The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity 9780857457714

Citation preview

The French Road Movie

Archer_final.indd i

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd ii

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie Space, Mobility, Identity

Neil Archer

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Archer_final.indd iii

26/09/2012 08:12

First published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013 Neil Archer All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Archer, Neil, 1971– The French road movie : space, mobility, identity / Neil Archer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-85745-770-7 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-771-4 (ebook) 1. Road films--France--History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.R63A73 2012 791.43’655--dc23 2012034447 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0 85745-770-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-771-4 (ebook)

Archer_final.indd iv

26/09/2012 08:12

To the Archers: Steve, Mags, Matthew

Archer_final.indd v

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd vi

26/09/2012 08:12

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on Translations

Introduction Locating the Road Movie

ix xi 1

One Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

25

Two ‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

39

Three No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix Four Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie Five From Flânerie to Glânerie: The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’ Six Travel and the Transnational Road Movie in the Twenty-First Century

75 89 119 147

Afterword ‘Welcome to France!’ The Road Movie and French National Cinema 169 Filmography Bibliography Index

173 175 187

vii

Archer_final.indd vii

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd viii

26/09/2012 08:12

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my Ph.D. supervisor at Cambridge University, Emma Wilson, for her unfailing support and advice, and to Phil Powrie and Isabelle McNeill, for their invaluable comments on my thesis. I would like to express my thanks to the following for their encouragement over the last few years: Sarah Barrow, Victoria Best, Peter Collier, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, Nina Lübbren, Alan O’Leary, Song Hwee Lim, Trish Sheil, Rowlie Wymer, and to the various students at Anglia Ruskin willing to discuss with me all things cinematic. Special thanks, finally, to Giulia Miller, who kept me company from the beginning of the project; to Noa Eloise Archer, who kept me busy toward the end of it; and to the other Archers – Steve, Mags and Matthew – to whom this work is dedicated. Parts of this book have been published, in a different form, in the following journals: Studies in French Cinema 8(1) (2008); French Forum 33(1-2) (2008); and E-pisteme 2(1) (2009). Many thanks to the editors for allowing the re-use of this material.

ix

Archer_final.indd ix

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd x

26/09/2012 08:12

Note on Translations

All translations from original French texts are my own. Where I have used existing translations, these are recognized in the bibliography.

xi

Archer_final.indd xi

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd xii

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction Locating the Road Movie

A man at the wheel of his car loses himself to the sounds of his radio and the sights of the landscape, trying to leave behind him the troubles of his work and family; while another, fuelled by whisky, drives down a midnight highway in a delirium of speed and fluorescent lights. A girl, meanwhile, her boots torn apart at the seams, hitches along dusty roads; while elsewhere, two delinquents steal a car, then blaze a trail through the country’s roads. At the same time and in another place, a desperate young man hijacks a bus, leading it at gunpoint across an empty and unforgiving landscape. These sound like descriptions of American films: the type of film  most commonly recognized as the ‘road movie’. Yet the films I have in mind are, in the most recognized sense of the term, French. Made in France, generally with French money, in French with French actors, these are works which represent a dimension of French cinema from the last four decades. We know the troubled executives from Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps/Time Out (2001) and Cédric Kahn’s Feux rouges/Red Lights (2004); the itinerant girl from Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985) and the sentimental criminal from Aux yeux du monde/Autobus (Eric Rochant, 1991); while the lawless duo, we may recognize alternately from Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses/Going Places (1973) and Merci la vie (1991), or from Virginie Despentes’s and Coralie Trinh-thi’s Baise-moi (1999). 1

Archer_final.indd 1

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

As this book will argue, motifs familiar from the road movie can be traced and analysed within the context of recent French cinema; to the extent, I will suggest, that we might even talk of a recognizable ‘French road movie’. Any discussion of the road movie’s influence in the context of French cinema needs to deal with its ambiguity and elusiveness as a cinematic genre. Recent studies on the road movie from a variety of perspectives (Corrigan 1991; Cohan and Hark 1997; Laderman 2002; Wood 2007) have tended to stress, to varying degrees, the centrality of masculinity (typically in crisis), the importance of rebellion, of mechanized automotive culture and of self-discovery as a process of the journey. For the sake of clarity, we generally accept as a road movie any film which fulfils a number of these criteria. Yet even from this basis, if the road movie has any presence in France, it tends to be exceptional rather than familiar: as I will discuss, the above-mentioned studies offer little or no coverage of the genre in a French context. Moreover, because of its lack of grounding within a French tradition of production and reception, which has its own distinct genre traditions, the road movie is rarely recognized even in existing French cinema histories.1 Nevertheless, in terms of academic interest, the genre has enjoyed a recent resurgence of attention in the French and Francophone world, as well as in Europe more widely. The 2005 edition of CinémAction devoted to ‘Utopie et cinéma’, for example, features an essay by Anne Hurault-Paupe entitled ‘Une Utopie américaine: le road movie’. This essay is quoted in a 2008 brochure, ‘Le road movie’, made to accompany an exhibition of posters and photographs celebrating the genre at the Cinémathèque Française and coinciding with the larger exhibition devoted to Dennis Hopper, director of Easy Rider (1969).2 In 2008, meanwhile, the French daily newspaper Libération offered a série road movies set of DVDs, sold weekly in conjunction with the paper, with an article in the respective editions dedicated to each volume. Neither of these events, however, introduced to any sizeable degree the idea of a French road movie, or even a European one. Of the Libération series, only one film, Chris Petit’s English road movie 2

Archer_final.indd 2

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

Radio On (1979), is not American. The selective chronological filmography accompanying the Cinémathèque brochure, meanwhile, establishes the genre’s precursory and foundational films as entirely American, with the exception of Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället/ Wild Strawberries (1957) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969), the latter in any case being filmed in the U.S.A. The exhibition in fact follows a familiar notion, established in most existing studies on the genre, of a chronological borrowing of the form on the part of European and, later, Asian, Australian and South American filmmakers. The resurgence of interest in the genre, however, is not limited to American cinema, nor simply to academic or exhibition interests. If we are to understand the road movie in its most fundamental semantic and syntactical sense – as a genre in which narrative development is intertwined with physical movement, automotive or otherwise, across space – then since the turn of the millennium we have seen a revitalization of the road movie in an international, or more particularly ‘transnational’, cinematic context. A strain of French and Francophone filmmaking, for example, has focussed on questions of displacement and identity, particularly in relation to the experience of maghrébin immigrants, or of young beurs exploring the culture of their parents or grandparents: films such as Inch’Allah dimanche (Yamina Benguigui, 2001), La Fille de Keltoum/Daughter of Keltoum (Mehdi Charef, 2001), Le Grand voyage (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2004) and Exils (Tony Gatlif, 2004). At the same time, European cinema is displaying an increasingly familiar motif of border-crossing (both by protagonists and the filmmakers themselves), with a particular emphasis on marginal identities and economic migration – as in Lilja 4-ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) and Import / Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007), to take just three well-known examples. These concurrent trends have been accompanied by an academic engagement with the road movie in its new geo-political contexts: in particular, the centrality of travel to issues of post-colonialism and migration, be it the ethnographic issues relating to the genre (Ruoff 3

Archer_final.indd 3

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

2006), or the genre’s potential to explore contemporary questions of dislocation, memory and identity (Naficy 2001; Ezra and Rowden 2006). Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2006), meanwhile, have sought to bring the road movie’s motifs of quest, flight and transition to bear on this contemporary European experience, taking up the previous work of critics such as Ron Eyerman and Orvar Löfgren (1995) in their effort to read the genre in its European context. A similar approach has been taken up most recently by Wendy Everett (2009), who looks to trace a European specificity across a variety of films and national contexts. As this brief overview suggests, the road movie need not be so strictly confined within the connotations of an ‘American’ genre. In terms of origins, to what extent we can or should acknowledge these as American is a question I will consider in more detail below. It is important to stress that questions of national specificity, interesting as they may be from a film-historical point of view, should not obscure what the road movie actually does: which, as I discuss in this book, is to explore space and mobility within that space and the meanings produced through this movement. It is, in this sense, a genre whose identity is always already in flux, in a process of becoming. Rather than take a reductive approach which prescribes generic specificity within a national context, then, this book aims to take a productive approach, considering the impact of the road movie itself on ideas of national cinema and identity.

The Possibilities of the Road Movie in the French Context Before we can discuss the possibilities of a French road movie, we need to deal with some of the more complex associations of the genre in its American mode. A common line of thinking sees the American road movie as at once a supposed break from the organizing colonial structures of old Europe (Hurault-Paupe 2005: 54) and a liberal counter-aesthetic to the classical Hollywood system (Kramer 1998: 300). Yet a more sceptical strain of criticism sees the road movie also 4

Archer_final.indd 4

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

taking its cue from the territorial (that is, colonial) spirit of the pioneers. To take Barbara Klinger’s example, the tagline for the release of Easy Rider famously stated: ‘A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere’. Yet here, paradoxically, ‘America’ is already implied structurally in the act of looking: the very search implied by the American road narrative may then always already affirm what it supposedly repudiates: the founding American myth of freedom and discovery, the idea of nation and nationalism as process (Klinger 1997). In this sense, a film like Easy Rider is little different from a proto-road movie such as Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939); another film which inscribes its now iconic geography as nation in the process of the journey, through the latter’s own resolution of narrative trajectories, and, in particular, the journey’s forging of a mobile community. Such structural paradoxes lead Susan Hayward, who sees the road movie’s precedent in westerns such as Ford’s, to suggest that the genre ‘is about a frontiersmanship of sorts’ (2006: 313). It is also, as Hayward adds, a genre that tends to disavow its predominantly masculine nature (see also Haskell 1987); the implication being that such processes of ‘self-discovery’ within the genre are implicitly conservative. David Laderman’s Driving Visions, a history of the genre from a mainly American perspective, walks this same tightrope between a radical agenda and a reactionary politics. Weighing heavily on the archetypal notion of the genre as expressing ‘rebellion against social norms’, of the journey as ‘a means of cultural critique’, Laderman sees the genre as one that ‘aim[s] beyond the borders of cultural familiarity, seeking the unfamiliar for revelation’ (2002: 1). Yet a potential problem with Laderman’s analyses (although one he manages to avoid) is the way a failure to address the issues of power and privilege, of gender and the iconography of nation, risk making notional rebellion and discovery mere re-inscriptions of the ‘social norms’ the films putatively rebel against. The kind of casual misogyny and latent fear of otherness seen in many road movies, for example, should be indication enough that the road movie is hardly radical or visionary in itself. 5

Archer_final.indd 5

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Beyond the issue of how a supposedly American genre is intelligible within European cultural and filmmaking contexts, how, moreover, is the road movie intelligible within a European spatial context? As Everett argues, American narratives of the road privilege the scale and notionally utopian possibilities of travel in that country (what Eyerman and Löfgren call the ‘freedom to move upward and outward’ (1995: 55)), while European space is by nature more contained. Interestingly, while containment may once have been intelligible in terms of scale and more precisely in terms of the relative smallness of European countries, ‘New’ Europe and its more fluid borders has brought about a change in scale, but also, paradoxically, a new kind of containment: be it in the form of ‘enforced journeys’ and ‘widespread migratory experiences’ undertaken within it (Everett 2009: 166); or at the level of ‘Europe’ itself as an idea, already existing in a balance of various and often intractable constituencies, characterized by the problem of communication (Everett 2009: 169). Implicit however in Everett’s analysis, as in Mazierska and Rascaroli’s Crossing New Europe, is that these same circumstances of European space in flux and contestation give the road movie its significance as a contemporary form. These studies recognize how the road movie as a genre responds to geo-political and cultural transformations, as one of its defining features is the intention to comprehend space through movement. But in its ability to cross borders (both literal and imaginary), it can also be used to transcend boundaries. Even if we see the road movie as an imported category, for example, we can see it in terms of a dialogue, mapping a particular spatial imaginary onto an often inappropriate material space and exploring the discrepancies of this mapping. This transcending of boundaries, in the process, enacts a form of self-questioning into location and identity, or the idea that the latter is determined by the former. Consequently, the road narrative functions across cultural contexts not as a marker of any specific culture, but as a marker of its possible disruption and transgression. This enables us, furthermore, to consider the movement and journeys of domestic or ‘native’ subjects in new ways, focusing on 6

Archer_final.indd 6

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

the search for identity rather than its re-inscription. This also underpins my decision to focus not on the more overtly transnational or inter-national road movies: those identified by Hamid Naficy as an ‘accented cinema’ of exile and dislocation, or the ones covered in Yosefa Loshitsky’s recent work (2010) on migration, ethnicity and ‘the stranger’ in European cinema. Although I will touch upon a number of films which may be read in these terms, both the given scope of this book, and the sense that the films are well covered within these above studies, prohibits their consideration here. Yet my decision to focus on films located predominantly within French national borders, frequently featuring French protagonists, is also motivated by a theoretical position: specifically, my interest in the possibility of reconfiguring space, rather than the relationship between two places (in terms, say, of the ‘adoptive’ nation and the ‘home’). As I will discuss at more length, what interests me in my choice of films is not the idea of the ‘leaving’ or ‘returning’, both of which presuppose at a structural level a stable idea of place. Rather, it is the possibility of transformation within a space that these films explore and the consequent undermining of fixed conceptions of place and identity. Before looking into this, we need to consider some of the contextual issues around the road movie in France.

1968 and the Road Movie As Keith Reader puts it, the French experience of May 1968, a catch-all term for the dramatic social events of that month, acts ‘as a prism in which the major cultural changes of twentieth-century France are multiply refracted’ (1993: 2). These events and their aftermath and the contested nature of what the events meant – what Kristin Ross calls the ‘management of May’s memory’ (2002: 1) – have only emphasised their continuing fascination to French life. It is not within the focus and scope of this present study to address 1968 as a cultural happening; nor will I take the reductive approach of using the chosen films to gloss such a complex and fiercely debated historical moment. However, besides providing a suitable 7

Archer_final.indd 7

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

chronological starting point for the study, many of the contestations that were and are part of the ongoing process of the événements can be seen to persist in a number of French road movies. It is useful for one thing to stress the importance of 1968 as part of a debate into the meaning of cinema itself. The immediate period surrounding and following May 1968 saw the increasing influence of Louis Althusser’s ideological critique on filmmaking and theory, alongside the political turn in the editorial of the previously auteur-driven Cahiers du cinéma and the increasing influence in the English-speaking academy of the journal Screen (which was itself instrumental in publishing translations of French film theory). Inherent to such a development in criticism and theory was the broader attack on ideology and imperialism (American in particular): consequently, many of the prevailing norms of cinema aesthetics, production and distribution were called into question (Harvey 1978). Significantly, a film such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967), which in its image content and narrative structure utilizes many of the tropes now familiar to the road movie, is often seen to represent a transitional point; certainly in Godard’s career and possibly within certain modes of film production more widely. To what extent we should take Week End as representative of ‘French cinema’ is of course a highly debatable point, bringing into focus as it does the discrepancy between work like Godard’s and the more popular French cinema that domestic and international audiences actually see. Nevertheless, given the centrality of Godard’s work to questions of French cinema within academic study and in particular the kind of political questions it addresses, the use of a road movie as a form to bring into focus key questions of the period – capitalism, spectacle, the politicization of cinema – cannot be overlooked. 1968 is, however, pertinent not only to the French cultural context. Using this period as a starting point, Peter Biskind (1998) has famously depicted the cultural, film-industrial and film-aesthetic contexts which gave rise to the ‘New Hollywood’, exemplified by road movies such as Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte 8

Archer_final.indd 8

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

Hellman, 1970), Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, 1971) or Badlands (Terence Malick, 1974), to name just a few; films which partly took their cue from Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). The predominance of the road movie in this period suggests its centrality to an industrial and ideological shift in American filmmaking,3 and with it, its pertinence against the backdrop of political instability, witnessed in the United States within this period as much as elsewhere (Harris 2008). Whether or not the road movies of the New Hollywood can be seen as genuinely radical departures from cinematic and cultural norms, these films at the very least bring into focus the cinema’s significance in reflecting socio-political contexts; especially in relation to the liberalization and loosening of representation stimulated by late 1960s social change and the dismantling of the Hollywood Production Code at the end of that decade (Shiel 2006: 18–20). Looking at the French context, it is significant that the kind of individualism or hedonism the road movie often explores has sometimes, albeit controversially, been held up as one of the real meanings of 1968 (see for example Lipovetsky 1983). Writing four decades later about the cultural memory of the events, for example, Chris Darke suggests just as much: part of their legacy, he writes, was the way ‘libertarianism found expression’ in, alongside the kind of softcore pornography typified by Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974), ‘Bertrand Blier’s road movie romp[s]’ (2008: 29). The allusion here to Blier’s Les Valseuses amongst other films is revealing. The popularity of Blier’s film in its time, second only in domestic popularity to Jaeckin’s film, cannot but suggest its significance to this filmgoing era: qualities which appear to be those of a cynical individualism, a carefree attitude to sexual promiscuity, and a sense of romantic revolt typical of much of the decade’s cinema and the crime film in particular (Smith 2005: 35–73). As I will suggest below, any reading of Blier’s film needs to take into account its adaptation of popular traditions and practices, in particular notions of carnival (Harris 2001; Rigby 1991: 1–38). Moreover, the idea of a cynical individualism in 1970s cinema, 9

Archer_final.indd 9

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

and, more concretely, its legacy in the kind of fatalistic or violently thwarted individual trajectories we see in later films, is more complicated than it appears. If for many critics at the time Les Valseuses, with its picaresque tale of two near-sociopathic youths, appeared to offer an image of moral bankruptcy and irresponsibility, this may have had something to do with the type of individual being represented, rather than its individualism per se. Aside from this, the failure that, as I will discuss, is actually inscribed in Les Valseuses amongst many other French road movies, disrupts the presumed close fit between society, ideology and its workings on screen. Conventional thinking would say that, like any other genre, the road movie has the aim of resolving social contradiction at the level of the imaginary. This may sometimes be the case, but what is significant here is the frequency with which this particular genre, in a French context, ends in a sense of lost direction, capture, or death. As I will show, then, it is a sense of absence and loss that underpins many of these films.

Origins of the (French) Road Movie The idea that the road movie is ‘a peculiarly American genre, albeit one which has been subsequently borrowed and adapted by filmmakers of other nationalities’ (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006: 2), has until recently been a critical commonplace. Given its discursive centrality to American cinema, it is unsurprising that the phrase ‘road movie’ persists trans-culturally, together with many of its connotations. A rare but important analysis of road movies in the French context, in Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet’s Cinema and the Second Sex, acknowledges from the outset that it is ‘an archetypal American genre’ (2001: 228); although here, significantly, its foreignness is seen to signify an inversion of representational norms, consistent with the inversion of gender representation discussed in their study. Recent Anglo-American volumes on the genre, meanwhile, often position the non-American road movie in a relation of dependency. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s The Road Movie Book consigns 10

Archer_final.indd 10

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

the European (along with the Queer and Australian) road movie to a third section entitled ‘Alternative Routes’. Such an editorial inflection places these texts within a hierarchy and chronology: they are other (‘Alternative’) yet are constrained by the notion of the American journey to which they stand in dialogue or difference. Driving Visions, similarly, manifests a fear of flying through its relegation of ‘The European Road Movie’ to a sixth and final chapter, one whose title – ‘Travelling Other Highways’ – also implies a kind of secondary status. More ambivalently, Jason Wood has argued that ‘the road movie is by no means an exclusively American domain and has been historically embraced by filmmakers from across the globe as a means of exploring national identity and confronting social and political issues springing from disenchantment with the dominant ideology’ (2007: xix). Besides the road movie’s status within reception and discourse, what is it, we might ask, that makes it so ‘American’? Eyerman and Löfgren’s suggestion is that, while the journey is a motif as old as European narrative itself, ‘the Americanisation of this type of narrative in the road movie format is a consequence of the way specific conceptions concerning the freedom and the function of the road were constructed in the United States’ (1995: 55). We have already considered these conceptions and the way they might sit uneasily within a European context, where the ‘function of the road’ has a more limited connotation. Responding to this, and aiming to justify the road movie as a European form, Mazierska and Rascaroli seek to trace films which (in a potentially circular description) ‘maintain . . . a strong European imprint’ (2006: 3). Examining the genre’s historical development, however, suggests that the chronology of the road movie and its direction of influence are less clear-cut. This can be illustrated by a couple of passages from recent studies. While suggesting the origins of the road movie lie in the 1950s and early 1960s, along with the influence of writers such as Jack Kerouac, Laderman sees the key transition towards his ‘visionary’ road movie in the form of Bonnie and Clyde: a film which, for Laderman, explores ambivalently the tensions of modern capitalism 11

Archer_final.indd 11

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

(2002: 50–51), or what, reasserting his central thesis, Laderman calls the road movie’s ‘negotiation between individual impulse and social organisation’ (2002: 35). Yet in the final chapter we read: Released the same year as Bonnie and Clyde, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) furnishes yet another distinctly European contrast with the American genre. Like most road movies, Weekend is driven by a cultural critique of Western middle-class society . . . that leaves American road movies in the dust. In this respect, Weekend essentially turns the road movie on its head. (2002: 255)

The chronology of this passage seems informed mainly by the belated entry of European film in the study, and which therefore, as Dervin Orgeron argues, gives a misleading idea of continuity and influence (2008: 7). It is confusing to suggest that a film made at the same time as Bonnie and Clyde, and on the other side of the Atlantic, should turn out to be not only ‘like most road movies’ but one, moreover, that ‘turns . . . on its head’ this same genre. Similarly, in a 2006 book on American cinema, Michael Hammond writes: While the genre has examples from the classical period . . . it is not until the late 1960s with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) that the road becomes a forceful metaphor for a crisis-ridden America. This potential in the road movie ‘American style’ has inspired European filmmakers [such as] Jean-Luc Godard. (2006: 14)

As Hammond implies, Godard’s dialogue with the road movie in his films up to and including Week End was in response to proto-road movies such as Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950).4 Yet those qualities Hammond identifies in the New Hollywood road movie – marginality, ‘existential ambiguity’, the ‘peripatetic’ (2006: 14) – are, as the same writer actually points out, those qualities already evident within a European postwar ‘art’ tradition exemplified by films such as Godard’s: those same films which contributed to the re-vision of American cinema and space generally attributed to the New Hollywood. Bonnie and Clyde’s discursive centrality in terms of the New Hollywood and the road movie, in fact, risks neutralizing the influence of European filmmaking aesthetics and practice on that film’s own development, as well as New Hollywood filmmaking 12

Archer_final.indd 12

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

more broadly. As is well documented elsewhere, David Newman and Robert Benton acknowledged the influence of Godard’s A bout de souffle/Breathless (1960), along with François Truffaut’s Tirez sur la pianiste/Shoot the Pianist (1960), on their writing of the Bonnie and Clyde screenplay; and in fact early versions of the script were discussed with both French directors as early as 1964, before the project was passed on to Arthur Penn (Newman and Benton 1972: 13–31). Many of these issues are already addressed in Dervin Orgeron’s Road Movies, which is not only the most recent full-length book to engage with the genre, but also the one that challenges most consistently the idea of the road movie as an ‘American’ genre. Besides its innovative thesis that the road movie, in its most familiar form, embodies a fascination with filmic and automotive mobility that is actually as old as cinema itself, Orgeon’s study is significant for its emphasis on the transnational nature and in-between-ness of the road movie since the 1960s. Hence, for Orgeron, not only does a film like A bout de souffle stage the crisis of a protagonist who cannot reconcile cinematic images with physical landscape (or an American idiom with French filmmaking) (2008: 75–80), but similarly, analysts of archetypically American road movies undervalue ‘the peculiar mobility of [the genre] or the equally critical fact that the road movie is modelled on postwar [European] cinematic reflections upon American genre’ (2008: 6). It is not my point here to argue for an inversion of road movie chronology: it should be clear that the movement of influence is more hybridized and reciprocal than anything else. But more importantly, to claim an historical priority for the French road movie would be beside the point: this would merely reiterate the inherent ‘French-ness’ of the genre, countering this book’s view that the road movie complicates received or essentialized notions of nation and national cinema. The key point for our present concerns, then, is that the road movie is and always was an inherently self-reflexive genre (Hammond 2006: 14), one that is about the search for identity, rather than being a representation of it. 13

Archer_final.indd 13

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

On a related point, the notional ‘Americanization’ of France since the end of the Second World War forms a background to the readings in this study (on this subject, see Golsan 2007), especially as it has been central to debates about the identity and status of French (and more broadly, European) cinema, in the face of so-called American economic and cultural imperialism (Giffard 2003). My reading of this American influence, in line with my argument so far, is a complex one. Gordana Crnkovic is right, I believe, when she suggests that ‘Americanization’ may be a misleading term for what is in reality a process of parallel change, with late twentieth-century Europe reaching similar stages of postindustrial development to its more developed transatlantic counterpart. France, from this viewpoint, is not so much influenced by American capitalism and culture, as belatedly ‘adopting the existing forms’ that are really transnational in character (Crnkovic 2003: 10). Crnkovic nevertheless misses a trick when she assumes that these processes of development inevitably lead to a preference for homogenized or purely escapist cultural production. But nor should it follow, from the historical outline I have given above, that the use of the road movie in a French context implies a parodic adaptation of the genre. In some instances, for example in Les Valseuses or Baise-moi, a form of American influence can be read in liberating terms, an explosive challenge to representational norms. In any case, whether or not the dominance of the Hollywood model has left an imprint on recent French cinema (a discussion beyond the scope of this book), the flows of cultural influence can work in different ways. The road movie, from the 1960s (in both America and France, as we have seen), was already out of step with the dominant ideology from which it emerged. Consequently, even if we do see the road movie as representing Americanization and in turn American influence on French cinema, its influence is to some extent already to question and criticize these same processes that bring it into being: an idea I will explore later with regard to Le Huitième jour/The Eighth Day (van Dormael, 1996), L’Emploi du temps and Extension du domaine de la lutte/Whatever (Harel, 2000), and their implicit critiques of technocracy and capitalism. 14

Archer_final.indd 14

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

The French Road Movie in its Historical and Film-historical Contexts This book is structured mainly around key thematic issues that pertain to the road movie in French cinema; issues which, I argue, relate to socio-political, cultural and cinematic transformations. At the same time, this thematic movement is generally allied to a chronological movement through four cinematic decades. The aim here is to bring the film-historical to bear on the historical and vice versa: to see how transformations at the level of film production, discourse and aesthetics both inform and are informed by the broader social contexts. In my first chapter, ‘Road to Autopia’, which focuses mainly on Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses, I look at how a particular form of road movie emerges during this period of the 1970s. Following my argument above, I see this emerging form not in a parodic sense, but as the product of specific forces and ideas pertinent to France within that period. As with the study of any genre, we need to account for the particular appeal of the form to filmmakers and audiences of the period. The nascent interest in the genre in the French imaginary, as suggested above, is arguably related to liberalization, along with related transformations in consumer life. In her seminal study Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Kristin Ross details the way that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the largely unattainable (American) automobile figured as a desired object for the burgeoning consumer society (1995: 27–29). As she points out, the white Cadillac that rolls down the seafront in Jacques Demy’s film Lola (1961) is a fetish object, precisely because the car itself (let alone a Cadillac) was still for most an object of desire rather than an everyday commodity (1995: 30). This book picks up where Ross’s leaves off and where the road movie as we commonly know it comes into being. Les Valseuses, I will argue, has at its heart a fascination with the fetish objects of consumer culture and with acquisition more generally. Blier’s choice of the country’s often remote highways as a main location links his film to other works of the decade that are equally interested in transient 15

Archer_final.indd 15

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

spaces, the lure of motorized liberty and the influence of low-cultural texts: Alain Cavalier’s rarely seen Le Plein de super /Fill’er Up with Super (1976) and to a slightly different extent Alain Corneau’s Série noire (1979). What is important to note in the context of these films, and in the shift between Fast Cars and the present study, is that the connotations of the automobile change markedly in the 1970s. The early part of that decade gave the West an oil crisis and recession that, in France, marked the end of the trente glorieuses (the thirty-year period of postwar prosperity). The motor car’s promise of automotive liberty at this point is undermined at once by the car’s ubiquity – still a desired object, but by now a more commonplace one5 – along with the absence of material means to run it. Jacques Tati’s Trafic (1971), meanwhile, expresses the banal way the motor vehicle comes to signify in the life of the early 1970s.6 Tati’s film depicts the car not so much as the imaginary extension of its occupant but as a character in itself. As indicated in the film’s frequent shots of motorway traffic, moving in close but precise order at unified speeds, the modern mass-produced car no longer affords the kind of display-value with which it might previously have been associated. Individual expression is played down, paradoxically, in the service of a monadic, individualized lifestyle, designed to move rapidly and concurrently, but also separately. Trafic, and the films I discuss in chapter one, are emblematic of an aesthetic turn in the late twentieth-century most famously evoked by Gilles Deleuze in his work on the medium (1983, 1985); in particular, his notion of the postwar shift from the ‘movement image’ to the ‘time image’. For Deleuze, Tati’s films illustrate the shift towards a cinema in which optical and aural impressions predominate over the spatial coherence of narrative trajectory (1985: 18). Deleuze’s analyses of a particular and predominantly European tendency will prove suggestive in this thesis, if not unavoidable in terms of their wide influence, although it is important to stress the methodological position I will take regarding his work. As has been suggested, using Deleuze as a framework for reading film risks a form of circular 16

Archer_final.indd 16

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

argument, one that in turn becomes a gloss on Deleuze rather than an analysis of specific film texts (Powrie and Reader 2002: 79). The more purely philosophical elements and high-cultural tendencies of Deleuze’s cinema books, meanwhile, have meant that they are sometimes received and discussed in isolation from the text-and-context approach I will be undertaking here; and in particular, from the possibility of a reading relating to more popular film traditions. There is, then, space for a more historical contextualization of Deleuze’s readings; one that considers them not as the product of a counter-cinema or of an auteur’s individual genius, but in the light of related transformations in the social sphere and the economies and technologies of film production. The choice of Blier’s film as a starting point is useful, as it brings into focus conceptions of the popular in French filmmaking, as well as explaining my choice of key texts. While many of the films studied here can be connoted within the terms of auteur filmmaking (for example, those works by Agnès Varda, Claire Denis or Laurent Cantet), or films notionally aimed at minority social constituencies (Baise-moi or Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 1999)), I am keen to move away from a reading which locates the films purely within the tendencies of auteur or ‘art’ cinema. This would play into a reading based purely on opposition (‘anti-Hollywood’, for example), rather than on parallel development, dialogue or inter-textuality. But it would also be a false opposition, given that the American road movie, historically, already has a slippery or even oppositional relationship to the mainstream norms of Hollywood production. Furthermore, such distinctions would downplay the possibility that the road movie as a genre had an impact at the level of the popular imaginary. Blier’s film was extremely popular commercially, without being obviously populist; at least not in the contemporary sense of the globalized cultural mainstream and high-concept exportability. Blier, like his sometime collaborator Michel Blanc (director of Marche à l’ombre (1984)), as well as both Patrice Leconte (Tango (1995)) and Philippe Harel (Les Randonneurs (1997) and Extension du domaine de la lutte), all 17

Archer_final.indd 17

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

of whom are discussed later in this book, are filmmakers with their roots in theatrical traditions such as the café concert or television satire. The popularity of their films indicates that popular cinema in the French context does not necessarily equal ‘Americanized’ or even ‘commercial’, but needs to be considered in relation to other performance traditions. Moreover, beyond its dominant understanding within the terms of commercial success, ‘popular’ also has specific social connotations in terms of its relationship to ‘the people’; an elusive term which does not automatically imply a mass audience, but particular social formations and practices (Dyer and Vincendeau 1992). From this perspective, Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (2000), or L’Emploi du temps, although we can see them as the work of distinct directorial identities, are significant mainly for their engagement with social situations: the marginal practices of gleaning, in Varda’s film; contemporary redundancy and unemployment in Cantet’s. Besides being a documentary about specific social practices, Varda’s film in particular can be understood as a ‘popular’ film by virtue of the fact that it generated, in the form of responses to it, its own form of public afterlife (as depicted in Varda’s follow up film Deux ans après/Two Years After (2002), an extra on DVD versions of Les Glaneurs). We can therefore consider these films, to follow Martin O’Shaughnessy’s recent study (2007), as representative of contemporary political engagement: an overarching and incorporating characteristic that subsumes their identity as individual auteur films. As I argue in this book, their dialogue with the road movie as a form contributes to the way they explore their particular themes. Chapter two looks more closely at the politics of the road movie, in its consideration of the individual as a key motif of the genre. The ‘individual’ in this context is not to be understood simply in terms of ‘individualism’, but in terms of the complex and often antagonistic relationship of the individual to the social body. The fact that the road movie frequently invests in expressions of individual liberty directs us to the individual’s relation to social formations; formations 18

Archer_final.indd 18

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

to which – in the French context – they exist only superficially in distinction. In other words, liberté needs to be balanced alongside the other constituent parts of the tripartite Republican model, égalité and fraternité. This indicates the degree to which the concerns of the road movie are not related merely to the accelerated and individualist nature of consumerist (car) culture, but to the foundational texts and tenets of the French Republic. This is suggested by Hayward’s reading of Week End as a fable of liberty in the Revolutionary tradition (underscored by the film’s various allusions to the renamed months of the Revolutionary calendar): one in which the logical extension of the Jacobin revolutionary text is the Sadean endpoint of terror, murder and ‘an indifference to and abuse of human rights’ (Hayward 1993: 255). Week End does indeed make a mockery of automotive aspiration, and our received iconography of the road genre, through its reduction of car culture to mechanized manslaughter or the literal impasse of traffic jams. But it is either a limitation to Hayward’s reading, or to Godard’s film, that the connotations of fable make Week End seem a highly moralistic film; much more didactic than works like A bout de souffle or Pierrot le fou (1965), the strength of which consists in their general reluctance to condemn or condone (both films, in their own ways, are about the tension between action and inaction, movement and stasis). In its extremes, nevertheless, Week End illustrates the power of the road movie to explore our relationship to images, pushing limits and generating critical dialogue. Week End might even be a blueprint for the genre’s continued exploration of social unease and its applicability to broader issues of liberty and identity. As Powrie puts it in reference to Baise-moi, the particular drama of the road movie involves ‘reconciling the intensity of individual affect with social insertion’ (Powrie 2007: 73). The testing of limits becomes the theme, challenging the very desire to prescribe boundaries. These issues of liberty form the core of this chapter, as do my readings of Baise-moi, Sans toit ni loi and Aux yeux du monde; in particular, the way that liberty in these films, as Powrie implies, 19

Archer_final.indd 19

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

involves a process of negotiation. Rather than simply focus on the negotiation within the film’s narratives, however, I examine the negotiation that takes place between the films and the viewer: what does it mean to ‘capture freedom’ when freedom itself implies a resistance to capture? And in what ways do changes in cinematic influence and content require us to reconsider our judgement of what we see? If chapter two focuses on questions of individual identity, chapter three, ‘No Place Like Home’, picks up on two other familiar motifs of the road genre: movement and space. Far from reiterating a hegemonic notion of the national space, I argue here for the road movie’s potential to transform our conceptions of the spatial and its connotations. A common theorization of classical film montage as representing ‘the modern nation as a textual unity’ (McQuire 1998: 206), through its capacity to evoke temporal simultaneity across space (what Benedict Anderson (1991), in literary terms, calls the ‘meanwhile’), is altered in the road movie. If the imagined synchrony of parallel montage in much narrative cinema suggests the totality of a shared space, the road movie tends towards the restricted narrative space of the moving vehicle and protagonists. If the road movie is interested in vision and landscape, it does not, then, as we might presume, necessarily express the unified space of action and nation. Paradoxically, it represents a restricted and hence de-familiarized narrative space. In the road movie’s frequent emphasis on pure vision and movement, in fact, this is a space closer to the ‘cinema of attractions’ that, in Noël Burch’s terms (1990), preceded the bourgeois ‘industrial mode’ of representation, characterized by narrative techniques such as synchronic montage, as defined above. The road movie’s departure from this industrial mode is also reinforced by a movement on the audio level towards a mix of the subjective and the objective, between intra- and extra-diegetic sound. This is particularly relevant given the road film’s frequent use of music, and also in-car music, as soundtrack. As film theorist Michel Chion remarks, this introduction of a complex subjective register 20

Archer_final.indd 20

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

in modern film indicates ‘a shift from the collective sound in the old style’ (1994: 77); he then adds that the attention in the modern audio-visual image towards ‘pure indices of reality and materiality’ bring us closer in such works to the conditions of silent film (1994: 155–156). One implication of these developments, simultaneously forward-moving and primitive, is that they work to disrupt the more unified connotations of place and identity more typically related to language, along with those classical techniques such as the establishing shot and cross-cutting. ‘No Place Like Home’ therefore focuses on these issues of spatial signification and practice, through a detailed reading of Ducastel and Martineau’s Drôle de Félix. As I show here, through close analysis of the film’s use of space, point of view and sound, Ducastel and Martineau’s film works in a highly self-reflexive manner to explore the experience of the road movie and its effects. The film’s approach, I argue, reveals the road genre’s intrinsic appeal and potential, in the form of an imaginary projection across borders of both space and identity. Importantly, because the protagonist of Ducastel and Martineau’s film is both as an HIV-positive gay man, and a person of mixed French and maghrébin descent, the film has been seen as an expression or affirmation of such identities; or indeed, has been criticized for not going far enough in this regard. I emphasise, however, that Drôle de Félix implicates viewers within processes of identification and border-crossing that most clearly affirms not any one identity, but rather the possibility for transformation and invention that is the real subject of the film. Chapters four and five consider a group of films which provide a specifically French context for the analysis of gender: an issue which has figured significantly in debates about the road movie. Chapter four, ‘Nowhere Men’, focuses on the now familiar generic motif of men on the road, exploring what the latter means for men in a world regulated by the working routine, either in its presence or its absence. For the road movie in its more recent American form, the road is often connected with freedom from work and responsibility and hence associated with leisure, as in Alexander Payne’s Sideways 21

Archer_final.indd 21

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

(2004), or Todd Philip’s The Hangover (2009), to take just two examples; although it has also been used to explore the transitional space and time between work and leisure, as in John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). The films under discussion in this chapter go slightly further, depicting the road as an ambiguous space in which men both carry out their social function, while at the same time evade responsibility: a process that is brilliantly explored in L’Emploi du temps or Harel’s Extension du domaine de la lutte. Alternatively, it serves as a kind of liminal, transient zone for the masculine subject in crisis or disavowal, as in Feux Rouges, or in Manuel Poirier’s Western (1997), about two unemployed and lovelorn men wandering around coastal Brittany. Much of the discussion in this chapter engages with aspects of fantasy, and more specifically virtuality: the point at which the ‘real’ space and time of the film becomes imprecise, transformed by the effect of the journey and the protagonist’s mood and vision. This directs us towards a modern reading of the road movie as a specifically filmic re-presentation of space, a world re-viewed through a (wind)screen. In the fifth chapter, ‘From Flânerie to Glânerie’, I bring this vision of the road movie to bear principally on two films by women filmmakers: Claire Denis’s Vendredi soir/Friday Night (2002) and Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. My focus is on their reconfiguration of cinematic vision and narrative space in ‘feminine’ terms, thinking beyond the potential limitations of the ‘women’s road movie’ exemplified, for example, by a film like Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). Through Denis’s film in particular, I consider the road movie’s potential for evoking the subjectivity of a female protagonist that, in distinction to the kind of viewing paradigms familiar from classical Hollywood theory, is both the bearer of the look and mobile. Denis’s work therefore dialogues historically with the road genre’s motifs, and in turn aims for a transformation both of the genre and of the gendered assumptions relating to cinematic vision. Varda’s film, meanwhile, is significant in the way it works concurrently with shifts in cinematic technologies: shifts which respond to and help effect 22

Archer_final.indd 22

26/09/2012 08:12

Introduction

a reorientation towards what has been described (in the late 1990s) as a new realism in French cinema (Powrie 1999) and a new significance for the road movie. If the increasing mobility and portability of film cameras since the 1960s helped facilitate the road movie as a form, the emergence of digital video in the 1990s contributed towards a cinema of itinerancy, intimacy and exploration (Vasse 2008: 198): a réel de proximité in Jean-Pierre Jeancolas’s words (1997). This new realism intersects with the narrative and virtual space of the road movie in two ways. First, because it emphasises a ‘real’ that is not pre-determined, but is waiting to be found through the mutual involvement of filmmaker and viewer in a sensorial process of cinematic viewing (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 23); second, because this subject, imprecise and waiting to be found, is already in a liminal relationship to represented or representable space and is therefore already a figure of movement and instability. In my final chapter, ‘Travel and the Transnational Road Movie in the Twenty-First Century’, I look at three examples of this more recent type of road movie – Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), Gela and Temur Babluani’s L’Héritage/Legacy (2006) and Denis’s L’Intrus/The Intruder (2004) – in which we see a new vision of the form’s possibilities. This modern road movie responds to those transformations that globalization and more fluid borders have had on European space, identity and cinema; whether this be in the form of the foreign ‘other’ (as in L’Héritage and L’Intrus), or the crisis of a European culture itself (Twentynine Palms). As I suggest, the new experiences of the twenty-first century mean that these millennial road movies also look back towards cinema’s infancy; in particular, to the traditions of the travelogue or ethnographic film. Yet if such early cinematic experiments frequently inscribed the foreign subject as primitive or irredeemably other, a form of cinematic tourism, the transnational circumstances of the early twenty-first century require a more urgent renegotiation of this relationship between the filmmaker, viewer and subject. As I conclude, then, this type of film offers a striking and vital direction for French filmmaking in the context of the new century’s demands. 23

Archer_final.indd 23

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Notes 1. For example, in both Hayward (1993) and Williams (1992) there are occasional references to individual films as road movies, though no identification of a corpus or tradition. 2. The brochure is anonymously authored and unpaginated. The exhibition ran from 15 October 2008 to 19 January 2009. 3. Eyerman and Löfgren (1995: 62) offer an outline of the number of films termed road movies made between 1968 and 1975. The size of this output – sixteen are mentioned within this brief sketch alone – indicates to what extent, in a period in which the studio system was in crisis, the road movie had become central, rather than peripheral, to the (New) Hollywood aesthetic. 4. On this connection see Andrew 1995. 5. By 1970, 56% of French homes had access to a car. By the end of the decade this figure had gone up to 68% (Ardagh 1982: 387). 6. The contiguity between both Week End and Trafic and the publishing of J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973) should not be overlooked. Ballard’s novel, steeped in the milieu of Greater London’s road network, is a striking example both of the contemporary staged as science-fiction, and an ambiguous expression of the car as eroticised instrument of death.

