist Madame Bovary. And he planned to extend La Chienne’s stylistic discoveries, using the resources of a much higher budget. These discoveries include location sound, scenes played out at length while captured by a mobile camera, and a deep perspective that keeps the wider physical and social world in view. Renoir doesn’t pursue an intrigue as in standard



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cinema; as if directing a play, he gives actors leeway and time to interact and move about in a world that exists around, and outlasts, them. This is not a bad way to approach Flaubert. Renoir envied people of the theatre; he was hungry for its sociability and for the dramas not just of plays but of the performances of plays. In performance one must rise to the occasion of the moment, expose a work, and oneself, live before one’s colleagues and a public. True, in his very first films, Catherine and La Fille de l’eau, he expended himself on remarkable ‘cinematic’ feats (the montage and subjective sequences of the former, the double exposures and dream sequences of the latter). He seemed to need to prove his mastery of a technological medium, but he ‘consider[ed] Nana his first film worth talking about’.21 And Nana, adapted, like Madame Bovary, from a substantial and renowned nineteenth-century novel, focused all its efforts the interplay of actors performing on carefully chosen and constructed sets. Its only notable technical innovation consisted of a modified dolly that allowed for sustained mobile follow-shots without tracks being laid down. It was in short ‘theatrical’, and it sustained criticism for exactly this. All his biographers underline the importance Renoir placed on forming an ‘équipe’, something like a theatrical company. He wanted to gather a consistent and trusted group of assistants, crew and actors who would travel with him, film to film. Actors are less easy to keep in the fold, both because the famous ones are in demand elsewhere and because producers won’t always accept those in the troupe for a given role or on a given project. Still, more than most directors, Renoir recruited a set of players who did frequently return to his new projects. And he strove to foster an atmosphere of creative conspiracy during his productions, as if the ‘family’ of the film should remain intact as families are meant to do. When it came to shooting Madame Bovary, Renoir was enthusiastic to create ‘an atmosphere of great conviviality on location in Rouen and Lyons-la-forêt and the producer spent a great deal of money on all the appurtenances of production’.22 To the familiar helpers (his mistress Marguerite, his nephew Claude, and the indispensable assistants Jacques Becker and Karl Koch) he added people from the theatre who had begun dipping into film roles now and again, including besides his brother, Max Dearly, Fernand Fabre, and Robert le Vigan. And of course Valentine Tessier brought her panache, as did Gaston Gallimard who, avidly watching each day’s work, paid for the long evening meals where bourgeois values and witty cynicism co-existed, much as they do in Flaubert.23 And the acting is remarkable, particularly Pierre Renoir, through whose exacting discipline Charles appears a hesitant dullard, lacking style, and not understanding what he’s missing. Portraying men of the world – seducers or salesmen of one sort or another – Robert le Vigan, Fernand Fabre, and Max Dearly play up to Tessier’s Emma in the film, as they would have on stage or in real life. Thus, paradoxically a most famous novelist provided Renoir with ‘the great reason for this film … it was an experiment with people from the

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theatre … I was very happy to write a screenplay for these actors, with dialogue that I thought ought to be well spoken by people from the theatre.’24 But Renoir’s brand of theatre, as I pointed out in Mists of Regret,25 was nothing like that of the boulevard theatre full of sprightly dialogue and sudden twists of fate. Chotard & Cie might have gone in that direction but not Madame Bovary. The dialogue Flaubert’s characters emit is deadly, in all senses of the term, and the gradual dramatic progression he plots leads inevitably to a bitter conclusion. You can see Renoir trace this line in his transitional scenes. Twice the silhouette of a diligence on the high road carries Emma from Rouen back to Yonneville (as Flaubert describes it, ‘la voiture roulait … et la route, entre ses deux longs fossés pleins d’eau jaune, allait continuellement se rétrecissant vers l’horizon’). Also twice the camera retreats down a straight road in the flat countryside, as if from the back of a horse-drawn cart. Darius Milhaud’s doleful woodwind accompany this emblematic and empty shot, measuring the dull time between scenes representing stages of Emma’s declining hopes. I count thirty-five scenes in the extant version; there were originally more, quite a few more. But the vicissitudes of a fickle producer, a weak distributor, and a band of ignorant but powerful exhibitors forced cuts that, Renoir felt, made the shorter version far more ‘monotonous’. It certainly made it uncharacteristically monotone. Renoir, who so often alternates light and dark scenes (and did so in La Chienne, against which Madame Bovary can always be productively compared), this time lays a grey scene next to a charcoal one, next to a very dark one.26 Can one say of Madame Bovary what Bazin said of Le Journal d’un curé de campagne? ‘Forced to throw out a third of his final cut for the exhibitor’s copy, he [Bresson] ended, as we know, by declaring, with a delicate touch of cynicism, that he was delighted to have had to do so. Actually, the only “visual” he really cared about was the blank screen at the finale’.27 Renoir too aimed for an unadorned last scene. He spares us nothing of Emma’s death, not cutting away, but looking intently, as does she, for a revelation that doesn’t come. If we sense that the curé’s soul holds firm, while hers, pleading, rosary in hand, succumbs to the arsenic, we can look beyond differences in their moral strength; we can look to the distinct forms within which these souls have breathed on the screen. As Bazin notes, ‘Bresson’s undertaking is somehow related to the work of Stroheim and Renoir’ in that, through the diary and voice-over, word and image make up ‘the Bressonian dialectic between abstraction and reality thanks to which we are concerned with a single reality – that of human souls’.28 In comparison, Renoir puts Flaubert’s Emma on the successive stages of a life that fails to transcend them. We see and feel for her from the outside, through the frequent doors and windows that frame her in all but the exterior scenes. She has no diary to retreat to, only her bed at the back of an enclosed boudoir, or, later, Rodolphe’s divan, or, later still, the carriage she rides off in with Léon, and the bed at their hotel in Rouen. Unaccompanied by Flaubert’s prose,



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in Renoir’s film she registers too little the nausea brought on by the tawdry and demeaning encounters that she, like the curé of both Bernanos and Bresson, must undergo. Would the inclusion of more scenes have instantiated the dialectic of romantic flight and enervating circumstances that make up Emma Bovary, and the novel of her life and demise? I believe not, since Flaubert’s tone remains famously uniform; rather than alternate scenes composed of bright notes with those in the base clef, so to speak, Flaubert put everything into minor key. Renoir’s most memorable scenes – the ones most commented upon – likewise internalize this dialectic. In the film’s most expensive scene, the camera descends into the formal ball. As the episode reaches its conclusion Emma swirls radiantly with the aristocratic partner who has asked her to dance, while behind them, doubled by a mirror, stands Charles looking on and looking uncomfortably alone. He moves, as do the dancers, to another part of the room and, in answer to her partner’s questions, and reminiscent of Peter in the Gospel, she denies that she knows the man, her husband, who appears so abject. A single take renders the dancers in foreground with Charles behind them, staring distractedly at a painting on the wall. He turns and sits as they and the camera move back to the centre of the floor, so that the camera can retreat elegantly above and behind the orchestra as the scene concludes. Eric Rohmer singled out this scene as emblematic of Renoir’s ‘frame within a frame’ technique,29 since symmetrical shots enclose the ball scene and since the mirror and paintings are miniatures of the screen’s rectangular format. Rohmer is reminded of the proscenium of a stage, saying that ‘the characters are acting out a play for themselves that even the pangs of death cannot interrupt’. Leo Braudy goes further by singling out Emma’s attempt to throw herself from the attic in despair after Rodolphe’s letter, hidden in a basket of fruit, has dashed her dreams. ‘The attic window can be an opening to freedom; in terms of theater, it freezes and stylizes … The mockheroic solipsism of Emma Bovary’s emotion is imagistically expressed by the many frames in which we cannot help feeling she purposely places herself.’30 Braudy’s point applies to the entire scene, for Valentine Tessier delivers (as actress and character) a thoroughly theatrical, melodramatic, response in receiving Rodolphe’s letter. Beginning with her throwing up her hands, the next ninety seconds manage to cover four pages of Flaubert’s panting prose, the highpoint of which I reproduce: Elle n’y tenait plus, elle courut dans la sale comme pour y porter les abricots, reversa le panier, arracha les feuilles, trouva la lettre, l’ouvrit, et, comme s’il y avait eu derrière elle un effroyable incendie, Emma se mit à fuir vers sa chamber, tout épouvantée. Charles y était, elle l’apurçut; il lui parla, elle n’entendit rien, et elle continua vivement à monter les marches, haletante, éperdue, ivre, et toujours tenant cette horrible feuille de papier, qui lui claquait dans les doigts comme une plaque de tôle. Au second étage, elle s’arrêta devant la porte du grenier, qui etait fermée … Emma poussa la porte et entra. Les ardoises laissaient,

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tomber d’aplomb une chaleur lourde, qui lui serrait les tempes et l’étouffait; elle se traîna jusqu’à la mansard close, dont elle tira le verrou, et la lumière éblouissante jaillit d’un bond … Le rayon lumineux qui montait d’en bas directement tirait vers l’abîme le poids de son corps. Il lui semblait que le sol de la place oscillant s’élevait de long des murs, et que le plancher s’inclinait par le bout, à la manière d’un vaisseau qui tangue. Elle se tenait tout au bord, presque suspendue, entouée d’un grand espace. Le bleu du ciel l’envahissait, l’air circulait dans sa tête creuse, elle n’avait qu’à ceder, qu’à se laisser prendre.31 (She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting-room as if to take the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found the letter, opened it, and, as if some fire were behind her, Emma flew to her room terrified. Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and ever holding this horrible piece of paper that crackled between her fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped before the attic-door … Emma pushed the door and went in. The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples, stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew back the bolt and the dazzling light burst in with a leap … The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield to let herself be taken.)

In rendering this powerful episode, Renoir himself ‘drew back the bolt to that window’ by cutting from an extreme low angle, where Emma is a dark animal trapped in the attic to a perch outside and high above, her dress now gleaming in the light. As in Flaubert’s description, a repetitive sound below on the street continues like a beat, driving her inner drama, though ignorant of it.32 The vertiginous angle and the shock of light produces almost on its own, Emma’s collapse onto and nearly through the sill, her maid grabbing her at the last moment and bringing her down to dinner. Nothing of Flaubert’s description of the awful dining room scene is missing either. Charles bites into Rodolphe’s succulent apricots and hands Emma one; she stands up when she hears the unmistakable sound of Rodolphe leaving town: ‘tout à coup, un tilbury bleu passa au grand trot sur la place. Emma poussa un cri et tomba roide par terre, à la renverse’. Mercifully – and melodramatically – Emma has fainted away and Renoir can cut to the following act. For the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, curtains and frames define not just plays but paintings. Thus doorways and windows shape the composition of some forty separate shots,33 not including those that were excised, such as one that Flaubert provided seemingly with the director in mind. This is when Emma’s father has arranged to signal to Charles Emma’s consent to his marriage proposal by throwing back the shutters of his upstairs window. Flaubert’s frequent depiction of Emma at windows (which, as critics often



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point out, confine her but invite her romantic imagination to take flight) encouraged the director to use this motif again and again.34 Keeping Renoir’s overall style in mind, I take these windows and doorways to be thresholds that, when traversed, join spaces and link outside and inside. A subtle example occurs just after the Bovarys have married: a twominute shot develops in the salon where Emma stands painting at a drawing pulpit.35 Charles has silently entered and surprises her first by putting a shawl she coveted on her shoulders; then he leads her and the camera to the window which he throws open, revealing across the street the gift of a new horse and buggy. With her little painting in foreground as a matrix, this perfectly framed moment of happiness continues with an indiscernible refocus when the couple slips off-screen, then reappears outside, excited to try out the buggy. As it pulls away, several gawking townspeople are revealed in the furthest plane, another set of windows behind them. Calling for the careful coordination of set design, and camerawork (lighting, focus, and tracking), and occasional location sound, Renoir broke new ground. In order to encapsulate Emma’s Thursdays spent with Léon, he had George Wakhévitch match the studio set with an actual hotel room in Rouen, to enable the camera to track from the little dining table by the lovers’ bed right up to the window whose velour curtains are pulled back to reveal a street down which children follow and harass a blind man who sings in a lugubrious voice of a young girl’s dreams of love. Wakhévitch is proud to have perfectly matched studio and location, so that Rouen’s antique appearance (the walls of the buildings across the way, the old paving stones and rank gutters) could contribute to the song’s nostalgia and colour a scene that proves to be key, since the blind man and his song return in the film’s finale.36 Wakhévitch claims to have shocked his colleagues when he constructed a half-set replica of Charles’s study on location in a garden near Paris. He inserted yellow cellophane instead of glass in the windows to filter the sunlight, and then suspended a cover over the garden to darken it and to hold irrigation pipes to direct torrents of rain onto Charles’s first wife as she took laundry down from the clothes line. The camera tracks forward past Charles’s desk to the window, continuing into the garden where the woman collapses in a wheelbarrow from a heart attack.37 Proud to have achieved the continuity Renoir sought via this portable wall with its window, Wakhévitch would be doubly disappointed to learn that surviving prints delete the interior altogether, leaving only the final moments after the camera has settled into a mid-shot of the dying wife. A great deal besides this was discarded. As already mentioned, the designer recalls the film’s first projection in a private screening, estimating it at four hours, certain ‘a masterpiece had been born’;38 Renoir suggested the length to be over three hours, and producer Robert Aron two-and-a-half. Whatever its actual duration, in order to truncate the film to the 110 minutes demanded by the exhibitors, one can imagine the excision of Renoir’s inquisitive camera

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leading into or exploring the residues of many dramatic moments. With their heads and tails deleted, scenes tend to become static and autonomous, limiting the dramatic current passing from one to the next. This may not have bothered him since he understood Flaubert’s disdain for novels driven by plot and for writing scenes that are meant only to lead to other scenes. Flaubert wanted each scene, no matter how banal, to be beautifully rendered and relished as such.39 He would have approved Renoir when the latter went on record: ‘Personally I prefer the method which consists in conceiving each scene as a little film apart.’40 In this film full of ‘little films apart’, the story of Rodolphe’s seduction of Emma stands out for the way it elaborates the disparity of desire and circumstance for which the novel is famous. It also puts on display that combination of ‘realism and poetry’ that both Wakhévitch and Aron found so special in Renoir and that resonates with what critics have always said about Flaubert.41 The episode begins with its own title: ‘Les Comices agricoles Juillet 1941’. Resorting to alternating shots to echo, even faintly, Flaubert’s symphonically contrapuntal composition, Renoir isolates interiors of the Bovary home with exteriors of the town centre. Rodolphe has just been introduced to the Bovarys and offers to wait till Emma finishes dressing while Charles and Humeau, having staked out places to listen to the officials who have been shown parading, along with prize cows, into the square, tempt the club-footed Hippolyte to submit to an experimental operation. Cutting from the men outside to Rodolphe and Emma inside, Renoir satisfyingly conjoins these spaces in a deep shot of the couple in the living room that shows the fair in progress through a window behind them. A poor woman bent over with age gratefully receives a lifetime achievement award from a pompous official: ‘twenty-five francs for fiftyfour years of service … and she’ll give most of it to the Church,’ Humeau cynically notes. Meanwhile, on a divan Rodolphe coaxes Emma to go riding with him. The actual seduction now finds its fulfilment: Charles operates indoors on Hippolyte’s foot while Emma and Rodolphe are carried by his horses through the forest toward their tryst accompanied by Darius Milhaud’s woodwind and Renoir’s lyrical camera. The contrast between these might be summarized as between a surgical ‘operation’ and a romantic ‘opera’.42 Of equivalent length, these scenes are both delivered in four shots, starting with elaborate tracking movements. In the first, the camera swings around Charles as he finishes sewing up Hippolyte’s leg until we can see townspeople in the background observing the surgery. Some are leaning on a billiard table. They come into focus when the camera continues to pan, as Charles laces a wooden boot on the patient. Renoir had done his homework. Such immobilizers were standard practice, and operations could be public events. The shot gives us time to notice both the orthopaedic apparatus and the silhouettes of three additional townspeople peering through windows beyond those crowding the billiard room.



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Equal care was taken with the forest scene, as Robert Aron, the production supervisor recalls: Jean Renoir is at once fastidious and visionary. He introduces a new detail in any standard general scene. He invents an unexpected perspective for an otherwise flat décor. In such ways he embellishes and perfects the work that he aims to elaborate. Managing with many hands and mixing with many arms [maniant à pleines mains et brassant à pleines bras] the natural elements at his disposal, he sets them in play with one another, until they yield the vibrations that respond to his desires.

For this particular scene, Aron recalls: ‘To deliver the fullest meaning of this important turning point in the novel, it was crucial, according to Jean Renoir, that one sense, the complicity, indeed the approbation of all of nature surrounding the young couple.’43 The scene took days to get right, costing an inordinate amount of lost time and footage, most of it discarded. But the result is beautiful and affecting. The same can be said for the film as a whole. And so Renoir brought his quite original ideas about space in the new era of sound film to a novel he stood in awe of. Rather than guide the audience through a melodrama, he staged the novel’s world – its locations with their appurtenances, its episodes and conversations, its ambience of architecture and sound – and he did so using designers and actors he believed in. Les Misérables is a grand spectacle and a grander achievement of storytelling. The public pays to put itself in the hands of an author who stands behind the world he has constructed and conveys its story and meaning, in the most rhetorically powerful manner. Though standing in line with Griffith (Intolerance) and with Gance (Napoléon), two directors who surely believed themselves to be fulfilling, in a more powerful medium, the grand universal mission that Victor Hugo had given to the novel, Bernard spares us the bombast of preachy intertitles. Yet he accepts the mantle of the orchestra conductor on a podium above all the instruments at his command, overseeing the score lying open before him. We should want to applaud at the finale. There seems no one to applaud after reading Madame Bovary or watching Renoir’s adaptation. Emma’s world has been ‘simply’ presented, not orchestrated. The bitter taste of that world remains. That’s all. Two years later, when asked about what he might do otherwise if he were to remake the film, he claimed he would focus on the affair with Léon from beginning to end, foregrounding Lheureux as the figure of modern capitalism whom he believed to be at the bottom of the ‘tragedy’ not just of Emma’s loves and life, but of all generations since.44 Renoir, at this politically charged moment of the Popular Front, was writing in the idiom he used for the Communist newspapers he contributed to. It was an idiom appropriate for Le Crime de M. Lange, La Vie est à nous, and Les Bas fonds, but I for one am glad he made Madame Bovary when he was more politically innocent or agnostic, more distant and ironic, like Gustave Flaubert.

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On 8 June 1946 Renoir wrote a lengthy letter to Robert Hakim, the producer who had been behind one of Renoir’s great successes in France, La Bête humaine (1938) and whose next film, The Southerner, also by Renoir, had come out the previous autumn. The letter concerns the next project they thought of making together: Madame Bovary. Hakim had witnessed the success of Hollywood remakes of French films, including his production of 1936 hit Pépé le Moko that had been recast, remade, and retitled in Hollywood as Algiers in 1938. So redoing Madame Bovary and with Renoir made sense. While the French version had played a couple weeks at the Acme Theater in New York late in 1934, an American picture with American stars and a full advertising campaign was very attractive. Vincente Minnelli and Dore Shary understood this and brought it off a couple of years later. Renoir and Hakim went so far as to meet with Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, charged with pre-censoring scripts and advising studios in Hollywood. Renoir’s four-page letter responds point for point to Breen’s concerns. These mainly involved Emma’s adulteries, the lack of punishment for the men who led her astray, the sarcastic treatment of the priest, and the absence of anyone to speak on behalf of good morals. Renoir shows himself accommodating, using Flaubert’s own prose to defend the ‘morality’ of the film he envisions. To satisfy Breen, he would compromise on Flaubert’s satirical presentation of the priest. He even claims that by making the priest a sympathetic character, beleaguered by too many responsibilities and doing his best to help Emma find her way, he can balance Emma’s perspective and come closer to the dry and distanced attitude Flaubert is praised for. Minnelli, by the way, would abandon distance and balance, delivering a version completely overtaken by Emma’s romantic dreams, rather like the Gaston Baty theatrical adaptation of 1936 mentioned above. Renoir hadn’t fallen into this trap in 1934 and wanted to avoid it again in 1946. His Madame Bovary must not (only) concern its heroine’s quest for, and tragic loss of, love; adopting, even briefly, the perspective of the priest, it would also be about ‘moeurs de Province’, as the novel’s subtitle reads.45 The dossier of the project retained among Renoir’s papers, consists of a 1,200-word summary of the novel and 230 pages of film script. The summary is comprehensive, mentioning virtually all of the incidents of the novel. But the script, even from the outset, seems ready to pick out certain telling episodes for expanded treatment, linking these with an authorial voice-over, sometimes illustrated by brief montage sequences. The film was to open on a close-up of a dirty hand drawing the picture of a man on a sheet of paper. Without cutting, the camera tracks back to show a ten-year-old boy at his desk; tracking further back the full classroom is in view as the teacher enters, focusing attention on a new kid in class. That boy mumbles his name, ‘Charbovari’. The voice-over that accompanies this speaks as Gustave Flaubert



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and as if he had been a former classmate of Charles now looking back over his cheerless life: We were in class when the headmaster came in … we remember nothing distinctive about this boy, except he slept well in the dormitory, ate well in the refectory … and went on walks with his servant. Occasionally the two would stop to look at a grazing cow with great interest.46

The dossier shows that Renoir thought of, then rejected, a cutaway to a cow who looks up at the camera. Instead he dissolves to medical books as Charles’s hands are shown arranging them. The voice-over, again coming directly from the novel: ‘He understood nothing of it all. He did not follow. Still he worked, doing little tasks like a mill-horse with bandaged eyes, not knowing what work he was doing.’ This time there is an explicit cutaway: a mill-horse trudges round and round, before a dissolve leads to the bourgeois dining room of the young doctor’s parents and then to the street in Tostes with a shot of Charles’s mother: ‘she found him a forty-five-year-old widow in Dieppe who had an income of 1200 francs.’ Charles is shown helping an ugly woman with her bags. What led Renoir to rely this time on Flaubert’s spoken prose and to deliver the film as if in flashback? Perhaps he was following a trend in American cinema (The Magnificent Ambersons, Our Town). The voice-over would bring the famous author and his language into the picture, so to speak, though not to the degree that Minnelli would by casting James Mason to play him at the trial. The voice-over does let us relish Flaubert’s descriptions while shortening scenes like the one at the opera. And the montage sequences, such as one that quickly show Léon checking every hotel in Rouen to locate Emma, might visually render something like the imperfect tense Flaubert uses to cover repeated actions.47 Both techniques would have accentuated the film as an adapted ‘novel’, in comparison to the 1934 version that, as I have argued, more directly ‘staged’ the novel for the screen, keeping the novelist out of sight and off the soundtrack. In 1946, Renoir makes Flaubert not only audible in voice-over but brings him on for a curtain call. As the film closes, the fade-out on Emma’s face, her eyes closed in death, is not final. A fade-in gradually illuminates a painted portrait of Gustave Flaubert, which dissolves to an etching that eternalizes him. Pascal Mérigeau hints that this Hollywood Madame Bovary project came to a halt mid-summer 1946, perhaps because Woman on the Beach, which shares one or two themes with Madame Bovary, ran into trouble after a disastrous test screening, and Renoir had to devote all his efforts to reworking it.48 Meanwhile Robert Hakim was turning another 1930s French film, Le Jour se lève, into The Long Night, with Spencer Tracy taking on Jean Gabin’s role. In 1990 Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub inserted a nearly eightminute sequence from Renoir’s Madame Bovary – the ‘little film apart’

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Renoir titled Les Comices agricoles – into their fifty-one-minute Cézanne – conversations avec Joachim Gasquet, produced by the Musée d’Orsay. In her detailed study of this film, Sally Shafto brings to light numerous tantalizing couples and ‘encounters’.49 Straub and Huillet were already a couple, of course, but what about Straub encountering Renoir? Or Straub and Cézanne? In interviews Straub had already forged these connections that Shafto details. As for Renoir and Cézanne, there are two generations of contact, since the painters knew each other well, and their sons (Jean and Paul Jr) corresponded all their lives. Most striking for Shafto and for us, however, is Cézanne’s encounter with Flaubert, expressed in a letter presumably written to Gasquet in 1896, concerning the painting ‘The Old Woman with a Rosary’. Try as he might to keep literary allusions from appearing in his work, Cézanne concedes that Flaubert’s description of an old woman at the fair had affected this new painting’s composition and colour. Juxtaposing ‘The Old Woman with a Rosary’ and the Renoir clip, Huillet and Straub have put into play a complex bank shot like top-ranked billiard players, a shot that ricochets from Flaubert to Cézanne to Renoir to themselves and now to us. For as the visual parallel of the filmmakers demonstrates beyond a doubt, Renoir clearly consulted Cézanne’s painting in casting the old woman who gets up and shuffles sheepishly to the stage to receive her lifetime service award at the fair. My essay too has been an account of encounters and ricochets, particularly the one involving Flaubert and Renoir. As for the coincidence of Renoir and Raymond Bernard with which I began, I now believe we should speak not of encounter but of divergence, for each found his own manner of bringing about the encounter that is paramount to me and to this anthology of essays, that between French literature and cinema.

Notes 1 Madame Bovary was the second Renoir film to open in New York, the first one having been another prestige adaptation, Nana. Both these films failed in France but their titles alone made them attractive exports. 2 Renoir, cited in Pascal Mérigeau, Jean Renoir: A Biography (Burbank, CA: RatPac Press, 2016), p. 170. Renoir goes on to say that the film did better at the box office than has been admitted. 3 Georges Wakhévitch, L’Envers des décors (Paris: Robert Laffont 1977), p. 74. 4 Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret, Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 212. 5 Geneviève Sellier, ‘Raymond Bernard, un directeur à l’americaine’, Cinema 83 (June 1983): 67–70. 6 David Bellos, The Novel of the Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2017), pp. 248–9. 7 Moving Picture World indicates the co-existence of these two distinct four-part films, both coming out in autumn 1909.



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8 My colleague Charles Musser has turned up the following notice in Moving Picture World, 30 August 1909: ‘“The Galley Slave,” the first of the Vitagraph films de luxe of “Les Misérables”, will be released September 4. It deals with the incident of the Bishop’s candlesticks, done into a sketch for James K. Hackett’s vaudeville appearances, and it is said to be a remarkably faithful depiction of this dramatic situation. Other studies will follow in rapid order.’ 9 Stina Teilmann, ‘British and French Copyright: A Historical Study of Aesthetic Implications’, PhD dissertation, University of Southern Denmark, 2004, pp. 119–20. 10 Boyd Carter, ‘Madame Bovary’, French Review 11.3 (February 1938): 207–18. 11 A contributing factor may have been the death in 1931 of Caroline Hamard Commanville Franklin-Grout, the niece who had assiduously watched over Flaubert’s estate. Suddenly correspondence, fragments, and other materials became available. 12 Gallimard had on his editorial board two men steeped in cinema, Georges Sadoul, the future communist film historian, and Robert Aron, a founding member of Ordre Nouveau. The latter was editor of Revue du Cinéma till it was dropped in 1931, and he oversaw the shorts that represented Gallimard’s cautious wading into film production. Pierre Assouline, Gaston Gallimard (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 186. 13 Claude Sicard, ‘Gide et le cinéma’, Annales de l’Université de Toulouse le Mirant 16 (1980): 75–92. 14 Henri Fescourt, La Foi et le montagne (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), p. 313ff. 15 Mérigeau, Jean Renoir, p. 149. 16 Jacques Kermabon, in Pathé: premier empire du cinéma (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994), p. 242. 17 And it seems to have been when his affair with Tessier foundered (she went back to Pierre Renoir during the shooting) that Gallimard lost his enthusiasm for the project and put no effort into protecting its fate during post-production and exploitation. See Mérigeaux, Jean Renoir, p. 163. 18 Falconetti – Dreyer’s ethereal Joan of Arc – was also mentioned; she likewise was over forty, and so twice the age of Flaubert’s Emma when we first meet her. 19 Martin du Garde predictably found Renoir’s film ‘Indefensible’. See Mérigeau, Jean Renoir, p. 170. 20 Katherine Mannheimer developed these ideas in ‘Emma Bovary’s Formalist Frames, Madame Bovary’s Realism’, a paper for my seminar at Yale, December 2002. She dwelt on the various paintings hanging on walls in the film, something carefully discussed by Mary Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2009), pp. 59–67. The author suggests that Renoir introduced paintings as an equivalent of Flaubert’s frequent mention of the books Emma knows. 21 Christopher Faulkner: Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston, MS: G.K. Hall, 1979), p. 64. 22 Faulkner, Jean Renoir, p. 87. Renoir described the situation in Normandy as ‘The ecstasy of intimacy’ (Assouline, Gaston Gallimard, p. 187) and he would aim to repeat it for Une partie de campagne where cast and crew holed up for many weeks in a villa near where Renoir had memories from his youth. That production also turned unhappy in the end.

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23 The good feelings evidently waned soon after the return to Paris for the studio scenes and post-production. Pierre Renoir had once again taken up with the leading lady and a betrayed Gallimard seemed to lose interest. See Mérigeau, Jean Renoir, p. 163. 24 Jean Renoir, interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1957, p. 31. 25 Andrew, Mists of Regret, pp. 280–3. 26 This point comes from Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films 1924–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 149. 27 André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, foreword by Jean Renoir and Dudley Andrew (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), p. 128. 28 Still the comparison seems apt, as Bazin notes on p. 139 that ‘Bresson’s undertaking is somehow related to the work of Stroheim and Renoir’. As in Renoir, word and image make up ‘the Bressonian dialectic between abstraction and reality thanks to which we are concerned with a single reality – that of human souls’. 29 Eric Rohmer, in André Bazin, Jean Renoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 236. 30 Leo Braudy, Jean Renoir, the World of his Films (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 81. 31 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Gallimard, folio), pp. 271–2. Translation Eleanor Aaeling. 32 The film is full of off-screen sounds, some crucial, such as Hippolyte’s screams during the amputation of his leg, others ambient. Sounds pass through the rather small rooms of the Bovary house, alerting us to what surrounds Emma. 33 Sesonske, Jean Renoir, p. 156. Drawing on Sesonske’s calculations and Rebecca Pauly’s intuition that painting and family portraits are behind Renoir’s overly framed compositions (Rebecca Pauly, The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film (Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 134). 34 Mary Donaldson-Evans provides several fine examples of painterly compositions, as well as paintings on many walls. 35 Donaldson-Evans provides an even fuller description of this scene, Madame Bovary at the Movies, pp. 59–60. 36 Wakhévitch, L’Envers des décors, p. 75. See also Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 282. 37 Wakhévitch, L’Envers des décors, pp. 73–4. 38 Wakhévitch, L’Envers des décors, p. 74; Renoir, Interview, Cahiers du Cinéma 78 (December 1957): 32; Robert Aron, Fragments d’une vie (Paris: Plon, 1981), p. 63. 39 Alan Raitt, The Originality of Madame Bovary (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 85. 40 Jean Renoir, quoted in Sesonske, Jean Renoir, p. 155. See also Bazin, Jean Renoir, p. 75. 41 Wakhévitch, L’Envers des décors, p. 73; Aron, Fragments d’une vie, p. 59, was enthralled: ‘Un film de Jean Renoir est un peu une oeuvre de demiurge, qui remodèle le monde en function de ses propres humeurs, de ses phantasms, de ses regrets, de ses désirs. Il n’est jamais rien d’imaginaire dans ce qu’il croit imaginer: semplement, en faisant se croiser les fils de réalités successives, en ajourant des traits inattendus mais reels, à la grande fresque de la vie, dont-il déroule un episode, Jean Renoir attaint ce résultat merveilleux de donner à la nature, dont-il respect le volume et l’agencement, une dimension nouvelle, qui est celle de la sensibilité, de l’esprit et du genie.’



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42 Harry Levin came up with this pun to distinguish Flaubert’s ability to present with equal intensity a tone of critique and one of lyricism. See his Gates of Horn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 257–8. 43 Aron, Fragments d’une vie, pp. 59–60. 44 Jean Renoir interview with Maurice Romain, in Nouvelles Littéraires, 18 April 1936, cited by Boyd Carter, ‘Madame Bovary’: 212–13. 45 ‘Patterns of Provincial Life’, ‘Life in a Country Town’, ‘Provincial Manners’, ‘Provincial Ways’ have been used in some of the many English translations. See Julian Barnes, ‘Writers Writer and Wtier’s Wrieter’s Writer’, London Review of Books, 18 November 2010: 7–8. 46 These lines come directly from the novel’s first chapter, Renoir adding only the phrase about the ‘cows’, perhaps to link the name Bovary with ‘bovine’. 47 Raitt, The Originality of Madame Bovary, p. 83. The imperfect tense in Flaubert, he claims, goes beyond its standard use for repeated actions. Many verbs that should be in past tense to certify their definitive closure are left open by Flaubert’s imperfect tense. Further study of Renoir’s style might examine the ‘typicality’ of the scenes that play out as if completed once and for all. I am thinking of the tryst in the Rouen hotel or the scene in the garden during Emma’s convalescence when Humeau and the curé have their dispute. 48 Mérigeaux, Jean Renoir, p. 529. 49 Sally Shafto, ‘Artistic Encounters: Jean-Marie Straub, Dnièle Huillet, and Cézanne’, in Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

5

The Americanization of Victor Hugo: Darryl F. Zanuck’s Les Misérables (1935) Guerric DeBona

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables enjoys a staggering adaptation history like no other. Begun in 1845 when the author became a peer of France as a member of the French Upper House and completed in 1862 while in exile, Hugo’s sprawling, melodramatic indictment of the socio-economic system under the Bourbon restoration and the events leading up to the June insurrection in Paris in the summer of 1832 was voraciously anticipated and an instant sensation. Almost immediately after its publication in a multivolume series, the novel provided the source material that would catapult one of the lengthiest works of fiction ever written – replete with emotive digressions on the dangers of the cloistered religious, speculations on the argot and a lengthy excursion in the Paris sewer system – from numerous nineteenth-century adaptations on stage into our own day; these would include radio, television, and film, together with international versions of the ubiquitous musical, ‘Les Mis’, that proliferate and continue to animate popular culture. There has been a renewed interest in the adaptation strategies surrounding Les Misérables, inviting us to explore the phenomenon of the great French novel even further.1 As I have argued at length elsewhere, there are at least three useful coordinates when contemplating what used to be called ‘the novel into film’. The cultural politics of authorship, intertextual or collateral considerations, together with cultural value form a kind of blueprint for an investigation in adaptation. For the purposes of this essay, then, I propose interrogating Twentieth Century Pictures’ production of Les Misérables in 1935 with these three aspects in mind.2 I want to argue that these features enabled the early days of the Golden Era in Hollywood to adapt France’s greatest and most notoriously political novelist into a Great Depression-era – and distinctly American – milieu.

Rewriting Hugo Darryl F. Zanuck’s production of Les Misérables in the midst of the Great Depression and at a time of great change for the film industry (and Twentieth



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Century Pictures in particular) represents a choice that was simultaneously ingenious as well as baffling.3 On the one hand, Zanuck, like his contemporaries David Selznick and Irving Thalberg, was hungry for so-called ‘prestige’ pictures which would garner an aura of respectability for the film industry and, in particular, for the newly implemented Production Code (1934), which harboured strictly enforced ethical guidelines on everything from childbirth to representations of the clergy. Hugo’s moving depiction of Jean Valjean’s heroic journey from convict to businessman to sacrificial saviour carried moral weight and would surely guarantee a broad audience appeal. Indeed, Hugo himself, though never visiting the United States, had further clout as the rebel who stood for the values of the Republic, championing the underdog in the face of Napoleon III’s Second Empire from which the author had banished himself. What novel could better champion the poor for an audience during the Great Depression, many of whom (25 per cent) were out of work and some destitute? At the same time, though, as one of the largest tomes that ever saw the light of day – some 1,300 pages of often rambling, discursive prose – Les Misérables hardly seemed likely source material for a two-hour Hollywood screenplay. Indeed, the action itself, including the Battle of Waterloo, would be expensive to film and the novel’s French historical period obscure to most Americans. Moreover, the novel itself was not exactly free from the taint of moral turpitude for the likes of the moral majority, especially organized religion.4 In Philadelphia, for example, the Board of Education considered Les Misérables ‘decidedly improper’ and ‘perfectly shocking in its relation to the French side of life’, and especially harmful to young girls. With that, the novel was removed from the curriculum for advanced French in schools.5 In fact, Les Misérables had a history of commercial and literary sensationalism which worked both for and against its cinematic adaptations. When the novel was brought out on 3 April 1862 Hugo’s reputation was subject to an advertising campaign the likes of which had never been seen before. In a certain sense, the long delay from Hugo’s initial conception of the novel well into its final publication only augmented the fervour around the author, now in exile in Belgium. Even the format of the novel’s publication was a kind of modernist invention, structured around public, highly commercialized discourse in major cities across the world. Indeed, the volumes themselves were carefully timed in order to create suspense in the midst of the advertising campaign in Paris, London, Brussels, Leipzig, Rotterdam, Madrid, Milan, Turn, Naples, Warsaw, Pest, St Petersburg, and Rio de Janeiro.6 Hugo had already gained enormous celebrity, of course, as the novelist of Notre-Dame de Paris published in 1831 (and adapted for the stage early in its literary history), as a poet, and a political figure, but now the author was feeding his Belgian publisher, Lacroix and Verboeckhoven, press releases, saying that it was ‘the social and historical drama of the nineteenth century’ and ‘a vast mirror reflecting the human race, capture on a given day of its enormous existence’. And this: ‘Dante made a hell with poetry; I have tried

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to make one with reality’.7 The publisher’s careful and aggressive advertising campaign proliferated in shop windows, store fronts and edifices throughout the city. In the midst of the release of the last two parts of the novel: Gigantic posters were pasted up on walls which had once carried Hugo’s call to the Army to oppose the coup d’etat. Episodes from the novel were illustrated in bookshop windows. Hugo’s characters were household names even before the last volumes were out: Jean Valjean, the ex-convict turned philanthropic factory owner; Javert, the maniacally dedicated police inspector; the saintly Bishop Myriel, who plants the seed of charity in Jean Valjean’s benighted soul and antagonized the Church (both in the novel and in reality) by following Christ’s teaching to the letter; Fantine, the abandoned grisette, and her orphaned daughter, Cosette, rescued from the infernal inn-keepers, the Thénardiers, and raised as Jean Valjean’s own child; Marius, the son of a Napoleonic general who joins a gang of young republicans and falls in love with Cosette; Gavroche, the snotty-nosed, street-wise, lantern-smashing gutter-snipe. Every character struck a chord and had such a profound effect on the French view of French society that even on a first reading one has a vague recollection of having read the novel before.8

Lines of people waiting to purchase the novel stretched for blocks throughout Paris and remained something of a cultural event itself. But the middle-class appropriation of the Hugo’s work did not stop on the street corner. As if to underline the way in which French culture quickly imported the author’s characters, the pioneering filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière shot what we now know to be the earliest cinematic adaptation of Les Misérables, centred entirely on brief mimes of characters, such as Javert, Valjean and Bishop Myriel. Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des misérables (1897) is as much an artefact of mid-nineteenth-century social stereotypes as it is a touchstone of early film culture. The emerging French film culture would soon focus the shape of its adaptations of Les Misérables in much the same way, concentrating on recognizable post-Revolutionary social types in a strong historical context. Albert Capellani’s 1905 five-minute film, Le Chemineau (The Vagabond), depicts the arrival of a destitute Jean Valjean in a snowy little town, where he is scoffed at by passers-by as he begs but soon finds a room with the welcoming local bishop, from whom he steals some ecclesiastical furnishings (including candlesticks) which he tries to sell off to a local merchant, only to be turned in by the housekeeper. Capellani would remake the film again (released in four parts in 1912), this time in twelve reels and distributed by Pathé-Eclectic to great acclaim and a reportedly $100,000 budget.9 Capellani’s sense of detail of French social types is rather extraordinary, even if not drawing much at all from the novel’s plot. With the novel’s socio-economic emphasis on characterization, French adaptations of Les Misérables, therefore, predictably advertised Hugo himself as a draw to these productions.10 But the heroic novelist of the Republic found himself eclipsed in future Americanizations of Les Misérables and, in particular, in the Hollywood of the 1930s. As Delphine Gleizes has argued,



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French and American adaptations of Les Misérables bifurcate in two very different patterns and traditions of reception: The French approach privileges a focus on the novel’s socio-historical context and a fidelity to Hugo’s political discourse, whereas American versions offer a more voluntarist – and optimistic version – of social progress. The French adaptations focus on understanding the harsh reality of the human condition in the nineteenth century, whereas the American ones show the narrative possibilities of the novel and their potential exploitation through the hybridization of cinematographic genres.11

This hybridization’ of the novel is precisely where Hugo could be useful to Hollywood during the Great Depression. Therefore, when it came to bringing Hugo’s novel to the screen in the 1930s, Darryl F. Zanuck and director Richard Boleslawski positioned the author as a champion of democratic principles, rewriting Les Misérables as a novel of social progress centring principally on the struggle of the main character to overcome poverty and adversity.12 Zanuck was helped by the novel’s nineteenth-century American reception early in its history during the Civil War. According to Graham Robb, Hugo secured his global reputation in America and prepared the way for the future reception of Les Misérables when the novelist wrote in ‘Letter to the London News Regarding John Brown’ on 2 December 1859 about the Harper’s Ferry incident that ‘the murder of John Brown would be an irreparable mistake. It would create a latent fracture in the Union which would inevitably dislocate it.’ Although bound to be viewed favourably by abolitionists, Hugo’s comments caused a great deal of fuss with the press in the South in what the Memphis Morning Inquirer regarded as the French novelist’s ‘high-strung intellect’.13 Nevertheless, Hugo’s anti-Southern position created a sufficient buzz to create a whirlwind around himself as a liberator, and some years later copies of the novel owned by Confederate soldiers ‘were read to pieces’ in 1863, according to the secretary of the Virginia Historical Association who saw the remnants of Les Misérables when he was a boy.14 At least from the point of view of the popular press, the novel was better received in the North during the Civil War and viewed by some as a moral instrument whose time had come. The New York Tribune (11 October 1862) wrote that ‘such works as this appear but once in a century; Les Misérables is too humbly designated a novel by its author, for the novel is but a screen behind which the master sits proclaiming, as with authority, the grandest and most vital truths … Les Misérables is not a protest against civilization; it is a call for a nobler and wiser Civilization.’15 Zanuck’s own history was a good match for Hugo’s. Zanuck formed Twentieth Century Pictures with Joseph Schenck in 1933, having worked as a writer for Warner Brothers from 1924, turning out to some degree or another various versions of something like a social problem film (including producing the Rin-Tin-Tin pictures). At Warners, Zanuck took a great interest

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in producing a script based on the moving portrait of a real-life escapee, which became I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy, 1932) The film was a mega hit nationwide, but extremely controversial, even for pre-Code Hollywood.16 After the Production Code Administration (PCA) was revised in July 1934, there was a ubiquitous run of so-called ‘prestige productions’ throughout the industry that would look for respectable literary property, a run lasting well into the beginning of World War II. But Zanuck was pragmatic about his prestige productions made for a Depression audience. It is not too much of a stretch to reimagine I Was a Fugitive as another Les Misérables, or as reimagined highbrow literary property, yet one that would speak to contemporary middle-class Hollywood audiences: We’ve known for years that there was a great classic, a monument to literature, a great story. I’m making it now because it is the story of a normal, family-loving man that found himself balked on every hand, a man that was persecuted, a man that was beaten – and a man that would steal a loaf of bread, if he had to, to feed his children. It’s the theme of today.17

It might have been the first time either at home or abroad that Jean Valjean was to be characterized as ‘a normal, family-loving man’, but that description fitted Frederick March as Valjean, whose versatility included the Ernst Lubitsch urban comedy Design for Living (1933) and literary melodrama The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934, as Robert Browning). Zanuck’s Les Misérables would be built around Jean Valjean and his self-sacrifice as a ‘family-loving man’. The opening epigraph – severely edited from Hugo’s own at the beginning of the novel18 – forecasts precisely what Zanuck had in mind for the film: the picture was to be constructed precisely around Jean Valjean, stripping away the potentially sensational plot elements, including Hugo’s scathing indictment of nineteenth-century French society in Fantine’s full story. Indeed, the introduction to the film suggests already that it is Valjean’s victimization alone that it seeks to expose to light. ‘So long as there exists in this world that we call civilized a system whereby men and women, even after they have paid the penalty of the law and expiated their offenses in full, are hounded and persecuted wherever they go – this story will not have been told in vain.’ To this end, Zanuck and Boleslawski created an opening sequence sympathetic to an American audience facing the plight of the Great Depression. Zanuck told Boleslawski to construct a tracking shot that would emphasize the stale loaf of bread. Some scenes later, according to his conference notes, Zanuck envisioned the kindly Bishop Bienvenu (Cedric Hardwicke) who opens his door to the starving ex-convict, not as ‘a sweet, miracle man type. He’s more like an understanding businessman – a charming gentleman. His nearest prototype today would be a psychiatrist’.19 So saying, the bishop invites Valjean ‘to give’, through the course of his life; that invitation guides the protagonist throughout the movie, giving him the courageous impulse to forsake his newly acquired social status as Monsieur Madeleine when a



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man is falsely identified as ‘Jean Valjean’, as well as to surrender his beloved ‘adopted’ daughter in marriage. The bishop’s invitation is echoed in Valjean’s closing surrender at the end of the film, as he gives himself up to Javert: ‘Father of all … take what you will.’ There are a number of plot threads running through the massive novel, but Zanuck and his team at Twentieth Century isolated a major strand which would make Les Misérables more palatable and useful Hollywood fare; the secondary plots all lead to the protagonist. First, there is the Valjean versus Javert plot that undergirds the philosophical current of mercy versus the law and which both characters articulate throughout the film. Like the novel, one is redeemed by mercy the other is destroyed by it. Second, Zanuck seems to have imagined that Hugo’s novel could be adapted into something like a plot of ‘rebirth’,20 in which his shelter of Cosette ultimately bestows on the single journeyman the only love he has ever known, and which he must eventually lose. According to Zanuck’s conference notes, written 16 November 1934, the romance between Jean Valjean and Cosette is the most important human element of the story and should be developed. His feeling for her when he first takes her in is one of attachment. This later develops into devotion and culminates in her being his life blood. By treating it this way, the scene where he finally gives her up will absolutely slaughter the audience. This treatment will strike a human note in the picture and make it something much more important than just a finely conceived melodrama.21

Boleslawski and cinematographer Gregg Toland position Cosette and Valjean in a number of dramatic sequences lit as if they were in a romantic relationship. Consider, for instance, the scene in which Cosette discloses her love for Marius to Valjean, a revelation which occurs in the novel not in an intimate encounter but when Valjean accidentally spies a letter in the young woman’s bedroom. Third, there is Valjean’s physical transformation in the course of the story, which serves as a reminder of his interior disposition. It is striking that unlike his worn-out and threadbare counterparts in French adaptations – notably the careworn Jean Gabin, in Jean-Paul Le Chanois’s version of the novel – Frederick March’s Valjean seems to age very little, except for some noticeable grey hair, perhaps suggesting a testament to his social progress.

Some intertextual relationships Through carefully managed production choices, Zanuck transformed Les Misérables into what Roland Barthes has famously called a ‘readerly’ text, increasing its legibility to an American audience through well-established semic codes or connotations.22 Hollywood’s well-known classical narrative conventions, such as the continuity system – together with a strong emphasis on the psychological fate of the protagonist and his overcoming of opposition

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– and camera shots (especially close-ups), reinforce Zanuck reimagined Les Misérables as a single plot strand built around the main character and with no digressions or subplots. 23 But the very distinctly American and ‘readerly’ adaptation found collateral partners in some intertextual features as well, especially in the educational community, whose inherited pedagogy on the novel by the 1930s popularized the moral struggle of the main character while teaching the dynamics of film narrative and style in relation to the source text. Legibility for the prestige production depends to some extent on dialogical intertextual features already in place at the time of production. I am thinking particularly here of visual discourse, or the tableaux vivants, which renders a certain authenticity (almost certainly the key to legibility when it comes to film adaptation) to a production. For his biblical adaptations, for instance, Cecile B. DeMille drew from a canon of well-known religious artists such as Gustave Doré to establish his mise-en-scène in King of Kings (1927). David Selznick’s eagerly anticipated prestige adaptation of David Copperfield (1935) for MGM relied on the cultural clout of Charles Dickens in America, but the producer meticulously cast and dressed characters precisely as the illustrator ‘Phiz’ had depicted the beloved portraits in the novel.24 But American editions of Les Misérables were scantly and variously illustrated by several artists, and an American audience certainly would have had very little familiarity with either the visuals provided by E.A. Bayard, the master French artist who famously illustrated the 1862 edition with the (now iconic) portrait of Cosette and her oversize broom, or the extensive silhouettes of Gustave Brion’s 1865 French edition of Les Misérables. There were indeed a number of editions of Les Misérables translated into English but none of the accompanying illustrations became popularly associated with the novel or its author. Popular English editions of Les Misérables were published with illustrations from a variety of artists, such as the Calwell’s of Boston edition or the 1887 Little, Brown edition illustrated by Pierre Jeannoit in four volumes. A translation published by the popular Heritage Press in 1938, with ‘all five volumes in one’ by Lascelles Wraxall (a reissue of the British translation he made in 1862) and authorized by Hugo himself (with an introduction by André Maurois), was illustrated in a kind of anti-realist, modernist style pen and ink series of woodcut etchings by Lynd Ward. Ward also illustrated other books, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and became quite influential for the future of graphic artists, but his etchings for Hugo’s novel never became terribly popular. In fact, the French illustrations appear largely to embellish the sociohistorical portraits of the characters, which held little interest for Hollywood. Zanuck apparently saw no need to pair the young actress playing Cosette (Marilyn Knowlden) with any of her illustrations and, on the contrary, probably had something of a reinvention of the waif in mind. Not surprisingly, little Marilyn, with her swirling curls and porcelain features resembles not a French peasant girl as much as another young child star who would



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Figure 5.1  Cosette (Marilyn Knowlden) looking like Shirley Temple

become Zanuck’s golden girl when Twentieth Century merged with Fox in 1935: Shirley Temple (see Figure 5.1). As is well-known, Temple presided over big box-office revenues (the most popular star four years in a row) and her smiling baby face helped an American ‘to forget his troubles’, according to FDR himself. In a certain sense, Knowlden’s Cosette provides a similar gesture for the Great Depression in America, since her coquettish presence in the film certainly shows no parallel to an uneducated and neglected urchin in rural France. Indeed, the absence of Bayard’s realist drawings in American editions probably goes a long way toward underlining Gleizes’ earlier point concerning the tendency of American adaptations to draw less from sociopolitical French realities of the nineteenth century. Instead, as with Zanuck’s production, this and other casting decisions tend to optimize other narrative possibilities for the prestige production, including acting styles and types. Even attention to the authenticity of French costuming was not very rigorous, and the use of a bicorn hat for what Hugo describes (and duplicated in Gustave Brion’s silhouettes in the 1865 illustrated edition) as a ‘chapeau rabattu’ in Javert’s military costume is a case in point.25 While Zanuck and Twentieth Century chose to reinvent the characters in Hugo’s novel for a Depression audience, pedagogical practices supporting the reception of Les Misérables remains an intriguing intertextual component

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as well; these educational alliances with Hollywood helped to strongly influence the film’s legibility as a ‘classic’. The producer found his collateral relationship by partnering with education in the American public school system, since the novel’s popularity in America, evident early on even in the Civil War, extended throughout the literary curricula, albeit in a modified version. The novel was popular as a radically abridged version for elementary students and then as a text for high-school freshmen. In 1924 a retelling of Les Misérables by author Ettie Lee was reviewed and recommended by the Elementary School Journal, saying: a number of outstanding incidents from the original volume have been rewritten in such a form that the story is continuous and the language well within the understanding of the child. The story is very well retold and will, without doubt, be of interest to elementary-school children. It should, furthermore, tend to stimulate a later reading of the original work.26

Also in 1924, a group of 200 college students from the University of Wisconsin were asked to discuss questions involving their favourite book, ranked according to ‘greatness’ and ‘favourite’. The Bible, Dickens, Hugo (Les Misérables), Hutchinson and Shakespeare constituted the top-ranking works. From what the students were asked to discuss, it appears as if the state of Jean Valjean’s social plight and injustice were the major point of interest and not too far from Zanuck’s own plot focus ten years later about a story of ‘a man that was persecuted, a man that was beaten’.27 Indeed, Valjean’s struggle with injustice could not have found a more interesting collaborator than the emergence of a remarkable educational tool which reinforced in a ‘Jean Valjean’ version of Hugo’s narrative for high-school students the values already present in 1930s America. The Motion Picture Previewing and Advisory Committee of the Department of Secondary Education under the chair and general editorship of Max J. Herzberg produced a series of ‘Photoplay Studies’, beginning with Les Misérables (published in April 1935). Including an instructor’s manual, the guide’s introduction appeals to teachers to attend to ‘one of the best sellers of the ages’. It went on to remind the reader of the original reception of Les Misérables as akin to a religious event in Holland, where ‘Dutch pastors, when it was new, read portions of it from their pulpits and called it “the gospel of the people” … These qualities the motion picture has sought earnestly to preserve.’28 The guide contained fairly lengthy introductions by Zanuck (‘The Producer’s Viewpoint’), Boleslawski (‘The Director’s Viewpoint’), and W.P. Lipscomb (‘The Adaptor’s Viewpoint’). The latter seems to clarify Zanuck’s intention to create a story around the main character and give it a social justice concern when Lipscomb says My task then became one of extraction, of taking the significant phases of Jean Valjean’s life and dramatizing them for the screen with Hugo’s poignancy. It was separating the chaff from the wheat, and thus it was not necessary, as with many books, to alter either the author’s purpose or his story.29



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The guide suggests that the students read an abridged edition of the novel ‘that will give you the novel in detail sufficient for the purposes of comparison with the photoplay’. And it further queried the students before they viewed the film or photoplay: Can you suggest deletions of character and incident that might be made without impairing the effectiveness of the author’s work? If you were the director of the photoplay [i.e. screenplay] Les Misérables, at what point in the progress of the story would you find it most difficult to handle your materials while maintaining the continuity of your picture? Why? Where would you cut.30

If the students were reading an abridged version of Les Misérables, that text would have focused almost exclusively on Jean Valjean, thereby averting any problems faced previously by school districts which objected to the novel’s Fantine plot. After students viewed the film, the guide presented them with two sections, one literary or analytical and the other historical and social. From a literary perspective, most of the questions deal with the protagonist, who is described by the authors of the Photoplay Studies as one whom, ‘by good deeds, has reclaimed his own soul’.31 For instance, students are asked to consider the following, among many enquiries: ‘Comment on the condensation of the opening scenes: A protest, “I was hungry” a sentence; Exhibit A – a loaf of bread, half-eaten; the despairing cry of a young child; the crucifix on the courtroom wall.’ The question here gives us an indication how closely the Photoplay Studies were collaborators with Hollywood’s adaptation process, since Zanuck’s instructions to Boleslawski and cinematographer Gregg Toland for the opening sequence were precisely to dwell on the details mentioned in this very question. Moreover, some of the twenty-five questions in this ‘post-viewing’ section deal with reading the cinematography as an element of style. ‘Comment on the use of light and shadow on the face of Javert as he instructs the men who are to attempt the identification of M. Madeleine.’ And this: ‘Comment on the use of eyes, lips, facial expressions and make-up to show intense mental and emotional strain in the portrayals of Javert and Jean Valjean.’32 But what I have called the ‘Americanization of Victor Hugo’ is perhaps nowhere more obvious in the Photoplay Studies than in the section dealing with US social studies and Les Misérables: As one looks into the picture of French injustice given by Victor Hugo, it may be well for American youth to notice the advance made towards social justice by the nations of today. The way in which a free press and free speech were denied the young Parisian radicals may be contrasted with the freedom of speech existing in the United States in the year 1935 – and the lack of freedom in certain other countries.33

We know already of the importance Zanuck placed on the social problems in the film – a kind of literary version of Warners’ I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang – but the film appears at pains to draw our attention to the alliance of the situation in post-Revolutionary France with that in Depression

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America which the guide accentuates. During the uprising of 1832 in Paris, for instance, the film shows a contrast between the real radicals among the young Republican rebels in the film (particularly Enjolras, played by John Carradine, whom Toland shoots ominously in shadows) and Marius, who seems more dreamily interested in democratic principles and romantic love. Valjean’s rescue of the young man and his restoration to Cosette suggests the importance the protagonist plays in shaping twentieth-century American justice, which, according to the film, is tempered by mercy.34 In a certain sense, from an American cultural perspective the reunion of Marius and Cosette in the film represent a new day – and, perhaps, a New Deal – for a country newly revitalized by the Roosevelt administration. Whereas the novel leaves Valjean to a broken-hearted death because of his self-sacrifice into the hidden passage, in the film the hero is incorporated into the middleclass family of his precious Cosette and her husband Marius.

