Studies in French Cinema

STUDIES IN

FRENCH CINEMA

intellect

4.3

ISSN 1471-5880

STUDIES IN

FRENCH CINEMA Volume 4 Number 3 – 2004 163–164 Editorial Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie

Articles 165–174 French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

175–185 Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite Florence Martin

187–196 ‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place Matthew Lazen

197–207 Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain Michelle Scatton-Tessier

209–218 Surviving the reign of the father: the family and the law in Georges Franju’s feature films Kate Ince

219–228 The book as motif in One Plus One Kevin J. Hayes

229–238 Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction Maria Tortajada

ISSN 1471-5880 42

9 771471 588007

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 2004 Studies in French Cinema (SFC) is an academic, refereed publication for scholars, teachers and students from around the world whose focus is on French-speaking Cinema. SFC is published to provide academics and students with a consistent quality of scholarly investigation across the full breadth of the subject, including a focus on largely underdeveloped areas of study and research. To address this, the Editors especially welcome articles in Film History, Film Genre/Film Trends, and Film Technique/Film Theory. Submissions in French are welcome and will be translated for publication. For submission details and further information, please consult the Intellect website <www.intellectbooks.com>.

Editorial Board

General Editors

Julia Dobson – University of Sheffield Elizabeth Ezra – Stirling Sue Harris – Queen Mary College Kate Ince – Birmingham, UK Jeff Kline – Boston Michèle Lagny – Paris III Geneviève Sellier – Caen Michael Witt – Roehampton Carrie Tarr – Kingston

Susan Hayward

Advisory Board

School of Modern Languages Centre for Research into Film University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

Richard Abel – USA Dudley Andrew – USA Guy Austin – UK Laurent Creton – France Colin Crisp – Australia Anne Jackel – UK Jean-Pierre Jeancolas – Paris Florence Martin – USA Charles O’Brien – Canada Keith Reader – UK Lieve Spaas – UK Michael Temple – UK Alison Smith – UK Ginette Vincendeau – UK James Williams – UK Emma Wilson – UK Studies in French Cinema is published three times per year by Intellect, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK. The current institutional subscription rate is £130. The personal subscription can be gained from Intellect at a rate of £30, or through joining the Studies in French Cinema association (see advertisement at the back of the journal). A postage charge of £8 is made for subscriptions outside of Europe. Enquiries and bookings for advertising should be addressed to: Journals Manager, Intellect, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK. © 2004 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organisation.

Film Studies Department Queens Drive University of Exeter Exeter EX4 4QH, UK Tel: (44) (0)1392 264342 Fax: (44) (0)1392 264222 E-mail: [email protected]

Phil Powrie

Tel: 44 (0)191 222 7492 Fax: 44 (0)191 222 5442 E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1471-5880

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd

Contributor Notes Please read the Notes for Authors on the Intellect website: the following notes are intended to complement these. Where detailed presentation issues are concerned, it is the 'Notes for Contributors' below which take precedence, especially in the case of bibliographical references. It takes a very long time to standardise non-standard texts. Regrettably, then, if contributors do not present their text according to the following guidelines, the Editors may send it back.

General • Submit the article as an email attachment in Word 6 or in Rich Text Format. Do not send files in WordPerfect or Text files (i.e. with the suffixes '.wpf' or '.txt'). Do not send your article pasted into an email message. • Please avoid using Word’s ‘Style Gallery’. This is the facility accessed through the menus Format-Theme-Style GalleryTemplate, which allows you to use templates to format your text. You will know if you already use this; if you don’t use it, please do not try to do so for submission, since it complicates the work immensely. • Send the article in a finished written-up state. We cannot advise you on unworked-up conference papers. • Each journal issue has a maximum number of words. Your article must not therefore, under any circumstance, exceed 5000 words, (excluding ‘Notes’. See also the comment below on Notes). If it exceeds 5000 words, it will be returned to you unread with a request that you resubmit with the right word length. • Include an article abstract of 150–200 words, and a short biography. The abstract will go onto the Intellect website; the biography will be included in the journal issue. Place these items at the beginning of your file, with the titles 'abstract' and 'biography'. • Make sure we have both an email address and a telephone number so that we can contact you at the editing stage. We expect to do most of our business with you by email, but it may be necessary to phone you at the last minute because of urgent editing issues.

Presentation • Your title should be in bold at the beginning of the file, without inverted commas. • The text, including the notes, should be in Times New Roman 12 point. • The text, including the notes, must be double-spaced. • The text should have ample margins for annotation by the editorial team. • You may send the text justified or unjustified. • You may if you wish break up your text with sub-titles (no more than three). In this case, the sub-titles must be in ordinary text, not 'all caps'.

Quotations • Quotations must be in English. For reasons of space we do not publish the original French text. • Quotations must be within single inverted commas. Material quoted within cited text should be in double inverted commas. • Quotations must be within the body of the text unless they exceed approximately four lines of your text. In this case, they should be separated from the body of the text and indented. • Omitted material should be signalled thus: (...). Note that there are no spaces between the suspension points. • Avoid breaking up quotations with an insertion, for example: 'This approach to mise-en-scène', says MacPherson, 'is not sufficiently elaborated' (MacPherson 1998: 33).

References • Please check that ALL of your films and quotations are fully referenced before sending your article to us – this is particularly crucial for the website references (see below). • Only include bibliographical references if there is a direct quotation from the text, or a direct allusion to the text concerned. In other words, references should not include 'interesting material which readers might like to know about'. • Films must be given their full originallanguage title. • The first mention of a film in the article (except if it is in the title) must have the English translation if it is available, the director's surname (not Christian name), and the year of release, thus: Romance (Breillat, 1999); La vie rêvée des anges/The Dreamlife of Angels (Zonca, 1998). • We use the Harvard system for bibliographical references. This means that all quotations must be followed by the name of the author, the date of the publication, and the pagination, thus: (Lalanne 1995: 6). PLEASE DO NOT use '(ibid.)'. Note that the punctuation should always FOLLOW the reference within brackets, whether a quotation is within the text or an indented quotation. • Your references refer the reader to a bibliography at the end of the article, before the endnotes. The heading should be 'References'. List the items alphabetically. Here are examples of the most likely cases: Anon. (1931), ‘Les films de la semaine,’ Tribune de Genève, 28 January 1931. Cabrera, D. (1998a), 'Table Ronde de l’APA (Association pour l’Autobiographie et le Patrimoine Autobiographique)', La Faute à Rousseau: ‘Le secret’ 18, pp. 28–29. – – – (1998b), ‘Une chambre à soi’, Trafic 26, pp. 28–35. Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Urbana and Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Grande, M. (1998), ‘Les Images nondérivées', Le Cinéma selon Gilles Deleuze (ed. O. Fahle), Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284–302. Hayward, S. (1993), French National Cinema. New York and Paris, Routledge. Hottel, R. (1999), 'Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda's ‘Le bonheur and L'une chante, l'autre pas', Cinema Journal, 38: 2, pp. 52–72. Roussel, R. (1996), Locus Solus, Paris, Gallimard. First published 1914 Ströter-Bender, J. (1995), L’Art contemporain dans les pays du 'Tiers Monde' (trans. O. Barlet), Paris, L’Harmattan. Note in particular – • no author Christian name • 'Anon' for items for which you do not have an author (because all items must be referenced with an author within the text) • year date of item in brackets • commas, not full stops, between parts of item • absence of 'in' for a chapter within a book • name of editor of edited book within brackets after book title and preceded by 'ed.' or 'eds' (latter without full stop) • name of translator of a book within brackets after title and preceded by 'trans.', not 'transl.', or 'translated by' • absence of 'no.' for the journal number • colon between journal volume and number • 'p.' or 'pp.' before page extents

Web references These are no different from other references; they must have an author, and that author must be referenced Harvardstyle within the text. Unlike paper references, however, web-pages can change, so we need a date of access as well as the full web reference. In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this: Cabrera, D. (2000), ‘Les idées sont vivantes et la vie est politique’, http://www.peripheries.net/g-cabr.html. Accessed 14 December 2000. If in doubt as to how to reference material on a web-page, please contact Phil Powrie.

Notes • Use as few notes as possible. In general, if something is worth saying, it is worth saying in the text itself. A note will divert the reader's attention away from your argument. If you do think a note is necessary, make it as brief and to the point as possible. • Use Word's note-making facility, and ensure that your notes are endnotes, not footnotes. • Place note calls outside the punctuation, so AFTER the comma or the full-stop. • The note call must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3), NOT Roman (i, ii, iii). Susan Hayward Phil Powrie

Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors. These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not sufficient; contributors will also need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specific journal. Intellect Notes for Contributors is obtainable from www.intellectbooks.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal.

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.163/0

Editorial Studies in French Cinema is now in its fourth year of publication. Already we believe we have made a helpful contribution, in terms of research, to the field of French and francophone film studies. Contributions have come from nearly all four points of the globe: Europe, America, Australia, Canada, and Singapore - pointing of course to the marvellous impact of electronic mail, to say nothing of the widespread nature of research into French film studies. The range of cinemas covered by the first three volumes of this journal has also been broad and we have received very positive reviews in L’Esprit Créateur and French Cultural Studies, amongst other journals. The Association of Studies in French Cinema has held four annual conferences to date. These have been well attended and, in this context, we are grateful to the French Institute and the French Cultural Attaché for their support in our endeavours to create a strong platform within the United Kingdom for the exchange of ideas in this vital research domain. Membership of the Association is healthy, allowing us to fund the publication of the journal. Following on from our announcement last year of two new annual essay prizes we made the first of these awards for the postgraduate essay prize at this year’s SFC conference (April 2004). The winner, adjudicated by Colin Crisp, was Georgina Evans from Cambridge University for her essay: ‘Synaesthesia in Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Bleu’. The undergraduate prize will be announced in September 2004 on the website (www.ncl.ac.uk/crif/sfc/home.htm) and the winner will be invited to attend the 2005 conference along with the postgraduate prizewinner to receive the award. BUT we are making further strides still (albeit modest) to assist new scholars in the field and Studies in French Cinema is pleased to make a further new announcement of FIVE Ph.D. Conference Travel Awards (see further in journal for details). This issue is quite wide in its approach. We begin with an illuminating essay from a group of researchers: Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant, Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez, who attempt to set the record straight for an international public, on what was in fact one of the richest periods of experimental cinema in France - the 1970s. This is followed by three articles which have as a common theme the representation of a nation’s psyche. First, Flo Martin demonstrates how sound and silence in Moufida Tatli’s films can be seen as echoes of the cultural history of Tunisia. Matthew Lazen shows how Jacques Demy’s first feature film Lola revises the representation of regionalism by rejecting the concept of fixed origins and identities. And Michelle Scatton-Tessier’s analysis of J.-P. Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain provides a convincing argument that this is less a film about nostalgia and more a reaction to globalization and the loss of individual identity. In a further three essays, new

SFC 4 (3) Editorial © Intellect Ltd 2004

163

approaches to Franju, Godard and Rohmer are proposed. Kate Ince investigates the patriarchal family in Franju’s work; Kevin Hayes tackles Godard’s assault on the corrupting forces of capitalism in his sequence analysis of One Plus One; and Maria Tortajada argues for seduction as an anthropological concept in Rohmer’s Conte d’automne. Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie

MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES: A journal subscripton, reduction on conference fees and special offers on Intellect books
I wish to become a member of Studies in French Cinema
I wish to renew my subscription
Subscription – £32 per annum (£40 outside Europe)
Concessionary Rate for Students and unwaged – £20 per annum (£30 outside Europe) FOR UK MEMBERSHIP
I enclose a cheque made out to Studies in French Cinema for £........ FOR OVERSEAS MEMBERSHIP
Charge my Visa/Access/Mastercard (please delete appropriately) Name: .................................................................................... Address: .................................................................................... .................................................................................... Country: .................................................................................... E-mail: .................................................................................... Card Number: .................................................................................... Expiry Date: .................................................................................... Signature: .................................................................................... Send to: Prof. Susan Hayward, Film Studies, Queen’s Building, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QH Enquiries: [email protected] Tel: (44) 01392 264 342 Fax: (44) 01392 264 222 Institutional and library subscription (including FREE electronic access): £130 (£138 outside Europe). For details on payments, contact the Journals Director at Intellect: Or write to: Intellect, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE; or fax: 44 (0) 117 958 9911.

