Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema 9780822388975

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Masculine Singular

Masculine Singular French New Wave Cinema

Geneviève Sellier Translated by Kristin Ross

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

vii

1

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave 11

Chapter One

A New Generation Marked by the Emergence of Women 22

Chapter Two

Cinephilia in the 1950s 34

Chapter Three

Auteur Cinema: An A√air of State 41

Chapter Four

Contrasting Receptions

Contents

70

Chapter Five

The Precursors 95

Chapter Six

Between Romanticism and Modernism 128

Chapter Seven

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity 145

Chapter Eight

The Women of the New Wave: Between Modern and Archaic 184

Chapter Nine

Jeanne Moreau: Star of the New Wave and Icon of Modernity 199

Chapter Ten

Brigitte Bardot and the New Wave: An Ambivalent Relationship vi

210

Chapter Eleven

The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank: A ‘‘Feminist’’ Alternative? 221

Conclusion

The New Wave’s Legacy: ‘‘Auteur Cinema’’

225

Appendix One

Box O≈ce Results 227

Appendix Two

The Press

231

Notes

245

Bibliography

253

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Noël Burch and Ginette Vincendeau for their intellectual support and for their friendship throughout the period of time I spent writing this book. My thanks to Michel Marie and Laurent Creton for their attentive reading of the first draft. I am grateful to the Film Archives (Bois d’Arcy) for making it possible for me to view its prints of Thérèse Desqueyroux and Vacances portugaises. For the American edition, my deepest thanks go to Kristin Ross and Alice Kaplan. For its illustrations, I thank the Bibliothèque du Film in Paris. I thank Alain Gresh for being by my side.

Introduction

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

What is striking about New Wave cinema is the fact that it gave rise to such an abundant literature, beginning as soon as the movement itself began in 1959.∞ Essays and commentary about the New Wave appeared not only in the mainstream press and in the journals that supported or critiqued the movement—Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, respectively—but also, almost instantaneously, in works written by André Labarthe in 1961, by Jacques Siclier the same year, and by Raymond Borde, Freddy Buache, and Jean Curtelin in 1962.≤ Outside the immediate cinematic milieu (which, by the way, is still briskly tearing itself apart on the subject) New Wave cinema immediately awoke the passionate interest of the academic world: witness, for example, the investigation published in 1962 by a group of sociologists headed by Edgar Morin, which attempted to evaluate the changes in film representations linked to the emergence of the new cinema. The movement was, from the outset, ‘‘overmediatized,’’ as we might say today, and it was

Introduction

2

vigorously reproached by its detractors for its talent at self-promotion. And yet by 1962 most critics had found the New Wave to be on its deathbed, and Cahiers du cinéma and Positif each published a special issue about its decline that same year—accounts which, to be sure, had neither the same intentions nor the same conclusions. The rapid eclipse of the movement, which cinema historians have since confirmed, has not prevented the progressive constitution of the New Wave into a patrimonial monument or a veritable cult object for successive generations of cinephiles and film students—in France, of course, but also in many foreign countries, and not just in the West. For all of these, the New Wave has become synonymous with modernity—modernity as it is generally understood in France, in the aesthetic rather than historic sense of the term. In the matter of cinema, it is the good object of ‘‘cultivated’’ culture (Bourdieu 1979). No university film studies curriculum gets by without at least one course on the New Wave and/or its most famous protagonists (the trio of Chabrol, Godard, and Tru√aut); no account defending or illustrating the seventh art can avoid referring to this prestigious moment in its history; no critic—at least no critic in France, where every cultivated person is obliged to be a cinephile—judges the work of new filmmakers outside of the standard set by the New Wave. Histories of French cinema published in the last ten years all give a privileged place to the New Wave (Prédal 1991; Frodon 1995). All of this is indicative of the construction of a doxa that presents this movement as the turning point of the postwar period, the moment when cinema as such—and no longer just the exceptional work by this or that ‘‘auteur’’—accedes to the dignity of modern art. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the ‘‘o≈cial’’ birth of the New Wave—which its protagonists as well as its historians situate at the moment of the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where Les 400 Coups and Hiroshima mon amour were presented—an avalanche of books was published to fill the relative void in the bibliography of works treating the movement in its entirety. These ranged from the most personal remembrances to the most erudite historical or aesthetic studies. Among French publications, they included the extensively documented short didactic work by Michel Marie, La Nouvelle Vague, une école artistique (1997), which featured an historical approach, and Jean Douchet’s richly illustrated volume, Nouvelle Vague (1998), which retraced ‘‘from the inside’’ the path taken by the emer-

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

gence of what the author identified as the aesthetic modernity of cinema, from Voyage en Italie (1955) to Bande à part (1964). Since the publication of the two-volume Histoire des Cahiers du cinéma (1991) and Tru√aut (1998), written in collaboration with Serge Toubiana and based on a privileged access to the personal archives of the dead director, Antoine de Baecque had for all intents and purposes become the o≈cial historian of the New Wave. In his new book about the movement, La Nouvelle Vague, portrait d’une jeunesse, 2000, he chose to adopt the perspective of a cultural historian, resituating the new cinema in the context of the sociocultural and generational upheavals that engendered it at the beginning of the 1960s. Among the many special issues of film journals that celebrated the fortieth anniversary, we must first mention that of the Cahiers du cinéma (1998)—honor to whom honor is due—which attempted to sift through the critical doxa that the journal itself had been largely responsible for establishing. Guy Gautier edited an issue of CinémAction (2002) that brought together analysis and historical investigation of the New Wave cinema cult. Several collective works allowed specialists both inside and outside of the academy to add their stone to the edifice: among these were the proceedings of a colloquium held at Rennes entitled Nouvelle Vague, nouveaux rivages, permanences du récit au cinéma 1950–1970 (2001), which was dominated by aesthetic analyses in relation to other fields within artistic modernity. Taking a more polemical stand, Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? (2003), edited by the Italian critic Aldo Tassone, brought together interviews with the protagonists of the era (filmmakers of both the earlier regime and the New Wave) as well as with their heirs for a reevaluation that, unfortunately at times, veered into a settling of old scores. The numerous monographs about filmmakers associated with the New Wave, whether famous or obscure, must also be mentioned. But if we expand our optic to include international scholarship, as I intend to do in this book, we see that the most heavily researched studies of the New Wave have come from English-speaking countries. The American academic Dudley Andrew’s well-documented but also very empathetic study of André Bazin (1978) is frequently cited. Richard Neupert’s recent book about the movement itself, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002), does not question the orthodox vision of the New Wave; nevertheless, it is distinguished by an extensive analysis of films and their directors in the con-

3

Introduction

text of their production and reception. This kind of analysis is rarely found in works published in France, which, sympathetic to the point of view of a film’s director, tend to privilege the aesthetic analysis of films at the expense of documentary and historical research that might allow us to put films into relation with their historical context.

Renewing the Cultural History of Representations

4

What all of these publications have in common is their focus on works and their authors and their disregard for the analysis of filmic representations as an element of a collective imaginary echoing the society of the times. The historian Pascal Ory (1989), on the other hand, resituates the New Wave in a broader context framed by the changes in technology that transformed cultural industries beginning in the 1950s, and that produced an acceleration in individualization of the relation to culture, at the same time as a growing socialization of the forms of expression. On the American side, Kristin Ross (1995) traces the articulation between the New Wave and the social and economic modernization of the country impelled by Mendès-France, and later accelerated by de Gaulle in a more authoritarian mode. In a study devoted to the history of French cinema, Alan Williams (1992) situates the enthusiastic welcoming of the New Wave at the end of the 1950s in the context of the new prosperity of French society, the demographic boom, and the social changes that accompanied the decline of rural areas and provincial towns, whose traditional bourgeoisie was submerged by the new American lifestyle adopted by youth in the cities. Middle-class mass consumption develops at the expense of shopkeepers and artisans, and the growth of the suburbs leads to a deracinated society. The arrival of de Gaulle corresponded to the access to power of a whole new cultural, social, and economic generation. In Britain, Susan Hayward (1993), surveying the ‘‘national French cinema,’’ speaks of a postmodern age in relation to the New Wave—an age characterized by a rejection of history, by the a≈rmation of an eternal present whose dominant cultural trait is mannerism, stylization, formalism, and reflexivity, and by a culture devoted to the individual rather than to collective movements. She views these phenomena as the result of an ideological crisis provoked by the genocide of the Jews and the atomic bomb, which results in the return of ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ of estheticism, and of the privilege given to form over meaning.

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

The American Lynn Higgins (1996), who studies, more narrowly, ‘‘the fiction and the representations of history in post-war France,’’ sees the same eclipse of the social in the New Novel and in the New Wave, which is expressed not only through the aggressive claims for the autonomy of the text (the work), but also through the obsession with memory, with a personal or a historic past as well. According to Higgins, this contradiction translates into a ‘‘crisis in fiction’’ that leads back to a crisis in representation and to a social, economic, and political crisis in the French society of the era. She views the New Wave critique of Balzacian realism or of ‘‘French quality’’—characterized as ‘‘outdated,’’ bourgeois, and reactionary—as a kind of Oedipal rejection. But the ambivalence of this refusal of realism in the context of the Cold War and anticommunism is expressed by the artists as much in their refusal of the Jdanovism incarnated by the French Communist Party as it is in their hostility to Sartre, who advocated an engaged literature, and in their choice of the narcissistic formalism that is at the heart of the New Wave. Within this sociocultural perspective, the recent book by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Jean-Luc Godard et la société française des années soixante (2004), represents a radical rupture with the aesthetic/‘‘auteurist’’ approach that prevails—among Anglophone critics as much as French ones—when it comes to works devoted to this beacon of the New Wave. Using an approach borrowed from Bourdieu (Les Règles de l’art, 1992), Esquenazi traces the way in which the director of A bout de souΔe invents his place as an innovative artist by at first reappropriating American mass culture to use against the patrimonial academicism of French filmmakers and then, very rapidly, by ‘‘distinguishing’’ himself in the cultural field, as Flaubert did a century earlier, through a distanced writing style accompanied by a radical critique of the society of consumption. The director of Masculin féminin would construct his image from that point on by associating cultural elitism with political radicality, at the very moment when French society begins to valorize a form of modernity, characterized as subversive, that is practiced only within the cultural field. In this book, I too adopt a sociocultural perspective—all the while emphasizing what became the central problematic, as Edgar Morin observed at the time, in the majority of the films made by the new filmmakers between 1957 and 1962: namely, the relations between men and women and, more generally, the construction of sexual identities. In fact, in a much more systematic way than that of the mainstream cinema of the era, the

5

Introduction

6

New Wave invented a cinema where amorous and sexual relations are explored as explicitly as was permitted under the censorship of the time. These films were a reaction against the puritan hypocrisy of the society of the 1950s, marked by familialism, birth-rate panic, and the repression of contraceptive methods—a consensus that encompassed all of the political parties and social forces, and one that Gaulist power would continue to impose until the conflagration of May 1968. It is not as if the ‘‘cinéma de papa,’’ to borrow the condescending phrase that the ‘‘young Turks’’ of the Cahiers du cinéma used in reference to their elders, avoided the question of sexual relations.≥ But their stories were recounted in a classical manner, which is to say, using a narrative posture ‘‘exterior’’ to the characters, a legacy of the nineteenth-century novel (Burch and Sellier 1996). The filmmakers of the new generation, propelled by youthful aspirations to a greater degree of personal liberty (Sohn 2001), began to ‘‘write’’ in the first person singular in a new attempt to take account of lived experience at its most intimate, its most quotidian, and its most contemporary. Like the romantic novelists of the beginning of the nineteenth century, the young filmmakers (or at least those who exerted the most influence, which is to say the former critics from the Cahiers du cinéma and their friends) make the decision to say ‘‘I.’’ This crescendo of representations strongly marked by a subjectivity that echoed the preoccupations of youth was the first aspect that struck the critics at the time. I propose to examine this particular moment from the perspective of cultural history and the history of representations; to articulate the analysis of films with their sociocultural context of production and reception, in order to evaluate to what extent the films of the New Wave take into account the aspirations of the new generation and to what extent the filmmakers express in their films their own interests, both social and sexual. In fact, their belonging to either the petite bourgeoisie or the cultivated grande bourgeoisie gives them a particular point of view on lived experience, one that Bourdieu has characterized as ‘‘distanced.’’ This distance not only permits the interiorization of a cultural heritage recognized as legitimate, but also the conviction of escaping from social determinations and the capacity to form a personal project, to forge a destiny. It is worth remarking that of the 150 filmmakers who made their first full-length fictional film between 1957 and 1962, there isn’t a single woman. Agnès Varda, who is frequently saddled with the ambiguous title of ‘‘mother of

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

the New Wave,’’ made her first full-length film, La Pointe courte, in 1954, completely outside of commercial circuits.

The Importance of Gender for Understanding the New Wave The analysis of filmic representations must take into account the fact that New Wave cinema is in the first person masculine singular at a moment when the first surveys of young people were showing a considerable gap between the aspirations of young men and those of young women (Giroud 1958). This determining element is the blind spot of French analyses, as Antoine de Baecque’s La Nouvelle Vague, portrait d’une jeunesse (2000) shows. While de Baecque’s sociocultural orientation is completely innovative, he questions neither the gender dimensions of the phenomena he examines nor his own empathetic position vis-à-vis male cinephiles and critics, where it concerns, for example, highly erotically charged female images on film. Similarly, he identifies ‘‘naturally’’ with the masculine point of view of the young filmmakers without ever asking himself about the absence of women filmmakers in a generation he characterizes as ‘‘modern.’’ Thus, it is this blind spot in the French historiography of the New Wave that I will explore in particular in this volume. This work would not have been possible without the Anglo-American theoretical contributions that, thirty years ago, ‘‘invented’’ gender and cultural studies—the two research orientations that were born in Great Britain and later experienced an extraordinary development in the United States. Their establishment during the 1960s and 1970s took place within a context of political debate about academic knowledge, which began with a critique of patriarchal power and cultural elitism that had no equivalent in that form in France, even if, paradoxically, it was in part the texts by French theorists—Bourdieu, Kristeva, Derrida, Irigaray—that were used as the basis for the emergence of the new orientations. Gender studies, which is of particular interest to me here, takes as its object sexual identities and relations as sociocultural constructions. But the term ‘‘gender’’ poses a problem for the French language, in that sexué (sexed) and sexuel (sexual) refer to the biological, genital, or erotic, while genre (gender) is a grammatical term. We are therefore reduced to various paraphrases, such as the one I propose as follows: ‘‘The study of sexual relations and identities, such as they are socially constructed.’’ For theoret-

7

Introduction

8

ical reasons, I will not use the terms ‘‘women’s studies’’ or ‘‘feminist studies,’’ nor their French equivalents (études féminines, études féministes), even if they partially overlap, in practice, with the same research orientations. The issue is not actually about privileging a particular ‘‘object’’—women or the images of women—even if this means half of humanity, but rather about defining an approach that allows us to explore the way in which cultures think, construct, and fantasize their gender dimension. The fact that this dimension has been the occasion for relations of domination of one gender over the other explains both why the dominant discourse has naturalized the masculine as universal and why feminists were the first to make sexual relations and identities visible as sociocultural constructions and not natural givens. But the gendered dimension of cultural production is a universal given, which renders it an object of study as legitimate and necessary as cultural production’s social or aesthetic dimensions. Beginning with its inception in the mid-1970s, gender studies privileged the study of classic Hollywood cinema, revealing in these films a collective imaginary criss-crossed by the mechanisms of domination that transpire, for the most part, through gender relations. But the development of this research also allowed the discovery of an often subtle dialectic between the mechanisms of masculine and patriarchal domination at work in these films and the recognition of the point of view of the dominated, which is to say the women spectators, particularly in ‘‘feminine’’ film genres. Gender studies then turned to the representations of masculinity in film and the contradictions produced by changes in the relations between men and women, particularly after World War II. These approaches completely renewed film analysis, without French publishers taking the least notice. In the space of this introduction, it is impossible to linger on the reasons for the resistance to this type of research in France. It is clear that the reasons extend beyond the domain of film studies, even if the particular reasons for this blockage within the French cinephilic tradition have been analyzed elsewhere (Vincendeau 1988; Burch and Sellier 1998). A few academics who write between the two cultures have attempted to introduce some ideas about it by translating articles (Reynaud and Vincendeau 1993; Burch 1993, 2001). I edited an issue of the journal Iris on the subject in 1998, and in so doing created a collection devoted to the translation into French of key works that make use of these approaches.∂

The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

A number of books and articles written in English examine the New Wave by taking into account, but not in an exclusive way, the representation of gendered identities and social relations. One of the pioneering and essential texts on this subject is Laura Mulvey and Colin McCabe’s ‘‘Images of Women, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J. L. Godard’’ (1980). The authors identify two narrative regimes in Godard’s early films—regimes that can be found in most of the New Wave filmmakers—depending on whether the principal protagonist(s) is (or are) male or female. In the first case, the film is built on a point of view empathetic with the male hero; in the second case, the narrative is distanced, often with a sociological alibi, and looks from the exterior onto the female protagonist(s), constructed as Other(s). I take up these theses when, in chapters 6 and 7, I explore a broader corpus of films. The work of Ginette Vincendeau, who lives in Great Britain, has been equally fundamental. Her essay ‘‘L’ancien et le nouveau: Brigitte Bardot dans les années 1950’’ (1993), as well as the chapters she devoted to Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (2000) propose very stimulating hypotheses from within the perspective of star studies theorized by Richard Dyer (1979 [1998]), by articulating the analysis of films with the context of the production and reception of new images of women in order to illuminate their place in the collective imaginary of the era. A few other attempts, often limited to a single director and to a textual approach, have opened the way for a gender analysis of New Wave cinema. Anne Gillain (1991), a French academic who works in the United States, has proposed an analysis of Tru√aut’s oeuvre that, although it takes a more psychoanalytic rather than ‘‘gender studies’’ approach, is very pertinent to the perspective developed here. Gillain shows, in e√ect, that the construction of female characters in the whole of Tru√aut’s work is based on an ambivalent relation with a mother who is both fascinating and menacing and from whom Tru√aut felt no love. Beginning with the matrix for this schema, which she illuminates in Les 400 coups, Gillain explores all of the other variations of the feminine Other as powerful and dangerous. Limited to an internal analysis of Tru√aut’s films in relation with his biography, Gillain’s book does not contextualize Tru√aut’s work in terms of society or of the collective imaginary of the era. But it does suggest the importance of the fantasmatic dimension of the images of women, to the same extent that directors insist on the subjectivity of their inspiration.

9

Introduction

10

Several years later, the British writers Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram confirmed Gillain’s intuition in their gender study of Tru√aut. Their concern is with the ‘‘sexual politics’’∑ of Tru√aut’s films—this concept, which has no French equivalent, refers to the fact that the vision of gender identities and relations proposed by an individual or a group is a political construction. Following the analysis by Simone de Beauvoir (1949), they show that the ‘‘idealization of woman, like her demonization, aims at negating her status as a human being,’’ and how ‘‘Tru√aut has a tendency to construct his female characters as idols or monsters.’’ His films are torn between a misogyny undergirded by the sexist point of view of the male hero, and the emergence, beginning in the 1980s, of the counterpoint of a feminine subject. Holmes and Ingram also examine the relation between masculinity and the claim to auteurism, filtered through the question of the father. In a more focused study, the American academic T. Je√erson Kline (1992) examines the literary references in the principal New Wave films, as well as the usage that these are put to by the directors, taking into account the gender dimension of the meanings produced by these references. This original approach allows Kline to highlight the very conscious self-positioning of the new filmmakers in the realm of ‘‘cultivated culture,’’ but also the often subtle usages they make of the texts that have inspired them, like the reference to the ‘‘Carte du Tendre’’ in Les Amants (see chapter 9), the reference to Ibsen in Marienbad (see chapter 6), or the reference to Goethe in Jules et Jim. The limit of such an analysis is that of considering films as texts independent of their reception: Les Amants, for example, is analyzed as a feminist film, whereas the French critics of the era saw it rather as a lyrical expression of physical love (see chapter 4). All of these analyses confirm the richness of gender approaches to New Wave cinema, but they are often limited to a textual analysis that misses the relationship of film to its era. The fact that the subjectivity of the director is determinant in these films is not at all contradictory with its inscription in a specific historical and sociocultural context, especially as it concerns the construction of gender identities and social relations. This is what this book will try to show.

Chapter One

A New Generation Marked by the Emergence of Women

A Sociological Phenomenon It is well known that the expression ‘‘New Wave’’ first referred to the generation born before the war that entered adulthood after the Liberation. As the last generation before the birth rate exploded, the New Wave would soon be dethroned by that of the ‘‘baby boomers’’ (Sirinelli 2003), but it is the first generation to be understood in its entirety as a sociological phenomenon. At the end of 1957, the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique (ifop) and L’Express—two media institutions that incarnate Americanstyle modernization in France—simultaneously launched an investigative survey to attempt to categorize the specific characteristics of the generation born between 1927 and 1939.∞ In the book published by Françoise Giroud in 1958 that provided commentary on a representative sample of fifteen thousand letters received by L’Express, Giroud notes a di√erence so evident between the men’s and women’s responses that she decides to present them separately:

Chapter One

Why isolate the women of the New Wave from the men of their age group? Not only is such a separation not artificial—it’s frankly necessary. In the first place, a careful study of the women’s responses we received shows lines of division completely di√erent from those we can trace among the men. Young women define themselves less in terms of their milieu, their social class and the problems particular to that class, than they do in terms of their personal situation inside society. Together, they constitute a class that has been called ‘‘the proletariat of man,’’ of the man-boss, and they feel themselves determined first and foremost by their condition as women, a condition that we will divide into four large categories: single women under twenty-five, single women over twentyfive, married women who work (or who once worked), and those who do not work. (201)

12

Giroud’s after-the-fact reflection suggests that neither the journalists at L’Express nor the analysts at the ifop had considered ahead of time the pertinence of di√erentiating responses by gender, a problem that makes the results of the survey undertaken by the ifop of no use whatsoever for what interests us here.≤ But it at least indicates a solid myopia concerning the importance of the gender variable revealed by the survey of the fifteen thousand letters received by L’Express. The letters published by Françoise Giroud in fact bear witness to the dominant conservatism of the young men when it comes to their vision of relations between men and women, regardless of their political opinions or social class. Most of the women, on the other hand, emphasize the good fortune they feel is theirs for living in an era of women’s emancipation. Even if a majority of these women do not question their primary responsibility as wife and mother, their testimony is accompanied by a strong claim to the right to have access to higher learning and worthwhile employment. They frequently speak of the unbearable contradictions of their situation, torn between the will to be good wives and mothers, the responsibilities that weigh them down, and their desire for emancipation. Because of this di√erence in perception, Giroud decides to present the letters from men separately, and di√erently, than those from women: the men are divided according to the social class of their author and, secondarily, according to his political leanings; for the women, on the other hand, marital status prevails, followed by salaried employment. We can, of

A New Generation Marked by Women

course, view this presentation as a result of Giroud’s presuppositions, but the content of the letters shows a distinct di√erence: most of the men speak at length about political and philosophical problems and have little to say about more concrete or personal problems, about which the women, on the other hand, express themselves at greater length, in particular because the di≈culties of everyday life (the housing crisis, cost of living, child care) weigh essentially on their shoulders, and because they have personal aspirations whose realization seems to them to be out of reach. These letters suggest that the new generation, for the most part, internalizes the role assigned to women to be that of maternity and the private sphere, but in a very di√erent way according to gender: upper-class men express their attachment to that gender division of roles with a tranquil egoism; men from the lower classes aspire to it as the inaccessible ideal of having a salary large enough to be able to care for their wife and children. Women, on the other hand, regardless of their social origins and unlike the preceding generation of women, want access, like men, to a good job. But they acknowledge that this desire is nearly incompatible with their wish to raise their children, as well as with their inability to control the spacing of children’s births, an anxiety that can be read between the lines of the letters from married women (in the France of the 1950s and 1960s, the state politics of increasing the birth rate meant the allocation of a unique salary and the outlawing of contraception and abortion).≥ Despite women’s desire to marry, marriage is in fact lived by them as a radical loss of liberty, or of the possibility of an individual destiny. Not a single man, on the other hand, lives marriage in that way. The family is described by many men as a refuge against professional, social, or political frustrations, in a period perceived as particularly calamitous (the war in Algeria, negligence on the part of politicians, di≈cult living conditions). On the subject of men, Françoise Giroud remarks that ‘‘in general, the fear is expressed by the whole New Wave generation that women would become more masculine because they are working and becoming interested in men’s professions, that they would cease to be ‘real women’ ’’ (322). This statement, of course, confirms the fact that this generation was confronted with the necessity of redefining gender relations, a process that would be far from painless.∂

13

Chapter One

The Emergence of Women in Mass Culture

14

What Françoise Giroud called the New Wave brought together the emergence of a new generation and the era of the mass media. Nothing shows this more clearly than the success of the 1954 paperback novel Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan, then eighteen years old, and the ‘‘B.B. phenomenon’’ that resulted in the wake of the 1956 release of Et Dieu créa la femme. Several years later, the triumph of the 45 rpm recordings of ‘‘yéyé’’ songs made female idols out of young singers like Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy, the immortal voice behind ‘‘Tous les garçons et les filles de mon age.’’ Film, the popular press, paperback books, records, and television were all part of manufacturing the New Wave and were carried along by it, along with female figures whose number and importance are unprecedented. These figures actualize a demand for liberty that scandalized the earlier generation, because it questioned the double standard of the bourgeois morality that imposes on ‘‘well-brought-up’’ girls the qualities of reserve, docility, and virginity until marriage while at the same time their future husbands are free to ‘‘sow their wild oats’’ before marrying. Literature of the 1950s is also marked by the scandalous arrival of novels written by young women that recount with an unprecedented freedom the love a√airs and sexual adventures of their young heroines: Françoise Mallet-Joris, in Les Remparts de Béguines (1951), recounts the sexual initiation of a very young girl to homosexuality; Françoise Sagan, in Bonjour tristesse (1954), coldly narrates the murderous jealousy of a young girl toward her father’s mistress; Christiane Rochefort, in Le Repos du guerrier (1958), associates the discovery of physical pleasure with a humiliating sexual dependence that is daringly acknowledged by the heroine. These three novels of formation of the feminine describe in a lucid and often raw manner the contradictions of sexual and amorous emancipation for ‘‘modern’’ young women who are nevertheless strongly marked by ancestral mechanisms of domination. They also make clear, through heroines completely free of any feeling of guilt, the unbridgeable divide that separates the generations. This new generation created scandal, and it would be stigmatized in particular by a director from the earlier generation, Marcel Carné, in his film Les Tricheurs—in which a young woman, Mic, played by Pascale Petit, expresses the ‘‘reasonless revolt’’ of the new generation. Based on a screenplay

A New Generation Marked by Women

by Jacques Sigurd, the film came in fifth in box o≈ce receipts for the 1958– 59 season, with five million spectators, and it won the Grand Prix du cinéma for 1958 before being named ‘‘the best French film of the year’’ by a referendum organized by Cinémonde and Le Figaro.∑ In October 1958, L’Express devoted a special issue to the film, as well as to the social problems it excited. Centered, according to its director, on the inability of young people to commit themselves emotionally, the film is built around the narrative flashback of a young man (Jacques Charrier) after the death of the young woman he loved. But it gives the viewer a privileged access to the point of view of the young woman, whose first name, Mic, sounds very masculine, and whose malaise evokes the di≈culties faced by young women of the new generation in constructing their identity outside of the traditional norms of femininity. Kristin Ross (1995, 54–55) quotes the character’s remark that she ‘‘wouldn’t mind dying like [James] Dean: young, and at great speed,’’ thus identifying, despite the gender di√erence, with ‘‘the mutinous but self-reliant teenager’’ that Dean incarnated. Mic decides to acquire, by any means possible, ‘‘an extraordinary car,’’ a white Jaguar. ‘‘When I was your age,’’ her brother remarks, ‘‘girls were interested in dresses.’’ ‘‘Not since the two wars,’’ Mic retorts. The film ends with her suicide, which is whitewashed as a car accident. For Edward Turk, ‘‘Les Tricheurs’s success was in some measure responsible for the ease with which ninety-seven novice directors managed to make their feature débuts between 1958 and 1962. Like the most popular New Wave productions, Les Tricheurs’s concern was youth. Its treatment of sex was explicit’’ (1989, 401). A little further on, Turk adds that the movie ‘‘steadily stigmatizes hedonism and exalts the wholesomeness associated with hard labor and monogamy, as epitomized by Roger [Roland Lesa√re, Mic’s mechanic brother].’’ The problem with the film, for Turk, is that ‘‘Carné’s attitude toward his characters is essentially one of prurience and guilt-ridden voyeurism.’’ Despite the fact that ‘‘the film-maker is unable to break with the commonplace notion that love and sexuality best entail definitive pairing and exclusivity,’’ it is nevertheless worth noticing that the strongest incarnation of youthful anxiety in the film is that of a young woman. Carné and Sigurd seem to register the strong and active presence of girls in the new generation. It goes without saying that the construction of the female character is not without a certain ambivalence: the girl’s unhappiness, the film seems to say, derives from her desire to imitate the most cynical male behavior, which conflicts with her spontaneous desire to love and to be loved. But if cynicism

15

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is in fact embodied by a young man (Laurent Terzie√), the fear of expressing one’s feelings paralyzes the two main characters (Jacques Charrier and Pascale Petit) to the same extent. And yet, it is the young girl who pushes her disquiet to a tragic end.

The Male Hero of the New Wave

16

But in New Wave cinema, the tragic dimension of the character—the element that elicits empathy on the part of the spectator—is systematically displaced onto the male protagonist, the director’s (auteur’s) alter ego, even when it is a woman who dies, as in Le Petit soldat or Tirez sur le pianiste. The way that Godard uses Jean Seberg in A bout de souΔe, for example, is emblematic of these contradictions. The young American actress had just become famous for her role in Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse (1958), based on Sagan’s novel. She is both the heroine and the narrator of Preminger’s film, in which she is associated with a white American convertible, the emblem of her happy complicity with her father. Godard managed to hire Seberg for his first full-length film (thanks to help from Chabrol and Truffaut), but in this film the actress lost the central role she had in Bonjour tristesse and became instead the object of an amorous fixation of the hero, played by Belmondo. We might say that Godard’s film puts the female character imagined by Sagan back in the traditional place allotted to women in Western culture: not the subject of the history and the narrative, but the object of the male subject’s love and/or hatred. The signification of the ‘‘borrowing’’ of the young actress from Preminger is obviously overdetermined, since it also has to do with Godard’s relationship to American cinema. But in the French cultural context, this rea≈rmation of male domination by way of fiction is not neutral; by giving the role of Patricia to Jean Seberg, Godard expresses not only the erotic impact that American actresses had on the young Cahiers du cinéma critics (de Baecque 1998), and more generally on young men of his generation, but also a fascination and hostility for the young independent women that Françoise Sagan had brought to life so successfully in 1954. It is not just the emblem of the white American convertible that became the object of a masculine reappropriation. Ross (1995) maintains that the movement’s exhilaration, which seized both the (male) characters and the camera in New Wave cinema, is expressed above all through the experience

A New Generation Marked by Women

of driving in a car as a suspended time in which past and future are joined. In the 1950s and 1960s, mobility was an economic imperative and the car permitted the individual’s availability that is the basis for free-market ideology. The car is thus the metaphorical ‘‘vehicle’’ for this new subjectivity. But the popular press was busy showing that the car is ‘‘man’s friend,’’ while ‘‘women’s friends,’’ on the other hand, were household appliances. In Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, written by Roger Nimier (who was killed at the wheel of his own car shortly after the release of the film), the American convertible is an essential element in the seduction of Maurice Ronet—as well as the source of all his troubles. The opening sequence of A bout de souΔe, in which Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) drives across France in a stolen American convertible, dramatizes the ‘‘only car on the road’’ feeling of ubiquity and speed as the mark of an independent spirit that manifests itself, among other ways, in Poiccard’s disdain for ‘‘ugly’’ female hitchhikers. The hero steals this kind of car twice in the film, and he associates it mentally or concretely with his ability to seduce Patricia, the American (Seberg). As Ross states: ‘‘In the opening sequences of Jacques Demy’s 1960 film Lola, the camera hugs the luxurious movement of the massive white American convertible—referred to by all the characters who see it as a ‘voiture de rêve,’ driven by a kind of white knight’’ (1995, 30). Cinema produces a masculine myth out of the aura surrounding the (American) car, at the same time that the automobile becomes everyday in its popular French version, with a good family-man father at the wheel. Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme (1966) helped manage to popularize the viril eroticism of the sports car (a Ford Mustang). In this way New Wave cinema relayed Hollywood cinema in generating a fascination for the American way of life among French youth—but in a strongly gendered way. In fact, when a woman drives a convertible in a New Wave film, the car breaks down (Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants). It is well known that in reality Françoise Sagan was one of the most famous promoters of American convertibles, until she became, like Nimier, the victim of a very serious accident in which she alone survived. As for Françoise Giroud, she was extremely conscious of the symbolic importance of her American convertible as a way of seducing the ‘‘great men’’ she frequented (1990, 195).

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Chapter One

Laying Claim to Distinction in the Face of Feminized Mass Culture

18

New Wave cinema is not simply one expression—among many—of the state of relations between men and women in the new generation. It is also a reaction of young, bourgeois men worried about acceding to the status of the artist and to the privileges traditionally attached to that status, in the face of the destabilizing emergence of the women of their generation into the realm of cultural production. To this view must be added the recurrent fear that has inhabited French culture since the middle of the nineteenth century: namely, the fear of confusion between mass culture and elite culture. As Andreas Huyssen (1986) has shown, beginning with the new a≈rmation of mass culture in the 1850s, the ‘‘ontological’’ dichotomy between man/creation and woman/reproduction is mirrored by a sociocultural opposition between (middle-class) women as consumers of mass culture, and men (of the cultivated, upper classes) as producers of elite culture. Flaubert initiates this dichotomy when he chooses as the heroine of Madame Bovary a petit-bourgeois provincial woman whom he depicts as completely deranged by the cheap romantic novels she read compulsively as a young girl. This novel inaugurates the new posture that Bourdieu (1992) called ‘‘the autonomy of art,’’ which protests against the commercial relations set up by mass culture, as much for the producers as for the consumers. From that moment on, the French literary and artistic field is built around a dichotomy between elite culture and mass culture with a strongly gendered overlay. In the new phase of the development of mass media culture that is the 1950s in France, Françoise Sagan, with her highly fluid writing associated with a wide tonal liberty, embodied a new risk of confusion between mass culture and elite culture. As Kristin Ross remarks: The work of producing the domestic or ‘‘intimacy’’ myth of the car was taken up by women writing in a realist vein for whom the print media—novels, magazines—were of course more accessible than the medium of film. . . . And if [Sagan] is better known now for a mythology of danger and speed (derived largely from her own near-fatal car accident in April 1954, as much as, if not more than, from the spectacular conclusion to her first best-seller), her writing, along with that of less well-known but heavily marketed young female ‘‘pulp’’ novelists, also helped perform the slow integration of driving into the

A New Generation Marked by Women

web of everyday, lived emotional relations, particularly those of the couple. (1995, 55–56)

Ross registers this problematic of the early 1960s in the books written by young women novelists like Christiane Rochefort (Les Stances à Sophie, 1963) and Françoise Mallet-Joris (Les Signes et les prodiges, 1966), in the company of several significant older sisters who also treated the theme of modernity by putting female heroines in the position of subject: Elsa Triolet (Roses à crédit, 1959) and Simone de Beauvoir (Les Belles images, 1965), whose novels are built around how men and women di√er in their relation to the society of consumption. But the class variable is every bit as important as the gender variable: Martine, the heroine of Roses à crédit, born to an impoverished rural woman, will ingest the society of consumption like a drug, sacrificing to it everything else, especially her relationship with her husband whom she excludes little by little from her life in order to be free to devote herself to ‘‘things.’’ Elsa Triolet recounts the story of a madness, and, following in Flaubert’s footsteps, she does not allow her character any consciousness of her situation. Martine’s husband Daniel, on the other hand, who is also from the countryside, but a more prosperous one, will succeed thanks to his investment in higher learning and not in things. During this time, Martine, like Emma Bovary, will be lost because of accumulated debts, and her husband’s desire for a divorce throws her into madness. Her job as a manicurist places her squarely in the business of embellishing the female body—the business that symbolizes women’s alienation within the society of consumption. But the end that Triolet reserves for Martine is even crueler than the one Flaubert gave to Emma—at the end of her tether, she allows herself to die, devoured by rats, in the sordid hut where she had spent her childhood. Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles images has as its protagonist a bourgeois woman who becomes conscious of the alienating conventions of her social set. She too embodies the society of consumption since her job consists in inventing advertising imagery. She herself is as pretty as a picture, a happy and docile young mother of two little girls, adored by her husband as she is by her relatively interchangeable lover. In alternating between the first and third persons as a way of transmitting the protagonist’s moods, the novel recounts her progressive rebellion against the conventions of her surroundings—against the styles that, with the help of money, have replaced values. It is a di≈cult rebellion that includes depression and anorexia, but it

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20

is also one that proclaims the right to di√erence and su√ering in a world anesthetized and sanitized by advertising. Ultimately, the revolt also targets conjugal comfort. Georges Perec, on the other hand, whose critical gaze on the society of consumption took the form of his 1965 Les Choses, introduces no gender di√erentiation whatsoever in the forms of alienation lived by the couple who incarnate modernity in his novel. This couple too has totally replaced values with the desire for objects and comfort, but Perec uses an undi√erentiated ‘‘they,’’ from the beginning to the end of his novel, to describe the young couple as well as the objects into which they have projected their identity. It is evident that the theme of an alienating society of consumption is a commonplace of the literature of the era. If the women novelists introduce a di√erence in the way men and women are alienated, that di√erence is modulated by the class background of the character. Elsa Triolet makes a poor, rural girl incarnate the most extreme form of alienation, even madness, while Simone de Beauvoir allows the daughter of the Parisian bourgeoisie to become conscious of her alienation. In a similar way, the heroine of Bonjour tristesse ultimately becomes aware of the emptiness caused by her exclusive taste for the most materialistic of values. In New Wave films, when women are not the new avatar of the eternal feminine—fascinating and fatal for the hero—they frequently embody the alienation of mass culture. In this case, they are, most often, of lower-class origins (Les Bonnes Femmes; Adieu Philippine), but not always: the bourgeois woman in Une femme mariée (1964), or the girl from a good family in Vie privée (1962) are every bit as alienated. With a mixture of contempt and compassion, the films by young directors explore the new commonplace of elite culture that allows a derisive look at women’s emancipation. Associated with the society of consumption, women symbolize its alienating effects by transforming themselves into merchandise for the best price and thus bearing little in common with sexually and socially emancipated media figures like Sagan or Bardot. The fear of being absorbed by a feminized mass culture was expressed by François Tru√aut in an interview with Louis Marcorelles in France-Observateur (October 19, 1961): The linear aspect of these [New Wave] films was found to coincide with a literary genre that greatly annoys high-minded critics and the educated public as well, a genre that we could call ‘‘Saganism’’: sports car, bottle of scotch,

A New Generation Marked by Women

short-lived loves, etc. The intentional lightness of these films looks like frivolity—sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. Where it becomes confusing is that the qualities of the new cinema: grace, lightness, reserve, elegance, rapidity, lead in the same direction as its faults: frivolity, lack of awareness, naïveté.

With this rather tortured declaration, Tru√aut reveals the claim to distinction being made by the films of the young men of the New Wave: he warns ‘‘high-minded critics and the educated public’’ (that is, the cultivated elite) against the risk of ‘‘confusing’’ what they are doing with a ‘‘frivolous’’ feminine literature that apparently looks a lot like it. Tru√aut doesn’t make an argument: instead, he a≈rms their natural di√erence, despite similar appearances, as if the refusal on the part of young filmmakers of certain popular movie conventions were enough to establish the di√erence from a kind of literature that, for its part, was never accompanied by a ringing manifesto. It is not di≈cult to detect in such a declaration a desire for distinction (Bourdieu, 1979) in relation to the cultural production of women, obviously lacking in value.

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Chapter Two

Cinephilia in the 1950s

Contradictions between Democratization and Legitimation The cultural context of postwar France, marked by the development of ciné-clubs, created conditions favorable both to state intervention in film production and to the emergence of a new cinema. The guiding light for the new postwar cultural attitude was André Bazin, whose feelings for the popular dimension of cinema were awakened through his adherence to the social current of Catholicism (the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier), which would become, in the context of the Liberation, a privileged instrument for cultural democratization (Andrew 1983, ch. 4).∞ Bazin participated actively in popular culture associations, side by side with communist militants. But the Cold War would bring a halt to such fruitful exchanges between intellectuals hailing from di√erent intellectual camps and the popular milieux. The early 1950s, the birth of Cahiers du cinéma and of Positif, and the public development of the ciné-clubs—increasingly associated with the cultured urban classes—all correspond to a period when the tradi-

Cinephilia in the 1950s

tional fractures between social classes came to be rea≈rmed, in the wake of the broken promises of the Liberation. In Bazin’s work more than in that of any other critic or theorist of the era we can see a contradiction between the will to recognize film as popular culture and the desire to legitimate it in its entirety as an element of ‘‘cultivated’’ culture, by purifying it as much as possible of its social—as well as of its feminine, or a√ective—dimensions. In his texts we find both the acknowledgment of film’s capacity to explore social relations and an idealist, abstract perspective on films, with the latter granted greater value than the former. After a profound analysis of the social and psychological value of a film by Carné, for example, Bazin writes: ‘‘Despite its structure and its realist appearance, Le Jour se lève is not in the least a ‘psychological,’ or even a ‘social’ drama. As with tragedy, the true necessity of this story and its characters is purely metaphysical. . . . It is a tragedy of purity and solitude’’ (1983 [1948], 68). When he is interested in the social problematic of a work, Los Olvidados, for example, he dissociates it from its artistic quality, a≈rming an unequivocal hierarchy: ‘‘The artist aims for a distant truth that transcends morality and sociology: a metaphysical reality, the cruelty of the human condition’’ (1961 [1951], 22). The dichotomy between a genuine interest in the way that cinema speaks about ‘‘the here and now,’’ and a stronger attraction for that which transcends the here and now, reflects both the idealist and elitist dimension of the cinephilic gaze. In order for film to be the cult object it deserves to be in the act of contemplating its beauty, it must be stripped of the socio-historical context of its production. In this way Bazin places himself in the lineage of Malraux, whom he explicitly praises in his text on Chaplin: ‘‘André Malraux tells the story of how one night somewhere in Arabia, on a white wall with cats asleep atop it, he saw the most marvelous of Chaplin’s films: an unusual snake made up of morsels picked up here and there from a pile of old films bought at a reduced price. The myth appeared in its pure state’’ (1961, 3: 91).≤ The removal of context is here multiplied by the fact that the images are watched in a place that is radically foreign to the viewer, and in a fragmented form that destroys the context created by the film itself. Through Malraux, Bazin seems to tell us that the purity of artistic emotion is inversely proportional to the perception of the social, cultural, and narrative context of the film. And the notion of myth, so important to Bazin, is

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employed with an abstract and universalizing connotation, as opposed to the way it would be used by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957). Bazin’s cinephilia borrows another cultural dominant: art does not exist without great geniuses to incarnate it. And the genius of a ‘‘creator’’ resides in his style, which is to say in the most abstract quality of his work. As Michelle Coquillat (1982) has shown in the case of literature, in the French cultural tradition creation is considered a male prerogative in which the writer experiences himself as a demiurge at the origin of his work, absolutely autonomous from the world and from others. Conscious of the contradictions that this ideology generates in the field of cinema, Bazin tries to propose a restrictive definition that would take into account cinema’s specificities: ‘‘Style is a quality found more rarely in cinema than in the other arts since, as the most intimate expression of the personality of its creator (after handwriting), technical complications and the many requisite collaborations get between the director and his work’’ (1998, 163). By taking a detour through the great classical authors, cinephilia is able to justify its pantheon; here is Bazin, writing about Lamplight, a film that was poorly greeted when it came out: It is certainly justifiable to have reservations about masterpieces, to criticize Racine for Théramène’s story, or Molière for his endings, or Corneille the awkwardness of his relation to the rules. And I am not at all accusing these critics of being false or unoriginal, but I think that when one is dealing with a certain level of quality in artistic creation, and in any case, when confronted with genius, the opposite set of assumptions is more productive. What I mean is that instead of imagining how to purify a work of its supposed shortcomings, it is better to be prejudiced in favor of them, and treat them as qualities whose secrets have not yet been divulged. It’s an absurd critical attitude, I admit, if one doubts one’s object, and it presupposes a kind of wager! (1961, 3, 121)

The explicit denial Bazin attempts to mask with this overly refined declaration registers a contradiction at the heart of his thought—a contradiction between a critical and didactic posture that tries to grasp everything within cinema that might constitute the basis for a more democratic approach to culture, and his need as an intellectual steeped in academic tradition—even a renovated tradition—to constitute for himself a good object in the field of art, in the most traditional sense of the term. Abstraction as the measure of a sublimated relation to art works, the

Cinephilia in the 1950s

construction of a pantheon as proof of cinema’s artistic legitimacy, the cult of works stripped of their socio-historical contingencies—these are the traits that make cinephilia an individualistic, elitist practice—and a masculine one as well. It is this, the second of Bazin’s options, that will prevail little by little in the editorial politics of the early issues of Cahiers du cinéma, despite the ambivalence of Bazin himself, but in a relative continuity, nevertheless, with most of his writing. Even the reservations he has about the ‘‘Hitchcock-Hawksian’’ politics of the journal’s young Turks operate within the same system of thinking. If the young Turks, according to Bazin, have shown ‘‘the formal intelligence of the mise-en-scène that is lurking behind the idiocy of the screenplays Hawks had to choose from, it should nevertheless not make us shut our eyes to the idiocy in question’’ (1995, 18). All the while criticizing his young colleagues’ formalism, Bazin does not dispute the idea used to justify paying scant attention to what the films are talking about—namely, what is referred to as ‘‘the idiocy of the screenplays.’’ This claim is not just a way for cinephiles to distinguish themselves from the vulgate with which they then shared, whether they liked it or not, the same object of cultural consumption. This scarcely flattering judgment can be analyzed as a denial, the camouflage for a real but disavowed interest in what Hawks’s films were actually talking about, that ‘‘sublimated homosexuality’’ of the young men of Cahiers du cinéma later analyzed by Serge Daney (1983 [1971], 29), whose own homosexuality allowed him to see what remained invisible to the rest of the men in the group: the fact that Hawks’s screenplays, which he chose more or less freely, and whose writing he controlled, repeatedly built monuments to the glory of the most archaic virile values. A formalist attitude meant one could ignore all of this while delighting in it. If Bazin is uneasy about having to shut his eyes to Hawks’s screenplays, he considerably reduces the stakes of this intentional blindness by reductively calling it ‘‘idiocy.’’ The young Turks of the Cahiers would soon bring an end to the scruples of the journal’s founder. Generational di√erence, in this troubled time, undoubtedly played a major role: the young people energetically refused to feel concerned by the social and political debates that still commanded the passionate interest of their elders. They supported each other in the refusal of the father, in the will to invent a culture of their own and escape as much as possible from the constraints and restrictions that still, after the war, weighed heavily. Hence, a provocative ‘‘radicalization’’ of the journal’s editorial politics announced by François Tru√aut in the companion weekly

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Arts: ‘‘I don’t believe in good or bad films, I believe in good or bad directors. . . . A director has a style that can be found in every one of his films. . . . The di√erences from one film to another, a more ingenious screenplay, a better camera, no matter—these are not important, since these di√erences have everything to do with support from the outside, more or less money, more or less time spent filming. What’s essential is that a gifted and intelligent director remain gifted and intelligent no matter what film he’s making’’ (1983 [1957], 222). According to Olivier Thévenin: ‘‘The confrontation between a profession and young critics who possess a more and more influential tool, the press, bore fruit thanks to François Tru√aut, who reinvented a polemic between ancien and moderne just as the romantic writers of the nineteenth century had done before him’’ (2001, 292). ‘‘Auteur politics’’ is also a kind of parthenogenesis, a way of giving birth to oneself by inventing fathers as far away as possible from one’s ‘‘natural’’ fathers—namely, postwar French filmmakers who had su√ered the humiliating vicissitudes of history. By fixing their choice on Hitchcock or on Hawks, the young filmmakers of the Cahiers elevate to the status of artist the filmmakers who, for the French critics of the time, incarnated the Hollywood dream factory in all that it represented as the opposite of any exercise of individual talent or national genius (Barrot 1979; Hubert-Lacombe 1996; Marie 2005). Enthroning Hollywood filmmakers in the cinephilic pantheon could itself be a≈rmed as a pure creative gesture, and thus pave the way for the future films of the young New Wave directors. The contradiction between their admiration for films produced more or less on the assembly line and their laying claim to the individual, and even intimate, dimension of cinematic art, is only an apparent one: by choosing to elevate this or that Hollywood filmmaker to the dignity of an ‘‘auteur,’’ they make him emerge into, and henceforth exist in, the world of cinephilia, a world that has nothing to do with the world of ordinary filmgoing. Here is Truffaut again: ‘‘The film of tomorrow will look like the man who filmed it and the number of people in the audience will be proportional to the number of friends the filmmaker has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love’’ (222). Auteur politics tries to theorize what Serge Daney (1983 [1971], 31) called ‘‘the obsessional search for unity’’ and whose principal Eric Rohmer applied to Renoir: ‘‘If we could only save one film to give to future generations an idea of what cinematic art was in the twentieth century, I would choose Le Petit Théâtre, because all of Renoir is contained within it, and Renoir contains all of cinema’’ (1984 [1979], 211). Over and above the

Cinephilia in the 1950s

idealist fantasy of quintessence (that is, of an object that alone could incarnate the essence of an art), it is not worth remarking on the almost caricatural will to ‘‘distinction’’ in a declaration that chooses the least known and the least recognized (by ordinary cinephiles) of Renoir’s films to incarnate not only the quintessence of Renoir’s oeuvre, but that of all of twentieth-century cinema! As Rohmer states: ‘‘The cinema that concerns us in the Cahiers is perhaps cinema ‘in itself,’ and even, I concede, a state of mind’’ (1984 [1961], 80). This stated taste for abstraction is one reason that the journal’s fixation on American cinema was not accompanied by any sociocultural investigation into the meaning these films might hold for the society that produced and watched them, since this would assuredly disturb the reassuring vision of the unity and universality of artistic genius. A radical critique of ‘‘auteur politics’’ by the American John Hess, published in the first issue (1974) of the film journal Jumpcut, is worthy of attention. The cinephilic attitude is analyzed in this article as ‘‘a justification, masked in aesthetic terms, for a culturally conservative and politically reactionary attempt to keep cinema distanced from social reality at a moment when the forces born with the French Resistance, immediately after World War II, were precisely trying to situate all the arts inside life’’ (52). Hess locates a narrative schema in the cult films of the Cahiers du cinéma that would be repeated in the films made by the critics (and future filmmakers) of the journal: The narrative always has as its premise the situation of a totally isolated person. [The author cites as an example Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and Roberto Rosselini’s Europe 51.] As the story develops, we observe that the hero, at the mercy of exceptional, often violent circumstances, is brought to consciousness of the lowest, most humiliating aspects of his personality. It is only then that he discovers his relation with others, and finally with God, and that the viewer participates in the same discovery through the go-between. . . . This narrative movement from ‘‘moral solitude’’ to self-revelation and finally salvation, . . . can be found in all the films cherished by those who adhere to auteur politics. (52)

Hess establishes a direct relationship between ideological choice, the climate of the Cold War, and the intellectual legacy of the young critics of the Cahiers: the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier transmitted by Roger Leenhardt, Amédée Ayfre, and André Bazin, which leads them to ‘‘grant value to the spiritual dimension of life more than to participation in social

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life’’ (53). Their aesthetic principles derive from the following: the greatest realism so that images serve as ‘‘revelatory of the relation between the human being and the infinite’’; the choice of mise-en-scène conducive to ‘‘reveal, in the most direct way possible, ‘the soul through appearance.’ ’’ ‘‘Actors must, through their identification with their role, reveal their spiritual dimension.’’ For John Hess, the political and ideological chaos of postwar France, riven by political instability and the colonial wars, would lead ‘‘a number of French intellectuals to reject the idea of a socially committed art. . . . This refusal took the form of an apology for art for art’s sake, and a full-fledged return to conformist and bourgeois conceptions of art in general, like the a≈rmation that art is autonomous and outside of time’’ (53). From the perspective of what particularly interests us here—the gendered dimension of cinephilia—the determining influence of the Cahiers du cinéma on the formation of a cinematic culture in France is undoubtedly linked to a form of masculine sociability that is not limited to the upper classes. In this vein, Fabrice Montebello (1994), analyzing the cinephilic practices of young working-class cinephiles in Longwy during the 1950s, confirms that the band of boys was the privileged social form, or, in any case, a visible and recognized form of cinephilic practice in those days.≥ The Cahiers du cinéma functions as well as a band of boys who are not above plastering the walls of their o≈ce with photos of their favorite Hollywood actresses, to the point, as Antoine de Baecque (1991, 121–22) notes, speaking about Tru√aut, of serenely cultivating erotomania. Cinephilia, an amorous relation to filmed images, thus seems to be structured by a divide between a more or less conscious fascination for films that are actually addressed to a masculine public or constructed for a masculine gaze—the cinephilic preference for certain American genres (the thriller, the western) is explained as well by the gendered targeting of audiences by Hollywood, which has no equivalent in French cinema—and an intellectual e√ort that aimed to empty these films of any attachment they have to the world in order to make them into the sublimated objects of a cult.

Cinephilia, Masculinity, and Eroticism If we need to be convinced that film criticism, especially among its most modernist practitioners (the young generation of cinephiles), was in the 1950s an almost exclusively masculine activity, we need only read the nu-

Cinephilia in the 1950s

merous articles devoted to eroticism, love, and desire in Cahiers du cinéma and Positif. The articles, all written by men, posit as an unquestioned a priori that the cinephilic gaze is necessarily male, heterosexual, and directed toward icons, fetishes, and female sexual objects. Thus, Claude de Givray, founder of La Revue du cinéma, opens his article, ‘‘Nouveau traité du Bardot,’’ with these words: ‘‘I willingly share François Tru√aut’s profession of faith that he made in this journal: Let’s make Jean-Georges Auriol’s definition our own: ‘Cinema is the art of making pretty women do pretty things’ ’’ (1957, 42). This androcentrism dominates the ensemble of cinephilic texts. It anticipates and in part explains the androcentrism of New Wave cinema. The ‘‘I’’ of the cinephilic journals is the uncomplicated expression of a masculine subjectivity that considers itself universal. The Christmas 1953 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, for example, entitled ‘‘Woman and Cinema,’’ is a veritable anthology of male cinephilic attitudes. The famous playright Jacques Audiberti, a habitué of the Cahiers, composed a lyrical commentary on Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; on the subject of The Blue Angel, he describes ‘‘the devastating, inhuman, and taciturn female trap in which the unlucky man is lost’’ (7), and he adds that both Marlene and Garbo ‘‘are the light, the torch, the recompense, . . . the delicious calamity. But above all, [they are] a separate nation’’ (8). And on Vivian Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, he speaks of ‘‘the unbearable embrace of genital frenzy’’ (9). We are here solidly within the archaic fantasy —strongly resuscitated at the end of the nineteenth century (Maugue 1987) —of woman as the fascinating and threatening Other, the incarnation of a devouring Nature, always fatal to man. As for Alexandre Astruc, he maintains that ‘‘cinema invented the long shot to allow the crowd to watch women die,’’ all the while recalling that ‘‘those faces with pale lips are the intermediaries between the crowd and the dreams of the [male] creator’’ (15). The only article that breaks conclusively with this fantasmatic vision of women in cinema is humorously entitled ‘‘It’s Midnight, Dr. Kinsey.’’ The feminism and leftist commitment (‘‘of a Roger Vailland tendency’’ [de Baecque 1991, 215–20]) of its author, Pierre Kast, is well known. ‘‘Cinema is almost exclusively made by men. Woman, in cinema, is thus very precisely woman as she is seen by men. . . . In reality, cinema is a male game preserve for reasons that derive from the capital importance of the representation of female characters. In short, mystification. . . . Women, in the cinema, are not only women made by men, they are women made for men’’ (51).

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A few women (who did not usually write for the Cahiers, and for good reason) were also called upon for the ‘‘Woman and Cinema’’ issue. MarieClaire Solleville proposes a satirical portrait of the di√erent types of women present in the professional milieu: the actress, the script girl, the screenwriter, the walk-on, the hairdresser, the wardrobe woman, and finally, the female filmgoers. The humoristic tone of this sequence of little scenes seems to function as a defense mechanism against the dominated and scorned status of women in the milieu. Nicole Védrès, director of the wellknown documentary Paris 1900 (1946), invited by Bazin, responds negatively with great humor, suggesting that women are not terribly interested in male fantasies of ‘‘the Eternal Feminine.’’ The issue musters overwhelming ‘‘evidence’’ that women in cinema only exist as erotic go-betweens for the male critic/spectator. The idea that these images are inflected by relations of domination clearly never enters the minds of most of the authors. One month later, in the January 1954 issue of the Cahiers, Jacques DoniolValcroze, journal cofounder and editor-in-chief, wrote a justifiably famous article entitled ‘‘Déshabillage d’une petite-bougeoise sentimentale.’’ It begins from the observation (again, saturated with a completely unconscious androcentrism) that ‘‘the woman of this half-century is first and foremost a woman of the cinema and the cinema is first and foremost women’’ (3). He continues by adding, ‘‘Tell me who your favorite actress is, and I will tell you who you are,’’ in order to reproach French cinema ‘‘for mostly portraying women who don’t exist, [to be] full of invented women, without a trade, without a context, without origins’’ (4). In order to prove his point, he sets up a systematic analysis of the representations of women in postwar French cinema, beginning with a selection of seventy important films containing one or more heroines ‘‘worthy of the name,’’∂ based on the definition of woman o√ered by Audiberti: ‘‘Woman begins at eleven years of age and ends before the age when the hair from her pubis has migrated to her chin’’ (5). At the end of his investigation, he concludes: The average heroine in French cinema (of a certain level of quality) from 1945 to 1953, is a young woman of about twenty-five, bourgeois, living in the current moment, presented in a way that tries to be realist: in the film she serves a romantic function, and predominantly symbolizes the conflict in love between good and evil, . . . that is to say, a sentimental petite-bourgeoise. It’s the woman of women’s magazines and lonely-hearts columns, but she is not a

Cinephilia in the 1950s

subject, only an object. From Gigi and Caroline chérie onward, she has begun taking o√ her clothes, and has again become an amusing instrument for gentlemen. . . . We will call that eroticism, and this allows the making of pornography with the blessing of the censors and other relevant constituted bodies. Only one director, Becker, can say: my girls are my victories [with a ] series of portraits of women with a real psychological, social, and literary dimension—counterpoints to the tendency toward women-objects. . . . French cinema, if you don’t watch out, you will soon be nothing more than a horny old man leering at a half-dressed party girl. (12–14)

Even if it leaves out many of the ‘‘proto-feminist’’ figures that Noel Burch and I explored in La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français (1996), this criticism of the ‘‘wanderings’’ taken by French cinema after the war has the merit of clearly indicating the tendency of the ‘‘commercial’’ cinema of the era to reduce female characters to the point of being nothing more than the expression of the most primitive fantasies of male spectators. This ‘‘political’’ sensitivity to the subject of gender relations tended to disappear from the journal after the departure of Kast and Doniol-Valcroze. Instead, the fetishistic and voyeuristic dimension would prevail, as the December 1954 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, entitled ‘‘Love at the Movies,’’ clearly shows. Centered on an inventory called ‘‘Cinépsychopathia sexualis,’’ typical of the journal’s fetishism, the issue’s articles are written by men only. Audiberti, like most of the authors, tranquilly merges love and women: ‘‘Since there were women, and they spoke, not one has said what she was feeling at the moment of love. . . . Cinema turns on the obsessive interest men have in women. To force secrets to be revealed, to pursue, to investigate, to conquer, this is its nature’’ (1954, 17–18). Only Frédéric O’Brady,∑ in his article ‘‘Vous êtes volés . . . ,’’ seems conscious of the androcentrism underlying cinematic representations of love: The sexual frustration of the screenwriters is evident in the feminine mythology they created. It’s very probable that if women began to write screenplays, the classic situations would change. There would be less little lost girls in films, for example, girls who look toward their male protectors with a cleareyed, pure gaze, like Pauline in The Perils of Pauline knows how to do. They would make less visible and strenuous e√orts to seduce a little fellow. Infidelity would appear as an unimportant incident, like a good joke or a distraction. It’s the unutterable candor of male screenwriters that conceived of the

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vamp and the pitiful female in need of protection. If these two phenomena exist in modern life, it’s only because life imitates film, as a pre-fabricated product, just as the Martian signals that we now find everywhere always correspond to American drawings. There are no vamps in nature, and even the most casual look around us proves that the more fragile the little slip of a girl, the better she knows how to defend herself. (78–79)

32

Despite the ambivalence of its final remark, this article expresses a lonely voice in the crowd, a perspective isolated in terms of a hegemonically ‘‘macho’’ vision, a vision in turn supported by the dominant representations in the cinema. In a recent work on cinephilia, Antoine de Baecque devotes a chapter to ‘‘Cinephilic Erotomania, Infantile Malady of Dark Rooms (1944–1963),’’ whose ‘‘prophet and poet’’ he rightly views to be Audiberti. But de Baecque, no more than the critics he writes about, never takes into account the exclusively masculine and heterosexual nature of this cinephilia: ‘‘And woman, for many cinephiles, is the incarnation of their love for cinema’’ (2003, 263–264). Voyeurism and fetishism, which were granted a new lease on life in the Hollywood films of the 1950s with the reign of the pinup displayed in cinemascope and technicolor, are complacently discussed, including on the pages of serious journals, without the stakes of such a masculine relationship to cinema ever being analyzed by de Baecque. We can see at work the mechanisms analyzed by Laura Mulvey (1975): the identification between the male gaze behind the camera, the male character subject of the story and the male spectator in the audience, taking pleasure in the woman/object of desire, a fragmented and fetishized body. But the symbolic domination (Bourdieu 1998) and the exclusion of women— including female cinephiles—implied by this relation to cinema remain invisible. The erotomania shared by the two great cinephilic journals, the Cahiers and Positif—sublimated in the latter as a kind of Surrealist legacy— is analyzed by de Baecque as an endearing penchant of young men using the cinema for their sexual initiation (despite the fact that there were among them men ‘‘of a respectable age’’ like Audiberti). For de Baecque, it was the Marilyn Monroe cult of the 1950s, shared by Positif, that illustrates the quintessence of that ‘‘regulated and codified eroticism, sulphurous and fetishized’’ (2003, 283) practiced by the critics at the Cahiers. On the other hand, he sees in Bergman’s Monika and the icon that she in turn became for the young cinephilic critics, the negation of the

Cinephilia in the 1950s

erotic fetishism of the early issues of the Cahiers and the arrival on the cinematic scene of the modern woman ‘‘liberated from the fetishism of the star’’: ‘‘Monika incarnates the desire to make movies combined with that of being the figuration of a di√erent, modern woman’’ (286). Thanks to Harriet Anderson, who ‘‘changes the cinephilic gaze on women, . . . this image of the female body, once seen and understood, will become one of the matrices of the New Wave: desire, freedom, nature, provocation, youth’’ (287–288)—something that suggests that New Wave cinema would be liberated from all male fetishism. De Baecque, marching in lockstep with Tru√aut and Godard, views Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme as the first arrival in French cinema of the free, natural, modern woman. Allowing himself a moment of lyric commentary about ‘‘the little girls of the New Wave,’’ de Baecque celebrates ‘‘one of the rare contemporary movements in French cinema’’ (290). But he uses an argument—no doubt unconsciously —that reveals instead all of the archaic qualities of the New Wave: ‘‘The woman who appears here is ungraspable: through her complexity, her opacity even, she brings modernity to the films of the New Wave’’ (291– 92). To represent the woman as an ‘‘ungraspable,’’ ‘‘opaque’’ Other is one of the oldest ways of denying her the status of full-fledged subjectivity. In addition, de Baecque does not mention the fact that the Cahiers lost interest in Bardot after she became a popular star in movies like La Vérité or En cas de malheur, which were directed, respectively, by Clouzot and AutantLara—two revered filmmakers of the ‘‘French quality’’ school. She would only be worthy of renewed attention when Malle, and then Godard, took possession of her image, with all of the ambivalence that will be discussed in chapter 10. I have spoken at length about de Baecque’s recent work in order to indicate the persistence of a characteristic blindness in French cinephilia (and, in particular, in the dominant strain of the Cahiers du cinéma) that prevents any evaluation of the gendered stakes of a cultural practice largely tributary to male fetishism and voyeurism. The fact that cinephilia in France was for some time mostly shared by both men and women makes the unquestioned model of this cultural practice even more problematic. It testifies to a mechanism of symbolic domination all the more e≈cacious in that it is, for the most part, internalized by the dominated (Bourdieu 1998).