24

Archer_final.indd 24

26/09/2012 08:12

One Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super This chapter will consider the road movie as a trans-contextual or parodic form, mainly through an analysis of Les Valseuses. However, just as it is proved important to reconsider the road movie’s historical flow of influence, it will be equally important in this instance to consider the workings of parody. Parody, I suggest here, is positioned ambivalently between the thing it derides and a fascination with that same thing. The objects of desire that are the perennial targets of parody, in other words, may prove more significant than the act of parodying itself. As I argue in this chapter, this ambivalence in films such as Blier’s opens up a space of uncertainty which, by definition, is an ethical one: this notion of ambivalence as ethical will then form the basis of my further readings in chapter two. The 1970s tendency towards the carnivalesque exemplified by Les Valseuses and with it the re-evaluation of ‘low’ or ‘pulpy’ forms, finds its expression not just in the road movie, but in related cultural forms such as the detective movie – or in its French incarnation, the polar. This is indicated by a film such as Alain Corneau’s Série noire, which as its title suggests, is inspired by Gallimard’s famous crime novel series. The film may appear to offer a Godardian satire on the over-investment in imaginary worlds. The film’s hero, Frank Poupart (played by Patrick Dewaere, who also features in Les Valseuses), 25

Archer_final.indd 25

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

is a door-to-door salesman who exists in a peculiar and cinematically unprecedented zone: a liminal space of sub-urban wasteland and dilapidated housing, along with a banal domestic life, within which Frank nevertheless enacts a solipsistic performance of himself as a semi-imagined character in his own novel (copies of série noire paperbacks clutter his otherwise sparse apartment). The culmination of this dislocated performance is disastrous – double murder, theft and ruin. Yet is arguably Dewaere’s extraordinary physical performance, and Frank’s quixotic resistance to physical circumstances, that is an abiding pleasure and legacy of the film, rather than any putative critique of pulp fiction. This is probably because, as in Godard’s earlier work, the political intent is genuinely ambiguous; but also because the film allows us to participate in (rather than critically observe) its protagonist’s world. Comparisons between the road movie and the série noire, and more particularly its cinematic relation the polar, are useful, both in terms of the narrative similarities between the forms, but also their use of transposed, low-cultural forms. Claire Gorrara has shown how, in the 1970s especially, the néo-polar synonymous with writers like Jean-Patrick Manchette inverted dominant notions of law, order and crime, and chose to move their action ‘out of the big cities to the suburbs and the margins of society; to those places . . . perceived to be a wasteland for social outcasts and rejects’ (2003: 16). This is the setting for Corneau’s film, as well as for Les Valseuses’s picaresque tale of delinquency. As the example of Série noire suggests, the appropriation of lowcultural forms can be ambiguous, to the point at which interpretation may depart either from the ‘correct’ reading or authorial intention. For Gorrara, the néo-polar incorporated pulp-fictional tropes into the suburban strata as a form of criticism: viewed this way, the gap between the protagonists’ imaginary and their circumstances exemplified ‘the failure of a capitalist economy where those in charge refuse to acknowledge the human price of technological progress’ (2003: 16). The only drawback to such a reading is its potentially schematic attitude to narratives, and its delimitation of the possibili26

Archer_final.indd 26

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

ties and power of desire within texts and their readers. At some level, that is, the attraction of consumption itself must form part of the desire and fascination that propels narrative. The focus on individual desire, through identification with a central protagonist, also repositions the narrative in favour of the individual subject as agent, rather than as just a metaphor for capitalist systemic failure. Whether we see this as a radical re-reading or reactionary recuperation is partly a question of choice, yet it is important to consider the function of desire and transgression within film narrative, with key implications for our chosen films. In her study, Gorrara gives the interesting example of Jacques Deray’s Trois hommes à abattre/ Three Men to Kill (1980), a film version of Manchette’s Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (1976), adapted by and starring Alain Delon. Manchette’s novel, with its book-ending scenes of the protagonist’s apparently aimless drive around the Parisian périphérique, offers a blueprint for a new kind of road narrative, similar to the one I will discuss both here and in chapter four. Gorrara correctly identifies the way that Delon’s star vehicle transforms Manchette’s néo-polar into a more formulaic action movie (2003: 71), thereby recuperating for a conservative agenda what she sees as Manchette’s ‘critique of consumer culture’ (2003: 66). This ‘critique’, based as it is in the novel on a blankly descriptive style and an obsessive narratorial approach to objects and consumer goods, presupposes a complicity on the part of the reader in seeing through the veneer of consumer culture: a complicity, and therefore pre-conception, which neutralizes much of the work’s critical effect. The supposedly more critical and self-reflexive néo-polar of the 1970s appropriates those qualities that made the polar so attractive in the first place: those ‘fetishized object[s] in a consumerist culture’ (Gorrara 2003: 65) that are the notional objects of derision (makes of car, brands of whisky, cigarettes). Yet these same objects may also be read as transgressive fantasy objects of consumer desire (an argument I make in the next chapter with regard to Baise-moi). This double-edged aspect of the road movie, which draws on aspects of film noir and the polar, is one reason why road movies such 27

Archer_final.indd 27

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

as Les Valseuses can generate profoundly oppositional responses. Yet its capacity to do this is the source of its power rather than its weakness. An ethical engagement within the road movie, inasmuch as the genre deals with questions of freedom, has to invoke the possibility of transgression. This distinguishes it as a moral genre, rather than a moralistic one. It is this aspect of the road movie that makes it difficult or even unpalatable, but it is also what makes it so often misunderstood. For Jill Forbes, Les Valseuses ironically stages ‘postwar spatial and social mobility through the development of various means of transport [. . . Its] rapid passage from one transport form to another [acts] as a motorised history of France’ (2000: 214). Significantly, this history of mobility is mapped on to a trajectory in which the communitarian significance of the bicycle and train is replaced by symbols of individualist acquisition and consumption, and where use value converts to symbolic value. Indeed, much of the film’s action has as its catalyst the theft of a hairdresser’s Citroën DS:1 the subsequent joyride in the car is filmed, advert-style, in a fastmoving tracking shot in front of the car, while Gérard Depardieu’s Jules rhapsodizes to Dewaere’s Pierrot over the famous Citroën suspension. In fact, the appropriation of the car is equated in the film in terms both of fetishism and a form of sexual violation. Pierrot indeed comments that the car’s engine is still hot; a comment that connects with the film’s broader fascination with the scent, heat or wetness of the female sexual organs. This connection is emphasised further by the fact that the theft of the car is followed by the abduction of the hairdresser’s lover (played by Miou-Miou), who like the car, according to its owner, is said to be beyond the two boys’ reach. Rémi Fournier Lanzoni reads the film in this fashion, arguing that the liberalism of many 1970s films reflected a society sold on the values of consumerism, yet suffering the first shocks of advanced capitalism’s downturn (2004: 246). Les Valseuses in this light appears to be a violent parody of mobility and consumerism, inasmuch as the fetish objects for its protagonists become empty signs: the appropriation of glamorous cars that is one of the motifs of Blier’s film merely 28

Archer_final.indd 28

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

takes the protagonists further away from any society that would recognize the vehicle as the status symbol it is supposed to be. In the end, careering along mountain roads, they are totally removed from society altogether. Above the DS that starts everything off is a large poster for Brandt appliances: a typical motif in a film in which only the objects and marks of consumer culture are identifiable. If the film seems alien, in some respects akin to science-fiction – ‘a sort of postapocalyptic near future’ in Fournier Lanzoni’s revealing phrase (204: 286) – this is all the more remarkable, given that, like Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange (a reference point for Les Valseuses), it is made using mainly available exteriors rather than sets. These in fact are the peripheral sites of (in)action often favoured in Blier’s work: suburban new towns, out of season seaside resorts, roadside bars, bowling allies and shopping centres. The nearest we get to an establishing shot shows us, notably, the entrances to shops: a Mammut clothing superstore, or a Monoprix (in the absence of street or road signs, we see this name clearly); while the few splashes of vivid colour amongst the predominant whites emanate from the aforementioned advertising hoardings or neon signs. The failure of mechanized mobility (the bicycles, motorbikes and cars described by Forbes) to guarantee social mobility for its protagonists, combined with the film’s focus on empty status symbols, might suggest that the film uses its picaresque anti-heroes as the subjects of an anti-consumerist satire; a satire which then extends to the parody of male sexual anxiety and consumption (part of the  plot revolves around Pierrot’s bullet wound to the testicles – the valseuses of the title, in slang French – and his subsequent fear of impotence). Yet this reading would be simplistic. While Pierrot and Jules’s sociopathic behaviour may be alienating, the film subtly positions them as the scapegoats for a voracious consumer culture, rather than its cause; a move which situates the film ideologically alongside a film such as Easy Rider, whose politically ambiguous heroes (in case we forget, the protagonists of Dennis Hopper’s film 29

Archer_final.indd 29

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

are funded by cocaine dealing) may be just the socially unacceptable facet of the society they merely embody. The respectable citizens who repeatedly run Pierrot and Jules out of town are, after all, the middle-class provincials whose comfortable lifestyles are presumably founded on consumer capitalism and the economic plenty of the trente glorieuses (as I will argue later, this image of ‘the French’ as a kind of collective antagonist is a feature of the French road movie). Blier’s film may therefore be a film about judgement, but it is not itself a judgemental film (a distinction and method I will consider more fully in chapter two). This quality is underscored by the way in which its two protagonists are allowed to dominate the film, at times with an improvisatory, clowning pleasure that resists condemnation at the same time as encouraging it (when, for example, they raid the house of a holidaying family, and proceed to dress up in the children’s snorkeling gear and riding hat). Categories of judgement may be further confused by the film’s use of cartoon rhythms; for instance, in the repeated sequences of Pierrot and Jules on the run from locals, which becomes comic in its predictability. This deliberate refusal to ground representation in a socio-political context – what Robin Buss terms ‘the reassurance of some coherence in the fictional world’ (1994: 76) – is also the source of potential anxiety, given the nature of the acts depicted. By refusing to contain its protagonists within any specific milieu, the film resists framing them within the terms of social realism; and, in turn, undermines any potential reduction to ethnographic or psychological readings. The film instead sets up a form of virtual space (an extension, in fact, of the theatre from which the film’s performers originate), often drawing attention to its own performance and cinematic play. As suggested, this vision is never wholly extricated from credibility (and hence, perhaps, its association with science-fiction): the film’s testing of limits across an almost-familiar terrain sets up ‘a relationship between film and audience that will not lead to outright rejection of the “impossible” fiction’ (Smith 2005: 115). Straddled between the spaces of fantasy and realism, then, the film becomes a kind of moral theatre. 30

Archer_final.indd 30

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

This utopian possibility of the road film is brought up by Sue Harris in her reading of Les Valseuses (2001: 81–82). Following Richard Dyer’s work on the Hollywood musical, Harris argues that the carnivalesque nature of Blier’s film, and we might add its recourse to a type of ahistorical picaresque, respond to the deficiencies of modern (urban) life; deficiencies Dyer categorizes in terms of scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, fragmentation. The fictional response aims to invoke a collective experience that transcends these deficiencies and allows us to perceive, in Dyer’s words, ‘what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised’ (1981: 177). Dyer’s phrasing is suggestive of the ideological issues surrounding cinematic genre: the distinction between ‘feel like’ and ‘how . . . organised’ highlights the gap between the desire and its possible realization. Within a certain logic, in fact, utopias can never be realized: the desire for utopia itself, as a concept, underlines its impossible nature (Jameson 2007: xiii). This paradox of utopia is inscribed within the neologism coined by Thomas More for his eponymous 1516 book. The common application of the word as implying an ideal society is suggested mostly by the book’s contents (its full title, translated from the Latin, is ‘On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia’), but also by its potential Greek etymology of eu-topos: ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ place. At the same time, an alternative and homophonic etymology gives us ou-topos, or no-place (Logan and Adams 2002: xi). This ambiguity is structured into the Hollywood musical, whose exuberant sense of collective performance evokes the utopian, for the basic and obvious reason that it is a fantasy. Similarly, the road movie’s motifs of movement and flight aspire to the utopian at the same time as they demonstrate its evanescence or difficulty. While it may be possible to identify the utopian in the road movie more generally, Les Valseuses emphasises an important distinction in its particular context. The genre in its classic American form appears more realist in its intentions, making the authenticity of its location shooting both an index of American landscape and an aesthetic principle. In part, as I will outline below, these aspects of the 31

Archer_final.indd 31

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

New Hollywood cinema are assisted by technology, but they are also part of a more realist, liberated agenda that is part and parcel of that cinema’s departure from major studio norms. But Blier’s film, although contemporary with New Hollywood, on the whole rejects these principles. Besides its tendency not to name places, there are stylistic aspects to this rejection: on numerous occasions, for example, the film uses back projection for the driving scenes, with the actors filmed frontally in a mock-up vehicle. Back projection was of course standard practice in movie-making for most of its first century, although by this point it was nearly an anachronism. Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard had already illustrated the possibilities of shooting in-car, as early as the sequences shot with the lightweight Caméflex camera in A bout de souffle (Jullier and Mazdon 2004: 222). Les Valseuses was also made the same year as The Sugarland Express; Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical feature film and one which showcased the new Panaflex camera’s ability to shoot complex set-ups from within a moving car (McBride 1997: 217–218). Comparing the two films is of course unfair, especially as Spielberg’s film, backed financially by Universal Pictures, won the exclusive rights to this new technology. Blier has nevertheless indicated a similar relationship to the real in later films such as Merci la vie (1991), where the technology was presumably more freely available; and we can assume from the popularity of Les Valseuses that its difference from other contemporary representations did not significantly count against it. It is probably most useful to think about Blier’s choice as a tactic: a way of establishing its status as textual discourse rather than a representation of reality (which, as I discuss in chapter five, is taken to excess in Merci la vie). Through doing this, Les Valseuses draws attention to the film text and viewing in itself as utopian. While this does not dispense with the debates on the film’s representational issues and especially its potential misogyny (Harris 2001: 123–126), it at least demands that we understand these representations within a conception of the film as surface, play and fantastic expenditure. 32

Archer_final.indd 32

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

Expenditure of time – and of petrol – is similarly at the heart of Alain Cavalier’s Le Plein de super, which recounts the adventures of a young man in the north of France, asked by his boss to deliver a car – an American Chevrolet – to a client in Cannes. On the way, he and a friend, who has joined him for the trip, pick up a couple of hitchhikers. More than in Les Valseuses, Le Plein de super is interested in the intimate spaces of the car as a new form of cinematic space and site for dialogue: here, in the mode of Godard and Spielberg, this was done not with back-projection, but by squeezing the director and his director of photography (Jean-François Robin, who would later work on Jean-Jacques Beineix’s films) into the back of the car itself, immersed within the action and movement. As Charlotte Garson has pointed out, these tightly knit shooting conditions reflected the politics of the film’s production: cast and director all worked for an equal fee, as well as taking a collaborative approach to the film’s dialogue (Garson 2007: 28). This contributes to the sense of the film as its own ‘mini-utopia’ (to use a description applied by Alison Smith to Blier’s earlier film (2004: 115)). More striking, perhaps, than Les Valseuses, is the desire to create a unique and contained space of action that is also realistic, therefore countering the more derisory or theatrical modes of Blier’s work. Cavalier’s film, therefore, is one that is contained by real-world limits, but which fashions a space of mobility and transgression within the boundaries of those limits. The concentration on the car in Le Plein de super, in the mode of films such as The Sugarland Express, also indicates that the road movie’s utopian quality is tied to the specific filmic qualities of the genre, rather than just the action it describes. The road movie is even essentially cinematic, insofar as the motor car is itself a privileged space of vision; a kind of camera, in the mixed etymological sense of a room which allows light to enter, with the distinction that this camera permits the entry of moving – kinetic, or cinematic – light.2 The road-movie vehicle is a space of perpetually shifting light and image; one that is never fixed. With the in-car road movie, the car is an intrinsic (rather than anecdotal) location for the genre’s motif of transformation. The conversations that take place in Cavalier’s 33

Archer_final.indd 33

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

film, for example, do so partly because the automotive space allows them to, with the implication that they do not exist outside this space. Movement, and the specifically cinematic nature of this movement, permits a suspension of normal rules and laws, even time. Inasmuch as the road movie specifies a site rather than just a mood, one that both exists and does not, at once tangible and unreal, it calls to mind not just utopia, but the heterotopia, as set out in Michel Foucault’s original paper of 1967. The heterotopia within Foucault’s terms is characterized by its facilitating of a practicable space (espace) within the determinations of place (lieu), yet a space which by this very logic implies an original point of loss or failure: ‘The role of [the heterotopia] is to create an illusory space, which in the process denounces as even more illusory any real space’ (Foucault 1994: 761). Synthesizing to a degree these various theoretical terms, I suggest we think of the road movie specifically as an autopia.3 The autopia incorporates dimensions of the heterotopia, specifically its emphasis on spaces of performance and compensation and on expenditure and abundance.4 It emphasises, in its own etymology, the shifting of the utopian into the more anomic and isolated spaces of the autonomous individual flight, the pastoral mode of companionship, or the romantic couple. Most significantly, and following the motor car’s pre-eminence as alternative and individual habitation from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, it often figures this as a retreat behind the cinematic, hermetic space of the automobile’s windscreen and dashboard (Atkinson 1994). If we can see experiential patterns between the utopian expenditures of the prewar Hollywood musical and the autopia of the later twentieth-century road movie, for the purposes of a contextual study it is essential to understand how this experience can straddle distinct textual content. In the same way as American precursors of the road movie – films such as It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), or in a slightly different vein The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) – place an emphasis on travel as a public activity, the early American musical is in its chaotic way a vindication of community. Yet in the modern road movie, as indicated in Les Valseuses’s 34

Archer_final.indd 34

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

distinction between ‘La France’ and the autopia inhabited by its protagonists, it is often this same community that is called into question, replaced by the tribal. It is not simply that the New Hollywood road movie comes into being at the same time as the major studio musical had reached its nadir (Hayward goes so far as to describe Easy Rider as ‘[a] musical in its post-1970 sense’ (1998: 20); an argument that emphasises how the expenditure and spaces of the road movie supersede the communal utopian moment of the musical number). Such a chronology helps to ground the road movie in a relational sense to the social (rather than seeing it as just an anti-social or escapist form), whilst also showing us that the utopian is not uniform, but needs to be understood and modified across historical moments. Even given the film’s popular success (over five million viewers in its year of release), the film’s appeal is essentially premised on antagonism or even division; just as particular kinds of genre cinema often work around conceptions of fragmented spectatorial communities within the social body. Whatever fragmented and divisive form utopia may take, however, by its own nature it is always inscribing some notion of community, or a relationship to it. As Orgeron astutely notes, the road movie is at heart a paradoxical, morally confused genre. It is at once obsessed with mobility but anti-technological, set on modern highways but frequently nostalgic, even pastoral. Above all, the road movie is typically not a progressive genre, but one which ‘posits a hopeless and lamentable mobility in an effort to eulogize or find stability’ (2008: 2, emphasis in the original). In some respects this paradox underscores the potentially reactionary, or even (male-) hysterical qualities of the road movie; qualities which may be read in both Blier’s and Cavalier’s films, especially in their elements of misogyny and male disavowal. To reduce them as such, nevertheless, would be to undervalue them in a number of ways. To take this kind of autopian film as merely paradigmatic of a gendered narrative of disavowal would overlook, as I have suggested above, the specific historical and film-historical nature of this mode and its content; just as it would overlook the broader social and spatial configurations which, 35

Archer_final.indd 35

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

I have also argued, are central to the road movie at this juncture. Moreover, it would underestimate the possibilities of this restless, in-between form to play on and play with motifs of gender in its relation to genre, rather than simply inscribe them (an idea I will explore in more depth in chapter four). Most importantly, cinematic autopia such as these should be considered for their ability to create a space of contestation and limittesting, which, I have argued, situates them as political and ethical rather than reactionary. If the road movie in France is more than imitative, but rather original and innovating, and if the form it takes calls into question the connotations of space and identity, then we cannot disregard its processes of imaginary re-configuration. As I will show in the next chapter, this aspect of the road movie, in its French mode, accumulates greater force still when used to represent those figures that are themselves outside social hegemony and frequently deprived of the means of mobility itself. The road movie in this case is not so much used to explore compensatory heterotopia or hysterical flight, but rather to interrogate the nature of social formation itself.

Notes 1. The DS (or Déesse, the feminine idealization not lost on Blier’s film) is the subject of one of Roland Barthes’s essays in Mythologies (originally published 1957): it also features on the cover of the most recent edition, at the time of writing (Barthes 2001). 2. Regarding his work on Sugarland Express, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond emphasises the significance of the car-camera interface: ‘the moving camera . . . gives you the third dimension, which is the way movies should be. If you lock down the camera, it’s like seeing everything with one eye’ (in McBride 1997: 218). 3. This neologism appears in the title of two recent books on car culture: Wollen and Kerr 2002; Axelrod 2009. 4. Geoff King, in his study of action cinema (a genre which, like the road movie, has attracted its own share of ideological criticism), also invokes Dyer’s reading of utopia as a way of understanding the pleasures of kinetic and explosive spectacle: ‘The energy of [action] films can be seen as offering an escape from the exhaustion or pressures of modern life. 36

Archer_final.indd 36

26/09/2012 08:12

Road to Autopia: Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super

Their intensity can be appreciated in contrast to the relative dreariness and monotony of everyday existence’ (King 2000: 103). King’s analysis is notable for the way it assumes awareness on the part of audiences as to the strictly fictive nature of generic representation, rejecting the assumption that ‘all such enjoyment has to be lined up unambiguously on one side or the other of a strict ideological equation’ (2000: 103).

37

Archer_final.indd 37

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd 38

26/09/2012 08:12

Two ‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie The idea of the road movie as a film populated by rebellious, counter-cultural protagonists has come to be a dominant one, especially in light of the New Hollywood films that took to the road. Given the popularity of the road movie within the political and cultural contestation of the Vietnam years, we have come to accept the disaffected or rebellious individuals in films such as Easy Rider or Two-Lane Blacktop as representations of their particular audience. Identification, then, in its very broadest sense – in terms of a sense of ideological or emotional kinship with the protagonists, a recognition of the similarities pertaining to them and oneself – are overtly mobilized in the road genre. There are two main reasons for this. The road movie is the narrative cinematic approximation of travel and evokes a close fit between what protagonists see and experience and our own pleasurable experience of the trip. It is also because the road movie so regularly inscribes cultural oppositions in its content, embodied by its protagonists; oppositions it calls on its audience to empathize with. This appears to be the case at the beginning of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi. In an early lateral tracking shot – the first of several that punctuate the film and provide its temporal core – we see a young, solitary woman prepared for the road: the camera’s movement 39

Archer_final.indd 39

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

alongside this woman, followed in a medium shot, suggests within the connotations of film language a sense of proximity or intimacy. This, in other words, is the person we are invited to follow on the film’s trip. Then the tracking shot gives way to a shot of the girl in close-up, tersely resisting the chat-up of the lorry driver who has given her a ride. ‘Not many people out’ says the driver. ‘There’s me’, the girl replies, staring ahead. The man, presumably sensing that his pick-up merely wants a free ride, tells her she needs to get out: the girl steps down, before giving the finger to the departing driver. This gesture in fact establishes the pattern for the remainder of Varda’s film: throughout, the girl (whose name, we discover, is Mona, played by the young Sandrine Bonnaire) will accept or decline favours and hospitality with equal disregard for those who offer them. Her motives, meanwhile, remain mostly unknown. Who then is this girl? And more importantly, how is it possible to identify with her? This early sequence in Varda’s film suggests a mismatch between what it appears to describe and what it actually does. As the film’s title implies, Mona is a figure outside law and convention. But what happens when this same figure is made the subject of filmic identification, when this word – in both practice and in an etymological sense – implies the desire to render similar? The proximity of the camera here, both in its use of the tracking shot and the close up, may in fact accentuate what it cannot grasp: Mona’s freedom, her internal thoughts, her private space. Capturing freedom, or representing marginality, risk being contradictory terms. These contradictions form the basis for this chapter’s questions. In what way do questions of filmmaking and cinematic identification problematize notions of representation and the subject, when this subject is freedom or marginality? And who is the actual subject of film: its protagonist, or the person watching them? Does identification, the sense of rendering-similar, overlook the potential discrepancies or oppositions between textual subjects and the reallife viewers in the world outside the text – those gaps, in other words, between the world of the film and the social realities within which 40

Archer_final.indd 40

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

films are seen? Varda’s film, as we will see, whose plotting does not obey the chronology of its story, has already indicated these problems before we see its protagonist in movement: Mona, as we see at the start, is dead before she takes an on-screen step. This brief example indicates that the road movie’s focus on marginality, considered within its socio-political context, must avoid becoming merely ‘reflective’ of such contexts. This stresses again the suitability of self-reflexivity as an aesthetic of the road movie and as an approach to its study. Varda’s film, I argue here, provides an influential model for a new form of political road movie by rejecting the presentation of a ‘given’ reality, in favour of a more ambiguous, open kind of filmmaking: one in which the viewer is engaged in recognizing those discrepancies between the film’s world and the world of its viewing and which thereby opens up spaces of difference through the work of the text itself. Our interest then is in those cinematic figures who either cannot or will not fit into (narrative) schemes of place, belief, identity, morality or productivity. A film such as Sans toit ni loi, which establishes a paradigm for a number of the films which follow it, is striking in the way it is to some degree as a very typical road movie, while simultaneously working to counter and challenge many of our expectations relating to the genre. In the majority of motion picture narratives, as Noël Carroll argues, what we loosely term identification, in terms of a sort of proximate mental or emotional state to that of the protagonist, is a misnomer. As Carroll puts it, the idea of such proximity, akin to assimilation in its notion of same-feeling – encouraged by the kind of visual contact we see in the tracking shots of Sans toit ni loi and more broadly in the road movie’s analogy of protagonist with viewer point of view – is never identical but at best ‘similarly charged’ (2008: 170). Carroll asks, consequently, why it is that the idea of identification, with its connotations of identity, is mobilized at all? In any case, the complexity of most narratives, and in particular the ‘significant differential between what we know and what the characters know’ (2008: 165), means that ‘identification’ tends to be what Carroll calls asymmetrical; more a condition of dramatic 41

Archer_final.indd 41

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

structure than anything to do with the protagonists and the notional subjectivity we might otherwise think to be ‘shown’ by the film. Moreover, as already mentioned, a familiar motif of the road movie sees the movement of protagonists already in opposition to societal norms: indeed, we see in these films under discussion that their protagonists are to an extent already on the other side of the dividing line: a line we are seemingly asked to cross. Yet in many instances, such a move would in actuality ask us to reconsider our very presence and practice as viewers. Could we legitimately endorse the protagonists’ actions without the protective dividing line of the screen and the films’ containment as fiction? In this sense, then, the French road movie requires us to engage ethically with questions of identification, narration and representation. The other films that are the main focus of this chapter – Rochant’s Aux yeux du monde, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 37° 2 le matin/Betty Blue (1986) and Despentes and Trinh-thi’s Baise-moi – all incorporate more recognizably American cinematic motifs as part of their sense of dislocation, using the specific qualities and connotations of the road movie to challenge or transcend national connotations and generic norms. As we see in all these films, the movement inscribed in the road genre is intrinsic to their interest; in terms both of the imaginary movement built into this shifting, in-between genre and the literal movement of the characters it describes. From the point of view of the road movie and French culture, the use here indicates the impact of this de-centred, hybridized form, and, to an extent, the potency of American cinematic influence. If movement itself indicates restlessness, moreover, then the films’ form is also determined by the protagonists’ repudiation of given social identities. Sans toit ni loi recognizes that marginality is always already a position of movement, as there is no place in which the outsider can or will exist, in terms of social place or recognition. Varda’s film is prescient, in fact, in its anticipation of itinerancy as a major issue in our contemporary age of economic migration (to be taken up cinematically, once more by Varda, in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse; equally in Eric Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges/The Dream Life of Angels (1997), the opening 42

Archer_final.indd 42

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

of which, where an itinerant girl turns up in a new city looking for work, echoes Sans toit ni loi). If vagabondage is often the refusal (rather than the inability) to settle down, it is also an extreme example of the disaffection or economic deprivation pertinent to the post-1968 generation: specifically, those born after the 1950s, who entered adulthood after the postwar boom years of economic prosperity. This so-called ‘hardship generation’ (génération galère), sacrificed in the view of some to protect the financial security of the previous generations (Smith 2004: 185), found itself disproportionately sidelined in the field of employment.1 It is within this context that, in Aux yeux du monde, the question of the young unemployed man (chômeur) and his integration or otherwise within the social body is explored. If the intricate formal strategies of Varda’s film seem remote from Aux yeux du monde, I will suggest that Rochant’s under-regarded film shares with its predecessor an awareness of the way marginal subjects are constructed and disciplined through the practices of film narrative and viewing. In other words, both films are sensitive to the fact that representations of marginality need first of all to consider the structures through and within which such marginality is named and framed. In Baise-moi, meanwhile, its young directors and performers appropriate the road movie form in order to explore questions of pleasure, morality and community, effectively playing them out as social debate. Because Baise-moi, as a fiction film, has at its centre issues of personal pleasure and fantasy, it focuses on the role and the policing of the image: in particular, the image as a medium of representation, through which critical or censorious forces encroach upon what is – and this is evidently the main issue – the inviolable space of private choice. The fact that it is also about young women on the road, and therefore inverts gendered generic norms, casts light on the possible anxieties repressed in genre: the film’s vision of promiscuous females on a deadly ride through France dialogues with the road movie’s implicitly masculinist codes, conjuring images of its freewheeling couple as a lethal disease, a ‘foreign body’ in the domestic landscape. 43

Archer_final.indd 43

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Writing Marginality: Sans toit ni loi Within French film studies, especially those concerned with the politics of representation, Varda’s film – in which the last weeks of Mona Bergeron, a young female vagabond, is recounted mainly through a series of witnesses – is seen as a central text (Beugnet 2000: 50). The combination of subject matter and gendered authorship has contributed to the film’s widespread influence and substantial critical attention (for example Flitterman-Lewis 1990; Forbes 1992; Smith 1998; Hayward 2000). Significantly for this study, the film has been situated in dialogue with the road movie. As Hayward writes, Varda ‘subverts the traditional codes of narrative cinema which depict man as gender on the move and woman as static’ (2000: 288). She then adds, with reference to the film’s central series of tracking shots, that the film ‘goes counter to the [road movie’s] canonical laws . . . it is filmed going backwards down the road (the tracking from right to left)’ (2000: 290). By stressing the counter-cultural movement of the film’s protagonist (her movement in the ‘sinister’ direction, against the flow of Western script) Hayward stresses the expressive ‘writing’ of the film in relation to dominant modes of reading and its feminist undercurrent. This emphasis on the politics of movement is similarly taken up by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, who writes: The French title . . . implies at once Mona’s strident rejection of any attachment . . . Mona is described by the variety of people who encountered her as she strode defiantly across the frozen vineyards of the Languedoc; . . . workers, peasants, hippies, professionals – a spectrum as diverse as French society itself. (1990: 39)

Given the amount of critical attention it has attracted, the significance of Varda’s film within French cinema, or of its gender politics in the wake of feminist theory’s formative era, need not be overstressed here. At the same time, the quotations above suggest a possible antagonism which, as we shall see, relates to the assumed liberty evoked in the figure of Mona. There is a discrepancy between, in the first instance, the authorial gesture of making the film, and, in  the second, the focus on Mona’s subjectivity. Conflating the two, in fact, 44

Archer_final.indd 44

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

is a problem, as is the act of reading the film as if ‘through’ the protagonist. For example, by giving Mona’s movement an intention (‘strident rejection’, ‘strode defiantly’), Flitterman-Lewis literalizes and romanticizes Mona’s cinematic journey. More problematically, her description suggests an identification with – or assimilation to – the protagonist, which in this case undermines her own argument that Mona ‘reject[s] attachment’. As I will discuss here, Sans toit ni loi is more pertinently about the problem of identification, rather than a celebration of it. By having Mona’s final days recounted through a series of witnesses (a structure consciously borrowed from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941)), the film underscores that ‘Mona’ is in reality the locus for competing interpretations and meanings. There is the moving body of the performer, Bonnaire; the direction of a filmmaker, Varda; and finally, the interpretive tools of the reader (audience and critic): these combine to cohere imaginatively in the fictional figure of Mona Bergeron. The attention of Varda’s constantly tracking camera, and her character’s indifference to the attention, merely emphasises that Mona is really as enigmatic as the Leonardo painting whose name she inherits. She will not write, as Ross Chambers argues about the film: ‘she must therefore be written about’ (1999: 45, emphasis in the original). The film is in this sense a drama about the way we read and interpret. But the characteristics of the road movie with which the film dialogues are not incidental to this drama. Sans toit, like many road movies, draws much of its appeal not just from the presence of a strong central character, but from its indexical, material qualities (here, the metal and clay tones of the wintry countryside, the focus on abjection and dirt, the vicissitudes of the seasons, and so on). In this case, such characteristics contribute to the film’s realism, the sense that it is almost a documentary. This is further marked by the topical variety of the witnesses – the ‘workers, peasants, hippies [and] professionals’ Flitterman-Lewis describes – with whom Mona comes into contact. These figures range from social marginaux living in run down squats, or the North African immigrant worker she 45

Archer_final.indd 45

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

briefly accompanies, to the idealistic (although ultimately flawed) soixante-huitard raising goats and making cheese. The film therefore elicits belief in these representative figures, at the same time as it emphasises its status as fiction. What it dramatizes, then, is the space between; the point at which we start to believe in the fiction: or in Christian Metz’s words, the process through which ‘I . . . “take myself” for the character’ (Metz 2004: 827). Varda has always emphasised the dialogue her cinematic work has with literature; a process for which she has provided the term filmécriture. It is her own, unidentified voice we hear in the voiceover that narrates the beginning of the film, thereby signaling the overarching presence of a cinematic narrator in her film. A precedent for this kind of narrative self-consciousness and play can be found, appropriately, in the early novels of what we now term the ‘picaresque’. Lazarillo de Tormes, the anonymous Spanish novel that anticipates the genre, features as its titular protagonist the semidelinquent itinerant figure that later characterizes the pícaro. In an essay on Lazarillo, Paul Julian Smith (1988) stresses that the book’s play with point of view, with the relationship between interpretation and narrative voice, constitutes a form of game with the reader. The realism of the novel’s world engenders the reader’s belief, while the frequently competing truth claims in the narrative undermine this faith in the word. For Smith, this is a form of mimetic trick that exposes ‘the willingness with which readers surrender to the mirage of the real’ (1988: 85). Varda transfers the techniques of the picaresque’s pseudo-realism via cinema’s particular reality effect: (the story of) Mona, like (that of) Lazarillo, assumes ‘a spurious, yet seductive, unity: both character and work take on a substantial “presence” lent them by the readers themselves’ (Smith 1988: 97). Or as René Prédal observes, the textual ‘community’ seen in the film allegorizes the collective interpretive desire generated by the film itself (1996: 617). In and amongst the various witnesses that retrospectively seek to interpret Mona, we might expect that the series of twelve tracking shots, which provide a coherent chronological thread to Mona’s 46

Archer_final.indd 46

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

story, might show Mona ‘herself’. These shots begin effectively just after the initial authorial voiceover (with Mona hitching a lift near to a beach), then move through the increasingly harsh weather and Mona’s increasingly embattled journey: in one of the shots, we see her abducted by a rapist; in another, towards the end, we see her disheveled state and slower, more arduous stride. Yet these shots are also just another layer of representation, underlined by the precise movement of the camera and therefore their highly constructed nature. What do these shots actually do, then? As Varda writes, the tracking shots responded to one of the film’s needs: ‘We had to find a way of representing this solitude on foot’ (1994: 174). Or as she has said elsewhere, the problem was how to ‘capture freedom’ (in Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 285). That the subject of this tracking shot often moves ahead of the frame, or is occasionally left behind, again foregrounds the director’s presence and authority as narrator. Typically, the shot moves at a steady pace, occasionally accelerating or slowing down, yet over the course of the film there is an increasing disjunction between this fluid movement and that of Mona. We could in this sense see the sequences as underlining Mona’s ‘independence and her transience’ (Smith 1998: 15). Yet ‘independence’ cannot here imply the kind of affirmative sense in which it is often employed. The freedom evoked in the images here is counterweighted: first, in that the protagonist’s movement within or out of the frame is only ever subject to the dictates of the film’s author; and second, by the fact that the series of tracking shots as a whole is ultimately contained by its retrospective fatality, its movement towards death. Sans toit in this sense highlights the problem inherent to film of expressing consciousness, of emotion (Branigan 1992: 101–102; Currie 1988: 91). It operates through the appeal of the itinerant narrative, only to question the ontological leap from viewing subject to the subject of the film. The capturing of freedom, like the expression of solitude, proves difficult, if not impossible, as it cannot be a shared experience. To know Mona would be to eliminate what Mona is. 47

Archer_final.indd 47

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

This might suggest that the film is fatalistic, or at least ‘highly pessimistic’ (Forbes 1992: 94), about the possibility of evoking freedom; indeed, as this fatalism is built into the film from the start, we could argue that its apparent pessimism is over-determined. The notion of a road movie that unravels in retrospect certainly has a contradictory aspect; especially as the genre, in ways I have outlined, is characterized by its apparent high degree of contingency and documentary-like openness to chance. Significantly (and as I will show in chapter five), when Varda returns to similar thematic territory in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, she favours the more open and less determined structure of the road documentary. Beyond using its structure to make a rhetorical point about interpretation, however, we can understand Sans toit in terms of its intent to evoke a genuinely removed or ‘other’ form of being. In this sense, the otherness of Mona that is merely emphasised by her death is in fact the real meaning provided by the film. For example, there is a very distinctive representation of natural and inanimate objects in the film (seen in close up, or held briefly in shot at the end of the tracking shots), yet their lack of obvious relation to the wider story in this context de-familiarizes the object. Tactile associations create peculiar resonances: the faulty zip of Mona’s jacket and the zip of a plastic body-bag; the jab of the needle in the blood-donor centre and the sharp edges of a crudely opened sardine tin. The effect is to reveal the objects in new ways. As Alison Smith argues: It is no longer so clear that the stray objects are interpreted through the feelings of the protagonist – it is not even clear that Mona notices [them] . . . Mona’s reaction to every object she encounters is in terms of immediate need, and we may pick up this way of seeing. In this perspective, most of the objects are little more than potential shelters. However, even this approach requires a sense of the form of the object coupled with a perception of it, as it were, through the body. (1998: 31)

The underlying narrative of hunger, then, reinforces the connection between the land and the protagonist as one of function rather than aesthetics. Or as Varda puts it: ‘Those who live on the road are not going camping or being tourists [. . .] They live within nature 48

Archer_final.indd 48

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

but don’t regard it. Beautiful landscapes or sunsets hold no interest for them’ (1994: 168). We are therefore asked to see beyond the film’s pictorial qualities, which in effect also means moving beyond romanticism, or a sense of shared feeling with the central figure. Empathy with Mona cannot be easily found, but must be worked for. A key encounter in this respect is that between Mona and the platanologue Mme Landier, who briefly befriends her, only later to have a premonition of Mona’s fate when she has her own near-death experience. Mme Landier’s exceptional position within the film is, allegorically, to replicate within the text the film’s own spectators and our ethical position vis-à-vis Mona. After the film’s reflexive fashion, this figure is not dissimilar to that of the filmmaker herself: she studies trees, but her own survival does not depend on their well-being (in fact, in the episode of Sans toit in which she features, she is present because the trees are sick). Similarly, as a filmmaker, Varda’s survival does not depend on the health of her subjects: she is removed from them by the camera and can return home at night. Nor is Mme Landier, or the young male assistant seemingly both attracted to and repelled by Mona, distinct from the type of spectator (educated professionals) the film, in its predominantly arthouse circuits of distribution, might expect to attract. These figures therefore bring into focus, in a self-interrogatory fashion, the questions of class, social distinction and generational division that Mona’s presence might raise. Yet there is therefore the sense that Mme Landier’s privileged position as narrator-spectator points, once again, to what the film cannot capture: presence. We should remind ourselves that Mme Landier’s meeting with Mona is re-viewed in retrospect: within this context there is an emphasis on the latter’s relevance to the former, as if Mona existed primarily for the gratification of the academic. That Mme Landier emphasises first of all Mona’s foul smell stresses in fact the sort of detached fascination of the scientist: Mona, in other words, becomes the other through which the academic – or the filmmaker, or viewer – performs their own self-definition. 49

Archer_final.indd 49

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

But if Mona is produced by the nexus of readings that make up the text, she then becomes the ‘some one’ that, as Stephen Heath argues, is always implied within the cinematic encounter, even in fiction (1981: 69). The film’s focus on the body enables us to consider this ‘some one’ in more concrete terms, beyond the more abstract notions of the image’s ontology, or its ability to reveal the truth of the world. Even as an entity produced through the writing and reading of the text, the film brings into focus the fact that Mona, in her movement against the cultural grain, cannot be ignored. The routard, like the outlaw or the stranger, alternately disturbs and fascinates because their actions and lifestyle will always invoke one’s own by reflection (Kristeva 1988; Bauman 1990). Whether the response is an impulse towards protectiveness or self-protection, identification or condemnation – and in Sans toit either is possible – we can argue that both responses collapse into the same negation of this other’s being: Mona, an example of what the French call the SDF (Sans domicile fixe), always needs to be taken care of (Damon 2002: 1–13). The film’s apparent pessimism, therefore, needs to be weighed alongside what is effectively brought to light by its negative representation: a freedom that resists capture and which by its nature resists representation. The film therefore becomes a philosophical one about the nature of freedom itself, which partly explains its centrality to the readings in this chapter and to those of this book more generally. Constantly pushing the limits of tolerability and endurance, this extreme road movie will not let us along for an easy ride: instead, it tests limits of response, be these repulsion or attraction. But even a positive response, such as the desire for protection, is a form of capture, as it creates the other in one’s image (the term sans domicile fixe suggests a lack in relation to a social norm, rather than a different order of being): it demands that this some one either wants or needs ‘help’, that is in reality neither desired nor required (Quant 1986– 1987: 9). In the figure of Mona, Sans toit, a social stigma and absence, becomes in this film its homophone: sans toi, freedom ‘without you’. As I have argued, then, the idea of liberty in Varda’s film requires us to rethink how true liberty in envisioned. Such a vision inevitably 50

Archer_final.indd 50

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

may involve repulsion, as logically, a pure liberty incorporates indifference in order to satisfy its criteria. The liberation Varda’s film offers then is a hard one, born of this difficult encounter between Mona and the spectator. Alain Bergala, in his Cahiers du cinéma review, both sums up this encounter and offers a working description for a different road movie paradigm: the freedom Mona chooses, he argues, is ‘absurd and indivisible’; adding that ‘[the] obstinate refusal to respond with sympathy to the enquiry of the other, whoever they may be, and including Varda who is filming her, means that the alterity of this character remains radical’ (1985: 6). I would stress that Varda’s most notable achievement in Sans toit is not to do away with the road narrative, but to reclaim it as a form whose evocation of freedom and otherness must be true to its word: Mona’s flight is not contained, but set loose in its difference. The film’s liberating possibility lies therefore in its efforts to depict liberty itself as a living force: an effect of the film rather than just the film’s subject.