164

Editorial

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.165/0

French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s Raphaël Bassan Gérard Courant Christian Lebrat Dominique Noguez Abstract

Keywords

This article is written as a response to a misleading study published by the filmmaker Rose Lowder in the French periodical 1895. The article is an attempt to set the record straight, for an international public, on what was in fact, contrary to the impression given by Rose Lowder, one of the richest periods of experimental cinema in a country where experimental cinema has always been a strong feature. In this article we cover experimental cinema in the 1970s in all its aspects: films, people, associations, festivals, critical reception, teaching and research.

experimental cinema avant-garde cinema festivals cooperatives history transmission of knowledge

For the past twenty years we, who were active in experimental cinema during the 1970s and beyond, have regularly seen texts published in books and journals which tend to support the idea that the 1970s were a fallow period in experimental cinema in France. Up until now, we have not reacted, but a recent text by Rose Lowder in the journal 1895 which focuses specifically on this period, requires a response. She contrasts the dynamism of experimental cinema in other countries with what she considers to be the ‘distressing’ situation in France: There was no solidly established mode of distribution, practically no venues devoted to screening these films. Cinephiles, just like the trade journals, swore only by auteur films. No one, or nearly no one, knew about or appreciated this non-conventional film practice, with the result that one had to work very hard to organize screenings of any kind. (Lowder 2003: 125)

If such extravagant statements had been made in an uninformed popular magazine, we would just have shrugged it off. But they were made in an academic journal by someone who claims to be both a historian and a teacher, a doubly aggravating circumstance. This is all the more aggravating when these statements appear to give credence to gross misrepresentations of the facts already circulating in Anglo-American experimental cinema circles. What follows is a brief and non-exhaustive survey of what really happened in France in the 1970s. It is worth recalling that France, along with Germany, is one of the

SFC 4 (3) 165–174 © Intellect Ltd 2004

165

cradles of the cinematographic avant-garde in the 1920s, and that after the Second World War, from 1950 onwards, the Lettrists made and showed many films, either in the Cinémathèque française (which welcomed diverse film-making practices), or in a few ciné-clubs open to the public. It is also worth recalling that the Paris Biennale, founded in 1959, with the mission to promote the work of young artists, more or less regularly showed experimental films. And that the research arm of the then ORTF (the French Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation) was a firm supporter of avant-garde audio-visual work. When we come to the 1960s, the Short Film Festival of Tours, more open in this respect than current short film festivals, had experimental

166

Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

films on its programmes. The Evian Festival of Free Film, dedicated to nonstandard, poetic and subversive films, took place in 1965-66. Not long afterwards the Bordeaux Sigma Festival was established, dedicated to experimentation of any kind. In 1965, more particularly, the International Young Cinema Festival of Hyères was established, a festival which was to play a key role in the 1970s. Then later, there was the FUFU of Nancy, or Cinémarge in La Rochelle, and so it goes on. In Paris, there were many specialized screenings at the Cinémathèque. Tributes to the British avant-garde took place from the early 1960s, with, amongst others, films by Don Levy and Jeff Keen. The Lettrists had regular screenings. In 1967, P. Adams Sitney proposed a huge retrospective of recent American avant-garde films to the Cinémathèque, renamed by Henri Langlois ( a sign of the times ( ‘The Pop and Beatnik Avant-Garde’. It was at this time that Dominique Noguez, Raphaël Bassan and Marcel Mazé discovered these films. Maurice Lemaître established the café-cinéma Le Colbert in 1967, where he screened experimental films. Andy Warhol’s actor Piero Heliczer and the Yugoslavian Antoine Perich organized regular screenings of underground films in the American Centre on the Boulevard Raspail. Christine Aubry, in charge of the audio-visual department of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, also screened experimental cinema. In her gallery on the Rue de Seine, she presented films as works of art, in the same way as paintings. The Givaudan Gallery adopted a similar procedure when showing the films of Pierre Clémenti, Martial Raysse, and Étienne O’Leary. There were other screenings in the École Normale Supérieure, the École d’Architecture, and the École de Chimie on the Rue du Banquier, organized by ad hoc groups. In 1969 there was a large event at the Vieux Colombier as a tribute to Antonin Artaud. It was organized by the publisher ‘Soleil noir’, François Di Dio, and called ‘36 hours of free speech’, and there were many independent films. At this time, Noël Burch cofounded the IFC (Institut de Formation Cinématographique), a private school where there were lectures on Kenneth Anger, amongst others. All was not rosy, however. At the end of the 1960s, France, which had seen the birth of the first international cooperative of this kind in 1929, did not have a cooperative for the distribution of experimental film. As a result, when the meeting of European cooperatives took place in Munich in 1968, organized by Hans Helmut Klaus Schoenherr from Zurich, France was represented by a few isolated individuals, for the most part visual artists. But this absence was amply compensated for by what happened in the 1970s. On 23 June 1970, Marcel Mazé, enthused by the films he had seen at the Cinémathèque française and the International Young Cinema Festival of Hyères, organized a screening at the Studio du Val-de-Grâce. He carried on in the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, and in the law faculty. These screenings took place under the aegis of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Young Cinema Collective). Some of the spectators became his friends and fellowtravellers: Raphaël Bassan, Jean-Paul Cassagnac, Noël Burch, Luc Moullet, and Marcel Hanoun. After a preparatory meeting at the Hyères Festival in 1971, and another one in Paris, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (CJC) became a cooperative on the model of the Film-makers’ Cooperative of New York,

French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s

167

co-founded by Jonas Mekas. It was legally constituted on 5 June 1971 during a general assembly comprising ‘approximately 150 people, including sixty or so young film-makers’ (report AFP of 6 June 1971 by the journalist Gylaine Guidez). The CJC immediately began showing films daily in the Olympic Cinema of Frédéric Mitterrand (at 6 p.m.), with four all-night shows. These attracted such large crowds that some had to be run again. In the mid-1970s, the CJC brought together about 150 French and foreign film-makers. At the Hyères Festival, established by Maurice Périsset, Marcel Mazé, in collaboration with several film-makers and critics, was active from 1972 to 1983 in the development of a cinema différent strand. This festival was international, and attracted a large public. Several generations of experimental film-makers, both French and foreign, went through Hyères (they are listed on the Cineastes website (http://www.cineastes.net)). Every year there were numerous critical reviews of the films, by Dominique Noguez, Gérard Courant, Raphaël Bassan, Elisabeth Ayala, and Alain Sudre, as well of course as by a wide range of journalists from the local and national press. In 1974, Claudine Eizykman, Guy Fihman, Giovanni Martedi, Pierre Rovere, Alain Bonnamy, Djouhra Abouda, and Ahmet Kut established the Paris Films Cooperative; they were soon joined by Christian Lebrat, JeanMichel Bouhours, and Dominique Willoughby, amongst others. From the outset, this organization was extremely coherent. Films made by its members were mostly in the tradition of American post-structuralism, bringing a new radicalism to French experimental cinema. Members of the Paris Films Cooperative and critics such as Prosper Hillairet wrote important texts from 1976 to 1979 in the review Melba. The Paris Films Cooperative organized many screenings, notably at the MBXA in Paris, at the La Rochelle Film Festival in 1976, in Rennes, and so on. In 1976, Patrice Kirchhofer established, along with Gérard Courant and Martine Rousset, the Coopérative des Cinéastes (the Film-makers Cooperative), a breakaway group of the CJC. The Coopérative des Cinéastes had 40 film-makers and regularly showed films in Paris, first in the Palais des Arts from 1977 to 1978, and then in the Galerie de l’Ouverture from 1978 to 1980. In Avignon, from 1977 to 1978, the Coopérative des Cinéastes screened its complete catalogue of films, including a week-long programme in 1977. When they organized their own fringe festival in Avignon, Rose Lowder and Alain Sudre could count on well-established structures like the CJC and the Coopérative des Cinéastes (see Sudre and Lowder 2002). And there were other active groups: KMP, Les Morlocks, l’Omnium des Cinéastes, MétroBarbèsRochechou Art, Ciné Suite Action Super 8, and KOCK Diffusion. The CJC continued with its programmes in the Ciné-théatre Gallery. From November 1974 to December 1975, every Wednesday at 8.30 p.m. there was a selection of Super 8 films; every Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8.30 p.m. there were 16mm films and special events. Amongst the latter there was, notably, the first retrospective of films by Gregory Markopoulos, presented by the film-maker himself with his close collaborator Robert Beavers, every night for a week; there was also a Jonas

168

Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

Mekas special event. The programmes continued once a week in the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture in the sixth arrondissement, Place St Michel, from January 1976 to May 1977; at the Palais des Arts, Boulevard de Sébastopol, from October 1977 to June 1978; and at Confluences, near the Place Clichy, from October 1978 to October 1980. The cinéma différent strand of the Hyères Festival, the CJC and its review Cinéma Différent established strong links with other festivals or events dedicated to experimental cinema, such as the Festival Universitaire de Nancy, Cinémarge in La Rochelle, the Festival du Film Abstrait in Montpellier, Knokke-le-Zoute, Osnabrück, and Hamburg, the Festivals Forum in Berlin, and Rotterdam ...

French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s

169

In 1974, the films of Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman were presented at the Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute, the world’s main experimental festival. Two years later, the Paris Films Cooperative published its manifesto, ‘Parisfilmscooption’, in the catalogue of the 4e Rencontres Internationales d’Art Contemporain (Fourth International Meeting of Contemporary Art) in La Rochelle. Interested by the development of this other cinema, the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) organized conferences where Marcel Mazé was regularly invited to speak. There was ‘Éloges du Cinéma’ (‘In Praise of Cinema’) 1 and 2. The first of these, ‘Promotion de la Culture par le Film’ (‘Promoting Culture through Film’) took place in December 1970 in Bourges; the second, ‘Jeunes Cinémas et Circuits parallèles’ (‘Young Cinemas and Alternative Circuits’) took place in July 1972 at the Maison de la Culture in Nevers. In 1973, the cinéma différent strand of the Hyères Festival and the CJC organized an event against censorship at the American Centre for Students on Boulevard Raspail, in Paris, with a screening of Jean Genet’s prohibited Un Chant d’Amour, preceded by an American experimental film,

170

Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

Tony Conrad’s The Flicker. There were so many people that the programme had to be repeated. Experimental cinema was never so rich as in the 1970s, a decade in which Dominique Noguez wrote key books on the subject (see Noguez 1977 and Noguez 1979, both published in new editions since then). At the same time Noguez was writing for the widely read monthly L’Art Vivant, as well as for a variety of newspapers and reviews, and giving lectures abroad. He also helped set up the teaching of experimental cinema in the Department of Fine Art and Science of Art in the University of Paris I (in Saint-Charles), which contributed to the development of the careers of many film-makers. He also helped set up, in January 1977, the Ciné-Club de Saint-Charles, which rapidly specialized in experimental cinema, presenting the premieres of new material by a wide range of film-makers working in Paris or elsewhere (notably in Japan). In the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, lectures by Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman were well attended. In 1976, Claudine Eizykman published La Jouissance-cinéma (Eizykman 1976), a book which influenced a number of young filmmakers and critics. The CJC, the Paris Films Cooperative, and the Coopérative des Cinéastes rented out hundreds of films from their catalogues, not just in France, but all over the globe. With other groups, or with individual enthusiasts, not forgetting the cinema staff of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in the Centre Georges Pompidou (prefigured from 1974 by the screenings of the CNAC in the Rue Berryer, organized by Alain Sayag and Gisèle Breteau), they organized screenings in Paris on a more-or-less daily basis, screenings which fed into the work of critics and theorists, as well as teachers. Moreover, art cinemas such as Le Gît-le-Cœur, La Pagode, Le Marais, etc. often programmed experimental or underground films. Such was the demand that Pascale Dauman established the Studio Christine in 1973, dedicated exclusively to the screening of avant-garde films. In 1976, the CNAC presented a retrospective called ‘Une Histoire du Cinéma’ (‘A History of the Cinema’), conceived by Peter Kubelka, which integrated films by contemporary French film-makers amongst other international film-makers. The programme was so successful that it was repeated the following year in the Cinémathèque française, and subsequently in the newly opened Centre Pompidou. The large catalogue for the event included texts by Dominique Noguez, Claudine Eizykman, Guy Fihman and Marcel Mazé, alongside pieces by Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney. Raphaël Bassan was writing regularly about experimental cinema in established cinema journals such as Écran and La Revue du Cinéma, as well as in the review devoted to the plastic arts, Canal. This eventually led to a special issue of CinémAction (nos. 10-11, 1980) on international avant-garde cinemas (experimental and militant), edited by Bassan and Guy Hennebelle (Bassan and Hennebelle 1980). The official cinema journals only recognized the avant-garde of the 1920s; it took the superhuman efforts of Dominique Noguez, Raphaël Bassan, and Gérard Courant to get these journals to include texts on Teo Hernandez, Joseph Morder, Stéphane Marti, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Jean-Paul Dupuis and many others, then young film-makers

French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s

171

in their 20s and 30s, and to get more traditional critics, such as Jacques Grant or Marcel Martin, to do the same. Noguez wrote many texts as a result of which he was invited to speak on television. Alain Pacadis and Elisabeth Ayala wrote on experimental cinema in the newspaper Libération, before Bassan took over their column. And during this period, Lemaître and the Lettrists, Hanoun and other post-war artists carried on producing and showing their films. Without this fertile terrain (the presentation of very large parts of the catalogues of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma and the Coopérative des Cinéastes), Lowder and Sudre would not have been able to create their own organization, the Archives du Film Expérimental d’Avignon (he Archive of Experimental Films in Avignon). As a result of all of this, the CNC, under Jack Gajos, organized international meetings of those involved in experimental cinema (amongst them Rose Lowder) in Paris, Avignon and Lyon. In 1978 ACIDE (Association du