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Auteur Cinema: An Affair of State

The Establishment of a Cinema at Two Speeds The emergence of New Wave cinema took place in the context of a relationship between the state and culture that was transformed, little by little, from a negative one (censorship) to a positive one (aid). Cultural intervention on the part of the state makes the founding myth of the New Wave, the liberty of the creator, appear somewhat relative. In fact, the protectionist relations between the state and the profession that were put into place in 1948 (Léglise 1977; Creton 2004) would lend a growing role to the state as patron of the arts with the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1959 (Ory 1989). French cinema at the end of the 1950s experienced the most important transformation of its recent history with the establishment of aid based on quality, and, soon after, aid derived from an advance on ticket receipts. It is this aid that created the institutional and economic bases of ‘‘auteur cinema.’’ In order to eliminate the ‘‘perverse e√ects’’ of the first law for public aid to the cinema put into e√ect in 1948,∞ a new law in 1953 made

Auteur Cinema

‘‘automatic aid’’ definitive rather than provisional. It also introduced a ‘‘quality subsidy,’’ which would be granted after completion to films considered particularly original or di≈cult.≤ This new law wasn’t fully operational until 1956, and Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge was one of the first films to benefit from it. An interview with Jacques Flaud, the general director of the Centre National du Cinéma (cnc) (Cahiers du cinéma, n. 71, May 1957), shows that the state was very conscious of the inconveniences caused by the system of automatic aid, which became all the more apparent with the establishment of aid for exportation.≥ From this moment on, the state envisioned a full-fledged reform of the system to encourage producers to take artistic risks and to create conditions favorable for the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers. After all, the system of qualitative aid had proven beneficial in the case of the short feature.∂ But the reforms had to wait for the arrival into power of General de Gaulle. The cnc changed guardians, moving from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to the newly formed Ministry of Cultural A√airs created by and for André Malraux, whose politics brought together three traditions established since the Revolution: state intervention of a monarchical type, both preserving patrimony and defending modernity; a liberal politics defending artistic freedom; and a politics of cultural action directed at the larger public (Ory 1989, 52–55). It was in this spirit that the system for dispensing aid to quality was perfected in 1959 by the creation of an advance against receipts, distributed before the film was made, upon presentation of the screenplay to an ad hoc commission (Bonnel 1978; Farchy 1992; Creton 1994, 2004). This system, which became increasingly complex as it developed over time, continues to govern state intervention in film production. The establishment of ‘‘qualitative’’ aid can be analyzed as a kind of grafting onto cinema of the logic of cultural legitimation derived from the most prestigious sectors of artistic creation in France, like literature and painting, the synthesis of which is wonderfully incarnated by Malraux and his Musée imaginaire. We are in the presence of a modification of the hierarchy of the arts at the heart of French society. It was not that cinema in its entirety had acceded to the legitimacy of the traditional arts, but that the value of the auteur was increasing at the expense of that of film genre or star, in the larger context of the legitimation of ‘‘minor arts’’ like the mystery novel, the poetic song, photography, and graphic arts. This transformation took place using two systems of leverage: reviewers and

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novice filmmakers. On the one hand, ciné-clubs and cinephilic journals were aided by the 1955 establishment of the label ‘‘art and essay’’ for theaters; on the other hand the quality aid for short features functioned like a seedbed for new directors (Ory 1989). If the ‘‘automatic’’ aid instigated by the law of 1948 actually managed to reconstruct the national cinema in the face of external (Hollywood) imperialism, ‘‘quality’’ aid, beginning in 1956, introduced into the interior of national production an instrument of selection whose criteria emanated from a vision of art belonging to the cultivated elite, in a medium that up to that point had belonged to mass culture. This selective aid, combined with the development of television and mass leisure activities, would accelerate the mutation of French cinema and turn it in the direction of a media ‘‘at two speeds,’’ a ‘‘commercial’’ cinema, on the one hand, and an ‘‘auteur’’ cinema on the other. In the preceding era, cinematic production functioned in its entirety with its creators installed collectively, in a quite artisanal fashion, within a capitalist mode of production regulated by the power of the French state. The new filmmakers would, on the contrary, claim an individual posture and an elite culture, whose model was the ‘‘great literature’’ of the nineteenth century: witness Tru√aut’s or Astruc’s admiration for Balzac. Through the institution of the advance against ticket receipts, the state would legitimate this new procedure—at the very moment when the accelerated modernization of France was giving rise to a new social phenomenon, cultivated young urban professionals, who would become the ‘‘natural’’ audience for the new films, an audience subsidized in its turn by the creation of art theaters. To this economic change we must add an equally important legal one as well: the law of March 11, 1957. The result of a long legal battle undertaken by Marcel L’Herbier in particular, beginning in the 1920s, this law attributes the status of ‘‘author’’ to the filmmaker (in a list of coauthors: ‘‘screenwriter, adapter, dialogue writer, musician, author of the original work’’). Only the director possesses, along with the producer, the moral right to distribution. The law ‘‘marked a definitive victory of the creative end over the financial end’’ (Jeancolas, Meusy, and Pinel 1996, 147). It made a distinction between the intellectual and moral rights belonging to authors, on the one hand, and the rights to commercial exploitation belonging to producers, on the other, but according to a contract in which the producer ‘‘must anticipate a percentage of the receipts from sale and distribution for

Auteur Cinema

the author.’’ The law went into e√ect in March 1958. But opposition on the part of producers and theater managers prevented any direct access for directors to their rights at the source, that is, in the theaters, which would encourage directors to become their own producers—the examples of Tru√aut, with the Films du Carrosse, and Rohmer with the Films du Losange, are the best known—a supplementary revolution in film financing and the relation of directors to their work. We can indeed call this a decisive rupture at the economic and institutional level.

A New Generation Breaking All the Rules About 150 filmmakers made a commercially distributed first feature between 1957 and 1962 (an average of thirty new directors a year, compared to an average of fifteen per year in preceding years). Among them, there is not a single woman—Agnès Varda directed her first feature-length film, La Pointe courte, in 1954—which confirms the noncoincidence, if not the contradiction, between modernization, creative renewal, and the emergence of women during this period, at least in film. A number of issues—the fact that many of the young directors belonged to the grande bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie; their distrust of political commitment, which they saw as incompatible with creative liberty; their ideological proximity to the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and with the right-wing literary figures known as the ‘‘hussards’’ (Roger Nimier, Jacques Laurent, Antoine Blondin);∑ and their fascination with American cinema and their refusal to take part in French ideological debates—all add up to create the breeding ground for and the manifestation of the young directors’ deep involvement in the phase of postwar modernization that aimed to bury the fiercely conflictual society that emerged with the Liberation. Contemporary critics of the New Wave (Siclier 1962) analyzed its emergence as the logical consequence of several phenomena: the development, beginning in the early 1950s under the impetus of state aid, of a veritable school of short-length feature filmmaking; the establishment, through the work of the ciné-clubs and cinephilic journals, of an intellectual climate favorable to the recognition of the artistic status of cinematic creation, equal to literature and the other arts; and the exhaustion of the economic formula generated by the 1948 law, which had given rise to a cost inflation and negative e√ects on film quality, reduced to the standard considered adequate for exportation.

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It is in this context that the group of young critics at the Cahiers devised a strategy—and they did so quite consciously, if we are to believe André Labarthe. The strategy had to do with imposing the notion of the ‘‘auteur’’ into a domain that had up until then been exclusively regulated by the imperatives of industry. The critics would not abolish the industrial dimension, but they would create a new modus vivendi in between art and industry: Two stages were necessary: first, to prove the soundness of the theoretical views (concerning auteur cinema) through the quality of the works, and then, to find a refuge in the usual production system, but with guarantees of freedom . . . Potential directors became their own producers . . . and their artistic and commercial success decided the fate of the new cinema. . . . The bet was won, and naturally, producers became interested in new-comers who had found a way to sell seats at the box o≈ce without giving up their artistic vocation . . . Auteur cinema had proven itself, and was from that point on central to the system which in turn found itself, for that very reason, pro38

foundly altered. Two phrases sum up the revolution: reduced budget, increased creative liberty. (Labarthe 1961, 14–15)

Antoine de Baecque (1996) describes in detail Tru√aut’s strategy as a producer. Thanks to the commercial success of Les 400 coups, which was produced by his own company, Les Films du Carrosse, Tru√aut tried to impose his friends’ works, including film outlines that would allow beginners to be grandfathered in by elders already launched in their careers: ‘‘You have to fight and hold the door open to let your friends in before it’s too late.’’∏ But the failure of that strategy led Tru√aut, after 1962, to limit the activities of his company to the production of his own films. Despite this failure (and that of Chabrol, with his Ajym company), the economic solidarity between the filmmakers of the new generation was a determining point in their emergence, as well as the will they shared to break out of the constraints of the cinema of the era—particularly the dictatorship of the distributors—without deviating from the commercial circuit. Tru√aut gave high praise to Jacques Rivette, who was the first to make a mediumlength fiction feature (Le Coup du berger), and then a full-length one (the symbolically titled Paris nous appartient), without any financial backing from his family—the kind of backing that was decisive, on the other hand, for Malle, Chabrol, and Tru√aut. According to Tru√aut, it was Rivette’s determination that motivated the others. Rivette’s diatribe against French

Auteur Cinema

filmmakers ‘‘rotten with money’’ and his plea for ‘‘the spirit of poverty’’ is premonitory: ‘‘New directors will take the risk of making films for twenty or thirty million [francs], maybe even less, making movies by taking a chance, without presenting their screenplays to be censored ahead of time, maybe not even showing them to the producers or the distributors. I believe this is the only chance French cinema has’’ (Cahiers du cinéma n. 71, May 1957, p. 86). Despite the idealism in these words, this is more or less the schema that would come into existence early on, leading producers and distributors to look for low-budget projects whose profits could end up being colossal and the losses negligible, with so little capital having been invested in comparison with the normal funding for the commercial cinema of the era. Tru√aut put it this way in an interview with Louis Marcelles in France Observateur (October 19, 1961): ‘‘The essential e√ort of the ‘new cinema’ led to an emancipation with regard to the cinema industry. Films had become impersonal due to constraints. We thought we had to simplify all that in order to be able to work freely and make non-extravagant films about simple subjects—thus, that quantity of New Wave films whose only point in common is a set of refusals: a refusal to use paid ‘extras,’ a refusal of theatrical plots, a refusal of elaborate décor, a refusal of scenes of exposition —these are often films with three or four characters and very little action.’’ State powers had created and accompanied what Jacques Flaud, still in charge of the Centre National du Cinéma in October 1959, called ‘‘an e√ort at cinematic liberation.’’π His solemn declaration, which opened the hundredth issue of the Cahiers du cinéma, confirms the role played by the cnc in this revolution: Jacques Flaud had, in e√ect, decided, against the rules instituted by the joint state/professional organizations of the cnc itself, to grant authorizations to shoot films to Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Tru√aut, none of whom had taken the extremely long and demanding training needed to win the status of a director (Thévenin 2001). That this decisive aid from the state to young filmmakers led to an irreversible loss of influence for the professional unions, ‘‘managed’’ by the CGT since the Liberation, is undoubtedly not just a coincidence.∫ But beyond this settling of political accounts, it was the status of the cinematic professions and trades that would find themselves changed—transformed from a technical and artisanal model to an artistic one, with all the consequences in terms of sociocultural origin and job instability (Menger 2002). Tru√aut, writing in the journal Téléciné in March 1961, declared that ‘‘the

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New Wave demystified the function of the director: it was a secret, something inaccessible, something that artists and intellectuals were steered away from, under the pretext that directing involved technical and manual aspects as well as a kind of physical performance.’’ The statement is very paradoxical, but it illuminates the change in status of the filmmaker e√ected by the New Wave: no longer a technician, but an artist, in the modern sense of the term, which is to say an individual who proves his talent through his capacity to innovate and not by mastering the rules of the trade—the savoir-faire. No longer the apprenticeship of technique, but the expression of solitary genius. As Tru√aut continues: ‘‘And then again there was too much security in the job of being a director. The industry demanded more films than there were directors; so very mediocre people continued to work, for the simple reason that there weren’t any others.’’ This is another pertinent remark, whose author undoubtedly failed to understand all of its consequences: in fact, a profession protected by extremely strict union regulations now assumed the generalized status of the part-time entertainment-industry worker —that is, the generalized instability of the artistic professions, with a widening gap between how many feel called upon to go into cinema and how many actually manage, in the end, to make a film.

Chapter Four

Contrasting Receptions

A Criticism Informed by Cold War Divisions At the moment of the birth of the New Wave, the world of French film criticism had hardly emerged from the onset of the Cold War, which had wreaked havoc on the brief ‘‘ecumenical’’ period of the Liberation. During a few short years, Sadoul and Bazin, culturally and ideologically in agreement, published their essays in the same weekly associated with the Communist Resistance, L’Ecran français (Barrot 1979). After that, the hardening of the political situation, both inside and outside of France, meant that communist critics fell back on a French version of ‘‘socialist realism,’’ while the Cahiers du cinéma critics championed an American cinema seen afresh through a cultivated optic. At the end of the 1950s, while the French Communist Party labored to digest the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Georges Sadoul, the regular critic for the Lettres françaises, the communist cultural weekly edited by Louis Aragon, began a critical transformation that relied heavily on the New Wave. From 1958 on,

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he had become anxious about a qualitative crisis in French cinema, and, breaking with the Communist doxa that privileged a corporatist defense of the professional milieu, he began to celebrate innovation in works that were as scandalous to Stalinist puritanism as Les Amants (Marie 2005). Certain young critics writing in the communist press came under his sway, while older ones like Samuel Lachize resisted. Despite warnings from the political leadership and murmuring among militants and union members, Sadoul began to put forward a positive vision of the New Wave, based not on its political content but on its capacity to foster aesthetic innovation. It is di≈cult today to appreciate the importance of the position he took—several years ahead of the Communist Party’s change in orientation concerning its relations with intellectuals and artists—such as it would be formulated at the Central Committee of Argenteuil in 1966.∞ Sadoul thus contributed to a critical consensus on the new cinema that transcended politics and that would, in the end, make an aesthetic and apolitical vision of the value of these films prevail in France. Paradoxically, it was the critics associated with the journal Positif, who had inherited an anti-Stalinist Marxism tinged with Surrealism, who would violently condemn Sadoul’s position and the films made by the former critics of the Cahiers in favor of a politically committed art that they located in the so-called filmmakers of the Left Bank: Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Georges Franju, and Agnès Varda.≤

Short-Lived Enthusiasm for the New Wave If we examine together the two criteria of critical reception and box o≈ce success, we can see that the phenomenon of the New Wave, in the sociocultural sense of the term, is limited to an extremely short period of time. In fact, those films favorably labeled ‘‘new cinema’’ that met with broad audience approval mainly came out between September 1958 and September 1959. These two dates frame the May 1959 Cannes Film Festival, which is considered the o≈cial birthday of the New Wave. From 1960 on, there is sand in the ointment: either some critics register extreme reservations about a film or the audience disapproves of it. The honeymoon was over. It was not that the new cinema disappeared or became indefensible. Rather, from that moment on, ‘‘new’’ films praised by ‘‘enlightened’’ critics would only be addressed to a limited audience made up of cultivated young citydwellers. The New Wave and broad audience appeal were now o≈cially divorced.

Contrasting Receptions

The reception of the new directors by the mainstream press would fall along two lines, separated in time, that derive from two very di√erent sociocultural attitudes: in the earlier moment, most critics recognized the emergence of a new representation of youth, strongly marked by an explicit sexuality and a provocative ‘‘amorality.’’ A little later on, emphasis was placed on the films of the new generation that were perceived to be artistically innovative or that signaled the arrival of ‘‘modern art’’ in the field of cinema.≥ Traces of the first perspective appeared at the end of 1956 with Et Dieu créa la femme, and then it was a≈rmed with Les Amants at the end of 1958. Les Cousins, Les Dragueurs, Les Liaisons dangereuses, A bout de souΔe, and Jules et Jim were appreciated in an analogous way. Vie privée, on the other hand, suggested the end of the convergence between the new cinema and the ideology of sexual liberation. In this film, Louis Malle, eminent representative of the new generation of filmmakers, presented an analysis of the ‘‘B.B.’’ myth in which Brigitte Bardot functioned no longer as an icon of sexual liberty but rather as a symptom of alienated mass culture. Elsewhere, and a little later in time, critics began to register the emergence of artistically innovative films. The first film to be identified with the arrival of ‘‘modern art’’ in the cinema was Hiroshima mon amour in May 1959. Critics talked about a ‘‘battle of Hernani’’ when the film was screened at Cannes. L’Année dernière à Marienbad confirmed the interest in ‘‘experimental cinema’’ of most critics, who compared it to the New Novel or to Cubism. Today, the New Wave is presented as a great moment of formal invention, the moment of ‘‘modern cinema.’’ But contemporary critics were more nuanced in their reaction. Most of the films directed between 1958 and 1962 by the former critics from Cahiers du cinéma and their friends were, for the most part, perceived as much more authentic, spontaneous, and sincere than the ‘‘old school’s’’ well-oiled screenplays. Resnais’s films, and, to a lesser extent, those of Godard, were the only ones that created an aesthetic shock such that many critics could speak of a new era in the history of cinematic art. By analyzing the critical reaction to some emblematic films of the ‘‘new cinema,’’ I want to reconstruct the animated history of that reception, so filled with contrasts and divisions, in order to move beyond the cinephilic doxa on the New Wave to evaluate the perception that contemporary critics had of what it was that was actually new about the new cinema. I will

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only talk about a few of the films made before the end of 1962 that met with a notable box o≈ce success: Et Dieu créa la femme, Les Amants, Les Cousins, Les 400 coups, Hiroshima mon amour, A bout de souΔe, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Jules et Jim, and Cléo de 5 à 7.∂

The B.B. Scandal

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Et Dieu créa la femme∑ came out in December 1956 and deeply split critical opinion along an unusual division. Most journalists, whether on the left or the right, elite or popular, recognized in Vadim, based on this, his first film, an undeniable technical skill. But they were indignant about the way he ‘‘exhibited’’ Brigitte Bardot, while a few independent-minded voices defended tooth and nail the modernity of this image of woman. André Lang, writing in France-Soir, launched the first salvo: ‘‘A whole film based on enhancing the physical attributes of a pretty girl, her indecencies and her fluttering about—it’s tedious and rather unpleasant.’’∏ Le Canard enchaîné is frankly insulting: ‘‘This film ‘neither written nor directed’ by Vadim tends to prove that the swaying of a chick’s ass can be considered one of the beaux-arts.’’ Combat was equally insulting: ‘‘Marital intimacies and laying out the goods for sale shouldn’t be confused . . . If you want this type of thing, it’s better to spend the afternoon at a strip-tease.’’ Despite its modern image, L’Express joined the chorus: ‘‘The ingenue has become perverse . . . It’s di≈cult to sympathize with this new darling Caroline.’’ And Claude Mauriac, in Le Figaro littéraire, castigates the ‘‘frenzied narcissism of Mademoiselle Bardot, which, like the complaisance with which her director exhibits her, exceeds all measure.’’ Two more nuanced critiques appeared—and they are the only ones written by women. Simone Dubreuilh, in Libération, registers the birth of Bardot the star ‘‘in the lineage of the perverse ingenues of the 18th century.’’ While criticizing the pandering aesthetic of Vadim’s film, she celebrates ‘‘a real find, the rectification of the emerging myth of B.B.: an orphan crazy about her body, B.B. rebels against her milieu. Like a cat, she does only what she pleases, she has no morality, no modesty, no shame. The Taming of the Shrew on a smaller scale, with intoxicated men circling around her, she allows herself to be tamed by a store-bought Petrucchio. A strange product of cinema and a decadent civilization.’’ Paule Sengissen, writing in RadioCinéma-Télévision, cites Vadim: ‘‘This time, the war has struck the innermost

Contrasting Receptions

chord. Girls are often crazy, with an unbridled sensuality. . . . They believe in nothing, and especially not love. Boys are very careful to hide what remains of their romanticism and enthusiasm under a well-bred cynicism.’’ Sengissen concludes that ‘‘the film is a sociologically interesting document.’’ Beyond the generally negative reception, there are a few independentminded critics who o√er positive remarks.Robert Chazal in Paris-Presse, for example, praises Vadim’s ability to make the woman who was his wife perform ‘‘with a peaceful indecency at the same time as with a real emotion tinged with insolence and sometimes humor.’’ For him, the film is ‘‘as important as a Sagan novel for coming to terms with the youth of today.’’ François Tru√aut and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, both associated with the Cahiers du cinéma, defended the film. For Tru√aut, writing in Arts: ‘‘It’s a film typical of our generation, for it is amoral (refusing the current system of morality and not proposing another one) and puritan (conscious of that amorality and worried about it).’’ Doniol-Valcroze, in France-Observateur, sets the bar very high: ‘‘There was James Dean. There is Brigitte Bardot . . . Brigitte Bardot suddenly sets the standard for half of the girls we’ve known in the past ten years. . . . A young person’s film made for young people and that says something about youth.’’ The first example of an entirely new way of representing youth was thus not recognized as such by most of the critics at the time. Certainly, the rather raw expression of sexuality by a female character contains voyeuristic aspects cleverly exploited by Vadim that couldn’t help but shock critics concerned with legitimating the seventh art. But the inability of most of the critics to register the sociological importance of the new model of femininity undoubtedly derives from their hesitation regarding a film that positioned itself squarely and frankly in the realm of mass culture. We can also detect generational (and masculine) resistances that would evaporate to the extent that sexual liberation became an acceptable ‘‘good object’’ for the cultivated classes. The fact that the two lone women critics perceived the newness of the female figure suggests, in fact, that the male critics’ hesitations were not merely cultural. The sexual emancipation of young women remained a taboo subject for most French men in the 1950s, regardless of their social class (Mossuz-Lavau 2002). In July 1957, Roger Vadim lodged a protest in L’Express concerning an attempt to ban the screening of his film in Angers. He spoke about ‘‘a profound divorce between the new generation and its elders.’’ ‘‘The elders

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think that without their moral code, there is no possible understanding of good and evil. Young people, on the other hand, are convinced that this ‘code’ ends up falsifying any notion of good and evil. Leaving morality behind, but not yet clearly possessing new ethical rules, they react to situations according to what their heart and their temperament tell them to do. So the term ‘‘amoral’’ can, in fact, be applied to them . . . They are victims of a malaise, a habit of questioning everything at every instant, and of a total, irremediable, and absolute lack of confidence in—or admiration for—their elders.’’ Et Dieu créa la femme is, of course, much more ambiguous than this speech by Vadim about youth might lead one to believe. Nevertheless, most of the young male and female moviegoers of the era (Audé 1981; Rihoit 1986) as well as those intellectuals—male and female—most attentive to changes in behavior, like Simone de Beauvoir (1979 [1959]), would in fact see in the film the explosive expression of female emancipation.

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The Triumph of Les Amants Les Amants, Louis Malle’s second feature-length film after the successful Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957), came out in November 1958. Two months earlier it had provoked a scandal at the Venice Film Festival. Despite the protests emanating from the Italian Catholic milieu, the film was in fact warmly embraced by a near unanimity of the French press, in reviews that emphasized the sincerity of this ‘‘love poem.’’ Simone Dubreuilh (Libération) began the discussion in a dithyrambic tone: ‘‘[The film is] the most beautiful cinematic homage to the purity of gesture, to the purity of love’s intoxication. For the first time in film history, we have heard a woman murmur and moan with pleasure.’’ The compliment is unequivocal: it is because of his ability to ‘‘tell the truth about love’’ that Malle is being honored, which is to say for an ethical, and not merely an aesthetic, achievement. But she is alone in putting it so explicitly; male critics who were the most favorable to the film spoke of a ‘‘style, . . . an elegant writing’’ (Favatelli, Paris-Presse); of a ‘‘diamond, . . . a courageous breath of fresh air . . . from an artist of the seventh art’’ (Deltour, L’Humanité). Baroncelli in Le Monde is a little more explicit when he talks about a ‘‘healthy lack of modesty . . . of a liberated portrait of love’s pleasures and disorders.’’ Sadoul (Les Lettres françaises) opted for paradox by declaring: ‘‘It’s di≈cult to find a more sexually modest film than Les Amants, compared with the pornography that satu-

Contrasting Receptions

rates half the films playing in Paris.’’ He then concludes: ‘‘This highly beautiful film has the spontaneity, the lyricism and the sincerity of a first novel.’’ Conservative Catholic opinion was resolutely hostile to the film for moral reasons, although some debate ensued. Jean Rochereau, film critic for La Croix, speaks about a ‘‘fetid work, . . . an aggressively immoral film, in form and in function,’’ while André Bessègues, in La France Catholique, is more nuanced: ‘‘This film is not libertine, it is not erotic, it is not obscene, . . . it is immodest.’’ As the polemics surrounding the film at the Venice Film Festival showed, Les Amants expresses the social tension between those who hold traditional morality dear, and those who champion sexual freedom, which in this case overlaps with artistic freedom. Most of the critics agree that the representation of amorous passion in the film is beautiful, because it was of a truthfulness never before seen on film. This virtual unanimity is significant because it indicates a certain level of expectation regarding cinema—a demand for truth and authenticity that Les Amants was able to fulfill in the context of France in 1958.π

The Polemics Surrounding Les Cousins In March 1959, one month after Claude Chabrol’s film Le Beau Serge was released, his Les Cousins was immediately greeted by critics as another representation of youth because of its resemblance and chronological proximity to Sigurd and Carné’s Les Tricheurs, released in October 1958. Ten out of fourteen critical articles make a comparison between the two films. In most of these, Carné’s film is used to set o√ Chabrol’s to the latter’s advantage; critics emphasize the authenticity and quasi-documentary quality of Les Cousins: ‘‘The young people in Chabrol’s film are located in a completely di√erent milieu than those of Carné: it’s no longer about fake students from Saint-Germain-des-Près, but rather rich young people from Neuilly leading the good life, perfectly situated socially, in a society that the director seems to know very well’’ (François Maurin, L’Humanité-Dimanche). Others emphasize the di√erence in attitude between the two filmmakers: ‘‘The new French school no longer tries to tell us stories where the good confront the bad, who are invariably punished, but stories with characters reacting— poorly or well—to their environment or to a given situation outside any pre-established norms’’ (Libération).

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Only Louis Chauvet in Le Figaro compares the two films at the expense of Chabrol: ‘‘Cheats versus cheats, Carné’s cheats leave a masterful impression that is not found here.’’ That the critic for Le Figaro should prefer traditional cinema is not surprising. What’s striking, though, is the virtual unanimity of the critics, including those writing in more or less popular venues (France-Soir, Paris-Presse, Paris-Jour), in bestowing favor on the new cinema in the early days of its emergence. Opinion will divide a little later on, with the arrival of films that break more explicitly with the norms of cinematic storytelling. But in the beginning the young filmmakers were viewed by most critics as engaged in shaking up the conventions of commercial cinema imposed by producers and distributors in order to realize a more realistic representation of contemporary society.

Cannes 1959: The Apotheosis

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The Cannes Film Festival of 1959 was a paradoxical event. Tru√aut’s Les 400 coups succeeded in winning unanimous approval, even though the old guard was lying in wait for the former critic after his years of attacks on the ‘‘cinéma de papa.’’ On the other hand, Hiroshima mon amour, directed by the very discrete and eminently respected Alain Resnais, unleashed an unprecedented diplomatic, political, and artistic polemic. In fact, the classical composition of Tru√aut’s film, as well as its explicitly autobiographical dimension, provoked sympathy in even those critics who harbored the most reservations about the ‘‘new cinema.’’ Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro), for example, declares: ‘‘We can see in this film virtues that are directly contrary to the portrait that the author strove to give us of himself . . . The style is that of a Jean Vigo who knows some of the contemporary secrets of Italian neo-realism.’’ And Paul Guyot (France-Soir) writes: ‘‘It’s a heart-rending shock. . . . The film is beautiful like all things that proceed, wordlessly, to the depths of truth. . . . The 400 Blows struck by Tru√aut will be felt for a long time.’’ A highly unusual consensus about the film was reached by journals whose political and cultural leanings were opposed to each other. Baroncelli (Le Monde) uses the same arguments as do his colleagues on the right: ‘‘It’s the work of a man who speaks with an open heart about himself, or at least about the child he once was, and, in its clarity and simplicity, this confession is a thousand times more moving than all the invented dramas.’’ In the same vein, Simone Dubreuilh (Libération) states:

Contrasting Receptions

‘‘Les 400 coups resembles the humorously despairing realism of Zéro de conduite. . . . François Tru√aut tells the story of himself in images, in a language that is fluid, light, and alive, never aesthetic.’’ This exceptional consensus can no doubt be explained by the fact that Tru√aut’s film was about preadolescence, and as such avoided any representation of explicit sexuality—the bête noire of traditional critics. And the classical composition of the film, as well as its soberly realist style, inscribed it in a legitimate cultural tradition. Tru√aut’s later films would bring an end to the unexpected honeymoon between the enfant terrible of criticism and his former colleagues. Although Les 400 coups met with triumphant acclaim at the festival competition, Hiroshima mon amour was not permitted by the Quai d’Orsay (which considered it ‘‘anti-American’’) to represent France at the competition. This was the case despite the favorable opinion of the minister of culture André Malraux, who, according to Paris-Press, exclaimed, ‘‘It’s the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen!’’ Many people had to intervene to even have it shown at Cannes outside of the competition. The film immediately unleashed a violent reaction. As Edgar Schneider recounts in France-Soir: ‘‘A battle is brewing at Cannes over Hiroshima mon amour. ‘Appalling,’ says Marcel Achard, president of the jury. ‘Overwhelming,’ responds Micheline Presle, a jury member. ‘Marvelous!’ exclaims Jean Cocteau. The Festival Palace experienced its ‘battle of Hernani’ yesterday.’’ Leaving aside the exchange of invectives, what is striking is the sheer number of polemical subjects at issue. Scandalous because of its political content, because of the parallel it establishes between the tragedy of the atomic bomb and the misfortunes of a young girl with a shaved head in 1944, the film was also morally shocking because of the lyrical vision it presents of an ephemeral love a√air between two married people. But formally it appeared every bit as scandalous: Hiroshima mon amour is the first full-length fictional feature film made for commercial release that critics perceived, whether approvingly or disapprovingly, as belonging to the avant-garde. The polemic thus operates at several levels. A good many journalists on the right protested against this work created for the happy few: L’Aurore accused Resnais of ‘‘proving his complete disregard for the public’’ and of having created ‘‘a poem about languishing love, often boring and of an unsustainable pretention’’; La Croix speaks about ‘‘an interminable, tedious work’’; Carrefour used as a title ‘‘Boring

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Resnais’’ and speaks about ‘‘an exceptionally boring, pretentious, and stupid film filled with the most detestable literature, . . . an absolutely outrageous language, with psalmodies and repetitions that are supposed to be poetry.’’ When the film came out in Paris in June, Paris-Presse accused it of ‘‘leaving the realm of the profane in a painful state of confusion . . . while ascending into a faraway and inaccessible zone, vague and cloudy’’; Le Canard enchaîné, whose satirical verve dispensed with any subtlety, speaks of ‘‘the most irritating, exhausting, pretentious film, stu√ed with bad literature.’’ Given the political nature of Resnais’s earlier films,∫ one would expect the left to defend the film. And indeed it did. L’Humanité celebrated ‘‘the most astonishing, disturbing admirable film we’ve seen thus far’’; Libération is dithyrambic: ‘‘It’s the most deeply scandalous (in the sense of generous and anti-conformist) film—the most violently original film in the Festival’’; France-Observateur speaks of ‘‘the audacity of one of the most wise and revolutionary compositions ever attempted by cinema.’’ But a more subtle division can be seen between those whose enthusiasm is boundless, and those who praise Resnais’s work while maintaining sometimes severe reservations about that of Marguerite Duras, for apparently stylistic reasons. Thus Baroncelli (Le Monde) talks about an ‘‘important, superb film’’ before going on to add, ‘‘What is debatable for me, is the emphasis on recitation and the continually solemn tone . . . and strange aestheticism’’; Le Figaro littéraire is even more explicit: ‘‘What is excellent is Resnais’s vision, . . . what is disputable, I’m sorry to say, is Marguerite Duras’s text, . . . a literature that is so out of date’’; Les Lettres françaises agrees: ‘‘Alain Resnais’s mastery is sublime. . . . never, since Dreyer, such rigor. The flaw in the diamond is in Marguerite Duras’s contribution.’’ RCT opposes ‘‘the art with which Alain Resnais manages to melt the past and the present into each other, . . . his rather astounding mastery at editing and the soundtrack’’ with ‘‘the dialogue that often rings false, . . . the pretentions of the screenplay.’’ The distinction that is made by the critics between the style of the two authors, when in fact Duras and Resnais speak with one voice, derives from a deep reservation about the political and personal implications of the film; many of the critics are shocked by the parallel established between the collective tragedy of Hiroshima and the individual drama of the shaven-headed girl in Nevers. A few critics in the Catholic and communist papers express their uneasiness about the film’s problematic. For La Croix, ‘‘Hiroshima mon amour is recognizable morally by a complete confusion of values. . . . It remains

Contrasting Receptions

shocking to judge the cosmic tragedy of Hiroshima against this pitiful event: the love a√air between a French woman and a Japanese man. . . . From a moralist’s perspective, whether Christian or not, the total amorality of the theme and the story cannot raise the slightest doubt.’’ La Croix also sees in Resnais’s film the same ‘‘harmfulness of a fundamentally amoral work’’ as it saw in Les Amants. In RCT, which represents a more open form of Christianity, we nevertheless find two opinions of a similar degree of reservation: Anne-Marie Avril questions the treatment of love in the film: ‘‘Love is condemned, love is impossible. . . . But isn’t there a fundamental misunderstanding that the magic of the images and of the commentary tends to hide from us? What love are we talking about? . . . Everything about their meeting is instinctual, and what we are shown about the liaison in Nevers suggests nothing of a more spiritual dimension. Why be surprised, then, when a ‘love’ of this kind is doomed?’’ Jean d’Yvoire in the same periodical speaks more crudely about ‘‘a love made for the soaps.’’ On his side, Georges Sadoul (Les Lettres françaises) reproaches Marguerite Duras for ‘‘a morality of come what may, which is the negation of love itself.’’ Armand Monjo, in L’Humanité, expresses directly the disagreement that some communists had with the film: ‘‘To situate the Nevers drama in the dross of the Liberation era (the shaven-headed women), is a ‘scandal’ that will be pleasing only to Petainists or yesterday’s collaborators.’’ But Marguerite Duras’s screenplay also provoked enthusiastic reactions. For Simone Dubreuilh (Libération), ‘‘it’s the most scandalous film, because it deliberately disagrees with the conventions of love and refuses to follow in the footsteps of Corneille. It is the most talked-about film because, precisely, it neglects the facts—patriotic or moral—in favor of the sole fact of love, mad love.’’ The most interesting argument in favor of Duras’s screenplay is undoubtedly Claude Mauriac’s in Le Figaro littéraire: Ours is not a feminine logic. . . . Thanks to Marguerite Duras, we have the first film testimony by a contemporary woman about love. What Simone de Beauvoir succeeded admirably in showing in L’Invitée, what Françoise Sagan’s novels made palpable (without having totally expressed) appears for the first time on screen. In Hiroshima mon amour there is a very beautiful idea that is Marguerite Duras’s: the substitution of one forbidden love for another. . . . But there is this as well, which the director knows by intuition and which Marguerite Duras knows natively: that the forms of forgetting are not the same from one gender to the other. . . . Balzac said it all: ‘‘In every situation,

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women have more reasons to su√er than men and she su√ers more than he does . . . Woman endures, she remains face to face with sadness which nothing distracts her from, she descends to the depths of the abyss it has opened, measures it, and frequently fills it with her sighs and her tears.’’ Let the subtle Marguerite Duras not be surprised to be thus put in the same camp with Eugénie Grandet. What is best, what is the most moving about her, is not the writer but the woman. A woman who, it is true, is a writer, and can at last express what generations of women, buried alive, have kept silent.

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Throughout this perception—very ahead of its time—of the specificity of a female point of view on love, Claude Mauriac makes clear a contrario the undoubtedly unconscious reasons for the hesitation on the part of many male critics regarding Marguerite Duras’s screenplay and text. Their cultural resistance is directed at the arrival of a feminine perspective in the creative act, a perspective, moreover, that claims to boldly take on the noble subjects that lie traditionally within the preserve of men: war, mourning, forgetting, death. But Mauriac’s question remained buried. Despite Resnais’s insistance on presenting his collaboration with Duras as an equal partnership, the prevalent reading of Hiroshima mon amour became that of an avant-garde work by a great inventor of forms—Resnais. And the ‘‘battle of Hiroshima’’ would be settled by a victory granted to the aesthetic interpretation of the film, as expressed at the time by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in France-Observateur: ‘‘Today, the notion of avant-garde supposes the equivalent of the revolutions in technique that a Proust, a Joyce, a Faulkner, or, closer to our own moment, a Pavese, a Butor, a Robbe-Grillet, have brought to literature. Hiroshima mon amour merits the comparison. . . . Cinematic form now participates fully in the great experiment of the renewal of modern art.’’ Jean Douchet makes the same argument in Arts: ‘‘Alain Resnais addresses in cinematic terms the modern aesthetic preoccupations of the other arts. He breaks the frame of the narrative and introduces a novelistic technique dear to Faulkner. . . . Pictorially, the film recalls Cubism, Picasso and Braque.’’

A Revolution Named Godard The March 1960 release of Godard’s first feature-length film, A bout de souΔe, would reunite a virtual consensus about the innovative dimension of the young cinema. It seems as though the film’s reputation preceded its

Contrasting Receptions

release, since Michèle Manceaux writes in December 1959 in L’Express: ‘‘This week, the buzz in Paris that makes or breaks reputations is sounding very flattering. From Jacques Becker to Jean Aurenche, from the old guard to the new, . . . people are saying, ‘‘Have you heard that Jean-Luc Godard’s first film is excellent!’’ And Manceaux adds: ‘‘Godard’s film is indisputably a film of youth, in which the director has strongly merged with his hero.’’ The film’s reception would, in fact, develop along two themes: first, Godard’s ability to describe youth, and particularly relations between girls and boys, with unprecedented authenticity; and second, the invention of a new cinematic language that puts A bout de souΔe at the same level as Hiroshima mon amour. Even critics who had reservations about the film recognized its ‘‘documentary’’ qualities. For Pierre Macabru (Combat): ‘‘The film is ethnographic, since it describes the customs (postures and language) of the director’s own milieu. . . . A confidential document, the personal diary of a small group of people, something touching and mocking at the same time, the exact opposite of the revolutionary film we may wish to see, the extremely narrow representation of a pocket-sized universe and its absurd laws.’’ For Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro), ‘‘Jean-Luc Godard is an inspired documentary filmmaker and an analyst excited by moods and sensibilities, their endless e√ects on the animation of faces.’’ Le Canard enchaîné talks about ‘‘a very particular tone, somewhere between documentary and fable. . . . A good slice of life.’’ More surprisingly, Jean Dutourd in Carrefour proclaims the film ‘‘a brilliant success,’’ ‘‘the story of ‘a child of the century.’ . . . It really seems as though Godard has painted a little bit of himself in the portrait of his hero.’’ Simone Dubreuilh (Libération), carried away with enthusiasm, unreservedly embraces the misogyny of the film, defined as ‘‘an essay about love and the untrustworthiness of women. . . . We are inside Michel Poiccard’s skin, we think with him. . . . We only let go of him for a few seconds to follow the trace of the young American woman . . . a little secretive animal. . . . These cheaters thus appear more vile than those of Carné, closer still to the sordid truth, more deceptive and more tragic as well. The wreckage of a society whose natural heroes are thieves, murderers, and pregnant girls who betray their lover to the police.’’ In fact, it is the ‘‘documentary,’’ ‘‘ethnographic,’’ ‘‘sociological’’ quality of the film that most captures the critics as a whole—its portrait of ‘‘the boy/ girl relation’’ (L’Humanité). For France-Observateur, ‘‘A bout de souΔe is an

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extraordinary documentary about a boy and a girl today—their love, their fear of love, desire and the fear of loving. . . . But Godard’s master stroke was to make the characters’ behavior, their relationship, the very essence of the film, and to subordinate to that everything that actually makes up a film: screenplay, photography, framing, montage, dialogues.’’ François Nourissier argues something similar in Les Lettres françaises: ‘‘The breakthrough was to have made, in spite of the crime-story plot, a love story, whose truthfulness of tone and tender quality far exceeds the framing of the anecdote. The best and longest scene in the movie, which must be called a love scene, takes place in Patricia’s bedroom.’’ Sadoul picks up this idea a week later in the same journal: ‘‘The relations between the characters matter more than the characters themselves. During a soliloquy between the two of them in the hotel bedroom on the subject of the failure of communication between the two lovers, an authentic drama is played out, one that is deeper and more important than the pretext provided by a crime and a police chase.’’ But all of the critics emphasize as well the newness of Godard’s style, even when compared to films made by his friends from the Cahiers. Chauvet (Le Figaro) takes as an ‘‘absolute quality’’ the fact that the filmmaker ‘‘strives to create a language by bringing together humorous or seductive images with dialogues. This constitutes a real innovation, . . . a kind of magic, an underground poetry made of caprice and paradox.’’ France Roche, writing in France-Soir, states that ‘‘since Hiroshima mon amour, this is the first and only film that renders obsolete and puts in their (tiny) place all those smutty bedroom farces, the cute little love stories with a ‘literary’ sauce that seem to be the only interest of a wave that, judging from the last few months, is ‘new’ in name only.’’ Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro Littéraire) is just as lyrical, speaking about ‘‘a truly original and revolutionary film,’’ ‘‘writing of an astonishing liberty. . . . Joyfully, we celebrate the birth of the first filmmaker from the young school who brings us the happiness of a rich, violent, poetic work that in no way resembles anything that came before it.’’ Samuel Lachize (L’Humanité) has some reservations about the film, but acknowledges Godard’s talent: ‘‘He writes his film with the camera lens, just as others write with a pen.’’ The critic writing in Le Canard enchaîné is obliged to concede that ‘‘resolutely turning his back on technique, and knowing nothing about cinematic orthography, nevertheless, Godard has style.’’

Contrasting Receptions

We can thus conclude that the film was appreciated at its true value upon its release, but in a more complex way than the cinephilic doxa judges it today. Critics of the time appreciate the portrait of youth and of new amorous relations as much as the formal invention of Godard’s style, for the most part establishing a relation between the two by means of a shared freedom and authenticity. This is undoubtedly what explains the film’s success with a broad audience—something Godard would never experience again, having resolutely crossed over the modernist rubicon.

The Birth of Cinema as Modern Art L’Année dernière à Marienbad was the major event of the Venice Film Festival in August 1961, where it received the Lion d’Or. It was released in France in September after a long, dark series of films that unleashed polemics while straining unsuccessfully to reach an audience.Ω Especially after the splash made by Hiroshima mon amour, the much-awaited film brought the hopes and contradictions of the new cinema to an incandescent level, judging from the unequaled volume and the quality of the reviews, interviews, and letters from readers to which it gave rise. Critics were divided between the majority who were fascinated by a cinematic writing that completely undermined the postulate of ‘‘realism’’ that had been imposed onto narrative cinema since the beginning of sound film, and those who had reservations about or protested violently against such transgressions in the name of ‘‘the audience who has a right to stories they can understand.’’ The film’s story would in fact elicit contradictory interpretations. Wary or hostile critics were upset about the gap between narration and image; thus, Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro) writes about ‘‘a man who ceaselessly harasses an evasive young woman whose husband never stops prowling around them.’’ André Ferrier in Le Nouvel Observateur explains that ‘‘a young man tells us a story of passion of which he is, or was, or will be, the hero. . . . What the two characters remember is not identical: the young woman, if I’ve understood correctly, refuses to remember the love a√air she had ‘last year in Marienbad,’ and does not accept the past as it is presented by the young man.’’ For Candide, ‘‘A young man tries to convince a woman that he knew her and loved her. . . . Bewitched by the memories that have been forced on her, she leaves with the young man.’’ Other critics frequently adopt the dominant narrative point of view in the film—that of the male protagonist who, by

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means of his omnipresent voice as narrator, imposes his version of the facts. For Jeander (Libération), ‘‘A man tries to convince a woman that they have met before and loved each other the previous year’’; according to Samuel Lachize (L’Humanité), ‘‘It’s the story of a love a√air that took place, but we don’t know when or where. . . . What is certain is that they loved each other, and that they share a past.’’ For Michel Aubriant in Paris-Presse, ‘‘We are witness to a séance of white magic. A stranger, by conjuring up imaginary memories, subjugates, seduces, and conquers the young woman. He frees her from her past life, and from her companion, who is resigned to the fact.’’ Michel Ciantar (Paris-Jour) doesn’t bother with nuances and sums up the movie in this way: ‘‘A man is entranced by a woman . . . who is willing.’’ Certain critics, undoubtedly influenced by Resnais’s previous film, reestablish—despite the omnipresence of the male narrator—a kind of equality between the story’s two protagonists: thus Yvonne Baby in Le Monde sees ‘‘the meeting of a man and a woman who try to communicate with each other. They look for each other, flee each other, find each other again, prisoners of themselves, and of a society that determines them, constrained, in the crisis and the anxiety that holds them together, to choose between commitment or its refusal.’’ Michel Martin, in Les Lettres françaises, has the same reading: ‘‘A man and a woman remember or imagine that they loved each other the year before at Marienbad.’’ Some even give first place to the female character: Pierre Macabru (Combat) recounts the plot in this way: ‘‘Two men, one woman. The famous triangle. The woman leaves one man to be with the other. The film describes the tension, the breakup, and the hesitations and uncertainties brought about by the tension and the breakup.’’ Jean-Louis Bory recounts in Arts that, after the second or third viewing, he ‘‘succumbed to the beautiful, somewhat mad, love story that tells us how Sleeping Beauty is finally awakened by the obstinate voice of the unknown prince to the point of leaving the palace to follow him.’’ We find here again the idea of a bewitchment that operates on the film’s viewers as well, leading them little by little to accept the male character’s—that is, the narrator’s—version of the story, despite all the signs that contradict it in the film. Georges Sadoul (Les Lettres françaises) pushes this interpretation the furthest when he titles his review ‘‘Eurydice at Marienbad’’: the male character thus becomes a new Orpheus attempting to snatch the beloved woman from death. After having evoked his own surrealistic memories regarding the peculiar nature of the story, Sadoul decides that the key to the

Contrasting Receptions

interpretation lies in the statue in the park, whose meaning the characters ponder at great length: ‘‘The man is Orpheus, and the woman is Eurydice trying in vain to leave Hades where she will be kept forever by Pluto. The baroque chateau is therefore Hades, and its guests the dead, or rather a pair of the dead multiplied repeatedly, whom Orpheus tries in vain to bring back to the light.’’ But over and above this unresolved meaning (the critic in Candide, for example, has a good time exploring three completely di√erent interpretations of the film), the reception of Marienbad is focused on the ‘‘new language’’ (Les Lettres françaises) invented by the film, and on the transformations it implied in the habits of filmgoers and in the role of the critic: ‘‘Alain Resnais speaks to the spectator as though he were speaking to a reader’’ (Arts); L’Humanité proposes ‘‘the keys to a masterpiece’’; Combat returns to the film with ‘‘some modest practical advice for anyone watching L’Année dernière à Marienbad.’’ In Arts, Jean-Louis Bory’s impassioned praise for the film caused readers to react. Gathered under the title ‘‘Marienbad in Question’’ were four letters, all written by men (it is not known if any women wrote in). The editor presented the letters as ‘‘characteristic of our readers’ state of mind.’’ One of them praises Resnais’s homage to the avant-garde of the 1920s, another disparages literary cinema in favor of a cinema of action, movement, and mise-en-scène exemplified by Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, Joseph Losey, and, strangely, Jean-Luc Godard. Another criticizes the banality of the story of a triangle, told in a tangled and confusing way. The last letter views Resnais and Robbe-Grillet as being in competition with an ibm machine, since they have gone about enumerating, in an artisanal manner, all of the mathematical possibilities of the given data. Le Monde, in turn, launched a survey of its readers regarding the film—a completely unusual procedure that, in so doing, showed what was at stake. Jacques de Baroncelli made a list of questions to which readers were invited to respond: ‘‘1. What was your personal reaction watching L’Année dernière à Marienbad? 2. Given that cinema is both an art and an industry, do you think that a film like Marienbad helps or hinders its development? 3. In the first case, what does Alain Resnais’s film bring to the cinematic art? In the second case, in what way does it harm its development?’’ The results of the survey were published, with commentary, three months later (Le Monde, January 3, 1962). Baroncelli begins by registering his surprise at having

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received 300 letters, which he categorizes as 106 for, 72 against, and 85 mixed. In his review of the letters it is surprising how many women are cited, and it suggests both that women found the film moving and that they were beginning to participate in intellectual debates (many female professors were among those cited). Perhaps the fact that the subject was cinema, an art only recently legitimated, facilitated their participation. The readers, male and female, who are hostile to the film castigate it for being hermetic, for being of a glacial and mannered formalism, for lacking in human warmth, for producing a limitless boredom, for ending up in the dead end of experimental cinema, for being an artistic impasse or a cinema for the happy few, and for being of an intellectualism associated with Robbe-Grillet. Many of the women spectators criticize the ‘‘negative’’ character of the film, its lack of humor, tenderness, and love for life. Those in favor of the film, both men and women, express their seduction and their identification with the hero carried away with passion. But both men and women mostly insist, as did the critics, on its new aesthetic dimension: the attempt to capture the workings of memory and meandering thought patterns, all in a new language. Further, both men and women see the emergence of a new cinema, more artistic than industrial, that joins together with the preoccupations of modern art, and both see a film that incarnated a necessary mutation given the growing competition from television. If Le Monde’s readers are largely favorable to the film, it is nevertheless true that the proportion favorable is less than among the critics. Out of the more than twenty periodicals I studied (not counting cinema journals), the only resolutely negative criticisms occur in Le Canard enchaîné (twice) and in La France catholique. There were unfavorable reviews in Le Figaro, Candide, Télérama, and France-Observateur, but in these cases a second more favorable or even enthusiastic review is included that counterbalances the first. Most periodicals published several articles on the film—there were four in Les Lettres françaises and seven in Télérama. In addition, long interviews, deferential to both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, are widespread. We can thus conclude that despite the enthusiasm generated by the film, Marienbad opens up a gap between specialists and ‘‘ordinary’’ filmgoers (albeit with professors and cinephiles among the latter).

Contrasting Receptions

Truffaut Rethinks Love In January 1962, the release of Jules et Jim became the occasion for numerous interviews in Le Monde with François Tru√aut, in which he presents his film as the story of ‘‘a woman hesitating between two equally appealing men. The challenge for me was to have the woman be touching and not a whore, and that the husband not appear ridiculous.’’ In the same paper he adds some details about his conception of the female protagonist: ‘‘Undoubtedly the young woman in Jules et Jim wants to live the same way as a man, but that has to do with a particularity of her character, and not with a feminist, demanding attitude.’’ This is a significant denial, to the extent that the character in Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel is, on the contrary, explicitly participating in a struggle for women’s emancipation. Even though the film was a literary adaptation and the story takes place at the beginning of the century, most critics declared the ‘‘New Wave’’ spirit to be present in the film, both in its subject matter and its treatment. According to Robert Chazal (France-Soir), Tru√aut tells ‘‘the story of a love triangle, two men and a woman,’’ but ‘‘his youthful, spontaneous narrative erases from this improper adventure anything smutty or bothersome it might contain.’’ But Claude Garson in L’Aurore views the same elements in a negative way: ‘‘Even though the action takes place at the beginning of the century, the sentimental stereotypes of New Wave cinema are already there. We are always being shown heroes and heroines changing partners, in or outside of the bonds of marriage. None of that matters, since these young gentlemen believe that love trumps everything, as long as it is liberated.’’ It is also the ‘‘New Wave’’ aspects of the film that Georges Charensol (Les Nouvelles littéraires) criticizes: ‘‘The adaptation didn’t fail to accentuate sexuality in a story that was originally about a friendship and the portrait of a woman’s character. . . . François Tru√aut, like all the boys in his generation, is attracted by situations that flourished on the Boulevard between the two World Wars, and his film is in the end nothing more than the banal story of a ménage à trois.’’ And yet most of the critics, for better or worse, take seriously the film’s problematic. For Samuel Lachize (L’Humanité): ‘‘Despite the classic love triangle—the husband, the wife, and the third party—we are way beyond vaudeville. . . . Its theme is this: Is there, in love, another way besides the couple? Can a woman love two men at the same time? . . . The authors

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return to the old Christian morality they wanted to dispense with . . . And because of this result, the film is much ado about nothing.’’ But Arts, on the other hand, maintains that ‘‘the couple is not the ideal, as Pierre Kast has already shown us in La Morte-Saison des amours. . . . Agreed, replies Truffaut, but the ménage à trois doesn’t lead to happiness. The answer doesn’t matter. What’s important is that François Tru√aut poses the question sincerely, frankly, and cleanly—and outside any bourgeois hypocrisy.’’ Despite the prize that the Centrale Catholique du Cinéma had earlier bestowed on Les 400 coups, it is the Catholic critic André Bessègues in La France catholique who is the least indulgent toward the film’s contradictions: ‘‘As one of my colleagues remarked disparagingly about Jules et Jim, ‘the New Wave’s new morality is always about sexuality.’ But the New Wave’s new morality is rather about the role of the woman in society and in the couple. And on this point, Tru√aut, like Godard, has a rather retrograde attitude—that of a shame-ridden puritan for whom woman is an incomprehensible demon.’’ The same reservations are found in Jeander’s column in Libération, despite the contrasting ideological position of the journal: Henri-Pierre Roche’s novel is the story of a ‘‘love at first sight’’ friendship between two men. Translated onto the screen and thanks to—and because of—Jeanne Moreau, it becomes dark vaudeville. . . . The woman invades, submerging the subject. . . . This depolarization of the subject is, I believe, part of an intellectual agenda that belongs to French directors of the new school called the New Wave. The woman exerts on them a type of fascination they defend themselves against with a kind of vengeful contempt (thus their sudden veering away from Bergman, whose pathological philogyny they quickly tired of) and which is expressed by a brand of misogyny that is both derisive and timid. Their attitude toward women remains that of avid, brutal and romantic students. . . . What fascinated François Tru√aut in the character of Kathe is that she is precisely the opposite of a child-woman or a womanobject. She is a woman-storm, . . . a woman-sex who badly needs a psychoanalyst or—since it’s 1907 and there’s no Freud in sight—a good kick in the ass to calm her outbursts born of hormonal unbalance.

It is, of course, interesting to note here the way that criticism of the misogyny of others combines with a solid dose of misogyny on the part of the critic. But over and above the polemical aspect of such considerations,

Contrasting Receptions

these remarks confirm that the predominant image of the New Wave at the time of its emergence was associated for the most part with the filmmakers’ ability to render a new representation of the relations between men and women, and the exploration of sexual desire. Contrary to what the ambivalent reactions of male critics might seem to augur, the audience, and particularly women, appear to have been seduced by the character played by Jeanne Moreau.∞≠ Despite competition from Louis Malle’s Vie privée starring Brigitte Bardot, which was released one week later, Jules et Jim was one of the New Wave films with the biggest popular success.

An Ambivalent Welcome to the Lone Woman Filmmaker Although Cléo de 5 à 7 was Agnès Varda’s second feature-length film, it was the first to be produced and released commercially.∞∞ In April 1962, when the New Wave was no longer at the height of critical favor, critics greeted the first film by a woman of the new generation in a generally favorable way, but not without a few nuances. Pierre Macabru (Combat) is filled with praise: ‘‘The intelligence of the gaze is admirable, as is the quality of the writing, its precision and rigor.’’ Similarly, Samuel Lachize in L’Humanité writes: ‘‘This dance of love and death that grips our hearts is perhaps the most intelligent film made by the new generation of French filmmakers, born during the Algerian War, and who couldn’t or who didn’t know how to approach the real reason for its anxiety.’’ But the reservations voiced by other critics, though subtle, are nonetheless real. Several days after Macabru’s review, Henri Chapier returns to the film in Combat: ‘‘Greeted with unanimous praise from critics of all points of view, applauded by the young Left Bank audience who up until now has made the fortune of so-called New Wave films, . . . and chosen in addition by the Cannes selection committee, Cléo begins a thunderous career that more than one commercial film would envy. Let’s point out right away that its success is merited. . . . But Agnès Varda’s film is not without weaknesses, and from time to time bows to avant-gardist conventions that Agnès Varda undoubtedly didn’t want or didn’t dare to sco√ at. In Cléo there is a discovery of nature, of simplicity and of other people that rings false. How can we

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believe in this idyllic sketch, . . . in this world born of an intellectual mythology that at no moment is convincing to the audience? . . . a universe of a ‘superior shop-girl’ that is never convincing. . . . Cléo is lacking that strength in perfection that up until now only Alain Resnais has attained.’’ After a very positive and detailed review, Baroncelli, the critic for Le Monde, ‘‘regrets the refinement in the writing that doesn’t always escape mannerism, . . . Agnès Varda, in the end, proving that she knows how to let go of arabesques and flourishes when it comes to expressing simple human tenderness.’’ He then concludes: ‘‘The film will be discussed. All the better. Despite the reservations one might have, it is one of the most intelligent, passionate, and fascinating films the young cinema has brought us.’’ At Télérama, opinion is divided; the main review, written by Jean Collet, is enthusiastic: ‘‘With an entirely feminine sensibility, Agnès Varda knows that certain feelings have the ability to upset our conception of time. . . . In less than two hours, we leave behind a small-minded, flirtatious little person and watch a true woman appear, one who can love and be loved.’’ But Jean d’Yvoire disagrees: ‘‘The rub is Cléo, a void at the center of the film. . . . This is why the very feminine, subtle and refined talent of Agnès Varda can hardly make us believe in a profound love between a soldier on leave and a starlet threatened with a terminal disease.’’ Claude-Marie Trémois, on the other hand, defends the film: ‘‘From a doll to a woman—such is the path that a succession of losses makes Cléo follow.’’ And finally, Jacques Siclier, all the while a≈rming that ‘‘it’s the most important and the newest French film of the last three months,’’ predicts ‘‘that the audience may be upset if they expect to find in the film what is called without any fear of stereotype, ‘the expression of a female sensitivity.’ . . . What is disconcerting is that Agnès Varda does not identify with her heroine. . . . [From the beginning], Cléo is presented objectively. . . . We therefore cannot sympathize with Cléo as we would with La Dame aux camélias or with a beautiful heroine in a novel threatened with an untimely death. By lending her own point of view, Agnès Varda detaches us from skin-level impressions and from vague yearnings in order to make us share the physical repulsion of a woman face to face with the idea of the disintegration of her body and with death.’’ This very astute analysis is an implicit criticism of the simplistic remarks by a Baroncelli or a Collet about ‘‘feminine sensitivity,’’ but it also explains the uneasiness and reservations awakened by the film. Clearly, Varda’s film cannot be accounted for with reductive pieties about what a woman’s art work should be . . . And

Contrasting Receptions

a number of male critics clearly have a hard time granting a woman filmmaker the same rights to innovation as they do a man.

Godard, the Artist Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie was released in September 1962, two and a half years after the triumph of A bout de souΔe, which had been followed in 1961 by the complete banning of Le Petit soldat and the critical and popular failure of Une Femme est une femme. Vivre sa vie was first shown in Venice, where it won the special jury prize. According to Combat, ‘‘Jean-Luc Godard talked about his intentions before he started making the film: ‘It’s not about spying on Nana (Reichenbach), nor tracking her (Bresson), and especially not surprising her (Rouch), it’s only about following her: thus, just being right and good (Rosselini) . . . Nana, who is gracious, which is to say full of grace, knows how to retain her soul all the while giving her body . . . I would like to try to make palpable what modern philosophy calls existence as opposed to essence: but at the same time, thanks to cinema, I want to give the impression that there isn’t a true opposition between the two, that existence supposes essence and vice versa, and that it is beautiful that it should be so.’ ’’ When the film came out Godard gave an interview to Nicole Zand, which was published in Le Monde under the title ‘‘What I am trying to do is to express thoughts rather than tell stories.’’ With consummate skill at advertising his own work, the filmmaker presents his film in the interview: ‘‘A film about prostitution that tells how a young, pretty Parisian shop-girl hangs onto her soul as she passes unscathed through a series of adventures that make her aware of all possible deep human feelings, . . . [adventures] filmed by JeanLuc Godard and acted by Anna Karina.’’ On the whole, the critical reception was very favorable, but the subject of the film—prostitution—undoubtedly played a role in the film’s success. Among the positive reviews, Georges Sadoul (Les Lettres françaises) is the only one to see in the film a work of denunciation: ‘‘No matter how distant and discreet its tone, Vivre sa vie is a violent indictment of the inhuman condition that western society imposes on women today.’’ He complicates this idea a month later in the same journal: ‘‘Without saying (and without believing) he is committed to social critique, Godard, in this highly documentary-style study, has used prostitution to ‘reveal’ contemporary

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society.’’ Rather than confronting that reality (so well described by Godard when he shows Nana’s clients), isn’t it more comfortable to reserve the day-to-day realities of prostitution for the contemptible domain of melodrama and stereotype?’’ Henri Chapier (Combat) insists more on the formal qualities of the film: ‘‘This is a film unlike others. [It is] a new film because it draws the filmgoer out of his passivity. . . .Its originality lies in transferring to cinema a theatrical style close to Brecht’s. . . . What remains, undeniably, is the formal beauty of the film. . . . Here is a cinema we can defend without any second thought.’’ Michel Aubriant (Paris-Presse) is laudatory along the same lines: ‘‘[Vivre sa vie is] probably the best film to come from this insolent, high-kicking young director. [It was] filmed in eighteen days, using methods once dear to the New Wave: small budget, wandering camera, unknown actors. The subject is not important. . . . The originality is in the manner of recounting the story, of joyfully overturning the sacrosanct rules of traditional cinema in order to try to renew relations with the freshness of primitives. . . . [The film demonstrates] a prodigious virtuosity, a sense of ellipsis, of the intelligence of the image, a perfect expressive e≈cacity. . . . [With] honors bestowed on silent cinema, . . . he has deliberately sacrificed language to the image.’’ Albert Cervoni (France-Nouvelle) sees in it an ‘‘auteur film’’ par excellence: Godard is not only one of the most talented, he is also one of the most sensitive and personal French directors. If the notion of an ‘‘auteur film’’ is sometimes applicable, it’s only for directors with such a strong personality. Godard makes movies the way other people breathe, out of vital necessity. . . . The notion of an ‘‘auteur film’’ is given to us as the ideal, the exemplary—an ‘‘auteur film’’ being most often a film whose director also wrote the screenplay. [Vivre sa vie is] a film where the filmmaker, in any case, refuses to be a simple illustrator in order to express his personal universe, his vision of the world. . . . Tru√aut responded to questions from La Nouvelle Critique by saying that the film of the future would be ‘‘as personal as a diary.’’ In practice, this formula has shown itself to be at once excessive and justified. . . . Godard’s success is an example of one of the possibilities cinema possesses today, having acquired a great power of intimacy that has escaped up until now all the other representative arts, and notably theater.

Many male critics saw the film in an empathetic relation whereby Godard the man directs a loving homage to his actress/wife. Georges Sadoul titles

Contrasting Receptions

his review ‘‘Jean-Luc Godard succeeds in making a portrait of his wife and— upon reflection—his best film,’’ and then he develops the idea when he writes: ‘‘The film is above all a song of love dedicated to a young, twentytwo-year-old Danish woman who has become (thanks to the director) a great actress.’’ Henri Chapier in Combat says much the same: ‘‘Vivre sa vie is also Jean-Luc Godard’s elegy to his wife, Anna Karina. . . . It’s the ‘lost woman found,’ the one who was taken from us by those who would make of her a simple object of desire, an erotic utensil or a mannequin without a mind, without feelings . . . a woman who is not that fleshy creature ‘made by Vadim,’ nor that threatening monster discredited by Tashlin, but quite simply a real woman, tender, vulnerable, secretive and dignified. [She is] a woman to make Bergman’s heroines and women spectators jealous. . . . After this, will anyone still dare to accuse the New Wave of misogyny?’’ The same level of enthusiasm appears in Jean-Louis Bory’s review in Arts, in which the lyrical prose is exemplary of the new critical attitude taken by young people who are often the same age as the filmmakers they are writing about. This empathetic attitude leads them to imitate in their writing the style of the film and thus completely abandon the very idea of a critical attitude, which is to say one that establishes a distance vis-à-vis its object: Nana turns tricks the way that, were she a professor, she would give classes, or a housekeeper, she would clean house: as an individual free inside. . . . [This is] Montaigne’s art of living tinged with Sartre: at every moment, Nana claims responsibility for herself, and thus for her freedom. No fatality— neither interior nor exterior. She is an existentialist Nana. . . . She is the sister of Catherine in Jules et Jim, who also knows how to live her life; she is the sister of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, who lived it. . . . Jean-Luc Godard’s whore respects herself. As Simone de Beauvoir might say, she does not accept to be an object. And it’s in this vein that Vivre sa vie seems to me so lucid, so new. . . . These twelve tableaux do not o√er the splendor and misery of a courtesan, but, in a much more pedestrian manner, a professional’s tasks, her days, . . . the prosaic details of the normal existence of a streetwalker. . . . This objective documentary is a lyrical song. This reportage is a film of love. Modest and sensitive, Vivre sa vie is Godard’s film about Karina.