Worlds Without Pity: 37° 2 le matin and Aux yeux du monde Two of the key tendencies discussed in relation to 1990s French cinema were a return to realism (Powrie 1999) and the emergence of what has been termed the ‘Young French Cinema’ (jeune cinéma français). These tendencies are related, given that the funding initiatives on offer to young filmmakers encouraged the production of low-to-medium budget films for which realism is best suited (Trémois 1997; Marie 1998). From a certain perspective, the move to a more realist aesthetic in the jeune cinéma français contrasts with the audio-visual extravagance of the so-called cinéma du look; the French cinematic tendency which, alongside Claude Berri’s starry literary adaptations (Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (both 1986)), was a key part of French cinema’s international profile in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the filmmakers and films associated with the latter such as Luc Besson (Subway (1985)), Léos Carax (Mauvais Sang/The Night is Young (1986), Les Amants du Pont-Neuf/Lovers 51

Archer_final.indd 51

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

on the Bridge (1991)) and Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva (1981), La Lune dans le caniveau/The Moon in the Gutter (1983)), all favoured relatively youthful protagonists and were characterized by a style that frequently drew on the aesthetics of contemporary visual culture. Eric Rochant’s Aux yeux du monde, his second film after the highly successful debut Un monde sans pitié/A World Without Pity (1990), occupies a transitional place between the cinéma du look and the jeune cinema français. As I will discuss in this section, Aux yeux du monde was to an extent perceived as being close in spirit to the films of Beineix, Besson and Carax. In fact, it shares similarities with Beineix’s own film IP5 (1991), which was produced and released at around the same time; just as it shared a similar fate at the French box office, with both films yielding disappointing returns relative to expectations (see Frodon 1995: 794–795; also Powrie 2001: 183– 184). Aux yeux du monde is the story of a young unemployed man, Bruno, who hijacks a school bus in order to visit his long-distance girlfriend. IP5, similarly, features an unemployed male protagonist, who instigates a road trip with the aim of finding a young woman. In both films’ then, the road journey is a kind of romantic gesture, even an act of amour fou. Both films also use the road as a means of extending their disadvantaged protagonists’ space of action: an escape from the entrapment of poverty and boredom, or, in the case of IP5, from slum accommodation and racial marginalization (one of the film’s protagonists is a second-generation Cameroonian boy with an alcoholic father). Alongside Aux yeux du monde, my focus in this section will be on Beineix’s earlier 37° 2 le matin rather than IP5. It is worth pointing out from the start, however, that while the stylistic and thematic links to the cinéma du look are present in Rochant’s film, they may be read too literally. The film, I will suggest, is very self-conscious in the way it employs its inter-textual allusions and romantic elements, making it a much more critical film than is suggested by its simplicity. Key to this reading is the fact that, on the whole, the film’s setting and aesthetic rarely cohere with its apparent romanticism. We can get a sense of this when we compare the look of Aux yeux du monde to 52

Archer_final.indd 52

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

IP5. Beineix’s work has often been described as ‘neo-baroque’ (see for example Bassan 2006), and, in spite of its notional engagement with urban socio-political issues, IP5 still calls upon many of the stylistic and technical resources that informed his previous works: in particular the lighting-intensive approach to design and mise-enscène, even in ‘natural’ contexts such as a forest,2 along with aspects of interlude and performance which tend towards a pure musical aesthetic. Rochant’s film, by contrast, is quite modest in its technical display. Only the crane shot near the end of the film (when Bruno is finally captured and arrested at his girlfriend’s house), and a subsequent tracking shot which takes in the inhabitants of the returning bus, display a technical deviation from the predominant vocabulary of fixed cameras, medium shots, and the predominance of exterior locations and available light. The film’s vein is in this sense more neo-realist than neo-romantic, creating a discrepancy between the imaginary of its protagonist and the landscape that contains him. Un Monde sans pitié, with its tale of disaffection amongst privileged Parisian university students, explores what Claude-Marie Trémois describes as ‘itinerant laziness which goes nowhere’ (1997: 20). Rochant’s second film looks to extend this search outside the earlier film’s upper-middle class metropolitan spaces. Fashionable urban ennui is replaced here by working class boredom, in which itinerancy is born not of idleness or nihilism, but of the absence of opportunity. This transition from the city to the country, as we will see, has important connotations with regard to its (and any film’s) ability to represent the nation, given the ever-increasing division in the modern world between urban and rural cultures and economies. But this transition is also striking in representational terms. Just as Varda de-familiarizes Provence in Sans toit, removing any place names or cultural associations the region may have, Rochant favours a landscape free from obvious associations of cinematic or literary heritage (certainly for an international audience), and one in which both cities and landmarks are virtually absent. Much of the bus journey that makes up the film was shot in the west of France, in the Poitou-Charentes department and the Périgord, yet little 53

Archer_final.indd 53

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

information is given to us, visually or through dialogue, as to the journey’s starting point and destination, or indeed the bus’s whereabouts at any time. Such lack of specificity underlines the sense of the film’s protagonists as spatially dislocated. As I will consider at more length below, the film’s mapping of a generic structure (the romantic outlaw, the hijacked vehicle and cross-country pursuit) onto the film’s prescriptive and unremarkable geography underlines the discrepancies that, as I outlined in the introduction, are figures of the European road movie. Importantly, seeing Rochant’s film in this fashion, and especially the way it relates to 37° 2 le matin, enables us to consider in more detail the aims and achievements of Beneix’s hugely popular, controversial and often misunderstood film; and in particular, how it may be understood in the context of the French road movie tradition. 37° 2 le matin is the story of an under-achieving handyman and part-time writer, Zorg, and his passionate but troubled girlfriend Betty, whose rambling journey around France intersects with Betty’s emotional disintegration and Zorg’s growing emergence as a writer. Beineix’s film, while not totally a road movie in terms of its syntax and structure, certainly shares many of the genre’s characteristics (aleatory narrative, generational divide, amour fou), as well as quoting the genre more overtly (the departure of the protagonists Betty and Zorg as their beach house burns to the ground recalls a similar moment in Terrence Malick’s Badlands; while the film in general, as Powrie has suggested, bears structural, aesthetic and thematic similarities to Pierrot le fou (2001: 124)). The aesthetics of Beineix’s film (saturated colour, nostalgic quotation, musical montage, and, above all, a sense of visual fascination around the female protagonist), combined with its subject matter (the sametitled book by Philippe Djian, which like much of the author’s work pastiches a form of American ‘beat’ style), inscribe it as something of a mongrel film. This is emphasised by the frequent critical sense that the film is out of place, retrograde in both its politics and aspects of pastiche. The ideological issues surrounding the film’s style and representation, particularly those relating to advertising aesthetics 54

Archer_final.indd 54

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

and the politics of gender, have left their mark on the film in an often highly negative way, often dominating discussion on the film at the expense of its more innovative aspects.3 What makes 37° 2 le matin significant for the present study is that such criticism is largely beside the point; or rather, the fact that the film generated such a popular response (nearly five million viewers in its first French run) itself points towards an area of spectatorship and filmmaking that exists outside criticism or to hegemonic notions of taste. The pulp-fiction allusions and objects which are the object of notional critique in the work of someone like Manchette, and may be the source of critical parody in Série noire, become the much less problematized objects of desire both in Djian’s writing and Beineix’s filmmaking. The gender issues surrounding the film, meanwhile, remain complex and are too detailed to enter into completely here, although they are worth mentioning in terms of film’s use of genre.4 The female object of desire that is invariably a source of erotic fixation and inevitable damnation in the novels of the série noire – the book on which Corneau’s Série noire was based was Jim Thompson’s Hell of a Woman; while Pierrot le fou took as its loose inspiration Lionel White’s similar Obsession – is indeed figured in 37° 2 le matin; yet the femme fatale trappings are in the service of productivity, not death. In both book and film, Betty’s spontaneity, energy and faith are a catalyst for Zorg’s emergence as a writer, even if this emergence, dubiously, seems to respond inversely to the demise in Betty’s health and sanity and her eventual death. Nevertheless, as Emma Wilson has argued, the enduring legacy of the film for audiences tends to be the image of its female protagonist and its appeal to female viewers (1999: 59). 37° 2 le matin is effective as a form of autopia, then, in its incorporation of trans-contextualized cinematic and literary motifs and in its emphasis on a particular ‘feel’ or ‘look’: from the pink-painted beach huts at Gruissan in the film’s opening scenes, to the riverside hotel in the Parisian outskirts (a nod, perhaps, to French poetic realism), to Zorg and Betty’s tryst above the piano store in the rural provinces. The visual signature of Beineix, along with cinematographer 55

Archer_final.indd 55

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Jean-François Robin and composer Gabriel Yared (the three of whom also collaborated on IP5), is to add an audio-visual luster to the already-present, whether this be through Beineix’s filtering of natural light in favour of artificial illumination (Russell 1989–90: 45), or his occasional eschewing of verisimilitude in favour of an episodic and mood-driven aesthetic, close to the pop expressionism of music video: hence the kind of criticism directed at the film from Cahier du cinéma’s Serge Toubiana, to the effect that the film was not so much a film, as a series of ‘images’ (1986: 79, emphasis in the original). Critics of Beineix’s work often miss the point that these synthetic spaces are not meant to be representational. They are rather, in David Russell’s words, ‘universes of the imagination composed entirely of sound and images which [the characters] have appropriated for themselves’ (1989–90: 44). The film then is a virtual space, at once otherworldy (in its relation to colour, space and reference) and prosaic (in its everyday locations and objects). Its relation to the real is therefore at once idealized and derisory and hence utopian: in Beineix’s words, ‘a romanticism in which you do not really believe’ (in Powrie 2001: 124). Rochant’s film is therefore a companion piece of sorts, although one that is arguably more critical, in the way it transfers the romanticism of Beineix’s work to a concretely realist setting that cannot contain it. Aux yeux du monde therefore resists the play of surfaces we find in 37° 2 le matin, requiring us to go beyond that film’s recourse (however derisory) to a type of fantasy space. This is an important distinction, given that some critics of the film bemoaned its apparent advocacy of amour à tout prix and its supposed trivializing of social context: something already rendered stereotypical by its use in films such as Beineix’s (Danton 1991: 68; Prédal 1996: 663). Yet where Beineix gives us mobility through imagination and the intervention of chance, Rochant establishes a topography constrained by circumstance. This is established within the opening sequence, which tracks the restless movement of Bruno as he waits to pick up his little sister, travelling on the same bus he will later hijack. The movement of focus here, from the anonymous passing cars to the walking figure 56

Archer_final.indd 56

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

of Bruno, shows that the latter lacks the means of independent travel. The significance of this is reinforced by the fact that Bruno is the only male amongst the group waiting at the stop, positioning him on the ‘wrong’ side of cinema’s classical gender divide. That the theme of mobility and means become the catalyst for the film as a whole is marked within the subsequent scene, which includes a phone call to his distant girlfriend, Juliette, and Bruno’s understanding that the relationship is compromised by his inability to visit her. As this synopsis suggests, a reasonable criticism of the film is that Bruno’s hyperbolic criminal act indicates an anachronistic and gendered notion of mobility as a means of ‘winning’ the female object of desire; especially as the female character is herself connected to a clichéd feminine space (Juliette, played in the film by a young Charlotte Gainsbourg, is a hairdresser). Of course, Juliette does at least have a job, unlike Bruno, and therefore we can read a compensatory or deflective masculine response onto Bruno’s gesture. Indeed, Bruno’s agitated shuffling among the the line of waiting mothers seems to play up, even caricature, the stereotypical gender division of active male versus passive female. Equally, the film foregrounds the foolishness and anachronistic nature of Bruno’s actions, while implicitly relating this critique to his appropriation of outdated cinematic models (significantly, it is the women in the film – Juliette and the schoolteacher on board the bus, played by Kristin Scott-Thomas – who point this out to Bruno). This does not mean that the film is simply a film about cinema. The anachronistic quality of Bruno’s action in fact works to emphasise, in juxtaposition, the inadequacies of the socio-economic context in which Bruno acts. Bruno belongs to that not-so-distant period on the cusp of telephone and information technology’s proliferation. Constrained by the availability or otherwise of public payphones, or the need to get food and petrol, the journey has a stuttering quality that captures the real-time rhythms of the road. The distance from Bruno’s home to Juliette’s village, moreover, seems disproportionately long in the age of high-speed train travel, apparently taking about thirty-six hours. Bruno’s recourse to the bus, 57

Archer_final.indd 57

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

meanwhile, alludes to a previous (cinematic) age of public transport in which the communities forged en route were key, such as in Capra’s It Happened One Night: here, the public option is taken under duress and merely reinforces the absence of community. The high-tech France of President François Mitterand, meanwhile, which ushered in the TGV and the architectural grands projets of Paris and other major cities, also seems far away; and if, as in Beineix’s earlier Diva (1981), the Parisian postman becomes a metaphor for technological reproduction and distribution (Forbes 1992: 65), outside the capital the post often fails to arrive, thereby aggravating Bruno and Juliette’s long-distance relationship. In a society (and cinema) dominated by the capital city, non-metropolitan subjects like Bruno find themselves only further displaced. In keeping with the anachronistic social context, Rochant’s film also turns to an older generation of American cinema for inspiration. The director has acknowledged the influence of films such as Sugarland Express on his film, along with Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) (Vachard 1991: 35); while Yvan Attal, who plays Bruno in the film, has commented more generally on the importance of American 1970s cinema in his work with Rochant (in Kaganski 2009). Aux yeux du monde’s plot synthesizes the kidnap road trip of Spielberg’s film with the elements of sentimental crime and media intervention that characterize Dog Day Afternoon (in Lumet’s film a young man, played by Al Pacino, holds up a bank in order to get money for his pre-op boyfriend’s sex change). The effectiveness of this textual transposition in Aux yeux du monde proceeds again from the already-anachronistic nature of the quotation, which contributes to the film’s out-of-joint temporal and spatial quality. This makes the film, as I have suggested, to some extent about the suitability of this textual influence itself. The main aspect of this textual transposition is the way that aspects of community, evoked strongly in the American films, dissipate in the French context. A characteristic of the American road movie tradition, especially in Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, is the idea of an outlaw space of action as a projection of popular feeling. The 58

Archer_final.indd 58

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

cinematic outlaw is often produced by the antagonistic circumstances which obtain within modern capitalism; the result being that this outlaw, however ambiguously, stands for the ‘people’, the often abstract victims of this capitalism gone bad. The elision of the crime movie into the road movie, in a film like Bonnie and Clyde, is suggestive of the way this idea of the popular develops and persists within a certain vision of modern life, but also how it increasingly makes the popular ‘marginal’. The road movie, in this sense, calls on us to identify with figures whose quirky deviation from routine and regulation ask us to view them as exceptional, but also, paradoxically, ‘like us’. In Aux yeux du monde this exceptional popularity is embodied by Attal, who further connects Rochant’s film to Lumet’s in terms of his resemblance in looks to Pacino and similarly agitated performance style.5 With the counter-cultural anti-hero it is his or her shortcomings, not accomplishments, that connote the real and the comprehensible. As Fredric Jameson remarks about Pacino in Dog Day (and by turns Attal’s own performance), the scattergun delivery and failure to communicate become ‘the highest form of expressiveness . . . and the agony over un-communicability suddenly turns out to be everywhere fluently comprehensible’ (1990: 43). Inarticulacy, in other words, becomes vernacular poetry, a marker of authenticity (1990: 41–42). Aux yeux du monde, in its dialogue with Lumet’s film, explores some of the complexities involved in this kind of identification. Noël Carroll suggests that genre cinema is inherently political, to the extent that it mobilizes sympathy and solidarity for a notional ‘us’ against a notional ‘them’ (2008: 183). This is obvious enough, although we can see the difficulties involved when such solidarity is elicited counter-intuitively to the experience and lifestyle choices beyond the boundaries of the film viewing. Hollywood cinema often naturalizes this contradiction through the introduction of a textual community. In Lumet’s film, for instance the bungled bank robbery which turns its protagonist into a public folk hero is underscored by the visible presence of a public chorus on the streets outside: a visualization which, as Jameson argues, acts as a reflection of the 59

Archer_final.indd 59

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

‘suburban moviegoing audience itself’ (1990: 43). In Aux yeux du monde, this spectatorial body is more ambiguous and abstract, represented in the form of the unseen audience of the radio and TV news. The non-visibility of this public in Rochant’s film increases the sense of isolation around Bruno. In such a context, Attal-Bruno’s agitated performance is frozen in its weird incongruity, its excess. It cries out for a public response it cannot in reality have. The landscape of Rochant’s film therefore turns out to be a real world without pity: a sparsely inhabited place of cultural uniformity and banal hostility. An uncomfortable scene late in the film, in which Bruno is humiliated by the staff of a dingy roadside bar, recalls the spaces of the disaffected American road movie such as Easy Rider, with its redneck diners, dirty looks and veiled mutterings. What makes the scene in Aux yeux du monde more unsettling – in this sequence, Bruno enters to buy drinks for the schoolchildren, but the staff merely titter and giggle at some unspecified joke, of which Bruno may or may not be the victim – is that he is made to seem ridiculous and powerless; whereas, in Easy Rider, the negativity of the public other actually affirms the protagonists’ danger to them. As I have suggested, Easy Rider appeals to ambiguous conceptions of the popular or ‘the nation’: ones which both appear to repudiate the national’s imaginary coherence, only to recuperate the imagined nation through the motifs of individual mobility and the evocation of the landscape. A visual allusion in Aux yeux du monde to Easy Rider draws attention to this kind of signifying work: transcontextualizing the stars-and-stripes helmet worn by Peter Fonda in the earlier film, Bruno wears the shirt of the French football team. Such appropriation is again more dialogic than merely quotational. As Michael Atkinson (2009) has suggested, romantic individualism is appealing to American film’s perennial re-vision because it does not conflict with the foundational beliefs, and wide spaces, of America. Aux yeux du monde queries, however, whether such resolutions are transferable to its immediate French context. The film may repudiate a vision of the fraternal Republic, but what mythology, in the context of Rochant’s film, is left to replace it? 60

Archer_final.indd 60

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

The main problem touched upon in Rochant’s film, however, is representation itself, especially in its contexts of cinematic practice. From its opening images the film makes claims to depict the other side of the economic and geographic divide; yet by 1991, the sort of subject Bruno represents had become increasingly alien to the production and reception of French cinema. The urbanization – and in turn the gentrification – of cinema construction, followed some decades later by the abandonment of the ‘roving cinemas’ that served rural communities, contributed to this change (Hayward 1993: 49–50). Mirroring the job crisis amongst the young, the period between 1983 and 1988 had also seen cinema attendances among those aged fifteen to twenty-four drop by 42 per cent (Frodon 1995: 628). The French working class’s most representatively prosperous years in social and political terms were actually mirrored in the proletarian heroes and communities of the 1930s (around the time of the short-lived Popular Front), yet in subsequent decades, and in particular the period leading up to the late 1980s, working-class audiences plummeted to negligible levels. As Hayward argued at the time, Working-class audiences have all but abandoned the silver screen . . . for two major reasons . . . Over the past two decades alone [1970–1989], the price of cinema tickets has gone up threefold. Over that same period, the concentration of cinema theatres in town and city centres, to the detriment of the working-class suburbs and the provinces, has meant a loss of accessibility to that means of entertainment for this class. (1993: 52)

Bruno’s foraging for a means of transport and communication in a verdant yet spiritually desolate landscape therefore represents the absence of a coherent cinematic community, one that would connect the metropolitan centre with its suburban or rural other. Returning to the imaginary witnesses in Aux yeux du monde, we see the echoes of an earlier antecedent, in the form of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se lève/ Daybreak (1938). Carné’s film also figures its central protagonist as proletarian everyman: Bruno and his football shirt are anticipated in Gabin’s François, ‘the Frenchman’, who cycles to work in a cloth cap. Yet if the gawping public witnesses of Le Jour se lève, and Gabin’s enraged response to them, figure the frustrated communitarian hopes 61

Archer_final.indd 61

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

of the Popular Front and its cinema, they at least suggest the presence of community. In Aux yeux du monde, however, this public is absent altogether. We can also relate the film in this way to Sans toit ni loi, in terms of the problem of representation. Both films dialogue with, but are not contained by, realism. But the rejection of realism is political in this instance, as the political validity of realism is here questioned. Who ‘speaks’ for Bruno or Mona if, as fictional subjects, they cannot speak for themselves? Moreover, what representational imbalances are in fact inscribed in the very act of this ‘speaking for’? With regard to the chômeur, is to speak on his behalf merely to situate him as he who lacks – voice, work, opportunity – and consequently in a dependent and inferior position within an unchallenged and hierarchical order?6 Realism in this sense would only contain the social outcast, depriving them the opportunity to escape their own designation as such. As with Varda’s film, then, what type of freedom might the film ultimately describe? Late in the story’s second day, with Bruno made to realize the police are closing in, he is given the chance by the coach driver, his former antagonist, to leap from the bus: an intervention which, from a narrative point of view, enables Bruno to fulfill his role within the story. The following morning, in the quiet of a village street, an armed police team, anticipated in the armoured convoy previously seen following the hijacked bus, takes Bruno from Juliette’s house. The excess of this police intervention appears clumsy, emphasising the disparity between authority’s conception of the ‘criminal’ and our own, based on the impressions of the film up to this point. After all, as we have seen, Bruno is no ‘criminal’, unless the naïve susceptibility to types of cinematic heroism is a criminal act. Yet the police’s excessive force, while returning the protagonist to his real status as just another news item (one we subsequently hear on the radio news as the bus returns), also works to emphasise the complicity of narrative fiction itself in the subjection of its protagonists. The pre-fabricated nature of the genre’s dénouement, its sub62

Archer_final.indd 62

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

servience to the generic demands of cinema itself, is underlined, at this concluding point, by Aux yeux du monde’s rare and spectacular deviation from its cinematic vocabulary. As the now arrested Bruno is taken outside, a crane shot pulls back to reveal not just the machinery of authority but the machinery of moving-image production – cameras, boom mikes – which fleetingly provide a textual image of the crime as media event, but also of the story’s own status as filmic construction. Bundled into the police vehicle, from which he will not re-emerge, Bruno recedes out of the frame’s foreground. In all these late sequences, Bruno, whose voice has dominated the film, is rendered silent. Narrative, then, is illustrated as foreclosing the possibility of its protagonist’s freedom. Here, in a similar way to Sans toit, this self-reflexivity in the text takes on its own particular poignancy and power, given the discrepancy between the voice and space afforded to and then retracted from its protagonist. It is significant that, at the end of the film, Rochant deliberately denies the cathartic option, removing the body of his protagonist altogether. Bruno neither dies, nor comes back. He is simply not there, as if he never really existed. At the same time, the conclusion of the film, by erasing its protagonist, offers an important reflection on the experience of the road movie. If the significance of the space and time of the film’s journey is often subsidiary to a nominal quest – especially one which, as in this case, turns out to be an abortive one – it is in this moment of narrative death that the meaning of this space and time is retrospectively realized.7 As the film’s concluding tracking shot takes in the impassive faces of the bus driver and its passengers, it renders these witnesses of the action mere silent spectators: spectators for whom the film, and with it the adventure (an adventure they perhaps didn’t realize they had had), has finished. Significantly, the effect here is of a transformed and transforming space, an experience which only emerges as a retrospective one. Freedom in this type of road movie, then, is less to do with identification in the conventional sense, than with an absence: the trace of something or some one always just out of reach, only perceived when it has already gone. The potent sense 63

Archer_final.indd 63

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

of this trace, combined with the realization that it cannot be recovered, appears intended to provoke not so much a sense of loss, as responsibility: responsibility for these ‘some ones’ who are conjured up for a space and time, only to be rendered socially invisible once more. Perhaps, then, the point of those final impassive faces is that they – we – are the film’s real criminals.

Going Too Far: Baise-moi Baise-moi (literally Fuck Me) is a film whose apparent aim, from its title downwards, is provocation. The feature debut of writer Virginie Despentes and former porn actor Coralie Trinh-thi is the fast-moving and violent tale of two young women, Manu and Nadine, who from largely unclear motives embark on a trail of armed robbery and killing through provincial France. The film follows the point of view of its female duo almost exclusively until its conclusion, which sees the death of Manu and the arrest of Nadine. Significantly, much of the attention regarding the film focuses less on the specific qualities of style or content, than the circumstances of its release and reception. In France, the film’s initial PG-16 certificate was later changed to an X after campaigning from, amongst others, the National Front: a judgement that would hamstring the possibility of the film’s wider distribution (the film fared better in the U.K., where it was passed by the BBFC, although the film was not widely distributed). From these censorship issues raised, to the critical and academic material it has generated, it is clear that the film is a focus for debate about the limits of representation. Response to the film suggests that its images are never ‘merely’ images and the question of boundaries situates representation as an arena for contesting relationships of power and control. In other words, political questions of legality (and in turn liberty) come to impact on the space of cinematic fiction (Joyard 2000). Where both Sans toit ni loi and Aux yeux du monde employ narrative strategies centred around the protagonist’s absence, in Baisemoi it is largely the presence of the performer, through what is in 64

Archer_final.indd 64

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

effect a conflation of actor and protagonist, that calls representation into question: it places the ‘who’, and also the ‘for whom’, of representation on an equal level to the ‘what’. Lisa Downing’s assertion that ‘[searching] for a straightforward “message” may be the wrong way to approach Baise-moi’ (2004: 273) suggests that the meaning of the film may lie in the relationship between image and viewer: I will argue here that we see the film in terms of a mode of excess which aims to unsettle the possibility of ‘reading’ the film. Obviously, excess is a relational concept: here, the basis for relation seems to be to the generic framework within which the film works. For Downing, the film’s ‘slick, existential nihilism’ (2004: 275) is due to its resistance to any one generic blueprint. The film is loosely comparable to the plot of Thelma and Louise, in which an attempted rape, and subsequent shooting of the offending man, are the catalyst for the women’s flight from both the law and society. Baise-moi also begins with a rape (not prevented in this case), as well as an unconnected shooting, although in this case there is no obvious or proportionate connection between the beginning of the film and what follows. Downing nevertheless exaggerates the film’s distinction from genre cinema. As outrageous as it often is, stretching the limits of verisimilitude in its spectacle of violence, it retains a fairly conventional and familiar structural core. In fact, what is probably most significant about the film is that, while its academic interest and micro-budget aesthetic situates it discursively to the side of mainstream cinema, its sensibilities are closer to American genre cinema than the European art cinema traditions we might assume are its closer relatives. Critical associations, for example, between the film and the so-called ‘New Extremism’ in European cinema (Wimmer 2011), generally associated with the films of Gaspar Noé (Irréversible (2003)) or Bruno Dumont (Twentynine Palms), inevitably overlook the fact that filmmakers such as Noé and Dumont are more overtly tied up with the contexts of the international festival circuit and the importance of the auteur, none of which seem so relevant to Baise-moi. Despentes and Trinh-thi’s film, moreover, certainly at the level of consumer 65

Archer_final.indd 65

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

iconography (most of the women’s trip is fuelled by Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola), and the music soundtrack (much of which, like the songs quoted in Despentes’s original novel, has English lyrics), has a very transatlantic feel.8 There is in fact a sense that the film’s departure from the mainstream of representation is, paradoxically, because it draws partly on the mainstream. Or at least, on the American mainstream; which, in the 1990s as now, maintained its representative parity at the French box office, while remaining outside the discursive centrality of French-produced cinema.9 A key motif in early 1990s American cinema, certainly at the time Despentes was writing the novel of Baise-moi, was the rise of the so-called ‘fatal femmes’, best exemplified by films such as Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) and The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1995); films which, as Jacinda Read has shown (2000), invert the gendered motifs of classical film noir by letting their women protagonists have it all yet still come out on top. Thelma and Louise was a representational precedent for these films, especially as a touchstone for the various debates it raised.10 Yet the representational approaches of Baise-moi would suggest that for its makers, Thelma and Louise, or even Basic Instinct, do not go far enough.11 Baise-moi consequently employs an often indiscriminate (in other words, unmotivated) use of violence, and, most significantly, hardcore pornographic tropes which remain an indexical step too far in terms of mainstream representation. In Despentes and Trinh-thi’s film, however, this emphasis on excessive representation, situated within rebellious connotations of the road film, becomes a way of exploring and extending the boundaries of the genre, rather than parodying it. Baise-moi therefore shares with the other films in this chapter the desire to find a form suitable to the content: a cinematic representation of freedom which is true to its word. The dual tropes of sex and violence are crucial to the film in that they are at once its content and its motivation, neither a specific cause nor a means to an end. Clearly, of course, narrative implications for the moment aside, there is the sense in which such representations may be co-opted for more male-oriented generic pleasures. 66

Archer_final.indd 66

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

As variants of Carol Clover’s famous ‘Final Girl’, in that they are at once overtly feminine and masculine – typified by the shots of Nadine posing with her new gun in her underwear, implicitly referencing Besson’s La Femme Nikita/Nikita (1989) – the film’s protagonists could be said to enact a kind of male fantasy which, contained as it is within the domain of cinematic fiction, neither unduly threatens nor undoes ‘the structures of male competence and sexuality’ (Clover 19993: 51). It is nevertheless important to stress that the depiction of sex in the film is never allowed to stabilize into easily readable patterns. As Shirley Jordan argues, to introduce sexual activity within the film in terms of a graphic (anal) rape sequence marks whatever follows in the film in indelible and potentially troubling ways (2002: 132). At the same time, the casual attitude to this rape experienced by Manu – ‘in the end it’s just a bit of cock’, she says – undercuts the logic of the rape-revenge narrative by rendering it incidental and therefore not a motivation we might attribute to the ensuing events. The psychological underpinnings of the rape-revenge drama, in fact, over-determine the phallus in the very violence of its response: the violated avenger-castrator, because of the extremity of the revenge act, leaves the phallus very much intact, which might explain her perennial appeal to male spectators. For Manu and Nadine, the violence experienced and witnessed in the film’s opening act seems more of an opportunity: their flight, both in concrete terms, but also, in the sense just considered, as a flight from symbolic restraints, allows them to realize whatever they wish. If Sans toit ni loi figures Mona’s own indiscriminate promiscuity as part of its acid-test for liberalism and viewer tolerance, Baise-moi looks like the realization of the rampant consumer culture which, as previously discussed, may be a by-product of liberalism itself. The kind of fantasy consumption here is freed from its constraints within an exchange economy, just as the narrative aims to resist readability in terms of motivation and overarching goals. In the utopian drift and expenditure of this road trip, the sexual encounters, having no intrinsic narrative function, are both its microcosm and its extension: 67

Archer_final.indd 67

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

in effect, they replicate the drift of the drive itself. They interrupt the sense of narrative movement towards a destination through a pure jouissance of expenditure: a point emphasised by Linda Williams (and not insignificantly for our understanding of film-historical shifts in genre and representation), when she identifies similarities between the porno sex-scene and Dyer’s utopian musical number (1989: 155). Powrie summarizes these elements in his assertion that here, ‘narrative matters less than a new kind of energy’ (2007: 76). In Powrie’s view, this has significant gender connotations, in that it goes against the kind of anxious male-dominated drama through which French cinema, especially in its noir-ish turn in the 1970s, sought to negotiate questions of community. In Baise-moi, in contrast to the gender norms of noir, ‘the female refuses to serve as the bracketed section of a male-driven equation’ (ibid.). Following this reading, any discomfort elicited by the film may not be a response to its extreme appropriation of generic norms, but to its specifically gendered nature. As with Thelma and Louise, Baise-moi is already distinct in forging a rare female site of consumption and pleasure: a fact which locates it within a broader discourse regarding feminism, consumption and power in the 1990s. As Read suggests in the study referred to above, this inversion of the femme fatale figure points towards a new, postmodern female subjectivity and not just the female as a subject of male anxiety. As Read argues, this fatal femme is not eroticized and fetishized, but rather the reverse: feminization is the result of a shift away from, and always in excess of, eroticization (Read 2000: 172). That the girls in Baise-moi seek to get what they want in a consumer-culture mode might prove extremely challenging, especially from the perspective of the protagonists as women living literally and symbolically outside the privileged centre (and who, as Wimmer points out (2011), are also beurs). Consequently, the ending of the film, with the death of Manu and her immolation, together with Nadine’s consequent arrest at the point of suicide, plays with generic conventions, while at the same time drawing attention to forces impinging on the bodies of its protagonists. The film at once recognizes the closure involved in generic 68

Archer_final.indd 68

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

codes, and also the reality principle undercutting its untenable jouissance, yet at the same time it represents this closure in terms of mourning and its imposition as a form of violence. The film also refuses any possibility of redemption through romance or the appeal to social justice. We are asked to take the protagonists’ actions for what they are and nothing more. In any case, interpretive efforts to limit or close off what the film’s economy of flight and consumption might mean for some viewers – to turn it, for example, into a satire or critique of consumer culture, as some interpretations have hinted towards (Best and Crowley 2007: 167) – are risking a prescriptive reading which would effectively police the film’s protagonists and also (as per the previously discussed adaptations of Manchette and Djian) undercut consumption’s disruptive force within narrative. This type of disruption also has a political, representational edge. As Read points out, the cycle of American films she discusses has one main problem; namely, that the ‘having it all’ ethos often operates in reverse, taking already successful women as its models, rather than those for whom such aims have more vital day-to-day resonance (2000: 175). In this context, the ending of Baise-moi, and the violent way its particular autopia is brought to a close, would appear to reiterate Manu and Nadine’s status as marginal, confining their flight to the order of cinematic fantasy: the very excess of the protagonists’ actions only exposes by implication the tenuous and fragile basis for their escape. It is here, however, that the film’s use of technology, related to its use of pornographic modes and performers, finds its significance. Filmed in the standard porn industry format of digital video (DV), also a standard format for home movies and documentary, this more domesticated image texture, in distinction to celluloid (or the newer range of digital film on which many features are now shot), confuses ‘our very conception of inside and outside . . . of distanciation . . . appropriation . . . and consumption’ (Beugnet 2007: 52–53).12 The ontology of the pornographic is echoed in the use of DV within the fictional feature film at this relatively early juncture. Unlike the ‘past-ness’ of film, the effect of early DV is to seem jarringly ‘present’. The digital and the 69

Archer_final.indd 69

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

pornographic in Baise-moi therefore team up to create their own distinct filmic quality. As Slavoj Žižek writes on the relationship of pornography to the cinematic, but in a phrase equally applicable to the early digital image, ‘[as] soon as we “show it”, its charm is dispelled, we have “gone too far”’ (1991: 110). The film’s use of non-stars, moreover, beyond its obvious representational connotations in terms of agency (as the ‘others’ of a more mainstream industry with its own system),13 also has an ontological dimension. The initial, shaky close-up of Karen Bach as Nadine can only draw our attention to the presence of a performer in the act of performing, especially as this longish take has no narrative motivation. Here, ‘ordinariness’ returns, not as a constructed and naturalized product of the star-system (Ellis 1982: 97–98), but simply as the everyday unseen. The road movie in this instance, moving into the digital age, emphasises its productive and specific qualities of seizing the contingent and the everyday (Jeancolas’s réel de proximité): NadineBach and Manu-Rafaëla Anderson, together with their trajectory – recognizably dingy brasseries, poorly lit provincial streets and squares, the beach in the morning, unremarkable hotel rooms with overhead lighting – are tangibly present, often unsettlingly close and familiar. To watch these two women dancing together in front of a hotel mirror offers the intimate, even intrusive, glimpse of an experience between two actors. At this moment they ‘represent’ nothing: they just are. The conclusion of Baise-moi, as with the other films discussed in this chapter, may ultimately suggest a pessimistic attitude regarding the possibility of freedom for their subjects. Yet it is the apparently incidental episodes, like the one sketched just above, that point towards a space of liberty. Significantly, the dance is presented to us, but, insofar as it is a shared experience locked in diegetically by the mirror and the protagonists’ enjoyment of the reflected image, it is not for us. It claims for itself a space of bodily presence and pleasure that both incites and shows indifference towards its audience: a space of provocative inclusion/exclusion which, in fact, is replicated in the scene of the girls’ first pick-up. Here, Nadine-Bach, character 70

Archer_final.indd 70

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

and porn performer, engaged in the act of sex, looks across the hotel room at Manu-Anderson: a look which is also, glancingly, a look towards the spectator; a look, then, that rejects the viewer’s notional ‘identification’, circumscribing a space of intimacy and exclusivity, and thereby revealing in the selfsame gesture a subjectivity not so negotiable to appropriation by viewers.14 Despentes and Trinh-thi’s film offers a useful summation of many of the issues addressed in this chapter. If Varda’s film is significant for the way it uses fiction to test the boundaries of permissiveness and morality, ultimately calling into question the boundaries constructed in response to the stranger’s threatening otherness, Baise-moi updates this practice through its hardcore strategies. Emphasising either the fantastical nature or the intimate pleasures of its generic tropes, it brings into focus the often inter-related areas of private experience and public morality. In answer to the chapter’s central question – whether the road movie can ‘capture freedom’ –Baise-moi joins with its predecessors in focusing the question around the protagonist-as-subject, positioning it in terms of freedom for whom. In my reading of Varda’s film, I emphasised the way its techniques encourage a closeness it simultaneously repudiates: it leaves the ‘some one’ of the text as a figure striving against capture. The anti-hero of Aux yeux du monde, I went on to argue, is himself revealed as a figure whose representation is ultimately beyond the possibilities of the text and its frameworks of reception and reading. The use of technology and the pornographic in Baise-moi, finally, brings this question of the filmic subject into sharper focus, in its emphasis on the bodily presence of its performers and its blurring of the division between the documentary and the fiction. A pessimistic view of the evidence – through the death of Mona, the disappearing of Bruno and finally the capture of Nadine – might suggest that such freedom is irreducible from the protagonists’ absence. Yet even this pessimism emphasises, to an extent, the desire that the protagonists exist and thrive for us and consequently the desire that their difference be neutralized. As I have shown, then, freedom is expressed through these road movies, but specifically, as 71

Archer_final.indd 71

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

an independent and irreducible quality beyond the more assimilatory processes of film narrative viewing and identification. In Baise-moi, nevertheless, the blurring of boundaries between real and fantasy afforded by the technology opens up a radically new space: a space of play in which subjectivity can be expressed and asserted, without this necessarily implying loss or capture.

Notes 1. By 1990, for example, the under-25s constituted more than half of both the national unemployed and the ‘working poor’ of the occasional and poorly-paid employed (Smith, France in Crisis, pp. 194–195). 2. For more on IP5 see Powrie 2001: 185–195. 3. See Powrie 2001 for a review of these debates. 4. For a critique of the film on gender grounds, see Beugnet 2000. See Powrie 2001: 128–140 for an outline of these debates and an alternative reading. 5. This similarity, and Attal’s own acknowledgement of Pacino’s influence, is indicated in numerous online reviews of Rochant’s film and profiles of Attal. 6. This is a similar argument to that of O’Shaughnessy (2007: 136). 7. This is an argument made most persuasively by Kermode (2000); also Ricoeur (1983). 8. The choice of the very loose translation Rape Me for the U.S. release of the film was possibly made with Nirvana’s 1993 song of the same title in mind; a choice that also draws on the musical and lyrical content of Despentes’s novel and film adaptation. 9. Ginette Vincendeau (2000), with reference to La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995), argues that a certain kind of American cinema functions at this point as a figure of marginalized identification within French filmmaking. 10. For example, the essays collected under the headings ‘ “Should we go along for the ride?” A Critical Perspective on Thelma and Louise’, in Cinéaste 18(4) (1991): 28–36; and also ‘The Many Faces of Thelma and Louise’, collected in Film Quarterly 45(2) (1991–1992): 20–31. 11. The chronological and structural closeness between Thelma and Louise and Despentes’s original novel of Baise-moi (1993) would suggest the former exerted some influence on Despentes’s work, consciously or otherwise. In any case, the frequent evocation of Scott’s film in discussions of Baise-moi indicates their inseparability at a level of cultural reference and register: see for example Williams (2001). 12. This is especially true in the case of the DVD viewing of Baise-moi. 72

Archer_final.indd 72

26/09/2012 08:12

‘Capturing Freedom’: Marginality and the Road Movie

13. Bach and Rafaëla Anderson were familiar performers within the French porn industry; however, inasmuch as Baise-moi seeks a ‘legitimate’ international audience, it is fair to say that their anonymity is part of the film’s effect, if not its intent. 14. For a similar analysis of this sequence, see Best and Crowley 2007: 178.