172

Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

Cinéma Indépendant, Différent et Expérimental) was created which brought together, at least briefly, the representatives of a number of different cooperatives. It is this ferment which Rose Lowder calls nothing. There are numerous accounts of this fertile period, published later by Christian Lebrat in his collections for Paris Expérimental, the only publisher specializing in experimental cinema in the world: there have been re-editions of books by Dominique Noguez, as mentioned above, French translations of key works by Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Maya Deren, and many others. Rose Lowder does not cite any of these books. She only refers to the recent Jeune, dure et pure! (Brenez and Lebrat 2001), and material published by institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou, and her own book on the 1990s (Sudre and Lowder 2002; see Lowder 2003: 124). In parenthesis, if you look through Jeune, dure et pure!, you will find several hundred pages on the experimental cinema in France during the 1970s! We leave it up to readers to reach their own conclusions. Can one really say then that nothing happened in experimental cinema in France during the 1970s? It is true that the definitive history of this period still remains to be written; but it has been sketched out more than substantially, and no one can pretend not to know about it. Everything we have written about here can be found in many publications which are still available. It is against all the principles of intellectual honesty - especially if one has a responsibility for the transmission of academic knowledge - to ignore, or to pretend to ignore it. Translated by Phil Powrie

References Bassan, R., and Hennebelle, G. (eds) (1980), CinémAction, 10-11, ‘Cinémas d’avant-garde - expérimental et militant’, Paris: Papyrus Éditions. Brenez, N. and Lebrat, C. (eds) (2001), Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France, Paris and Milan: Cinémathèque française/Mazzotta. Eizykman, C. (1976), La Jouissance-cinéma, Paris: Éditions 10/18. Lowder, R. (2003), ‘Des archives du film expérimental, lieux de mémoire’, 1895, 41, pp. 119-26. Noguez, D. (1977 [1987)), Le Cinéma, autrement, Paris: Éditions 10/18; new edition, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Noguez, D. (1979 [1999]), Éloge du cinéma expérimental: définitions, jalons, perspectives, Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; new edition, Paris: Expérimental. Sudre, A.A., and Lowder, R. (eds) (2002), L’Image en mouvement: 25 ans d’activité pour la défense du cinéma comme art visuel, Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon, Avignon

Suggested Citation Bassan, R. Courant, G. Lebrat, C and Noguez, D. (2004), ‘French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 165–174, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.165/0

French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s

173

Contributor details Raphaël Bassan is a film journalist who has written on experimental cinema (amongst other forms of cinema) in specialist journals such as Écran and La Revue du Cinéma, in national dailies such as Libération, and in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, for example L’Encyclopaedia Universalis (since 1996), Une encyclopédie du court métrage français (2004). He is the co-founder of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in 1971, and has made three short films: Le Départ d’Eurydice (1969), Prétextes (1971), and Lucy en miroir (2004). Gérard Courant is a film critic and film-maker. Since 1978 he has been making Cinématons, the longest film in the world (2100 portraits of personalities from the performing arts, 150 hours), 15 linked series (Lire, Portrait de groupe, Couple, De ma chambre d’hôtel, etc.), and 17 features, amongst them Cœur bleu (1981), Les Aventures d’Eddie Turley (1989), and 24 Passions (2003), and has received many awards in film festivals. He has published several books on cinema, as well as collections of poems. Christian Lebrat is a film-maker and photographer, who has made fifteen or so films or performances since 1976. He founded the Paris Expérimental publishing company in 1985, devoted entirely to avant-garde cinema, and he has published a number of essential books on the subject. He is the organizer of several retrospectives, amongst them ‘Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France’ (Cinémathèque française, 2000), and ‘Le Cinéma visionnaire: l’avant-garde américaine’ (Paris and Rome, 2002). Dominique Noguez is an agrégé in philosophy, and was a professor at the Universities of Montreal and Paris. He established practical and theoretical courses in experimental cinema in Paris at that time (the early 1970s). He was awarded a Doctorat d’État on US underground cinema. He has published, amongst many other reference books on the subject, Éloge du cinéma expérimental (1979), and made three short films, including Una Vita (1984). He is also an essayist and novelist; amongst others, he has published Les Trois Rimbaud (1986), L’Homme de l’humour (2003), and he was awarded the Prix Femina in 1997 for Amour noir. Researchers interested in experimental cinema should contact Christian Lebrat at Paris Expérimental, BP 175421, Paris Cédex 09 (E-mail: [email protected])

174

Raphaël Bassan, Gérard Courant,Christian Lebrat, and Dominique Noguez

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.175/0

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite Florence Martin Goucher College Abstract

Keywords

One way to look at Tunisian film-maker Tlatli’s two films to date, Saimt el Qusur/Silences of the Palace (1993) and La Saison des hommes/Season of Men (2000) is to watch them in a continuum, as two movements of a cinematic suite, structured around two central call-and-response elements: silence and scream. Sound and silence then become central to the architecture of the narrative, to the organization of space (both literal and symbolic) in the film. As signifiers, they also function as echoes of the cultural history of Tunisia.

casting cinematic suite counterpoint flashback montage music nushuz point de cri/screaming point resolution scream silence Tunisia

Moufida Tlatli, as the titles of her two films to date show - Saimt el Qusur/Silences of the Palace (1993) and La Saison des hommes/Season of Men (2000) - enjoys paradoxes. She announces a ‘talking’ film about silences in the first one; and she posts ‘men’ in the second, only to barely show them. Known throughout the Arab world for her formidable career as film editor, Tlatli fulfils her most demanding viewer’s expectations in the visual quality and pace of her films. Most strikingly, she seems to open a possible new way of representing women’s sound and silences. Structurally, she complicates the notions of silence and voice by setting them up as ‘counterpoints’ (in the Western musical sense of the term) within each movie and from one film to the next. Hence, I want to listen to the call-and-response pattern of silence and scream in both films, examine how they are visually projected onto the screen, in complex, delightful ways (cinema is, after all, about visual and aural pleasure), and finally look at how they might point to a new way of filming. To do so, let us envision the films as two movements of a cinematic suite, composed around two elements - silence and scream - that are brought to a cinematic resolution at the end of the first, and then, more definitely, the second movement.

Tlatli composes a cinematic suite ... Tlatli’s two films offer parallel themes, characters, interior worlds, as well as narrative structures, and even recurring shots. I am therefore proposing that we look at them as two movements of a ‘musical suite’ that share thematically and structurally linked narratives, as well as an overarching construction of space via sound, the use of flashbacks and ingenious continuous casting. Both films present two interrelated stories: a more-or-less recent, framing narrative and a past, framed one. In Silences, the 1960s narrative shows Alia, a young singer who lives

SFC 4 (3) 175–185 © Intellect Ltd 2004

175

with Lotfi and who earns her keep by singing at weddings and such. She is pregnant, but Lotfi wants her to have an abortion and refuses to marry her. She leaves their home to attend the funeral of one of the beys. This is when the past narrative invades the more recent one: she has not been back to this palace, where she grew up, since her mother’s death. The latter, Khedija, was a servant who refused to tell Alia who her father was. Alia’s flashbacks uncover the lives of the female servants kept inside the palace in the 1950s, on the eve of Tunisian independence. In Season, the present narrative shows us Aïcha and Saïd living in an apartment in Tunis, with their autistic son Aziz, and Zeineb (Saïd’s sister and Aïcha’s closest friend). The couple also has two older daughters: Meriem (married but hitherto unable to consummate her marriage) and Emna (single, a violinist). Saïd wants to commit Aziz to an institution. Aïcha refuses and asks her daughters and Zeineb to accompany her and Aziz to the villa where they used to live on the island of Djerba, far from Tunis and from Saïd. Upon her arrival in the villa, the past narrative unfolds via flashbacks, revealing the lives of cloistered women under the iron rule of an authoritarian mother-in-law. They all await the ‘season of men’, the annual one-month long visit of their husbands gone to Tunis to make a living in the souk. In both films, then, women are confined to interior spaces: in the first instance, a palace belonging to the Beylicale family during the last few years of the French protectorate. Hence, towards the end of the film, we see a male servant, Houssine, report on the nationalists’ riots in the streets, to which the women servants in the kitchen do not have access. Muted echoes of the general strike only reach women through his and the radio’s accounts. From these echoes, a Tunisian audience would guess that we are in January 1952, under the so-called ‘rule’ of Moncef Bey (who had taken the place of the popular, and therefore dangerous Mohamed Lamine Bey in 1943, and was largely perceived as a puppet in the hands of the French). The film takes us back to the time after Habib Bourguiba’s call to struggle against the French, which sparked a brutal and massive repression. The French arrested the heads of the Néo-Destour party (including Bourguiba) and sent Tunisian prisoners to concentration camps. The same audience would also recognize the forbidden nationalist anthem sung first on the radio, then by Tahar, and finally by Alia toward the end of the film. What interests me here, is that sound (the radio, the anthem, Houssine’s news) and silence (no screaming nationalist on the street is heard from within the palace) effectively contribute to the filmic construction of an enclosed female space, isolated from the rest - and historical unrest - of the world. Similarly, in Season, women are locked up in a house on the island of Djerba. Their isolation, worsened by their insularity, finds an aural expression via a similar ‘surround-silence’. Apart from the opening credits (to the sound of crashing waves and the cries of seagulls), the film track carries almost no sound from the outside. Even the call for prayer does not penetrate the thick walls of the villa; we notice it only once, faintly, in a rare scene where we see the women outside the house, returning from the sea where they rinsed the henna in their hair. Here again, the sound and/or lack of surrounding sound shape a claustropho-

176

Florence Martin

bic muted space reserved for women. The initial open soundscape only points to the space of the framing narrative (outside), in opposition to the space of the past narrative (inside). The enclosed spaces in the film are further defined along a vertical line: the upstairs-downstairs story in Silences clearly locates the servant women below the apartments of the noble family. The palace of the beys is shown from the perspective of the women who work in the kitchen (downstairs) and are admitted inside the magnificent interiors of the beys’ palace only when the princes need them to serve or entertain them (they dance, sing, massage their bodies, fulfil their desires). Similarly, the women in Season all reside in the ground-floor rooms of the villa, in contrast to Saïd and Aïcha’s apartment in Tunis a couple of flights up, or to Saïd’s store on the hill of the Medinah. The free male world is upstairs and open: rumours from the outside world permeate it. The female world is downstairs and almost hermetically sealed: no sound from the outside world can penetrate its borders. Narrative structures are also contrapuntal in Tlatli’s two films. Both films show consciously framed narratives bridging past and present. As Tlatli said: I use flashbacks because this is something which is part of my way of understanding the world. Our desires and fears secretly come from our parents and our grandparents who transmit their traditions and sufferings to us; and we carry the latter like a wound or a force throughout our lives. (Tlatli 2002)

In Silences, Tlatli uses a total of nine flashbacks to narrate Alia’s discovery of self, identity and mother. The narrative of Season follows the same structure: Aïcha’s story is told through exactly nine flashbacks. Nine: as if memory recall and tale-telling could only work on a 3 x 3 tempo. This unearthing of a past story in nine parts seems to echo another nine-part legend: according to a hadith (an anecdote about the prophet Muhammad) by Ali ibn Abu Taleb, the husband of Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima: ‘Almighty God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men’ (Mernissi 1987: 44). Hence, perhaps, the fitting choice of a nine-part structure to narrate the fullness of woman’s repressed desire in both films. Furthermore, although both films present different narratives, they are linked in a thematic and filmic continuum which indicates the possibility of a meta-narrative about, by, and perhaps for women: both depict cloistered women; both focus on mothers keeping secrets from their children, warning their children against predatory men without being explicit about sex; both deal with mothers not always wanting their pregnancy; both use the same strategies to tell a story. The continuum is even expressed through ingenious casting, as revealed by the use of the same actresses in both films. Tlatli employs Sabeh Bouzouita in both films: in the first one she is one of the servants, Schema, and in the second one, she is Zeineb, Aïcha’s sister-in-law. In both films, she embodies a forlorn female figure, in the shadow of others, alone,

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite

177

1. This does not preclude the extracinematographic image - or audience perception - of the star shared by a Tunisian audience (see Farinelli and Passek 2000).

en souffrance, as one would say in French with both meanings active: suffering (her body, in Season, ‘hurts all over’) and abandoned like an undelivered package at the post office (her life, in Silences ‘is like a curfew’). Tlatli further tightens the casting of both films by choosing two actresses from Silences, Hend Sabri (teenager Alia) and Ghalia Lacroix (grown-up Alia) to play the roles of Aïcha’s two daughers in Season: respectively, Emna and Meriem. These casting links produce echoing or doubling effects that add an intertextual or interfilmic value to the intrafilmic image of each actress in the second film.1 This is especially true for Emna and Meriem who appear on the scene of Season as Alia’s older sisters. Their questions are ‘physically’ located in the wake of Alia’s: although they no longer ask about the identity of a still mostly absent father, they still need to decipher their mother’s present-day silence and the old secret it is supposed to protect, as Alia did. This doubling effect is reinforced by the recurrence of specific shots and sound effects in birth-giving sequences that the viewer recognizes from one film to the next, as one would musical themes in a contrapuntal piece. In counterpoint, one voice is made to sing against another. In her films, Tlatli establishes a dialogue between the recent narrative voice, and the responding - sometimes contradicting - past narrative voice. In the wake of this initial duality, other counterpoints are disseminated. But there is more: the composer places ‘dissonances’ waiting to be resolved by ‘consonances’ (points at which both voices sing in unison or harmony). Hence, the resolution at the end of Season takes the form of a montage of all narratives stitched together, along the cadence (in the musical sense of a lingering chord at the end of a composition) of Aïcha’s birthing scene. However, by the end of her suite, Tlatli has inserted so many embellishments that the initial two-part structure is hardly recognizable: the doubling effects have multiplied, and other oblique voices have come to complicate and thicken the texture of the entire piece.