The rare critics with reservations, who nevertheless acknowledge positive aspects of the film, belong to the most conservative press—which was generally hostile to the New Wave. Thus Claude Garson (L’Aurore) writes: ‘‘The film tells us the story of the undoing of a girl thrown out on the streets

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of Paris, with nothing. . . . Nothing is missing. . . . We are especially not spared sequences in sordid bedrooms. . . . But in Jean-Luc Godard there is something else: a sharp sense of the beauty of the image. It is undoubtedly for this reason that his film attracted the attention of the judges at Venice. . . . Like all the New Wave filmmakers, this director likes to take his camera out on the street, or rather into places that have not been fabricated in a studio.’’ Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro) expresses a similar ambivalence: ‘‘Godard’s method consists in defying conventional rules by perplexing the viewer every ten minutes. . . . There are two Godards in Vivre sa vie: a naive, suddenly clumsy, disoriented and scattered Godard who takes to heart an aberrant screenplay . . . and a Godard who attracts sympathy through his strong taste for pure cinema, . . . through the clear emotion and expressive talent with which he photographs the leading actress. . . . But this film risks heightening the divide between the young cinema and the audience.’’ Using other arguments, Maurice Ciantar (Paris-Jour) reveals the same attitude: ‘‘Prostitution is taken here symbolically, as M. Jean-Luc Godard interprets one of Montaigne’s ‘thoughts’: ‘One should lend oneself to others and give oneself to oneself.’ . . . But this important idea is treated in a scholarly fashion, despite the supportive help given by philosopher Brice Parain. . . . [There is] the forceful personality of Mme Anna Karina, traversed by all the nuances of feeling, as though she were playing herself.’’ The only truly negative review appeared, paradoxically, in France Observateur. Although the journal traditionally had defended the New Wave, the arrival of a ‘‘Brechtian,’’ Bernard Dort, as film critic in 1960 had changed the journal’s tone substantially: ‘‘Godard films with an o√handedness bordering on mannerism twelve moments in the existence of Nana. . . . But this objectivity is in appearance only. Behind the ‘moral document,’ we glimpse the Passion of Nana. . . . From that point on, Vivre sa vie no longer looks like the existentialist film that Godard, with his innate sense of advertising, claimed he wanted to make, but like a work of shameless romanticism, open to all the illusions of spirituality.’’ After a negative article by Jeander, on the other hand, Libération published a ‘‘response’’ from Jacques Doniol-Valcroze: In Libération you have always supported a certain tendency in the new French cinema of which Vivre sa vie is the perfect example. . . . An auteur cinema made with a small budget and addressing itself more than the other kind to the audience’s imagination and sensitivity. . . . It’s natural that the film disturbs us

Contrasting Receptions

because of its newness and its structure—it’s precisely the job of the critic to prepare the audience to appreciate this newness, in short, to do for cinema what intelligent criticism did for modern painting, music, and literature. An essay about the di≈culty of staying true to oneself, a portrait of the loved woman, a report on freshness and spontaneity, Vivre sa vie—which also speaks about prostitution as nothing else has ever done—is a serious, pure, and touching film. . . . Can’t we expect a minimum of respect for those who have chosen the most di≈cult, dangerous, and sincere of paths?

Vivre sa vie thus commands critical attention through its visual lyricism, as the love poem of an artist, in the grand literary and pictorial tradition. The problematic articulation between a ‘‘love poem’’ and a ‘‘sociological’’ report about prostitution is not visible for the critics of the time, who are, on the other hand, attuned to the way the film breaks away from the enticing melodramas about prostitution that flourished in the popular cinema of the 1950s.∞≤ 67

Mass Market Heroines versus the Heroes of an ‘‘Auteur Cinema’’ Among the films from the new cinema that had a marked success with the audience, the majority are centered on a female character, played in turn by Brigitte Bardot (Et Dieu créa la femme; Vie privée), Jeanne Moreau (Les Amants; Les Liaisons dangereuses; Moderato Cantabile; Jules et Jim), Emmanuèle Riva (Hiroshima mon amour), Delphine Seyrig (L’Année dernière à Marienbad ), Anna Karina (Vivre sa vie), and Corinne Marchand (Cléo de 5 à 7),∞≥ in roles that explore questions of the sexual, amorous, or social emancipation of women (see chapters 8–11). It is thus striking to observe that the proportion of films successful with a broad audience is reversed if we consider the New Wave films that the cinephilic doxa has placed at the summit of their pantheon. Some of the cinephilic favorites are present in the corpus I’ve examined here,∞∂ but many are absent because they were not successful with the audience.∞∑ Most of these films share a narrative focus on one or two male protagonists, representing the alter ego of the director (see chapter 6). Those that are centered on one or several female characters adopt a distanced gaze that renders any viewer identification with the protagonist(s) very di≈cult (see chapter 8).

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When these films were released, the female characters and the actresses who played them (at least in the films examined in this chapter) were often taken seriously by the critics (almost entirely male)—particularly those associated with the press on the left. Only Brigitte Bardot is an exception, whether it be the reception given to Et Dieu créa la femme, at the end of 1956, or to Vie privée, in early 1962. In the ‘‘serious’’ press, the figure of B.B. generally elicits condescension, contempt, indignation, or smutty innuendo, undoubtedly because from the outset she was associated with the popular media, which created a spectacle out of her private life, and with the society of consumption, which made her into one of its privileged vectors (the little Vichy dress, the chignon). Most of the critics draw an implicit line between, on the one hand, actresses whose sphere of reference, whether because of their ‘‘look’’ or their roles, is a social class that is more or less that of the modern, cultivated urban set that emerges at the same time as the New Wave (Ross 1995), and, on the other, those who embody the alienation of women (of the popular classes and the middle class) in the society of consumption then becoming dominant. On the other hand, the popular magazines (Cinémonde) or the women’s magazines (Elle, MarieClaire) make use of Brigitte Bardot more than any other to explore the figure of the ‘‘modern woman’’ (see chapter 8).∞∏ Film critics in the ‘‘cultivated’’ press appreciate the figures of women in love when they are the object of the idealizing gaze of an artist (Moreau as seen by Malle or Tru√aut, Karina as seen by Godard), but figures of sexual emancipation like Brigitte Bardot give rise to more acerbic commentary, either when criticizing films that present this emancipation positively (Et Dieu créa la femme), or when adhering to the point of view of a film that ridicules such emancipation (Vie privée). We have taken note of a few more ambiguous figures—figures in between sexual emancipation and amorous passion (Hiroshima mon amour and Jules et Jim)—that ‘‘enlightened’’ critics greeted favorably, undoubtedly because they appear in films that are clearly identified as ‘‘culturally ambitious.’’ On the whole, the problematics of women’s emancipation present in many of the films remains largely unacknowledged by ‘‘cultivated’’ critics, who emphasize instead a purely artistic problematic—that of formal innovation. Strengthened by the firm alliances that many of the young filmmakers knew how to make with critics (through the recurrent practice of interviews), this hierarchy is put into place, little by little, in the evaluation

Contrasting Receptions

of the new cinema by means of the complicity between creators and those critics who had become their mediators vis-à-vis the public. The public itself was dividing along sociocultural lines at that time, between a mass audience (the audience for ‘‘commercial’’ films) and an elite audience (those who went to art theaters). As the new cinema developed, the ‘‘cultivated’’ reception would grant even greater privilege to formal innovation at the expense of innovation at the level of representation. This was accompanied, without our being able to determine who influenced whom, by an ‘‘aesthetic radicalization’’ among the new directors that count (Godard, Resnais, Rivette, Tru√aut, Rozier), while others, more attuned to popular success, would instrumentalize the problematic of women’s emancipation to commercial ends (Vadim). In fact, ‘‘auteur films’’ would become focused on the expression of male subjectivity, and target in a more and more deliberate fashion a small, ‘‘cultivated’’ audience. This is one indication of the phenomenon that Andréas Huyssen (1986) noticed in French culture at the middle of the nineteenth century with the development of industrial society and access to culture opening up to the middle and popular classes: namely, the tendency of elite male culture to distinguish itself from mass culture associated with an alienated femininity. Critics who, when they wanted to castigate a film, repeatedly mentioned romantic photo-novellas or women’s magazines, were not mistaken.

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The Precursors

Before we approach the best-known figures of the New Wave, it is necessary to take a detour through a group of men (and women) who provided the bridge between the Resistance, the immediate postwar years, and the new generation determined to turn the page on the contradictions and conflicts born of the Occupation, the Liberation, and the Cold War. Despite the fact that certain of their films are contemporaneous with the New Wave, they are clearly distinguishable on the cultural and ideological level, and in particular in their strong interest in the changes in relations between men and women that emerged with the Liberation—changes clearly indicated by the success of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe (1949), which was an incendiary best-seller throughout the entire 1950s (Chaperon 2000). These young people, whose earliest texts published immediately after the war call for a break with the dominant cinematic practices of the era, gravi-

The Precursors

tated to the intellectual and artistic milieu that the popular press often associated with existentialism, jazz, the bars of Saint-Germain-des-Près, and excesses of all kinds, but particularly sexual and alcoholic ones. Having become filmmakers, the most ambitious of these precursors to the New Wave were forced prematurely to stop making films by a lack of recognition and popular success, and they have practically disappeared from the cinephilic memory. One of the aims of this chapter is to ‘‘rehabilitate’’ them.

Roger Vailland’s Influence With their ties to the literary world and influenced, like everyone in their generation, by Sartre and Camus, some of these intellectuals were also close to the Communist Party, and particularly to Roger Vailland. This ‘‘left libertine’’ was a Surrealist before the war, a member of the Resistance during the Occupation, and a journalist and novelist after the war. In 1965 he died of cancer. A strong admirer of Les Liaisons dangereuses, he wrote a book about Laclos in 1953 for the ‘‘Ecrivains de toujours’’ series at the Editions du Seuil. In his book he presents the eighteenth-century writer as ‘‘the defender of woman’’ (27) and sums up Laclos’s thought as follows: ‘‘A. Woman is naturally the equal of man. . . . B. But every woman is a slave. . . . C. Like all slaves, woman substitutes cleverness for force. . . . D. But woman can be liberated!’’ (28–31). Vailland sought to be Laclos’s heir, as much in his political commitment on the side of the Communists after 1942 as in his relationship with women; after a passionate a√air clouded by drugs before the war, he enters into a ‘‘free’’ relationship in 1949 with the woman he would marry, Elisabeth Vailland. She would in turn edit an uncensored version of his Ecrits intimes after his death. Both a libertine and politically militant, Vailland’s novels and essays express a materialist vision of the workings of society, including in its e√ects on individual destinies (Un jeune homme seul, 1951; La Loi, Goncourt Prize in 1957) and on relations between men and women (Les Mauvais coups, 1948). His work reveals an interest in the working class as well, expressed at the descriptive level with a rare social and psychological perceptiveness (Beau masque, 1954; 325000 francs, 1955). But what rightly remains the best known aspect of Vailland’s work is his description—as raw as it is lucid—of amorous relations. In his novels, in his essays (Le Regard froid, 1963), as in his Ecrits intimes (1968), he analyzes without any false modesty the dead

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ends of passion that lead to subjection, the way that desire functions outside of any relation based on love, and the utopia of the couple whose relation is based on respect for one another. Far from any Surrealist idealism, his novels are filled with surprising portraits of bourgeois and working-class women, who are torn in di√erent directions or even destroyed by their aspirations that conflict with an egalitarian relationship with a man or with the free expression of their desire, but who also are forced to protect themselves from these same men who attempt to ‘‘possess’’ them and/or ‘‘throw them away.’’ Roger Vailland had considerable influence after the war on the young generation of intellectuals whose formation was the Resistance—men like Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. What they shared in common was a more egalitarian vision of women, an admiration for ‘‘mistresses’’ (women who aspire to the same autonomy as men in their love life and their professional life), but also a Don Juan-ish taste for collecting women, particularly young girls whose mentor they wanted to be. Unlike many men of their generation, they are sympathetic to e√orts toward women’s emancipation, without really being able to give up the traditional privileges of man the conqueror. They also share a sympathy for Marxism—both of these characteristics distinguish them from the Cahiers du cinéma camp, influenced by the Christian personalism of André Bazin (see chapter 2).

Pierre Kast, Visionary Pierre Kast was undoubtedly one of the ‘‘precursor’’ filmmakers closest to Roger Vailland. He was also the sharpest critic of popular cinema—French or Hollywood—in terms of the representation of women and sexual relations (see chapter 2). Finally, he was at once the most politically committed and the most involved in the cinematic milieu—while working as Jean Grémillon’s assitant after the war, he also made a series of well-regarded short features. He began directing feature-length films in 1957 with Amour de poche, with its adaptation and dialogues written by France Roche. But the cumbersome nature of traditional commercial production and actors that Kast was not attuned to—Jean Marais, Agnès Laurent, and Geneviève Page —led to a critical and commercial failure for the film: ‘‘I was not in control of things,’’ explained Kast (cited in Boiron 1985, 66). With Le Bel Age, his three-part film shot between spring 1958 and winter

The Precursors

1959, Pierre Kast displayed an agenda typical of the New Wave: a tiny budget; a subject matter taken directly from the behavior of his acquaintances; actors recruited from his closest circle of friends, often playing themselves; and an episodic form that the director conceived of as such from the outset to o√set financial di≈culties: notably, for Kast, ‘‘To find a form that would allow me to direct a new feature-length film, in conditions that I would control’’ (Boiron 1985, 67). First, Kast obtained enough financing from Pathé to make a short film, an adaptation (cowritten with Doniol-Valcroze) of a novella by Alberto Moravia called Un vieil imbécile, then, when the producer reacted positively, he proposed two other short features (already written by Doniol-Valcroze) with the same characters— which transformed the short film into a feature-length one. Un vieil imbécile is about the habits and behavior of a small group of male intellectuals, habitués of Saint-Germain-des-Près, surrounded by their female advisors and their more or less short-lived conquests, with the aim of establishing a kind of measure of the advantages and disadvantages of the new relations between men and women linked to women’s emancipation. The tone is deliberately light, but the subject is serious. The male characters are torn between their desire to control their female conquests and their amazement at the emancipated women who escape them. Some of the women characters are, just as much as the men, engaged in conquest, even if their methods are di√erent. In this group portrait most of the actors are called by their real first name—‘‘proof ’’ of the proximity between fiction and reality. Depending on who was available, we see Jacques Doniol-Valcroze himself (the narrator of the first two episodes), Jean-Claude Brialy, Marcel Pagliero, and Alexandra Stewart in the first episode; in the second, Doniol-Valcroze again, Gianni Esposito, Boris Vian, Françoise Prévost, Loleh Bellon, and Alexandra Stewart. In the third episode, the narrator Françoise Prévost is surrounded by Alexandra Stewart, Françoise Brion, Ursula Kubler-Vian, Virginie Vitry, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Esposito, Hubert Noël, and Pagliero. The three episodes are constructed as a flashback that begins with a hunting party in Sologne—an homage to La Règle du jeu—during which Jacques tries to explain to Hubert how to seduce women. Because Françoise has overheard them, she tells a young friend how the women should launch a collective strategy to catch the men in their own nets. Needless to say, neither one of these battle plans has the desired result, and it could be

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said that the game ends in a draw. All the pleasure is in the game and in the attempt to keep one’s ‘‘sovereignty,’’ to use a term dear to Vailland. There is less of a di√erence between men and women than between those who retain mastery of their feelings and those who throw themselves headlong into a self-destructive passion. Filmed outdoors in places dear to the small group of intellectuals and artists (Sologne, a bookstore on the river bank, Deauville, Saint-Tropez, a ski lodge), the film has an authentic, natural tone that would become the mark of the New Wave. Nevertheless, the world of the cultivated upper middle class (even if on the left and libertine), along with Kast’s decision to make no reference whatsoever to how they make a living, nor to any constraints other than those of the heart and desire, limited the impact that the film had on a wide audience. When it was released in February 1960, the film was well received by critics who saw it as a reflection on modern libertinage and an attempt to reinvent amorous relations in the era of women’s emancipation. But many right-wing critics, and many of those writing in popular venues, saw the milieu represented in the film as typically New Wave in the pejorative sense of the term—that is, Parisian, intellectual, bourgeois, and narcissistic. Georges Charensol (Les Nouvelles littéraires) in an article subtitled ‘‘Drôle de jeu,’’ a reference to Vailland, saw it as ‘‘a Françoise Sagan novel in images’’—which coming from him was not at all a compliment. Even Simone Dubreuilh (Libération) massacres the film by stating that it was ‘‘Paul Bourget reinvented in 1960, to be used by the dilettantes of useless cinema.’’ Invited to comment on the film in L’Express, Roger Vailland writes: ‘‘[Kast] has used his pen and his camera the way children use their imagination, . . . to ‘dream while awake’ the world in which they want to live. In the waking dream of Pierre Kast, all the young women are beautiful and all the young men sensitive. They play with passion but never get burned. They never confuse possession with property. Every place has been created with happiness in mind. The ‘elective a≈nities’ impose their laws, and, after a few tears, love triumphs.’’ The critical respect that Kast received for Le Bel Age allowed him to direct La Morte-Saison des amours in more comfortable economic conditions. And this was the case despite the sudden death of Boris Vian, with whom Kast had several screenplay projects in mind. With a sparkling cast made up of people close to Kast (Françoise Arnoul, Daniel Gélin, Pierre Vaneck, Fran-

The Precursors

çoise Prévost, and Alexandra Stewart), the film was shot in the Salines d’Arc-et-Senans, an unfinished utopian city designed by the eighteenthcentury architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, about whom Kast had already made a short film. In a July 1960 interview with Les Lettres françaises, Kast states that ‘‘the theme of the film is the influence of duration on a love story and the inevitable path love takes along the successive stages of the encounter, habit, and degradation.’’ The screenplay is designed in several stages. On the one hand, through the relationship between Sylvain (Pierre Vaneck), who su√ers from writer’s block, and his girlfriend Geneviève (Françoise Arnoul), a relationship that changes from the amazement of a fresh new love to the deception of day-to-day life, Kast criticizes the ivory tower illusion insofar as it pertains to creativity as to love. On the other hand, through the relationship between Jacques (Daniel Gélin), a deputy and landowner, and his wife/partner Françoise (Prévost), Kast criticizes the bourgeois couple estranged by the management of their rank and their possessions, and whose only connection with each other amounts to the defense of common interests. As Kast puts it in the interview in Les Lettres françaises: ‘‘The condition of women and its transformation seem to me to be a major problem. Hence the importance, to my mind, of Simone de Beauvoir’s work, the most in touch with the spirit of the times.’’ After di√erent meetings between friends and lovers, the story recounted by the film ends with a wager, that of the new dynamic of a three-way relationship between Jacques (who abandons his manor, his wife, and his political career—having been convinced by Geneviève of the ridiculousness of his status as a leading citizen), Sylvain, and Geneviève, who refuses to choose between the two men that she loves precisely because they are so di√erent. The beauty of the Jura countryside lends a melancholic air to the story whose characters remain, in the end, a little too ‘‘literary’’ to be convincing. Pierre Vaneck, the writer who drowns his terror of the blank page in alcohol, or Daniel Gélin, the gentleman farmer who accumulates female conquests on horseback or in a convertible, have a hard time a√ecting us. Even the female characters, Françoise Arnoul as a demanding muse and Françoise Prévost as a mistress, lack the substance to flesh out the story. We are never in the realm of sordid allusions or the clichés of the boulevard, but the ending of the film appears more arbitrary than utopian. Presented outside of competition at the Cannes Festival of 1961, the film was released, unfortunately, in August (the ‘‘o√-season [morte-saison] for

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cinema,’’ as several critics, playing on the film’s title, remarked). If we are to believe Combat, the release date was due to the censoriousness of distributors who demanded cuts; its box o≈ce tally was respectable in such conditions—59,900 tickets sold in an exclusive Parisian first-run. The critics were generally favorable, with a few dissenters. For Jeander (Libération), writing in the misogynist vein: ‘‘There are a bunch of women, . . . a whole henhouse clucking around two roosters too tired out to even work up the energy to fight each other over their conquests. . . . The matriarchy—Pierre Kast’s hobbyhorse—triumphs.’’ But the most prevalent criticism of the film pertained to its bourgeois milieu. According to L’Aurore, ‘‘This ballet or four-step, interpreted by creatures straight out of the sixteenth arrondissement, driving sports cars, drinking—usually whisky—straight up, and playing at love as one plays at roulette, out of having nothing else to do, brings nothing but sad destruction.’’ For Henri Chapier (Combat), ‘‘His heroes, sheltered from any social problem, spared any financial worries, have nothing else to do but to analyze their moods.’’ Samuel Lachize (L’Humanité) says much the same: ‘‘The characters he has created live in an undefined world, where social, human, financial and other problems don’t exist, . . . their main preoccupation is with love. . . . It’s a gratuitous game, useless enough in itself.’’ On the other hand, Michel Capdenac (Les Lettres françaises) writes a very flattering review: ‘‘Pierre Kast chose on purpose a certain milieu—the well-o√, intellectual bourgeoisie—in order to treat the problems of choice and liberty, or the problem of truth in love. Antonioni does the same thing. The absence of material contingencies allows the problems he treats to emerge as essential, vital preoccupations.’’ The antagonistic positions taken by the two communist publications clearly reveal that from that point on cultural di√erences would prevail over ideological allegiances, even though L’Humanité, addressed to ordinary communists, continues to defend a social cinema accessible to a broad audience. Les Lettres françaises, addressed to intellectuals, anticipates what would become the Communist Party’s o≈cial position in 1966: the right of artists to autonomy in relation to politics—a renouncing of Stalinist Jdanovism (see chapter 2). But it is the feminist dimension of the film that elicits the most favorable reviews. Thus Capdenac writes: ‘‘As with Antonioni, the women are the center of interest in the film, women of today, independent, intransigent, and who, in relation to men, often act as a kind of revelation: Geneviève,

The Precursors

who refuses to be duped, will first make Jacques aware of the vanity of his career and his ambitions, and then make Sylvain see the cozy nest he’s made out of his literary illusions.’’ Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro littéraire) also emphasizes the originality of the problematic: ‘‘La Morte-saison des amours ’ creator knows that love must be reinvented. . . . Pierre Kast observes, registers, and comments on the present situation that involves a fundamental overturning of erotic and sentimental customs.’’ And finally, Paul-Louis Thirard in Positif—a journal with which Kast, unlike the Cahiers camp, had excellent relations—devotes four pages to La Morte-saison des amours, focusing on women’s emancipation and the commotion it has caused in the relations between men and women: ‘‘One of the revolutions of the twentieth century (which is not doing too badly in that dimension) is the new condition of women. It’s commonly said today that woman is not inferior to man. . . . Nevertheless, nobody yet recognizes the ultimate consequences of this simple premise. . . . What Kast’s characters share is an ability to confront these problems in new ways.’’ Then, enlarging the debate, Thirard continues: ‘‘If we believe the critics, ‘a new vision of amorous relations’ first appeared in French cinema with the New Wave; . . . as for Kast, he actually presents a new vision of amorous relations, as di√erent from those of Hiroshima mon amour, Les Amants, or A bout de souΔe as society in 1830 is di√erent from socialist society in 1960.’’ He adds: ‘‘It is not at all the plastic or aesthetic quality of La Morte-saison des amours that makes it particularly remarkable.’’ Actually, if Kast’s films, unlike the three other films mentioned by Thirard, have disappeared from cinephilic memory, it is not only because women’s emancipation was of no interest to the young generation of the New Wave (except for Resnais, but Resnais was not, of course, a young Turk), it is also because they are less innovative aesthetically, and we have seen how that aspect would little by little supplant the question of representations in the critical discourse surrounding the New Wave. The film Vacances portugaises, which was directed by Kast in 1962 in the same artisanal conditions and friendly complicity as many New Wave films, met with an almost nonexistant critical and public reception in autumn 1963, despite a broad distribution—a sign of the decline of films ‘‘seriously’’ interested in relations between men and women.∞ Vacances portugaises is a kind of thematic synthesis of Kast’s two earlier films, with the improvisational qualities of Le Bel Age and the facility of La Morte-saison des amours. But it also manifests a new virtuosity at the level of the writing, a

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skill at weaving together the stories of the di√erent couples. Each couple refers to a stage in, or a di√erent type of, contemporary amorous relationship: protagonists of di√erent ages (or a couple with a large age di√erence), length of the relationship (including a couple who find each other again after having broken up), nature of the relationship (associated or not with work, a public or a more or less clandestine a√air), a rivalrous relation, and, finally, power di√erences among the protagonists. The modernity of these representations is still striking today, filtered through the formal beauty of the story’s frame (an old villa and various history-laden seaside locations in Portugal) and through the lighting that illuminates faces showing feelings, compulsions, desires, and frustrations. The filmmaker treats male and female characters with the same equanimity, but for most of the film the women appear to be the most engaged, coherent, and audacious in their amorous behavior. Even the very young Catherine Deneuve, who plays Daniel Gélin’s daughter, reveals her love to Bernard Wicki, an older intellectual she admires, and she proposes an a√air as a valuable experiment for both of them. In the end, however, it is the older man who panics and flees. Among the filmmakers of his generation, only Pierre Kast made films that fully recognized the revolution in behavior caused by women’s emancipation. Even if he chose to show us only bourgeois, intellectual women because they are the women he knew, he is alone in taking them completely seriously and in gauging the instability and the resistance that these changes brought to men. The oblivion that now surrounds these films is a good indication of the blind spots of auteur cinema.

Doniol-Valcroze: Between the Libertine Tradition and Male Empathy Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, a close friend of Pierre Kast, was born, like Kast, in 1920. As exact contemporaries, they shared a political, literary, and cinephilic formation. Cofounder with Bazin of the Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, Doniol-Valcroze had first worked with Jean-Georges Auriol at La Revue du cinéma in the immediate postwar years.≤ He had also directed three short films on literary and artistic subjects. His first feature-length film, L’Eau à la bouche, was released in January 1961 and attracted 71,000 spectators in an exclusive first screening in Paris. Weighed down by literary and cinematic

The Precursors

references, the film seemed artificial—a type of stylistic exercise. Even though the director denied it, the most cumbersome reference was no doubt to La Règle du jeu, with an amorous crisscross between the mistress of an isolated chateau and her guests, with this plot in turn mirrored among the servants. The film was shot among the director’s friends in a nineteenth century neo-gothic chateau in the eastern Pyrenees (which belonged to the filmmaker’s wife’s family). In a 1961 interview with Yvonne Baby in Le Monde, Doniol-Valcroze describes his light comedy in words that recall Kast’s description of La Morte-saison des amours: ‘‘Within the unreal framework of a fairytale, I’ve reunited three couples. Time is suspended, they have nothing to do, they think only of love. My goal was to show how, mysteriously, a couple either comes into being or does not.’’ But the film also su√ers from some clumsiness: an arbitrary direction of the actors, a plot that is poorly tied together, and conventional characters. On the other hand, the sophisticated elegance of the camera movements—sometimes a bit gratuitous—is reminiscent of Astruc. Yet the world that is described in the film and the choice of actresses in it bring us back to Kast: Françoise Brion and Alexandra Stewart, with the addition of Bernadette Lafont as an alert maid (borrowed with a wink to the New Wave camp). Doniol readily acknowledged the reference to the New Wave. When Yvonne Baby asks him why the films made by the new directors are often about love, he answers: ‘‘For certain young people, love is the only recourse against the absurdity of the world in which we live, . . . I’m thinking of Les Amants . . . but especially of Hiroshima mon amour . . . and A bout de souΔe.’’ He also makes the claim that the autobiographical dimension of the new cinema, while banal in art, was original in the case of film. Doniol-Valcroze was, in fact, clearly identified as on the side of the New Wave when the film came out in February 1960. As Jean d’Yvonne (Télérama) writes: ‘‘A little closed world of the leisured class . . . occupied with their love life, or what takes the place of it. Because the New Wave’s style means that successful love only rarely rises above the carnal level, and at the carnal level it’s made clearly visible.’’ If Doniol’s water is too salty for Télérama, it’s positively ‘‘briny’’ for Charensol (Les Nouvelles littéraires): ‘‘We find here the erotic atmosphere that New Wave productions can’t do without,’’ but then the critic complains of a ‘‘laborious bedroom farce.’’ Critics in favor of the new cinema, who knew Doniol-Valcroze as one of their most esteemed colleagues, seem to want to mask or disguise their

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disappointment. Thus, Baroncelli (Le Monde) writes that ‘‘despite its frivolous appearance, this is a likable, elegant, refined, melancholic film, . . . a pleasing, sentimental a√air.’’ For Albert Cervoni (France-Nouvelle), ‘‘for a first film, at least, the artistic personality of the auteur counts perhaps as much as the more or less relative success constituted by the film itself.’’ Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro Littéraire) compares Doniol-Valcroze to Roger Leenhardt of Les Dernières vacances: ‘‘[It is a film that] first revealed a filmmaker capable of opening up with simplicity and truth, in all rigor and honesty, in a confidential tone, as though he were speaking, with the best of his intelligence, to special friends.’’ Jeander (Libération) is less careful: ‘‘L’Eau à la bouche is to cinema what the novels of Françoise Sagan are to literature. It doesn’t matter if they’re well written or not, they’re read because they convey precisely and truthfully the rather blurry state of mind of a certain public. . . . For love is the great undertaking of the world where boredom and a refined eroticism meet.’’ L’Humanité ’s Samuel Lachize complains ‘‘that it is impossible to believe in the characters, whose inconsistencies are limitless. . . . The deliberate refusal to adopt a critical position vis-à-vis today’s society tarnishes the works of the ‘New Wave.’ ’’ Only France-Observateur—the journal that Doniol-Valcroze cofounded —finds nothing to criticize: in a review entitled ‘‘L’Esprit de finesse,’’ Pierre Kast announces: ‘‘The time has come for films as personal, as revealing of a private universe as are the novels we love. . . . [It is] an auteur film, personal and sincere, and [one] that sounds absolutely new. . . . It is exactly because he is intelligent that the film is sensitive. . . . The film [is that] of a man who loves women, who says it and shows it. More precisely, who shows them. The pleasure we have watching three girls as beautiful in di√erent ways as Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Brion, and Alexandra Stewart is incomparable.’’ Yet Doniol-Valcroze’s first film is far from attaining the same level of acuity as Kast’s first film: the games of seduction between ‘‘masters’’ and their guests remain very conventional, bordering on cynicism, and the plot between the butler (Galabru) and the new servant (Lafont) in the end reveals a strong contempt for women of the lower classes: after Lafont uses all of her agility and cleverness to escape the lascivious butler, whom she tells with a kind insolence what she thinks of his very personal interpretation of the droit de cuissage, she ends up unceremoniously opening her door and her bed to him.

The Precursors

Doniol-Valcroze certifies his ambivalent place in New Wave cinema with his second feature-length film, Le Coeur battant, which was shot in 1960 but not released until June 1962 because of a lack of distributors. In this film he gives a variant of the figure of the vulnerable young man essential to the new cinema (see chapter 6), with the mildly ironic gaze of a libertine intellectual, visibly older, and with a di√erent political culture than the ‘‘young Turks.’’ The film received a moderate welcome from critics and a mediocre response at the box o≈ce. Le Coeur battant is ‘‘a likable, fragile sentimental comedy, of moderate ambition’’ (Baroncelli, Le Monde) that tells us the story of the tangles of young François (Jean-Louis Trintignant [see Brassart 2004, 245–58]) with the beautiful Dominique (Françoise Brion), the clandestine mistress of a mysterious (Don) Juan, married and Catholic, for whom the younger man functions as a ‘‘beard,’’ passing as Dominique’s lover on the Mediterranean island where they are supposed to meet. But François has accepted to play the role while daring the woman with whom he is visibly in love to ‘‘play the game’’ no matter what occurs. The spectator identifies with the young man’s point of view in this amorous gamble, but unlike the films by the young generation of the Cahiers, the female figure is neither derisive (Chabrol), nor menacing (Tru√aut), nor infantilized (Godard)—instead she is an adult woman, played by an actress (Françoise Brion) whose quiet assurance and amused gaze is at a far remove both from the figures of the woman-child that Godard favored, and from the mysterious, menacing figures found in Tru√aut. The elegant and detached tone that is at once the film’s charm and its limitation indirectly confirms that Doniol-Valcroze, like Kast, does not occupy the same social, cultural, and historical place as the Cahiers camp. With La Dénonciation—produced by Braunberger, shot in 1961, and released in July 1962—the filmmaker presents a ‘‘left’’ version of the recurrent New Wave thematic of nostalgia for heroic masculinity (see chapter 7). Doniol seems to have at last gone over to the New Wave camp, whose films are elaborated according to a male subjectivity that constructs women as ‘‘Others,’’ who are sometimes amusing but ultimately menacing and even fatal. In La Dénonciation, Françoise Brion—who in the meantime had become Doniol’s wife—plays the seductive wife of his fictional alter ego (Maurice Ronet). In a typically ‘‘libertine’’ scene, she tries to distract him from his political concerns by performing an amateur striptease, but then ends up ‘‘betraying’’ him to his father and indirectly causing his death.

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If Kast and Doniol-Valcroze made the new relations between men and women the subject of their first films, their point of view remains that of men torn between fascination and fear, between respect and the desire for mastery. For reasons I will try to clarify, the young generation, the one born in the 1930s that forms the ‘‘hard core’’ of the New Wave, claims a vision of sexual relations that is much more romantic, archaic, and misogynistic.

Astruc: A Male Gaze onto Women’s Emancipation

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The itinerary of Alexandre Astruc is quite a bit di√erent from that of the other directors discussed above. Although Astruc also came from bourgeois origins, he freed himself from his family during the Occupation by joining Jean Paulhan’s Nouvelle Revue Française. During this period of his formation, Sartre played the role of his mentor. Even if afterward he moved closer to the group known as the ‘‘hussards’’ (Nimier, Blondin, Laudenbach, and Laurent; see Cahiers du cinéma, May 1957), whose literary inspiration was clearly right-wing, Astruc remained the inventor of the ‘‘camera pen,’’ the concept for which appears in an article he published in 1948 in L’Ecran français, which is rightly considered to be the manifesto of auteur cinema. Astruc directed his first film in 1952—a medium-length movie based on a novella by Barbey d’Aurevilly. The film, titled Le Rideau cramoisi, became the model of a new creative attitude in cinema. By choosing to tell the story solely by means of the interior voice of the main character, played by JeanClaude Pascal, the filmmaker inaugurates the first person masculine singular as the enunciative instance of modern cinema, in a tonality very marked by romanticism. It is not that the popular cinema of the 1940s and 1950s never used male character-narrators (indeed, it is one of the innovations of postwar cinema) but the sovereign character of the narrative instance, the unique holder of speech, is unprecedented in French fiction film, with the exception of the 1936 Le Roman d’un tricheur by Sacha Guitry—whom Tru√aut, in fact, proclaimed as his master in his famous preface to Guitry’s Le Cinéma et moi. The diegetic sound in Le Rideau cramoisi only contains noises and music.≥ By eliminating the prologue and epilogue of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novella, in which a narrator-witness presents the protagonist of the story several decades after the event, Astruc constructs a direct relationship between the

The Precursors

viewer and the hero-narrator. The story is set in the Napoleonic era, but the filmmaker has reduced the historical context to a minimum, as if to make the narrative more phantasmatic. The décor is limited to a big bourgeois house in a park, and most of the scenes happen at night. The film tells the story of an amorous encounter between a young garrison o≈cer—the narrator—and the daughter (played by the then unknown Anouk Aimée) of the people who are putting him up. Everything indicates the unforeseen, incomprehensible, and magical nature of this encounter, instigated by the young girl and renewed each night with the same passion, until her sudden death and the flight of the narrator. The magic can be read as the realization of the male fantasy of possessing a girl who o√ers herself without explanation and demonstrates her passion in an exclusively physical manner: the narrator makes it clear that she stubbornly refuses to speak and that he soon understands that he must respect her muteness. Even her death—before her lover could tire of her, sparing him the bother of a breakup, or more seriously, of a marriage with a ‘‘compromised’’ girl—shows very clearly the stakes of this ‘‘fantastic’’ death; the sudden turn of fortune is answerable to a logic of desire and not verisimilitude. Astruc is careful not to use e√ects that could place his film within the fantasy genre. The phrase that brings an end to the story makes an allusion to the young girl’s illuminated window, as if a displacement of the memory of the amorous adventure onto the screen of fantasm. This film is thus the beginning of the dominant reign of a male enunciator that reduces the female character to a fantasmatic projection. Capable of providing the narrator with the most delicious sensations, but silent and ‘‘ephemeral,’’ the young woman lover unites the enthusiasm of passion with the knowing docility of the courtesan, ‘‘qualities’’ that are quite contradictory in real women—not to mention young girls of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. By detouring through a literary adaptation and a costume drama, this rather naive male fantasy is granted a cultural legitimacy that the narrative economy, the site of enunciation, and the elegance of the filmic writing manage to render as ‘‘magic.’’ In fact, Astruc’s choice of highly prestigious collaborators—Schuftan on camera, Mayo for costumes, Grunenwald for music—can be explained not by an academic taste for the beautiful image, but rather by the typically modernist concern for emphasizing questions of writing in such a way as to establish an esthetic complicity between viewer

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and director. This ‘‘cultivated’’ cultural attitude would be recognized and legitimated by the many prizes consecrating Le Rideau cramoisi as a ‘‘work of art.’’∂ This first attempt and the welcome it received allow us to understand the nature of the transformations that would occur in the late 1950s. The changes are situated both in the instance of enunciation (the auteur) claiming from this point on his subjectivity as against the invisibility of classical writing, and in the mode of construction of the characters, which derives less from the demiurgic logic of a novel by Balzac than from a romantic empathy with an alter ego, on the basis of which the film’s point of view is constructed. Cultivated filmgoers would recognize themselves in this posture. After the glittering success of Le Rideau cramoisi, Alexandre Astruc made three films in a row about conflicting relations between men and women, inscribed in precise social contexts. What interests him are the social and psychological di√erences between the sexes, despite their apparent equality in the modern world. At the same time, he builds the series around an insistent masculine presence that functions as the auteur’s point of view on the story. It is also because of this decision that Astruc can be considered a precursor to the New Wave. In Les Mauvaises rencontres, an extra-diegetical male voice recounts the edifying story of a young girl trapped by her desire to live like a man (the police suspect her of having had an abortion); in Une vie, the narrative makes the spectator empathize with the husband of Maria Schell, played by Christian Marquand, despite the heroine’s interior voice that punctuates the story; in La Proie pour l’ombre, Christian Marquand again, the veritable alter ego of the auteur, reveals the character of Annie Girardot to herself and delivers the ‘‘moral of the story’’ at the end of the film by way of an interior voice. Alexandre Astruc was close to the literary milieu of the ‘‘hussards’’ through Roland Laudenbach, who founded the Editions de la Table Ronde in 1945, and with whom he wrote most of his screenplays. This intellectual proximity with the anarchist and literary right also makes him a precursor to the New Wave—that of the young Turks of the Cahiers and Louis Malle. On August 12, 1959, when the film was shown on television, where it was introduced by Marcel L’Herbier, Paris-Presse (whose film critic, Robert Chazal, was generally favorable to the New Wave) entitled its review ‘‘Les Mauvaises rencontres: First manifestation of a ‘new wave’ that has not yet been christened as such.’’ One of the signs of this a≈liation, for the journal,

The Precursors

was Astruc’s refusal at the time to use ‘‘a well-known actress who shines less, unfortunately, because of her talent as an actress than because of her sharp sense of advertising’’ and to instead have chosen Anouk Aimée, a still unknown young actress, but one whom the producers accepted in the end because of Le Rideau cramoisi—in which she had already played the partner of Jean-Claude Pascal, with whom she had created a magic couple that had seduced the audience. Les Mauvaises rencontres was adapted from Une sacrée salade, a novel by another ‘‘hussard,’’ Jacques Laurent. Astruc, writing in his memoirs, called the book ‘‘a courageous denunciation of the hypocrisy surrounding abortion’’ (1966, 115). The young filmmaker made use of experienced and famous collaborators: Max Douy, Archimbaud, Marcel Camus, and an assortment of first-class actors—besides the young couple from Le Rideau cramoisi, JeanClaude Pascal and Anouk Aimée, there was Claude Dauphin, Yves Robert, Gaby Sylvia, and Philippe Lemaire. The film received a special medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1955, despite the e√orts by the French government to have it taken out of competition because of its taboo subject. For what concerns us here, Les Mauvaises rencontres is indeed a precursor film, to the extent that it poses the question of abortion from the point of view of a young woman and, more generally, addresses the contradictions brought on by women’s new sexual freedom. A poster for the film warned: ‘‘The film you are about to see is the story of a young girl today, a young girl from the provinces, brutally plunged into the feverish atmosphere of Paris. Implicated in an abortion and questioned by the police, she will watch, as if in a memory, all the images of her life. She hearkens back to one after another of the di√erent men she has known and who for her add up to so many ‘unfortunate encounters.’ ’’ Released in October 1955, the film caused a scandal as much because of its subject matter as its highly proclaimed artistic ambition, but the box o≈ce results were mediocre (58,250 tickets were sold). Critics were divided: some defended and others contested its portrait of a certain kind of intellectual youth. Robert Chazal (Paris-Presse) talks about ‘‘the work of a young man who hasn’t cheated with his memories, his intellectual attitude about life and his bitterness which is that of an entire generation.’’ Paule Sengissen (RCT) sees in it ‘‘the fresco of the under-thirtys, with their words, their gestures, their hardness, their pride, their weaknesses and the taste for metaphysics that gives precedence to love.’’ In the same weekly,∑ Jean-Louis Tallenay

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writes: ‘‘The true subject is the despair of certain young people of the postwar period. . . . They cultivate the taste for nihilism like a drug and their revolt has no goal! Of course. But are they entirely responsible? And even if they are, do we have the right to close our eyes to their solitude and their revolt? . . . How many, among those who snicker, have twenty-yearold sons and daughters who, without their knowledge, see themselves in the sorry heroes of Les Mauvaises rencontres?’’ In France-Observateur Doniol’s review is full of praise: ‘‘The subject: success, Parisian air, a young girl, her loves, her lost illusions, it’s important to emphasize that this is all profoundly part of our times, the times of ‘the Saint-Germain-des-Prés vicinity’ which I don’t much like and which Astruc judges with tenderness and severity, but which is a historical fact and which, for the first time, is rightly and truly expressed.’’ His review unleashed an avalanche of scandalized readers, to whom André Bazin tried to respond a month later by characterizing the film as ‘‘the cinematic novel of postwar intellectual youth, the only one after all . . . [It is] a moral essay about purity and ambition.’’ Jean Rochereau, on the other hand, denounces the film in La Croix as ‘‘a sordid story about dealings in abortion.’’ For Louis Séguin, in the literary monthly Les Lettres nouvelles: ‘‘Not one of the pathetic and inconsistent imbeciles that he tries to make his heroes is worthy of shining the shoes of a Rastignac.’’ The critic for Le Monde, Henry Magnan, writes: ‘‘The so-called confusion of the young, the pretext for all the flights and all the exhibitionisms of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, does not convince me in the slightest: why don’t they all find a job!’’ In a more moderate tone, Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro) regrets ‘‘the excesses of a juvenile romanticism’’ and ‘‘cardboard characters who are the director’s shadows.’’ Les Mauvaises rencontres thus appears good in the eyes of its contemporaries, for better or worse, because of its subject matter: as a film about youth, made by someone young—the trademark of the New Wave a few years later. On the other hand, when it comes to what is at the heart of the story, the sexual emancipation of girls, the critics remained surprisingly evasive. Most of them carefully avoid the taboo subject and cling to generalities about ‘‘the acknowledged arrivisme of the hero . . . and the hardheartedness of those who are now between twenty-five and thirty-five years old’’ (ParisPresse). Others allude to it more explicitly, but without pursuing the matter. Jean d’Yvoire (RCT), for example, writes: ‘‘Everything is false begin-

The Precursors

ning with the plot. Have we ever seen a doctor commit suicide and a young girl, who was merely a witness, treated like the worst murderer based on the most specious of denunciations?’’ But then he quickly concedes: ‘‘Only the young girl possesses a relative consistency in the face of the feeble and empty men.’’ Jean Thévenot (Les Lettres françaises) peremptorally declares: ‘‘There is one point on which the film’s success is as complete as if it had been obtained through intuition: the matter of female psychology. Talk to interested women: I think they will all agree about that.’’ According to Doniol-Valcroze, Astruc had not made a film about ‘‘abortion (the word is not even pronounced in the film),’’ but ‘‘he has told us something else: the story of his heroine, Catherine Racan, a young girl who comes to Paris to succeed. He has said himself in an interview that he was thinking about Balzac: ‘Let’s say that in my mind, it’s a little bit Illusions perdues. . . . The subject is Anouk Aimée and Paris.’ . . . Anouk Aimée, the heroine, fragile and tough, touching and bitter, will unforgettably remain the ‘Alice in the Wonderland of Men’ that we have never before seen on the screen.’’ For Claude Mauriac, thanks are due ‘‘to the talent, the beauty, and the unusual presence of Anouk Aimée, she is the only believable character for those of us who do not have the opportunity—as Astruc’s friends do—to have his protagonists benefit from what they like about him.’’ Astruc was rather lucid about the reasons for the relative failure of his first feature-length film: ‘‘My bad angel, only interested in the mise-enscène and the form, made me multiply the complicated shots, when I should have been constructing a well-fashioned story if I wanted to succeed. . . . I thought I was making a commercial film when in fact I was making something for the ciné-clubs.’’ The film is, in fact, marred by its extreme formal sophistication that at times appears gratuitous. But the lighting (many contrasts), the framing, and the camera movements often give this modern drama a singular brightness in the cinema of the era. Like La Proie pour l’ombre a few years later, Les Mauvaises rencontres could be called a ‘‘problem film.’’ Astruc is already trying to show ‘‘the disequilibrium of a woman torn between her physical, sexual, passive and submissive condition as a woman, and the kind of total freedom and absolute equality with men made possible in today’s society.’’∏ The construction of the narrative, with its flashbacks to the police interrogating the young woman suspected of having had an abortion, is not without a certain resemblance to Charles Spaak’s screenplays for André

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Cayatte during the same era. If the film avoids a reductive kind of special pleading, it is because the heroine remains opaque in a way that expresses the di≈culty she has in finding her place. Anouk Aimée’s face is usually meditative or questioning when dealing with the attractions and fears she feels. She smiles only rarely, and the camera takes seriously her hesitations, sadnesses, and confusions. Astruc refuses to film her voyeuristically: her clothing is not what is usually seen in commercial films of the era: in the beginning, fresh from the provinces to Paris, she wears a series of blouses tightly buttoned up to her chin—a kind of reverse provocation to the flattering décolleté of a Françoise Arnoul or a Brigitte Bardot in the same moment. The film is interested in her feelings and her thoughts, not her ‘‘assets.’’ The sculptural beauty of Anouk Aimée’s face and her Joan of Arc haircut encourage the viewer’s interest in her state of mind. The film opens with an extra-diegetic voice, that of the omniscient novelist who dives into his characters’ thoughts, but the flashbacks are commented on by the voice of the young woman who thus takes charge of her own story, punctuated by a recurrent phrase: ‘‘I have no regrets.’’ If certain turns of fortune appear artificial (in particular, the explanations relating to Blaise [Jean-Claude Pascal], the ambitious journalist who ‘‘dumps’’ her after two blissful weeks on the Côte d’Azur, and whom she runs into at a reception in Paris), and if the very dark ending (she learns of the suicide of her friend, the abortionist doctor, a sympathetic cynic played by Claude Dauphin whom she had ended up denouncing after a night of harassment from the police) expresses above all Astruc’s conviction that women are incapable of taking responsibility for their new freedom, the film remains a kind of female bildungsroman that tries to take seriously the contradictions generated by a young woman’s desire for emancipation. Une Vie, released in September 1958 (with 121, 240 tickets sold), was greeted as a brilliant adaptation of Maupassant’s famous novel, made with the means and constraints of an international coproduction (with Maria Schell starring), in costumes and in color. The film can be read as a radical critique of bourgeois marriage, which alienates men as much as women. Christian Marquand, the director’s friend and alter ego, plays the husband who renounces all of his personal ambitions in order to marry a young heiress, a naive young thing incapable of responding to his aspirations. The film tries to take into account the point of view of the forlorn wife (played by Schell with her slightly foolish air of purity), but the filmmaker’s empa-

The Precursors

thy for the male protagonist, avid for liberty and adventure, can be felt quite clearly. His tragic end (the shepherd’s caravan in which he hid his liaison with a beautiful aristocrat who lives nearby falls o√ a cli√ and unites the two lovers in death) ends up making the audience take the side of the young man trapped by a marriage he made for money. La Proie pour l’ombre, released in April 1961 (with 51,200 tickets sold), was originally a screenplay entitled La Plaie et le Couteau, which Astruc wrote with Françoise Sagan in 1956. Astruc described the screenplay in Cinémonde: La Plaie et le Couteau is about the disequilibrium of women today. They live like men. They work, travel, they go out alone. They have suceeded in obtaining living conditions similar to those of men, but they forget that they remain naturally passive, sentimental, even if they are leading a more active life. That’s where a deep inconsistency grows. . . . I suggested this theme to Françoise Sagan, who was immediately ‘‘plugged in.’’ . . . My heroine is a young woman married to a much older man, consequently less available, less generous even though rich. She becomes interested in a boy who has nothing. She is seduced by Bohemianism. And above all she wants to create a need in this perfectly free boy, the need for her. (n. 1303, July 28, 1959)

In an interview with Rivette and Rohmer for the Cahiers du cinéma, Astruc discussed his divergences with Françoise Sagan: ‘‘The first treatment [written with Sagan] was about a woman’s discovery of the power she has beginning with the moment she notices her husband’s jealousy. And the second treatment, which was grafted onto the first, was the discovery a woman makes that she is not invulnerable. . . . For the first time I felt drawn to tell the truth about . . . a woman character, as I believe, whether rightly or wrongly, women to be’’ (n. 116, February 1961). This is how the filmmaker recounts in his memoirs the disappearance of Sagan from the final screenplay: ‘‘Christian Marquand o√ered to produce La Plaie et le Couteau, the famous screenplay I had written with Sagan. With our two names on it, he was keen to produce it. It was like going back to a reheated meal when I started work again on La Plaie et le Couteau, which had become La Proie pour l’ombre, since Sagan, in withdrawing from the project, had asked me to change the title. To be completely honest, I have to say that Christian, in his clumsiness, contributed to the rupture. He had gone out and found Lourau [a producer], who accepted to produce

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the film on the strength of Sagan’s name. But when the moment came to divide up the rights, Christian wanted to give more to me than to Françoise, which, and I understand her, she, despite her nice nature, could not forgive’’ (1996, 162–63). This is a significant anecdote, both regarding Marquand’s identification with Astruc and the male will to dominate in the world of art just as elsewhere. The film opens with the passionate encounter between Anna (Annie Girardot), the wife of a rich, indi√erent architect (Daniel Gelin), and Bruno (Christian Marquand), a publisher of classical recordings. Anna manages a contemporary art gallery that legally belongs to her husband. She is hesitant to become involved with Bruno and leave behind the material comfort of her bourgeois marriage, but her lover’s interest in her work at the gallery compared to her husband’s sarcasm makes her decide to leave. The lovers move to a country home, but Bruno demands a passionate investment from her that soon shows itself incompatible with her work in the gallery. After her husband makes her a goodbye present of the gallery before taking o√ with another woman, she leaves Bruno to confront solitude, which appears to her to be a necessary condition for her independence. Astruc’s ambivalence toward his female character is confirmed by the way he talks about the film in his memoirs: ‘‘Naturally, Christian Marquand played the role of Bruno, the musicologist and lover that Anna was going to smash like a toy, and Daniel Gélin [played] the role of Eric, the architect husband, both abandoned and bruised. As for Anna, the woman, the heroine torn between her profession, her husband and her lover, her thirst for freedom, we hesitated for a long time, Christian and I, between Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, but ended up o√ering the role to Annie Girardot, who, having asked to meet me, accepted’’ (1996, 164). The highly controlled mise-en-scène oscillates between Anna’s point of view and Bruno’s. But, from the outset, it’s the young man who seems to make the woman discover her ‘‘true nature,’’ that of a woman in love. We are back in more or less the same social milieu (the cultivated bourgeoisie) as in Les Amants three years earlier, and the same theme of a woman’s selfrevelation through the love of a man, alter ego of the auteur (both are marginals associated with the artistic or intellectual world). But Astruc has added an element that determines the modernity of the story: the woman’s investment in her profession and her desire for independence. Even if the art gallery is a caricature of how an upper-middle-class woman manages to

The Precursors

work, the film nevertheless presents it as a determining factor in the consciousness that the heroine acquires of her independence. The success of her professional activities first causes open conflict with her husband, followed by quarrels with her lover, and then in the end their breakup. Certain critics recognized the relevance of the subject. Claude Garson in L’Aurore is thankful to Astruc for having insisted on ‘‘this need that a certain number of women have to not be considered as objects but as people ready to confront life with the same weapons, the same desires, the same uncertainties as men.’’ For Martine Monod in L’Humanité, Astruc ‘‘has well understood that relations between men and women can no longer be the same in society as it exists today.’’ It is not surprising that for Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro), ‘‘the heroine su√ers from an excessive need for autonomy, which perhaps indeed characterizes women today.’’ According to Maurice Ciantar (Paris-Jour): ‘‘By approaching for undoubtedly the first time in cinema the problem of the social promotion of women, a problem that completely transforms intimacy within a couple, M. Astruc has upset his audience.’’ For André S. Labarthe (France-Observateur), ‘‘Alexandre Astruc has chosen to treat a key theme in contemporary life—briefly, the condition of women —the legitimate right of the modern woman to confront her companion of the opposite sex on a terrain of perfect equality.’’ Jacques Siclier, whose review in the Cahiers du cinéma is titled ‘‘The Maladapted Woman,’’ recalls: The first thematic innovation of the young French cinema . . . was to describe the actual relations between men and women today and to talk in particular about love, without paying any attention to the taboos and social and moral prejudices. . . . Underneath her unsettling appearance, Anna is the most touching female character, the most human and the most true of any we have been o√ered by the young French cinema. It is less about the battle between the sexes than it is about the battle of a woman with herself. What Astruc expresses through Anna is the existing inadequacy between the sensitive nature of woman and the independence that is now o√ered to her by modern society. In this society men have hardly changed, but women are uneasy because they are dragged into a historical evolution for which they are not prepared. (n. 120, June 1961)

But many critics reproach the filmmaker for having taken up an outmoded theme ‘‘where the husband-wife-lover triangle plays out its unreal

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game, disinterested in the living world’’ (Jeander in Libération). Baroncelli (Le Monde) sees in it ‘‘the argument of a Henry Bernstein play or a Marcel Prévost novel,’’ unflattering references to boulevard theater that we see as well in Macabru (Combat). Garson concludes that ‘‘the little love stories of overly spoiled people aren’t as important as one might think,’’ and Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro littéraire) finds the story ‘‘strangely outdated, from an era when women’s work and its possible reconciliation or not with their sentimental life constituted a real problem (1900).’’ Positif (n. 40, July 1961) asked Andrée Michel, a feminist sociologist, to analyze the film’s thesis. The article is humorously entitled ‘‘The Eternal Masculine,’’ and it explains Astruc’s point of view in this way: ‘‘A woman cannot be happy unless she is strictly subordinated to a man; her ‘essence,’ her ‘eternal nature’ make her an appendix to a man, she cannot have an authentic existence beyond her spiritual and material dependence in regard to men. . . . Women’s emancipation is nothing but a trap for the woman herself.’’ To show the weakness of Astruc’s thesis, Andrée Michel pitilessly deconstructs the ‘‘image of the bourgeois woman who prefers her husband’s money over her professional independence,’’ and shows the falsity ‘‘at the level of sentiments, of a woman who has never loved her husband sexually, nor morally or intellectually, and who we are shown is fully satisfied by her lover, missing the first and abandoning the second. . . . There is no more of an eternal feminine, who looks like Anna, than there is an eternal masculine archetype, who looks like Eric. The content of their personality is given to them by the social class to which they belong.’’ But by making the bourgeoisie the site of ‘‘women’s subordination to men,’’ Michel, squarely within an orthodox Marxist tradition, suggests that women who work are not concerned by male domination . . . In this sense Michel underestimates in what way Astruc’s thesis might, at that time, be widely representative, particularly among the cultivated classes. In the end she does not see the complexity of Anna’s character, to which Annie Girardot’s grave portrayal grants a great deal of pathos, torn between the desire to live a love a√air intensely and the refusal of the dependent relation her lover wants to impose on her. Astruc takes his characters (particularly the two lovers) su≈ciently seriously to make their contradictions credible. And the fact that he added onto the last image—that of Bruno watching Anna leave—by means of an interior voice used for the first time in the film, a ‘moral’ heavily intoned by the abandoned lover, (‘A man alone is

The Precursors

never as alone as a woman alone’), suggests that he was perhaps afraid that viewers, especially women, might see Anna’s departure in a positive way, as the apprenticeship in independence whose cause she had defended very convincingly a few scenes earlier. The relative failure of La Proie pour l’ombre can doubtlessly be explained in part because it was perceived as a film that ‘‘like all those of his generation, depicts, yet again, the ‘Parisian’ milieu in which women have no ambition to be loved, but rather to have a career’’ (L’Aurore). But the film’s pessimistic vision of the relations between ‘‘modern’’ men and women suffered from the contrast it drew with the more superficial, but also more exciting, vision of sexual freedom that for the most part characterized the new cinema of the time. After the failure of his next film, L’Education sentimentale (1962), a very mediocre adaptation of Flaubert, Astruc described his change in orientation: ‘‘I have never done anything else until now except film women’s faces, and trace what crosses those faces—which is to say passion. It was almost as if someone came and pulled me out of bed by my feet to announce to me like Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai: ‘I didn’t give you that brain, that precious brain you are rightly so proud of, to have you remain among a herd of women. I have other ambitions for you. From now on you are going to become interested in men, and in what makes them shiver with ecstasy—not passion but the play of ideas. Give up the facile games of passion, my son, and follow me along the path of abstraction’ ’’ (1996, 173– 74). Leaving aside the misogynistic aggression of a filmmaker facing failure, we are back to the highly French conviction that men and women are ontologically di√erent, where men are drawn to abstraction and women devoted to passion, which is to say to dependence (Coquillat 1982). But this retrospective moment of spite also conveys the fact that Astruc was not able to adapt stylistically to the new cinema. The heaviness and frequent clumsiness of his direction of actors and his di≈culty giving up ‘‘leaden’’ screenplays are undoubtedly largely responsible for the public’s lack of appreciation of his films. In retrospect, these original personalities who emerge in a more or less ephemeral way in the French cinema of the 1950s seem to belong more to the heady climate of the immediate postwar than they announce or prefigure the New Wave. The New Wave, after all, is built instead around a romantic, puritanical, and formalist reaction in the face of the social and

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cultural upheavals of the period. The links that the ‘‘precursor’’ filmmakers held with intellectual currents on the left (Sartre, Vailland) or on the anarchist right (the ‘‘hussards’’) placed them on a political horizon that the new generation would reject completely. Each in their own way, the three filmmakers discussed in this chapter were swept aside by history, some because their films became invisible (Kast), others because lacking public or critical success, they stopped making films that directly addressed relations between men and women (Astruc and Doniol-Valcroze). That the change in relations between men and women—the burning issue of the postwar period—should become central to some young film-makers at the end of the 1950s shouldn’t come as a surprise. On the other hand, we should pause to wonder about such a rapid disappearance of the problematic, both from films and from critical discourse, as the New Wave progressively a≈rmed its ‘‘modernity.’’ It is as if cinematic modernity, in the aesthetic sense the term has taken on in France, were accompanied at this moment by a reaffirmation of male mastery of the creative process, which in turn makes women regress to the status of fantasm or muse.

Chapter Six

Between Romanticism and Modernism

A Sociological Survey of the New Cinema as Early as 1962 In 1962, Claude Bremont, Evelyne Sullerot, and Simone Berton published an investigation into ‘‘the conditions of appearance of the New Wave’’ in the first issue of Communications, a new journal edited by the sociologist Edgar Morin. By comparing two contemporary groups of films, one traditional, the other New Wave, between 1957 and 1961, Bremont, Sullerot, and Berton set out to analyze the nature of innovation in filmic representations. For these researchers, the specific characteristics of New Wave films were clearly apparent: the plots are all set in the immediate present, privileging the sphere of private life and geographic proximity; the actions are completed in a very brief span of time, making use, for the most part, of protagonists without a past, without memory, and without a project; the protagonists have nothing to do with heroes in the strong sense found in popular literature and film; the gender distribution is not as skewed as in traditional cinema, even if women remain in the minority and are most

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often partners rather than full protagonists; and, finally, the focus is on the sexual problems of the characters, who are markedly younger than those of traditional cinema. It is a world of antiheroes who have nothing but individual problems in a stable social world that is not made likeable to the audience: the only participation demanded of the viewer is at the level of empathy, without any ethical reference. According to the same article, New Wave heroes belong as much to the well-to-do milieux as do those from the ‘‘cinéma de papa,’’ but they are indi√erent to money. Professional problems play a lesser role, and work is undervalued compared to leisure. Professional success is inversely proportional to success at love. Their refusal of institutions is political, and social values leave them indi√erent. New Wave heroes live an absurd everyday life directly inherited from Camus’s L’Etranger: nihilism and the absence of altruism. The family as a social unit is dead. Familial or couple relations are perpetually in crisis, except when a pact of complacency has been worked out. Infidelity is the rule, whether the couple is married or not. Most of the amorous relations take place outside of marriage and outside of any matrimonial perspective. The films systematically emphasize the sexual dimension of male behavior (and not that of the female alone, as in traditional cinema); the sexual act is clearly indicated in most of the films, and often it is the first such act between the two partners. Passion is always recent and without a future. The eruption of love disturbs a well-ordered libertine pattern— love being experienced as a threatening attachment that endangers the hero’s availability. And yet it is this vulnerability that incites the viewer’s empathy. Almost all of the New Wave films circle around the theme of love as ultimate risk: that it must give meaning to one’s life or die. The transcendental value of passion is romantically a≈rmed, while the daily life of the New Wave hero is often banal or mediocre. The ending is frequently a ‘‘senseless death’’ for the hero. Most of the films are pessimistic, implying the hero’s failure, or else the ending is an open one but not happy, because the future is unpredictable even though the social world is tranquil; the individual, no longer depending on anyone but himself, is overwhelmed by the very excess of his freedom. This rigorous investigation confirms that New Wave cinema profoundly altered cinema’s representations, particularly those having to do with gender relations. It is not that postwar French cinema showed little interest in

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the question, but relations between men and women were always interwoven with social or professional relations and with power di√erentials. As Noël Burch and I showed in La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français (1996), French cinema, unlike American cinema in particular, has been constructed, at least since sound film, around ‘‘mixed’’ genres—that is, genres addressed to women as much as to men. These genres, all centered on relations between men and women, include comedy (boulevard or vaudeville; the dominant genre before the war), the costume drama, ‘‘poetic realism,’’ melodrama (dominant during the Occupation), and even the crime or detective genre—particularly in the form of the ‘‘noir’’ realism of the postwar period. The novelty of New Wave films is the disappearance of class relations: the protagonists all belong to the same cultivated, urban (petit) bourgeoisie, and amorous relations seem to escape any social determination.

A Cinema Heir to Romanticism The major di√erence between the films of the new generation and traditional cinema is the presence of a male character who is the origin of the film’s dominant point of view. As in the romantic tradition of the novel of formation or bildungsroman, it is usually a young man, a kind of alter ego of the director, with whom the spectator will establish an empathetic relation. Michelle Coquillat (1982, 295–318) has shown that romanticism— beginning with its most famous precursor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of La Nouvelle Heloïse (1761)—contains a claim to self-engendering on the part of writers who associate, ontologically, creation and masculinity, while women are defined as on the side of contingency, nature, and reproduction. The humble artisan of the classical age who submits to the rules of Beauty gives way to the inspired thinker, to the solitary prophet who no longer accepts any social tie other than that of the fraternity of artists. The valorization of individual singularity as opposed to social hierarchy or the collective environment is explicitly expressed in romantic texts by the articulation between the tragic destiny of the male hero and his ‘‘capture’’ by the love for a woman, an event that makes him lose his creative power, or more generally, his ability to be himself, in the absolute autonomy of a person who self-generates.∞ Coquillat analyzes the matrix of this schema in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the text that would become the obligatory

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reference point for the French writers of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Two abysses open up in front of the young poet imagined by Goethe: the passivity of his own sensitivity that makes of him an androgyne, and the passivity of the woman who inserts herself between him and his desire to create. He must conquer both or die. For Coquillat, thwarted love masks the way in which the hero’s creative capacity is endangered by his encounter with Charlotte: Werther dies less of not being able to marry the girl he loves than from the dissolution of his vital energy in a love that makes him dependent on others, when male identity can only be constructed in splendid isolation. The figure of the romantic hero is that of the creator (of himself or of a work of art) who aspires to total autonomy, in contrast with the woman who needs others in order to exist and who threatens to draw him into her contingency. The ‘‘ontologically’’ misogynistic dimension of romanticism (which, paradoxically, may find itself expressed through very moving female characters) establishes an exclusionary relationship between the construction of male identity and being in love with a woman. It can be found in most New Wave films, with the same tragic tonality that makes the exclusion a fatality. The happy ending is unknown in New Wave cinema. The hero of A bout de souΔe dies, as does the hero of Les Cousins, Combat dans l’île (Cavalier, 1962), and La Dénonciation (Doniol-Valcroze, 1962); the hero of Feu follet (Malle, 1963) commits suicide, the hero of Le Petit soldat is left tragically alone, as is the hero of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Malle, 1957), La Tête contre les murs (Mocky and Franju, 1958), Les Dragueurs (Mocky, 1959), Tirez sur le pianiste, and Lola (Demy, 1960). Jules et Jim brings together suicide, murder, and tragic solitude, as does Paris nous appartient (Rivette, 1961). Films that appear to end more openly suggest the necessity to distance oneself from women (Le Beau Serge), the ephemeral character of any passion (Les Amants). Les 400 coups ends with the hero’s escape to the sea after his descent into hell provoked by the lack of maternal love. The recurrence of a narrative schema whereby the young male protagonist in search of identity undergoes various su√erings, ending often with death, raises the question of the particular meaning that such a masochistic display at this historical moment might have. The fantasmatic configurations of New Wave films≤ can be illuminated by a Freudian analysis of male masochism articulated through the desire to be beaten/loved by the father.≥ If we recall that the young critics of the Cahiers du cinéma exhibited a very violent attitude of revolt against their cinematic fathers, and aspired to

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take their place (which they would indeed do a few years later), all the while refusing to lend a political dimension to their revolt, we can easily conceive that a certain unconscious guilt feeds their work in the form of heroes in search of su√ering. The pleasure associated with su√ering is particularly palpable in the first films of Chabrol, Tru√aut, and Godard, as I will show later on. The disappearance of, or the ridicule directed against, paternal figures is accompanied by a masochistic display that a√ects the young male hero as a violently desired punishment. If male masochism, as Frank Krutnik (1991, 79–91) has shown in the case of 1940s Hollywood film noir, reveals a moment of disjunction between the possibilities of representation of a personal image of masculinity and the traditional cultural codifications of masculine identity—that is, a crisis in patriarchal society and culture—New Wave cinema can also be read as the elaboration of a moment of crisis. In this case, the cult object that young French filmmakers have made of American film noir takes on a new meaning. We can see it as the expression of an anxiety in relation to patriarchal values, perceived as castrating and absurd, which makes submission to paternal law di≈cult for the young men. Most of the New Wave films, unlike film noir, derive from a narrative of formation, but their narrative schema takes place for the most part within a crime plot. The two kinds of ‘‘heroes’’ actually share more similarities than they do di√erences, if only because the ‘‘formation’’ of the New Wave protagonists almost always ends tragically. Melodrama seems to be used in this case as a way of figuring a su√ering hero, without that su√ering being linked to social contradictions. It is associated, rather, with ontological causes—particularly sexual di√erence and the hero’s need for autonomy.