The question of cultural value Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that cultural value requires the aura of authenticity in order for the product to attain symbolic capital. Bourdieu says: the consecrated authors who dominate the field of production also dominate the market; they are not only the most expensive or the most profitable but also the most readable and the most acceptable because they have become part of ‘general culture’ through a process of familiarization which may or may not have been accompanied by specific teaching.35

Imbued with considerable cultural freight as a ‘classic’, and with a sparkling reception history extending back to the Civil War, it is probably no coincidence that when adapting fiction ‘within the small world of art radio’, Orson Welles chose Les Misérables as his first production in 1937, regarded as a ‘stamp’ of prestige.36 The symbolic capital embedded in the novel concerning the struggling protagonist’s heroic moral courage translated very quickly into dollars for Hollywood, so creating legibility around the canonical prestige production was paramount. Zanuck, who seemed to have a knack for sensing literary cultural property, had built the most successful independent studio to date, with eighteen productions breaking box-office records. Further enhancing the production value for Les Misérables was an impressive ensemble: director Richard Boleslawski, who had gained an arty reputation with his association with the Moscow Art Theatre as a teacher and director (and had recently published the definitive work on Stanislavsky’s System, Acting: The First Six Lessons in 1933); cinematographer Gregg Toland (already anticipating his stylish cinematography in the current production); and the classical and very British actor, Charles Laughton. These production values helped translate Les Misérables into a film adaptation of what Zanuck called ‘a great classic, a monument to literature, a great story’.37



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At the same time, we can see why it was so crucial for Zanuck not to stray too far into the high art culture evoked by the classic, but to normalize Hugo’s novel as a conventional Hollywood narrative. That was why the film would prioritize the singular battle of Jean Valjean, the ‘normal, familyloving man’, as Zanuck named him, against his opposite, the pathological legalist, Javert; and why it was essential to emphasize Valjean’s recovery from poverty to economic and political prosperity in the midst of the economic failure in America in the 1930s; and why, with the implementation of the new Production Code, it was imperative that the Fantine plot be significantly repressed and replaced with Cosette’s transformation to middle-class respectability and bourgeois marriage. Like many signifiers of literary adaptations, Les Misérables helped to assuage tensions during the Great Depression by exploiting the myth of social progress. At the same time, the urge for moral respectability was further strengthened when the pressures from the Legion of Decency and other factors caused a revision of the Hollywood Production Code in 1934. A pre-Code version of Les Misérables produced, say, in 1932, would have looked very different – and perhaps would have brought out a darker side of American culture – and may have starred Barbara Stanwyck as the doomed Fantine, who (as in the novel) literally sells parts of her body (her teeth) for the sake of her child, and perhaps accentuated a plot of what Thomas Doherty calls a ‘vice film’, luring audiences into a spectacle of sin, deluded by a dose of redemption.38 On the contrary, not only did the film become a story of the moral conversion of the protagonist (something already popularized in Canada in the 1930s39), but it artfully marshals religious codes so that the adaptation’s legibility becomes normalized, especially to contemporary (Catholic) immigrant audiences. Along these lines, there are a number of religious codes (recall the apt quotation in the Photoplay Series about the novel’s status as ‘the Gospel of the people’) which would not only satisfy the Legion of Decency and the Breen Office, but appeal to the expanding infrastructure of Catholic immigrants, whose numbers were swelling tremendously by the 1930s. Indeed, the film might even be placed in the context of what Anthony Burke Smith calls ‘the cycle of Catholic movies’ of the 1930s, with a socially minded priest (Bishop Bienvenu) and a gangster he befriends and tries to reform (Valjean), against a cruel and merciless system (Javert).40 Again, based on Zanuck’s interest in the social problem film, it is possible to see the producer’s rewriting of Hugo as a gangster film inside the structures and cultural advantages of a prestige adaptation. Consider, for instance, the positioning of the enormous crucifix in a shot at the very beginning of the film (also a question for students in the Photoplay Series). While Valjean is behind bars in the court, he argues for justice and receives none. The crucified Christ and Jean Valjean remain associated with the mise-en-scène, as the religious (Christian) audience might be asking: ‘Is this another aspect of social injustice two thousand years later?’ In another sequence, a pious devotion to the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary (under

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which Valjean has buried the precious candlesticks) segues into a new episode in Valjean’s life. Having been given an invitation to begin anew with the encouragement of the bishop, Valjean kisses the base of the statue in a pensive (contemplative close-up) gaze to the choral swellings of an ‘Ave Maria’ and begins to make his way in the world of success and new identity. The film places a coda after this episode and concludes with enormous letters across the screen: ‘Thus ended the first phase of the life of Jean Valjean’. Religious conversion mixes with social (moral) redemption to move the plot to its conclusion. There are numerous examples in which the cinematography colludes with what David Morgan refers to as the construction of ‘visual piety’.41 After welcoming Valjean into his home and retiring for the evening, the cleric lies on his bed completely motionless and surrounded by a vague light, suggesting peace and even transcendent tranquillity. Another sequence shows the adult Cosette (Rochelle Hudson) in her final days as a student at the convent where she has been educated and given refuge, together with Valjean. She is in a procession of other young ladies, all dressed in white for a religious service. The interior of the church and the accompanying ceremony of clerics celebrating a Catholic liturgy are shot in extreme long shot. Valjean keeps his distance, lowering his eyes as Cosette steps over the threshold of the church, as if to suggest his unworthiness to enter. The ceremony is also a graduation; Cosette, like her guardian, has made religious as well as social (educational) progress. Her fate in the film eventually binds her to a middleclass husband, Marius (John Beal), after he has been stripped of his radical tendencies for his involvement in the uprising of 1832. Religious codes become closely allied with moral and social redemption, and such blurrings of cultural codes encompass the whole plot of the film; these are evinced especially in the entwining of Valjean’s quasi-religious conversion together with his moral and social progress to middle-class respectability as Monsieur Madeline, mayor and owner of manufacture d’objets de verre. Like the novel, though, Valjean’s moral conversion surpasses his social achievement when he risks disclosing his identity when a half-witted man is mistaken for the convict and stands trial. Boleslawski stages the trial to great effect, certainly drawing on his theatrical background, ramping up the tension in a proscenium-like courtroom in which a range of character actors showcase their wares. In another crucial point in the film, the protagonist must forsake his possessive love for Cosette and rescue her future husband, passing through the dark (and the way Toland shoots it, almost mythical) journey through the Paris sewers, as if travelling into the Underworld. Frederick March’s portrayal of Jean Valjean’s normal family guy image, as Zanuck emphasized, remains incomparably contrasted with Charles Laughton’s Javert, another signifier of cultural value. If mercy redeems Valjean, mercy destroys Javert, who at the film’s end cannot comprehend Valjean’s surrender. The casting of Laughton was a critical decision. England’s quirky character actor was not necessarily everyone’s idea of stone-hearted Javert.



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Laughton had played a dazzling and expressive array of characters on the stage and the screen, from King Henry VIII to Nero, but the casting of a British actor allowed for March’s Americanization of Valjean to become all the more illuminated. When it comes to sensing what Laughton brings to the narrative, I agree with what James Naremore says about ‘Britishness’ when he discusses Hitchcock: ‘the feeling of repressed anxiety or violence breaking through a well-ordered surface’.42 When we first get a glimpse of him, Laughton projects a rigidly repressed man at stiff attention, seemingly ready to burst out of the tight uniform into which he has been poured, so much so that his lips and jaw quiver when interrogated by a superior officer. The slightly ruptured face of the law will come to define not only his British façade but the way Javert understands the world and his only way of coping with its contours. ‘I’ve only one line,’ he tells Monsieur Madeleine when they first meet, ‘the law’. Toland lights Laughton at this fateful meeting as we will come to know him: a split self, waiting to self-destruct; half in shadow, half in light (see Figure 5.2). Part impish boy, part ruthless sadist, Laughton’s Javert, ironically, becomes the real (past) ‘secret’ in the film – threatening to erupt, in contrast to the masquerading of Valjean as Monsieur Madeleine. (Interestingly, in the same scene, Valjean’s face is completely illuminated, while he holds tightly to the candlesticks.) I would speculate

Figure 5.2  The very British Charles Laughton as Javert in Toland’s half-shadow, half-light

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further that Boleslawski’s direction emphasizes Laughton’s submerged and complex hostility in the depiction of Javert: the trademark of the Stanislavsky method is all here, with its organic and personalized approach to discovering character and motivation.43 In one sense, Laughton’s Javert anticipates the smouldering anxiety of the guilt-ridden and self-consciously conflicted postwar wounded male in countless noir and detective thrillers in the decade to come; they are time bombs waiting to implode. In hindsight, Les Misérables belongs to a unique cadre of prestige film adaptations that Hollywood found useful during the Great Depression for a variety of reasons. In the hands of Darryl Zanuck, the Americanization of Victor Hugo imagined a middle-class fate for Jean Valjean, who achieved such moral and social redemption by self-sacrifice and industry. Despite being pursued by injustice, mercy transformed the protagonist and rewarded him with stability and a family of his own. Ironically, the very revolutionary tendency which inspired Hugo’s novel in the first place becomes rather bourgeoisified, even as Marius, the one-time radical, becomes a family man himself with his perfect mate, a poor waif abandoned and transformed into an educated lady; both make room for Papa Valjean. Although Les Misérables was the last film for Twentieth Century Pictures before it merged with Fox, Zanuck, who would become chief of production at the new studio until 1956, continued to re-inscribe literary property from its somewhat radical origins to more or less progressive, but acceptable, middle-class Hollywood material. So the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) becomes a story about regular guy Tom Joad and his fight for freedom and justice, without the novel’s biting indictment of industrial capitalism; Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was my Valley (John Ford, 1941) is a charming love letter by its narrator, Huw Morgan, to a small mining village in South Wales which reflects more of the protagonist’s fateful escape from the world of mining (through education) than a condemnation of its conditions. Nevertheless, Les Misérables would find its afterlife in countless productions, a final triumph of Hugo’s deathless narrative, ‘One More Day’.

Notes 1 Recently, La Société des Amis de Victor Hugo (founded in 2000) in conjunction with La Ciné Lumière helped to sponsor the International Victor Hugo et Égaux Festival 2013 devoted to a consideration of adaptations of Les Misérables. Booklength publications on adaptations of Hugo include Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens (eds), Les Misèrables and its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage and Screen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015); and Delphine Gleizes (ed.), L’Oeuvre de Victor Hugo à l’écran: des rayons et des ombres, ed. (Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005). 2 For a more detailed account of these categories, see Guerric DeBona, OSB, Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 1–36.



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3 Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures adaptation was not the only production of Les Misérables in the early 1930s. For an interesting discussion of Raymond Bernard’s French (1933) version, see, for example, Martin Barnier, ‘Les Misérables de Rayond Bernard (1933) et de Richard Boleslawski (1935) dans leur contexts de production français et américain’, in L’Oeuvre de Victor Hugo a l’ecran, ed. Gleizes, pp. 35–46. 4 Perhaps most notoriously, Pope Pius IX placed the novel on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1864, where it remained until 1959. 5 Quoted in Kathryn M. Grossman, ‘The Making of a Classic: Les Misérables takes the States, 1860–1922’, in Les Miserables and Its Afterlives, ed. Grossman and Stephens, p. 122. 6 Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 377. 7 Robb, Victor Hugo, p. 377. 8 Robb, Victor Hugo, p. 379. 9 See Christine Leteux, Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2013), pp. 33–9. 10 Leteux, Albert Capellani, p. 38. 11 Delphine Gleizes, ‘Adapting Les Misérables for the Screen: Transatlantic Debates and Rivalries’, trans. Stacie Allan, in Les Misérables and Its Afterlives, eds Grossman and Stephens, pp. 141–2. 12 The question of authorship and adaptation remains a fascinating issue. From my vantage point, the rewriting of the source text might be best viewed in the context of reception theory and the construction of the auteur and informed by the pioneering inquiries of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, André Bazin and H.R. Jauss. For a useful, albeit brief summary see Hélène Maurel-Indart, ‘Réception et notion d’auteur’, in Questions de Reception, eds Lucile Arnoux-Farnoux and Anne-Rachel Hermetet (Paris: SFLGC, 2009), pp. 41–8. 13 Robb, Victor Hugo, p. 371. 14 Jeanne Rosselet, ‘First Reactions to Les Misérables in the United States’, Modern Language Notes 67.1 (January 1952): 43. 15 Rosselet, ‘First Reactions’: 39. 16 See Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 135–6. 17 J. P. McEvoy, ‘He’s Got Something’, Saturday Evening Post, 1 July 1939: 66. Quoted in George F. Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 189. It is well known that prestige productions dominated the 1930s, and Zanuck claimed that his company would specialize in biographical and classical pictures. The succession of literary property before and after Les Misérables included such films as Cardinal Richelieu, The Mighty Barnum, The Affairs of Cellini, The Call of The Wild, and Clive of India (p. 187). According to Tino Balio, between 1933 and 1935, Twentieth Century Pictures produced eighteen prestige films and two of them were hits, The House of Rothchild (1934) and Les Misérables, ranking the company third for such movies. See Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Scribners, 1993), p. 205. 18 It is significant that Hugo cites not one but three problems of the age: ‘La dégradation d’homme par le prolétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l’atrophie

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de l’enfant par la nuit’. (The reduction of men to servitude, the annihilation of women by hunger and the atrophy of the child by darkness; my translation). Taken together, these social deformations inhabit the major plot strands of the novel, but only the first of them – the Valjean–Javert plot – becomes the significant storyline in Zanuck’s production. 19 Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, p. 190. Zanuck was also on safe ground here when it came to the new PCA as well, which advised that depictions of religious traditions be respected and the clergy not be ridiculed. In fact, the bishop of the novel was renamed Bishop Bienvenu, which was about as allegorical as Hollywood ever gets. 20 See Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (New York: Continuum, 2004), esp. pp. 193–213. The ‘rebirth’ story is one of these basic plots, which recalls the overall fate of Valjean. But another one, ‘overcoming the monster’, represents the Valjean versus Javert relationship as well. 21 Quoted in Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, p. 192. 22 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), sec. 28, 41 and 81. 23 See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 174–240. 24 See Guerric DeBona, OSB, ‘Dickens, the Depressions, and M.G.M.’s David Copperfield’, in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000) pp. 106–28. 25 Gleizes, ‘Adapting Les Misérables for the Screen’, p. 132, says that not only was Hollywood taking liberties with the adaptation, but ‘the creation of archetypes’ therefore began in the nineteenth century with Briton’s sketches in France. And the Hollywood tradition ‘is far less likely to be subject to the illustrations’ cultural resonances’. 26 Unsigned review, ‘Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (An Adaptation) by Ettie Lee; Stories from English History by Albert F. Blaisdell; The Children’s Poets by Walter Barnes’, Elementary School Journal 25.3 (November 1924): 236. Ettie Lee does a lovely version of the story for children, concentrating mostly on the bishop’s encounter with Valjean and the rescue of the young Cossette, with a few pages devoted to her eventual marriage to Marius. This little story itself (with no illustrations) could well prepare students for the 1935 production. 27 C.E. Lauterbach, ‘The College Student and Literature’, English Journal 13.3 (March 1924): 210. The actual question to which the students responded was: ‘Do we regard any book as great that tends to increase man’s anxieties?’ They were to take their ‘favorite book and discuss it from this standpoint’ (209). 28 Les Misérables: Photoplay Study (Chicago: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1935), p. 3. 29 Photoplay Study, p. 5. 30 Photoplay Study, p. 7. 31 Photoplay Study, p. 8. 32 Photoplay Study, pp. 8–9. 33 Photoplay Study, pp. 10–11. 34 By contrast, Hugo’s novel seems to be at pains to show us the irony of Valjean’s moral courage in surrendering to Javert and rescuing Cosette’s lover; the latter restitution causes him to die of grief.



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35 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 108. 36 Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 305–6. 37 Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, p. 189. 38 See Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 103–36. Also, Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 39 A Protestant minister from Winnipeg published Jean Valjean in 1935, which was accompanied by fourteen scenes from a recent (1933) production by Raymond Bernard. The book was extremely popular in Canada and used in secondary education for years. 40 Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), esp. pp. 44–56. 41 See David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 42 See James Naremore, ‘Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir’, in James Naremore, An Invention Without a Future: Essays on Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 144. 43 See further Sergei Tcherkasski, ‘The System Becomes the Method: StanislavskyBoleslavsky-Strasberg’, Stanislavski Studies 2.1 (2013): 97–148.

6

From heterotopia to metatopia: staging Carmen’s death Phil Powrie

There have been some eighty film adaptations of the Carmen story since 1895 (excluding over thirty TV films), based either on Prosper Mérimée’s novella (1845) or on Georges Bizet’s opera (1875), or on a combination of both. It is one of the most adapted stories in cinema history, and the most adapted classical literature in French cinema (the next most adapted being the fifty-odd film versions of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables). Those adaptations range across national cinemas: the USA is the most prominent (twenty-seven), followed by France (ten), Spain (nine), UK (eight), Italy (six), Germany (four), Brazil (two), Russia (two), and there are Argentinian, Austrian, Czech, Dutch, Mexican, Senegalese, Slovenian, South African, Swedish, and Venezuelan versions.1 The Carmen story has unsurprisingly then been the focus of considerable academic attention.2 In this chapter I will focus on the climax of the story, the ritualistic murder of the threatening femme fatale represented by Carmen in her irreducible difference. In most cases, Carmen’s death takes place either in the wild countryside of Mérimée’s original 1845 novella, or in the urbanized bullring of Bizet’s 1875 opera version. Whatever the location of Carmen’s death, a majority of film versions construct the death scene as a ritual performance where the location is transformed into an enclosed and generally non-realist stage, especially when the rest of the film has been relatively realist in its use of locations. Using Foucault’s theory of heterotopia as ‘other’ contested place, I argue that the reason for this staging is to provide a segregated ritual space which retrospectively legitimizes the narrative as a performance of excessive sexualities, at the same time as, paradoxically, it contains that excess by staging it as a performance. However, I argue that the role of voice in the narrative leads us to posit something that I call the heterotopic acoustic, located at the edge of the Otherness incorporated in heterotopic space. I shall propose that this edge, whereby Carmen manages to escape the containment proposed by the films, is metatopic.



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The final scene The final scene of the novella takes place in the countryside. Don José has seen the bullfighter Lucas offer Carmen a rosette plucked from the bull and is in no doubt that Carmen loves Lucas rather than him. Carmen agrees to leave the city with him, and they end up ‘dans une venta isolée, assez près d’un petit ermitage’ (Mérimée 1846: 149) (‘at a remote venta [inn] close by a little hermitage’ (Mérimée 1989: 50)),3 where don José goes to ask the hermit to pray for him. He returns to the inn, and he and Carmen ride off, stopping ‘dans une gorge solitaire’ (Mérimée 1846: 155) (‘in a lonely gorge’ (Mérimée 1989: 52)). He asks her to follow him to America, and she refuses, claiming her freedom: ‘Carmen sera toujours libre. Calli elle est née, calli elle mourra’ (Mérimée 1846: 157) (‘Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born, and a calli she’ll die’ (Mérimée 1989: 52)). She throws away his ring, and he stabs her to death. The final act of the opera, on the other hand, could not be more urban. It takes place in the square outside the bullring, Seville’s Plaza de Toros. A variety of performers process across the square and into the bullring, followed by the crowd, leaving don José and Carmen outside for the final duet. Carmen claims her freedom much as she does in the novella: ‘Jamais Carmen ne cédera! Libre elle est née et libre elle mourra!’ (‘Carmen will never yield! Free she was born and free she will die!’)4 Don José stabs her as the crowd cheer the action in the bullring. While there are almost exact parallels in the dialogue of the novella and the libretto of the opera for this final scene, in addition to what I have quoted above, there is obviously considerable difference in location: on the one hand, a wild place in the mountains with a lonely inn and a hermitage, and on the other a deserted public square next to a noisy space of performance teeming with excited spectators. The films therefore tend to choose between three locations for their climax: the countryside, a public space, or, in a combination of the two, urban wasteland. In what follows, I consider these locations in a selection of films, covering films from the silent period, wellknown and much-analysed films, less well-known films, and a few TV films, generally filmed opera. Not many Carmen films use the wild countryside location of the novella. Amongst early films, the 1913 version starring Marion Leonard and directed by Stanner E.V. Taylor is particularly interesting for its use of a hilltop location with panoramic vistas, introduced by a melodramatic intertitle: ‘To the vale of death’. This is combined with some startling camerawork as Leonard walks toward the camera in three successive close-up shots, prefiguring Jean-Luc Godard’s use of jump-cuts in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) over forty-five years later. This kind of open-space location is in fact rare. Those films that use a non-urban location close to that of the novella tend either to situate Carmen’s demise in urban wasteland – this is the case for Carmen di Trastevere (Carmen 63, Carmine Gallone, 1963) – or in a

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claustrophobic woodland setting, which is the case for the version starring Raquel Meller (Jacques Feyder, 1926) and the wartime French version starring Viviane Romance (Christian-Jaque, 1945). The final scene of the Christian-Jaque version is particularly interesting because critics commented on it at the time. Critics objected to the tonality of the finale, which they saw as awkwardly different from the rest. A French reviewer was exasperated by the lighting effects;5 an English reviewer poked fun, saying that the finale ‘is so swathed in studio mist that the appearance of Hecate and the Three Witches, or, more likely, the perturbéd spirit of Prosper Mérimée would not strike an incongruous note’.6 This finale was somehow too Gothic, too Expressionist, too German. Raymond Chirat and Olivier Barrot repeated the charge in the 1970s, accusing the film of being too Wagnerian, and, again, too Expressionist.7 A similar contrast between the final scene and what precedes it can be seen in the 1926 Feyder version. The film was technically brilliant for the time, with a forty-five-shot sequence in a street scene, most of those shots being travelling shots, and the use of wide-open country spaces, such as Carmen and don José’s tryst on the ramparts of Seville. This cuts away from medium shots of the lovers sitting on the ramparts with the countryside in the background, to extreme long-distance shots of them taken from the countryside, where they are reduced to pathetically small figures, overwhelmed by vast expanses of stone and sky. The final scene, however, occurs in a woodland setting; the trees crowd in on Carmen, limiting the performance space and turning it into an enclosed stage. Conversely, in a spaghetti Western version starring Franco Nero and Tina Aumont (L’Uomo, l’orgoglio, la vendetta – Man, Pride, and Vengeance, Luigi Bazzoni, 1968), José drags Carmen away from the bullring and into the desert to kill her. The wide-open spaces of the desert are contrasted with the many tight close-ups on the characters’ faces. These close-ups reinstate the sense of enclosure that the open desert landscape might have undermined. Turning to the films relying more on Bizet’s opera, the stage directions for the opera make it clear that the final duet occurs in the square just outside the bullring: ‘Une place à Séville (Au fond du théâtre les murailles de la vieille arène. L’entrée du cirque est fermée par un long velum).’ (‘A square in Seville (The walls of the old arena are in the background. The entrance to the ring is closed by a long curtain).’) It is not clear whether Bizet’s gate is intended to be the main entrance to the Plaza de Toros, the Puerta del Príncipe (Prince’s Gate) with its ornate sixteenth-century gates. Many of the films nonetheless attempt an approximation of this gate, with its marble pillars and distinctive door. When they do not do so, they often have imposing gates or walls against which Carmen’s death is framed, for example in Calmettes’s Film d’Art version with Régina Badet (1910), DeMille’s version with Geraldine Farrar (1915), Lubitsch’s version with Pola Negri (1918), von Karajan’s film of the Salzburg Festival with Grace Bumbry (1967), and Zeffirelli’s filmed opera with Yelena Obraztsova (1978).



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Some films show interesting variations on this décor. An RAI TV film (Franco Enriquez, 1956) has a melodramatic bursting open of the gate, with the dying Carmen falling into the bullring, a staging that seems out of kilter with what the death scene implies, as I shall explain below. Peter Brook’s three-film version, La Tragédie de Carmen (1983), begins the scene in a busy arcade and moves for the finale to an empty space that reminds us more of the novella than the opera.8 Comic versions generally omit Carmen’s death, thus eschewing the contrast between town and country, or bullring and square, proving a contrario the importance of that spatial contrast for those films in which it constitutes the tragic finale. A Brazilian version, for example, Carmen, a cigana (Vanoli Pereira Dias, 1976), has a happy ending. It is a star vehicle for the male singer, Teixeirinha, whose company produced the film, and is only remotely connected to the novella. Teixeirinha plays a businessman who is interested in the fate of a young Gypsy and becomes involved with evildoers in his search for her. The film purports to show ‘Gypsy life’ interlaced with its adventure narrative, thus being close to the fourth and final chapter that Mérimée, wanting it to appear more like an ethnographic study, added to the story for the second edition of the novella. But this is a romantic adventure story; Teixeirinha and Carmen sail happily into the sunset. In Lotte Reiniger’s 1933 shadow-puppet version, Carmen does not die; the bull bows to her in the ring, and she and don José, who literally takes a back seat, ride the bull triumphantly around the ring. As Harriet Margolis writes, ‘here in this urban public space, Gypsy Carmen conquers man and beast’.9 In Charlie Chaplin’s A Burlesque on Carmen (1916), a parody of the two competing 1915 versions by DeMille (with opera star Geraldine Farrar) and Raoul Walsh (with one of silent cinema’s best-known vamps, Theda Bara), the finale takes place just outside the bullring, but when ‘Darn Hosiery’ played by Chaplin stabs Carmen, and then stabs himself in sorrow, neither of them dies because the knife is a harmless stage prop. Comedy was not the only reason why Carmen might live rather than die. In the two-language and Fascist-inspired Carmen, la de Triana (Florián Rey, 1938)/Andalusische Nächte (Andalusian Nights, Herbert Maisch, 1938), starring Imperio Argentina, don José dies and is rehabilitated by the military while a stricken Carmen looks on. As José F. Colmeiro writes: ‘Neutralizing the subversive potential of the myth, Carmen is made to conform to the Fascist ideal construction of femininity as submissive and resigned and is spared her life in the end, as a heroic death is reserved for the male soldier, the self-sacrificed martyr hero of Fascist ideology.’10 By contrast in Carmen, la de Ronda (Tulio Demicheli, 1959) – based more on Mérimée than Bizet, and a curious mixture of historical epic and folkloric musical set in the early nineteenth century when Spanish freedom fighters fought with the French invaders – José and Carmen both die, shot by French soldiers in a tavern where Carmen has been singing.

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But in general Carmen dies after a struggle with don José in a space that is contrasted with the public space of the bullring, and starkly so, as no novella-based version makes direct reference to Mérimée’s inn or hermitage. Don José and Carmen are alone in the final scene. There is little difference between the films using the novella or those using the opera, because the opera’s final scene, even if it is just next to the bullring, also occurs in a deserted space. In both novella and opera, the lovers are constantly surrounded by others, whether soldiers, factory workers, crowds in the street or in the inn, smugglers. But in the final scene they are alone. Godard’s version, Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen, 1984) is set in a hotel, and full of groups of people (criminals, police, hotel staff, a string quartet rehearsing Beethoven); even this film briefly sets them apart, observed from a distance by two characters, one of whom asks which of the two will kill the other. Carmen’s death occurs in a social vacuum, parenthesized by don José’s obsession with her, and her desire to be free of any commitment. That space is small, enclosed, claustrophobic, whether set in the countryside or in proximity to the bullring. It is indeed a mirror image of the bullring itself, especially in the many films that situate the final sequence in the town square. Small details in the mise-en-scène of some films suggest this parallel, such as Carmen rushing toward the outstretched knife in Zeffirelli’s 1978 version, as if she were a charging bull. Some films double up on the bullring. The soft-porn version by Albert López, Carmen nue (Naked Carmen, 1984) has the lovers in an empty bullring, with a curious inversion of roles: José is like a bull as he pursues Carmen (Pamela Prati), who waves her dress much like a toreador would his cape; but once José has killed her, he pulls her across the bullring as one would a slaughtered bull. Similarly, Francesco Rosi’s 1984 version locates the final duet in what looks like a housing pen for the Ronda bullring, which was used instead of the Seville bullring for the film. The final scene is a tragic space (hence its elision in comic versions) within which the two characters perform a ritual of excessive desire, whether for freedom, or its opposite, possession, leading to loss and repetition. This is why the most powerful staging of the final scene in my view occurs in those films that emphasize performance through the use of décor. It is to these that I now turn.

Heterotopic space Rita Hayworth’s Carmen, The Loves of Carmen (Charles Vidor, 1948) was, after the Marion Leonard film discussed above, chronologically the most innovative in its use of décor. Whereas it is on the whole closer to the novella than the opera, its finale shifts toward the opera. The finale is no longer located in the deserted place of the novella, but outside the bullring in a stage set comprised of interlocking staircases, without other people, except for the soldier high up who will shoot don José at the moment that José



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Figure 6.1  The labyrinthine staircases of The Loves of Carmen (1948)

stabs Carmen. Indeed, the set is excessively empty, as is stressed by a black cat that scampers across it both before Carmen meets José and once they lie dead on the staircase. This is all the more surprising because there is no staircase in the libretto of the opera; nor indeed is there a black cat in either novella or opera.11 We are encouraged to read the staircases as a metaphor for Carmen’s bid for freedom, her flight away from the male and from patriarchal social and moral constraints. It is almost as if, as in a cartoon or a fairy tale, the staircases appear magically before her as she struggles to get away, a hysterical somatization of her desire for freedom; and yet paradoxically at the same time they trap her in a labyrinth (see Figure 6.1), with a scowling Glenn Ford as the unlikely Minotaur. This entrapment is underlined by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s melodramatic music, by Hayworth’s somewhat laboured acting as she reacts to the sight of the black cat, and by the oddly demotic and petulant dialogue later in the scene, as Carmen shouts at don José: ‘Don’t hang on to me; I can’t stand anyone hanging on to me.’ Vertiginous staircases feature in the final scene of the South African U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (U-Carmen) (Mark Dornford-May, 2005), winner of the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear. The bullfight has been changed to a musical performance in a sports hall, which Carmen leaves by a set of staircases. She is killed against a wire fence overlooking

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wasteland. She and Jongikhaya, as the don José character is called, are framed in pronounced high- and low-angle shots. Given that much of the film is grittily realist, as reviewers pointed out, the effect is similar to the final sequence of the Hayworth version, imparting a sense of melodramatic theatricality, as well as a sense of labyrinthine enclosure. Labyrinthine space recurs in Godard’s version, which, as I pointed out above, is set in a hotel. Godard introduces a feature that later films will build on, in that the action is located in a space of performance. This sense of perfomance is brought about partly because there is a string quartet rehearsing Beethoven at different points of the film – and commenting on their performance of the music. It is also because as she lies dying at the end of the film Carmen makes clear references to Jean Giraudoux’s play Électre (1937). What Carmen says is less important than the fact that a French audience would have recognized the allusion to the well-known play, not least because there are references to the character Electra earlier in the film.12 Carmen’s death is theatrical in both senses of the word: it takes place in a space that is tagged as ‘theatre’ and is almost pompously but certainly parodically ‘theatrical’, as Verena Andermatt Conley points out.13 Two versions take theatricality a step further, locating Carmen’s death in the flies of a theatre: a Senegalese version, Karmen Geï (Joseph Gaye Ramaka, 2001), and a hip-hop version with Beyoncé Knowles as an aspiring actress in the same year, Carmen: A Hip Hopera (Robert Townsend, 2001), both of these versions having all-black casts. In both cases, and as was also the case for U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, another all-black version, the performance is musical: singers sing on stage while the drama between Carmen and don José unfolds. There are slight differences in narration: in the case of Karmen Geï, Karmen’s death is followed by scenes of her funeral, while in Carmen: A Hip Hopera, it is not the don José character, Derek, who kills Carmen, but the corrupt police officer, Lieutenant Miller. These changes to the original are of less importance here than the fact that Carmen dies in or close to a theatrical performance space, and that where she dies is contrasted with that space: the open stage versus the cross-wired labyrinth of the flies (see Figure 6.2). Importantly, these ‘theatrical’ versions emphasize song and draw attention to Carmen’s voice, an issue I shall return to below. The restricted space of Carmen’s death is also evident in the only other all-black version, Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954), in which the don José character, Joe, is a fugitive from the military police after he has assaulted a superior, and the bullfighter Escamillo becomes Husky Miller, a boxer. Carmen dies in a space that is close to the boxing ring, so conforming to what happens in most of the films; but that space, in which Joe strangles Carmen rather than stabbing her, is a small, cramped storeroom (see Figure 6.3). In Carlos Saura’s Carmen (1983), Antonio Gades, the (real) flamenco dancer and choreographer, rehearses a performance of Carmen. The film conflates the Carmen story with Antonio’s recreation of it. He kills the dancer who has the Carmen role because she stands up to him, her death



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Figure 6.2  The cross-wired labyrinth of the flies in Karmen Gëi (2001)

Figure 6.3  The killing storeroom in which Joe (Harry Belafonte) confronts Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) in Carmen Jones (1954)

occurring in an even smaller closet than Carmen Jones’s storeroom, away from the flamenco rehearsal space. We do not see Carmen as he stabs her, but only when she falls out of the closet (see Figure 6.4). As I pointed out above, there is little difference between those films that use Mérimée and those that use Bizet, or indeed those that combine both sources. In all cases, except the comic films, Carmen’s death occurs in a space that is different from the public urban space. That space may be Mérimée’s wilderness, or more likely a space close to Bizet’s bullring. In the latter case, it is more often than not an empty public square; but it can also be an integral part of the public space, as is the case with the flies of a theatre, or the small rooms that form part of whatever public performance space (singing, boxing, flamenco) is being used. The key point to note is that Carmen’s death occurs in a different, enclosed space where emphasis is laid on its constraining and often labyrinthine nature. In films where that

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Figure 6.4  The killing closet in Saura’s Carmen (1983)

option is not possible, such as a desert location, the camerawork functions to constrain the space with extreme close-ups. An enclosed space that reflects the dominant space while clearly being different from it, even when it is part of it, corresponds aptly to Michel Foucault’s conception of heterotopia. Heterotopic spaces for him are: des sortes de contre-emplacements, sortes d’utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l’intérieur de la culture sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, bien que pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables. (something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.)14

Carmen’s place of death is just such a heterotopia, corresponding to all of the six principles of heterotopic space analysed by Foucault. In the first principle, such a space is a space of deviancy, ‘celle dans laquelle on place les individus dont le comportement est déviant par rapport à la moyenne ou à la norme exigée’ (‘those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’),15 such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons. Second, and linked to this, is a displacement that amounts to ghettoization, such as the location of cemeteries as places of death on the periphery of urban centres. Third, heterotopic spaces bring separate spaces together, such as the theatre or the cinema, where we see



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the evocation of a variety of spaces on stage or on screen. Fourth, it is a space where time is broken, the example Foucault gives being the cemetery as a space that signals the loss of life. Fifth, ‘les hétérotopies supposent toujours un système d’ouverture et de fermeture qui, à la fois, les isole et les rend pénétrables’ (‘heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’);16 one of his major examples is spaces of ritual purification. And then finally spaces that contest and invert normal social spaces, such as the brothel, or in a broader sweep, the attempt to create perfect societies in the colonies. The place of Carmen’s death is precisely a place of death (principles two and four), a ritual played out between conflicting desires, where Carmen is positioned as the deviant (first principle), the ‘demon’ as don José calls her (Mérimée 1846: 158 and 1989: 52), who has to be killed so that male hegemony can be purified (principle 5);17 and the space is in a specific relation to a space of performance (principle 3), the most powerful instances of this being those spaces that are closely linked to theatrical spaces. This is why any intrusion into that private space of death, such as a fleeting glimpse of onlookers in Godard and Rosi’s films as the lovers fight it out, or in Zeffirelli’s version the bursting open of the bullring doors as Carmen falls dead in front of the public within, undermines the heterotopic nature of the killing space. To succeed in moving us, Carmen must not die publicly, but in close combat with don José at one remove from the diegetic public. Their fight must be intensely private before it becomes subsequently public, because it is the struggle between absolute freedom and absolute possession of the other in an enclosed ritual and space best represented by the theatrical space. The theatrical space is not the stage itself, but spaces above or beside or behind the theatrical space, so both within and outwith in a sort of in-between. Bizet and his librettists clearly understood this, given that their stage directions indicate that the bullring is separated from us by a curtain. Whether this has any connection to some historical reality is not the point: I do not know whether the Puerta del Príncipe might have had a curtain in front of it either before or after its final construction in 1881. The point is that Bizet’s curtain indicates performance, which many films, with their adherence to realism, fail to understand. On the one side of the curtain, the side we do not see, there is the failure of male performance, that of the bullfighter, the stud par excellence, the hombre with cojones, Escamillo, who is mortally wounded by the bull. On the other side of the curtain, the side we do see, there is the performance of the female, a performance just as rooted in pride as Escamillo’s, but a pride that prizes freedom, not public recognition. If Carmen is a bull, as some of the versions try to suggest, it is because she is fighting for survival in an impossible situation. Julia Migenes-Johnson, who plays Rosi’s Carmen, in an article entitled ‘Carmen Cojones’, ‘likens the conflict between Carmen and don José to that of the bull and the toreador, with Carmen as the fighter’.18

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These narratives have a syllogistic logic of ‘space-passion-performance’: the Carmen narrative forms a space for passion; passion performs space (etymologically, pushes it beyond form – I shall return to this ‘pushing beyond’ below); passion must be a stage performance if the polis as form (and formality, rather than excess), and with it male hegemony, is to survive. The over-determined set we find at the end of the Carmen films therefore functions convulsively as a hysterically gendered (en)closure, where performance and feminized objects (whether props or Carmen herself as ritual object) coalesce melodramatically. The segregated ritual space retrospectively legitimizes the narrative as a performance of excessive sexualities, at the same time as, paradoxically, it contains that excess by staging it as a performance.

From the heterotopic acoustic to the metatopic edge In that space of performance, we attend less to the finality of Carmen’s death than the melodrama of two voices struggling to be heard, with the woman’s voice by far the voice that touches us the more in her cry for freedom. This is to be expected in heterotopic space, which is not just the space of the Other, but the space of the marginalized, ex-centric Other. Carmen’s voice is the only possible expression of the stage shaped by the décor, whether remote or urban. It is a stage that performs the solitude of freedom in a lonely space. That space, whether set on a hilltop, a wood, or outside the bullring, is a space of compressed desire. It is compressed to such an extent that it expresses Carmen’s cry for freedom, in the sense that the space compresses her desire for freedom until it explodes as a howl of anguished defiance. The private heterotopic space of the finale, proximate to a more public space, compresses her voice as well as her freedom; she cries out in frustration, performing her freedom through voice in what one could call a ‘heterotopic acoustic’. The narrative as a whole leads us with terrifying logic to this climax, where Carmen’s cry rips open the space of performance. As so many commentators on the Carmen films have reiterated, the name Carmen is associated with the ‘siren’s song’. Dominique Maingueneau, for example, contrasting Carmen with her virginal foil in the opera, Micaëla, points out how Micaëla’s name is not imbued with local colour, whereas Carmen’s is not only essentially Hispanic, but through its Latin roots, has polyvalent associations with song, the sound of the voice, magical utterances, enchantment. All of these are layers of meaning in the original Latin word, many of them being retained in the French and English derivative ‘charm’.19 The climax of the films (and the source texts) takes the idea of song, and ‘charm’, pushing them to the edge of sense; in most versions, whether sung or spoken, Carmen’s cry is more a howl. This is no doubt why the endings of many Carmen films have often been commented on adversely. The films



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cannot get it right for many critics: they descend into either melodramatic cliché, cultural inauthenticity, or infidelity to the original texts. Why this fixation on ‘feminine endings’, as McClary calls them, this ‘undoing’ of women, as Catherine Clément calls it?20 Michel Chion considers that certain films are organized in such a way that they lead ineluctably to what he calls the ‘point of the cry’ (‘le point de cri’, translated by Claudia Gorbman as ‘the screaming point’), emanating from a woman’s mouth either in reality or in imagination.21 His formula translates literally as ‘the point of cry’, the absence of the definite article in French, ungrammatical in English, signalling that it is less the substance of the cry that matters than its position. It is ‘un point d’impensable à l’intérieur du pensé, d’indicible à l’intérieur de l’énoncé, d’irreprésentable à l’intérieur de la représentation’ (‘The unthinkable inside the thought, of the indeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentability inside representation’).22 It is a kind of ‘absolute sonority’, which Chion likens to a black hole. He suggests that the black hole is that of female jouissance, unrepresentable for the male, redefining the black hole as something that resembles the dissolution of identity. The woman’s cry ‘renvoie à l’illimité, il avale tout en lui-même, il est centripète et fascinant […]. Le point de cri est comme la butée des mots, la sortie de l’être (‘Has to do with limitlessness. The scream gobbles up everything into itself – it is centripetal and fascinating […]. The screaming point is where speech is suddenly extinct, a black hole, the exit of being’).23 Clément’s view of the voice resembles Chion’s, as Elena del Río points out: ‘The voice is never more poignant than at the moment when it is lifted to die.’24 This apocalyptic teleology – a film works toward the apotheosis of a woman’s inarticulate cry – clearly does not apply to all films, but resonates for the Carmen films. Michel Poizat’s work on opera makes an analogous claim: that the work of opera has been an evolution from speech to a woman’s unintelligible cry, whose function, Poizat suggests, is to signal absolute loss, the ultimate destitution of the self, both for the singer and for the listener: C’est dans ces instants où le chant […] se pose délibérément comme chant, comme musique pure, rompant toute attaché avec la parole, la détruisant littéralement au profit d’une mélodie purement musicale qui se développe petit à petit jusqu’à confiner à quelque chose qui est de l’ordre du cri; c’est dans ces instants où disparaît toute parole et apparaît petit à petit ce qui est cri, que surgit cette émotion qui ne peut s’exprimer autrement que par l’irruption de cette marque du sentiment de la perte absolue qu’est le sanglot, au point d’ôter d’ailleurs à l’auditeur lui-même toute possibilité de parole. (It is with such instants that we are concerned, instants when singing […] presents itself as singing, as pure music free of all ties to speech; singing that literally destroys speech in favour of a purely musical melody that develops little by little until it verges on the cry. In such instants, when language disappears and is gradually superseded by the cry, and emotion arises which can be expressed only by the eruption of the sob that signals absolute loss; finally a point is reached where the listener himself is stripped of all possibility of speech.)25

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The point for both Chion and Poizat is that such narratives must end with the destitution of both character and audience in a transcendent moment of pure jouissance where, much as in Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora, meaning collapses into pure sensation, the ‘other’ space and the ‘other’ sense particular to heterotopia. What is articulated by Carmen’s voice in the heterotopic space of the finale is a disarticulation of sense into an excess of sensation anchored in the drives. In that sense, the finale of each film needs to be different from the rest, needs to puncture any notion of the real, needs to disarticulate violently any sense of proportion, any sense of what might be ‘proper’. Carmen’s cry of freedom is the outermost limit of heterotopic space, the point at which it begins to dissolve in the affirmation and performance of flight, into what I want to call ‘metatopia’. This term has been defined variously as a blandly literal ‘transformation of place’,26 and more helpfully as a ‘place the possible world created in the narrative in a future phase of the real world today’.27 I prefer the botanical definition of metatopia as the dislocation of organs by differential growth, in other words an outgrowth. This captures both Carmen’s difference, and her attempts to escape. Her dislocation is flight, ‘vol’ in French, but of course this also translates as ‘stealing’, which is what Carmen does. She steals and escapes, steals things and steals away, dislocating herself in difference. Metatopia in Carmen’s case is the explosion of an uncontainable heterotopia; it is signified by Carmen’s cry of freedom, which exceeds the constraints of genre and pushes the films, often frighteningly, into something beyond melodrama, beyond the combination of music and drama (μέλος and δράμα), beyond the affirmation of utopian drives. Carmen outgrows don José and his redundant spaces of guilt for having broken the law. She grows out of them in her disruptive flight to unnameable and unlocatable metatopical spaces. We might remember that Carmen comes and goes constantly, appearing and disappearing. Just as she escapes being imprisoned at the beginning, so too she will constantly disappear on ‘affaires d’Egypte’ (Mérimée 1846: 103, 121, 128, 129) (‘Gypsy business’; Mérimée 1989: 34, 40, 42, 42), exacerbating don José’s jealousy. In this respect one could argue that her death is an attempt to fix her forever as the object of unconditional love, as Elizabeth Bronfen explains: ‘Like the mother/daughter in Freud’s “fort-da” narrative, Carmen stages the disturbing dialectic of disappearance/appearance […]. As in Freud’s scenario, an experience of the incessant play of fading/returning of his loved object provokes in José fantasies of destruction, mastery and revenge.’28 Carmen’s ‘angel’ cry, as Poizat would have it, is the cry of the woman whom don José tries to turn into the Angel in the House. But Carmen is no angel; she is a nomad, she is demon far more than angel. In this psychoanalytic paradigm, the Carmen films stage, repeatedly, the apparition of the Mother’s voice and body, and their disappearance. Like don José, we want Carmen to say, as Mother, ‘I love you’, all the more so because she constantly claims her freedom from any attachment. The repeated



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death of Carmen over so many films is paradoxically the revenge of the Child for the disappearance of the Mother who wants to be Other. If we carry on for a moment adopting the psychoanalytical paradigms familiar from the 1970s and 1980s, the Carmen narrative could be seen as a return to the moment or moments when the individual is constituted as an individual, not by the recognition of the ideal ego in the mirror, as in the solipsistic Lacanian paradigm, but by the recognition of loss, as the ‘charm’ – ‘Carmen’ – is broken, and the Mother walks off leaving the Child with murder in mind. This is emphasized by don José’s final words in the opera (and many of the films): ‘C’est moi qui l’ai tuée! Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée!’ (‘I am the one who killed her. Ah! Carmen! My Carmen … I adore you!’). Nietzsche considers these words to exemplify the ‘Todhaß der Geschlecter’ (‘deadly hatred of the sexes’; his emphasis).29 What he then says of this conclusion could apply with equal force to that primary relationship between Mother and Child: ‘Ich Weiß keinen Fall, wo der tragische Witz, der das Wesen der Leibe macht, so streng sich ausdrückte, so schrecklich zur Formel würde’ (‘I know of no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with equal terror into a formula’).30 That ‘formula’ is not so much hatred as the terror of male solitude in the face of female freedom. We love Carmen, and kill her – again and again – because we cannot accept the (for us) impossible freedom of the Other. She dies in that Otherness so that we can exist. The films, caught up in the specificities and contingencies of their historical moment, do not always satisfactorily embody that freedom, that edge of the fleeing Other. The ceaseless repetition of the narrative across national cinemas embodies nation while at the same time disembodying it. A ‘new’ Carmen arrives, but she is always already an ‘old’ Carmen, part of the nomadic drift, a ‘Frenchness’ that is not French because it is (also) an ersatz ‘Spanishness’, this hybrid being ceaselessly rescreened. A new nation-specific Carmen arrives, but she is always already nomadically beyond nation, inbetween, caught on the border, waiting for the in-between heterotopic space where she will be sacrificed. As Ann Davies and Chris Perriam note in relation to the Saura and Rey versions in a comment that could apply to all of the films: ‘The burden of bearing national identity must be assumed by the man in the face of the woman who threatens its collapse, fearful and yet desirable because she makes national identity untenable.’31 Carmen will always remain free; she exceeds all attempts to ‘frame’ her and interpret her. Carmen’s inarticulate cry is inarticulate because we are unable to bestow and fix meaning – articulation – upon it. It is Carmen’s history in more than a century of cinema that most clearly reveals our incapacity to do anything more than allow her to tease our desires for a while before finally eluding us. If Mérimée and Bizet first proposed Carmen as a way to play with our desires, the myriad film versions serve to reinforce how desperate are our attempts to try to understand and interpret Carmen,

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to put her in her place, to make her topical as she strives to be metatopical; but also how pleasurable it is to attempt it, again and again.32

Filmography Andalusische Nächte (Herbert Maisch, Germany, 1938) Blow Out (Brian de Palma, USA, 1981) A Burlesque on Carmen (Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1916) Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, Germany, 1920) The Campus Carmen (Alf Goulding, USA, 1928) Carmen (André Calmettes, France, 1910) Carmen (Stanner E.V. Taylor, USA, 1913) Carmen (Cecil B. DeMille, USA, 1915) Carmen (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1915) Carmen (Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1918) Carmen (Jacques Feyder, France, 1926) Carmen (Christian-Jaque, France, 1945) Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, USA, 1954) Carmen (Italy, Franco Enriquez, 1956. TV film of the opera) Carmen (Herbert von Karajan, Austria/Switzerland, 1967. Recording of Salzburg Festival) Carmen (Franco Zeffirelli, Austria, 1978. TV film of the opera) Carmen (Carlos Saura, Spain, 1983) Carmen (Francesco Rosi, France/Italy, 1984) Carmen (Vicente Aranda, Spain/UK/Italy, 2003) Carmen, a cigana (Vanoli Pereira Dias, Brazil, 1976) Carmen: A Hip Hopera (Robert Townsend, USA, 2001) Carmen, Baby (Radley Metzger, USA/Germany/Yugoslavia, 1967) Carmen di Trastevere (Carmine Gallone, Italy/France, 1963) Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, USA, 1954) Carmen, la de Ronda (Tulio Demicheli, Spain, 1959) Carmen nue (Albert López, France/Spain, 1984) Karmen Geï (Joseph Gaye Ramaka, France/Canada/Senegal, 2001) The Loves of Carmen (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1927) The Loves of Carmen (Charles Vidor, USA, 1948) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA, 1933) The Man who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1956) Prénom Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1984) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960) La Tragédie de Carmen (Peter Brook, France/UK/West Germany/USA, 1983) U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, South Africa, 2005) L’Uomo, l’orgoglio, la vendetta (Luigi Bazzoni, Italy/West Germany, 1968)

Notes 1 I have used the primary country of production for this list; many films after 1950 are co-productions. In what follows all films are titled Carmen unless otherwise indicated.



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2 See A. Davies and P. Powrie, Carmen on Screen: An Annotated Filmography and Bibliography (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006). 3 Due to the frequency of citations, references to the novel and translation of Carmen appear in parentheses throughout the chapter, which refer to P. Mérimée, Carmen (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères 1846); P. Mérimée, Carmen and Other Stories, translated and with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Jotcham (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 The full text in a parallel French/English version can be found on Dmitry Murashev’s website at www.murashev.com/opera/Carmen_libretto_French_English (accessed 18 September 2018). The original libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, this translation is by Alan Gregory (1964). 5 J. Sollies, ‘Carmen’, Gavroche, 28 December 1944. 6 Anon., ‘Carmen’, Monthly Film Bulletin 16 (1949): 30. 7 R. Chirat and O. Barrot, ‘Carmen’, Travelling 47 (1976): 58. 8 There are three variants of Brook’s version with three different singers for Carmen. This is the version with Zehava Gal; the other two singers are Hélène Delavaut and Eva Saurova. See Phil Powrie, ‘La Tragédie de Carmen (Peter Brook, 1983) and Embodiment’, Studies in European Cinema 1.3 (2004): 141–51. Many of the films I refer to in this chapter are at the time of writing available on YouTube. 9 H. Margolis, ‘Shadow and Substance: Reiniger’s Carmen Cuts Her Own Capers’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. C. Perriam and A. Davies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), p. 70. 10 J.F. Colmeiro, ‘Rehispanicizing Carmen’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. Perriam and Davies, p. 95. 11 Dolores del Rio also sees a black cat in Raoul Walsh’s The Loves of Carmen (1927). 12 See Ronald Bogue’s excellent analysis of the final scene and its tragic connotations in Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 13 V. Andermatt Conley, ‘A Fraying of Voices: Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen’, L’Esprit Créateur 30.2 (1990): 78. 14 M. Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–9, http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia. en.html (accessed 18 September 2018). Translation from M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1 (1986): 24. 15 Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’; Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’: 25. 16 Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’; Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’: 26. 17 My reading differs from that of Mary Wood’s use of Foucault’s heterotopia in her discussion of Rosi’s Carmen: ‘The heterotopias are those of the military, sport, and criminality. Carmen represents the disruption which enables access to those closed, intimidatory [sic], spaces’. Mary Wood, ‘The Turbulent Movement of Forms: Rosi’s Postmodern Carmen’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. Perriam and Davies, pp. 189–203. 18 Wood, ‘The Turbulent Movement of Forms’, p. 197. Wood is quoting E. Fernández, ‘Carmen Cojones’, Village Voice, 25 September 1984: 67. 19 D. Maingueneau, Carmen: les racines d’un mythe (Paris: Éditions du Sorbier, 1984), pp. 47–8. 20 S. McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), C. Clément, L’Opéra ou la défaite des

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femmes (Paris: Grasset, 1979), translated by Betsy Wing as Opera or the Undoing of Women (London: Virago, 1989). 21 M. Chion, La Voix au cinéma (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982). Translated by Claudia Gorbman as The Voice in Cinema (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 76–7. The films he lists are: King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), The Man who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), and Blow Out (Brian de Palma, 1981). 22 Chion, La Voix au cinéma; Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 77. 23 Chion, La Voix au cinéma; Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 79. 24 As quoted in E. del Río, ‘Rethinking Feminist Film Theory: Counter-Narcissistic Performance in Sally Potter’s Thriller’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.1 (2004): 14. 25 M. Poizat, L’Opéra ou le cri de l’ange: essai sur la jouissance de l’amateur d’opéra (Paris: A.M. Métailié, 1986), p. 61. M. Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 37. 26 G. Dobrov, Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 52. 27 B. Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 109. 28 E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 185. 29 F. Nietzsche, ‘Der Fall Wagner: Turiner Brief vom Mai 1888’, in Der Fall Wagner: Nietzsche contra Wagner (Berlin: Hofenberg, 2013), p. 7. F. Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner: Turinese Letter of May 1888’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 615. 30 Nietzsche, ‘Der Fall Wagner’, p. 7; Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, p. 615. 31 T. Powrie, B. Babington, A. Davies, and C. Perriam, Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 182. 32 I would like to thank Ann Davies and Chris Perriam for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

7

From the Recherche on film toward a Proustian cinema Steven Ungar

A chacun sa madeleine. (To each one her or his madeleine.)1

Each reader of Marcel Proust’s 3,000-page novel creates her or his Recherche.2 And this either by fashioning mental images while reading Proust’s prose. Or – after the fact – by recalling thoughts associated with having read the novel. Roland Barthes wrote in The Pleasure of the Text that Proust was a mandala containing an entire literary cosmogony.3 Elsewhere he confessed that, having read the Recherche several times, he tried never to skip over the same passages. The assertion is provocative, not least because of the questions it raises. How would Barthes have known which passages to skip? Did he mark the margins in different colours? Or were seemingly random skips part of a pattern whose logic he may – or may not – have understood? If one were able to access this reading practice, what insights concerning memory and forgetting might it yield? Barthes’s remarks call to mind the traces of multiple readings in the marginalia Proust added to drafts and proofs of the Recherche, especially as his health declined. They also invite comparison with current streaming services such as Rhapsody and Spotify that store information concerning user access to their musical holdings. On a day-to-day basis, this information generates profiles on which these services draw for marketing purposes. In theory, it might also trace an extended or even a lifelong playlist: It is now possible for a person to synchronize the outside world to music, to make the world a manifestation of the music she chooses to hear. A record of these choices, viewed years after the fact, suggests the fine-grained emotional and imaginative lives we live while apparently doing nothing, or nothing of note. Play the songs you heard on February 2, 2013, in the order in which you played them, and you can recreate not just the emotions but the suspense and surprise of emotion as it changes in time. Nothing is lost.4

We can only speculate how Proust might have drawn on this technology to recall the ‘fine-grained emotional and imaginative lives’ associated in the

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Recherche with Vinteuil’s petite phrase and the petite madeleine cakes dipped in tea. (Why are these triggers of involuntary memory qualified as petite? Perhaps the adjective discloses the minor dislocations generated by sensory experience in ordinary settings.) The point here is how technology related to the storage and retrieval of experience as information might inform understanding of what Proust wanted to say about still and moving images in the Recherche concerning time and memory. In what follows, the storage of and access to memory – whether partial or total – is central to the dynamics of personal recall and adaptation. Before surveying efforts to adapt Proust’s novel to the movie screen, it is helpful to consider – if only briefly – the status of motion pictures in the Recherche. Numerous passages in Le Temps retrouvé can be construed as expressing Proust’s personal misgivings concerning motion pictures: What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround it simultaneously – a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from the truth the more it professes to be confined to it – a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence.5

The three occurrences of the term rapport (‘relationship’) in the passage cited above disclose the capacity of associated words to convey internal states of consciousness and emotion that ‘a simple cinematographic vision’ is unable to convey because of its nature as a visible presence always on the surface of experience. The perspective persists despite a lack of clarity concerning exactly what would constitute ‘a simple cinematographic vision’. The same holds for the evocative density of Proust’s prose in the Recherche and a predilection for the verbal equivalents of panorama shots, close-ups, and parallel editing. All of which lend substance to the idea that Proust may well have drawn on cinematic or proto-cinematic techniques in writing the Recherche. And this perhaps without realizing it. The presence of cinematic or proto-cinematic techniques associated with the Recherche is all the more surprising in light of cinema’s negligible presence in the novel. Even so, some of the first images in Combray – the adventures of Golo and Geneviève de Brabant projected by magic lantern – were cinematic images that simultaneously fascinated and upset the young Marcel as he projected them onto the walls of his bedroom: And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself.6

Claude Beylie has argued that the idea of a cinematic Recherche alongside Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord was central



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to debates surrounding films concerned with regaining time.7 At the same time, complications surrounding this idea derive from a sense that Proust considered cinema a popular art removed from the fine arts such as painting and music.8 Proust’s attitude toward cinema aligns with those of disdainful intellectuals that hovered between indifference and dismissal fails to resolve the complexity of the matter. The fact that Proust wrote (boasted?) in a January 1920 letter to Jean de Pierrefeu that he had never set foot in a movie theatre likewise fails to override characterizing the prose style of the Recherche as cinematic or proto-cinematic. Writing in 1946, Jacques Bourgeois confronted the matter in no uncertain terms: We can imagine Proust as a director and no longer as a writer, since he needs images instead of general ideas to express himself. As an active director he could have given a concrete form to these images, piece by piece, not only like the painter whose universe is instantaneous, but also in time, with live sets and actors.9

My goal in what follows is to reconsider efforts to adapt the Recherche to the screen. In so doing, I mean to explore how a sense of what is at stake in these efforts contributes to a critical understanding of relations between prose fiction and film. And this because adaptation draws on memory and reading transposed from written word to the audiovisual medium of cinema. In conjunction with the possibility of a Proustian cinema that might draw on formal as well as narrative elements of the Recherche, I conclude with remarks on Chantal Akerman’s 2000 feature film, La Captive, inspired by the section of Proust’s novel known as La Prisonnière. Full disclosure: I state from the start that I consider efforts to film the Recherche less in terms of failure or success in conjunction with fidelity to the Proustian source text than as experiments or exercises worthy of exploration on their own. Critical accounts since 2000 by Martine Beugnet, Marion Schmid, and Pascal Ifri have renewed debate surrounding cinematic adaptations of the Recherche.10 For Ifri, a major challenge faced by filmmakers is how to contend with resistance among readers for whom the Recherche is an extreme demonstration of the degree to which representations of time are less malleable on the movie screen than on paper. This is the case, Ifri argues, less in conjunction with linear duration than with the singular complexity of the novel’s depiction of psychology, affect, and emotion. Adapting the Recherche to film is also complicated by the novel’s length, the absence of a traditional plot, its verbal style, and descriptions of painting and music, some of which Ifri describes as un-cinematic. Because Proust’s novel explores what lies behind visible reality and because that reality is reputedly the only one cinema can show, adapting the Recherche to the screen is extremely problematic. Ifri’s openness to a cinematic Recherche runs counter to readers of Proust’s novel or whom such an undertaking borders on a taboo: ‘One can tamper

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with Balzac, with Zola, with Victor Hugo, with Stendhal. One can even slice them up without general approval. But one cannot tamper with Proust’ (‘Mais on ne touche pas à Proust’).11 Responding to a question on differences between a film and a novel, 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Patrick Modiano stated that no one had succeeded in transposing Proust to film. He added that leafing through a photo album composed of portraits of people on whom Proust might have based his fictional characters created a strange effect that did away with the book’s magic: ‘One saw overweight adults, style 1900, cramped in their dresses or tight-fitting jackets. Well, Proust on screen creates the same impression. But that’s not really what Proust is all about.’12 The earliest mention of the Recherche on film I have identified appears in Jean Epstein’s 1921 poem-tract, Bonjour cinéma, in which Du côté de chez Swann is listed alongside film projects based on The Three Musketeers and Fantômas. Which means that the idea – if not necessarily the reality – of a cinematic adaptation existed during Proust’s lifetime.13 Thirty years later, producer Raoul Lévy commissioned Bernard de Fallois and Frantz-André Burguet to draft a screenplay for director René Clément, whose major films at the time included La Bataille du rail (Battle of the Rails, 1946) and Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952).14 (De Fallois had edited versions of Proust’s early prose fiction works, Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, published in 1952 and 1954, respectively.) When the screenplay failed to materialize, the one-time actress, producer, and director Nicole Stéphane took over the film rights. After conferring with Clément and François Truffaut, Stéphane turned to the director Luchino Visconti who had long wanted to make the Recherche because, as his colleague Suso Cecchi d’Amico put it, Visconti ‘was Charlus’.15 Visconti commissioned one screenplay in Italian and another in French. He and Cecchi d’Amico even drafted a screenplay of their own before scouting locations in France. Proposed casting included Alain Delon as Marcel, Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier as Charlus, Dirk Bogarde as Charles Swann, Brigitte Bardot as Odette de Crécy, and either Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, or Claudia Cardinale as Albertine. Greta Garbo reputedly expressed interest in the role of the queen of Naples. Production delays led Visconti to take on an interim assignment, Ludwig, during which he suffered a stroke that prevented him from returning to the Recherche project. A French version of the Visconti–Cecchi d’Amico screenplay was published in 1984. No film based on it was ever produced. Visconti had understood early on that even a four-hour film with thirteen or fourteen episodes would have failed to do justice to the complexity of the Recherche: ‘You wouldn’t have the temps perdu, which is so fascinating in the novel; you see the character you have met at the beginning completely transformed by time at the end of this work.’16 Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico began their screenplay with a segment involving the little train to Balbec in the novel’s second volume, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, before jumping to events