... around two pivotal elements: silence and scream ... Screams and silences seem to respond to one another symmetrically within each film, from one film to the other, and against a larger inherited cultural script that includes the collective memory of Muslim history and myth; the derived legends around women; and finally, Tunisia’s recent history and popular culture. For, if we inherit our mother’s silence, we also inherit our community’s culture and collective fantasies. For instance, the women servants of the palace in Silences are not slaves, since slavery was abolished in Tunisia in May 1890, and yet the inherited, fantasized reminiscence of the figure of the harem slave seems to haunt the film. Khedija for instance, can be seen as an evocation of the female slave, who appeared in the harems of the eighth century and in the fiction of the 1001 Nights: a sexual slave well versed in the art of dancing. Echoes of inherited narratives introduce points of consonance and/or dissonance in Tlatli’s films. One such dissonance/consonance is the point at which the traditional silence of obedience meets the silence of resistance, a story which is by no means unique in Muslim women’s history. In Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, Fatima Mernissi describes the

178

Florence Martin

hierarchy of Muslim society as determined by the concept of obedience: man is an obedient submitter to God and the community (umma), and a master at home; woman is an obedient submitter to man. The slightest instance of disobedience on her part threatens the whole edifice. From her reading of the Qu’ran, Mernissi extrapolates two acts of female rebellion: bid’a (innovation, that challenges the social order based on consensus) and nushuz. Nushuz refers most often to the woman’s refusal to have sex with her husband. It is, we are led to believe, what Aïcha does in Season in her attempt to resist the authority of both her husband and her mother-in-law, who demand that she produce a son. It is a quiet denial. No word is said. The rebellious woman, the nashiz, thus subverts the meaning of silence from obedient acquiescence into her active refusal to obey. There are several other instances of nushuz in both films. Here, Aïcha breaks a plate instead of answering her mother-in-law; there, Khedija does not respond to Sidi Bechir when the latter asks for her to send Alia to his bedroom. Nushuz is reprehensible because it undermines the vertical phallocentric social order as described in the sacred text. Mernissi derives from its original meaning the intent of a conscious rebellion: The Qu’ran only refers to nushuz in order to describe the punishment a husband must inflict upon the wife in case she rebels. Ghazali defines the nashiz (the woman who rebels) as a wife who confronts her husband either in act or word. He explains that the word nashiz means ‘that which tries to elevate itself above the ground’. (Mernissi 1996: 109; Mernissi’s emphasis)

Rebellion takes on several forms in Tlatli’s films: from silent disobedience to vocal response to the master or the husband. The latter posits the nashiz as an interlocutor, i.e. on an equal footing with the other. In Silences, Khedija refuses to send her daughter Alia to Sidi Bechir’s bedroom to ‘serve his tea’ (a code word for sexual intercourse) by going there herself. Later, when she is talking with Sidi Ali (Alia’s father), she no longer simply listens but responds as an equal partner in the conversation: Sidi Ali: Alia’s voice is a treasure. She has a soul. Khedija: I no longer do. Sidi Ali (angrily): Are you crazy? Don’t talk that way!

Here Sidi Ali brutally reasserts the lines of power by reminding her of her place in the vertical gender and class hierarchy of the palace, while pointing to the complex mélange of ‘sensuality engendering cruelty, and of cruelty begetting sensuality’ (Chamkhi 2002: 200). Similarly, in Season, Aïcha, told by Saïd once again that she needs to produce a son before joining him in Tunis, retorts: ‘I am not the Holy Virgin; how can I be pregnant when you are so far away?’ This fairly logical response threatens his authority; in an attempt to reassert it, he abruptly switches tones, and orders: ‘Bring me my things and scrub my

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite

179

back!’ She does as she is told, but then rinses his back with scalding water, in a violent gesture of wordless rebellion. The most successful nashiz is Alia who rebels against male authority twice, as Dina Sherzer observes: first, she sings the forbidden Tunisian anthem in front of the beys’ family and guests at Sarra’s engagement party - an act of political resistance; second, she stands up against her lover Lotfi, and decides to have their baby - an act of resistance in the equally significant realm of micro-politics. Finally, Tlatli herself is a nashiz, since she uses cinema to reveal the secrets held by women and their silence. Projecting the silence of women onto a screen is as paradoxical as publishing private diaries: it destroys intimacy by sharing it in the public sphere. However, when set against the history of women’s nushuz, it does more: it amplifies what was whispered, and it publicizes women’s inherited modes of resistance as meaningful acts of defiance. It performs another reversal with the symbolic value of a nushuz: once the bubble of silence has been punctured, the hidden pain of women is ‘outed’ and their bad treatment is exposed. The first ‘consonance’, or resolution (as defined above), in both films is the mother’s silence around a secret. Tlatli’s films tell us about silence and signal the presence of the secret it conceals. When Khalti says to Alia towards the end of the film, ‘At the palace, we were only taught one rule: silence’, we understand that it is only away from the locus of the secret the palace - and away from the mother’s silence, that Alia will be free. Her beautiful voice can only resonate outside the palace, off the maternal screen. At least this is how Lotfi, a Tunisian nationalist fighting for independence, describes it: ‘You have a beautiful voice. Too bad it is shut up inside.’ In Season, mothers’ words are either non-existent or double-edged. Hence the matriarch who rules the house, Ommi (i.e. ‘my mother’), barks orders at her daughters-in-law and her daughter Zeineb. Her rare kind words or gestures, we quickly learn, cannot be taken at face value. For instance, seeing her daughter in the sun, she seems to be concerned about Zeineb’s well-being: ‘Zeineb, do not stay outside. The sun is hot and your skin is fragile.’ But what she really wants is to keep her - at this point mature - daughter inside the house in case Younès, Aïcha’s brother, comes to the house to sell his fish. Her chief concern is to protect her daughter’s honour (although Zeineb is married, her husband left her after the wedding night to go to France, and she has been bound to chastity ever since). Ommi’s silence can also be deafening: when her granddaughter Meriem returns home, having narrowly escaped being raped on her way from school, her grandmother wordlessly tests her virginity (a brutal test whose violence damages Meriem’s sexuality). Ommi is clearly portrayed here as the bad mother, the frightening figure of matriarchal and patriarchal power combined (she represents her sons’ authority). Silence then shifts values: it can both express a victim’s response to violence and the cold-blooded act of violence itself. In the latter case, authoritarian silence envelops both its perpetrator and victim. To film the coming-out of silence of her characters, Tlatli uses different strategies. In Silences, as Lieve Spaas notes, she stages Michel Chion’s point

180

Florence Martin

de cri (‘screaming point’; see Spaas 2000: 169). In a cinematographic fiction, the ‘screaming point’ shows a scream coming out of a woman’s mouth, which we see but may or may not hear. That scream occurs at a pivotal point in the film: The screaming point is the surge of the unthinkable within the thought, of the unspeakable within the utterance, of the impossible to perform within the performance. [...] This scream embodies the fantasy of absolu sonore ‘sound absolute’; it is supposed to satiate the soundtrack, deafen the one who listens to it; it may not even be heard by the woman who utters it. (Chion 1993: 77)

This is exactly Alia’s scream, uttered in a differed reaction to her witnessing her mother’s rape, a crucial moment in the construction of Alia’s subjectivity. It is at once ‘painful’ and ‘empowering’, her sustaining gaze constitutes ‘a first, essential step toward true independence’ notes Naaman, for she has faced the horror of her mother’s dependent condition (Naaman 2000: 342). Her reaction is filmed in an extreme close-up. The screamer’s face is framed by the wrought-iron gate of the palace gardens. The impact of the scream is all the more powerful as the scream is entirely visual: it is inaudible literally and figuratively, for no one could stand to hear such a scream. The screaming point stands in direct opposition to the birthing scenes in both films, in which the birthing woman’s scream stops exactly when the baby’s starts, in one fluid aural fade-in. The symbolic effect is striking: a woman is allowed to scream her pain at this precise moment only (otherwise, she is to keep her pain a secret); she transmits her cry - her pain - to her baby daughter, who will be secluded in her own pain as she herself has been. The only male baby born to utter the same scream as he comes to life in the wake of his mother’s, is Aziz, the autistic child who is walled in his own impenetrable world and expresses himself through inarticulate screams. These scenes punctuate both films like obsessive images of women’s pain finally unleashed. In both films, women are allowed to express their anguish through their bodies only. Hence, in Season, Zeineb, when she falls ill to a psychosomatic disease, wishing her husband would come home and knowing he will not, exclaims to the doctor: ‘My body hurts all over’. After years of waiting, of being subjected to her own mother’s tyranny, she has now found the only permissible outlet to express herself. In contrast, men’s suffering is not seen. It is, literally, off screen. We rarely see men in Silences and do not hear so much as the nationalists’ muted cries, as they are wounded or killed outside. We simply hear about them through the servants’ renditions of their rebellion. The latter points to the freedom of men: they can join the rebellion as opposed to the women who are prisoners of the palace. One of the women servants envies their freedom, which she translates in bodily terms: I don’t belong to myself. I want to go out in the street, naked, barefoot ... To run without being stopped, to scream and shout loud. Only their bullets can shut me up as they pass through me as if through a sieve.

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite

181

Hence the counterpoints of scream and silence are at once symmetrically opposed (by their very nature) and eerily alike (they both subvert their original meaning). The silent scream of a suffering woman responds to the loud scream transmitted from a suffering mother to her child. Both representations introduce dissonances in the composition that require a resolution. That resolution comes in two forms: singing and cinematic montage.

... with a musical and cinematic resolution Singing refers to the larger diverse cultural script of Tunisia and the world of Arabic legends and history. For instance, just as Khedija can be seen as a distant silhouette of the 1001 Nights pleasure slave, Alia too might evoke the figure of the qayna, the slave versed in the art of singing. Such a position used to be most enviable for a female slave at the time of the harems. Alia has a special status for Sidi Ali, not only because she is his daughter and has inherited his gift for music (he plays the ‘ud or Arabic lute), but also because she might even have exceeded his gift (Alia’s singing voice is actually the surprisingly mature voice of 14-yearold Sonia Laraissi). Her singing, however, takes on different meanings. In the opening scene of the film, she sings in a professional setting: she performs a number which was recorded in the 1960s by the Egyptian ‘star of the East’ Um Kulthum: ‘Amal Hayati’ (‘The Hope of My Life’): ‘Leave me by your side/in your heart/and let me dream/Wish time will not wake me up’. With this performance, Alia has a brief metonymic relationship with the famous singer: like her, she inherited her musical talent from her father, and came from an extremely modest background. Later in the film, Alia’s politically charged performance of the forbidden anthem also echoes Um Kulthum’s political agenda and support of Egyptian President Nasser’s pan-Arabism in the 1950s, or at least the way Um Kulthum’s songs were heard; as Danielson explains, the lyrics ‘give me freedom, set my hands free’ (Danielson 1997: 168), about the agony of romantic love, were heard by some as pertaining to the various Arab struggles against the West in the 1950s. This initial reference to the star illustrates Alia’s musical dream since childhood. Alia clearly sees music as her way out of the servants’ quarter, and when she receives this wonderful gift - a lute - from her mother and Khalti, it becomes her ‘fetish/companion’ says Tlatli (Mulvey 1995: 19). Playing the ‘ud and singing are both therapeutic and liberating. Alia, although she leaves the palace to go singing in newly independent Tunisia, will not be free, however, from the stigmas of her social origin: she remains the fatherless child of a servant sold to a wealthy family, in Lotfi’s eyes, and she will, as Ella Shohat notes, only be independent once she frees herself of him (Shohat 1997). The play on ‘independence’ is striking: just as Lotfi and his comrades have rejected the ‘protection’ of the French, Alia finally rejects his in the end. In an eerie voice-over, she speaks, by her mother’s grave, to herself, to Khedija and to the baby to come: ‘I hope I’ll have a daughter. I’ll call her Khedija.’ Her singing voice has first helped her break away from the women’s silence described by Tlatli to Mulvey as ‘a silence through the