The Male Hero: Alter Ego of the Filmmaker New Wave films, by definition, function in an extremely personal mode. This means that, more than for the cinema that came before it, the individual variations in which these new representations appear must be taken into account. But we will see that this does not invalidate establishing a point of view shared by the generation. I want to linger on some of the first featurelength films by the principal figures—that is, the group of ‘‘young Turks’’ that gravitated around the Cahiers du cinéma and some of those who belong to the same sociocultural tendency. To do so I adopt a chronological order in order to restore the temporality of the new generation’s emergence.

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A new generation of actors also came into being with the new cinema— one that departed from the categories of popular cinema. Alain Delon, the only actor of the period who truly qualifies as a leading man, particularly because of his physical attributes, is also the only actor not to cross paths with the New Wave. This is not by chance; the young filmmakers chose less-than-ideal versions of masculinity. Ranging from the sympathetic ugliness of a Belmondo to the e√eminate allure of a Brialy, then passing through the most frequent type of gentle, vulnerable man, played by Ronet or Trintignant, the New Wave created actors who are the filmmaker’s alter egos rather than icons designed for the adoration of women filmgoers.∂ The di√erence, here again, is sociocultural. The variations that I examine here on the theme taken by this masculine figure as alter ego of the filmmaker include Julien (Maurice Ronet) in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud; the pair Serge and François in Le Beau Serge and the pair Paul and Charles in Les Cousins, played by Gérard Blain and JeanClaude Brialy; Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in Les 400 coups and Edouard (Charles Aznavour) in Tirez sur le pianiste; François (Jean-Pierre Mocky) in La Tête contre les murs and Freddy (Jacques Charrier) in Les Dragueurs; Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in A bout de souΔe and Michel Subor in Le Petit soldat; Roland (Marc Michel) in Demy’s Lola and Jean (Claude Mann) in La Baie des anges by the same director; Pierre (Jess Hahn) in Le Signe du lion by Eric Rohmer; François (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Le Coeur battant (Doniol-Valcroze); Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Le Combat dans l’île by Cavalier; Gérard (Gianni Esposito) in Paris nous appartient; and even Giorgio Albertazzi, the narrator character in L’Année dernière à Marienbad. By analyzing some of these films, I will try to show the repetitions in the construction of the characters, in their relation to the point of enunciation, and in their narrative treatment as well as in the physique, the acting, and the behavior of the actors who play them, in order to understand what new representations of masculinity emerge and how, given this, a perspective on women and gender relations comes into being.

Chabrol: Between Empathy and Derision Claude Chabrol was the first member of the New Wave to break with the traditional way of producing films. Thanks to an influx of family money (his wife’s inheritance), he wrote, produced, and directed two films back to

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back, with two young unknown or yet to be known actors, Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain.∑ In February 1959 when Le Beau Serge was released and awarded the Jean-Vigo prize, it was auteur cinema that was being honored; indeed, critics emphasized the fact that Chabrol was the complete author of his film, which was made outside of the production ‘‘system’’ and even in opposition to it. Sadoul’s (Les Lettres françaises) assertion that Chabrol ‘‘made his film with the same liberty as a writer his first novel’’ returns like a leitmotif, and ‘‘the film’s touching tone of truthfulness’’ (Claude Mauriac, Le Figaro littéraire) is perceived as the consequence of the complete economic freedom Chabrol enjoyed. What is more, the film’s release coincided with the highly publicized creation of the French Association of Independent Creators of Cinema, a group of authors, filmmakers, and collaborators in film creation ‘‘wishing to defend their freedom of expression and committed to realizing that goal in practice within their profession by new methods of production,’’ which several critics mention in their reviews (but which, in fact, will remain at the stage of pious vows). Even Le Canard enchaîné’s critic, Michel Duran, adopts a surprisingly formalist position on the film: ‘‘Le Beau Serge has only one star: cinema. Le Beau Serge will undoubtedly not receive the glittering reception of a rather anodyne film like Les Amants, which owes its success to a few minutes of eroticism, falsely audacious and soliciting its clients. There is much more real audacity and personality in Le Beau Serge.’’ From February 1959 onward, we can trace a division in the critical discourse between the false audacity of ‘‘scandalous’’ cinema and the truly audacious writing of auteur cinema. The exceptional quantity of articles about Le Beau Serge indicates the importance of the event despite the film’s limited success with the audience: all of the critics salute the birth of an alternative cinema that shows the possibility of making films as one would write a novel—with complete freedom. Only Roland Barthes, in Les Lettres nouvelles, voices a reservation. He reproaches Chabrol for trying to be a Flaubert without managing to do so, because he ‘‘invests his story with pathos and a moral, which is to say, whether he wants to or not, an ideology.’’ The film’s release was also marked by what would become from that moment on an obligatory stage in the reception of auteur cinema: long interviews with the filmmaker, who gives the ‘‘right interpretation’’ of his work that critics would strive to relay, thereby often renouncing their critical role to become a simple mediator between the artist and his potential

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audience. This phenomenon is all the more striking in the case of Le Beau Serge in that critics ‘‘spontaneously’’ produced an interpretation of the film that Chabrol vigorously proceeded to contest. Témoignage chrétien, for example, published an interview with Chabrol by Jean Carta in which the critic talks about a ‘‘very Rosselinian film, in which I thought I was watching the redemption of one being by another, a degenerate alcoholic by a secular saint. Most of the audience shared my point of view.’’ Chabrol replies, with the taste for provocation that would become his trademark, ‘‘That would really be too bad for I meant to say more or less the opposite. The sympathetic character is Gérard Blain—the one who beats his wife, who gets drunk, who mistreats his friend, who screws around with his sister-in-law, and so forth. The dirty hypocrite is Brialy, who plays at being the little saint, the choir boy, the boy-scout.’’ The critics then docilely came around to the auteur’s interpretation. What remains unsaid in the reception of the film are the representations of gender relations. Unlike films by Vadim or Malle, Chabrol’s first two films rework in an exacerbated way a form of misogyny inherited from romanticism that constructs the woman as a danger to male identity (Coquillat 1982). Much more seriously, no critic mentions the fact that the figure of the ‘‘easy woman,’’ played by Bernadette Lafont, doesn’t appear to have su√ered in the least from having been raped by her father. The violently misogynistic subtext of the film was not, apparently, able to be perceived at this point (rape and incest at that time still enjoyed a wide impunity in all social sectors). The invisibility of gender issues is confirmed by the fact that a certain number of (male) critics—including Eric Rohmer, Claude Mauriac, Samuel Lachize, Jacques de Baroncelli, Louis Chauvet, Roland Barthes, and Roger Régent—make absolutely no mention of the female characters but rather focus their analyses on the friendship between the two men. In Le Beau Serge (filmed first though written after Les Cousins) Blain and Brialy in fact play two sides of the same destiny—that of a promising young man in danger of physical and psychic death. The film progressively lifts the veil on the nature of the threat. The interior voice of François (Brialy) opens the film, as he arrives by bus in the village in the Creuse where he spent his childhood and where he has returned for medical reasons having to do with a lung condition. He tries to see his friend Serge (Blain), who as the most brilliant of his old friends had dreamed of becom-

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ing an architect,∏ but he finds him a wine-sodden wreck. With François we learn that the reason for this unraveling is a village woman whom Serge married because she became pregnant by him, but then the baby was stillborn and abnormal. Since then, Serge has a reputation in the village for being impotent and ine√ectual because of his inability to father a healthy child. The film lets us know, however, in the purest tradition of Zola’s L’Assomoir, that it is undoubtedly the young woman’s alcoholic father who was responsible for supplying the bad genes. Serge’s wife, who François discovers pregnant again, is a model of loving, virtuous resignation, which allows Chabrol to be absolved of any ‘‘vulgar’’ misogyny. On the other hand, her function in the film, clearly, is to prevent Serge from existing as a man, which is to say as a solitary creator. By accepting without protest his descent into alcoholism, she embodies the danger of masculine entrapment by the feminine—associated here with nature, immanence, and the rural. The film, which was shot entirely in the little village in the Creuse where Chabrol spent the war years, uses the whole repository of peasant life—avatar of a long French literary tradition (Weber 1983) reactivated by the Petainist ideology of a return to the earth: ‘‘the earth doesn’t lie’’ (Miller 1975)—while associating women with it. The village is essentially embodied by three women: the innkeeper, an older woman whose function is entirely limited to nursing and thus merits indulgence; Serge’s wife, the ‘‘objective’’ instrument of his destruction; and the wife’s sister, Marie, a notorious tramp, played by Bernadette Lafont. The two young women, the virgin-mother and the whore—sisters to better signify that they are two sides of the same ‘‘feminine’’ coin—are the two destructive agents of the masculine life force. The film’s events are structured around the successive trials that the two heroes undergo: Serge and his wife, then François and Marie. François allows himself to be ‘‘seduced’’ by the young tramp who soon tracks him down at the inn, making demands. But the real trial (for the spectator as for the hero) happens when Marie is raped by her father after François has informed the old drunk that Marie is undoubtedly not his biological daughter. The young man, discovering his lover prostrate, searches out the rapist whom he knocks out. But Serge soon convinces his friend that he was wrong to take the rape as a tragic event: ‘‘This is how peasants behave.’’ Marie takes it upon herself to confirm this version by showing up to flirt with Serge at the dance the next day as though nothing had happened. The

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naive François stubbornly holds to his indignant feelings, and Serge, dead drunk, ends up knocking him out in order to go o√ to sleep with Marie. This series of events, which are di≈cult to bear today, especially for a woman spectator, functions as an initiation for François, so that he learns that men are mistaken who attribute to women their own conscience and sensitivity to right and wrong. Contrary to Serge’s declaration, it is less peasant behavior that is being flogged here than it is ‘‘female nature’’: Marie and her sister, in appearance so di√erent, have in common being reduced to an existence that they bear without protest, because they aspire to nothing else. Only the two men are animated by a consciousness that allows them to formulate projects, hopes, value judgments, or despair. The final sequence, in which François tries to save Serge from dissolution, unfolds like the Stations of the Cross and ends with a resurrection— that of François and Serge who symbolically ‘‘give birth to’’ a boy. The sequence alternates between François in the night and the snow, dragging a dead-drunk Serge, and his wife’s giving birth, from whom we hear nothing but cries of su√ering that are immediately associated with François. The newborn’s wailing, followed by the cries of joy of his father at last reunited with his masculinity, brings a lyrical-mystical ending to the film associated with romanticism. Exemplary of the anxiety of a masculinity in revolt against traditional patriarchal values, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins propose a split androgyne figure whose poles are inverted from one film to the other, as if to confirm their organic unity.π The ‘‘feminine’’ pole of this su√ering masculinity is embodied by Brialy in Le Beau Serge, then by Blain in Les Cousins, and inversely for the ‘‘masculine’’ pole. Les Cousins, which came out a month after Le Beau Serge, in March 1959, and reached a bigger audience, set up a more artful version of the same schema. Gérard Blain plays Charles, the naive cousin from the provinces who comes to live with Paul, the blasé Parisian rake, and pursue his studies in law. Beneath an apparently Manichean discourse that opposes the unrewarded honesty of Charles to Paul’s ever-lucrative cynicism, the film functions as a bildungsroman in which the principal danger pursuing the country boy is that of being trapped by the love for a woman. One of the earliest scenes shows a pitiful blonde (Geneviève Cluny) who comes to Paul’s place weeping because she is pregnant by him. The lordly reaction of the young man who casually gives her money for an abortion is both provoca-

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tive in terms of the censor and condescending in terms of the girl, who must also undergo the sarcastic remarks of Paul’s mentor, Clovis (Claude Cerval, a Machiavellian but lucid spiritual father figure, who is the counterpart of the ridiculous father figure, a bookseller, from whom Charles seeks comfort in vain). The main plot brings together Charles, Paul, and Florence (Juliette Mayniel), an ‘‘emancipated’’ (but whom we never see at work) Parisian student. After a ‘‘romantic’’ episode of vows of love exchanged between Charles and Florence, Paul makes use of Charles’s absence to convince Florence that she will be unhappy if she responds to the young man’s love: Here are the facts: you want to love him. Suppose you manage. As for him, he adores you. You move in together. In your place, so that I won’t be in your hair. Fine. He’ll work like a dog, he’s a real grind, I know him. You’ll do the housework for a couple weeks. Then let’s say you find someone to take your place doing it. You’ll stay in bed for a couple weeks. And you’ll read. [Pause]. And he’ll be the one to pick out what you read! . . . On Saturday night you’ll go to the movies. Sunday afternoon I’ll come see you and I’ll invite you both out for a drink but he’ll refuse. . . . he’ll have work to do! And you’ll want to stay home with him . . . But I know you! You won’t be able to avoid looking like a martyr and I won’t be able to prevent myself from laughing.

The scene continues and takes an even crueler turn with the arrival of Clovis. But underneath the cynicism of the two men, we can read a certain lucidity about the blind alleys of the life of the couple in its petit-bourgeois version, such as it was popularized after the war. The modernity of the scene also derives from the image of the woman outlined in the portrait that Paul makes of Florence. Breaking with the stereotype of the sentimental young girl in search of true love, the scene shows a knowing young woman, confronted with the illusions of true love embodied by Charles, the boy from the countryside. Her encounter with Charles is perhaps the expression of nostalgia for that illusion, but not once in this crucial scene does Florence argue with Paul’s analysis. What is more, the scene’s composition, made up of long tracking shots that follow the physical and psychological movements of the characters, makes us share the pathos of the situation. But with the female character’s own acquiescence, the scene also tells us that only men know the true nature of women. This is highlighted by the confiscation of speech and point of view by the male characters: it is

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Paul who reveals to Florence her own truth, which she accepts as a truth, suggesting that women are too alienated to accede to the truth of their desires and their innermost nature by themselves. Besides, the end of the scene is extremely ambiguous: it is left to the perverse Clovis to bring Florence back around to her truth: ‘‘Everything in you is on the surface, my kitten. You were born to be caressed. You were not made for the life of the mind.’’ While speaking, he proceeds to hands-on exercises, inciting Paul to caress Florence, to the point where she lets herself go in the young man’s arms, death in her soul, but without resisting. The tragic gravity with which she finally abandons herself to the vision the two men have of her seems to confirm the accuracy of that vision. In this scene we can see a mixture of the modernity and archaism that is the mark of the New Wave, expressed here with an astonishing authenticity still perceptible today: the malaise of a youth population completely out of step with the previous generation’s models of behavior. But this malaise gives way to a violent a≈rmation of a new form of male domination, which the film completely endorses. Even if it is only at the level of what Bourdieu would call symbolic violence, the film confirms the domination all the more e≈ciently in that neither the actress’s physical appearance (the unmade-up face, clear eyes, and fine features of Juliette Mayniel) nor the character’s behavior up until that scene suggest the stereotype of the ‘‘easy woman’’ to which she is reduced from that point on, reunited with the ‘‘herd’’ of complacent women who gravitate around the male characters, who are the only ones to be developed at the individual level and to be distinguishable the one from the other. In the end Charles dies much more from his incapacity to dominate the feminine that is in him (attested to by his uninterrupted epistolary dialogue with his mother and his painful fixation on Florence) than from the involuntary gunshot fired by Paul, which the film absolves with a final shot of his face, crushed with sadness.

Truffaut; or, Identification with a Suffering Masculinity Like Chabrol, Tru√aut was able to shoot his first films due to money from his wife’s family.∫ The directly autobiographical dimension of Les 400 coups establishes in a typical fashion the privatization of representations begun by auteur cinema. Anne Gillain (1991) has brilliantly shown the pertinence of

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a psychoanalytical approach to this privatization, arguing that Tru√aut’s first feature-length film establishes the matrix for all of his later work, constructed around a fascinated and painful relationship to an indi√erent mother. The immediate success of Les 400 coups di√ers from the more mitigated welcome that greeted Tirez sur le pianiste in November 1960, a film that deliberately departs from the norms of classical narration. And yet, as Truffaut himself remarked in an interview in Le Monde, ‘‘The true theme of the film’’ is ‘‘love and the relations between men and women,’’ thus clearly indicating that the distanced writing style did not undercut the seriousness of the subject in the slightest. The film’s critical reception was largely positive, even in the press most lacking in enthusiasm about artistic modernity. Valensi (L’Aurore) speaks about a ‘‘demystification of the traditional crime film. . . . The images . . . unfold in a crazy rhythm and according to a burlesque logic. . . . From out of these fireworks, which pulverize the established rules and mistreat all the cinematic Prix du Rome, there emerges the touching face of Charles Aznavour.’’ Michel Duran (Le Canard enchaîné) finds it ‘‘a much better film than Les 400 coups, if not in the subject matter, at least stylistically and in the continuous inventiveness of its narration. . . . It has tone, black humor, a Prévert-like wit, a boys’ comic-book aspect . . . So, those people who came to see a Série noire mystery told according to the rules are invited to leave. . . . Charles Aznavour is perfectly natural.’’ Pierre Macabru (Combat) sees in it ‘‘the most heartfelt, the most personal, the most direct film that the new generation of French filmmakers has given us.’’ Jeander (Libération) is positively ecstatic: ‘‘I am for this film. I’m for it because I’m against cinematic sugar candy.’’ Only Louis Chauvet (Le Figaro), faithful to his position as defender of tradition, shoots down the film ‘‘which mocks the viewer,’’ where there is ‘‘no narrator, no story,’’ and ‘‘inaudible or distressing dialogues.’’ Tirez sur le pianiste is constructed around the point of view of a wounded male subjectivity, but this time it is an adult one. As Jean Domarchi, the regular film critic for the Cahiers, wrote in Arts: ‘‘Behind a skillfully wrought plot, François Tru√aut wanted to entertain us with what he holds dear: timidity, friendship, women and the di√erent ways of being attached to them. Tirez sur le pianiste prolongs the moral autobiography begun with Les 400 coups. I prefer the second to the first because of its anarchic side. The

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film’s hero refuses to follow the rules of the game.’’ Most unexpectedly, though, it is in Positif (n. 38, March 1961) that we find the sharpest analysis of the personal dimension of the film, written by Jean-Paul Törok: An artist is much more uninhibited in an apparently objective work than he is in so-called personal diaries, which are usually fake. . . . In Tirez sur le pianiste there is a sequence of such an unusual gravity of tone that François Tru√aut sweeps away any hesitations we might have. It’s the flash-back, a kind of film within the film, of such a totally di√erent tone that it profoundly modifies the film’s meaning. . . . Edouard Saroyan’s tragic deception in love, betrayed by the woman he loves (and who cares if it was for a good reason, if she betrayed him out of devotion) kills him as surely as if he had leaped with her out the window, the way Raymond Rouleau dies at the end of Falbalas. In 1960, when other directors, suspiciously complacent about a purely physical eroticism, shamefully invite us to become high-class libertines, it is entirely to Tru√aut’s credit to dare to say that love doesn’t happen without the absolute 108

requirement of fidelity. . . . a neurotic work, which multiplies the detours and folds of repression, but where the triumphant obsessionality ends up manifesting itself: . . . a fear of women, a fear of what the other sex has that is mysterious, alien, enemy. . . . To di√erent degrees all the characters have inside them a Baudelarian obsession with Woman, and all are brothers together in the unhealthy inability to understand her, or to understand the motivations of her disconcerting tricks, the very reason for her existence.

This is a remarkable analysis, including even its blindnesses provoked by the empathy the male critic feels for the filmmaker and his hero—something that indicates clearly the way the film constructs the place of the viewer. The ruptures in tone and mixing of genres that upset the general audience of the era—which Tru√aut added to the David Goodis crime novel —creates a complicity with the cultivated public without disturbing the empathetic relation with the unhappy hero. With his interesting ugliness, his short stature, his air of a beaten dog, to which we must add his muteness, the unhealthy timidity of his character and his ruined career as a virtuoso, Charles Aznavour is the ideal figure of vulnerable masculinity. The cyclical structure of the narrative around two catastrophes, the first evoked only by a return to the past, confirms the inexorability of his tragic destiny. The interventions provided by the interior voice of the male pro-

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tagonist, who comments on the events he undergoes, distance the spectator from the story at the same time that they awaken his or her empathy with the hero. The two female characters in the film (played by Nicole Berger and Marie Dubois)—at the furthest reach, apparently, from the ‘‘bad mother’’ of Les 400 coups—are in fact the objective instruments of the catastrophes that befall Saroyan (Aznavour); they are as active, and unconsciously harmful, as the male character is passive and ‘‘feminine.’’ The film’s unconscious sadism consists in making the two women die in order that we might be better able to sympathize with the hero’s existential unhappiness. Women for Tru√aut seem even more dangerous when they are loving than when they are tramps, for in the second case at least the hero can try to escape them, as the young boy does in Les 400 coups.

Mocky Directed by Franju: A Critique of Patriarchy Jean-Pierre Mocky and Georges Franju are each considered marginal to the New Wave for completely di√erent reasons over and above their di√erence in age: Mocky’s style is trademark burlesque whereas Franju belongs to the ‘‘Left Bank’’ group.Ω But in the first phase of the emergence of the New Wave, Mocky and Franju’s film La Tête contre les murs, released in March 1959, o√ers a ‘‘left’’ version of the vulnerable young man. And this is the case despite the fact that the film was adapted from a highly conventional realist novel by the arch-conservative Hervé Bazin. Louis Seguin in Positif (n. 30, July 1959), sees it as ‘‘the most beautiful French film made since the war. . . . The least erudite of cinephiles will recognize Franju’s well-known darkness and cruelty. . . . Poetic invention—a constant—contributes to darkening and freezing Franju’s horizons. . . . Franju’s goal was not to untangle an intricate plot—nothing or very little remains of the novel adapted—but to mark the stages of a fatal engulfment. . . . Franju’s reaction to madness and the condition it creates is a mixture of indignation and shocked horror.’’ It’s interesting that Positif never mentions Mocky, who is, after all, the author of the adaptation—an adaptation completely in keeping with the logic of the most subjective auteur cinema, in that it introduces a problematic completely absent in the novel. More than just a plea for the reform of psychiatric hospitals, the film constructs the figure of a young man named François, played by Mocky himself, in desperate revolt

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against the Law of the Father, embodied as much by the bourgeois and repressive natural father (Jean Galland) as by the terrifying figure of the psychiatrist, Pierre Brasseur. Opposite them, the young woman (Anouk Aimée) who incarnates adult love will be shown to be incapable, like the ‘‘good’’ psychiatrist played by Paul Meurisse, of saving the young man from his own demons. Young François will in the end be literally seized by the patriarchal Moloch of the psychiatric institution, as though the sons cannot grow or escape their fathers. This strange film is imbued with a somber nostalgia, and the main character’s masochism irresistably makes one think of Freudian hypotheses: Pierre Brasseur’s ambivalence suggests the young man’s desire to become a little boy loved by his father, rather than to accede to adult love with a woman, even if she has the tranquil generosity of Anouk Aimée’s character. The film’s classical composition doesn’t prevent a few strongly lyrical scenes, particularly when François, filmed in extreme close-up, reveals to the psychiatrist Pierre Brasseur the traumatic memory of his mother’s death. But what distinguishes Mocky and Franju’s film from those of the New Wave is above all a dialectical vision of the young male protagonist’s existential anxiety: an empathetic relation with the hero doesn’t blind us to his immaturity, and his failure at love is not transformed into misogyny. On the other hand, the trio of paternal figures that structure La Tête contre les murs can be read as what remains unsaid in New Wave cinema: an unaccepted revolt of sons against fathers, unaccepted because it is sapped by a regressive desire to be loved and recognized by paternal figures—something that tends to be confirmed by the cult that the filmmaker critics of the Cahiers developed for an entire gallery of spiritual fathers (Renoir, Guitry, Bresson, Melville, Hitchcock, Hawks, and so forth).

Mocky as ‘‘Auteur’’: The Solitude of a Don Juan Les Dragueurs, released in April 1959, two months after La Tête contre les murs, is the first film written and directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky himself. During the shooting, in an interview with Jean-Luc Godard in Arts, Mocky locates his film in a quasi-sociological register describing the dragueur (skirt chaser)—the term was not yet widely used at that time—in a way that eerily recalls the social types in Les Tricheurs or Les Cousins: ‘‘The dragueur is never a Prince Charming . . . He is free of any sentimental or physical prejudice. . . . But the character interpreted by Jacques Charrier is a false dragueur, or more

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exactly, he’s a boy who has all the required qualities to become a perfect dragueur, but he realizes along the way that by becoming an automaton of seduction he is condemning himself at the same time to a frightening moral solitude. He has a sentimental side that prevents him from joining the dragueur clan that he nevertheless envies and admires.’’ And, indeed, the critics mention Les Tricheurs and Les Cousins when reviewing Les Dragueurs, but they do so in order to complain about the shortcuts taken by Mocky in his exploitation of the new gold mine. Henri Magnan opens the attack in Combat: ‘‘We can’t avoid mentioning Carné’s Les Tricheurs on the occasion of these new adolescent pastimes more geared toward surprise-parties than metaphysical disputes. . . . But Carné’s characters appear driven by complex and subtle feelings compared to the monolithic and pragmatic tandem Mocky has invented.’’ Even Jean-Luc Godard, still writing criticism in Arts, expressed his disappointment: ‘‘Jean-Pierre Mocky got scared and refused to opt for the liberated film his subject matter demanded. . . . One must choose either reportage or style. . . . But at the end of the day, the biggest problem with Les Dragueurs is that it’s a badly produced film. When you don’t have much money, you try to make up for it with sincerity.’’ Mocky’s film incited a debate that would be frequently reiterated in the critical discourse. Gilbert Salachas (RCT) gives a definitive version: Les Dragueurs is exploiting a vein . . . and that is what is worrisome. . . . Vadim started the fashion, that of a casual investigation of the world of young people and love. Louis Malle, in his turn, made a morally bold film. Carné’s famous Tricheurs scandalized viewers and ‘‘raised problems.’’ Chabrol’s Cousins sailed around in the same waters. . . . Thanks to a campaign in the press, not orchestrated, perhaps, but highly e≈cacious, the ‘‘new wave’’ was thrust upon us. Today, young people make films about youth and for youth. These films make noise. . . . It’s because they make money. . . . The only merit of Les Dragueurs is that it makes this fact visible. One fashion arrives on the heels of the last: the new wave in its turn becomes a system. . . . Excessive debauchery is less shocking than it is irritating. . . . Les Dragueurs is a sinister caricature, which, in comparison, makes us admire Les Tricheurs. . . . With a great deal of audacity and talent, Claude Chabrol carved out a niche. Please beware of counterfeiters!

The film was thus received rather badly by critics, even though it could be placed in close proximity to the films of Mocky’s generation: the protagonists are two chance companions, one rich and handsome (Jacques Charrier) and the other poor and ugly (Charles Aznavour again) whom

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we follow in their trials and tribulations ‘‘chasing’’ girls. One is supposed to initiate the other. In fact, the screenplay is full of frustrating turns of events for the two heroes who are constructed as ‘‘doubles,’’ as in Chabrol’s first films. As the story proceeds, the protagonist who is supposed to be a Don Juan is as unlucky as the one who is not. The strings that tie the story together—sometimes very thick ones—try to get across the idea that all young boys, no matter their seductive powers or apparent self-assurance, are vulnerable when it comes to girls. The film’s thesis borders (involuntarily) on bad melodrama when Mocky rigs up Anouk Aimée with a grotesque orthopedic apparatus in order to convey the inaccessibility of the ideal woman. After countless abortive encounters, the two young men end up stumbling onto an ‘‘orgy,’’ during which a girl from a good family (Belinda Lee) ‘‘has a last bachelorette party’’ before marrying an associate of her father. Although for a brief moment Jacques Charrier is tempted to ‘‘save’’ her, he abandons her contemptuously when he hears her laugh at his friend (Aznavour), who is mistreated for having tried to protect a ‘‘poor girl’’ (Nicole Berger) whom the orgy participants were trying to rape. All this concludes in the most moralistic possible way: our nice dragueur goes home alone, but he is satisfied with having allowed his companion to meet the woman of his life, someone as socially oppressed as he. Beneath Mocky’s recognizable style, his taste for the rough sketch and for breaks in tone, the New Wave theme of su√ering masculinity can be found, along with, behind the comic camouflage, a very strong misogyny made up of hatred of strong women (the tramp or the rich heiress) and pity for weak or wounded women. The boy who was presented as a heartthrob is shown to be an incurable romantic, a victim of women or of ‘‘fate.’’ Women, a highly varied collection of which appear in the film, are completely instrumentalized in order to convey the rocky path that is the apprenticeship in masculinity, no matter what the social or natural advantages boys might have. In this his first auteur film, Mocky, who wrote the screenplay, unites a very puritan vision of women, who can only be inaccessible ‘‘virgins’’ or whores, and a fierce denial of male domination.

Godard: Between Male Empathy and Modernity The hero of Jean-Luc Godard’s first film, A bout de souΔe, also bears analysis as an heir to romanticism, over and above the modernist e√ects of the writing. In fact, that is how Godard presented his film, whose screenplay

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was written by François Tru√aut: ‘‘Roughly, the story is about a boy who thinks about death and a girl who doesn’t.’’∞≠ The first sequence, in which Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) drives from Marseille to Paris in an American car, after having jilted the girl who helped him steal it, is emblematic: the hero, alone at the wheel, charges down the road talking to himself, the only master on board, defying the sun with a pistol he found in the glove compartment, laughing at the female hitchhikers and ‘‘average French people’’ he meets on the road, even defying the viewer by addressing that famous remark directly to the camera: ‘‘If you don’t like the sea . . . , if you don’t like the mountains . . . , if you don’t like the city . . . , go fuck yourself!’’ The camera makes us share completely in the jubilant sensation of independence and mastery that grips the hero and that leads him in the end to defy motorcycle cops. The ellipsis in the place of the policeman’s murder, and the wide shot of the hero running across a field, still alone and free, is not a return to reality but rather an expression of the feeling of all-powerfulness and impunity—a feeling that will not be undercut in the film except by the female character. The writing of A bout de souΔe, founded on ‘‘visible’’ ellipses that transgress the codes of classical narrative montage, produces throughout the film the ‘‘magical’’ e√ect associated with the hero, whom we follow almost constantly—except during the press conference of Parvulesco (played by Jean-Pierre Melville, the tutelary figure for the New Wave). Reinforced by the writing, the film establishes the young hero’s feeling of power (see, for example, the sequence where he steals the money of a former conquest, the viewer having been rendered complicit with the young man’s skill). Despite the many turns of event necessary for him to recuperate the money owed to him by his partners in crime (including the woman employee who gives him up to the cops) he slips systematically through the police net, in a manner close to a fairytale. Even when Patricia betrays him, he could still have escaped thanks to a friend’s car, but he decides to stay and die. It is thus a barely disguised suicide provoked by the loved woman’s betrayal, and the last images confirm this interpretation with the reply Michel makes to Patricia before dying: ‘‘This is really disgusting!’’ Jean Seberg, crowned with the international success of Otto Preminger’s film Bonjour tristesse (1958), gives an aura to the character of Patricia that Godard uses in an ambivalent manner. She plays a young American student hesitating between her career and her loves, without the audience having access to her inner life. The deservedly famous scene between Patricia and

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Michel in her bedroom is a good example of the film’s ambivalence toward the female character. Shot in the natural decor of a hotel room with adjoining bathroom, the scene is made up of medium shots in which the two characters are filmed together, alternating with moving shots that follow one or the other as they move around, and several close-ups of faces, the most often that of Seberg whose photogenic quality is heightened by the lighting. Here Godard oscillates between the fetishism of the close-up when he shoots the female face and body as objects of desire for the male gaze, and a more distanced mise-en-scène for filming the relations between the two characters. But it is the autonomy, the di√erence, the isolation of each that the composition emphasizes, at the same time as their disjointed attempts to reach each other. Yet the male character is twice seen to possess a knowledge about the female character that the film confirms, creating an inequality between the two characters vis-à-vis the audience: we see a closeup of Patricia’s face that Michel threatens to strangle—his two hands circle her neck—if she doesn’t smile, and we hear Michel announce o√ camera that she will smile because she is too weak, just before she in fact does smile. A little later, in a wide shot that takes in both of them against the light, we see her try to light a cigarette while Belmondo says: ‘‘Women who can’t manage to light their cigarette—it’s because they are afraid!’’ She confirms the remark a few moments later—she is afraid she is pregnant. Another loss in value for the female character is her inconsistency. A moment after she slaps Michel because he has lifted up her skirt, he caresses her buttocks without her reacting while she hangs up a Renoir print in her bathroom. The shot of the two characters at first framed down to the waist, drops slightly lower to allow us to discover Michel’s hand on Patricia’s buttocks, a way of making the spectator complicitous with Michel and of making Patricia inconsistent. No such thing happens in the other direction. Patricia simply states that she doesn’t understand Michel, while the audience, who has been with him since the beginning of the story, knows more about him than she does. Elsewhere, and this will not happen again in the early films, it is the female character who possesses ‘‘legitimate culture’’ (Bourdieu 1979). But each time that Patricia talks about Renoir, Bach, Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and other figures of high culture, Michel makes a vulgar retort or contradicts her with assurance without her reacting, such that her culture appears more like a social polish than like something vital and internalized, as will

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Jean Seberg in A bout de souffle.

be the case in other of Godard’s films where it is the male character who reveals his culture: Bruno in Le Petit soldat or Ferdinand in Pierrot le fou, for example. Despite its unstructured appearance, the scene is governed by Michel’s desire to sleep with Patricia and on her resisting him before succumbing in the end. The spectator has no way of knowing why she resists, nor why she gives in. Once again we see the old stereotype of women incapable of knowing or taking responsibility for their desire. The novelty undoubtedly lies in Godard’s treatment of the stereotype: Patricia is not portrayed as a flirt, but as a young woman who has contradictory projects and desires and who doesn’t manage to resolve them. In this scene the film takes seriously her hesitations, fears, and aspirations, which is not the case in the following scene of the interview where Parvulesco (Melville) enjoys ridiculing her professional ambitions in order to reduce her to the status of a pretty woman—with her smiling complicity. And the film’s ending gathers her up into the male fantasy of the fatal woman. As Jean-Pierre Esquenazi recalls: ‘‘A bout de souΔe, a film whose story is contemporaneous with its shooting, and that tells a love story between two

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modern young people, cannot be understood without recalling this fact: the film is about love, or, more precisely, it is about the amorous conflicts generated by the evolution in customs and behavior’’ (2000, 309). But these customs and behavior are shown from a male point of view highly ambivalent about that evolution.

Demy: The Idealized Woman-Mother

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Although Jacques Demy’s first two films, Lola (released in March 1961) and La Baie des Anges (released in March 1963) are centered on a female character (Lola [Anouk Aimée] and Jackie [Jeanne Moreau]), they are also constructed from the point of view of a vulnerable young man (Marc Michel in Lola; Claude Mann in La Baie des Anges). They both develop the fantasy of a pre-Oedipal fusion with an all-powerful mother who is both a ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ object for the child who depends on her (Klein 1998 [1968]). As in Les Enfants du paradis where, according to Edward Turk’s astute analysis (1989), a link is established between Baptiste the man-child and Garance the inaccessible woman-mother (a link Turk associates with Carné’s homosexuality), Anouk Aimée and Jeanne Moreau in Demy’s films play fascinating and distant creatures—mothers of a little boy that they take care of intermittently, thus indicating the at once enviable and anxietyproducing place that the hero wants for himself. The figure of the father is sent back to an elsewhere before Oedipus, but he returns at the end of Lola in order to definitively carry o√ the desired woman-mother. This iconic character of the ‘‘white knight,’’ who opens the film driving toward Nantes in a white convertible, is presented in counterpoint with the ‘‘real’’ character of the film, Roland, the sad and erratic young man whose comings and goings in the pursuit of more or less insubstantial projects we follow, while the mysterious Michel appears and disappears like an ironic punctuation. He is Lola-Cécile’s great love, and he only has to appear to win her and take her away, while Roland fails miserably to convince her of his love. Michel is the ideal man, strong, rich, blond, the one women dream about, while the ‘‘real’’ young men are pitilessly rejected into the Limbo of a world without love. Lola’s poetic tone makes Roland’s despairing sadness bearable while masking it: the figure of the young man beaten in advance in the race for love. He does not have the stature to do battle with the Father; even less is he able to submit to him, as indicated in the scene in the beginning when he

Between Romanticism and Modernism

Jacques Harden in Lola.

is fired by his boss, because his only desire is to regain the little boy’s place in his mother’s arms. Black-and-white photography and cinemascope play with the background light, making the characters fantasmatic like the memories of childhood. In this first film, Jacques Demy multiplies at will the ill-matched encounters, all the while winking at the audience over the heads of his characters. The figure of malicious destiny that would become the filmmaker’s trademark refers back to the childhood belief that the world is magic. But it functions, too, as the artist’s revenge on reality. In La Baie des Anges, which can be interpreted as a happy version of the same screenplay, the paternal figures are thrown completely outside the frame of the story: the hero’s ‘‘real’’ father, a clockmaker and shopkeeper, plays a derisive reality principle that the son flees at the beginning of the movie, and Jackie’s absent husband is happy to keep their son, leaving the place conveniently open for Jean. The corsets and boas with which Demy’s heroines adorn themselves and the out-of-date ‘‘other worldly’’ universe they live in (sailors’ haunts and casinos filmed in a willfully unreal manner) indicate clearly that they are more about fantasy than they are about reality. Lola’s narrative complexity

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and variety of characters hold a greater attraction for cinephiles than does the very spare schema of La Baie des Anges, which is entirely focused on the ‘‘incestuous’’ couple.∞∞ But the idealization of the female characters derives from the same fixation at the pre-Oedipal stage that one finds in Joseph von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich (Studlar 1988). The young men in love with these fascinating and inaccessible women are looking for su√ering, and unlike the dominant currant in the New Wave (characterized by a more classical heterosexual misogyny), the heroes of Demy’s films have no existence beyond their unsatisfied desire for the idealized woman-mother, typical of a certain homosexual fantasy structure.

Rozier: An Ethnographic Look at Popular Masculinity

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Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine was begun in 1960, finished in 1961, and only found a distributor in September 1963.∞≤ With this film, for di√erent reasons and using completely di√erent methods, Rozier too erects a distance in relation to his characters that breaks with the dominant regime of empathy found in most of the other films examined here. And yet Tru√aut, writing in the magazine Lui in November 1963, defended it as the quintessence of the New Wave spirit: ‘‘If for nothing else but this, the New Wave had to exist: to film twenty-year-old characters from a gap of ten years, just enough to take a distance but without losing along the way the rightness of tone that is an end in itself.’’ And the characters Rozier describes for us are indeed not alter egos; rather, they belong to the middle class and the working class and the gaze the filmmaker directs upon them is that of an ethnologist: the condescending gaze of the cultivated elite onto the new lifestyles generated by the society of consumption, and particularly leisure activities. The episode in the Club Méditerranée in Corsica eloquently expresses this class contempt, with ‘‘herds’’ of half-dressed vacationers who shiver under the pitiless eye of a camera’s low angle and long shots. The derisive—because working class—machismo of Michel, the young man around whom the story is organized, confronts the even more derisive coquetry of the two shopgirls who decide to seduce him. A collection of ‘‘fathers,’’ each more grotesque and ‘‘impotent’’ than the next, are scattered through the story, of which the most hilarious is the shady producer Pachala, who is associated with mass culture (advertisements, photo-novellas, and the like). But from this distanced gaze that seems to include all the characters in

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the film in the same sociological leveling, the balance is nevertheless not equal. First, the two ‘‘real’’ characters in the film (who play their own role), Jean-Christophe Averty and Stellio Lorenzi—emblematic figures of the creative television of the Buttes-Chaumont school—are each the object of a quasi-lyrical sequence, emphasizing their absolute mastery as ‘‘auteurs’’ and the extreme complexity of the apparatus of direct filming. In addition, they both have the right to insert the credits for their show in the film, in order to underline their status as Rozier’s alter ego inside the fiction. This reminds us that television at that time was not considered mass culture, but rather something like a veritable creation accessible to a broad audience. In Rozier’s film, mass culture is figured by Pachala, the shady producer of commercials and photo-novellas. The other twist to the sociological gaze concerns the main character, young Michel, as opposed to his two conquests, Juliette and Liliane. First, the numerical asymmetry must be noted: there is one boy but two girls; Michel has a real job and a salary even if he isn’t a manager, while the girls come up with projects, each more shaky than the last, and the film complacently insists on their absolute incompetence (notably in a hilarious scene involving advertising rushes for a cleaning product, where the two girls are supposed to be good housekeepers). Finally, their unshakeable friendship, proudly proclaimed at the outset of the story, will not survive their rivalry over Michel, who in turn plays with them with a facility that makes the ‘‘personality’’ of the two girls even more derisive, especially since the filmmaker has chosen them to be physically interchangeable (even after several viewings, it is very di≈cult to tell them apart). But the ‘‘ontological’’ di√erence between the masculine and the feminine is expressed above all by the reference to the war in Algeria, as confirmed by Jean Collet, writing in Télérama when the film came out: ‘‘Michel is the boy who will leave for the war in Algeria. . . . From its very first images, the film is marked by that rupture. And the character of Dédé, who comes back from the service mute, absent, closed o√, tells us enough about what is weighing on Michel and what awaits him after his vacation. . . . Through this, his film attains a tragic dimension: we know that these moments of happiness are threatened. Each instant, each e√usion, each smile is already marked by the seal of absence, and perhaps death.’’ Rozier’s film, made in 1960, at a moment when no one could ignore any longer the mortal dangers facing draftees plunged for more than two years

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into the ‘‘dirty war’’ that dared not speak its name, hangs, from the outset, a sword of Damocles over his male character’s head: he goes into the service in three months. The spectator’s gaze upon him is thereby modified. This theme runs like a leitmotif all through the film, to recall for us that a boy runs risks that girls do not, which gives a completely di√erent meaning to the twists and turns of their game of hide and seek: for the boy, these are his last pleasures before the war and maybe, before his death; for the girls, it’s all part and parcel of their derisive nature as shopgirls, as Michel himself reminds them in the car taking them to the boat at the end of the film. The war in Algeria in this film is not the object of a political concern, but a decisive way of distinguishing masculine from feminine. Adieu Philippine is a more modernist (in the school of Flaubert) than romantic variation of the construction of a New Wave auteur posture. This discordant mixture of writing inspired by reportage and a highly complex narrative structure, is punctuated by lyrical passages (the use of romance and the Corsican landscape) that luckily allow the audience to get some rest in between the derisive laughter that gives the film its dominant tone.

Rohmer: Divine Manipulator Le Signe du Lion (which was directed by Eric Rohmer in 1959, but lacking a distributor would not be released until May 1962 in a limited screening) is also inscribed within the modernist genealogy: a cold and distanced gaze on derisive characters. Yet testimony from people close to the project indicates that the principal protagonist is designed to be an alter ego of the young filmmakers. According to Paul Gégau√, who is credited with the dialogue, it is ‘‘a story that happened to both me and Godard. . . . I told it to the Grand Momo [Eric Rohmer]. And Jean-Luc had almost the same thing happen to him at the same time. Jean-Luc almost died of hunger several times. . . . Le Grand Momo wrote it all down and gave the whole thing to me. I didn’t allow myself to touch a single line by the Grand Momo, in the end I touched two or three, but really, no more than that. He wanted me to be in the film playing the role of Jess Hahn, but I couldn’t, I was too bad an actor’’ (1997, 63–64). In Rohmer’s manner of proceeding, the filmmaker-demiurge’s will to mastery and the entomologist’s gaze that dominates (and manipulates) his creatures, prevails over the empathetic relation with the story’s protagonist.

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The film centers on an avant-garde musician, a foreigner, no longer young (Jess Hahn) who lives in Paris in a Bohemian fashion and who suddenly finds himself confronted with poverty and disgrace. In an optic that might be characterized as Judeo-Christian, the filmmaker introduces a rather arrogant character who will undergo humiliation after humiliation to the point of completely losing all dignity, before being miraculously ‘‘saved’’ by deus ex machina.∞≥ We follow the stages of what is both a physical and moral unraveling of a man without resources in a summertime Paris, deserted by all the rich relations who might have helped him. The film’s achievement derives from the clinical precision with which the filmmaker describes the physical and material details of the stages of unraveling, to the point where the hero becomes nothing more than a beggar. The quasi-ethnographic posture of observation prevents the spectator from establishing an empathetic relation with the character, but, on the other hand, it does establish an identification with the filmmaker’s point of view. Inscribed within a Flaubertian tradition of ‘‘objective’’ writing about a banal, even sordid, reality, the filmmaker refuses any novelistic shortcuts. Rohmer, who is older than the young Turks of the Cahiers (like DoniolValcroze and Kast, he was born in 1920, while Tru√aut, Chabrol, Godard, and Rivette were born around 1930), does not give us a variation on the romantic figure of the young man in revolt. On the contrary, his avantgarde musician character who prefers to become a beggar rather than work like a mere mortal, embraces his social disgrace as a tragic destiny, that of the cursed artist obliged to play songs on café terraces when he is capable of creating avant-garde works of art. The overwhelming commercial failure of this first work, even though honored by the critics, undoubtedly explains why Rohmer adopts a more seductive tone, set of characters, and universe in his films that follow (the two medium-length films La Boulangère de Monceau [1962] and La Carrière de Suzanne [1963], which were not released commercially, as well as the other Contes moraux), without for all that abandoning a demiurgic posture and an ironic distance from characters still bu√eted about by a destiny behind which the manipulator filmmaker hides himself. Rohmer defines the theme of his six stories in this way: ‘‘While the narrator is looking for a woman, he meets another one who corners his attention up until the moment when he finds the first one’’ (cited in Vidal 1977, 30). That is as much as to say a schema that is very close to the first New Wave films

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examined earlier, since the story’s subject is a young man and women as the object of his fantasies. In fact, from La Boulangère de Monceau on, the narrator is a provincial student living in Paris, in a rather bourgeois neighborhood (l’avenue de Villiers in the seventeenth arrondissement) in the spring—a season that caters to the explorations of desire. The choice of actors is unambiguous: while Barbet Schroeder and Michèle Girardon— blond, slender, and well built—have the perfect physique for seductive young bourgeois characters, the baker—short, brunette, and dumpy (a nonprofessional actress)—carries her social class on her face and body as well. The film’s subtext has roots going back to the France of the nineteenth century: how a young idle bourgeois man allows himself to be tempted by the proletarian charms of a gracious seller of croissants, before returning like a good boy to court the distinguished young girl who is destined, socially, to be his. The spectator’s empathy with the male character is inevitable since it is he who tells the story of what happens to him, the two young women being nothing but the flip sides of his desire (the virgin and the whore in Judeo-Christian terms; the girl from a good family and the comely working girl in the terms of the nineteenth century). The social construction of desire is masked by the alleged chance events that make the distinguished young girl disappear for a time to leave the place open to the gracious baker, before the filmmaker demiurge puts his hero back on the right homogamous path, to speak like a sociologist (Singly 2004). The lightly traced character of the little summer adventure avoids all the upset that would arise from a more realist treatment of the subject (imagine what Maupassant would have done with the ancillary loves of a young bourgeois), and the hero is absolved by the fact that he doesn’t ‘‘consume’’ his love (croissants are enough for him). Ever useful, the friend-confidant is there to indicate the viewer’s place—that of an amused, indulgent witness. But the hero’s narcissism reduces the amorous encounter to a putting to the test of his seductive abilities and refers us to a typically male vision of amorous relations, in terms of strategy, tactics, and conquest. His a√air with the baker allows him first to avenge himself in his imagination on the woman who escapes him momentarily, his heart’s elected one (bourgeoise), and then to confirm his social prejudices: ‘‘What shocked me was not that she could like me, but that she could think that I could like her in some way.’’ But what might have been a satirical portrait of the cynical and base behavior of a young bourgeois seducer is transformed, thanks to the

Between Romanticism and Modernism

empathetic point of view of Rohmer’s camera, into a ‘‘moral tale’’ where everything ends up returning to the (social) order that is the only thing that counts. The young hero sees his heart’s delight again; she believes he has been pacing underneath her window (close to the bakery) the whole time that she has been immobilized by a sprain, when he in fact was trying to seduce someone else . . . La Carrière de Suzanne, which uses nonprofessional actors, also presents a male narrator, Bertrand, and his friend Guillaume, both students in the Latin Quarter. But this time the Don Juan is Guillaume while Bertrand is just the confidant, himself unable to seduce either of the two girls in the story: Suzanne, who works to pay for her studies, or Sylvie, the beautiful foreign student. Here Chabrol’s Cousins comes to mind, because of the symmetrical opposition between the two male protagonists who are the two complementary faces of the same figure, and because of the chronicle of Parisian student life, characterized by the change in relation between girls and boys; the internalized misogyny on the part of the female characters is also reminiscent of Chabrol. Thus Suzanne repeats Guillaume’s declaration: ‘‘Girls like to be forced.’’ But, as in the earlier Rohmer film, we find the same physical characteristics associated with a devalorized female character: Suzanne is short, brunette, round and comely, and she is cynically pursued by Guillaume, who has sworn to sleep with her in order to ridicule her principles and her seriousness. He rejects her as soon as he has reached his goal. So a man who lives at his mother’s and his friends’ expense has succeeded in ruining a woman while she works to pay for her studies. Once again, the film’s ambivalence derives from the point of view that organizes the narrative: because of the narrative procedure, we are constantly complicit with the cynical Don Juan by way of his narrator-confidant who allows it to happen, admiring the caddishness that he himself is incapable of. No girl says no to Guillaume, but Bernard is desperately lonely, most often because of his own awkwardness. Rohmer thus remakes a typical schema of the dominant cinema: the male viewer is fascinated by a hero who has exceptional seductive abilities, which he, like most real men, completely lacks. The ordinary viewer is relayed within the fiction by a narrator who looks like him and who, like him, is the fascinated witness to the hero’s prowess as immoral as it is irresistible. And yet, unlike most of the other New Wave films, Rohmer’s films are characterized by a much greater ambivalence in the relation between the director and his male characters: the

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viewer is divided between his sympathy for heroes who resemble him and his disgust for their cynicism and cowardliness. The filmmaker manipulates the audience as much as he manipulates his characters. Yet the male and female characters do not have the same status: the films are constructed from the young men’s point of view and the young women are only their objects of desire, of their will to power, their disgust, and their fear.

Robbe-Grillet as Visualized by Resnais: An Overwhelmingly Masculine Point of View

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Resnais’s second feature-length film, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, which was released in France in September 1961, can be considered the culmination of the modernist and romantic influences borne by the New Wave. The film was the result of a collaboration between the most heavily publicized of the ‘‘New Novelists,’’ Alain Robbe-Grillet, and a filmmaker whose innovative writing and political audacity had been celebrated the previous year at the Cannes Film Festival. According to each of these figures at the moment of the film’s release, the collaboration had gone perfectly well because they had both envisioned exactly the same film (see chaper 4). In actuality, however, remarks made later suggest that RobbeGrillet, unlike Resnais’s other screenplay writers before and after Marienbad, had imposed his choices down to detailed frame and camera movement (without mentioning décor and characters), and that Resnais had gone along with it honestly but without enthusiasm. Resnais was unfamiliar with the novelist’s work when a producer suggested they work together; out of the four synopses that Robbe-Grillet showed him, Resnais chose, in the novelist’s words, ‘‘the most sentimental and the most austere,’’ which is to say the most distant from what would be the tone of RobbeGrillet’s films when they were made. At the moment of the film’s release Marienbad’s two authors were interviewed together for an article in Le Monde on August 29, 1961, in which they presented their shared work in significantly di√erent ways. Resnais insists on the film’s subject matter: ‘‘It’s about a love story, or rather, a story about love’s uncertainties: can we ever really know if we project onto the other our own fantasies or if we ‘receive’ poorly our partner’s fantasies? . . . We might say that it’s about the search for the other or it’s about a charming prince arriving at the castle to awaken his sleeping beauty, a messenger from Death who comes to claim his victim

Between Romanticism and Modernism

a year later, or simply, a woman who had an a√air and who hesitates between her lover and her husband.’’ Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, talks only about the writing, but he makes it clear that ‘‘the film for Resnais has a more obvious psychological existence than it does for me.’’ In an earlier interview (published in Arts on March 8, 1961), Resnais had in fact a≈rmed that he had addressed several psychological themes in his film: ‘‘Persuasion through speech, fear of the unknown, rape considered as a ritual union. . . . a stranger tells a young woman that they have already met. The woman has a companion, but she pretends to remember. She struggles, gives in, gets a hold of herself again.’’ Not only does Resnais insist on the psychological content of his film, he focuses on the female character, a character Robbe-Grillet’s text had maintained in the position of an object through the invasive voice-over of the male protagonist. In another journal (Les Nouvelles littéraires, September 7, 1961), RobbeGrillet o√ered a reading of his story that confirms their di√erences of interpretation: ‘‘A stranger wanders from room to room. . . . He comes back again and again to the face of a young woman, a beautiful prisoner perhaps still living in a golden cage. . . . He o√ers her the impossible: he o√ers her a past, a future of freedom. . . . Little by little, the young woman, almost regretfully, begins to give in. Then she becomes afraid. She sti√ens. She does not want to leave her false and reassuring world, the one she is used to, and which is represented for her by another man, tender and distant, undeceiving, who watches over her and who is perhaps her husband. . . . The growing tension between the three protagonists creates in the heroine’s mind fantasies of tragedy: rape, murder, suicide . . . Then, suddenly, she will give in . . . She had already given in, a long time ago. . . . She seems to accept . . . to go o√ with him toward something unnamed: love, poetry, liberty . . . or perhaps, death.’’ Robbe-Grillet’s ascendancy over the film is confirmed by the interpretation that most critics put forward when the film came out—an interpretation that most often adheres to the male point of view that imposes its version of the facts through the interior voice (see chapter 4). But if, instead, we consider two American academics, Lynn Higgins (1991) and T. Je√erson Kline (1992), who take into account the analysis of the representation of identities and gender relations, we begin to see that L’Année dernière à Marienbad is a problematic film. Lynn Higgins views the

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film as an example of the contradictions between modernist writing (that is, the refusal of a linear narrative and the deconstruction of meaning) and feminism (303–22). She suggests that the floating signification has the e√ect of masking what is at the heart of the story, the rape of the young woman. The many repetitions and denials in the story in the male character’s voice-over accomplish ‘‘the story of a persuasion,’’ in Robbe-Grillet’s terms, that aims to dilute his own violence. And yet several indications remain in the text—the woman’s cries, the broken glass, her terrified attitude shown several times, or her arms folded in front of her to protect herself. But the aleatory quality of the text ends up stripping them of credibility, all the more so in that the male voice never ceases to impose its own interpretation of the story. Kline is interested in literary references in New Wave films, and he shows that beneath Robbe-Grillet’s violently masculinist and sadistic text Resnais has slipped some sand into the ointment, particularly through the reference to an Ibsen play, ‘‘Rosmersholm’’ (posters announce the play that is being mounted in the chateau under the name of ‘‘Rosmer’’) (54–86). Ibsen’s play recounts the attempt at political emancipation of a woman who will in the end be destroyed by the revelation of the incest she underwent at the hands of the man she thought her mentor. Kline also refers to the analysis Freud did of the play, in which he returns to his theory of the imaginary character of the father/daughter incest scenes in his patients’ treatment, while in the play, as very often in reality, incest is revealed on the contrary to be of a destructive reality for the heroine. According to Kline, Resnais was perfectly aware of the two texts, and the whole of the heroine’s behavior in the film is understandable through the optic of incest trauma (Resnais noticed Delphine Seyrig in New York where she was acting in an Ibsen play; Marienbad is her first film appearance). Kline sees in this an attempt on the part of the filmmaker to contradict Robbe-Grillet’s masculinist screenplay through a highlighting of the symptoms described by victims and clinicians, of a woman who has undergone incestuous violence. These interpretations depart from the cinephilic approach in that they question the meaning of the story recounted by the film, while critics at the time (and afterward) are for the most part content to adhere to the ‘‘masculine’’ interpretation of the film in order to comment on narrative form alone. For Marienbad in France was the culmination and the point of no return, in the approach to the new cinema, of a critical attitude that accords

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an absolute privilege to aesthetic questions at the expense of the interpretation of films. From this point on, what constitutes the identity of the new cinema is formal innovation. The question of representations goes definitively out the window. But it is worth noting that it is in favor of a film that gives an exorbitant privilege to the male protagonist by making him the narrator of a story whose interpretation he imposes at the expense of the female character. We can see the convergence of the obsession with the mastery of the man over the woman and of the artist over his work, which will become the trademark of ‘‘auteur cinema.’’ Despite the broad diversity in style and story of the films analyzed here, something like a new attitude emerges: the construction of an empathetic relation between the spectator and the auteur, by way of a male character conceived of as the latter’s alter ego. The dominant register of the New Wave lies in the inheritance of romanticism, which legitimates the new claim of cinema as an individual artistic creation, associated with the construction of an ever-tragic male identity. But also, for the most ambitious films, we find the inheritance of modernism such as it was elaborated beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, with Flaubert and Baudelaire (Huyssen 1986), as a will to a≈rm art’s autonomy in relation to all social determination, through formal experimentation that makes of innovation the absolute aesthetic value. This attitude implies a distance from the referential world and, even more so, from a mass culture content to tell stories ‘‘that make shopgirls dream.’’ In the new cinema, the attitude takes two principal forms: the transgression of traditional narrative codes (A bout de souΔe, Tirez sur le pianiste, L’Année dernière à Marienbad) and the construction of an entomologist’s gaze upon the characters (Adieu Philippine, Le Signe du lion). The combination of romantic inheritance with modernist inheritance creates the originality of this new auteurist attitude in the cinematic field.

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Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

The political positions of the New Wave filmmakers, as well as the ideological analysis of their works, have generally been considered by critics at the time, and later by historians, as irrelevant if not taboo. The only exception —a notable one—was the journal Positif, which virulently denounced the ‘‘right-wing’’ orientation of most of the New Wave films when they first came out.∞ But its polemical excesses and lack of articulation between aesthetics and politics allowed the dominant critical opinion to ignore the journal, even when its articles were as well constructed and argued as that of Gérard Gozlan on André Bazin’s ideology (Positif, n. 46–47, 1962). Gozlan analyzes the Catholic theorist’s use of ambiguity as a refusal to take a stand in relation to social contradictions generally, and, in particular, in relation to the choices any film makes regarding the real. The idea that a film is worth noticing because it ‘‘respects the ambiguity of the real’’ would become the thread running through all of Bazin’s aesthetic judgments and

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would lead him to praise, for example, sequential shots over montage and Welles over Eisenstein—a position whose ideological dimension is visible in the very way it simplifies the aesthetics of the first in order to better use it against the second.≤

Rivette; or, (Male) Creation as Absolute Value Gozlan takes Jacques Rivette’s film, Paris nous appartient (1957–1961)≥ to be an example of New Wave cinema’s ideology of ambiguity: the more the plot progresses, and the more the characters try to discover the truth, the more ‘‘reality’’ is obscured. Art, in the form of a piece of music recorded by a Spanish musician dead before the beginning of the narrative, becomes the symbol of the absolute and that which all the characters in the film are seeking. Art is the priesthood to which Gérard (Gianni Esposito), the director, will consecrate himself as well, before committing suicide in the end. Thus, the only enduring truth is the genius of the artist, much preferable to commitment of a political and social nature, a commitment that can only be illusory in a world characterized by ambiguity. Rivette, according to Gozlan, does not try to understand the reasons why we perceive the world as obscure, but rather constructs his film to show the viewer that there is nothing to understand, unless it be that (artistic) genius is always a victim of the forces of evil, no matter from what direction politically—left or right—these forces might appear. If we can in fact define this blurring of political categories as a typical right-wing position, the ideological analysis of Rivette’s film also exemplifies one of the distinctive traits of the New Wave: a value system whereby artistic genius, and not morality or politics, becomes the measure of everything. As the hero in Godard’s Le Petit soldat put it: ‘‘If everyone has an ideal, there certainly must be something that everyone lacks. I’m sure God doesn’t have an ideal.’’ Profoundly in accordance with Rivette when the film appeared, Baroncelli writes: ‘‘If it is false that a diabolical plot threatens the world, it is true that youth, purity and creative energy everywhere hit up against invisible walls.’’ And indeed, Rivette’s first feature-length film can be taken as a kind of New Wave political manifesto, leading to the conclusion that politics are not relevant to explaining the world: the only thing that exists is the will of the powerful to destroy the rebel force of artists. The plot of Paris nous appartient centers on Anne (Betty Schneider), a

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bored young student neither beautiful nor particularly intelligent, who finds herself caught up in a world that for her is both fascinating and opaque, a mix of political exiles (Spanish Republicans pursued by Francoists, American victims of a witch hunt) and artists (Juan, the musician, who has just committed suicide, and Gérard, the avant-garde director, who is trying to put together a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles). The film follows Anne’s peregrinations as she tries in vain to uncover the secret of this world that appears to live under a nonstop, di√use threat. Terry (Françoise Prévost), a second female character, plays a strategic role in the story. A rich idle woman with a convertible, she lures all the men into her web in order to crush them: Philip, the American, who after his breakup with Terry, wanders around Paris talking in a hallucinatory way about a universal plot; Juan, the Spanish exile, who commits suicide under the same circumstances; and Gérard, the ‘‘praying mantis’s’’ final lover, who becomes more and more cynical and depressed until he too puts an end to it all. Terry is constructed as a woman-vampire, who is pitiless and in some ways the figure of death—an impression reinforced by the tall, slender silhouette of the actress Françoise Prévost, who wears a tragic and contemptuous expression. Anne, on the other hand, is short and round, smiles at everyone, believes whatever she is told, and immediately falls in love with the handsome, gloomy director. On one side, a shopgirl, on the other, a femme fatale. Unlike New Wave films centered on a male character, Paris nous appartient does not create empathy with the heroine. Scattered indices throughout the story highlight Anne’s ignorance and naïveté: we notice very quickly that she is manipulated by her brother Pierre to whom she confides, and in the end we understand that she was manipulated by Philip, who wanted proof of Pierre’s complicity in the ‘‘plot.’’ Pierre dies as a result of the joint action of Anne and Terry, and we could say the same about Gérard. At his wit’s end, having left Terry, having broken with all of his partners who forced him to make too many concessions, Gérard comes looking for Anne as his last chance for salvation. She pushes him away out of spite and he commits suicide. The film, which presents itself as political (in it there are discussions, right in the middle of the Cold War, about an international brainwashing plot), is a story in which remarkable men, avant-garde artists and political resisters, struggle tragically, while two women—one because she under-

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stands nothing, and the other because she knows too much—destroy them instead of helping them. Recurrent scenes emphasize the sadistic character of the relationship between Terry and Gérard: she overwhelms him with her irony while, beset by the worst di≈culties, he is desperately trying to give birth to his work of art. Gianni Esposito is a typical romantic hero: a gentle man, broodingly handsome—and with his three-piece corduroy suit he is the figure of the bohemian artist possessed by his creation who will in the end be vanquished by a world without pity. But the world’s cruelty is strongly mediated if not incarnated by the two women. First there is Terry and her sarcasm—Terry who erases the recording of the famous piece of guitar music Juan wrote for Gérard’s play; Terry and her unhealthy relationships with powerful men (we learn that it’s because of a request from her, and in order to please her, that the financier, Degorge, commissions Gérard’s play, in order to better crush him later). And then it is Anne who delivers the coup de grâce without even knowing it, which adds to the silliness of her character. In the purest romantic tradition, Rivette has constructed female characters as the fatality that befalls the artist to prevent him from creating and, finally, to annihilate him. The women, of course, are incapable of creating and have no cares in the world other than falling in love or trapping men in the web of their love. The a≈rmation of art’s supremacy over politics—the only really dangerous rebel is the artist—is accompanied by a deadly representation of amorous relations. An analogous problematic can be found in the few New Wave films that have a relation to politics: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Le Petit soldat, and Le Combat dans l’île.

Nimier/Malle: A ‘‘Lost Soldier’’ Destroyed by a Femme Fatale Louis Malle was a young twenty-five-year-old filmmaker fresh from finishing up at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (idhec) and crowned with the prestige of the technical direction of Coustaud’s Le Monde de silence (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1955) when he made Ascenseur pour l’échafaud in 1957. It was thanks to the confidence shown him by a new production firm that had just produced Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé, with Malle serving as Bresson’s assistant, that he was able to make the film.

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Its screenplay, the adaptation of a best-seller of the day—a rather mediocre crime novel by Noël Calef (1956)—was in fact completely rewritten by Roger Nimier. Most of the male critics spoke both of ‘‘a very personal vision of the world’’ and of a ‘‘life straight from the present moment,’’ and saluted in Malle a new talent. Only the two women critics, Simone Dubreuilh and Paule Sengissen, voiced doubts about the authenticity of Malle’s talent. But curiously, the former compares the ‘‘aestheticism’’ of Malle’s film unfavorably to the profound truth of Vadim’s second film Saiton jamais, which had just come out, while Sengissen puts the two films in the same basket: ‘‘Same mastery . . . same gamy atmosphere . . . same sympathy on the part of the directors for the slackness of their characters.’’ The ‘‘novelty’’ of the film would be consecrated by the Louis-Delluc prize and by the attribution of a ‘‘quality subsidy.’’ Louis Malle, in fact, constructed his first feature-length fiction film around a major transgression of the norms of commercial cinema: the film’s two stars, who play the pair of lovers whose story it is, never appear together on the screen. Their separation from each other, in fact, organizes the story, beginning with the initial telephone conversation, during which the mistress (Jeanne Moreau) encourages her lover (Maurice Ronet) to kill her husband so that they can love each other freely. The film accentuates the point of view of the male character mired in projects that weaken his identity. The hero’s politico-military past is an invention of Nimier’s, as is the adultery.∂ The film’s main character, played by Maurice Ronet, who would become one of the new generation’s preferred actors, is, unlike the character in the novel, strongly situated socio-politically: he is a former captain who served brilliantly in the Indochinese War (Diên Biên Phu has just fallen), and who, a civilian once again because of the defeat, has been reduced to playing secret agent for an oil magnate (Jeanne Moreau’s husband) who is trying to get his hands on the black gold of North Africa. This cynical boss goes about his business in an ultramodern building, which inscribes in the heart of the film the articulation between (de)colonization and capitalist modernization (Ross 1995). The building’s guard, a crippled ex-soldier who exhibits a cult-like devotion to his former captain, will be the involuntary instrument of the trap—the elevator—that will close around the hero. The film’s subtext deplores the loss of a heroic male identity, that of the soldier, castrated by modern society, which has replaced the battles of warriors with international commerce.