73

Archer_final.indd 73

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd 74

26/09/2012 08:12

Three No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix In an early scene in Martineau and Ducastel’s Drôle de Félix, the titular protagonist – a young man living in Dieppe, of mixed white and Arabic parentage, who is also HIV-positive – decides to travel to Marseilles to find his father: a maghrébin immigrant, it appears, who left Félix and his mother many years ago and whom he never knew as a child. In this sense, the film follows a familiar roadmovie motif of quest and self-discovery. The concept of the road trip as a search for origins or lost connections continues to inform the contemporary American cinema, in films such as About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002), Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005) and Transamerica (Duncan Tucker, 2005). As I pointed out previously, it is also a dominant motif in recent French and Francophone cinema, providing the narrative catalyst in films such as La Fille de Keltoum, Exils and Robert Guédiguian’s Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (2006). Indeed, one of the main corollaries of globalization and the increasingly mobile and fragmented sense of community or identity it helps foster, seems to be an increased sense of – or rather nostalgia for – an idea of home, of origins: an idea explored most comprehensively in Naficy’s study An Accented Cinema (2001). Given the basic narrative of Drôle de Félix, it might seem logical to consider the film within the same paradigms of displacement and 75

Archer_final.indd 75

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

return. Yet in the case of Ducastel and Martineau’s film, this search to find a father who remains unremembered, initiated by the discovery of a photo and an address from the other side of France, turns out to be less straightforward. To read the film as in some senses a resistance to, or at least problematizing of, the idea of nostalgia and return, is not just to perversely read against the grain: it is obvious at the level of the plot. Towards the end of the film, approaching Marseille, Félix meets a man by the riverside who may or may not be this looked-for father: the film makes no clear indications as to the fact. In any case, after allowing them a brief interaction together, the film quickly moves on without elaboration and the search for the father – which may or may not be realized – is forgotten. The conclusion, instead, sees Félix reunited with his partner from Normandy, now come to meet him at the end of his trip, as they take a boat across the Mediterranean. In the case of this film, then – as suggested by the drôle de in the film’s title, which can be translated literally as ‘odd’ or ‘peculiar’ – all is not as it seems. In the previous chapter, I discussed a series of French road movies that disrupt the assumed connection and comprehension between viewer and the cinematic protagonist. There is a similar process, I argue in this chapter, at work in Drôle de Félix. In terms of the narrative aims it sets out, the film would appear quite conventional: it is a quest, in which a journey will be made and a secret from the past will be unlocked. In other words, the truth – and in particular the truth of Félix’s identity – will be revealed. Yet the structural selfconsciousness and anti-climax I have already hinted at, and which I will consider in more detail, have significant implications in terms of how we read this film. In some respects, then, the arguments of the previous chapter are carried over into this one, yet I would like to go a bit further here. Because Félix, played by Sami Bouajila, is both gay and of North African descent, questions of identity in the film become highly charged. As I will discuss, the identity claims that the film invokes are also potentially over-determined and prescriptive. The film can easily be read as validating or repudiating a variety of particular 76

Archer_final.indd 76

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

interests, often political in nature, that are brought to bear on it. Yet the idea that the film can be used to exemplify or promote a specific kind of identity or affiliation – in this case, gay or beur – is to overlook its own specificity as a road movie, which (as my broader argument suggests) is concerned both with the process of becoming that takes place within the journey, as well as the disruption of categories and boundaries that is part of this process. As I will conclude, in fact, what makes Félix so significant as a road movie is that viewing the film itself becomes a kind of performance and projection across categories, often in the selfsame act of trying to categorize the film’s own protagonist. The film’s putative narrative aim, the search for an Algerian father (and hence, also, the search for the protagonist’s maghrébin heritage), has naturally generated interest in the film from the perspective of beur filmmaking and identity (Tarr 2005: 147–150; McGonagle 2007). The film’s apparent failure to explore this dimension at more length has been seen by some as a failing, and, at worst, a problematic endorsement of Republican assimilation. Equally, Félix’s HIV-positive status (even if this ‘status’ is mostly downplayed in the film, indicated simply by the pills Félix regularly takes) has encouraged another variety of approaches (for example Pratt 2004; Provencher 2007). Despite the film’s insistence that HIV no longer indicates a drastic prohibition of lifestyle choice or sexual activity, some of these readings have also been disappointed by the film’s apparent endorsement of the traditional family unit, rather than non-normative social formations. In short, then, if the circumstances of the film’s protagonist suggest, at the outset, the exploration of alternative ethnic and sexual identities, the film appears to disregard these possibilities in favour of a more feel-good vision of the nation: an idea underscored by the way Félix’s journey takes in a range of picturesque French locations and landscapes, from its northern coast to the shoreline of the Mediterranean. This is also carried out via a structuring device which relates, through the use of screen titles, each episode in the film to a different familial relation: little brother, grandmother, cousin, sister and father. 77

Archer_final.indd 77

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

This discursive struggle over the film’s meaning, in other words, what it is ‘about’, is nevertheless at the expense of what the film is really doing. To limit the film as representation of a particular subject denies its work as a movie – in short, something that moves, that develops – not to mention its possible appeal as a road movie and therefore a film that specifically foregrounds the act and consequences of movement. Indeed, the complex work of the film is indicated precisely by the contested nature of its reception. The reduction of the film’s protagonist – to a representative of HIV-positive identity, or of displaced beur – indicates the problem of making the protagonist little more than a vehicle for particular concerns. Ducastel and Martineau’s film therefore plays from the outset with the incongruity, but also the implicit violence, of trying to frame a protagonist through representation. The broader intention of the film is indicated in the opening credits. Here, a tracking shot pulls backward, framing in medium shot the young protagonist on a bicycle, cycling in an easy and unhurried manner, swaying slightly as if echoing the lilting rhythm of the song played extra-diegetically on the soundtrack: ‘Tout doucement’, sung in French by the American singer Blossom Dearie. This initial composition of beur, bicycle and seaside might be unexpected or even incongruous, at least based on previous conceptions of beur protagonists in French cinema and above all their links to the cinema of the banlieue (as discussed in Tarr 2005). This perceived incongruity highlights the playful quality of this sequence, but also its focus on movement and performance as a means of questioning stereotypes and disrupting any fixity in identitarian terms. The position of the camera may put the protagonist in a frame, but the fact that both he and the image are moving – and therefore become a living presence, not a frozen one – denies the kind of fixity that a purely photographic representation often yields. The trans-national status of the chosen song becomes another layer in this disrupting process: the use of music, moreover – in particular, the way the sequence combines extra-diegetic music and image to suggest a kind of imaginary subjectivity – will also prove suggestive to this reading, as I shall argue below. 78

Archer_final.indd 78

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

If the film tries from the start to offset stereotyped or reductive readings, then what is the film really exploring? As this chapter’s title suggests, the idea of camp is important in Ducastel and Martineau’s film; but as a thorough understanding of camp indicates, this does not imply that the film is one big joke. This is a road movie in which French landscape and landmarks predominate and one which is programmatic in its intention to traverse the whole country from one extremity of the nation-space to the other. Looking at the way the film opens and concludes, however, we may regard the whole enterprise of ‘mapping’ the nation-space as tongue-in-cheek. Yet in its own way, this would be an equally reductive approach. Similarly, I am wary of the dangers in using the film merely to illustrate another example of the protagonist’s irreducible otherness: potentially, this would merely be another way of both rendering Félix ‘unknowable’ and also essentializing beur or gay identity. It is best therefore to approach the film as one that instigates a debate about identity and identification; one that uses the road movie form, moreover, to consider the kind of imaginary journeys and projections viewers themselves take and which therefore calls their own presumed identity into question. Just prior to embarking on his journey, Félix buys a kite. This is a short sequence, the narrative significance of which is not apparent until later, when he flies it with his ‘father’. Yet its immediate relevance lies in what it apparently represents outside the terms of the plot. Félix does not buy just any kite: he buys a particularly large rainbow-patterned one. This visual referencing of the international symbol for the gay community, in the context of the film and its protagonist’s sexuality, might be an in-joke, a knowing moment of camp. However, as this sequence is located at the very start of Félix’s trip, we need to consider how such a gesture informs the ensuing journey. In other words, if it is indeed camp, what does this then signify in terms of the journey’s aims? To what extent, in any case, can we call this action camp? As Susan Sontag puts it in her celebrated essay (originally published in 1964), camp oscillates between consciousness and innocence, the 79

Archer_final.indd 79

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

key being that the camp attitude towards an object – or a film, an art- or similar work – indicates an acutely knowledgeable relationship to this object. Repudiating seriousness, it is alive to the spirit of failure (Sontag 2001: 283); recognizing the essential absence of meaning in anything, it revels in the artifice of everything (Sontag 2001: 280–281). Yet we cannot obviously describe Félix as camp. He himself does not register any ironic recognition with regards to the flag, commenting only on its price. Félix embodies a degree of levity, as we saw in the opening sequence, but he is also earnest and direct rather than obviously self-effacing or mocking. The combination of directness and levity that we see in the opening sequence is carried through into the film’s chapters, all of which introduce the protagonist in media res at a different stage of the journey, always in brisk movement, with the camera tracking either just behind or in front. The effect of this editing approach is to give the film a strong sense of continuity towards its goal and an affirmation of the journey’s intent. When Félix performs an improvised song and dance in the early stages of his journey, with the steps of his marching providing the central rhythm, any incongruity or irony in this performance is undercut by the couplet that finishes the song: C’est à la mer/Qu’attend ton père: ‘Your father waits for you/By the sea’. There seems to be nothing detached or ironic in Félix’s journey at this point. If camp is an attitude historically connected to the thought and creativity of gay culture, and if Félix, via the rainbow flag, putatively embodies this culture at the turn of the millennium, why does Félix often come across as so serious, as if wishing to repudiate these associations? The film’s decision to hint towards a camp reading, only to downplay it, may be one of its efforts to complicate reductive readings: it dangles the possibility of one interpretation, here in the form of the kite, only to retract it in the same gesture. But it is also an implicit comment on the specific uses – rather than misuses – of camp itself. A contemporaneous road movie such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliot, 1994) leaves us in no doubt of its camp intentions through its embedding of allusion, theatricality 80

Archer_final.indd 80

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

and double-meaning from its title onward. Yet inasmuch as this film, and other recent transpositions of a gay subculture into the popular sphere, become both a kind of style and a new kind of mainstream, it is debatable to what extent they uphold the subtle spirit and worldview of camp as Sontag sketched it in the late 1960s. Sontag’s essay is alive to the way that camp’s tendency towards fragmentation, to the theatricality of failure in narrative and its bid for meaning, already gestures towards postmodernism’s questioning of essentialist truths and identities (2001: 287). Camp is always attentive to the ambiguity of things, its only enemy the idea of an absolute. Félix’s deadpan approach to the kite in the face of its iconographic signification is therefore itself camp: acknowledging the reference, the gesture is nevertheless alive to the possibility that it demonstrates absolutely nothing, especially not who Félix ‘is’. If this all relates to the buying of the kite, how then can we relate this moment to its situation within the film and in particular its relevance to the road genre? As I have described it, this pre-emptive gesture, made prior to the journey, instills a note of caution: we should be wary, it suggests, as to the real significance of the journey. This ironic precursor to the start of the trip is also a gentle reminder that we are watching a piece of cinematic fiction with its own generic codes. This is supported by another inter-textual reference towards which the rainbow motif directs us: The Wizard of Oz. The structural blueprint of Oz’s road trip is clear in Félix: the idea of flight and adventure beyond domestic confines, to a place ‘over the rainbow’;1 the accumulation of a surrogate family en route; and finally, the quest for an unseen paternal figure (The Wizard of Oz himself; Félix’s father). This meeting, furthermore, will enable the protagonist to get back ‘home’ (Kansas for Dorothy, childhood for Félix). To some extent this is a textual allusion that the film enjoys making. Félix is given his own yellow-brick road of asphalt, his own perils to face and escape from, even his own musical numbers, if we count the one described above. Given the set-piece nature of the film’s structure and its emphasis on some of the country’s provincial heritage sites – Rouen, the cathedral at Chartres, the Puy-de-Dôme – the film 81

Archer_final.indd 81

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

is in some ways a visual journey through the cultural and historical variety of provincial France. This is a notion underscored by the film’s rich chromatic register; from the chalky greys of Dieppe, to the blush of dawn on the road to Chartres; from the verdant fields north of the Puys, to the sun-bleached rock and sapphire waters of the Marseille seafront. In distinction to Oz, the register of Félix is one of verisimilitude, as underlined by the exclusive use of location shooting and the absence of marked fantasy. Yet the quotation remains at the level of structure. How can we understand the realism of its content and its underlying fantasy form? In this regard, we should again consider the way the film reveals its own structure, as well as its particular idea of ‘home’. In Oz, of course, the basic structural goal is return, not escape. The great wizard, meanwhile, turns out to be a cinematic trick of projected images and amplified sound: no more than hot air, the little man eventually floats away on a balloon. Félix’s arrival in the south represents its own form of return, just as the ambiguous paternal figure, played by Maurice Bénichou, is himself a kind of child-man. If he does not actually float away, it is no less significant that it is the ‘father’ who takes the child’s role in their flying of the kite, with Félix in the more paternal role behind. The film’s surface realism therefore encourages belief, only to explode the search for the father as ‘hot air’ (and which, in turn, allows Félix to ‘go home’, here in the form of his lover who he subsequently meets). Because the father figure vanishes at the moment of the quest’s resolution, it suggests that the quest object is only a structuring signifier, both for the protagonist and the viewer: an illusory motivation which pre-empts the cinematic adventure.2 It therefore highlights the overlap within the narrative experience between motivation at the level of the plot (the desire to find one’s father) and at the level of the film’s viewing (the desire for a story). Félix in this sense considers the structures underpinning the search for distant origins, but also why such narratives, the road movie in particular, engage so strongly with viewers. For Carrie Tarr this is a self-reflexive step too far, as it ultimately denies its protagonist ‘the 82

Archer_final.indd 82

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

prospect of discovering a completely different aspect to his identity’ (2005: 147); in other words, the chance to ‘reclaim his Maghrebi heritage’ (2005: 150). Tarr’s reading distinguishes Félix from contemporaneous ‘resolved’ road movies such as La Fille de Keltoum and Exils, whose second-generation maghrébins reach their intended goals. But ‘identity’ and ‘reclaiming heritage’ are complicated in the case of Félix, who has no memory of his father (and who, it is hinted, deserted him and his mother). Consequently, while Tarr’s argument makes sense in terms of correcting hegemonic representation, and in terms of giving identity to that which Republican assimilation tends to occlude, it may bind Félix within an overly rigid identity; one which, crucially, undermines his capacity to choose, rather than offering him the chance. The unintentional result, whatever the political intent, may be to replicate the kind of assimilationist process such arguments set out to criticize. Nevertheless, while Félix seems superficially very distinct from other contemporary films focusing more on post-colonial (hi)stories, which make the journey overseas part of their narrative, a more structural reading reveals similarities. Seen this way, Félix is more of a pre-emptive commentary on these other films than a critique of them. La Fille de Keltoum, which depicts a young adopted woman’s search for her unseen Algerian mother, also appears to recognize that the search for the parental figure can be over-determined. Consequently, the ‘discovery’ of the mother is another ruse, as the final encounter confirms what the journey has suggested all along: that the real mother has been at her side throughout, accompanying her and guiding her and in this sense embodying the desire for return itself that motivates the journey. Exils, meanwhile, makes similar use of photographs to allude to spaces and a time that persist as images and figures of identification. But we should be wary of reading too much into the motifs of exile and return in Gatlif’s film, or the idea that these images are intrinsic to the characters’ identity. Rather, they are prompts for the kind of exploratory restlessness that characterizes the film’s exuberant protagonists, markers of a longing for an elsewhere rather than a specific place. Films such 83

Archer_final.indd 83

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

as La Fille de Keltoum and Exils, after all, are about the extended process of getting to a place, which is why they are road movies: if they weren’t, these films could just skip the journey, or get their protagonists to their destination a lot more quickly. Félix, in ways similar to these two other films, seeks to find an optimum point between the meaning of the destination and the meaning of the journey. The film is essential to our understanding the road movie in its French context, because it works self-consciously to illustrate the point I made regarding Aux yeux du monde: that the end of the journey is in effect the point at which we understand the journey that has been made. In Félix, importantly, this sheds light on the experience we actually get from the film, for which the quest object is really only a red herring. In other words, the attempt to ‘read’ Félix’s identity in the film through the quest only reveals the desire for transformation underlying the act of reading itself. But there is also a political element to this process. Presuppositions as to what is supposedly the object of Félix’s search, such as Maghrebi heritage or gay identity, are in essence surface-level assumptions, reducing colour of skin or sexual preference to an identity category. Whether or not the link to such heritage or communities goes unexplored, or should be explored further, there is the risk of essentialism implicit in the insistence that such identification is an inevitable object of the search. Félix’s awareness of institutional or administrative racism, for example, and of himself as potential victim (as seen in the episode in Rouen, where he witnesses a racial hate crime and escapes capture by the perpetrators), is in these terms less an example of Félix’s ethnic bad faith, than an indication that conferring identity in racial terms can cut both ways. Denis Provencher’s criticism, meanwhile, that Félix rejects more subversive possibilities and learns to become ‘a “good” member of the Republic’ (2007: 194), besides its possibly simplistic view of Republicanism, also risks being too rigid in its assertions. It is true that Félix rejects the advances of Jules (mon petit frère), the boy craving experience whom he meets and briefly stays with in Chartres, which closes off a potential area the film could explore. But for Félix to have gone 84

Archer_final.indd 84

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

in that direction would only serve to categorize him within a particular lifestyle option, however marginal this might be, rather than allowing him to reject all categorizations in general. Provencher’s example, then, indicates once more the potential symbolic violence in attempting to fix an identity onto the film’s protagonist. I would nevertheless like to stress that all these interpretations are of equal significance in terms of our overall understanding of the film. My suggestion is that we read the film through its various interpretations. For one thing, the fact that the film can elicit so many responses emphasises that the capacity to choose (to go back to Tarr’s argument) is only really possible at the level of interpretation: the character of a fiction film, after all, cannot actually make a choice, but can only follow the dictates of a writer and filmmaker. Moreover, any reading of the film, any attempt to presuppose or comprehend Félix’s motivation or actions, is in effect to enter into the film’s play of identity: to follow Félix imaginatively is at once to engage in a mimetic (or more precisely, imitative) relationship towards him. By identifying with the search for identity, that is, the viewer must to an extent get inside Félix’s head; but this only indicates how much identification – literally, the process of rendering-similar – is also a process in which the viewer is rendered other to him- or herself. The film’s identity politics are therefore already explored through the imaginary projections and transformations the film encourages. The journey becomes its own form of acting-out, and it is here that the congruities between this process and the film’s meditation on camp become apparent. Take the visual depiction of Félix’s trip through France. It might seem from one perspective that the film, in its focus on landscape and landmarks, offers a ‘heritage’ vision of the nation, characterized (as Andrew Higson (1995) has indicated in relation to British cinema) by a photographic form of visual display. But such a view is countered by the film’s representations, which in effect seek a visual equivalent for what Sontag calls the ‘quotation marks’ central to the camp vision of the world. The movement and pace of Félix is significant here for the way it dialogues with the pictorial. Chartres cathedral, for example, is first glimpsed out 85

Archer_final.indd 85

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

of focus, in the background to the tracking shot following Félix’s purposeful walk: a shot which serves basically as a visual bridge from one episode into the next, in which Chartres and its celebrated cathedral have a subsidiary role.3 The Puy-de-Dôme, similarly, is alluded to momentarily as the speeding car passes beneath a sign: yet subsequently, at the summit, the panoramic view is thwarted by the weather. With appropriate irony, Jules and Félix come across a temple to Hermes, the messenger of the Gods. But the summit is covered by mist and rain: there is therefore nothing to see and therefore no message, as the image cannot signify anything. On arrival in Marseille, meanwhile, a brief glimpse of the train station gives us a fleeting impression of the ethnic diversity of the Mediterranean city, alluding to Félix’s paternal heritage. Such images then move on as quickly as they come, never becoming ossified into the sort of respectful semi-ethnographic portraiture that, for all its good intentions, only works to fix its subjects in a kind of romanticized otherness: something that hampers a film like Exils once it reaches North Africa (I will return to the issue of ethnography in chapter six). The idea that a transnational identity is already an inherent experience of the cinema, and of our engagement with the film, is also expressed through the conjunction of music and image; above all, in the combination of travelling shot and music (especially the use of raï songs) that we see and hear throughout the film. In the Chartres sequence, for example, after stealing a car in order to drive southwards, a shot of Félix and Jules in the front seats shows a smiling Félix moving his body to the raï music on the radio. This is followed by a sustained tracking shot, apparently taken from the car, which takes in the passing countryside while a different raï track is heard. Such a shot can be explained away as narrative shorthand for the passage of time, yet this does not totally account for it. First, there is only a suggested equivalence in this second shot between point of view, protagonist and soundtrack. In terms of the audio track, there is an indeterminacy in the movement from diegetic, sourced sound to the non-sourced sound in the second sequence. In other words, we can initially assume that the music track is coming from the car 86

Archer_final.indd 86

26/09/2012 08:12

No Place Like Home: Camping it Up in Drôle de Félix

radio, but in the second sequence this is not obviously the case. The point of view of this second sequence is therefore also ambiguous. Narrative shorthand suggests that it is Félix’s, since he has put on the music, but this proves inconclusive: not only is this shot unmotivated within the narrative codes of point of view, but as a protagonist point of view the sequence is illogical, as it is not a driver’s perspective. Film never offers us a literal point of view, of course, but rather signs that we read in terms of the familiar language of cinema. Yet the type of protagonist-centred shorthand such as ‘point of view’ is in this case insufficient to express the complexity of the image. In this instance, while the tracking shot through the countryside is narratively intelligible and coherent as the vision of a protagonist, is also an audio-visual image of our own; a fact that is especially pertinent to the road movie, with its documentary-like concentration on vision in motion. In effect, then, the idea of a ‘third person’ and a ‘first person’ viewpoint become blurred in these kind of shots. In this sense, we effectively enter the film itself, at the same time as not being there. In other words, as a place where we both are and are not, the film becomes a heterotopia. For the film’s broader theme of identity, it is also significant that this sequence offers the apparent semantic disjunction of Algerian music and rural French countryside. Part of the appeal of raï – music whose origin is Algerian, but which has more recently been internationalized through artists such as Cheb Mami (whose songs feature in Félix) – can in part be understood in terms of its cultural resonance amongst diasporic communities. Yet to understand raï only in this way is in some ways to limit it. Like any musical form, such as blues or flamenco, it is not anyone’s exclusive property: to suggest it is would only preclude the possibility that the music could be shared or understood, across and between ‘cultures’ that are from this logic essentialized. It is simplistic, similarly, to make straightforward connections between raï and the protagonist of Félix. To assume that Félix’s fondness for raï is ‘natural’ could only be a limiting, essentialist assumption based on skin colour, as there is no ‘natural’ connection between the music and Félix’s background. The more 87

Archer_final.indd 87

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

significant inference, then, is that Félix listens to raï not because it is natural, but because he chooses to listen to it. As I have argued, it is really this issue of choice, and of the desire to explore beyond prescriptive borders (borders which, in the process, cease to make sense), that is both the main theme of the film and the underlying meaning of the road movie in general. In the end, and to evoke The Wizard of Oz a final time, the point is not that there is no place like home: the teasing-out of our own desires and imaginary projections in Drôle de Félix goes to show, for the duration of the road movie at least, that home is no place. The film, for one thing, explores the way in which France is depicted and represented as a passage through the country, rendering it multiple in the same gesture as naming it, yet without creating the kind of essentialisms imposed either by regionalism or the aesthetics of heritage. Félix’s journey embodies the paradox that to ‘see’ the whole country in its apparent totality requires that one keeps moving, never stopping in one place: it is therefore itself a utopian concept and space. Invoking the constant motion of desire and projection that we undertake within viewing, the film also suggests the paradoxically mobile nature of our cinematic homecomings.

Notes 1. This is not an arbitrary connection. Given Judy Garland’s status as a gay icon, and the connections made between the rainbow flag and Garland’s song from the film, it seems a viable piece of the film’s inter-textual allusion. 2. McGonagle (2007: 31) makes this point, reading the film in terms of the Graal tale. 3. Jules, the day after Félix’s arrival, suggests he go and see the stainedglass windows in the cathedral. There is then a cut to Félix talking about the windows he has just seen, but the action is never shown. Landmarks, in other words, are never more than incidental to the action of the protagonists.

88

Archer_final.indd 88

26/09/2012 08:12

Four Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie It need not be stressed that, in film-historical terms, the road movie is predominantly a man’s genre. It also goes without saying that, because of this fact, the genre has come in for its fair share of criticism. Much of the discourse around the road genre that focuses on its notionally unreconstructed masculinity (and which gives rise to the generic inversions we witness in a number of road movies) can be seen as part of a wider questioning of the dominant fiction of patriarchy, and therefore also of mainstream cinematic narrative; the two of which come together as a target of the emerging feminist film theory, in the 1970s and beyond. In a very straightforward way, the critical focus of these debates, with their emphasis on the active male, disavowal and Oedipal narratives, lend themselves overtly to a discussion of the road movie. This is because the road genre is always bringing into play, potentially at least, the reinscription of patriarchal space through the naturalization of the heroically active, solitary male in motion. Even if structures of male disavowal can be clearly inferred within the genre – in particular, its emphasis on homosocial spaces of mobility, or the imaginary self-sufficiency of the male protagonist in movement – the more pertinent historical task is to consider not just what the road movie might seek to inscribe, but what it seeks to disavow. As I argue in this chapter, maintaining my emphasis on the French road movie as an essentially self-reflexive form, it is only 89

Archer_final.indd 89

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

a small transition for these structures of disavowal, barely hidden below the surface, to become the subject of the film itself. If the dominant fictions of masculinity are the problem, then the revelation and meditation on this problem becomes its potential source of transformation. The French road movie in this sense avoids its potential reduction to an outdated model running on empty: the number of films considered here that draw on motifs of the road genre, moreover, made within a short historical timeframe and across different production contexts, testifies to the genre’s pertinence within the French cinematic context. My focus here will be on the qualities of the road and the journey not as affirmations of hegemonic masculine space, but as a kind of non-location. The idea of the autopia comes into focus here, stressing as it does the idea of a projected space of self-sufficiency and empowering mobility that is at the same time a retreat, a retraction from contact with, and responsibility towards, the world. To disappear in such a way is to repudiate one’s social identity, which is in effect to repudiate adult identity: the name and place determined reciprocally in the vision of the other and through language. In one sense it is to repudiate the dominant Oedipal fiction itself: in effect, to reject the law of the father through a refusal of paternal obligation. Yet to disappear is also in turn to call into question the stability of personal identity itself. This is an idea explored in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Professione: Reporter/The Passenger (1975). In the film, a switch of photographs and a dead man’s passport enable the titular reporter to live another life: a life whose ensuing unpredictability and eventual violent end, through its very excess of contingency, stand in allegorically for the multiple lives existing in potentiality, left unlived at the making of every life choice. The continuity of the self when weighed against the contingency of time and occurrence is a question posed by the empiricist philosopher John Locke, who gives his surname to Antonioni’s disappearing anti-hero, David (Locke 1993: 174–190). If for Locke coherent identity could be inferred through memory across time, such reliability is nevertheless uncertain. Is the 90

Archer_final.indd 90

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

self reducible to the accumulation of habit, of routine? As Locke himself implies in his reflections on the link binding the ‘night-man’ to that of the day (1993: 189), the sense of self as the cataloguing of everyday data fails to incorporate the significant effect of dreaming or fantasy, or indeed the movement from one physical space into another. The combined effect of these forces is evoked in the title and the credit sequence of Agnès Jaoui’s Le Goût des autres/The Taste of Others (2000). While this ensemble comedy of manners and mores is evidently not a road movie, it is nonetheless significant that a road motif can permeate an apparently unrelated contemporary work. In the sequence, to the accompaniment of a Mendelssohn Lied, speeding shots of the Normandy countryside replicate the experience of aimless drift that characterizes that of the backseat passenger. Blurred trees or speed barriers in the foreground give way to the expanse of farmers’ fields, then back again. The duration of the drive gives way to the logic of dreaming, as the countryside gives way to huge, brightly coloured industrial plants and factories. While this drive follows a narrative order, effectively continuing the previous scene, its status as a credit sequence gives it a quality of suspension: subordinate to the business of the credits, the images do not seem to have any realistic motivation within the diegesis, but seem to lie outside the spatial and temporal order of the story. It is therefore a surprise when the apparently unmotivated shot of factories is figured, via a reverse shot which is also an eyeline match, as the view of the film’s protagonist, the factory owner Castella, who we have seen in the earlier opening scene. The factories are now seen reflected in the half-open windscreen, at once superimposed over the passenger and screened off. Castella is here rendered childlike, in terms of the proximity of his bodyguards and his own placing in what is often the child’s seat. The music, meanwhile, which might ordinarily be imagined as intra-diegetic (that of the car stereo, for example), is at this point shown to be extra-diegetic, as the voice of his wife pulls Castella back from an implied space of reflection. At the same time, as the film will in turn suggest, the Mendelssohn is 91

Archer_final.indd 91

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

not figured here as pertaining explicitly to his conscious thought, at least at this point. The correspondences between this sequence and the car sequences analysed in Félix, and their implications in terms of filmic signification, are striking: just as the visual evokes a potential perception that is at once mimetic and non-anthropocentric, the audio evokes an aesthetic dimension or sensibility not yet realized. In such images, the unmotivated drift of the car journey comes to embody both identity’s instability and its potential transformation: a schism at the heart of the public persona.1 The world of work, which brings into focus the antagonisms of obligation and leisure, or of public image and private space, makes it a productive site for this exploration of masculinity. Work guarantees social status linked to material wealth, or undermines status in its absence. It is also, within a French context (although of course not exclusively so), a male-dominated terrain, to the extent that the ‘femininity’ of women competing in the workplace is always in some way at stake or in question (conversely, masculinity need only be equated with working itself, but which therefore implies that the non-worker is in some sense ‘feminized’) (Girling 2004: 21). Profession, as the Italian title of Antonioni’s film suggests, also connotes identity as a form of public shorthand. This begs the question of what unemployment implies in terms of identity, but also what the limitations are of equating identity with employment. If social circumstances such as the executive redundancies of the 1990s form the background to a film such as L’Emploi du temps, Cantet’s film suggests a concern less with the threat to that life and lifestyle, than with the meaning of that life itself. In the book L’Adversaire (2000), a personal account of the procès Romand – the real-life crime of embezzlement and murder which partly inspired Cantet’s film, and which was given a more direct treatment in Nicole Garcia’s 2002 film, also called L’Adversaire/The Adversary – Emmanuel Carrère suggests it was Jean-Claude Romand’s inability to admit failure or weakness that was the catastrophe at the heart of the affair. Carrère’s complex Romand, who stole from and killed his own parents, wife and children, is neither villain nor victim, but a man unable to 92

Archer_final.indd 92

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

reconcile his own self and limitations with the appearance and social recognition offered by a successful career, one denied him partly through his own ambivalence to it. In Cantet’s film this discrepancy inspires a meditation on the tensions between work and idleness; a tendency which recurs over this same period in other stories of male (non-)working lives: the world of the computer technician in Extension du domaine de la lutte; of the workaholic executive in Le Huitième jour or the alcoholic of Feux Rouges; of the itinerant salesman in Western. In terms of a broader consideration of French film and its politics, the discussion of a film such as Cantet’s from the viewpoint of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Higbee 2004) has been criticized as a reactionary move, in terms of its ‘pushing . . . socio-economic and class questions into the background’ (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 152). Yet to interrogate questions of masculine identity in an analytical fashion is implicitly to touch upon broader issues, given the extent to which masculine identity is bound up with notions of social status and economic success. If these films explore the road as a site of transformation or disappearance, it is, as I will argue here, less in the service of a conservative re-affirmation of masculinity, than a re-thinking of its shaky foundational status and its position vis-à-vis changing societal norms. One element these films draw on, then, is the way masculinity signifies ambiguously and conflictingly in the late twentieth-century era. If male employment during these years becomes increasingly precarious, while employment for women actually increases (Rodgers 1999: 62), such material encroachments at the level of gender do not guarantee a shift in attitudes. The gender discrepancy in pay, the predominance of men in the most high-profile and high-paid positions, together with the still-living cultural memory of patriarchy as legal practice (Wadia 1993), would contribute to the consolidation of masculine symbolic power. Arguably, the more recent successes of women in prominent positions only serve to highlight the discrepancies, by the very nature of their exceptional and highlighted status: such nominal advances reinforce the ‘universality’ of the 93

Archer_final.indd 93

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

French model, leading to a false sense of equality which may impede women’s development and reinforce male positions. If working life is still a male terrain at the level of signification, however, the apparent encroaching of women onto this terrain, together with the further loss of ground in terms of unemployment, might confuse such otherwise unquestioned gender roles, as the masculine subject finds himself caught between imaginary superiority and material insecurity. Added complications, moreover, have emerged. As I will discuss in relation to Harel’s film, a millennial cultural shift comes to the fore in which economic security is an insufficient marker of masculine authority, inasmuch as a sexual economy emerges alongside the monetary. In the light of Baise-moi, representing as it does a gendered appropriation of a hitherto masculine narrative, it is interesting to see how these contemporaneous films correlate: how is the road figured, once it no longer represents sexual freedom and power, but its potential opposite? Or similarly, when, as in Poirier’s film, the contemporary man on the road becomes a figure of social deficiency? If, as Max Silverman argues, itinerancy within modernity is less a sign of counter-cultural choice than the brutal economic effects of the culture itself (1999: 77), then it further begs the question of these films’ political validity; especially as they often deal with the economic ‘haves’ rather than the have-nots. The analyses in the previous chapters have nevertheless shown that a political consideration of the nomadic and the itinerant is possible beyond the reductive connotations of place and possession. While Mazierska and Rascaroli, for example, in their reading of L’Emploi du temps, are sensitive to the appeal and limitations of its protagonist’s automotive drift, they also suggest a somewhat de-historicized nostalgia for a more romantic era of ‘manly, itinerant adventure’, a ‘dream’ which the conditions of late capitalism leave the protagonist ‘unable to realize’ (2006: 124). Such a reading risks straying from the film’s significance, especially when it implies that Vincent’s actions are the result of his being a ‘loser’ on the economic terrain (2006: 113). O’Shaughnessy suggests, contrastingly, that a binary discourse of 94

Archer_final.indd 94

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

possession and exclusion phases out the potential for meaningful critique of the system at a deeper level. As dominant members of a society in which the only alternative is to be a loser, the implication is that the ‘winners’ are silenced, unable to ‘denounce their [own] domination, exploitation or alienation’ (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 136). Bypassing the binary schematics of material possession, these films analysed here question the dominant fictions of contemporary capitalism, rather than reassert them.