182

Florence Martin

inability to speak’ (Mulvey 1995: 19). By the end of the film, her singing voice has helped her gain a talking voice: her heavy lugging of unspoken traumas (the mystery of her father’s identity, her witnessing her mother’s rape) has stopped. At the end of Silences, Alia’s voice resolves the tension between scream and silence. In her second film, though, Tlatli achieves a similar finale via montage, producing a third, if not fourth sense out of the contiguity of two images, hence out of two original different meanings. Each flashback in the film participates in this production of meaning in excess of what is shown. Here again, she obliquely tells a story through the sequence and ordering of images, that supersedes and sometimes contradicts the meaning produced by each image, as both examples below will show. In the first film, Tlatli edits two parallel scenes - one upstairs and one downstairs - that link two characters: Khedija and her daughter, Alia. Khedija, who has discovered she is pregnant (most probably from her rape), refuses her pregnancy and is seen bleeding to death. That same night, Alia is singing upstairs for the beys. The cuts from one scene to the other are striking both visually and aurally, as they alternate Khedija’s screams and Alia’s rendition of the nationalist song. This montage, set against the repeated birth scene we have seen in both films, shows the screams of the mother ending in the silence of her death (and of her still-born baby); meanwhile, her daughter’s song of freedom allows the latter to leave the palace. It is the story of Alia’s rebirth shown through powerful aural signs as well as visual ones. In her second film, Tlatli goes further in her productive montage: she shows scenes belonging to different time periods and to different narratives. The montage in the final sequence of the film unites all protagonists in a variety of situations, the past and the present, in a kind of aural fade-in and out: Aïcha’s cries are heard over all short sequences. Connoting both birth pain and sexual pleasure, they harmonize with the sequences of the consummation of Meriem’s marriage, and of the fulfilment of Zeineb’s desire. Here, it is not the silence of the mother which closes the film but, rather, the inarticulate expression of her pleasure and pain, and of the pleasure and pain of all around her. We then end up with a film which has told us that silence (together with the secret it covers) and screams are passed on from mother to daughter. The resonance of both silences and screams is amplified and gathers more and more meaning(s) from one generation to the next. This handing down of secrets from mother to child is not new and has been the daily bread of many a psychoanalyst; furthermore, in this particular case, it happens to be partly autobiographical, as Tlatli confided to Isabelle Fajardo: ‘I made this film for my daughter, to respond to her questioning. She needs to decide where she is going. But I wanted her to know where she came from’ (Tlatli 2002). Tlatli records and stages traces of the repressed, traces of the unsaid, the unvoiced, as well as loud outbursts. Her notion of cinema would then subscribe not to the traditional dusty notion of ‘illusion’, but rather to Wadi el-Khabash’s notion of a re-presentation of the unspeakable:

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite

183

Isn’t cinema, among other things, the trace of the unspeakable in the picture? And isn’t the unspeakable, in both its inability to translate into words and yet its ability to produce a mediation signalled by emotion, a form of cinematographic unconscious? (El Kabash 2000: 139)

Indeed, an oblique look at Tlatli’s cinema opens up the possibility of viewing her films as a conscious montage of images haunted by the unconscious. The spectator is then faced not with a projected talking cure but with a medium (an in-between, a mediating element) that points to images around the repressed and triggers an emotional response in viewers. However old that notion of cinema (e.g. Hitchcock, Bergman), what is innovative here is how Tlatli consciously films around the silence inherited from the mother, around the original secret, how she stages the silence and the scream so that I, the viewer, feel the weight of its oppressive presence. This apparent circumventing way of filming could be ‘in keeping with this lack of directness that so characterizes Islamic society’, as Tlatli confessed to Laura Mulvey (Mulvey 1995: 19). It might also echo the traditional Sufi theatre of the shadows, in the way it meanders around the fact itself to project oblique representations of it on a screen. And here I am imagining the screen as a curtain (hijab), a veil on which women’s faces, bodies, songs, and voices can be fully projected and magnified. Once again, then, Tlatli, in filming, embodies a nashiz: the veil that hides the inside is turned inside out to become the cinema screen on which women’s close-ups are blown up.

Conclusion I would not be surprised if these two movements of a cinematic suite were in fact the first instalments of a trilogy from silence to scream to voice. Rumour has it that Tlatli is plotting a film about Shahrazad, the legendary nashiz who saved herself and the women of her kingdom from death by keeping her executioner under the spell of her tales. Tlatli uses the same ancient technique of framed narrative, giving woman a lasting voice, and offering tales of survival while tricking the king. ‘Tell thy tale, and tell it quickly’, says the king to Shahrazad towards the dawn of the first night (Burton 2001: 123). But Shahrazad and Tlatli take their time to tell and film their wondrous stories. References Barlet, O. (2000), ‘Entretien avec Moufida Tlatli’, Africultures, Cannes, May. http://www.africultures.com/revue_africultures/articles/affiche_article.asp?no=1661. Accessed June 2003. Burton, Sir R.F. (trans.) (2001), The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, New York: Random House [first published in 1885]. Chamkhi, S. (2002), Cinéma tunisien nouveau: parcours autre, Tunis: Sud Éditions. Chion, M. (1993), La Voix au cinéma, Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers du Cinéma. Danielson, V. (1997), The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the 20th Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

184

Florence Martin

El Khabash, W. (2000), ‘Un cinéma soufi? Islam, ombres, modernité’, Écritures dans les cinémas d’Afrique noire (ed. D’Béri Boulou Ebanda), special issue of CiNéMAs, pp. 133-49. Farinelli, G.L. and Passek, J-L. (eds) (2000), Stars au féminin: naissance, apogée et décadence du star system, Paris: Éditions du Centre George Pompidou. Mernissi, F. (1987), Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —- (1996), Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory, London: Zed Books. Mulvey, L. (1995), ‘Moving bodies: interview with Moufifa Tlatli’, Sight and Sound, 5: 3, pp. 18-20. Naaman, D. (2000), ‘Woman/Nation: a postcolonial look at female subjectivity’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 7: 4, pp. 333-43. Sherzer, D. (2000), ‘Remembrance of Things Past: Les Silences du palais by Moufida Tlatli’, South Central Review, 17: 3, pp. 50-59. Shohat, E. (1997), ‘Framing post-Third-Worldist culture: gender and nation in Middle Eastern/North African film and video’, Jouvert, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm. Accessed 11 September 2003 Spaas, L. (2000), The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tlatli, M. (2002), ‘La Saison des hommes’, http://www.commeaucinema.com/mcm/news.php3?nominfos=5318&cine news=4. Accessed 29 June 2004.

Suggested citation Martin, F. (2004), ‘Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 175–185, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.175/0

Contributor Details Florence Martin is Professor of French at Goucher College, Baltimore (Maryland, USA). She has published essays on jazz, cinema, and francophone literature and culture. She is the author of Bessie Smith (Marseille: Parenthèses, 1996), and the co-author, with Isabelle Favre, of De la Guyane à la diaspora africaine: écrits du silence (Paris: Karthala, 2002). She is currently working on a book on francophone women film-makers. Contact: Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland, 21204, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite

185

!! PRIZES ANNOUNCEMENT !! Studies in French Cinema is offering the first of its annual prizes for the best student essay on French Cinema: The SFC-MUP Graduate Essay Prize (supported by Manchester University Press) This prize is awarded for an original essay in English on any aspect of French or francophone cinema. The prize consists of books published by Manchester University Press up to a retail value of £150, and free admission to the Studies in French Cinema annual conference in the year following the award. The essay will automatically be considered for publication in Studies in French Cinema. The conditions are as follows: • The essay (written in English) must be at least 4000 words long and should not exceed 6000 words (notes and references included). • It must have been written by a postgraduate student registered at the time of submission at an institution of higher education in the United Kingdom or Ireland. • It must be submitted in its original state, preferably without assessor comments. A photocopy is acceptable. • The student’s name and institution should not appear anywhere on the essay. A form (obtainable on the Studies in French Cinema website) must accompany the essay which will include the mark awarded and an attestation from the supervisor verifying the mark, the originality of the essay, and the date of its first submission. For guidance, we suggest that essays receiving less than a mark of 75 per cent should not be submitted. Essays should be submitted to Professor Susan Hayward, Film Studies, Queen’s Building, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QH, using the cover-sheet which can be found on the SFC website. Essays will be judged by a sub-committee formed from members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards of Studies in French Cinema. SUBMISSION DATE 31 OCTOBER 2004

Studies in French Cinema: Student Essay Prizes Prize applied for (please delete): Name of applicant: Title of essay: Original submission date:

Postgraduate

Undergraduate Institution:

Length of essay (inc. notes/references):

Mark awarded:

ATTESTATION TO BE COMPLETED BY THE CANDIDATE: I confirm that this essay is submitted in its original unrevised form, and that it is all my own work. Signature: Date: ATTESTATION TO BE COMPLETED BY THE SUPERVISOR/TUTOR: I confirm that the information provided by the candidate above is correct. Name (please print): Signature: Date: Email Address:

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.187/0

‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place Matthew Lazen Harvard University Abstract

Keywords

As a cinema of place, the new wave is most famous for its loving representations of Paris, but many new wave film-makers, such as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Demy depicted provincial France. During the 1950s, France experienced rapid modernization and urbanization, but by the end of the decade, France was beginning to revisit the provincial towns and countryside that had been transformed or left behind. In its narratives and form, the new wave registered this dual migration and fond glance back at the provinces as a tension between mobility and dwelling in place, between nostalgia and modernity. A detailed analysis of Jacques Demy’s first feature-length film, Lola (1961) illustrates this double movement. Demy himself returned to his hometown of Nantes to film this story of return of departure, which he repeats in revised form in other port cities in his subsequent films, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). In its dynamic of restless peregrination, Lola revises traditional regionalism by rejecting fixed origins and identities despite its undeniable attachment to place.

Lola Demy new wave place nostalgia intertextuality

In the 1950s, France discovered mobility as never before within a new Fordist economy based on consumer goods and urbanization. This mobility, expressed in the cinema of the new wave, was experienced in everyday life through the automobile. Even though only an eighth of the French population actually owned a car in 1961, the affordable 4CV, developed in 1947, helped make the car seem accessible to all rather than just the affluent few, and in the 1950s the press and advertising fanned a cult of the car. Auto-mobility, however, is a paradoxical mobility, for while the vehicle hurls through space, the rider remains still in the seat watching the scenery unfurl through the windscreen, the way a film projects across the screen for the stationary spectator (Ross 1995: 39). The rider/viewer also streaks through the outdoors while remaining indoors. This much could be said of train travel, but the boom in sales and mythologization of the car generalized this paradoxical experience of exteriors and mobility and integrated it into everyday life. Moreover, the car personalized this experience of space and motion, carving a mobile enclave of private or family space from the public space of the highway - that anonymous, interstitial public space that Marc Augé has called a non-place (Augé 1995) - the way that television at just this time was domesticating the public image flows that had been exclusively cinema’s domain and as auteurist film-making was individualizing Taylorist studio production. 1 SFC 4 (3) 187–196 © Intellect Ltd 2004

187

1

As Ross puts it, ‘in the later compensatory myths of the car it is its protected interior space that takes on value, its quasidomestic (but also anti-domestic) function: a home away from home, a place for solitude or intimacy’ (Ross 1995: 54-55). The infiltration of television into the home likewise serves a quasi-domestic and anti-domestic function.

2

Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946) exemplifies this discourse in its depiction of a noble natural lifestyle that nonetheless must submit to modernization. On the other hand, in Jour de fête/Holiday (1948) and Mon oncle/My Uncle (1958), Jacques Tati treats modern rationalization as a comical threat to the conviviality and ambling pace of provincial life.