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

The relation to politics is extremely ambiguous. Ronet’s character claims his former identity as a soldier as though it were a political commitment: he accuses the man he will kill of being the incarnation of the abandonment of the colonies, and thus responsible for the soldier’s undoing. But through assimilating military heroism—physical courage, ability to command—with political commitment, the film excludes collective and peaceful forms of militantism; political commitment is valuable when it allows the individual to a≈rm ‘‘virile’’ qualities. It is easy to see how this kind of relation to politics can merge ‘‘naturally’’ with the activism of fascist groups, such as developed with the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète) shortly thereafter. And yet the film’s ambiguity also derives from the fact that the hero, after the physical prowess of the ‘‘perfect crime’’ is over, only appears to us as beaten down, a loser, reduced to doing battle with an elevator . . . and, what is more, he has the sad and somewhat soft beauty of Maurice Ronet. We don’t see him engaged in military accomplishments—as fascinating as they are dangerous—in Indochina. The film’s title, which is the same as the novel, is inadequate because the film has displaced the major responsibility for the crime onto the female character: the male character trapped in the elevator is not presented as a criminal but as merely submitting to his destiny, that of a man who has already lost his autonomy before the story begins. Jeanne Moreau is the unconscious instrument of the fatality that brings an end to a man that the story has already castrated. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud thus constructs an empathetic relation with a lost soldier of the colonial wars, a character whose novelty the journalism of the era emphasized, and who would later become a veritable cliché, as much in French cinema as in that of America, a way of occulting politics under the cover of individual tragedy. If the a≈nities of Malle’s film with the right-wing anarchism embraced by the ‘‘hussard’’ Roger Nimier are undeniable, the political allusions remain vague. The films by Godard and Cavalier, on the other hand, which treat more directly the question of political commitment, had trouble with the Gaullist censor because they evoked a little too precisely the ‘‘dirty war’’ in Algeria. Shot in 1960 and 1961, they would not be released until after the Evian Accords in March 1962. These films, whose directors also wrote the screenplays, actually correspond more closely to the characteristics of New Wave cinema.

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Le Petit Soldat; or, The Derision of Politics Godard’s second feature-length film, Le Petit soldat, made in 1960, was banned for three years by the censor under the minister of the interior Louis Terrenoire. Here is the synopsis that Godard gave the censorship commission in August 1959: Bruno, a French journalist in Geneva, works from time to time for a spy ring. He is ordered to eliminate X . . . , a Swiss reporter whose projects run counter to the interests of his ring. But Bruno is suspected at the same time of belonging to an adversarial ring. To show his innocence, Bruno is thus going to eliminate X, who belongs to the adversarial ring, but at the last minute he hesitates. The occasion is missed. Fearing reprisals, he decides to leave Switzerland. Captured and tortured by the enemy ring that wants to know what mission his outfit has given him, Bruno manages to escape, but now he is being tracked down by both camps. He takes refuge with a Danish woman 134

friend while waiting to flee the country. Veronika then reveals to him that she works for the second ring. But they decide to flee together. They don’t manage to do it, and in the end Bruno is obliged to accomplish his mission.∑

Godard’s care in avoiding a mention of Algeria, along with the expression ‘‘spy ring’’ without anything more specific, allows us to believe that we are dealing with a film whose genre is perfectly anodine. When the completed film was presented to the censor commission, the unfavorable opinion was explained in this way: The film’s theme is essentially a long exposition of the behavior, as well as the intellectual motivations, of a deserter from the French army. . . . But the film excedes this general theme. . . . 1 The activity of French special services is described—engaging in political

assassination—to which the French people and French politics in general are constantly assimilated. 2 A long representation—for the first time on the screen—of fln [Na-

tional Liberation Front] agents, whose activities, preoccupations and motivations are described. 3 Torture scenes practiced by the fln, which, it is indicated, are also per-

formed by the French. This kind of scene always incites the most severe reservations on the part of the commission. 4 Finally, Bruno’s young mistress delivers a long analysis of the ideals cast

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aside by the conflict in Algeria. The analysis is an illustration of, and an apology for, the fln’s cause, while France’s action is presented as lacking any ideal and destined to fail.

By a vote of nineteen for, six against, and one abstention, the commission ordered a total ban of the film. After repeated attempts by producer Georges de Beauregard to negotiate cuts and after several refusals from the commission, authorization was finally given in September 1962, providing there be ‘‘reworking and cuts of the dialogue and substantial reduction of the torture scene.’’ The film’s reception when it was released in January 1963, after being banned for two years, would be colored by these turns of event. Given the problems it had had with the censor, critics expected a political film. ‘‘When you see the film, you are surprised by the severity of the commission’s ruling. The allusions to the Algerian War are in fact discrete, confused, and rarely aggressive.’’ And Baroncelli (Le Monde) continues: ‘‘All the more so in that the Algerian War, this vague story of the secret service, is only a pretext. . . . What interests Godard is the character’s becoming conscious, as a man, of certain problems of existence.’’ In Télérama, opinion is so divided that the magazine lets four critics review the film: Jean Collet defends the ‘‘di≈cult film,’’ mutilated by the censor, in the name of Godard’s desire to ‘‘film thought as it progresses . . . with a camera as indiscrete as a mirror.’’ He sees the film as ‘‘an extremely courageous attempt to look at human beings just as they are.’’ Claude-Jean Philippe invokes Stendhal in order to justify Godard’s ‘‘having approached the Algerian problem without taking either one side or the other.’’ Paule Sengissen is much more severe. She sees the film as ‘‘the manifesto of the rather right-wing generation that has succeeded the Saint-Germain-des-Près generation, who were on the left.’’ She sees in it ‘‘the reflection of a mentality some young people exhibit: a refusal of political commitment.’’ Finally, Jean-Louis Tallenay violently castigates the film, accusing it of resembling its character: cynical, confused, without any ideals, and to have ‘‘created a kind of vertigo in the face of obscure violent passions, instead of enlightening the viewer about the drama of conscience that is being played out.’’ And here is how Godard presented his film in the Cahiers du cinéma (n. 109, July 1960): It’s the story of a French secret agent who refuses to accomplish his mission, but who ends up accomplishing it, after a few misadventures that include his

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arrest and torture by an enemy network. In short, once it’s been figured out, the story for the distributors becomes that of a man who sees a face in the mirror that doesn’t correspond to the idea he has of himself inside, a man who thinks that women shouldn’t get older than twenty-five, a man who loves the music of good old Joseph Haydn, a man who would also like to have the force to carve his way with a sword, a man who is very proud of being French because he loves Joachim du Bellay and Louis Aragon and besides, he’s still a little boy—that’s why I called it ‘‘the little soldier.’’

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It is impossible to not be struck by the total absence of any reference to the political dimension of the film in this declaration. On the other hand, Godard makes a show of the elitist posture of the creator who takes his distance from mass culture (the distributors) and from the recounted story (that of a secret agent), and then claims a romantic inheritance that merges ‘‘philosophical’’ and cultural considerations with the portrait of an aggressively misogynistic masculinity, at once ‘‘virile’’ and immature, a contradictory mix that invites the spectator into an empathetic relation with the character. In his second film, Godard is, in his own words, in a more masterful creative position than he was in A bout de souΔe,∏ since he wrote the screenplay as well. In the definitive version of the film, Bruno (played by Michel Subor, a little-known actor who corresponds to the same type of ‘‘gentle young man’’ as Ronet and Trintignant) is an agent from the French secret services in Geneva engaged in a fierce war against the fln. When the film begins, the hero (by means of an ‘‘interior voice’’ that will maintain a privileged relation with the viewer throughout the film) expresses his desire to extricate himself from a combat in which he no longer believes, in order to find himself. The assimilation—the confusion—between a secret agent and a political activist, that is, between a paid professional and a benevolent militant, is willfully maintained and ends up ‘‘sublimating’’ the hero who refuses the mission assigned to him at the point when he no longer believes in it; but the confusion, which concerns the two ‘‘camps,’’ allows the fln to be reduced to salaried agents. On the one hand, militant activity is confused with that of the state police, and on the other, the film recounts the tragic story of a man who tries in vain to free himself from the trap of political allegiance in order to become himself. The film insists on showing that the question of political orientation is derisory in the face of the ‘‘ontological’’ question of the conquest of autonomy against all allegiances.

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

Michel Subor in Le Petit soldat.

One of the key scenes in the film is the torture sequence. In it we see Bruno, who has been kidnapped by the fln and shackled in a bathtub, undergo first burns, then smothering by a wet rag on the face, then the famous gégène—electrodes attached to his ankles. A filmgoer, even one not very familiar with the details of that dark period, cannot help but notice that Godard is filming tortures ‘‘typical’’ of the Algerian War, such as those that Henri Alleg and a few others courageously denounced after having experienced them in the cellars of the French army (Alleg 1977 [1958]). But in the film, they are performed by the fln on a (former) member of the French secret services. This reversal, which corresponds to the director’s intention to ridicule a certain conformism on the left at the time,π is obviously not neutral. In relation to the human and political reality of the Algerian War, where what was at stake was a very unequal battle between some courageous democratic fighters and the apparatus of the French state, it is neither more nor less than a position that, under the cover of denouncing the equal horror of torture no matter who the perpetrator, very concretely undermines the combat of Algerian nationalists by showing them as torturers working over a man whom we know is at that point considered a

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traitor by his former comrades. Godard’s ambiguous, to say the very least, ideological position is articulated through the devaluation of politics in general compared to the hero’s mission of self-discovery: looking for one’s own identity o√ the beaten tracks. Bruno has more than one characteristic in common with Meursault, the ‘‘hero’’ of L’Etranger, including denial of the relations of colonial domination. The fact that Bruno falls in love at the very moment he decides to break away from his activist group establishes a link between two types of ‘‘entrapment’’ (by politics and by love) around which the story is woven. The link is made explicit with the hero’s discovery—but too late, love has done its work—namely, Véronika’s (Anna Karina) adherence to the fln, which is to say, the enemy camp. At the beginning of the film Bruno falls in love with her when he sees her playing with a mechanical dog just given to her by an older man later revealed to be a member of the fln. If Véronika does not consciously betray her lover, her membership in the fln puts Bruno in danger: it is in order to get information about their adversaries that his former friends in the French secret services kidnap the young woman, and it is in exchange for the (false) promise of her liberation that Bruno finally accepts to commit the assassination he refused to do, in order to safeguard her freedom. Narrative manipulations allow only the hero’s su√erings to be shown; they also enable the su√ering and death of the female character, thrown into the no man’s land of what lies outside the narrative, to be instrumentalized in the service of the male protagonist. In fact, if Godard shows us at great length the torture the fln inflicts on Bruno, he sums up in a single sentence at the end of the film Véronika’s torture and death at the hands of Bruno’s former friends, in order to allow us to linger on the hero’s psychological su√ering: ‘‘I was glad to have time, for I had to learn not to be bitter.’’ Le Petit soldat expresses the refusal of entrapment of (male) identity in a collective allegiance that refers to political commitment. Political conflict disappears behind a test of virility, beginning with the torture sequence, during which the hero’s interior voice a≈rms his intention to not give in, not because of political conviction, but ‘‘because he doesn’t feel like’’ submitting to the demands of those brutalizing him. All of a sudden his resistance becomes a pure test of physical courage, he proves he is a man by being ready to risk his life ‘‘for nothing,’’ if not for the beauty of the gesture. The film takes to its logical end the idea that there is no commitment for a

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

man worthy of the name except commitment to himself, in tragic solitude, which is the price to pay for constructing his (male) identity. One must find one’s own goal within oneself, instead of having it depend on collective others (political camps) or on a particular other (a woman).

Alain Cavalier: A Lost Soldier in the OAS Destroyed by His Wife (the Encore) It was Louis Malle, fortified by two commercial successes,∫ who o≈cially supervised Le Combat dans l’île (1961–1962), the first feature-length film of Alain Cavalier (the two were in the same year at l’idhec). The film’s rather classical composition shows the mark of its sponsor. Cavalier’s screenplay involves two political figures typical of the times: the far-right activist and the leftist militant, with the former privileged by the film narrative. The press at that time emphasized the political courage of the film, which, for the first time in French cinema, clearly evokes the terrorist practices of the far right and opposes them with a militant democrat armed only with his sense of conviction and his pamphlets. The film had trouble with the censor, which delayed its release. But certain critics pointed to the film’s ambiguity, which tries to understand from the inside the path taken by a far-right extremist, played by the overly charming Jean-Louis Trintignant, at the risk of creating a dangerously empathetic relation with the viewer. The potential for empathy is all the greater in that it is he who dies at the end (against all verisimilitude) and that the winner of ‘‘the combat on the island,’’ the left militant played by Henri Serre, has in the meantime ‘‘stolen’’ his wife (Romy Schneider). In fact, if Clément/Trintignant is a boy from a good family who has turned out badly, a voice-over ‘‘played’’ by the warm timber of Jean Topart takes up the task from the beginning of the film of making us understand the point of view of a young man tragically manipulated and led astray. At the beginning of the film, Clément breaks with his father, a factory owner who refuses to negotiate with striking workers, which makes the young man appear generous and socially open. Afterward, the political dimension of his a√airs is never discussed. When his wife finds an enormous phallic instrument (a bazooka) in his closet, which is to be used to eliminate a leftwing journalist, we understand that he has to kill in order to prove (to himself) that he is a man. Luckily, the assassination, which succeeds—

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technically speaking—is revealed to have been staged, and he has been duped. No one is dead, and the viewer can keep his or her sympathy for the character . . . A symbolic father figure, manipulative and vile (the leader of the activist group) allows the hero to be relieved of any real responsibility for his terrorist acts. In this description of political commitment, we find the same characteristics as in Malle’s film: it has no value except as a test of individual masculinity, enabling the a≈rmation of virile warrior qualities —physical courage, boldness, the ‘‘test’’ of being able to murder someone —that the film describes in keeping with the hero’s point of view. And, as in Le Petit soldat, this kind of definition of political commitment is articulated ‘‘naturally’’ with the exclusion of women. Clément is married to Anne (Romy Schneider), a former actress reduced to the role of a spouse in love. From the outset, the female figure associates infantilization and eroticism: she gets drunk at a chic party where she is bored; back home, her husband slaps her violently before dragging her o√ to bed for a passionate coupling. She knows nothing about his political activities. The violence and domination he exerts over her—there are several slaps—is explained by amorous passion. The conflict that structures the film narrative is built on the incompatibility between the hero’s clandestine political activities, motivated by strictly identitarian concerns (proving he is a man), and his love for Anne, who, of course, can’t understand this necessity. It is a dilemma straight out of Corneille that he solves by opting for his sense of duty that will make him lose everything, except honor. While he is gone overseas pursuing the traitor, his wife consoles herself in the arms of a very reasonable leftist (Henri Serre) who encourages her to go back to acting and by whom she quickly becomes pregnant. The press of the era appreciated the portrait of the woman, first because it confirmed the talent of a new Romy Schneider as revealed by Visconti in Boccaccio 70, after she had definitively left behind the character of Sissi. But it was also because certain critics saw in it ‘‘the path taken from a woman/object to a free woman, conscious of herself and her responsibilities’’ (Paule Sengissen, Télérama). It is significant that this appreciation comes from one of the rare woman critics of the era. Jacqueline Sieger (TC) makes a similar judgment: ‘‘When she meets Paul the leftist, who encourages her to take up acting again, she regains her dignity, a need for personal realization.’’ It’s a man who expresses eminently misogynistic reservations about the construction of the female character: ‘‘As for Anne, in my opinion she

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

reveals the screenwriter’s and the director’s rather broad contempt for women and, at the same time, a grave psychological error. What Anne loves in Clément is the fact that he’s a brute. He fascinates her. She could at the most be fascinated by ‘the enemy,’ that is, a fellagha or a dynamitero, but absolutely never by a ‘neutral’ like Paul’’ (Jeander, Libération). Actually, Le Combat dans l’île, like Les Amants, makes the woman’s emancipation depend on her encounter with a ‘‘positive’’ man, after her dependence on a man who alienates her. This is a curious way to describe emancipation, which indicates a persistent suspicion regarding women’s capacity for autonomy. Besides, the apparent ‘‘modernity’’ of the Anne/Paul couple is erased by the final episode, ‘‘the combat on the island’’: the woman becomes nothing but an object exchanged between the two men, the compensation for whoever wins. Presented as Clément’s ultimate, desperate attempt to win back his wife, which fails, and the hero’s tragic destiny is confirmed. The violent machismo of his amorous behavior and the fascist violence of his political activities are sublimated by the fundamental necessity of a≈rming his masculinity and by Trintignant’s acting—the figure of the touching little boy, capable of awakening the viewer’s empathy, which is also maintained by the voice-over. Objective political categories (right and left) are mostly merged together by the lyrical vision of a tragic masculinity that belongs only to its interpreter. If politics is the concern of men alone, it is not a viable value system but rather the possibility of a≈rming an identity: we see how the right-wing activists’ bazooka shooting lends itself to such a project incomparably better than the printing and distribution of tracts, which seems to be the leftist’s main political activity.

Doniol-Valcroze: Rallying to Tragic Masculinity With La Dénonciation—filmed in 1961, released in July 1962—Jacques Doniol-Valcroze introduced a ‘‘left’’ version of the same theme. After the elegant but somewhat conventional variations on modern libertine habits of his first two feature-length films, La Dénonciation was greeted by the press as a mature work whose political dimension was essential. Only Bernard Dort (France-Observateur) voiced reservations about a film where ‘‘politics are e√aced in favor of the morality of a belated romantic ‘hero’ who dreams of playing the ‘little soldier’ like those in the OAS.’’ Based on an original screenplay by the filmmaker, La Dénonciation joins

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together the Occupation period with that of the Algerian War through the story of a ‘‘leftist,’’ Michel Jussieu (played by Maurice Ronet), a producer of avant-garde films (in other words, the auteur’s alter ego), who is mixed up inadvertently with the assassination of an OAS activist, and who remembers his past in the Resistance. Unlike Le Petit soldat, this film does not entertain the slightest ambiguity about the value of this or that political orientation: the group of far-right activists is depicted without any complacency, including in its mafia-like practices, and the police commissioner who leads the investigation, played by Sacha Pitoë√, is the epitome of honest republicanism and human intelligence. But the story, accompanied with the voice-over of an omniscient narrator who constructs an empathetic relation between viewer and hero, will soon take an introspective turn, with the repeated flashbacks of Michel’s memories of the Occupation. Two key scenes muddy up the apparently clear stakes of the story—for the character as well as for the viewer. The first is a scene after torture in the Gestapo’s cellar, where Michel, horribly beaten, is brought before a Nazi o≈cer who waits for him to speak. A young French translator takes advantage of his role to urge Michel to spare his own life by confessing, since, he tells him, the o≈cer already knows everything. Michel talks, o√ screen, and then escapes . . . The second flashback happens just after the Liberation: Michel is called upon by the Republican authorities as a witness for the defense in the trial of a young collaborator—the translator—at the request of the accused. But Michel does not have the courage to reveal the circumstances, hardly edifying for him, in which the young translator had tried to save him. The translator is executed, but, with a sad smile whose obsessional memory stays with Michel, he signifies to him that he has understood his silence. The film thus obscures, little by little, political roles and identities, and in the end Michel decides that in order to regain his own self-esteem he will no longer ‘‘collaborate,’’ which is to say he will not reveal to the police in the story’s present the OAS plot, at the same time that the activists, knowing themselves discovered, have decided to assassinate him. The film ends with a sequence in which the hero, at the wheel of his car, is driving to a certain death accompanied by lyrical chamber music and by the voice-over that delivers the hero’s spiritual testament: ‘‘Michel Jussieu finally knows that courage is a simple, serious thing, he is finally free and happy.’’ The last mental image that appears before him (and us) before his death is that of

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity

‘‘the young man with a sad smile,’’ the one he had condemned to death previously with his silence, and that he now rejoins in death, beyond all political a≈liations. The extreme complexity of the story line is in proportion to the contradictions that the film attempts to reconcile. It is, in e√ect, a matter of a≈rming the validity, in the present of the story told, of the leftist political values embraced by the filmmaker, all the while proclaiming the superior value of the individual who decides to give them up in order to accomplish his personal destiny. This is a di≈cult contradiction to resolve, all the more so in that the main character, the origin of the film’s point of view, in fact embodies a certain political skepticism, since he does not believe wholeheartedly enough in his ideals to be able to combat the OAS, unlike his former Resistance leader. The story recounted by the film appears in the end like a long quest for self that leads, in the purest romantic tradition, to freedom and death at the same time. Another element shared with the films discussed thus far is the female character’s place and role. Michel Jussieu’s wife, the beautiful Elsa (Françoise Brion), is constructed in a paradoxical way: both erotic (she performs for her husband a very knowledgeable striptease that symbolizes her ability to maintain desire in the couple) and a traditional figure of female oppression on two levels: by her powerful minister father whom she ends up calling for help and thus precipitating her husband’s death, and by her role as wife and mother (they have a charming little twelve-year-old girl) limited to the private sphere (Michel doesn’t talk to her about the things he talks ‘‘to us’’ about, namely political things). Moreover, it is Elsa that the film makes (involuntarily) responsible for the initial setting into motion of the tragedy, when she speaks to her husband about the necessity that he ‘‘collaborate with the police’’ in order to get to the bottom of the activist’s murder. The voice-over makes it clear to us that, speaking for Michel, ‘‘Elsa pronounced the word that shouldn’t be pronounced,’’ and that would bring back to the surface the whole poorly digested past. It is also Elsa who sets into motion the final turn in the fatal circumstances: ‘‘Michel understood that Elsa had let go of him . . . The die was cast . . . the time to choose had past.’’ We have here a subtle example of the New Wave’s ‘‘ontological’’ misogyny. The superb woman, perfectly in love and faithful, who, because she is a woman and cannot understand what goes on inside a man’s head, even that

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of her husband, will, out of a desire to protect him from himself, which is to say to bring him back to her, provoke his flight to the only territory that is totally free (of her presence), death. This examination of the most explicitly ‘‘political’’ of the New Wave films shows that regardless of the convictions of the individual filmmaker, the systematic articulation of politics with masculinity suggests a heroic vision of commitment, in the lineage of the great novelists of the period between the two wars: Godard, through his alter ego of the Petit Soldat, refers explicitly to the Spanish Civil War, lived and ‘‘written’’ by Malraux and Hemingway, in order to express his nostalgia of a committed intellectual. But in this historically very di√erent moment of the beginning of the 1960s in France, the Cold War and the colonial wars have made impossible a simple equation between a fantasy of heroic accomplishment and the choice of a political orientation. In fact, heroic virility is now associated with the most retrograde of political values. The films analyzed here reveal above all the di≈culty that their auteurs have in accepting this new given. It is as if the creator in our culture, even when he is sincerely ‘‘on the left,’’ could not fantasmatically a≈rm himself except in the mode of the most traditional of virile values: physical courage, the refusal of all social or a√ective ties, and the confrontation with death.

Chapter Eight

The Women of the New Wave: Between Modern and Archaic

‘‘Mademoiselle New Wave’’: Reality or Fantasy? After 1956 and the success of Et Dieu créa la femme, the New Wave became associated in the media with the emergence of a new figure of the woman. As Antoine de Baecque (1998, 75) recalls, André Cayatte, a specialist of ‘‘problem films,’’ asked readers of L’Express in an article on October 30, 1958, to ‘‘work [with him] to develop a screenplay about youth today.’’ Cayatte received hundreds of letters, and in response sketched a verbal portrait of his young heroine, ‘‘Mademoiselle New Wave’’: She remains very serious, but very childlike at the same time, very young. She has her own ideals (sexual equality, freedom in love), a taste for work and for pleasure, for play: movies, records, reading, going out in the evening. She likes to dress up elegantly, but prefers being relaxed and sober, with a certain casualness. Above all, she despises patriotism such as it was conceived in the past. What she expects is modern life and she values everything that is new.

Chapter Eight

On the other hand, Mademoiselle New Wave is frequently afraid. She is extremely anxious about living, missing out on things, getting old, ruining her life, being misled, not being loved or not being considered.

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Cayatte’s project led to nothing, but the idea was taken up again in a survey by Madeleine Chapsal. Titled ‘‘The Truth about Girls,’’ it appeared in L’Express on October 20, 1960, and then was published that same year by Grasset. Announced on the magazine’s cover with a quote from Paul Morand, ‘‘Today’s girl—she’s more or less yesterday’s young man,’’ it appeared to confirm Cayatte’s hypotheses. Defining girls by age (between fifteen and twenty years old) and by status (unmarried, not having settled down), and refusing the criteria of virginity, Madeleine Chapsal counts about 1,250,000 of them, among whom 43 percent were working. But the journalist knowingly falsifies her sample by minimizing the place of young working women (workers, farmers, employees): ‘‘To talk about young girls is to talk about the privileged ones who have the time, the means, the possibility—and that great luxury, culture—to think about their state. . . . This is why we decided to interview, for the most part, those girls . . . whom social circumstances haven’t completely swallowed up and digested.’’ This vision of class, fairly typical of L’Express, led Madeleine Chapsal to come up with the following sample: 32 percent students, 23 percent workers, 25 percent studying for the baccalaureate, 18 percent apprentices, and 2 percent who do nothing. Of this group 55 percent are middle or upper middle class, 30 percent lower middle class, and 15 percent working class. The responses to the questionnaire emphasize the di≈culty of being a girl (66 percent), conflict or disagreements with parents (76 percent), the intention of preparing for a career or trade (53 percent), the refusal to be a virgin on her wedding day (49 percent). Further, 42 percent (against 49 percent) claim the right to abortion in the case of an unwanted pregnancy; 80 percent are in favor of divorce, and 82 percent want to marry for love. In addition, 68 percent know how to cook, 79 percent know how to swim, and 78 percent know how to put on make-up. The survey is filled with contrasts but nevertheless reveals a profound change in values in relation to the preceding generation. In addition, 68 percent of them had seen Les Tricheurs and 43 percent Les Cousins, with the majority finding Carné’s film false in its representation of youth while Chabrol’s rings true. Madeleine Chapsal’s survey concludes that ‘‘girls today have no armor. They speak our language, know what a salary is, know about illness, solitude, a man who forgets and who becomes,

The Women of the New Wave

in turn, forgettable, work, disgust, impotence . . . At the age when we ask questions about ourselves, they are already asking di√erent ones.’’ In other words, the ingenue, the silly little goose, has disappeared. It is tempting to compare these ‘‘surveys’’ of young girls with the analysis of representations of female figures in New Wave cinema that sociologists working with Edgar Morin published at the same time, even if the age group represented is broader. On April 27, 1961, a study by Evelyne Sullerot entitled ‘‘A Composite Portrait of the ‘New Wave’ Heroine’’ appeared in L’Observateur littéraire, the supplement to France Observateur.∞ In this study the sociologist returns to the investigation undertaken by the Center for the Study of Mass Communication, but from the angle of female characters. The comparative study of fifty-five non–New Wave films and fiftyfive classified as New Wave made between 1958 and 1959 shows more heroines in the New Wave group (twenty-four) than in the non–New Wave group (nineteen). But even in the New Wave films, only fourteen of the heroines are the main character of the film (while twenty-two male characters have that role). The predilection for sexual themes explains the larger representation of women. And yet certain heroines ‘‘command the entire optic of the film (as in Les Amants and Hiroshima mon amour, two films whose screenplays, moreover, were conceived by a woman). Others are the very subject (Les Bonnes femmes) of an entomological study of a specific category of young women. Others still are vigorous partners attracting the same amount of attention as the hero in the couple, as in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Les Liaisons dangereuses, A bout de souΔe, Une fille pour l’été, L’Eau à la bouche, Les Jeux de l’amour. . . . In classical French production, there is always a more or less numerous group of working women, little girls, old ladies—here, all the women’s roles are that of love interests. And these are almost entirely played out in a tragic tonality.’’ But ‘‘only a third are sacrificed to ‘true love,’ and the two-thirds remaining are divided into a√airs without a future, more or less serious flirtations, or sexual relations without love (7 out of 22).’’ They change partners once or more than once during the story’s (brief) duration, which is ‘‘completely new and shows the emergence of an almost equal treatment of male and female characters in the sexual domain: a kind of de facto equality in amorous behavior, which is itself revolutionary. In classical production, the hesitations, fumbling around, and experiments are usually left to male heroes. . . . Two-thirds of the heroines have sexual intercourse in the film (we

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are shown it, as much as this can be done), and two-thirds again say specifically that they have had sexual experiences (outside marriage) before the beginning of their ‘film life.’ We must know that they are not virgins, or that they have been adulterous. What is more, out of our 24 heroines, there is not a single one that is a virgin at the end of the film. (While the young virgin, the ingenue, proliferates in non-New Wave French production and in foreign production).’’ Twenty-two make sexual experimentation their ‘‘constant principal value,’’ undoubtedly because they are young, the majority being under thirty (classic cinema privileged women between thirty and forty). But they proclaim ‘‘a worrying emptiness’’ in values: two practice their religion, three are openly unbelievers, and for the others it is a nonexistent problem. Only one makes an allusion to political values (Hiroshima mon amour, atypical). All except two are unaware of ambition, and the same for money. But some (six) are seeking ‘‘independence, self esteem, individual pride,’’ which they perceive as being ‘‘in conflict with the value of being ‘in love,’ ’’ —conflicts that ‘‘all end up ‘without emotional happiness.’ ’’ The complete absence of women who sacrifice love to duty (numerous in classical cinema) is worth noticing. Half have contempt for values of ‘‘legality and conformism,’’ virtue, and traditional ‘‘moral values.’’ Familial values, held dear, broadly speaking, by the heroines of ‘‘romance’’ fiction, are mostly absent here: two-thirds don’t mention their parents, eight are married. Among these eight, six have a lover, five are in the midst of serious conjugal conflict, three are on their way to a divorce, only five have a child—with whom, furthermore, they are in conflict. ‘‘The New Wave mother is really monstrous (Les 400 coups, A double tour, Une fille pour l’été).’’ A few vague friendships barely counterbalance ‘‘the tragic and sustained condemnation of marriage and maternity.’’ ‘‘Half of New Wave heroines do not work’’ (neither salaried, nor in the home). Among those who work, there is a very clear division between ‘‘subordinates’’ (those who work out of necessity) and the others who are generally students or have ‘‘interesting’’ jobs: artist, antiques dealer, decorator. ‘‘But we know nothing, unfortunately, about the way they exercise their profession,’’ nor what interest they take in their work. ‘‘Madame New Wave’’ is at ease in the domain of love, and disparages ‘‘the myth of virginity, of monogamy, of the all-beneficient-maternity, of marriage-as-the-unique-solution.’’ This leads to the disappearance of ‘‘two complementary figures: the ingenue and the prostitute.’’

The Women of the New Wave

This sociological investigation of filmic representations confirms that the di√erence between New Wave and popular cinema is perceptible in the area of female roles as well. New Wave filmmakers depict women such as they meet them in their daily lives, belonging to the same cultivated (petty) bourgeois background as they do, and with the a√ective and sexual conduct characteristic of the ‘‘modernity’’ of the urban elites. And yet, if Cayatte’s hypotheses, Madeleine Chapsal’s survey, and New Wave cinema all share a tendency to make women who work either invisible or ridiculous, the cynicism that the new cinema credits women with having seems to be more a male fantasy than a reality. This may be interpreted in two ways: either as the will to invent an ‘‘ideal’’ woman for men, a woman finally liberated from the puritan education that made her o√ limits until marriage, or as a quite paranoid vision of changes in female behavior—two hypotheses that are not in the least contradictory.

Women of the New Cinema: Masculine Creations Concerning the construction of female characters, there are two types of films in New Wave cinema. Most, as illustrated in chapter 6, are elaborated from the gaze of one or two male protagonists, the alter ego of the auteur (A bout de souΔe, Le Petit soldat, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, Les 400 coups and Tirez sur le pianiste). Female characters in these films are the male hero’s fears and desires made concrete, and the viewer only has access to them through his gaze. They embody directly or indirectly the fatality that will befall the hero, for the very reason that he has fallen in love with them. In order to exist, he must drive them away or destroy them, but he may also risk being destroyed himself. There is another, smaller group of films where women are the main protagonists of the story: the director’s gaze functions in these films like that of a ‘‘sociologist,’’ who describes, with more or less pity or distance, the social and sexual alienation of the female character (and eventually, her ‘‘emancipation’’ through love), in the lineage of Madame Bovary. Alexandre Astruc, precursor of this tendency, proposed brilliant variations of it with Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955) and La Proie pour l’ombre (1961) (see chapter 5); Malle associated it with an agreeably scandalous eroticism in Les Amants (1958); and Godard produced, successively, a light version of it, a romantic version, and a modernist one with Une femme est une femme and

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Vivre sa vie (1962) and Une femme mariée (1963). Chabrol gives it what is undoubtedly its most radical form in Les Bonnes femmes (1960). There, too, the filmmakers of the Left Bank are an exception: Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962)≤ are clearly the only films of that generation (two of these films were written or directed by a woman) that construct the female character as a subject, a consciousness, and not as the object of the story. If most of the New Wave actresses became prominent, like the actors, in the course of the movement, the actresses have a completely di√erent relation to their directors. The young filmmakers often rework the very ancient tradition of the artist and his model, where the work of art becomes a way of fixing an amorous sentiment often confused with a Pygmalion posture: the loved woman accedes to (cinematic) existence thanks to the talent of her creator. Jeanne Moreau and Anna Karina can be considered the two opposing poles of this galaxy: the one manages to impose herself as the ‘‘star’’ of the New Wave (in the media and economic sense of the term, see Dyer 2004), while the other, on the contrary, plays the unexportable model of a lone creator. Stéphane Audran, Anouk Aimée, Juliette Mayniel, Marie Laforêt, Francoise Prévost, Emmanuèle Riva, Alexandra Stewart, Françoise Brion, and Marie Dubois all o√er various profiles of an image of female modernity, sexually emancipated and tending, in social terms, toward the cultivated urban classes. The traditional dichotomy of French society is confirmed, between a willfully libertine bourgeoisie on the one hand, and popular milieux that are more conservative when it comes to customs and behavior on the other. Only Bernadette Lafont introduces a female figure of popular origins, but her compositions, vacillating between burlesque and self-ridicule, seem to confirm the New Wave’s inability to take seriously female characters from the lower classes. New Wave actresses broke with the soliciting, striptease kind of eroticism of the beginning of the 1950s associated with Martine Carol or Françoise Arnoul (in her first incarnation),≥ and then later with the more ‘‘natural’’ eroticism of Brigitte Bardot. The new cinema introduced a sublimated eroticism that passes more through the face and the voice (and through the lighting and framing) than through the body: faces with very little makeup as opposed to the masquerade of femininity such as it was deployed in commercial cinema; bodies that correspond very little to the calibrated norms of 1950s eroticism—in this way as well, the young filmmakers af-

The Women of the New Wave

firmed their creative power and invented new images of women whose seduction seems to emanate less from their objective ‘‘endowments’’ than from the capacity that the men behind the camera have to reveal their secret charms. Many of them would not have much of a career outside of the New Wave. Critics of the era were sensitive to the phenomenon, regardless of their cultural or political tendencies. Actresses who were already well known changed their look and their acting style completely under the direction of a young filmmaker, as did Jeanne Moreau with Louis Malle (see chapter 9). The November 7, 1961, issue of the popular magazine Festival film, which was devoted to La Morte-saison des amours, declared of its leading actress: ‘‘Françoise Arnoul just turned thirty . . . She is no longer the perverse little ingenue of her early films, she is no longer the one the Italians called a ‘pocket-sized vamp.’ But she is a very lucid woman, aware of her possibilities, of the secret universe she can express. And we can see that the sorcerer who awakened this true comedienne’s talent is the same magician who created the Bardot phenomenon: Roger Vadim. For it is in Sait-on jamais that Françoise Arnoul found her way. This excellent film, ‘new wave’ before the time or the fashion, will certainly find the success it merits on its second release. In La Morte-saison she is excellent in a very nuanced role, one of those roles that any intelligent woman wants to be o√ered.’’ Anouk Aimée also had a life before the New Wave, as the issue of Sélection nous deux (n. 12, November 1, 1961) devoted to Jacques Demy’s Lola recalls: Anouk Aimée, who had an unfortunate début with La Fleur de l’âge, Marcel Carné’s uncompleted film, has had a rather uneven career. After Les Amants de Vérone, La Maison sous la mer, Le Rideau cramoisi, Les Mauvaises rencontres, an interruption, then Pot-Bouille, Tous peuvent me tuer, Montparnasse 19. . . . Discovered by the New Wave that came after Astruc, she played the heroine of La Tête contre les murs and Les Dragueurs. Italy gave her her big break with Fellini’s La Dolce vita and Lattuada’s L’Imprévu. . . . Anouk Aimée finds a new character in Lola, the first feature-length film by director Jacques Demy. The pure Anouk of Les Amants de Vérone changes her face and her character to become Lola, a singer in a sailors’ bar, whose heart nevertheless remains as pure as her expression.

But the young cinema also ‘‘invents’’ a type of actress that appears completely new. For Combat, for example, ‘‘Juliette Mayniel [the protagonist in

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Les Cousins], a girl of our own times, evokes nobody, for she belongs to a race of women that didn’t exist in the belle époque of French cinema. She is, quite simply, stupifying.’’ Despite the magnificent green eyes that first made her famous in a television commercial, Mayniel’s career did not take o√, but Jean-Pierre Mocky’s second film, Un couple, which came out in December 1960, bore witness to her charm as a modern young woman. According to the filmmaker, the film was the result of his friendship with Raymond Queneau (credited with the adaptation and dialogues) who, like Mocky, was having marital troubles.∂ They decided to make a film about an ideal couple who make a pact to always tell each other the truth. Mocky chose Juliette Mayniel without the slightest hesitation to play the young woman, but he couldn’t find a male lead and ended up using a nonprofessional, Jean Kosta, chosen for his likeable appearance, whose total lack of charisma tilted the film in the direction of the female character. We are introduced to the young couple after three years of living together, when the husband admits to his wife that he is no longer satisfied with their physical relations: she seems to no longer want to make love. Hurt, she protests that her love is still strong. They try to reawaken their desire by taking a vacation, but the husband is soon called back to work and neglects his wife for a nice and engaging colleague. On her side, she is bored and ends up responding to a neighbor’s advances. Having taken pleasure in this purely physical relationship, she decides to leave her husband, who, stricken, watches her depart. The subject’s treatment, in its simple frankness, is extremely new, but the seriousness of the subject is marred by all the burlesque characters that surround the couple, like so many variations on real failed couples—a burlesque that would later become Mocky’s trademark. Nevertheless, Juliette Mayniel creates a profoundly empathetic character, conveying a young woman’s contradictory desires with a new authenticity. An unprecedented naturalness was also what the popular press (Festival film) perceived in Anna Karina, at the moment of the release of Une femme est une femme: ‘‘She’s a tall brunette whose smile is that of a happy and malicious child whose gaze seems always a bit astounded by the beauty of what she is seeing.’’ In order to explore the transformation of female figures, conveyed by both the actresses and their roles, I will analyze several emblematic New Wave figures: Anna Karina in Godard’s early films; Bernadette Lafont in Les Mistons, L’Eau à la bouche, Le Beau Serge, A double tour, and Les bonnes femmes; Emmanuèle Riva in Hiroshima mon amour, Léon

The Women of the New Wave

Morin, prêtre, and Thérèse Desqueyroux. Jeanne Moreau, the only New Wave star, will be the subject of chapter 9. Finally, the famous utilization of Brigitte Bardot in two New Wave films (Le Mépris and Vie privée) will be examined in chapter 10.

Anna Karina and Godard: the Demiurge and the Woman-Child In what way is Godard’s invention and utilization of Anna Karina typical of the New Wave? If the history of Hollywood is filled with amorous encounters between an artist and his female model, only rarely is the actress totally ‘‘fabricated’’ by the filmmaker. Marlene Dietrich, to mention only the most famous case, was already a known actress in Germany when Joseph von Sternberg gave her the role in The Blue Angel. And after Sternberg she would go on to pursue a star’s career. The artistic relation between Godard and Karina is more reminiscent of the history of painting than of cinema: in fact, not only does Anna Karina ‘‘not exist’’ before Godard and then act very little after him, just as a painter’s favorite model can fall into anonymity after ceasing to be pleasing, but Godard’s early period is commonly known as ‘‘the Karina years’’ (Bergala 1985), indicating the organic tie that exists between the works of art and the female figure that inspired them. Retrospectively, the unity and specificity of Godard’s early works up until Pierrot le fou are striking, both in terms of aesthetics and of representation. According to William Simon, Karina ‘‘apparently favors the expression of the most romantic aspects of Godard’s temperament, particularly in the formation of a cult. In the early Godard films, we find this cult to a high degree through the attitude of the male character toward Karina. The hero is, to a certain degree, Godard’s alter ego in the fiction.’’∑ But, according to Yosepha Loshitzky, ‘‘despite the dithyrambic reception with which many critics greeted Godard’s representation of women, the misogynistic tendency of the films, and particularly the first ones, cannot be avoided. . . . Romanticism and idealization . . . as Janet Bergstrom [1982] remarks, ‘characterize the position of the desired woman in the enunciative logic of most of Godard’s films.’ . . . In his films with Anna Karina, Godard develops a female type à la Louise Brooks, recognizable by her famous haircut. Godard’s image of the woman, particularly during his New Wave period, is that

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of the woman-child. Jacques Rivette remarked: ‘Have you ever noticed that Godard never uses women older than twenty-five? He was approached to direct Eva (which Losey directed) but he refused because of Jeanne Moreau. An adult woman terrified him.’ In Le Petit soldat, Michel Subor declares that women shouldn’t live beyond the age of twenty-five’’ (1995, 136). In fact, beginning with Le Petit soldat, the inaugural film of the ‘‘Anna Karina cycle,’’ a female figure and a narrative composition emerge that are perceptibly di√erent from those of A bout de souΔe (see chapter 5). The androgynous physical allure and the foreign accent of Belmondo’s partner do indeed appear again, but these traits are accentuated in Karina’s case and accompanied by numerous elements of clothing and behavior that connote the woman-child, while the ‘‘cultivated student’’ aspect of Patricia, on the other hand, disappears. Karina’s long hair, which she brushes constantly like a narcissistic little girl fascinated by her own beauty, her blouses edged with English embroidery, her full skirts, her very pronounced foreign accent that gives all of her sentences the awkwardness of a child learning to speak—all this reinforces the infantalizing connotation of the female figure throughout Le Petit soldat, and undermines the value of her political commitment. When Bruno invents the excuse of a photo session in order to meet with her alone at her place, we know he is already in love and that she does not know. The film’s argument, like the mise-en-scène, will reinforce the inequality in the treatment of the two characters: Bruno literally stages her before our eyes in order to photograph her, and the camera for the most part follows Bruno’s gaze on her, while we listen to his interior voice commenting on the vision. Once again we find the typical situation of the artist facing his model, and Bruno, as a photographer, is the alter ego of the filmmaker in the fiction. He has the monopoly of speech, he asks her questions all the while having her adopt di√erent poses, and, even though she compares the situation in the beginning to a police interrogation, she gives in docilely to his quite paternalistic and authoritarian manipulation of her. The choreographic movement of the camera and the disjointed dialogues of A bout de souΔe are again present, but the lighting treatment contrasts Bruno, backlit, to Véronika, in full daylight, the most often in close-up; the scene is a fetishistic contemplation of Anna Karina’s face, which Godard pushes to the level of provocation in terms of the rules of cinematic narrative. Nothing happens in the scene in which Bruno/Godard literally shoots Anna Karina that makes us share his amorous/aesthetic fascination. It is a game of seduction to which the woman lends herself complacently.

A series of shots of Anna Karina and Michel Subor in Le Petit soldat.

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Anna Karina and Michel Subor in Le Petit soldat.

With Une femme est une femme, released in September 1961, Godard seems to have changed his tone. The film takes up the same screenplay idea (a woman wants a baby, but her companion does not)—for which Geneviève Cluny is credited—as that of Philippe de Broca’s Les Jeux de l’amour starring Jean-Pierre Cassel and Geneviève Cluny herself, a film that appeared in June 1960. Godard’s film, with its screenplay and dialogue by the filmmaker, is a comedy—one bordering on pastiche and parody, in color and cinemascope, at the furthest extreme from de Broca’s poetic realism as it is from the tragic tone of Le Petit soldat. An article by Claude-Marie Trémois on the shooting of the film (Télérama, May 22, 1961) indicates that the filmmaker’s stock was then at its highest point, at least among cultivated journalists: ‘‘Yes, Godard is shooting in a studio, but don’t start snickering . . . the child prodigy of the ‘New Wave’ is not abdicating his prerogatives this time either . . . The story? It’s exactly the same as de Broca’s Les Jeux de l’amour . . . It’s di≈cult—and futile—to try to ascertain the paternity of ‘new wave’ screenplays. The auteurs possess a quite exceptional sense of community and, actually, the originality of their respective styles is enough to di√erentiate their works.’’

The Women of the New Wave

On the other hand, when the film came out, critics were divided. Le Figaro, unsurprisingly, was condemnatory: ‘‘We are told that Jean-Luc Godard was improvising. . . . This is a sometimes dangerous and delicate procedure when it concerns exposing the problems of a couple at variance because the young woman ardently desires a baby, . . . The director has made of his film a bizarre jumble of gags as old as cinema itself, and unrelated images.’’ L’Aurore agrees: ‘‘What a disappointment! On the same subject another young filmmaker full of talent, Philippe de Broca, was able to make of his first film a little masterpiece of gaity and kindness, Les Jeux de l’amour: always charming, never vulgar. Jean-Luc Godard, on the other hand, has set out deliberately to shock the public with a nonconformism pushed to its most extreme.’’ More surprisingly, Pierre Macabru of Combat gives his review a nasty title: ‘‘Jean-Luc Godard, or Buddy Cinema.’’ ‘‘Une femme est une femme,’’ he writes, ‘‘is French vaudeville reworked and corrected by a clumsy Swiss. . . . While American musicals are all movement, dynamism and invention, Une femme est une femme reveals a permanent paralysis of the muscles, nerves and imagination. . . . Firecrackers are thrown, as if by elderly pranksters a√ected by advancing age.’’ Similarly, Jeander (Libération) proclaims: ‘‘Une femme est une femme is a flop. . . . Zazie was a failed film, but it failed prettily. . . . Une femme est une femme is a stupidly failed film, it fails heavily and knowingly, if we realize that Godard systematically goes against the grain of what can or cannot be done. . . . And this is how Godard has managed to make a comedy that no one laughs at and a drama that fails to touch anyone.’’ For its part, L’Express reproaches Godard first of all for ‘‘petit-bourgeois smuttiness,’’ before acknowledging that ‘‘he has nevertheless invented a personal writing. . . . And then, and this is perhaps the most moving aspect, there is an attempt to pierce the screen . . . to surprise the characters through the keyhole.’’ The conclusion: ‘‘But everything happens as though Godard, full of promise and audacity, unfortunately obeyed another infantile Godard who dictated to him a schoolboy’s jokes.’’ Samuel Lachize (L’Humanité), on the other hand, develops a flattering comparison in his title: ‘‘The Games of Humor and Chance,’’∏ and he accentuates the amorous relation between the artist and his model, a leitmotif found in most of the reviews favorable to the film: ‘‘It’s a film about love, as astonishing as that might appear. The first love is that of Jean-Luc Godard for his wife and actress, Anna Karina.’’ Maurice Ciantar (Paris-Jour), under

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the title ‘‘Madame Jean-Luc Godard Wants Children . . . But On Screen,’’ proposes a variation on the same theme: ‘‘Out of a slim, endearing subject, M. Jean-Luc Godard establishes exquisite variations on a couple. It is well worth our living in the intimacy of a ‘1961’ household. . . . Surely [it is] a bit more fantastic than most. But that doesn’t take away any of its authenticity. It is actually the trademark of this director’s talent: his concern for the here and now that gives the expression ‘new wave’ its fullest meaning. Jean-Luc Godard explores his generation.’’ For Louis Marcorelles (FranceObservateur): Une femme est une femme lies right in the middle—it doesn’t kill the emotion with formal invention. . . . An insignificant theme that Godard turns topsyturvy, by displacing the crux of the story into the middle of René Clair’s 14 juillet, . . . and then by a di√erent conception of love. Everything revolves around the amorous caprice, mixed with resentment, of an overly tender young woman. . . . Jean-Luc Godard, the misogynist of A bout de souΔe, has 158

suddenly changed ammunition and has built an entire film around the pouts, intonations, and caprices of the loved woman, without for all that losing sight of the fragility of this beauty, this love. . . . Une femme est une femme is one of the most passionate documents that exists about modern malaise and about the genesis of an art that no longer has anything to do with those that preceded it.

Baroncelli (Le Monde) refuses to see in it a simple hurried piece of writing, and he judges ‘‘the film extremely careful, minutely elaborated and mastered from A to Z.’’ But, above all, ‘‘the film was made for Anna Karina around whom the camera never stops circling lovingly. Who could complain about that?’’ Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro littéraire) attempts a general appreciation for what the New Wave has brought about, inextricably combining formal innovation with innovation at the level of representations: It’s the kind of light, sparkling, ticklish, funny film and yet less gratuitous, more true than we could have believed, and whose pleasure and emotion young viewers were waiting for without even knowing it. What French cinema lacked the most, in the days before Godard and the best of his friends, was tone. All films looked alike. . . . The world of cinema had nothing to do with a real world, no matter which. Godard, Tru√aut, Molinaro, Chabrol, and Kast have changed all of that. And yes, the society evoked by most of the so-called new wave films only represents a tiny and not very interesting part of

The Women of the New Wave

our population. . . . But at least Jean-Luc Godard knows his characters, created in their resemblance and situated in a world which is familiar to him. . . . The real subject of Une femme est une femme is the pleasure and anguish of loving. For, more than anything else, it is a film about love. . . . Even when it seems to most make fun of itself and of us, Godard is revealing his intimate secrets. And his revelations are also our own.

Michel Capdenac (Les Lettres françaises) also proceeds by comparison, but in order to distinguish Godard from his closest contemporaries: Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t hesitate to parody, to pastiche, with a fantasy that is often close to a schoolboy’s joke, and with an inextinguishable spontaneity in its audacity, which gives the film all of its charm. He vitriolically attacks all of comedy’s conventions. . . . And yet, unlike most of the filmmakers of the new generation, and notably Kast or Resnais, Godard has a sort of instinctive aversion to literature in images. He thinks, he feels, he writes cinema and only cinema. We are in the most unbridled clownishness, the most likeable that can be, but love, like humor, has things to say that are not negligible. Love of cinema, . . . a more sensual love as well that magnifies a woman, this Anna Karina . . . who expresses herself with her whole body, and with all her beauty as detailed by the director.

It is no surprise that the only critic who makes an allusion to the social contemporaneity of the subject should be a woman, Paule Sengissen (Télérama), and that her tone should be accusatory: It may be as old as the hills, but the pretext around which the film is organized is nonetheless new: a woman wants a child. The man she loves does not want to give her one. She is ready to go elsewhere to get what she wants. Using an identical screenplay, de Broca humorously reworked what is a near vaudevillian situation by making our age of painless childbirth feel its novelty: women no longer undergo maternity; with scientific information that is still not completely trustworthy, they can choose it. This, then, is an essential theme. It is thus striking to see to what extent Godard is afraid of treating his subject frontally: he minimizes it, makes it vulgar, circles around it like a timid schoolboy, makes jokes in poor taste, forgetting all along what it is that ties sexuality to true love. It is not insolent, but rather contemptuous, to end the film with the subtitle: ‘‘The deed being done, she turned on the light.’’ It isn’t surprising that the fleeting impression the film leaves is one of sadness . . . conveying values that contribute to the development of confusion, absurdity and despair.

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Opposite Sengissen’s column on the same page, the weekly placed a review by Jacques Siclier, for whom Une femme est une femme was ‘‘Jean-Luc Godard’s most ambitious film: Paule Sengissen doesn’t like Godard’s new film, which she reproaches for having willfully spoiled a beautiful subject. Against her pertinent criticisms, I o√er an observation. Godard does not care very much about his subject. Like a ballet director, he makes use of an argument in order to show Anna Karina at her full worth. . . . Godard has succeeded in shattering the traditional realist universe of French cinema in order to create a new world of forms and colors.’’ Thus, the film’s critical reception, over and above the opposition between those praising and those castigating the film, indicates a convergence between admiration for formal innovation and male identification with Godard’s fetishistic (‘‘amorous’’) gaze upon Anna Karina. What fascinates male critics are the aesthetic variations whose object is the pretext-figure that is also the director’s young actress-wife, in the great tradition reactivated, with well-known brio, by Picasso. The subject has no importance (except for the lone woman critic) because it is a subject that in those days only concretely preoccupied women. As for the public, it was not very excited about this lighthearted parody of a musical comedy, nor about Anna Karina’s charms; it stayed away from the film (only 56,323 tickets were sold). The film’s tone is characterized by a playful distance, which the characters regularly remind us of by speaking directly to us, as Belmondo inaugurated in A bout de souΔe. But distance always operates in relation to something, and it has a meaning. The (good) model, American musical comedy, here freely pastiched by Godard allows him to take his distance from the (bad) model, the French comedy of manners, which claims to treat social questions—here the crisis in a couple caused by the woman’s desire, not shared by the man, to have a child. Anna Karina plays Angela, who dances striptease in a sordid cabaret in Strasbourg-Saint-Denis in Paris and lives in an attic apartment with Emile (Brialy), who works in a bookstore and is an amateur bicycle racer. Paul (Belmondo), Emile’s friend, is in love with Angela. The film opens with Angela leaving to do her number, chatting with the other cabaret girls, then running into Paul in the street, before going home to make lunch and take a ‘‘fertility test’’ while waiting for Emile.π Godard strengthens his power in transgressing codes by parodying the

The Women of the New Wave

striptease number that was quasi-obligatory in many popular films of the 1950s. Anna Karina makes fun of the conventions of sex appeal, first by singing dressed as a preadolescent (a sailor blouse and a white pleated skirt), then by taking these o√ to reveal a perfectly modest white bustier edged with red. Her mimicry and her song incite laughter, as if coming from a clumsy little girl trying to be alluring. This insistence on childlike behavior throughout the film (awkwardness, naïveté, sulkiness, laughter, and tears) makes her touching and endearing, but doesn’t really make us take her seriously. The first ‘‘couple sequence’’ between Emile and Angela lasts ten minutes and links together a series of gags that highlights each of the actors, using as pretext the most conventional of gender divisions: Angela invents a comedy because she has burned the roast; Emile imitates a soccer match with the broom instead of sweeping; Angela wants a child, but Emile refuses under various pretexts, all the while riding around the apartment on his bicycle; Angela bets Emile that she will ask the first man who comes along to give her a child, a bet she loses, of course, when two policemen burst into the room, under the pretext of a terrorist attack on the boulevard (it is November 1961). The astounding choreography of the scene uses the entire space of the cinemascopic screen to develop the characters inside the apartment, but it is noticeable that the camera highlights the inventive mobility of Emile, who uses the apartment space as a game field, while Angela goes from the table to the kitchen, and then to bed, as if determined by her domestic functions. At the end of the scene the tone suddenly changes, as does the mise-en-scène: Angela weeps in a stationary close-up facing the camera and makes several attempts to make a solemn declaration: ‘‘I think women who don’t cry are asses . . . modern women who want to imitate men.’’ This strong moment, underlined by inserts of Emile’s suddenly grave face, before returning to the light tone and wide shots in movement, is in some way the serious subtext of this light film. The desire for a child is presented as a natural fact in women and it is just as natural a fact for men to have no such desire. Emile wants to ride his bicycle, Angela wants to have a child. Through subtitles written in white across the image, the film a≈rms for us the love between Angela and Emile as just as much of an indisputable given. It stages sexual di√erence and inscribes as natural, outside of any possible discussion, the contradiction of their desires. The happy ending is a double pirouette: the conflict is resolved by Emile’s

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Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy in Une Femme est une femme.

unconditional surrender. In the world of Une femme est une femme, women, in spite of reality, are all-powerful. And the conflict’s resolution is performed in a magical mode, since Emile and Angela, by making love, symbolically erase the sexual encounter between Angela and Paul.∫ Vivre sa vie came out in September 1962, immediately after its screening at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the special jury prize. It benefited from an impressive worldwide critical coverage that was extremely favorable (see chapter 4), and from a real success with the public. The heroine, Nana (Anna Karina) is clearly the object and not the subject of the story: a male voice-over, a sujet-supposé-savoir, takes charge of indicating this fact, along with the inserted chapter titles. But the images constantly oscillate between the coldness of sociological information and the aestheticiza-

The Women of the New Wave

tion of the real, particularly regarding the images of prostitutes. The beauty of Anna Karina’s face and body is heightened by the lighting, and her constant changes of clothing and hairdo, justified by her ‘‘work,’’ complacently feed the spectators’ fetishism, to the second degree, we might say, since the camera never aligns itself with the client’s gaze upon the prostitutes, but sublimates their nudity or their more or less undressed states by granting them, by means of framing or lighting, the abstract beauty of a statue. Near the end of the film, after the sequence in which ‘‘Nana philosophizes without knowing it’’ with Brice Parrain, a scene breaks with the sociological tone that has prevailed thus far. The young man who has just fallen in love with Nana reads to her aloud an Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘‘The Oval Portrait,’’ with his face hidden behind the book. Connaisseurs (that is, the cultivated public to whom the film is addressed) recognize Godard’s voice, and when he gets to the description of the portrait, several rather long close-ups of Anna Karina posing for the camera succeed each other, in dim light, in full sunlight, facing the camera, in profile, up until the point when Godard’s o√-screen voice declares: ‘‘It’s our story . . . a painter who makes a portrait of his wife. Would you like me to continue?’’ To which Anna Karina, facing the camera, responds ‘‘Yes.’’ When Godard—still o√screen, like the male character whom he ‘‘vampirizes’’—starts to read again, the fiction has therefore come to an end, and we hear him tell the story of a painter who has made such a ‘‘living’’ portrait of his wife that she dies of it, over shots of Anna Karina, who finally disappears, melting into the dark. Is it necessary to recall that the heroine dies in the next scene? We have here an example of a scene built on a complete inequality in the treatment of the protagonists: the man in love is o√-screen, behind the camera, while the woman/model listens to the story of her own execution, which blends into the amorous cult-object that her lover/artist makes of her. Must we conclude that during the first period of his career,Ω Godard’s critical capacity in the representation of relations between men and women is undermined by the demiurgic fantasy that feeds his relationship with his wife-model Anna Karina? In fact, the two films from this first period in which the protagonist is played by an actress whose fame was independent from the filmmaker (Jean Seberg in A bout de souΔe and Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris) o√er more complex representations of gender relations, and a real acknowledgment, even if episodic, of the autonomy of the female char-

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acter, as if the director, respectful of the actress’s stature, accorded the character a larger space than when he is dealing with ‘‘his creature.’’ The romantic vision of love and the construction of Anna Karina as a femme fatale in Pierrot le fou, the last in the filmmaker’s Karinian opus, would tend to confirm this hypothesis.

Bernadette Lafont and Chabrol: Derision of the Popular Feminine

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The young woman revealed by Les Mistons—a silhouette exposed to the lust-filled gaze of the preadolescents pursuing her—is inscribed from the outset in the ambivalence between a cinephilic fantasy inspired by Bergman’s Monika and a quest for authenticity: she embodies a frank and natural sensuality, gay, problem-free, brunette, and provincial—a sort of B.B. truer than her model. But she undoubtedly corresponds more to the kind of young boys’ dreams that Tru√aut identified with than to the reality of the French provinces in the 1950s. And yet, the way Chabrol uses her in Le Beau Serge would fix her image in a perceptibly di√erent way. If we believe the critics of the era (February 1959), Michel Aubriant (Paris-Presse), for example, it is ‘‘the revelation of a young comedienne, Bernadette Lafont, who has a surprising presence. In the world of sly bitches, this one will go far: one has the impression of watching the debuts of Ginette Leclerc or Viviane Romance.’’ For Paul Giannoli (ParisPresse), Chabrol ‘‘in Le Beau Serge, gives us Bernadette Lafont as though he were giving us a slap, . . . in her blouse buttoned up the front, insisting with her eyes and encouraging with her lips.’’ She is a ‘‘fascinating local vamp,’’ for Doniol-Valcroze (France-Observateur). Jean Carta’s judgment (TC) is more ambivalent: ‘‘As for Bernadette Lafont, she can neither speak nor act. This does not prevent her from exerting an almost animal fascination similar in its naturalness to B.B.’s aura.’’ France Roche’s appreciation (France-Soir) is interesting because it contains an implicit criticism of the character created by Chabrol: ‘‘Bernadette Lafont, with her neglectful and almost unconscious sensuality, is a curious animal. One wishes she will develop enough to play something other than a poultry-yard hysteric.’’ Over and above the actress, it is in fact the character that is problematic: Tru√aut’s sensual fantasy has become in Chabrol’s hands a ‘‘nymphomaniac,’’ according to Sadoul (Les Lettres françaises), ‘‘a little slut who has already slept with all the boys in town,’’ according

The Women of the New Wave

to Jeander (Libération), ‘‘a kind of country pin-up, both lazy and slutty, malleable and blasé,’’ according to Jean Dutourd (Carrefour). All these descriptions bear witness above all to the critics’ adherence to Chabrol’s point of view. But the joyful dimension of Lafont’s acting makes the deeply misogynistic character of the ‘‘easy’’ woman tip into the realm of farce, and reinforces, by contrast, the seriousness and vulnerability of the two male characters (see chapter 6). L’Eau à la bouche and A double tour would solidify the class dimension of her character. Twice in a row, she plays a farcical servant who entices her master and is chased by the valets. She thus becomes a farcical representation of popular femininity and ancillary loves in the New Wave, confirming the inability of the young bourgeois filmmakers to take seriously a female character from the dominated classes. A double tour, Chabrol’s third film, is, in addition, a disappointment for most of the critics. It is the adaptation of a crime story, shot in color, set in the dreamlike decor of an aristocratic country villa near Aix-en-Provence, with a cast that combined non–New Wave actors (Madeleine Robinson, Jacques Dacqmine) and ‘‘new’’ (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bernadette Lafont). When the film debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September 1959, before its o≈cial release two months later, it was greeted very coolly, and the best actress award given to Madeleine Robinson, whose character is horribly mistreated in the film, seems more like a compensation for the actress than an award for the filmmaker. Because Chabrol in having had access for the first time to a substantial budget seems to lightheartedly adopt the mold of the satirical conventions of the ‘‘cinéma de papa,’’ certain critics contemptuously cite boulevard authors like Bernstein and Anouilh when discussing the dialogues, and Chabrol is assimilated to a pale facsimile of Autant-Lara or Christian-Jaque—the supreme insult. A doubt is awakened about the new generation’s ability to innovate the art of film with any consistency. It is undoubtedly these ‘‘traditional’’ elements, including Bernadette Lafont as a vaudevillian servant uniquely interested in amorous flings, that brought the film a notable success with the audience. Chabrol used Bernadette Lafont again in his fourth film, Les Bonnes femmes (1960), a film that merges a sociological tone with contempt in order to recount the misadventures of four clerks working in an appliance store. The screenplay writer, Paul Gégau√, talked about it as the ‘‘only screenplay where [he] was free, the only one he likes.’’ In an interview with André S. Labarthe, he admits having written it in ten days and presents it in

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this fashion: ‘‘The thesis, . . . was the love I had for the mystery of simple souls. For I loved them, those girls, when all is said and done. I’ve been accused of being mean, and that’s true too. In the beginning I wanted to be, I wanted to drag them through the mud and I noticed that I ended up loving them. But more profoundly (the longstanding dream of my life), I wanted to probe commonplaces. In the end, to arrive at penetrating a commonplace as deeply as possible. To get inside a simple soul’’ (Limelight. n. 60, June 1997, interview held in 1967–68). One cannot claim a Flaubertian inheritance more explicitly than this, in all its ambivalence of a demiurgic relation to alienated creatures. Described by its director as a materialist look at female alienation, the film was greeted in di√erent ways by critics and relatively ignored by the public, because of its being at the farthest remove from the romantic subjectivism associated with the New Wave (and with Chabrol himself, given his first two films). But Les Bonnes Femmes deviated just as fully from populism, which had remained the dominant ideology, since the 1930s, of films portraying characters from the lower classes. This populism, an idealized vision of the popular classes made by (petit) bourgeois artists often ‘‘on the left,’’ was not exempt from a certain misogyny (Burch and Sellier 1996, 23– 56). But it did set out to denounce the particular oppression weighing on young women as the target of male lust, particularly that of bourgeois men and bosses (Le Quai des brumes or Le Crime de M. Lange). The 1950s did not overturn that ideology, even if it was often expressed in a conventional way capable of still safeguarding a good popular masculinity (Des gens sans importance by Henri Verneuil, in 1956, with Françoise Arnoul and Jean Gabin). Chabrol’s look at four clerks working in an appliance store in the Bastille neighborhood is completely void of the reassuring illusions of populism. Like Flaubert with Madame Bovary, Chabrol uses an entomologist’s gaze to describe the di√erent appearances that the alienation of young, uneducated women in Paris takes. But Chabrol doesn’t insist on an ‘‘objective’’ gaze: beginning with the first scene, in a nighttime Paris filmed with all the modernity of the New Wave, we feel the author’s veritable joy in emphasizing the vulgarity of the two older lechers in a white convertible who ‘‘pick up’’ Bernadette Lafont and Clotilde Joano, take them to a restaurant, then to a cabaret, hoping to finish the evening in bed, a wish that will be granted, at least by Lafont. The insistence on the grotesque nature of the characters

The Women of the New Wave

and their ludicrous situations characterizes the whole of the film, which follows the four young women at work and at play for a period of time no longer than two days. An interminable day at work in the boredom of the store, a second evening at the music hall, then at the swimming pool— these scenes delimit their world. The summit of derision is attained with the falsely romantic plot of which Clotilde Joana, with her sad madonna face, is the object. The film introduces suspense from the outset with the character of a transitory flamboyant motorcyclist lover, played by Mario David, who follows her everywhere without approaching her until the moment, at the swimming pool, when he protects her from the two lechers who have become aggressive. Their romantic ride to the countryside, an explicit parody of the idylls of photo-novellas, ends with a sadistic crime. To drive the nail home, Chabrol, with no transition, leaves the ending open: in a dance hall, a young girl alone awaits her Prince Charming whom she greets with an ecstatic smile, in the person of the first dancer to come along and whose back is all we see. The filmmaker reserves his most biting attacks for the men of whom the women are, without exception, the victims, each one in her manner, by marrying them, accepting to sleep with them, or by getting strangled by them. But the total absence of consciousness—even a fugitive one—of their situation places the women in an irremediable position of inferiority in relation to the viewer. And the fact of only giving them the choice between pathetic lechers on the rebound, a fiancé terrorized by his parents, or a psychopath, reveals the manipulative dimension of the film. Like Flaubert,∞≠ Chabrol does not adopt the same tone when his protagonists are young men, and more or less his alter ego, capable of awakening the viewer’s empathy, as in Le Beau Serge or Les Cousins, and when they are female characters, deprived of any individuality or consciousness of themselves, reduced to the status of ‘‘bonnes femmes,’’ under the pretext of describing their social alienation. Even if work is not a value in New Wave cinema, the caricature of it in the rather long scenes in the appliance store, when the young clerks watch flies on the wall, renders their professional status perfectly ridiculous and allows the avoidance of the question—very real in those days—of the exploitation of young female service workers. Similarly, the question of sexual harassment becomes a joke through the grotesque character of the boss (Pierre Bertin), who calls his employees into his o≈ce to ‘‘reprimand’’ them in a

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lecherous way that is systematically made a euphemism by the film, undoubtedly because a real scene of sexual harassment would have implied taking the victims seriously. For the purpose of comparison, consider the perspective on ‘‘shopgirls’’ that Roger Vailland exhibits in an article entitled ‘‘In Praise of Politics’’ in Le Nouvel observateur (November 26, 1964), at a moment when he had already broken with the Communist Party: I think that today, even those who are of an age to remember have forgotten what a ‘‘shopgirl’’ was before 1936. . . . The shopgirl had never been ‘‘organized’’; she was an unmarried girl, a transitory state; she didn’t make enough money to live on, but it was better than being unemployed; no one had ever taught her anything, except respect, not respect for herself, but for others: respect for the client or for the floor manager. Respect makes a shopgirl, there was no other solution if she didn’t want to ‘‘go bad.’’ . . . Well, in June 1936, the department store clerks threw the clients and the floor managers out of 168

the store, occupied the cash registers, organized ‘‘in their workplace,’’ as they put it then, as if in a fortified camp.