Fail Good: Emasculating the Buddy Movie in Extension du domaine de la lutte Philippe Harel’s adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s 1994 novel, scripted in collaboration with the author, explores a semantic shift in the age of consumption; one that philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky has described as a move from a consumerism based in material display (consommation ostentatoire) to one based on experiences (consommation expérientielle) (2006: 37–45). For Lipovetsky, the signification of consumption has shifted not only from its connotations of material well-being, but also from the product’s conferring of social standing or distinction (as outlined, say, in Baudrillard’s early work (1968)). In this ‘third phase’, the consumption of the product as an end in itself is superseded by that of experience and sensation, with youthfulness and sex as central. Its efficiency as a hierarchical system is that, in keeping with the idea of natural selection, membership cannot be bought via appropriate products or brands: the consumer has to earn distinction on the experiential plane (or at least is able to convert extreme wealth into attractiveness). It is the desperate efforts to ‘buy into’ such culturally experiential distinction that the opening of Harel’s film depicts, with its detached observing of a frenetic and sexless striptease by a drunken office worker at a party.2 As technocratic middle-income earners, of undistinguished physical appearance, too old to have the required, sufficiently youthful, social skills, the central protagonists of Extension – ‘Notre héros’ (as the film’s credits and voiceover name him) and Raphaël Tisserand 95

Archer_final.indd 95

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

– lack capital. They are the economic losers within the socio-sexual economy that forms the philosophical core of both film and novel, causing them in a certain sense to gravitate towards each other. The itinerant pair that they form within Harel’s film, by virtue of both the medium and its generic intertexts, is much more obvious than in the source novel. In the film, Tisserand is by necessity a visual adjunct to Our Hero, whereas in the book he is simply a described figure who dialogues with the narrator at certain junctures (in fact the film seems sold and packaged partly on the pre-tested comic appeal of its performers as a double act).3 The visualized pair can in turn be located within a tradition of the buddy movie and more specifically the ‘yuppie buddy movie’, identified in American cinema since the 1980s (Hark 1997). As I will argue, we can situate Extension within a more specifically French road movie tradition; one which, moreover, reconfigures the work of male disavowal frequently associated with the buddy genre since Molly Haskell’s pioneering work on the subject (1987: 361–362). This intertextual dimension situates the film within a distinct cultural register from that of the novel; one which integrates the episodic structure and café-théâtre traditions of Les Valseuses, Blier’s later Tenue de soirée (1986) and Michel Blanc’s Marche à l’ombre (1984), as well as the protagonists of Leconte’s Tango (1995). The latter is a good example both of what Haskell critiques and a possible counter to this critique. In Leconte’s film, a serial adulterer, Paul (played by Thierry Lhermitte), is repaid in kind by his wife. His wife then leaves him and Paul sets off in pursuit. Joining him on this trip are his uncle, a misogynist judge (Philippe Noiret), and Vincent (Richard Bohringer), a pilot who has killed his unfaithful wife, only to be let off by the same judge. The plan is for Vincent to kill Paul’s wife if and when they find her; the interim, and the hermetic space of Paul’s car, provides an opportunity for the three men to muse over women, love and sex, in a way already seen in Les Valseuses and Le Plein de super. What undercuts the film’s notional disavowal, however, is that the usual structuring absence of this type of buddy movie – a woman, in other words – is very much a structural 96

Archer_final.indd 96

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

presence; played, moreover, by Miou-Miou and therefore establishing an intertextual continuity with her similar role in Les Valseuses. The title of Leconte’s film points to its nature as a kind of sexual ritual; a performance of masculine self-sufficiency that ultimately collapses in the face of the female (exactly what happens, in fact, at the end of the film, in which Paul and his wife are reunited). Extension goes further still in complicating Haskell’s reading, primarily through the degree of male passivity within the narrative and the mise-en-scène: not so much disavowal as disinterest. Things happen to Our Hero: rarely does he make them happen. The predominance of the bedroom, sitting room and waiting rooms as narrative spaces of ‘action’ underscores the protagonist’s fundamental inertia. Similarly, Harel’s performance style, his semi-inebriated demeanour (a take on Houellebecq’s public persona), describes not the tersely heroic gaze to a distant point characteristic of the classical male hero – one that, as Dyer has argued (1982), disavows its own passive looked-at-ness as much as it encourages it – but rather one that registers with a mixture of surprise and resignation the incidents which impact upon him. Our Hero, whose initial road trip with Tisserand (in fact, a series of computer-training seminars in their company’s provincial offices) is imposed upon him by his boss, is mobile without motive. We find him on the road, in Rouen or La Roche-surYon, but it was not his impulse that brought him there. We likewise find him observing and listening (for example the meeting with his curate friend, with Catherine Lechardoy, with the dentist in the bar at La Roche-sur-Yon), but these encounters are explained only by chance, routine, or the vagaries of work; moreover, the contact of these exchanges is always mediated on the auditory level through a disjunctive voiceover that undermines the action depicted visually. The buddy movie since Laurel and Hardy (itself visually referenced in the Garcia and Harel pairing) tends to leave the women at home:4 it therefore connotes travel as the inverse of domestic female space. Harel’s film foregrounds the failure of travel within the new economy; terrain already prepared in Harel’s earlier Les Randonneurs, with its take on the French holiday film. There, the 97

Archer_final.indd 97

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

landscape of Corsica, filmed in sumptuous widescreen, offers the lure of spiritual transformation through travel which, as Jean A. Gili points out, indicates the film’s intertextual link to the road movie (1997: 65). Yet this contextualizing of Corsica as restorative otherplace for harassed and self-absorbed Parisians renders the landscape incidental: an idea mirrored on the visual plane by a tendency to film the hiking protagonists at one extremity of the frame, moving towards the camera and therefore not actually seeing the landscape. In a similar way to Extension’s disjunctive voiceover, the incessant dialogue that accompanies the randonnée of its titular protagonists adds to this effective erasure of the landscape as a transformative factor. Les Randonneurs parodies the insufficiency of the grand voyage within an era of mass tourism. Extension, in turn, re-situates the myth of masculine independence within an historical moment in which such certainties are strained: one in which, as Dyer suggests, ‘values of masculine physicality are harder to maintain straightfacedly and unproblematically’ (2004: 11), yet also one in which, given the economy it describes, such unironic masculinity might still persist as a guarantor of sexual capital. The journey in Extension, besides having no motivation beyond work obligation, does not provide any obvious revelation. The affection between the two men is borne out through the time Our Hero chooses to spend with Tisserand, culminating in the fateful Christmas Eve misadventure. Yet even here, if Our Hero addresses a disconsolate Tisserand with sincerity and compassion, his message is homicidal, suggesting he murder the boyfriend of a girl Tisserand has failed to pick up at a seaside nightclub. The pair’s trip is not, however, figured as derisory. If narrative space and movement no longer guarantee anything for the male protagonist, this trip undertaken by chance’s sake rather than from intention takes on a distinct character. Extension’s passivity, linked as it might be to domesticity or femininity, is disavowed within the proactive buddy film: such passivity creates the possibility for unexpected things to occur to its protagonists, to alter them (or ‘other’ 98

Archer_final.indd 98

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

them, as the etymology of the latter actually suggests). Adventure, in its strictest etymological sense as something which literally comes up or breaks through, can in this sense be understood, beyond the over-determined routes of the traditional buddy film, as something which happens through inertia. The text of Our Hero’s voiceover, after his and Tisserand’s first work assignment is over, makes this clear: ‘Somewhat absurdly, I decided to spend the weekend in Rouen. This surprised Tisserand. I told him that I fancied visiting the city, and that I had nothing to do in Paris. In truth I had no desire to visit the city’. What makes this moment interesting is its oscillation between activity and inertia, or even a middle-point between the two: a kind of willed laziness. Our Hero’s adventures in Rouen, or in La Roche-sur-Yon after he has been hospitalized for mild heart problems, do not appear to ‘succeed’ in any conventional sense: he does not come away healthier or more enlightened. But what does this mean exactly and to what extent might lack of success actually be the point? Our Hero’s extra trip moves away from any definition as work, but more importantly, it resists being connoted as an opposition to work – it is not approved leisure time or a holiday in the strictest sense – meaning it escapes any inscription within the sphere of productivity. Nothing really ‘happens’: he sees a few sights, does some shopping, goes to a pornographic cinema, all of which are rendered in the same blank framing, the directorial equivalent of Harel’s desultory performance style. Yet this does not mean nothing is taking place. What is important is the trip’s failure to register within what Kristin Ross, in her earlier study of Parisian space, terms ‘the programmed dyad of labour and leisure’, a dyad in relation to which the narrator’s active inertia ‘constitutes a kind of third term’ (1988: 61). This space between the twin poles of productivity (if leisure is the constitutive ‘other’ of work) forms the basis of the narrative from this point. The narrator’s disgust with his own job proceeds from its role in the multiplying of technological references, which only increase the subject’s distance from himself.5 When, after Tisserand’s death on the autoroute after the fateful Christmas Eve, Our Hero stops 99

Archer_final.indd 99

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

working, the short but logical reason is that ‘he simply couldn’t be bothered’. His boss tells him to ‘take all the time he needs’, with the implication that it is the recuperation of his productive energies that is the priority. But the film’s real interest is in non-productive energy and directionless expenditure: this is shown in a sequence of the film in which Our Hero visits Rouen station after working hours. The voiceover here evokes the carnivalesque inversions of 1968: being too young to experience it, for Our Hero it fittingly remains utopian, an unattainable idea. Yet as part of a fantasy he is able to commemorate ‘those moments when nothing works anymore’, the parenthetical suspensions in the productive world. At this point, shots of empty rail tracks and platforms denuded of their passengers and trains – which offer the filmic illusion of non-subjective vision, of a view without a viewer – evoke this sense of fantasy inasmuch as they are empirically ‘impossible’ sequences from a mimetic perspective: pure space without human-centred use or aim. This liminal movement between the twin poles of production extends to the area of sexuality. To counter a recent Freudian reading of Houellebecq’s writing (Clément 2007), it is simplistic to argue that Extension is a narrative about frustrated sexuality. This is to misrecognize that ‘normative’ sexuality is figured in his work as a constituent part of a healthy and therefore productive life. Just as seeing the empty railway tracks is logically impossible (outside of cinema, that is), and therefore necessarily out of reach, the focus in both film and novel on dream and failure is important, as to successfully realize erotic fantasy would undermine its operation as a third space: in other words, it would render Our Hero successful. The psychoanalyst Our Hero meets later in the film sees her role in terms of reinstating Our Hero within the sexual economy: her task, she tells him clinically, ‘is to get you in a fit state so that you can once more go about the processes of seduction, in order that you might have normal relations with young women’. That Our Hero proposes a sexual relationship with the psychoanalyst at this point could be read as misogynist; yet equally, this transgression of the analystanalysand contract, before the ‘cure’ has been effected, represents 100

Archer_final.indd 100

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

a desire to preserve the un-health of dysfunction, to acknowledge and perpetuate this productively unproductive and unresolved lack. With this in mind, how are we to read the film’s most pronounced deviation from its source: namely, the replacing of the novel’s remarkable concluding evocation of corporeal isolation, in favour of an apparently ‘feelgood’ affirmation of the possibility of love, with Our Hero attending an evening dance class and apparently meeting the woman of his dreams? This ending is particularly jarring, given the book’s implied message that all forms of narrative reconciliation are futile (Best and Crowley 2007: 182). To an extent the choice is dictated by the medium, as the novel’s monologue in its final sections is too dense to be translated into cinematic action. Yet this hardly accounts for the film’s radical departure, which owes more to the particular reconfiguring of the buddy movie that, I have argued, is at work in Harel’s adaptation. One of the film’s structural re-workings is to shift the narrator’s concluding comments on Tisserand: a virgin at 28 who nevertheless continues his search for love, refusing to pay for sex. In the novel, the eulogy on Tisserand’s determination in spite of constant failure – ‘I know that deep in his heart the fight was still there, the desire and will to fight’ (Houellebecq 1994: 121) – comes immediately after Tisserand’s death and before the narrator’s breakdown and eventual departure for Saint-Cirgues. In the film, these comments are heard in the penultimate, invented sequence, when Our Hero visits Tisserand’s grave. Harel therefore gives more overall prominence to the character and, in turn, the relationship. Given its placing within the film’s structure (they are the last words heard), an aside takes on the form of a valedictory statement. At the same time, it is somewhat undercut by the arbitrary introduction of the dance-class scene. To this extent, the valedictory moment is also heavily ironized, or at least made to seem less authoritative. Our Hero’s actions suggest a more wary and weary attitude to the struggle (la lutte) than this ending might suggest. The point may be that derision constitutes a form of response; moreover, the comic homosocial pairing celebrated in Extension is 101

Archer_final.indd 101

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

not a strictly compensatory relationship, nor a disavowing one which aims to re-constitute heterosexual norms. The comedy of dysfunction is here celebrated as a kind of alternative mode itself, a jouissance outside the dominant sexual economy. Keith Reader sees the film, as such, as post-phallic; its fantasy is the abjection or removal of the penis altogether and the nod to masculine generic codes and the motions of desire is ‘little more than a weary genuflection to the Zeitgeist it thereby denounces’ (2006: 113). The comic aspects of the film, its desultory attitude to sex in particular, play a vital role here; both in their affective qualities and in the way the comic repudiates seriousness and the potential narcissism of heroic masculinity. We can see this in the final scene, as Our Hero allows himself to become the subject of a dominant female gaze: it is no accident that his dancing partner is both taller than him and the one who initiates the exchange of looks. It is not clear whether this slightly tagged-on sequence is itself a kind of fantasy; a happy ending, perhaps, we are not supposed to believe. Such a derisory view would be in keeping with the spirit of the film and the tradition it forms part of. In its relinquishing of male mastery, the film’s final gesture may offer a comic, but therefore innovative, rethinking of modern screen masculinity.

Heart is Where the Home Is: Border-Crossing and False Nostalgia in Western As Anne Jäckel argues in her defence of the transnational financial policy of French film, Western is one of a number of low-budget films supported by the Centre Nationale de Cinématographie which demonstrate a movement away from homogeneity in French film production, whilst being the touchstones for ‘a French national cinema which seeks out the unofficial histories of the nation’ (2007: 23–24). That the film is regarded as something of a cause for celebration within studies of French film is signaled by the attention it has received and Jäckel in particular points towards the kind of third or interstitial route that has characterized much recent French film production. Yet it is also important to stress the extent to which the film, 102

Archer_final.indd 102

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

in its structure and content, explores what is essentially a gendered narrative of mobility. To take the trans-European plurality of its cast and crew as a cause for celebration, for example, hardly explains what the film is about, with its story of two men – one Russian, the other Catalan – whose initial meeting results in the loss of the latter’s car and whose second meeting leads to them drifting on foot around a coastal corner of Brittany. To see the collision of difference and multiple identities in utopian terms, for example (figured in the plethora of flags we see in the end credit sequence, illustrating the plural ‘national’ identities of cast and crew), risks undermining the tensions and traumas which underlie transnational movement as a condition in the first place. ‘Transnational cinema’, in other words, above all if it is to have political significance, cannot be merely a trend or aesthetic, but rather ‘an essentially self-motivated, and apparently amoral, cultural force’ (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 9), generated by new flows of capital and the movement and situation of people(s) that come in its wake. My suggestion here is that Western considers the operation of masculinity within this economy, to the extent that a possibly anomalous vision of masculinity subtends the economies of bodily movement the film describes. As I will argue, the protagonists’ complicity in this economy means that the film also complicates a reading in what Hamid Naficy, as I mentioned in the introduction, calls the ‘accented’ mode. While Naficy’s study of exilic cinema emphasises the traces of the homeland sought in the exile’s adopted country, or the nonplaces of transitional zones (ports, airports and stations) as sites of longing, Western has little enduring concern with its protagonists’ Catalan and Russian origins. Neither men are exiles in the strict sense of the term: bureaucratically, return does not seem to pose a problem, even for the Russian Nino. Consequently, the melancholy solitude of Nino and the Catalan Paco must be read not in terms of some longed-for native soil, but rather as symptomatic of the New European system and the continued dominance of a normative sexual economy: one which allows an easier flow of 103

Archer_final.indd 103

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

wage labour (Paco is a travelling shoe salesman), but also the kind of cross-border sexual consumerism that brings Nino originally to France, in pursuit of a mail-order bride that jilted him. The focus within the film on a generalized condition of displacement over and above the search for ‘origins’ underlines, then, the way this ‘transnational’ male subject in part engineers his own alienation: in distinction of course to the female, who is frequently the victim of male sexual consumption, and therefore an involuntary traveller (Brown, Iordonova and Torchin 2009). Poirier’s choice of the road movie as a generic framework can be related to the genre’s historical association of mobility and self-exile with heterosexual pursuit. In many ways the film has its precedent in another French film: Michel Blanc’s previously mentioned Marche à l’ombre; according to Powrie, ‘a very traditional road movie focusing on a pair of male losers’ (1997: 142) and the most popular domestic French film of 1984. The film is indeed traditional in many respects, above all in its notion of the male duo confirming their friendship through travel, while emphasising their heterosexuality through sexual pursuits en route. Yet the film is also striking in its attitude to place and space. As itinerant workers returning to France from abroad, the protagonists (played by Blanc and Gérard Lanvin) are precariously positioned, disenfranchised citizens within their own country. This is emphasised on the visual level through a decentring of city space: Parisian geography is suggested by nothing more than the direction plaques of a Métro station’s passage souterrain; while much of the action takes place in a peripheral wasteland of crumbling buildings, amongst a fringe culture of immigrant workers and musicians. The historical connotations of Paris, often manifested cinematically through Parisian architecture, are rendered superfluous within a narrative of itinerancy in which objectives and aspirations are no longer connoted by space. Crucially, in Marche à l’ombre as in Western, the pursuit of sexual gratification is the basic narrative through-line and destination. As if to establish the indifference to place as a meaningful signifier of attainment, the two men leave France in the end in order to pursue a young dancer with 104

Archer_final.indd 104

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

whom one of them has fallen in love. The film ends where it began, at a port: only the Aegean of the opening sequence is replaced now by the Atlantic of New York. For these male wanderers, the nation as a site of belonging ultimately defers to the potential space of sexual gratification. Relating this to Western, we see how the film’s title connotes a space that is at once specific, virtual and structured by generic connotations. This combination in Western generates a number of allusions through which we read the film. The movement west, which gives us the basis for the western as a cinematic genre, is a utopian one, in its mapping of a space and home that is either yet to be discovered, or awaiting rediscovery through homecoming, with a physical geography waiting to be traversed. In its indebtedness to the ur-narrative that is The Odyssey of Homer, the movement homewards becomes at the same time the definition of a specific site of adventure and discovery (Boym 2001). As a retrospective genre, of course, whose appeal is rooted in a kind of ersatz nostalgia, discovery in the western is often over-determined. ‘Home’, as an essentially static construct and thereby resistant to the impulses of cinematic movement, fails to provide a secure basis for the masculine wanderer. Yet in Western, set deliberately at the limit-point of Western France, its protagonists are given no more space to move. Paco and Nino’s Ithaca is not situated across the ocean: having nothing to do with actual geography, it lies at a point not recoverable in geographical terms. Nino has headed there, together with a car stolen from Paco, in order to find a girl to impress, yet he has failed: at the same time, Paco has both found and lost the woman, a Breton local named Marinette, who might let him settle down. In this sense the port town of Le Guilvinec becomes at once the pair’s destination and the place in which they cannot stay. The problem then that Western poses, once the two men have reached the westernmost point, is where they can go next. As Antoine de Baecque argues in his perceptive critique (1997), it is only through a process of loss and rejection that the film can take place: the ‘wandering film’ (film déambulatoire) represents the aesthetic solution to the problem of having nothing to do, yet 105

Archer_final.indd 105

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

there is the evident repercussion that such a trajectory merely defers the problem. As de Baecque points out, the two friends’ trip inscribes a form of in-between space that represents both the desire to be free and the desire to settle down, to be itinerantly marginal and be part of a community. This oscillating position is also inbuilt within the conditions and dispositions that have brought both men to this point. Paco’s itinerant job permits him a level of irresponsibility and promiscuity that is a form of male fantasy. The film’s opening freeze-frame (which contrasts significantly with its concluding one, of a massive family dinner) plays with the iconography of the female hitch-hiker as object of sexual adventure: viewed from behind, frozen and therefore objectified, soliciting the look but denied agency, the girl in the film’s opening image seems ready to be picked up. It is only when the film starts into life and we discover that this girl is merely using her body to get Nino a ride – generically referencing Claudette Colbert’s similar action, for Clark Gable’s benefit, in Capra’s It Happened One Night – that we have an intimation of the more selfreflexive and parodic direction this road movie is going to take. In this film, men betray themselves through their allegiance to generic codes. Both Paco and Nino can entertain having casual relationships and contemplate new romances once on the road, suggesting how much the desire for liberty is bubbling away beneath the surface of commitment. Yet this liberty ultimately proves a constraint, always demanding new satisfactions and new objects of consumption. If Paco, seemingly irresistible to most of the women he meets, is rich in the sphere of sexual capital, his prodigality in this area eventually robs him of the stability he apparently craves: his wealth turns out to be illusory. Nino, inversely, embodies poverty in this regard. He steals Paco’s car at the film’s opening because he thinks it will give him a better chance to seduce, thereby attempting and failing to breach the gap between the economic and the affective realm: a failure we have already seen explored in Extension. He is effectively trying to appropriate the capital and freedom he erroneously believes Paco to possess: in this sense, stealing the car, and initiating the story 106

Archer_final.indd 106

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

in terms of a lack of mobility, picks apart the given-ness of Paco’s masculinity and power. The levelling of both men to the status of itinerants, obliged to steal clothes, do odd jobs for money or coax free drinks out of locals, might prove an overly determinist tale of disenfranchisement, were it not for the fact that such disenfranchisement is seen as self-enacted. In a similar way to the protagonists of Harel’s film, they inhabit ‘a world whose circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere’ (Reader 2000: 124): any idea of home is displaced by the demands of the flesh. Harel had already referenced this Houellebequian idea in the conclusion to Les Randonneurs. Returned from their trip, the friends reunite at a wedding, to the strains of The Beach Boys’ ‘Sloop John B’, played incongruously in a Caribbean style somewhere in the background. The film ends with the song’s repeated refrain, ‘I want to go home’, a lyric of homesickness and nostalgia: yet they are already ‘home’, back in Paris. In one sense, the film’s ending ironically evokes the relief of these urbanites to get back from the holiday which, supposedly, was the reward for their working endeavours; at the same time, given this antagonistic pull between a metropolitan workaday base and the lure of the exotic and (failed) romance, the conclusion captures the hopelessly stranded, always-in-between nature of these dissatisfied urbanites. To relate these issues to the debated question of the transnational in Western, I would argue that in Poirier’s film, as in Harel’s, the concern is mostly with the structuring absences that displace subjects in the first place. Paco’s identification as Catalan, and therefore as a kind of state-less subject, is clearly marked: indeed, the acting persona and career of Sergi Lopez, who plays Paco, has subsequently revolved around his own ‘accented’ performances in French-, Spanish- and English-language films. Yet within the context of Western this state-less quality serves, initially at least, to underpin rather than undermine Paco’s illusion of liberty and mobility. On this point, for example, I would argue against Ezra and Rowden’s division of the transnational economy into ‘itinerant residents’ and ‘immobilised nomads’, the former being those whose connectedness through 107

Archer_final.indd 107

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

communications technology ‘enables a kind of hyper-mobility’ (2006: 9). Where would Paco fit into such a polarized system? The more pertinent point is that the mobile phone or laptop that signifies one’s connectedness also limits freedom, through this very connectedness and the network of demand and obligation it imposes. In other words, its freedom (a notion I will develop with reference to L’Emploi du temps) is only based on a form of license or membership which needs constant maintenance. As a result of the theft of his car, Paco is symbolically emasculated and is dependent on Marinette both for transport and assistance. His foreignness is accentuated, or even revealed, by this symbolic emasculation. For example, the lack of mobility and its ensuing frustrations expose the loss of symbolic capital and in turn the loss of language: confronted during the film with three losses (his car/job, his suitcase, and Marinette) he can only swear in Spanish (about the first two) or say nothing (in the last case, where he weeps in isolation against the backdrop of the ocean). If the film challenges the inference of a lost homeland, however, it shows an equal ambivalence towards this western landscape as the site of a new homecoming. Peter Baxter’s suggestion that landscape in Western, especially in the climactic sequence of Paco’s rejection, exists as a form of pathetic fallacy (Baxter 2002: 68–69), is most interesting in the way it suggests a desire for sense and resolution that may not actually be present. Landscape in Western is most telling when the juxtaposition of protagonist action and backdrop fail to cohere into readability. For example, when the landscape serves as a visual backdrop either to revelation (the story of Nino’s failed marriage) or abjection (Paco’s breakdown, as described above), the purely picturesque quality of this backdrop, and the absence of suggestion at the level of the soundtrack, is revealing: the protagonists’ positioning within the mise-en-scène evokes isolation. The penultimate sequence by the sea, in fact, is a partial graphic match of the early sequence in which Paco loses his car. Here, Paco is framed against the landscape in a medium long shot, deprived of any centrality through close-up. Similarly, when Paco later tracks down Nino, their fight takes place in long shot with barely perceptible 108

Archer_final.indd 108

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

sound, emblematizing the indifferent dominance of space over the protagonists. The film’s resituating of generic tropes is evidenced further through the way the mobile camera sometimes deserts the two wanderers, rather than replicate their point of view or follow them in a tracking shot. These ‘mobile’ protagonists are often rendered apparently immobile through the foreshortening of space, effected by the pulling away of a frontal camera as it speeds away down the road, slowly diminishing the two travellers in a lengthening long shot. Such diminishment of the protagonists is further underscored by the disjunction between the dimensions of the journey in narrative terms and the actual trip itself: in reality, a circular one covering only a few dozen kilometres. Music also plays a significant role in the film’s evocation of masculinity as a condition of place-less exile. Bernado Sandoval’s score, mixing primarily Andalusian and Latin American motifs, provides a suitably disjunctive quality to underscore the protagonists’ displacement. The strains of flamenco and the Spanish lyrics of loss and longing chime well with the film’s narrative of lovelorn wandering, yet there is no reference within this choice of music to any obvious sense of place, or at least one that is relevant to the protagonists. The soundtrack does not consist of ‘Catalan’ or ‘Russian’ song until the end: Nino, finally, sings a song from home, but this is in conjunction with his emotional re-centring as a lover to Nathalie (the last of the film’s Breton women), and as surrogate father to her children. The score, then, works with the rest of the film text to resist essentializing notions of place or home as guarantors of stability or meaning. Like Andalusian music itself, a hybrid form, any echo of place is ultimately contained and immersed within the new form and place produced by the dialogue of different voices. Western’s poignancy resides in the fact that one cannot go home again: not because home is forbidden, but because ‘home’ as a signifier has moved on with its masculine bearer. In her recent study, Yosefa Loshitsky has argued that Western may ultimately fall short of its ambitions, as its final image of immigrant 109

Archer_final.indd 109

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

assimilation through inter-national marriage inscribes an antiquated model of migrant labour and its fantasy of a hospitality ‘secured through the female womb’ (2010: 43). This is a fair point; although as I have argued, we ought to see the film’s protagonists as false immigrants in the first place, rather than exemplary of modern migratory flows. Moreover, the film’s main achievement is to interrogate the types of narrative that underpin the non-coerced movement of masculine subjects, not explore the forces and possibilities for those whose mobility is imposed by external forces. In deconstructing the gendered nature of the genre itself, it ultimately points towards a reorientation of the masculine towards contact, commitment and stability: a movement that re-inscribes the notion of home without necessarily collapsing into either the Oedipal narrative or the myth of territory. Once upon a time, the West had to be won. Victory in this Western comes only after a fall; after many of the dominant fictions of masculinity are relinquished.

The Road as the (Non-)Place of Masculinity: L’Emploi du temps, Le Huitième jour, Feux Rouges One of the paradoxes of the road movie, in its historical positioning as a masculine-oriented genre, is that it often privileges that which is considered the opposite of a masculine-centred narrative: aimlessness, the avoidance of conflict and the failure to arrive. Given the emphasis within theories of classical narrative cinema on goal-oriented action and resolution (Bordwell 1986: 156–164), it is significant to what extent a cinema that focuses on the masculine subject, especially in a postwar context, often dwells on delay and procrastination: the failure to land, in other words. An unwillingness to come back down to earth is central to some of the American films discussed by Kaja Silverman in her study of male subjectivity (1992). In a film such as The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), the homecoming of three war veterans, forced to readjust to a new consumerist society that is itself an eradication of the war’s memory and their own heroism, becomes 110

Archer_final.indd 110

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

in Silverman’s words a ‘progressi[on] from one spectacle of loss to another’ (Silverman 1992: 67). The film, like Harel’s, plays out in many ways as a fantasy of male abjection: sexual dysfunction, drunkenness and childlike incapacity become the source of a new kind of cinematic masculinity, one that combines trauma with a sort of fantasy of emasculation (Silverman 1992: 89). Significantly, in Wyler’s film the reluctance to go home, rather than the desire to get there, is key. This is typified by the extended early sequence in which the three men, from the safety of a taxi’s back seat, view their home town for the first time since their return. Such is the pleasure of companionship and infantile regression evoked by the back-seat ride that we realize, on arrival ‘home’, that the prolonged homecoming was in fact a means of delaying the act of civilian re-entry. ‘Home’ now comes to signify instability and obstacle within the logic of narrative structure. In L’Emploi du temps, especially in its opening sequences, the emphasis on the spaces of commuter travel point us towards similar observations. Nothing really happens in these sequences; not at this point do they provide any clear narrative information beyond their depiction of a man, Vincent (Aurélien Recoing), spending the day either on the road or idling at various stops en route. As such, the opening suspends narrative, acting, to use the analogy of the musical again, as a kind of ‘number’. The conclusion of the opening passage sees the protagonist converging with the homecoming commuter traffic, joining the lanes of moving vehicles to the accompaniment of the early evening news on the radio. Since the driver does not seem to have been anywhere in particular, and since the spatial and temporal event of homecoming predominates for so long prior to its nominal goal, we infer that this intermediary space is the film’s principal space of ‘action’. This is a notable choice, in that it represents one of the main interventions on the part of Cantet and his co-writer Robin Campillo in their adaptation of the Romand story. In effect, L’Emploi du temps fleshes out the spaces between the story’s notional events. The road here is not merely a conduit for the various conflicts and actions depicted. To overlook the centrality of the road 111

Archer_final.indd 111

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

itself in the story of L’Emploi du temps is to underestimate its function in the story, its role in terms of the protagonist’s subjectivity and the cinematic pleasures it affords the viewer. The notion of the ‘non-place’ (non-lieu) as described by anthropologist Marc Augé (1992) is central to this argument. The relation between this feature of Augé’s work and Cantet’s film has already been pointed out by other commentators (Vincendeau 2002; Higbee 2004). This reading, however, will seek to expand upon these comments. The contextual significance of Augé’s concept is that it is specific and contemporaneous to the socio-economic milieu and anxieties depicted within L’Emploi du temps. The non-place’s ambivalence, moreover and its status as a form of intermediary zone, is reflected in the film’s oscillation between freedom and constraint: Vincent’s automotive wandering, which it turns out are a cover for a made-up job in Geneva, provide the appearance of escape, whilst simultaneously acting as a cover for, and leading him back to, his paternal responsibility (to the extent that they in some way come to represent that paternal function). My own reading of the film has similarities to that of Will Higbee, whose social-realist focus sees the non-place as a heterotopian site for the negotiation of crisis. I read its predominance within L’Emploi du temps, however, in terms of a slightly less dualistic schema. The non-place is not just an escape route for the male in crisis, but a site in which masculine identity is imaginarily restored and reassured. Or in other words, the tensions Higbee aptly describes find their imaginary resolution, rather than just evasion, within the zone of the non-place. How then do we comprehend Vincent’s road trips beyond the straightforward logic of escape? The journey in L’Emploi du temps is one that culminates every Friday at the original point of departure (Vincent’s family), rather than following a trajectory of outright disavowal. The road for Vincent figures simultaneously as a site of both evasion and production, just as his journey is one of both denial and acceptance. Cantet himself articulates this when he says that Vincent ‘chooses an untenable position, a mid-point between the reassuring world of bourgeois social recognition he cannot let go 112

Archer_final.indd 112

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

(family, career, wealth), and an altogether shadier world (idleness, fraud, trafficking). He thinks he can find a point of stability between these two poles, which proves impossible’ (Cantet 2001). Just as Vincent explains later in the film that the pleasure in his former job was the driving between places, the film illustrates how his transitional movement is intrinsic to an idea of productivity: first, in that his double life requires a continued absence to justify itself; second, in that his itinerary is not a deviation from the trajectory of working life, but rather an imitation of it. The key to reading Cantet’s film via Augé’s work is to recognize that the non-place describes not just sites, but the modes of being pertaining to those who use or inhabit these sites. This approach has implications not just for our understanding of Cantet’s protagonist, but for our understanding of the film’s particular appeal and rhetoric. The non-place, in Augé’s terms, describes a zone which creates ‘neither singular identity nor relations; only . . . similitude’ (1992: 130). Its appeal is not freedom so much as the suspension of decision-making itself, for, as long as we inhabit it, the non-place – motorways, service stations and hotels, the road itself – delivers us from the burden of responsibility. The contract made upon entering the non-place is then to be completely average, defined by one’s use of the road, retail or banking system (Augé 1992: 126). The condition of this particular contract is anonymity, but this anonymity provides its own reward to those permitted entry: ‘Without doubt . . . the relative anonymity which is part and parcel of this temporary identity can be experienced as a liberation by those who, for a short while, are no longer obliged to know their place and stick to it’ (Augé 1992: 127). O’Shaughnessy succinctly captures this quality of the film, as well as its implied political engagement, when he argues that the ‘apparent mastery’ Vincent would have felt as a travelling executive would be ‘entirely dependent on his place in the system and . . . therefore a contradiction in terms’ (2007: 156). The capitalist system, according to O’Shaughnessy’s argument, disguises containment as liberty: ‘constrained by the needs of capital, [Vincent’s] mobility only 113

Archer_final.indd 113

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

seemed like self-determination’ (2007: 175). It is in light of these contradictions that we might see the shift towards the interstitial spaces of working life – the drive between places of activity and obligation, for example – as a site wherein these contradictions are negotiated. The working routine acts then, to some degree, as its own form of escape. O’Shaughnessy’s resistance to a gendered reading, however, overlooks the fact that Vincent’s solitary trajectory evokes both an internalization of the dominant fiction of masculine responsibility, whilst at the same time a disastrous repudiation of this same responsibility. If Vincent’s redundancy from his executive position, which takes place several months prior to the start of the film, has allowed him to avoid the pressures of executive life, he is also unable to relinquish the trappings of this life and in particular the ‘contract’ which enables men (in this film, the workers on the road are always male), to disappear in the spaces of the working routine. The nonplace is therefore a site of both crisis and its resolution. Augé’s own imaginary projections of the hurried and harassed traveller suggest this dual process at work: ‘Somewhat dreamily, Pierre Dupont put down his magazine. The “Fasten seat belt” notice had gone out. He adjusted his earphones . . . For a few hours (the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would be alone at last’ (Augé 1992: 13). This final sentence is also strikingly evocative of the cadre’s appearance in Jacquot van Dormael’s Le Huitième jour, on board a jet, hiding behind a sleeping mask which hides the ‘working’ mask he will put on once back on the ground. Van Dormael’s fairly conventional and sentimental road/buddy movie (Daniel Auteuil’s executive loses the love of his family, then rediscovers his love of life, mainly through the intervention of a young man with Down’s Syndrome) is in fact most interesting in its initial sequences, in which recurring images of morning preparation in montage evoke a kind of stasis – what we would now call Groundhog Day, after the similar motifs in Harold Ramis’s eponymous 1993 film – which is at once a manifestation of security and entrapment; or rather, security as entrapment. Cantet’s film is more subtle in its suggestion that entrapment, 114

Archer_final.indd 114

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

in its own way, is security. Consequently, any notion of Vincent’s actions as ‘masculine fantasy’ (Vincendeau 2002: 32) must be balanced against this ambiguous position and the fact that this fantasy is not the kind of motorized escape typical of the classic road movie. Vincent’s ambiguity suggests that it is the process of attaining a happy family life, rather than the result itself, which is troubling. It is in this sense that the motor vehicle, both here and in the later Feux Rouges, comes to signify something altogether distinct in the traditions of road-movie representation. Kahn’s film, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, depicts the descent into automotive hell of an executive and his wife, in the space of a nocturnal car journey to pick up their children, prior to a family holiday. The journey linking the end of work to the beginning of the holidays constitutes the film’s space of action: as such, the film offers a further emphasis on this notionally transitional space as the supremely privileged site of masculine self-sufficiency and (lack of) control. Significantly, the blurring of the road in Kahn’s film into a kind of tunnel, illuminated intermittently by surreal flashes of neon signs, makes the autoroute the site of inaction, of a form of forgetfulness and the suspension of emotional or ethical ties. As I will suggest in the next chapter, in comparison to Claire Denis’s Vendredi soir, the film in fact hints that the nocturnal space prior to its daytime conclusion – in which the wife is raped by a hitch-hiker, who is then killed in turn by the driver – may be a fantasy space, or at least one in which fantasies come to fruition. The depiction of the car in L’Emploi du temps is clearly more grounded in realism, but no less oneiric. Cantet chooses to shift between the panoramic gaze offered up by the road’s trajectory, as well as Vincent’s position in the car, and therefore on the intimate space of the car itself. This stresses the uterine dimension of the car space (as Charles Tesson noted in his review of the film, the sleeping Vincent is figuratively ‘born’ within the womb of the car at the film’s opening (2001: 73–74)): a quality often overlooked in the tendency to view the automobile as phallic. This womb-like quality is accentuated by the limitations to vision: the site of his driving is the anonymity of the autoroute or the mountain pass, foggy or 115

Archer_final.indd 115

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

rainy landscapes of reduced visibility; night-time drives with their headlamp pools, tunnels with their pulsation of light and dark. This latter feature acts as a visual underscoring of the heartbeat, which in turn underscores the film’s other significant effect: its foregrounding of the acoustic register as that which is repressed by the optical. Engine noises, the sound of tyres on tarmac and gravel, the lulling chimes which accompany the opening and closing of doors, all point towards the maternal. Within the film’s logic, of course, this evoking of the uterine is set against Vincent’s own (self-)deceit, accentuating his resistance to commitment and productivity; just as in Feux rouges, the oneiric drive suggests the terrible consequences of abandoning responsibility to the road. The apparent repudiation of the phallic does not avoid the fact that the suspension of responsibility in the car drive is itself a reassertion of masculine control, albeit through the disappearing act of non-contact and silence, and the search for a pre-Oedipal state of weightlessness. The automotive bubble (the ‘me time’ of the drivetime commute) exerts a powerful influence, but only for as long as it remains undisturbed – which, in highway driving, is usually the case. So long as Vincent’s reveries are not interrupted, there is an illusory meaning to his wanderings. That driving is a bit like watching a film is a truism that need not be over-emphasised here; although it is worth stressing that the isolation and imaginary suspensions of time, place and identity evoked in cinema-viewing (and which, in previous chapters, I have argued as pertinent especially to the road movie), also simulate a kind of automotive bubble, and hence a non-place. To go back in conclusion to my earlier arguments regarding the ethics of a cinematic autopia, it is vital to see how the type of irresponsible pleasures afforded by the road movie are not secondary to the political aims of a film such as L’Emploi du temps, but inherent to it. Cantet’s film is in many ways at its most appealing when nothing happens, when we allow ourselves to drift along with Vincent. This is taken to extremes at the point where Vincent, with money he has received fraudulently from an old friend, buys himself a sports utility vehicle (SUV), which 116

Archer_final.indd 116

26/09/2012 08:12

Nowhere Men: Masculinity and the Road Movie

he promptly takes for an off-road spin. For a moment, we share in Vincent’s childlike regression as he drives around in circles. This is of course when Vincent’s actions are at their most destructive, when expenditure (of his time, and of others’ money) impacts most violently on the lives of those closest to him. Yet it is a key aspect of Cantet’s film that it does not adopt a moralistic tone, but rather allows us to participate in the temporary amnesia of Vincent’s drives: without this, there would be no sense of either the temptations or the tensions which Vincent and his actions exemplify. The ending of L’Emploi du temps brings us back to where we began in this chapter. At the same time as Vincent negotiates his return to productive life in the form of a job interview, Cantet’s subtly encroaching camera reveals a look awry, a moment of hesitation: a hesitation which, following the French connotations of the word, suggests a position of suspension between decisions. This, in turn, evokes not so much a question of the correct choice, as of the potential of choice: the sense that one might be simultaneously oneself and someone else, here yet elsewhere. We are once again with Antonioni’s Locke, struck by the contingency of identities, or with Jaoui’s Castella, poised on the verge of as-yet unrealized worlds and thoughts. Insofar as these films introduce potentiality as a form of politics, they may be seen to move away from more obviously gendered concerns and bring into focus previously addressed questions of cinematic time, space and action. To an extent, as the title of Cantet’s film suggests (L’Emploi du temps literally means timetable or schedule, but in its constituent parts it means ‘use of time’), they are as engaged with the problem of time itself. What might be more disturbing about L’Emploi du temps is that the emptiness of Vincent’s itinerary comes back to reflect on the meaning of productive itineraries in themselves. The film’s title and the way it explores aspects of routine and the filling of time, points towards the structuring of time into units of meaning, but also the use of time itself: how we use it; what we do with it. Its ultimate resonance may be the way it holds the politics of possession and place up to a more intense light: the 117

Archer_final.indd 117

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

meaning of possession, of acquisition, of social place, when weighed against the work of time itself. If such a drift towards the temporal is indicative of the movementimage in crisis, this chapter has shown that such a drift is also allied to a critical consideration of gender as itself shaping narrative. A film such as Western, as I argued, can only be understood in terms of a dominant narrative of mobility and quest that is out of step with its times. Masculinity in these films, then, along with the road movie itself, is positioned as central, rather than incidental, to a modern politics of representation, as well as a political aesthetic, as I have argued with regard to Harel and Cantet’s films. What I have shown above all is that, in these films, it is not the genre itself that is in question, but its uses: far from being bound by gendered connotations, the road movie in its French form is a mode through which the interrelationship between gender and genre can be explored, questioned, but also reconfigured. This key idea – that gender is not related to generic form in an uncontested fashion but can rather shape, and be shaped by, these generic forms – is one I continue to explore in the next chapter.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Will Straw for drawing my attention to this sequence: ‘Driving in Cars with Music’, paper presented at the Screen Conference, Glasgow, 4 July 2008. 2. Unless otherwise stated, it follows that the events of the film also occur in the source novel. 3. See for example the Studio Canal DVD, which features on its cover Harel and José Garcia en route with suitcases; an image that is reversed on the disc itself. Harel was already well-known for his film work; Garcia had established himself during the 1990s through his appearances in the Canal+ show Nulle part ailleurs. 4. Stan and Ollie’s efforts to escape their ‘hen-pecked’ domestic confines is a feature of several short films, and is most prominent in the feature film Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933); a story about the duo’s bid to attend a fraternal lodge meeting in Chicago, against their wives’ wishes. 5. This reflects Herbert Marcuse’s influential reading of the technocratic society (1991). 118

Archer_final.indd 118

26/09/2012 08:12

Five From Flânerie to Glânerie: The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’ While my first chapter did not focus explicitly on the question of gender, it is clear with regard to both Sans toit ni loi and Baise-moi that the gendered connotations of the road genre can be exploited in a referential manner, to highlight both the gendered aspects of genre itself, and in turn the dominant conceptions of gender in representation more broadly. Those particular films highlighted the problems inherent to a representation of women within an historically masculine genre. Yet a potentially limiting aspect to both films is that, implicit to their structure of challenge through representation, there is a potential over-determination of the road genre’s gendered nature. As in the previous chapter, I would like to suggest that, rather than dwell on the restrictions of the genre, we trace more positive possibilities at work in the road movie and its viewing. This approach implies a prior question we must also consider: why the road movie and do we need it? In what way, in other words, can the road movie specifically contribute to the identitarian and political concerns coalescing around any discussion of femininity? The title of this chapter indicates that a ‘feminine road movie’ may be possible, for reasons I will go on to discuss. Yet it is worthwhile to establish initially how we might understand this concept; and above all, to what extent it differs from, or is identifiable with, 119

Archer_final.indd 119

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

the ‘women’s road movie’. If there is a representational stake in delineating and discussing the latter, how do we approach something so inherently problematic in signifying terms, yet which, if we are to do it at all, needs to be defined in opposition to the ‘masculine’? ‘Woman’ is monolithic in its connotations. Similarly, ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ are ambiguous. It is unclear whether, in cinematic terms, these adjectives relate to institutional modes of definition and reception (‘a film by a female filmmaker’ or ‘a film for female viewers’); in addition, they are imprecise, as the designation of categories such as ‘female’ and ‘feminine’, or of the textual properties that would constitute this gendering of the text, are difficult to define. Moreover, exactly how such gendered inscription is intrinsically political remains the question. As Annette Kuhn asks: What possible link can there be between an attribute that informs the structure and organisation of texts, and gender? Even to suggest the possibility of a relationship between feminine-as-text and ‘woman’ is to pose some kind of connection between ‘woman’ and representation which, at least initially, side-steps the whole issue of feminism. (1994: 10–11)

This threat of reductiveness, both in terms of essentializing ‘the feminine’ and prescribing audience gender for a given film, may tempt us to disregard gendered authorship altogether, especially given the far from necessary correlation between an author’s ‘social femaleness’ and a text’s ‘structural femininity’ (Kuhn 1994: 204). At the same time, to undermine the signifying potential of a text’s female authorship may play into the hands of a dominantly masculine cinema, one underscored institutionally by the industry’s representational disparity between male and female filmmakers, performers and technicians. It is this issue of representation at the authorial and content level that informs Tarr and Rollet’s Cinema and the Second Sex, which, as previously noted, includes a rare assessment of the road movie in French cinema. Tarr and Rollet argue that the presence of women on the road and behind the camera is, ‘given that women have traditionally been assigned roles within the private (domestic) space . . . particularly transgressive’ (Tarr with Rollet 2001: 228–229). What is evident for the authors is that representation in this most direct 120

Archer_final.indd 120

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

sense is inherently politicized: the films discussed ‘use the road as a space in which to explore interpersonal relationships away from the constraints of the (patriarchal) domestic sphere’ (2001: 229–230); they share ‘the temporary or definitive abandonment of the domestic space and . . . therefore, of “home life, marriage, employment” as experienced from a female point of view’ (2001: 248). If there is a problem in emphasising a ‘female point of view’, it is that it risks circularity. Moreover; it evokes this point of view as existing prior to the road journey itself, rather than emerging out of the trip: in this sense, the meaning of the trip (and in turn the specificity of the road movie itself) would be undermined. Nevertheless, Tarr and Rollet’s decision to focus on the road movie as a specifically female choice of genre is striking, as it begs the question of what is so appealing to the ‘second sex’ of a little-regarded form within French film history and discourse. Most importantly, the study’s emphasis on a female space of friendship and communication that exists in a condition of mobility is crucial; suggesting as it does, in ways I have discussed throughout, the idea of a distinct or liminal space of representation that is at once within and outside social space and control.1 As I argue in this chapter, this liminal inbetween-ness of the road becomes highly charged in these films, given the way that gender, as a social construction, is so often tied to social and historical conceptions of appropriate space and action. Tarr and Rollet’s readings indicate then that the road movie is something of an indigenized genre within the field of women’s filmmaking: its adoption and adaptation is striking by virtue of its context: such overt use gives it the feeling of resistance.2 Yet if it does signify a form of resistance, it draws attention to the circumstances which produce such texts, and with which the ‘indigenized’ text exists in dialogue. In other words, as Tarr and Rollet’s previously quoted comments suggest, the freedoms evoked in the road movie play, in an often utopian fashion, on tensions between cinematic possibilities, presumed stability or fulfillment at the level of gender, and actual circumstances.3 The tendency towards desperation or eventual destruction in some of the films discussed by Tarr 121