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recalled in the fourth volume, Sodome et Gomorrhe. This and similar departures from the source text resulted from a decision to contend with the Recherche’s essence or spirit rather than with its formal and narrative specificity. Visconti’s vision of the Recherche on film refashioned the novel as a vast portrait extending outward from Proust’s narrator toward the social milieu surrounding him. Even those who lauded this vision recognized it as closer to the panoramic vision Honoré de Balzac had sketched a century earlier in La Comédie humaine. Visconti’s efforts resulted in a phantom film whose presence extended to other Visconti films, of which Death in Venice (1971) was perhaps the most notable.17 Visconti’s lifelong attachment to Proust’s novel permeated many of his films, even as far back as Ossessione, his 1943 adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Interviewed at the 1971 Cannes Festival on the subject of ‘his Proust’, Visconti told Positif critics Michel Ciment and Jean-Paul Török that he might never have completed a literary transposition of the Recherche for the screen because he understood that certain things would drop out, including the musicality of Proust’s prose: ‘But in exchange, I think I could, through an image, penetrate into Proust’s kind of deep labyrinth to explain a feeling, a position, an attitude, a sadness, a moment of jealousy […] staying faithful to the Proustian sentiment rather than to Proust’s style.’18 With Visconti out of the picture, so to speak, Stéphane approached expatriate American director Joseph Losey whose interest in the project prompted him to contact the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. Pinter and critic-translator Barbara Bray drafted a screenplay of 455 shots for a three-hour film. Losey even asked Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez to compose a musical score for the production, but both declined. The French government agreed to provide state funding, on the condition that the film be shot in French. The Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) likewise offered support for a three-and-a-half-hour film in exchange for a TV drama in five episodes to be aired two years after the film’s release.19 Once again, no film materialized. But this time around, the screenplay appeared in book form. Two decades later, it served as the basis for a 2000–1 theatrical production at the Royal National Theatre in London. In 2014, the 92nd Street Y in New York City staged a reading of the play, fully blocked out with lighting cues, set-pieces, and props. The presence of the actors’ scripts was the only sign that this wasn’t a complete production.20 Where Visconti had seen the Recherche as a broad social portrait, Pinter sought instead to distil the novel’s form and style by organizing his screenplay around the twin motifs of worldly disillusionment and artistic revelation. This take on the novel resembled that taken by Gilles Deleuze for whom the Recherche recounted the narrator’s lifelong initiation to signs of worldliness, love, and art.21 As with Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico before them, Pinter, Losey, and Bray faced hard decisions. Key motifs and scenes in the novel cut from their screenplay included passages dealing with involuntary

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memory involving the petite madeleine cake whose taste reminded the narrator of childhood Sundays in Combray when his aunt Léonie used to give him a piece of the spongy cake dipped in tea. Pinter and Bray’s omission of plot elements irked defenders of the Recherche reacting to what they took to be a selective adaptation. Others praised the screenplay whose divergences from the novel’s plot seemed not at all to deter Pinter and Bray from ‘transposing a primarily mental world into a world of sights and sounds’.22 For film critic Stanley Kauffmann, the genius of the Pinter screenplay was that it reworked Proust’s novel rather than merely recast its plot as a series of vignettes: ‘Places are established to be loved and returned to: characters are vivid, developed through growth and decay. A great fugue of European history, social, cultural, and moral, is once again deployed across our senses – other senses, which is the point of making the book into a film.’23 Literary critic Roger Shattuck likewise praised the Pinter screenplay as a viable effort to miniaturize the Recherche in eight parts. After suggesting that Pinter might have conveyed the novel’s first-person perspective by improving on director Robert Montgomery’s clumsy efforts to equate camera and subjective point-of-view in The Lady in the Lake (1946), Shattuck concluded that Pinter’s screenplay had caught ‘a strong glint of Proust’s subjectivity’ by enlarging ‘the language of film in order to encompass one of the most sustained products of the human imagination’.24 Kauffmann and Shattuck diverged from more conservative Proustians by inscribing their misgivings concerning Pinter’s screenplay within a shared sense of its viability. As Kauffmann put it, ‘This screenplay could be made into a film that, without by any means being the full equivalent of the novel, would be worthy of its source.’25 Here, then, were early expressions of a critical stance supporting the viability of a filmed Recherche. After the Pinter project failed to pan out, Stéphane turned to directorplaywright Peter Brook who drafted a screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne. Director Volker Schlöndorff drew on this latest screenplay to complete a 1984 feature, Un amour de Swann, starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Swann, Ornella Muti as Odette, and Alain Delon as Charlus. The decision to film a section rather the entire Recherche had advantages and drawbacks. Un amour de Swann made sense because the story of Swann and Odette was more or less self-contained and because, unlike the rest of the Recherche, Proust had cast it in the third person. Schlöndorff composed his dialogues as closely as possible to match those in Proust’s novel. He also compressed the plot of Un amour de Swann into a single day while alluding to later developments in Swann’s life that Proust had scattered throughout other sections of the Recherche. The result treated the fragment as a microcosm offering a reflection of the whole novel.26 Yet neither the lush colours of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography nor original music by Hans Werner Henze prevented critics from blasting Schlöndorff’s Swann as an illustrated novel



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unable to transpose Proust’s prose into cinematic form. Vincent Canby’s assessment in the New York Times was brutal: It’s as if someone had decided to copy and then recreate one of the great rooms of the chateau at Blois on the scale of a suburban, split-level ranch house. One remains more impressed by the eccentricity of the desire than by the result: a room that stands by itself without particular function and unrelated to any landscape.27

To his credit, Canby lauded the merits of Schlöndorff’s efforts to contend with a monumental task that bordered on the impossible. Even so, his remarks expressed the view held by many – but notably by neither Kauffmann nor Shattuck – that Schlöndorff’s film provided yet more evidence that a Proustian adaptation to film worthy of its literary source was not yet a viable reality. In the Cahiers du Cinéma, Marc Chevrie attributed the weakness of Schlöndorff’s Swann to a banal literality that sought to illustrate what Proust had described, through a minute and vain (‘soft’) reconstitution of period, place, and characters. The effect, he concluded, expressed confidence in neither Proust nor cinema.28 It was as though the sheer monumentality of the Proustian source text imposed a reverence that relegated in advance Schlöndorff’s efforts to failure. Shortly after the release of Schlöndorff’s Swann, Nicole Stéphane wrote that the effects of reverence for the Proust’s novel were as intimidating as they were unavoidable: [Proust] frightens French directors who fear betraying him. Those whom I approached before and after the Visconti and Losey projects, including three among the best who seemed the most apt to shoot the Recherche – François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle – all declined. Only Ariane Mnouchkine, for whom I have great admiration – her Molière is remarkable – would have been tempted to film Un amour de Swann. Unfortunately at the time, she was preparing her Shakespearean trilogy and was thus unable to accept my proposal. She would certainly have made a very interesting job of it.29

Reception of Schlöndorff’s Swann surely suffered from being the first cinematic adaptation of the Recherche. It is also likely that the savage reviews it received cleared the way for subsequent efforts. Even so, Schlöndorff’s efforts to convey period details of costume, décor, and character type drew him toward the pitfalls associated with the 1970s and 1980s vogue for historical films. Phil Powrie concurred when he wrote that Schlöndorff’s film was relentlessly literal in reinforcing its depiction of Swann as a voyeuristic, narcissistic hero and caricatural in its treatment of Charlus as an eccentric.30 Fifteen years after Schlöndorff’s Swann, the Chilean director Raúl Ruiz completed a self-styled adoption – yes, adoption was his preferred term – of Le Temps retrouvé based on a screenplay he co-wrote with Gilles Taurand. The decision to focus on the final novel in the Recherche matched Schlöndorff’s

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strategy to focus on Un amour de Swann because Le Temps retrouvé was the final novel in the Recherche, and thus the one in which everything purportedly came together. Ruiz wasted no time in deploying cinematic techniques that evoked the film’s source text. The opening credits started with a long shot of a church steeple – presumably at Combray – before cutting to a ninety-second-long close-up of water flowing on the surface of a stream or a river. The image was abstract – nothing in it conveyed a sense of scale or location – and perhaps even a visual pun of sorts in keeping with descriptions of the Recherche as a roman-fleuve (a long flowing novel, literally ‘river-novel’). The camera tilted on occasion as the water flowed along a diagonal axis from upper right to lower left. The third shot cut to heavily annotated typescripts on a table or desk, presumably those of the dying narrator. What might first have seemed a voice-over narration was quickly revealed to be the voice of the author off-screen, dictating sentences to his servant and confidante Céleste Albaret. After the opening shot of the church steeple in natural light and colour, the sepia tones of the second and third shots mobilized a colour palette typical of late nineteenth-century portrait photography, yet another marker of period detail. Ruiz enhanced the visual effects of the two opening sequences by raising volume levels for the church bells and flowing water. His third shot layered the narrator’s voice – actually that of the late film and theatre director Patrice Chéreau – and the scratches of a nib on paper, as Albaret transcribed the words the author was dictating. This attention to detail as well as the match of visual and sound tracks conveyed a sensuous immersion that might have triggered flashes of recognition among readers of the novel who might have thought they were actually seeing the Recherche. The film’s production values were polished, but all too often belaboured and obvious. Spectators could hardly fail to register that the film they were watching cast them as witnesses to an epic experience. Mise-en-scène and camera movement created tableaux that froze the characters of the Recherche between present and past, as though they were masked players in the narrator’s personal drama. When Marcel used a magnifying glass to enlarge details of old photos, the effect suggested a telescoping of time enhanced by voice-over comments, as though the photos were speaking across time. If the cumulative effect over the 158 minutes of screening time bordered on the funereal, Ruiz’s foregrounding of visual and sound techniques often captured the roles played by everyday objects – pen and paper, a chipped porcelain teacup – in the social and emotional interactions among the film’s characters. Undeniably, the cinematic effects occasionally approached those Proust had achieved in his prose. Initial reception of Ruiz’s film at the 1999 Cannes Festival was positive. But press and specialized reviews soon questioned the emphasis placed on the narrator (played by Proust look-alike Marcelo Mazzarella) and the casting of John Malkovich as a Charles whose French accent hovered between English and German. Efforts by Ruiz to include as many episodes and Proustian themes as possible resulted in a ‘confusing and tedious collection



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of vignettes which can only be deciphered by an avid Proust reader’.31 Janet Maslin drew on television melodrama as a measure of the film’s shortcomings when she wrote that Time Regained struggled under the burden of its rarefied source materials, so that what remained on screen was ‘a “Dallas”-load of furtive liaisons and lavish social gatherings’.32 Ruiz conveyed multiple temporalities in the form of lap dissolves extending from three to seven seconds. Slow pans and artful lighting displayed a predilection for Baroque theatricality that Ruiz claimed to share with Proust.33 Casting Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte and Catherine Deneuve as Odette, along with smaller roles for Edith Scob and Alain Robbe-Grillet, generated a certain degree of pleasure. Yet even this pleasure yielded mixed results. Responding to a question about whether one could see the film without having read the novel beforehand, Ruiz stated that he hoped so because no one had really read Proust and that a certain degree of amnesia made Le Temps retrouvé a different book each time he read it: ‘It’s like a book of sand.’34 Cinematic embodiment thus facilitated the means by which each spectator of Ruiz’s film created – or recreated – her or his own Temps retrouvé. Writing in Film Comment, Philip Lopate weighed Le Temps retrouvé’s merits against those of earlier adaptation projects: Heretofore, Proust has been a sort of Bermuda Triangle beckoning the foolhardy and the hubristic. We can only imagine what the great Visconti might have done with his projected Proust, before that deal fell apart. Harold Pinter’s screenplay tempted Losey, among others, but was overlong and ended up a paperback. We do have, by way of comparison, Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love, that solemnly inert curiosity with a morose Jeremy Irons drooling over the rounded shoulder, softcore flesh of Ornella Muti as Odette. Now that the bookends of Proust’s seven-volume opus have been filmed, what doughty director will take on the middle? Ruiz, I hope. What Proust does for Ruiz is to plunge him into the oceanic meditation.35

Much like Lopate, Jonathan Romney praised Ruiz’s efforts to convey period artifice by presenting a gallery of living statues choreographed to embody literary characters whom readers of the novel – as well as viewers of Schlöndorff’s film – would recognize. But like reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, Romney compared the effect of Ruiz’s efforts to a ghost story based in romantic necrophilia.36 Even so, Le Temps retrouvé further suggested that the prospect of a viable Recherche on film could no longer be dismissed outright as impossible. (see Figure 7.1) Starting in 1922, the journalist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) wrote essays on Weimar-era literature, photography, film, and press while serving as Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung.37 Kracauer left Germany in 1933 and emigrated to the United States in 1941 where Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships supporting research at the Museum of Modern Art facilitated completion of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947). In his Theory of Film

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Figure 7.1  Swann (Jeremy Irons) with Odette (Ornella Muti) in Swann in Love (1984)

(1960), Kracauer summarized differences and similarities between film and novel for which Proust’s Recherche served as a major reference. He began by acknowledging that great novels such as Madame Bovary, War and Peace, and Remembrances of Things Past aimed at unfolding the wide expanses of reality beyond the requirements of plot that substituted an ordered sequence of events for life’s unfathomable contingencies.38 Responding to a claim by aesthetician Étienne Souriau asserting the clumsiness of the cinematic flashback to approximate the Recherche’s treatment of time, Kracauer cited counterexamples including Howard Hawks’s Scarface, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon to support his assertion that the inwardness achieved in the Recherche through Proust’s masterful prose was not completely inaccessible to films. Setting Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries alongside André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, Kracauer argued that the respective treatments of time in novel and film marked a difference of degree rather than of essence. Three pages later, Kracauer wrote that certain films capitalized on the suggestive power of material phenomena to convey what was neither visible nor material. After acknowledging irreducible differences among literary and cinematic treatments of the open flow of experience, Kracauer commented on a passage in La Prisonnière in which Proust’s narrator described listening to the cries of street vendors while lying in his bed at dawn. So far, Kracauer wrote, the episode seemed predestined to be filmed: Yet Proust details the hawkers’ stereotyped exclamations and intonations mainly for the sake of the memories they evoke in him. They remind him of Gregorian



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chants. Accordingly, this episode leads up to comparisons between the Paris street cries and these liturgical divisions. But in weaving the infinite fabric of observations and recollections in which his life fulfills itself, Proust evolves a continuity impervious to the camera.39

Kracauer’s reading of the passage initially positioned him alongside those for whom cinematic treatments of comparisons and meditations failed to equal Proust’s prose. Yet Kracauer’s sense of differences between novel and film did not dismiss the latter. To the contrary, he wrote, if cinema failed to represent the mental continuity experienced by Proust’s narrator, its ability to represent the physical incidents that provoked a spontaneous response on the part of the narrator stirred the spectator to embark on the route that these incidents threw open to him. Even if efforts to convert the mental continuum of the novel into the camera-life were unsuccessful, the physical events that generated these responses were ‘a natural for the camera’.40 In support of his response to Souriau, Kracauer pitted John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and René Clément’s Gervaise against Jean Renoir’s adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose devotion to the total plot and details of the 1857 novel made his film decidedly un-cinematic. Kracauer’s remarks displayed a nuanced understanding that acknowledged differences between source and target texts without rejecting the potential of film to evoke the relationship between the mental continuum in its entirety and the physical sensations – Kracauer called them ‘incidents’ – that precipitated them. Returning to what he considered Proust’s ambiguous relationship to film, Kracauer described Proust as a contemporary of the new medium who completely ignored it in his capacity as a writer. So that despite an affinity for the cinema that made him sensitive to transient impressions, Proust ‘exchange[d] the world of the cinema for dimensions alien to it’.41 Along similar lines, Keith Cohen has argued that what Proust had described in the Recherche as the cinematic procession of things ‘effect[ed] temporal leaps and narrative reversals that were […] surprisingly comparable to the aesthetic vision conditioning Proust’s “internal reality”’.42 Citing Proust’s failure to devote serious attention to cinema as a burgeoning art form with specific aesthetic tendencies, Cohen’s sense of the cinematic experience was remarkably close to passages in the Recherche that conveyed the spatial configuration of duration, an innate relativity and perceptual shifting of point-of-view, and a vivid discontinuity of the narrating material by means of montage. Kracauer and Cohen thus sided with Roger Shattuck and Stanley Kauffmann as proponents of a minority stance in terms of which the prospect of a Proustian cinema was both feasible and viable. And this less in the strict sense of a cinematic adaptation whose formal and narrative specificity evoked the Proustian source text by virtue of literal fidelity than in that of a film whose deployment of cinematic techniques elicited responses from spectators that approximated those experienced by readers of the Recherche.

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A year after the release of Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé, director Chantal Akerman completed La Captive, a film she described as a free adaptation of Proust’s La Prisonnière. As Proust’s source text did, Akerman centred on the motif of sexual obsession that restaged Un amour de Swann’s treatment of jealousy as the essential and destructive expression of love. Samuel Beckett had understood this lesson as early as 1931 when he wrote that the Marcel– Albertine liaison was the type-tragedy of the human relationship whose failure was pre-ordained.43 Akerman’s film departed from the Recherche as well as Schlöndorff’s and Ruiz’s adaptations by: (1) locating La Prisonnière in late twentieth-century Paris; (2) linking jealousy and the essential unknowability of the other; (3) renaming the protagonists Simon and Ariane; and (4) titling her film La Captive. The change of title signalled an explicit departure from the Recherche. Yet the fact that Proust’s and Akerman’s female protagonists eventually left the men who had tried to imprison them suggested an additional change in title, from La Captive to La Fugitive, literally ‘she who flees’.44 Because La Fugitive was, in fact, the title that Proust initially chose for a followup section to La Prisonnière, Akerman’s change of title retained the spirit of the Proustian source text. This ability to draw on and depart from the Recherche is a measure of Ackerman’s success in avoiding the pitfalls to which Schlöndorff and Ruiz had succumbed. It is one of the key ways in which La Captive dealt with ‘all the great themes in Proust without ever actually naming them’.45 Two years before her death in 2015, Akerman spoke with literary scholar Antoine Compagnon about having read the Recherche for the first time as a fifteen-year-old in 1965. Recalling her impressions at the time, she referred to the passage of the mother’s goodnight kiss in Combray as a sequence. The slip was minor, but it revealed the ease with which Akerman thought of the novel in cinematic terms.46 A decade later, she continued, having read Proust was key to the visual treatment of corridors, spatial separation, and claustrophobia in her 1975 feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It was after making Jeanne Dielman that Akerman first thought about filming La Prisonnière, even if she felt she was ‘too puritan and dogmatic’ at the time to act on her idea.47 The changes Akerman implemented involving time, setting, character names, and title freed her from an obligation to retell the story of Marcel and Albertine as Proust had written it. So that instead of breaking down or tampering with (toucher à) the source novel, she could extend it and let it breathe. An additional change was casting Ariane (Sylvie Testud) as a dark blonde who wore her hair long, when readers of the Recherche would likely remember that Proust’s Albertine had curly black hair. Testud’s physical appearance brought to mind the fair-complexioned figures of Venus depicted by Sandro Botticelli in Mars and Venus (1483) and The Birth of Venus (1486). In the Recherche, Charles Swann had rationalized his infatuation with Odette by comparing her to the figure of Zipporah in Botticelli’s The Trials of Moses. He even placed a reproduction of the painting on his desk



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where one might expect to find photos of family and loved ones. In La Captive, the male protagonist’s obsession is likewise based on an image, one that – as I argue below – was expressly cinematic rather than painterly. Akerman established a distinctive visual tone with opening credits in plain white font superimposed over a night-time long shot of waves washing along a beach. The breaking waves conveyed an oceanic sensation of perpetual repetition and difference. And this in contrast to the flowing river seen at the start of Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé. Lap dissolves and a rack shift sustained a sombre dreamlike effect enhanced by the rhythmic sound of the waves. There was no music. After a minute, the credits cut to a daytime sequence of seven young women playing in the surf along a sandy beach. Nothing indicated that this was the same beach seen during the credits. Even so, the possible setting on the Atlantic coast of Normandy corresponded to the resort town of Balbec where Proust’s narrator first encountered Albertine. Grainy images and the whirring of a projector convey a sense of the segment as an amateur movie operating as a film within a film. Long and medium shots followed by slow pans scanned the group before framing a close-up of two young women. The woman on the left (Ariane) was fair complexioned; a second woman to her left seen in semi-profile on the right side of the frame (Olivia Bonamy as Andrée) was a brunette (see Figure 7.2). A slow zoom tightened into an extreme close-up of Ariane looking back directly at the camera.48 This initial part of the beach segment cut to a medium close-up of a young man, Simon (Stanislas Mehrar), seen beside a projector that he had presumably

Figure 7.2  Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) at the beach in a grainy amateur film from La Captive (2000)

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used to screen the clip. A lighting source to the man’s right cast the tone of his skin as blue-grey. A circle of intense white from the projector lens to his left stood out against the palette of muted colours. The crispness of the image contrasted with the blurred quality of the beach clip, hinting at a separation between dream or fantasy and reality. The beach clip continued with a medium close-up of Ariane and Andrée facing the camera with towels or wraps over their shoulders. Intense sunlight reflected on the surface of the sand and from the ocean behind them darkened their faces, especially that of Ariane. Simon was next seen stopping, rewinding, and replaying a two- to threesecond fragment frame-by-frame. After a moment, it was apparent that he was trying to determine what Ariane was saying. And this because the clip was silent. As he read and reread Ariane’s lips, he was shown and heard pronouncing the phrase ‘Je … vous … aime … bien’ (‘I really like you’ or ‘I like you very much’). To whom was Ariane speaking these words? Was it to Andrée beside her on the beach or to Simon, toward whom she was looking while he filmed her? The formal address ‘je vous aime bien’ in place of the more familiar ‘je t’aime bien’ complicated matters. In principle, the ‘vous’ could be addressed to the group of young women – probably not. Or it could be a period usage. Contrary to the emphasis it normally provided, the adverb bien further distanced Ariane from the person to whom she was speaking. (‘Je vous aime’ or ‘je t’aime’ is thus ‘I love you’, while ‘je vous aime bien’ or ‘je t’aime bien’ is ‘I like you’.) A similar uncertainty emanated from the extreme close-up. Was Ariane’s gaze into the camera open and receptive or was it instead impenetrable? Did Ariane already know Simon at the time he was filming her? Or was he a stranger filming women whom he happened to encounter on the beach? Beugnet and Schmid support the latter possibility when they write that the camera goes from one woman to another, ‘as if hesitating’, until the focus settles – ’relentless, isolating, and exclusive’ – on a chosen object.49 Simon’s head suddenly appeared in silhouette toward the lower left of the frame (see Figure 7.3). The effect approximated that of the shadow puppetry known in French as ombres chinoises (Chinese shadows). Posed between the projector and the screen, Simon repeated the phrase spoken by Ariane, which he addressed to her projected image. The beach clip ended over Simon’s silhouette with a long shot of Ariane turning away from the camera and running toward the ocean before stopping short on the shoreline. As in crime and thriller films, this section of the clip revealed in advance how Akerman would end her film with Ariane’s return to the ocean from which she had – at least figuratively – emerged. Most spectators were unlikely to grasp this mise-en-abîme on a first watching.50 Attentive readers of the Recherche would likely associate the start of the clip with the little gang (‘petite bande’) of adolescent women at Balbec



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Figure 7.3  Simon’s (Stanislas Merhar) silhouetted head appears on the screen of his projected film of Ariane and Andrée in La Captive

described in the Recherche as an apparition (‘rayon de lumière’, or ‘beam of light’) coinciding with the narrator’s first sighting of Albertine: I remembered Albertine first of all against the sea-shore, almost painted upon a background of sea, no more real for me than those theatrical tableaux where it is not clear whether one is looking at the actress billed to appear, at an understudy who is standing in for her, or simply at a projection. Then the real woman had detached herself away from the beam of light, come towards me, but only for me to perceive that in the real world she had none of the amorous accessibility she had seemed to possess in the magic tableau.51

The clip illustrates the extent to which Akerman appropriated and reworked – rather than simply adapted – the Proustian source text by conveying Simon’s fixation on Ariane. Moreover, Akerman obtained his effect by mobilizing cinematic devices (dispositifs) removed from the fine art of painting and performance art of theatre invoked in the passage cited above. Finally, Akerman’s use of shadow puppetry recalled proto-cinematic practices associated with the magic lantern that Proust had depicted in a passage early on in the Recherche. The world seen in the clip was a world of women from which Simon’s exclusion generated and sustained the jealousy that made him – rather than Ariane – the true captive of Akerman’s film. The latter half of the segment staged Simon’s desire to cross over, so to speak, du côté de chez Ariane (toward Ariane). It was a crossing he never completed because his desire for fusion was directed less toward the flesh-and-blood Ariane than toward

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the figure he fashioned during the filming and private screening. An even stronger exclusion occurred two-thirds of the way through the La Captive during an opera performance at the Trocadéro Ariane and some women friends had attended to hear their friend, Léa (Aurore Clément), sing a lead role. Simon rushed to the theatre before leading Ariane away in a fit of jealousy because he suspected that Léa was Ariane’s lover. The title of the opera being performed, Così fan tutte (Thus Do All Women Do), was meaningful in literal and figurative terms. Once again, the opera’s title evoked a world of women; moreover, it did this in a reductive and judgemental way. Even more telling was the opera’s subtitle, La scuola degli amanti (The School for Lovers), which suggested a lesson to which Simon remained oblivious. Here as elsewhere in La Captive, Akerman opts for an indirect (connotative) treatment of the Proustian source text in place of the more literal (denotative) treatments by Schlöndorff and Ruiz. Simon’s jealousy generates an obsessive drive for evidence to substantiate the truth or reality he suspects. When Simon interrogates two friends of Ariane’s about sex between women, they tell him only that it is different from sex with men. Simon’s failure to understand this difference and its implications heightens his jealousy. The fact that Ariane tells Simon she is happy fails to alleviate his suspicions. When she admits toward the end of the film that she may have told some small lies, Simon predictably presses her to know more. As in Un amour de Swann, jealousy breeding suspicion irreparably alters relations. Visual and narrative parallels with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo appear early on in La Captive during a segment in which Simon tracks Ariane through the Musée Rodin. As she stops to contemplate a sculpture of a female figure rising of out an unformed base, a slow pan records her encounter with a sculpture that Marion Schmid has described as an allegory of ‘a modern-day Aphrodite’.52 The force of Ariane’s fascination is confirmed when her friend Andrée arrives and is likewise drawn to the sculpture. The chignon sported by the statue recalls those of Kim Novak’s Madeleine Elster – a near homonym of Proust’s Elstir – and of the female protagonist from the future in Chris Marker’s La Jetée.53 In François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), the two male leads are so taken with the statue of a woman they see on a magic lantern slide projected by a friend in Paris that they travel to Greece to see the statue in person. Shortly after returning to Paris, they meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), described in voice-over as: ‘The French girl, Catherine, [who] had the same smile as the statue on the island. Her nose, her mouth, her chin, her forehead, had the nobility of a certain province which she had once personified as a child in a religious festival. The occasion took on a dreamlike quality.’54 As a variant of the magic lantern episode at the start of the Recherche, the slide sequence in Jules and Jim anticipates the sequence in La Captive during which Simon projects his clip of Ariane and Andrée on the beach. As with Ariane in La Captive, the aura emitted by the real Catherine in



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Jules et Jim draws on Jules and Jim’s thoughts after seeing the statue as image and later in person. The sequence on the Greek island shot by cinematographer Raoul Coutard includes the same kind of circular movement that Akerman and her cinematographer Sabine Lancelin may be referencing forty-two years later in La Captive. Vertigo likewise features a circular pan when Scottie kisses the Madeleine Elster he has recreated with help from a reluctant Judy Barton. In line with Samuel Beckett’s insight some seventy years earlier, Jacques Rancière has written of the extent to which Akerman’s treatment of faces and gazes conveys the Proustian lesson (démonstration) of obsessive love.55 Nowhere is this treatment more forceful than in a two-minute segment during which Ariane and Simon are seen in adjoining bath tubs separated by a panel of patterned glass. Simon is in a frontal plane talking to Ariane, whose nudity is obscured by the translucent panel (see Figures 7.4–7.6). The effect is similar to that of a framed painting or a movie screen. Ariane sings softly as she washes herself, while Simon lying in his tub gazes up at her. After a minute, Simon stands up and turns toward Ariane, who is standing on the other side of the glass panel. They hold out their hands as though to touch or embrace across the glass partition that separates them. Of note is the fact that the song Ariane sings behind the translucent panel is from Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte: ‘And in May as the proverb goes/Do what comes your way’. Because the bathroom sequence occurs well before the one when Simon goes to the theatre to take Ariane away from Lea, the song can be understood in retrospect as a clue to Ariane’s ‘invisible and unknown life outside, in the world’.56 Is Ariane singing to Simon or to herself? Either way, there is no indication that Simon pays enough attention to the words Ariane is singing to understand them as anything other than an expression of the ease she allows him to witness. A later sequence during which Simon overhears Ariane and an unseen woman singing a call-and-response duet of the ‘Che Diletto’ (What delight!) aria from Mozart’s opera likewise excludes Simon from an intimacy between women that casts the act of singing as a primal sonority.57 The final two segments of La Captive approximate a ‘bookend’ return to the setting of its credit and opening sequences. Ariane tells Simon that she wants to go for a brief swim before their room-service dinner at the oceanside hotel where they are spending the night. After she leaves, Simon becomes anxious and calls out her name into the pitch-black night. He runs to the shoreline and into the swelling ocean. Just as he reaches Ariane and begins to pull her toward shore, she drops out of sight. Akerman’s final shot is a two-and-a-half-minute long take filmed the following morning. It begins as an extreme long shot of a small motorized boat set against the ocean, an open sky and a distant breakwater. A figure – soon recognizable as Simon – is visible sitting toward the fore of the boat, which is searching for Ariane near the beach. A slow zoom frames him and a man operating the boat’s outboard motor as they approach the shore. Lateral movement from one

Figures 7.4–7.6  Adjoining baths with Simon watching Ariane, then both touch the glass partition



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breakwater to another discloses the two figures dwarfed by the immense scale of ocean and sky.58 The segment concludes with a close-up zoom that passes over and beyond Simon’s head before a sharp cut to black. La Captive stops rather than ends. Ariane has disappeared and presumably drowned, thus returning to the ocean setting from which she emerged in the Super 8 clip. Without dialogue, the sequence builds on mise-en-scène and camera movements enhanced by non-diegetic passages from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1908 brooding symphonic poem, The Isle of the Dead, sections of which are first heard when Simon begins to feel anxious about Ariane’s safety. Rachmaninoff reputedly wrote the composition after seeing a black-and-white reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s painitng, The Isle of the Dead, in which a figure standing up in a small boat is seen standing over a coffin.59 The music and painting confer aesthetic complexity that yoke visual and sound techniques that are irreducibly cinematic. The opening and closing segments of La Captive draw on and depart from the Recherche. Moreover they do this in ways that display Akerman’s skills as a filmmaker for whom the Recherche serves a point of departure rather than as a source text to be emulated as literally as possible. The Recherche nonetheless pervades La Captive indirectly by drawing on connotation as a necessary supplement to effects Schlöndorff and Ruiz had sought to achieve more directly on the order of denotation. Where Schlöndorff and Ruiz grounded their respective adaptation and adoption in fidelity to Proust’s novel, Akerman opted for a film whose Proustian plot opened onto a cinematic vision of her own. Building on and appropriating La Prisonnière, La Captive proposes love between women as an irreducible alterity she stages cinematically in her own way. The result is the most successful to date of a Proustian cinema that Beugnet and Schmid aptly characterize as a cinema of différance.60 La Captive is not the lastest cinematic adpatation of Proust’s Recherche. Nor is there reason to believe that Akerman intended it to be a last word (last image?) on the topic. A complete account of adaptations would need to include Fabio Carpi’s Quatetto Basileus (1982) and Le Intermittenze del cuore (2003), to which Beugnet and Schmid devote an entire chapter of their study.61 Percy Adlon’s Monsieur Proust (1981) likewise warrants scrutiny. What distinguishes Akerman’s film from those of Schlöndorff and Ruiz is the skilful evocation of gazes, actions, and sounds linked to characters and physical objects whose interactions generate the cinematic analogue of the fictional world of people, places, and things conjured up by Proust’s prose. Not simply, then, a simple series of images, but something closer to the cumulative density of associations that readers of the Recherche should recognize as a full transposition of experience that digital technology has begun to approach in its mandate to record, store, and recall experience in the form of information that may soon approximate the retrieval of time that Proust had sought to approach in writing the Recherche.

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Notes 1 Chris Marker, Immemory (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1997), CD-ROM liner notes in English. 2 The full title in French is À la recherche du temps perdu, hereafter Recherche. In English, I prefer the more elegant and literal In Search of Lost Time proposed by Richard Howard and others in place of C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s Remembrance of Things Past, inspired by the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past’. 3 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 59. A decade earlier, the equation of author and text is surprising and even retrograde in light of the polemics surrounding the plays of Jean Racine in which Barthes had advocated going beyond author-based models of interpretation. Maybe Proust and the Recherche were so much a part of who Barthes had become that he could not stop himself from asserting – if only in passing – a critical position at odds with those he had taken a decade earlier against the Sorbonne professor Raymond Picard. 4 Dan Chiasson, ‘All the Songs Are Now Yours’, New York Review of Books, 9 June 2016: 18. 5 Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Allen Lane, 2002), pp. 197–8. 6 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 10–11. 7 Claude Beylie, ‘Note sur Proust et le cinéma’, L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 321–2 (February 1984): 108. 8 In addition to Chevrier, see Brassaï (aka Gyula Halász), Proust in the Power of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [1997]). 9 Jacques Bourgeois, ‘Le Cinéma à la recherche du temps perdu’, Revue du Cinéma 3 (1946): 20. Cited in Marine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), p. 38. 10 The accounts are Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, Pascal A. Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations: Proust on Film’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 9.1 (2005): 15–29, and – to a lesser extent – Peter Kravanja, Proust à l’écran (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2003). 11 ‘La Longue Marche, entretien avec Nicole Stéphane’, L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 321–2 (February 1984): 8. I have translated the French verb toucher à as tamper. Other possible translations include ‘meddle’ and the more colloquial ‘mess with’, as in the 1980s anti-racist slogan ‘ne touche pas à mon pote’ (don’t mess with my buddy). At the start of his 1896 ‘La Musique et les lettres’ (Music and Letters), first presented as a talk at Cambridge and Oxford, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, ‘On a touché au vers’. Toucher in this context meant something closer to ‘taken a hit’ or even ‘roughed up’. My thanks to Marshall Olds for explaining the relevant context surrounding this statement. 12 ‘“Ce  que je dois au cinéma” propos recueillis par Antoine de Gaudemar’, in Patrick Modiano, ed. Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée, Cahiers de L’Herne (Paris: Editions de L’Herne, 2012), pp. 242–3. My thanks to Lynn Higgins for pointing me to this statement by Modiano.



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13 Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinéma (Paris: La Sirène, 1921), p. 28. The same passage, cited by Léon Moussinac in Intelligence du photographe (Paris: Correa, 1946), p. 258, appears in Yves Baudelle, ‘Proust et le cinéma’, Roman 20/50, special issue, ed. Paul Renard (1996): 48–9. 14 Raoul Lévy (1922–66) produced films starring Brigitte Bardot, including Et Dieu créa la femme (1956) and La Vérité. Jean-Luc Godard cast him in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle in a minor role as an American ‘john’ whom Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady) and her friend Marianne (Annie Duperey) visit in their roles as part-time prostitutes. 15 Laurence Schifano, Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion, trans. William S. Byron (London: Collins, 1990), p. 368. Cited in Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations’: 19. 16 Henry Bacon, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 208. Cited in Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations’: 19. 17 The notion of ‘phantom film’ attributed to Michel Ciment’s 1999 book on Stanley Kubrick appears in Florence Colombani, Proust-Visconti: histoire d’une affinité elective (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2002), p. 11. See also ‘La Longue Marche’, p. 8. 18 Colombani, Proust-Visconti, p. 21. Visconti had first encountered the Recherche as a teenager in 1920 when he saw his father absorbed in reading Du côté de chez Swann. Ever since, his devotion to Proust’s novel was so extreme that his fear of making a film unworthy of its source text trumped his desire to complete what he had once hoped would be the culmination of his directorial career. 19 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 55. 20 Christopher Richards, ‘“The Past is a Mist”: Pinter’s Proust’, Paris Review, 23 December 2014, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/23/the-past-is-a-mistpinters-proust (accessed 19 September 2018). 21 See Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1964] 2000). 22 Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations’: 22. 23 Stanley Kauffmann, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, New Republic, 24–31 December 1977: 22. 24 Roger Shattuck, ‘The Filming of Proust: The Proust Screenplay, by Harold Pinter’, Partisan Review 46 (1979): 615. 25 Kauffmann, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: 23. 26 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 91. 27 Vincent Canby, ‘Swann in Love: A Proustian Vignette from France’, New York Times, 14 September 1984), www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0CEEDA14 3AF937A2575AC0A962948260 (accessed 19 September 2018). Canby’s sense of Schlöndorff’s film as scaled-down invites consideration of the graphic novels that Stéphane Heuet has published at the Editions Delcourt, especially in conjunction with individual frames/cels understood as variants of the storyboards often used by directors to provide an initial breakdown into sequences and shots. 28 Marc Chevrie, ‘Proust, côte boulevard’, Cahiers du Cinéma 358 (April 1984): 50. 29 ‘La Longue Marche’: 8. 30 Phil Powrie, French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 28–9. 31 Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations’: 25.

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32 Janet Maslin, ‘Time Regained: From Sickbed to Boyhood and Back, Echoing Proust’, New York Times, 30 September 1999, cited in Ifri, ‘One Novel Five Adaptations’: 25. 33 See Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Paris: DisVoir, 1995). 34 ‘Dans le laboratoire de La Recherche: entretien avec Raoul Ruiz’, Cahiers du Cinéma 535 (1999): 46. Beugnet and Schmid speculate that Ruiz’s use of commentary, odd shooting angles, and treatment of objects during the final reception at the Guermantes may constitute a humorous evocation of the opening sequences of L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad). If so, they continue, the sequence is a pastiche in retrospect since Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay for Marienbad, appeared in Ruiz’s film as a guest at the feast that was being depicted (Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 150). 35 Philip Lopate, ‘Memory Loves Company’, Film Comment 36.4 (2000): 60. 36 Jonathan Romney, ‘Masque of the Living Dead’, Sight and Sound (January 2000): 32. 37 Many of the Weimar essays were republished three decades later in The Mass Ornament. 38 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 232. [1960] 39 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 238. 40 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 238. 41 Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 238–9. See also Kracauer’s remarks on Proust in a 1951 piece, ‘The Photographic Approach’, reprinted in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 206–8. 42 Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 207. 43 Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, [1931] 1994), p. 7. David Ellison has described a discontinuous jump in La Prisonnière from the ‘kaleidoscopic Balzacian social world to strange and spare territories that point to the reduced imaginative space of Samuel Beckett’ (David Ellison, A Reader’s Guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 136). 44 When Cyril Béghin notes that La Captive could equally have been titled La Captivante, he seems to attribute a degree of tendentiousness to Ariane’s actions – as the one who captivates – beyond that conveyed by Ackerman’s title. See Cyril Béghin, ‘The Long Take Mastery’, trans. Mark Cohen, Film Quarterly 70 (2016): 48. 45 Frédéric Bonnaud, ‘Proust Regained’, Film Comment 36.4 (July–August 2000): 61. Bonnaud saw La Captive and Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé as dissimilar films nonetheless opposed in common to the received ideas of those who wanted to keep Proust forever out of cinema’s reach: ‘Two magnificent demonstrations of the Proustian universe lending itself to the most exacting and innovative cinematic experimentation’. The passage by Raymond Bellour is from his ‘Ces Images d’un malheur sans partage’, Trafic 35 (2000): 22. Proust reputedly changed the title from La Fugitive to La Disparue after learning that the former was the title of a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Ironically, La Disparue also turns out to be a suitable characterization of what Akerman does with the Albertine figure in La Captive. Akerman stated in a 2000 interview that because changing



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the names helped the viewer transcend any recollections of having read Proust’s novel, it had a liberating effect on her own imagination. See Magazine littéraire 2 (2000): 89. 46 Chantal Akerman, ‘Une jeune cinéaste lit Proust’, in Lire et relire Proust, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Nantes: Cécile Defaut), p. 56. A year after completing La Captive, Akerman told Bonnaud that her first reading was ‘just bits and pieces here and there’, but that she was so taken with La Prisonnère, it was as though Proust had written that section of the Recherche for her. See ‘The Captive: Frédéric Bonnaud Talks to Chantal Akerman’, Enthusiasm 4 (2001): 13, cited in Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 171. 47 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 171. 48 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 189. Akerman’s mise-en-scène of the petite bande of young women may be a model for a striking shot in Agnès Varda’s 2008 feature, Les Plages d’Agnès. 49 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 189. 50 Bernard Benoliel, ‘La Captive: Le Temps retrouvé de Chantal Akerman’, Cahiers du Cinéma 550 (2000): 14. Benoliel notes that Akerman included intertextual references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. 51 Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 359. 52 Marion Schmid, Chantal Akerman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010), p. 154. 53 The anonymous woman from the future played by Hélène Chatelain in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963) wears a similar hairdo, sometimes called a French twist. 54 Jules and Jim: A Film by François Truffaut, trans. Nicholas Frey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 25. 55 Jacques Rancière, ‘Histoire de visages’, Cahiers du Cinéma 550 (2000): 53. 56 Barbara McBane, ‘Talking, Singing, Exploding … and Silence: Chantal Akerman’s Soundtracks’, Film Quarterly 70.1 (2016): 42. 57 McBane writes: ‘The two voices eventually commingle in a crescendo of offscreen rapture – an implied sexual climax organized around what, for Simon, are primal sonorities’ (McBane, ‘Talking, Singing, Exploding’: 42). My thanks to UI School of Music colleague Bill Theisen for helping me to decode the references to Cosí fan Tutte in Akerman’s film. 58 Bellour, ‘Ces images d’un malheur sans partage’: 21–2. 59 Böcklin completed five versions of the painting. All were purportedly inspired by Greek mythology, images of the Greek isle of Pontikonisi, and the English cemetery in Florence, where Böcklin painted the first three versions of what he referred to as a dream-image. 60 Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, p. 206. See also Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Elizabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 61 See Beugnet and Schmid, Proust at the Movies, pp. 206–28.

8

Otto Preminger’s Bonjour, Tristesse: a tale of three women, if not more R. Barton Palmer

Otto Preminger’s 1958 screen version of Françoise Sagan’s first novel, Bonjour, Tristesse (Hello, Sadness, published four years earlier) was intended to be an important entrant in the distinguished series of ‘A’ budget adaptations of serious fiction and drama that were turned out (or in this case financed) by Columbia Studios in the 1950s under the general direction of studio head Harry Cohn. Bucking this trend, Tristesse would not be the kind of hit with US filmgoers, and especially critics, that Cohn had come to expect with such productions, even though, as will be easily demonstrated in this chapter, it offers an inventive and thoroughly cosmopolitan screen version of the novel. Sadly, like Preminger himself, the film has been little discussed by American film scholars. A recently restored version was not even made available in the Region 1 format of US DVD players, though its release in Europe was hailed as signal event within the film community. And yet even European admirers of Preminger and this project have paid scant attention to the adaptation process, which has left substantial traces in the film. In particular, the film’s intriguing trans-nationalism has seldom been remarked upon in any detail, even though it is clearly why Tristesse enjoyed a much more successful release in Europe, especially in France. Among others, the Cahiers critics reviewed Tristesse enthusiastically, accounting it one of the major releases of the year. Preminger’s reputation is still on the rise on the continent, where Tristesse is appreciated in important ways as a French film turned out with considerable finesse by one of Hollywood’s most prominent Europhile directors.1 The 2012 Locarno Festival featured an extensive retrospective, a cultural event that was much celebrated in the French press.2 Preminger’s oeuvre still awaits just appreciation in the country where he spent the bulk of his very successful career in filmmaking.3 While hardly a failure with filmgoers, Tristesse did only about half the gross business of the three Columbia best picture-winning adaptations. Tristesse earned a bit less than $15 million, on a budget of a bit more than $1 million.4 Columbia was committed to turning out, or co-producing as



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it did in the case of Tristesse, a continuing series of prestige projects in addition to its more ordinary cinematic fare. Critical recognition mattered as much as box office. It was thus doubly disappointing that American critics showed little appreciation for the trans-national aspects of what Preminger and the other filmmakers had accomplished in bringing Sagan to the screen, even though they should have realized that the project was intended to play well with European, especially French, filmgoers and critics. In particular, US reviewers showed themselves ignorant of the crucial fact that this property was no ordinary bestseller, to be judged simply on its plot, which was admittedly thin, uncomplicated, and lacking in suspense, or on its characters, who are flat in the Forsterian sense, that is, developed with very little depth and with only minimal backstory. They do not manifest in the least any complexity or contradiction, and this did not change in the film version. In the novel, the exception to this rule is Cécile herself, the extremely self-conscious and obtrusive narrator, who, meditating on both the past and the present, constitutes her own chief subject, displaying wit, intelligence, and, often, unabashed self-critique. Others are brought to life only through what she has to say about them, and for this reason ‘they’ reveal little of themselves and more about her, principally an only superficial interest, typically adolescent, in those who constitute her family circle. This formal structure, once faithfully dramatized, even with some voice-over hinting at the novel’s privileging of Cécile, would necessarily seem vague, even directionlesss, but there was no other way for Preminger, making a commercial film, to proceed, at least with this part of the ‘story’ as such. If he and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had expanded the slim narrative, adding characters or subplots, they would have risked ruining the very pre-soldness that was the rationale for the project. The novel indeed was pre-sold source material par excellence, a prime property whose sale, for the substantial sum of $100,000, was handled by one of the French cinema’s more active and important producers/directors, Ray Ventura. Ventura was an immensely popular orchestra leader whose interest in promoting jazz in France finds an interesting reflex in Preminger’s use of jazz chanteuse Juliette Gréco, who is shown performing the film’s title song, apparently written by Gréco with the help of Arthur Laurents for the English version (of this more below).5 Ventura had been able to pick the rights up from Sagan for one-tenth of what Preminger later negotiated. From all accounts, however, there was no bidding war, and none of the principals involved (including Sagan’s editor René Julliard) suggests that any French producers were interested, despite the obvious fact that the novel enjoyed an unparalleled popularity, especially with young adults, who constituted what was arguably the most influential section of the national film audience.6 Perhaps French filmmakers would not touch the property because they were fearful that a film version would arouse a profit-killing controversy. In 1954, Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Blé en herbe (Ripening Seed, 1954), based

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on a Colette coming-of-age novel that focused on a young girl’s first sexual experience, found its licensed exhibition protested, with some violence, in socially conservative areas, including Normandy, where Archbishop Martin of Rouen pronounced the film ‘profoundly unhealthy and immoral’.7 The film’s production had been disrupted, but not halted, by the Cartel d’action morale et sociale, a public decency watchdog group founded in 1883 and dominated by right-wing Catholics sympathetic to the anti-cinema sentiments expressed by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Vigilanti Cura (1936).8 Autant-Lara, in the spirit of French anti-clericalism, lent his energies to a campaign of protest against what he and others saw as an unwarranted religious intervention into the public square. He wrote: ‘It is then essential that we appreciate the gravity of the present moment and that those who are courageously defending a worthy cinema take up the struggle with vigor, a struggle more necessary and useful than ever before.’9 It certainly would have taken courage to attempt a screen version of Tristesse in the light of Autant-Lara’s experience with Le Blé en herbe and of the heavy criticism levelled against contemporary authors of the roman noir, especially Boris Vian.10 Preminger was only able to make this deal because French filmmakers, including the hotshot directors of the jeune cinéma then beginning to emerge, had for years shown no interest in adapting for the screen a novel that had quickly become part of the national literary patrimony (for cultural if not for literary reasons). Sagan was not enthusiastic that her novel would be turned into a Hollywood film or that, even worse, Cécile would be played by an American newcomer who could speak only halting French. Perhaps she knew that Preminger had approached Brigitte Bardot about the role, but had not succeeded in signing her perhaps because of husband Roger Vadim’s objections.11 Richard Kuisel argues that ‘in the first decades of the postwar era, the French believed that “Frenchness” was at risk because of the emerging power, prestige, and prosperity of the New World, manifested most obviously in the profit-seeking internationalism of the Hollywood film industry’.12 Trans-national adaptations like Preminger’s Tristesse can be seen negatively, as acts of untoward cultural appropriation even when the obtaining of rights is perfectly legal and the filmmaker, as in this case, can be credited with a sincere and in many ways surprisingly effective effort to be ‘faithful’ to the source’s cultural milieu and values. It is important to note that this was not the case with Preminger’s film, probably because of his own considerable reputation as Euro-American (a Hollywood director with a continental sophistication), and also because the film itself (and its young star) became instantly popular in France. Tristesse tells a story in which women and their concerns occupy a place of prominence that was rare in either American or French cinema of the age. That this was the case when a substantial formal change was necessitated by the switch in medium is a testimony to Preminger’s persistence in making the film a stealth biopic of the novel’s author. In the film, Cécile cannot



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speak ceaselessly of herself, and so she pales in importance compared to the pre-eminent position she occupies in the thoroughly subjectivized text that is the novel. The other characters only with difficulty can sustain filmgoers’ interest. Bosley Crowther was too sharp a critic not to notice something of this problem, but he ignores the solution that Preminger and Laurents devised. Crowther complained: The father, to whom she is devoted, is a figment – a shell of a man – a presumably charming playboy with no character or rationality. Why he flits about among women is never remotely explained. And the woman he suddenly aims to marry is simply a feminine facade that develops a final streak of prudery that is incomprehensible. These are plainly the creatures of a child’s mind that make no sense in a presumably adult film.13

Like the novel on which it is based, the film is by no means ‘presumably adult’ in the sense Crowther means, which includes, it seems, abiding by established conventions of cinematic storytelling. The US literary scene had just recently experienced a similar event. The distinctive voice of narrator Holden Caulfield, poignant and sympathetic, had been crucial to the phenomenal success achieved by J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a work that connected deeply to an international readership that yearned, over decades and in vain, for the star presence of its author. Salinger resolutely refused to the end of his days to become a public figure. But from the outset Sagan devoted herself to satisfying this powerful form of readerly desire. A master showman, Preminger understood this well and aimed for his part to do much the same by crafting his version of Tristesse as in part the story of Sagan herself. He traded on her considerable celebrity, while also extending it. Like the author she was in some sense to represent on screen, Preminger’s discovery Jean Seberg, an ‘instant’ star, was promoted as an ingénue worthy of admiration even before the film itself was made.14 She was groomed to be a phenomenon, in large part so that Tristesse would generate considerable buzz even while still in production. Seberg was only nineteen when production began, almost the same age that Sagan had been when, dissatisfied with her university studies, she spent part of her summer vacation writing Tristesse. Actress and novelist were very much the same physical type (tomboyish, blonde, petite, and self-assured), making it easy to see Cécile, Seberg, and Sagan as complementary selves through an elaborate gesture of biographical mise-en-abîme. Crowther’s dismissive comments (he says the film is a ‘bomb’) suggest that he was more or less ignorant about what the publication of this remarkable first literary effort had meant as a cultural event. And so his account of its screen adaptation misses its central accomplishment.15 As we will see in some detail, Preminger manages to recreate on screen the appealing sensibility of the author (her ‘child’s mind’), figuring her in a way that suggests the coincidence, even inseparability, of author and character, while distinguishing them visually and by implication ontologically. In the novel, the voice of

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Cécile was thinly disguised and immediately identified as in essence Sagan’s own once she became a public figure who was all too eager to speak out, especially about cultural issues. Arguably, it was her voice, not her fictionalizing or narrative powers, that continued to hold readers in rapt attention through a constant flow of texts. These were at turns fictional, autobiographical, but more often complexly both, very much on the model established early on by Tristesse. It was her distinct personality, especially her refusal to be defined by traditional roles or rules, that the public found intriguing. The novel succeeded because it provided access to the Saganian sensibility, a point of consciousness complexly evoking the power of la jeunesse in 1950s France.16 Here was a ‘youth’ displacing the older generation from cultural centrality, but also a nexus of values and attitudes promising radical change in how the French thought about themselves. Sagan became the principal spokesperson of a generation with very different ideas about how life should be lived; she was the harbinger of even greater changes to come in the next decade, which kept Tristesse relevant to a later generation.17 Translated into more than fifteen languages and selling millions of copies, Tristesse had been the major international literary sensation of the decade in France. In the words of critic Pierre de Boisdeffre, the enigmatic Sagan offered herself as a powerful ‘witness to her time. She embodied its emptiness, its lack of direction, its despair; she found a way to depict the fatal sweetness of love, as well as the startling manifestations of pleasure.’18 For Catholic thinker Georges Hourdin, Tristesse ‘illuminated a whole epoch, just like the negative of a photograph does. It crystallizes certain literary and sociological themes that are useful to meditate upon.’ Most important of these, he opines, is that it ‘proclaims the nothingness of a life without God’.19 That Sagan’s summer writing project could be the subject of a serious disquisition of this kind said something about the amazing reception it received and the position in French culture that it subsequently sustained. No fault for the film’s minimal impact in the US can be laid upon the studio, where Harry Cohn, though a tightfisted businessman, was certainly no Philistine. He supported European émigré directors such as Preminger and Fred Zinnemann, whose From Here to Eternity (1953), based on the James Jones bestseller about army barracks life and off-base amours raised, not lowered, the literary values of its source. Eternity, under Zinnemann’s astute and careful stewardship, demonstrated how success might be achieved with a story treating controversial themes (including corruption in the US Army) and not delivering the conventional satisfactions of its paired romances (with an adulteress and a prostitute as the women in question). Columbia’s adaptation of the sensational first book by neophyte Jones grossed more than $30 million from a production budget of $1.7 million and won the Academy Award for Best Picture as well. Engaging two of the era’s A-list cosmopolitan directors, Columbia picked up two more of these coveted awards for literary adaptations it produced during the decade: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), based on a story



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by well-known novelist Budd Schulberg; and then later David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which brought to the screen Pierre Boulle’s fictionalized memoir of his years as a Japanese POW working on the ‘railway of death’ in Burma. If Hollywood can be said to have sponsored a serious literary cinema in the early postwar period, such filmmaking found a welcoming home at Columbia. The studio proved generally adept at marketing these ‘serious’ films successfully (there were exceptions – Lázló Benedek’s version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1951) ran afoul of anti-Red protests against the playwright and was unceremoniously dumped by the studio). The publicity campaign for Tristesse was actually quite extraordinary, as Preminger made sure that the project, even in its earliest stages of development, was met with considerable hoopla. Most unusual, perhaps, was his promotional appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (14 October 1956).20 This Sunday-night variety hour was at the time one of the nation’s most watched television programmes. Preminger was able to use the show as platform to announce that his ‘discovery’ and protegée Jean Seberg would incarnate Sagan’s main character, Cécile, who was almost exactly the same age. Tristesse, Preminger informed his national audience, would go into production after the completion of his present project, Saint Joan, an adaptation of the G.B. Shaw play that was soon to begin production and eventually released the following year. Seberg was to star in this film as well, bringing to life one of the most famous and enigmatic of French historical characters, Joan of Arc. For any professional performer, the Sullivan Show announcement would have been a remarkable moment. A neophyte with not even much amateur stage experience, Seberg found herself overwhelmed. Had there ever been a moment when not just one, but two starring roles in big-budget, serious films to be overseen by one of the industry’s leading and most successful figures had been offered to an inexperienced actress? Preminger’s Tristesse, a female coming-of-age story, would not fare so well as Columbia’s best picture winners, and this was certainly in part because all three thematized masculine moral crisis, violent action, and spiritual redemption – not to mention romance – in ways that did not fundamentally diverge from the standard actioner melodramas of the classic period. Taken intact from Sagan’s novel, the plot of Tristesse was plainer by comparison, tracing the close relationship between a teenaged girl, Cécile, and her wealthy widowed father, Raymond, who leads a promiscuous life devoted to self-indulgence in a hillside villa overlooking the Mediterranean near Nice (Figure 8.1). For some time, the two had constituted a couple of sorts, and his decision to marry Anne, an old friend, threatens that relationship, especially when Anne takes on a mother’s role in stifling Cécile’s growing desire for independence. The rebellious young woman becomes a determined enemy when Anne attempts to end her love affair with young neighbour Cyril, which she defiantly continues; it eventually leads to a sexual initiation, but only when Cécile chooses. Jealous of Anne’s place in Raymond’s affections,

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Figure 8.1  Elsa (Mylène Demongeot) under the covers with swimsuited Raymond (David Niven) and daughter Cécile (Jean Seberg) prodding Elsa to join them at the beach

Cécile plots to put an end to their upcoming marriage and succeeds by demonstrating that his commitment to monogamy is a sham. The matter ends tragically when Anne, desolated by her discovery of Raymond’s perfidy, drives off the Grande Corniche above Nice in her powerful American convertible, an apparent suicide. As in the novel, this story belongs to a recent past, and is so ‘marked’ by Cécile’s intermittent present-tense voice-over commentary. It is in fact framed as a flashback, triggered by the young woman’s dissatisfaction with her life as she finds herself overwhelmed by grief but also by an inability to see beyond the more general sadness of a life given to restless enjoyment, but lacking real purpose. This somewhat older Cécile is more than a voice. In the film’s long opening sequence, added by Laurents, she receives considerable representation as a character, located in a quite different present moment that unfolds in an upscale Paris arrondissement on the Right Bank and in the Saint-Germaindes-Prés area of the Left Bank, both locations freighted with cultural meanings that Preminger carefully exploits. After the opening frame, the film evokes Cécile’s experience of this place and time in a series of black-and-white sequences with minimal dialogue; these are intercut with the sequences that develop the story proper, which are photographed in rich Technicolor. The different time/visual values of these sequences, as well as the intricate fashion in which they are melded, calls for comment more extensive than can be provided here. This is especially true since, cinematically speaking, the contrast in film stocks had become in the course of the 1950s a key semiotic element in the divergence between ‘entertainment’ and ‘serious’ projects. In terms of the film’s intended appeal, Preminger was eager to straddle this contrast, while making it the structural foundation of the narrative. The aim of the filmmakers, as we might say, was to represent the story but also, in some sense, the story of the story.