These remarks by Vailland paradoxically come out of a highly distressing observation: ‘‘Never, in human memory, have the French people (and not just the French) been so profoundly depoliticized.’’ (He dates the beginning of this depoliticization to 1956, with the Khrushchev report and the repression of the Budapest uprising by the Soviet Army.) We can indeed agree that Chabrol’s look at the ‘‘shopgirls’’ of 1960 is particularly revealing of such a ‘‘depoliticization,’’ and that it would become one of the specificities of the dominant New Wave tendency. Bernadette Lafont plays the figure of the socially dominated female (shopgirl or servant) in New Wave cinema, a figure treated by Evelyne Sullerot in her article in France-Observateur (April 27, 1961) cited above: ‘‘Nineteen out of twenty-four of our heroines are in very easy circumstances or do not worry in the slightest about the question of money. As for the ‘lowers’ who have no money, and who, in order to earn it, work at trades that are hardly glamorous (servants or shopgirls), well! They haven’t the slightest education and their problems are ‘petty’: their silliness and their limited universe is endlessly depicted for us. This disparity in treatment is all the more obvious in that the ‘lowers’ are often compared to the ‘uppers’ (rich, indolent, refined), and that the e√ects drawn from the contrast are of

The Women of the New Wave

the most questionable simplicity and social morality: to the ladies go the grand loves ‘who have class,’ while the lowers are content with trivial and stupifying stories (the parallel couples in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, in L’Eau à la bouche, in A Double tour, for example). . . . In New Wave films, working and lower-class heroines are ridiculed in a facile manner, and their behavior is depicted with a cruel dryness.’’ Sullerot’s remarks define very precisely the limits of the roles o√ered to Bernadette Lafont in the New Wave era: despite her vitality, and reduced, for the most part, to a vulgar brilliancy, she embodies the contempt for the dominated classes that inhabits many of the filmmakers. By accentuating in her acting the farcical dimension of her characters, she confirms the little importance they should be accorded.

Jacqueline Audry’s Modern Young Girl: An Invisible Alternative 11 For the purpose of comparison, consider the case of the only woman filmmaker of the postwar period, Jacqueline Audry (Burch and Sellier 1996, 248–50). Her film Les Petit matins, made in 1961 and released in March 1962, tells the story of a kind of ironic confrontation between a young secretary, played by Agathe Aëms in her first role, and an impressive collection of men, young, less young, and old, whom she meets while hitchhiking from the Belgian border to the Côte d’Azur. The film is a veritable female road movie that amuses itself by parading before the alert and simple young girl all of the masculine stereotypes of the ‘‘cinéma de papa’’: natty oldsters (Fernand Gravey and Noël-Noël), silver-haired and darkhaired skirt-chasers (Claude Rich and François Perrier, Pierre Mondy and Roger Coggio), a grumbling truck driver (Lino Ventura), a casual airline pilot (Gilbert Bécaud), a businessman in a hurry (Pierre Brasseur), an enterprising comedian (Daniel Gélin), an impotent pervert (Robert Hossein), a salesman (Bernard Blier), a tennis player in a convertible (Michel Le Royer), a motorcycle rapist, and so forth. Each time our heroine gets by, thanks to an aplomb and a presence of mind ready for any ordeal, obliterating all the clichés about the supposed flirtatiousness, vulnerability, naïveté, or venality of young girls, especially when they are from a working-class background. The heights of comedy are attained in the episode in which Robert Hossein, playing the perverted son of a good family, ends up collapsing in tears

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in his mother’s arms because none of his schemes that were supposed to terrify the young girl worked. The heroine finally arrives in Cassis and meets a young man who resembles her, Jean-Claude Brialy, with whom, in all simplicity, she spends the night (and perhaps the rest of her life). The film, which was judged completely insignificant when it came out, nevertheless proposes a sequence of very humorous sketches, filmed mostly outdoors with the light touch of the New Wave, and can be interpreted as a sort of humorous mise-en-abîme of the confrontation between the ‘‘cinéma de papa’’ and New Wave cinema. But a confrontation also exists between traditional male roles and the new figure of the young girl who does not need to belong to the bourgeoisie or the cultivated classes in order to be emancipated. The fact that the film went totally unnoticed says much about what was ‘‘visible’’ in those days. Neither venal nor a victim, the young secretary of Les Petits Matins, a French ‘‘girl next door,’’ is a ‘‘neorealist’’ version—certainly less sexy but also less conventional—than the Juliette of Et Dieu créa la femme. 170

Emmanuèle Riva: The Avatars of an Emancipated Woman A theatrical actress revealed to the cinema by Hiroshima mon amour, Emmanuèle Riva is ‘‘like Jeanne Moreau, the incarnation of a new femininity: sensual in a less glamorous and more intellectual way (compared to a sex symbol like Brigitte Bardot), she is associated with the sensitivity and modernity of the New Wave’’ (Vincendeau 2003, 69). The character she played in Hiroshima mon amour marked her in as indelible a way as Anouk Aimée was marked by Lola and Anna Karina by Godard’s films. But it was above all her voice, reciting Marguerite Duras’s written dialogues like psalms, that would be imprinted in viewers’ memories, undoubtedly more than her face and body (the love scenes with the Japanese lover are filmed by Resnais in a manner as sensual as it is anonymous: the faces are not shown). The alluring, hypnotic character of the heroine’s story of young love is born of the contrast between the banal images of Nevers, a quiet town on the banks of the Loire, and the interior horror of what she went through and that she recounts in a hallucinated way to the lover she has just met. Also memorable is the overwhelming ugliness of the young girl with a

The Women of the New Wave

The embrace of two anonymous bodies in the prologue to Hiroshima mon amour.

shaved head in Nevers, imprisoned in a humid cellar, covering her face with bloodied hands that she has scraped against the rough walls to try to attenuate the sorrow of the death of her German lover through the physical su√ering she inflicts upon herself. In the manner in which the heroine is filmed we can see the mark of the New Wave: no apparent makeup; the magic of black and white that, thanks to big close-ups, highlights skin tone and the sculptural design of the face; the face and body expressing su√ering and joy beyond any erotic or photogenic consideration (in the sense of commercial cinema). The actress becomes the instrument of a poetic vision of the body and of physical love, which e√aces the individual to celebrate the human. Her smile associates pleasure and su√ering, beyond any idea of seduction. Emmanuèle Riva’s face is filmed as the expression of an interiority; she is more laid bare than even Jeanne Moreau in certain film sequences by Louis Malle. The great postwar dramatic actresses like Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan, or Simone Signoret could attain such summits, but the constraints of the French version of the star system, makeup and lighting conventions, and the brilliance of the author’s words often had the e√ect of dampening emotions.

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By breaking with all the conventions (and thanks to the lyricism of Marguerite Duras’s dialogues) Resnais allows Emmanuèle Riva immediately to come into her own as a dramatic actress of unprecedented authenticity. In a long dialogue about the film between the principal editors of the journal, the Cahiers du cinéma bears witness to the gripping e√ect produced by the actress and her character: godard: Let’s take the character played by Emmanuelle (sic) Riva. If you ran into her on the street, or saw her every day, I think she would only be of interest to a very limited number of people. But in the film she interests everyone.

rohmer: Because she isn’t a classical heroine, at least not one that a certain classical cinema has habituated us to see, from David Gri≈th to Nicholas Ray.

doniol-valcroze: She is unique. It’s the first time that we’ve seen on the screen an adult woman with an interiority and a capacity for reasoning pushed to such a degree. 172

godard: For me, she’s the kind of girl who works at the Editions du Seuil or for L’Express, a kind of 1959 George Sand. A priori, she doesn’t interest me because I prefer the kind of girl you see in Castellani’s films. This said, Resnais has directed Emmanuelle Riva in such a prodigious way that now I want to read books from Le Seuil or L’Express.

doniol-valcroze: . . . Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman. She is, on the contrary, very childlike, guided by her impulses alone and not by her ideas. Antonioni was the first to show this kind of woman. . . .

domarchi: Hiroshima is, in fact, in a certain way, a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva.∞≤

Beyond the noticeable di√erences in the editors’ appreciation (we can read between the lines Godard’s hostility to intellectual women), there is a consensus on the newness of the character and of the acting in the film. Emmanuèle Riva’s subsequent films substantiate Hiroshima’s impact; she plays only dramatic roles: Marcel Hanoun’s Le Huitième jour, released in February 1960; Recours en grâce (Laszlo Benedek, screenplay by Noël Calef), released in May 1960; Léon Morin, prêtre, adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville from the novel by Béatrix Beck, released in September 1961; Climats (Stellio Lorenzi, from André Maurois), released in April 1962; and Thérèse Desqueyroux, directed by Georges Franju from François Mauriac,

The Women of the New Wave

adapted by his son Claude, released in September 1962. These films were not perceived at the time to be typical of the New Wave, but in them Emmanuèle Riva embodies a figure of the modern woman associated with the new cinema. Le Huitième jour is the second feature-length film by Marcel Hanoun.∞≥ It recounts the story of Françoise, as follows: An employee in the Ministry, nearing thirty years old, she is content in her comfortable apartment where a perfect taste and harmony reign. A neighbor, Georges (Félix Marten), tries to approach her and share her solitude. A widower with no children, Georges would like to give her a sincere love. But Françoise, fiercely secretive, goes back and forth in her mind and despairs about her own hesitations. The most beautiful day of the week for her is ‘‘the eighth day,’’ Sunday, when, with a refined elegance, she goes to the races. There, she blossoms, lives intensely, smiles at the trees, the sun, at the enchantment of a new spring. Georges steps up his late-night visits. One night she gives in to him, almost by surprise, ashamed of having relented. And yet she returns to Georges’s place a few days later. While he is away on a businessrelated flight, she is tempted by Georges’s little brother, whose bold pranks amuse and irritate her. Françoise leaves to spend a weekend with her parents at Chartres. Psychologically astute, her mother questions her daughter about the life she is leading in Paris, and discreetly advises her to settle down and get married. Returning from Paris, Françoise finds a postcard from Georges and is touched. Then she learns that the plane he was to take has burst into flames. Exhausted, she goes to sleep and dreams: a little wild horse throws o√ a little boy and bolts toward freedom. Isn’t this the image of liberation, unconsciously desired, which will finally be realized? Françoise learns that she loves Georges. She finds him in the end, and will undoubtedly marry him.∞∂

Not having been able to see the film, I will make do with reading between the lines of this summary, whose conservative point of view is more in keeping with the summary’s editor (the Centrale catholique du cinéma) than with the film’s director (if we refer to his earlier film). The film expresses a fear that is entirely real for educated women of that generation (if we believe Françoise Giroud’s survey [1958]), the fear of a loss of autonomy in marriage, which makes the heroine hesitate for a long time. Like the rare films of the era that treat the contradictions between a young woman’s desire for social and professional emancipation and the dominated status of

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married women, Le Huitième jour was almost completely overlooked when it was released—as ignored by critics as it was by the public. Léon Morin, prêtre, which came out in September 1961, helped establish Emmanuèle Riva’s dramatic range. In the film she plays the heroine of the largely autobiographical novel by Béatrix Beck (1952), which is written from the point of view of a young woman confronting the di≈culties of life under the Occupation. Like the novelist at that time, the heroine is a young widow of a Jewish husband, the mother of a little girl that she has to put in a shelter, all the while continuing to work in an administrative o≈ce prey to rivalries and pettiness amplified by the di≈culties of the time. Her encounter with Abbé Morin, at first in a polemical manner and then a friendly one, and then her conversion to Catholicism are recounted as a spiritual adventure. The amorous fixation that little by little, at first unconsciously, she has for the priest takes nothing away from her dignity, all the more so in that Abbé Morin continues to treat her with respect, even when he understands the feelings she has for him. Adapted and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, one of the ‘‘godfathers’’ of the New Wave, the film displaces interest onto the young priest, played by an actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, working against type, having become in the meantime the most famous actor of the young cinema (see Brassart 2004, 123–46). In this role Belmondo reworks the norms of virile seduction, by keeping the women who surround him ironically at a distance. With this shift, the film, unlike the novel, becomes through a whole series of changes and omissions (see Vincendeau 2003, 69–75) something like a settling of accounts with independent women, or those who claim to be. The choice of Emmanuèle Riva is not neutral from this point of view, since she exemplifies to the most extreme degree, after Hiroshima, the modern, autonomous woman. It is this emancipation that is undercut and made derisory by Melville’s film. The young widow’s conversion in the film adaptation becomes the expression of her sexual frustration, in a long misogynistic tradition that belongs to secular France, which sees in religious practice the refuge for sexually dissatisfied women. In response to her, Belmondo, unlike Beck’s Abbé Morin, adopts a tranquil assurance and a humiliating distance from the young woman, as though he never experiences ‘‘the temptations of the flesh.’’ Melville is even more cynical a few years later when he declares: ‘‘The principal idea was to show a seductive priest who likes to excite the girls but doesn’t sleep with them. Léon Morin is Don Juan’’ (cited in Nogueira 1971, 84). As a woman

The Women of the New Wave

viewer, one cannot help but feel humiliated by a confrontation that the film makes completely unequal. To the second degree, the priest’s vow of chastity appears as the means to keep women, as well as their fatal entrapment in the mires of sentiment, safely at a distance. The film’s style aims to be completely realistic in the modern sense of the term: it resuscitates, with an austerity worthy of Bresson, the climate and life conditions of the Occupation. But the subtext is much more indebted to the romantic heritage that sees in women a mortal danger to a man’s autonomy. Emmanuèle Riva plays a woman who has spiritual preoccupations, but the film ridicules her since her interest in theology is quickly shown to be motivated by her amorous fixation with the priest. Melville’s personality must, of course, be taken into account in this misogynistic rereading of Beck’s novel. More broadly, though, we can see in the gap between the Belgian novel and its French adaptation an indication of the di≈culty that French culture has in taking seriously women who have intellectual aspirations (Les Femmes savantes remains a reference text in the schools of the Republic). Melville’s film expresses the desire to prevent women from acquiring legitimacy in the intellectual field, an area defended by men in almost as aggressive a way as political power (Coquillat 1982; 2001). Recommended by o≈cial Catholic spokesmen, the film also asserts the ‘‘natural’’ di√erence between the sexes and the legitimacy of an exclusively male ecclesiastical power, accentuated by the dogma of celibacy for priests. They are the only ones to gain su≈cient mastery over their bodies and their instincts to be able to lead the troops of the faithful without yielding. Thérèse Desqueyroux, on the other hand, adapted from François Mauriac’s novel by the same name (1927) by his son Claude for Georges Franju (also credited for the adaptation and dialogues), and released in September 1962, is constructed on a point of view empathetic with the heroine. Here, it is the oppression and instrumentalization of women in bourgeois marriage that is targeted, and all the more e≈caciously in that the plot has been transported into the immediate contemporary era. The argument and dramatic structure in flashback is reminiscent of Henri Décoin’s La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (see Burch and Sellier 1996, 296–302), but Franju, like Mauriac, exclusively adopts the point of view of the female character, who tries to understand how she came to the point of attempting to poison her husband. We watch how the naïve young bourgeois woman discovers the sordid realities of her social class, at first concerned with its goods and proprieties, how she feels

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deceived vis-à-vis a husband incapable of satisfying her sexually, and how she su√ers when confronted with the indi√erence that settles in between them when he returns to his unchanging habits, how she becomes aware of her inability to become completely invested in maternal love, and how she finally feels the desire to end the bourgeois marriage that is stifling her, by committing an irreparable act. The heroine is in charge of the story from beginning to end. Even though the ‘‘criminal’’ is the woman, we are in a constant and exclusive empathy with her, thanks to her interior voice. Most of the critics in 1962 emphasized the veritable fusion operating between the actress and her character, and they adopt Thérèse Desqueyroux’s point of view to give an account of the film—a point of view that Franju reveals unambiguously in an interview with Patrick Bureau (Les Lettres françaises): ‘‘Thérèse is an admirable and extremely lucid girl. She’s a poisoner set adrift, and, in the eyes of Mauriac, the only ones who count are those who struggle for liberation of the mind. If Mauriac makes a saint out of such a beautiful criminal, that is his right, and I’m happy with it.’’ Claude-Marie Trémois (Télérama) defines Emmanuèle Riva’s image as follows: ‘‘To be skinned alive, that’s her job. Since her first film, since Hiroshima mon amour, there’s been a tendency to limit her to sad or painful roles: Le Huitième jour, Recours en grâce, Kapo, Léon Morin, prêtre, Climats, Thérèse Desqueyroux. ’’ Merging together the actress’s life and her screen roles—a surprising thing to do in the pages of the ‘‘cultivated’’ press—the journalist recounts the young provincial’s long struggle with her parents of modest means, who are opposed to her theatrical vocation, before concluding: ‘‘The calvary of those two years at Remiremont were transposed by Emmanuèle onto the imprisoned girl of Nevers. Provincial and imprisoned—this, decidedly, is Emmanuèle Riva’s lot: Georges Franju has her interpret the role of Thérèse Desqueyroux. . . . The female prisoners die of thirst—thirst for liberty. This, then, is Emmanuèle Riva’s own character. Like a beast trapped in a cage, she embodies the passion for liberty.’’ Nous deux film (n. 119, February 1963) printed the complete narrative of Thérèse Desqueyroux, with Emmanuèle Riva’s photograph on the cover; the article devoted to her was titled ‘‘In Love with the Absolute and with Truth, Emmanuèle Riva Remains a Secret.’’ Jean Louis Bory (Arts) also associates the film’s success with Riva’s ability to play Thérèse Desqueyroux: ‘‘She is Thérèse with an intensity bordering on hallucination: an angel filled with passion, aspiring to love and power, ambiguous, overly tender towards her

The Women of the New Wave

fragile little sister-in-law (Edith Scob), gentle, of a gentleness that takes too much out of her, then suddenly taut like a blade and vibrating, then wounded, bleeding, coiled in a corner of the cage, finally victorious and free, quivering nostrils, all the senses alert and in wonderment at the noise of the crowd so like the noise of the sea in the pines.’’ For Bory, ‘‘the film is a violent denunciation of tribal mentality . . . of principled families where intelligence in a woman is suspect.’’ Claude Mauriac emphasized the theme’s contemporary relevance: ‘‘Thérèse seems very interesting to me because eight out of ten women are like her, frustrated. The poisoning is, of course, an extreme case, but this kind of situation involving a woman who doesn’t have what she wants remains completely relevant to our times! And not only in the provinces: there are frustrated women in Paris, and in all the big capitals.’’ Without borrowing the most visible of the New Wave characteristics (improvisation, shooting in natural light, themes and actors associated with youth, liberty of tone in sexual matters) Franju’s mise-en-scène nevertheless sets itself clearly apart from the literary adaptations of ‘‘French quality’’ by its refusal of the writerly, dramatic, and aesthetic conventions of that cinema. (From this point of view, it can be compared to Jules et Jim or Léon Morin, prêtre.) Emmanuèle Riva gives the same impression of authenticity in the freshness of the scenes of the heroine’s youth as she does in her demise after the trial. The film’s modernity lies in a treatment of an eminently conflictual theme for the time that makes no concession, and in its choice of a visual style and a dramatic style as rigorous as its thematic intentions. Emmanuèle Riva is the symbol of the new exigency. And yet, if the film was greeted by an honorable public success, it had no followers: critics preferred films that were more audacious formally, and stories that were more consensual or more exciting. And the actress’s career would undergo the same waning of a√ection as the character of the modern woman she embodied, a character that combined intellectual, social, conjugal, and sexual emancipation. French society at the beginning of the 1960s was not ready to hear such a discourse.

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The Ambivalence of the ‘‘Modern Woman’’ in the New Wave

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After this rapid survey, it is clear that these new figures profoundly transformed the appearance of feminine seduction, making it less sexist than the way it was acted by the fleshy young stars of the 1950s. Whether they were newcomers or began their careers before the New Wave, these new figures were no longer reduced to being the instrument of a fetishistic and voyeuristic male eroticism. We can even speak about a kind of sublimation of the body in favor of an insistence on the face as ‘‘the window to the soul,’’ aided by the refusal of highly visible makeup and by ‘‘natural’’ lighting that broke with the use made by traditional cinema of studio lighting. These female figures are more authentic and less objects of exchange, less defined by commercial interests. It would, however, be naïve to conclude that we are dealing with a more authentic image of what women were really like at that time. First, because these films, like those by their elders, are almost entirely directed by men, and above all because the ambition of these young filmmakers is to make a cinema in their own image, nourished by a dose of subjectivity much more significant than in traditional cinema. Their desire for originality thus leads them to come up with female figures profoundly anchored in their lived reality as much as in their fantasies. Hence, the modern appearance of most of these figures: to borrow Godard’s words, young filmmakers film ‘‘girls the way we like them, boys like the ones we run into every day . . . in short, things the way they are’’ (Arts, April 1959). Actually, their films express the vision these young men have of women, and, as we have seen in the 1960 L’Express survey on the New Wave and elsewhere, the generation is characterized by a vast di√erence in feeling between men and women, and particularly concerning questions of sexual relations. Young men of bourgeois origin are particularly concerned with preserving their traditional prerogatives in that domain. If the new feminine images of the New Wave break with the vulgarity of the starlets of the 1950s,∞∑ it is also because they embody a social and cultural ‘‘distinction’’ directly tied to the class origins of their directors. Over and above the somewhat caricatured images of distinction associated with Françoise Brion or Françoise Prévost, all of the images of women proposed by the New Wave confirm, as if it were necessary, that this is a cinema addressed to cultivated urban viewers. The paradoxical use of B.B. by Godard and Malle, in fact, proves the point (see chapter 10). It is thus not

The Women of the New Wave

surprising that, with only a few exceptions from the filmmakers of the ‘‘Left Bank’’ (see chapter 11), the female figures created by New Wave filmmakers are a composite of modernity and archaism, authenticity and fantasy, a recognition of new sociological realities and an implicit rea≈rmation of male domination. These contradictions were made explicit by one of the more astute critics of the Cahiers du cinéma at the moment when the new generation began to direct: Jean Domarchi in March 1960, commenting on three ‘‘auteur films,’’ Kast’s Le Bel age, Godard’s A bout de souΔe, and Doniol-Valcroze’s L’Eau à la bouche, and on ‘‘a brand new subject: modern love.’’ What might appear to us now as an unusual grouping of films is in fact a pretext for developing a certain number of assertions on the changes in relations between men and women provoked by ‘‘the emancipation of women.’’ Arguing against the psychological verisimilitude of the films by Kast and Doniol-Valcroze, Domarchi writes: A pretty woman, sure of her charm and her charms, doesn’t allow herself to be contaminated by sentiment. She goes straight to the point, without worrying about contingencies. Since we’re talking about modern love, how can we think for a minute that the heart has something to say in the matter? . . . Economic competition has made it necessary for a woman (especially if she is poor and pretty) to rid herself of all sentimentality. She fights for her existence and must assure it by any means necessary. . . . She can agree to a√airs, but she cannot a√ord the luxury of passionate love. . . . A pretty woman is a monster of limited duration: fifteen years, twenty at the most. . . . What is particular to modern love is that it has killed o√ that royal distraction: passionate love. Men are misogynistic, because they reproach women with being self-interested, cynical and angry. Nonsense, for if they are like that, who is to blame? Women are what we have made them be. . . . Woman is the way she is: she pardons nothing in a man she doesn’t love, because she can’t a√ord the luxury of loving someone. She is a coward, because courage has gone out of her reach. Exposed to every peril, infinitely pitiful, she is incapable of feeling pity. Her situation is so vulnerable that all human sentiment is forbidden her.

Farther on, Domarchi comments on A bout de souΔe, a film that corresponds better with his vision of ‘‘modern’’ relations between men and women: The man who is truly in love is inevitably weak and awkward. This is precisely what a woman won’t forgive. . . . His qualities of intelligence and heart count

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for nothing if he loses the only masculine quality to which women are susceptible: will! . . . The logic of modern love is that, with the emancipation of women, the exercise of passion has become more and more di≈cult. The woman becomes free thanks to her work, she can sleep with whomever she pleases, she has shaken o√ the guardianship of society, and she savors the liberty so painfully acquired by making her lover su√er.

He concludes that: Women are easy to understand and the famous feminine mystery should be thrown aside. Masculine idealism that wants woman to be in man’s image and feminine materialism that only submits itself to purely objective determinations, are both respectable.

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We have here a veritable (masculine) manifesto of modern love that confirms that the stakes of New Wave cinema, for those to whom it is addressed, are strongly ideological in the realm of what is commonly called the private sphere. The films are appreciated according to their ability to give a convincing interpretation (for male viewers) of the changes in relations between men and women provoked by ‘‘the emancipation of women.’’ Domarchi’s commentary explains what is masked most of the time in favor of a formalist analysis of the films; he is representative of the ambivalence of that generation of ‘‘modern’’ men vis-à-vis ‘‘modern’’ women, an ambivalence found in Astruc as well, even though his ‘‘theory’’ of the ‘‘modern’’ woman is perceptibly di√erent. In both cases, it is striking to observe that women are an object of analysis, and not a subject with whom one could exchange ideas. The construction of the woman as ‘‘Other’’ is the shared premise of the films and their commentaries.

Empathy with the ‘‘Modern Woman’’ in the Popular Press In the popular press, the question of the ‘‘modern woman’’ is raised in a distinctly di√erent way. At the beginning of 1961, Cinémonde launched a broad investigation spanning several issues (n. 1405–1410) entitled ‘‘The Modern Woman on Trial.’’ In it, eighteen actresses susceptible to meeting that definition (Jeanne Moreau is among those labeled ‘‘passionate,’’ along with Emmanuèle Riva, Annie Girardot, and Madeleine Robinson), are sketched and interviewed. The magazine then asked personalities close to

The Women of the New Wave

the film world to designate the actress who corresponds best to the image. Among the personalities was Alexandre Astruc (in the midst of shooting La Proie pour l’ombre with Annie Girardot), for whom ‘‘film heroines, just like the real women who resemble them one hundred percent, seem to us like ‘nouveaux riches.’ They want to have everything.’’ According to Christine Gouze-Rénal (producing Vie privée, with Brigitte Bardot), ‘‘for the modern women we are shown on the screen, as for real women, the big problem now is managing to build a ‘true couple’ with a man. This quest is especially di≈cult for working women.’’ According to Louise de Vilmorin (who adapted Les Amants): ‘‘In the movies as in life, what di√erentiates more than anything yesterday’s women from today’s is divorce.’’ According to Marguerite Duras (who wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour and for Moderato Cantabile): ‘‘The actresses who best represent the women of our era are Jeanne Moreau and Simone Signoret, because they incarnate feminine drama and intelligence.’’ Finally, André Cayatte (at work on La Vie conjugale, on the ‘‘modern couple,’’ derived from a screenplay by Simone de Beauvoir [Sellier 2002]) declares: ‘‘Modern women interest me enormously. Women like Moreau and Girardot have a deeper mystery, something other than the projection of the mystery desired by man. Their mystery, and there is none that is greater, is that of the autonomy of a human being.’’ In the final part of the investigation, Cinémonde announced that ‘‘seventeen personalities have designated Jeanne Moreau, Annie Girardot, and Brigitte Bardot as the most representative stars of the ‘‘French woman of ’61.’’ The woman portrayed by French cinema, according to the journalist at Cinémonde, Hélène Mara, ‘‘has had sexual experiences at a very young age,’’ and she is ‘‘single,’’ even when she is involved with someone: Alone confronting her problems . . . that her companion, still attached to the traditions of woman’s submission, shares with di≈culty. . . . The modern woman works and decides everything that concerns her. She is a free human being, lucid, and, allowing herself successive loves, she is less in a hurry to get married. Men today are afraid of women who have become their equals. . . . But none of the women I interviewed showed herself to be rigorously feminist. . . . The modern woman, even if she is man’s equal, would not, in any case, wish to be identical to him. . . . Nevertheless, they want to find a companion capable of dominating them, protecting them. . . . This character of a young girl—a young emancipated woman, that of the modern woman who

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feels alone—does it correspond or not to the real women around us? Yes, for the adult woman, with her new problems, such as the roles played by Jeanne Moreau or Annie Girardot. On the other hand, young girls like the heroines of Les Tricheurs or certain New Wave films, who have repeated sexual experiences without any kind of feeling, are the product of a fashion. . . . If the astonishing B.B. (finally, here she is!) has actually had an e√ect, through her original and charming influence, on the physique, the hairstyle, the way of dressing of a whole generation of girls who admire her, she does not, for all that, behave, we are assured, like the heroine in Et Dieu créa la femme or in La Vérité. We recognize that B.B.’s characters have a certain kinship with the women of her era, to the extent that the heroines she plays are ‘‘solitary.’’ Young girls ‘‘alone’’ who, beneath the appearance of repetitive adventures, are looking, like Jeanne Moreau, Annie Girardot, Anouk Aimée, and Emmanuèle Riva are looking, for ‘‘a real guy.’’ . . . It definitely seems that the portrait of the woman being created today in the movies is a little dark, and reveals more about the taste certain filmmakers have for new and somewhat shocking 182

aspects of some aspects of today’s women.

This ‘‘investigation,’’ published in a popular magazine at the moment the New Wave was cresting, suggests both a coincidence between the new cinema and the image of the ‘‘modern woman’’ and a subtle time gap, since among the three actresses who are supposed to best embody the modern woman for their contemporaries, only Jeanne Moreau is exclusively associated with the New Wave. A year and a half later, Cinémonde (n. 1479 and 1480, December 1962) returns to the figure of the modern woman to keep only two stars: ‘‘Brigitte = Jeanne? Like twin sisters, they o√er us the same portrait of the modern woman.’’ The journalist, Hélène Mara, adopts as a pretext the simultaneous release of Eva (Losey) and of Le Repos du guerrier (Vadim) to revisit the career of the two actresses and their resemblance with the roles they are given. The journalist concludes: ‘‘In the end they incarnate, each in her own way, both the eternal Eve, and the typically modern young woman of today. Each in her own way, that is to say Brigitte in a more elementary way. More innocent. More physical. Jeanne, with the weight of her reflections, of her intelligence. . . . If Brigitte, up until now, is limited to this type of character, it is because she coincides fully with the character of the modern young creature she created. . . . Jeanne, on the other hand, who has more experience, has given us more nuanced faces. . . . While embodying

The Women of the New Wave

the modern-young-woman type just as much, she appears more subtle to us, more multiple, thanks to her astonishing power of transformation.’’ Thus, in the popular press, the ‘‘Modern Woman on Trial’’ is finally won thanks to the power the stars have to resolve magically social contradictions (Dyer 2004 [1979]). Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, as we will see in the following chapters, embody the two socially complementary faces of the same figure—one bourgeoise, the other from the popular classes— each proposing an original synthesis of the ‘‘eternal Eve’’ and the woman of today, through the rea≈rmation of the equivalence between amorous passion and female identity.

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Jeanne Moreau: Star of the New Wave and Icon of Modernity

‘‘Jeanne Moreau’s presence is complex and explosive. She knows how to do nothing; she knows how to serve her partners; she has that rarest of things: an aura.’’ This appreciation from Cinémonde (n. 1242, May 30, 1958) consecrates the change in the actress’s status after the release of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Jeanne Moreau became a star, in the economic and media sense of the term, with the New Wave, and her name will be from that point on associated both with auteur cinema and with the image of the modern woman, in spite of a rather long earlier career (twenty films) in the tried and true genres of popular cinema. Her change in image was prepared for by a very rich theatrical career, during which she played in productions by contemporary authors such as Tennessee Williams as well as in the great classics of the Théâtre National Populaire troop opposite Gérard Philippe. The cinematic transformation occurred between 1957 and 1962, during a favorable period in which all of the films Moreau starred in became events.

Jeanne Moreau

After the 1957 Louis-Delluc prize won by Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, the scandal that accompanied the screening of Les Amants at the Venice Film Festival in September 1958 certified the actress’s new image that blended eroticism and modernity, intelligence and maturity (Vincendeau 2000). In September 1959, Les Liaisons dangereuses provoked a literary, moral, and diplomatic polemic, after the Quai d’Orsay attempted to ban the film from exportation. Moderato cantabile was screened in May 1960 at the Cannes Film Festival, where Moreau was awarded the best actress prize, and then in Germany, where she received the best foreign actress award. Released in June 1960, Le Dialogue des carmélites was awarded the grand prize of the Centrale catholique du cinéma. La Notte [La Nuit], a Franco-Italian coproduction, made its debut in Paris in February 1961 and received the Golden Bear award the same year at the eleventh Berlin Film Festival. Finally, Jules et Jim, released in January 1962 in Paris, received the Académie du Cinéma prize, the prize for best French film, and Moreau was awarded the grand prize for an actress. The consecration was complete. 185

Jeanne Moreau ‘‘Revealed’’ by Louis Malle It was by way of theater that Moreau would change cinematic registers. After the success of La Machine infernale, written and staged by Jean Cocteau, and of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Jean Marais directing and costarring, she became a sensation in December 1956 in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (directed by Peter Brook), a play that was new to the French. It was on this occasion that Roger Nimier and the young Louis Malle o√ered her a role in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. In spite of her agent’s hostility to the idea, Moreau (who fired her agent at that moment) accepted the adventure. Louis Malle recalls that ‘‘the woman in the book existed much less. It was our encounter with Jeanne that determined our desire to create a character for her’’ (cited in Moireau 1988, 54). The emblematic image in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud rightly remains the opening extreme close-up of Moreau on the telephone murmuring words of love to her lover (Maurice Ronet). Against all existing film conventions, Louis Malle plunges the viewer directly into a woman’s intimacy, baring face and feelings with the indecent proximity of the camera. The close-up shows a face without any apparent makeup—so close that we can see the texture of the skin; it is a face entirely possessed by a passion that we know

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to be fatal. Beginning with this opening shot the new Moreau is born, through the imperial gesture of a young filmmaker who believes in the power of his camera. It also indicates, as Ginette Vincendeau (2000, 125) points out, that sexuality would from that point on be evoked more by the face than by the body, in a sublimation of romantic love such that eroticism is not incompatible with spirituality. Even if elsewhere in the film sacrifices are made to the generic conventions of the crime story, the most famous sequences are those in which cinema’s power is expressed via a quasi-contemplative camera that follows Moreau walking about at night in a deserted Paris, to the music of Miles Davis. But the new sensuality granted to Moreau by Malle’s camera is accompanied by a significant change in the social and narrative status of her character. In fact, the rich bourgeoise of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud who sends her lover to kill her husband is just as incapable of accomplishing her projects as the socially more modest characters she played in her earlier films. During the first two-thirds of the film, we see the heroine wandering around looking for her lover, whom she thinks she saw leaving with someone else, once the murder has occurred (actually, he’s trapped in the elevator while his car has been stolen). Unlike the viewer, she understands nothing about what is happening to her, and the film allows us to watch, in quite a sadistic way, how she progressively falls apart. When she finally thinks she understands what has happened, the initiatives she takes furnish the police with the elements they were lacking to solve their (almost) perfect crime and then arrest them, her and her lover. There is a kind of inverse relation between the heroine’s capacity for diegetic initiative and the aura she imparts, as though she can only become fascinating in passivity, an object of contemplation for the camera to the extent that she is not the active subject of the plot. The paradox here is all the more striking in that by encouraging her lover on the telephone she is the one who appears to initiate things. But this first initiative is revealed to be the original sin for which the entire film will punish her by reducing her to the status of a (superb) marionette in the hands of her demiurgic auteur. When the film came out in February 1957, the press emphasized the beauty of her face, the sensuality of her mouth, and her grave voice. From that point on, Moreau stopped acting in popular cinema and interrupted her theatrical career as well. In auteur cinema (young and less young), she found the artistic accomplishment that up until then theater

Jeanne Moreau in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

Chapter Nine

alone had brought her, but she gained a visibility and a capacity for initiative that only cinema could give her.

The Scandalous Triumph of Les Amants

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In September 1958, Les Amants was presented at the Venice Film Festival: Louis Malle was Jeanne Moreau’s director once again, transforming his experiment into mastery and o√ering his actress a role that made her acquire star status. The film was a scandal in the Italian Catholic milieu, and for that reason it did not receive the Lion d’Or (it had to be content with a special jury prize), whereas the greeting from French critics, both in Venice and when the film debuted in Paris in November 1958, was ecstatic. The film was a veritable consecration for Moreau: ‘‘Jeanne Moreau’s beautiful face . . . triumphs over the extraordinary ordeal of having a camera endlessly focused on her’’ (Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace); ‘‘Jeanne Moreau is a marvelous actress, utterly complete, as though she were not playing Jeanne, but living Jeanne, being Jeanne’’ (Libération); ‘‘We will never tire of reading the gentle wounds of voluptuousness and happiness on her beautiful face, naked and pathetic. She has dominated and crushed all of her festival rivals’’ (Paris-Presse); ‘‘No other woman except Jeanne Moreau could play such a perilous role’’ (Les Lettres françaises); ‘‘Dry at first, nervous, and a bit silly, then slowly inhabited, given over, laid bare, she is admirable’’ (L’Express); ‘‘Jeanne Moreau, in a role that was cut to fit her, and who is practically never o√ screen, runs the gamut of her overwhelming sensuality and exceeds the known limits of her talent’’ (L’Humanité); ‘‘Jeanne Moreau is admirable in the role of Jeanne. She has expressed everything about the character: her boredom, her secret melancholy, then her amazement and the worry that takes hold of her at the height of her happiness’’ (Le Monde). The press also praised the director’s ability to ‘‘strip’’ the actress of all of her masks. ‘‘Freed,’’ ‘‘naked,’’ ‘‘laid bare’’: the terms used insist on the actress’s abandon in the expert hands of the artist, like a woman in love in her lover’s arms. The comparison is, of course, facilitated by the love scene; it is the movie’s dramatic summit, and during it the filmmaker films sexual orgasm on the heroine’s face. All of the press, cultivated as well as popular, agreed on the newness of this sequence of images (see chapter 4). The image that the film constructs is that of a woman who breaks with her bourgeois and alienated life, thanks to an amorous encounter. Through

Jeanne Moreau

the image of an ‘‘impassioned lover’’ (Cinémonde) Moreau reaches the status of a star. According to Vincendeau (2000, 124), Les Amants replays fictionally the story of Moreau’s rebirth as an actress, from her bourgeois allure at the beginning of the film to her bare face and drawn features at the end. Unlike Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Malle’s second film is centered on the female character, who is almost never o√ screen, and the filmmaker claims it to be his first auteur film, in his control from beginning to end. The screenplay was adapted by Louise de Vilmorin from the short story ‘‘Point de Lendemain’’ by Vivant Denon (an eighteenth-century writer and scholar associated both with the Enlightenment and with the libertine tradition). The film opens with the famous ‘‘Carte du Tendre,’’ designed by Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century as the representation of an amorous utopia founded on respect for feminine sentiments; it is used as a backdrop for the film credits (Kline 1992, 24–53). Louis Malle thus seems to place himself both within a protofeminist literary tradition—that of the Précieuses—and within an enlightened, more masculine, libertine tradition. Both of these positions are rather distant from the romantic vision that would prevail in many New Wave films. But Malle himself relativizes the references; as he stated in an August 10, 1958, interview with Tru√aut in Arts: ‘‘In our adaptation, Louise de Vilmorin and I have clearly drawn the subject toward the nineteenth century, toward the novel of analysis, toward Flaubert.’’ From her side, Louise de Vilmorin confirms the decisive part taken by the filmmaker in the choice and adaptation of the novella: ‘‘Working with him, I realized that . . . sentiments only mattered to him because of the mad things they make us do, the audacities they inspire in us and the ties they condemn us to; I realized that he detested sentimentality. Stubborn and authoritarian, he takes his characters wherever he wants to and, when they have a few words to say, he lends them his voice and his own personal accent’’ (L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, n. 2, March 15, 1961, p. 7). According to Cinémonde (n. 1264, October 1958), this is the plot summary: ‘‘After eight years of marriage, Jeanne is bored in the countryside and tired of being kept at arm’s length by Henri, her husband, the editor of a newspaper, who finds her frivolous. . . . Doing what everyone does, she takes a lover, Raoul, a polo player not lacking in charm. All of this would be very banal if she didn’t meet Bernard, a young archeologist with a certain talent for rejecting false problems, and if she didn’t succumb to him in a park that evokes an earthly paradise, during a night bathed by moonlight.

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Having done this she becomes incarnate, she finally becomes a woman, alive, useful, vulnerable, important! The credits for Les Amants are inscribed on a ‘Carte du Tendre,’ and each episode of the film represents a place on the map.’’ The whole first part, curiously commented upon by the voice-over of Moreau, who speaks about her character—Jeanne Tournier—in the third person, presents the heroine under the hardly flattering appearance of a modern Madame Bovary who is unfaithful to her husband out of boredom. Everything about her looks artificial, her sophisticated hairdo, her chic dresses and hats, her white convertible, her friend Maggie (Judith Magre), and her polo-playing lover—played by José Luis de Villalonga as a worldly Don Juan truer than life (he will be used in a similar way by Agnès Varda in Cléo de 5 à 7). We are in the satirical register of the comedy of manners, and the newspaper-editor husband, aided by the handsome angular face of Alain Cuny, appears in comparison to be a more authentic character, even though he neglects his wife out of passion for his work. Jeanne Tournier’s encounter with a young archeologist who cares little for worldly ways (Jean-Marc Bory) is at first still in the same sarcastic tone, a tone used at the expense of the female character, uniquely preoccupied by her society dinner and her Parisian guests completely out of place in the ‘‘authentic’’ frame of an old provincial dwelling. When critics talk about the first part of the film, Madame Bovary is frequently mentioned to describe the filmmaker’s distanced gaze à la Flaubert on his heroine’s derisory concerns. And then . . . everything changes. Night falls, and Jeanne is revealed to be such as Louis Malle has at last transformed her, stripped of makeup and any artifice of dress, her hair floating and her body hidden under an ample billowing white nightgown, an apparition beneath the moon, out of time and out of society, an image of femininity cleansed of all the impurities of the real world as of any vulgar sensuality, the ideal object of romantic love that the music by Brahms accompanying the sequence helps to construct. The young archeologist is the enchanted witness of the metamorphosis, but he is also the alter ego of the Pygmalion filmmaker. The choice of the little-known theatrical actor Jean-Marc Bory—short and physically ‘‘ordinary,’’ a repetition of the ‘‘gentle man’’ figure that we see so frequently in New Wave cinema—to play the role of the man who transforms Jeanne, serves as a means of his not getting in the way between the artist and his model. The character’s intellectual talents serve to indicate clearly that the encounter has a strong spiritual dimension.

Jeanne Moreau

The story is one of liberation, and those critics were not mistaken who insisted on the radical rupture that the heroine makes with her social milieu and obligations—including maternal ones—by leaving at dawn and taking nothing with her, in front of her husband and her stupefied guests. The filmmaker’s choice of an open ending, unlike the ending of Vivan Denon’s short story, clearly indicates his intention of making the rupture a positive one. But the liberation—whose catalyst was the young archeologist— consists for the heroine in renouncing her place in society to become completely engaged in an amorous adventure. This willed confusion between liberation and amorous revelation recurs in the construction of female characters in the New Wave, which for them means e√acing the idea of social emancipation. Louis Malle undoubtedly describes with great accuracy a social milieu he knows very well since it is his own. But the character of an alienated bourgeois woman revealed to herself by love indicates the limitations on the way the question of women’s emancipation can be thought of in the cultivated, ‘‘modern’’ milieus of 1958. If certain critics were shocked by the spectacle of the heroine kissing her sleeping daughter before leaving the conjugal home forever, the very fact that she leaves a man (or rather two: her husband and her lover) for another (even if he is a di√erent type of man—marginal and intellectual), as well as the importance of the love scenes in the film, give a reassuring and controllable vision of female emancipation. In an article in L’Express on November 6, 1958, François Leterrier, Malle’s assistant on the film, clarifies the film’s ambiguities: ‘‘In the original screenplay, Jeanne left Bernard in a square in Dijon and went and took refuge in a café where her husband comes and retrieves her again. This ending, which ‘tied up all the loose ends,’ according to the sad conventions of most of French films, never satisfied Louis Malle. At the moment of shooting it, he couldn’t decide whether to make Jeanne get out of the car. And he rewrote it as an ‘open’ ending, where the two lovers, still under the spell of their night together, persevere, without any illusion, in the intention of leaving together.’’ The filmmaker’s hesitation about the ending indicates that he has an intuition about the liberating dimension (for the woman) that he must give to his love story for it to make sense, but also that he doesn’t really believe in it. Here is how he himself presented the story: ‘‘It’s the story of a ‘love at first sight’ at its most raw. In the morning our lovers leave together, but dawn is cruel on faces: they don’t separate but they understand that

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they have just lived the best of it and that their daily life must remain faithful to such a memory’’ (Arts, August 10, 1958). This typically romantic presentation completely bypasses any story of a female liberation. The stylistic terms in which the mutation transpires doesn’t allow the viewer to forget the omnipresence of the male creator behind his creature. In the first part of the film, the voice-over of Moreau talking about her character in the third person creates a distance with viewers.∞ The second part of the film, in which the heroine has the revelation of passionate love with the young archeologist, the alter ego of the auteur, adopts a lyrical tone and makes of the woman the object of the filmmaker’s loving gaze, as though he had given birth to her by making us discover her beauty. The demiurgic relation of the filmmaker to his creature is expressed in the first part through satirical distance and in the second through loving lyricism.

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Jeanne Moreau’s New Face: A Face Stripped Bare Released in September 1959, Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, a modern adaptation by Roger Vailland of Laclos’s epistolary novel, provoked a scandal somewhat out of proportion with the film’s interest. But it would reinforce a number of elements in the construction of Moreau’s image: her association with the grande bourgeoisie, her intelligence, and her sexual excess. In the way in which Vadim films her, what stays with the viewer is the self-control conveyed by an invariably impeccable silhouette, of a sober elegance in which she often is wearing straight black dresses that accentuate her face—which is to say, her intelligence and her determination. Her aura is inflected with the sense of the fascinating and terrifying mystery of a woman inaccessible to feelings of love, but not to erotic pleasure. Her character, only apparently in contradiction with the one in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Les Amants, is in fact developed on the same dramatic register, highlighted by her face. Moderato cantabile came out in Paris at the same time that it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1960 (it was preferred over A bout de souΔe to represent France, undoubtedly because of the prestigious names on its poster: Jeanne Moreau and Marguerite Duras). It was the first project for which the actress was directly responsible. Using the initiative that her new celebrity had given her, she asked Peter Brook (who had directed

Jeanne Moreau

her in the theatrical production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ) to adapt and film Marguerite Duras’s novel, and she chose Jean-Paul Belmondo to be her partner. Among critics disappointment prevailed, notably in comparison with Marguerite Duras’s other screenplay, Hiroshima mon amour. The failure is most often attributed to Peter Brook, a brilliant and innovative young director but a novice to the cinema. Nevertheless, Moreau was awarded the best actress prize at Cannes, which she shared with Melina Mercouri. (For the same role she won the best foreign actress award in Germany.) The press commented on her new role by referring again to Madame Bovary. In Moreau’s new image, this literary reference associates her entry into a culturally legitimate cinema and into a bourgeois and alienated female identity. In spite of their reservations about the film, most critics admired her performance in Moderato cantabile, emphasizing once again the expressiveness of her face. Her aura in the film is directly proportional to the reduction of the narrative to its simplest manifestation, since it concerns a love story that the two protagonists live on a purely imaginary level, without their bodies ever touching. The viewer follows the evolution of passion on Moreau’s face, in a complex operation of asceticism and laying bare that accentuates the distance from popular cinema conventions. In February 1961, Antonioni’s La Notte [La Nuit] was released. Because it was a Franco-Italian coproduction, it had the right to an important national debut in a French version where Moreau dubs herself. The film’s only French actress, she plays the main female role, and her acting was praised by critics, even though the reviews focused primarily on the film’s formal innovation. The modernity of her image here is Antonioni’s doing; the director, not without a certain sadism (the actress retains a bad memory of it), films her face in exhaustion and su√ering that were deliberately sustained by the conditions of shooting, and breaks with the cinematic conventions of feminine beauty.

The Consecration of Jules et Jim Released in January 1962, François Tru√aut’s Jules et Jim represents a summit in Jeanne Moreau’s career. It was thanks to her that this relatively expensive movie, compared to the average budget for New Wave films, was ever made. According to François Tru√aut, Moreau played a determinate role from the moment the project was conceived, making her participation

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a condition for the attribution of the rights of Roché’s novel to Tru√aut (we know that this autobiographical novel, discovered by the young critic in 1953, had determined his vocation as a filmmaker), when the producer Raoul Lévy wanted to acquire the rights to make the film himself (Cinéma 62, n. 62, January 1962). Centered, in spite of the title, on the character of Catherine played by Moreau, the film is also the most advanced manifestation of Tru√aut’s artistic control—his third film, and for many cinephiles today, his masterpiece. The film made money and had an honorable commercial career, despite being ruled o√-limits, because of ‘‘indecency,’’ for viewers younger than eighteen. The actress’s performance was greeted by the press in an ambivalent manner. Often, reviewers expressed the idea that the film is a Jeanne Moreau ‘‘festival,’’ but less in a good way than in a bad one. Les Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace judged that ‘‘François Tru√aut’s new film ought to have been called ‘Catherine.’ . . . The role is interpreted by Jeanne Moreau who also imposes her irresistible presence on viewers—that of a major comedienne who is in the lineage of Edwige Feuillère.’’ The debate, in fact, concerns the female character. Comparing the novel to the film leads certain critics to regret the ‘‘invasive’’ presence of Jeanne Moreau. For Claude Mauriac (Le Figaro littéraire): ‘‘Jeanne Moreau has an overwhelming presence. She has upset the equilibrium. Out of a film about friendship, she has made a film about love. And more seriously, out of an auteur film, an actress’s film. . . . It’s too bad, because what draws us to the story is not this pretty, egotistical girl, . . . but the two boys: modest, discreet, generous.’’ Bernard Dort (France-Observateur) outdoes him: ‘‘What was needed was a quick, tough girl, almost ungraspable, a brand new kind of girl. Instead, Jeanne Moreau imposes her presence, her past, her mythology. Jules and Jim are relegated to the background, knights in service to the new Minotaur: the star. . . . The equilibrium of the trio imagined by Henri-Pierre Roché has been broken: Jeanne Moreau (Catherine) has devoured Jules and Jim.’’ If Jules et Jim is an ode to Moreau’s beauty, it is made through the gaze of two men, Jules (Oscar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre). This gaze is solidified by a male voice-over that privileges Jim’s point of view, that of the Parisian and alter ego of the auteur. Tru√aut’s inspiration, Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel, describes the European avant-garde milieu of the early twentieth century, the author’s relationship with his German friend, and their encounters with women. In the film, the two male

Jeanne Moreau

protagonists are constructed as a figure of complementary doubling, the Don Juan and the ascetic, the two facets of Tru√aut’s masculine ideal. But the filmmaker chooses to focus the film on a unique woman presented as the eternal feminine, a figure that does not exist in the novel. The two friends at first discover the feminine image in the features of an ancient statue that they go to contemplate on a Mediterranean island, as though making a cult o√ering. Catherine will be the embodiment of this ideal image, fueled by a regressive desire, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, to find in the loved woman the image of the all-powerful archaic mother, such as she appeared to the small child. The iconic status of the character is reinforced by the fact that we never have access to her interiority: she is shown as dazzling and unpredictable for the two men who develop with her a relationship of dependence accompanied by an absolute feeling of insecurity. This fascinating woman can be pleased or displeased: the final catastrophe, when she drags Jim to his death to avenge the fact that he no longer loves her, was Tru√aut’s invention. In the novel, Kathe is an artist and an intellectual, like the two men, and she earns a living through her work. She does not commit suicide, she does not murder anyone, and she continues to remain autonomous. Everything that might indicate the female character’s sociocultural autonomy has been eliminated in the film. On the other hand, the fascination that she exerts on the two men refers back to a kind of ‘‘natural femininity.’’ The place where they are happy, the chalet in the forest, connotes a sort of originary cocoon outside of history and society. The mysterious, unpredictable woman, who announces ‘‘I don’t want to be understood,’’ is inscribed in a neurotic logic. There are moments of fusion and of rupture between her and the two men, but nothing that resembles the relational, the mediated, the symbolic (in the Lacanian sense). Elsewhere, the film establishes a link between the failure of Catherine’s love for Jim and the failure of her maternity, as if a child were the unavoidable sign of accomplished love—a surprising archaism in a film whose heroes are trying to ‘‘reinvent love.’’ The contradiction emerges once again between the acceptance of women’s sexual freedom and an archaic fear of the feminine that informs the whole of our patriarchal culture. Moreau’s version of the film’s song, Le Tourbillon, written for her by Bassiak, topped the charts for record sales in June 1962. This is an interesting indication of the public’s desire to privilege the sunny and joyful aspect of the character, since the song resolutely ignores the more worrisome

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aspects of Catherine in the film. A qualitative sociological investigation made in the 1980s of women who were adolescents in the 1950s confirms the emancipatory role that Moreau’s character in Jules et Jim might have played, in spite of the misogynistic aspects of the film: Béatrice got married at twenty and had three children. In her interview, she evokes Jules et Jim which, we must recall, tells the story of a woman, played by Jeanne Moreau, in love with two men, who moves without any drama from one to the other.≤ She insists on the importance that this film—as a symbol of monogamy put into question—had for her, and associates it with her sudden separation from her husband whom she leaves because, she says, she ‘‘had met a guy.’’ She was living in the provinces; she moves to Paris, and starts to work and lead an independent life.≥

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The extraordinary vitality emanating from Catherine, carrying along everything else in her wake, made the film into an event in the construction of the image of modern femininity. In May 1961, Cinémonde (n. 1399, pp. 2–5) devoted an article to the filming of Jules et Jim and used the occasion to do a ‘‘crisscross’’ interview with Moreau and Annie Girardot (the same questions were directed to both actresses, who were shooting films in locations fifty kilometers from each other). In response to Cinémonde, which willfully confused the characters she plays with her ‘‘real life’’ personality, Moreau declares: ‘‘Love alone interests me. Love has directed my life, in every way.’’ She thus certifies her persona of a woman in love. Two months later, Cinémonde returned to the subject under the title ‘‘The Passionate Ones’’ (n. 1405, August 11, 1961): For the public, Jeanne Moreau is the perfect example of the modern woman in love. A passionate, intelligent woman, torn by her lucid vision of the problems of today’s couple, but who no less desperately seeks Love no matter what price she must pay in su√ering. As in Les Amants, where she leaves behind her child, or in La Notte, where she experiences the world of solitude that separates her from her husband. On the screen, tormented character and tormented woman, strong and weak at the same time, generous and demanding, what is Jeanne Moreau like in real life?

In her response, the actress acknowledges having been ‘‘very close’’ to Florence, the heroine of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

Jeanne Moreau

Then, for a long time, I felt similar to Jeanne in Les Amants. . . . Now, I’m completely Catherine from Jules et Jim. Yes, I am passionate and very sentimental. Not romantic [romantique], no, but terribly novelistic [romanesque]. More of a lover, more of a woman than a mother, probably. . . . In the past, women lived in a man’s world where all relationships were based on man’s superiority. Now a woman is free to burst out laughing if she feels like it, to go to bed if she has a headache, or to just take o√. Also, between modern women, as in La Notte, jealousy no longer exists. They understand each other better. They are friends. All those conventions regarding men disappear. The mystery of my heroines is no less real, but it has become a veritable discovery when before it was a ‘‘dime romance’’ kind of mystery, the secrets of a womanobject arrayed and prepared for a man.

Here we see the actress, also, involved in confusing her characters on the screen, her ‘‘real life’’ personality, and the social reality of women of the era. 197

Jeanne Moreau; or, Passionate Love During the course of the process of consecration that made Jeanne Moreau the star of auteur cinema and the incarnation of the modern woman, her image changed profoundly. The capacity for social initiative that characterized her roles in the popular cinema from the 1950s disappeared, and her energy became instead focused on the world of love. But, paradoxically, it was less her body that expressed her emotions than her face. The manner in which she is filmed by Malle, Antonioni, Brook, or Tru√aut makes critics say that she has been stripped of all masks and laid bare, that she has attained her truth beyond beauty or ugliness. She embodies passion in a quasi-mystical dimension, like a revelation or a priesthood, to which everything else—independence, social status, maternity—is sacrificed. Similarly, the actress gives herself to the camera, sacrificing the appearances of conventional beauty. This sacrificial dimension is clearly inscribed in Louis Malle’s films, as in La Notte and in Moderato cantabile, as much in the story as in the acting and the manner of filming. If Jules et Jim appears to invert this logic, since the two friends seem to devote their lives to the cult of Catherine, it is finally Catherine who actually sacrifices her life along with that of her lover. The fascination that Tru√aut’s heroine exerts on her lovers as well as on viewers, male and female, comes from the way in which the

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filmmaker managed to make her express both the most extroverted joy as well as the most internalized seriousness. Beginning with Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, the image of the modern woman emanating from the ‘‘character’’ of Moreau has in common with that of Brigitte Bardot (from whom she is otherwise very distinct) the fact that emancipation is situated exclusively on the terrain of amorous relations. Moreau also shares with the Brigitte Bardot of Et Dieu créa la femme the liberty of her ‘‘real life’’ ways, but in a more discreet manner. And yet, at the moment that she became an international star of auteur cinema she was dethroned in the eyes of the French popular public by Annie Girardot, who was crowned ‘‘best French actress’’ in 1962. This turn of events is a good illustration of the schism then operating in French cinema. Further, the fact that Annie Girardot has been unfairly forgotten today, while Moreau has become an international symbol of the radiance of French culture, confirms that auteur cinema definitively relegated the popular traditions of the national cinema to the background in terms of image if not number of viewers. Undoubtedly, then, the New Wave created a new Jeanne Moreau, whose image would be henceforth inseparable from ‘‘modern’’ cinema and auteur cinema—that is, films that directly transgress traditional conventions of drama and photogeneity. But despite the impression of authenticity and liberty created by Moreau’s acting and her physical appearance, the image of the woman constructed in these films seems to be located at a great distance from any social modernity, in order that the feminine be associated entirely with amorous passion, out of space and time. The figure of the modern woman chosen by the cultivated classes, Moreau at the beginning of the 1960s, embodies an image of the feminine that associates sexual freedom with death, to borrow Vincendeau’s remark (2000, 127), and is hence part of a very ancient cultural tradition (Coquillat 1982). The masculine, on the other hand, is defined as the human in all of its social and cultural potentialities, and as the embodiment of the immortality brought about by artistic creation.

Chapter Ten

Brigitte Bardot and the New Wave: An Ambivalent Relationship

Brigitte Bardot’s status in relation to the New Wave is paradoxical. The film that launched her career in late 1956 (after fifteen roles of varying importance since 1952), Et Dieu créa la femme, Vadim’s first film, would be vigorously defended by the Cahiers du cinéma critics against all members of the ‘‘serious’’ press. The film’s depiction of the ‘‘natural’’ and sexually emancipated woman broke with traditional 1950s French cinema, as much with the popular genres as with the ‘‘cinema of quality.’’ François Tru√aut (Arts, December 12, 1956) saw in it ‘‘a documentary film about a woman of her generation,’’ and it indeed anticipated in many ways the female figures of the New Wave. And yet, the film was made with proven commercial revenue and shamelessly catered to male voyeurism. Ginette Vincendeau (1993) has shown all of the ambiguity of a film that hovers ‘‘between the ancient and the new.’’ Then, afterward, while Vadim was busy producing a modern and enticing eroticism, Brigitte Bardot became a star thanks to films made according to proven commercial formulas and traditional aesthetics by non–

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New Wave directors: En cas de malheur by Autant-Lara (1958), Babette s’en va-t-en-guerre by Christian-Jacque (1959), and La Vérité by Clouzot (1960). In the early 1960s, Vadim himself returned to his usual ways to make La Bride sur le cou (1961) and Le Repos du guerrier (1962) with Bardot. After the enthusiasm provoked in the cinephilic young critics by Et Dieu créa la femme, Bardot, having reached the status of a star of popular cinema, became a bad object for auteur cinema. Only Positif continued to defend her as a figure of female emancipation, including in its political dimension. To this end, the journal published a vibrant statement on her behalf. Titled ‘‘Pour Brigitte’’ (n. 45, May 1962), its author, José Pierre, stated: The French press in its totality, from L’Aurore to L’Humanité, [is] the expression of a profoundly reactionary society that does not accept that its delicate conformism be revealed by attacks on its vital prejudices. . . . But here we have Brigitte Bardot, who, all alone, is enough to trouble the quietude of French 200

society. . . . At a moment when forty million French were trembling with fear in their beds at the thought of a visit from the terrorist bombers, a young woman of twenty-seven had—and she alone—a virile reaction. Such an adjective will bring a smile, and virility, here, is a relative thing. But from one day to the next, this won’t prevent forty million French—twenty million of whom are male—to feel ridiculed. Especially the males, who don’t forgive this kind of a√ront: to appear less virile than a woman who is extremely ‘‘feminine’’ in every regard . . . [there follows here several examples of ironic or condescending reactions from the left-leaning press]. So, let’s accept the obvious: the French ‘‘progressive’’ shares with his political adversaries the naïve and inveterate conviction of an absolute masculine superiority in everything that has to do with social organization and the exercise of thinking. The French progressive has contempt for women. . . . He’s quite happy to concede a few sexual liberties to her which he’s counting on taking advantage of later. . . . The real enemy is Her: the woman who doesn’t limit herself to doing the dishes, the kid, and the back yard. . . . And so, a woman who pushes the logic of her being to the point of attacking the moral taboos of her era and her country, simply because she has the taste for and the sense of her personal liberty, is something other than a scandal, she is the Scandal of Scandals, a rebellion against patriarchal imperatives.∞

The radical nature of this text written by a man is, of course, the exception that proves the rule. But its political analysis of the media image of B.B.