Archer_final.indd 121

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

and Rollet (and of course in Baise-moi), or indeed the implication of a space of femininity as essentially exclusive, suggests a scepticism regarding the possibility of consensual social revolution or parity in terms of gender. Mazierska and Rascaroli, meanwhile, locate a similarly pessimistic strain in the European road movie more broadly, in which women travellers are either ‘affluent [or] destitute’ (2006: 178). The work of Claire Denis and Agnès Varda addresses these circumstances, and the issues of representation they bring into focus. Following Tarr and Rollet’s notion of a feminine space of work and expression, the authorial markers of Denis and Varda’s films – not just in terms of style, but in terms of the scale of their filmmaking and its distribution, and the repertory of collaborators with whom they work – contribute to an experience of their films which is in part extra-textual, already structured into the process of reception. Such qualities here work to distinguish their films from normative practices, in effect allowing it to embody an alternative position. The emphasis here shifts towards the more inherently interactive qualities of the text. The films’ formal practices engage comparatively with other forms of filmic representation, producing texts which do not prescribe a notion of how the feminine should be, but rather interrupt its naturalization. As echoed by Kuhn, who argues for a ‘feminine’ rather than a feminist text, implying that the latter is incomprehensible without the transformation of representational categories (1994: 11), such texts articulate the feminine in dialogic terms (Bainbridge 2008: 52). Importantly, such an emphasis on form avoids the circularity inherent to the concept of the ‘woman’s film’; moreover, in moving beyond a biological determinism, the ‘feminine’ text might create the possibility for a cinematic re-vision that operates across and beyond the particular gender of the viewer. It is therefore the foundations of representation itself that are of interest to us here. In a move that proves productive for this present chapter, Susan Suleiman sees the bases of both postmodernism and feminism intersecting, in that the latter is already constructed around a critique of representation and narrative. Feminism is therefore ‘at 122

Archer_final.indd 122

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

the centre of the debate on postmodernism’ (1990: 188, emphasis in the original). Suleiman thus politicizes the postmodern questioning of narrative and representation by stressing it as already feminist in itself (ibid.). As she puts it, ‘if there existed a genuinely feminist postmodernist practice . . . postmodernism could no longer be seen only as the expression of a fragmented, exhausted culture steeped in nostalgia for a lost centre’ (1990: 188–189). The loss of this ‘centre’, in fact, might be ‘for others [that is, women] no great loss at all’ (1990: 189). Suleiman’s interest in the politics of gender behind the avantgarde’s celebration of the city and creativity is also incidentally revealing here, as it brings into play questions of urban space and artistic expression and in particular the correlations between gender and movement within this urban space. These correlations have their origins, suitably enough, in canonical French artworks. As Griselda Pollock has shown, in her study of Parisian art of the late nineteenth century, a connection is forged between the artist and the free movement of the flâneur, typified by the (male) subject of Baudelaire’s ‘Peintre de la vie moderne’. Underpinning such free movement, and in turn conceptions of ‘modernity’ itself, are the dominant ideologies of gender and the stratification of social space. As Pollock argues, ‘the ideology of domesticity . . . regulated women and men’s behaviour in the respective public and private spaces . . . In objective terms, the separation of the spheres problematized women’s relation to the very activities and experiences we typically accept as defining modernity’ (1988: 69–70). These circumstances reinforce Tarr and Rollet’s point that the possibilities of expression are inextricably tied to the privileges of gender, with the added detail that the politics and possibilities of expression are linked to mobility itself. It is consequently no accident that the two films under discussion in this chapter – Denis’s Vendredi soir and Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse – should place such an emphasis on the idea of women’s movement in space and its links to the possibilities of filmmaking and cinematic pleasure. One way to avoid the potentially divisive and reductive implications of inverted generic space, I suggest, is to think about 123

Archer_final.indd 123

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

such possibilities in terms of the virtual. The virtual is powerful in the way it opens up spaces of potentiality uncontained by the constraints of the material, or held at bay within more classical narrative structure. This also opens up possibilities in gender-political terms. Blier’s Merci la vie, a fantastical road movie of sorts centred around two girls who meet, in the vein of Les Valseuses, at an outof-season station balnéaire, offers in this sense a precedent for the films in this chapter. Blier’s film reprises motifs of his sometime collaborator Josiane Bolasko’s earlier Sac de noeuds (1985), itself ‘seen by some as . . . a woman’s response to Les Valseuses’ (Tarr with Rollet 2001: 232). If Merci cannot strictly be regarded as a ‘woman’s response’ – although Tarr and Rollet, comparing it to Bolasko’s film, suggest it can be seen as Blier’s ‘feminine’ version of Les Valseuses (2001: 249n4) – it is nevertheless an intriguing attempt to rethink cinematic space. Referencing Les Valseuses in its opening sequences (in the earlier film, Patrick Dewaere pushes Gérard Depardieu into view in a shopping trolley; here, Charlotte Gainsbourg does the same with Anouk Grinberg), Merci promises initially to merely invert its predecessor’s narrative of vagrancy and promiscuity. The film, however, soon changes track, as the faint thread of continuity narrative becomes thwarted by spatial and temporal jumps and framing devices, all of which blatantly foreground the film’s status as textual composition. Russel King, following Blier’s own comments, describes this approach as replicating the ‘zapping’ and the ‘zipping’ of the TV and VCR viewer respectively (1999: 199–210). While King stresses this choice as determined by an emerging youth audience and their relationship to history and texts, there is a more gender-specific connotation. If Les Valseuses, as Forbes argues, is ‘marked by the events of May 1968 and the social revolution they bought about’ (2000: 215), so too is Merci. Yet, like Sans toit ni loi, it questions the gains of these events for women, as the flight and promiscuity ostensibly promised by the film are undermined by the wider prejudicial connotations of female sexual promiscuity, particularly in the context of AIDS, which the film obliquely references (Grinburg’s young itinerant, who we ini124

Archer_final.indd 124

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

tially see being beaten up by a lover, is supposedly the ‘carrier’ of an unspecified sexual disease). Like in Baise-moi, although in a less violent fashion, the film’s female pair are often policed and punished for possessing ‘the qualities of excess, deviance and transgression so characteristic – and so characteristically reassuring – of [Blier’s] male protagonists’ (Harris 2001: 134); a gender-specific reaction which accounts for the way their road trip deviates from a masculine and historical spatio-temporal logic. Merci can therefore be seen in some ways as Blier’s auto-critique of his previous gender representations; but it is also significant that – again ahead of Baisemoi – it relates feminine mobility and identity to the essentially private practices of film or TV consumption, themselves a kind of heterotopia. Vendredi soir is sensitive to its historical precedents and the issues of representation, as indicated by its implicit referencing of viewing and consumer practices that, historically coded as ‘feminine’, have often been discursively marginalized. To make the claim for types of spectatorship as ‘women’s’ activities is of course prescriptive. Nevertheless, as Geneviève Sellier argues, there is a tendency within French cinema culture, compounded by the nouvelle vague’s celebration of its almost exclusively male authorship, to oppose a ‘masculine’ legitimate culture to a ‘feminized’ (or ‘passive’) mass culture (2005: 64). Sellier’s point has significant implications for the road movie. This potentially ‘pulpy’ genre – pulpy not so much in its masculine connotations, but in its discursive status as ‘American’ and therefore by implication ‘low’ – becomes an eminently suitable, rather than antithetical, feminine form, by virtue of its distinction from (masculine) discursive approval. Working within this framework suggests how, historically, ‘feminine’ culture can be mobilized on an aesthetic level against both hegemonic ‘masculine’ representative norms and a masculine critical hegemony. This is especially pertinent to Varda; who, as Richard Neupert points out (2007), although benefiting from the critical and financial interest generated by the male-dominated new wave, was less integrated with the more famous ‘Right Bank’ directors than is sometimes assumed. Varda, 125

Archer_final.indd 125

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

moreover, while working at the margins of the mainstream, is nevertheless more attentive than most to the democratic possibilities of mass-market technologies. My reading here of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, for example, will focus largely on its use of digital video. Finally, we can bring together these various issues, with particular relevance to Les Glaneurs, through the contemporaneous theoretical interest in what French cultural studies terms the projet (Gratton and Sheringham 2005). As theorized, the projet or project – an artistic tactic often working across disciplines, aiming to re-configure the relationship of the individual to space as a process of the same creative act – works within the spatial conditions and fragmentations of the postmodern, yet against its pessimistic implications, through its emphasis on techniques of recording that lie outside the governing logic and hierarchies of social structures and narrative. Reading through contemporaneous works by writers such as François Maspero (1990) and Annie Ernaux (1993), whose books are forms of literary road narratives, and focusing on the way they reorient conceptions of the centre and the periphery, Michael Sheringham sees the projet as invoking May 1968’s ‘redirection of attention and a change in awareness’ (2006: 388). Varda’s film, as we will see, is most striking for the way it reconfigures the very notion of the popular, of centre and periphery, from the basis of its ostensibly marginal practice. As I will suggest, the foregrounding of Varda herself within the film acts as a form of intertext that helps connote this reorienting of vision and space.

Dusk Till Dawn: The City and the Spectatrix in Vendredi soir Vendredi soir, set within a Paris brought to a standstill by a general transport strike, is not an obvious road movie.4 To see it as such inevitably raises questions about what it means to move and the nature of the road narrative itself. Depicting the interruption of chance into the routine of the everyday, and predicated on the cessation of speed and vehicular flow, the film is largely premised on the failure of modern 126

Archer_final.indd 126

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

transportation. If anything happens in the film, it is because what was meant to happen, the intended movement from A to B, cannot and does not. Such a trajectory is the basic pattern for goal-oriented narrative in general (Bordwell and Thompson 2007: 55–57), and, in many road narratives, the source of dramatic pleasure is constituted by the obstacles getting in the way of the protagonists’ reaching their destination; as, for example, in John Hughes’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, about the endlessly thwarted efforts of two men to get from New York to Chicago for Thanksgiving. In Claire Denis’s film, the ‘obstacle’ becomes the unplanned destination itself. A woman, Laure, sets out across Paris to get to her new apartment, which it appears she is sharing with her boyfriend, planning to go to a friend’s place for dinner en route. Stuck in the traffic jam, she picks up a man, Jean, trying to get home on foot. The two end up spending the night in a hotel together, where they have sex. In the morning, Laure leaves and the film ends. As we have already seen, and as a film like Hughes’s amply shows, destination in the road movie is typically the pretext for the journey, whose quality of transition and transformation is the point (and consequently the destination) of the film. Vendredi soir shares this approach, foregrounding a space of frustrated transit as the location of meaningful contact and experience. Significantly, however, Denis’s film figures this ambiguously, focusing on its capacity as a space of possible threat, but above all of (imaginary) transgression. Vendredi soir is also emblematic, at least in its initial premise, of distinctions between the American road movie’s love of the road, and the disenchantment with motorized mobility familiar in many French road movies. The urban connotations of car travel as commuting reflects a society in which the workplace is significantly separated from the home and one in which men and women are moved spatially according to the demands of work organizations that increasingly constitute the ‘non-places’ identified by Augé. For the writer and left-wing publisher François Maspero, what we think of as ‘Paris’ has in the post-industrial age become a series of points linked by the ‘grey continuum’ of the car or train commute (in Silverman 127

Archer_final.indd 127

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

1999: 92). As we have seen in the previous chapter and will also see to a degree in Vendredi soir, disenchantment is not the sole property of the disenfranchised. Max Silverman’s observation that the spatial indeterminacy of postmodern transit is pertinent even to ‘those who have the means’ (ibid.) underlines the point that the experience of alienation impacts on the ‘haves’ of the communications revolution as well as the ‘have-nots’. From this starting point, Vendredi soir attempts to re-think the city of Paris, through a filmic practice that is conscious both of the contemporary conditions of urban space and of the city’s cinematic history. As Beugnet suggests, in drawing on the ‘city symphony’ tradition (as in the film’s opening montage of cityscape shots) and operating within the most historically cinematic of European cities, Denis offers in part ‘a homage to and a poetic variation on Paris, taking up anew the challenge that such a worn subject, nocturnal Paris, represents’ (2004: 189). In this case, the film’s ‘nocturnal’ movement from dusk to dawn runs counter to the city symphonies’ dawn-to-dusk arc. Filming at night, moreover, inherently foregrounds the development of cinema itself and its practical role (since the nouvelle vague) in both representing and creating nocturnal city space. Within this cinematic night, Denis’s film explores the possibilities and ethics of vision in the genre. A distinctive quality in the film is the way it moves between the intimate space of Laure’s car, and a reorientation of vision outward, through an ambiguous point of view, onto the paradoxically unseen figures of the everyday. Emmanuèle Bernheim’s source novel for Denis’s film took the transport strike of December 1995, part of a series of public sector strikes, as its inspiration. Both novel and film emphasise how the circumstances of a strike produce new kinds of space which represent a challenge to our perceptual habits. For John Orr, the modern car journey has to feed on speed, and therefore constant change, so that it does not become a source of anxiety (1993: 134). If stylistic approaches such as rapid editing, accelerated tracking shots and other hallmarks of what David Bordwell calls ‘intensified continuity’ (2006: 121–138) 128

Archer_final.indd 128

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

are historically related to ‘masculine’ cinematic genres and norms, Denis’s film foregrounds its deviation from this model, and in turn suggests a different possibility of seeing. The strike, and the resultant traffic jam it brings about, imposes itself above all as a compulsory slowness which insists upon a certain mode of vision. Vendredi soir concentrates on the effects of the strike, not its causes. The assumption that this negates the film’s political qualities is to overlook the way it allows the strike’s disruption of urban routine to become the catalyst for its encounters. In a similar way to that already explored in Extension du domaine de la lutte, the film concentrates on what occurs within the non-productive process of the strike itself. Denis employs unmotivated shots during the film’s traffic-jam sequences that share qualities with the train station sequence in Harel’s film: here, for example, within the montage of traffic shots, a dissolve slowly reveals then conceals a shot of an empty Métro platform and track: as described in the last chapter, an ‘impossible’ view, but a renewed, material space. The spirit of carnival emerges in these non-productive spaces, and with it the idea of the strike operating below the level of aims and targets: an end in itself, rather than a means to one.5 To counter Orr’s pessimism, the road movie becomes here the most suitable form for this redirection of attention to the immediate environment and to the individual’s relationship to this environment. This is due to the genre’s tendency towards restricted narrative and its inherent engagement of the spectator as participant. Denis’s film in this way is distinct from the more framed depictions of the traveller we encountered in the second chapter. At this zero degree of the road movie, point of view and narrative content are intertwined. The image does not provide information that we process in terms of retrospective conclusion, nor as the basis for prediction. This emphasis on movement in vision disconnected from the plot cues therefore underscores the importance of observation as its own end: or as Alexander Graf argues, in the road movie, the image ‘must be watched closely . . . For the spectator, this search [becomes] an act of personal discovery’ (2002: 66). 129

Archer_final.indd 129

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

To relate this to the encounter with Jean, the key narrative event in the film, this moment itself is intelligible in terms of a reorientation of cinematic vision; a reorientation with a specifically ethical dimension. If the motor car in modernity effaces the distance between points, it also obviates contact and responsibility. Here, the interruption of goal-oriented trajectory leaves vision open to the random and the contingent. In Varda’s ‘real-time’ wander through Paris, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), a precursor of the urban road movie and an obvious reference point for Denis’s film, a similar reorientation of perspective in the film’s second half emphasises the significance of the chance encounter – through conversations overheard by Cléo in the Dôme café, and, later, the meeting of the young conscript Antoine – in a way that equates transformations in subjectivity to a form of political engagement (Morrisey 2008: 102–103). In Denis’s film, similarly, the chance encounter is made ethical in that it involves the relinquishing of control. The point of view in these driving sequences, as I have suggested, emphasises viewer perception as well as that of the protagonist. Paradoxically, the concentration on a single point of view means that the film (in the way I discussed with regard to Félix) is in many ways not about one central perspective at all. Perspective therefore cannot find an obvious anchor: the film’s point of view is no longer rooted in a structuring anthropocentric vision, but is multiple, existing both in and out of the car(s), simultaneously seeing and seen (hence the film’s oscillation between point of view and the viewer herself as viewed). The transformation experienced within the film, through the figure of Laure, is the movement from the monadic motorised individual to (wo)man of the crowd, with everything this transition implies. The allusion here, via the title of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’, points us towards the key issue of flânerie: another point of contact with Varda’s earlier film, and its narrative of gendered urban mobility. Can we call Laure a flâneur, or is she a flâneuse? What is at stake in such a naming in any case? Nineteenth-century flânerie, as we have seen, is predicated on a naturalized liberty and anonymity beyond the reach of women, contained 130

Archer_final.indd 130

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

as they are by the connotations of domesticity: for Pollock, then, ‘there is not and could not be a female flâneuse’ (1988: 71). One question here is whether the conditions of Denis’s cinema, in distinction to circumstances of impressionist painting, offer a different perspective. It is useful to stress that the flâneur represented in Poe’s story, or in Baudelaire’s prose (1995), is a figure for whom anonymity and vision are inherently related to alienation and the loss of power, as much as the exercising of power itself. In Vendredi soir, the conditions of flânerie, when divorced from the electrification of speed through enforced slowness, become the very means through which such conditions are confronted. If the passante in Baudelaire’s famous sonnet evoked the love at last sight at the anguished heart of the flâneur’s gaze (Benjamin 1970: 120–121), Denis’s film reverses the roles and plays out the encounter in slow motion, happy to dwell on the essentially cinematic delectation of the serendipitous encounter. This encounter between Laure and Jean has generated varied critical responses: for example, that its ethics remain under-explored (Chauvin 2002), or that it embodies the failure to connect in modern life (Carter 2006: 79). In considering it here, we need to acknowledge that the pair’s meeting does not take place through a conventionally causal narrative logic, but rather through a more discontinuous, oneiric one. Where we might expect Jean’s immobile face to either emerge, or to follow from a directed look on the part of Laure, he in fact appears abruptly in a close-up shot, directly after a surreal shot of giant neon spectacles (themselves signalling, playfully, the entry into a different space of vision). He therefore emerges as an independent viewing subject within the film. The shot – reverse shot that follows is readable within continuity logic as Laure noticing Jean, yet there is a slight disjunction in the ensuing sequence, in which a blonde-haired woman seems to be identified both as the object of Jean’s movement and of Laure’s contemplation. The woman’s application of her lipstick, however, takes the form of an ellipsis, with a series of dissolves: there is consequently a blurring of the sequential temporality that would typically sustain continuity. A subsequent shot of Laure, now looking elsewhere, seems out of sync with the 131

Archer_final.indd 131

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

causal and temporal flow of the scene – as if, in fact, this shot should have introduced the sequence. In fact, when Jean eventually taps on Laure’s window, her reaction – one of surprise – goes against our textually cued supposition that he had gone elsewhere or that she had been watching him: it is not clear, in fact, whether she had registered his presence at all. What this sequence suggests is that the emergence of the dark and handsome stranger is determined through an almost arbitrary intervention: in effect, the insertion of a fantasy encounter within the causal and temporal flow of the film itself. This oscillation between agency and the arbitrary, or between Laure’s position as observer and as herself a possible object of vision, brings into focus the film’s attitude to the politics of flânerie. Laure momentarily loses the grounded space of her vehicle after she has left it to make a call: a call that cancels previous plans and thereby opens up the possibility of an adventure with Jean. The speed with which Jean subsequently drives Laure away, in a magically configured route away from the traffic jam, underscores this sense of lost control, in its blurring of the cityscape as the car rushes past, along with the accelerated musical score. Yet while the notion of Laure seeking to control the events is important, it is also significant that this sense of self-possession be disturbed. In a personal inversion of Wim Wenders’ Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (1987), a film on which both Denis and her director of photography Agnès Godard worked,6 the ‘angel’ here, in the form of Jean, could be read as the manifestation of a desiring female vision. At the same time, Denis’s film stresses Jean’s invasive physical presence (emphasised by the focus on his clothes, hands, and body, the leg-room he takes up, his cigarette smoke) as literally embodying the disruption of a centred, mastering perspective. It is this balancing between active agency and its intrusion that also evokes the potential transports, and equally the unease, of the cinematic experience: at once an illusion of visual mastery, but also a potential assault on that mastery. Judith Mayne’s similar reading of this pivotal meeting sequence notes the way that, in the parallel sequence from the original novel, there is an ambiguous overlap between the figure of the beautiful 132

Archer_final.indd 132

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

woman onto whom Laure projects her fantasy, and Laure herself (Mayne 2005: 123): Laure, in this sense, becomes the subject of her own fantasy. Mayne observes that the centrality of Valérie Lemercier as Laure, in terms of her ‘ordinary’ quality, emphasises the role of female looking and fantasy, and its relation, through the film’s various enigmatic female figures to questions of jealousy and rivalry (2005: 124). Disturbingly, Mayne’s reading implicitly expands upon Pollock’s reading of the flâneuse, in its evocation of a feminine subjectivity that has internalized its own to-be-lookedat-ness, trapped within its own objectification. On the face of it, this seems an overly problematic reading of Denis’s film, yet it makes sense once we understand the film as rooted in the experience of the cinematic itself: a position consistent both with the film’s dream logic and its situating of the protagonist, as driver, in a point-of-view position akin to that of the cinema spectator. This may seem a negative or cynical solution; yet it is in keeping with the kind of cinematic encounter Jean represents. The presence of Jean (played by popular French actor Vincent Lindon) as himself a kind of flâneur, yet one who is himself the object of a desiring gaze within the film’s revision, suggests a way of figuring and negotiating the possibility of consensual vision as the particular circumstances of a cinematic or virtual practice. To posit the flâneuse in virtual terms directs us to her twentiethcentury successor: the spectatrix. Both Giuliana Bruno (1993) and Anne Friedberg (1993) have sought to rethink the history of spectatorship in gender terms, pointing out that this spectatrix was in fact the original spectator. As Bruno argues (in reference to Naples, but applicable evidently to Paris), the arrival of cinema, a logical culmination of the passages or the department store, ‘provided a form of access to public space . . . [It] triggered a liberation of the woman’s gaze, enabling her to renegotiate, on a new terrain of intersubjectivity, the configuration of private/public’ (1993: 51). If the flâneur’s authority and privilege derives from his freedom to look without being watched (Pollock 1988: 70), this same possibility is facilitated for the spectatrix, but in the virtual space of the cinema. 133

Archer_final.indd 133

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

As we have seen, Vendredi soir alludes to the city of early cinema while giving it a more nocturnal twist: it is this latter inflection that invokes the cinema as (gendered) city space in itself. The casting of Lemercier, more familiar for her roles as comic bourgeoises in films such as Les Visiteurs, works in some ways against type, but also within it: it underlines this particular cinematic experience as historically the domain of the female consumer class. By casting Lindon, who blends old-fashioned virility with melancholy, and who also bears a slight resemblance to Jean Gabin (Mayne 2005: 121–122), Denis finds a suitably nostalgic figure for this cinematic evocation. This reading of Vendredi soir might suggest, as Vincendeau does in her review of the film, that the whole thing is Laure’s fantasy (2003: 70). This may seem like interpretive vacillation, but in fact comes closest to grasping the film’s play of indeterminacy (and the fact that its status as ‘just a film’ may be entirely the point). Jean and Laure’s tryst is deceitful, in the sense that Laure is betraying a partner to whom she apparently returns in the end. If the ethics of this act go unexplored, it is more pertinent that these ethics should be considered within the film’s exploration of the virtual. Representation and notions of the realistic are here actually extended in terms of the practicable qualities of the image as potentiality, rather than representation.7 Inasmuch as the film depicts an infidelity which may not take place, it again links back to Cléo and the wry suggestiveness of the film’s French title (‘de 5 à 7’ colloquially connoting the period for illicit romantic trysts). In Varda’s film, Cléo’s move away from the site of her own objectification – the domestic space, where she receives visits from her lover José – allows her the opportunity of a different perspective on herself and the world, especially with the aid of the conscript Antoine. If neither film is really about infidelity, the figuring of both films’ journeys in such terms, together with their shared emphasis on virtuality, has a jarring quality; as if the films were acknowledging their own limitations. Forbes’ revisionist reading (2002) of Varda’s film stresses the way that Cléo’s notional liberation still figures her as another photographic subject of desire; 134

Archer_final.indd 134

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

one, moreover, who seems to require the magical aid of another male gaze to realize this liberation. Jim Morrissey, meanwhile, makes the slightly overstated yet interesting observation that Cléo’s and Antoine’s tram ride, which embodies Cléo’s move from private to public, is in the context of FLN terrorism more fantastical than realistic (2008: 106). In Vendredi soir, by the same token, the oneiric drift of the protagonist and the enchanted intervention of the stranger might suggest an essentially pragmatic recourse to the virtual, as if recognizing the impossibility of such encounters in the real world. However ironic might be its recourse to the fantastic, there is nonetheless the implicit suggestion that something important takes place for Laure on the course of her journey: but, crucially, something which is significant for her alone. In other words, we need to consider the explicitly gendered connotations of this infidelity for both the protagonist and the film. Kahn’s Feux rouges shows similar characteristics, both stylistic and structural, to Denis’s film, yet with different implications. Like Denis, Kahn uses quotidian landmarks – here, the red lights (fires) of the title, at once signalling forbidden entry and the entry into the forbidden itself – to evoke the passage between waking life and the nocturnal-cinematic dream space. Both films explore the narrative space and aesthetic of the road movie as a kind of drift, and as de-familiarized space. In both films, moreover, this emphasis on a nocturnal space of action book-ended by daylight (Kahn’s film ends with its protagonists driving off into the morning sunshine, smiling as if nothing has happened) evokes an oneiric territory in which all norms are suspended. Feux rouges, as we saw in chapter four, gives us the spectacle of masculine disavowal; yet the film’s plot and denouement, with its subtle and troubling allusions, disturbingly suggests that its protagonist’s disavowal is subtended by fantasies of murder and even rape. In other words, if Denis gives us troubled but ultimately gratifying dreams, Kahn gives us a nightmare. Kahn’s film works deconstructively within the generic structure of the thriller. In order for narrative resolution to take place, the space of drift and contingency needs to be cohered back into continuity, yet 135

Archer_final.indd 135

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

it does this by denying (or disavowing) the potential lure of the ‘bad’ dream itself. In Vendredi soir, meanwhile, drift and contingency, the exploration of the dream, is openly engaged with. The significance of drifting, in both real and cinematic terms, is that it has no ‘significance’, lying outside both productivity and narrative development. Similarly, if for Laure, and by implication for the film’s viewer, the narrative aim was to get to the destination, it would merely reiterate the pre-established order of the world. This makes sense of the film’s ending and apparent return to stability. At dawn, Laure leaves the space of the hotel and of the film itself (a little like the spectatrix leaving the cinema). Initially anxious to find her car, Laure finally gets her bearings (via another cutaway to now-dimmed neon glasses), and the film ends with her smiling, running past the camera and back into daily life. Laure’s smile suggests relief, but also hints at pleasurable recollection. This does not so much suggest a resolution, as it does the potency of the movement between waking and dreaming: a position which, following the logic of the spectatrix, we occupy whenever we watch a film: an act which therefore becomes its own private act of transgression. It is notable that this should come as the film ends, pitched on the borderline of narrative, as if the transcendence of the encounter can only be attained in the liminal movement between entering and leaving the story. Once more, this liminal figure is captured – or rather, is not – in a gesture of mobility. It is in this elusive and evasive space that the film’s exploration of subjectivity and desire assumes its real force.

Underground Overground: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse While a great deal has been written on Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse – in terms of its autobiographical qualities, its status as documentary and its contextual politics – the choice of narrative form and its relation to content, although often evoked, remains under-explored. Both Sarah Cooper and Emma Wilson, for example, draw attention to genre, describing it respectively as ‘the documentary equivalent of 136

Archer_final.indd 136

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

a road movie’ (Cooper 2006: 86) and an ‘(experimental) road movie’ (2005: 98). Building on these observations, I will suggest here that form is dictated necessarily by the film’s raw material. The suggestion that Varda’s documentary is like a road movie, in other words, begs the question of where documentary and the road movie already interrelate: to what extent the road movie is documentary. How does the film’s itinerant and aleatory form (Wilson 2005: 98–99) constitute an engagement with its subject? A subject that also, in terms of the film’s representations, extends to the body of the filmmaker herself (Rosello 2001)? As it states at the beginning, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is an enquiry into the act and the art of gleaning: the accumulation and use of food or other things that are cast away or left behind. This initial enquiry prompts a trip around the roads of France, in search of those who glean, be it for survival or by choice. The movement around France that we see in the Les Glaneurs follows a logic of association and contingency, not geography: each movement links to an associated impulse, just as these phases of movement themselves privilege the random and apparently unrelated. En route between specific locations, for example, Varda films what she sees from the vantage point of a passenger seat, at one point playing a game in which she ‘catches’ passing lorries within her hand, placed in the foreground of the image before her camera’s lens; at another point, Varda pauses her enquiry to film in close up some flowers and vegetation which, as she says, take her fancy. The randomness of these sequences emphasises chance, and therefore the pro-filmic, all of which draw attention to the film’s notional status as documentary. As Cooper stresses, the pro-filmic and the contingent are central to the documentary’s rejection of a ‘pre-known reality’ and a visible reduction of the form’s possibilities to that which comes within the ‘reality’ of the camera’s field (2006: 8). What this suggests – in a move which links back to the original association, in French, of the documentaire with the travel film (Chanan 2007: 27) – is that the documentary and the aesthetics (and ethics) of the road movie are closely tied. The qualities of movement and re-attention that are features of this modern road 137

Archer_final.indd 137

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

narrative are, then, intrinsic to the revelation of the contingent and random explored in this type of documentary. The film’s visible foregrounding of its own medium, in the form of the portable DV camera, stresses that the possibilities of the digital era are also a subject of the film’s search. The orthographic slide from flâner to glaner stresses the shift from observer to active recorder, and therefore towards the politics and possibilities of authorship, and the relationship of the camera to the latter. An introductory image in the film shows us the filmmaker, assuming the glaneuse’s pose of Jules Breton’s painting, taking up her camera: yet while the association is made here, as elsewhere, between Varda’s physical presence and her manipulation of the camera, this does not (as I argued in this chapter’s introduction) guarantee any logical fit between authorial gender and a gendered form. What it does do, however, is draw attention to the transformed representational stakes, which work as a kind of intertext within the film and within its reception. The movement from flâneuse to glaneuse evokes the visual practices of flânerie as actually motivated and made possible by the technology of this digital glanage: the film comes into being ‘by virtue of digital video, and uniquely so’ (Vasse 2008: 190, emphasis in the original). The ethics of foregrounding authorship in gender terms assume an added dimension, then, inasmuch as it highlights a departure from the gendered history of representation. The female figure of Breton’s painting, as the subject of masculine pictorial vision, is still bound within representation. Substituting the painting’s bushel of wheat for a camera, and moreover directing this camera towards the film’s viewer, underscores the film’s redirection of (gendered) attention. If readings of the film as a critique of mainstream representation (for example Rosello 2001) are somewhat imposed on the film, inferring this critique rather than describing what the film describes, they nevertheless hint at the film’s resistance to selection. The strategy here is one of abundance: the question here not so much ‘what is it possible to film?’ as ‘what is it possible not to film?’ Within an over-abundance of modern image culture, how do we decide what is ‘valuable’? The film therefore to a degree refuses to privilege 138

Archer_final.indd 138

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

or select one thing over another (hence the games with the lorries and the flower shots), profiting from the DV camera’s ease of use, flexibility and relative cheapness. Like the previously mentioned books by Maspero or Ernaux, works whose accumulatory and aleatory approach are taken up in Les Glaneurs, there is a resistance to determining shape and order: the rules of the game, as in Maspero’s journey along the Parisian RER line, are that there must be no pre-set rules beyond the initial stating of the project. The emphasis then in Varda’s film on in-between spaces of transport and the road itself, that which fleshes out the ‘gaps’ between action or associative links, stresses this unwillingness to pre-determine what constitutes a subject or narrative space. These in-between spaces are a corollary of the film’s ontological approach; its enquiry, in fact, into what it means to film and be filmed (rather than a criticism of any particular mode of representation). Varda has admitted that the emphasis on incongruity and contingency may seem at odds with the film’s apparent social concerns (in Darke 2001: 30), but this is only the case if we prescribe or limit what these ‘concerns’ are supposed to be. To do so would not only break the rules of the game; it would risk reiterating the logic of a system that the film seeks to circumvent. This indicates the connection back to Sans toit ni loi: Les Glaneurs, similarly, seeks to describe a space of action irreducible to ‘use-value’. To pursue a more rhetorical or narrative approach to its subjects, especially in terms of them as ‘have-nots’, would implicitly affirm the consumerist system that gives way to the practice of gleaning itself. In this way, as in Varda’s earlier film, Les Glaneurs evokes a kind of mobile subject; one that forges spaces in between the binary order of affluence and destitution. Mazierska and Rascaroli, for example, risk a potential contradiction in their celebration both of the glaneur as nomad and of the film as a denunciation of poverty (2006: 129– 130), yet their reading does point towards an interstitial subject: one that is neither necessarily a victim of capitalism nor its complicit consumer. Les Glaneurs seeks to convey this subject is in terms of narrative space; for example, in its resistance to separating narrative 139

Archer_final.indd 139

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

space into centre and periphery. The question is not one of alternative sites but of alternative ‘space’, in the form of reconfigured modes of seeing and being: gleaning ‘is not the (good) opposite of (bad) waste but a practice that redefines social exchanges’ (Rosello 2001: 30, emphasis added). Picking up again on the association of the road narrative with an approach to documentary, Varda’s film in this way participates in a strain of what O’Shaughnessy calls digitally filmed ‘road documentaries’: films which ‘cross-cut . . . between different places, thus underlying the simultaneity and connectedness of processes in different locations’ (2007: 171).8 The alternative communities they describe operate below the signifying level of physical terrain; in Varda’s film, identification, in terms of the varied constellations of glaneurs, is configured through a lifestyle, through simultaneity at the level of circumstances and creative possibility, rather than an overarching national or regional imaginary. The connection to modern documentary is also significant, in that the use of DV and domestic editing software is increasingly contributing to a kind of levelling-out of filmic production and distribution. This may be perceived as a threat to more established cinematic practice, yet once again such ‘loss’ may be relevant only to those who might be threatened by the transition. The DV camera embodies therefore a democratization of image culture from outside the centre of representation; but Varda’s theatrical gesture of carrying the camera also has ironic gender connotations. Female cinematographers have traditionally been marginalized within French cinema, partly through a convenient masculinist assertion of the job’s physical difficulty (Smith 2004: 201–202). Showing the lightweight camera here, in the hands of a woman in her seventies, acknowledges playfully the anachronistic and sexist nature of such notions, whether they were ever valid or not. Equally, the demonstration of the camera’s properties (seen more implicitly via the imagery in Vendredi soir) emphasises the liberating possibilities of a more mobile and microcosmic visual practice. Far from being deficient, the digital camera in the filmmaker’s hands displays a variety of peculiar, differential qualities: the colour saturation and resolution possible in 140

Archer_final.indd 140

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

intense close-up; or, as seen in the game of capturing lorries, the way DV can replicate deep-focus effects, evoking an equivalence of plane between notionally distant objects (Bordwell and Thompson 2007: 241–242). Deficiencies are converted into virtues by necessity, in the way they produce a filmmaking of closeness and spontaneity. This connection made between forms of mobility, and the microcosmic and marginal practices of filmic glanage, is suggestive of a blending of the two on the terrain of the film itself: what I will playfully, in the spirit of this chapter, call glânerie. Varda’s glânerie, in its emphasis on a mobile camera eye and proximity, on association and filmic sleight-of-hand, becomes a practice of seeing itself: the revelation of a habitually repressed ordinary rendered extra-ordinary (Sheringham 2006: 229). In Les Glaneurs, the emphasis on disconnected material detail – water-damage in a room, mould on the wall of a house, moles and spots on a hand – coincide with its tendency to treat landscape, urban spaces and even bodies in a similar way; not in an effort to deny their significance, but to dislocate this significance from any overarching narrative scheme (and thus to render them material in and of themselves). Together with the film’s practice of montage, which connects space through the play of association rather than the dictates of the map, such approaches offer a vision of what Deleuze calls the ‘any-space-whatever’ (espace quelconque) (1983: 154–155), that, far from implying crisis or loss, suggest a politicized transformation at the level of representation, through the qualities of virtuality and potentiality stressed in Deleuze’s reading. It is not only the material practice of gleaning, which we might read as a kind of poaching, which repudiates schema of possession and land ownership; the free associations of Varda’s cinematic form itself ‘poaches’ territory at the imaginary level by freely traversing what the map divides. The political and the ludic therefore interact by imaginarily challenging the ordering and mapping of material space: a movement which also exemplifies O’Shaughnessy’s notion of subterranean or transnational ‘connectedness of process’. Les Glaneurs stresses cinematic movement beyond the pre-determined routes 141

Archer_final.indd 141

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

of transport, implying also that any trajectory taken is at once to exclude another possibility. In an early sequence, for example, the film juxtaposes images of rural gleaners with their urban counterparts at the Montparnasse market: not only is the gesture, the form, the same (the shared movement of stooping and picking, as shown in Millais’s painting); a graphic match is realized, cued by its editing to the rhythm of the music track, between the ploughed potato field, with its furrows heading towards a distant vanishing point, and the trajectory of the Parisian pavements and roads beneath elevated rail tracks. Lines of movement and possibility coincide and connect: filmic compression makes the remote equidistant and challenges the separation imposed by physical space, replacing it with an imag(in)ed proximity. The non-specificity at the spatial level is also matched by the absence of a clear linear chronology; just as, equally, there is no obvious aim or goal, or even argument, that might structure the work in any causally temporal way. If the film’s asymmetrical movement suggests a journey with a starting point (the Musée D’Orsay, home to Millais’s painting of gleaners) and a final finishing point (the museum at Villefranche), we cannot tell whether or not this trajectory is itself a ‘fictional’ one, an illusory construction of the editing process. Neither is there evidence to suggest that the film’s first and final sequences really represent the beginning and end of a journey which, in fact, proves to be circular, or even prismatic. Such indeterminate qualities in the film merely point towards the subjugation of objective ‘reality’ to the more subjective folds and bends of experienced time, fabricated by the film itself. The emphasis on temporal comprehension beyond linear causality is also, in the end, suggestive of a philosophical approach to the film’s findings. What the film’s various encounters or arbitrary selections actually mean may only be understood retrospectively, the illusion of an active process of comprehension, in its most material sense, having taken place in the process of editing. This also underscores the film’s desire, as a form of projet,9 to generate a more interactive existence for itself, one that extends beyond the immediate time and 142

Archer_final.indd 142

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

circumstances of its viewing.10 This redirection of attention, and the way it works to query notions of the useful and the useless, or the relevant and the incongruous, also stresses that such acuteness of perception is related to death (an idea emphasised by the film’s fascination with its director’s ageing body), and more particularly, the way mortality shapes notions of value and even narrative. Varda’s obsession with her own mortality embodies what is inherent to her personal narrative: the presence of the end as a structuring signifier within narrative itself (Brooks 1984: 22). As an intrinsically retrospective act, film narrative attempts to shape and understand what is already on the threshold of absence. This explains the predominant image within the film of final selection, with Van der Weyden’s polyptych of the Last Judgement at its centre. The magnifying lens which, together with Varda’s camera, scans the earth-coloured surface of the painting – in the same way that the gleaner’s hand scans the earth itself – seems here to evoke not so much the ethics of selection as its harrowing contingency; but also, in the process, the camera’s participation in generating some form of purchase, what Wilson appropriately calls an ‘(after)life’ (2005: 107), from these same findings. We might, in conclusion, see all three of Varda’s experimental road movies – Cléo, Sans toit ni loi and Les Glaneurs – as formal responses to the question of death and in particular a consideration of the female subject confronted with death (embodied extra-textually in the fact that Cléo took as its inspiration the painting of ‘Death and the Maiden’ by Baldung Grien (Varda 1994: 45–46)). As I argued with regard to Sans toit ni loi, in some ways death is narration itself, the inevitable preconditions, restrictions and violence of the story. If film narrative, in its traditional, classical mode, is spatially coherent and temporally linear, channeling its lines of action towards resolution, such narrative is by nature frequently pre-determined and redundant, effectively retrofitting its narrative point of entry to match its conclusions. Cléo sees this in deadly terms, the film’s narrative resolution a possible (sentence of) death which the film’s interest in duration and engagement looks to both defer and reconfigure; while 143

Archer_final.indd 143

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Sans toit ni loi’s death foretold is countered at some level by its allusion to a space of non-capture, both in the past and somehow outside the experience of the film’s viewing. Les Glaneurs, as I have argued, takes an approach to cinematic time and space which to a degree combines the two approaches, in an attempt to outdo the inevitable conclusion to which it alludes. As I have reiterated throughout this chapter, the ‘feminine’ possibilities of the road movie are connoted through comparative textual properties, rather than just the markers of authorship or representation. To relate these concluding points to the French road movie, the redirection of attention seen in both Les Glaneurs and Vendredi soir, along with the reconfigurations of time and space explored in both films, are in many ways a counter to the goal-oriented, retrofit closures of classical narrative. More particularly, they counter an idea of destination and the accumulatory crossing of terrain, marked connotatively as possession, along with those elements of disavowal; all of which have been seen as characteristics of the road movie, a historically masculine genre, which therefore comes under criticism on gender grounds. As I have shown in this chapter, however, and in the previous one, the road movie not only has the possibility to debunk or rethink these associations: in its tendency towards the aleatory and the non-conclusive, in its preference of drift and leisurely observation over haste and speedy arrival, the road movie runs implicitly counter to these associations. And insofar as these associations – disavowal, resolution, possession – are generically coded as masculine, in answering the question put forward at the start of this chapter, we can go a little further than anticipated. The ‘feminine’ road movie is not merely a possibility, with the implication that it needs to ask permission; the road movie, in fact, may already be feminine.