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Sagan’s tale of Cécile’s youthful misadventure is staged in what was beginning widely to be known internationally as the ‘Riviera’, established as a place of self-indulgent ‘fun’ (and assertive forms of female eroticism) established by earlier productions, notably Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) and Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956). Both films feature independent-minded, self-consciously glamorous and sexy young women playing characters that closely corresponded to their off-screen personas (Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot). The casting of Jean Seberg, more jeune fille than temptress, furthers this stereotype, but also contests it. The Riviera sequences are framed, narratively speaking, by the pictorial evocation of France’s better-known capital city, with location shooting dominating over studio sets. Importantly, except for an establishing shot that locates Notre Dame and the Left Bank, the film eschews scenic images of tourist Paris. Instead, Preminger evokes the strangely mixed bourgeois bohemianism of the city’s artistic, intellectual, and academic scene during a time of radical social change, one of whose features was its self-absorption. To be sure, ongoing political turmoil is erased entirely from representation though it was unfolding while Preminger proceeded with his Paris shoot (the buildings on the Left Bank even lack the political graffiti that were everywhere to be seen in the country at this time). While the film was in production, Charles de Gaulle returned to power after the Fourth Republic proved incapable of handling the turmoil resulting from the ending of colonial rule in Algeria. Only weeks after Preminger’s film had completed its release in theatres around the country, the French were absorbing the details of the substantially revised constitution that marked the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Soldiers brandishing automatic weapons patrolled the streets of Paris as continuing crisis threatened armed conflict. This atmosphere of potentially violent social disruption was not ‘documented’ by Preminger’s camera. Tristesse limns an ongoing struggle that is more cultural than political. In defiance of social norms; Cécile continues to live with Raymond, with whom she constitutes a kind of chaste couple, while attending classes at the Sorbonne. Her father remains unmarried, but seems content, as he had been before, with a succession of casual relationships, as does Cécile. In this cosmopolitan place, she seems to have found a world that answers better to her inchoate dissatisfaction, the ‘sadness’ which is the existential subject of the Paul Éluard lyric ‘Adieu Tristesse, Bonjour Tristesse’ deployed as the novel’s epigraph and the source of its title, as selected by publisher René Julliard. Translated and somewhat simplified by screenwriter Arthur Laurents, the lyric is also literally in the film, performed unforgettably as its theme song by Juliette Gréco, accompanied, somewhat uncharacteristically, by a full orchestra. This elaborately choreographed sequence is devoted to an elegant dinner that she and Raymond share with their companions of the moment at Paris’s most famous restaurant, Maxim’s, located near the Place de la Concorde, where this sequence was actually filmed (as Preminger’s framing ostentatiously reveals).

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Much like Sagan herself, Cécile is shown to be an habitué of the SaintGermain clubs (especially the famous La Huchette), to which she drives in an expensive and very sporty convertible on streets that, reflecting the economic realities of the age, are relatively free from personal vehicles. These striking images index both her substantial wealth and independence from gender norms. In the Left Bank clubs she visits, her designer clothes and glamorized presentation (very different from the well-scrubbed look she has in the Nice sequences) interestingly resonate with the idiosyncratic counter-culture of the quartier. Here flourished a bohemianism as welcoming of the well-off bourgeoisie as the genteelly impoverished members of the arts and academic communities.21 Throughout the present-time narrative, Preminger ensures that shooting locations (like the ‘Boul Mich’ of the student quarter) are precisely authentic, easily recognizable to the cognoscenti, at least to those in France, though this is an effect that even the better educated of American filmgoers neither decoded nor appreciated. If the point of realist filmmaking is to use the medium to allow the real to reveal itself, as André Bazin suggests, then such a documentary rhetoric is deployed to great effect in this part of the film.22 The film offers a record, if a brief one, of a subculture that is of no little significance to modern French and even European social history, providing an analogue to the renowned British Free Cinema documentary, Momma Don’t Allow (1955), co-directed by Tony Richardson and Karen Reisz, which surveys the similar cultural scene in a North London jazz club. In fact, if Tristesse is officially an American film version of a French bestseller, it is remarkably infused with a profound sense of contemporary Frenchness; but such cultural engagement in the fictional text has more to do with tone and ideas. In the novel, the new ‘youth’ take shape only in Cécile’s style of thought. Only in the film are the relevant institutions (like the Sorbonne and the clubs of Saint-Germain as well as their particular locations) evoked, then animated by the social practices that unfold there. Following the lead of Sagan’s text, Preminger designs the Riviera sequences to be more abstract, less culturally specific, more fictional that realistic. Locations are not marshalled to communicate particular meanings, as even basic signage on the coast (Saint-Tropez) and the corniches is not captured by the camera. Dialogue does not ‘fix’ the location of these sequences precisely. Once the tragic events of the affair with Anne and Raymond have run their course, Cécile makes her way north to an adult world in which contemporary cultural values and practices have greater purchase. But this narrative movement and radical shift of scene is anticipated by the complex intercutting of the film’s editing pattern, which presents the end of the story, and the point from which it can be told, before the beginning. This departure from the severely limited givens of the novel is striking, as the film includes a full portrait of the world that shaped Sagan’s adolescence and was, in slightly different form, to be the one in which she would find her place as an adult. As sociologist Edgar Morin unforgettably observed, if



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the country had been ruled by a gerontocracy, then a ‘degerontocraticized’ culture was developing in contemporary France. The young were displacing the generation of their parents from prominence and installing a new system of values that emphasized hedonism and self-actualization: ‘The youthful renewal of social cadres (ministers, technicians, etc.) has been translated into a general movement.’23 These changes were just emerging when Sagan published her novel and reached an apogee four years later when the film gave visual form to what the precocious teenager had written. Arguably, however, it is only in the film version of the story that its deep cultural resonances and connections could be, and were, given representational form. In the novel, Cécile is depicted within an adult world; in the film she also takes shape as an adult disposing of her own money, an expensive car, and a social life centred on dance clubs, parties at country houses, dinners at what was then Paris’s best-known restaurant, and expeditions to the city’s racecourse. Chronologically organized, these segments constitute an abbreviated narrative that with carefully deployed detail tells both the story of an older Cécile and, more obliquely, that of her creator. With deliberation and accuracy, the film evokes Sagan precisely as she had become ‘known’ to her public, not so much as a writer, but as a self-possessed and, financed by the novel’s substantial royalties, quite wealthy young woman enjoying the high life of conspicuous consumption that constituted a much-publicized aspect of this cultural scene. More important perhaps, the present-tense sequences also trace, if obliquely, the evolution of an authorial mentalité; ‘tristesse’ would become the key element of Sagan’s public persona, as well as the theme of the novels she would produce. Like her creator, the older Cécile is shown suffering from a sadness whose precise cause is difficult to identify and name, but which drives her restlessly from one companion to another, and from one restaurant or club to the next. The film ends in the ‘present’ with Cécile seated at her dressing table and dissolving into tears as the Gréco lyric plays on the soundtrack: I live with melancholy. My friend is vague distress. I wake up every morning And say, ‘Bonjour tristesse.’ The street I walk is sadness. My house has no address. The letters that I write me Begin ‘Bonjour tristesse.’ The loss of a lover is pain, Sharp and bitter to recall. I’ve lost no casual lover I have no pain from which to recover I’ve lost me, that is all!

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My smile is void of laughter My kiss has no caress I’m faithful to my lover My bitter-sweet tristesse.

A complex, if oblique, cultural portrait of Sagan emerges from these sequences. The film’s inclusion of this small-scale narrative significantly modifies the novel by layering its fictional spaces, of which more below. Sagan’s story is otherwise faithfully retold in the big-budget Hollywood manner, with A-list stars David Niven and Deborah Kerr effectively incarnating Cécile’s father and would-be stepmother. But the real star of the film was a nobody from nowhere USA. Seberg suddenly found notoriety (if not fame at first) thrust upon her.24 Soon after winning a talent-search contest that Preminger ginned up in order to create buzz about his next ‘discovery’, Seberg found herself at the very pinnacle of the filmmaking industry, with her first two appearances on screen being starring roles (as mentioned above, she had appeared as the title character in Preminger’s Saint Joan the year before). Her career was meant to be a ‘story’ in which she would play Eliza Doolittle to the producer’s Henry Higgins. She did in fact become a world-famous actress, but not in the way that Preminger imagined, of which more below. At this point, it can be noted that Seberg’s life, before and after Tristesse, eerily resembled that of Sagan, increasing the transcultural resonance of the film as it went through its initial release domestically and abroad.25 Like the novelist, the actress found herself suddenly world famous at a very young age. Introduced by Preminger to the Saint-Germain culture to which he had an entrée, Seberg became a prominent figure on that cultural scene when she decided to make Paris her home after the film’s production ended. She would in time begin an affair with novelist Romain Gary, a central figure in the Left Bank literary establishment. Improving her French, she would appear in a number of important French productions (most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film Breathless (1959), one of the most admired films ever made). Her relationship with Gary kept Sagan in the public eye, especially after he divorced his wife so that they could be married. The tumultuous relationship ended in divorce and then in 1979, at the age of forty-one, Seberg’s suicide from a drug overdose (in a car parked on a central Paris street). Gary ended his own life not long after, completing the story of one of the Paris arts community’s most famous couples. Though he released her from a personal contract soon after Tristesse failed to be the smash hit Columbia envisioned, Preminger was proven correct about the young woman’s beauty and charisma by her subsequent success working with others in both France and the USA. Seberg’s casting in this project was important enough in the producer’s mind to constitute the basis of an elaborate marketing campaign, which can be seen as an attempt to turn the young woman into a celebrity along the lines that Sagan herself was continuing then to achieve. Seeing the film, François Truffaut



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found most intriguing both Seberg and her incarnation of Cécile, with the actress sporting a bob similar to Sagan’s distinctive short hairstyle. To Truffaut, Seberg was a screen presence that evoked the feminized power of the medium. He was moved by the film to articulate a general rule: ‘The cinema is a woman’s art, which is to say it is an actress’s art.’26 This rave endorsement of the film answered perfectly to the decision of Cahiers the month before to put a glamorous still of Seberg as Cécile on its cover. Truffaut’s comment goes to the heart of what Preminger sought to accomplish with his reversioning of the novel, which had the effect of deepening its engagement with the lifestyle of young women claiming greater independence in all matters social, cultural, sexual, and artistic. This generational change, the subject of much anxious debate within the country at the time, fuelled in part by the widespread popularity of Sagan’s novel, is surveyed in depth by Françoise Giroud, using materials from a nationwide survey.27 Tristesse, as its director constructed it, offers a triple portrait of an emerging youthful femininity in French culture, with Seberg incarnating both author and character, and complementing this literary mythology with a myth of her own that Preminger had spent considerable energy in manufacturing during the previous two years. Seberg and Sagan, strikingly similar in their gamine demeanour, had both achieved success at an early age, and they were very much in the public eye when the production proceeded. In becoming Cécile, Seberg developed a screen persona that defined her subsequent career, and in an intriguing trans-national sense, since much of that career was spent working in the French cinema. In fact, through her appearance the next year in Breathless, Seberg became one of the iconic figures of the postwar French cinema. Preminger adds to the cultural resonance of the pairing Sagan/Seberg by including, as it were atmospherically, yet another female cultural icon associated deeply with youth culture and the arts scene more generally in postwar Paris. Poet and singer Juliette Gréco was at the time one of the country’s best-known performers and a charter member of the Left Bank social circle that included Sagan. The group would welcome Seberg.28 Gréco, as mentioned earlier, appears in what is, thematically speaking, the most significant of the present-time sequences. She sings in English ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, the hybrid text, thoroughly trans-national, that became in its French-language version one of Gréco’s signature numbers. Rivalling both Sagan and Seberg, the glamorous Gréco became the most photographed and publicized of the adolescentes existentialistes, the young women, understanding themselves in a cultural sense as ‘existentialists’, who came to typify this cultural movement. Her memoirs were an instant bestseller when published in 2012. The book’s title, This Is the Way I Am Made, evoked the defiant tone of her earlier career and the so-called existentialist ‘scene’ more generally; the title would have been equally appropriate for Sagan’s own autobiography.29 As her most recent biographer opines, ‘Françoise Sagan’s style of living became the prototype for adolescent hedonism’, a message to the younger

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generation that was given added volume by her well-publicized connection with film star Brigitte Bardot, known to her public by her initials BB; Bardot was then promoting a kind of unconventional glamour that melded nicely with Sagan’s flouting of other gender rules.30 Many in France thought it was shameful that ‘an eighteen-year-old had written such material’.31 This supposed affront to conventional behaviour was a counterpart in the public mind, critic Richard Jobs continues, to BB’s ‘brazen aggressiveness’ in promoting ‘sexual autonomy for the young’.32 This was one popular way of reading the young star’s performance for Roger Vadim in And God Created Woman (1956), filmed largely on location in Saint-Tropez. BB spent the summer there after production wrapped, and she was joined by Sagan, who sought her out through mutual acquaintances. The two became fast friends and frequent companions on outings that were often covered by hordes of journalists.33 To the traditionally minded, ‘the predatory sexuality of Bardot and Sagan was anathema to the conception of wholesome girls as future mothers’.34 Indeed. In a world in the midst of generational change, it is precisely the hostility of the older generation upon which the popularity of both celebrities was ultimately based.35 Making good use of the cultural capital that the success of Tristesse bestowed upon her, Sagan became, in the apt formulae of critic Judith Graves Miller, ‘a feminine dandy, a chic and irreplaceable public figure, a neo-romantic gaily and elegantly transforming her despair into art’.36 If it was her intent to become more than a little notorious, Sagan succeeded brilliantly. Within a year, ‘this shy young woman had become the most photographed female in France … the first woman writer in which the press took this kind of interest’.37 Tristesse limned a France vaguely located in time, evoking a Côte d’Azur that had changed little in the course of the twentieth century. The novel’s characters partied in the villas above Nice, drank in the cafés of the old port and of Saint-Tropez, and gambled in the casino at Monte Carlo, much as their counterparts had done in earlier decades, a lifestyle well recorded, for example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934). An unconcern with the public sphere may have helped Tristesse resonate with the younger generation. In a larger sense, the novel furthered the erasure of recent history, as well as the continuing difficulties faced by a society in the midst of reconstituting itself. Sagan called a newly prosperous postwar world to amnesia and self-indulgence, and this focus on pleasure and the individual was central dogma of the new wave of youthful attitudes then redefining the nation’s society. Achieving a literary and cinematic success that was similarly international, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) had summoned a previous generation, also scarred by war, to remembrance. Remarque’s novel quickly sold 2.5 million copies, including translations into more than thirty languages. The end of World War II gave rise to a radically different mentalité, and Sagan was one of its most admired proponents. This time Europe, and the world, looked forward rather than back, and even the bitterly divisive conflict



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over the final fate of Algeria might easily be erased from consciousness, or so the novel suggests. Based on an ‘enemy’ account, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) was banned in France for five years. To her credit, later in her career Sagan engaged with these political issues. At the end of the 1950s, however, only some among the French intelligentsia, notably filmmaker Alain Resnais and novelist Marguerite Duras, were interested in an accounting of what had happened during the war, as well as in the period of widespread lawlessness that had followed the Liberation in 1944. Remembrance directed toward a proper assessment of what the war and occupation had meant for France for the most part would follow only decades later. Issues raised by the hopelessly vague concept of collaboration remain even in 2018 the subject of divisive commentary and discussion, as indicates the controversy generated by President François Hollande’s much belated public apology for French police responsibility in the so-called Vel d’Hiv round-up of Paris’s Jews. Marine Le Pen’s vague call for the nation to reject guilt about this shameful past and this denial became an issue in the 2017 presidential campaign.38 Tristesse’s slim narrative, fable-like, is adorned with neither detailed description nor extended dialogue. It is thus more suggestive than precise, free from any consciousness of history. The Nice sequences of the film similarly feature a production design almost entirely free from whatever might ‘date’ it. The introspective narration of the novel is as remarkable for its silences as for its revelations, and even though there are, by necessity, more dramatic scenes in the film than in the novel, these are by no means talky. Yet even in its minimalist fashion the novel develops an ethos of self-fashioning with the same clear directness that captivated readers of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942). Here was another narrative reduced to its essentials that had served as an intellectual guide for an earlier generation. The ‘unsaid’ hangs heavily and suggestively over both tales, and these are also deeply meditative, with moral responsibility and guilt figuring as central themes. Tristesse celebrates an awakening to the power of self, and the possibility of guilt, in the light of existential absurdity. Sagan’s adoption of the voice of Camusian understatement remained influential throughout the 1950s, not only in France but across Europe. Enjoying, often with ostentatious hedonism, their fame and the incredible riches that success in the cultural marketplace provided, Sagan and Remarque, became literary celebrities, not just authors of some reputation. Their voices, addressing the tensions of different cultural moments, were more important than any of their works. Defined equally by talent and acclaim, the literary celebrity holds, in the view of critic Joe Moran, a ‘contentiously intermediate position in relation to literary production as a whole’.39 Star authors represent in their double function as artists and high-earning entertainers the uneasy connections between literature as, on the one hand, the source of cultural capital and, on the other, as a commodity fully marketable within developed capitalism. The writer becomes not only committed to art (whatever exactly

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that might mean), but also to providing highly remunerated entertainment, a social status established and reinforced by the media, which cultivate a symbiotic relationship with authors who have demonstrated unusual popular appeal as they demand representation for their own story and not just those they fabulize. With its capacity to dilate on the source text, adaptation can extend, even as it profits from, the star author’s celebrity. And this is precisely what Preminger’s Tristesse accomplishes. At the same time, Sagan’s connection with what would be called the ‘jet set’ made her as famous for her living as for her writing. For example, at a time when car ownership in France was far from universal, her enthusiasm for high-powered sports cars and driving at speed were covered in detail by the press. The diminutive young woman’s purchase of one expensive machine after another became a popular subject for feature stories, while a spectacular crash in 1957 that left her recuperating from serious injuries for months was front-page news. For Sagan, being behind the wheel of a sports car was something of a spiritual experience, as she was to reveal in an essay written at the time: ‘The truth of the matter is that a car – your car – endows you as its slave and master, with the paradoxical sensation of being free at last, or returning to the maternal bosom, to an original state of solitude, far from alien eyes.’ In the end, however, it was all about what driving at speed delivered, a ‘surge of happiness’, an ‘exultant and almost serene pleasure’.40 Interestingly, like her writing in general, this essay shows no consciousness that her enthusiasm for fast cars might be understood as a rejection of gender norms. In France at the time, young women were still expected to embrace the roles of mother and wife as opposed to independence of any kind, including and especially the pursuit of forms of pleasure, like driving at speed, that had traditionally been enjoyed by men only.41 There is little evidence that Sagan ever thought about patriarchy or the cultural origin of gender difference in the ways then being popularized by Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex had appeared in 1949, and who, along with inamorato Jean-Paul Sartre, frequented the same Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés as did Sagan.42 By ignoring male dominance and traditional gender rules rather than protesting against them, Sagan anticipated, even as she enacts, the more theoretically sophisticated critiques of patriarchy and phallocentrism that would in the early 1970s be promoted by Hélène Cixous and others in French feminist circles. Sex between the unmarried in both the younger and older generations dominates the novel’s narrative, though without explicitness, except for the famous passage in which Cécile rhapsodizes about her ‘first time’. She is as much seducer as seduced, reacting to the encounter with a sense of joy and newfound freedom that certainly went against conventional ideas of female propriety, in ways more complexly and shockingly explored in another novel published that same year, The Story of O by Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos). Female desire was also the subject of Duras’s screenplay for



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Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour. Belgian novelist Françoise Mallet-Juris’s Le Rempart des béguines (published in 1951 when the author had just reached the age of twenty-one) offers a first-person account of a young girl’s initiation into independence and a same sex relationship. Like Tristesse, this novel achieved a certain succès de scandale, also profiting from energetic marketing by René Julliard. Yet it was Sagan’s idiosyncratic style and manner, her provocative yet in some ways thoroughly traditional manner of living that captured the imagination of French culture at the time. In all four of these works, forceful female voices speak compellingly, forcefully, and so controversially, of desire and discontent in ways that previously in French culture only Colette had done. Colette’s first four novels, the so-called Claudine series, were first published under the pen name (‘Willy’) of her erstwhile husband, while the Desclos tale of bondage and objectification had, so she confessed, been written as a series of erotic messages to her male lover. Similarly, Mallet-Juris’s Hélène, a somewhat timid adolescent girl, is drawn into a lesbian encounter by a thirty-year-old seducer. Duras’s nameless main character recounts the post-Liberation punishment she suffered for what was at the time referred to as collaboration horizontale with a German soldier; losing her social identity, she reconstructs herself, a central element of which is a disregard for conventional sexual morals. Hiroshima focuses on her casual affair while on business in Japan; that she is as much the subject of a desire manifests itself in images of tangled bodies. Cécile likewise represents herself as in charge of her erotic life, discarding with no apparent neglect her handsome lover, Cyril, of whose seriousness and eagerness to rein her in she does not approve. And the narrative turns on her recognition that she bears responsibility for what happens when her plot to prevent the upcoming marriage of her father Raymond to Anne ends tragically after their break-up. The older woman’s subsequent suicide is also on her conscience. This one, but it is only one, of the sources of the ‘tristesse’ she must now embrace going forward. Throughout the narrative, Cécile presents herself as actor, not victim; her portrait of Raymond reveals him to be a shallow pleasure-seeker, concerned more with his fading good looks than with properly parenting his headstrong daughter, whom he treats like a companion. At the end, however, he like Cécile is affected by the tristesse existentialiste lamented in Juliette Gréco’s song: ‘I have no pain from which to recover. I’ve lost me, that is all.’

A ‘French film’ from Hollywood The invisible hand of the marketplace has ensured from its beginnings that the cinema tends toward a border-defying internationalism. In practice, this means that the concept of the ‘national’ itself is inherently problematic as far as these institutions of cultural production, and those who staff them, are concerned. Since the studio era, commercial filmmaking has developed into three separable, yet potentially integrable, branches (production, distribution,

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and exhibition). This division of labour (and of much more) has encouraged the development of projects that might be said to transcend national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries in aid of an internationalism that eminently suits the sophisticated marketing strategies of late capitalism, whose practices are disposed toward global conceptions of the public being addressed, with inclusion rather than exclusion being the operative protocol. The cinema is, in short, anational by economic inclination unless and until ‘nationality’, as often happens, appears to be appealing (that is, profitable) in some fashion. At least in the ‘West’, commercial filmmaking thus admirably suits an age based on Enlightenment universalism in which a disposition to locate ‘human’ and ‘timeless’ values in cultural texts prevails, but, as many would argue, not to the exclusion of a localism that such unsectarian universalism demands be reverenced as well. As the current preoccupation with the ‘national’ in filmmaking and also cinema studies attests, including of course this present volume, there are irresistible political and cultural pressures to affix national labels to, and hence invest values of different kinds in, bodies of films that are presented as reflecting ethno-political ‘unities’.43 Currently, some national cinemas, with production defined as such in legal terms, receive government support for endogenous reasons both cultural and economic, even when the eventual aim, responding to underlying market opportunities, is worldwide distribution and exhibition. Partaking of a universalism in order to broaden their appeal to other constituencies, such projects are thus not just of the people, not just by and for the people. Nevertheless, it seems legitimate to think of them as also constituting an element of the national cinema, one of whose functions can surely be imagined as promoting the uniqueness of the native culture to those abroad who would otherwise find little opportunity to recognize its richness and beauties. Worldwide release would serve something like a mission civilisatrice, not so strange an idea in the French context when one considers the announced purpose of the government-sponsored Fondation Alliance Française, one of whose mission statements is to ‘faire aimer les cultures francophones’ (bring esteem to francophone cultures).44 Disposing of support from their fellow citizens, ‘national’ filmmakers find themselves encouraged to put together complex forms of financing from cross-border sources because of the enormous costs currently involved in producing and then distributing a full-length ‘A’ feature. Considering the complex ways in which the profit motive then comes into play, the critic might find it difficult to imagine that such investment might not affect the aesthetic or political aspects of the film as produced, as well as the sort of editing that shapes release prints for different niches, and distribution/exhibition strategies. This has a number of important implications for a literary cinema dependent on the adaptation of classic texts, the French version of which is the critical construct or tradition that is addressed collectively in this volume. Of what body of texts does such a tradition consist? This is a problem made more



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complex when the adaptation of honoured and culturally significant texts is at issue. The separation of literary and cinematic production, and the profit-driven internationalism of both filmmaking and literary production, make ‘national’ asymmetries inevitable. In reaction, a ‘cinema,’ of course, can be defined narrowly, as consisting exclusively of films that are as national as the texts from which they are drawn. And yet surely a literary cinema could legitimately afford to embrace texts, and the films made from them, but not in the nation, and not even in the national language. These films could be conceived as somehow embodying the national, perhaps in terms of spirit. Bonjour, Tristesse, I submit, is such a film. Here is an admirable, sophisticated, and culturally sensitive screen versioning of what is perhaps the most culturally significant novel of 1950s France. The film is so French, moreover, that it could not be properly appreciated by even the most sophisticated and worldly of American film reviewers. American filmgoers, it must be added, were hardly in a position to identify, understand, and appreciate its portrait of a France whose young people were experiencing immense changes in attitudes and behaviour. It is a testimony to Preminger’s skill as a producer and director that the film did as well as it did in US distribution. Historian Richard Kuisel argues that in the first decades of the postwar era, the French believed that ‘Frenchness’ was ‘at risk because of the emerging power, prestige, and prosperity of the New World, manifested most obviously in the profit-seeking internationalism of the Hollywood film industry’.45 Trans-national adaptations like Preminger’s Tristesse can be seen negatively, as acts of untoward cultural appropriation even when the obtaining of rights is perfectly legal and the filmmaker, as in this case, can be credited with a sincere and in many way surprisingly effective effort to be ‘faithful’ to the source’s cultural milieu and values. But it is to the credit of the French critical establishment that Tristesse was not seen as a regrettable act of cultural expropriation, but rather as a tribute to one of the era’s most compelling fictional evocations of the national mentalité and to the emotional colour of the age as manifested in a restless adolescent, inspired to write the novel by her enthusiasm for Paul Éluard’s lyricism. Otto Preminger, with great finesse and respect, brought this melancholy tale to the screen, and in his creative wisdom he had the poem transformed into a haunting song, unforgettably sung on screen by one of France’s most talented chanteuses, who adopted it as one of her musical signatures. In so doing, he went beyond adaptation proper to limn unforgettably the contours of the existentialiste spirit of Sagan and her generation. One would well argue that no Frenchproduced film of the period even attempted to do the same.

Notes 1 See Gérard Legrand, et al., Otto Preminger (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1993) for further details.

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2 See, for example, www.arte.tv/sites/olivierpere/2012/01/12/retrospective-ottopreminger-au-festival-del-film-locarno-2012 (accessed 16 September 2018). 3 See Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger: The Man who Would be King (New York: Knopf, 2007) and Chris Fujiwara, The Life and Works of Otto Preminger (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009) for initial forays into this re-evaluation, which still awaits work with relevant archives and foreign journalistic sources. 4 All earnings figures in this chapter from Box Office Mojo: budget estimates from IMDB. 5 ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ became one of Gréco’s signature numbers and was featured in two albums of similar chansons – on her Juliette Gréco: Style Nouveau (1958), released before the film’s premiere, and then, in a testimony to the song’s popularity, Bonjour Tristesse (1968). 6 See Jean Ligniere, Françoise Sagan et le succès (Paris: Editions du Scorpion, 1957) for an interesting sociocultural analysis of this reception. 7 Quoted in Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 186. 8 See Annie-Lamarre, Incontournable morale: actes du colloque de Besançon, 1997 (Besançon: Université de Franche-Comté, 1998). 9 Léopold Schlosberg, Les Censures cinématographiques, preface by Claude AutantLara (Paris: Publications de L’Union Rationaliste, 1955), p. 11. My translation, as are all other quotations from French sources unless otherwise noted. 10 See Philippe Boggio, Boris Vian (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). 11 For an account of this period of Brigitte Bardot’s career, see Jeffrey Robinson, Bardot, trans. Jean-Paul Mourlon (Paris: Editions de la Seine, 1994), pp. 55–74. 12 Richard F. Kuisel, The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. xii. 13 Bosley Crowther, ‘Bonjour, Tristesse’, New York Times, 16 January 1958, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C03E5D71E3AE53BBC4E52DFB76683 83649EDE (accessed 19 September 2018). 14 For details, see David Richards, Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story (New York: Random House, 1981). 15 See Crowther, ‘Bonjour, Tristesse’. 16 For a sophisticated American view of this cultural development, see Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties (New York: Three Rivers, 1997), pp. 223–38. 17 For an account of youth movements in the 1960s, see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 18 Pierre de Boisdeffre, ‘Introduction’, in Gérard Mourgue, Françoise Sagan (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1958), p. 7. 19 Georges Hourdin, Le Cas Françoise Sagan (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 7, 8. 20 Referenced in Michael Coates-Smith and Garry McGee, The Films of Jean Seberg (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012), p. 11. 21 For detailed accounts, see Boris Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, trans. Paul Knobloch (New York: Rizzoli, 2005) and Boggio, Boris Vian. 22 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1967] 2005), p. 28. 23 Edgar Morin, L’Esprit du temps (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1962), p. 174. 24 See Richards, Played Out.



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25 For details, see Richards, Played Out. 26 Truffaut, quoted in Cahiers du Cinéma 81 (March 1958): 3. 27 See Françoise Giroud, La Nouvelle Vague: portraits de la jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), pp. 199–325. 28 For further discussion, see Juliette Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça (Paris: Flammarion, 2012); Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; Boggio, Boris Vian, and Bertrand Meyer-Stabley, Françoise Sagan: le tourbillon d’une vie (Paris: Pygmalion, 2014). 29 See Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça for further details. 30 See Meyer-Stabley, Françoise Sagan, p. 90. 31 Jobs, Riding the New Wave, p. 196. 32 Jobs, Riding the New Wave, p. 197. 33 For further details see Meyer-Stabley, Françoise Sagan, pp. 116–21. 34 Jobs, Riding the New Wave, p. 197. 35 For an interesting, if self-serving account, of BB’s star persona, see Roger Vadim, Bardo, Deneuve, Fonda (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 13–137. 36 Judith Graves Miller, Françoise Sagan (New York: Twayne, 1988), p. 1. 37 Meyer-Stabley, Françoise Sagan, p. 90. 38 See www.elysee.fr/declarations/article/discours-du-president-de-la-republique (accessed 16 September 2018) and www.lci.fr/politique/debat-macron-le-pen-tf1polemique-sur-la-rafle-du-vel-d-hiv-une-historienne-decrypte-les-propos-graves-demarine-le-pen-2044538.html (accessed 16 September 2018). 39 Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 7. 40 Françoise Sagan, ‘Speeding’, in Bonjour, Tristesse, trans. Irene Ash (New York: Harper, [1955] 2001), pp. 16–17. 41 See Jobs, Riding the New Wave, pp. 1–137. 42 See Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés for details. 43 For a classic analysis of this kind relevant to the concerns of this volume, see Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2005). For a useful collection of similar critical meditations on the relevant issues, see Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, Cinema and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000). 44 See www.fondation-alliancefr.org. 45 Kuisel, The French Way, p. xii.

9

Adapting Pagnol and Provence Jeremy Strong

Introduction It is nearly impossible to commence this chapter without remarking upon the coincidence that Marcel Pagnol’s birth in 1895 in Aubagne, Provence, was in the same year that his countrymen Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first public screenings of their cinematograph in Paris. Yet Brett Bowles reminds readers that this pleasing accident of chronology was not necessarily ‘a sign that Pagnol’s fate was somehow cosmically intertwined with cinema’.1 Bowles indicates that while Pagnol’s family history did not readily suggest a nascent facility for any particular art form, including the newest, what was to prove remarkable was his success across several media and roles. For Pagnol would achieve acclaim as a novelist, playwright, film producer, and director, becoming one of France’s leading cultural figures of the twentieth century. Unusually for an instance of adaptation, the films examined in this chapter have not followed the familiar trajectory of novel-film, but rather film-novel-film; an adaptive journey which reflects Pagnol’s identity as a multimedia author. Responding to Pagnol’s original 1952 film, itself a version edited down significantly from his desired vision of the story, André Bazin wrote that ‘in Manon of the Springs, with his inspiration finally at its peak – he gave Provence its universal epic’.2 Hence, even before the novels which gave rise to the adaptations examined here, Pagnol and this story were inextricably associated with Provence. Pagnol later novelized his own Manon into L’Eau des collines (The Water of the Hills) in 1962. Finally, in 1986 – eleven years after his death – the constituent stories of L’Eau des collines were adapted as the films Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. They achieved both critical and commercial success, nationally and internationally, though it was domestically that they achieved their greatest box-office success, running for seventy and fifty-eight weeks respectively, and selling 7.2 and 6.6 million tickets, making them the most popular films of that year.3 Importantly, the films were also a notable example of a concerted effort on the part of the French government of the time to support and promote cinema that foregrounded French history and culture, especially in the face of competition from anglophone filmmakers.



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The opening credits of both films emphasize their place in a national cultural and literary tradition. ‘d’après l’oeuvre de MARCEL PAGNOL de l’Académie Française’ precedes any of the other major acknowledgements and works to assert the films’ credentials as quality adaptations, and – in turn – vouchsafes the adaptive source with the imprimatur of his being one of ‘les Immortels’: member of a pre-eminent French cultural institution that has included such major literary figures as Voltaire, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo. Equally, it should be noted that Pagnol’s election to the Academy in 1946 rested essentially on his achievements as a filmmaker and playwright; the first filmmaker ever elected to the Academy, at that time his work in the forms of the novel and the memoir were still to come. Bowles argues that Pagnol’s ‘legacy as a French cultural icon depends largely on the enduring appeal of his trilogy of films set in Marseille – Marius (1931), Fanny (1932) and César (1936), the first two co-directed adaptations of his hit plays of the same name’.4 In the context of this particular chapter it is also worth noting the Academy’s role in policing the French language, in particular its opposition to English loanwords, to the use of feminine equivalents for conventionally masculine nouns, and to the affording of constitutional protection for regional languages. In defending its own rightness, the Academy has frequently revealed itself as unfriendly to neighbours and new arrivals. The extent to which the films are further anchored in a context of national structures and work to promulgate a politically endorsed version of cultural patrimony is further revealed by the credit ‘avec la participation du CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA CINEMATOGRAPHIE et du MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE’. Through funding and other forms of promotion and acknowledgement – for example the attendance of Minister of Culture Jack Lang at a special pre-release screening – the French state stood squarely behind what was at the time the nation’s most costly film project. Governmental involvement continued into the year after the films’ release in the shape of a large project to screen them in schools and colleges across France.5 Italy’s broadcaster RAI may have been one of the movies’ co-funders, but the credit to Giuseppe Verdi as the original composer of the ‘theme de Jean de Florette’ scarcely diluted the Gallic heft of what audiences were offered. Indeed, for British audiences the Italian connotations of the musical theme were further diminished through the 1990s by a series of award-winning television adverts for Stella Artois beer inspired by Jean de Florette that used the Verdi leitmotif and were set in an idyllic French countryside closely modelled on the films. The first advertisement was titled ‘Jacques de Florette’.

The story A brief summary of the events of L’Eau des collines, common to the book and films, is germane to the discussion that follows. In Jean de Florette Ugolin Soubeyran conspires with his uncle César to obtain the property ‘Les

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Romarins’ where Ugolin intends to grow carnations. Although the land in question ostensibly lacks a water source, there is a neglected spring known to César and other older villagers. Ugolin and his uncle approach the owner Pique-Bouffigue to buy ‘Les Romarins’, but his angry refusal sparks a fight in which he is accidentally killed. Leaving the body so it appears the result of a fall, Ugolin and César plug and cover the spring, intending to purchase the property for a depressed price. However, it is inherited by Jean Cadoret, a hunchbacked tax-collector from another village, Crespin. Jean is the son of Florette, a childhood friend of César’s and fellow villager. According to the local custom he would be called Jean de Florette, but the Soubeyrans deliberately do not reveal his connection to Florette, or to their own village, telling other locals that he is simply from Crespin. This manoeuvre is intended to ensure that the villagers are not motivated to help him, but to treat him with the indifference or outright antipathy traditionally afforded to outsiders. Arriving at ‘Les Romarins’ with his wife and young daughter Manon, Jean reveals that he intends to farm the land himself despite his inexperience. Although he has some initial success, and with Ugolin presenting himself as a friendly neighbour, Jean’s enterprise fails because of the lack of water. He takes out a mortgage and is eventually killed when he attempts to dynamite a new well. Finally acquiring the property, a gleeful Ugolin and César unplug the spring as the family are leaving. Unseen by them, this act is witnessed by Manon. Manon des sources takes up events several years later. Ugolin’s carnation business is thriving, while Manon has become a beautiful young woman, living half-wild as a shepherdess in the countryside around ‘Les Romarins’. After glimpsing her bathing in a pool Ugolin becomes infatuated with Manon and hopes to marry her. She is disgusted by his clumsy approaches and, of course, recalls his role in deceiving her father. At the same time a new schoolteacher, Bernard, arrives in the village and a mutual attraction develops. Overhearing a conversation between two villagers Manon realizes that others knew of the spring but did not help her father by telling him. This coincides with her accidental discovery, high in the hills, of the source of the water that serves the whole village and its surrounding farms. She takes her revenge by secretly blocking the source and driving the village to near-collapse. César and Ugolin’s crime is exposed by another villager and the pair are publicly shamed. Rejected by Manon, Ugolin hangs himself and seemingly ends the Soubeyran family line. Bernard persuades Manon to unblock the source. They marry and she becomes pregnant. A childhood friend of César’s returns to the village and reveals that Jean was in fact César’s son, conceived before he went on military service in Africa. The letter in which Florette told him of her pregnancy had gone missing in Africa and went unanswered, leading her to marry the blacksmith in Crespin, though only after taking dreadful measures to lose her unborn child; measures which, though unsuccessful, result in his being born hunchbacked. Broken, César dies in his sleep, leaving his property to Manon, his granddaughter.



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Hence the narrative of L’Eau des collines builds toward the revelation of a dreadful irony – generations in the making – that caps the successive tragedies of Jean’s failed labours and death, and of Ugolin’s doomed love and suicide. Believing himself childless, César has treated Ugolin as a substitute son and made him the vessel of his prideful hopes for the continuation of the Soubeyrans, assisting him in his business and encouraging him to marry and have heirs. The scheme to obtain ‘Les Romarins’ could never be conceived by the hapless Ugolin, but is the brainchild of the crafty uncle who, throughout the lengthy process of bringing about Jean’s failure, deliberately keeps his distance from the family, using Ugolin to bring him reports. Not knowing that the man he systematically torments and whose death he precipitates is his own son, César at first experiences the success of his scheme – a thriving carnation business for his nephew, and the possibility of Soubeyran successors – but sees his hopes dashed in the loss of Ugolin, in public humiliation, and ultimately in the discovery of his enormous mistake. The narrative device of the ‘incomer’, used by many nineteenth-century writers, is here deployed and adapted to great effect. Whilst César is fully aware that Jean is not quite so much of an incomer as he wishes the village to believe, he is wholly ignorant of the extent to which he is not an incomer at all. Although this bald summary elides many other features of the story – including the close observation of peasant life (by turns affectionate and critical), moments of comedy (though these are reduced in adaptation), and the developing romance between Manon and Bernard – it does little to explain why the story’s countryside setting should figure so prominently and positively in critical and public responses, and why it should have played a part in making the region a popular destination for visitors. Considered purely in terms of what happens, L’Eau des collines would induce readers/viewers to visit Provence to much the same extent that the events of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure would prompt anyone to visit Dorset. Which is to say, not at all. The explanation for the story’s success in conjuring a desirable image of Provence evidently resides elsewhere.

A sense of place In the novel Jean Cadoret’s affection for ‘Les Romarins’ and its surroundings is expressed strongly in the phases soon after their arrival, before his dream of a country existence has begun to be seriously thwarted: For the first time in his life he had great pleasure in living. His mother had been born on this lonely farm. In her youth she had gathered the almonds of these almond trees, and dried her sheets on the grass under those olive trees that her forefathers had planted two or three centuries ago … He loved these pine woods, these junipers, these turpentine trees, the cuckoos in the morning.6

Jean’s delight in the place reflects a couple of decidedly contemporary responses to the countryside; both the holidaymaker’s happiness in being away from

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the regular routine and the second-home owner’s nostalgic desire to connect with the lives and places of rural forebears. Connections with ‘places of childhood and family origin’7 are understood as common motivations for modern second-home ownership; ownership which often endeavours to ‘ground’ modern mobile urban-dwellers through a location that is perceived to have a more enduringly significant bond. Although the novel and the adaptations develop the theme of how Jean’s prior life experience and his bookish approach to farming do not serve him well in his agricultural ambitions, it is clear that the films invite us to share his view of the setting as essentially idyllic. When Jean’s family arrive at ‘Les Romarins’ and the upstairs shutters are thrown open to expose the vista – the musical theme swelling in the background – character point-of-view and omniscient perspective are collapsed into an unalloyed celebration of the beautiful landscape. By contrast, the view of César tasting a purloined pinch of soil from ‘Les Romarins’, moistened with a little water from a carafe, is presented as meanly utilitarian, an appreciation of the land arising from very different motives. The desire of Ugolin and César for the land – for its productivity (when allied with the crucial spring), for the generation of wealth, for the restoration and continuation of a family name – is very different to Jean’s, who explains his motives to a perplexed Ugolin: ‘I need air, I need space to crystallize my thoughts […] I want to live in communion with Nature. I want to eat the vegetables of my garden, the oil of my olive trees.’8 Although Jean’s grandiloquent account of an ‘authentic’ existence and Ugolin’s bafflement (believing ‘orthentics’ to be a new-fangled crop Jean seeks to cultivate!) are ripe for a comic interpretation on page and screen alike, it is clear that Jean’s dreams largely anticipate popular urban fantasies of decades later; of escaping the rat race, returning to nature, and of engagement in a type of utopian agriculture that will not prove back-breaking or precarious. In their study of contemporary second-home ownership Hall and Muller observe that ‘removal or inversion from everyday urban life appears to be a main attraction of second homes’9 and it is apparent that Jean too seeks not merely a relocation in this move to his mother’s childhood home, but a transformation. Whilst the term ‘lifestyle’ is not anachronistically deployed within the text(s), what Jean rhapsodizes about is recognizable to any modern reader or viewer as just that. UK texts as varied as the cookeryfocused ‘River Cottage’ series of books and television programmes (1998–2012), the property programme Escape to the Country (2002–present) or – far more closely connected to the specific Provencal setting of L’Eau des collines, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989, adapted for TV in 1993) – would seek to seduce readers and audiences with accounts of the rejection of city lives and the adoption of new lifestyles in attractive rural settings; lifestyles in which local foods and customs, seasonality, and landscape would loom large. Jill Forbes discerned other intertextual chimes in the adaptations of L’Eau des collines, finding in ‘the lush colour, the sounds and scents of the countryside before it was destroyed by intensive farming, the peculiar mix



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of Van Gogh and Elizabeth David that so excites the British middle classes’.10 In identifying a familiarity with British cookery writer Elizabeth David – author of A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) and French Country Cooking (1951) – as a likely shared connection between UK viewers of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources, Forbes also served to emphasize the connection between the adaptations and Mayle’s works, given the extent to which Mayle’s francophilia and his rapturous accounts of meals and associated lifestyles appear influenced by David. In the opening sentence of Mediterranean Food, David’s reference to, and enthusiasm for, the ‘colour and flavour of the South’11 seems a phrase equally applicable to Mayle (one could easily imagine this on a book jacket quotation!), to Pagnol, or to Berri’s adaptations. As David’s biographer, Lisa Chaney, observes, the writer ‘was gifted with a consummate ability to evoke time and place and – significantly for the English, enticed by it for centuries – this place was the Mediterranean’.12 Whilst the adaptations were especially notable for their pictorial qualities, with Bruno Nuytten’s BAFTA-winning cinematography attracting particular acclaim, it would be inaccurate to interpret this aspect of the films as simply an adaptive invention. Pagnol’s lyrical, nostalgic, rendering of the Provencal landscape is strongly present in his autobiographical account of his childhood, My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle, both first published in 1957 before the publication of L’Eau des collines but after the original film. With many of its incidents and locations clearly identifiable as the inspiration for parts of L’Eau des collines, My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle offers the reader a view of the country landscape as seen by Pagnol as a child that maps in many respects onto the idealizing vision of his character, Jean. Described by Pagnol as ‘the most beautiful days of my life’,13 his holidays there are marked by a close and sustained engagement with the landscape – walking, watching, listening, picking – and his account pays close attention to topography, geology, flora, and fauna. Summarizing the influence of those holidays on Pagnol, Bowles observes that ‘the young Marcel’s vacations in the countryside instilled in him a strong sense of regional identity and underscored the contrast between rural and urban culture’.14 Those same Provencal landscapes would also be used by Pagnol as a filmmaker, along with performers with marked regional accents, in many of the films he made through the 1930s. The inherently scenic potential of Pagnol’s Provence, and of L’Eau des collines in particular, comprised an opportunity and challenge for Berri to ‘faire du spectacle’, as the director announced in Cahiers du Cinéma, rather than merely a village comedy.15 One outcome of the massively successful adaptations of L’Eau des collines was an increased interest in Provence as a tourist destination, particularly for British visitors. Abetted by Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and its TV adaptation, which both centred on the rural and culinary charm of the region and emphasized a cast of quaint local characters, the effect of a type of tourism and property ownership inspired in part by literary and screen influences was becoming apparent by the early 1990s. Writing in The Times

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in 1992 Dominic Tonner observed how wealthy and trend-setting Britons were eschewing Tuscany – a perennially popular destination – for France; ‘forsaking chianti for champagne’. In particular he noted that ‘the burgeoning popularity of Provence is thanks, in part, to Peter Mayle-inspired fantasies of summer months spent sipping pastis in a café in Menerbes’.16 A year later, French writer Philippe Seel would explicitly link Pagnol and Mayle in a strident article in the Guardian, adapting the figure of the ubiquitous French aperitif to characterize Mayle in Provence as ‘the happy Englishman who floats there like a blob of crème anglaise on a pool of pastis’. 17 Responding angrily to the phenomenon of many local properties being snapped up by British buyers, renovated, and profitably let to other UK holidaymakers, Seel’s criticisms centred on the inauthenticity of Mayle’s view of Provence and its people. In particular, he pointedly described Mayle’s Provence as an incompetent ersatz of that originally rendered by Pagnol: Mr Mayle, your Provence, so touching in its simplicity, is on the verge of being ridiculous. It does not exist. No more than the Provence of Brigitte Bardot and her likes in Saint-Tropez, or this pastoral Provence of Marcel Pagnol that you so clumsily try to recreate. Please understand that Provence is not for sale, and neither are we.

Describing relations between the transplanted English and locals, Seel asserts that ‘it must be said that relations have slowly deteriorated and we are doing nothing to repair them: beneath our friendly and welcoming appearance, we southerners are in fact naturally suspicious’.18 It does not require any great leap of imagination to discern, in this account, echoes of the relationships between villagers and the family of Jean Cadoret in L’Eau des collines. Ugolin’s mixture of friendly overtures and sabotage, and the village’s studied silence in the face of Jean’s travails – when a hint of local knowledge would make all the difference – may be traced in Seel’s description of wily Provencal contractors who factor into their costs the time they may spend feigning friendliness or sharing a drink with their English clients. Hall and Muller observe that antipathy to second-home households, who may be perceived as ‘outsiders and even as invaders’19 is not uncommon, and Seel’s pointed reference to the Hundred Years War between England and France works to place the matter in a specifically adversarial context of conflict, conquest, and occupation. These intersecting, and sometimes clashing, interpretations of Provence reveal the extent to which what is at stake here is a ‘cultural landscape’ socially constructed out of textual representations. In Society of the Spectacle (first published 1967) Guy Debord argued that real social life has been displaced by the ‘spectacle’, a social relationship between people that is profoundly mediated by images.20 Employing Debord’s concept in the context of forms of tourism motivated by moving image texts, Joanne Connell argues that a ‘distinguishing feature of film tourism is spectacle, and a landscape or setting made into a spectacle through film transforms into a cultural



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landscape that may be created, manipulated, reinforced, and contested’.21 Equally, the construction of conceptions of landscapes and of the desire to visit them may also be identified in pre-film media, including, but not limited to, the novel. Connell notes that Jewell and Mckinnon point to the creation of new cultural landscapes through ‘literary tourism’ that both prompted the intention to visit and shaped the very identity of the place visited, and she gives the example of Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (first published 1810) as an early instance of a text prompting literary tourism.22 Selling twenty-five thousand copies – a record-breaking figure at the time for a work of poetry – the work was popular both in the UK and the US and is credited with launching commercial tourism in the Trossachs in central Scotland. The ‘film tourism’ connection postulated here between the viewing experience of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (and/or of A Year in Provence) and the desire to visit or purchase property there is not proposed along the lines of a ‘magic bullet’ effect. Rather, the texts are seen to be operating in a busy media landscape, along with other competing and complementary forces, to generate both awareness and a positive impression of a place greater than that which existed previously. Fernandez-Young and Young contend that the ‘binary classification of visitors into film tourists or non-film tourists’23 is not an especially helpful way to understand how films may encourage us to visit a particular place. A whole spectrum of activities with greater and lesser degrees of connection to film may fall under the rubric of film tourism. A visit to Disneyland, with its many film-specific attractions, may be said to be more deeply imbricated in the phenomenon than, for example, tossing a coin into Rome’s Trevi Fountain (which might, or might not, be done with an awareness of the 1954 picture Three Coins in the Fountain).24 Film tourism, it is suggested here, exists – to varying degrees – in an amalgam with other forms of tourism, enacted as a cultural practice in ways that commonly do not reveal distinct fault-lines. Equally, it is clear that since the 1986 Berri-directed adaptations the intervening years have seen a more explicit acknowledgement by the tourist industry internationally of the capacity of film (and in many cases its antecedent literature) to develop a propensity to visit. In 1990 Butler argued that the influence of screen-related tourism would increase and those expectations have largely been met.25 The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3) saw explicit endeavours to encourage travel to New Zealand, emphasizing the country’s unspoiled natural landscapes as the setting for Tolkein’s fictional Middle Earth, and resulting in an increase in overseas tourist visitors approaching 23 per cent between 2001 and 2004.26 The ‘Braveheart Country’ tag sought to promote Scottish tourism on the basis of the success of the 1995 film, while Kefalonia was the beneficiary of increased visitor interest following the publication of Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and its adaptation in 2001. Given the number of movies associated with film tourism that derive from literary

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sources, one might also speak plausibly of the phenomenon of adaptation tourism in which visiting is allied to an experience of both a book and a film. If film and literary tourism are understood as the desire to re-experience aspects of a favoured text, then adaptations afford the opportunity for its triangulation, including – for example – the opportunity to connect with places/locations that may have been elided in the inevitable compressing of events that occurs in most instances of the transit from page to screen. A corollary of this understanding is that film and literary tourism may themselves be understood as inherently adaptive, a deliberate engagement – like cos-play and fan-fiction – that takes a source text as the inspiration for a new experience. Adaptation tourism might also be taken to encompass other forms of inter-medial activity. Brunetti’s Cookbook (2010), a compendium of dishes from Donna Leon’s Venetian detective novels (1992–present), is precisely the type of text that could operate in the context of the Leon aficionado seeking to extend and augment their pleasure from the crime novels through a process that might involve ‘primary’ reading (the novels), ‘secondary’/ peripheral reading (the cookbook) as well as visits to specific Venetian restaurants, bars and markets named in the texts. Equally, the multi-textual and trans-media experiences afforded by spin-off texts allied to long-running series (for example Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano crime novels (1994– present), their Italian TV adaptations (1999–present) and the now-predictable cookbook)27 may also be said to be so comprehensive as to afford a type of ‘virtual’ adaptation tourism experience, similar to the non-visit to London undertaken by the narrator of Huysman’s A rebours (first published 1884). The concept of ‘mental’, as opposed to actual, travel is firmly associated with Xavier de Maistre’s late eighteenth-century book, A Journey Around my Room, written while under house arrest, as well as with the verb ‘robinsonner’, invented by Arthur Rimbaud and referring to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Incorporated into the inchoate field of psychogeography – a domain associated, though not exclusively so, with Guy Debord – the figure of the endlessly reinvented Robinson summons both the concept of the mental traveller on an imaginary adventure as well as the actual flâneur or urban wanderer traversing Paris or London. I.Q. Hunter specifically invokes psychogeography in his account of fan responses to the cult film The Wicker Man (1972) in which devotees visit numerous locations around Scotland which were the movie’s fictional setting. ‘The film has inspired considerable such cult tourism or psychogeography, by which fans invoke the ghostly historical valences of the film.’28 In an earlier paper Hunter had also acknowledged the potential dual nature of the psychogeographical ‘visit’, in which participants’ involvement may be either as a ‘sofanaut’ or could actually involve ‘taking our cue from online guides to the film’s locations, reading up on some Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard, and scooting off to the M3’.29 Relatedly, Douglas Cunningham refers to the ‘cinephilic pilgrimage [which] is born of love (for the diegetic world of the film), loss (the apparent absence of that diegetic world within the realm of the real) and a longing



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to occupy/influence a space-time somewhere between the index and the referent’.30 Evidently the type of responses to films discussed above, and especially the desire to experience film locations, intersect (if only to a degree) with the practices of tourism and second-home ownership analysed in this chapter. They share a sense of being an ‘excessive’ response, one that – in seeking a deeper grounding in a physical site – transgresses the bounds of viewer involvement planned by the makers of the texts. Equally, significant differences may also be observed. In terms of ideological orientation it seems likely that a not inconsiderable gulf would separate the second-home owner motivated in part by the Berri films from the edgier peregrinations of the cult film psychogeographer drawn to grittier locations and frequently (though not always) to the elevation of relatively ephemeral or obscure movies.

Nostalgia and heritage A many-faceted nostalgia is at work in the 1986 Berri adaptations, in the audience responses they stimulated, and in the phenomenon of increased touristic interest and second-home ownership in Provence which they – in part – encouraged. Beyond the general cinematic tendency in which ‘the countryside is outside of, and lost to, modernity’,31 several factors conspired to help the films provoke nostalgia for different types of viewer. For French audiences, Pagnol’s national standing, the fact that the novels to be adapted had been bestsellers two decades earlier, and, perhaps most importantly, the ubiquity of Pagnol’s films on French television, all meant that the new films were already in a dialogue with a national past that was not merely restricted to the early twentieth-century setting of the story. As Bowles argues, ‘already a cultural icon at the time of his death in 1974, since then Pagnol’s legacy has continued to expand through regular dissemination of his films on television and home video’.32 In short, French audiences had grown up with Pagnol, and these new adaptations offered them a recapitulative experience that combined the new and the deeply familiar. The desire of British secondhome owners to buy in France may also be interpreted in the context of nostalgia. Buller and Hoggart contend that such buyers were endeavouring to find a replacement for a now-disappeared British countryside – lost to the outward creep of the suburbs, and to the steady modernization of agricultural practices and the landscapes they engender – by purchasing in rural France.33 France-as-Britain had a clear precedent in filmmaking too, again as a means of conjuring an earlier, vanished, species of British countryside. Roman Polanski’s 1979 adaptation Tess – itself a proto-heritage picture, produced by Berri, with high production values and a canonical literary source – had eschewed the real Dorset/Wessex setting of Hardy’s novel for location shooting in Normandy, Brittany, and Pas-de-Calais. Whilst this move also avoided the risk of the director being extradited34 to the USA from Britain, the effect was to film Tess in settings more accurate to the novel’s Victorian era than those that actually remained in the UK. As with

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Jean de Florette and Manon des sources, the cinematography of Tess was well received. With a conscious evoking of the agricultural landscapes of Courbet and De la Tour,35 the film’s diffusely ekphrastic pictorial properties, its painterly compositions that foregrounded the wistful beauty of both its female lead (Nastassja Kinski) and the landscape, were allied to a tragic narrative to evoke the satisfying melancholy that underpins nostalgia. Nostalgia may be understood as a key component of heritage films. Focusing on a particularly British context, Andrew Higson defines these as a ‘cycle of quality costume dramas’36 and it is evident that many of the texts that have come to be grouped under this term are decidedly British in terms of their setting, source material, participants, and production. A range of screen texts have been bracketed under the ‘heritage’ term, including: the films of Merchant-Ivory;37 movies as diverse as A Passage to India (1984) and Another Country (1984); and prestige television productions such as Brideshead Revisited (1981) and The Jewel In the Crown (1984), many of which have dealt with the waning of British imperial power and associated lifestyles. For Higson, the representation of an English past ‘as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze’ is their principal connecting element, as well as a tendency to ‘reverential use of picturesque rural spaces’. Equally, other critics have drawn attention to the ‘increasingly pan-European’38 phenomenon of the heritage film. John Caughie described both Jean de Florette and Babette’s Feast (1987) as examples of ‘Heritage Cinema in Europe’39 while Street discerned ‘heritage themes and stylistics’ in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence (1993). For Ginette Vincendeau heritage cinema is unequivocally a European phenomenon that ‘emerged in the 1980s with the success of European period films’;40 her list of examples includes the French adaptations Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), La Reine Margot (1994), Les Destinées sentimentales (2000) and, of course, Jean de Florette. An analysis of Berri’s adaptations of L’Eau des collines in terms of heritage film also connects usefully to the questions of place, property and ownership that have exercised this chapter. Michael Atkinson characterized many heritage adaptations contemporary with L’Eau des collines as ‘entranced with the leisure of wealth’41 and even a cursory survey of heritage films points to the recurrence of desirable properties, fastidious attention to style and dress, characters who enjoy extended periods of recreational travel, and the general absence of work as either a topic or an implied means to fund characters’ lifestyles. Rather, these pictorial/material pleasures are typically presented as the ‘natural’ purview of those who inhabit – and inherit – them, while an existence predicated on accumulated capital, interest, and rents is assumed, though rarely pursued as a theme. It is self-evident that the same cannot be said for the Berri adaptations. Even with the success of Ugolin and César at its height, with ‘Les Romarins’ secured and the carnation enterprise proving lucrative, this is nonetheless an existence in which the elderly César is required to work outside, and where coins are jealously hoarded in a hidden jar. At



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Figure 9.1  César (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Ateuil) foregrounding the expansive landscape of Provence in Jean de Florette (1986)

other times in the films work is presented, at considerable length, as onerous, debilitating and ultimately fatal. Yet the films’ pictorial qualities also manage to out-gun this dimension of the narrative by presenting the physical context of the tragic story, the landscape of Provence, in a fashion that rendered it extremely desirable to viewers, helping to turn some of them into visitors (Figure 9.1). If Jean de Florette and Manon des sources did not offer property fantasies on the scale of Brideshead Revisited or Pride and Prejudice’s Pemberley, they certainly suggested – when allied to the depressed value of houses in the French country – more attainable dreams of Provencal holidays and second homes where one could enjoy the sunshine and vistas associated with the films, but without the unpleasant complications of their plots. This was not a phenomenon without a precedent; the 1972 film Deliverance, filmed in Rabun County, Georgia, was in almost every respect a very different film from Jean de Florette and Manon des sources but also combined outdoor scenic pleasures with the theme of an unwelcoming response to visitors from a tight-knit rural community. A narrative of city-dwelling adventurers coming to the Chattooga river seeking white-water adventure but encountering sexual violence and a fight for their lives would not seem likely to prompt a $20 million a year rafting industry with annual visitor numbers climbing from a pre-film figure in the hundreds to a modern-day total in the tens of thousands. Yet Deliverance is widely credited with the effect.42

Conclusion Connell describes how both literary and film tourism ‘emphasise the interconnections between people, plot and place’.43 The longer-term outcomes of the adaptations of L’Eau des collines and of Peter Mayle’s Provence-set stories, and of the audience responses they brought about, indicate how

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plots are not always subject to the control of their authors, how people and places can face unexpected change. Just as César and Ugolin discover that water cannot be turned off and on without incurring dreadful and unexpected consequences, so the interest in and popularity of Provence that was generated by these texts proved to have unplanned and undesirable results. Twenty years after the release of the films the owners of the real property used as ‘Les Romarins’ were still experiencing unwanted attention in the form of trespassers seeking out the house of Jean de Florette, film tourists pursuing that specific physical connection with a cherished screen location.44 In the case of Peter Mayle, an excess of sightseers inspired by A Year in Provence led the author to relocate to The Hamptons in the USA in the mid-1990s, at the very time his work was at the peak of its popularity.45 ‘They’re capricious, these springs!’46

Notes 1 Brett Bowles, Marcel Pagnol (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 10. 2 André Bazin, ‘The Case of Marcel Pagnol’, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo, Literature/Film Quarterly 23.3 (1995): 204. 3 Bowles, Marcel Pagnol, p. 237. 4 Brett Bowles, ‘Performing National Consensus: Populism in the Work of Marcel Pagnol, 1929–38’, French History 26.3 (2012): 371. 5 Jean-Michel Frodon and Jean-Claude Loiseau, Jean de Florette: la folle aventure du film (Paris: Herscher, 1987), p. 218. 6 Marcel Pagnol, The Water of the Hills (Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs), trans. W.E. Van Heyningen (London: Picador, 1988), pp. 105–6. 7 C. Michael Hall and Dieter Muller (eds), Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes: Between Elite Landscapes and Common Ground (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2004), p. 10. 8 Pagnol, The Water of the Hills, p. 75. 9 Hall and Muller, Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes, p. 12. 10 Jill Forbes, ‘Germinal: Keeping it in the Family’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), pp. 105–6. 11 Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterrean Food (London: John Lehmann, 1950), p. 1. 12 Elizabeth Chaney, Elizabeth David: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. xviii. 13 Marcel Pagnol, My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle, trans. W.E. Van Heyningen (London: Picador, 1991), p. 83. 14 Bowles, Marcel Pagnol, p. 11. 15 Quoted in Vincent Ostria, ‘Claude Berri sur les traces de Pagnol: le tournage de Jean de Florette’, Cahiers du Cinéma 380 (February 1986): 62. 16 Dominic Tonner, ‘A Week in Provence; Homes’, The Times, 19 August 1992. 17 Philippe Seel, ‘Hoax en-Provence: “Provence is Not for Sale and Neither Are We”. A Native Gives his View of the Second British Invasion’, Guardian. 26 February 1993.