Brigitte Bardot

(and not of her cinema roles) illuminates the reasons for the hostility directed against her—a hostility on the part of the totality of the ‘‘cultivated classes,’’ whether on the right or the left. At the same time, Bardot became a model for middle-class girls, as the critic Françoise Audé (1981), for example, shows. Audé sees in the actress the crystallization of the experience of a whole generation of women, at once an idealized reflection and a stimulating model of someone actively trying to acquire independence, and the sign of a global revolt against the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. Between 1955 and 1960, Bardot occupied a terrain that had up until then been forbidden to women: the terrain of sexual and moral autonomy. While a Jeanne Moreau or an Anna Karina function in films by Malle, Godard, or Tru√aut as the ‘‘creature’’ of the auteur and his own eroticized projection in the text, Brigitte Bardot, the first star of the era of mass media in France, is an ‘‘object’’ alien to auteur cinema. In this she is like all of the ‘‘stars’’ of popular cinema who are prone to disturbing the creative liberty of the young filmmakers. 201

Vie privée: A Film about ‘‘the B.B. Phenomenon’’ When Louis Malle accepted the producer Christine Gouze-Rénal’s proposition to make a film with Bardot,≤ the star had just experienced her first box o≈ce disappointments, and her popularity from that point on would have dissonant overtones due to the hostility directed against her because of the freedom of her lifestyle. In fact, Vie privée was not intended to be an homage to a star, but rather a denunciation of the alienating character of that popularity, shown to be typical of the forms taken by modern mass culture: a tabloid press fed by the paparazzi, a ‘‘commercial’’ cinema dependent on the all new (and relative) liberation of sexual behavior, the overflow of the private life of stars into their professional life, and so forth. Malle and his screenwriter, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, stated that they wrote their screenplay based on documentation of the ‘‘B.B. phenomenon,’’ and on autobiographical information furnished by the star herself. But a comparison of the screenplay with di√erent biographical and autobiographical sources (Rihoit, 1986; Bardot, 1997) makes a whole labor of reconstruction appear in the film built around the opposition between a passive and alienated mass culture on the one hand, to which the character played by Bardot is for the most part reduced, and an elite culture on the other, embodied by the art editor played by her costar, Marcello Mastroianni. If

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Bardot at that time undoubtedly incarnated an emancipated female figure for middle-class young women and women of the popular classes, the characters she is made to play in films (with the exception of Et Dieu créa la femme) are much less autonomous than the one she ‘‘plays’’ in real life, if we refer to Catherine Rihoit’s biography or to the star’s autobiography. Bardot establishes a relation between equals with some of the most brilliant young artists of her generation (Trintignant, Sami Frey, Gainsbourg); after her amicable separation from Vadim, she claims her right to a free love life, outside of marriage and maternity (the disastrous episode of the forced pregnancy and marriage with Charrier, however, confirms this by other means); and finally, she reveals an undeniable political courage by refusing to allow herself to be manipulated by the OAS at the end of 1961. All this confirms that at the beginning of the 1960s, she incarnates a powerful figure of female emancipation, and not only at the level of sexuality—all of which Vie privée completely denies. In fact, the female character is constructed in the film as an object and not as the subject of her own story, a narrative structure reinforced by the omnipresent male voice-over (the voice of the sujet-supposé-savoir) that comments on her deeds and gestures and gives us access to her thoughts in the manner of a Balzacian omniscient narrator. When a filmmaker (or rather, a camera without an identifiable auteur) registers the photogenic aspect of this young girl from a good family, her career is launched, but in a totally passive mode: she is an instrument in the hands of able merchants who fabricate her fame. The entire first part of the film, characterized by a rapid montage of elliptical scenes that prevent any identification between viewer and heroine, revisits without the slightest nuance all of the stereotypes about mass culture as a fabrication by the dominant classes to take advantage of the dominated classes. The young woman is simply merchandise; she is never conscious of her beauty or of her eventual talent (which the film tries carefully to deny), or of the manipulations of which she is the object. Her only expression of liberty in the first part of the film is the use she makes of young men—whom she changes as often as she changes her shirt—as sexual objects.≥ Here, another stereotype comes into play: the association of femininity with sexuality as principal identity (while the male characters in the film have a social and professional identity, if not artistic talent, similar to Mastroianni’s). The story speeds through the ascendant phase of the star’s career and changes rhythm at the

Brigitte Bardot

moment when her scandalous celebrity provokes hostile reactions against her: we see her then as a hunted animal who tries to rebel against her lot in life in a purely instinctual and completely ine√ective way. Finally, we see her ‘‘crack,’’ and her governess carries her o√ like a package (she is hidden in the back of the car under blankets) to the family house in Switzerland. The second part of the film begins with the encounter with Mastroianni, whose portrait was given to us in the prologue as an inaccessible genius with whom the little shopgirl of the past had been secretly in love. Meeting up again, now that she has become a star—and what is more, a hunted star—obviously changes things: now the artist pays attention to her, but more out of compassion than out of desire or love; the film never suggests that he is truly in love with her, precisely because art is the center of his existence. For her, on the other hand, the discovery of love means dependency: she can no longer do without him and attempts suicide as soon as he leaves her to work on his ‘‘masterpiece.’’ From the outset of their relationship, then, she is portrayed in the romantic tradition, as the objective obstacle to his accomplishment as a creator. The last part of the film is constructed on the opposition between the male creator’s autonomy and the woman’s a√ective dependence, a dependence associated with mass culture: Mastroianni, the alter ego of the filmmakers (Malle, but also Fellini: Mastroianni, in 1961, is fresh from La Dolce vita’s success), is staging Kleist’s Katherine de Heilbronn, which refers both to elite culture and to tradition. Bardot, reduced to the role of idle spectator, ends up killing herself on the play’s opening night by falling from the roof where she had gone in an attempt to watch the event without being seen by the paparazzi who were following her. Her fall into the depths is filmed in slow motion, accompanied by Verdi’s Requiem, and the film ends with this suspension of time and narrative, as though the filmmaker could only accord her a poetic dimension at the moment she dies. The film had a certain box o≈ce success, but less than the producers had hoped for, and the critical reception was mixed. Following a ritual well established by the young filmmakers, Louis Malle, in an interview with Yvonne Baby in Le Monde, took care to explain his project in several interviews when the film was released: ‘‘I thought I had to avoid making a new film with Brigitte Bardot, but that she could, on the contrary, be the subject of the film. . . . We tried to demystify B.B.’s character, to make of her a heroine . . . à la Corneille, in the sense that she appears above all as she

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should be. . . . Over and above an exceptional fate, this film conveys a climate of absurdity, a process of disorder, and shows in what an anguishing way values come to deteriorate. . . . Brigitte Bardot is an exemplary character, both a victim and the tragic heroine of our society, the symbol of the maladjustment of our lives.’’ Certain critics, like François Maurin (L’Humanité), supported him: ‘‘The film allows us to better approach and to better understand someone who is the victim of a myth she has engendered without wanting to’’; for Pierre Macabru (Combat), ‘‘Louis Malle is intelligent. He has looked at B.B. as a phenomenon. His film is a succession of glances, based on curiosity but also on reflective observation. While Vadim watched B.B. live as a graceful animal, Louis Malle, on the contrary, tries to explain the inexplicable.’’ But most critics are reserved: Baroncelli (Le Monde) writes: ‘‘At no point in the film was I touched, moved, nor even really interested in the ‘myth’ that Louis Malle wanted to create about the ‘sublimated’ life of Brigitte Bardot. Besides, I saw nothing mythical, or tragic, in this story. . . . Jill remains for us a pretty, capricious monster, egotistical, sulking, without any connection to real life, and whose ultimate fate leaves us completely indi√erent. . . . An excessive simplification of the character that does not correspond to B.B.’s profound nature.’’ Jean Carta’s reproaches (Témoignage chrétien) are undergirded by a solid contempt, typical of the ‘‘cultivated’’ milieus, for the star: They have invented a character some of whose adventures are incompatible with Bardot: the most important of these false notes is obviously her relationship with Mastroianni, the intellectual. . . . To explain the mutual attraction, Malle invokes the example of Swann and Odette, . . . but Swann is a dilettante, while Mastroianni in Vie privée is entirely given over to his task. . . . It’s impossible to conceive of him envisioning a continuing relationship with someone not interested in his work. It’s a primary idea, reactionary. . . . So, an ambiguous character who exists neither as Bardot, nor as Jill, . . . a character that elsewhere is presented to us as a victim, without alluding to her own complicities, her own responsibilities. . . . By erasing Bardot’s complicity in the elaboration of her myth, Malle removes any meaning from his film.

As for Michel Duran (Le Canard enchaîné), he seems to sympathize with Bardot the better to deride her: Dear Brigitte, you are a worldwide star, a very nice girl with plenty of pluck; . . . La Bride sur le cou was already a mistake. Here you are possessed again. By

Brigitte Bardot

a Louis Malle. You should have watched out for that guy. . . . Now he’s put you in an anti-Bardot film. Admit that it’s a dirty trick. . . . You are not an idiot. Far from it. But if we believe Louis Malle and his film, your glory is due to chance, you have nothing but a tiny pinhead and you are concerned only with making love. . . . Louis Malle has given us only a luxurious and brilliant sketch for the film that should be made about the private life of a screen giant. . . . There were other tasty episodes that could have been included . . . For example . . . you are in love with Jean-Louis Trintignant who is being taken away from you by military duty. You are left pouting and abandoned. A small-time producer, but who is the sister-in-law of an important minister in the Fourth Republic, made sure the young soldier was stationed not far from you. The only thing she asked in return was a signature at the bottom of a contract for several films. And this is how the small-time producer became big-time.∂

Jean-Louis Bory (Arts) is less perfidious toward the star and addresses his criticisms to the filmmaker: ‘‘It’s a kind of documentary: look at what she was, look at what people did to her, look at what she became. Conclusion: the wretch. . . . From the first images on, the documentary bifurcated into a morality tale. The Bardot we see is such as she has been changed into by France-Dimanche and Ici Paris. . . . Louis Malle has side-stepped the real film: ‘Bardot and the Crowd.’ ’’ The filmmaker complained about this very disappointing critical reception in an interview with Témoignage chrétien (which had torn the film to pieces), two weeks after Vie privée was released: I’m disappointed. The press understood nothing. . . . I have the impression that people were expecting me to uncover some ‘‘secret’’ of Bardot’s. . . . There was absolutely nothing to discover. . . . I wanted to show as much as possible that B.B. was an ordinary person. . . . What I attempted was an approach via romanticism. My character was supposed to escape from the naturalism of the social case. . . . Maybe I gave the public something too complex. . . . In any case, the main thing is to be able to continue. And success with the audience—if not with the critics—proves to me that I can do it.

The ‘‘misunderstanding,’’ in part shared by the audience, despite what the filmmaker said, reveals the divorce between what Bardot at that time signified—the sexual and amorous emancipation of women—and the ambiguous, to say the least, attitude of male New Wave filmmakers toward that aspiration.

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It seems to me that the film su√ers especially from the contradictory character of its project: the main female character is constantly shown to be uninteresting, lacking autonomy, without a project, and with no understanding of her situation (another cinematic Emma Bovary). Mastroianni, on the other hand, the auteur’s alter ego, is strongly valorized by the film— but it is not his story being told to us. The ‘‘popular’’ audience is thus just as frustrated in its desire to identify with the heroine as is the ‘‘cultivated’’ audience frustrated in its desire to identify with the auteur and his fictional representative.

Le Mépris; or, Godard’s Contradictions

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Godard, who had already directed six feature-length films that had made of him the quintessence of ‘‘modern cinema,’’ also had an encounter with Bardot by directing her in Le Mépris in 1963, which was based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo (published in 1954, and translated into French the following year). The film, like the novel, recounts the disintegration of a couple—Camille (Bardot) and Paul (Michel Piccoli)—against the background of the Italian cinematic milieu. Paul is working on a commission for an American producer named Jeremy Prokosh (Jack Palance): a new adaptation of the Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang (who plays himself). The ‘‘contempt’’ Camille feels for Paul, ostensibly due to his decision to work for Prokosh, precipitates the crisis in the couple, which is notably recounted in a very long and very beautiful scene in their apartment in Rome. At Capri, where the whole cast goes to finish Lang’s Odyssey, Camille begins an a√air with Prokosh. They leave together for Rome and die in a car accident. Paul goes back to writing for the theater, while Lang finishes his film. The artist that Mastroianni played in Vie privée is represented here by both Paul and Lang, who figure, as Piccoli put it, as ‘‘a kind of two-headed monster, Godard’s double’’ (cited in Viment 1991, 104). Godard himself makes a fugitive appearance as Lang’s assistant in the scenes set at Capri. In the face of this multiple figuration of the great male artist, Camille is doubly associated with ‘‘commercial’’ cinema and femininity: by the fact that she is played by Bardot, and through her a√air with Prokosh. Le Mépris thus reproduces the same dichotomy between a masculine elite culture and a feminine mass culture as Vie privée. And yet Godard complicates this scenario in several ways.

Brigitte Bardot

First of all, he modifies the educated culture of the Odyssey and the great writers cited by Lang (Dante, Holderlin, Brecht) by adding to it a ‘‘noble’’ version of popular culture: Rancho Notorious, Rio Bravo, ‘‘the cinema of Gri≈th and Chaplin,’’ and Rosselini. Lang represents the ultimate cultivated man and, as Michel Marie notes: ‘‘auteur politics in flesh and blood’’ (1990, 57), thereby allowing Godard to situate his own film in the sphere of art. Paul and Lang hold lengthy discussions about literature, myth, and cinema. Camille, on the other hand, is ignorant of learned culture (The Odyssey is ‘‘the story of a guy who travels’’) and of cinema according to the Cahiers du cinéma. When Paul suggests going to see Rio Bravo she is completely uninterested. Lang’s joke about the ‘‘two B.B.s’’ (Brigitte Bardot and Bertold Brecht) during the scene in the music hall in which Italian popular music is represented as inauthentic and vulgar (it’s a bad playback, ‘‘just good enough for southern Australia,’’ says Lang) underlines for the viewer—and not without irony—the distance separating them. In Le Mépris as in Vie privée, femininity and the society of consumption stifle masculine creation. The desire Camille feels for her beautiful apartment is the reason why Paul ‘‘prostitutes himself ’’ with Prokosh. Camille must die for Paul to return to his true art, the theater, and both Camille and Prokosh must die for the ‘‘true’’ film to continue. But unlike the charismatic Fabio (Mastroianni) of Vie privée, Paul is a mediocrity, torn between two universes: he has neither the aura of the great artist Lang, nor the vitality of the vulgar but powerful Prokosh. Nor is the ending of Le Mépris a triumphalist a≈rmation of great (masculine) creation such as we saw in Vie privée: it constitutes, plainly, a commentary on ‘‘the end of cinema’’ and the end of Western civilization (the impossibility of reviving the myth of Odysseus) that extends beyond the characters: the last shot of Lang’s film shows us a blue sky but an empty one, while Godard’s voice pronounces the word ‘‘silence.’’ It is, though, nonetheless true that Godard’s pessimistic metadiscourse is conveyed by a gendered notion of creativity, according to which the creator can only be male. The cinema mourned by Le Mépris is Fritz Lang’s cinema, not Brigitte Bardot’s. Godard’s attitude toward Bardot is more dialectical than Malle’s. Le Mépris is structured around a gap between the character (Camille) and the star (Bardot), while in Vie privée there is confusion between the two. For example, in the characters’ logic, Camille’s decision to go o√ with Prokosh (whom she holds in as much contempt as she does Paul) seems inexplicable; on the other hand, within the star-system optic, the Bardot/Prokosh

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Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris.

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couple is coherent. Camille is an opaque character, stripped of psychology, while Bardot brings her a visual, oral, and semantic depth. As Jacques Aumont (2000 [1990]) remarks, Bardot’s mythical aura associates her symbolically to the other ‘‘gods’’ in the film. The dichotomy between character and star is particularly clear in what concerns the representation of Bardot’s body. Godard, as always—complicitous with and critical of the dominant modes of representation of women (Mulvey and MacCabe 1980)—analyzes Bardot’s iconic dimension, but refers it constantly back to her body, her sexuality. Bardot’s body becomes the battleground for a struggle between elite culture (which includes here auteur cinema) and mass culture. Godard’s refusal to show Bardot’s body naked, and the producer Joe Levine’s demand that Godard add scenes unveiling the star’s body, is one of the causes célèbres of French cinema. Godard’s retort to the producer’s demand was to add a prologue (situated immediately after the famous spoken credits) in which Bardot specifies the di√erent parts of her body, shot through violently colored red and blue filters that alternate with frames shot in natural light. By transgressing in such an insolent way the codes of erotic representation, Godard remains faithful to his distanced aesthetics, and thus is assured the fidelity of his cultivated audience, who recognize and appreciate his signature (and get Bardot nude in the bargain), at the same time that he alienates the popular audience (it is not

Brigitte Bardot

surprising to learn that Le Mépris, which scored well in Godard’s career, was one of the worst in Bardot’s). In Vie privée as in Le Mépris, the characters played by Bardot, reduced to femininity, are excluded from the circuit of masculine creativity. The two films distance and marginalize the popular into what are its two most threatening aspects for auteur cinema as elite culture: a French movie goddess and an American producer. As Andreas Huyssen notes, ‘‘Modernism hides its jealousy of the popularity of mass culture behind a screen of condescension and contempt’’ (1986, 17). It is thus no surprise that in the two films Bardot dies at the end, as though the popular star could only be the victim of her image (Vie privée). In fact, Bardot would throughout the 1960s project the image of a woman claiming her economic, professional, and amorous independence, an image that had an important impact on the young girls of that generation.

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The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank: A ‘‘Feminist’’ Alternative?

Along with the Cahiers du cinéma group (and before its start), another school of filmmakers, known as the ‘‘Group of Thirty,’’ was formed in the 1950s around the practice of short documentaries. With the abolition of the ‘‘double bill’’ (two feature-length films in the same showing) in 1940, theater owners were obliged to present one or more shorts in the first part of the show. But it was the attribution of numerous ‘‘quality’’ subsidies to short features after 1953 (replacing ‘‘automatic aid’’) that gave this documentary school its opportunities by allowing a new generation of filmmakers to pursue their studies outside of the commercial and corporate constraints of the feature-length film (Prédal 1991, 107–12). On December 20, 1953, a variety of directors of short features created the Group of Thirty and then published a manifesto to defend the artistic ambition of the format. Soon thereafter the group would number more than one hundred. Guy Gauthier compares the school’s productions to landscape or still-life

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painting: it is ‘‘a cinema of places, things and works’’ that practices ‘‘the art of commentary’’ (1995, 67). The best of these short documentaries combine a profound knowledge of a subject, whether austere or trivial, with a great stylistic rigor, the a≈rmation of a point of view, and the exploration of the world. But time has shown that the short documentary functioned for many of these filmmakers not as an end in itself, but as an artistic and technical apprenticeship that preceded the attempt to make feature-length fiction films—a transition made possible by the institutional, economic, and aesthetic thrust of the young Turks of the New Wave. The ‘‘Left Bank’’ filmmakers as they came to be called, got their start in the Group of Thirty. They included, notably, Alain Resnais, Georges Franju, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy, all of whom shared the idea, already explicitly practiced in some of their short features, that stylistic experiments can be articulated with a progressive political commitment. In this aspect, these filmmakers can be strongly distinguished from the Cahiers group, whose members were more inclined to defend a modern form of ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ Often a bit older than members of the Cahiers, certain of the ‘‘Left Bank’’ filmmakers also showed themselves sensitive to the question of women’s emancipation. They did so, moreover, often in a more directly political way than, say, Vadim in Et Dieu créa la femme, to mention only the most famous of the films by the new generation that excited the young Turks because of its illustration, and defense, of the sexually emancipated ‘‘modern woman.’’ I have already analyzed the explicitly feminist adaptation that Franju proposed for Thérèse Desqueyroux (chapter 8); in this chapter I will linger on the films written and/or directed by the women who are a tiny minority in this generation (see chapter 6), but whose fame is fully in keeping with the revolution in attitude they proposed.

Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais: An Exemplary Collaboration Despite the enthusiastic reception that Alain Resnais’s first feature-length film, Hiroshima mon amour, received from the Cahiers group (with Tru√aut leading the pack), the film breaks with dominant New Wave representations. This is the case not only because the political and professional itinerary of the left-wing filmmaker is fundamentally di√erent from that of the Cahiers group, but above all because his films evince a di√erent logic than

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the one I’ve tried to define in this volume (see chapter 6). There is no trace in his work of the romantic posture dear to the New Wave, neither in its gaze nor in the construction of the characters. For Alain Resnais, creativity is not associated with the expression of his own subjectivity. Throughout his career, he never varied on this point: his visual and aural inventiveness is expressed on the basis of material written by someone else, someone he usually chose and always considered his full partner. Resnais’s practice differs clearly from what is often the case for his young contemporaries, namely, a more or less autobiographical screenplay or one based on a work as a pretext for the expression of personal obsessions. Resnais works from written texts that are commissioned by the filmmaker and created by a professional writer, man or woman, working in full autonomy. Even when he worked with a traditional, collaborative screenwriter (Jean Gruault at a later point), the material for the scenario doesn’t come from him. In addition, the subjects Resnais chooses to treat reveal an unabashed interest in the political, social, cultural, and scientific questions of his time: the director of Nuit et brouillard and of Les Statues meurent aussi did not change when he moved on to directing longer films. After Hiroshima he asked Anne-Marie de Vilaine to write a screenplay about a young couple torn apart by the Algerian War; however, the censor forced him to give up the project in which politics, in the traditional sense of the term, was articulated with sexual relations. After the Evian accords, Resnais came back to the subject in another form by asking Jean Cayrol to write Muriel. All of the di√erent elements make of Resnais’s creative posture a sort of alternative in its entirety to that of the Cahiers group. Unlike most New Wave films where the hero is without a past or a future and is plunged into an immediate contemporaneity, Hiroshima mon amour makes a powerful case for the historical perspective in which the characters are constructed. The flashback is not accompanied by the protagonist’s voice-over in order to reinforce the viewer’s identification; it signifies a mise-en-abîme of the past that makes the contradictions of the present emerge. Hiroshima mon amour, in fact, goes against dominant New Wave tendencies in more than one way. Resnais intentionally asked a woman writer to write the screenplay and the dialogues, which he respected down to the last comma. The screenplay situated a woman as the organizing principal of the narrative and makes of her the instance of consciousness: it is from her point of view that the story evolves, and, it could be said, it does so in a

The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank

twofold way, since her amorous encounter with a Japanese man becomes the occasion for her (and for us, the viewers) to relive a previous encounter with a German soldier during the Occupation. The writing of the film is entirely organized as an attempt to chart the movement of her consciousness. As Lynn Higgins has shown (1996, 19–54), the two stories of impossible love can be read both as a repetition compulsion and as the story of a therapy: making the past reemerge in memory in order to be able to forget it, as in a psychoanalytical cure. Higgins remarks that the two stories have the same narrative profile: a lyrical-erotic summit followed by a long agony and the return to life. But the possibility of forgetting Nevers is associated with a new loss, that of Hiroshima. The heroine thus substitutes the pleasure of repetition for loss, through an active mastery of the events: the desire for revenge that she exercises against her Japanese lover (she refuses to see him again while she still has time) compensates for the former loss, but she also punishes herself as she did before: she repeats her symbolic suicide. She feels guilty for having survived her German lover, like the Hiroshima survivors embodied by her Japanese lover. For Higgins, her trauma has the form of a fall: she becomes a fallen woman (‘‘a woman of dubious morals,’’ as she defines herself ironically), and, in the Nevers episode, madness is like an ultimate resistance to the fall in consciousness. She embodies an anonymous, because repetitive, history of loss, alienation, exile, and marginality. The Nevers idyll is a silent, preverbal film that derives from the imaginary. She loses speech and sinks into madness. In Hiroshima she recovers speech and her place in the human community. Jacques Rivette, in an interview in Cahiers du cinéma in 1959, explains the structuring function of the female character in the film in a di√erent way: It could be said that the film begins after the explosion for Emmanuèlle Riva, since it begins after the shock that shattered her social and psychological personality, in such a way that we only realize afterward, through allusions, that she is married, that she has children in France, that she is an actress—in short, that she has an organized life. In Hiroshima she undergoes a shock, a ‘‘bomb’’ hits her that explodes her consciousness, and for her, at that moment, it’s about finding herself, putting herself back together again. In the same way that Hiroshima had to rebuild itself after the destruction of the atomic bomb, so Emmanuelle Riva, in Hiroshima, must try to put her reality back together. She can only do so by forging a synthesis of the present and the past, of what she discovered in Hiroshima, and what she experienced before in Nevers.

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By choosing to tell the story of a ‘‘horizontal collaboration’’ from the point of view of the shaven-headed woman, the screenwriter Marguerite Duras inscribes the legitimacy of a female point of view within an extremely provocative historical perspective, a perspective that is shamefully ignored by o≈cial history.∞ Hiroshima mon amour takes completely seriously this ‘‘little sentimental melodrama’’ (Duras) of a young French girl in love with a German soldier, giving its evocation an extraordinarily lyrical quality, as much through the choice of images as in the musical leitmotif, which is vastly more lyrical and melodious than the ‘‘contemporary’’ music that accompanies the prologue. The choice of a writing style that powerfully transgresses dominant cinematic codes and that is associated with a female consciousness creates an organic and valorized connection—unheard of in French culture—between the feminine and aesthetic innovation. Finally, Resnais and Duras work through sociocultural contradictions by organizing their narrative around the opposition between o≈cial history and individual memory. The prologue, constructed on a very ‘‘writerly’’ counterpoint between documentary images of the atomic martyrdom of Hiroshima and the two lovers embracing in bed, is like the description of an impasse (‘‘You saw nothing at Hiroshima’’), before the ‘‘true’’ meeting between history and memory can take place. This meeting will only transpire through the sharing of two individual memories from radically foreign spatio-temporal origins. The confrontation between individual memory and collective history is one of the great innovations of Resnais’s film, as Pierre Kast pointed out in a 1959 interview in Cahiers du cinéma: There is no action, but a kind of double attempt to understand what a love story might mean. First, at the level of the individuals, in a kind of lengthy struggle between love and its own degradation brought about by the passage of time. . . . Then, at the level of the relation between an individual a√air and the given social and historical situation. The love between these anonymous characters is not situated on the desert island usually reserved for passionate games. It occurs in a precise frame, which only accentuates and underlines the horror of contemporary society. ‘‘To capture a love story in a context that recognizes the unhappiness of others,’’ Resnais says somewhere.

And yet, the voyage taken by the heroine (Emmanuèle Riva) into her own memory is, from beginning to end, awakened, stimulated, relaunched,

The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank

and decoded by her male partner, the Japanese lover (Eiji Okado), who begins by denying the validity of her conscientious ‘‘tourist’’ perspective on Hiroshima (cf. the litany of ‘‘You saw nothing at Hiroshima’’), before awakening, in the manner of a therapist, the traumatic memories of 1944. Establishing a distance from the discourse of o≈cial history in favor of a memory-history conveyed by individual life experience is a crucial critical operation. But it is the male character who performs this critique and substitution. He himself is not implicated as a character but as an instance of legitimation: from the character’s abstraction, a character who is first a body that awakens sensations/reminiscences, then an interrogating gaze, then the place of projection, and finally an empathetic listener. The triumphant cry he makes when she admits to having never spoken about it to anyone before, not even to her husband, clearly indicates the feeling of power brought on by the success of this ‘‘birth by forceps.’’ On the one hand, a sovereign narrative command, on the other, a female character who little by little begins to exist thanks to this demiurge. Thanks to him, she can at last give meaning to her existence, which, up until then, has been based on the denial of the trauma she underwent. The final interchange between the two lovers before separating gives a meaning to their encounter when the characters rename themselves (‘‘Nevers’’ and ‘‘Hiroshima’’), thus reestablishing a reciprocity between them. But within the narrative and enunciative role of each of the two protagonists can be seen an expression in the fiction of the unequal recognition given the role of the film’s two auteurs, such as it would be established by the cinephilic doxa that designated the director as the film’s only veritable auteur, despite Resnais’s unequivocal declarations about the determining role of Duras in the writing of the film. As soon as the film came out, Godard o√ered in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma an interpretation that powerfully reintegrated Hiroshima into the dominant New Wave schema concerning relations between men and women: ‘‘Up until now, Hiroshima has always been considered from the point of view of Emmanuèle Riva. The first time I saw the film, I considered it from the Japanese man’s point of view instead. Look: it’s a guy who goes to bed with a girl. There is no reason whatsoever that this should continue for a lifetime. But he says to himself: ‘Yes, there’s a reason.’ And he tries to persuade the girl to continue sleeping with him. And that’s when a film begins whose subject is: Can love begin again?’’ Leaving aside the provocative caprice that consists in interpreting Hiroshima mon amour as though, in

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Emmanuèle Riva and Eiji Okada in Hiroshima mon amour. 216

sexual terms, it were a version of A bout de souΔe, Godard astutely highlights the dynamic instigating role of the male character. Resnais’s second feature-length film, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, is the result of a temporary renunciation: according to Michèle Manceaux (L’Express, September 29, 1960) in an interview of ten filmmakers about a film project relating to the Algerian War that was abandoned because of the censor, Alain Resnais ‘‘had tried to develop several screenplays on the theme. With Anne-Marie de Vilaine, he had even gotten to the point of a rather advanced story. The disintegration of a married couple, following a political recognition of which the Algerian War is the cause. But Resnais, too, had to give up the project, and instead went to Germany to shoot an apolitical film that he said ‘should be regarded as a sculpture.’ This was L’Année dernière à Marienbad.’’ Resnais thus implicitly suggests that L’Année dernière à Marienbad was a kind of stopgap while waiting for better days (in fact, he would make Muriel, with a screenplay by Jean Cayrol, after the end of the hostilities). It is interesting that the filmmaker again planned on working with a woman and on a story about a couple. The fact that he gives it up in favor of a commission involving Robbe-Grillet is undoubtedly a sign of the cultural climate of the time, which was more favorable toward

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‘‘formalist’’ artistic projects than toward screenplays inscribed in contemporary social and political issues.

Agnès Varda: The ‘‘Mother’’ of the New Wave? Strictly speaking, Agnès Varda does not belong to the new generation of filmmakers who began making feature-length films at the end of the 1950s, since she directed La Pointe courte in 1954 when she was the publicity photographer for Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire. But the extremely personal tone of this first feature (both a reflection on the couple and a documentary about a fishing village) and its production conditions on the margin of the commercial circuit make it a typical ‘‘auteur film’’ before the fact. Jean Baroncelli, in introducing the director of La Pointe courte on June 9, 1955 in Le Monde, writes: ‘‘What did young women use to do on their vacations? Needlework, poems, or novels. Today they are making films, at least the most talented and passionate among them are.’’ But Baroncelli makes up for his condescending opening: ‘‘La Pointe courte proves that for Mme Varda’s generation, cinema has become a means of expression exactly the same as a pen or a palette knife.’’ Cléo de 5 à 7, made eight years later in 1962, confirms that Varda was, in a singular fashion, a vital part of the new directions that cinema was taking— first, of course, because she is and would remain the lone woman of the New Wave. Her uniqueness is structured by a totally unequal power relationship reinforced by a French cultural tradition that excludes women (Coquillat 1982). What is more, in the context of a cinema that claims a posture of individual creation against the dominant mass culture, the question of gender relations and sexual identity is overdetermined by sociocultural relations. In an article about the shooting of Cléo de 5 à 7 (L’Express June 26, 1961), Michèle Manceaux reports remarks made by Varda: ‘‘Hans Baldung Grien is a painter who painted fat blonde women in the arms of skeletons. Sex and death. My film is a little bit that. The story of a woman who has cancer. Everything she does is modified by her thinking about death. She never speaks about it. . . . Cléo is a person who is particularly unsuited to being sick, particularly badly prepared. For her, death is above all a physical attack on her beauty. The relation between coquetry and anxiety.’’ The filmmaker continues: ‘‘At first I wanted to film a journey through Paris, but Paris as seen by someone with a special eye. Why not the eye of

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someone who is about to die? Why not a woman?’’ In an interview with Jacqueline Fabre (Libération, June 30, 1962), Varda presents her project in a way that, despite what she says about it, reveals a distance taken from the young filmmakers: ‘‘Georges de Beauregard asked me to make an inexpensive film, uncomplicated and commercial. . . . I was not constrained in any way during the shooting. Beauregard had complete confidence in me. Cléo’s story is a story that touches me: it’s the portrait of a woman, young and beautiful, useless and adored, who, suddenly, is forced to think about death. . . . She is alone, and without any defenses when it comes to bearing the idea of death.’’ Cléo de 5 à 7 recounts, almost in ‘‘real time,’’ two hours in the life of a young woman, a variety singer (Corinne Marchand), who awaits the results of medical analyses to find out if she has cancer. Sandy FlittermanLewis (1996 [1990], 268–84) has astutely analyzed the innovative character of a film that recounts with a consistently jubilant and nongratuitous formal liberty the trajectory of a woman who passes from the status of an object to that of a subject complete with a point of view and a consciousness. The film is constructed in two dramaturgically opposing sections: a first part where we see Cléo undergo her fear and her life without being able to master them except in the mode of ‘‘caprice’’ (the term used by her governess Angèle and by her musician, played by Michel Legrand). After having rehearsed a song that scrutinizes women’s total dependence on love (‘‘I am an empty house, without you . . . Alone, ugly, livid, without you’’),≤ the camera marks her new awareness by a slow zoom on her tragic expression while singing. Then the camera retreats abruptly and Cléo cries out her revolt against the image to which she is being reduced—that of a woman alienated in love. She pulls o√ her wig and her feathered dressing gown, symbols of her femininity in masquerade, and leaves, wearing a simple black dress, alone for the first time. From this point on, the film’s tone changes: the female character becomes a consciousness: she looks at the world around her and notices, first, that her fame as a singer is entirely relative (in the café where she plays her song on the jukebox, the people don’t even lift up their heads to listen). On the other hand, she finds a model friend in a sculpture studio who greets her warmly, listens to her talk about her illness, then makes her forget about it by showing her a little burlesque movie.≥ Then she goes for a walk in the Parc Montsouris, where she allows herself to be approached by a

The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank

nicely talkative soldier on leave (Antoine Bourseiller), who accompanies her to the hospital where she goes to get her medical diagnosis. The film ends with the two young people looking at each other and smiling despite the cancer that the doctor has just announced to Cléo, and despite the war in Algeria, to which the young man must return that very evening. Varda was conscious at the time of her atypical vision of the world, including her vision in the context of the new filmmakers: At that time, the fashion consisted in saying there wasn’t any possible communication. . . . It’s a notion that Antonioni cultivated fervently, Resnais as well.∂ . . . I don’t agree. . . . I believe in ‘‘encounters.’’ According to their possibilities, people meet for an instant, a minute, or a lifetime. They have one encounter or ten in their existence, or they don’t have any. But everyone, one way or another, needs it. Those who know it are already less unhappy than those who don’t. . . . This need is essential. It must be said in an almost primary way, because it’s very important. That’s why there’s a whole ‘‘shopgirl’’ side to Cléo: a sick little girl meets a soldier on leave in a garden. (1962, 10)

With this declaration, we can measure the ideological separation between Varda and the young Cahiers filmmakers. Instead of the claim, inherited from romanticism, of a tragic solitude that alone permits the construction of a self, Varda maintains that each person is constructed through the encounter with another. The story of Cléo’s liberation, which to a certain extent reveals the inheritance of Hollywood women’s melodrama (Gledhill 1987), nevertheless displaces the problematic of alienation away from the terrain of gender relations toward that of sociocultural relations. With a very writerly initial sequence (alternating between shots in black and white and then in color) where the heroine has her tarot cards read by an old woman, Varda strongly inscribes the place of a certain traditional form of popular culture, in a mode that is both empathetic and distanced. By way of Cléo and Angèle, superstition will form a veritable leitmotif in the film, associating popular culture, femininity, and alienation (Huyssen 1986). In the beginning, Cléo totally identifies with the beautiful image of the woman whose reflection she sees in the mirror, an image that is highly flattering to her busy lover (José Luis de Villalonga). Her musician (Michel Legrand) suggests to her love songs typical of mass culture that construct an image of woman entirely reduced to her sexual identity. On the other hand, the alternative models that the film

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proposes in the second part associate ‘‘true’’ sentiments with ‘‘true’’ culture —that of the model friend who shares her projectionist lover’s taste for burlesque parody typical of a second-degree culture reserved by the elite; and later, that of the cultivated soldier on leave who tells her his ‘‘true’’ name, Florence, while revealing its etymological meaning. The heroine’s coming-into-consciousness thus takes place via a change in cultural milieu, and the erudite young man who makes her forget her fear tells her that he spent seven years at the Cité Universitaire (near the Parc Montsouris where they met), a strong connotation of his charm for the ‘‘cultivated’’ culture—and for a properly masculine notion of the tragic, since, as a draftee returning to Algeria, he is, like the young protagonist of Adieu Philippine, another death postponed. Cléo/Florence’s alienation appears in the end to be produced and maintained by the mass culture she embodies as a variety singer. The masking of gender oppression/alienation by sociocultural alienation indicates the contradictory attitude of Varda as filmmaker, who can only see relations of gender domination in the realm of mass culture, which she distances herself from resolutely through her innovative artistic project. Her problematic (as a woman) adherence to an artistic milieu where creativity is associated ‘‘naturally’’ with masculinity leads her to occult contradictions in order to obtain an ideal image of gender relations in this milieu. If many of the filmmakers who make their first feature-length fiction film at the beginning of the 1960s actually break with the dominant representations of gender relations and sexual identity of a largely conservative and patriarchal traditional cinema, the new cinema proposes cultural schemas that privilege a narcissism and a desire for mastery that rework male domination in other forms (more ‘‘distinguished’’ ones). Moreover, these films are for the most part received through a reading optic provided by elite modernist culture, which privileges questions of form over questions of representation. Despite several brilliant counterexamples from the ‘‘Left Bank’’ group that prove that formal inventiveness does not necessarily entail disinterest in social and political questions in the broad sense of encompassing gender relations, the feminist movement of the 1970s had to arrive before cinematic creation truly began to take women’s points of view into account.

Conclusion

The New Wave’s Legacy: ‘‘Auteur Cinema’’

The fortieth birthday of the New Wave resulted in the publication, between 1998 and 2002, of numerous new works on the movement. On the whole, though, these works did not produce any fundamentally new insights into the subject, even if, for the most part, historical research and aesthetic analyses tended to replace the earlier trend of lyrical flights of fancy and invective on the topic. The idea of aesthetic innovation remains the major theme associated with the movement considered to be an ‘‘artistic school,’’ to borrow the title of Michel Marie’s book. But in contemporary artistic, critical, editorial, and institutional practices, it is ‘‘auteur politics’’ that seems to be the principal legacy of the period. If the New Wave has become, for the cultivated French, Western, and even worldwide elite, the reference point for a cinema with artistic aspirations, it is primarily because of the conception the movement brought about of the film’s auteur as he who masters the whole of the creative process, whose own genius can be traced from film to

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film, and whose works have the legitimate right to state financing, regardless of their commercial success or lack thereof (Burch 1999). This ideology, often in contradiction with the reality of the collective production of socalled auteur films, has been broadly accepted. The regular consecration by the o≈cial organs of French cinephilia (known by the name ‘‘the Four Aces’’: Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, and Les Cahiers du cinéma)∞ of filmmakers from the four corners of the planet, but carefully cleansed of their original sociocultural context and celebrated for their ‘‘aesthetic’’ qualities alone, is a case in point. Kiarostami, Kitano, and Wong kar-wai, among the chosen of the last few years, have in common being presented as universal—which is to say abstract—geniuses by making films whose formal qualities alone are highlighted (perhaps their films have a meaning for their citizens but we know nothing of this). The system was refined in the last decades, in the wake of the cultural politics inaugurated by Jack Lang and largely taken up by his successors on the right as much as on the left, and it aims to subsidize artists rather than the public through the intermediary of various national and international commissions (see Schneider 1993). Thus, thanks to French public funding, a number of foreign filmmakers from around the world make films for the French cinephilic audience, since the circuits of distribution in their own countries make their own citizens’ access to these films improbable. Today, the principal legacy of the New Wave is thus, for better or worse, ‘‘auteur cinema,’’ whose existence depends more on those critics, professionals, enlightened cinephiles, and institutions that have the power to designate it as such, than it does on a capacity for aesthetic innovation often proclaimed, but rarely e√ective, on the model of the noble arts (literature, the plastic arts, music). For the principle of innovation as a perpetual overturning of the codes in place, which has become the principal criterion of value in the contemporary artistic field, seems to be in contradiction with the need for films to find an audience in the commercial circuit in relation, even if a distant one, with the increasingly more elevated cost of their fabrication. These contradictions are all the more visible in France in that the state has put into place a more and more sophisticated system of aid and public obligatory or untaxed private investment for cinema, without for all that the films escaping from the constraints of commercial distribution. Thus, more than aesthetic innovation it is the figure of the auteur that has become the criterion of value in cinema, on the literary model inherited

The New Wave’s Legacy

from romanticism, accompanied by a touch of formalism that establishes the connection with contemporary art. This model valorizes the expression of a subjectivity isolated in an ivory tower and centered on itself—rather than that of an individual engaged with social and cultural determinisms— as well as a fantasy of absolute mastery that makes of the filmmaker a demiurge rather than the motor of a collective project (which the filmmaker in fact often is, given the complexity of the process of artistic, technical, and economic fabrication of a film). The model identifies the auteur with an ensemble of recurring traits, traits that an enlightened amateur can detect from film to film, the sum of which defines a ‘‘personal universe’’ and a ‘‘style.’’ It is no longer about appreciating the capacity of a film to explore in an innovative manner the various contradictions that a society and an era produce. With the triumph of the cinephilic discourse that accompanied the New Wave, it is the question of representations that has disappeared from film’s critical discourse (as from the whole of discourse about art and culture in France)—that is, the relation between artistic production and the society in which it was nourished and which it in turn nourishes. The fantasmatic model of the artist who creates in splendid isolation, outside of any social constraint—dominant in France since the Renaissance (see Coquillat 1982)—has undergone a certain number of evolutions. But its power is such that it has been imposed on even the artistic means of expression that is the most economically antinomical—namely cinema, collective in its conception, its realization, and its reception. As Laurent Creton, speaking from an economic perspective, has remarked: ‘‘The supposed opposition between commercial cinema and auteur cinema is a poor one; it becomes an absurdity to the extent that a growing number of films that reach a broad audience present themselves as auteur cinema’’ (2004, 254). But the fantasy of ‘‘the heroic commitment of a few accursed artists’’ (252) has an irreplaceable value of distinction. From this we arrive at the paradox that the cinema considered artistic in France today is the one that has no relation to the society in which it was produced or received. Not that this is in fact true—most auteur films, beginning with those of the New Wave, as I have tried to show in this book, take part in a collective imaginary that contributes to our understanding of the spirit of a society and an era. But the critical discourse that forms the dominant optic for reading these films insists on purging them of anything that might make of them an instrument in the understanding of

223

Conclusion

contemporary sociocultural relations—particularly, when it comes to fictional film, gender relations, and sexual identity inasmuch as these are socioculturally constructed. This reading optic functions as an instrument of distinction in the reception of the films (Jullier, 2002), but it is just as much internalized by the ‘‘creators’’ themselves, and even more so by female creators, who constantly have to prove their legitimacy since the whole of French cultural tradition tends to exclude the ‘‘second sex’’ from this prestigious position. The contradictory legacy of the New Wave is thus both to have allowed the recognition of the filmmaker as artist, and, at the same time, to have imposed an extremely restrictive model of what constitutes an artist, one that reduces creativity to a formal game alone, outside of any sociocultural stakes.

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Appendix One

Box Office Results

The following list includes the New Wave films that sold more than 100,000 seats in an exclusive Parisian first-run release between 1956 and 1962. The number following the colon indicates total tickets sold. Et Dieu créa la femme (December 1956): 173,000 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (February 1957): 120,200 Les Amants (November 1958): 451,470 Les Cousins (March 1959): 258,550 Les Dragueurs (May 1959): 150,400 Les 400 coups (June 1959): 261,000 Hiroshima mon amour (June 1959): 160,360 Les Liaisons dangereuses (September 1959): 640,000 A bout de souΔe (March 1960): 259,000 A double tour (December 1959): 239,200 Moderato cantabile (May 1960): 140,930

Appendix One

Zazie dans le métro (October 1960): 126,540 L’Année dernière à Marienbad (September 1961): 141,970 Jules et Jim (January 1962): 210,065 Vie privée (January 1962): 241,720 Cléo de 5 à 7 (April 1962): 111,148 Vivre sa vie (September 1962): 148,010

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Appendix Two

The Press

Arts (1945–1964), ‘‘a weekly of artistic, intellectual and cultural news,’’ was edited by Jacques Laurent after 1954, who made of it the tribunal for the ‘‘hussards’’ of the anarchist right; the cinema columns were left to François Tru√aut and Jean Douchet until 1958, and then to Jean-Louis Bory. L’Aurore (1955), a news daily. Cinema critics: Claude Garson, Stève Passeur, and Raphaël Valensi. Le Canard enchaîné (1915–1940; 1946), a satirical weekly. Writing about cinema: Henri Jeanson, Pierre Laroche, and Michel Duran. Carrefour (1945–1967), a daily. Cinema critics: François Chalet and Jean Dutourd. Cinémonde (1928–1940; 1946–1971), a popular weekly edited by Maurice Bessy beginning in 1935, the spokesman for French cinema of the 1930s. After the war (publication was suspended between 1940 and 1946), the magazine absorbed Cinévie-cinévogue and Pour tous. Maurice Bessy left in 1966,

Appendix Two

and his journal disappeared a few years later, a victim of competition, notably from the Belgian Ciné-Télé-Revue. Combat (1944–1974), ‘‘The journal of Paris: From the Resistance to the Revolution.’’ Created underground in 1941, it became a daily with the Liberation. Writing about cinema: Denis Marion, R.-M. Arlaud, Henry Magnan, and Pierre Macabru. La Croix (1880–1940; 1945), ‘‘a Catholic news daily.’’ Film critics: Jean Rochereau and Henry Rabine. Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace (1944), a regional daily published at Strasbourg. Festival film (1960), a monthly published in Italy by the Cino Del Duca Editions. It publishes film stories in the form of photo-novellas accompanied by articles on actors including news about their love lives. Les Fiches du cinéma, created in 1934 by the Centrale catholique du cinéma. In 2002 it became an autonomous publication. It is used by the BIFI Internet site. Le Figaro, founded in 1826, is a center-right daily. Writing about cinema: Louis 228

Chauvet. Le Figaro littéraire (1946–1957), a cultural weekly. The cinema column during the period was by Claude Mauriac. La France Catholique (1906), ‘‘a Christian news and culture weekly.’’ France-Nouvelle (1945–1980), ‘‘the central weekly of the Communist Party.’’ France-Observateur, founded in 1954, became the leftist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964. Writing about cinema: Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and André Bazin. France-Soir (1944), a daily edited by Pierre Lazare√. Writing about cinema: André Lang, France Roche, and Robert Chazal. L’Humanité (1904–1940; 1944), a daily, ‘‘central organ of the Communist Party.’’ Writing about cinema: Georges Sadoul, Samuel Lachize, and Armand Monjo. L’Humanité-Dimanche (1948–1997), ‘‘the weekly magazine of the Communist Party.’’ Film critic: François Maurin. Libération (1941–1964), ‘‘The big morning news daily.’’ Founded underground in 1941 by Emmannuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, who was in charge of the Libération Sud network. A daily after 1945, close to the Communists. Film critics: Simone Dubreuilh, Jacqueline Fabre, and Jeander. Le Monde (1944), center-left daily. Writing on movies: Henry Magnan, and then Jacques de Baroncelli and Yvonne Baby.

Appendix Two

Nous deux film (1956), a monthly devoted to complete film stories in the form of photo-novellas, with interviews and articles on the actors. La Nouvelle critique (1948–1967), ‘‘A militant Marxist monthly.’’ Les Nouvelles littéraires (1922–1971), ‘‘a weekly of the arts, literature, science, and spectacles.’’ Film critic: Georges Charensol. Paris-Jour (1957–1972), evolved from Franc-Tireur (1945–1957), a morning daily. Cinema critics: Maurice Ciantar and Henry Magnan. Paris-Presse-L’Intransigeant (1944–1970), taken over by France-Soir in 1970. Writing about cinema: Max Favalelli, Claude Hervin, Robert Chazal, Claude Brûlé, and Michel Aubriant. Radio-Cinéma-Télévision (1954), edited by Jean-Louis Tallenay, became RCT and then Télérama in 1960; a weekly, originally Catholic, it became a journal of cultural news. Writing about cinema: André S. Labarthe, André Bazin, Jean d’Yvoire, Gilbert Salachas, Claude-Marie Trémois, Paule Sengissen, Jacques Siclier, and Claude-Jean Philippe. La Revue du cinéma, the first journal with a theoretical ambition, was founded in 1928, disappeared in 1931 due to a lack of readers, and appeared again after 1946 for nineteen issues until the accidental death of founder Jean-Georges Auriol in 1950. Published by Gallimard, with a sta√ that included Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Pierre Kast, Alexandre Astruc, and André Bazin. Les Cahiers du cinéma aspired to be its heir. Témoignage chrétien (1945), founded clandestinely in 1941, ‘‘a Christian news weekly’’ clearly on the left. Film critics: Michel de Saint-Pierre, Roger Fressoz, and Jean Carta.

229

Notes

Introduction This book, originally published as La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier, is the result of research begun in 1996. Although parts of it were published earlier in journals and collected works, these pieces were largely rewritten for this volume. Part of chapter 2 appeared in the journal Iris (no. 26, 1998) under the title ‘‘Cinéphilie et masculinité’’; an earlier version of chapter 6 also appeared in Iris (no. 24, 1996) under the title ‘‘La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma à la première personne du masculin singulier.’’ Part of chapter 7 appeared in the collection of essays entitled L’Exclusion des femmes: Masculinité et politique dans la culture du XX siècle, ed. Odile Krakovitch and Geneviève Sellier (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2001) under the title ‘‘Masculinité et politique dans le cinéma de la Nouvelle Vague: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Le Petit Soldat, Le Combat dans l’île, La Dénonciation.’’ An earlier version of chapter 8 was published in the Swiss journal Hors-Champ (no. 5, Oct. 2000), ‘‘Femmes et cinéma,’’ under the title ‘‘Les femmes dans la Nouvelle Vague.’’ An early version of chapter 9 appeared in the collection of essays Brûler les planches, crever l’écran: La présence de l’acteur, ed. René Prédal and Gérard-Denis Farcy (Paris: L’En-

Notes to Introduction

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tretemps, 2002), under the title ‘‘Jeanne Moreau, star du cinéma moderne.’’ An early version of chapter 10 appeared in the journal Iris (n. 26, 1998) under the title ‘‘La Nouvelle Vague et le cinéma populaire: Brigitte Bardot dans Vie privée et Le Mépris’’ (in collaboration with Ginette Vincendeau, who was responsible for the analysis of Le Mépris). Finally, an early version of chapter 11 was published in Au Théâtre, au cinéma, au féminin, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber and Hélène Cixous (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), under the title ‘‘Films de femme dans la Nouvelle Vague: Une alternative au cinéma d’auteur?’’ I thank those responsible for these journals and essay collections for their permission to reprint these portions of my research. The expression ‘‘New Wave’’ is used here to refer to the films made between 1956 and 1962 that were perceived by contemporaries as ‘‘new.’’ I also recognize the existence attested to by the critics of the era of two distinct groups, the one centered around the Cahiers du cinéma (undoubtedly the most numerous, and the ones that ‘‘made the most noise’’) and the one called ‘‘Left Bank,’’ whose protagonists came out of committed documentary making. Cahiers du cinéma is a monthly journal created in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Lo Duca (who was replaced in 1957 by Eric Rohmer). This was a pond in which numerous critics, filmmakers, and theorists swam, among them André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Chris Marker, Nino Frank, Audiberti, Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean Domachi, and the ‘‘young Turks,’’ François Tru√aut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Positif, at its outset in 1952 a journal edited periodically by cinephiles from Lyon, later became a monthly journal out of Paris. Directed by Bernard Chardère, Positif became the great cinephilic and ideological rival of Cahiers du cinéma between 1955 and 1965. Its regular critics included Bernard Chardère, Guy Jacob, Pierre Kast, Michel Subiéla, Raymonde Borde, Paul-Louis Thirard, Robert Benayoun, Ado Kyrou, Roger Tailleur, Gérard Gozlan, Louis Seguin, Fereydoun Hoveyda, and Jean-Paul Törok. ‘‘Young Turks’’ is an expression used by André Bazin to characterize the young editors of the Cahiers du cinéma: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Tru√aut (Thévenin 2001, 292 n.7). Works in the collection include Tania Modleski, Hitchcock et la théorie féministe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), Edward Turk, Marcel Carné et l’âge d’or du cinema français (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), and Richard Dyer, Le Star-système hollywoodien suivi de Marilyn Monroe et la sexualité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). [This phrase appears in English in the original—Trans.]

A New Generation Marked by Women 1

The investigation began in October 1957 in the form of a survey taken of a representative section of young people, the results of which were published in L’Express on December 5 and 12, 1957. At the same time, L’Express published,

Notes to Chapter Two

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and had published by France-Soir, Paris-Presse, and La Terre Nouvelle, twentyfour questions aimed at the readership from the same generation. The generation was defined as made up of those who had not lived through the war as adults—that is, those who were under thirteen years of age in 1940 (the criteria proposed by the ifop) and who were at least thirty years old in 1957. Those who fit this category (eight million French citizens between eighteen and thirty years old, out of a total population of forty-three million) included 53 percent who were not married, 11 percent married without children, and 36 percent married with children. What can be done with the percentages of responses to a question phrased like this: ‘‘For a woman, what is the best direction? Devote oneself to the home, or have an activity outside the home?’’ when the responses are not di√erentiated by gender? The allocation of a unique salary was instituted after the war, in function of the number of children and the closeness of their births: its purpose was to cause married women to stop working in order to ‘‘have babies.’’ On the issue of familial politics, see Duchen 1994; Mossuz-Lavau 2002; and Bard 2003. In 1961 an ifop survey taken of individuals aged sixteen to twenty years old confirms the di√erence in feeling between girls and boys regarding sexuality, in which it is lived as normal, unserious, or even useful for 66 percent of the boys but only 19 percent of the girls, the vast majority of whom (77 percent), on the other hand, judge it to be reprehensible or dangerous. For a brief description of Cinémonde and the other journals, periodicals, and film reviews cited, see appendix 2.

Cinephilia in the 1950s

1

2

My deepest thanks to Noël Burch, with whom I wrote an earlier version of this chapter. The Christian personalism of Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), according to the Encyclopedia Universalis, is very di√erent from individualism, for it emphasizes the community of beings at the heart of the collectivity and the cosmos. Its revolutionary program (opposed to both capitalism and communism) proposes ‘‘the individual for society and society for the person.’’ Mounier founded the journal L’Esprit, whose importance grew, especially during the years 1945 through 1955. The exact citation from Malraux, taken from Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (1946), is as follows: ‘‘In Persia I saw a film that doesn’t exist called La Vie de Charlot. In Persia movies are shown outdoors; on the walls that surrounded the spectators, black cats, seated, watched as well. Armenian movie managers had adroitly made a montage of all the little Charlots, and the result, a very long feature, was surprising: the myth appeared in its pure state.’’ The slippage from Malraux’s Persia to Bazin’s Arabia is typical of what Edward Said called

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orientalism, which reduces all ‘‘oriental’’ countries to a single fantasmatic and primitive identity. And yet, the letters from readers of Cinémonde in the same period bear witness to an undeniable form of cultural expertise, to borrow the concept of JeanMarc Leveratto (1996), on the part of young women cinephiles who are the privileged public for the popular weekly. A study of this notion remains to be done. According to Doniol, the ‘‘76 heroines’’ of the 63 films in his sample were divided into ‘‘48 young women, 26 young girls, two mature women and one adolescent’’ (there is an error of one point in Doniol’s calculations) and are on average 25 years old. As far as class, we find ‘‘35 bourgeois women, 21 women of the people (but a good half of these are not situated in a believable social context), 10 aristocrats, 6 prostitutes, and 2 peasants.’’ As far as time period, there are ‘‘46 heroines from our era (but very few appear to be our contemporaries).’’ Almost none bears witness to ‘‘the revolution in the condition of women that marks our century with the most flagrant seal.’’ This actor, born in 1902, whose real name was Frédéric Abel, played secondary roles in French films in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He only wrote two articles for Cahiers du cinéma, but he left a book, Extérieurs à Venise (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), which was prefaced by Orson Welles. Thanks to Noël Burch for this information.

Auteur Cinema 1

2

The politics of public aid inaugurated by the 1948 law consisted in giving back to producers of French films a percentage of the box o≈ce receipts from their films if they promised to reinvest the money in a new film production. The aid was derived from a tax gathered on all films, French or foreign, shown in theaters. Thought of at first as provisional, this measure aimed at appropriating part of the receipts from foreign films (especially American ones) to help jump-start French cinema, which had been badly a√ected by the war and then forced, after the Liberation, to submit again to an even more formidable competition from Hollywood. Characterized as ‘‘automatic aid,’’ it fully attained its goal, but began to produce a ‘‘perverse e√ect’’ by the privilege in fact accorded to commercially successful films at the expense of ‘‘di≈cult’’ or innovative films. Article 10 of the law of July 24, 1953, states that in order to bring into being the creation of funding for the development of the film industry, films ‘‘of a nature serving the cause of French cinema or opening new perspectives on the cinematic art or making known the great themes and problems of the French Union may be assured financial aid of ten million francs.’’ This sum could be increased by an endowment of up to 10 percent of the funding, reserved for short-length films ‘‘of quality.’’

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Aid to exportation, established in the middle of the 1950s, meant, concretely, that 21 percent of the box o≈ce receipts collected abroad went to the producer, in addition to 7 percent of the domestic receipts. This system progressively led to producers favoring ‘‘films based on well-known authors, subjects that have already proven successful (in other words, adaptations and remakes), and the use of the proven, confirmed talents of actors and actresses with an international commercial reputation.’’ (Jacques Flaud, interview with André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Cahiers du cinéma 71, May 1957, p. 7). For the short feature, there was no automatic aid—just subsidies based on quality. This system allowed the emergence of a veritable school, known as the ‘‘Group of Thirty,’’ which formed a large part of the following generation (Prédal 1991; Frodon 1995; Gauthier 1995; see also chapter 11). See ‘‘Six personnages en quête d’auteur,’’ Cahiers du cinéma, n. 71, May 1957. Archives des Films du Carrosse, dossier ‘‘CCH 60,’’ cited by de Baecque (1996, 207). ‘‘Libération, par Jacques Flaud,’’ Cahiers du cinéma, n. 100, October 1959, p. 1. Jacques Flaud was secretary of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), which was founded in 1944 by Georges Bidault and was Christian-Democrat in its leanings and close to General de Gaulle. Flaud was named to head the cnc in 1952, after the dismissal of Michel Fourré-Courmeray who was thought to be too close to the Resistance and who had himself replaced Paul Painlevé, thought to be too close to the communists, after 1945. Jacques Flaud would in turn be shown the door in October 1959, to be replaced by Michel Fourré-Courmeray! See Lindeperg 1997, 232, n.5.

Contrasting Receptions 1

2 3

Breaking with the Jdanovism that flourished since the Cold War, the Communist Party recognized the autonomy of art in relation to politics: ‘‘Artistic creation is not conceivable without research, currents, di√erent schools and confrontations between them. The Party appreciates and supports the diverse forms of contributions made by creators to the human progress in the free deployment of imagination, taste, and originality.’’ See Borde, Buache, and Curtelin 1962; Borde 1962; and Ciment 2002. Even if the more or less generalized critical delight in the first New Wave films continued unabated, this should not disguise the fact of a veritable ‘‘cultural revolution’’ operating in the press with the emergence of ‘‘modern cinema.’’ The division no longer falls between the cinephilic journals and the mainstream press, but between the defenders and detractors of ‘‘modern cinema,’’ both of which could be found in either kind of journal. The work performed by the cinephilic journals of creating an attitude toward the new cinema had spread out among professional journalists who had up until then been more sensitive to audience opinion than they were to film’s capacity for artistic inno-

235

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4

5

6

236

7

8

9

10 11

vation. When we read the critical response to Marienbad, for example, the degree of seriousness with which the daily press greeted the film is simply astounding and transcends all the usual cultural divisions. Here is the complete list in chronological order: Et Dieu créa la femme, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Les Amants, Les Cousins, Les Dragueurs, Les 400 coups, Hiroshima mon amour, A double tour, Les Liaisons dangereuses, A bout de souΔe, Moderato cantabile, Zazie dans le métro, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Jules et Jim, Vie privée, Cléo de 5 à 7, Vivre sa vie. I’ve excluded from the list several films made by filmmakers of the new generation that did well at the box o≈ce, on the grounds that most of the critics of the time didn’t consider them to be part of the new cinema: Une vie, Orfeu negro, La Bride sur le coup, Les Dimanches de Ville-d’Avray, Le Repos du guerrier, and Thérèse Desqueyroux. ‘‘Success’’ for the films I discuss is defined as a film that sold over 100,000 tickets in an exclusive first-run Parisian screening (the only figures available in the annual reports published by Le Film français) by the end of 1962. For a list of such films and their box o≈ce records, see appendix 1. Throughout this volume, unless otherwise noted, the articles cited are from the date when the film came out. For this reason, and to avoid cumbersome notes, I haven’t indicated the date of the article each time; these can be found in the press dossiers at the BIFI, which can be consulted on the Internet at bifi.fr. The film is no longer considered a jewel of the New Wave. Jean-Michel Frodon speaks of ‘‘an elegant story of bourgeois adultery [that] skillfully mounts a willfully provocative plot against the morality of the times, but in a descriptive mise-en-scène, one that is extremely artificial and closed in on itself ’’ (1995, 106–7). Michel Marie puts the film in the unflattering categories of ‘‘bedroom farce’’ and ‘‘Saganism,’’ and adds that it is among the ‘‘most superficial films’’ of the New Wave (1997, 87–88). Resnais’s documentaries Guernica (1949), Les statues meurent aussi (1953), and Nuit et Brouillard (1955), as well as the tangles he had with the censor, had firmly situated him on the left. Between March 1960 (the triumph of A bout de souΔe) and September 1961 the following films were released: Les Bonnes femmes, On n’enterre pas le dimanche, Les Jeux de l’amour, L’Enclos, Tirez sur le pianiste, Un couple, Le Farceur, Lola, Les Godelureaux, Le Propre de l’homme, La Proie pour l’ombre, Une aussi longue absence, La Morte-Saison des amours, Une femme est une femme, Ce soir ou jamais. None of these films reached the level of 100,000 spectators in an exclusively Parisian first-run, and many of them were critical and/or popular failures. See chapter 9 for the results of the sociological investigation undertaken in the 1980s by Verena Aebischer and Sonia Dayan. La Pointe courte was made in 1954 by a group functioning as a cooperative, with actors from the Théâtre National Populaire (Philippe Noiret and Silvia

Notes to Chapter Five

12

13 14 15

16

Monfort) and an editor who had already made a name in short features (Alain Resnais). But the film, which was made without the authorization from the Centre National du Cinéma, had only a limited showing in one art theater, the Studio Parnasse, in January 1956. For example, starring Françoise Arnoul: Le Fruit défendu (Henri Verneuil, 1952), Les Compagnes de la nuit and La Rage au corps (Ralph Habib, 1953), and Cargaison blanche (Georges Lacombe, 1957); starring Martine Carol, Nana (Christian-Jacque, 1954); starring Micheline Presle, Les Impures (Pierre Chevalier, 1954). I am not including Zazie dans le métro, which is centered on a preadolescent. Notably Les Cousins, Les 400 coups, Hiroshima mon amour, A bout de souΔe, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Jules et Jim, Cléo de 5 à 7, Vivre sa vie. Notably Le Beau Serge, Moi un noir, Les Bonnes femmes, Le Petit soldat, Tirez sur le pianiste, Lola, Une femme est une femme, Paris nous appartient, Le Signe du Lion, Adieu Philippine. This is certainly the case for Cinémonde, whose issues published between 1954 and 1964 I’ve studied. As for women’s magazines, which I will research in a future study, it remains a hypothesis. 237

5

The Precursors

1 2

3

4

5

My thanks to Michel Marie and Noël Burch for having suggested this chapter to me. I thank the Archives du Film for the opportunity to view Vacances portugaises. La Revue du cinéma (1947–1948) is a critical and theoretical monthly founded and edited by Jean-Georges Auriol and published by Gallimard, with a sta√ that included Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Pierre Kast, Alexandre Astruc, and André Bazin. Its publication was interrupted by Gallimard after nineteen issues, before the accidental death of Auriol in 1950. Les Cahiers du cinéma aspired to be its heir. ‘‘Diegetic’’ refers to sounds (words, music, noises) that belong to the narrative space-time evoked by the image; ‘‘extra-diegetic’’ refers to music that is superimposed on the space-time like a commentary, or the voice of a narrator commenting after the fact about the story that we see progressing on the screen, whether the narrator be a character in the story or the story’s supposed ‘‘author.’’ These prizes include the Prix Louis Delluc (1952); special honors from the jury of the Cannes Film Festival (1952); and the Grand Prix Féminin du Cinéma (1953). The film appeared su≈ciently important to the Christian cultural weekly for it to devote three pages to a contradictory debate, where Paule Sengissen (‘‘admiration’’), Jean d’Yvoire (‘‘indignation’’), Jean Louis Tallenay (‘‘Shouldn’t we listen to this cry of anguish?’’), and André Bazin (‘‘Better than a novel’’) each contribute their opinions.

Notes to Chapter Five 6

6

This is how he presents the subject of La Proie pour l’ombre in Les Lettres françaises.