Movement was also experienced through increased social mobility and geographical displacement. At the end of the Second World War, France was the most rural and agricultural of all Western countries, but booming modernization beginning in 1953 propelled populations from farms and provincial towns to urban centres. The city lay at the hub of a new society that proclaimed the reign of the New (the new man, the new novel, the new wave), while the increasingly moribund peripheral regions became an object of social discourse bemoaning their stagnation and archaism and promoting rural modernization.2 Yet, by the 1960s, the French, including many recently displaced into overcrowded city projects or maintaining strong family ties to a region, began to long wistfully for the imagined comforts and community of country living. New wave cinema - by which I mean the stylistic tendencies of a generation coming of age between about 1958 and 1962, rather than a homogeneous school consisting strictly of the core Cahiers du Cinéma critics (Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Rivette) - was as acutely sensitive to the social mutations of its moment as its film stock was to light, so it is not surprising that it perceptively registered the spatial flows and ruptures of its time in everything from its narrative content to its construction of space through editing, camera movement, and location shooting. The new wave foregrounded place and even displayed a certain proto-regionalism, distinctively inflected by new wave aesthetics and sensibilities. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regionalism emphasized tradition, rootedness, and closed identity, whatever detours and contradictions it compassed. Though their styles differed amongst themselves, the new wave film-makers shared instead a dialectical embrace of location and mobility and an attachment to childhood haunts and cinematic precursors imbued with a desire to capture the pulse and energy of their time and place with its restless modernism and open identities. Jacques Demy’s first feature-length film, Lola (1960), exemplifies the tension between nostalgic return and itinerancy in its story of departure and return that echoes Demy’s personal trajectory from Nantes to Paris and back to Nantes to shoot the film. Lola represents the desire to escape the provinces and the attraction of home, the desire for plenitude and connection and the inescapability of absence and rupture, the pursuit of identity and the slippage into difference. In short, it represents a restless transferential flight, marked by movement and differential repetition in the very effort to return to the domestic stability of ‘home’. Many critics have noted that the new wave is a cinema of place, and perhaps no new wave director is more closely attached to place, specifically his birthplace, than Jacques Demy. Demy spent his childhood in Nantes, former capital of the province of Brittany and a port city off the Atlantic coast; he maintained affective ties to his home town throughout his entire life, hence the title of his wife Agnès Varda’s first film memorial to him, Jacquot de Nantes/Jacquot (1991). Other sites in the vicinity of Nantes also marked his childhood and his films. One was the ‘super-rustic bistrot’ of his grandmother in Pontchâteau, 30 miles north of Nantes, where Demy did his homework in the middle of the peasant clientele and visited the folk doctor who practised from his bedroom (Berthomé 1996: 104). As Demy would nostalgically recollect later:

188

Matthew Lazen

I truly loved Pontchâteau; it was the very essence of a small French village. And then, all of this primitive France that had remained practically unchanged since the Middle Ages suddenly disappeared completely in the 1950s. Not much of all that remains. It only exists now in our heads. (Berthomé 1996: 28)

In his major feature films, Demy neither tries to reconstitute this past from memory, nor leave it completely behind; rather, he returns to the scene to capture what has taken its place. Demy also experienced this rustic France in 1943 during the Allied bombing of Nantes, when he was sent to live in the surrounding countryside with an elderly clog maker and his wife. Demy’s first notable short, Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (1955), winner of the prize for best short film at the 1956 Berlin film festival, narrated a fictional week in the life of the clog maker and his wife with extensive documentary shots of the clog-making process. With its emphasis on the cyclical rhythms of the old couple and the obsolescence of this life (a friend of the couple passes away and their adoptive son leaves for Paris at the end), Le Sabotier recalls Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique. In fact, Demy first made contact with Rouquier by showing him the scenario for the film, and he served as assistant on two of Rouquier’s films. After Le Sabotier, Demy largely abandoned its documentary realism, but he remained forever haunted by the places of his childhood and the common Frenchmen he knew. By the time he made Le Sabotier, however, Demy had already undergone the obligatory passage to Paris, where he eventually became part of the Cahiers du Cinéma social circle. The passage to Paris was so obligatory at that time for any film-maker, that one director passing through Nantes when Demy was an adolescent told Demy to come and see him when he ‘makes his way up to Paris’ (Berthomé 1996: 36). Any other trajectory was unthinkable. From this geographic and temporal distance, however, Demy strove to recover the lost scene of his youth, incarnated successively in the port settings of his films Lola (in Nantes), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Ladies of Rochefort (1966), and Une chambre en ville/A Room in Town (1982) (shot back in Nantes). Departure, absence, and return are the section titles to Les Parapluies, and these orientations likewise structure Lola’s dance of loss, desire, and repetition. Roland Cassard, a rudderless daydreamer, longs to leave the provinces one day. After getting fired from his job, Roland runs into his childhood sweetheart, Lola, a dancer who waits faithfully for the return of Michel, her first love and father of her child, Yvon. Meanwhile, she fends off the friendly advances of Frankie, an American sailor who reminds her of Michel. Roland also strikes up an acquaintance with a Mme Desnoyers and her 14-year-old daughter Cécile, who reminds him of Lola, and Cécile later meets Frankie and is smitten by him under much the same circumstances as Lola (whose given name is Cécile) was smitten by Michel. Having agreed, before running into Lola, to take a shady job delivering a briefcase to Johannesburg, Roland wavers when he eventually convinces Lola to consider staying with him and abandoning any hope of Michel’s return. Just then, however, Michel reunites with Lola, revealing himself to

‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place’

189

be the mysterious man we saw returning to Nantes at the beginning of the film wearing a white suit and stetson and driving an American ‘dream car’. The film ends with Roland heading off in despair for Johannesburg and Lola leaving for a presumably fairy-tale life with Michel and her son. Meanwhile, Frankie has left with his unit for Cherbourg, young Cécile has followed him, and Mme Desnoyers has run after her daughter. Thus, after circling around Nantes, intermittently crossing paths with each other, all the main characters in Lola spin, as Jean-Pierre Berthomé notes (Berthomé 1996: 126), ‘in a vast centrifugal movement’ away from the provincial town, driven either by desire or despair. This centrifugal movement is caught splendidly in the film’s last shot. After a series of shots where the camera or characters’ heads swivel left and right, the film ends with a high-angle pan in which the car carrying Lola, Michel, and Yvon seems to rotate, as though beginning to spin out of orbit, even though it is driving down a straight road. Lola thus represents the two causes of departure from the provinces: the seduction of the other and desperate flight from the self-same. Roland, the melancholic black sheep whose brown hair and black suits stand out from the other males, who are blond and wear white, complains: ‘people bore me, the city bores me, the Provinces bore me [...] Everything sickens me [...] and me first of all’ (his emphasis). In the provinces, ‘people don’t know how to live’ and ‘the only cure for [his] sickness’ (boredom) is to leave. Though Demy’s Nantes is filled with American sailors, exotic dancers, jazz, and fairs, Roland expresses the common view that the provinces are hopelessly unexciting and second-rate compared to Paris and America. Roland’s malaise is especially characteristic of a post-war generation that had lost a mooring in traditional values of work, ambition, and family (he tells his boss that he ‘works without knowing why’), and faced service in the Algerian War (1954-62) without necessarily believing in the justice of the cause. Roland’s discontent with Nantes also seems to be in part a symptom of a more profound subjective lack and longing since it is ‘first of all’ Roland who sickens himself. Otherwise, one supposes, Roland might more easily adjust to life in Nantes rather than experiencing wanderlust. If Roland is driven from Nantes by a vague sense of lack, however, Lola and other characters are lured away by desire for the other. Lola leaves at the end of the film with Michel, the Frenchman she met at a fair dressed as an American sailor, and Cécile pursues the real American sailor, Frankie, to Cherbourg. Hollywood, too, of course, trafficked in dream images, and Roland himself is taken by the Gary Cooper film Return to Paradise (Robson, 1953), set in the South Sea islands, where Michel in fact went to seek his fortune. It is well known that new wave film-makers themselves admired America as the antidote for stifling cinematic conformity in France and, more generally, many of the French saw America at this time as the fountain of wealth, spectacle, and spontaneity. Lola’s provincial town is, in fact, already saturated with this alluring American otherness at its very core, and it is this, paradoxically, that lures away many of its characters. As much as the characters disperse from Nantes at the end of the film, Lola is also a story of return (to the mother, the lover, and home), but far

190

Matthew Lazen

from being a stabilizing agent, return is itself a movement towards an impossible end (i.e. the beginning), a transferential flight across substitute love objects rather than a return to the origin. In Lacanian terms, the gap created by the loss of the other, the ‘mother’, can only be provisionally closed by a chain of substitute others (objets petit a). In Lola (which repeats several times that ‘a first love is so strong’), home, a parent, or the first mature love, can all represent the first object of attachment, which must be replaced. When Michel’s mother is stupefied to have seen him, unimaginably, in a ‘dream car’ dressed as a cowboy, Roland and the owner of the café they both frequent assure her that it could not have been him because ‘a son returns first to his mother’ (‘sa mère’). In a sense, this is, in fact, what he does, but rather than returning first to his mother (mère), in the opening shots of the film, Michel gets out of his car to gaze at the sea (mer), the sounds of seagulls fading in and out on the soundtrack as an additional sign of place. Thus, the film suggests that both place and the mother represent the place of origin or primordial love object to which one returns, and place, metonymically represented by the water that is associated with the port city of Nantes, even takes precedence over the mother. Moreover, Michel does not return to see his mother, but a mother, Lola, mother of his child and object petit a to his desire, and no sooner is he reunited with Lola/mother than they both leave Nantes in unarrested pursuit of other horizons. For, the lover, place, and his mother are merely provisional substitutes for the ‘Mother’, the unlocatable, lost origin that can never be recovered. The film again aligns lover, place of birth, and parent when Cécile leaves Nantes at the end of the film to follow her first love, Frankie, but by so doing heads towards her birthplace of Cherbourg and her ‘uncle’, who is actually her father, unbeknownst to her. In both cases, place, the parent, and the loved object are all substitutable surrogates of some lost past, and their provisional recuperation is merely a moment in a forward flight towards other substitutions. Just as the characters chase substitutable figures of the place of origin, ‘the mother’, Demy showcases mirror identities between his characters where there are actually only differential resemblances and desire for the other which propels the narrative forward. In traditional regionalist narratives, the characters occupy different positions within the community, but they are bound together in resemblance as fruits of the same soil, linked by homosocial reciprocity, proximity, and exchange. These characters represent complementary types joined together by a common body of language, customs, and history. Demy, on the other hand, insists on a sharper identity between his characters, but they resist this reduction to sameness all the more forcefully. Lola’s protagonists do share several features: Michel, Frankie, and Lola’s son Yvon resemble each other physically and both Frankie and Michel are dressed as American sailors when Lola meets them, while Lola, Cécile, and Mme Desnoyers are all linked by dance and Cécile and Lola (née Cécile) share the same given name. This structural identity is, moreover, established, by triangulation, through shared desire the way Roland Barthes says that a symmetry is established between lovers of the same love object (Barthes 1978: 65-66). Michel, Roland, Frankie (and Yvon) all love Lola while Lola loves Michel, Yvon and, in the

‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place’

191

absence of Michel, Frankie. Meanwhile, Lola’s young double, Cécile, also loves Frankie, and her elder double, Mme Desnoyers, is smitten by Roland. A metaphorical chain of equivalences between characters (Lola=Cécile=Mme Desnoyers and Michel=Frankie=Yvon=Roland) thus cuts across the metonymical narrative chain where these equivalent characters’ paths intersect (though only tangentially for the most part). There is virtually no identification, or even interaction, between homologous characters. Rather, the narrative is driven by the instability of desire between unlike characters. (Except perhaps for the apparently happy couple of Michel and Lola, the other characters are left with unfulfilled longing, although in Lola, such is the enchantment of desire that just ‘to want happiness is already a little bit of happiness’ even if its object is unattainable.) Thus, the characters are not exact doubles, despite Demy’s own remarks in interviews that he strove to avoid flashbacks by using Cécile and Mme Desnoyers to represent Lola in her childhood and later years. Even a partisan of the ‘double take’, Jean-Pierre Berthomé, notes of the sing-songy dialogues that: ‘Mme Desnoyers sings a melody that is more controlled, less whimsical and acrobatic, than Lola’s - and it’s also classical music, Mozart and Weber, that Demy associates with her while Lola glides along to Legrand tunes’ (Berthomé 1996: 126). Moreover, Cécile is no more the young Lola than Frankie is Michel. Cécile’s brush with Frankie, the American sailor who reminds Lola of Michel, mimics Lola’s encounter with her true love Michel, dressed like an American sailor, at a fair when she was 14 years old. Yet we know that Michel is, in fact, a Frenchman dressed as an American (Lola specifically informs a curious Frankie that Michel is French) whereas Cécile’s love is really American. Cécile does not relive the exact same event as Lola, but what Gilles Deleuze calls a repetition, similar but different. Whereas movie flashbacks suggest that we are witnessing the same character at a different moment, contrary to his stated intentions of representing Lola’s different life stages through three contemporary characters, Demy’s technique presents us with differential repetitions. Likeness, not identity is, after all, the middle term in Roland’s play in the film on the English word like (‘like, likeness, likely’), stressing resemblance and desire rather than identity. Individual identities are themselves unstable and non-self-identical. The self is not what it appears to be, or rather it is only what it appears to be. Being is not the origin of appearance but only an appearance itself, which asserts itself as essential, and what appears to be the gap between being and appearance is merely the divergence between different aspects of a person over time and in changing contexts of self-presentation. Mme Desnoyers appears to be the perfect priggish and affected bourgeoise by upbringing, but a glimpsed photograph of her as a dancer suggests a different past. She quickly explains to Roland that she was merely wearing a ‘disguise’, but which of her radically different faces is the ‘disguise’? Michel, too, though French, is first seen in the film dressed like a Texan in a big American car, and when Lola meets him for the first time, he is ‘disguised’, she says, as an American sailor. As for Lola, she is Cécile by given name, but she laughs when Roland calls her by this name because it has