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18 Seel, ‘Hoax en-Provence’. 19 Hall and Muller, Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes, p. 3. 20 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). 21 Joanne Connell, ‘Film Tourism – Evolution, progress and prospects’, Tourism Management 33 (2012): 1013. 22 Connell, ‘Film Tourism’: 1010–11. For Bronwyn Jewell and Susan McKinnon, see ‘Movie Tourism – A New Form of Cultural Landscape?’ Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24.2–3 (2008): 153–62. 23 A. Fernandez-Young and R. Young, ‘Measuring the Effects of Film and Television on Tourism to Screen Locations: A Theoretical and Empirical Perspective’, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24.2–3 (2008): 208. 24 Actually wading in would probably be done with a fuller consciousness of the famous scene in La Dolce Vita (1960). 25 See R. Butler, ‘The Influence of the Media in Shaping International Tourist Patterns’, Tourism Recreation Research 15 (1990): 46–53. 26 Martin Phillips, ‘The Lord of the Rings and Transformations in Socio-Spatial Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in Cinematic Countrysides, ed. Robert Fish (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 150. 27 Stefinia Campo, I segreti della tavola di Montalbano: le ricette di Andrea Camilleri (Turin: Edizioni Il leone verde, 2009). 28 I.Q. Hunter, Cult Film as a Guide to Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 15. 29 I.Q. Hunter, ‘A Psychogeography of British Trash Cinema: New Maps of the Field in England’, conference paper given at the University of Lincoln, 28 May 2015. 30 Douglas Cunningham, ‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and the Redemptive Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage’, Screen 49.2 (Summer 2008): 123. 31 Robert Fish (ed.), Cinematic Countrysides (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 6. 32 Brett Bowles, ‘Performing National Consensus: Populism in the Work of Marcel Pagnol, 1929–38’, French History 26.3 (2012): 391. 33 H. Buller and K Hoggart, International Counterurbanization: British Migrants in Rural France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), p. 13. 34 Polanski was, at the time, wanted in the USA following a conviction for sex with an underage girl. 35 Andrew Pulver, ‘Girl Interrupted: Roman Polanski’s Tess’, Guardian, 26 March 2005. 36 Andrew Higson, ‘Rural Spaces and British Cinema’, in Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, ed. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 109. 37 Though, of course, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala were non-English members of that team. 38 Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 113. 39 John Caughie and Kevin Rockett, The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (London, BFI Publishing, 1996), p. 186. 40 Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. xvii. 41 Michael Atkinson, ‘Michael Winterbottom: Cinema as Heart Attack’, Film Comment (January/February 1998): 47.

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42 Cory Welles, ‘40 Years Later, Deliverance Causes Mixed Feelings in Georgia’ (2012), www.marketplace.org/2012/08/22/life/40-years-later-deliverance-causesmixed-feelings-georgia (accessed 15 September 2018). 43 Connell, ‘Film Tourism’: 1011. 44 Kieran Falconer, ‘The Landscape of Manon des Sources’, The Times, 8 August 2005. 45 Alice Steinbach ‘Adieu, Provence Profile: Author Peter Mayle is No Longer at Home with his Celebrity in the Little French Village he Made so Famous’, Baltimore Sun, 25 June 1996. 46 Pagnol, The Water of the Hills, p. 330.

10

Maigret on screen: stardom and literary adaptation Ginette Vincendeau

One of the most prolific and successful francophone writers of the twentieth century, Georges Simenon is also one of the most frequently adapted to the screen. His legendary output includes 436 novels published between 1931 and 1972, as well as many essays and autobiographical pieces of writing. Seventy-five of them are devoted to the author’s most popular hero, Chief Inspector (Commissaire) Maigret, a senior policeman at the Police Judiciaire (PJ), the criminal police in Paris. The first Maigret novel, Pietr-le-letton, was published in 1931, and Simenon officially launched the series with two further books, Monsieur Gallet, décédé and Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien, on 20 February 1931 at a ‘bal anthropométrique’ in Montparnasse, Paris, with guests dressed as gangsters or prostitutes. Others followed at the phenomenal rate of one every two months until 1934, when Simenon attempted to put a stop to them in order to concentrate on what he considered his more serious romans durs. However, public demand and financial reward were hard to resist; the Maigret series resumed at the beginning of the war and continued until 1972, appearing at the ‘reduced’ rate of two or three a year. Barely a year elapsed between the publication of the first Maigret novel and the first film version, La Nuit du carrefour, directed by Jean Renoir in 1932. Many others followed, with altogether more than 300 films and television series,1 two-thirds of which are devoted to Maigret, in France primarily, though not exclusively. At least 30 actors have incarnated the character, the latest, at the time of writing, being British comedian Rowan Atkinson. Beyond Simenon’s talent, such enduring popularity owes a lot to the strength and simplicity of Maigret’s characterization, and to a well-defined iconography, consisting of a stocky figure often wrapped in a thick overcoat with its ‘legendary velvet collar’,2 a hat, a pipe in his hand or stuck in his mouth. Also well known is the inspector’s idiosyncratic method of investigation based on intuition and empathy, his penchant for ‘soaking up’ the atmosphere ‘like a sponge’.3 Last but not least is the iconic Parisian topography,4 centred on his office at 36 Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité – the world of his male colleagues – and his home on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, the domain

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of the patient Madame Maigret. The coherence of Maigret’s characterization was reinforced from the start by its close association with Simenon. There are similarities in terms of physical appearance but also biography: both came from a modest background and dropped out of medical studies; biographers also point out echoes of the author’s own father and grandfather, described in his 1948 autobiographical novel Pedigree. The blurring of the boundaries between Simenon and his creature culminated in 1951 with the publication of Les Mémoires de Maigret, in which, in an extraordinary mise-en-abîme, ‘Maigret’ describes his relationship with the author who created him, while the latter explains that he deliberately drew the policeman as a simplified, instantly recognizable silhouette, ‘that gradually became fleshed out with details’.5

Maigret as celeactor Like all adaptations, the screen versions of Maigret are the site of ongoing negotiations between the literary text and mise-en-scène decisions by the filmmakers, such as location vs studio shooting, black and white vs colour, choice of screenwriter and generic tropes. In France alone the aesthetics of the Maigret films range from the Poetic Realist noir dramas of the 1930s to the nostalgic heritage television of the 1990s and beyond, via light comedy thrillers in the 1940s and the polished works of the Tradition of Quality in the 1950s and early 1960s. But particularly crucial is casting, because, like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, Maigret is a celebrity character, what Chris Rojek calls a celeactor,6 a figure who transcends time, medium, and performer – which explains his remarkable ability to retain coherence while being embodied by many different actors. For Rojek, celeactors are also characterized by their topicality, the fact that they ‘cater to the public appetite for a character type that sums up the times’.7 The Maigret novels, as many commentators have remarked, are on the surface strikingly ahistorical, omitting reference to the major political events that marked France’s history from the 1930s to the 1970s, whether in the shape of changing political regimes, the war and German occupation, riots, or industrial unrest. In the words of Jean-Luc Dumortier, Simenon’s ‘realism is undoubtedly not a “historical” realism’.8 Yet, while ‘history with a capital H’ is conspicuously absent, the books offer myriads of small details that anchor the stories in their time – from what people drink in Parisian cafés to gender relations. In this respect, Maigret possesses a remarkable sociological density. A man of peasant origins, he is a civil servant and a solid petit-bourgeois (the antithesis of the British and aristocratic Sherlock Holmes), a middlebrow character, obeyed and respected by his subalterns but often battling his hierarchy: the investigating magistrate, the head of the PJ, the minister. A reassuring patriarchal figure ‘born’ at the age of forty-five, he is economical with words and movements. His terrain is emotion rather than intellect, and his gruff tone and occasionally abrupt behaviour



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hide a deep humanity, an ability to empathize with victims and criminals. He has been compared to a priest, a doctor, and a social worker in his ability to elicit confidences. But as the sociologist Luc Boltanski points out, Maigret is a dual character: there is the warm, understanding private man and there is the cool, law-enforcing civil servant9 – in other words he can sympathize with criminals’ motives and yet have no qualms in sending them to the guillotine. In the novel Maigret tend un piège (but not the film), Maigret goes home after nailing a vicious serial killer and his murderous spouse, has a long nap and tells his wife, ‘tonight, we’re going to the cinema …’.10 There is another duality in Maigret. His looks, simple tastes and down-to-earth nature construct a studied ‘ordinariness’; yet at the same time the novels constantly remind the reader that he is a celebrity who is regularly recognized by people – thus the character structurally echoes the nature of stardom, based on the ordinary/extraordinary paradigm, as Richard Dyer has shown.11 After a brief account of early manifestations of Maigret on screen, this chapter will focus on the pivotal figure of Jean Gabin in three films of the late 1950s and early 1960s: Maigret tend un piège (Jean Delannoy, 1958), Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (Jean Delannoy, 1959) and Maigret voit rouge (Gilles Grangier, 1963). A particularly harmonious star–character combination, Gabin’s Maigret was close to the actor’s persona during the period when the films were made, as the actor excelled at representing what one might call charismatic ordinariness.12 At the same time Gabin’s powerful star image de facto opened a gap between himself and the literary hero, even though this did not preclude success. Examining the alterations Gabin and other stars bring to the character of Maigret illuminates how the adaptation process creates a hero that despite its remarkable coherence manages to ‘sum up the times’ differently at particular historical moments.

Maigret’s early screen incarnations: trial and error The first Maigret adaptations – La Nuit du carrefour (Jean Renoir, 1932), Le Chien jaune (Jean Tarride, 1932), and La Tête d’un homme (Julien Duvivier, 1933) – with respectively Pierre Renoir, Albert Tarride, and Harry Baur – are frequently bunched together and as early examples of Poetic Realism in their translation of Simenon’s famous ‘atmosphere’ – a dark, yet poetic vision of ‘ordinary’ people, of urban or rural landscapes more often than not shrouded in rain or fog. Of the three actors, rather than the elegant Pierre Renoir or the unimposing Albert Tarride, Harry Baur is the closest match to the literary inspector. Already a monstre sacré of stage and screen, the fifty-three-year-old actor had a burly, powerful physique. The critic Nino Frank talked of his ‘powerful, rugged and unflappable body’.13 Baur had been a rugby player, and a year after La Tête d’un homme he played Jean Valjean, the force-of-nature hero of Les Misérables. Looking older than his age (Simenon complained that he was twenty years older than the model14),

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the balding actor, with circles under his eyes, brought to the character his massive silhouette and laconic presence, in part inherited from his work in silent cinema. When he does speak, his slow, sardonic elocution projects a wise but also jaded persona. Baur’s stillness brilliantly portrays Maigret’s method of soaking up the atmosphere. For instance, as he sits for hours in the Eden-bar (a studio reconstruction of La Coupole in Montparnasse) playing a cat-and-mouse game with the criminal Radek (Valéry Inkijinoff), he embodies Maigret’s grounded nature, while the bustle of the brasserie around him symbolizes the agitation of the world. Baur’s blunt but humane manner also perfectly expresses Maigret’s public/private duality as well as his class sympathies: fascinated by the anarchic outcast Radek and indulgent toward the wretched peasant Heurtin (Alexandre Rignault), he shows contempt for the bourgeois crook Willy Ferrière (Gaston Jacquet) and his entourage. Baur’s Maigret is capable of being both physically threatening and tender, of growling ‘scum’ at Radek and shedding tears for a young colleague shot dead during a raid. With such a good fit and the fact that the film was a success, the question arises of why Baur only made one Maigret version. Dissatisfied with La Nuit du carrefour and Le Chien jaune, Simenon had in fact planned to direct La Tête d’un homme himself, but his inexperience worried the producers, who replaced him with the seasoned professional Duvivier, quite rightly as it turns out: the film drew a lot of praise and one reviewer thought Duvivier the ‘best French director’15 of the time. Simenon, however, was piqued and he subsequently blocked all adaptations, refusing to release the rights to his books for a period of seven years, at substantial financial cost to himself.16 This explains why Baur was not able to repeat his highly successful performance, and the hiatus between La Tête d’un homme and the next wave of Maigret adaptations, which took place during the war. The German occupation, in one of its many paradoxes, turned out to be a golden age for Simenon, who became the star writer at the German film production company Continental with nine adaptations in four years, including three Maigrets, making him the most frequently adapted writer of the period.17 On 19 March 1942 he signed a contract giving Continental exclusive rights to Maigret, for the tidy sum of F500,00018 (for all this there would be a reckoning at the Liberation, and the writer emigrated to the US largely to avoid reprisals). Under the ambivalent leadership of Alfred Greven, both a Nazi and a francophile, Continental’s mission was to foster French film production as part of a revival of European cinema, to defeat the British and American film industries, whose products were then banned. As such, and despite the direct links to Nazi Germany, Continental eschewed propaganda and favoured well-made films by the best of the French film talent available – that is, minus Jewish personnel and those, such as Renoir and Duvivier, who emigrated to Hollywood. As a result, dominant genres included escapist comedies and literary adaptations,19 which explains the peculiar turn that the Continental-produced Maigret took. Picpus (Richard Pottier, 1943), Cécile est morte! (Maurice Tourneur, 1944), and Les Caves du Majestic (Richard Pottier, 1945) as a result, unlike the



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books and unlike earlier and subsequent films, present a quasi-comic vision of Maigret. All three feature Albert Préjean, an actor described by Claude Gauteur as ‘sympathetic but totally ill adapted’20 to playing Maigret. Préjean indeed embodied an engaging type, the popular ‘regular guy’. By the time he shot the Maigret films, he had already had two careers. He had made a number of successful silent films, and he then flourished in sound films as an actor and singer playing working-class characters in light musical comedies, such as Sous les toits de Paris (René Clair, 1930) and Dédé (René Guissart, 1934). His main rival, Jean Gabin, who also started in light comedy and musicals, then overtook him when he switched to dramatic parts. Préjean thus was enjoying a third career during the war, partly because Gabin, a résistant, had left for Hollywood. He offers a rejuvenated, sunnier but also more belligerent version of Maigret. Thirteen years younger than Baur, he seems younger still, and his trim figure and lightness of step endow the character with an energy and agility that are alien to Simenon’s creation. Even though in Les Mémoires de Maigret the author ‘reveals’ the young policeman as thin and lanky, the Maigret of the novels has settled into middle-age embonpoint and he walks with a heavy step. By contrast, in the Continental films Préjean’s Maigret runs up staircases, whistles, pedals heartily on a tandem bicycle and jumps on to a motorbike. In Cécile est morte! he is compared to ‘a cinema matinee idol’ while in Les Caves du Majestic he punches a suspect in the face (in the eponymous novel, in fact, it is the other way round21). His assistant Lucas, played in the three films as a stuttering joker by the rotund comic André Gabriello, reinforces the comedic dimension of the character and the films. Yet, despite these discrepancies between Préjean and the literary hero, despite the critical consensus that the actor was, in Raymond Chirat’s words, ‘one of the worst Maigrets ever seen’,22 the Préjean versions did very well, and there were plans to shoot more after the war.23 These however were never made, partly because the cinematic mood changed, toward greater realism and pessimism, and partly because the actor’s career never recovered from his wartime implication with the occupying forces. Apart from working for Continental, he had been one of the most prominent actors to make the infamous trip to Berlin, Vienna, and Munich in March 1942 to entertain French prisoners, but also to meet Nazi film personnel. He was arrested by the Free French forces (FFI) in September 1944 and suspended from work for six months (and in effect did not work for fifteen months).24 Thus both the success and the singularity of Préjean’s Maigret were deeply embedded in the context of the war and German occupation. During his North American exile (1945–52), Simenon in several ways turned his back on France, a stance that included prioritizing American and British projects.25 A number of Maigret adaptations were considered, including one by Jean Renoir, who was then in Hollywood, which came to nothing. One exception was L’Homme de la Tour Eiffel, a 1950 US-France production starring Charles Laughton as Maigret, and based on La Tête d’un homme. The project, initiated by Franchot Tone, who also appears in the film, was

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beset by technical difficulties during shooting in France (the unusual AnsColor process, the weather, erratic electricity supply). Laughton quarrelled with the director Irving Allen and replaced him with his friend Burgess Meredith, who, however, lacked experience.26 Thus, despite Laughton throwing himself wholeheartedly into the preparation, including carefully selecting Maigretappropriate costumes, the film was a disappointment. Described by Simon Callow as ‘soporific’,27 Laughton’s performance sits oddly against the spectacular chases on rooftops and up the Eiffel Tower, which are themselves in stark opposition to the Maigret books’ avoidance of landmarks and emphasis on the everyday life of populous quartiers. Simenon returned to Europe in 1952, and French versions of Maigret resumed. First was one episode in Henri Verneuil’s Brelan d’as (1952). Each of the film’s three episodes features a different type of criminal investigator: suave detective Inspector Wens (Raymond Rouleau), American tough guy Lemmy Caution (John Van Dreelen), and Maigret, played by Michel Simon who gives a characteristically memorable performance that was singled out by critics, to the detriment of the other two male leads. Simon was also much praised by Simenon as ‘the real Maigret’,28 even though at first sight the actor’s image is far from that of the character. To the latter’s sedate and reassuring persona, Simon brings a typology based on excess, ugliness and outrageous behaviour. His Maigret appears truculent and dishevelled.29 However as Gwénaëlle Le Gras argues, Simon’s art is based on his ability to ‘transcend disgrace’.30 In 1952, Simon was also trailing a substantial pre-war popularity as well as several popular and critical postwar successes in Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946), La Beauté du diable (René Clair, 1949), and La Poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951). Thus, like Albert Préjean, the strength of his star persona, however distant from Maigret, enabled him to override the potential gap from his literary model, although his incarnation remained a one-off. A similarly single interpretation, though a very different case, was that of the Canadian actor Maurice Manson in Maigret dirige l’enquête (Stany Cordier, 1956), a film that was much less successful at the box office and is now largely forgotten.31 Two years later, with Maigret tend un piège starring Jean Gabin, Maigret finally found a more enduring and successful impersonation – a trajectory mirrored in box-office figures: while Brelan d’as was seen by 1.7 million spectators, Maigret dirige l’enquête gathered only 708.157. By contrast, Maigret tend un piège was seen by more than 3 million viewers, and the two Gabin ‘sequels’ also did very well: 2.8 million for Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre and just over 2 million for Maigret voit rouge.32

‘Seeing double’ or perfect fit? Gabin as Maigret Altogether, Gabin appeared in ten Simenon adaptations: La Marie du port (1950), La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952), Le Sang à la tête (1956), En cas de malheur (1958), Le Baron de l’écluse (1960), Le Président (1961), Le



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Chat (1971), and the three Maigret films: Maigret tend un piège (1958), Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), and Maigret voit rouge (1963). This makes him the Simenonian actor par excellence, one of the few who found grace with the author, who declared, after Maigret tend un piège, that his writing ‘might well, from now on, be influenced by [Gabin’s] incarnation of his hero’.33 Gabin had been the leading male star in the 1930s playing the ultimate tragic proletarian hero of classics such as La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937), Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937), and Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) among others. He spent the war years in Hollywood where he made two films that had virtually no impact in France. A fallow period after the Liberation came to an end with the success of the gangster film Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), in which Jacques Becker cast him as the ageing ‘godfather’ of a Paris gang, and Jean Renoir’s costume drama French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955), in which he plays the director of the Moulin Rouge. These were followed by a string of hugely successful films, ranging from comedies to psychological dramas to crime thrillers. While elements of his pre-war class and masculine identity clung to his image, the mid- to late 1950s films consolidated a more mature star persona replete with quiet yet powerful authority and authenticity. This was underlined by a performance style characterized by charismatic underplay, thrown into relief by famous outbursts of anger or bad temper. By the time Maigret tend un piège came out, on 29 January 1958, Gabin’s postwar star identity was so well-established that his incarnation of Simenon’s hero was, inevitably, judged against it (Figure 10.1). The critical consensus, reiterated in many reviews, was that his image was so powerful that it ‘crushed’34 the literary figure, but that the actor nevertheless succeeded in impersonating him in a process summed up by Jean de Baroncelli: ‘Something curious happens. Gabin’s personality is so strong that he is not [Maigret]; he cannot be Maigret. We see double, as it were: we see Gabin, and, superimposed over him, the image of Maigret that each of us has more or less created. But the talent of the actor soon wins us over.’35 Maigret tend un piège In Maigret tend un piège (first published 1955), the inspector pursues a serial killer who has already killed five women (four in the film) in the popular quartier of Montmartre. Convinced by the theories of a psychiatric expert that such killers are narcissistic and crave recognition, he ‘sets a trap’ by pretending through the press that he has arrested the killer, thus forcing the real one to manifest himself. He quickly tracks down Marcel Moncin (Maurin in the film, played by Jean Desailly), an architect-decorator who lives with his wife in a grand flat on Boulevard Saint-Germain (in the film Quai Louis Blériot), but who was born in Montmartre, where his late father was a butcher and where his mother still lives. Once he is arrested, his wife

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Figure 10.1  Jean Gabin as Maigret with the ubiquitous, iconic pipe in Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959)

(Annie Girardot) commits another murder in a desperate attempt to save him, but Maigret sees through her and charges the couple. Jean Delannoy and his scriptwriters took many liberties with Simenon’s narrative. First of all the film moves the action from Montmartre to the Marais. Delannoy claims36 this was because the area was familiar to Simenon (who had lived on Place des Vosges in the 1920s), although the director strips the quartier of its Jewish associations that are prominent (and not devoid of anti-Semitism37) in the Simenon novels set in that area. The Marais of Maigret tend un piège, however, is – as it was in real life in the 1950s – a working-class area (similar to Montmartre in that sense), and not the wealthy enclave it has become. The film invents several characters, including a butcher who functions as a red herring, and a seedy nightclub dancer; it significantly expands the role of Maurin’s wife, no doubt to give a bigger part to rising star Annie Girardot, and adds a scene in which Maigret visits Maurin’s mother at home. Although Delannoy claims he battled with the producers who wanted to impose more action scenes,38 his version undoubtedly cranks up the drama compared with the more sedate novel, including adding a reconstruction of the murder in situ and a scene where Maurin, released by Maigret, tries to kill another woman in his father’s former butcher’s shop. Other features of the film are directly attributable to Gabin’s star power and image, including its existence in the first place. Following the triumph of Touchez pas au grisbi and French Cancan, Gabin shot in rapid succession five films in 1955 and four in 1956, all highly successful. Among others he



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signed a three-year contract with producer Jean-Paul Guibert for six films, including the first two Maigrets. He was thus able to dictate aspects of the production and crew. In particular he insisted on the director of photography Louis Page, with whom he had already made several films (and who went on to shoot many more Gabin films, including the other two Maigrets), and the dialogue-writer Michel Audiard who from then on forged a long-standing collaboration with the actor. Page and Audiard can be seen to have direct impact on Gabin’s embodiment of Maigret. Page found technical solutions to Gabin’s dislike of make-up,39 thus producing a more naturalistic image, while Audiard’s truculent dialogues and use of slang fashioned a more ‘popular’ oral presence in line with Gabin’s identity, compared to the classneutral language of Simenon’s hero. Delannoy for his part had directed Gabin once before in the hit drama Chiens perdus sans collier in 1955, where the star plays a stern but humane juvenile court judge, a part with obvious similarities to Maigret, in its combination of private compassion and public severity – another element confirming the closeness of the star’s image with the character at that point. Starting with the credit sequence, which features a pipe over a map of Paris, the traditional Maigret iconography permeates the film and the actor clearly did his utmost to adopt it. He chose his own outfit consisting of a crumpled suit with braces at La Belle Jardinière,40 a popular department store, rather than the elegant bespoke ensembles he was used to in life or in his roles as a glamorous gangster. His middle-aged appearance, with grey hair and growing embonpoint, which had been a problem when he returned, only in his forties, from the US after the war, here serves his performance as Maigret. He even exaggerates his age, walking slowly, puffing, sitting heavily in armchairs, pushing his stomach forward; he tells Madame Maigret, ‘I feel retirement coming on.’ Several scenes in his home, not present in this particular novel, show him literally cooling his heels in bowls of water, drinking reheated coffee with Madame Maigret in her dressing-gown in their kitchen and sipping eau-de-vie in their living room decked out with old-fashioned furniture. The environment provides the perfect shrine to Maigret’s reassuring petit-bourgeois image, especially by contrast to the chic modernist flat of the Maurins. Star and character overlap perfectly in this characterization of Maigret as a mixture of authority, authenticity, and ordinariness. More Gabin than Maigret, however, is an aggressive edge, visible in the ‘explosions of anger’ that his performance style was famed for. Helped by Audiard’s dialogue, Gabin overrides Maigret in a number of scenes where his performance becomes a little more theatrical, with key moments clinched by a hard stare, a raised voice through clenched teeth and a pointed finger – all of which can be found in the subsequent two versions, as indeed in all Gabin films. In line with the misogynist cinema of the 1950s that, as Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier discuss, promoted ‘restoring the patriarchal order’41 to which Gabin singularly contributed, his Maigret’s anger targets

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Maurin’s wife and mother in a way that is less marked in the book. First he harangues the mother, calling her ‘a monster and a monster of stupidity’. Then, he predicts that Maurin will escape the death sentence in view of his diminished responsibility because ‘he is not a real man’ (it is made clear that he is sexually impotent, because he has been dominated by his mother and then his wife), whereas ‘it’s the woman who will pay’. Thus despite the fact that a male killer has repeatedly acted out his lethal hatred of women, it is a woman who has killed once, out of misplaced love, who is deemed by this film to be the guiltiest. Gabin’s own patriarchal star image at the time is more ambivalent than this suggests, though, as his characters often balance patriarchal domination with ageing male anxiety, but here Maigret’s law-enforcing position is made to coincide with a sexist viewpoint that belongs to the period’s gender ideology more generally. This is confirmed by the fact that Louis Malle’s thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, which coincidentally came out on the same day as Maigret tend un piège, ends with the policeman (Lino Ventura) similarly telling the heroine (Jeanne Moreau) that the jury will be harsher on her than on her accomplice in crime, her lover played by Maurice Ronet, notwithstanding the fact that he committed the actual murder. This analysis is evidently retrospective; at the time critics’ reservations about Maigret tend un piège were not concerned with gender. Because of the simultaneous release, many compared Delannoy’s and Malle’s films, but mostly to criticize Delannoy’s ‘academic’ or ‘commercial’ mise-en-scène, typical of the Tradition of Quality, compared to the more innovative style of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, a film that was indeed a harbinger of the French New Wave.42 But beyond these aesthetic quarrels, Gabin’s impersonation of Maigret was judged masterful, his looks and performance fitting the character like a glove. As Delannoy put it, Gabin’s ‘allure’ was that of Maigret, ‘his shoulders, his neck, it was all there’.43 Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre The evocative power of Gabin’s ‘allure’ as Maigret can be seen right from the beginning of Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre, made the following year by the same team of star, director, producer, cinematographer, and dialoguewriter. The film is based on the novel L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre, first published in 1933. It opens on Gabin/Maigret seen from the back, the highly recognizable coat, hat, and pipe forming a dark silhouette against the window of a train racing through the countryside. Maigret is travelling to the village of SaintFiacre near Moulins in central France, summoned by the Countess of Saint-Fiacre (Valentine Tessier) who has been threatened in an anonymous letter with death ‘before the end of the first mass on the Day of the Dead’. For Maigret the travel in space is also a travel in time, as his father used to manage the late Count’s estate when he was a child, and it is where he was born. Now the widowed Countess is prey to several young men, including



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her beloved ne’er-do-well son (Michel Auclair), as is visible in the decaying château that has been stripped of most of its furniture and paintings. Despite Maigret’s presence, the Countess dies in church the next morning as predicted. During the wake, a dinner attended by Maigret brings together several men who ostensibly had an interest in her demise: her (male) secretary, her son, the estate’s manager Gauthier and his son, the doctor, the priest and a lawyer. The latter, at the end, reveals that Gauthier and his son had not only ruined the Countess by selling off bits of the estate on the cheap but had also placed a fake press cutting about her son’s suicide in her prayer book to provoke her death, knowing she had a weak heart. Compared to the preceding film, Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre takes relatively fewer liberties with the book’s narrative, and these are significantly tailored to Gabin, partly because in this story Maigret plays an unusually passive role. This is linked to this early novel’s highly personal subtext, in which the moral defilement of the Countess can be read as Simenon’s symbolic settling of scores with his own mother.44 Clearly the task of the adapters was to enhance Gabin’s role to bring it in line with his earlier incarnation, given that the film was promoted and perceived as both a sequel and a Gabin movie. Le Canard enchaîné’s review is jokily entitled ‘Gabin and the Maigret Affair’, while the film writer in La Croix rhetorically concludes: ‘Like everyone I asked myself, who killed the Countess? But of course, not! The real question is: how will Gabin stuff Maigret’s pipe this time.’45 The adaptation makes three main changes to the literary text. The first one is the shrinking of a subplot involving a choirboy who steals the Countess’s prayer book after her death. Maigret guesses immediately who did it because as a choirboy in the same church he had coveted a similar book. In marginalizing this detail, the adaptation downplays the autobiographical input to make space for the star. More significant still is the different treatment of the meal that occupies two chapters of the book (9 and 10, out of eleven). In the novel the young Count gathers several guests and stages a dramatically candle-lit supper ‘in the style of Walter Scott’, places a gun on the table and thereby forces the culprits to betray themselves. The inspector is a mere witness, to the point that Simenon writes that ‘probably for the first time Maigret felt he was not up to the situation. Events were going over his head […] he was losing patience, feeling he was left out of the drama!’46 By contrast Gabin’s Maigret very much takes charge. It is he who summons various parties to the château and tells the priest, ‘tonight we will unmask the guilty party’. Despite having no official mandate (since he came out of respect for the Countess), he remains the dominant force throughout the evening, which unfolds as a veritable Gabin festival. His Maigret holds forth, interrupts conversations, harangues and threatens guests, literally pointing the finger at them and forcing them to confess to various misdemeanours. The scene culminates with him slapping the prayer book on the table, adding triumphantly, ‘the lethal weapon!’ Finally he drags the young Gauthier to the Countess’s coffin and forces him to apologize down on his

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knees. As one reviewer put it, the film ‘transforms a passive Maigret into a domineering Gabin’.47 Also indicative of the impact of Gabin’s stardom on the adaptation is a third, deceptively minor change, the addition of the Hula Hoop nightclub, downstairs at the Grand Café (‘Café de Paris’ in the book) in nearby Moulins. This can legitimately be seen as simply updating a book of 1933 for a film of 1959. But while in the novel Maigret blends in at the Café de Paris, in the film Gabin sticks out at the club with its American-sounding name, the presence of two briefly glimpsed US soldiers48 and a striptease act. Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre in this respect mobilizes a major aspect of Gabin’s postwar star persona, that is his incarnation of an increasingly nostalgic association with a vanishing French lifestyle, threatened by modernity styled as foreign and tasteless. It is no accident that the two characters associated with the Hula Hoop are the cowardly and venal secretary (and last lover) to the Countess and his girlfriend, the stripper, a peroxide blonde presented as vulgar and ignorant. When offered the choice between whisky and champagne (since the club does not serve beer), Maigret naturally goes for the latter. The symbolism of whisky features more prominently in Gabin’s third Maigret film, which stages an extended encounter between France and America. Maigret voit rouge While Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre took the spectator to the depths of the France profonde, with a hint of a foreign ‘invasion’, the next Maigret adaptation brings America home. Written in exile at Simenon’s Connecticut home in 1951, the novel entitled Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters (first published 1952) stages a face-off between Maigret and American gangsters on the streets of Paris, with the unlucky Inspector Lognon caught in the crossfire. Lognon (Guy Decomble in the film) witnesses a man being shot from a car and left wounded on the pavement, then kidnapped by a mysterious group of men in another car. Maigret comes to Lognon’s rescue and pursues the gangsters through contacts at a restaurant and a bar run by ItalianAmericans (in the film the two venues are merged into one, Le Manhattan). To his annoyance, he is repeatedly told by the bar and restaurant owners and by his FBI contact to drop the case. After a violent shoot-out in a covered market in which a gangster and a policeman are hurt, Maigret finally tracks the gangsters down to a house outside Paris. He finds the kidnapped man, but he is forced to relinquish him to the FBI as he turns out to be an important witness for a mafia trial in the US. As this summary makes clear, there is a marked difference between Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters and the other two books. The narrative contains more action and violence, and organized crime makes an appearance, whereas Simenon repeatedly stated that professional criminals bored him because they ‘simply do their job’, and he preferred ‘ordinary’ people, ‘like you and



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me, who end up, one day, killing without being prepared for it’.49 Simenon thereby acknowledges both American crime literature and his own presence in the US, which he fictionalizes by having Maigret recall his visit the US and meeting with FBI colleagues. The film in turn somewhat increases action and violence, adding two murders to the original story. But the ‘Americanization’ of Maigret also follows the evolution of Gabin’s career. Apart from Louis Page, who remains as director of photography, the Maigret voit rouge team is different from the preceding films. Nevertheless the new setup was equally tailored to the star. Gilles Grangier, the director, made twelve films with Gabin between 1953 and 1969, including a significant number of policiers. The title Maigret voit rouge (‘Maigret sees red’) alludes cleverly to their earlier collaboration, the gangster film Le Rouge est mis (1957). The third Gabin Maigret attracted fewer viewers than the first two, and yet with over 2 million spectators it still figured in the top twenty films of the year (at number seventeen). It came out in September 1963, only a few months after another major gangster film featuring Gabin, Mélodie en sous-sol, directed by Henri Verneuil (number seven at the box office of that year). Thus the third Maigret adaptation fits smoothly in the long series of Gabin’s postwar crime films that stretches from Touchez pas au grisbi in 1954 to his last film L’Année sainte in 1976 – accounting perhaps for the sense of weariness that runs through the reviews: ‘once more, Gabin lends his stature to Maigret’;50 there are mentions of Gabin ‘doing his number’,51 and of a blurring of the boundary between gangster and law-enforcer: ‘no sooner has he blasted open a casino safe in Mélodie en sous-sol than here he is again, a bit heavier with age and the burdens of the job, as Inspector Maigret’.52 The permeability between the two strands is also signalled by the presence of Marcel Bozzuffi53 as Maigret’s assistant Torrence; the young actor, who also appeared in Le Rouge est mis, was here at the beginning of a long career playing gangsters and tough guys. In other ways Maigret voit rouge pursues the trend identified in Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre, in which the interlocking of star and character affirms a nostalgic Frenchness precisely through its interaction with Americanness. The process is explicit already in the novel as Maigret resents his contacts repeatedly telling him that the Americans are ‘more professional’ in matters of crime. Also galling for Maigret is the fact that while he does arrest the gang, he has to relinquish the witness to the FBI. But the adaptation tweaks this narrative further, deploying the star’s potential to chauvinistic ends. The quasi-humiliation of Maigret, witnessed by Lognon in the book, disappears to make way for Gabin’s more aggressive stance. The FBI agent is seen to double-cross the PJ by deliberately withholding information (which is not the case in the novel), thus justifying Maigret’s anger, as opposed to his resignation in the book: American power is acknowledged while French honour is saved. The change is understandable as the by-product of adapting a novel written in exile by a writer who had reasons to embrace his host country into a mainstream French film for a French audience. But also

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relevant is the wider historical context; between the writing of the novel and the making of the film General de Gaulle – whose portrait is visible in Maigret’s office – had come to power (in 1958) with a distinctly defiant stance toward the US. At the same time the French love of American cultural artefacts continued apace, visible precisely in the popularity of crime movies, and in the way the film lovingly multiplies signs of American culture: the gangsters speaking American English and driving a large Chevrolet, jazz music, a bowling alley, the drinking of whisky (which Maigret refers to as medicinal, a standard French joke of the time). As Thomas Pillard shows,54 French crime films of the postwar period engage with Hollywood cinema to negotiate their own identity. Maigret voit rouge belongs to the love-hate relationship between France and America that characterizes the period, with the combined forces of Gabin and Maigret epitomizing French resistance to the encroaching ‘foreign’ modernity. Maigret voit rouge was the last Gabin Maigret adaptation, no doubt as a result of the weariness evoked above, and the concomitant danger of typecasting. But Maigret voit rouge was also the last major adaptation of Maigret for the cinema. The Franco-Italian Maigret à Pigalle, directed by Mario Landi and shot in Paris, achieved barely more than 500,000 viewers in 1967, despite Gino Cervi giving a creditable performance and the film’s location shooting affording a sense of authenticity. The Italian actor, however, was already starring in a successful series of Maigret adaptations made for Italian television between 1964 and 1972. Cervi in this respect was at the vanguard of a new trend that soon became the norm.

Summing up the times A major factor in Maigret migrating from cinema to television in the early 1960s was the changing nature of crime films which, under the influence of James Bond, became more violent, or more comic, or more exotic, or all of these at once. Confronted with Anglo-American blockbusters with superior production values, European adaptations of Maigret suddenly seemed passé. The slow pace, the mundane milieus, the ordinary characters, were better suited to the modestly realistic visual style of the television of the time, which often included scenes shot on location. Television also favours seriality, as Charlotte Brunsdon points out in her discussion of the first televised incarnation of Maigret, the BBC series starring Rupert Davies (fifty-three episodes from 1960 to 1969).55 The formula clearly proved popular, as many others followed: among others a Dutch series of seventeen episodes (1964–68) with Jan Teulings; Cervi’s Italian series (sixteen episodes from 1964 to 1972), and the longest-running French series starring Jean Richard, with eighty-eight episodes, made between 1967 and 1990. The 1990s marked another turning point, coinciding with Simenon’s death in 1989. The adaptations started to reflect on the world of the novels rather than treat them as contemporary or update them. Maigret entered the realm



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of nostalgia. The French series starring Bruno Cremer (fifty-four episodes between 1991 and 2005) and the British series starring Michael Gambon (twelve episodes in 1992–93) are witness to this process. Stylistically, they illustrate the turn to heritage aesthetics: shot in colour and studio sets (respectively in Prague and Budapest), both are lavish productions, with polished colour photography, beautiful décors and music. Elaborate camera movements highlight the attractive surroundings and pick out vintage objects such as cigarette packets, radio sets, telephones, cars, and of course pipes. In 2016–17 the British television company ITV produced a miniseries of four episodes starring Rowan Atkinson. Although Atkinson is primarily the star of comic sitcoms, in particular Blackadder and Mr Bean, his Maigret is very sober, ‘unexpectedly muted, even buttoned-up’ in the words of the Times Literary Supplement.56 But while the actor rises successfully to the challenge of embodying Maigret in a register far from his normal performances, the episodes are aesthetically similar to Cremer’s and Gambon’s. Shot in Budapest, they too delight in vintage clothes, cars, and accessories and, like Cremer’s and Gambon’s versions, they offer views of ‘Paris’ that are as pretty as they are foreign to the French capital. Atkinson’s version, like other ‘heritage Maigrets’, illustrates the continued currency of Simenon’s books (concurrently brought out in new translations by the British publisher Penguin) and the desire to bring them to the screen, but in the process the representation of Maigret loses the sociological density of earlier incarnations. The strength of Maigret as a literary figure and celeactor has survived multiple screen incarnations from the early 1930s to the present day; and hopefully will continue to do so. As Michel Durand put it in Le Canard enchaîné (while reviewing Maigret voit rouge), ‘actors go, Maigret remains’.57 This chapter has shown, however, that some incarnations of Maigret sum up their times better than others. From the 1930s to the 1980s gifted actors (Harry Baur, Pierre Renoir, Michel Simon, Charles Laughton, Gino Cervi) have convincingly embodied the inspector, but for numerous reasons, as we saw, they did not achieve a deep or lasting identification with the character. Sometimes actor and/or film register were too idiosyncratic, as in the case of Préjean, Laughton, and Simon. The Jean Richard television series, entirely shot on location, offers the most realistic screen portrayal of Simenon’s universe, and now acts as a remarkable visual archive of France in the 1970s and 1980s, but the popular actor’s identity is too marked as comic to be persuasive. And once screen versions of Maigret reach the heritage phase, the inspector literally and metaphorically emigrates in time and space. Despite the high calibre of actors such as Cremer, Gambon, and Atkinson, their incarnation of the character is, like the films’ depiction of ‘Paris’ and ‘France’, pleasurable, decorative, but eerily detached. By contrast, Jean Gabin exemplifies a particularly felicitous fit between his star persona and the character. For a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, his image and performance were exceptionally in tune with dominant characteristics of the literary figure, of national identity, and of

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popular cinema. At a time when Simenon was publishing Maigret stories on a regular basis, Gabin’s incarnations felt contemporary and authentic, notwithstanding the studio aesthetics of the Tradition of Quality. In Maigret tend un piège, Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre, and Maigret voit rouge, camerawork, décor, music, and dialogue all work as a shrine to Gabin’s performance of Frenchness: a sense of authenticity, class consciousness, and reassuring solidity, but also of misogyny, intolerance of (forms of) otherness, and embattled love-hate relation with America. Simenon, as we saw, praised Gabin’s performance as Maigret highly. In the end, the Gabin–Maigret fit is particularly strong because it also applies to the author; Simon Leys’s opinion58 of Simenon in this respect is as true of his fictional creature as it is of the star, namely that all three know how ‘to use ordinary means to create unforgettable effects’.

Notes 1 These figures should be treated with caution as statistics differ according to sources, and new adaptations appear on a regular basis; the point remains that Simenon’s output was prodigious by any standard. 2 Georges Simenon, Les Caves du Majestic (Paris: Gallimard Folio Policier, 2009 [first published 1942]), p. 27. 3 Francis Lacassin, Mythologie du roman policier (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1987), p. 7; Alain Bertrand, in Anne-Marie Kosmicki, ‘Les Maigret, de Jean Richard à Bruno Cremer’, CinémAction, Littérature et Télévision 79 (1996): 105. 4 Some Maigret stories are set in the provinces or sometimes outside France, but these are less frequently adapted; they also regularly make reference to Maigret’s Parisian professional and personal base. 5 Georges Simenon, Les Mémoires de Maigret (Paris: Editions Gallimard, La Pléiade, 2003 [first published 1951]), p. 226. 6 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), pp. 23–9. 7 Rojek, Celebrity, p. 23. 8 Jean-Luc Dumortier, ‘“Sadisme pantouflard’ et ‘Vichyisme modeste”? Maigret au tribunal de la sociologie’, in Simenon, ed. Laurent Demoulin (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2013), Kindle edition, location 2893. 9 Luc Boltanski, Énigmes et complots, une enquête à propos d’enquêtes (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), Kindle edition, location 880. 10 Georges Simenon, Maigret tend un piège (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1955), p. 185. 11 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998 [first published 1979]), p. 43. 12 For further discussion of Gabin, see Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Jean Gabin: From Working-Class Hero to Godfather’, in Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 59–81. 13 Nino Frank, in Olivier Barrot and Raymond Chirat, Noir et blanc, 250 acteurs du cinéma français 1930–1960 (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), p. 57. 14 Georges Simenon, in Claude Gauteur (ed.), Simenon au cinéma (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 36. 15 Anon., ‘La Tête d’un homme’, L’Ami du film, in Ben McCann, Julien Duvivier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 65.



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16 Pierre Assouline, Simenon, biographie (Paris: Julliard, 1992), pp. 177–9. 17 Assouline, Simenon, p. 309. 18 Assouline, Simenon, pp. 314–15. 19 For further discussion of French films of the German occupation period, see Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma sous l’occupation: le monde du cinéma français de 1940 à 1946 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1992), and Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956, trans. Peter Graham (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).. 20 Claude Gauteur, Simenon à l’écran (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1992), p. 10. 21 Georges Simenon, Les Caves du Majestic (Paris: Gallimard Folio Policier, 2009 [first published 1942]), p. 130. 22 Barrot and Chirat, Noir et blanc, p. 451. 23 Assouline, Simenon, p. 397. 24 Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma sous l’occupation, pp. 202, 229–30. 25 Assouline, Simenon, p. 397. 26 Charles Higham, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography (London: W.H. Allen, 1976), p. 150. Irving Allen, however, stayed as producer. 27 Cited in Gauteur, Simenon à l’écran, p. 30. 28 Claude Gauteur and André Bernard, Michel Simon (Paris: PAC, 1975). p. 172. 29 This film unfortunately appears to be unavailable and my assessment is based on a brief extract available on www.ina.fr/video/CPF86634922/maigret-video.html; see also the discussion of the film in Thomas Pillard, Le Film noir français, face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre (1946–1960) (Paris: Editions Joseph K, 2014). 30 See Gwenaëlle Le Gras, Michel Simon, l’art de la disgrâce (Paris: Editions Scope, 2010). 31 I have not been able to see this film, which remains elusive. 32 Statistics from Simon Simsi, Ciné-passions: le guide chiffré du cinéma en France (Paris: Editions Dixit, 2012). 33 Claude Mauriac, Le Figaro Littéraire, 15 February 1958. 34 François Gault, Le Coopérateur de France, 14 February 1958. 35 Jean de Baroncelli, Le Monde, 5 February 1958. See also: Charles Ford in Le Midi Libre, 24 March 1958; Raymond Barkan, Le Progrès de Lyon, 6 May 1958; François Gault in Le Coopérateur de France, 14 February 1958. 36 Claude Guiguet, Emmanuel Papillon, Jacques Pinturault (eds), Jean Delannoy, filmographie, propos, témoignages (Châtenay-Malabris: Institut Jacques Prévert, Les Amis de Ciné-sous-Bois, 1985), p. 57. 37 Jean-Louis Robert, ‘Maigret à Paris’, Sociétés et Représentations 17 (2004): 159–69. 38 Guignet et al., Jean Delannoy, p. 57. 39 André Brunelin, Gabin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), p. 441. 40 Brunelin, Gabin, p. 435. 41 Burch and Sellier, The Battle of the Sexes, pp. 269–304. 42 See Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd revised edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 43 Guignet et al., Jean Delannoy, p. 57. 44 For a discussion of the autobiographical aspect of Simenon’s L’Affaire SaintFiacre, see Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Maigret pour toujours?’, in Policiers et criminels: un genre populaire européen sur grand et petit écrans, ed. Raphaëlle Moine,

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Brigitte Rollet and Geneviève Sellier (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009), pp. 89–100; my analysis of this text is indebted to Paul Mercier, ‘L’Enfant de choeur et le missel, dans L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre. Pacte dénégatif et secret des hommes’, Traces 13, ‘Simenon à l’écran’ (Lièges: Travaux du Centre d’Etudes Georges Simenon, 2001), pp. 119–40. 45 Jean Rochereau, ‘Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre’, La Croix, 12 September 1959. 46 Georges Simenon, L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1933), pp. 192, p. 203. 47 Anon., ‘Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre’, Noir et blanc, 11 September 1959. 48 Moulins housed a NATO sub-station at the time. 49 Simenon, Les Mémoires de Maigret, p. 211. 50 Claude-Marie Trémois, Télérama, 13 October 1963. 51 Claude Garson, L’Aurore, 20 September 1963. 52 Robert Chazal, France-Soir, 20 September 1963. 53 His name is spelt Bozzufi on the credits of this film. 54 Pillard, Le Film noir français. 55 Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Maigret from across the Channel’, in Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flâneur, ed. Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFIPalgrave, 2017). 56 David Coward, ‘Buttoned-up Noir’, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 February 2017: 20. 57 Michel Durand, ‘Gabin voit rouge’, Le Canard enchaîné, 29 September 1963. 58 Simon Leys, cited in Pierre Assouline, ‘Les Écrivains face à Simenon’, in Simenon, ed. Demoulin (dir.), location 5086.

11

The making and remaking of Thérèse Desqueyroux: one novel, two films Susan Hayward

The novel, synopsis Thérèse Desqueyroux, whose mother died at her birth, is brought up by her radical father and later sent to the secular lycée where she studies philosophy. She feels both detached from the provincial bourgeois society in which she moves and attached to the forest pines which she owns. To compensate for this sense of being an outsider in a territory in which she feels embedded, she forms a deep romantic attachment to Anne, who lives on the neighbouring estate that belongs to her half-brother Bernard. Thérèse decides to marry Bernard in order to stay close to Anne and to find her place in society; she also hopes marriage will calm her passionate intellectual being. The marriage brings about the consolidation of two major pine-tree estates, something that also attracts her to the marriage with Bernard. Fairly soon (on her wedding day) she discovers she has made a terrible mistake, and after the birth of their daughter she gradually disconnects from Bernard and his family. Bernard, who has a heart condition is prescribed drops of Fowler and one particularly stressful day he accidentally overdoses and falls ill. Thérèse says nothing to prevent this mistake and later experiments by giving him an overdose herself, which she then continues to administer. Eventually Bernard is so ill he is whisked away to hospital; Thérèse’s crime is uncovered, but for the sake of the family’s reputation, Bernard testifies in favour of his wife, and the case is thrown out. Bernard places Thérèse under lock and key, abandoning her to her fate. He only relents and sets her free once his half-sister Anne is safely married.

Section one: authors and narratives Thérèse Desqueyroux – reconciling the unreconcilable Before considering the two film adaptations of François Mauriac’s novel Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), and because it stands as a fulcrum of so many

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narrating voices, themselves constructed out of obsession, desire, repression, suffocation, and a sense of futility, it behoves us to lift the layers away one by one, as one would uncover a palimpsest, to understand these meanings, first, before proceeding further. So let us begin. By the early 1920s, Mauriac was already a well-established author, known for his strong Catholic principles which translated into his literary output in the form of the conflict between the flesh and religious faith and which, in turn, earned him praise from the Catholic press in particular. He was also at this point much under the influence of Maurice Barrès and held strong right-wing views (he was both anti-bolshevik and anti-democracy1). This did not, however, stop him from writing virulent anti-bourgeois texts exposing the scheming, grasping hypocrisy of the very society from which he emanated: the provincial bourgeoisie of Bordeaux, which he perceived as fossilized in its ways and completely lacking any sense of culture.2 Mauriac was brought up by an overbearing mother who ruled her children with a rod of strict Catholicism – which included inculcating the belief in the flesh as the source of all evil. Nonetheless, he observed the narrow-minded conservatism of this self-satisfied class which invoked its Christian values to validate its good conscience (as indeed his mother had done over the Dreyfus affair, she was an anti-Dreyfusard).3 Furthermore, he had witnessed, first hand, the grotesque behaviour of his extended family over the inheritance of his beloved grandmother – fighting over her fortune before she had even passed away. Much of his writing reflects this environment in which his characters struggle to overcome their split nature: between the grasping concupiscence on the one hand and, on the other, the desire to be forgiven by those whom they have harmed but, above all, by God. However, by 1923–24, as Mauriac embarked on a new cycle of novels (Genitrix, Le Désert de l’amour, and Thérèse Desqueyroux) there is a marked shift in his writing; an apparent volte-face almost, where God and the concept of Grace have evaporated. Here is what he says: Dans mes prochains romans, le catholicisme touchera de moins en moins mes héros, et ce sera cependant faire oeuvre catholique que de montrer l’absence du catholicisme et les conséquences lamentables que cela entraîne; rien qu’en mettant en scène des êtres complétement dépourvus de vie religieuse, on découvre le grand vide des âmes, vide surtout sensible chez les femmes.4 (In my new novels, my characters will be less and less affected by Catholicism, even though by showing the lack of Catholicism I shall be working for its cause by showing the dreadful consequences of a lack of faith; simply by creating characters who are completely deprived of a religious life, we discover the great emptiness of their souls, especially amongst the women.)5

Upon the publication of these novels, the reaction of the Catholic press and indeed the Church was one of reproach, the former now speaking of Mauriac as a ‘pornographer’, the latter of his ‘tarnishing the reputation of French literature abroad’.6



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God, faith and Grace are absent in these novels, especially Thérèse Desqueyroux. There is no hint of salvation, and in effect the heroine gets away with attempted murder. To understand this shift more fully, it is important to know that during this period Mauriac, too, was a man in conflict. As he said (in 1923): ‘Je suis romancier; je suis catholique, c’est là qu’est le conflit! […] Je crois qu’il est heureux pour un romancier d’être catholique, mais je suis sûr aussi qu’il est très dangereux pour un catholique d’être un romancier.’ (I am a novelist; I am a Catholic, and therein lies the conflict […] I think it is fine for a novelist to be Catholic, but I am certain also that it is very dangerous for a Catholic to be a novelist.)7 But writing was not the only domain of conflict within the author. He was a man who had been deeply affected by the horrors of World War I, in which he served for a while as a medical orderly. In particular he felt great sympathy for the poilus (the working-class soldiers)8 and the Black recruits from colonial French Africa.9 This was the moment when he wrote ‘je ne sens plus Dieu’ (I no longer feel God).10 The war left him haunted by his feelings of failure and futility. Most crucially, however, he was a man troubled by the conflict between his carnal desires and his religious aspirations.11 Mauriac had always been aware of his attraction to men12 yet was terrified of being unmasked.13 Once he was of age, in 1907, he left the stifling environs of Bordeaux and set himself up in a bachelor apartment in Paris (with his mother’s assistance, it has to be said), ostensibly to continue his scholarly studies but which he quite soon abandoned in order to pursue what he regarded as his calling: the life of an author. During these early years in Paris, he had a number of intimate relationships with men.14 Moreover, he moved in several circles, political and literary. In the latter instance Gide, Proust and Cocteau were amongst his familiars. However, Mauriac, in his private correspondence, reveals his own sexual ambivalence, being both repelled and fascinated by these authors’ explicit homosexuality.15 Even upon his marriage to Jeanne (1912) – which he undertook hoping it would put some order into his life16 ‘le mariage devient pour moi une nécessité’ (marriage for me has become a necessity)17 – he was unable to relinquish his double life and continued to live his bachelor existence in Paris (ostensibly because it was only there he felt he could write).18 Jeanne was kept firmly in their Bordeaux home. But then, in 1924, came the coup de foudre with the Swiss Cultural Attaché Bernard Barbey, an attachment which, by Mauriac’s own admission, drove him ‘comme fou pendant deux ou trois ans’ (crazy for two or three years).19 As the chronicler of the times, Paul Morand, noted, Mauriac was ‘amoureux fou’ (madly in love with him).20 Mauriac confided to his friend Daniel Guérin the extent of his suffering; devastated by a love that had no future, he wrote: ‘je souffre […] le coeur atteint vite l’extrême bord de la douleur et il s’y tient jusqu’à son dernier battement.’ (I’m suffering (…) the heart quickly reaches the extremes of pain and holds on to the bitter end.)21 For three years Mauriac lived in this frenzy of love and self-loathing (‘le

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dégoût sans nom que j’ai de moi-même’ (this unnamable disgust I have for myself)22), during which time he wrote Thérèse Desqueyroux. This contextual knowledge begins to open new doors to an understanding of the novel. Almost as if, to parody Flaubert, we could hear Mauriac saying: ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux, c’est moi.’23 During this period Mauriac described himself as ‘err[ant] à travers Paris comme un chien perdu’ (wandering through Paris like a lost dog).24 An animal imagery used here to express his own despair and sense of destitution that will recur frequently in his novel in relation to Thérèse, whom he claims is ‘faite pourtant de tout ce qui en moi-même j’ai dû surmonter, ou contourner ou ignorer’ (created from all in me that I had to overcome, avoid or repress).25 Indeed, he readily admits that they are virtually one and the same and that this ‘monstre de lucidité’ (monster of lucidity) that is Thérèse, ‘je la sens vivre à côté de moi et en moi’ (I feel her living beside and inside me).26 Curiously, however, given his earlier political tendencies and paradoxically homophobic views, it was during this time of deep suffering that Mauriac was at his most generous and open-minded, indicating some kind of split from his right-wing alliances.27 For, in 1925, he was in favour of Moroccan independence and supported the Moroccan uprising at Abd-el-Krim against colonialist rule; and, in 1926, in a special edition of the literary review Les Marges on the question of homosexuality, he refused to stigmatize it: ‘nous n’avons ni à “tolérer” ni à “condamner” les invertis’ (it is not our place to either ‘tolerate’ or ‘condemn’ inverts), he writes.28 This more liberal-minded self finds itself expressed in Thérèse Desqueyroux through Thérèse’s own liberal views on many issues, and, furthermore, in the exposure of everyday anti-Semitism (mostly through Bernard) and political opportunism (Thérèse’s father). Those familiar with Mauriac’s oeuvre will know that triangulations abound in his novels, often in the form of two men in love with the same woman, but in which the two men undeniably share an attraction for each other (a recognition of this order occurs as early as Mauriac’s second novel La Robe prétexte, 1914). In most instances, the triangulation is never resolved, other than by crumbling apart through rejection, or by one of the three leaving the dynamic. These triangulations reflect Mauriac’s own sexual ambivalence and his self-confessed inability to ‘choisir’.29 But what is intriguing in Thérèse Desqueyroux (beyond the various relational triangulations: Thérèse/Anne/ Bernard; Thérèse/Anne/Jean Azévédo) is the displacement of homoerotism onto the eponymous heroine who, right from the beginning of her ‘confession’, acknowledges that it is her attachment to Anne that is key to understanding her ‘crime’. And throughout the novel we are privy to the hapless Thérèse’s pursuit of the rejecting Anne. It is doubtless Mauriac’s most explicit representation of his own split self. There are of course other triangulations that make up the texture of this remarkable, dark novel, beginning with the nature of the authorial voice, split as it is into three: first, the narrator’s voice; second, Thérèse’s interior monologue of the living present (initially, as she mentally prepares to meet



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Bernard after the trial, and subsequently as she submits to her ordeal of incarceration); third, her interior monologue of the lived past (recollections of Anne, her encounters with Jean Azévédo, and her growing dislike for Bernard). Which voice to believe? Then there is the source material as a further triangulation giving strength to the narrative. First, the story itself which is based on a true event, L’Affaire Mme Carnaby (1906), in which a wife attempted to poison her brutish husband so she could live with her lover who was an intellectual. Second, Thérèse’s subsequent sequestration and self-starvation terrifies Bernard, who recalls the scandalous 1901 case of the Séquestrée de Poitiers (a young woman who was locked away by her mother for twenty-four years because of her love for an ‘unsuitable’ man and who almost starved to death) and fears that he will be accused of the same abuse. Finally, the land itself – a site of contestation, attachment, yet brutal in its weather extremes of heat and rain. Thérèse, therefore, comes to embody Mauriac’s own desire to ‘vivre librement avec soi-même’ (live in harmony with himself).30 His dilemma was that he could not find a way to ‘concilier l’inconciliable’,31 as he saw it, between his being ‘follement sensuel et très catholique’ (madly sensual and very Catholic).32 Mauriac’s split self finds a ready reflection in Thérèse, whom he deliberately makes a-religious (and, apart from her infatuation with Anne, asexual), thus making it possible for the irreconcilables of her split self – her fierce intellectual self and the romantic passionate woman – to come to some resolution. Thérèse’s passion for an intellectual life, which she readily links to Paris, explains her attachment to Azévédo. But it is her split self that pushes her to poison her husband (which is why it seems such an incomprehensible act, even to her). For the Thérèse who seemingly drifted into this crime is also the Thérèse who longed to become a free spirit and pursue her dream of a life of the mind, as indeed, according to Mauriac, did Mme Carnaby (whose trial he attended and openly took her side), seeing in her act ‘un côté sublime: faire disparaître un ignoble complaisant et réaliser l’amour’ (a sublime act: to get rid of a horrible individual and find true love).33 By what right do we judge Mme Carnaby, asks Mauriac, since her husband lives and he believes in her innocence? Similarly Mauriac does not judge Thérèse. The point is, surely, that her transgression was to go against the ‘tribe’ (bourgeois family values) and attempt to assert her difference; as such Thérèse’s seemingly incomprehensible gesture was an act of defiance, a refusal to allow her passionate spirit and intellect to be crushed. Authorial integrity: adapting Thérèse Desqueyroux for film There have been two film adaptations of Thérèse Desqueyroux: one in 1962 by Georges Franju, in which the script was co-authored between the director and Mauriac; the second, in 2012, by Claude Miller in which the script was co-authored between the director and Natalie Carter (who had already written two other adaptations with Miller).