Between Romanticism and Modernism

1

2

3

238

4 5

6

7

8

9

My thanks to Sabine Chalvon-Demersay for having alerted me to this study, and to Noël Burch for having passed it along to me. For examples of such texts, see Le Rouge et le noir (Stendhal, 1830), Le Lys dans la vallée (Honoré de Balzac, 1836), La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Alfred de Musset, 1836), Ruy Blas (Victor Hugo, 1838), and La Maison du berger (Alfred de Vigny, 1843). An exception must be made for Jacques Demy’s films: the masochism displayed in these films, analyzed by Gilles Deleuze (1967), is articulated through the relation to the pre-Oedipal mother, both good and bad object, as in the concepts elaborated by Melanie Klein (1998 [1968]). Freud distinguishes several types of male masochism (erogenous, feminine, and moral) that have in common the desire to be treated as a ‘‘bad’’ child that deserves punishment from a paternal figure. Freud assimilates this to the desire to occupy the ‘‘feminine’’ position in intercourse, to be castrated, to give birth. He sees in it a regression to the Oedipal complex, where the desire to be beaten by the father is equivalent to the desire to have passive (feminine) sexual relations with the father. In other words, male masochism is constructed around the unconscious desire to be loved by the father. See ‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism,’’ in Freud 1961, 159–70. On the new generation of male actors who emerge at the beginning of the 1960s, see Brassart 2004. Le Beau Serge was made first because it cost less. It was due to the subsidy for quality awarded by the cnc (after the filming) to the first film and to sales abroad that Chabrol could film Les Cousins. The money earned by the first two films would be used by Chabrol’s Ajym production company to finance certain projects made by his young friends (see Chabrol 1992 [1976]; Marie 1997). This profession has a strong demiurgic connotation that is reinforced by a mythical film among cinephiles: The Fountainhead by King Vidor (1949), adapted from the novel by Ayn Rand, which constructs an emblematic and somewhat fascist figure of the solitary creator, played by Gary Cooper. According to Chabrol, ‘‘if it could be said that Le Beau Serge is inspired by Catholicism, or at least is full of good sentiments, Les Cousins is willfully blasphemous’’ ([1992] 1976, 143). The father of Tru√aut’s wife Madeleine is Ignace Morgenstern, who as the president and managing director of Cocinor was an important distributor of French commercial film of the era (see de Baecque and Toubiana 1996). The age di√erence is that of seventeen years: Franju was born in 1912 and Mocky in 1929.

Notes to Chapter Eight 10

11 12 13

7

This quote is from a letter from Godard to Tru√aut written the day before shooting began on A bout de souΔe (Archives des Films du Carosse, cited by de Baecque 1996, 210). And yet Lola was a relative failure when it came out in March 1961, with 43,385 spectators in an exclusive Parisian first-run. This late and limited release, confined to one art movie theater, La Pagode, explains in part its grave commercial failure despite a good critical reception. See John Hess’s critique of ‘‘auteur politics’’ in chapter 2.

Nostalgia for a Heroic Masculinity 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8

8

See ‘‘Feux sur le cinéma français,’’ Positif, n. 46, June 1962. See ‘‘L’Évolution du langage cinématographique’’ in Bazin 1997, 63–80. Begun in 1957, the film would not be completed until three years later, and it was seen by only 30,000 viewers in an exclusive Paris run. In Noël Calef ’s novel, Julien Courtois assassinates a usurer to hide the embezzlement of his wife’s fortune, a wife who pursues him with an invasive love. She turns against him during the investigation, convinced that he spent the weekend with another woman. All the documents mentioned come from the dossier conserved at the cnc by the commission of classification, whose archives can be consulted. See his interview with Les Cahiers du cinéma, reprinted in Bergala 1985. At the time of the film’s public premiere, Godard declared that to show the OAS torturing ‘‘would have been too easy: at that moment, it was the fln that was more appealing and it was more meaningful for what I wanted to do to show the fln practicing torture and to merely suggest that the French were doing it as well . . . I’m not taking a side.’’ The success of Les Amants in 1958, after that of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud in 1957, confirmed for producers the ‘‘solidity’’ of Louis Malle’s talent.

The Women of the New Wave 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I thank François Albéra for having given me this document. We can add to this list the first two feature-length films by Marcel Hanoun: Une simple histoire (1958) and Le Huitième jour (1960). Vadim, first, with Sait-on jamais (1957), then Pierre Kast, in La Morte-saison des amours (1961), will perceptibly modify Arnoul’s image. Mocky, speaking at a screening of Un couple at the Forum des images in 2004. Simon here is cited in Loshitzky 1995, 136. The reference is to Marivaux’s Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730). This test, like the temperature method called ‘‘Ogino,’’ (named after the doctor who invented it) claimed to allow women to ‘‘master their fertility’’ by foreseeing their ovulation period in view of not becoming pregnant. Contraception, at

239

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8

240 9

10 11

that time, remained a major taboo in French society, with hundreds of women dying from complications after clandestine abortions each year, as the beautiful film by Marianne Otéro, Histoire d’un secret (2002), fortunately reminds us. In 1956, Jacques Derogy, a journalist at L’Express, denounced the scandal of clandestine abortions in an investigative article published under the title of ‘‘Children Despite Us,’’ causing public protest from both Catholics and Communists. The legalization of contraception would not be voted in until ten years later, in 1967. It wasn’t until 1975 after many struggles (Planned Parenthood, Movement for the Right to Abortion and Contraception [mlac]) that abortion was legalized in France, bringing up the rear in northern Europe in this domain. Godard’s film, like most New Wave films (with the notable exception of the precursor Alexandre Astruc’s Les Mauvaises rencontres in 1955), passes lightly over the question, since the heroine uses the test with the opposite aim than the one sought by ‘‘real women’’ who used it in those days: she wants a child (see Giroud 1958). Given the French state’s concern with increasing the birthrate at the end of the 1950s, the choice of a female character obsessed with the desire to have a child may appear an unusual provocation. This infidelity of Angela’s was undoubtedly too hard to digest for the popular audience: the photo-novella based on the film by the monthly Festival film (n. 8, December 15, 1961) adroitly erases this turn of events. Like all periodizations, by definition artificial even if justified, the one that I propose in this book (first films made between 1956 and 1962) leads me to set aside works that derive more or less from the same logic, in this case the other Godard films from the ‘‘Karina years’’: Une Femme mariée (1963), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville (1965), and Pierrot le fou (1965). See the di√erence in tone between Madame Bovary and L’Education sentimentale. Just as invisible was the only New Wave film directed by a woman, Paule Delsol’s La Dérive, which appears in the 1962 dictionary of the Cahiers du cinéma with this commentary: ‘‘An entirely independent production, starring Jean-François Calvé and Barbara Laage. In principle, this film could be a sequel to Bergman’s Monika, with the same heroine, three years later.’’ Actually, the film, whose main character is played by a nonprofessional (Jacqueline Vandal), would not be released until November 1963, and it arrived, as it were, poised for a quick getaway. It was the first film of Paule Delsol (her second and last, Ben et Bénédicte, dates from 1972), who was the script girl on Tru√aut’s Les Mistons and later an assistant and then screenplay writer. The film recounts the sexual and amorous encounters of a girl ‘‘adrift’’ at Palavas, without illusions, without guilt, and without any other horizon except her refusal to have the same fate as her mother and her sister, harassed by household tasks and raising children. Filmed outside in the dunes of the Narbonais coast and with a very free tone, the invisibility of this astonishing film confirms that women’s films were null and void in the context of the New Wave.

Notes to Chapter Nine 12

13

14

15

9

From the dialogue, entitled ‘‘Hiroshima, notre amour,’’ between Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer (Cahiers du cinéma, n. 97, July 1959, pp. 1–18). Marcel Hanoun was able to experiment outside commercial norms, thanks to financial support from television; very close to cinéma- vérité, Une simple histoire was content to follow a young woman and her little daughter wandering in Paris in search of housing and work. One of the originalities of the film, shot entirely in natural decor, is the constant presence of the young woman’s interior voice that comments, in the tone of an objective description, neither indignant nor resigned, on the miniscule events in the endless and hopeless wandering that we are watching. An unembellished testimony on the ordinary distress of a woman alone with a child in the anonymity of the ‘‘modern’’ big city, a place where traditional solidarities have disappeared, the story is told in flashback after the mother and daughter have been taken in by a woman who sees them sleeping in a no man’s land in the basement of her low-income apartment building. This film-essay, as modest in its means as it is rigorous in its composition (see Burch 1969, 119–31), can be viewed as a kind of materialist and feminist counterpoint to Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion. Les Fiches du cinéma, created in 1934 by the Centrale catholique du cinéma, became an autonomous publication in 2002. They are used by the BIFI Internet site. In postwar cinema, this treatment was reserved for young actresses. Those who had already proven themselves, like Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, or Michèle Morgan had the right to real characters, and their aura (as their popular and critical success proves) never had anything to do with the exhibition of their ‘‘physical gifts.’’

Jeanne Moreau 1

2

3

On the other hand, Godard’s or Tru√aut’s voice-over, when it is that of the male protagonist in the first person, functions like an interior monologue that reinforces the viewer’s empathy (Le Petit soldat, Tirez sur le pianiste, and Jules et Jim). Godard uses the other classical register of the voice-over—that of the sujet-supposé-savoir—always masculine, of course, in Vivre sa vie to comment on Nana’s story. The plot summary by the two sociologists already involves a rereading of the film that privileges the positive aspects of the character of an emancipated woman at the expense of other, more negative aspects that are very present in the film—in particular, the character’s demonization at the end. Aebischer and Dayan-Herzbrun 1986, 147–59. Elsewhere the article emphasizes B.B.’s role as a model for lower- and middle-class women.

241

Notes to Chapter Ten

10

Brigitte Bardot

1

2

3

4

242

11

Sincere thanks to Ginette Vincendeau, with whom I wrote the first version of this chapter. Bardot had received threats from the OAS at the end of 1961. She responded to them with an open letter to L’Express. In it she denounced the racket of which she was the victim and declared that she refused to give in to them. In a gesture typical of auteur cinema, Louis Malle radically transformed the initial project of an adaptation of a play by Noel Coward, Private Lives, by proposing that the producer write an original screenplay with Jean-Paul Rappeneau inspired by the life of B.B. (see the archives on Vie privée at the BIFI). In this regard, it is clear that the film’s auteurs borrow the most worn-out gossip from the tabloid press about Brigitte Bardot, even though it was contradicted by biographical and autobiographical documents. Bardot’s claim of liberty in her love life was of a completely di√erent nature than that portrayed in the beginning of the film. This anecdote refers to Christine Gouze-Rénal. It should be made clear that this misogynist gossip is, at the very least, a travesty of the truth: she was already Bardot’s ‘‘favorite producer’’ when the actress got involved with Trintignant in 1956 (see Bardot 1996, 117; 126).

The Independent Filmmakers of the Left Bank 1

2 3

4

We had to wait until 1991 and the work of philosopher Alain Brossat on the shaven-headed women for this unglorious episode of the Liberation, which mostly a√ected women of modest means, to become the subject of academic research. The words of the song were written by Varda. In this pastiche of silent film made by Varda along with her gang of New Wave friends, we recognize Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Sami Frey. The ‘‘private joke’’ aspect is typical of the new generation’s artistic practices, which claim the right to only address peers. Her allusion to Resnais undoubtedly concerns L’Année dernière à Marienbad (screenplay by Robbe-Grillet), which had just come out, and not Hiroshima mon amour (screenplay by Duras), which was entirely based on the ‘‘miracle’’ of an encounter.

Conclusion 1

Known only by connoisseurs, ‘‘the Four Aces’’ is a name for a group whose domination extends well beyond these periodicals, in particular in the commissions for advances on box o≈ce receipts (for a critique à la Bourdieu of French cinephilia, see Laurent Jullier, Qu’est-ce qu’un bon film? [2002]). In the

Notes to Conclusion

realm of French film criticism, they make up what Bourdieu (1979) defines as distinguished taste. The recent ‘‘polemic on criticism’’ (October-December 1999) is a case in point. The polemic was initiated by filmmakers whose ambition was to make ‘‘quality’’ movies that were accessible to a broad audience (Tavernier, Leconte), thus going against the cinephilic critics. This polemic was settled by an overwhelming victory for the critics and took up an impressive number of pages throughout the press for several months. Initiated by a letter from Patrice Leconte to his colleagues at arp (Association des auteursréalisateurs-producteurs) complaining of the contempt shown by the critics from ‘‘the Four Aces’’ for ‘‘French, popular, commercial, mass audience cinema,’’ the confrontation became one between ‘‘auteur cinema’’ versus ‘‘quality’’ cinema, accused of not being ‘‘true cinema,’’ which is to say modern art worthy of the name, where each work is supposed to be identifiable to an original, innovative, and transgressive style, as in literature, painting, or music.

243

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251

Index

abortion: French attitudes concerning, 239 n.7; in Les Mauvaises rencontres, 84–88 A bout de souΔe, 5, 236 n.4, 237 n.14; car motif in, 16–17, 113; criticism of, 43–44, 52–55; masculine alter ego in, 100, 112–16, 136; modernity in, 112– 16, 127; romanticism in, 98, 127; woman’s image in, 154, 160, 164–65, 179–80, 216 Adieu Philippine, 20, 118–20, 127, 219, 237 n.15, 239 n.12 A double tour, 165, 169, 236 n.4 Aëms, Agathe, 169–70 Aimée, Anouk, 116; in A bout de souΔe, 116; in Astruc’s films, 83, 85, 87–88;

in Les Drageurs, 110, 112; as New Wave actress, 150–51, 170 Ajym film company, 38, 238 n.5 Algerian War: New Wave cinema and, 119–20, 133; in Le Petit soldat, 134– 39; Resnais and, 212, 216; Varda’s films and, 218–19 Alleg, Henri, 137 Amants, Les, 90, 181, 236 nn.4, 7; Les Combat dans l’île compared with, 141; criticism of, 42–43, 46–47, 51; mass vs. elite culture in, 67; Moreau’s performance in, 185, 188–92; romanticism in, 98; woman’s image in, 10, 17, 147, 149 ‘‘amorality’’ of New Wave cinema, 43–44

Index

254

Amour de poche, 72 Anderson, Harriet, 33 Andrew, Dudley, 3 androgyny: of Chabrol’s heroes, 103–6; in Godard’s films, 154 Année dernière à Marienbad, L’,10, 235 n.3, 236 n.4, 237 n.14; criticism of, 43–44; filmmaker’s alter ego in, 100; masculine perspective in, 124–27; mass culture and, 67; realism and art in, 55–58; Resnai’s work on, 216–17 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 185, 197–98 archaism, in New Wave cinema, 106 Archimbaud, 85 Arnoul, Françoise, 74–75, 88, 150–51, 166, 239 n.3 art and politics: male creativity and, 129–31; in New Wave cinema, 41– 42, 235 n.1 Arts (journal): L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed in, 56–57, 60; Bardot discussed in, 205; Et Dieu créa la femme discussed in, 199; Mocky interview in, 110–11; on Moreau, 191–92; New Wave cinema discussed in, 52, 65, 178; on Riva, 176–77; Tru√aut’s articles in, 25–26; Tru√aut’s films reviewed in, 107–8 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 236 n.4; heroic masculinity in, 100; Moreau’s performance in, 184–88, 196–98; politics in, 131–33; romanticism in, 98; woman’s image in, 17, 46, 169 Association des auteurs-réalisateursproducteurs, 242 n.1 Assomoir, L’,103 Astruc, Alexandre, 29, 36, 79, 237 n.2; male gaze and women’s emancipation in films of, 82–94; women in films of, 149–50, 181 Aubriant, Michel, 56, 64, 164 Audé, Françoise, 46, 201 Audiberti, Jacques, 29–32 Audran, Stéphane, 150

Audry, Jacqueline, 169–70 Aumont, Jacques, 208 Auriol, Jean-Georges, 78, 237 n.2 Aurore, L’, 65–66; Astruc’s films reviewed in, 91, 93; Godard’s films reviewed in, 157; Jules et Jim reviewed in, 59; Kast’s films reviewed in, 76; New Wave cinema reviewed in, 49– 50, 65–66; Tru√aut’s films reviewed in, 107 Autant-Lara, 33, 200 auteur cinema: Bardot and, 200–201, 204–9; Godard’s Vivre sa vie as, 64– 65; heroes of, 67–69; legal provisions for, 36–37; masculine creation of women in, 149–53; modern woman in, 179–80; Moreau’s performances in, 186–88, 197–98; New Wave legacy and, 221–24; politics of, 25– 28, 121–24; state funding of, 34–37 Averty, Jean-Chrostophe, 119 Avril, Anne-Marie, 51 Ayfre, Amédée, 27 Aznavour, Charles, 100, 107–9, 111–12 Babette s’en va-t-en-guerre, 200 Baby, Yvonne, 56, 79, 202 Baie des anges, La, 100, 116–18 Balzac, Honoré de, 36 Bande à parte, 3 Bardot, Brigitte, 9, 88; class politics and image of, 214 n.3; French critics’ view of, 33, 44–46; Godard and, 163–64, 206–9; in Le Mépris, 206–9; mass culture image of, 14, 43, 61, 67– 69, 181–83, 201–9; New Wave cinema and, 150–51, 178–79, 198–209; threats against, 242 n.1; in Vie privée, 201–6, 242 n.3 Baroncelli, Jacques: on Astruc, 91; on Chabrol, 102; on Doniol-Valcroze’s films, 80–81; on Godard’s films, 135, 158; on Hiroshima Mon Amour, 48, 50; on L’Année dernière à Marienbad,

Index

56–58; on Rivette, 129; on Varda, 62, 217 Barrot, Olivier, 26 Barthes, Roland, 24, 101–2 Baudelaire, Charles, 127 Bazin, André, 3, 232 n.3, 237 n.2, 237 n.5; Catholic Church and, 22, 128– 29; film criticism of, 78; ideology of, 128; political writing of, 22–28, 41 Beau masque, 71 Beau Serge, Le, 100–106, 237 n.15, 238 n.5; criticism of, 47; government funding for, 35; popular feminine motif in, 164–69; romanticism in, 98 Beauvoir, Simone de, 10, 19, 46, 70, 181 Bécaud, Gilbert, 169 Beck, Béatrix, 172, 174–75 Bel Age, Le, 72–74, 77–78, 179 Belles images, Les, 19–20 Bellon, Loleh, 73 Belmondo, Jean-Paul: in A bout de souffle, 16–17, 113, 154; in A double tour, 165; in Léon Morin, prêtre, 174; Moreau and, 193; as New Wave actor, 100; in Une femme est une femme, 160–63 Benedek, Laszlo, 172 Ben et Bénédicte, 240 n.11 Bergala, Alain, 153 Berger, Nicole, 109, 112 Bergman, Ingmar, 32–33 Bergstrom, Janet, 153 Berton, Simone, 95–97 Bessègues, André, 47, 60 Bidault, Georges, 235 n.8 bildungsroman, Les Cousins as, 104–5 Blain, Gérard, 100–105 Blier, Bernard, 169 Blondin, Antoine, 37, 82 Blue Angel, The, 29, 153 Bocaccio 70, 141 Bonjour tristesse (film), 16, 113 Bonjour tristesse (novel), 14, 20 Bonnel, René, 35

Bonnes Femmes, Les, 20, 147, 150, 165– 69, 236 n.9, 237 n.15 Borde, Raymond, 1 Bory, Jean-Louis, 56–57, 65, 176–77, 190–91, 205 Boulangère de Monceau, La, 121–22 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 5–7; cinephilia theory and, 32–33; distinguished taste concept of, 242 n.1; mass vs. elite culture and, 18, 21, 114 Bourseiller, Antoine, 219 Brassart, Alain, 81, 174 Brasseur, Pierre, 110, 169 Bremont, Claude, 95–97 Bresson, Robert, 110, 131–32 Brialy, Jean-Claude, 73, 100–103, 160– 64, 170, 242 n.3 Bride sur le coup, La, 200, 236 n.4 Brion, Françoise, 73, 79, 81, 143, 150, 178 Brook, Peter, 185, 192–93 Brooks, Louise, 153 Buache, Freddy, 1 Burch, Noël, 8, 31, 97, 175 Bureau, Patrick, 176 Butte-Chaumont school, 119 Cahiers du cinéma: American actresses discussed in, 16; American cinema discussed in, 41; Astruc’s films discussed in, 89–92; auteur cinema and, 38–40; Et Dieu créa la femme, 199; early influences on, 81, 210, 237 n.2; economics of filmmaking in, 38–39; editorial politics of, 25–28; eroticism discsussed in, 29–30, 32–33; founding of, 78, 232 n.2; Godard’s articles in, 135–36; Hiroshima mon amour discussed in, 211–15; history of New Wave in, 3; Kast’s relations with, 77; on Le Mépris, 207; ‘‘Love at the Movies’’ issue of, 31–32; masochism as theme in, 98–99; New Wave criticism in, 1–2, 43–45, 54, 179, 232

255

Index

256

Cahiers du cinéma (cont.) n.1; as one of ‘‘Four Aces’’ of French cinephilia, 222, 242 n.1; patriarchal images in, 110; politics and art in, 42; Riva discussed in, 172; state role in cinema discussed in, 39; ‘‘Women in Cinema’’ issue of, 29–30; ‘‘young Turks’’ at, 99–100 Calef, Noël, 132, 172 Camus, Albert, 71, 96 Camus, Marcel, 85 Canard enchainé , Le (journal), 44, 50, 53, 58; Bardot discussed in, 204–5; Chabrol’s work discussed in, 101; Tru√aut’s films reviewed in, 107 Candide (journal), 55, 57–58 Cannes Film Festival, New Wave cinema at, 2, 42–43, 48–52, 75–76, 191– 92 Capdenac, Michel, 76–77, 159 Carné, Marcel, 14–15, 23, 46, 116; women’s view of, 146–47 Carole, Martine, 150 Carrefour, 49–50, 53, 165 Carrière de Suzanne, La, 121–24 cars, as New Wave motif, 16–17, 113, 130–31 Carta, Jean, 102, 164, 204 ‘‘Carte du Tendre,’’ 10 Cassel, Jean-Pierre, 156 Catholic Church: Bazin’s adherence to, 22, 128–29; in Chabrol’s films, 103, 238 n.7; hostility to New Wave films in, 46–47, 60–61 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 185, 193 Cavalier, Alain, 133, 139–41 Cayatte, André, 87–88, 145, 149, 181 Cayrol, Jean, 212, 216 Center for the Study of Mass Communication, 147 Centrale Catholique du Cinéma, 60, 173, 241 n.14 Centre National du Cinéma, 35, 39 Cerval, Claude, 105

Cervoni, Albert, 64, 80 Ce soir ou jamais, 236 n.9 Chabrol, Claude: academic interest in, 2; Ajym company of, 38; as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, 232 n.3; film critics’ view of, 47–48, 101–6; Godard and, 16; influences on, 121; Lafont and, 164–69; masochism as theme for, 99; state funding for films of, 35, 39; women in films of, 81, 112, 150; women’s view of, 146–47 Chaos, Les, 20 Chaperon, Sylvie, 70 Chapier, Henri, 61–62, 64–65, 76 Chapsal, Madelieine, 146–49 Charensol, Georges, 59, 74, 79 Charrier, Jacques, 15–16, 100, 110–12, 202 Chauvet, Louis, 48, 66, 91; on A bout de souΔe, 53–55; on Chabrol, 102; on Tru√aut, 107 Chazal, Robert, 45, 59, 84–86 Christian personalism, influence on New Wave of, 22, 27, 37, 233 n.1 Ciantar, Michel, 56, 66, 91, 157–58 ciné-clubs, development of, 22–23 CinémAction, 3 ‘‘cinéma de papa,’’ 169–70 Cinéma et moi, Le, 82 Cinémonde, 234 n.3, 237 n.16; Astruc’s films discussed in, 89; Godard’s films discussed in, 68; on Jules et Jim, 196– 97; on Malle’s films, 189–90; ‘‘modern woman’’ in cinema discussed in, 180–84; New Wave criticism in, 15 cinephilia: L’Année dernière à Marienbad and, 126–27; democratization and legitimation and, 22–28; ‘‘Four Aces’’ of, 222, 242 n.1; masculinity and eroticism and, 28–33 cinephilic journals, criticism of New Wave in, 235 n.3 ‘‘Cinépsychopathia sexualis’’ concept, in Cahiers du cinéma, 31–32

Index

class politics: Bardot’s image and, 201– 9; in Chabrol’s work, 165, 168–69; democratization and legitimation and, 22–28; gender roles and, 13, 28; in Kast’s films, 73–78; mass culture vs. elite culture and, 18–21; New Wave representations of, 4–7; in Vailland’s work, 71–72; women in New Wave cinema and, 146–49 Cléo de 5 à 7, 44, 67, 150, 190, 236 n.4, 237 n.14; feminism in, 61–63, 217– 20 Climats, 172 Cluny, Geneviève, 104–5, 156 Cocinor (film company), 238 n.8 Cocteau, Jean, 185 Coeur battant, Le, 81, 100 Coggio, Roger, 169 Cold War, New Wave cinema and, 22– 23, 41–42, 70–94, 130–31, 144 Collet, Jean, 62, 119, 135 Combat (journal): Astruc’s work reviewed in, 92; on auteur cinema, 64–65; Godard’s films reviewed in, 157; Hiroshima Mon Amour reviewed in, 53; on Kast’s Mort-Saison des amours, 76; L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed in, 56–57; New Wave cinema reviewed in, 44; Tru√aut’s work reviewed in, 107; on Vie privée, 204; women actresses of New Wave discussed in, 151–52; on women film makers, 61–63 Combat dans l’ìle, Les, 98, 100, 139–41 Communications (journal), 95–97 Communism, New Wave cinema and, 41–42 Contes moreaux, 121 contraception, in Une femme est une femme, 239 n.7 Coquillat, Michelle, 24, 93, 97–98, 175, 198, 217, 223 Coup de berger, Le, 38 Cousins, Les, 100–106, 236 n.4, 237 n.14,

238 n.5; criticism of, 43–44, 47–48; Mocky’s films compared with, 110– 11; romanticism in, 98; woman’s image in, 123, 167; women’s view of, 146–47 Coward, Noel, 242 n.2 creativity, as male preorgative in French culture, 24 Creton, Laurent, 34–35, 223 Crime de M. Lange, Le, 166 Croix, La, 47, 49–51, 86 cultural studies of New Wave cinema: gender issues in, 7–10; mass culture vs. elite culture and, 18–21, 69; representations in, 4–7. See also sociocultural theory Curtelin, Jean, 1 Dacquemine, Jacques, 165 Daney, Serge, 25–26 Darrieux, Danielle, 171, 241 n.15 Dauphin, Claude, 85, 88 d’Aurevilly, Barbey, 82 David, Mario, 167 de Baecque, Antoine, 3, 7, 16; on cinematic erotomania, 28, 32–33; on women in New Wave films, 145 de Broca, Philippe, 156–57 Décoin, Henri, 175 de Gaulle, Charles, 4, 35, 235 n.8 de Givray, Claude, 29 Deleuze, Gilles, 238 n.2 Delon, Alain, 100 Delsol, Paule, 240 n.11 democratization, legitimation and, 22– 28 Demy, Jacques, 17, 100, 116–18, 151, 211, 238 n.2 Deneuve, Catherine, 78 Denon, Vivant, 189, 191 Dénonciation, La, 81–82, 98, 141–44 Dérive, La, 240 n.11 Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace, Les, 188, 194 Dernières vacances, Les, 80

257

Index

258

Derogy, Jacques, 239 n.7 Derrida, Jacques, 7 Des gens sans importance, 166 ‘‘Déshabillage d’une petite-bourgeoise sentimentale,’’ 30–31 Deuxième sexe, Le, 70 de Vilaine, Anne-Marie, 212, 216 de Villalonga, José Luis, 190, 219 de Villemorin, Louise, 181, 189 Dialogue des carmélites, Les, 185 diegetic sounds, French cinema’s use of, 82–84, 88, 237 n.3 Dietrich, Marlene, 29, 118, 153 Disprezzo, Il, 206 Dimanches de Ville-d’Avray, Les, 236 n.4 distance, New Wave cinema and role of, 6 documentary filmmaking, ‘‘Group of Thirty’’ school and, 210–11 Dolce vita, La, 203 Domarchi, Jean, 107, 172, 179–80 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 121, 234 n.4; alter ego in films of, 100; on Chabrol, 164; film criticism by, 52, 66–67; Kast and, 72–73; Les Mauvaises rencontres reviewed by, 86–87; libertine tradition and male empathy in films of, 78–82, 94; modern woman in films of, 179; on Riva, 172; tragic masculinity in films of, 141–44; on women in cinema, 30–31, 45 Dort, Bernard, 65, 141–42, 194 Douchet, Jean, 3, 52 Douy, Max, 85 Dragueurs, Les, 43, 98, 100, 110–12, 236 n.4 Drôle de guerrer des sexes du cinéma français, La, 31, 97 Dubois, Marie, 109, 150 Dubreuilh, Simone, 74; on A bout de souΔe, 44, 53; on Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 46, 132; film criticism of, 48– 49, 51, 74 Duran, Michel, 107, 204

Duras, Marguerite, 50–52, 170, 172, 181, 192–93; Resnais and, 211–17 Dutourd, Jean, 53, 165 Dyer, Richard, 9, 150 d’Yvoire, Jean, 51, 62, 86–87, 237 n.5 d’Yvonne, Jean, 79 Eau à la bouche, L’, 78–79, 165, 169, 179 economic conditions: gender roles and, 13, 233 n.3; New Wave representations and, 4–7; solidarity of auteur filmmakers and, 38–40 Ecran français, L’, 41, 82 Ecrits intimes, 71–72 ‘‘Ecrivains de touhours’’ literary series, 71 Editions de la Table Ronde, 84 Editions de Seuil, 71 elite culture: in A bout de souΔe, 114–15; Bardot’s media image and, 203–6; mass culture vs., 18–21 Elle (magazine), 68 emancipated woman: Bardot as symbol of, 200–209, 242 n.3; in Cléo de 5 à 7, 217–20; Moreau as symbol of, 196– 98; Riva as example of, 170–77, 214– 15 En cas de malheur, 33, 200 Enclos, L’, 236 n.9 Enfants du Paradis, Les, 116 enunciation, role in Astruc’s films of, 83–94 eroticism: of Bardot, 199–201; cinephilia and masculinity and, 28–33; of women in New Wave cinema, 150– 53; women in New Wave cinema and, 149–50. See also sexuality Esposito, Gianni, 73, 100, 131 Esprit, L’, 233 n.1 Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre, 5, 115–16 Et Dieu créa la femme, 236 n.4; critical reception of, 33, 44–46, 67–68, 199– 201, 211; mass culture and impact of, 14, 202; sexuality in, 43–44, 199–200; woman’s image in, 145, 170, 198

Index

Etranger, L’, 96–97, 138 ‘‘Eurydice at Marienbad,’’ 56–57 Eva, 154, 182 Evian Accords, 133, 212 Express, L’, 74, 232 n.1; Bardot discussed in, 44–46; Bardot’s letter to, 242 n.1; Cayatte’s articles in, 145–46; Godard’s films reviewed in, 53, 157; ‘‘Mademoiselle New Wave’’ article in, 145–46, 178; on Moreau, 191; New Wave cinema discussed in, 11–13, 15; Varda’s films discussed in, 217 Fabre, Jacqueline, 218 familial politics, gender roles in New Wave cinema and, 13, 148–49, 233 n.3 Farceur, Le, 236 n.9 Farchy, Joëlle, 35 feminism: Astruc’s films and, 82–94; independent ‘‘Left Bank’’ filmmakers and, 208–9; Jules et Jim and, 196–97, 241 n.2; in Kast’s films, 76–77; in Malle’s Les Amants, 189–92; mass culture and emergence of, 18–21; in New Wave cinema, 14–16, 45–46; in Varda’s films, 61–63, 217–20. See also emancipated woman Femmes savants, Les, 175 Ferrier, André, 55 fertility test, in Une femme est une femme, 160, 239 n.7 Festival film, 151–53 fetishism: in A bout de souΔe, 114–15; cinephilia theory and, 28–33; in Une femme est une femme, 160 Feu follet, 98 Fiches du cinéma, Les, 241 n.14 Figaro, Le: A bout de souΔe reviewed in, 53–55; ; L’Année dernière à Marienbad reviewed in, 58; Astruc’s work reviewed in, 91; film criticism in, 15, 66; Godard’s films reviewed in, 157; Hiroshima Mon Amour reviewed in,

48; on Jules et Jim, 194 Les Mauvaises rencontres reviewed in, 86; Tru√aut’s films reviewed in, 107 Figaro littéraire, Le, 44, 50–52, 54; Astruc’s films discussed in, 92; Chabrol’s work discussed in, 101; Doniol-Valcroze’s films reviewed in, 80; on Godard’s films, 158–59; Kast’s films reviewed in, 77 film noir genre, New Wave cinema and, 99 Films du Carrosse, 37–38 Films du Losange, 37 film theory: mass culture vs. elite culture in, 22–28; New Wave cinema and, 1–2 Flaubert, Gustave, 18–19, 93, 127; Chabrole influenced by, 165–69 Flaud, Jacques, 35, 39, 235 nn.3, 8 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 218 ‘‘Four Aces’’ of French cinephilia, 222, 242 n.1 400 Coups, Les, 100, 107–9, 236 n.4, 237 n.14; auteur cinema and, 38; cinephilia theory and, 2; critical assessment of, 44, 48–52; masculine alter ego in, 100; masochism in, 98, 106–9 Fourré-Courmeray, Michel, 235 n.8 France Catholique, La, 47, 58, 60 France-Nouvelle, 64–65, 80 France-Observateur, 147, 158; A bout de souΔe discussed in, 52–54; L’Année dernière à Marienbad reviewed in, 58; Astruc’s work reviewed in, 86, 91; on Chabrol, 164; class politics and mass culture discussed in, 20–21; DoniolValcroze and, 66, 80, 141–42; on Jules et Jim, 194; New Wave film criticism in, 50, 168–69; state funding for cinema discussed in, 39; women in cinema discussed in, 45 France-Soir, 54, 59, 233 n.1; on A bout de souΔe, 44; New Wave cinema criticism in, 48–49

259

Index

Franju, Georges, 42, 109–10, 172, 175– 77, 211 French Association of Independent Creators of Cinema, 101 French Communist Party, 41–42, 235 n.1; artists’ rights campaign by, 76– 77; intellectuals and, 71–72 ‘‘French quality’’ school of film, 33 Freudian analysis, of New Wave cinema, 98–99, 238 n.3 Frey, Sami, 202, 242 n.3 Frodon, Jean-Michel, 2, 236 n.7 Fuller, Samuel, 57

260

Gabin, Jean, 166 Gainsbourg, Serge, 202 Galland, Jean, 110 Gallimard (publishers), 237 n.2 Garbo, Greta, 29 Garson, Claude, 59, 65–66, 91–92 Gauthier, Guy, 3, 210–11 Gégau√, Paul, 120, 165–66 Gélin, Daniel, 74–75, 78, 90, 169 gender relations: in Chabrol’s films, 102–6; economic conditions and, 13, 233 n.3; femininity’s emergence in New Wave and, 7–10, 14–16; in Godard’s films, 153–64; malecentered editorial politics of Cahiers du cinéma and, 28–33; male hero of New Wave cinema and, 16–17; mass culture vs. elite culture and, 18–21; media surveys of New Wave and, 11– 13, 232 n.1, 233 n.2. See also women Giannoli, Paul, 164 Gillain, Anne, 9, 106–7 Girardon, Michèle, 122 Girardot, Annie, 90, 180–81, 194, 198 Giroud, François, 7, 11–13, 17, 173–74 Gledhill, Christine, 219 Godard, Jean-Luc, 242 n.3; A bout de souΔe of, 43, 52–55, 112–16; academic interest in, 2; Bardot and, 33, 178–79, 206–9; critical assessment of,

57; as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, 111, 232 n.3; female heroines of, 16, 69, 81; film criticism of, 110–11, 179; on Hiroshima mon amour, 172, 215– 16; influences on, 121; Karina and, 68, 153–64, 240 n.9; masochism as theme for, 99; narrative regimes and gender in work of, 9; Le Petit soldat of, 129, 134–39, 144; politics in films of, 133; Rohmer and, 120–24; state funding for, 39; Vivre sa vie by, 63– 67; voice-over used by, 241 n.1; women in films of, 149–50, 178–79 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 97–98 Godelureaux, Les, 236 n.9 Goodis, David, 108 Gouze-Rénal, Christine, 181, 242 n.4 Gozlan, Gérard, 128–31 Gravey, Fernande, 169 Grémillon, Jean, 73 ‘‘Group of Thirty’’ school, emergence of, 210–11, 235 n.4 Grunenwald, 83 Guernica, 236 n.8 Guitry, Sacha, 82, 110 Guyot, Paul, 48 Hahn, Jess, 100 Hanoun, Marcel, 172–73, 239 n.2, 241 n.13 Harden, Jacques, 116–17 Hardy, Françoise, 14 Hawks, Howard, 25–28 Hayward, Susan, 4 Hemingway, Ernest, 144 heroic masculinity: creation of women by, 149–53; as filmmaker’s alter ego, 99–100; in Jules et Jim, 195–97; masochism and, 98–99, 238 n.2; in New Wave cinema, 16–17, 81–94; nostalgia for, 128–44 Hess, John, 27–28 Higgins, Lynn, 5, 125–26, 213 Hiroshima mon amour, 181, 236 n.4; cin-

Index

ephilia theory and, 2; critical reception of, 48–53, 55–56, 67–68; emancipated woman image in, 170–77; politics in, 148; Resnais-Duras collaboration on, 211–17; sexuality in, 43–44; woman’s image in, 147, 150 Histoire des Cahiers du cinéma, 3 Histoire d’un secret, 239 n.7 historiography of New Wave cinema, gender and, 7–10 History of the French New Wave Cinema, A, 3–4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 26–28 ‘‘Hitchcock-Hawksian’’ politics, of New Wave cinema theory, 25–28 Hollywood cinema: cinephilia theory and, 32–33; French public aid politics and receipts from, 36–37, 234 n.1; masochism in, 99; New Wave film theory and, 17, 25–28 Holmes, Diana, 10 homosexuality, New Wave film theory and, 25 Hossein, Robert, 169–70 Hubert-Lacombe, Patricia, 26 Huitième Jour, Le, 172–74, 239 n.2 Humanité-Dimanche, L’, (journal), 47 Humanité, L’, (journal): Astruc’s work reviewed in, 91; Bardot discussed in, 204; Doniol-Valcroze’s films reviewed in, 80; Godard’s films reviewed in, 53–54, 157–58; Jules et Jim reviewed in, 59–61; Kast’s films reviewed by, 76–77; L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed in, 56–57; on Moreau, 188; New Wave film criticism in, 46, 50–51 ‘‘hussards’’ (French right-wing movement), 37, 82, 84–85; New Wave cinema and, 133 Huyssen, Andreas, 18, 69, 127, 209, 219 Ibsen, Henrik, 10, 126 ‘‘Images of Women, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J. L. Godard,’’ 9

individualism, Christian personalism and, 232 n.1 Indochinese War, New Wave cinema and, 132–33 Ingram, Robert, 9 ‘‘In Praise of Politics,’’ 168–69 Inrockuptibles, Les, 222, 242 n.1 Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (idhec), 131 Institute Français d’Opinion Publique (ifop), 11–13, 233 n.1 Irigaray, Luce, 7 Iris (journal), 8 ‘‘It’s Midnight, Dr. Kinsey,’’ 29 Jdanovism, French Communist Party and, 41–42, 76–77, 235 n.1 Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre, 36 Jeander, 80; on Astruc, 92; on Chabrol, 165; on Les Combat dans l’île, 141; on Doniol-Valcroze’s work, 80; Godard’s films reviewed by, 157; on Hiroshima Mon Amour, 53, 56; on Kast’s films, 76; on New Wave cinema, 49–51; Tru√aut’s work reviewed by, 107 Jean-Luc Godard et la société française des années soixante, 5 Jean-Vigo prize, 101 Jeux de l’amour, Les, 156–57, 236 n.9 Joano, Clotilde, 166–67 Jour se lève, Le, 23 Jules et Jim, 236 n.4, 237 n.14; awards for, 185; critical assessment of, 59– 61, 67–68; Moreau’s performance in, 192–97; romanticism in, 98; sexuality in, 43–44; Thérèse Desqueyroux compared with, 177; woman’s image in, 10 Jumpcut, 27–28 Karina, Anna, 138, 242 n.3; Godard and, 68, 153–64, 240 n.9; as New

261

Index

Karina, Anna (cont.) Wave actress, 150, 152–53, 170, 201; in Vivre sa vie, 63–67 Kast, Pierre, 29, 31, 72–80, 94, 121, 179, 237 n.2, 239 n.3; on Hiroshima mon amour, 214 Katherine de Heilbronn, 203 Kiarostami, Abbas, 222 Klein, Mélanie, 116 Kline, T. Je√erson, 10, 125–26 Kosta, Jean, 152 Kristeva, Julia, 7 Krutnik, Frank, 99 Kubler-Vian, Ursula, 73

262

Labarthe, André, 1, 38, 91, 165–66 Lachize, Samuel, 42, 54; on Chabrol’s films, 102; Doniol-Valcroze’s films reviewed by, 80; on Godard, 157–58; on Jules et Jim, 59–61; Kast’s films reviewed by, 77 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 71, 192 Lafont, Bernadette, 79, 102–3, 150, 152; Chabrol and, 164–69 Laforêt, Marie, 150 Lamplight, 24 Lang, André, 44 Lang, Fritz, 206–7 Lang, Jack, 222 Laudenbach, Roland, 82, 84 Laurent, Agnès, 72 Laurent, Jacques, 37, 82, 85 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 100 Leconte, Patrice, 242 n.1 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 75 Lee, Belinda, 112 Leenhardt, Roger, 27, 80 ‘‘Left Bank’’ filmmakers, 109–10, 179, 210–20, 232 n.1 Léglise, Paul, 34 Legrand, Michel, 218–19 Leigh, Vivian, 29 Lelouch, Claude, 17 Lemaire, Philippe, 85

Léon Morin, prêtre, 172, 174–75, 177 Le Royer, Michel, 169 Lesa√re, Roland, 15 Lettres françaises, Les: L’Année derniere à Marienbad discussed in, 56–57; Astruc’s films reviewed in, 87, 92; Chabrol’s work discussed in, 101; Godard’s films reviewed in, 63–64, 159; Kast’s interview in, 75; on Moreau, 188; La Morte-Saison des amours reviewed in, 76; New Wave film criticism in, 46–47, 50, 54; Thérèse Desqueyroux reviewed in, 176 Lettres nouvelles, Les, 86, 101 Leveratto, Jean-Marie, 234 n.3 Levine, Joe, 208–9 Lévy, Raoul, 194 L’Herbier, Marcel, 36–37, 84 Liaisons dangereuses, Les (film), 43, 67, 185, 192–93, 236 n.4 Liaisons dangereuses, Les (novel), 71–72 Liberation: class politics and legacy of, 22–28; French film during, 70–94; Hiroshima mon amour and influence of, 213–17, 242 n.1 Libération (journal): Astruc’s work reviewed in, 92; Chabrol’s films reviewed in, 165; Doniol-Valcroze’s criticism in, 66–67; DoniolValcroze’s films reviewed in, 80; Godard’s films reviewed in, 157; Hiroshima Mon Amour reviewed in, 53, 56; Kasts’ films reviewed in, 74, 76; on Moreau, 188; New Wave cinema reviewed in, 44, 46–51; as one of ‘‘Four Aces’’ of French cinephilia, 222, 242 n.1; Tru√aut’s work reviewed in, 107; Varda interviewed in, 218 Limelight, 166 Loi, La, 71 Lola, 17, 98, 100, 116–18, 151, 236 n.9, 237 n.15, 239 n.11 Lorenzi, Stellio, 119

Index

Losey, Joseph, 57, 154, 182 Loshitzky, Yosepha, 153 Louis-Delluc prize, 185 Lui (magazine), 118 Macabru, Pierre: on Astruc, 92; Godard’s films reviewed by, 53, 157; on Jules et Jim, 61; L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed by, 56; on Malle and Bardot, 204; on Tru√aut, 107 Machine infernale, La, 185 Madame Bovary, 18–19, 149, 166, 190 Magnan, Henry, 86, 111 Magre, Judith, 190 male actors in French cinema, New Wave directors and, 99–100 male gaze: cinephilia theory and, 32– 33; in Jules et Jim, 194–97; masculine creation of women and, 149–53; in Le Petit soldat, 154–64; in Rozier’s films, 118–20; in Une femme est une femme, 158–64; in Vie privée, 202–6; women as mass culture heroines and, 68–69; women’s emancipation and, 82–94 Malle, Louis: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud of, 131–33; auteur cinema and, 38; Bardot and, 179–80, 201–6; Chabrol and, 102; cinephilia theory and works of, 33; mass culture and works of, 61, 68; Moreau and, 151, 171, 185–92, 197–98; New Wave and, 43, 46–47, 84; Vie privée by, 201, 203–6, 242 n.2 Mallet-Joris, Françoise, 14, 19 Malraux, André, 23–24, 35, 49, 144, 233 n.2 Manceaux, Michèle, 53, 217–18 Mann, Claude, 100, 116–18 Mara, Hélène, 181–82 Marais, Jean, 72, 185 Marcelles, Louis, 20–21, 39 Marchand, Corinne, 67, 218 Marcorelles, Louis, 20–21, 158 Marie, Michel, 3, 26, 42, 207, 221, 236 n.7

Marie-Claire (magazine), 68 Marker, Chris, 42, 211 Marquand, Christian, 84, 88–90 marriage: gender roles and, 13, 233 n.3; in New Wave cinema, 175–77 Martin, Michel, 56 Marxism, postwar intellectuals’ view of, 72 Masculin féminin, 5 masculinity in New Wave cinema: L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 124– 27; Chabrol’s films and, 101–6; cinephilia and eroticism and, 28–33; creation of women by, 149–53; DoniolValcroze’s tragic masculinity, 141–44; Franju’s critique of patriarchy, 109– 10; male empathy in A bout de souΔe, 112–16; male hero motif and, 7–10, 16–17, 81–82; Resnais’s films and, 124–27. See also heroic masculinity masochism, in New Wave cinema, 98– 99, 238 n.3 mass culture: in A bout de souΔe, 114– 15; auteur films and, 67–69; Bardot as symbol of, 14, 43, 61, 67–69, 181– 83, 201–9, 242 n.3; elite culture vs., 18–21; heroines in, 67–69; ‘‘modern woman’’ image in, 180–83; women’s emergence in, 14–16 Mastroianni, Marcello, 201–3, 206 Maugue, Anne Lise, 29 Maupassant, Guy de, 88–89 Mauriac, Claude: on Astruc’s films, 86– 87, 92; on Chabrol’s films, 101–2; on Doniol-Valcroze’s films, 80; on Godard’s films, 44, 54, 158–59; on Kast’s films, 77; on Moreau, 194; on New Wave cinema, 51–52; Thérèse Desqueyroux written by, 173, 175–77 Maurin, François, 47, 172–73, 175–76, 204 Maurois, André, 172 Mauvais coups, Les, 71 Mauvaises rencontres, Les, 84–88, 149, 239 n.7

263

Index

264

Mayniel, Juliette, 105–6, 150–52 McCabe, Colin, 9 media coverage of New Wave cinema: Bardot’s image in, 200–201, 242 n.1; 242 n.3; critical reception in, 42–44, 235 n.3; emergence of, 11–13; mass culture and, 68–69, 237 n.16; Vie privée as symbol of, 201–6; women’s emergence in mass culture and, 14– 16 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 103, 113, 115, 172, 174–75 Mendèz-France, Pierre, 4 Mépris, Le, 163–64, 206–9 Mercouri, Melina, 193 Meurisse, Paul, 110 Meusy, Jean-Jacques, 36 Michel, Andrée, 92–93 Michel, Marc, 100, 116 Miller, Gérard, 103 Ministry of Cultural A√airs (France), 34–37 Minnelli, Vincente, 57 misogyny: in A bout de souΔe, 53–55; Bardot’s media image and, 204–9, 242 n.4; in Chabrol’s work, 102–6, 164–69; in Les Combat dans l’île, 140– 41; in Le Dénonciation, 142–44; in Jules et Jim, 60–61; woman-mother motif in New Wave films and, 117– 18 Mistons, Les, 164 Mocky, Jean-Pierre, 100, 109–12, 152 Moderato cantabile, 67, 181, 185, 191– 92, 197–98, 236 n.4 modern art, view of cinema as, 42–44, 55–58, 233 n.3 modernism: in A bout de souΔe, 112–16; of Adieu Phillippine, 118–20; in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 126– 27; in New Wave cinema, 106, 126– 27; women of New Wave and, 178– 80, 197–98 Monde, Le: Astruc’s work reviewed in,

86, 92; Bardot discussed in, 46, 202– 3; Doniol-Valcroze’s films discussed in, 79–81; Godard’s films reviewed in, 135, 158; Hiroshima Mon Amour reviewed in, 48, 50; on Moreau, 188; New Wave cinema reviewed in, 56– 59; as one of ‘‘Four Aces’’ of French cinephilia, 222, 242 n.1; Resnais/ Robbe-Grillet interview in, 124–27; Tru√aut interview in, 107; Varda’s films reviewed in, 217; women in film discussed by, 62–63 Monde de silence, Le, 131 Mondy, Pierre, 169 Monika, 32–33 Monjo, Armand, 51 Monod, Martine, 91 Monroe, Marilyn, cult of, French cinephilia and, 32–33 Montebello, Fabrice, 28 Montfort, Silvia, 236 n.11 Morand, Paul, 146 Moravia, Alberto, 73, 206 Moreau, Jeanne, 9, 17, 61, 116; in Les Amants, 188–92; in Ascenseur pour léchafaud, 132, 184–88; in Jules et Jim, 67–69, 192–97; in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 192–93; Malle and, 151, 171, 185–92; mass culture images of, 180– 83; as ‘‘modern’’ woman, 197–98; as New Wave star, 150, 153–54, 184–98, 201; Riva compared with, 170–72 Morgan, Michèle, 171, 241 n.15 Morgenstern, Ignace, 238 n.8 Morin, Edgar, 1, 5, 95, 147 Morte-Saison des amours, La, 74–79, 151, 236 n.9, 239 n.3 Mossuz-Lavau, Janine, 45 Mounier, Emmanuel, 22, 27, 37, 233 n.1 Mouvement Républicain Populaire (mrp), 235 n.8 Mulvey, Laura, 9, 32 Muriel, 212, 216–17 Musée imaginaire, 35–36

Index

myth, Bazin’s discussion of, 23–24 Mythologies, 24 Neupert, Richard, 3 New Novel, 5, 43; Resnais’s films and, 124–27; women as portrayed in, 14–16 New Wave cinema: academic interest in, 1–2; auteur cinema and legacy of, 221–24; class politics in, 20–21; Cold War politics and, 22–23, 41–42; commercial success of, 43–44, 236 nn.4– 5; cult status of, 2; decline of, 2; definition of, 232 n.1; emergence of, 2–3, 37–38; gender issues in, 7–10; limited success of, 42–44; literature sources on, 1–4; male hero of, 16–17; media surveys on, 11–13, 232 n.1; precursors to, 70–94; right-wing politics and, 128–29; role of state and, 34–37; romanticism and, 97–99; as sociological phenomenon, 11–13; sociological survey of, 95–97; Varda as mother of, 217–20; women directors of, 169–70, 240 n.11 Nimier, Roger, 17, 37, 82, 132–33, 185 Noël, Hubert, 73 Nogueira, Rui, 174 Noiret, Philippe, 236 n.11 Notte, La, 185, 197–98 Nourissier, François, 54 Nous deux film, 176 Nouvelle Heloïse, La, 97 Nouvelle revue française, 82 Nouvelles littéraires, Les, 59, 74, 79, 123 Nouvelle Vague, 3–4 Nouvelle Vague, nouveaux rivages, permanences du récit au cinéma, 1950–1970, 3 Nouvelle Vague, portrait d’une jeunesse, La, 3, 7 Nouvelle Vague, un école artistique, La, 3–4 Nouvel Observateur, Le, 55, 168 novel, New Wave cinema and legacy of, 6 Nuit et Brouillard, 212, 236 n.8

O’Brady, Frédéric, 31–32, 234 n.5 Observateur littéraire, L’, 147 Occupation (of France): DoniolValcroze’s Le Dénonciation, 142–44; Hiroshima mon amour and influence of, 148, 150, 213–17; influence on New Wave of, 70–94, 174–75 Odyssey, Le Mépris and adaptation of, 206–9 Oedipal complex, in New Wave cinema, 98–99, 116–18, 238 n.3 Olvidados, Los, 23 On n’enterre pas le dimanche, 236 n.9 Orfeu negro, 236 n.4 orientalism, 233 n.2 Ory, Pascal, 4, 34–35 Otéro, Marianne, 239 n.7 Page, Geneviève, 72 Pagliero, Marcel, 73 Painlevé, Paul, 235 n.8 Palance, Jack, 206 Paris 1900, 30 Paris-Jour, 48, 56, 66, 91, 157–58 Paris nous appartient, 38, 98, 100, 129– 31, 237 n.15, 239 n.3 Paris-Presse, 233 n.1; L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed in, 56; Le Beau Serge, 164; Hiroshima Mon Amour discussed in, 48–50; Les Mauvaises rencontres reviewed in, 84–86; on Moreau, 188; Vivre sa vie reviewed in, 64; women in cinema discussed in, 45–46 Pascal, Jean-Claude, 82, 85, 88 Pathé cinema, 73 patriarchy, Franju’s critique of, 109–10 Paulhan, Jean, 82 Perec, Georges, 20 Perrier, François, 169 Petit, Pascale, 14–16 Petit matins, Les, 169–70 Petit soldat, Le, 237 n.15; car motif in, 16; culture in, 115; masculine alter

265

Index

266

Petit soldat, Le (cont.) ego in, 100; masochism in, 98; politics in, 129, 134–39; woman’s image in, 63, 154–56 Petit Théâtre, Le, 26–27 Philippe, Claude-Jean, 135 Philippe, Gérard, 184 Picasso, Pablo, 160 Piccoli, Michel, 206 Pierre, José, 200–201 Pierrot le fou, 115, 153, 165 Pinel, Vincent, 36 Plaie et le Couteau, La, 89–94 ‘‘Point de Lendemain,’’ 189 Pointe courte, La, 6, 217, 236 n.11 politics and art: in Les Combat dans l’île, 140–41; heroic masculinity and, 128– 44; Hiroshima Mon Amour controversy and, 49–52; in New Wave cinema, 41–42, 131–44, 235 n.1; in Le Petit soldat, 129, 134–39; Vailland’s contributions to, 71–72 Positif: art and politics in, 42; Astruc’s films discussed in, 92; on Bardot, 200–201; eroticism discsussed in, 29, 32–33; history of, 232 n.2; Kast’s films discussed in, 77; New Wave criticism in, 1–2; politics in, 128; La Tête contre les murs reviewed in, 109; Tru√aut’s films reviewed in, 108 postmodernism, New Wave representations and, 4–7 postwar era, French filmmakers in, 70– 94 Prédal, René, 2, 210 Preminger, Otto, 16 Prévost, Françoise, 73–75, 130, 150, 178 Private Lives (play), 242 n.2 Proie pour l’ombre, La, 84, 87–94, 149, 181, 236 n.9 Propre de l’homme, Le, 236 n.9 prostitution, in New Wave films, 63– 67, 237 n.12 public arts funding: emergence of New

Wave and, 37–40, 222–24; French cinema and politics of, 34–37, 234 nn.1–2, 235 nn.3–4 Pygmalion, 185 Pygmalion ideology, New Wave film actresses and, 150 Quaie des brumes, Le, 166 Queneau, Raymond, 152 Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague, 3 Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, 44–45, 50–51, 85–87, 111 Ramparts de Béguines, Les, 14 Rancho Notorious, 207 Rappeneau, Jean-Paul, 201, 242 n.2 realism: in New Wave films, 73–74; New Wave rejection of, 5, 55–58 Recours en grâce, 172 Regard froid, Le, 71–72 Régent, Roger, 102 Règle du jeu, La, 73, 79 Règles de l’art, Les, 5 Renoir, Jean, 26–27, 110 Repos du guerrier, Le, 14, 182, 200, 236 n.4 representations, cultural history of, 4–7 Resistance, influence on New Wave of, 71–72 Resnais, Alain, 236 nn.8, 11; L’Année derniere à Marienbad of, 56–60, 124– 27; Duras and, 211–17; ‘‘Group of Thirty’’ and, 211; Hiroshima Mon Amour of, 48–52, 68; New Wave cinema and, 42–43; Varda and, 243 n.4; women’s emancipation and films of, 77, 172–77 Revue du cinéma, La, 29, 78, 237 n.2 Rich, Claude, 169 Rideau cramoisi, Le, 82–85, 237 n.4 Rihoit, Catherine, 46, 201–2 Rio Bravo, 207 Riva, Emmanuèle: eroticism of, 150; in Hiroshima mon amour, 152–53, 170–

Index

77, 214–15; mass culture images of, 67, 69, 180–81 Rivette, Jacques: as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, 89, 232 n.3; films of, 38, 129– 31; on Godard, 153; on Hiroshima mon amour, 213–14; influences on, 121 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 57–58, 124–27, 216 Robert, Yves, 85 Robinson, Madeleine, 165, 180 Roche, France, 54, 72, 164 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 59, 194 Rochefort, Christiane, 14, 19 Rochereau, Jean, 47, 86 Rohmer, Eric, 26–27; alter ego in films of, 100; on Chabrol’s work, 102; as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, 89, 232 n.3; Films du Losange, 37; manipulation in films of, 120–24; on Riva, 172 Roman d’un tricheur, Le, 82 romanticism: of A bout de souΔe, 112– 16; of Le Beau Serge, 104; New Wave cinema and, 97–99, 126–27; women in New Wave cinema and, 148–49 Ronet, Maurice, 81–82, 100, 132–33, 185 Roses à crédit, 19 ‘‘Rosmersholm,’’ 126 Ross, Kristin, 4, 15–19, 68, 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 97 Rozier, Jacques, 69, 118–20 Sadoul, Georges, 63–64; L’Année derniere à Marienbad reviewed by, 56– 57; on Chabrol, 101, 164–65; film criticism of, 51, 54; on politics and film, 41–42; Vivre sa vie reviewed by, 63–64; on women in film, 46 Sagan, Françoise, 14, 16–17; Astruc and, 89–90; mass culture vs. elite culture in work of, 18–19 Said, Edward, 233 n.2 Sait-on jamais, 132, 239 n.3

Salachas, Gilbert, 111 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 71, 82, 94 Schell, Maria, 84, 88 Schneider, Betty, 129–30 Schneider, Edgar, 49 Schneider, Romy, 140 Schroeder, Barbet, 122 Seberg, Jean, 16, 113–15, 264–65 Séguin, Louis, 86 Sélection nous deux, 151 Sengissen, Paule, 237 n.5; on Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 132; on DoniolValcroze, 141; film criticism of, 44– 45, 85–86; on Godard, 135, 159–60 Serre, Henri, 140, 194 sexual harassment, in Chabrol’s films, 167–69 sexuality: Bardot as symbol of, 45–46, 199–209; in Et Dieu créa la femme, 45–46, 199–201; gender di√erences in attitudes concerning, 13, 233 n.4; in Godard’s films, 53–55, 161–63; of ‘‘modern woman,’’ 178–80; in Moreau’s performances, 186–92; in New Wave cinema, 7–10, 43–44, 147–49; sociological aspects of New Wave cinema and, 96–97; in Tru√aut’s work, 10 Seyrig, Delphine, 67, 126–27 shaven-headed woman, image in Hiroshima mon amour of, 147, 150, 214–17, 242 n.1 Siclier, Jacques, 1, 37, 62, 91, 160 Sieger, Jacqueline, 140–41 Signe du lion, La, 100, 120–24, 127, 241 n.13 Signes et les prodiges, Les, 19 Signoret, Simone, 171, 181, 241 n.15 Sigurd, Jacques, 15, 47 Simon, William, 153 Singly, François de, 122 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 11 ‘‘socialist realism,’’ New Wave cinema and, 41–42

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Index

268

sociocultural theory: in Hiroshima mon amour, 214–17; Jules et Jim and, 196– 97, 241 n.2; masculine creation of women in New Wave and, 149–53; New Wave cinema and, 5–7, 95–97; women of New Wave cinema and, 147–49, 178–80 Sohn, Anne-Marie, 6 Solleville, Marie-Claire, 30 Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 97–98 Spaak, Charles, 87–88 Spanish Civil War, 144 Stances à Sophie, Les, 19 Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, 9 star studies, New Wave cinema and, 9 state, New Wave cinema and role of, 34–37 Statuees meurent aussi, Les, 212, 236 n.8 Stewart, Alexandra, 73, 75, 79, 150 Streetcar Named Desire, A (film), 29 Studlar, Gaylyn, 118 Subor, Michel, 136–37 Sullerot, Evelyne, 95–97, 147, 168–69 Sylvia, Gaby, 85 Tallenay, Jean-Louis, 85–86, 135, 237 n.5 Tassone, Aldo, 3 Téléciné, 39–40, 140–41, 164 Télérama: L’Année dernière à Marienbad reviewed in, 58; on Doniol-Valcroze, 79, 141; on Godard, 135, 156; on New Wave cinema, 119; on Riva, 176; on women in film, 62 Témoignage chrétien, 102, 204 Terrenoire, Louis, 134 Terre-Nouvelle, La, 233 n.1 Terzie√, Laurent, 16 Tête contre les murs, La, 98, 100, 109–10 Théâtre National Populaire, 184, 214 Thérèse Desqueyroux, 150, 172–73, 175– 77, 211, 236 n.4 Thévenin, Olivier, 26, 39 Thévenot, Jean, 87

Thirard, Paul-Louis, 77 325000 francs, 71–72 Tirez sur le pianiste, 16, 98, 100, 107–8, 127, 236 n.9, 237 n.15 Tórok, Jean-Paul, 108 torture, in Le Petit soldat, 135–39 Toubiana, Serge, 3 Tourbillon, Le, 195–96 ‘‘Tous les garçons et les filles de mon age,’’ 14 Trémois, Claude-Marie, 62, 156, 176 Tricheurs, Les, 14–15, 47, 110–11, 146 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 81, 100, 139– 41, 202 Triolet, Elsa, 19–20 Tru√aut, François: on A bout de souΔe, 113, 239 n.10; academic interest in, 2; alter ego in films of, 100, 164; on Bardot, 33, 45; as Cahiers du cinéma editor, 232 n.3; critical assessment of, 48–52, 59–61, 69; on Et Dieu créa la femme, 199; film criticism of, 25–26, 28, 118; Films du Carrosse and, 37– 38; gender studies’ analysis of, 9–10; Godard and, 16; Guitry and, 82; on Hiroshima mon amour, 211–12; influences on, 121; Malle interview with, 189; masochist theme in films of, 99, 106–9; on mass culture, 20–21, 68; Moreau and, 192–93, 197–98; on New Wave cinema, 39–40; nineteenth-century literary influences on, 36; state funding for, 39; voiceover used by, 241 n.1; women in films of, 81 Turk, Edward, 15, 116 Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé, 131–32 Un couple, 152, 236 n.9 Une aussi longue absense, 236 n.9 Une femme est une femme, 152–53, 155– 64 Une femme mariée, 20, 150 Une vie, 84, 88–89, 236 n.4

Index

Un homme et une femme, 17, 63, 149–50, 236 n.9 Une sacrée salade, 85 Une simple histoire, 239 n.2, 241 n.13 Vacances portugaises, 77–78 Vadim, Roger, 239 n.3; Bardot and, 44– 46, 199–202; mass culture and films of, 69; Moreau and, 192–93; New Wave cinema and, 132, 182, 211; sexuality in films of, 102 Vailland, Elisabeth, 71 Vailland, Roger, 71–72, 74, 94, 168 Vaneck, Pierre, 74–75 Varda, Agnès, 6–7, 37, 42, 190, 211, 242 n.3; feminism in films of, 61–63, 217–20 Vartan, Sylvie, 14 Védrès, Nicole, 30 Venice Film Festival, 46, 55, 85, 162, 165, 188 Ventura, Lino, 169 Vérité, La, 33 Vérité seru Bébé Donge, La, 175, 200 Verneuil, Henri, 166 Vian, Boris, 73–74 Vidal, Marion, 121 Vie conjugale, La, 181 Vie privée, 181, 236 n.4; Bardot’s performance in, 201–6, 209; criticism of, 67–68; mass culture and, 20, 43, 61, 181 Vilar, Jean, 217 Viment, Pascal, 206 Vincendeau, Ginette, 8–9, 170, 185–86, 198–200 Visconti, Luchino, 140 Vitry, Virginie, 73 Vivre sa vie, 63–67, 150, 162–64, 236 n.4, 237 n.14 von Sternberg, Joseph, 118, 153 Voyage en Italie, 3 voyeurism: cinephilia theory and, 28–

33; in Vadim’s Et dieu créa la femme, 45 Weber, Eugen, 103 Werner, Oscar, 194–95 Wicki, Bernard, 78 Williams, Alan, 4 Williams, Tennessee, 184–85 woman-mother motif, 116–18 women: A bout de souΔe and image of, 113–16; in Astruc’s films, 88–94; Cahiers du cinéma discussions of, 29– 33; in Chabrol’s films, 164–69; in Les Combat dans l’île, 140–41; in DoniolValcroze’s films, 81–82; L’Express surveys of, 145–49; film criticism by, 44– 46; as filmmakers, 61–63, 169–70, 240 n.11; in Godard’s films, 153–64; as heroines, 67–69, 147–49; Hiroshima mon amour and image of, 147, 150, 212–17; Jules et Jim and image of, 195–97; in Kast’s films, 71– 78; male gaze and emancipation of, 82–94; masculine creation of, in New Wave cinema, 149–53; mass culture and images of, 14–16, 18–21, 67–69, 180–83; Le Mépris and image of, 207– 9; ‘‘modern women’’ of New Wave, 178–80, 197–98; in New Wave cinema, 7–10, 145–83; in Rohmer’s films, 122–24. See also gender relations; misogyny Wong Kar-wai, 222 ‘‘yéye’’ songs, female idols of, 14 ‘‘young Turks’’: heroic masculinity of, 99–100; masochism of, 97–99; New Wave cinema and, 6, 82–84, 121, 232 n.3 youth, in New Wave cinema, 44–55 Zand, Nicole, 63 Zazie dans le métro, 236 n.4 Zola, Émile, 103

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geneviève sellier is a professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Caen.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sellier, Geneviève. [Nouvelle vague : un cinéma au masculin singulier. English] Masculine singular : French new wave cinema / Genevieve Sellier; translated by Kristin Ross. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4175-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4192-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures-France-History. 2. New wave films-France-History and criticism. I. Title. pn 1993.5. f 7 s 3713 2008 791.430944—dc22 2007042439