Notes 1. Geoff Andrew points out in his book on Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002) – a film shot almost entirely from inside one car, whose driver is a woman 144

Archer_final.indd 144

26/09/2012 08:12

The Possibilities of a ‘Feminine Road Movie’

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

– that the car has a uniquely dual function: ‘a private space which has several characteristics (visibility, the possibility of movement, etc.) often associated with public space’ (Andrew 2005: 59). In other words, the car in Kiarostami’s woman-centred film becomes transgressive, in its capacity to permit intimacy and candid discussion, at the same time as permit free movement and vision within a public space. The car’s role as a space that is at once personal and public has significant implications for my reading of Vendredi soir. Here I am following the theory of indigenization as set out by Linda Hutcheon (2006: 150). As Wadia (1993) has argued in relation to May 1968, the predominantly masculine historicizing of the events has occluded women’s frequent subordination, and their subjection to pre-established gender norms, within the actions of the événements themselves. Wood (2007) nevertheless includes it in his British Film Institute book, 100 Road Movies. O’Shaughnessy argues that the 1995 strikes were distinctive for their ‘refusal of centralized and hierarchical organizations’ (2007: 12) and their absence of a ‘longer-term social project’ (2007: 13). Denis was assistant director on the film, Godard an assistant to director of photography Henri Alekan. In this way, Denis’s film connects with two previous films, both of which embody the transitory, cinematic possibilities of desire and transgression: Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), which has two strangers meet on a train, fall in love and part within the space of a night; and, more specifically, Catherine Breillat’s Brêve Traversée/Brief Crossing (2001), in which a married woman has an erotic encounter with a teenage boy on a cross-channel ferry. The title of Breillat’s film appears of course to reference Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1946): both Breillat and Denis play down the moral content that Lean’s film introduces. The films O’Shaughnessy analyses are Ouvrières du monde (MarieFrance Collard, 2000), Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter, 2003) and Davos, Porto Alegre et autres batailles (Vincent Glenn, 2003). Zaïda Ghorab-Volta’s Jeunesse dorée (2002) provides an interesting echo of Varda’s film. The film recounts the adventures of two adolescent girls from the Parisian banlieues, travelling south and photographing houses and workplaces, in an attempt to document urban spaces at the margins of representation. In its direct photographic approach, and apparent use of local non-professionals, Ghorab-Volta’s film also seeks to blur divisions between fiction and documentary. In the sense that the film’s simple story replicates the work’s own pro-filmic circumstances, as well as its own status as a low-budget work operating outside the dominant frameworks of production and distribution, the film is a type of projet in the spirit of Varda’s film, looking to create its own afterlife in 145

Archer_final.indd 145

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

terms of the observations and encounters it evidently made, and subsequently re-presents in film. 10. As I mentioned in my introduction, Varda made a follow up to the film, Deux ans après/Two Years Later, in which she discusses the repercussions of the film with a number of the original participants.

146

Archer_final.indd 146

26/09/2012 08:12

Six Travel and the Transnational Road Movie in the Twenty-First Century If what we understand by ‘transnational cinema’ is to a large extent still a definition in progress, the connection between mobility and travel within the terms of the transnational has assumed critical currency. To suggest that this is a necessary connection is really to beg the question, in fact, of what transnational means, and more specifically what is at stake in the process of naming it. This is an important task, given that the recent topicality of transnational cinema, as far as its academic study is concerned, is based less on its status as a cinematic trend, than on the forces underpinning the particular tendency; whether we see this tendency in terms of representation at the level of the text, of production and reception, or of a combination of the two. As I have already stated, mobility and in particular the idea of border-crossing is a natural trope in the modern transnational film, given the predominance of itinerancy and migration (economic or political) as a symptom of the geo-political and economic circumstances of the twenty-first century. The re-emergence of the road movie as a genre in world cinemas can be understood partly in the light of such global transformations; even if the dominant focus, both in films and their studies, have been those subjects on the underprivileged side of the geo-political balance. The aforementioned 147

Archer_final.indd 147

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

studies that have taken these circumstances as background to their readings, such as those of Naficy (2001), Ezra and Rowden (2006) and Loshitsky (2010), have therefore brought into focus recent cinema’s reorientation towards alternative, often marginalized figures of representation, within an increasingly porous world. Given that integral notions of both ‘France’ (as a nation) and ‘French cinema’ (as an industry) lie on the notionally dominant side of global capital flow, studies have tended to consider within the transitional mode only those French films focusing on the foreign, or at least the marginal, figure within the French hexagone. The representational and political value of such films lies partly in their depiction not merely of those ‘other’ subjects, but of those other conditions and motivations of travel, often forced, that differ from those hegemonic representations and travelling practices of the West. It would nevertheless be false to assume that the more traditionally hegemonic narrative of travel and mobility – the representation of privileged Western travellers, in other words – could no longer have representational value within an engaged transnational cinema: not unless we overlook the possibility of a cinema which engages critically with the more dominant forms of the travel narrative and hence their ideological and representational bases. I therefore continue in this chapter the approach, following O’Shaughnessy, I outlined in chapter four: one in which true critique of a system and its values comes not just from its outcasts, but from those at its centre. The cinema in its earliest decades, combining its scopic possibilities with the desire for knowledge or profit, exploited its potential to make the absent present by seeking out that which was physically and culturally distant. Early cinema could therefore offer virtual travel, images of other places and peoples in an era before mass tourism. If the meeting of mobility and camera was the perfect marriage for the ethnographic film, such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) or Moana (1926), the ethics of films like these tend to be reappraised by modern viewers. For Anna Grimshaw, for example, the ethnographic or anthropological film ‘looks backward [to] the past of a society, not its present’ (2001: 24). Yet recent 148

Archer_final.indd 148

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

criticism in the postcolonial vein has suggested the extent to which alienating images of the ethnic other still predominate, supposedly at least, at the broader level of popular visual cultures (Shohat and Stam 1994; Mirzoeff 1999). The twenty-first century phenomenon of travel is, similarly, politicized by its inherent dichotomy: for some a leisure option, for others a question of survival. Modern tourism, meanwhile, has in effect created a dispersed aristocracy of travellers, colonizing more economically dependent nations. The confrontation of these movements, especially in light of our current century’s climate of ideological polarization (Barber 2003), has given rise to recent cinema’s tendency to represent the travelling encounter in terms of fear and paranoia. In Géla and Temur Babluani’s L’Héritage (2006), for example, which I discuss below, a picturesque journey through Georgia on the part of three French travellers ends up, arguably through their own voyeuristic intervention, in tragic death. The conclusion of Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), meanwhile, about two young travellers in California, has its driver-protagonist run off the road, assaulted, and then raped by a gang of anonymous men: an act of violence which seems inscribed within the film as intrinsic to the alien land itself, an eruption directed at the film’s protagonists as strangers to this world. In this most superficial sense, these films indicate a kinship to a number of recent horror films or thrillers that literally depict the Western traveller as object of ‘alien’ hostility. These typically take place in Eastern Europe, in films such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006), or the British film Severance (Christopher Smith, 2007), but also increasingly in Western Europe, as in the Paris-set French production Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008). On an explicit level, what these films connote is that there are places to which one shouldn’t go; or, as Kim Newman crudely but evocatively puts it, their message ‘is that Other People Are Shit’ (2009: 38). We can of course rethink this paradigm, reading into such texts an implicit critique of tourism itself: less Other People Are Shit, than What Are We Doing There? Yet the apparent political correctness of such a viewpoint itself 149

Archer_final.indd 149

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

disguises a similar inscription of irreconcilable otherness, one that denies the possibility of encounter and mutual comprehension. While these are extreme examples, we should be wary of assuming that the politically correct inverse of such films (what we might call ‘Other People Are Great’) is any less problematic. This is because the qualities inscribed in these ‘other people’, whatever they may be, do not alter their over-arching inscription as other: hence the viewed object is in a scopic dynamic within which the filmmaker and implied viewer is on one side, the foreign subject on the other. So-called ‘positive images’, in other words, are themselves ethnographic, yet at the same time flatter viewers that they are not being voyeuristic or racist. This is a problem akin to the issue of assimilation touched on in chapter two of this book. How do you represent that which, by its own nature and demands, cannot or will not be captured within the terms imposed by a dominant viewpoint? And how can cinema avoid merely reinscribing difference and hence reiterating essentialisms and binaries? As I argue in this chapter, a way to approach this problem is not necessarily through the supposed representational ‘authenticity’ of the subject filmed, which is always I think a questionable (even impossible) ideal, but rather through a more reflexive questioning of the subject that films. In considering the connections between travel and ‘knowledge’, then, the films in discussion here examine how, as much as what, we comprehend through filming the foreign ‘other’. This is an approach taken in Claire Denis’s L’Intrus (2004); a film which, in its move from European isolation to global encounter, and playing on the question of who its titular ‘intruder’ really is, provides a suitable concluding film for this chapter.

Bad Trips: L’Héritage and Twentynine Palms The problem of travelling and filming foreign lands and people is wittily and disturbingly evoked in L’Héritage (2006), a kind of road movie thriller made by the French-based Georgian filmmaker Géla Babluani and his father, Georgian filmmaker Temur Babluani.1 The 150

Archer_final.indd 150

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

film relates the journey of a young Frenchwoman and two friends into rural Georgia, nominally to locate an inherited piece of land left to the woman: a journey which provides the pretext for another story altogether. The focus of the film deviates from the young woman to the two friends: a couple who, for reasons that are not fully given, are intent upon filming the trip. Many close-ups throughout the film emphasise the presence of the video camera as both a mediator of the travellers’ perception of Georgia itself, as well as a symbol of their naturalized economic privilege (early in the film, their camera is stolen: they end up buying it back from an illicit trader and purchasing a second camera at the same time). For the French, communication takes place mostly through a laconic, morally ambivalent interpreter, while the point of view in the film is often connected to the diegetic camera’s viewpoint. This is done either directly, in the form of relayed video footage, or indirectly, in terms of a frontal and often non-subtitled depiction of the Georgians they encounter. Much of the film’s first half, which takes place on the crosscountry coach the travellers are obliged to take, evokes the boredom brought on by long-distance road travel and the paradoxical interest and attention such boredom and proximity generate. In this simultaneously mobile and inert huis clos, chance occurrences and encounters assume the quality of narratives waiting to be told. When the French trio stumble onto an example of local ‘mountain justice’ – an old man, accompanied by his grandson and an empty coffin, who is on his way to be shot in order to resolve a long-standing feud – the instinct of the travellers is to follow and film its outcome. The ensuing key sequence in a mountain village shows us the interpreter filming clandestinely from a nearby window, with the travellers watching, immobile, as the grandfather walks slowly to his appointed death. The sequence in this way stages its own ontological problem, and, as such, the problems of representation in such a film. If the travellers’ desire to film the act is not explicit, the implication is that this local practice is suitably bizarre, or horrific, to warrant its recording. An intrinsically moral outrage, then, subtends its filming, yet it is the same act of filming, the desire to make this outrage visible, that 151

Archer_final.indd 151

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

in effect intercedes between this morbid fascination and any actual intervention or communication. The film therefore reaches a kind of impasse at this key moment: at the point of capturing the foreign other in this photographic gesture, all it does is trap both the observer and the observed in fixed and isolated representational frameworks. In the sense that the intra-diegetic filming works to highlight the film’s own status as text, this exceptional moment in the film invites ethical consideration relating to the structures of cultural belief that shape and determine interpretation: structures that are especially pertinent to the ethnographic tendencies of the travel film. The travellers’ desire to film the killing, an ethnographic gesture, works in effect to freeze and sustain the action in all its ‘barbaric’ otherness. We see then how the fiction film can converge with what Bill Nichols calls the ‘expository’ documentary mode: films which proffer ‘epistemic knowledge’, in the Foucauldian sense of ‘the categories and concepts accepted as given or true in a specific time and place, or with a dominant ideology of common sense such as the one our own discourses of society support’ (Nichols 1991: 35). By showing the mediated nature of this ‘knowledge’, however, and the way the travellers’ actions effectively preserve this representation as immutable, the film goes some way to destabilising its epistemic authority. To extend the arguments brought up in this chapter’s introduction, rather than see the Babluani’s film as a kind of ‘revenge’ narrative on the travellers themselves, which would simply fix the Georgian other as barbarian (and in turn reiterate the diegetic filmmakers’ own point of view), we should see the film as a kind of process: a rhetoric of vision and knowledge, rather than a representation. The Babluanis’ film bears superficial similarities to films such as Robert Guédiguian’s Voyage en Arménie, and especially to the road movies of Tony Gatlif such as Exils, Transylvania (2007) and in particular Gadjo Dilo (1997), which features a young French traveller searching for a particular singer amongst Romania’s gypsy community. L’Héritage shares Guédiguian’s motif of the distant relative, while its fixation with the technology of reproduction is a variation on Gadjo Dilo, whose protagonist has as his main accessory a portable 152

Archer_final.indd 152

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

tape recorder. It is nevertheless significant that in Guédiguian’s and Gatlif’s work, journeys are structured around a specific site of memory or identification (family, a country or community, music) that, however over-determined this may prove, suggests a form of return on the part of the traveller. In the Babluanis’ film, even the inheritance alluded to in the title turns out to be a ruin and as such offers no site of return. In its lack of such a site, then, L’Héritage draws attention to its own journey and images as motivated not by return, but potentially by exploration; or in other words, by cultural tourism. The violent reaction of Jean to the initial loss of his camera in Tblisi centres partly around the fact that this loss deprives him of the means to record the photographic subject, the foreign country in all its otherness, which appears to be his reason for being there. In Gadjo Dilo the boho Parisian’s bid to record ‘authentic’ sounds actually involves a meticulous process of selection and erasure, and therefore his authentic sound is actually highly mediated (McGregor 2008: 78). Similarly, in L’Héritage, Jean cannot see that what interposes itself between the photographer and his ‘authentic’ photographic subject is the subject itself. Given the tendency in Gatlif’s films to figure music as a form of portal, mediating between his protagonists’ dominant home culture and the foreign culture to which they gravitate, it is unsurprising that L’Héritage introduces its doomed pair of Georgians, en route, via the kind of local musical flourish characteristic of Gatlif’s work. In the end, what is most significant about Gatlif’s road movies from a representational perspective – their ‘unequivocal celebration of marginality’, to use Loshitsky’s phrase (2010: 39) – may also be what limits them, especially as their pre-determined willingness to speak for and through the communities represented obviates the problem of difference; in other words, that which subtends their marginalization in the first place. Encouraged by the representational strategies in the Babluanis’ film, I suggest we see the gaps in knowledge on the part of both protagonist and viewer to operate, counter-intuitively, as a productive interpretational force. Such a strategy plays around possible 153

Archer_final.indd 153

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

limitations in the field of cinematic and cultural knowledge (in this case, that of ‘Georgia’, and of ‘Georgian cinema’, about which most western European viewers know little). At the same time, it questions the suitability of a ‘national’ or ‘minority’ cinemas approach, which risks treating each constituent part of the ‘inter-cultural’ encounter in isolation. Such approaches say little about what really happens within the textual encounter, or about how we might understand the trans in the transnational as a form of transformation, rather than merely a movement to-and-fro between mutually exclusive constituencies. Such a view also brings the ethical possibilities of the road movie further into focus, underscoring the importance of the in-between space of transition as the site of productive encounter and not the often pre-determined end points of destination. Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) is another notionally French road movie that opts to move beyond its borders; in this case, to the Californian desert. In its opening sequence, while a woman sleeps on the back seat, an unspecified man at the wheel of a huge SUV reveals via mobile phone that he is ‘driving – driving to Twentynine Palms’. The film therefore establishes from the outset that there is both a nominal destination, but also a process and passage that precede this destination. In this instance, driving, and not the destination, will predominate, with much of the film’s action (or in this case, inaction) taking place within and around the motor vehicle itself, the camera frequently dwelling on the mobile perspectives of its two protagonists. Twentynine Palms in this way indicates its continuity with the road movie’s structural and stylistic motifs: here, the destination is never reached, just as the motivation for the trip is never really explained; while for much of the film, Dumont is content to let the characters and the car drift, often very slowly and with apparent aimlessness. Like a number of the films discussed in this book, then, although in a way that virtually dispenses with narrative drive altogether (Beugnet 2007: 94), Dumont’s film is a reflection on driving itself. Given the tendency of Dumont in his other films, set in his native Pas-de-Calais, to explore the interrelationship of inertia, mobility and violence 154

Archer_final.indd 154

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

(Bowles 2004), it is consistent with the director’s authorial signature that he should use the road movie’s aleatory drift to explore the connections between driving and desire. Any sense of narrative causality in Twentynine Palms is largely absent, replaced instead by an associative causality of appetite and consumption. So it is that the two protagonists – named David and Katia, after the two actors (David Wissak and Katia Golubeva) – intersperse their driving with breaks to shop, eat an ice-cream or some noodles, and most of all to have bouts of frenzied sex, little of which contributes to a clear sense of narrative development. Dumont’s aim, in a film of little event and over two hours of running time, seems to be to encourage a form of contemplative boredom on the part of the viewer, as a didactic device for drawing out the viewer’s underlying energies and desires (the desire, in other words, for action, for something to ‘happen’). For Chris Petit, whose filmmaking CV is bookended by the experimental road movies Radio On (1979) and Content (2010), such an approach is vital to understanding the automotive capitalist age: the boredom which driving at once generates and seeks to alleviate ‘underpins consumerism’ in its inevitable drift towards sensory stimulation and gratification; it is, though, a boredom that ‘invites terror (as its only cure)’ (2008: 40). For the purposes of studying the ‘French road movie’, a key question here (as with L’Héritage and L’Intrus) is what they really have to do with France. Beyond the nationality of the film’s director (whose Cannes Jury Award for 1999’s L’Humanité helped cement his presence within the ranks of European auteurs), the connotations of funding sources, and the partial use of French in the film (itself a stipulation of the funding), it is hard to determine what connotes ‘Frenchness’ in the film. Within the logic of this study, this is not so relevant, if we take the film as exploring a relationship to space and mobility itself; by this, I mean that we might see Twentynine Palms not as a transnational film, but as a nation-less one, a film about space in itself. The only problem with this view is that it overlooks the discourses around the film that proceed partly from the director himself. Dumont has not been shy in stating his antipathy towards American culture, and, in particular, his wish to make 155

Archer_final.indd 155

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

Twentynine Palms a cinematic ‘terrorist attack’ (in Matheou 2005: 17): an attempt to bring into view the moral or aesthetic void in an American genre through a notional exploding of the genre itself. Moreover, Dumont resorts to occasional representational strategies – irrationally screaming rednecks, and the mysterious truckload of yokels that force David’s car off the road and rape him – that, oddly, do not really parody the kind of representations Dumont seeks to critique (as in his cited example of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1971)), but rather serve as pale imitations of them. Despite its apparent distance, then, ‘France’, or at least an idea of ‘Europe’, re-emerges within this paradigm, not as the terrain being explored and (re)configured, but rather as that which is upheld, or even defended, through the film’s practice. Within this logic, in other words, is a rethinking of power and culture within globalization, in which Europe itself is positioned as vulnerable and marginal, threatened by the hegemony of American cultural imperialism. The desire to explore America in this sense marks America as the source of anxiety, but for these same reasons also a source of fascination. Unsurprisingly perhaps for the work of a former philosophy teacher, Dumont’s film bears a certain relation to Jean Baudrillard’s book Amérique (1986); a form of travel diary and cultural meditation, and which features ‘Twentynine Palms’ as the title of one of its chapters. For Orgeron, who begins his study of the road movie with a quotation from Amérique, the particular qualities of the modern American landscape which intrigue Baudrillard – what Orgeron calls ‘primitive modernism’ (2008: 1) – also underpin the enduring cross-cultural seduction of the road movie: those qualities of newness, speed and pure surface (2008: 1–2). This potentially utopian tenor to Baudrillard’s book, and its notional equivalence in Dumont’s film, are nevertheless tempered by both men’s own cultural self-location and an ability to reconcile themselves to the implications of America’s modernity. At a later point in Amérique, Baudrillard refers to the ‘mental shock’ experienced by ‘us’, for whom the world is organized around ‘beauty, rationality and culture’, when confronted by the dizzying newness 156

Archer_final.indd 156

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

and disconnection of American desert cities (1986: 240). Underlying Amérique, in other words, is a distinct binary, or even a notion of historical hierarchy, which situates ‘we Europeans’ in opposition to ‘America’. Inasmuch as Dumont’s self-absorbed and rejected travellers themselves reject contact with the inhabitants of the Californian desert through which they drive, hermetically insulated within their huge car, Twentynine Palms also inscribes an oppositional position: one which, if we take the protagonists as embodying in some way the position of the film and filmmaker, also inscribes them as ‘European’. The film also uses Dumont’s characteristic mix of fixed sequence shots and meticulous sound design to evoke a human landscape without depth, rendering motel pools and palm tree-lined consumer strips as inert as postcards. The use of Bach in the latter instance, sourced faintly in the long shot of a downtown strip, then sourced as muzak in the subsequent cut-in of David and Katia walking, has by implication a critical function: a high-cultural artifact reduced, via inferior reproductive sound systems, as an aid to consumerism, and in turn another commodity in itself. The ironic (and in the context of this book, problematic) aspect of this tendency is that, despite its putatively radical approach to the genre, the film may be profoundly reactionary in its apparent endorsement of European high culture (an association with which, both implicitly and through direct statement, Dumont seems to make with regard both to himself and his work). Even more problematically, a reading of Twentynine Palms from this ‘oppositional’ perspective fails to account for its own symbolic violence, in the sense that its protagonists’ journey through the American West reenacts the same Eurocentric gesture of territorial possession, and even altericide, for which the American western genre has been made the subject of ideological critique (Shohat and Stam 1994: 116–119). David and Katia’s desert search for a form of unmediated, premodern space leads them to seek out mountainous outcrops from which, in long-distance and reverse shots, they can be seen to both occupy and survey the landscape. In this instance, moreover, they are literally unclothed, therefore apparently freed from all markers of modern 157

Archer_final.indd 157

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

civilization. The connotation of a modern Eden in this image disguises its sense of territorial appropriation, along with the paradoxical fact that this premodern idyll is largely achieved via motorized transport (Laderman 2002: 18).2 Given the amount of implications here, and the way the film discursively situates itself in opposition, the possibility of autopia collapses here under the film’s symbolic weight.3 And then again: whether intentionally or not on Dumont’s part, the film may be seen more ambiguously. In the film’s inverted semiotics, the violence enacted upon David and Katia implies that the demented locals are the actual intruders, and not the travellers. Yet this begs the question of how seriously, and how seriously ‘representative’, we should take such authorial emphasis. Ill-defined as they are, it makes no sense to do so. In effect, like in Deliverance, the point may be that these cinematic monsters merely embody the violence that is already present but disavowed within the protagonists’ journey. From this perspective, the violence inflicted on David, which he then inflicts on Katia and himself (the end of the film reveals David’s naked body in the desert beside a police car), is merely a symptom of the latent violence of the journey itself, and of the drive to consume and possess. If this suggests a more pessimistic vision of the road movie and its possibilities than that previously considered, we can also see it in terms of a continuity with the earlier-expressed idea of the road movie as defining a space of otherness, through a critical or negative dialogue with what the genre traditionally inscribes. Along with L’Héritage, it suggests that the hereditary preconceptions of cinematic travel, and the journey through foreign lands, may work to produce a form of productive encounter, in their questioning both of manicheistic representation and ethnographic idealization.

The Impossibility of Solitude: L’Intrus Early on in L’Intrus, a familiar face appears: that of Katia Golubeva, co-protagonist of Twentynine Palms. In L’Intrus, a largely non-linear 158

Archer_final.indd 158

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

and abstract film, which loosely depicts the global journey of a man to have a heart transplant and revisit the places of his youth, Golubeva re-appears at various points: her role, it seems, is to act both as agent for the film’s protagonist, as well as a kind of conscience or reminder of his past. That Golubeva is herself figured in such a way, as one of the film’s numerous intruders that disrupt the protagonist’s isolated and protected space, generates significant associations leading back to Dumont’s film. In Twentynine Palms, to follow a view of the film as one which engages critically with the road genre, the violence enacted, after David’s rape, on Katia – who actually, as a Lithuanian, is the only real ‘foreigner’ in the film – is also, from the perspective of gender, a marker of David’s hysterical reiteration of masculinity. Yet from the argument I have made regarding Dumont’s film, this violence is implicit in the relationship from the beginning: in fact, given the way the camera often dwells on Katia, sometimes revealing what David cannot see, there is a sense in which her own foreignness (which therefore both fascinates and repels) literalizes her status as a source of anxious fascination to the male protagonist, but also as an embodiment of the alien landscape itself. The fact that the violence in Twentynine Palms is marked in terms of emasculation and hysterical re-masculation, ultimately falling on the body of Katia, indicates to what extent hardness and control, and the repudiation of ‘effeminizing’ bodily violation, underlies the film, and more broadly, the gendered sub-texts of the road movie. L’Intrus, with its largely associative approach to narrative causality and progression, is a road movie in the most extended sense of the term, yet my argument here focuses on how issues of the body and its violation are related in Denis’s film to issues of global mobility. Here, the self-contained world the film’s protagonist makes for himself in the Jura region of France, an old-style forest lodge with land extending seemingly for hundreds of acres around, can be read as a symptom both of the contemporary global system and of the related exercizing of masculine self-sufficiency and inviolability. As Beugnet puts it with regard to the film, situating it in the context of contemporary transnational cinema: 159

Archer_final.indd 159

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

While the virtual and actual circulation of images and human bodies across national divides increases, an ageing, post-colonial western world appears to retreat . . . behind the illusion of a unified and integral identity, and occasionally reacts like a besieged body, as if seized in paranoiac fear of hidden takeovers. (Beugnet 2008: 37)

Beugnet, then, conflates the ageing masculine body of the film’s protagonist (Louis Trebor, played by Michel Subor) with the ageing bastion of Old Europe and its values. In Denis’s film, the fertile greens and waters of the Jura where Trebor lives unsettle the association of hardness and isolation, yet this is part of an aesthetic strategy in which orders and terms are inverted. In contrast to the de-exoticized images later in the film of the South Korean port city of Busan, and of the island of Tahiti, the French sequences are dreamlike in their green lushness or icy whiteness. Yet such romanticizing of this European landscape, a move which links back through Romanticism itself – the opposition of ‘nature’ to the modern city, in other words – in effect naturalizes, and therefore de-historicizes, solitude within nature as the true condition of man (sic). In other words, it allows us to overlook the effacing of nature as culture and privilege: that the relation to the social other signified by such solitude is violent; a retreat from nature, in fact.4 By locating the film on the Swiss-France border, moreover, together with the intertextual references brought by the presence of Michel Subor – linking back through Denis’s earlier Beau travail, in which Subor plays a captain in the Foreign Legion, and his connected role as Bruno Forrestier of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1961), a sequence from which is replicated in L’Intrus – subtle inferences are made relating to the past, to notions of neutrality and responsibility, to foreign (mis)adventure belying the pastoral order of the domestic. Yet at the same time, its location at the threshold of two nominally different spaces, indicated at the film’s beginning with its scene of border controls, points to the instability of this position. Within this landscape, the central figure of Trebor is a figure of apparent contradiction: a man of violence in paradise, whose simple lifestyle is funded through imprecise and implicitly criminal means 160

Archer_final.indd 160

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

(Trebor, like the covert operatives of espionage cinema, appears to have several passports and is multi-lingual). The subtle allusions, in this depiction of solitude, to the likes of Rousseau and the Enlightenment – an allusion which extends into the second half of the film, in the New World of the South Sea Islands – suggests the ways in which L’Intrus instigates a form of cinematic dialogue with this particular Siècle des lumières; in turn drawing parallels with that later cinematic century the Brothers Lumière helped usher in. Pastoral tranquility is figured here as the domestic face of colonial adventure, not an untroubled Eden: in particular, when Trebor brutally slits the throat of an apparent nocturnal intruder. In a similar way to the protagonists of Twentynine Palms, Trebor’s self-exclusion from the world suggests a prelapsarian retreat and an implicit comment on the fall of man: yet through its own logic, such contempt for man implicates the damning voice within this same fall, as one who hastens the demise. The hard body and its potential invasion finds its literal embodiment in the imposingly strong yet ageing body of Subor. Agnès Godard’s camera stays close to Subor’s face and body; gazing upon his tanned skin amongst the ferns, the profile of his watching face at the window, the musculature of his legs and torso when cycling. The duration and slow pacing of these early scenes in the Jura, intercut as they are with images of the other figures (economic migrants, perhaps) who ‘invade’ the territory and whose watching eyes are mimetically suggested in the long shots we see of Trebor, have a sense of unease. As with Twentynine Palms, however, it would be mechanistic to suggest that this sense of unease should be produced through these motifs of genre, in the same way that such a reading would leave solitude itself unquestioned, implicating the other as hostile to the integrity of the individual subject. My suggestion is that there is something immanent to the depiction of Trebor that expresses such unease as a condition of the solitary figure, rather than something extrinsic to him. As I discussed earlier in relation to Sans toit ni loi, the depiction of freedom, which in Varda’s film is related to solitude, is complicated 161

Archer_final.indd 161

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

by the process of viewing itself. Something similar occurs in the opening scenes of L’Intrus, in that we are being asked to witness solitude, which in theory denies solitude. At the same time, the film does not evoke this simply as a violation of intimacy. Trebor’s own cultivation of his sovereign territory, a territory that inevitably contains its own limit, implies this intruding other in and as offscreen space. What the film evokes, then, is the sense of this offscreen space as that which completes Trebor’s territorial identity. For Jacques Lacan, in ways Kaja Silverman has related specifically to film, this return of the gaze is in fact structured into self-perception itself: the self in the field of vision is naturally imaged in a bodily form, which in effect is projected from outside the self and which implies the other that sees (Lacan 1973: 79–135; Silverman 1996: 96). It is no accident, in fact, that Denis and Godard focus on Trebor in action, especially as the camera follows him cycling, tracking him at his same speed, emphasising action and the dynamism of the body: it is precisely this quality in the masculine subject which, cinematically, has always engaged the look whilst simultaneously disavowing it, aggressively repudiating man’s need of others. The exertion of the ageing Trebor cannot exist purely in and of itself, but implies an absent observer, especially in its connotations of narcissism. The (hard) body-consciousness of the protagonist, accentuated by its striving against the softening and gravitational pull of old age, asserts that even the solitary masculine body is one made flesh as a subject of vision. From this perspective, what is important and distinctive in the film is that the act of looking, and its association with travel or tourism, becomes a process whose nominal politics of possession become inverted. It is in this sense, to bring the argument to bear more forcibly on the meaning and potential of the road movie, that Denis’s film represents a particular approach to the problems of filming travel. From an initial assumption of the centralized power of the gaze, the authority and trajectory of this gaze is called into question. Fredric Jameson makes an assertion along these lines in reference to the claustrophobic close-up of the conspiracy thriller, which, in terms 162

Archer_final.indd 162

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

of the generic motifs of surveillance and anxiety I have highlighted, has relevance to L’Intrus: From Sartre to Foucault, and beyond them in contemporary feminism, the look has been the privileged ontological space in which our disempowerment as manipulatable objects is dramatised and deployed. Yet the dynamics of the visual and of the gaze always project a space of ‘power’ – the absent Other, the watch-tower of the panopticon – which is somehow itself immune to sight and escapes its own logic by taking refuge behind the recording apparatus. (1992: 66)

Jameson’s description is useful in its essential affirmation of the cinematic, or more particularly of cinematic looking. For the notionally central figure and ‘bearer’ of the look to be now held and scrutinized in this same look’s return inverts the presumed order of panoptic control. In L’Intrus, the viewing traveller is at once the subject and object of viewing, himself caught and tracked in the eye of vision. To this effect, movement is skillfully employed within the film, problematizing the association of mobility with mastery; therefore echoing the structure of the film as a whole, in its movement from dominance and self-sufficiency to vulnerability and loss (the film evokes parallels between Trebor’s search for a heart, and therefore longevity, and the death of his son). In a similar way to Vendredi soir, Denis and Godard create fluid images of bodies and faces that are themselves in movement. The vagabond girl who appears intermittently in the film, when spied upon through Trebor’s binoculars, appears to drift through and out of their field of vision. Similarly, it is in movement itself that the woman played by Golubeva first appears, gliding past the already-moving bicycle of Trebor. On arrival in Tahiti, Trebor himself becomes the elusive object of the film’s vision in a partial graphic match of these earlier sequences. Confronted by the fact of his own physical exceptionality in Tahiti, which in turn makes Trebor, as in the Korean sequence, the outsider (and a notional ‘intruder’), we see his look directed towards a passing truck, on board which we see a group of young men. With both parties filmed in the gliding movement of two opposing trajectories, the apparent return of the look has Trebor glide in and through 163

Archer_final.indd 163

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

vision in a way reminiscent of the vagabond girl’s earlier motion. If L’Intrus plays with the conventions of the thriller genre, here it is as if the spy is suddenly made the target. Trebor is framed as if at first sight, picking him out from the series of moving bodies, of which he is no longer the centre but simply a part. Where this evocation of vision through movement relates back to many of our previous concerns is in its ethical and libertarian implications. Inasmuch as Trebor is the nominal bearer of the look, his representation in movement, via the movement of other bodies, evokes not freedom in its misrecognized sense of power and mastery (which is not free, but dependent on the other for its own being), but freedom in the more complex way I discussed previously: namely, a debunking of the notion of mastery and a recognition of the existence of beings and subjectivities in movement that are irreducible to assimilation. The particular use of the movement-image in L’Intrus – the representation of movement via movement, ‘the moving of movement, not a movement that is organised and fixed by some static point of view’ (Colebrook 2002: 44, emphasis in the original) – evokes this more radical notion of freedom as an abandonment of the solipsistic and anthropocentric look. As Claire Colebrook puts it in her distillation of Deleuze’s cinematic thinking, ‘freedom lies in affirming the chance of events, not being deluded that we are “masters” or that the world is nothing more than the limited perceptions we have of it’ (2002: 38). We see this in the Busan sequence. For Trebor, alone in the city, the men drinking in the restaurant are the putative subjects of the traveller’s cinematic gaze. Yet at the same time it is they whose language and own scrutiny of the stranger in their midst remains beyond the possession of the European eye and ear. The men here, then, maintain their difference without collapsing ethnocentrically into the otherness of the exotic: an occurrence which rebounds upon the newly estranged figure of Trebor, forced into recognizing his own otherness, and of the power-play of looks through which (national) identity is fashioned. In this road movie, progressively freed from the constraints of a central spatial vision, this de-centring is also at work on the temporal 164

Archer_final.indd 164

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

level. Trebor’s journey provides a notional chronological trajectory for the film, yet it refuses a total causal and temporal linearity that would evoke possession, the reduction of the world to the consciousness of a single male traveller. A third of the way into the film, a shot of Trebor silhouetted against a Geneva hotel window gives way to the Jura again, now in autumn, and the hunters who may or may not be seeking human prey. Later, a shot on board a tanker evokes the swell of the ocean and the sensation of sea travel, although before any narrative motivation within the logic of Trebor’s journey. Should we seek to make sense of these spatial and temporal discontinuities? As I have said, the film hints towards a cinema of conspiracy or of clandestine criminality: a suggestion underscored by its emphasis on borders and trafficking, of undisclosed international trade and Swiss bank accounts. For Jameson, the fascination of the conspiracy film is the way it problematizes the empirical nature of truth and the search for it, in a world beyond the scope or knowledge of the anthropocentric individual witness (1992: 10). The enigmatic nature of montage in L’Intrus, which asks for interpretation and association without providing any obvious connections, would suggest such a problem, just as Denis’s fascination with the non-places of international business (hotel rooms, shadowy offices, the transit-sites of boats and aeroplanes) are suggestive of the work of capital below and beyond the level of the national. Ultimately, however, L’Intrus resists the conspiracy film’s promise that the investigating individual can somehow solve the riddle; or even, in failure, that the riddle’s decoding remains the goal, the revealing of the world in its clarity. L’Intrus suggests that such a decoding, which would inevitably imply a single, central intelligibility and intelligence, may be part of the problem. The film’s juxtaposed dislocations ask to be made sense of, although at the same time such an action would reduce their own immanent quality as intensities: spaces of being that, like the figure of the stranger itself, are themselves powerful in their resistance to assimilation. Towards the end of the film, the ailing Trebor meets a young Tahitian man who may or may not be his son. Whether he is or is 165

Archer_final.indd 165

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

not is irrelevant: for the film, which is a work of poetic fiction, it is the image that counts and the idea that the relationship becomes real through its representation. At the same time as finding this surrogate child, he loses his estranged European son (with the film symbolically revealing the latter, it seems, as the provider of Trebor’s transplanted heart). By this point, the film has taken us from the apparent solipsism and self-sufficiency of the masculine figure, through to its fragmentation and dispersal via the intensities and potentialities of the movement- and time-image. The latter subsumes the remnants of the heroic quest narrative itself, as if stressing its anachronism; moreover, it suggests the fallacy of a world understood as a linear trajectory, or the idea that what takes place in time and space is determined merely by the motion of an individual body. In a move that again connects the road narrative to the conclusions of Deleuze’s work on cinema, L’Intrus evokes the predominance of time over action and the illusion of free movement’s (masculine) sufficiency and immortality. In many respects the key factor here is the cinematic specificity of Denis’s film, in distinction to the literary or biographical aspects of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book of 2000 which inspired it (and that which makes the film, necessarily, a dialogue with Nancy’s L’Intrus and not merely a gloss on it). As Anja Streiter argues, the film of L’Intrus seeks to efface ‘the last heroic resorts of Nancy’s story, that of the male adventurer, the space traveller, the Son of God’ (2008: 61). By reversing the narrative of birth and lineage, by having the father look for a son, only for a son to die for the father, the bloodline is cut: notions of patriarchy and lineage are superseded by a newer, more contingent or accidental notion of connectivity (hence the providing of a ‘virtual’ son over one connected by blood and soil) (Beugnet 2008: 39); a connectivity which, in its move from the isolated individual, shifts the film’s concerns into the area of contemporary geo-political relationships. One of the key aspects of cinematic travelling that L’Intrus confronts, then, is this possibility or meaning of moving beyond the self: whether or not such immersion in the world of ‘others’ in effect merely effaces the textual trace and epistemic framework of the 166

Archer_final.indd 166

26/09/2012 08:12

Travel and the Transnational Road Movie

observer. In Denis’s work, as I have argued, we are able to travel cinematically beyond the geographical limits of our own experience, yet in a way which, rather than implying transcendence, operates on the basis of encounter and confrontation: a recognition of alterity which, in this case, returns upon the traveller-viewer in a reciprocated gesture. Nancy evokes this cinematic process at the very end of his book: ‘it is as an intruder that I pass through a world in which my presence may be so arbitrary, or have such little basis . . . Isn’t such a recognition, in its simplest sense, that of my altogether contingent nature?’ (2000: 47). The elegance of Nancy’s conclusion is to find freedom precisely in the relinquishing of that which so often pertains to the creative act: the desire for control or immortality. In the variety and multiplicity of the world evoked in Denis’s global film, such an intent on the part of one man (or woman) would only be a grotesque one. In the afterword that follows this chapter, I briefly resume the arguments of this book, considering what it means to understand the French road movie within the terms of a French national cinema. As a lead-in to these conclusions, and based on the readings in this final chapter, how might we understand or support the concept of the national within the conditions of a transnational cinema these same films reflect? Films such as L’Héritage and L’Intrus, while illustrating the connectedness and permeability of borders, or the structural binaries through which so much is defined and misunderstood, do not undermine the significance of national identity: rather, they emphasise the extent to which identity is a constant negotiation and re-negotiation that must incorporate (literally, in Denis’s film) the other’s existence. Importantly, this idea of national identity does not relinquish the idea of a national altogether. As Carrie Tarr has argued in an essay on transnationality in French cinema (2007), transnational does not imply a sort of post-national uniformity. To do away with the national as a concept, especially within the conditions of globalization, only opens the space for cultural homogeneity or the imperialism of the dominant cultural and economic order. National 167

Archer_final.indd 167

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

identity is in this sense revived, but as a form of self-recognition within plurality and difference. The example in these films suggests that the term ‘national cinema’ – like the ‘French road movie’ – be understood not as static and defensive ideas of the nation-space or its cinema, but as ongoing investigations into what this nation and cinema mean within, and in relation to, the wider world.

Notes 1. For an extended analysis of this film, see Archer 2010. 2. In his review of the film, Richard Falcon (2005: 76) makes the point that the car used in Twentynine Palms is a Hummer: the same car used by the American military in the Middle East. 3. For an extended argument on these issues see Archer 2011. 4. As Jean Starobinski writes on the solitary Rousseau, ‘In his most profound isolation, he remained bound to society by his very revolt and anti-social passion: aggressive detachment is itself a form of attachment’ (1971: 60).