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Miller’s version strays from the novel’s intention in a number of ways which, as I shall go on to demonstrate, undermine both characterization (especially of Thérèse) and narrative. Miller claims that, although he chose to move the story forward linearly rather than using the flashback format of the original text (something which Franju does respect in his film), this choice was in no way detrimental to the author’s novel. Rather, he states, he deliberately chose to avoid it because today so many television films use the flashback trope.34 This rather misses the point that Mauriac’s novel is a confession, Thérèse’s. As such, it is a jigsaw puzzle of moments in her life that she disjunctively attempts to piece together to make some sense of her ‘crime’ both for herself and for Bernard. It is not therefore a linear text, more of a palimpsest. The effect of Miller’s abandoning the interior monologue and flashback is that we stand outside of the narrative, watching the characters move but without any real sense of interiority which is, of course, the prime tenor of Mauriac’s novel. Miller argues, also, that he remains faithful to the characters even if he does not to the structure of the novel.35 Yet Miller’s interpretation is to make Bernard more sympathetic (than he is in the original) and indeed someone who actually loves Thérèse, whereas the primary reason for the marriage – hardly seen as advantageous by Bernard’s stuffy pretentious bourgeois mother – is to bring two mighty properties together. In the novel there is no intimation of love. And, as we know, Thérèse marries Bernard for two main reasons: one to remain close to her adored Anne, and two to try and put some order into her mind, to calm her intellect. It is then a marriage of convenience, as such loveless, and one which turns disastrously, layer after layer, into one of degradation. Miller kept to the 1920s period. In this regard, his film enters the canon of heritage cinema (Figure 11.1). Not just because it was made some ninety years after the novel’s publication but because of the production values associated with that generic type: close attention to the plastic values in the

Figure 11.1  Visual historical accuracy in the mise-en-scène with Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) in period outfit from Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012)



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form of beautifully accurate costumes, appropriate settings and décors; visual accuracy, therefore, at the expense of close adherence to the source text. Indeed, consistent with heritage cinema, as an adaptation, the film is fairly free with the original text, producing inaccuracies which simplify or alter the author’s intention. Although Franju’s version updates it to the early 1960s – the period in which the film was shot – nonetheless, the tone and intent of the novel are respected. The flashback mode and the use of interior monologue are maintained and, as Franju rightly asserts, even if we have moved forward in time, women’s conditions, particularly in provincial bourgeois France, were not a great deal different from that of the 1920s.36 Women’s freedoms were (in the 1920s as in the 1960s) seriously curtailed by law and, upon marriage, became even more containing. The use of the interior monologue is key within the novel in that it provides the reader with insight into Thérèse. Interestingly, in an interview with Freddy Buache in 1962, Franju sets out why it was necessary to use the flashback, which he sees as bringing a fourth dimension to the story – arguing that without that depth, that fourth dimension, one ends up with a simplistic and less effective tale.37 Firstly, he sees the story as a psychological drama, and to that effect the flashback acts as a link, a hyphen between the disparate parts of Thérèse’s story. Secondly, it serves to convey Thérèse’s psychology – the who and the why of Thérèse.38 We come to understand that, once married, Thérèse felt as if she was sleep-walking (she refers several times to this ‘somnanbule’ she has become), a non-aliveness which led toward this fatal act of poisoning. We know also from the beginning of the novel that she sees herself as a woman who has suffered a great deal (these are almost her first words). And it is this broken woman that Franju presents to us in his film in its opening sequence; the rest of the film (as with the novel) is to unravel the mystery that is this state of affairs. Mauriac, in co-authoring the script with Franju, sought to dilute the original homoerotic layer within the text and focus the narrative, instead, on the hypocrisy of a particular bourgeoisie attached only to keeping up appearances, protecting the family name. To this effect, Mauriac asked Franju to cut a scene in which the intensity of Thérèse’s friendship with Anne is made more explicit – in other words, Mauriac wanted the love element removed, and gave as his reason: ‘Mon héroïne appartient à une époque de ma vie déjà ancienne […] Elle est le témoin d’une inquétude dépassée.’ (My heroine belongs to a part of my life that is long since gone […] she bears witness to an outdated anxiety.)39 He thereby sought to eliminate the queer element that is so transparently present in the novel and which as we know refers to his own personal torment at the time (see above). Thérèse’s attachment to Anne is a key factor to what happens next in her life; it is also a key factor in her jealousy and subsequent betrayal of Anne over her love affair with Jean. So in this censoring, Mauriac betrays his own heroine as much as he denies the autobiographical relevance of this attachment. It is

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also the case, ironically, that in wanting to simplify the narrative and make its focus an attack on provincial bourgeois family values (‘j’y ai mis toute mon exaspération à l’égard d’une famille que je ne supportais plus’ (I filled it with all the exasperation I felt about a family that I could no longer stand)40), his intention has the potential effect of bringing the adaptation of his novel somewhat closer to Miller’s rendition. However, as we shall see, Miller’s version only partly achieves this and, in Franju’s version, the queer will win, as indeed the exposure of provincial bourgeoisie. Within this triangulation of authorial voices let us now turn our attention to the film adaptations themselves.

Section two: transposing Thérèse Desqueyroux to film Creating Thérèse: a construction in counterpoint (Franju’s 1962 Thérèse Desqueyroux) Franju spoke of wanting to ‘réaliser’ Mauriac’s novel;41 not just to direct but to ‘create/render’ the novel on screen. And so this brings us to a consideration of how the film is structured in its transposition of the novel. The starting point, as suggested earlier, was the function of the flashbacks and the interior monologues within them. In the novel the narrative is constructed as a recollection of all that occurred right up to the closing lines when Thérèse, now released by her husband Bernard, is free in Paris. What changes in the film, but which remains faithful to the intention of the text, is that the narrative is split into two parts. Part One traces Thérèse’s car journey back home to Bernard, during which time she mentally prepares her ‘defence’. The moments when we see Thérèse in the car and hear her interior monologues are in the present. The flashback moments are, of course, in the past; however, the discursive interior monologues are still in the present (but interpret the past). Part Two begins once she arrives home and Bernard immediately sets out what is to become of her – total sequestration in her room. Here the time is in the present as we witness Thérèse’s gradual physical degradation until she is finally set free. In Part One (lasting sixty-two minutes), the interior monologues are far more in evidence than in Part Two (which lasts forty-three minutes). As Thérèse composes her story to present to Bernard, the interior monologues (totalling twenty-two minutes) serve to link the flashback episodes together, but also, and more significantly, allow us to understand in some depth what is Thérèse’s own perception of things, and her state of mind (suffocation, despair, and disconnection). In Part Two, now she is incarcerated, with only one window to look out over a river and some trees, her interior monologues (totalling four minutes) serve this time in the briefest of ways to communicate her solitude. For we can see for ourselves how she gradually gives up on life. As a means of understanding how Franju ‘created’ his version of Mauriac’s novel it is useful to see the film as a construction in counterpoint between

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Narrative turning points

Part One 62 minutes:

Part Two 43 minutes

Thérèse leaves court (late autumn): 3m 1. Build-up to Thérèse’s wedding and wedding night (high summer): 17m 2. Discovery of Anne’s love affair with Jean Azévédo (high summer): 13m 3. Anne despatched/Thérèse meets Jean/Anne returns (mid-October): 18m 4. Thérèse’s giving birth and gradual desensitization (spring/summer): 4m 25s 5. Fire at Mano’s/Bernard overdoses/Thérèse says nothing/starts poisoning him/Bernard taken to hospital/Thérèse arrested (high summer/autumn): 3m 35s Thérèse arrives home: 15s

6. Bernard sets the rules Thérèse must obey: 6m 7. Thérèse attempts to poison herself/Tante Clara dies/funeral: 5m 8. First stages of Thérèse’s sequestration (autumn/ winter/rain): 3m 25s 9. Thérèse’s growing despair/gradually stripped of her few pleasures (books, gramophone records, cigarettes)/stops eating/ takes to her bed (winter/ rain): 10m 10. Thérèse, almost skeletal, visited by Bernard and family/Bernard shocked, begins her rehabilitation (winter/early spring): 10m 11. Bernard (now Anne is properly married) finally sets Thérèse free (spring): 7m 25s

Total time including (2m 45s) credits: 62m

Total time including(1m5s) closing music: 43m

Total duration

105 minutes

Figure 11.2a  Narrative structure of Thérèse Desqueyroux

three essential strands: interior monologue, silence and music. As we shall see from Figures 11.2a (above) and 11.2b (on p. 192), these three elements are more or less equal in terms of duration: 24m 54s, 21m 10s and 20m 29s respectively; where and how they interpolate the narrative is revealing. If we now draw a graph of Parts One and Two in relation to these three dominant strands, we obtain a very clear picture of their peaks and troughs and a visualization of the texture they give to the narrative (see Figures 11.3 and 11.4, on p. 194). As I shall now go on to explain, it is the powerful interplay of these three strands that both reveals (‘réalise’) Thérèse in all her complex psychology and renders the dense structural narrative of the original text. Let us start with the music, since the score both opens and closes the film, and then link up with the other two elements as we proceed. The credit sequence opens with a piano solo (1a) which is then joined by full orchestration (1b). The tempo is a slow waltz, nostalgic in tone, if not melancholy. Image and sound move together as the camera slowly pans left to right over a darkening Argelousian landscape – the camera comes to an arbitrary stop, but the

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Credits 2m45s

Part One 62 minutes:

Part Two 43 minutes

Narrative

Thérèse leaves court and prepares her ‘defense as she travels back to Argelouse Thérèse arrives home (62m)

Thérèse’s incarceration through to her release by Bernard and taking up a new life in Paris. (43m)

Interior monologue

around point 1: 4m/30s/2m30s/20s/35s = 7m55s around point 2: 40s/1m20s/15s = 2m15s around point 3: 20s/1m12s/15s/20s/15s/25s/10s/20s/10s = 3m12s around point 4: 1m/2m = 3m around point 5: 40s/1m50s/1m15s/1m47s/50s = 6m22s

between points 6 & 7: 25s between points 7 & 8: 40s between points 8 & 9: 35s between points 9 & 10: 15s between points 10 & 11: 15s after point 11: 15s

Total: 22m 44s

Total: 2m10s

Silence

begins during honeymoon once Anne’s love affair is exposed (points 1 & 2); re-emerges crucially (in point 3) and makes a fourth appearance when Thérèse remains silent over Bernard taking the overdose (in point 5):

begins as soon as she enters the house that is to become her prison: • in point 6 before Bernard dictates the conditions of her sequestration: 1m5s • in point 7 as Thérèse seeks out her hidden cache of poison, visits her little girl in bed, goes to her own room and pours the poison into her soup: 4m30s • in point 9 as she is stripped of all her comforts and takes to her bed: 2m5s • in point 9 as Ballionte (the servant) gets her out of bed and changes her linen: 4m15s • in point 10 as she gets ready to meet the family: 1m10s • in point 10 as the family await her descent: 1m

• in point 1: 30s • in point 2: 30s • in point 3: 5m5s • in point 5: 55s

7m in total

Total: 14m 10s

1. Waltz in credits 1a and 1b = 2m45s Waltz in film: Part One 1a Thérèse’s theme/solitude = 54s 1b Thérèse’s theme romanticised = 1m15s 1c Thérèse and Anne’s theme = 5m45s Total = 6m45s

Waltz in Part Two 1a = 1m45s 1b = 1m40s 1c = 1m Total = 4m25s

2. Polka piano

2. Polka In opening sequence, Thérèse leaves court and her father awaits. Stop/start = 3m

Polka in Part Two • in point 9 as river flows by = 25s

3. Jazz electric bass guitar

3. Jazz tune In Tour Eiffel restaurant

Music: 1.WALTZ 1a piano 1b piano & orchestra 1c orchestra

TOTAL music (incl credits 2m45s)

Total duration

105 minutes

24m 54s

21m 10s

= 3m = 15m39s

Total music = 4m50s

21m 29s

Figure 11.2b  Duration of interior monologues, silence and music in Thérèse Desqueyroux

music plays on, as the remaining credits roll by. The lack of light and the gloomy music do not bode well – to say nothing of the fact that the camera stops halfway through the waltz circle as the music continues. We then cut to a low-angle shot in full daylight of the Palais de Justice tower and this time the piano breaks into a jaunty polka melody (2) as we see, first, Thérèse’s father walking in short rapid steps up toward a grilled gate, behind which we perceive Thérèse’s lawyer, and then Thérèse coming toward him. The

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Interior monologue

Silence

193

Music

10.

8.

6.

4.

2.

0. 1

2

3

4

5

Figure 11.3  Graph of Thérèse Desqueyroux Part One: vertical numbering 0–8 refers to duration in minutes; horizontal to the narrative sections (1–5) Interior monologue

Silence

Music

7

5.25

3.5

1.75

0.

6

7

8

9

10

11

Figure 11.4  Graph of Thérèse Desqueyroux Part Two: vertical numbering 0–8 refers to duration in minutes; horizontal to the narrative sections (6–11)

music is in 2/4 time, syncopated by a stop-start rhythm in which the first beat and a half of the bar is played, then the music stops and we hear footsteps (first the father’s then the other two characters’) filling in the last half of the bar (where in the dance proper there would be a musical hop). The camera then executes a 360-degree pan of the totally empty square

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with this polka arbitrarily stopping and starting. Given the scandal surrounding Thérèse’s alleged poisoning of her husband, the complete lack of any curious bystanders is striking; furthermore, the music is in complete (indeed ironic) counterpoint to the events – Thérèse has been acquitted, yes, but the family’s reputation has been tarnished by the court case. What does resonate from these empty spaces (both musical and visual) is just how cut off Thérèse is from everything and everyone. When her father shoves her into the car and she is driven off, the image is framed holding her in close medium shot within the car whilst, through the rear window, we see both the lawyer and her father walking away in intense conversation (presumably about local politics and her father’s prospects for future advancement). It is an image of total isolation. Day turns to night, Thérèse, still in the car, reflects ‘libre, que souhaiter de plus?’ (Free, what more could I wish for?), and thus begins the first of her numerous interior monologues as she prepares her defence to present to Bernard. She peers out of the window into her past, her adolescence and recalls ‘Anne’, at which point the frame is flooded with sunlight, Anne appears on a bicycle and the music, the same waltz as before but in a faster tempo and with orchestration only, swells into play (1c) and thereafter accompanies Thérèse’s lengthy interior monologue recollection of her adolescent days with Anne (four minutes). This time, music gives the allure of a joyful dance, swirling round and round as one does in a waltz. Yet, the images suggest differently. All begins well, with Anne and Thérèse greeting each other, Thérèse jumping on the back of Anne’s bicycle as they race through the countryside, seemingly totally in unison. However, in the next set of shots, Anne sets off with her gun to shoot birds. Thérèse, reluctantly following some distance behind, informs us that she hates the killing but is ‘insatiable de sa présence’ (insatiable for her [Anne’s] presence). Finally, this series of reminiscences ends with Thérèse and Anne parting, Thérèse’s hopeful request that they meet up tomorrow having been brusquely brushed aside by Anne (‘ah non, pas tous les jours’ (ah, no, not every day)). The music ends, Thérèse moves toward her house, looking most forlorn, and Tante Clara rings the bell calling her in for dinner. As in the opening credit sequence, the waltz remains unfinished, broken even (as is Thérèse’s spirit). The melancholy slow tempo of 1a and 1b is solely associated with Thérèse. Franju made a deliberate choice for the piano to be used for this part of the score: ‘parce qu’il n’y rien de plus nostalgique que le piano, entendu de l’extérieur et à l’intérieur. A l’intérieur c’est souvent assez inquiétant et entendu de la rue, la sonorité du piano est belle et étrange, avec quelquechose d’attirante. C’est un instrument qui possède je ne sais quoi de féminin.’ (There is nothing more nostalgic than the piano, heard from outside or inside. Inside, it’s often quite disconcerting, heard from the street the sound of the piano is beautiful and strange, with a beguiling edge. It’s an instrument that has a feminine aura to it.)42 Nostalgic, disconcerting, beguiling, and feminine – such adjectives match well with Thérèse’s perplexing persona.



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As Thérèse herself says, ‘pure je l’étais; un ange oui, mais un ange plein de passion’ (I was pure; an angel, yes, but an angel full of passion). Her theme, constructed as it is of two stages (solo piano and full orchestration), points to this split self: the solitary, intellectual woman on the one hand and the passionate romantic on the other. Anne, however, whom Thérèse perceives as a harmonious whole (an ideal other: ‘pure’ and ‘innocence’ are the terms she uses), is uncomplicated in her desires and unquestioning in her impulses. She is light to Thérèse’s obscure, hence the faster, lighter, perhaps dizzying tempo to the waltz when the two of them are together (after all, Thérèse is ‘insatiable’ for Anne). But, as we know, this more upbeat version also covers some uncomfortable truths: namely that Anne can be cruel, not just to Thérèse, but to the little bird whose life she snuffs out by squeezing its throat between her finger and thumb – a metaphor surely for what is to come (in both cases in the interests of the family): first, Anne’s near-annihilation when she is refused access to and is later jilted by Jean Azévédo; second, Thérèse’s own erasure when she is sequestered by Bernard. We should not forget that the waltz has the dancers going round in circles, and that although there is movement, nonetheless, there is no actual advancement, one remains in the circle, stuck – in a deadlock,43 as occurs for the two women, trapped in marriages of convenience (even when she is ‘set free’, Thérèse is obliged by Bernard to remain married to him, for propriety’s sake, and Anne is about to be pushed into a marriage that she clearly does not relish, but which will be to the family’s benefit). In Part One, we are introduced to Thérèse’s theme during the credits as we observe the very landscape which, we are told later, she has ‘dans le sang’ (in her blood); it then reappears, some forty minutes later (in narrative point 4), but only in a brief (twenty-four seconds) snatch of a piano solo as her interior monologue informs us how she is gradually becoming detached from the family: ‘leurs paroles ne me joignaient pas’ (their words failed to reach me); ‘je ne rencontrais jamais Bernard’ (I never encountered Bernard). By this juncture, her former intense relationship with Anne is completely broken (as Anne’s mother herself remarks in this same scene, there is nothing left of their former ‘tendresse’ (tenderness)). Jean Azévédo has left for Paris. So Thérèse has lost both her passionate connection with Anne and her intellectual one with Jean – small wonder she is desensitized and cut off as she wanders off alone, and the brief piano solo serves to make this point. Interjected between these two musical moments of Thérèse’s theme (from the credits to the end of her honeymoon) come the already-mentioned polka (2) and orchestrated waltz music (1c) and, later, the jazz music at the Eiffel Tower restaurant (3). Shortly after the polka comes to a close, Thérèse begins preparing her confession; this is accompanied (as already discussed) by the waltz music (1c) that links her and Anne together, thereby underscoring the importance of that relationship to her – the absence of the solo piano points to that all-consuming connection. As she switches from Anne to then consider Bernard’s role in all of this, we enter into a period where there is no music

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until the special honeymoon meal at the restaurant. The jazz, as with the polka before, gently ironizes pompous bourgeois values – this time embodied by Bernard (his going on about the interests of the family, his observing with disgust the young woman with her sugar daddy at a table nearby) and also reveals how Paris’s modernity passes him by. Then, we are without music until Thérèse becomes fully aware (in narrative point 3) of her disconnection from Bernard when, as she herself names it in her interior monologue, she wonders ‘comment anéantir en moi cette nuit d’octobre?’ (how to wipe from my memory that night in October?). Crucially, as we can observe from Figure 11.3, it is in this point 3 that silence reaches its apogee in Part One (lasting five minutes and five seconds). Until this juncture, it had been a slow burner (thirty seconds each, in points 1 and 2), hinting at Thérèse’s sense of lack and loss, beginning with her wedding. ‘Le jour étouffant de noces […] je me sentais perdue’ (the stiffling day of the wedding […] I felt lost); the church organ resonates loudly, drowning out any other ambient sound and as the church door is slammed shut Thérèse almost jumps out of her skin, looking remarkably like a scared rabbit trapped in the headlights. Similarly, her wedding night was ‘horrible […] je faisais la morte’ (awful […] I played dead), she tells us as we see Bernard mounting her then rolling off. The next day, Anne’s letters in which she speaks of her tremendous love for Jean is the final straw ‘elle connaît cette joie … et moi alors?’ (she knows that joy … but what about me?) Thérèse cries out into the mirror. But, to return to narrative point 3, all set in mid-October. Anne is once again at the centre of the intrigue. She is banished to Biarritz, away from Jean; in the meantime Thérèse befriends this young man, they share common intellectual interests; Thérèse begins to come alive: ‘je prenais conscience de mon existence individuelle’ (I was becoming aware of my individual existence). But almost immediately the door is slammed on this possibility of her becoming herself (the deadlock of the waltz). Jean leaves for Paris and in the next moment we witness the most painful sequence of isolation Thérèse has yet experienced (‘cette nuit d’octobre’). She and Bernard sit down to dinner, they remain eating in silence until Bernard reproaches Thérèse for drinking coffee (bad for the baby, he declares). She realizes ‘seul comptait le fruit que je portais’ (all that mattered was the fruit of my womb) – implying her lack of any personal worth. As if to confirm this, Bernard turns his chair around to face the fire and puts his back to her. The medium shot holds Bernard in the foreground slumbering in front of the fire and Thérèse the other side of the table looking aghast at her husband’s back. This scene of silence lasts two minutes and twenty-five seconds. It is followed by Anne’s arrival, desperate to see Jean. Refusing to believe Thérèse that he has left, she insists on going over to his house. Thérèse follows her in silence, holding a torch to illuminate the shutters and doors that Anne throws herself against, seeking her lost lover. She then trails back with Anne to be greeted by a bullying Bernard. This second scene of silence also lasts two minutes and twenty-five seconds.



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Both scenes are similarly lit in chiaroscuro/contrast lighting, showing how both women are at crisis point. Moreover, these are parallel moments of loss for Thérèse. Loss of her self through Bernard’s complete indifference to her (except as a machine for reproduction); loss of Anne who declares she has betrayed her. That loss is confirmed in the next sequence of the film (point 4) by her interior monologue ‘il fallait vivre dans les ténèbres […] c’est après mes couches que je commençais vraiment à ne plus pouvoir supporter la vie’ (I had to live in the shadows, but it was after giving birth that I could no longer stand to be alive) and endorsed by the brief piano solo. As Jean Azévédo had indeed predicted, ‘ici vous êtes condamnée au silence jusqu’à la mort’ (here, you are condemned to silence until you die). Thérèse’s sense of nothingness is what leads her to remain mute when a distracted Bernard overdoses on his drops (point 5). This is the moment in her flashback when she informs us that the time has come to face up to her actions. The fire at Mano’s having scared Bernard about the safety of his own forests, he returns to the lunch table comforted that his pine trees are safe. There, a wilting Thérèse sits mopping her brow; he bullies her about her smoking, she ignores him (almost a repeat of the scene over the coffee described above), then he asks her if he has already taken his drops. ‘Je demeurais muette’ (I remained silent), she tells us and it is in this act of silence that her other act begins: ‘l’acte qui durant le déjeuner était déjà en moi à mon insu commença alors d’émerger du fond de mon être, informe encore, mais à demi baignée de conscience’ (the act which at lunchtime was, unbeknown to me, already within me began to emerge from my being, not yet formed but half-bathed with consciousness). So now silence becomes a double-edged reality; first, it reveals the truth of Thérèse’s isolation, suffocated through silence; second, now it is her suffocation of the truth through silence that induces her crime (her ‘passage à l’acte’, as she calls it). The result of which will be that her dashed hopes of ‘être soi-même’ (being herself) will become transposed into ‘faire disparaître’ (made to disappear), and, as has happened with previous relatives of inconvenience, she too will be made to disappear. Small wonder that, as she arrives home, she realizes nothing is left of her prepared confession; all that remains is silence. In Part Two, Thérèse’s theme makes five appearances. First, at the end of point 6, once Bernard has set out his orders for her sequestration and declares to Thérèse, ‘vous n’êtes plus rien’ (henceforth you are nothing) – as indeed will become the case as she gradually fades away through not eating. We hear the piano solo for thirty seconds and it is then joined by the orchestra for a further minute. At this juncture the piano music (1a) is present within the interior of the house; Thérèse briefly steps out of the French windows, as the orchestra joins the piano (1b), and she declares: ‘Argelouse jusqu’à la mort’ (Argelouse until I die); she then comes back in and closes the windows, the music with her at all times. This motif of interior–exterior is recalled differently a little later (in point 7), when, after Tante Clara’s funeral, the piano (1a) accompanies the camera as it pans

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along the river, sweeps up to a window on the first floor of a house perched well above the flowing water; the camera then cuts to inside the room, with Thérèse peering down at the river, out of the open window; she closes the window, thereby muffling, but not silencing, the sound of the piano. Solitude penetrates from all corners of Thérèse’s diminished world; inside, outside, there is no respite. Silence reigns in this place of sequestration; it permeates just over a third of Part Two. The interior monologue links passages, confirms what we can already see (for example, ‘je demeurais claustrée, condamnée à la solitude’ (I remained cloistered, condemned to solitude)). It has a far smaller presence; there is no possibility of connecting with others, as is made clear when Thérèse puts on a record that plays the orchestrated waltz (1c) and the camera traces a 180-degree pan, stopping at the door that keeps her enclosed (one minute). This attempt at reaching to the past (to her and Anne) is shown in all its futility, as is her own existence when, almost immediately, she is stripped of any further privileges (no more books or records). Deprived of intellectual nourishment, she deprives herself of food and takes to her bed and chain smokes. The camera endorses her desolation by showing the incessant rain that falls outside on the rooftops, amongst the trees, upon the river, accompanied (in ironic counterpoint once more) by the jaunty polka (2) heard at the beginning of Part One. Things surely can get no worse; but then she is stripped of her cigarettes. The density of silence at this point of the narrative (in point 9 for six minutes and twenty seconds) shows the crushing effects of provincial bourgeois family values and recalls Jean Azévédo’s words about marriage as a ‘morne existence’ (dreary existence) and ‘lugubre traversée à bord d’une vieille maison’ (a lugubrious existence aboard an ageing house). This is the very existence Anne is about to embark upon with the Deguilhem boy. So when the family arrive to check Thérèse out (at the insistence of the Deguilhem family) there is a certain ambiguity to Anne’s gestures as she moves over to the piano, lifts the lid, strokes the keys up and down and finally strikes a note, the opening note of Thérèse’s theme (1a). It shatters the silence reigning in the room, everyone jumps; at which point Anne hears Thérèse descending the stairs. Is the gesture of stroking the keys a nostalgic reminiscence of her former relationship with Thérèse? The fact that Anne is the only one in tune to hear her sister-in-law descending the stairs suggest as much. But, then again, is the striking of the single note a death knell (much like the ringing of bells that sporadically appear in the narrrative: Tante Clara at the beginning calling a disconsolate Thérèse in to eat; the clanging bells at Thérèse’s wedding and then at Tante Clara’s funeral)? Is it a final signal of the end of any connection between Anne and Thérèse? A forewarning of her own lugubrious future? As the sound itself, the answer is left hanging. As the film draws to a close, Thérèse’s theme makes two further appearances. Immediately after Bernard announces that she is to be set free and we see her



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walking in the pine forests, then at the very closing shots of the film when the camera cuts away – from her walking down the streets of Paris – to the pine trees of Argelouse. In both instances the music is accompanied by Thérèse’s interior monologue. Of the place she is leaving, she states, ‘je n’avais plus peur d’Argelouse, les pins me faisaient signe que je prenais le large’ (I was no longer afraid of Argelouse, the pine forests were telling me I was leaving). Indeed the music score (1a, then 1b) concurs as it embraces a slightly faster tempo. Of the place she has found, Paris, she declares, ‘ce n’est pas la ville de pierres que je chéris […] c’est la forêt vivante qui s’y agite, et que creusent les passions plus forcenées qu’aucune tempête. Le gémissement des pins d’Argelouse, la nuit, n’était émouvant que parce que l’on eût dit humain.’ (It’s not the the city of stones I cherish, but the restless, living forest where passions are whipped up, more frenzied than any storm. The whimpering of the pine forests of Argelouse, at night, was only moving because it seemed human.) The theme is 1b, but back to the slow tempo and, furthermore, is played over images of the pine forests only, as the film draws to a close. Thérèse’s theme does not, therefore, infiltrate her new life in Paris. It remains in Argelouse, a place of so much suffering. It is surely no coincidence that it is only once in Paris, in this place that her melancholy nostalgic theme cannot penetrate, that Thérèse is able finally to make her true confession to Bernard as to why she committed the act. In trying to disrupt Bernard’s unquestioning self-satisfaction (‘si sûr de soi’ (so sure of himself)), ‘je cédais à un affreux devoir’ (I gave in to a terrible duty), she tells him. But he repeatedly fails to understand what she is trying to say. She did not, she explains, want to repress one side of herself and become a ‘personage’ (a somebody). Indeed, she goes on, the woman who was proud to marry a Desqueyroux was just as real to her as the other, and she saw no reason to sacrifice the one to the other. In short, she asserts, here and now to Bernard, the truth of her split self, and declares it as whole, as one. The Thérèse who sleep-walked into marriage, who had asked Bernard to destroy what he termed her ‘idées fausses’ (wrong ideas) – her intellectual self – came awake in the act of poisoning (we recall her saying her consciousness stirred within her). The repressed resurfaced and even her sequestration by Bernard could do nothing to erase it. Only she could choose to disappear by not eating, to become nothing (unlike before when Bernard made her feel she was nothing). The territorialized Thérèse (owner of pine forests, who had them in her blood) had, first, to be deterritorialized both mentally (by disconnecting from the family, including Anne) and physically (by being sequestered) to the point of becoming almost a body without organs, a living nothing, so that Thérèse in all her truth could finally emerge into the living forest (Paris) as opposed to the whimpering simulacre of provincial Argelouse. As the above analysis makes clear, Mauriac’s sparse style is matched unerringly by Franju’s sound-economy. In constructing his film from a soundtrack intensely welded to images, he has both rendered the novel and portrayed for us the Thérèse of its author’s imaginings, a monster of lucidity.

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The sphinx without a riddle: Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012) By choosing to ignore the flashback mode of Mauriac’s novel, Miller, in adopting a linear, chronological strategy, renders the narrative into a traditional three-act arc formation. The story now becomes: Act One – a woman (Thérèse) is gradually made aware (thanks to Jean Azévédo in particular) of the unsatisfactory nature of her existence as a married woman in Bordelaise provincial life; Act Two – reaching crisis point she attempts to poison her husband and fails, is taken to court and acquitted; Act Three – she is, first, sequestered (punished by her husband for her ‘crime’), then ‘set free’ (again by her husband) to live her life in anonymity in Paris. In Act One, we learn nothing of Thérèse’s passionate attachment to Anne, rather we see them as two young adolescent girls who spend time together, off and on, in the summer holidays. At the end of an opening sequence constructed of episodic moments of the two of them together, it is Anne who announces to Thérèse that she will marry Bernard. We then cut and leap forward six years to see Thérèse and Bernard arm in arm walking in the pine forests, a scene shortly to be followed by the wedding ceremony and the honeymoon. It is only once Thérèse meets up with Jean Azévédo and he pronounces his views on provincial bourgeois marriage and its deadening effects, that Thérèse’s consciousness begins to awaken and her discontentment with Bernard starts to creep in. In her brief interaction with Jean, we witness also how she and he have an intellectual connection that equally serves to bring her alive (that is, until he leaves for Paris and she begins to doubt her intelligence: ‘je suis sotte’ (I’m stupid)). In Act Two, Thérèse gradually disconnects from Bernard, her baby, and the family, with the day of the fire over at Mano’s becoming the crisis point. For, after that moment (in which she remains silent over Bernard overdosing himself), she enters into her own crime of poisoning Bernard. But, because there is no interior indication of motivation (in the novel, Thérèse tries out the overdosing as an experiment, not meaning anything further by it), we are witness to the deliberateness of Thérèse’s criminal act. She puts nine drops into Bernard’s water, and when he comes to drink it, she declares; ‘j’allais te le préparer’ (I was about to get it ready for you). In fact she lies, since she has already prepared it (and overly so, for the count should be four drops). Thus, when Bernard unwittingly adds a further four drops it is small wonder he is so violently ill. This linear approach, in effect, betrays Mauriac’s intention since his purpose was, through Thérèse’s interior monologues and flashbacks, to present us with her psychology and to reveal how this ‘monstre de lucidité’,44 as he calls her, came to commit her crime, ultimately, in defence of her intelligence. Other than by asserting her difference, how could this woman ever hope to escape from ‘cette cage aux barreaux innombrables et vivants’ (this insuperable living prison) that is the family tribe?45 Her ‘passage à l’acte’ is her sublime act of self-defence, which Mauriac both admires and abhors.



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Admires, because she has the courage to assert who she is (as opposed to Mauriac), and abhors because that passionate being with all the drives it implies is what he most hated in himself. He has created in her ‘un monstre […] que nous aurions pu devenir’ (the monster […] I could have become).46 To represent such a complex creation as Thérèse, there is a need therefore to respect the notion of duration implicit in the novel with its temporal spiral that expands and contracts as we are taken into the present, the past and the future-anterior of Thérèse’s perceptions of her self and her crime. As Franju commented in making his own version of the novel: c’est un film de psychologie […] l’intérêt consiste à savoir comment, pourquoi, elle a pu arriver à tenter d’empoisonner son mari. (Mais sans) les interventions […] qui définissent la psychologie de Thérèse, c’est une petite fille qui joue avec une autre petite fille et tout se passe bien jusqu’au moment où ça se passe mal; si l’on n’est pas prévenu de l’issue des événements et de certains états intérieurs de Thérèse, qui ne peuvent être éclairés que par elle […] on ne comprend pas.47 (It’s a psychological film […] the point is to understand how, why, she got to the point of poisoning her husband. (But without) the interjections […] that define Thérèse’s psychology, we’re left with a little girl who plays with another little girl and all is well until all is no longer well; if we are not forewarned of certain events and states of mind which can only be elucidated by Thérèse […] we wont understand anything.)

Miller’s treatment of the novel’s narrative not only deprives us of an interiority to Thérèse, it also forces his hand as a director to change certain key traits in the heroine herself to move the narrative along and, in other instances, to make things over-explicit (even to the point of placing precise dates on screen). Furthermore, the linearity obliges him at times to roll too many events into one another, rushing things that need greater development. Let us unpick this. The point of Thérèse is that, although she may have acted monstrously, nonetheless, she has integrity. Therefore to have her lie is to misrepresent her. It is true that in order to save family appearances (‘la sainte famille’ (the holy family)) she colludes with her father and Bernard to lie to the juge d’instruction in order to obtain a ‘non-lieu’. However, Miller has Thérèse lie a couple of times to Anne – falsifying events in the original text. First, she engages in letter-writing to Anne whilst she is away on her honeymoon in Baden-Baden (where it rains for the most part), in which she sings out the joys of marriage and the couple’s enjoyment on holiday. Evidently an untruth and a point which Miller heavily underscores when Thérèse, on the train home, says to Bernard ‘je pense que je connais moi-aussi ce bonheur avec mon mari’ (I’m thinking that I too know that happiness with my husband) (almost as if quoting from Anne’s letters). Indeed, on their honeymoon Thérèse for the most part is seen alone, apart from the first night where Bernard is on top of her as she stares out blankly into space. Second, when Anne is in distress at being barred from seeing Jean, Thérèse lies when she says to Anne ‘puisqu’il

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ne t’a pas écrit’ (since he hasn’t written to you), thereby turning the screw on Anne’s unhappiness, for she knows full well that Jean’s letters have been intercepted by Anne’s mother. In the novel it is Anne who says ‘on arrête ses lettres, je ne peux rien savoir’ (they stop his letters, I know nothing).48 It is the case that Thérèse, in her jealousy at Anne’s having discovered the true meaning of passionate love with Jean, wants to hurt her former loved one, but it is inconsistent with her persona that she would lie to Anne (in the novel, Bernard’s mother describes her as ‘droite, franche comme l’or’ (straight as a die)49). Her third lie is the one already mentioned above over her first poisoning attempt on Bernard. In each instance, we can see how the lying reduces Thérèse from the ‘créature’ Mauriac admired50 to a femme fatale bent on destroying Anne’s happiness and harming Bernard, possibly to the point of killing him. We note also how these lies serve as shorthand to move the narrative on without having to delve in depth into what is motivating Thérèse’s character. When it comes to thought and emotions, Miller in an interview explains that ‘si le visage ne dit pas tout, il faut s’arrêter de faire des films’ (if the face doesn’t say everything then one might as well give up making films).51 This kind of economy in narrative style not only demands a great deal from the actor, it also runs the risk of backfiring. Thus, there are times when Audrey Tatou’s rendition of Thérèse works perfectly, the most striking examples being when she is led into church by her father on her wedding day (she looks both startled and overwhelmed); and again when she looks into the mirror after burning the photo Anne has sent her of Jean (she stares numbly into the bathroom mirror, knowing she has not experienced that passion with Bernard). But at other times, this economy of shots fails, or is overdone. Again to quote just two examples: when, after the fire incident at Mano’s, Bernard accidentally takes a second round of drops having asked Thérèse if he has already taken them, she glances aside and looks over to the bottle of Fowler drops, not once but twice (her visual gesture serving as a very big pointer of what is likely to come); in the scene where Thérèse leaves the pharmacy having picked up some more poison (by forging the doctor’s signature), her face is caught in the mirror (looking apprehensive and guilty) along with that of the pharmacist looking on suspiciously – the looks and relay of looks feel heavy-handed (and as an extra gilding of the lily the music score plays a few opening bars of Rossini’s Agnus Dei). Indeed, for almost the entire film we are not allowed into Thérèse’s consciousness,52 a decision which certainly flies in the face of Mauriac’s intention. Instead, Tatou’s Thérèse is cold and detached, her voice sharp and her phrasing staccato, like a prickly bush keeping others at bay. Her face, like the rest of her, remains for the most part impenetrable (rather than inscrutable). We get no sense of the passionate intellectual who marries to quieten her mind, in fact we have no idea what troubles her so (in the novel, and Franju’s version, the suggestion is the futility of life). Nor do we get any sense of the intensity of her feelings for Anne. Often, when together as



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adolescents, Thérèse is reading (in the boat, or in bed when discussing sex). As a result of this, the rare moments when we are offered an insight into her mind strike a rather strange chord. There are three modalities that come into play in this regard: first, a representation of Thérèse’s imaginary on three occasions; second, three occasions upon which she faints; third, two epistolary moments, during which we hear Thérèse’s inner voice as she writes, first to Jean, and later to Anne. The entries into Thérèse’s imaginary (on the train when she opens the train door as if to throw herself out but then pulls back; during the fire episode, as she imagines going out at night and setting fire to the forest with her cigarette; as she imagines Bernard forgiving her) occur as if she is in a dream. These offer us a brief insight into her (un)consciousness. But, because we have been kept at the surface of her persona, we remain uncertain what to believe (is this real or imagined?); moreover, never having been privy to Thérèse’s (un)conscious, these acts of violence (suicide, arson, poisoning) offer us a view of the repressed which is inconsistent with the intentional distancing effects used by Miller when it comes to his portrayal of Thérèse’s personality.53 As for the fainting fits (which occur first, when she knows her crime is about to be discovered; then at Tante Clara’s funeral; third, when the family come to visit her and she sits down exhausted from her sequestration ordeal), we come to know a Thérèse who is afraid and fragile, overwhelmed by events, a portrayal that is inconsistent with Mauriac’s ‘monstre’. We also engage with a woman who shows her emotions in the most profound of ways, a subjectivity heretofore denied us in this film’s version of Thérèse. In both cases, flights of the imaginary or fainting, a disjuncture occurs. Similarly disjunctive in tone are the epistolary moments, which have a number of effects, the first of which is to change or distort Mauriac’s original intention, thereby betraying Thérèse’s characterization. In the first instance, we hear a voice-over exchange of letters between Jean and Thérèse. This occurs immediately after he has left for Paris. He writes that, when he returns in a year’s time, he is sure Thérèse will have liberated herself. Thérèse in turn writes that ‘maintenant que vous êtes parti, je pénètre dans un tunnel indéfini’ (now that you have left I’m entering into an endless tunnel) and adds that maybe with distance he has decided that she is boring and stupid (‘fade’ and ‘sotte’). Thérèse’s sense of self and subsequent growing dissatisfaction with Bernard hinge, in this interpretation, on Jean’s departure. He is the cause both of her lack of self-belief and her increasing dislike of her husband whose boorish ways lead her to poison him. Yet in the novel it is made clear that it is the gradual erosion of her intellectual being, her suffocation by the family rules and their unquestioning hypocrisy that push her to her near-fatal act. Jean is a catalyst amongst several, but Thérèse never cedes agency (in the novel she says ‘dès que je l’eus quitté je suis pénétrée dans un tunnel indéfini’ (as soon as I left him, I entered an endless tunnel)54). Even when she is sequestered she acts in defiance – and she certainly never expresses fear; whereas Miller’s Thérèse, after

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Bernard has read out her ‘sentence’, goes to the window and says ‘j’ai peur’ (I’m afraid). The second instance is Thérèse’s letter to Anne, which comes toward the very end of the film: a letter which Thérèse says she will never send. We get to hear it, of all things, in the form of an interior monologue, interspersed with flashbacks! It is a confession of sorts. But, as opposed to the novel, in which the confession is intended for Bernard, here the recipient is Anne. The whole point in the original is that Thérèse’s prepared confession brings her to a realization that Bernard will never understand ‘why’, because he is incapable of putting himself in another person’s place, so assured is he of his own, belonging as he does to ‘la race implacable des simples’ (the implacable race of the unquestioning). As such Miller’s substitution clearly distorts Mauriac’s intention. Moreover, it is only now that we learn of Anne’s significance in this sorrowful affair – ‘la place […] que tu as occupée dans cette histoire. Notre histoire. Mon crime’ (the place […] you occupied in this story, our story, my crime). Yet the reference is more to seeds of discontent that were already there in childhood rather than to any great passion on Thérèse’s part for Anne (‘ce qui a pu germer d’empoisonnement sous nos pas d’enfants’ (what poison could have germinated under our feet as children)). Thérèse further confesses, ‘je t’ai vu aimer et je t’ai haïe pour cela’ (I saw you in love and I hated you for that), yet says nothing of her role in destroying Anne’s happiness. Nor do we gather (as we do in the novel and indeed Franju’s version) that Thérèse’s jealousy is ambiguous – that another has had the love she so wanted from Anne. Finally, this letter is also a rejection of Anne: knowing she will be consigned to oblivion by Anne and her family, she remarks that she, Thérèse, is now her only subject of concern, ‘je m’occupe toute entière, je m’efforce de me rejoindre’ (I am my only preoccupation, seeking to find myself again). In fact, in Mauriac’s narration, Thérèse’s quest was to ‘not be’, to let the ‘silence d’Argelouse’ engulf her and let the freezing cold penetrate through the window into her very being,55 possibly to dematerialize completely. This epistolary moment is a curiously constructed sequence, with a great deal occurring: a blend of present and past within Thérèse’s interior monologue, including flashbacks to her adolescence with Anne, alongside a disgruntled Balionte cleaning Thérèse’s room, and the whole accompanied by a music score. Lasting two minutes and forty-five seconds, the scene feels rushed and dense at the same time, with too many elements pressed in, as if the entire arc of Thérèse’s story is to be delivered in this one space and time. Figure 11.5 is an attempt to illustrate this. Here, all of a sudden, we have a layered approach reminiscent of the Franju version, a complexity in which all strands have their meaning. The music score, which progresses from a stringed interpretation of Schubert’s Andantino through to a solo piano at the end of the sequence, matches the progression of Thérèse’s interior monologue as she reminisces, first about her and Anne together and subsequently to her now solitary beingness.

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Speech

Interior monologue ‘tu ne comprendras begins: ‘ma chérie, pas …’ (you won’t petite soeur understand …) innocente …’ (my dearest, my little innocent sister …)

‘j’ai souffert … tu es ‘je m’occupe comme ton frère … toute entière … ignorant ton rôle tu m’oublieras …’ dans toute cette (I am my only histoire …’ (I’ve subject of suffered … you are concern … you’ll like your brother … forget me …) unaware of your role in this story…)

Visual

Present/flashback to Present/flashback to adolescence adolescence together together

Present/flashback to Present adolescence together

Music (Schubert’s Andantino)

Cello and plucked strings, joined by piano

Interior monologue intercut with Balionte cleaning room and complaining at filthiness

Interior monologue intercut with Balionte taking sheets away and complaining of their sorry state

Cello and piano

Cello and piano

Piano

Figure 11.5  Mise-en-scène of Thérèse’s letter to Anne

Balionte’s reproachful presence and grumbling words act as a kind of chorus to Thérèse’s degenerescence in her sequestered life. The flashbacks assert a time of sisterly togetherness at the same time as the interior monologue spells out the differences between the two. In contrast to what has preceded in the film, here we have an overabundance of information, visual and aural, and this is where the problem lies – the density of it all means that temporality, tone, and narrative clash (both in this sequence and between this sequence and the film’s overall approach). Thus, the present/past nature of Thérèse’s solemn interior monologue is disrupted by Balionte’s own disgruntled monologue; the music overfeeds the words and images (e.g. the plucked strings as Thérèse utters ‘ma chérie, petite soeur innocente’ (my darling, my innocent little sister)); Thérèse’s flashbacks and the words covering them are not in concurrence, suggesting that there never was full harmony between the two. All this would be fine if the structural tone of the entire film had been layered, but instead we are confronted here with disjunctural overcompensation, which rather makes the point that Miller’s linear approach failed to provide him with the potential to ‘faire surgir Thérèse dans sa continuité’ (bring Thérèse out in her continuity)56 – hence the need for these very dense layered moments (see, for example, the opening prologue to the film with its snapshot feel of many moments in Thérèse’s adolescent life and friendship with Anne, or her encounter with Jean, in which a lot gets said very speedily; both sequences needed space and time to develop character and intention). And this brings me finally to Miller’s use of music in the film. At times it is extremely effective, at others over-emphatic or, alternatively, seemingly inappropriately placed. There is non-diegetic music, Schubert’s Moments

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Musicaux No. 2 (an Andantino for piano) and Rossini’s Agnus Dei (usually for chamber orchestra, solo soprano and choir). And then there is diegetic music: the songs Don Soledon and Sans y penser (respectively a Portuguese and French song of seduction), the Lauda Sion chanted at Tante Clara’s funeral; and, finally, the Valse de l’abbeye musette, played on the accordion at Thérèse’s wedding. In terms of effective placing, the diegetic music works well either to underscore narrative meaning or to counterpoint it. Thus, Jean Azévédo’s singing of Don Soledon (Sir Solitaire) when sailing his boat, is first observed by Anne and Thérèse (twenty-one seconds) and later by Bernard and Thérèse (forty seconds). The song clearly foreshadows Anne’s fate: Don Solidon is the apple of his mistress’s eye who asks repeatedly for him to seduce her, but, as his name suggests, having demured, he will eventually sail on by. The song also stands in counterpoint to Bernard’s dreadful anti-Semitic tirade against the Azévédo family, which in turn gives rise to Thérèse voicing her own far more liberal views (to the annoyance of Bernard). In sixty seconds we learn a lot – it is a moment in the film where the entire editing process works brilliantly and elliptically. Sans y penser, sung by Lys Gauty, is another successful elliptical moment. A heavily pregnant Thérèse listens to the song on the radio as it relates how a young woman got pregnant by her lover and fell into marriage without so much as a thought; in much the same way that Thérèse speaks (in the novel at least) about sleep-walking into her own marriage. The most poignant, however, has to be the Valse de l’abbeye musette. The musette waltz can be fast or slow. In both instances the partners hold each other close as if in an embrace. If the pace is slow, as is the case for this particular waltz at Thérèse’s wedding, the couple’s movement is sensuous and suggestive. However, instead of Bernard and Thérèse twirling away as newlyweds, we see Thérèse holding hands with a little girl as they dance around in circles. Bernard meantime is seated eating – and, apart from the lonely accordion, the rest is silence. A painful start to a marriage, one surmises. Turning now to the non-diegetic music, the occasional placing of the jaunty opening bars of the Rossini Agnus Dei (played here just on the piano) has an ironic, hyperbolic or comedic impact – it first appears, as if mocking Anne’s deep distress, when she is joined by Thérèse in the garden and the rain forces them to take shelter in the greenhouse (where they discuss Jean); second, when Bernard is counting out his drops for the first time (a slightly Hitchcockian piece of humour here); third, when a furtive Thérèse scampers down the road with her bottles of poison; and, finally, when Thérèse’s pompous and controlling father tells her she will be taken to court. Everything seems to indicate that the ‘Lamb of God’, who takes away the sins of the world, is unlikely to show much mercy toward any of these forlorn characters. When it comes to the Schubert Andantino, however, there is an inconsistency in its usage which makes its placing at times over-emphatic and therefore



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less effective. It is first introduced over the prologue images of the adolescent girls at play. It is a slow, lonely melody, the solo piano suggesting solitude and also nostalgia – as indeed was Schubert’s intention, written as it was in the last years of his life. There is a pathos to this music which emanates from the monotony of the composition – a yearning of a repressed self, longing to emerge, very consistent with Mauriac’s Thérèse, one might say. This Moments Musicaux No. 2 is based on an ABABA form in which theme A begins tentatively, leaving the melody open and incomplete; the B section mirrors the melodic main theme (A) but in a subversive, contrapuntal way – remaining distant therefore, as a disturbing memory. As analysed by Charles Fisk, the plot of this music ‘unfolds as a double spiral, here first recovering a memory but then returning to it to re-enact it in order to repossess that memory not only in conscious thought but in a psychodrama of presently lived experiences’.57 In many ways, we can read this music as perfectly embodying Thérèse and her troubled mind. Thus, when it appears in piano solo form, as it does in her moments of crisis and final passage to freedom, it makes perfect sense. These moments occur when, on her honeymoon, she reads Anne’s first letter to her; upon her return train journey from BadenBaden; when she imagines setting the fire; when she reasserts her self in her letter to Anne (‘je m’occupe toute entière’); when she presents her frail self to the family toward the end of the film; and, finally, when she walks alone down the Paris boulevards. However when, as also occurs sporadically throughout the film, the piano is accompanied by the violin, something changes – indeed, Franju was aware of this danger and, when talking about his score and why he stuck with just the piano, he explains: ‘le piano n’est pas repoussant comme le violon qui est un instrument qui pleure’ (the piano is not repelling like the violin which is an instrument that cries).58 So the effect of the violin is both to distance (repel even) and to provoke an emotional response, tears. Its presence, therefore, can be considered openly manipulative, particularly when joined by the baser chords of the cello, to say nothing of the plucking of strings (as in the scene described above in Figure 11.5). Melancholy and nostalgia now run hand in hand with plaintive sentimentality. Thus the piano is first joined by the violin when Thérèse reads Anne’s second and third letters (the latter one containing Jean’s photo). Thérèse’s torment (piano) is compounded by Anne’s romantic fervour and distress (violin). The next occurrence is when Thérèse meets Jean by chance in the boathouse and a conversation ensues (the piano is joined by the violin) – Thérèse’s solitude (piano) is interrupted by Anne’s story in the form of Jean (violin). In the next placing, a seemingly arbitrary reversal occurs: the violin is joined by the piano – however, this is the moment when Jean (violin) holds up a mirror of truth to Thérèse (piano) about the deadening effects of provincial marriage. Her set of beliefs is no longer secure, a fact reinforced by the instrumental reversal. But also, as with the general tenor of this film, it is consistently the patriarchal voice that rules (be it Bernard, Thérèse’s father, or Jean). In

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the second part of the film, in the sequence where, Thérèse’s crime having been uncovered, Bernard is taken to hospital and Anne and her family take Marie away from her, leaving her with nothing. Only violin and cello play – no piano – making the first erasure of Thérèse explicit. The same thing occurs when she imagines a scene with Bernard forgiving her (‘j’ai pas voulu ce crime’ (I didn’t want this crime to happen), she says; and in her imaginary he says, ‘je te crois, je te pardonne’ (I believe you, I forgive you)). Once again it is a moment of complete erasure, emphasized by the absence of the piano, and endorsed by Thérèse’s words ‘personne ne peut plus rien pour moi’ (no one can help me now). But, as we can observe, in the placing of these string-accompanied moments, the music points to the meaning rather than allowing meaning to reveal itself. In its attempt at passing for depth, the scoring makes the obvious even more so. In this regard, a pattern emerges that holds true for the overall structuring and editing of this film in that it hits too many beats head-on, a tendency that in many ways has become a hallmark of heritage cinema.

Conclusion The lack of mystery and ambiguity surrounding Miller’s interpretation of Thérèse’s character is undoubtedly the weakness of his film. His simplification of the narrative (going from light to darkness, as he put it59) meant that he also reduced his other characters to two dimensions. Anne in this instance is yet another clear example. Mauriac’s Anne, as Thérèse, is an unruly female, not, as Miller’s version would have us believe, one who belongs to ‘la race implacable des simples’. She will become so, because the family eventually wins the struggle and she marries Deghuilem, but she has known love, something none of the others has experienced. Until she is made to come to heel (by her parents and Bernard) she is a free spirit, quite wild (her love of shooting, her passion for Jean). The manner in which she kills the bird in front of Thérèse is particularly revealing when we compare Miller’s to Franju’s version. In the former, Anne snaps the wood-pigeon’s neck in a swift brutal gesture (much as Bernard would). In the latter, Anne gently strokes the little bird (a stonechat?), then gradually applies pressure on its throat to slowly extinguish life. In Miller’s version, Anne appears unambiguously hard. Franju’s Anne appears a complex contradiction, both sentimental and cruel. So, even as Thérèse assures us she is pure and innocent, an ambiguity arises. The narrative was a mystery, Thérèse an inscrutable enigma (Franju’s word is ‘insolite’ (strange)60). It is she who reveals to us the ‘why’ of her, as much as the ‘why’ of her crime. In a way she is an existential hero worthy of Camus’s l’Etranger for she perceives the absurdity of life, commits an act of attempted murder seemingly without reason, and has no belief in salvation. This is the Thérèse Franju delivers with Emmanuelle Riva as her interpreter; sadly Miller’s Thérèse remains without mystery, a victim of her social condition



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maybe and ruled by patriarchy, but one into whose consciousness we never can penetrate, so a shadow of Mauriac’s original.