192

Matthew Lazen

become so foreign to her (until it is uttered at the end of the film by Michel). Lola is, in fact, her stage name, and we had just learned that Lola is not (is) Lola in the previous scene when she rehearses her dance routine, lip-syncing to a recording, ‘It’s me, it’s Lola’. As Lola imperfectly mouths the words to the recording, we recognize in the split between Lola’s voice and her body, the gap that is crossed between the performed identity and the performer who assumes it. Lola assumes a performative, and thus fluid identity instead of having an essential, fixed self. Like Michel Poiccard in À bout de souffle/Breathless (Godard, 1960) imitating Humphrey Bogart or Cléo in Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), the self in the new French society of the spectacle is image, modelled in the image of others, as image for others. Lola’s self and the text of the film are composed of repetitions in which any original retreats. Not only is the song she lip-syncs an endlessly repeatable mechanical reproduction but Lola’s entire performance is no more than a repetition. Although the film showcases voyeuristic spectacle, notably in the sequence where dancers and sailors exchange gazes of seduction and excitement while another dancer performs, in a sense the ‘real’ spectacle never appears. Rather, we see the dancers rehearse (répéter in French) and in fact, they are twice told to repeat their répétition. Moreover, Lola recalls the Lola Montès of Max Ophüls (Lola Montès/The Fall of Lola Montes, 1955), to whom the film is dedicated in the opening credits, and when she dances, in a top hat, she mimics the moves of Marlene Dietrich’s already redundantly-named character Lola Lola in Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930). Her dance is thus in several ways a répétition of a repetition which blurs the self-presence of the self. ‘Lola’ is merely a composite of vocal, corporeal, and textual repetitions and yet she is, for most of the film, ‘Lola’ and not ‘Cécile’ . As a subject, Lola, repeats; and the film text Lola, too, is an intertextual quiltwork of allusions and quotations rather than an entirely original text, even though Lola, Demy’s first film, serves as a point of origin for later Demy films. (For instance, Roland reappears in Les Parapluies, and Lola resurfaces in Model Shop (1969).) From the very beginning, Lola projects for itself a filmic genealogy. Not only does Lola recall Lola Montès and Marlene Dietrich’s character in The Blue Angel, but Mme Desnoyers, played by Elina Labourdette, shows a photo of herself in the role of a dancer in Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du bois de Boulogne/The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945), and Lola on the whole looks back to Hollywood musicals with American sailors. Demy was also intent on having Anouk Aimée play Lola coming off her role as Maddalena in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita/The Sweet Life (1960). Unlike some other new wave directors, who use unknown or even amateur actors stripped bare of accreted associations from other roles, Demy cultivates these intertextual connections to provide a ready-made history for his characters. On the other hand, in other ways, the new wave fully shared Demy’s love of filmic homage, the desire to create the new from the old ‘by playing with the hundreds of visions that every spectator of the time has accumulated since childhood’, which Antoine de Baecque refers to as a ‘return to origins’ (Baecque 1998: 131). Demy’s gestures of filmic homage undermine the possibility of secure

‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place’

193

origins but also signal their nostalgic pursuit, and Demy is, perhaps more than any other new wave director, nostalgic for an older tradition of cinematic finesse and spectacle whose techniques he perfects rather than rejects. Rather than unproblematically affirming origins, however, by establishing a genealogy for Lola, his first feature-length film and the source of characters in later films, Demy makes this ‘origin’ already a repetition. Every aspect of Demy’s work is permeated by a nostalgic pursuit of plenitude that is nonetheless shot through with absence, irony, and incompleteness. Having shot too much film for À bout de souffle, Godard simply amputates scenes rather than deleting them entirely. Demy, on the other hand, strives for continuity, manifest, for instance, in his wish to avoid flashbacks (so conspicuous in Lola Montès) that would break the flow of the narrative present. Even chance within this universe, the haphazard intersection of characters’ trajectories, appears as an anti-rational system not the postmodern sublime that is beyond conceptual ordering, but the deeper logic of the Freudian unconscious (in this case consciously controlled by the narrator). The same logic of plenitude motivates Demy’s use of the iris to open and close the film. Demy explains: That’s very infantile. I saw that done at the theatre, above all in silent films, and I didn’t know how it was done but I was fascinated by this little circle that encircles a face, isolates it, and causes the image to disappear. The dissolve is truly an image that is rubbed out, erased, whereas what I love in the iris is that the image remains underneath. It’s not totally gone. I don’t like to open or end a film on a dissolve, whereas here it’s as if the film existed before and continues to exist afterwards, it’s behind the circle. This helps to avoid breaks. (Berthomé 1996: 121)

It is hard not to see here, in this infantile desire, a longing to reconstruct the unity of the child with the ‘mother’. By having Roland Cassard reappear in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Lola in Model Shop Demy also constructs links between different films. As Demy explains: ‘it was my idea to have a total permanence in space and time, that the characters have lives of their own and one could rediscover them from one film to the next’ (Collet 1972: 130). Demy thus expresses an unrealized desire for a totality that seems to exist outside the manipulation of the film-maker: characters that reappear in multiple films as though not contained within their textual boundaries, like the pre-existing settings that the iris merely opens or closes on. Certainly, though, Demy does not construct whole fictional universes, as do Balzac or Faulkner; he creates links between certain films, and this shift from holistic universes to partial connections reveals as much the fading possibility of imagining holistic worlds as it does the desire for such unity. Indeed, at all times, Lola is haunted by absence. The film’s two main characters, Lola and Roland, are both transfixed in longing for the absent lover or the elsewhere where diffuse daydreams will be satisfied and ennui dispelled. One might also measure this absence

194

Matthew Lazen

against Demy’s ideal version of the film that he did not get to produce. As Demy explains: I wanted to make Lola in colour, but [...] for financial reasons, I couldn’t do it. I asked the producer for 250 million [francs], and he told me gallantly, ‘Here’s 45, get by with that!’ From that moment, instead of doing painting, I had to do charcoal drawing or design, work in black and white because these were the only two colours at my disposal. (Collet 1972: 127)

Likewise, Demy lacked the means to make the musical he desired. Thus, as Jean Collet concludes: Lola was [...] absence across the board: absence of colour, of dance, of the loved one [...] [Yet] thanks to one of those marvellous paradoxes of which Jacques Demy has the secret, the sum of these absences made for the richness and vitality of his work. (Collet 1972: 128)

Perhaps this tension between presence and absence is most interestingly represented in the film by the play of fort/da in Mme Desnoyer’s apartment, when Cécile skips out of view off a balcony in the background only to reappear unexpectedly to the left then the right sides of the apartment, which the balcony encircles. Lola ends with a satisfying sense of fulfilment, yet Demy even casts doubt on this fairy-tale sense of plenitude at the end. Certainly, if we consider Roland’s dejected departure rather than Lola’s abrupt, ecstatic reunion with Michel, the film does not really have an entirely happy ending. But the ending undermines this plenitude even more by creating a reflexive distance. When Michel returns to Lola and she throws herself into his arms, the camera shows us an ‘audience’, or chorus, of the other dancers sobbing at this melodramatic scene, as we, the film spectators, might also want to do. By representing an audience on screen, however, it brings the fictitiousness of the diegesis into view (‘It’s just a film, see, there’s the audience’), at the same time that it solicits identification with this surrogate audience, the dancers, which erases the separation between real spectators and them. Thus, the spectators at the preview screening did not know whether to treat the scene as melodrama or parody (a reaction that inspired Demy to begin the film with a pseudoChinese proverb as epigraph: ‘Pleure qui peut, rit qui veut’/’Cry if you can, laugh if you want’. Whether or not we identify with this on-screen audience, we are distanced from the film by the recognition provoked by them that this is only a film. Contrary to Demy’s desires to treat the diegetic world as though it exists outside the film, the film’s opening and ending iris further reinforces this self-reflexivity by simulating the opening and closing of a lens. The entire narrative is thus situated as a film in a film that fills the entire limits of the diegesis except for the epigraph and those bracketing moments where the lens is simulated through the iris. I doubt, however, that these reflexive moments sufficiently distance the typically unreflective viewer to dispel the sense of pleasure, satisfaction and plenitude that the film conveys so well elsewhere.

‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place’

195

The new wave’s attachment to place is ‘proto-regionalist’ in the way that the formalist utopianism of high modernists is ‘proto-political’ for Fredric Jameson. Certainly, Demy and his cohort show only a glimmer of political consciousness at this time regarding the regions, but a perhaps more interesting subtextual relation to place is inscribed in their form. In other words, their form speaks symptomatically, but they have not articulated a regionalist analysis or rhetoric. The new wave does, however, lay the grounds for the regionalist film-makers of the 1968 generation. Despite influences from the new wave, however, this later cinema never recaptures the dynamic tensions that permeate Lola, springing as it does from a liminal moment where French society was still ebulliently transforming itself but beginning to look back at what it was losing. With characteristic wit, Demy captures this tension in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, when the young sailor Maxence (who resembles Frankie and Michel) repeats several time that he is going ‘on leave in Nantes’ (in French ‘en perme à Nantes’) a pun on the word ‘permanent’. ‘Perme à Nantes’, however, is only temporary, and (to extend the pun in English) ‘leave’ emphasizes departure rather than return. There is no doubting Demy’s fixation on his home town of Nantes and surrogate port cities, but his is anything but a regressive nostalgia yearning for true permanence or stasis. Lola is always on the move, racing after its desires. In it, nostalgia is modernized, no identity is fixed, and the origin is tantalizing, but elusive and finally unlocatable. References Augé, M. (1995), Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. John Howe), London and New York: Verso. Baecque, A. de (1998), La Nouvelle vague: portrait d’une jeunesse, Paris: Flammarion. Barthes, R. (1978), A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard), New York: Hill & Wang. Berthomé, J.-P. (1996), Jacques Demy et les raciness du rêve, Nantes: L’Atalante. Collet, J. (1972), Le Cinéma en question: Rozier, Chabrol, Rivette, Truffaut, Demy, Rohmer, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Deleuze, G. (1968), Différence et répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ross, K. (1995), Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Suggested citation Lazen, M. (2004), ‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 187–196, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.187/0

Contributor details Matthew Lazen served three years as a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University and is currently a teaching fellow in film at Harvard. He has previously published articles on French regional culture in French Cultural Studies and the French journal Plurial. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Literature Program at Duke University. Contact: Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-3804 E-mail: [email protected]

196

Matthew Lazen

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.197/0

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain Michelle Scatton-Tessier University of North Carolina Abstract

Keywords

The happiness carefully constructed in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amélie (2001), finds its roots in the recent French phenomenon of a return to minuscule pleasures of daily life, le petisme. Petisme is first a reaction to and a concern about everything that is gigantic or growing in France, that is, globalization, crime, ordinary violence, unemployment, hypermarkets, and the loss of individual identity in the technological age. Petisme bears homage to the little things. It prioritizes the local, the immediate, that which can be quickly rectified, and implies a diversion from the larger issues. It centres on the familiar, resulting in a withdrawal into oneself. It involves an interest in the ‘fait divers’ or usually sordid, current local event. Jeunet’s film taps into this need for a diversion from a mistrust and growing malaise in a France facing the rise of globalization, increasing cultural diversity, a growing lack of confidence in governmental institutions, public security and an unstable economic climate. As this article demonstrates, Jeunet’s film remains well anchored in its socio-historical and cinematic period, exploiting the same issues of loneliness and isolation found in recent French new social cinema.

Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain Jean-Pierre Jeunet petisme faits divers French film

Enthusiasm in France surrounding Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amélie (2001) has focused primarily on the film’s ability to make its audiences feel good. Critical reviews have often drawn on the film’s potential to evoke a certain happiness present in everyday life. The happiness carefully constructed in Amélie sparks from the female protagonist’s active intervention in the lives of her co-workers, neighbours and family, just as much as it finds its roots in the minuscule pleasures of daily life, le petisme (Mermet 2003: 279). A relatively new French word (formed on the ‘petit’, or small), petisme refers to a reaction to the national concern about everything that is gigantic or growing, that is, globalization, crime, ordinary violence, unemployment and the loss of individual identity in the technological age. Petisme bears homage to the little things. It prioritizes the local, the immediate, that which can be quickly rectified, and implies a diversion from the larger issues. It centres on the familiar, resulting in a withdrawal into oneself (Biais et al. 2003: 53). Petisme implies an attraction for everyday scenarios, situations, obstacles and news. The happiness associated with Amélie develops from this recent phenomenon. I argue that this happiness functions as a diversion, a distraction or avoidance of reality. The viewers’ pleasure derives from the heroine’s mischievous antics and revenge; satisfaction arises from her rapid potential

SFC 4 (3) 197–207 © Intellect Ltd 2004

197

elimination of others’ misery and frustration. Souvenirs, games, disguises, imaginary friends and secret collections distract us from the background of deformation, malady and isolation haunting the film. Infantile actions become a valorized means of achieving immediate gratification. They provide a means of escape for the female protagonist (and for the viewer), allowing for a regression to a time before adult responsibilities and behaviours. This happiness is, however, inseparable from the angst and mistrust that foreground the film; it grows from the loneliness found in an increasingly individualistic French society in which 7.3 million persons live alone (Mermet 2003: 149). This emphasis of small pleasures and malaise reveals the extent to which Amélie is anchored in its socio-historical and cinematic period.