168

Archer_final.indd 168

26/09/2012 08:12

Afterword ‘Welcome to France!’ The Road Movie and French National Cinema The aim of this book has been to historicize and understand French cinema’s exploration of the road movie. As I suggested in my introduction, this is not a straightforward task. As the road movie is difficult to identify in culturally specific terms, and is therefore always a genre in search of its identity, a French road movie is engaged in a constant negotiation of its own physical and conceptual boundaries. In fact, as I hope to have shown, analysing the ‘French road movie’ ultimately begs the question of its ‘French-ness’. If the road movie, to an extent, resists being easily identified within national cinema terms, what does it mean to call it ‘French’? And more importantly, why does it still matter? As we saw at the beginning of this study, the topography of films such as Les Valseuses, Sans toit ni loi, Aux yeux du monde and Baisemoi, and the protagonists they describe, point towards the contested nature of identity and nation space within France. This contestation, I suggested, is partly grounded in the debates generated by the events of May 1968, to which extent these films provide part of the events’ legacy. In my reading of Drôle de Félix, similarly, I argued that the road movie could be used as a form of interpretive grid through which narratives of identity could be both engaged with and critiqued, but also a film through which the transformative pleasures of the road 169

Archer_final.indd 169

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

genre are made evident. In the discussion of gender in chapters four and five, meanwhile, I argued that the gendered historical connotations of genre could be explored or countered, in order to rethink conceptions of gender itself. This process, I suggested, has implications for our understanding of gender as central to socio-political ideas of space and mobility. In the case of the films in chapter four, I argued that the male-centred road movie provided a critical mode for exploring modern capitalism; while in chapter five, as well as offering a particular conception of women’s filmmaking within a French tradition, the films by Denis and Varda also aimed to reconfigure concepts of social space and its use. In chapter six, lastly, I considered how the road movie functioned outside national borders, looking at how modern cinematic travel involves an ethical encounter with otherness. What ultimately links these six chapters, I have argued, is the reflexive and searching quality of the road genre; the way it enacts its own ongoing enquiry into the cinematic forms and narratives suitable for its particular stories and themes. If the French road movie is ultimately about limits and definitions, this study’s conclusions may have significant implications for how we conceive of national film studies in this new century. As the readings in my final chapter indicate, within a world in which identity is increasingly transnational, the topographies of films such as L’Intrus and L’Héritage are beginning to constitute a new kind of norm, at least at a certain level of film production. Displacement, migration and linguistic blurring are also increasingly familiar motifs in a proportion of French-produced cinema, thereby raising the question of what ‘French cinema’ actually connotes in the twenty-first century. A film such as Philippe Lioret’s Calais-set Welcome (2009), which recounts the attempts of a young Kurdish immigrant, Balil, to reach the U.K. by swimming the English Channel, is emblematic in this respect. The geo-political ambiguity of the Channel/la Manche, neither French nor British and always in motion, is an appropriate figure both for the film’s national and linguistic blurring (the dialogue is in French and English), but also for its intrinsic questioning of the idea of borders. What it is that constitutes for some an 170

Archer_final.indd 170

26/09/2012 08:12

Afterword

impermeable barrier (the economic and political migrants waiting for their chance to leave), and for others a porous zone of circulation (the freight lorries that pass through day and night, or the channelhopping Europeans on commercial ferries)? Welcome is in this sense the auto-critical road movie par excellence, an absurdist reduction of the genre: a film about the desire for movement, whose protagonist is physically unable to move. Lioret’s intimate film, shot on location, is at pains to emphasise its verisimilitude, and in turn, the urgency of the situation it depicts. Yet as a realist narrative, it is inevitably caught between two equally untenable routes. A happy ending, in which Balil reaches his destination, would render the film both sentimental and politically inert, whitewashing fact with wish-fulfilment; if it ends unhappily, as we know it surely must, it effectively tells us what we already know (although might like to forget). Leaning to the latter category (Balil drowns during his final swim, attempting to evade the British border patrols), Welcome nevertheless avoids a potential didacticism in its subtle use of space and more particularly its use of imagined space. An edit towards the end of the film sees one-time champion swimmer, now swimming instructor (played by Vincent Lindon), doing rapid laps in the pool. His contact with Balil, first as a coach and then as a kind of father, appears to have awakened his sense of political engagement and therefore his lost youth. As Lindon cuts through the water of the pool, the film cuts instantly to a shot of a young man at sea, who we presume to be Balil, his strokes graphically matching the previous shot. Making use of its widescreen ratio here to suggest both imaginary and literal width, the cutting here establishes an unspoken connection between the man and what is in essence his surrogate son. But it is also striking in the way it momentarily makes the two spaces indivisible and hence virtual; as if it were not the pupil at sea, but the instructor’s own vision of either himself or his young charge. The film, in other words, introduces out of nothing its own evanescent utopia: one that, by its own logic, cannot be realized or endure, but whose effect stems from its purely cinematic nature. 171

Archer_final.indd 171

26/09/2012 08:12

The French Road Movie

For all this – or rather because of it – the ‘French-ness’ of Welcome, like other films I have discussed in this book, is paradoxical. While the film could take place in any number of modern countries, it is also about the desire to leave the nation-space that gives the film its international cinematic identity (within the discourses of production, reception and criticism that define it as French) and the desire to resist the national(ist) policies that restrict the movement of people like Balil. Yet, despite the frequently reiterated notion that a national cinema has a mythical function, with the aim of maintaining belief, consensuality and order (Hayward 1993: 1–5), it would be both reductive and negative to suggest that a product of ‘national’ cinema cannot provide a challenge to othodoxy and hegemony. Returning to the concept of the ‘popular’ I touched upon earlier, a nuanced view of popular art is one that recognizes the particular uses made of it by particular constituencies of individuals within the nation, but who are not reducible to the nation in a form of totalizing view. For all its possible faults and inconsistencies, we do not see the films of the French New Wave, which departed from many of the aesthetic and ideological values of previous French cinema, as any less French for it. Neither does the counter-cultural intent of the New Hollywood and its numerous road movies, even if at times misguided, define it as non-American. Rather, we understand such filmmaking tendencies and movements as a process of negotiation and contestation; a process not of maintaining imaginary order, but of questioning the meaning of this order within the designated nation space, on the part of those people who make up that space. And as I have argued throughout, the road movie is the ideal cinematic forum for these issues: a genre about space, mobility and identity, constantly questioning and reflexive about its own location, meanings and aims.

172

Archer_final.indd 172

26/09/2012 08:12

Filmography

A bout de souffle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) L’Adversaire (dir. Nicole Garcia, 2002) Les Amants du Pont Neuf (dir. Léos Carax, 1991) Aux yeux du monde (dir. Eric Rochant, 1991) Baise-moi (dir. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh-thi, 1999) Beau travail (dir. Claire Denis, 1998) Brêve traversée (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2001) Cléo de 5 à 7 (dir. Agnès Varda, 1961) Deux ans après (dir. Agnès Varda, 2002) Diva (dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981) Drôle de Félix (dir. Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 1999) L’Emploi du temps (dir. Laurent Cantet, 2001) Exils (dir. Tony Gatlif, 2004) Extension du domaine de la lutte (dir. Philippe Harel, 1999) Feux rouges (dir. Cédric Kahn, 2004) La Fille de Keltoum (dir. Mehdi Charef, 2001) Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (dir. Agnès Varda, 2000) Le Grand voyage (dir. Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2004) L’Héritage (dir. Géla and Temur Babluani, 2006) Le Huitième jour (dir. Jaco van Dormael, 1996) L’Intrus (dir. Claire Denis, 2004) IP5 (dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1991) Jeunesse dorée (dir. Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, 2002) Le Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938) Lola (dir. Jacques Demy, 1961) Marche à l’ombre (dir. Michel Blanc, 1984) Merci la vie (dir. Bertrand Blier, 1991) Pierrot le fou (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Le Plein de super (dir. Alain Cavalier, 1975) 173

Archer_final.indd 173

26/09/2012 08:12

Filmography

Les Randonneurs (dir. Philippe Harel, 1997) Sac de noeuds (dir. Josiane Balasko, 1985) Sans toit ni loi (dir. Agnès Varda, 1985) Série noire (dir. Alain Corneau, 1979) Subway (dir. Luc Besson, 1985), Tango (dir. Patrice Leconte, 1995) Tirez sur la pianiste (dir. François Truffaut, 1960) Trafic (dir. Jacques Tati, 1971) 37° 2 le matin (dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986) Twentynine Palms (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2003) Les Valseuses (dir. Bertrand Blier, 1973) Vendredi soir (dir. Claire Denis, 2002) La Vie de Jésus (dir. Bruno Dumont, 1997) Week End (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Welcome (dir. Philippe Lioret, 2009) Western (dir. Manuel Poirier, 1997)

174

Archer_final.indd 174

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Agamben, G. 1988. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Andrew, D. (ed.), 1995. Breathless. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Andrew, G. 2005. 10. London: BFI. Archer, N. 2010. ‘The Rhetoric of the Transnational: Interpretation and Identity in Géla and Temur Babluani’s L’Héritage/Legacy (2006)’, New Cinemas 8(1): 3–14. ______. 2011. ‘Beyond Anti-Americanism, Beyond Euro-Centrism: Locating Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms in the Context of European Cinematic Extremism’, in T. Horeck and T. Kendall (eds), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 55–65. Ardagh, J. 1982. France in the 1980s. Harmondsworth: Penguin Atkinson, M. 2009. ‘Thunder Roads’, Sight and Sound 19(8): 32–34. Augé, M. 1992. Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil. Axelrod, J.B.C. 2009. Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Bainbridge, C. 2008. A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ballard, J.G. 1973. Crash. London: Jonathan Cape. Barber, B. 2003. Jihad vs. MacWorld, 2nd ed. London: Corgi. Barthes, R. 2001. Mythologies, Paris: Seuil. 175

Archer_final.indd 175

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Bassan, R. 2006. ‘Three French Neo-Baroque Directors: Beineix, Besson, Carax, from Diva to Le Grand Bleu’, in S. Hayward and P. Powrie (eds), The Films of Luc Besson: Master of Spectacle. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 11–22. Baudelaire, C. 1995. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne. London: Phaidon. Baudrillard, J. 1968. Le Système des objects. Paris: Gallimard. ______. 1986. Amérique. Paris: Grasset. Bauman, Z. 1990. ‘Modernity and Ambivalence’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalism and Modernity. London: Sage, pp. 143–70. Baxter, P. 2002. ‘Putting Characters in Place: From Le Bonheur to La Vie de Jésus and Western’, Studies in French Cinema 2(2): 65–73. Benjamin, W. 1970. Illusions, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape. Benoliel, B. 2000. ‘Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse’, Cahiers du cinéma 548: 62–63. Bergala, A. 1985. ‘La Repousse’, Cahiers du cinéma 378: 5–7. Best, V. and M. Crowley. 2007. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Beugnet, M. 2000. Marginalité, sexualité, contrôle dans le cinéma français contemporain. Paris: Harmattan. ______. 2004. Claire Denis. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ______. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ______. 2008. ‘The Practice of Strangeness: L’Intrus – Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)’, Film–Philosophy 12(1): 31–48. Biskind, P. 1988. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. London: Bloomsbury. Bordwell, D. 1986. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge. ______. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Bordwell, D., J. Staiger and K. Thompson, 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bordwell, D. and K. Thompson, 2007. Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bowles, B. 2004. ‘The Life of Jesus’, Film Quarterly 57(3): 47–55. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic. Branigan, E. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge. Brooks, P. 1984. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Clarendon. 176

Archer_final.indd 176

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Brown, W., D. Iordanova and L. Torchin, 2009. Moving People Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe. London: Wallflower. Bruno, G. 1993. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Buckland, W. 1998. Film Studies. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Burch, N. 1990. Life to Those Shadows, trans. B. Brewster. London: BFI. Buss, R. 1994. French Film Noir. London and New York: Marion Boyars. Cantet, L. 2001. ‘L’Emploi du temps’, Passant 37. Retrieved 12 December 2006 from http://www.passant-ordinaire.com/revue. Carrère, E. 2000. L’Adversaire. Paris: P.O.L. Carroll, N. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Carter, M. 2006. ‘Acknowledged Absences: Claire Denis’ Cinema of Longing’, Studies in European Cinema 3(1): 67–81. Chambers, R. 1999. Loiterature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Chanan, M. 2007. ‘Authentic Talking Cinema’, Sight and Sound 17(9): 27–29. Chauvin, J. 2002. ‘Panne des sens’, Cahiers du cinéma 571: 80–81. Chion, M. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. C. Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Clément, M.L. 2007. Michel Houellebecq revisité: L’écriture houellebecquienne. Paris: L’Harmattan. Clover, C.J. 1993. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohan, S. and I.R. Hark (eds), 1997. The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge. Colebrook, C. 2002. Gilles Deleuze. London and New York: Routledge. Comolli, J. 1978. ‘Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much’, Screen 19(2): 41–53. Cook, M. and G. Davie (eds), 1999. Modern France: Society in Transition. London and New York: Routledge. Cooper, S. 2006. Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary. London: MHRA/Maney. Corrigan, T. 1991. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Crnkovic, G.P. 2003. ‘“American” Utility vs. “Useless” Reflection: On Possible Futures on Both Sides of the Atlantic’, in S.P. Ramet and G.P. Crnkovic (eds), Kazaam! Splat! Ploof! The American Impact on European Popular Culture since 1945. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 9–12. Cruickshank, R. 2006. ‘Sex, Shopping and Psychoanalysis: Houellebecq and Therapy’, in G. Boyd (ed.), Le monde de Houellebecq. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, pp. 199–212. 177

Archer_final.indd 177

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Currie, G. 1988. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damon, J. 2002. La Question SDF: Critique d’une action publique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Danton, A. 1991. ‘L’Amour tout court’, Cahiers du cinéma 442: 67–68. Darke, C. 2001. ‘Refuseniks’, Sight and Sound 11(1): 30–33. ______. 2008. ‘Unbelievable but Real: the Legacy of ’68’, Sight and Sound 18(5): 28–32. De Baecque, A. 1997. ‘Western’, Cahiers du cinéma 514: 24. Deleuze, G. 1983. Cinéma 1: L’image-movement, Paris: Minuit. ______. 1985. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps, Paris: Minuit. Despentes, V. 1993. Baise-moi. Paris: Florent Massot. Downing, L. 2004. ‘French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre’, French Cultural Studies 15(3): 265–80. Dyer, R. 1981 ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in R. Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 175–89. ______. 1982. ‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up’, Screen 23(3–4): 61–73. ______. 2004. Heavenly Bodies, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer, R. and G. Vincendeau (eds), 1992. Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge. Ellis, J. 1982. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Radio. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ernaux, A. 1993. Journal du dehors. Paris: Gallimard. Eyerman, R. and O. Löfgren, 1995. ‘Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility’, Theory, Culture and Society 12(1): 53–79. Ezra, E. and T. Rowden (eds), 2006. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Falcon, R. 2005. ‘Twentynine Palms’, Sight and Sound 15(8): 75–76. Flitterman-Lewis, S. 1990. To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Forbes, J. 1992. The Cinema in France. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. ______. 2000. ‘Sex, Politics and Popular Culture: Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 213–26. ______. 2002. ‘Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7’, Studies in French Cinema 2(2): 83–89. Foucault, M. 1994. Dits et Écrits 1954–1988. IV. Paris: Gallimard. Fournier Lanzoni, R. 2004. French Cinema from its Beginnings to the Present. New York and London: Continuum. Friedberg, A. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press. 178

Archer_final.indd 178

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Frodon, J-M. 1995. L’Age moderne du cinéma français. Paris: Flammarion. Galt, R. 2006. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New York: Columbia University Press. Garson, C. 2007. ‘Le Plein de super’, Sight and Sound 17(8): 28. Giffard, C.A. 2003. ‘Culture versus Commerce: Europe Strives to Keep Hollywood at Bay’, in S.P. Ramet and G.P. Crnkovic (eds), Kazaam! Splat! Ploof! The American Impact on European Popular Culture since 1945. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 37–54. Gili, J.A. 1997. ‘Les Randonneurs’, Positif 435: 65–66. Girling, J. 2004. Social Movements and Symbolic Power: Radicalism, Reform and the Trial of Democracy in France. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Golsan, R.J. 2006. ‘From French Anti-Americanism and Americanization to the “American Enemy”’, in Alexander Stephan (ed.), The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism after 1945. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 44–68. Gorrara, C. 2003. The ‘Roman Noir’ in Post-War French Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Graf, A. 2002. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. London: Wallflower. Gratton, J. and M. Sheringham (eds), 2005. The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in French Culture. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Grimshaw, A. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hammond, M. 2006. ‘The Road Movie’, in L.R. Williams and M. Hammond (eds), Contemporary American Cinema. Open University Press: Maidenhead, pp. 14–18. Hark, I.R. 1997. ‘Fear of Flying: Yuppie Critique and the Buddy-Road Movie in the 1980s’, in S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 204–29. Harris, M. 2008. Revolution: The Birth of New Hollywood. Edinburgh: Canongate. Harris, S. 2001. Bertrand Blier. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Harvey, S. 1978. May ’68 and Film Culture. London: BFI. Haskell, M. 1987. From Reverence to Rape, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayward, S. 1993. French National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 1998. Luc Besson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 179

Archer_final.indd 179

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

______. 2000. ‘Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 285–96. ______. 2006. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Hayward, S. and G. Vincendeau (eds), 2000. French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Heath, S. 1981. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Higbee, W. 2004. ‘“Elle est où, ta place?” The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent Cantet: Ressources humaines (2000) and L’Emploi du temps (2001)’, French Cultural Studies 15(3): 235–50. Higson, A. 1995. Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holmes, D. ‘Sex, Gender and Auteurism: The French New Wave and Hollywood’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 154–71. Horeck, T. and T. Kendall (eds), 2011. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Houellebecq, M. 1994. Extension du domaine de la lutte. Paris: J’ai lu. Hurault-Paupe, A. 2005. ‘Une utopie américaine: Le road movie’, CinémAction 115: 49–57. Hutcheon, L. 1985. A Theory of Parody. New York and London: Methuen. ______. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Jäckel, A. 2007. ‘The Inter/Nationalism of French Film Policy’, Modern and Contemporary France 15(1): 21–36. Jameson, F. 1990. Signatures of the Visible. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: BFI. ______. 2007. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jeancolas, J. 1997. ‘Une bobine d’avance: du cinéma et de la politique en février 1997’, Positif 434: 56–58. Jordan, S. 2002. ‘“Dans le mauvais goût pour le mauvais goût”? Pornographie, violence et sexualité feminine dans la fiction de Virginie Despentes’, in N. Morello and C. Rodgers (eds), Nouvelles écrivaines, nouvelles voix? Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 121–39. Joyard, O. 2000. ‘X, le retour’, Cahiers du cinéma 548: 16–17. Kaganski, S. 2009. ‘Conversation avec Yvan Attal’, Les Inrockuptibles 18 November. Retrieved 26 May 2011 from http://www.lesinrocks. com/actualite/actu-article/t/41534/date/2009–11–18/article/conversat ion-avec-yvan-attal/ 180

Archer_final.indd 180

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Kermode, F. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction; With a New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, G. 2000. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. King, R. 1999. ‘Zapping Without Mercy: Merci la vie!’, in P. Powrie (ed.), French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 199–210. Klinger, B. 1997. ‘The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider’, in S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 179–203. Kramer, P. 1998. ‘Post-classical Hollywood’, in J. Hill and P. Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 289–309. Kristeva, J. 1988. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard. Kuhn, A. 1994. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso. Lacan, J. 1973. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil. Laderman, D. 2002. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lipovetsky, G. 1983. L’Ere du vide. Paris: Gallimard. ______. 2006. Le Bonheur paradoxal: Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation. Paris: Gallimard. Lloyd, C. 1999. ‘Race and Ethnicity’, in M. Cook and G. Davie (eds), Modern France: Society in Transition. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 34–52. Locke, J. 1993. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Everyman. Logan, G.M. and R.M. Adams, 2002. ‘Introduction’, in T. More, Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loshitsky, Y. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. McBride, J. 1997. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber. McGonagle, J. 2007. ‘Gently Does It: Ethnicity and Cultural Identity in Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Drôle de Félix’, Studies in European Cinema 4(1): 21–33. McGregor, A. 2008. ‘French Cinema in Exile: Trans-National Cultural Representation in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo Dilo’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6(2): 75–83. McQuire, S. 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Cinema. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. 181

Archer_final.indd 181

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Marcuse, H. 1991. One Dimensional Man, 2nd ed., trans. D. Kellner. London: Routledge. Marie, M. (ed.), 1998. Le Jeune cinéma français. Paris: Nathan. Marx, L. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Maspero, F. 1990. Les Passagers du Roissy-Express. Paris: Seuil. Matheou, D. 2005. ‘Vanishing Road’, Sight and Sound 15(8): 16–18. Mayne, J. 2005. Claire Denis. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mazierska, E. and L. Rascaroli, 2006. Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. London: Wallflower. Metz, C. 2004. ‘From The Imaginary Signifier’, in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 820–36. Morrissey, J. 2008. ‘Paris and Voyages of Self-Discovery in Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’, Studies in French Cinema 8(2): 99–110. Mulvey, L. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Naficy, H. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Nancy, J-L. 2000. L’Intrus. Paris: Galilée. Neupert, R. 2007. A History of the French New Wave, 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Newman, D. and R. Benton, 1972. ‘Lightning in a Bottle’, in S. Wake and N.  Hayden (eds), The Bonnie and Clyde Book. London: Lorrimer, pp. 13–31. Newman, K. 2009. ‘Horror Will Eat Itself’, Sight and Sound 19(5): 37–38. Nichols, B. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orgeron, D. 2008. Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Orr, J. 1993. Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. O’Shaughnessy, M. 2007. The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film since 1995. Oxford: Berghahn. Petit, C. 2008. ‘Germany and England/England and Germany’, Vertigo 4(1): 40–42. Pollock, G. 1988. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge. Powrie, P. 1997. French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity. Oxford: Clarendon. ______. (ed.), 1999. French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 2001. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 182

Archer_final.indd 182

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

______. 2007. ‘French Neo-Noir to Hyper-Noir’, in Andrew Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 55–83. Powrie, P. and K. Reader, 2002. French Film: A Student’s Guide. London: Arnold. Pratt, M. 2004. ‘Félix and the Light-Hearted Gay Road Movie: Genre, Families, Fathers and the Decolonization of the Homosexual Self’, Australian Journal of Film Studies 41(3): 80–100. Prédal, R. 1996. 50 Ans du cinéma français. Paris: Nathan. Provencher, D.M. 2007. Queer French: Globalisation, Language and Sexual Citizenship in France. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Quant, B. 1986–87. ‘Agnès Varda: A Conversation’, Film Quarterly 40(2): 3–11. Read, J. 2000. The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the RapeRevenge Cycle. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reader, K. 1993. The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. ______. 2000. ‘Jouissance at the Margins: Philippe Harel’s Extension du domaine de la lutte/Whatever’, Studies in French Cinema 1(2): 118–25. ______. 2004. ‘Representations 1930–1960: The Geography and Topography of French Cinema’, in M. Temple and M. Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book. London: BFI, pp. 153–61. ______. 2006. The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ricoeur, P. 1983. Temps et récit I: L’intrigue et le récit historique. Paris: Seuil. Rigby, B. 1991. Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse. London and New York: Routledge. Rodgers, C. 1999. ‘Gender’, in M. Cook and G. Davie (eds), Modern France: Society in Transition, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53–72. Rosello, M. 2001. ‘Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady’, Studies in French Cinema 1(1): 29–36. Ross, K. 1988. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ______. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Cambridge: MIT Press. ______. 2002. May ’68 and its Afterlives. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ruoff, J. (ed.), 2006. Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Russell, D. 1989–90. ‘Two or Three Things We Know About Beineix’, Sight and Sound 59(1): 42–47. Schor, N. 2001. ‘The Crisis of French Universalism’, Yale French Studies 100: 43–64. 183

Archer_final.indd 183

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Sellier, G. 2005. La Nouvelle vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier. Paris: CNRS. Sheringham, M. 2006. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiel, M. 2006. ‘American Cinema 1965–1970’, in L.R. Williams and M. Hammond (eds), Contemporary American Cinema. Open University Press: Maidenhead, pp. 12–40. Shohat, E. and R. Stam, 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge. Silverman, K. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London: Routledge. ______. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. London and New York: Routledge. Silverman, M. 1992. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 1999. Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Smith, A. 1998. Agnès Varda. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ______. 2004. ‘The Other Auteurs: Producers, Cinematographers and Scriptwriters’, in M. Temple and M. Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book. London: BFI, pp. 194–208. ______. 2005. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Smith, P.J. 1988. Writing in the Margins. Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, T.B. 2004. France in Crisis: Welfare, Irregularity and Globalisation since 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, S. 2001. Against Interpretation. London: Vintage. Starobinski, J. 1971. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle. Paris: Gallimard. Streiter, A. 2008. ‘The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis’, Film Philosophy 12(1): 49–62. Suleiman, S.R. 1990. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the AvantGarde. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Tarr, C. 2005. Reframing Difference: ‘Beur’ and ‘banlieue’ filmmaking in France. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ______. 2007. ‘French Cinema: ‘Transnational’ Cinema?’, Modern and Contemporary France 15(1): 3–7. Tarr, C. with B. Rollet, 2001. Cinema and the Second Sex. New York and London: Continuum. Temple, M. and M. Witt (eds), 2004. The French Cinema Book. London: BFI. Tesson, C. 2001. ‘Vrais semblants’, Cahiers du cinéma 562: 73–74. Trémois, C-M. 1997. Les Enfants de la liberté: Le jeune cinéma français des années 90. Paris: Seuil. 184

Archer_final.indd 184

26/09/2012 08:12

Bibliography

Vachard, L. 1991. ‘Aux yeux du monde’, Positif 363: 34–35. Varda, A. 1994. Varda par Agnès. Paris: Tamaris/Cahiers du cinéma. Vasse, D. 2008. Le Nouvel âge du cinéma d’auteur français. Paris: Klincksieck. Vattimo, G. 1992. The Transparent Society, trans. D. Webb. Cambridge: Polity. Vincendeau, G. 2000. ‘Designs on the Banlieue: Matthieu Kassowitz’s La Haine’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 310–27. ______. 2002. ‘White Collar Blues’, Sight and Sound 12(4): 30–32. ______. 2003. ‘Vendredi soir’, Sight and Sound 13(10): 68–70. Virolle, M. 1995. La Chanson raï: De l’Algérie profonde à la scène internationale. Paris: Karthala. Wadia, K. 1993. ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, in K. Reader, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, pp. 148–66. Wake, S. and N. Hayden (eds), 1972. The Bonnie and Clyde Book. London: Lorrimer. Williams, A. 1992. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Williams, L. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, L.R. 2001. ‘Sick Sisters’, Sight and Sound 11(7): 28–29. Williams, L.R. and M. Hammond (eds), 2006. Contemporary American Cinema. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Wilson, E. 1999. French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories. London: Duckworth. ______. 2005. ‘Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Salvage and the Art of Forgetting’, in J. Gratton and M. Sheringham (eds), The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in French Culture. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, pp. 96–110. Wimmer, L. 2011. ‘“Sex and Violence from a Pair of Furies”: The Scandal of Baise-moi’, in T. Horeck and T. Kendall (eds), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 130–41. Wollen, P. and J. Kerr (eds), 2002. Autopia: Cars and Culture. London: Reaktion. Wood, J. 2007. 100 Road Movies. London: BFI. Žižek, S. 1991. Looking Awry. Cambridge: MIT Press.

185

Archer_final.indd 185

26/09/2012 08:12

Archer_final.indd 186

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

10, 144–45n1 37° 2 le matin, 42, 54–56 A bout de souffle, 13, 19, 32 About Schmidt, 75 accented cinema, 7, 75, 103 L’Adversaire, 92 Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, 51 America, 5, 156–57 cultural imperialism and, 156 American cinema, 1, 3, 4–6, 8–9, 10–13, 14, 15, 21–22, 31, 34, 42, 58, 60, 65–66, 69, 72n9, 75, 96, 110, 125, 127, 155–56, 157 Americanization, 13–14, 15, 18 Anderson, Benedict, 20 Anderson, Rafaëla ,70–71, 73n13 Atkinson, Michael, 60 Attal, Yvan, 58, 59–60, 72n5 Augé, Marc, 112–14, 127 Aux yeux du monde, 1, 19, 42, 43, 52, 56–64, 71, 84, 169 Bach, Karen, 70–71, 73n13 Badlands, 9, 54 Baise-moi, 1, 14, 19, 27, 42, 43, 64–72, 94, 119, 122, 125, 169 Ballard, J.G., 24n6 Barthes, Roland, 36n1

Basic Instinct, 66 Baudelaire, Charles, 123, 131 Baudrillard, Jean, 156–57 Baxter, Peter, 108 Beau travail, 160 Before Sunrise, 145n7 Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 33, 52–53, 55–56 Benjamin, Walter, 131 Bergala, Alain, 51 Bernheim, Emmanuèle, 128 Berri, Claude, 51 Besson, Luc, 51–52 The Best Years of Our Lives, 110–11 Beugnet, Martine, 69, 128, 159–60, 166 Biskind, Peter, 8 Blanc, Michel, 17–18 Blier, Bertrand, 9, 17–18, 25, 29, 32 Bonnie and Clyde, 9, 11–13, 58–59 Bordwell, David, 110, 127, 128, 141 Brêve Traversée, 145n7 Brief Encounter, 145n7 Broken Flowers, 75 Brooks, Peter, 143 Bruno, Giuliana, 133 187

Archer_final.indd 187

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

Burch, Noël, 20 Buss, Robin, 30 camp, 79–81 Cantet, Laurent, 111, 112–13 Carax, Léos, 51–52 Carrère, Emmanuel, 92 Carroll, Noël, 41–42, 59 cars cinematography and, 32, 33, 36n2 as feminine space, 130, 132, 144–45n1 French consumer culture and, 15–16, 19, 24n5, 27, 28 as masculine space, 96, 108, 115, 116 point-of-view shots and, 86–87, 128, 129–30 semiotics of, 16, 19, 24n6, 28, 29, 34, 106, 108, 115, 127, 128, 130, 144–45n1, 157, 168n2 as urban transport, 130 Chambers, Ross, 45 Chion, Michel, 20–21 cinéma du look, 51–52 Citizen Kane, 45 Cléo de 5 à 7, 130, 134–35, 143 A Clockwork Orange, 29 Clover, Carol, 67 Cohan, Steven, 10–11 Colebrook, Claire, 164 Content, 155 Cooper, Sarah, 136–37 Coutard, Raoul, 32 Crnkovic, Gordana ,14 Darke, Chris, 9 Davos, Porto Alegre et autres batailles, 145n8 de Baecque, Antoine, 105–6 Deleuze, Gilles, 16–17, 141, 164, 166 Deliverance, 156 Delon, Alain, 27

Denis, Claire, 17, 122 Despentes, Virginie, 64, 66, 72n8 Dewaere, Patrick, 25–26 digital video, 23, 69–70, 138, 140 Djian, Philippe, 54–55, 69 Dog Day Afternoon, 58, 59 Downing, Lisa, 65 Drôle de Félix, 17, 21, 75–88, 92 Dumont, Bruno, 65, 154–58 Dyer, Richard, 31, 36n4, 68, 97, 98 Easy Rider, 2, 5, 8, 12, 29, 35, 39, 58, 60 Emmanuelle, 9 L’Emploi du temps, 1, 14, 17, 18, 22, 92–93, 94, 110–18 Ernaux, Annie, 126, 139 Everett, Wendy, 4, 6 Exils, 3, 75, 83–84, 86, 152 Extension du domaine de la lutte, 22, 93, 95–102, 129 Eyerman, Ron, 4, 6, 11, 24n3 Ezra, Elizabeth, 4, 103, 107–8, 148 femininity, 57, 67, 92, 98, 119–25, 133 La Femme Nikita, 67 Feux rouges, 1, 22, 93, 116, 117, 135–36 La Fille de Keltoum, 3, 75, 83–84 flâneuse/flâneurie, 130–34, 138 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 44–45 Fonda, Peter, 60 Forbes, Jill, 28, 29, 47–48, 124, 134–35 Fournier Lanzoni, Rémi, 28–29 Friedberg, Anne, 133 Gabin, Jean ,134 Gadjo Dilo, 152–53 Garcia, José, 118n3 Garland, Judy, 88n1 Gatlif, Tony, 152–53

188

Archer_final.indd 188

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, 18, 22, 42, 48, 123, 126, 136–44 glaneuse/glânerie, 138, 140 Godard, Agnès, 132, 145n6, 161–63 Godard, Jean-Luc, 8, 12, 25–26, 32, 33 Golubeva, Katia, 158–59 Gorrara, Claire, 26–27 Le Goût des autres, 91–92 Graf, Alexander, 129 Le Grand voyage, 3 Grimshaw, Anna, 148 Groundhog Day, 114 Guédiguian, Robert, 153 Gun Crazy, 12 Hammond, Michael, 12 The Hangover, 22 Harel, Philippe, 17, 95, 97–98, 99, 107, 118n3 Hark, Ina Rae, 10–11, 96 Harris, Sue, 30–31 Haskell, Molly, 96–97 Hayward, Susan, 5, 19, 24n1, 35, 44, 61 Heath, Stephen, 49–50 L’Héritage, 23, 149, 150–54, 155, 158, 167, 170 heritage film, 53, 85–86, 88 Higbee, Will, 93, 112 Higson, Andrew, 85 Himmel über Berlin, 132 Homer, 105 Hopper, Dennis, 2 Hostel, 149 Houellebecq, Michel, 95, 97, 100–1 Le Huitième jour, 93, 114 identification, 39–42, 45, 59, 71, 79, 85 identity, 3–4, 6–7, 11, 13, 14, 19, 21, 42, 75, 76–79, 82–85, 86, 87, 90, 92, 103, 125, 164, 167–68

Import/Export, 3 Inch’Allah dimanche, 3 In This World, 3 L’Intrus, 23, 150, 155, 158–68, 170 IP5, 52–53, 56 Irréversible, 65 It Happened One Night, 34, 58, 106 Jäckel, Anne, 102 Jameson, Fredric, 59–60, 162–63, 165 Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre, 23, 70 Jean de Florette, 51 jeune cinéma français, 51–52 Jeunesse dorée, 145–46n9 Jordan, Shirley, 67 Le Jour se lève, 61–62 King, Geoff, 36–37n4 King, Russel, 124 Klinger, Barbara, 5 Kuhn, Annette, 120, 122 Lacan, Jacques, 162 Laderman, David, 5, 11–12 The Last Seduction, 66 Laurel and Hardy, 97, 118n4 Leconte, Patrice, 17–18 Lemercier, Valérie, 134 Lilja 4–ever, 3 Lindon, Vincent, 134 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 9, 95 Locke, John, 90–91 Löfgren, Orvar, 4, 6, 11, 24n3 Lopez, Sergi, 107 Loshitsky, Yosefa, 7, 109–10, 148, 153 La Lune dans le caniveau, 52 Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 26–27, 55, 69 Manon des sources, 51 Marche à l’ombre, 104–5 Marcuse, Herbert, 118n5 189

Archer_final.indd 189

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

masculinity, 57, 90–95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 109–18, 125, 128–29, 135, 138, 140, 144, 159, 160, 162, 166 Maspero, François, 126, 127–28, 139 Mauvais sang, 51 May 1968, 7–10, 43, 100, 124, 126, 145n3, 169 Mayne, Judith, 132–33 Mazierska, Ewa, 4, 6, 11, 94, 122, 139 McGonagle, Joseph, 88n2 Merci, la vie!, 1, 32, 124 Metz, Christian, 46 Miou-Miou, 96–97 Moana, 148 mobility, 13, 23, 28–29, 33, 35, 36, 56–57, 60, 89–90, 102–3, 104, 106–7, 107–10, 113–14, 121, 123, 139–41, 147–48, 154–55, 159, 163 Un monde sans pitié, 52, 53 Mondovino, 145n8 More, Thomas, 31 Morrisey, Jim, 130, 135 music, 20–21, 54, 66, 78, 86–87, 91–92, 109, 142, 153 Naficy, Hamid, 7, 75, 103, 147–48 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 166–67 Nanook of the North, 148 narrative, 3, 5, 6, 16, 20, 23, 26–27, 41, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 63, 67–70, 76, 82, 87, 89, 98, 101, 104–5, 110, 111, 118, 122–23, 124, 126–27, 129, 131, 135–36, 137–40, 141, 143–44, 154–55, 159, 166 nation, 5, 7, 20, 53, 60, 79, 85–86, 140, 161, 164, 167–68, 172 national cinema, 102, 154, 167–68, 169–70, 172 Neupert, Richard, 125 Newman, Kim, 149 Nichols, Bill, 152 Noé, Gaspar, 65

Orgeron, Dervin, 12, 13, 35, 156 Orr, John, 128, 129 O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 18, 72n6, 93, 94–95, 113–14, 140, 141, 145n8, 148 Ouvrières du monde, 145n8 Pacino, Al, 59 Paupe, Anne-Hurault, 2 Petit, Chris, 155 Le Petit Soldat, 160 Pierrot le fou, 19, 54, 55 Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 22, 127 Le Plein de super, 16, 32–34, 96 Poe, Edgar Allen, 130–31 Pollock, Griselda, 123, 130–31, 133 Powrie, Phil, 19–20, 54, 68, 104 Prédal, René, 46 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 80–81 Professione: Reporter, 90, 92 Radio On, 3, 155 raï, 86–88 Les Randonneurs, 97–98, 107 Rascaroli, Laura, 4, 6, 11, 94, 122, 139 Read, Jacinda, 66, 68, 69 Reader, Keith, 7, 102, 107 road movie Americanization and, 14 as autopia, 34–36 the buddy movie and, 96–101 as documentary, 45, 68, 71, 87, 136–38, 140, 145n9, 152 as ethical, 28, 42, 43, 49, 129–30, 152, 154, 164 as European genre, 4, 6, 11 as feminine genre, 22, 121, 144 film noir and, 28, 68 freedom and, 5, 6, 11, 28, 40, 47–48, 50–51, 62–63, 66, 70, 71–72, 113, 121, 161–62, 164

190

Archer_final.indd 190

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

in French film histories, 2, 10 French ‘origins’ of, 12–13 historical chronology of, 10–13 libertarianism and, 9–10 as masculine genre, 2, 5, 43, 89–90, 94, 102, 104, 110, 115, 119, 144 the musical and, 31, 34–35, 53, 81, 111 as parody, 14, 25 as picaresque, 46 point of view in, 41, 86–87, 109, 128–29, 130, 133, 151, 164 as process, 63, 84–85, 88, 127, 154 as projet , 126, 142–43, 145–46n9 the polar and, 25–28 rebellion and, 2, 5, 39 as transgression, 6, 27–28, 33, 120–21, 125, 127, 136, 144–45n1 as transnational, 7, 13, 23, 86, 103, 104, 107, 147–48, 154, 155, 159–60, 167, 170 as travel, 23, 39, 137, 148, 150, 152, 158, 162, 166–67 the western and, 5, 105, 157 Rollet, Brigitte, 10, 120–22, 123–24 Rosello, Mireille, 138, 140 Ross, Kristin, 7, 15, 99 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 168n4 Rowden, Terry, 4, 103, 107–8, 148 Russell, David, 56 Sac de nœuds, 124 Sandoval, Bernard, 109 Sans toit ni loi, 1, 19, 39, 41, 42–43, 44–51, 53, 62, 63, 64, 67, 119, 124, 139, 143, 144, 161, 169 Sellier, Geneviève, 125 Série noire, 25–26, 55 Severance, 149 Sheringham, Michael, 126, 141

Sideways, 21 Silverman, Kaja, 110–11, 162 Silverman, Max, 94, 127–28 Smith, Alison, 30, 33, 47, 48 Smith, Paul Julian, 46 Smith, Timothy, 43 Smultronstället, 3 Sons of the Desert, 118n4 Sontag, Susan, 79–81 space, 6–7, 20, 23, 33–34, 56, 70–72, 79, 90–91, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104–6, 109, 111, 114, 115, 120–21, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 133–34, 135, 139–42, 144–45n1, 155, 157–58, 159, 162–63, 171 spectatrix, 133–34, 136 Spielberg, Steven, 32 Stagecoach, 5 Starobinski, Jean, 168n4 Straw, Will, 118n1 Streiter, Anja, 166 Subor, Michel, 160 Subway, 51 The Sugarland Express, 32, 33, 36n2, 58 Suleiman, Susan, 122–23 Taken, 149 Tango, 96–97 Tarr, Carrie, 10, 82–83, 85, 120–22, 123–24, 167 Tati, Jacques, 16 Tesson, Charles, 115 Thelma and Louise, 22, 65, 66, 68, 72n10 Thompson, Kristin, 127, 141 Tirez sur la pianiste, 13 Toubiana, Serge, 56 Trafic, 16 Transamerica, 75 Transylvania, 152 travel, 3–4, 6, 34, 57–58, 97–98, 104, 114, 147–51, 162 Trémois, Claude-Marie, 53 191

Archer_final.indd 191

26/09/2012 08:12

Index

Trois hommes à abattre, 27 Twentynine Palms, 23, 65, 149, 154–58, 159, 161, 168n2 Two-Lane Blacktop, 8, 39

Vilmos, Zsigmond, 36n2 Vincendeau, Ginette, 18, 72n9, 112, 115, 134 Voyage en Arménie, 75, 152

Les Valseuses, 1, 9, 15, 17, 25–26, 28–33, 34–35, 96, 124, 169 Vanishing Point, 9 Varda, Agnès, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 51, 122, 123, 125–26, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 146n10 Vasse, David, 23, 138 Vendredi soir, 22, 115, 125, 126–36, 140, 163 La Vie rêvée des anges, 42–43

Week End, 8, 12, 19, 24n6 Welcome, 170–72 Western, 22, 93, 102–10, 118 Wilson, Emma, 55, 136–37, 143 Wimmer, Leila, 68 The Wizard of Oz, 34, 81–82, 88 Wood, Jason, 11 Zabriskie Point, 3 Žižek, Slavoj, 70

192

Archer_final.indd 192

26/09/2012 08:12