Notes 1 See J-L. Barré, François Mauriac: biographie intime – 1885–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 2009), pp. 290–300. I am endebted to this recent biography of François Mauriac, which reveals much of his personal and secret life (all rigorously documented from Mauriac’s own writing, letters, journals etc.), along with a very interesting analysis of his fiction writing in the light of these revelations. 2 See Barré, François Mauriac, pp. 238, 307, and 98. 3 See Barré, François Mauriac, pp. 83, 95, and 104. 4 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 345. 5 All translations are mine. 6 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 346. 7 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 344. 8 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 250. 9 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 257. 10 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 249. 11 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 303. 12 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 186. 13 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 344. 14 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 186. 15 See Barré, François Mauriac, pp. 186, 269–70, 310, and 314, 344, and 376. 16 See Barré, François Mauriac, pp. 221. 17 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 209. 18 See Barré, François Mauriac, p. 271. 19 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 371. 20 Morand, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 371. 21 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 392. 22 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 392. 23 See Barré’s demonstration of this interpretation, François Mauriac, pp. 405, 510, and 512. 24 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 395. 25 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac. p. 397. 26 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 405. 27 Mauriac had already rejected Barrès in 1917 (Barré, François Mauriac, p. 270. 28 Respectively, Barré, François Mauriac, p. 382 and Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 402. 29 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 344. 30 Barré, François Mauriac, p. 99. 31 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 309. 32 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 344. 33 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 118. 34 Miller, cited in C. Castang, ‘Entretien avec Claude Miller – La femme dans le métro’, Positif 622 (2012): 95. 35 Castang, ‘Entretien avec Claude Miller’: 95.

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36 Franju, cited in F. Buache, F. ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux: entretien avec Georges Franju’, Image et Son 155.10–15 (1962): 14. 37 Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 11. 38 Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 10–11. 39 Mauriac, cited in D. Verbeken, ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux ou la quête de l’identité’, CinémAction No 141 (2011): 119. 40 In Verbeken, ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux ou la quête de l’identité’: 119. 41 Franju, cited in Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 13. 42 Franju, cited in Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 13. 43 This concept of the waltz as deadlock was brought to my attention by Michèle Lagny in her article: ‘“Parler de partir en rêvant de rester”: entre acceleration et blocage de l’histoire dans Transit de René Allio (1990–91)’, Écrire l’histoire 16 (autumn 2016): 165–74. 44 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 399. 45 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 401. 46 Mauriac, cited in Barré, François Mauriac, p. 390. 47 Franju, cited in Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 11. 48 François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1927), p. 67. 49 Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 58. 50 Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 6. 51 Miller, cited in M. Cieutat, ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux de Claude Miller’, Positif 617–18 (2012): 115. 52 P. Eisenreich, ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux – la femme des bois’, Positif 622 (2012): 93. 53 ‘La mise en scène tient en permanence le spectateur au seuil de la personnalité de Thérèse’ (the mise-en-scène keeps the spectator on the threshold of Thérèse’s personality at all times), Eisenreich, ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux – la femme des bois’: 93. 54 Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux, p. 96. 55 Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux, pp. 155–6. 56 Carter, cited in O. Curchod, ‘Entretien avec Natalie Carter, scénariste – un délice’, Positif 622 (2012): 108. 57 Charles B. Fiske, ‘Rehearing the Moment and Hearing In-the-Moment: Schubert’s First Two Moments Musicaux’, College Music Symposium 30 (1990) published online http://symposium.music.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view= item&id=2056:rehearing-the-moment-and-hearing-in-the-moment-schuberts-firsttwo-moments-musicaux&Itemid=124 (accessed 24 September 2018). 58 Franju, cited in Buache, ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux’: 13. 59 Miller, cited in Curchod, ‘Entretien avec Natalie Carter’: 108. 60 Franju, cited in R. Hamery, ‘Georges Franju par Georges Franju: le discours de la méthode à l’épreuve des films’, CinémAction 141 (2011): 155.

12

Elle (2016), rape, and adaptation Homer B. Pettey

While the primary subject of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) remains an examination of rape, the film places rape within a dark satire of contemporary French bourgeois life: the technological usurpation of emotions and sexuality; the uncertain future of a new generation of slacker male children; the shallowness of casual marital infidelity; and even the comically violent frustrations over the lack of parking in Paris. Elle especially addresses rape in contrast to a current culture of unquestioned feminist assumptions. Indeed, Elle provokes feminist paradigms that have foregrounded much of the discussion of gender and sexuality in both literary and film studies. Elle takes the subject of rape and radically alters conventional, popular, and academic assumptions about woman’s agency, undercutting as it critiques the several waves of feminism. In doing so, Elle eschews and at times mocks feminist grand narratives of oppressive patriarchy and pervasive misogyny with their repeated subtext of women trapped within a dominant rape culture. Instead, Elle formulates a satiric counter-narrative that affirms female agency and examines the ambiguities of feminine desire. Elle problematizes feminist polemics against the voyeurism and scopophilia of cinematic portrayals of rape and their reducing of woman to a victim status under the domination of the male gaze. In doing so, Elle does not dismiss feminism outrightly, but rather adapts a new text that does not need to be faithful to that original theoretical text. Based upon Philippe Djian’s novel ‘Oh …’, Elle also calls into question the process of adaptation, which for Elle involves movement not only between literary and cinematic forms, but also among transmedial forms of computers, video games, and messaging systems. The subject of these intertextual forms of adaptation always remains rape and its consequences. These provocations reveal how Elle admirably, if quite disturbingly, plays with conventions of contemporary femininity by taking the emotionally and politically fraught subject of violent sexual assault and rendering it graphically and satirically. Elle, then, serves as an outré, contemporary model for the process of adaptation.

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In Elle, adaptation takes on a number of guises, from the repetitions of rape to the transformation of the protagonist Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) following the sexual assault. Theorists concerned with defining adaptation often address adaptation as a type of translation, appropriation, and intertext, which certainly relate to the problems of rape in the novel and film. Obviously, Elle is both a script and a mise-en-scène cinematic adaptation of Philippe Djian’s popular novel, but it also includes remarkable intertextual references, both overt and oblique, to other works, as well as commenting upon other rape-revenge films in contemporary French cinema. Linda Hutcheon’s immensely influential A Theory of Adaptation offers a fluid and, in terms of Elle, a somewhat dangerous admission of the relationship of the original text to the transformed text. Her often convincing discussion of the intertextual and palimpsestic qualities of adaptation, as well as the wide range of possible textual inclusions under adaptation, opens up this field to greater apprehension of the diversity of texts – literary, operatic, visual, new media – under the aegis of adaptation. Moreover, Hutcheon investigates both the product and the process of adaptation. Certainly, Elle would fit as a palimpsest or series of quotations of other texts or a process of reiteration with a difference from an original text of both the novel itself and of Michèle, for whom the original process of adaptation in the film begins with the rape. Rapine as a noun derives from the Latin rapina, which became the Anglo-Norman and Middle French rapine, a theft, a plunder, and an abduction, the carrying-off as property, such as women. Rape as a sexual assault noun comes from the Anglo-Norman rap or raap, still associated with a seizure, as well as sexual violence upon a woman, the criminal act, the metaphorical use associated with any unlawful seizure. Rape and rapine indicate possible theoretical and critical approaches to adaptation. Violence to the text has long been a conservative response to cinematic adaptations, particularly with the language of fidelity. Elle acknowledges violent usurpations of Michèle as a text, the ‘Elle’ of Elle, and especially the critical and theoretical assaults upon that visual, adapted text. Thomas Leitch’s keen penchant for lists often provokes scholars to re-examine essential assumptions about adaptation. In ‘Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does it Matter?’, Leitch, perplexed by the lack of definitions for adaptation, proposes that adaptation is a subset of intertextuality before reviewing nine differing accounts of the relationship of adaptation to intertextuality. Leitch points out the theoretical grouping problems associated with adaptation taxonomies, which are, of course, the problems with all taxonomies: that niggling desire to categorize, to contain, and to prioritize that which often eludes such forms of domination.1 Kamilla Elliott, in ‘Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship’, employs almost violent metaphors to illustrate how theories try to dominate over adaptation; her words are quite telling when considering the subject matter of Elle: To theorize something is to conform it to a set of tenets, beliefs, and ideas, to adapt something is to modify it to suit a new set of conditions.



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More specifically, traditional theorization seeks to define, taxonomize, and devise principles to account for its subject matter in all times and all places; adaptations inherently resist each theorization because they cross every border and line seeking to define and categorize them. They are never fixed: even after their production, they continue to assume new identities in new contexts of consumption and re-adaptation. Because adaptations resist theorization of all kinds, theorization of all kinds is, to varying degrees, anti-adaptation, regularly subjugating adaptations to tenets that distort and delimit them, disciplining them, and making them and their scholarship appear dull, obvious, banal, gauche, clichéd, and unfashionable. Adaptations, we know, can be quite the reverse: scintillating, surprising, immensely creative, subtle, innovative, and absolutely cutting edge. Even politically and philosophically radical theories are conservative in their relations to adaptations, disciplining and punishing them whenever they stray from their tenets. [emphasis mine]2

What these brilliant analyses offer are the ways in which adaptation invariably, if unconsciously, reveals how the originary text, both the novel and Michèle herself, undergoes a process of rapine by the adapter and by the theorist. As provocative as this chapter’s title may appear, Elle presents suggestive connections to theories of adaptation, particularly Michèle’s perplexing reactions to and memories of her original rape, as well as several additional rapes that occur in both the novel and the film. While an adaptation of Philippe Djian’s Prix Interallié 2012 winning novel ‘Oh …’, Elle also serves as an adaptation of Paul Verhoeven’s previous fixation with rape and revenge in his own films. Katie Tippel (1975), based upon Neel Doff’s Jours de famine et détresse (1991), follows the tormented life of a young, rural Netherlands girl’s journey with her family to Amsterdam. There, because of her father’s indolence and her sister’s alcoholism induced by prostitution, Katie (Monique van der Ven) takes a job in a hat store, where her employer brutally rapes her, an incident that propels her, by the insistence of her own mother, to take up prostitution in order for the family to survive. Flesh and Blood (1985) involves a sordid tale of vicious medieval Italian mercenaries, with Martin (Rutger Hauer) seeking revenge against city lord Arnolfini by raping his son’s betrothed virgin, Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who then becomes the acquiesced property of Martin, until the return of her betrothed after castle sieges, the plague, and near-death. Showgirls (1995) includes the gratuitous subplot of stripper-turned-Las Vegas star Nomi’s (Elizabeth Berkley) close friend, Molly (Gina Ravera), whom Nomi introduces to Molly’s musical idol, Andrew Carver (William Shockley), a Michael Bolton look-alike, at a reception honouring Nomi’s rise to dance fame. Carver convinces Molly to join him in his hotel room, where he savagely assists one of his bodyguards to brutally rape her. Nomi later avenges this rape by attacking and beating Carver to unconsciousness. In Hollow Man (2000), a contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), Sebastian Caine’s (Kevin Bacon) pruriently aggressive behaviour, a psychological side effect induced by his invisibility, lead him to rape an attractive neighbour whose apartment windows

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face his own. Including the rape-prevention scene in Robocop (1987) and the feminine phallic ice-pick substitution murders of Basic Instinct (1992), Verhoeven’s career has negotiated, if not exploited, both rape and women’s reactions to sexual assault. Of course, French subculture also shares a fascination for rape in its cinema, as attested to by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s convoluted, underground New French Extremity rape-to-crime spree Baise-moi (2000), whose title in street slang means ‘Fuck Me’, a very forcible expletive. The British reception of Baise-moi was negative in the main and logically paradoxical, since its audiences found the film to be ‘failed pornography’ and just an ‘art-house porn flick’: in the first case, the failure indicates a subconscious desire by audiences for more, if subdued titillation, as though it did not achieve the proportional amount of ‘sexual arousal’.3 Baise-moi relies upon an extreme feminist revenge against society, males in particular à la Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), and received dismissive, polarized critical attacks for being a ‘primitive mongrel movie’ and a film that is ‘bravely effective and undeniably repellent’, which are both in line with Despentes and Thi’s ‘feminist warrior vision’.4 Baise-moi, however, displays feminine agency that does not rely upon social and genre conformity roles. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), another New French Extremity film of the nihilistic cinéma du corps genre, includes the very controversial nearly ten-minute extended long take of the rape and sodomizing of Alex (Monica Bellucci) in the passageway to a Paris Metro station. The reversal of chronology, but also of plot construction, transforms Irréversible from grungy, predictable sub-pornography to a cinematic, even philosophical analysis of the social and personal meaning of sexual violence. The disturbing rape occurs at the outset and not as a climactic plot moment, thereby undercutting any anticipated and so often misdirected thrill of the inevitable rape and revenge. Irréversible, then, thwarts any easy, culturally accepted answers about sexual violence. The plot forces the awful reality at the beginning, unfolding and moving backward toward a couple’s sexual security. Elle seems in so many ways to serve as a cinematic extension of and commentary on these two notorious French rape films. In this sense, Elle would also appear to be a logical extension of Verhoeven’s previous films; however, Elle complicates rape and women’s reactions to sexual assault and sexuality in general. In fact, Elle seems a logical extension of Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006), a complex tale of female political sexuality among Nazis. Verhoeven’s treatment of rape and sexual aggression appears to be transformed in Elle. Additionally, Elle presents a number of intriguing relationships among cinematic influence, textual adaptation, and rape. The impetus for adapting Djian’s novel came from Isabelle Huppert herself: ‘I read the book ‘Oh …’ which I loved, and I immediately thought, ah, it could be a great role, it could be a great film.’5 Huppert’s ‘ah’ will punctuate much of Elle, particularly scenes of sexual assault. The association of Elle with adaptation in no way diminishes or neglects the horrid nature of rape.



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Instead, Elle and ‘Oh …’ serve as paradigmatic texts for correspondences among existential transformation, intertexual violations, and the adapted text’s revenge upon the original text. Michèle expresses a range of emotions, actions, and states of mind concerning that initial moment of violation: resistance, ignoring, compliance, acquiescence, fixation, re-enactment, and revenge. Michèle must adapt herself to her new existence as one who has been transformed without her agreement. Fittingly, Michèle’s last name is Leblanc, the cipher, the empty text, the as yet unwritten. In many respects, Michèle, in the novel a scriptwriter, becomes a new text, one adapted from her previous self, as she does in Elle. Her relationships with others also become determined by her re-vision of the rape incident. Elle, then, offers an intriguing set of possibilities for analysing the process of adaptation culturally and aesthetically, as well as the often discordant, dissonant, and disparate relationship between the two media of the literary and the cinematic. Five repetitions of the rape occur in Elle, each an adaptation of the original disturbing sexual assault. In some respects, the sexual assault revisited, reenacted, and re-presented have the effect of that difference occasioned by adaptation of the original text. This adaptation occurs in two forms in Elle: the transformation of Michèle, who must adapt to her new condition as a woman who has been raped, and the awakening of Michèle to her experience of newly awakened sexuality. The rape that shockingly opens the film is sudden, explicit, and brutal in its physicality. In ten shots occurring for only one minute and thirty-nine seconds, the initial rape scene in Elle starts in a curious sonic manner, with the last of the stark black background of the white lettering credit sequence ending with Verhoeven’s name, the musical score replaced by glass breaking, a woman’s voice repeating ‘Ah’, decidedly identifiable male grunts, and the sound of a fist hitting flesh. Then, the soundscape becomes visual with a close-up of a cat’s impassive face, then cut to a medium shot of the cat indifferently walking away through a doorway. The next shot reveals the rape with a long shot from the doorway at the cat’s eye-level. China debris covers the floor. A woman’s head and bare legs show underneath a black ski-masked male, who pants and rises, picks up her panties, wipes off his genital region with them before tossing them down on her supine figure as he turns and walks out through two exterior French doors, all the while pulling up his pants over his exposed buttocks. Cut again to the cat’s POV of the woman lying, then slowing turning on her left side, and rising to a seated position. The next shot shifts from the cat’s perspective to an objective camera angle as the woman sits with her dress up, breasts exposed with her bra pushed down her rib cage, among broken china and a table cloth on the floor, all the aftermath of a violent struggle. Cut to a shot of her shins and shoes as she sweeps up the mess with a long broom. Cut then to a long shot of her picking up the pieces using a whisk broom and a dustpan to discard the debris into a rubber garbage can, the sound of which is eerily like the initial soundscape.

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Cut to a medium shot of the woman now in a bathroom in her bra as she removes her blouse and tosses it in a standing garbage can. Cut to the woman in a bubble bath as a blood-red triangle of her mons veneris forms in the suds just before she splashes, almost casually, away this sign of her violation. In the novel, the original sexual assault remains suspended as Michèle goes through the first moments of its aftermath, by recalling it in fragments and dislocated sensations: Ma mâchoire me fait mal. J’ai renversé un vase en tombant, je me souviens l’avoir entendu exploser sur le sol et je me demande si ne me suis pas blessée avec un morceau de verre, je ne sais pas. Le soliel brille encore dehors. Il fait bon. Je reprends doucement mon souffle. Je sens que je vais avoir une terrible migraine, dans quelques minutes.6 (My jaw hurts. When I fell, I knocked over a vase, I remember having heard it smash on the floor and I wonder if a piece of glass cut me, I don’t know. The sun is still shining outdoors. The weather is fine. I catch my breath bit by bit. I feel that I am going to have one terrible migraine in a couple of minutes.)7

After arming herself with red-pepper spray, she prepares for the return of her sexual assailant, especially since she has received a text message from her rapist, as complementary as it is degrading and intimidating: ‘Je t’ai trouvée très étroite, pour une femme de ton âge. Mais bon …’ (23) (I found you pretty tight, for a woman your age. But ok …). She recalls little at first of the rape, but she discloses that it was forced sodomy, making the text message all the more horrid in its snide remark: Je ne pratique pas la sodomie à la moindre occasion, si bien que j’ai légèrement saigné, mais ce n’est pas grand-chose. C’est maigre. Je n’ai aucune image. Le teneur du message, cependant, le ton – l’ironie, le tutoiement – et la tournure méprisante employées me font penser qu’il s’agit d’une punition – forcément liée à mon travail ou aux diableries de mon père – que m’adresse quelqu’un qui me connaît. (31) (I don’t engage in sodomy at every opportunity, so although I have bled slightly, but it is not a big deal. It is slight. I have no image of it. The tenor of the message, however, the tone – ironic and too familiar – and the contemptuous turn of phrase used makes me think that it’s about punishment – necessarily related to my work or the sins of my father – addressed to me by someone who knows me.)

Significantly, Michèle has been transformed into a text, the real rape now retold by her tormentor, and that adaptation, in turn, recontextualized by Michèle, who seeks not an originary text so much as another way to tell this story herself, albeit in fragments. She is adapting to this horrific event. Again, the point here is not a facile play on adaptation, but to reveal the complexities of confronting adaptation. Again the post-rape bubble bath scene, with a blood-red mons veneris pattern emerging, remains difficult to



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read because Huppert’s performance, like the first-person voice of the novel, has a sustained stoicism, as well as an ironic tone. Michèle later recalls the rape, like a Proustian remembrance, with her cat’s meow inducing the memory. While nearly thirty seconds shorter than the initial scene, this reconstruction of the rape contains two and a half times the number of shots. It begins with Michèle eating at her table as she reads the paper. The cat cries and the camera follows her as she opens the exterior French doors to let the cat in. Cut to the cat entering. Cut to Michèle closing both doors, although one sticks briefly, then a black-gloved hand stops it from closing completely. Cut to a shot from behind Michèle to reveal the black ski-masked figure. Cut to Michèle’s mouth agape, as she screams ‘Ah’ when the rapist forces his way in. Cut to Michèle backing away. Cut to the rapist in the now-open doorway. Cut to Michèle’s stunned look as she backs away; the rapist advances upon her and she turns to run. Cut to his pursuit and tackling her. Cut to their falling down. Cut to their continued fall to the floor. Cut to a close-up of Michèle’s head and hands as she tries to crawl away; she grabs the table cloth and yanks it. Cut to the rapist pulling Michèle by her legs; she still holds onto the table cloth and china crashes down. Cut to the rapist forcing himself between her legs. Cut to Michèle’s stockinged legs kicking at her assailant. Cut to just Michèle kicking. Cut to right leg landing a kick, sending the rapist backward, but he recovers and plunges on top of her. Cut to the rapist between her legs as he pulls back his hand to strike her face. Cut to the blow landing, she grabs her chin, and he tears her dress, exposing her bra. Cut to the rapist pulling down her bra, exposing her breasts. Cut to the rapist’s hand on Michèle’s throat. Cut to the rapist unzipping his fly as he holds her down. The next shot occurs from above them as he penetrates her; her hand grabs his shirt as she screams ‘Ah’ and he puts his hand over her mouth. This shot remains the most disturbing of an already graphically violent scene. Michèle’s reaction, with her hand grabbing the rapist’s shirt, is ambiguous. This memory appears to be both a violation and an oddly sexualized moment. It is a quick shot, which makes it all the more disorienting, especially as the film plays out in detail Michèle’s sexuality. Cut to the cat watching the scene, which returns the narrative back to the opening scene of the film, and to Michèle’s screams. Finally, cut back to Michèle holding up her cat and chastising it. In the second recollection of the rape, Michèle sits at her table and plays out a revenge fantasy, one in which she takes all the power away from her rapist. It occurs after two odd moments. In the first one, Robert (Christian Berkel), her friend and business partner Anna’s (Anne Consigny) husband, comes into Michèle’s office and closes her blinds, as she explains to him that she has just had a traumatic experience, to which he flippantly remarks that his insensitivity is just part of his character. He proceeds to unbuckle his belt, drops his drawers, and mockingly challenges her: ‘Tu es fanée, mais tu peux encore me le toucher, non?’ (You are a faded flower, but you could

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at least touch it, right?’). She proceeds to masturbate him, all the while giving him a sardonic grin. Later that evening in her office, Michèle receives an unnerving text on her phone: ‘J’aime bien le chemisier que tu portes. Sa couleur crème. Mon sperm n’y fera pas de tache’ (I like that blouse you’re wearing. Cream coloured. My sperm will not leave a trace’). Earlier, Michèle has not been satisfied with her game design crew for the slipshod scene of a grotesque, medieval monster subduing a blonde female figure from a rape-like rear-entry position and then violently penetrating her skull with a phallic appendage. The text message adds to Michèle’s sense of disorientation as she moves through the office spaces in order to seek out the perpetrator. At this point, the film becomes a mystery with Michèle in the roles of both victim and detective (Figures 12.1–12.3). Michèle’s revenge fantasy scene contains twenty-four shots over a period of one minute and forty seconds. The sequence follows the first memory with a similar number of shots, beginning with the rapist entering the exterior French doors, Michèle’s scream, her moving back, his pursuit, the tackling to the floor, and then her crawling away and grabbing the table cloth. Here, the scene shifts to a revenge plot. Among the cascading china from the table is a large, heavy ceramic ashtray, which Michèle grabs. As the rapist turns her over, she swings the ashtray and hits him in the face. Now, a shot from above replaces the penetration shot from above. This time, all of the power resides with Michèle. She swings the ashtray. Cut to her landing the blow, then cut to him grabbing his face. Cut to her rising up and swinging the ashtray to another shot of the blow. This swing and land the blow occur again as Michèle gets to her knees above her assailant. She continues to swing and land blows with tremendous force, the ashtray now covered with blood. Cut to him receiving six blows. Then, cut to her swinging and landing three blows in syncopation with her exclamations of ‘Ah’. The final shot of this sequence returns to Michèle at her table, and a wry, satisfied smile begins to appear across her lips (Figure 12.4). In her life, Michèle suffers from a succession of violations: from her abusive soon-to-be daughter-in-law, pregnant with a black child obviously not Michèle’s son’s; from her mother’s indecent relationship with a gigolo; and, from her mother’s insistence that Michèle visit her homicidally deranged father in prison. As the successful co-owner of a state-of-the-art video company, Michèle must navigate in a world of young, aggressive males. On her office computer, she receives an email video sequence of the animated medieval rape in the computer game. The monstrous beast pins face down on a table the medieval damsel. The clip cuts to a shot of the damsel’s exposed buttocks as the beast mounts her back, its tail penetrating the damsel either vaginally or anally from behind. The clip then reveals the reverse shot of the damsel’s face and shrieks during the rape, with Michèle’s placid face now superimposed over the damsel’s visage. Michèle’s partner, Anna, enters the office and informs her that everyone in the office has received this video. The two women look out of the office window upon row after row of young men intently watching the looped video on their computer screens,



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Figures 12.1–12.3  In her revenge fantasy, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) strikes her would-be rapist with a ceramic ashtray, cut to bloody assailant, and her final unleashing of multiple blows in Elle (2016)

their facial expressions revealing reactions that are Kuleshovianly difficult to gauge. Clearly, this cyber-prank is another sexual violation, interestingly presented as a grotesque adaptation of the original computer game scene. While searching a young techie’s computer, Michèle discovers her driver’s licence photo and the reconstruction of the medieval damsel’s face. Now

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Figure 12.4  Michèle’s satisfaction with her revenge fantasy

she knows the identity of her cyber-tormentor, the very same techie whom she had enlisted to discover the culprit’s cyber-fingerprint. As a form of humiliation, Michèle demands the young man drop his pants and expose himself to her, so that she can discover if he is circumcised or not, adding another piece of evidence to the rapist’s identity. Of course, the young techie is not the man, but this scene reveals Michèle’s need to shame and degrade any violator as a way of regaining her own agency and authority. In this way, Michèle’s debasing of the young man reverses her own debasement in the adapted video game rape scene. Each violation in Elle also occurs in a kind of syncopation with Michèle’s sexual arousal, not by these horrid incidents, but by her own yearnings. While surreptitiously observing the young, yuppie couple across the street setting up their nativity scene, Michèle uses binoculars to observe the handsome virile husband, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte). She masturbates as she watches him carry the black wise man, Balthasar, to the outdoor nativity, reaching her breathless climax, almost comically, as the Christmas lights are turned on. The scene reveals an eccentric aspect of Michèle’s sexuality, a form of visual violation and visual pleasure – a female gaze – that could well serve as a metaphor for the sexual spectacle on the screen. As the couple complete their nativity scene, Michèle crosses the street and invites them to her Christmas dinner party. At the Christmas dinner table, Michèle learns that Patrick is married to a devoutly Christian woman, Rebecca (Virginie Efira), who bows her head, says grace, and then crosses herself with Patrick mimicking her actions. Michèle, having had a few drinks, foot rubs Patrick’s thigh and crotch under the dining table with a kind of predatory, yet amorous persistence. Later, she even confesses her childhood secret to him, when she was a young girl whose father went on a religiously fuelled killing spree in her neighbourhood, the victims being twenty-seven people, six dogs, and a couple of cats. Her father made her complicitous by having her help him burn clothes and



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evidence. In retrospect, the irony of this scene happens to be Michèle’s confession about her violent, sadistic father to her violent, sadistic rapist. She continues to entice Patrick a few days later. During a violent wind storm, Michèle calls for this handsome neighbour to help her close her shutters, all the while dressed in a nightgown and overtly sexually teasing him. The violence of the storm certainly plays out as more than meteorological; it is a cinematic metaphor for Michèle’s sexual arousal. She even allows herself to fall back into his arms as he rubs her provocatively, if far too briefly for her satisfaction, before he departs, leaving her unsatisfied, a kind of unfulfilling foreplay. In part, as Michèle confesses in the novel, she very much enjoys her new lover, ‘un nouvel amant’, with whom she shares in those first three weeks feelings of astonishment, freshness, and pure dynamite, ‘d’étonnement, de fraîcheur, de dynamite’ (221). After the initial rape, Michèle has struggled with her sexuality, wondering if she can adapt to this new Michèle, someone who was raped, and still achieve sexual pleasure. Darkly ironic in retrospect, she finds that pleasure in watching her neighbour across the street, Patrick, while she masturbates: Je ne dirais pas non plus que Patrick est exactement mon genre d’homme, mais comparé à Robert dont les caresses me sont pour ainsi dire devenues indifférentes, mon jeune banquier éveille en moi de troubles sentiments et j’y suis assez sensible car ils sont les premiers signes de mon réveil sexuel depuis le viol … . Je rentre, je me masturbe en pensant à lui, je me mords les lèvres et la machine fonctionne. J’en pleurerais de joie, de gratitude. (70) (I could not say for certain that Patrick is exactly my kind of man, but compared to Robert whose caresses are, so to speak, becoming indifferent to me, my young banker awakens in me some confusing feelings and I am quite aware because they are the first signs of my sexual reawakening since the rape … . I re-enter the house, I masturbate while thinking about him, I bite my lips, and the machinery still works. I am nearly crying with joy, with gratitude.)

After her mother’s funeral, Patrick takes Michèle home. Later, he arrives to help Michèle close her window shutters because of the fierce wind, and she gives way to his commanding presence, sexualizing as a moment of her submission: ‘À ce stade, il peut gagner le partie s’il le souhaite’ (141) (At this stage, he can win it all if he wants it). Michèle’s post-rape need for sexual reawakening, her overt willingness to succumb to this younger man, and her continual thoughts about Patrick subduing her – all remain very darkly ironic, since Patrick is her rapist. In Elle, as much as Michèle seeks out sexual pleasure, she cannot escape from the sexual experiences of those around her. At this same Christmas dinner party, Michèle’s mother (Judith Magre) announces her engagement to her gigolo, to which Michèle responds with an appropriate outburst of laughter. Later that evening, as Michèle’s mother castigates her for a general lack of feeling for anyone, just before she falls to the floor, a victim of a

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severe stroke. In the hospital, Michèle viciously attacks her comatose mother, complaining about her mother’s lack of morality just before her mother slips into ventricular tachycardia and dies. When Michèle returns home from the spreading of ashes, she enters her darkened house, only to be frightened by her cat jumping on her. This shock effect moment sets up the real shocking moment to come. When Michèle enters her bedroom, the only light that emanates comes from her open laptop on her bed. The computer’s screen reads: ‘PARDON J’AI PAS PU RETENIR’ (Sorry. I couldn’t help myself). On her bedspread, Michèle discovers semen stains, another sexual violation by her rapist. Michèle cannot escape her sexual predator even in cyberspace. The second rape occurs at night when Michèle arrives home to discover a large package at her front door. She carries it into her dining room and opens it to discover a car seat for a baby. As she contemplates it, from behind the floor-to-ceiling curtains appears the rapist. In one minute and forty-five seconds, this attempted rape scene includes a rapid sequence of fifty-five shots, approximately one shot every three seconds. The rapist throws Michèle to the floor, jumps on top of her, and repeatedly slaps her. She manages to pull the strap of the infant car seat so that it falls down on her violator, but she cannot escape from his grasp on her ankles. Like the previous recollection and fantasy revenge of the rape scenes, the majority of the editing in this scene occur as graphic and rhythmic shot-on-action for the moments of slapping between rapist and victim. Fourteen edits reveal the extreme violence of the rapist’s poised hand ready to slap and then cut to its landing on Michèle’s face. Verhoeven employs a Hitchcockian climax, a visual parody of Dial M for Murder (1954), with Michèle getting the upper hand, literally, on her assailant by grabbing a pair of scissors and stabbing the rapist through his hand just as a slap was about to land. Michèle reverses the rapist’s penetration with her own, driving the scissors into the hand before yanking them out. The rapist screams as Michèle unmasks him. To her shock and to his embarrassment, the culprit is Patrick! With scissors in hand, Michèle forces Patrick out of the house. In a series of oddly combined scenes, this revenge sequence becomes a reconciliation. After Michèle arrives at the prison to identify her dead father’s body, she drives away down a secluded country road when suddenly a buck – of course! – jumps in front of her car, forcing her to have an accident. With her knee injured, she tries to call for help, but none of her friends or relations are available. Ironically, only Patrick can help. Back at her house, Patrick carefully bandages her sprained knee, as she inquires about his hand. Their bland, yet wary affection for one another is disturbing. When Michèle asks Patrick why he rapes, he only responds that it is necessary. At a grocery store with her son, Michèle meets Patrick, who invites them to his house for dinner. The wastrel son drinks too much wine and passes out. In a scene almost repeating her foot-rubbing at Christmas dinner, Michèle indicates a kind of sexual attraction for Patrick. Taking her down into the



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basement, Patrick explains the new wood-burning heating system that he installed, which is only a ruse to get her alone. He violently pushes her against a retaining pillar, repeatedly smashing her head against the cement, to which she replies with her familiar ‘Ah’. He throws her to the floor preparing to rape her, but he stops when Michèle encourages him: ‘Vas-y’. Patrick cannot continue: ‘Non, pas comme ça. Pas pour moi’. But, Michèle slaps him back into action. He responds with violence, hitting her several times, again the slaps followed by her ‘Ah’. As he penetrates her, she clings to him, clearly sexually aroused. Patrick ejaculates prematurely, stands up, and looks bewildered as Michèle masturbates to her own climax. Obviously, Michèle has reconciled her masturbatory fantasies with her sexual desire, even for sadistic sexual encounters. In ‘Oh …’, Michèle learns that her husband Richard (Charles Berling) has a new woman in his life, but only after Michèle has stalked and subdued with pepper spray Richard, whom she believed to be her returning rapist, smoking in a car outside her house. After their divorce, Michèle frets on occasion about the type of woman Richard will unthinkingly be attracted to: Je ne voulais pas qu’elles soient trop intelligentes non plus, capables de dévorer un homme jusqu’à l’os, d’échafauder des plans machiavéliques. Je me méfiais de celles qui avaient de gros seins, mais aussi de celles qui avaient lu Sherwood Anderson ou Virginia Woolf et qui n’en auraient fait qu’une bouchée. (50) (I did not want that they be too intelligent, capable of devouring a man to the bone, or hatching Machiavellian plans. I distrust those with big tits, but also those who had read Sherwood Anderson or Virginia Woolf and who could swallow him whole.) (Emphasis mine)

The Machiavellian plans and the devouring capacity of certain women who concern Michèle echo Balzac’s warnings in La Cousine Bette: Ces Machiavels en jupon sont les femmes les plus dangereuses; et, de toutes les mauvaises espèces de Parisiennes, c’est la pire. Une vraie courtisane, comme les Josépha, les Schontz, les Malaga, les Jenny Cadine, etc., porte dans la franchise de sa situation un avertissement aussi lumineux que la lanterne rouge de la Prostitution, ou que les quinquets du Trente-et-Quarante. Un homme sait alors qu’il s’en va là de sa ruine. Mais la doucereuse honnêteté, mais les semblants de vertu, mais les façons hypocrites d’une femme mariée qui ne laisse jamais voir que les besoins vulgaires d’un ménage, et qui se refuse en apparence aux folies, entraîne à des ruines sans éclat, et qui sont d’autant plus singulières qu’on les excuse en ne se les expliquant point. C’est l’ignoble livre de dépense et non la joyeuse fantaisie qui dévore des fortunes. Un père de famille se ruine sans gloire, et la grande consolation de la vanité satisfaite lui manque dans la misère. (These Machiavellis in petticoats are the most dangerous women; and, of all the evil species of Parisian women, they are the worst. A true courtesan, like the Joséphas, Schontzs, Malagas, Jenny Cadines, etc., carries in the frankness of her situation a warning as luminous as the red lantern of Prostitution, or

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as the footlights of the Thirty-and-Forty. A man knows then that he goes there to his ruin. But the unctuous honesty, the appearance of virtue, the hypocritical manner of a married woman who never lets be seen anything other than the common necessities of the household, and who appears to refuse herself anything frivolous, drags a man to unpredicted ruins, and which are all the more odd that he excuses them by not explaining them at all. This immoral expense, no happy fantasy, devours fortunes. A father of the family is ruined without fame, and in his misery lacks even the consolation of his vanity satisfied.)

Like Djian’s, Balzac’s world invariably rests upon economics, and his characters negotiate Paris in terms of games of gain and loss, remuneration and expense, and appropriation and compensation. Sexuality, passion, and love – all become subjected to market valuation and devaluation in Balzac’s Paris. In La Cousine Bette, overwrought, misguided, and obsessive sexual desires lead to financial ruin for the Hulot family, particularly for those characters who violate through adultery or maintain through misplaced marital devotion the norms of the upper-class household. Female sexual aggression and revenge underwrite the plot of La Cousine Bette. Both the BBC production and Fox Searchlight Pictures adaptations of Balzac’s novel rely upon female sexual awareness, female self-commodification, and female sexual obsession to convey a new marketplace for modern morality. Both Bettes (Margaret Tyzack and Jessica Lange) understand the economic advantages of exchanging feminine sexual outlay for male financial investment. Both versions concentrate the camera upon Valérie’s (Helen Mirren) and her revision as the courtesan Jenny Cadine’s (Elisabeth Shue) bodies to accentuate a fetishizing of the feminine as an idol of a libidinous economy: Mirren with her overtly open décolletage and Shue with her often exposed buttocks. Both adaptations of the novel recreate Balzac’s Parisian social and visual culture through excessively gendered mise-en-scène, use of colour, décor, and costume. Aside from the liberties taken with Balzac’s complex, lengthy novel, both screen accounts incorporate erotic theatrical routines and sexually subversive performances. These acts serve as self-reflexive commentaries on adaptation as a system of appropriation, exchange, and interpolation. Michèle distrusts not only women who display themselves openly, but also intellectual women. The intertextual combination of Anderson and Woolf might appear incongruous at first. Anderson’s ‘An Awakening’, however, depicts Belle Carpenter, a powerful, self-possessed, and attractive young woman who humiliates the narrator George Willard, a faux beau, by having her real beau, Ed Handby, a hyper-masculine barman refuse to fight the impotent George. Ironically, Belle Carpenter exhibits some of Michèle’s own traits, especially post-rape: ‘When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists.’8 Michèle worries that Richard will become involved with a Belle who will dominate and humiliate him; even after her own domination and humiliation, Michèle worries about Richard at the hands of unscrupulous and



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dangerously powerful, physical women. That his new belle fille works as a yoga instructor causes Michèle concern. Considered in the context of her recent rape, such a thought is indeed ironic, if not darkly humorous. As for Virginia Woolf, her Mrs Dalloway concludes with Mrs Dalloway worrying about the arrangements and progress of a party she throws for the oppressors of Septimus Smith, who has committed suicide, a figure whom Mrs Dalloway now admires. In Woolf’s self-indulgent, bourgeois hypocrisy, ironically the supposed target of her Bloomsbury attack, Michèle now recognizes similarities to her own life among her relatives and friends, reminding her of the world in which she exists. Elle plays with Virginia Woolf’s repressed sexuality and her commentary on patriarchy in order to reassess feminism and its options for the modern woman and for contemporary feminine agency. Crucial to understanding Djian’s perspective in ‘Oh …’ remains his critique of modernist feminism and how Michèle embodies, literally, a new contemporary femininity, not a feminism in an ideological or a political sense. The idea of Richard being faced with a politicized, self-annihilating woman, à la Woolf, frightens Michèle. Djian’s criticism of the successive waves of feminism, not from a man’s, but a contemporary woman’s point of view, reveals the adaptive and adapted woman in a world of the changing dynamics that constitute modernity. That these adaptive movements can prove to be absurd, selfdefeating, and simultaneously self-affirming remains the purpose of Djian’s novel. The novel and its two adaptations, David Birke’s screenplay and Verhoeven’s film, all display the ironic, satiric twists on feminism that Elle develops. In the screenplay, Michèle’s concerns about Richard’s women omit Sherwood Anderson and keep only Virginia Woolf.9 In the film, however, both Anderson and Woolf are replaced by only Simone de Beauvoir and her masterwork, Le Deuxième Sexe. Of course, the inclusion, then exclusion of Virginia Woolf from these scripts, both original and shooting, catches one’s attention. Such a radical change in the adapted film calls attention to Verhoeven’s shift in Michèle’s post-rape worldview. Of course, Michèle’s comment in the film about de Beauvoir could well be considered along with her sarcastic jibes at Anderson’s grotesque, masculine females in Winesburg, Ohio and Virginia Woolf’s proto-feminist women in her novels, so that de Beauvoir’s writings face a similarly dismissive fate with Michèle. Here, though, Michèle’s separation of the women of large breasts from the Simone de Beauvoir readers significantly points to two works by the author. Most of the audience might assume that Le Deuxième Sexe happens to be the main source of Michèle’s allusion. Certainly, de Beauvoir’s overview of patriarchal power over the course of Western civilization in the first part of The Second Sex might well be applicable to Michèle’s condition, as might de Beauvoir’s analysis, if speculative, of modern woman’s bodily confinement within the current social-political structure. The intertextuality of these changes comments upon feminism in general, not as a dismissal, but rather as a studied approach to the pitfalls of feminist theory as opposed to the lives of real women.

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Like the abstract female of de Beauvoir’s master text, Michèle fulfils a number of strange, adaptive roles in modern society. She is the pariah daughter of a notorious psychopathic father and an over-sexed octogenarian mother, ex-wife of an immature husband, and mother of an even more immature son, and mother-in-law to an overbearing young woman who is carrying the child of another man. Michèle is also a successful entrepreneur, a partner with her oldest friend, in the male-dominated field of video gaming. She also is the clandestine, adulterous lover of her best friend and partner’s husband, who is as self-centred as her own ex-husband. Now, Michèle is a survivor of rape and paradoxically the lover of her rapist. Negotiating all of these roles requires Michèle to adapt continually to the vicissitudes of a contemporary woman’s existence, which Elle and the novel treat with considerable irony. Michèle retains agency, even as she realizes that she cannot have it all. The roles that Beauvoir outlines in the second book of Le Deuxième Sexe follow the formation and maturation of women, always in relationship to men. La jeune fille, according to Beauvoir, suffers from the imperative of ‘feminité’, or to serve the pleasures of men, so that being feminine becomes a form of impotence, ‘futile, passive, docile’.10 Michèle’s relationship to her homicidal father, by joining in on burning evidence, hardly seems a passive response. La lesbienne, for Beauvoir, constitutes no vice, no anomaly, but rather ‘une attitude choisie en situation, c’est-à-dire à la fois motivée et librement adoptée’ (a chosen attitude by situation, that is to say at a motived time and liberally adopted).11 When Michèle and her business partner Anna (Anne Consigny) share a bed after the collapse of Michèle’s mother at the Christmas party, they recall a time in their friendship while in Cassis when they attempted lesbianism, but as Michèle recalls, ‘On ne faisait que rigoler’ (We couldn’t get through it without laughing). The response hardly fulfils Beauvoir’s sense of liberation afforded lesbianism; instead, it treats homosexual curiosity as ridiculously silly. La femme mariée, in Beauvoir’s quasi-Marxist formulation of the union of woman and man, must first be liberated economically, then liberated sexually so that both parties engage in a consensual contract. Michèle’s relationship to Richard from the outset has always been one of her economic and sexual superiority to his lack of success in both realms. Richard struggles to have his work published, while Michèle’s digital gaming enterprise thrives. In a later chapter, Beauvoir asserts the assumption from The Communist Manifesto that bourgeois marriage is a form of prostitution, or wives in common. Elle satirically turns that concept on its head, with Michèle still very much in control of Richard economically and with Michèle literally, although unbeknownst to her friend, sharing Anna’s husband Robert (Christian Berkel) by having a tawdry affair of office sexploits and hotel rendezvouses. Their final assignation ends with Michèle terminating their affair in a moment of oddly humorous social satire, with Robert commenting on their lovemaking:



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‘Tu as été formidable. Comment savez-vous l’idée de faire la morte?’ (You were incredible. Where’d you get the idea to play dead?). The social construct of la mère for Beauvoir is based upon myths, not reality. In fact, Beauvoir reveals that the stages associated with the physical moments that constitute motherhood are frequently expressed by women in negative sentiments – anguish, anxiety, depression, indifference. Elle presents four types of mothers. Michèle’s elderly mother Irène engages in sexual play with her young gigolo, while ignoring her daughter’s wishes. Michèle has a detached, somewhat hostile relationship with her layabout son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet), who cannot hold down even a simple low-level service job. Her son’s fiancée Josie (Alice Isaaz), pregnant with another man’s child (obvious at the birth of this black baby), shows only contempt for Michèle and appears to regard birth as a way to increase her status materially. Finally business partner Anna, who is incapable of having children, adopts the role of surrogate mother to Vincent, even while Michèle is present. The change from the novel to script to film that eventuates in Simone de Beauvoir seems a very calculated satire on traditional feminism and its reductive view of women with the old saw of them constantly thwarted by the patriarchy. Elle serves as much as a social satire on bourgeois feminist concepts as it does upon French modern bourgeois modern manners. At times, the satire produces moments of laughter, albeit uneasy mirth. Another towering figure of French literature, and another philosophernovelist, may well come to mind in relationship to de Beauvoir and to Michèle’s situation – the Marquis de Sade. Beauvoir’s famous essay, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, strikes at the core of sexuality in Sade, Beauvoir, and Djian: ‘His chief interest for us lies not in his aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them. He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature.’12 In Philosophy in the Bedroom de Sade, as Godelievre Mereken-Spaas has pointed out, advocates for positions of sexual equality, and yet has two self–other, male–female polarities for the role of woman, in which de Sade depicts the feminine future ‘est d’être comme la chienne, comme la louve; elle doit appartenir à tous ceux qui veulent d’elle’ (is to be like the bitch, like the she-wolf: she should belong to all those who desire her).13 The two uses of ‘elle’ from de Sade suggest the film’s title, the self ‘Elle’ and the object ‘elle’, both of whom not only describe Michèle’s encounters with men, but also reside within her own psyche. The New French Extremity heritage from de Sade exploits spectacle, abjection, and pleasure, particularly the shifting role of women, who in Baise-moi play out the reverse roles as ‘rapist-murderers’.14 Just prior to the final complicated rape scene, one of almost theatrical performance and actual assault, Michèle reveals to herself her sense of shame about the whole sordid, suffocating affair, as though she had unknowingly contracted a disease: ‘J’aimerais que ce soit comme une maladie que j’aurais attrapée, un microbe en ne me lavant pas les mains, un virus contre lequel

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je n’aurais pas été armée, mais je rencontre des difficultés à remporter cette manche, je ne me convaincs pas tout à fait’ (229). (I would love that this be like a disease I caught, a microbe because of not washing my hands, a virus against which I had not been immunized, but I meet complications trying to pull it off, I cannot quite convince myself.) At the party, Michèle informs Anna that she has been having an affair with her husband, ironically expressed as Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ blares throughout the office. Michèle becomes aware that sexual sadism is a contagion, one that causes her pleasure and dis-ease. While driving home with Patrick after the party celebrating the launch of the medieval video game, Michèle castigates her rapist and herself for their affair. Michèle’s sense of release from that guilt prompts her to challenge Patrick by telling him that she is going to report him to the police, if only to prevent him from harming any other women. Of course, this confrontation moves Patrick to don the ski mask, and to attack Michèle to the point of nearly killing her. This one minute and twelve second scene of thirty shots corresponds to the previous rape scenes in terms of cut-onaction match shots with blows. The main difference, however, is that the level of violence is far greater than before. He only stops his murderous revenge because Vincent beats him over the head with a log from the fireplace. A dazed Patrick, blood running down his face, stares at Vincent before collapsing. In the novel, on the day after Vincent’s killing of Patrick, Michèle feels a sense of guilt: Ma part de responsabilité est énorme. Je remercie le ciel que Patrick m’ait au moins violée pour de bon, au moins une fois, sinon je pense que la culpabilité m’aurait rendue folle, et je n’ai tenue qu’à ce seul petit fil jusqu’à aujourd’hui, qu’à la seul pensée qu’il avait payé pour une faute qu’il avait commise quoi qu’il en soit – je ne savais pas si c’était suffisant, mais je n’avais rien d’autre à proposer et c’était un vrai cauchemar, une malédiction. (237) (My part of the responsibility is enormous. I thank heaven that Patrick at least definitely raped me, at least once, otherwise I think the guilt would have driven me crazy, and I only held onto that tiny thread up to today, that one thought that he had paid for a sin that he had committed be that as it may – I don’t know if that was sufficient, but I had nothing else to propose and it was a real nightmare, a curse.)

In some respects, since these thoughts occur just after the death of her cat, Marty, it is curious how much shame, guilt, or responsibility Michèle really assumes. She is far more ready to express her sorrow over Marty’s death than any recognition of the killing of Patrick. She also feels little regret for her affairs with Patrick or Anna’s husband, as she expresses in the final scene of the film. In a counter-move, Anna expresses how impressed she is with Vincent being so grown up, but also how she wishes to move in with Michèle. Initially, Michèle responds with ‘Ah’, but changes, as though in a kind of resignation and acceptance, to ‘Oh’.



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Elle confronts woman’s own range of powers – sexual, retributive, existential, social – so that woman’s place no longer relies upon a dominant patriarchy, but rather points out that such a theoretical construct is only that – an abstraction. Elle also reveals how the attempts by oppressive domination of gender theories cannot restrain the adaptive woman. Ultimately, the reality of power resides with the individual, as Michèle proves throughout the film. Her ability to overcome without victimizing herself provides a socio-political lesson for the dis-abled logic of contemporary feminism. Clearly, Michèle adapts according to her own will.

Notes 1 Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation and What Does it Matter?’ in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). 2 Kamilla Elliott, ‘Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship’, in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 682–3. 3 Martin Barker, ‘“Typically French”?: Mediating Screened Rape to British Audiences’, in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 155. 4 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2011), p. 164. 5 Rebecca Nicholson, ‘Isabelle Huppert: Raising Elle’, The Times, 26 February 2017. 6 Philippe Djian, ‘Oh …’ (Paris, Galliamard, 2012), p. 11. Hereafter citations from the novel occur parenthetically in the chapter. 7 All parenthetical translations are mine. 8 Sherwood Anderson, ‘An Awakening’, Little Review, 13 December 1918: 13. 9 Elle, Written by David Birke, Based on the novel «Oh…» by Philippe Djian (2016): 35; #48. 10 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, folio essais, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), vol. II, p. 98. 11 De Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. I, p. 215. 12 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Gross Press, 1966), p. 6. For an intriguing examination and interpolation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, see Lori J. Marso, ‘Must We Burn Lars Von Trier?’, Theory and Event 18.2 (2015). 13 As quoted in Godelieve Mercken-Spaas, ‘Some Aspects of the Self and the Other in Rousseau and Sade’, SubStance 6/7.20 (Autumn 1978): 75. 14 Joanne Bourke, ‘Sexual Trauma and Jouissance in Baise-moi,’ in Rape and Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 186.

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Barker, Martin (2010) ‘“Typically French”?: Mediating Screened Rape to British Audiences’, in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell, New York, Continuum, 145–57. Barnes, Julian (2010) ‘Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer’, London Review of Books, 18 November, 7–11. Barré, J.–L. (2009) François Mauriac: Biographie intime – 1885–1940, Paris, Fayard. Barrot, Olivier and Raymond Chirat (2000) Noir et blanc, 250 acteurs du cinéma français 1930–1960, Paris, Flammarion. Barthes, Roland (1973) Le Plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil. —— (1974) S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill and Wang. Bassan, Fernande (1993–94) ‘Le Roman-feuilleton et Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870)’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 22.1/2, Fall–Winter, 100–11. Baudelle, Yves (1996) ‘Proust et le cinéma’, Roman 20/50, special issue, ed. Paul Renard: 45–70. Bazin, André (1967) What is Cinema? Vol 1, trans. Hugh Gray, foreword by Jean Renoir and Dudley Andrew, Berkeley, University of California Press. —— (1973) Jean Renoir, New York, Simon and Schuster. —— (1995) ‘The Case of Marcel Pagnol’, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo, Literature/Film Quarterly 23.3, 204–8. Beckett, Samuel (1994) Proust, New York, Grove Press. Béghin, Cyril (2016) ‘The Long Take Mastery’, trans. Mark Cohen, Film Quarterly 70, Fall, 48–53. Bellos, David (2017) The Novel of the Century, New York, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Bellour, Raymond (2000) ‘Ces Images d’un malheur sans partage’, Trafic 35, September, 20–4. Benoliel, Bernard (2000) ‘La Captive: Le Temps retrouvé de Chantal Akerman’, Cahiers du Cinéma 550, October, 14–19. Bertin-Maghit, Jean-Pierre (1992) Le Cinéma sous l’occupation: le monde du cinéma français de 1940 à 1946, Paris, Olivier Orban. Beugnet, Martine and Marion Schmid (2005) Proust at the Movies, Aldershot, Ashgate. Beylie, Claude (1984) ‘Note sur Proust et le cinéma’, L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 321–2, February, 105–8. Boggio, Philippe (1993) Boris Vian, Paris, Flammarion. Bogue, R. (2007) Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Aldershot, Ashgate. Boltanski, Luc (2012) Énigmes et complots, une enquête à propos d’enquêtes, Paris, Gallimard. Bonnaud, Frédéric (2000) ‘Proust Regained’, Film Comment 36.4, July–August, 61. Bouquet, Stéphane and Emmanuel Burdeau (1999) ‘Dans le laboratoire de La Recherche: entretien avec Raoul Ruiz’, Cahiers du Cinéma 535, May, 42–53. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson. New York, Columbia University Press. Bourgeois, Jacques (1946) ‘Le Cinéma à la recherche du temps perdu’, Revue du cinéma 3, 18–37. Bourke, Joanne (2014) ‘Sexual Trauma and Jouissance in Baise-Moi’, in Rape and Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 185–93. Bowles, Brett (2012) Marcel Pagnol, Manchester, Manchester University Press. —— (2012) ‘Performing National Consensus: Populism in the Work of Marcel Pagnol, 1929–38’, French History 26.3, 367–94.

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Brassaï [Gyula Halász] [1997] (2001) Proust in the Power of Photography, trans. Richard Howard, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Braudy, Leo (1972) Jean Renoir, the World of his Films, New York, Doubleday. Bronfen, E. (1992) Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Brunelin, André (1987) Gabin, Paris, Robert Laffont. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2017) ‘Maigret from Across the Channel’, in Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flâneur, ed. Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, London, BFI-Palgrave. Buache, F. (1962) ‘A propos de Thérèse Desqueyroux: entretien avec Georges Franju’, Image et Son 155, 10–15. Buller, H. and K. Hoggart (1994) International Counterurbanization: British Migrants in Rural France, Aldershot, Ashgate. Burch, Noël and Geneviève Sellier (2014) The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956, trans. Peter Graham, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Butler, R. (1990) ‘The Influence of the Media in Shaping International Tourist Patterns’, Tourism Recreation Research 15, 46–53. Callow, Simon (1995) Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, New York, Penguin. Campo, Stefania (2009) I segreti della tavola di Montalbano: Le ricette di Andrea Camilleri, Turin, Edizioni Il leone verde. Camus, Albert (1988) L’Étranger, ed. Ray Davison, London, Routledge. Canby, Vincent (1984) ‘Swann in Love: A Proustian Vignette from France’, New York Times, 14 September, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0CEEDA143 AF937A2575AC0A962948260 (accessed 19 September). Carter, Boyd (1938) ‘Madame Bovary’, French Review 11.3, February, 207–18. Castang, C. (2012) ‘Entretien avec Claude Miller – la femme dans le métro’, Positif 622, 94–6. Caughie, John and Kevin Rockett (1996) The Companion to British and Irish Cinema, London, BFI. Chabrol, Claude (1991) ‘Un scénario sous influence’, interview with Pierre-Marc de Biasi, in Autour d’Emma, Paris, Hatier. Chaney, Elizabeth (1998) Elizabeth David: A Biography, London, Macmillan. Chazal, Robert (1963) France-Soir, 20 September. Chevrie, Marc (1984) ‘Swann, côte boulevard’, Cahiers du Cinéma 358, April, 49–50. Chiasson, Dan (2016) ‘All the Songs Are Now Yours’, New York Review of Books, 9 June, 18. Chion, M. (1982) La Voix au cinema, Paris, Éditions de l’Étoile. —— (1999) The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York, Columbia University Press. Chirat, R. and O. Barrot (1976) ‘Carmen’, Travelling 47, 56–60. Cieutat, M. (2012) ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux de Claude Miller’, Positif 617–18, 115. Clément, C. (1979) L’Opéra ou la défaite des femmes, Paris, Grasset; trans. Betsy Wing (1989) as Opera or the Undoing of Women, London, Virago. Coates-Smith, Michael and Garry McGee (2012) The Films of Jean Seberg, Jefferson, NC, McFarland. Cohen, Keith (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Colmeiro, J.F. (2005) ‘Rehispanicizing Carmen’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. C. Perriam and A. Davies, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 91–105.



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Colombani, Florence (2002) Proust-Visconti: histoire d’une affinité elective, Paris, Philippe Rey. Connell, Joanne (2012) ‘Film Tourism – Evolution, Progress and Prospects’, Tourism Management 33, 1007–29. Coward, David (2017) ‘Buttoned-Up Noir’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 February, 20. Crary, Jonathan [1991] (2001) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Crowther, Bosley (1958) ‘Bonjour, Tristesse’, New York Times, 16 January, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C03E5D71E3AE53BBC4E52DFB7668383 649EDE (accessed 19 September 2018). Culler, Jonathan (1985) Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Ithaca, NY, and London, Cornell University Press. Cunningham, Douglas (2008) ‘“It’s All There, It’s No Dream”: Vertigo and the Redemptive Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage’, Screen 49.2, Summer, 123–41. Curchod, O. (2012) ‘Entretien avec Natalie Carter, scénariste – un délice’, Positif 622, 107–9. Custen, George F. (1997) Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood, New York, Basic Books. Davies, A. and P. Powrie (2006) Carmen on Screen: An Annotated Filmography and Bibliography, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer. De Baroncelli, Jean (1958) Le Monde, 5 February. De Bernières, Louis (1998) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, London, Vintage. De Beauvoir, Simone (1966) ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, New York, Gross Press, 3–64. —— (1986) Le Deuxième Sexe, folio essais, Paris, Gallimard. De Maistre, Xavier (2004) A Journey Around my Room, London, Hesperus. Debord, G. (1983) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, Black and Red. Del Río, E. (2004) ‘Rethinking Feminist Film Theory: Counter-Narcissistic Performance in Sally Potter’s Thriller’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.1, 11–24. Deleuze, Gilles [1964] (2000) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Delluc, Louis (1988) ‘Prologue’, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Demoulin, Laurent, ed. (2013) Simenon, Paris, Editions de l’Herne. Dicale, Bertrand (2001) Gréco: Les Vies d’une Chanteuse, Paris, JC Lattès. Dobrov, G. (1999) Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Donaldson-Evans, Mary (2009) Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context, Amsterdam, Rodolpi. Dumas, Alexandre, père (2015) Le Comte de Monte Cristo, introduction by François Taillandier, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, Livre de Poche Classique. Dumortier, Jean-Luc (2013) ‘“Sadisme pantouflard” et “Vichyisme modeste”? Maigret au tribunal de la sociologie’, in Simenon, ed. Laurent Demoulin, Paris, Editions de l’Herne, Kindle edition, location 2893. Durand, Michel (1963) ‘Gabin voit rouge’, Le Canard enchaîné, 29 September. Dyer, Richard [1979] (1998) Stars, London, BFI. Eisenreich, P. (2012) ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux – la femme des bois’, Positif 622, 92–3.

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Elliott, Kamilla (2017) ‘Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship’, in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 682–3. Ellison, David (2010) A Reader’s Guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’, New York, Cambridge University Press. Emeljanow, Victor (2003) ‘The Events of June 1848: The “Monte Cristo” Riots and the Politics of Protest’, New Theatre Quarterly 19.1, 23–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0266464X02000039. Epstein, Jean (1921) Bonjour cinéma, Paris, La Sirène. Erish, Andrew A. (2012) Col. William N. Selig: The Man who Invented Hollywood, Austin, University of Texas Press. Falconer, Kieran (2005) ‘The Landscape of Manon des Sources’, The Times, 8 August. Faulkner, Christopher (1979) Jean Renoir, a Guide to References and Resources, Boston, G.K. Hall. —— (2007) Jean Renoir, Cologne, Taschen. Fernandez-Young, A. and R. Young (2008) ‘Measuring the Effects of Film and Television on Tourism to Screen Locations: A Theoretical and Empirical Perspective’, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24.2–3, 195–212. Fernández, E. (1984) ‘Carmen Cojones’, Village Voice, 25 September, 67. Fescourt, Henri (1959) La Foi et le montagne, Paris, Paul Montel. Fish, Robert, ed. (2007) Cinematic Countrysides, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Flaubert, Gustave (1969) Madame Bovary, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling, New York, Dodd, Mead. —— (1972) Madame Bovary, Paris, Librairie Générale Française; Livre de Poche edition. —— (2001) Madame Bovary, Paris, Gallimard. —— (2003) Madame Bovary, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London, Penguin Books. Forbes, Jill (2001) ‘Germinal: Keeping it in the Family’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau, London, BFI Publishing. Ford, Charles (1958) Le Midi Libre, 24 March. Foucault, M. (1984) ‘Des espaces autres’, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, 5 October, 46–9, http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed 18 September 2018). —— (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1, 22–7. Frodon, Jean-Michel and Jean-Claude Loiseau (1987) Jean de Florette: la folle aventure du film, Paris, Herscher. Fujiwara, Chris (2009) The Life and Works of Otto Preminger, New York, Faber and Faber. Garson, Claude (1963) L’Aurore, 20 September. Gault, François (1958) Le Coopérateur de France, 14 February. Gauteur, Claude and André Bernard (1975) Michel Simon, Paris, PAC. Gauteur, Claude, ed. (1991) Simenon au cinema, Paris, Hatier. Gleizes, Delphine (2015) ‘Adapting Les Misérables for the Screen: Transatlantic Debates and Rivalries’, trans. Stacie Allan, in Les Misérables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage and Screen, ed. Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens, Bulington, VT, Ashgate, 129–42. Godard, Jean-Luc (1957) ‘Jean Renoir’, Cahiers du Cinéma 78, December. Gréco, Juliette (2012) Je suis faite comme ça, Paris, Flammarion.



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Greene, Naomi (1999) Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Grégoire, Vincent (2001) ‘Le Rôle et l’importance du cinéma dans les oeuvres d’Albert Camus’, French Review 75.2, December, 328–40. Groensteen, Thierry, ed. (1998) La Transécriture: pour une théorie de l’adaptation, Colloque de Cerisy, 14–21 August, Québec, Editions Nota Bene. Guiguet, Claude, Emmanuel Papillon and Jacques Pinturault, eds (1985) Jean Delannoy, Filmographie, propos, témoignages, Châtenay-Malabry, Institut Jacques Prévert, Les Amis de Ciné-sous-Bois. Gunning, Tom (1991) ‘Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology’, Screen 32.2, Summer, 184–96. Hall, C. Michael and Dieter Muller, eds (2004) Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes: Between Elite Landscapes and Common Ground, Clevedon, Channel View Publications. Hamery, R. (2011) ‘Georges Franju par Georges Franju. Le discours de la méthode à l’épreuve des films’, CinémAction 141, 153–58. Hayward, Susan (1993; 2005) French National Cinema, 2nd edition, New York, Routledge. —— (2005) French Cinema’s Classical Age 1895–1929, New York, Routledge. Heck, Maryline and Raphaëlle Guidée, eds (2012) Patrick Modiano, Cahiers de L’Herne, Paris, Editions de L’Herne. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra (2011) Rape-Revenge Films, Jefferson, NC, MacFarland. Higham, Charles (1976) Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography, London, W.H. Allen. Higson, Andrew (1999) ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman, London, UCL Press. —— (2006) ‘Rural Spaces and British Cinema’, in Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, ed. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield, Detroit, Wayne State University Press. Hirsch, Foster (2007) Otto Preminger: The Man who Would be King, New York, Knopf. Hjort, Mette and Scott Mackenzie (2000) Cinema and Nation, New York, Routledge. Hourdin, Georges (1958) Le Cas Françoise Sagan, Paris, Editions du Cerf. Hunter, I.Q. (2013) ‘A Psychogeography of British Trash Cinema: New Maps of the Field in England’, conference paper given at the University of Lincoln, 28 May 2015. ——(2016) Cult Film as a Guide to Life, London, Bloomsbury. Hutcheon, Linda (2006) A Theory of Adaptation, New York, Routledge. Huysmans, J.K. (2008) Against Nature (A Rebours), Sawtry, Dedalus. Ifri, Pascal A. (2005) ‘One Novel, Five Adaptations: Proust on Film’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 9.1, 15–29. Ince, K. (2005) Georges Franju, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Jewell, B. and S. McKinnon (2008) ‘Movie Tourism – A New Form of Cultural Landscape?’ Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24.2–3, 153–62. Karnow, Stanley (1997) Paris in the Fifties, New York, Three Rivers. Kauffmann, Stanley (1977) ‘A la recherche du temps perdu: The Proust Screenplay’, New Republic 177, 24 December, 22. Kermabon, Jacques and François Barré (1994) Pathé: premier empire du cinéma, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou.

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Kosmicki, Anne-Marie (1996) ‘Les Maigret, de Jean Richard à Bruno Cremer’, CinémAction 79, 96–105. Kracauer, Siegfried [1960] (1997) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (2012) ‘The Photographic Approach [1951]’, in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson, Berkeley, University of California Press, 206–8. Kravanja, Peter (2003) Proust à l’écran, Brussels, La Lettre Volée. Krueger, Cheryl (2003) ‘Being Madame Bovary’, Literature/Film Quarterly 31:3, 162–8. Kuisel, Richard F. (2012) The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Lacassin, Francis (1987) Mythologie du roman policier, Paris, Union Générale d’Editions. Lack, Roland-Fançois (2008) ‘First Encounters: French Literature and the Cinematograph’, Film History 20.2, 133–43. Ladenson, Elisabeth (2007) Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Lolita’, Ithaca, NY, and London, Cornell University Press. Ladenson, Elizabeth (1999) Proust’s Lesbianism, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press. Lannes, Sophie (1984) ‘La Longue Marche, entretien avec Nicole Stéphane’, L’AvantScène Cinéma 321–2, 5–10. Le Gras, Gwenaëlle (2010) Michel Simon, l’art de la disgrace, Paris, Editions Scope. Leblanc, G. (2011) ‘La Réception critique du cinéma de Georges Franju’, CinémAction 141, 159–66. Legrand, Gérard et al. (1993) Otto Preminger, Paris, Cinémathèque Française. Leitch, Thomas (2007) ‘Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation and What Does It Matter?’ in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 87–104. Les Misérables: Photoplay Study (1935) Chicago, National Council of the Teachers of English. Leteux, Christine (2013) Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen, Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Levin, Harry (1963) Gates of Horn, New York, Oxford University Press. Lewis, Robert M. (1988) ‘Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America’, Revue Française d’Études Américaines 36, April, 280–91. Ligniere, Jean (1957) Françoise Sagan et le succès, Paris, Editions du Scorpion. Lopate, Philip (2000) ‘Memory Loves Company’, Film Comment 36.4, 57–60. Maingueneau, D. (1984) Carmen: les racines d’un mythe, Paris, Editions du Sorbier. Mannheimer, Katherine (2002) ‘Emma Bovary’s Formalist Frames, Madame Bovary’s Realism’, seminar paper, New Haven, CT, Yale University. Margolis, H. (2005) ‘Shadow and Substance: Reiniger’s Carmen Cuts Her Own Capers’, in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, ed. C. Perriam and A. Davies, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 61–74. Marso, Lori J. (2015) ‘“Must We Burn Lars Von Trier?” Simone de Beauvoir’s Body Politics in The Antichrist’, Theory and Event 18.2. Martin du Gard, Roger (1955) Oeuvres complètes, Volume I, Les Thibault, preface Albert Camus, Paris, Gallimard. Marwick, Arthur (1998) The Sixties, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Maslin, Janet (1999) ‘Time Regained: From Sickbed to Boyhood and Back, Echoing Proust’, New York Times, 30 September. Mauriac, Claude (1958) Le Figaro Littéraire, 15 February.



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Mauriac, F. (1927) Thérèse Desqueyroux, Bernard Grasset. Mayle, Peter (2000) A Year in Provence, London, Vintage. McBane, Barbara (2016) ‘Talking, Singing, Exploding … and Silence: Chantal Akerman’s Soundtracks’, Film Quarterly 70.1, September, n.p. McCann, Ben (2017) Julien Duvivier, Manchester, Manchester University Press. McClary, S. (1999) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Mercier, Paul (2001) ‘L’enfant de choeur et le missel, dans L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre. Pacte dénégatif et secret des hommes’, Traces 13, ‘Simenon à l’écran’, Liège, Centre d’Etudes Georges Simenon, 119–40. Mercken-Spaas, Godelieve (1978) ‘Some Aspects of the Self and the Other in Rousseau and Sade’, SubStance 6–7.20, Autumn, 71–7. Mérigeau, Pascal [2012] (2016) Jean Renoir: A Biography, Burbank, CA, RatPac Press. Mérimée, P. (1846) Carmen, Paris, Michel Lévy Frères. —— (1989) Carmen and Other Stories, trans. and with introduction and notes by Nicholas Jotcham, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press. Meyer-Stabley, Bertrand (2014) Françoise Sagan: le tourbillon d’une vie, Paris, Pygmalion. Minnelli, Vincente (1975) I Remember it Well, London, Angus & Robertson. Morgue, Gérard (1958) Françoise Sagan, Paris, Editions Universitaires. Morin, Edgar (1962) L’Esprit du temps, Paris, Editions Grasset. Moussinac, Léon (1946) Intelligence du photographe, Paris, Correa. Neupert, Richard (2007) A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd rev. edn, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Nicholson, Rebecca (2017) ‘Isabelle Huppert: Raising Elle’, The Times 26 February. Nietzsche, F. (1992) ‘The Case of Wagner: Turinese Letter of May 1888’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Modern Library, 609–48. Nietzsche, F. (2013) ‘Der Fall Wagner: Turiner Brief vom Mai 1888’, in Der Fall Wagner: Nietzsche contra Wagner, Berlin, Hofenberg. Nourissier, François (1956) Les Chiens á Fouetter, Paris, Julliard. Novak, Daniel A. (2016) ‘Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage’, Victorian Studies 59.1, Autumn, 35–64. Ostria, Vincent (1986) ‘Claude Berri sur les traces de Pagnol: le tournage de Jean de Florette’, Cahiers du Cinéma 380, February. Pagnol, Marcel (1988) The Water of the Hills (Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs) London, Picador. —— (1991) My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle, London, Picador. Pauly, Rebecca (1993) The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film, Ars Interpretandi, 2nd edn, Bern, Peter Lang. Phillips, Martin (2007) ‘The Lord of the Rings and Transformations in Socio-Spatial Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in Cinematic Countrysides, ed. Robert Fish, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Pianaro, Roberta (2010) Brunetti’s Cookbook, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press. Pidduck, Julianne (2005) La Reine Margot, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Pillard, Thomas (2014) Le Film noir français, face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre (1946–1960), Paris, Editions Joseph K. Poizat, M. (1986) L’Opéra ou le cri de l’ange: essai sur la jouissance de l’amateur d’opéra, Paris, A.M. Métailié. —— (1992) The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

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Powrie, Phil (1997) French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity, New York, Oxford University Press. —— (2004) ‘La Tragédie de Carmen (Peter Brook, 1983) and Embodiment’, Studies in European Cinema 1.3, 141–51. Powrie, P., B. Babington, A. Davies and C. Perriam (2007) Carmen on Film: A Cultural History, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Proust, Marcel (1927) À la recherche du temps perdu, XV, Le Temps Retrouvé (Deuxième partie), Paris, Gallimard. —— (1989) Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin, New York, Vintage. —— (2002) Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson, London, Allen Lane. —— (2002) The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne, London, Allen Lane. Pulver, Andrew (2005) ‘Girl Interrupted: Roman Polanski’s Tess’, Guardian, 26 March. Raitt, Alan (2002) The Originality of Madame Bovary, Bern, Peter Lang. Rancière, Jacques (2000) ‘Histoire de visages’, Cahiers du Cinéma 550, 52–3. Renoir, Jean (1979) Entretiens et propos, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Richards, Christopher (2014) ‘“The Past is a Mist”: Pinter’s Proust’, Paris Review, 23 January, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/23/the-past-is-a-mist-pinters-proust (accessed 19 September). Richards, David (1981) Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story, New York, Random House. Robb, Graham (1997) Victor Hugo: A Biography, New York, W.W. Norton. Robert, Jean-Louis (2004) ‘Maigret à Paris’, Sociétés et Représentations 17, 159–69. Robinson, Jeffrey (1994) Bardot, trans. Jean-Paul Mourlon, Paris, Editions de la Seine. Rochereau, Jean (1959) ‘Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre’, La Croix, 12 September. Rojek, Chris (2001) Celebrity, London, Reaktion Books. Romney, Jonathan (2000) ‘Masque of the Living Dead’, Sight and Sound 10.1, January, 30–3. Rosselet, Jeanne (1952) ‘First Reactions to Les Misérables in the United States’, Modern Language Notes 67.1, January, 39–43. Rouchy-Lévy, Violette (2008) ‘L’Image des protestants dans La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 154, April–June. Ruiz, Raul (1995) Poetics of Cinema, Paris, DisVoir. Saffar, Patrick (2009) Otto Preminger, Rome, Gremese. Sagan, Françoise (1954) Bonjour, Tristesse, Paris, René Julliard. —— [1955] (2001) Bonjour, Tristesse, trans. Irene Ash, New York, Harper. —— ‘Speeding’, in Bonjour, Tristesse, trans. Irene Ash, New York, Harper, 13–17. Salien, Jean-Marie (2000) ‘La Subversion de l’orientalisme dans Le Comte de Monte Cristo d’Alexandre Dumas’, Études Françaises 36.1, 179–90. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1995) Les Mots, Paris, Gallimard. Schifano, Laurence (1990) Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion, trans. William S. Byron, London, Collins. Schlosberg, Léopold (1955) Les Censures cinématographiques, preface by Claude Autant-Lara, Paris, Publications de L’Union Rationaliste. Schmid, Marion (2010) Chantal Akerman, New York, St Martin’s Press. Seel, Philippe (1993) ‘Hoax en-Provence: “Provence is not for sale and neither are we”. A Native Gives his View of the Second British Invasion’, Guardian, 26 February. Sellier, Geneviève (1983) ‘Raymond Bernard, un directeur à l’americaine’, Cinema 83, June, 67–70.



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Index

92nd Street Y (New York City), 111 Abel, Richard, 10–11, 230, 233, 239 À bout de souffle/Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard), 91, 140–1 Académie Française, 151 Acting: The First Six Lessons (Book), 82 ‘Adieu Tristesse, Bonjour Tristesse’ (Lyric), 137 Adjani, Isabelle, 5 Adolescentes existentialistes (Young Existentialists), 141 Adventures of Dolly, The (1908, D.W. Griffith), 15 Age of Innocence, The (1993, Martin Scorsese), 160 Akerman, Chantal, 109, 118–23, 125, 128–9, 230–1, 237–8 Alcover, Pierre, 56 Algeria, 137, 143 Algiers (1938, John Cromwell), 66 Alhambra Theatre (Los Angeles), 18 Allégret, Yves, 7 All Quiet on the Western Front (Novel), 142 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Novel), 110 Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini), 108 Andalusische Nächte/Andalusian Nights (1938, Herbert Maisch), 93, 104 Andersen, Hans Christian, 35 Anderson, Sherwood, 223–5, 229–30 Andes Mountains, 7 And God Created Woman (1956, Roger Vadim), 137, 142 Andrew, Dudley, 6, 11, 48, 68, 70, 230–1 anime, 14, 27 Another Country (1984, Marek Kanievska), 160 Antoine, André, 3, 5–6, 54, 57 Arnaud, Georges, 3 Aron, Robert, 50, 63–5, 69–71, 230 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1961, Louis Malle), 174 Asian-Bourbon Steampunk (Aesthetic), 14 Astruc, Alexandre, 3, 83

Atkinson, Rowan, 165, 179 Aubagne (Provence), 150 Auclair, Michel, 175 Audiard, Michel, 173 Audry, Jacqueline, 3 Autant-Lara, Claude, 131–2, 148, 238 Auteuil, Daniel, 5, 13 Autour de la lune (Novel), 2 Aux grandes manoeuvres (Newsreel), 6 ‘Awakening, An’ (Story), 224, 229–30 Azévédo, Jean, 186–7, 191, 195, 197–8, 200, 206 Bacon, Kevin, 213 Badet, Regina, 92 Baise moi (2000, Virginie Despentes & Coralie Trinh Thi), 214, 227, 229, 231 Balmer, Jean-François, 36–7, 41 Baltimore, 2 Bara, Theda, 93 Barbey, Bernard, 185 Bardot, Brigitte, 110, 127, 132, 137, 142, 148, 156, 238 Baroncelli, Jacques, 2, 171, 181, 233 Barthes, Roland, 77, 87–8, 107, 126, 231 Basic Instinct (1992, Paul Verhoeven), 214 Battle of Algiers, The (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo), 143 Baur, Harry, 1, 52, 56, 167–8, 179 Bayard, E.A., 78–9 Bazin, André, 60, 70, 87, 138, 148, 150, 162, 231 Bazzoni, Luigi, 92, 104 Béart, Emmanuelle, 115 Beckett, Samuel, 118, 123, 128, 231 Belle du jour (1967, Luis Buñuel), 4 Bellos, David, 54, 68, 231 Benedek, László, 135 Benoit, Pierre, 2 Bergman, Ingmar, 108, 116 Berkel, Christian, 217, 226 Berlin, 95, 106, 115, 169, 223, 237 Bernanos, Georges, 3

242 Index Bernard, Raymond, 48–51, 56–8, 65, 68, 87, 89 Bernhardt, Sarah, 1, 6, 56 Berri, Claude, 4, 155, 157, 159–60, 162, 237 Beugnet, Martine, 109, 120, 125–9, 231 Beylie, Claude, 108, 126, 231 Bible, 13, 18, 80 Birke, David, 225, 229 Birth of Venus, The (Painting), 118 Bizet, Georges, 90, 92–3, 97, 99, 103 Blackadder (TV Series), 179 Black Book (2006, Paul Verhoeven), 214 Bloquet, Jonas, 227 Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma), 104, 106 Board of Education (Philadelphia), 73 Bogarde, Dirk, 110 Boggs, Francis, 14–15, 17 Boileau, Pierre, 3, 61 Boleslawski, Richard, 2, 75–7, 80–2, 84, 86–7 Bonjour cinéma (Book), 110, 127, 234 Bonjour, Tristesse (1958, Otto Preminger), 130–49, 233, 238 Book of Mediterranean Food, A (Cookbook), 155 Botticelli, Sandro, 118 Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932, Jean Renoir), 58 Boulle, Pierre, 135 Bourdieu, Pierre, 82, 89, 231 Bourgeois, Jacques, 109, 126, 231 Bowles, Brett, 150–1, 155, 159, 162–3, 231 Box Office Mojo, 10, 148 Bozzuffi, Marcel, 177 Brando, Marlon, 110 Brasillach, Robert, 7 Braudy, Leo, 61, 70, 232 Bray, Barbara, 111–12 Breen, Joseph, 66, 83 Brelan d’as (1952, Henri Verneuil), 170 Bresson, Robert, 3, 60–1, 70 Brideshead Revisited (Miniseries), 160–1 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957, David Lean), 135 Brion, Gustave, 78–9 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 178, 224 British Free Cinema, 138 Brittany, 159 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 102, 106, 232 Brook, Peter, 93, 104–5, 112, 238 Brown, John, 75 Brunetti’s Cookbook (Compendium), 158, 237 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 178, 182, 232 Brussels, 73, 126, 236 Buache, Freddy, 189, 210, 232 Budapest, 179 Bumbry, Grace, 92 Buñuel, Luis, 2, 4, 30 Burch, Noël, 173, 181, 232 Burguet, Frantz-André, 110 Burke Smith, Anthony, 83, 89 Burlesque on Carmen, A (1916, Charlie Chaplin), 93, 104

Café de Paris (Nightclub), 176 Cahiers du Cinéma, 47, 70, 113, 127–30, 141, 149, 155, 162, 231–2, 234, 237–9 Cain, James M., 111 Callow, Simon, 89, 170, 232 Calmettes, André, 92, 104 Calwell’s of Boston (Publisher), 78 Camille (1936, George Cukor), 2 Camilleri, Andrea, 158, 163, 232 Campus Carmen, The (1928, Alf Goulding), 104 Camus, Albert, 7–9, 11, 143, 208, 232, 235–6 Canby, Vincent, 113, 127, 232 Cannes Film Festival, 111, 114 Capellani, Albert, 3, 49, 54, 74, 87, 236 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Novel), 157, 233 Cardinale, Claudia, 110 Carmen (1845, Novella), 2, 90–106, 230, 232–4, 236–40 Carmen (1910, André Calmettes), 92, 104 Carmen (1913, E.V. Taylor), 91, 104 Carmen (1915, Cecil B. DeMille), 92–3, 104 Carmen (1915, Raoul Walsh), 93, 104–5 Carmen (1918, Ernst Lubitsch), 92, 104 Carmen (1926, Jacques Feyder), 92, 104 Carmen (1926, Novel), 2 Carmen (1933, Lotte Reiniger), 93, 105, 236 Carmen (1946, Christian-Jaque), 92, 104 Carmen (1956, Franco Enrique), 93, 104 Carmen (1978, Franco Zeffirelli), 92, 94, 99, 104 Carmen (1983, Carlos Saura), 96, 98, 103–4 Carmen (1984, Francesco Rosi), 94, 99, 104–5, 240 Carmen (2003, Vicente Aranda), 104 Carmen (Opera), 90, 92–3, 97, 99, 103 Carmen, a cigana (1976, Vanoli Pereira Dias), 93, 104 Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001, Robert Townsend), 96, 104 Carmen, Baby (1967, Radley Metzger), 104 Carmen di Trastevere/Carmen 63 (1962, Carmine Gallone), 91, 104 Carmen Jones (1954, Otto Preminger), 96–7, 104 Carmen, la de Ronda (1959, Tulio Demicheli), 93, 104 Carmen, la de Triana (1938, Florián Rey), 93 Carmen nue/Naked Carmen (1984, Albert Lopez), 94, 104 Carné, Marcel, 3, 171 Carpi, Fabio, 125 Carradine, John, 82 Carrière, Jean-Claude, 112 Cartel d’action sociale et morale (Watchdog Group), 132 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario, 95 Catcher in the Rye, The (Novel), 133 Catherine (1924, Jean Renoir), 59 Caughie, John, 160, 163, 232 Caviezel, Jim, 24–6 Cécile est morte! (1944, Maurice Tourneur), 168–9 celeactor (Celebrity Character), 166, 179

Index 243 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 7 Celle qui n’était plus (Novel), 3 Centre national de la cinématographie, 151 Cervi, Gino, 178–9 César (1936, Marcel Pagnol), 2, 151–4 Cézanne, Paul, 68, 71 Chabrol, Claude, 35–7, 39–47, 232 Chaplin, Charlie, 93, 104 Chattooga River, 161 Chéreau, Patrice, 5, 11, 114, 238 Chevrie, Marc, 113, 126–7, 232 chiaroscuro (Lighting), 197 Chicago, 14, 86, 88, 126, 232, 236 Chiens perdus sans collier (1955, Jean Delannoy), 173 Chion, Michel, 101–2, 106, 232 chora (Concept), 102 Chotard & Cie (1933, Jean Renoir), 58, 60 Christian-Jaque, 3, 92, 104 Ciment, Michel, 111, 127 Civil War, 75, 80, 82 Clair, René, 169–70 Clément, Aurore, 122 Clément, Catherine, 101, 105, 232 Clément, René, 110, 117 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 3–4 Cocteau, Jean, 185 Côte d’azur, 142 Cohen, Keith, 117, 128, 231–2 Cohn, Harry, 130, 134 Colette, 3, 132, 145 Colmeiro, José F., 93, 105, 232 Columbia Studios, 130, 134–5, 140, 231–2 Communist Manifesto, The (Book), 226 Connell, Joanne, 156–7, 161, 163–4, 233 Consigny, Anne, 217, 226 Continentale (Studio), 168–9 Contre Sainte-Beuve (Book), 110 Cordier, Stany, 170 Cosquer (Southern France), 19, 30 Counterfeiters, The (Novel), 116 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1913, Edwin S. Potter), 3 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1934, Rowland V. Lee), 2, 23 Count of Monte Cristo, The (2002, Kevin Reynolds), 25–6 Count of Monte Cristo, The (Novel), 3, 12, 23, 27–8, 30–1, 240 Courrier sud (Novel), 7 Coutard, Raoul, 123 Cremer, Bruno, 4, 179–80, 236 Crowther, Bosley, 133, 148, 233 Cunningham, Douglas, 158, 163, 233 Cyrano de Bergerac (1990, Jean-Paul Rappeneau), 160 d’Amico, Suso Cecchi, 110–11 Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Weine), 30, 104

Dassin, Jules, 4 David, Elizabeth, 155, 162, 232 David Copperfield (1935, George Cukor), 2, 78, 88 Davies, Rupert, 178 Davis, Colin, 32 Dearly, Max, 59 Death in Venice (1971, Luchino Visconti), 111 Death of a Salesman (1951, László Benedek), 135 de Balzac, Honoré, 1–2, 33, 110–11, 128, 223–4 de Baroncelli, Jean, 171, 181, 233 de Beauplan, Robert, 49 de Beauvoir, Simone, 144, 225–7, 229, 233, 236 de Bernières, Louis, 157, 233 de Boisdeffre, Pierre, 134, 148 DeBona, Guerric, 72, 86, 88 Debord, Guy, 156, 158, 163, 233 de Broca, Philippe, 5 Decomble, Guy, 176 Dédé (1935, René Guissart), 169 de Fallois, Bernard, 110 Defoe, Daniel, 158 de Gaulle, Charles, 137, 178 Delacroix, Eugène, 19 de La Fayette, Madame, 4 Delannoy, Jean, 7, 167, 172–4, 181, 235 De la terre à la lune (Novel), 2 Deliverance (1972, John Boorman), 161, 164, 239 Delluc, Louis, 3, 10, 233 Delon, Alain, 110, 112 del Rio, Elena, 101, 105–6, 233 de Maistre, Xavier, 158, 233 de Maupassant, Guy, 35, 38 Demicheli, Tulio, 93, 104 DeMille, Cecil B., 78, 92–3, 104 Deneuve, Catherine, 4, 110, 115, 149 Depardieu, Gérard, 24–5 de Pierrefeu, Jean, 109 Department of Secondary Education, 80 Depression-era America, 24, 72–3, 75–6, 79, 81, 83, 86, 88–9 de Sade, Marquis, 26, 227 Desailly, Jean, 171 Despentes, Virginie, 214 Devigny, André, 3 de Vilmorin, Louise Veveque, 3 Dial M for Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock), 222 Diaboliques (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot), 3–4 Diamant-Berger, Henri, 3 Dias, Vanoli Pereira, 93, 104 Dickens, Charles, 78, 80, 88 Djian, Philippe, 211–14, 224–5, 227, 229 Doff, Neel, 213 Dominczyk, Dagmara, 25 Donaldson-Evans, Mary, 32, 44, 46–7, 69–70, 233 Donat, Robert, 2, 22 Dordogne (Southern France), 19 Dornford-May, Mark, 95, 104 Dorset/Wessex, 153, 159

244 Index Dréville, Jean, 5 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908, Otis Turner), 14–15, 17 Du côté de chez Swann (Book), 110, 127 du Gard, Roger Martin, 6–7, 11, 56–8, 69, 236 Dulac, Germain, 2 Dullin, Charles, 50 Dumas, Alexandre, 1, 3–5, 12–17, 19–31, 151, 231, 233, 238 Dumortier, Jean-Luc, 166, 180, 233 Dunne, Philip, 22 Dupuis-Mazuel, Henry, 56, 58 Duras, Marguerite, 9, 143–5 Du rififi chez les hommes (Novel), 4 Duvivier, Julien, 56, 167–8, 170–1, 180, 237 Earrings of Madame de…, The (1953, Max Ophuls), 3–4 Echo Park, 14 Ed Sullivan Show, The (TV Series), 135 Egypt, 14, 27, 102 Eiffel Tower, 169–70, 192, 195 Electra (Play), 96 Elementary School Journal (Publication), 80, 88 Elle (2016, Paul Verhoeven), 211–29, 237 Elliott, Kamilla, 212, 229, 234 Éluard, Paul, 137, 147 En cas de malheur (1959, Claude Autant-Lara), 170 Enrique, Franco, 93, 104 Epstein, Jean, 2, 110, 127, 234 Escape to the Country (TV Series), 154 Estienne, Marie-Hélène, 112 Fabre, Fernand, 59 Fairbanks, Douglas, 3 Fanny (1932, Marc Allégret), 2, 151 Fantômas (1913, Louis Feuillade), 2, 7, 110 Farrar, Geraldine, 92–3 Fechter, Charles, 16 Fellini, Federico, 108 Fernandez-Young, A., 157, 163, 234 Fescourt, Henri, 18–19, 21–2, 30, 49, 69, 234 Feuillade, Louis, 2 Féval, Paul, 5 Feyder, Jacques, 2, 56, 57, 92, 104 Fifth Republic (France), 137 Film Comment (Publication), 115, 128, 163, 230–1, 236 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 142 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 4, 32–50, 54–6, 58–62, 64–71, 117, 186, 233–4 Flesh and Blood (1985, Paul Verhoeven), 213 Flynn, Emmet J., 16–17, 23, 29–30 Fondation Alliance Française (Organization), 146, 149 Ford, John, 86, 117 Foucault, Michel, 87, 90, 98–9, 105, 234 Fox Corporation, 16, 29, 79, 86–9, 224, 233 Fox Searchlight, 224

Franju, Georges, 4, 9, 187–90, 194, 199, 201–2, 204, 207–8, 210, 232, 235–6 Frankenheimer, John, 4 Frankenstein (Novel), 78 Frankfurter Zeitung (Publication), 115 Frank, Nino, 167, 180 French Africa, 185 French Cancan (1955, Jean Renoir), 171–2 French Country Cooking (Cookbook), 155 French Riviera, 137–8 Freud: The Secret Passion (1962, John Huston), 7 From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinnemann), 134 Gabin, Jean, 4, 56, 67, 77, 167, 169–82, 232–3 Gabrio, Gabriel, 56 Gades, Antonio, 96 Gallimard, Gaston, 6, 11, 50, 55, 57, 59, 69–70, 149, 180–1, 229–31, 233–4, 236, 238–9 Gambon, Michael, 179 Gance, Abel, 17–18, 65 Gankatsu-ou (TV Series), 14 Garbo, Greta, 2, 57, 110 Gary, Romain, 140 Gauty, Lys, 206 Gaye Ramaka, Joseph, 96, 104 Genitrix (Novel), 184 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 19 Gide, André, 6, 55, 57, 69, 116, 185, 239 Gigi (1949, Jacqueline Audry), 3 Gilbert, John, 16–18, 29 Girardot, Annie, 172 Giraudoux, Jean, 57, 96 Giroud, Françoise, 141, 149 Gleizes, Delphine, 74, 79, 86–8, 234 Go-Between, The (1971, Joseph Losey), 108 Godard, Jean-Luc, 91, 94, 96, 99, 104–5, 127, 140, 230, 234 Golden Lion (Venice), 4 Grange, Jean-Christophe, 9 Grangier, Gilles, 167, 177 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940, John Ford), 86, 117 Graves Miller, Judith, 142, 149 Gréco, Juliette, 131, 137, 139, 141, 145, 148–9, 233, 234 Greed (1924, Erich Von Stroheim), 7 Green, Julien, 9 Greene, Naomi, 4, 11, 235 Grégoire, Vincent, 8, 11, 235 Greven, Alfred, 168 Griffith, D.W., 16, 50–1, 65 Guérin, Daniel, 185 Guggenheim (Scholarship), 115 Guibert, Jean-Paul, 173 Guissart, René, 169 Guitry, Sacha, 170 Hakim, Robert, 66–7 Hall, C. Michael, 156, 162–3, 235 Hammer (Studio), 4

Index 245 Hardy, Thomas, 153, 159 Harper’s Ferry Incident, 75 Harris, Richard, 26 Hauer, Rutger, 213 Hawks, Howard, 7, 116 Hays Code, 41, 44, 46 Hayward, Susan, 1, 10, 18, 30, 149, 183, 235 Hayworth, Rita, 94–6 Heflin, Van, 41, 47 Heterotopia, 90–1, 93, 95, 97–9, 101–3, 105, 234 Hiroshima, mon amour (1959, Alain Resnais), 9, 145 Hitchcock, Alfred, 85, 89, 104, 106, 122, 129, 137, 206, 222 Hollande, François, 143 Hollow Man (2000, Paul Verhoeven), 213 Hourdin, Georges, 134, 148, 235 How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford), 86 Hugo, Victor, 1–3, 5, 48–51, 54, 56, 58, 65, 72–81, 83, 85–90, 110, 151, 238 Huillet, Danièle, 67–8, 71 Huis clos (Film) (1954, Jacqueline Audry), 3 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1939, William Dieterle), 2 Hunter, I.Q., 158, 163, 235 Huppert, Isabelle, 35–6, 212, 214, 217, 219, 229, 237 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 212, 235 Hutchinson, John, 80 I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, Mervyn Le Roy), 76, 81 Ifri, Pascal, 109, 126–8, 235 Île de la Cité, 165 Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith), 16, 65 Invisible Man, The (Novel), 213 Irons, Jeremy, 112, 115–16 Isaaz, Alice, 227 ‘Isle of the Dead, The’ (Poem), 125 Jacquet, Gaston, 168 James Bond franchise, 166, 178 Jean de Florette (1986, Claude Berri), 4, 150–2, 155, 157, 160–2, 234, 237 Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1983, Chantel Akerman), 118 Jeanne Doré (1915, René Hervil), 56 Jeanne Doré (Play), 56 Jean Santeuil (Book), 110 Jenkins, Jennifer L., 12 Jeux interdits/Forbidden Games (1952, René Clément), 110 Jewel in the Crown, The (Miniseries), 160 Jewell, Bronwyn, 157, 163, 235 Joan of Arc, 55, 69, 135 Jones, James, 134 Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951, Robert Bresson), 3, 7, 60 Journey Around My Room, A (Book), 158, 233 Jours de famine et de détresse (Book), 213

Jouvet, Louis, 57 Jude the Obscure (Novel), 153 Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut), 122–3 Karmen Gei (2001, Joseph Gaye Ramaka), 96–7, 104 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 9 Kauffmann, Stanley, 112–13, 117, 127, 235 Kazan, Elia, 134 Kefalonia (Island), 157 Kelly, Grace, 137 Kerr, Deborah, 140 King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack), 104, 106 King of Kings, The (1927, Cecil B. DeMille), 78 Kinski, Nastassja, 160 Knowlden, Marilyn, 78–9 Kracauer, Siegfried, 115–17, 128, 236 Kristeva, Julia, 102 Kuisel, Richard, 132, 147–9, 236 Kurosawa, Akira, 116 La Bataille du rail/Battle of the Rails (1945, René Clément), 110 La Beauté du diable (1949, René Clair), 170 La Bête Humaine (1938, Jean Renoir), 2, 6, 35, 57–8, 66 La Captive (2000, Chantal Akerman), 109, 118–19, 121–3, 125, 128–9, 231 La Chartreuse de Parme (1948, Christian-Jaque), 3 La Chienne (1931, Jean Renoir), 58, 60 Lack, Roland-François, 7, 11, 236 La Cousine Bette (Novel), 223–4 Lacroix & Verboeckhoven (Publisher), 19, 73 Lady in the Lake, The (1946, Robert Montgomery), 112 Lady of the Lake, The (Narrative Poem), 157 La Fille de l’eau (1925, Jean Renoir), 59 Lafitte, Laurent, 220 L’Afrique (Newsreel), 6 La Grande Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir), 38, 171 Laguna Beach, 14 La Huchette (Club), 138 La Jetée (1963, Chris Marker), 122, 129 Lake Michigan, 14 La Légende de la Soeur Béatrix (Novel), 2 La Marie du port (1950, Marcel Carné), 170 Lange, Jessica, 224 Lang, Jack, 151 L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais), 9, 128 L’Année sainte (1976, Jean Girault), 177 La Nuit Du Carrefour (1932, Jean Renoir), 4, 56, 165, 167–8 La Poison (1951, Sacha Guitry), 170 La Princesse de Montpensier (2010, Bertrand Tavernier), 4 La Prisonnière (Novel), 109, 116, 118, 125, 128 La Reine Margot (1994, Patrice Chéreau), 5, 11, 160, 237–8

246 Index L’Armée des ombres (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville), 4 La scuola degli amanti (Subtitle), 122 La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922, Germaine Dulac), 2 L’Assomoir (Novel), 3 La Terre (1921, André Antoine), 2–3 La Tête d’un homme (1933, Julien Duvivier), 56, 167–9, 180 La Tragédie de Carmen (1983, Peter Brook), 93, 104–5, 238 L’Athénée Theater, 57 L’Atlantide (1921, Jacques Feyder), 2 Lauda Sion (Sequence), 206 Laughton, Charles, 2, 82, 84–6, 169–70, 179, 181, 235 L’Avenir du Service Renseignements (Newsreel), 6 La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952, Henri Decoin), 170 Lean, David, 135 L’Eau des collines/Water of the Hills (Novel), 150–1, 153–6, 160–1 Le Baron de l’écluse (1960, Jean Delannoy), 170 Le Blé en herbe/Ripening Seed (1954, Claude Autant-Lara), 131–2 Le Bossu (1997, Philippe de Broca), 5 Le Breton, Auguste, 4 Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 77 Le Chat (1971, Pierre Granier-Deferre), 170 Le Chemineau (1905, Albert Capellani), 74 Le Chien jaune (1932, Jean Tarride), 167–8 Le Coureur des spectacles (Tabloid), 13, 230 Le Désert de l’amour (Novel), 184 L’Education sentimentale (1962, Alexandre Astruc), 4 Lee, Ettie, 80, 88 Lee, Rowland V., 2, 22, 24 Le Front de l’art, 4 Legion of Decency, 83 Le intermittenze del cuore (2003, Fabio Carpi), 125 Leipzig, 73 Leitch, Thomas, 212, 229, 234, 236 Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Novel), 7 Le Jour se lève (1939, Marcel Carné), 67, 171 Le Marchand d’oiseaux (Novel), 7 Le Pen, Marine, 143, 149 Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (Book), 165 Le Président (1961, Henri Verneuil), 170 Le Salaire de la peur (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot), 3 Le Sang à la tête (1956, Gilles Grangier), 170 Les Caves du Majestic (1945, Richard Pottier), 168–9, 180–1, 239 Les Destinées sentimentales (2000, Olivier Assayas), 160 Les Enfants du Paradis (1946, Marcel Carné), 49 Les Exploits de maciste (Serial), 7 Les Frères corses (1916, André Antoine), 3, 5, 11, 239 Les Jeux sont faits (1947, Jean Delannoy), 7

Les Misérables (1909, Serial), 54, 69 Les Misérables (1912, Albert Capellani), 3 Les Misérables (1934, Raymond Bernard), 48–51, 58, 167 Les Misérables (1935, Richard Boleslawski), 2, 72–88, 236 Les Misérables (2012, Tom Hooper), 1 Les Misérables (Novel), 49, 65, 72–88, 90, 234, 238 Les Mousquetaires de la reine (1908, Georges Méliès), 5 Les Résultats du féminisme (1906, Alice Guy), 2 Les Rivières poupres (2000, Mathieu Kassovitz), 9 Les Sept Couleurs (Novel), 7 Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921, Henri DiamantBerger), 3 Les Yeux sans visage (1960, Georges Franju), 4 L’Étranger (Novel), 7, 9, 11, 143, 208, 232 Le Temps retrouvé (Film) (1999, Raúl Ruiz), 113–15, 118–19, 128 Le Temps retrouvé (Book), 11, 108, 113–15, 118–19, 128–9, 231, 238 Leviathan (1962, Léonard Keigel), 9 le Vigan, Robert, 59 Lévy, Raoul, 110, 127 L’Homme de la tour Eiffel (1949, Burgess Meredith), 169 Lipscomb, W.P., 80 Little, Brown (Publisher), 78 Little Match Girl, The (1934, Jean Renoir), 35 Llewellyn, Richard, 86 Locarno Festival, 130, 148 London, 10–11, 13, 46–7, 71, 73, 75, 100, 111, 126–7, 129, 135, 144, 158, 162–3, 180–2, 229, 231–40 Lonesome (1928, Paul Fejos), 55 Lopate, Philip, 115, 128, 236 Lopez, Albert, 94, 104 Lord Chamberlain, 14 Lord of the Rings, The (Film Trilogy), 157, 163, 237 Losey, Joseph, 108, 111, 113, 115 Loves of Carmen, The (1927, Raoul Walsh), 104–5 Loves of Carmen, The (1948, Charles Vidor), 94–5, 104 Lubitsch, Ernst, 76, 92, 104 Lumière, August & Louis, 17, 28, 54, 62, 74, 150 L’uomo, l’orgoglio, la vendetta/Man, Pride and Vengeance (1968, Luigi Bazzoni), 92, 104 McConville, Bernard, 16 McKinnon, Susan, 157, 163, 235 Madame Bovary (1934, Jean Renoir), 34–6, 38–40, 45–51, 57–60, 65–71 Madame Bovary (1949, Vincente Minnelli), 35, 40–7 Madame Bovary (1991, Claude Chabrol), 35–7, 45–7, 54–5

Index 247 Madame Bovary (Novel), 6, 32–47, 116–17, 232–6, 238 Madame Bovary at the Movies (Book), 32, 46–7, 69–70, 233 Madrid, 73 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 2 Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942, Orson Welles), 67 Magre, Judith, 221 Maigret dirige l’enquête (1956, Stany Cordier), 170 Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959, Jean Delannoy), 167, 170–2, 174–7, 180, 182, 230, 238 Maigret film series, 4, 56, 165–82, 230, 232–3, 236, 238–9 Maigret tend un piège (1958, Jean Delannoy), 167, 170–2, 174, 180, 239 Maigret voit rouge (1963, Gilles Grangier), 167, 170–1, 176–80 Maisch, Herbert, 93, 104 Malkovich, John, 114 Malle, Louis, 113, 174 manga, 14 Man in the Iron Mask, The (1939, Rowland V. Lee), 24 Manon (1949, Henri Georges Clouzot), 3 Manon des sources (Story), 150 Manon des sources (1986, Claude Berri), 4, 150, 152, 155, 157, 160–2, 164, 234, 237 Manson, Maurice, 170 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1956, Alfred Hitchcock), 104, 106 Maquet, Auguste, 13–15, 28 Marais (French District), 172 March, Fredric, 2, 76–7, 84–5 Margolis, Harriet, 93, 105, 236 Marius (1931, Alexander Korda), 2, 151 Marker, Chris, 122, 126, 129 Mars and Venus (Painting), 118 Marseille Trilogy (Pagnol), 2, 9, 151 Martin, Archbishop of Rouen, 132 Maslin, Janet, 115, 128, 236 Mason, James, 43, 67 Mauprat (Novel), 2 Mauriac, François, 1, 9, 181, 183–90, 199–200, 202–4, 207–10, 231, 236–7 Maurois, André, 6, 78 Maverick (TV Show), 24 Maxim’s (Restaurant), 137 Mayle, Peter, 154–6, 161–2, 164, 237, 239 Mehrar, Stanislas, 119 Méliès, Georges, 2, 5, 7, 17, 28 Meller, Raquel, 92 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 4 Mereken-Spaas, Godelievre, 227 Mérigeau, Pascal, 67–71, 237 Mérimée, Prosper, 2, 90–4, 97, 99, 102–3, 105, 237 Metatopia (Concept), 90–1, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–3, 105

Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), 7, 78 Migenes-Johnson, Julia, 99 Milan, 73 Milhaud, Darius, 50, 60, 64 Miller, Arthur, 135 Miller, Claude, 187–8, 190, 200–5, 208–10, 231–2 Ministère de la Culture, 151 Minnelli, Vincente, 35–6, 39–45, 47, 66–7, 237 Mirbeau, Octave, 7 Mirren, Helen, 224 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 113 Modern Monte Cristo, A (1917, Eugene Moore), 15 Modiano, Patrick, 110, 126, 235 Molière (1978, Ariane Mnouchkine), 113 Momma Don’t Allow (1955, Karel Reisz & Tony Richardson), 138 Monsieur Gallet, décédé (Book), 165 Monte Cristo (1922, Emmet J. Flynn), 16–17, 30 Monte Cristo (1929, Henri Fescourt), 18–19, 21–2, 30 Montgomery, Robert, 112 Montparnasse (Paris), 165, 168 Moran, Joe, 143, 149 Moreau, Jeanne, 5, 122, 174 Moreno, Marguerite, 50 Morgan, David, 84, 89 Morin, Edgar, 138, 148, 237 Mort à credit (Novel), 7 Moscow Art Theatre, 82 Motion Picture Mail (Publication), 15, 29 Motion Picture Previewing and Advisory Committee, The, 80 Motion Picture Production Code, 44, 47, 66, 73, 76, 83 Moulin Rouge (Cabaret), 171 Moving Picture World (Publication), 15, 29, 68 Mr Bean (TV Series), 179 Mrs Dalloway (Novel), 225 Muller, Deiter, 154, 156, 162–3, 235 Munich, 169 Muti, Ornella, 112, 115–16 My Father’s Glory (Autobiography), 155, 162, 237 My Mother’s Castle (Autobiography), 155, 162, 237 Mystères de New York (Serial), 7 Nana (1955, Christian-Jaque), 3 Naples, 73, 110 Napoléon (1927, Abel Gance), 17–18, 55, 65 Napoleon III, 73 Narcejac, Thomas, 3 Naremore, James, 85, 88–9 National Theatre (London), Negri, Pola, 92 Nero, Franco, 92 Netherlands, 213 New Rochelle (New York), 15, 29 New York Dramatic Mirror (Publication), 15, 29 New York Tribune (Publication), 75

248 Index New Zealand, 157, 163, 237 Night Flight (1933, Clarence Brown), 7 Niven, David, 136, 140 Normandy, 41, 58, 69, 119, 132, 159 Notre-Dame de Paris (Novel), 2, 73 Nouveau Roman (Genre), 9 Nouvelle Vague, 4, 35, 149 Novel of the Century, The (Book), 54, 68, 231 Nykvist, Sven, 112 Obraztsova, Yelena, 92 Observer (London Publication), 13, 28, 230 Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (Network), 111 ‘Oh …’, Elle (Novel), 211, 213 Olivier, Laurence, 110 Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks), 7 On purge bébé (1931, Jean Renoir), 58 On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan), 134 Ophuls, Max, 3 Our Town (1940, Sam Wood), 67 Page, Louis, 173, 177 Pagnol, Marcel, 1–2, 4, 9, 150–1, 153, 155–7, 159, 160–4, 231, 237 Paladin (TV Series), 24 Palmer, R. Barton, 1, 130 Panique (1946, Julien Duvivier), 170 Paris, 2–3, 6, 11, 13, 16, 18, 21–2, 25–6, 29–30, 46–50, 54–6, 60, 63, 67–70, 72–4, 81–2, 84, 87, 105–7, 117–18, 122, 126–8, 136–7, 139–41, 143, 147–50, 158, 162–3, 165–6, 171, 173, 176, 178–82, 185–7, 190, 192, 195–6, 199–200, 203, 207, 209–11, 214, 223–4, 229–39 Pas-de-Calais, 159 Passage to India, A (1984, David Lean), 160 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1927, Carl Theodore Dreyer), 55 Past Recaptured, The (Book), 5 Pathé (Studio), 1, 3, 7, 29–30, 50, 57, 69, 74, 235 Pathé Film d’Art (Series), 1, 92 Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray), 116 Pearce, Guy, 24–5 Pedigree (Novel), 166 Penguin (Publisher), 46, 89, 179, 232, 234 Pépé le Moko (1937, Julien Duvivier), 66, 171 Père Goriot (Novel), 2 Pest (Hungary), 73 Pettey, Homer B., 1, 211 Phantom Carriage, The (1921, Victor Sjöström), 7 Phelps, Eleanor, 23 Philosophy in the Bedroom (Book), 227 Picpus (1943, Richard Pottier), 168 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Novel), 17 Pietr-le-Letton (Novel), 165 Pillard, Thomas, 178, 181–2, 237 Pius XI (Pope), 132 Place de la Concorde, 137

Poetic Realism (Film Movement), 56, 166–7 Poizat, Michel, 101–2, 106, 237 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 143 Porter, Edwin S., 3 Positif (Publication), 111, 121, 209–10, 232–3 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Novel), 111 Post-Revolution France, 74, 81 Pottier, Richard, 168 Pour Vous (Magazine), 49, 57 Powrie, Phil, 90, 105–6, 113, 127, 233, 238 Prague, 179 Préjean, Albert, 169–70, 179 Preminger, Otto, 96, 104, 130–45, 147–9, 234–6, 238–9 Prénom Carmen/First Name Carmen (1984, Jean-Luc Godard), 94, 104–5, 230 Prévost, Antoine François, 3 Prix Interallié (2012), 213 Proud Ones, The (1953, Yves Allégret), 7 Proust, Marcel, 1, 5–7, 9, 11, 107–19, 121–3, 125–9, 185, 217, 230–3, 235–6, 238–9 Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), 104, 106 Quatetto Basileus (1982, Fabio Carpi), 125 Quatre-vingt-treize (1915, André Antoine), 3 Qui la fête commence (1975, Bertrand Tavernier), 4 Rabun County (Georgia), 161 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 125 RAI TV, 93, 151 Rampling, Charlotte, 110 Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa), 116 Ray, Satyajit, 116 Recherche (Term), 11, 107–24, 125–9, 231, 235, 238 Redon, Jean, 4 Reiniger, Lotte, 93, 105, 236 Reisz, Karel, 138 Remarque, Erich Maria, 142–3 Renoir, Jean, 2, 4, 7, 34–6, 38–45, 47–50, 55–71, 117, 165, 167–9, 171, 231–2, 234, 237–9 Renoir, Pierre, 4, 39, 41, 56, 59, 69–70, 167, 179 Resnais, Alain, 108, 113, 143, 145 Return of Monte Cristo, The (1946, Henry Levin), 24 Rey, Florián, 93 Reynolds, Kevin, 25–7, 31 Rhapsody (Streaming Service), 107 Richard, Jean, 178–80, 236 Richardson, Tony, 138 Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin), 4 Rignault, Alexandre, 168 Rin-Tin-Tin, 75 Rio de Janeiro, 73 Ritz Brothers, The, 2 Robb, Graham, 75, 87, 238 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 9, 115, 128 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds), 25

Index 249 Robinson Crusoe (1913, Otis Turner), 15 Robinson Crusoe (Novel), 17, 157 Robocop (1987, Paul Verhoeven), 214 Rockefeller Scholarship, 115 Romain, Jules, 6 Romance, Viviane, 92 Romney, Jonathan, 115, 128, 238 Rosi, Francesco, 94, 99, 104–5, 240 Rotterdam, 73 Rouchy-Levy, Violette, 11, 238 Rouleau, Raymond, 170 Route 66 (TV Series), 24 Ruiz, Raúl, 113–15, 118–19, 122, 125, 128, 231, 238 Sagan, Françoise, 1, 130–5, 137–45, 147–9, 235–8 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 7 Salinger, J.D., 133 Salzburg Festival (Recording), 92, 104 Sand, George, 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 7, 11, 144, 238 Saura, Carlos, 96, 98, 103–4 Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932, Howard Hawks), 116 Schenck, Joseph, 75 Schlöndorff, Volker, 112–13, 115, 118, 122, 125, 127 Schmid, Marion, 109, 120, 122, 125–9, 231, 238 Schulberg, Budd, 135 Scob, Edith, 115 Scotland, 157–8 Scott, Ridley, 214 Scott, Walter, 157, 175 Seberg, Jean, 133, 135–7, 140–1, 148, 232, 238 Second Empire (Napoleon III), 73 Seel, Philippe, 156, 162–3, 238 Selig, William, 14–15, 29 Sellier, Genevieve, 50, 68, 173, 181–2, 232, 238–9 Selznick, David O., 47, 73, 78 Shakespeare, William, 15, 80, 113, 126 Shattuck, Roger, 112–13, 117, 127, 239 Shelley, Mary, 78 Sherlock Holmes franchise, 166 Shue, Elisabeth, 224 Silas Marner (1916, Ernest C. Warde), 15 Simenon, Georges, 1, 56, 165–73, 175–82, 230, 233–4, 237, 239 Simon, Michel, 170, 179, 181, 234 Sjöström, Victor, 7 Society of the Spectacle (Book), 156, 233 Sodome et Gomorrhe (Book), 111 Son of Monte Cristo, The (1940, Rowland V. Lee), 24 Sorbonne (France), 126, 137–8 Souriau, Etienne, 116–17 Sous les toits de Paris (1930, René Clair), 169 South Africa, 90, 95, 104 Southern California, 14, 16 Spotify (Streaming Service), 107

Stanislavski, Konstantin, 82, 86, 89 Stanwyck, Barbara, 83 Stavisky, Alexandre, 49 St Bartholomew Day Massacre (August 1572), 5 Steinbeck, John, 86 Stendhal, 3, 110 Stéphane, Nicole, 110–13, 126–7, 236 St Germain, 136, 138, 140, 144, 148–9, 171, 239 St Petersburg, 73 Straub, Jean-Marie, 67–8, 71 Strong, Jeremy, 150 Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau), 55 Tale of Two Cities, A (1935, Jack Conway), 2 Tarride, Albert, 167 Tarride, Jean, 167 Tatou, Audrey, 202 Taurand, Gilles, 113 Tavernier, Bertrand, 4 Taylor, Estelle, 16 telenovelas, 14 Tempest, The (1911, George Thanhouser), 15 Tender is the Night (Novel), 142 Tess (1979, Roman Polanski), 159–60, 163, 238 Tessier, Valentine, 39, 55, 57, 59, 61, 69, 174 Teulings, Jan, 178 Thalberg, Irving, 73 Thanhouser Film Corporation, 15, 29 Théâtre Historique, 13 Théâtre Robert-Houdin, 7 Thelma and Louise (1991, Ridley Scott), 214 Theory of Adaptation, A (Book), 28, 212, 235 Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962, Georges Franju), 190–9, 210, 232–3, 237, 239 Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012, Claude Miller), 187–90, 200–10, 232–3, 237, 239 Thérèse Desqueyroux (Novel), 183–210, 232–3, 237, 239 Thérèse Raquin (1953, Marcel Carne), 3 Thérèse Raquin (Novel), 2–3 Three Coins in the Fountain (1954, Jean Negulesco), 157 Three Musketeers, The (1921, Fred Niblo), 3 Three Musketeers, The (1939, Alan Dwan), 2 Three Musketeers, The (Novel), 3, 110 Times Literary Supplement (Publication), 179, 182, 233 Times, The (Publication), 155, 162, 164, 229, 234, 237, 239 To Catch a Thief (1955, Alfred Hitchcock), 137 Toland, Gregg, 77, 81–2, 84–5 Tonner, Dominic, 156, 162, 239 Török, Jean-Paul, 111 Totheroh, Dan, 22 Touchez pas au grisbi (1954, Jacques Becker), 171–2, 177 Tourneur, Maurice, 168 Townsend, Robert, 96, 104 Tradition of Quality (French Cinema), 166, 174, 180

250 Index Train, The (1964, John Frankenheimer), 4 Tremont Temple (Boston), 18 Trials of Moses, The (Painting), 118 Trinh Thi, Coralie, 214 Trossachs (Scotland), 157 Truffaut, François, 110, 113, 122, 129, 140–1, 149, 239 Tuileries Garden, 57 Turin, 73, 163, 232, 237 Twentieth Century (Studio), 72, 75, 77, 79, 86–9 Typhus (Unmade Film), 7 Tyzack, Margaret, 224 U-Carmen e-khayelitsha (2005, Mark DornfordMay), 95–6, 104 Un amour de Swann (1984, Volker Schlöndorff), 112–14, 118, 122 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956, Robert Bresson), 3 Une fille du regent (Novel & Play), 4 Une Partie de campagne (1946, Jean Renoir), 35, 38, 69 Ungar, Steven, 107 University of Wisconsin, 80, 181, 237 U.S. Selig Polyscope (Studio), 14–15, 29 Vadim, Roger, 132, 137, 142, 149 Valland, Rose, 4 ‘Valse de l’abbaye’ (Musical Piece), 206 Van Dreelen, John, 170 Van Gogh, Vincent, 155 Variety (Publication), 18, 30 Venice Lagoon, 14 Verhoeven, Paul, 211, 213–15, 222, 225 Verne, Jules, 2 Verneuil, Henri, 170, 177 Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock), 122–3, 129, 163, 233 Vian, Boris, 132, 148–9, 231, 239 Vicar of Wakefield, The (1910, Theodore Marston), 15 Vichy Government, 3–4, 180, 233

Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des ‘Misérables’ (1897, Short), 54, 74 Vienna, 169 Vigilanti Cura (Papal Bull, 1936), 132 Vincendeau, Ginette, 160, 162–3, 165, 180–2, 232, 234, 239 Visconti, Luchino, 110–11, 113, 115, 127, 230, 233, 238 Vol de nuit (Novel), 7 Voltaire, 151 Von Karajan, Herbert, 92, 104 Von Stroheim, Erich, 7 Voyage dans la lune (1902, Georges Méliès), 2, 17 Vuillermoz, Émile, 5, 11, 239 Wakhévitch, Georges, 49, 63–4, 68, 70, 239 Walsh, Raoul, 93, 104–5 War and Peace (Novel), 116 Ward, Lynd, 78 Warner Brothers, 75, 81 Warsaw, 73 Waterworld (1995, Kevin Reynolds), 25 Welles, Orson, 82, 89, 232 Wells, H.G., 213 Wicker Man, The (1973, Robin Hardy), 158 Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman), 108, 116 Wincott, Michael, 25 Winesburg, Ohio (Book), 225 Woman on the Beach, The (1947, Jean Renoir), 67 Woolf, Virginia, 223–5 Words, The (Autobiography), 7 Wraxall, Lascelles, 78 Wuthering Heights (1939, William Wyler), 2 Year in Provence, A (Book), 154–5, 157, 162, 237 Young, R., 157, 163, 234 Zanuck, Darryl F., 72–3, 75–84, 86–8, 233 Zeffirelli, Franco, 92, 94, 99, 104 Zinnemann, Fred, 134 Zola, Émile, 1–3, 6, 35, 57–8, 110