(Un)happiness Amélie first appears as light entertainment, especially when compared with other contemporary French films displaying a fascination with the sordid and banal existences of everyday life. In Carlos Pardo’s February 2000 article in Le Monde Diplomatique on the then recent French cinema, originally published anonymously in Libération in 1999, the journalist and film-maker criticizes a certain tendency among French directors who revel in ‘despair, decadence, impasse, powerlessness and murder’ (Pardo 2000: 28). Pardo’s task in this socially engaged article is twofold. He criticizes recent French film-makers who create cinematic scenes which become true advertisements for their films. These scenes and expressions facilitate the sale of the film and, at times, supply a shock-value effect composed mostly of graphic violence and sex. This mixing of genres, of publicity and product, results in a solipsistic self-referentiality: ‘We sometimes ask ourselves if certain scenes have not been made uniquely for the preview’ (Pardo 2000: 28). Pardo’s article illustrates through comparison the ways in which films of the mid-to-late 1990s by Breillat, Dumont, Grandrieux, Kassovitz, Noé, Ozon and Zonca ‘darken into a sordid naturalism and stay fascinated with decline, hopelessness and defeatism [...]. Fundamentally, their fascination with the abject and sordid reveals an undeniable hate of the people’ (Pardo 2000: 28). In fact, it is not so much the content of recent films by these directors that is at issue, but rather the ways of filming and valorizing gore, repulsiveness and the lurid in a realistic cinematographic style. Though the films mentioned explore diverse subject matters and approaches, just as they demonstrate different styles of film-making, they are all marked by a realist aesthetic accompanied by ‘a very ambiguous social and political discourse’ (Pardo 2000: 28). They are part of a French cinema of the 1990s which has been described as social renewal by film critic Franck Garbarz and new poetic realism by Martine Beugnet (Beugnet 2000; Garbarz 1997). For Phil Powrie, this renewed interest in the social and the political is a new social cinema developing from a ‘postmodern attraction to representations of the ordinary, establishing ties with the social cinema of the 1930s and the realist cinema of the 1970s; the aura of spectacle has become the ordinary of the everyday’ (Powrie 2002: 81). This sordid naturalism, which Pardo sees in La Vie de Jésus/The Life of Jesus (Dumont,

198

Michelle Scatton-Tessier

1997) and L’Humanité/Humanity (Dumont, 1999), Assassin(s) (Kassovitz, 1997), La Vie rêvée des anges/The Dreamlife of Angels (Zonca, 1998), Sombre (Grandrieux, 1998), Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone (Noé, 1998) and Les Amants criminels/Criminal Lovers (Ozon, 1999), among others, show how film-makers are exploring a malaise in contemporary France, a malaise stemming from an unstable economy, rising rates of delinquency and crime, and a shift away from traditional values of family and religion. It is a microscopic examination of misery, awkwardness and identity crisis, a fascination in each other’s base behaviour and bad luck; it comes from film-makers who no longer curse or fight against the society in which they live, but who (may) loathe their condition as human and living beings (Caviglioli 2003: 45). Superficially, the fictional day-to-day in Amélie is far from the brutality of Ozon’s Les Amants criminels and Noé’s Seul contre tous, the rape and murder of a young girl in Dumont’s L’Humanité, and the boredom and violence of adolescence of his La Vie de Jésus or of Kassovitz’s Assassin(s). At first sight it seems impossible to compare the lives of Jeunet’s protagonists with the desperation portrayed in Rosetta (Dardenne, 1999) and with Isa’s and Marie’s destiny in Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges. Jeunet’s neighbourhood recalls few concerns of public insecurity or the questionable behaviour of public institutions which attempt to preserve urban safety, so clearly exposed in Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995). The disillusioned decors of Rosetta or La Promesse (Dardenne, 1996) of dirt, empty petrol tanks and sans-papiers appear initially to have little in common with Amélie. Undeniably, Jeunet’s Montmartre is a neighbourhood without socioeconomic hardship, without crime, without the racial or religious issues of contemporary France. In his world, the homeless do not even beg on Sundays. But just below the surface lies a plot preoccupied with angst, isolation, loss, sickness and death and a myriad of dysfunctional and lonely neighbours including a recluse, an alcoholic and a hypochondriac. What differentiates Amélie from other films mentioned above is that Jeunet weaves the human condition into a (false) sentimentalist story of a heroine out to provoke happiness, out to fix things. Like a new product, marketed for a needy public, Jeunet tells us, ‘Amélie will change your [desperate?] life.’ It is quite fitting that an interview with Jeunet should be entitled ‘Magnificent Obsession’ [sic] because most of the film’s characters are just that, obsessed (Pride 2001). They have developed neurotic pastimes and elaborate collections. Some have hobbies that structure their lives. Others relieve stress through repetitive gestures. Pleasure in Amélie comes from childhood habits and everyday adult tasks, mostly through the obsessive (re)ordering of objects, arrangement of things and fantasy. Comical biographies, focusing on the small solitary pastimes, show ways in which characters find pleasure and displeasure from everyday occurrences. Larger social concerns do not exist. While Amélie’s father likes to remove wallpaper, shine his shoes, meticulously vacuum and organize his toolbox, her mother obsessively cleans and repacks her handbag. She enjoys waxing the hardwood floors with her special slippers, and watching iceskating competitions on television. As a child, Amélie invents imaginary

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

199

friends, enjoys sliding her hands in sacks of grain, breaking through the caramelized surface of a crème brûlée and skimming pebbles on the canal, immediate pleasures experienced alone. As an adult, she likes watching others at the movies, being with others, yet without any direct social interaction. Happiness is either an affair of individuals and things, or it is constructed through play. In this world, as the rest of the film demonstrates, we are alone together. A sense of control and security comes from an obsessive mastering of ordinary situations: Amélie’s father scrutinizes her health by performing a thorough monthly medical examination and her mother schools her at home. Just as likes stem from activities performed alone, so dislikes entail chance events and the presence of others. Here, it is the question of urinating next to another, comments on sandals, swimming trunks which stick embarrassingly to the skin at the public pool, a stranger’s touch, and the irritating traces of unwanted contact with things, such as hands shrivelled by bath water and pillow marks left on the face after a night’s sleep. In Amélie’s family, contact with others either induces stress, embarrassment or disappointment, even a suicidal pet goldfish. In Jeunet’s Paris, people are alienated in their domestic space. They spend time in front of their televisions, find pleasure in dark movie theatres, peep shows and fun houses where people participate or watch alone in the dark. Individuals communicate through machines and mechanisms such as cassette players, telephones, cameras and video recorders. Joseph and Nino use Dictaphones to trace human expression. Garden gnomes facilitate the expression of thoughts and emotions. Letters and flyers fuel seduction. Protagonists converse through visual media. Some obsess over fixed images of others, yet have few relationships. Most interact merely through the exchange of things, usually lost objects that imitate the human form or return the gaze. Paradoxically however, the characters’ lack of healthy interpersonal communication skills creates a homogeneous community. As in numerous French films of the late 1990s, there are neither nuclear families, nor stable couples in Amélie. The plot often builds on couples breaking up, reuniting or individuals mourning a lost partner. In fact, family holds no central role in any of the films mentioned. In many cases, such as in Amélie, La Vie de Jésus, L’Humanité, Romance (Breillat, 1999), La Vie rêvée des anges, friendship replaces family. In Rosetta, La Vie rêvée des anges and Amélie in particular, female protagonists come from single-parent or dysfunctional households, where roles are reversed within familial structures and daughters care for parents while trying to get by themselves. Are we then to believe Jeunet when he states this digitally ‘cleaned-up’ version of Paris’s tenth arrondissement and of some eighty of the city’s sites bring to fruition his first positive film (Pride 2001: 53)? It is difficult to agree with Jeunet’s claim that Amélie is a fully positive work when every element of his inhabitants’ daily lives from childhood to adulthood is tainted with loneliness and unhappiness. Even childhood memories evoke painful events. Amélie loses her mother at an early age. She endures a stress-inducing monthly physical from her father. Nino is bullied by his classmates; ‘whereas Amélie was deprived of contact with other children, Nino could have really managed without it’, says the voice-

200

Michelle Scatton-Tessier

over. The schoolmaster humiliates the young Bretodeau who has just lost all the marbles he won. Whether in flashback or present time, loss permeates the film. It involves treasured objects as well as mobility, intimacy and loved ones. It stems from the accidental and unpredictable side of life in an increasingly individualistic society. In Amélie, loss simultaneously alienates and brings people together; it gives birth to Amélie, ‘the do-gooder’.

Loss and loners Without Amélie’s transformation, Jeunet’s film would be just a slice of life in the lives of the lonely: the retired widow, the single girl, the hypochondriac, the ill-natured grocer, the invalid, the jealous ex-boyfriend, the frustrated writer, the shut-in and the alcoholic concierge. It highlights loners who have lost normal daily contact with others or who have suffered from such contact and have become, consequently, recluses. In this instance, Amélie is not unique: numerous recent films highlight protagonists who are marginalized and spend most of their time alone. Audrey Tautou also stars in Laurent Firode’s 2000 film Le Battement d’ailes du papillon/Happenstance, where, as is the case in Amélie, she is an active female protagonist on a quest; and like Amélie, the film deals with the need for social recognition, mischievous revenge, popular superstition, loneliness, illness and old age. Both films also exploit the consequences of individuals’ everyday choices that create a ripple effect of random actions. What differs in Amélie is that Jeunet has created a marginal character who has perfected a system of mediated communication, a resourceful coping plan. Amélie intervenes, yet without directly addressing a problem or a desire. She provides what is lost or escaping our knowledge. She fixes small problems. She cannot solve unemployment, but arranges for a man to see his grandson. She gives us a quick fix, repairs what (we did or did not know) was broken and is an immediate remedy to every man’s daily life. Amélie, the domestic good fairy, grows out of the daily loneliness that she attempts to efface. Amélie may function as the element of hope, an incarnation of Lady Diana and Mother Teresa on the local level, in the petit quartier; however, this hope can never be divorced from loss. Images of Amélie’s conception are coupled with a short scene of an elderly man erasing the name of his deceased best friend from his address book. The accidental death of Lady Diana inadvertently initiates the trajectory of our heroine. Loss characterizes all those mentioned thus far, whether it be death as in L’Humanité, La Vie rêvée des anges, Les Amants criminels and Sombre, loss of love in Romance and Sombre or even L’Humanité, lack of hope in Seul contre tous, La Vie rêvée des anges and Rosetta. In such films, film-makers dissect human behaviour, offering graphic, and at times, grotesque, depictions of individuals in precarious and sombre situations. These films are not, however, unique. They are part of a stream of realist 1990s French films similarly motored by loss such as Patrice Chéreau’s film of mourning and movement Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train/Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train (1997), Le Battement d’ailes du papillon and Marius et Jeannette (Guédiguian, 1997), where it is question of employment, or Cédric Klapisch’s Chacun cherche son chat/When the Cat’s Away (1996), in which

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

201

the entire plot revolves around the search for Chloé’s cat. Marginalized in one way or another, the protagonists of these films grapple with loneliness, as in Amélie. Loneliness, of course, is the central paradox in recent years in French society, as well as in most Western cultures. Never have the means of communicating rapidly and efficiently been so available to the masses and never have the risks of ‘excommunication’, through exclusion and marginalization, seemed so pervasive (Mermet 2003: 57). In a society experiencing economic instability, the possibility of becoming marginalized is even greater. A fascination for films based on the everyday lives of those on the fringes of society is another shared theme in recent French cinema. This voyeuristic curiosity for others’ day-to-day actions is best emphasized by reality television exposing real stories of real people in real situations, as witnessed in France with Loft Story, Pop Stars or Star Academy (Mermet 2003: 22). This permanent presence of ordinary people eliminating others for lack of particular skills, affiliations or alliances pinpoints a growing anxiety of adaptability, competitiveness and social elimination in an increasingly individualistic society. In a society that values physical and social mobility, we also witness a preoccupation with the fear of the loss of attributes. Sickness and death remain central to plots in Amélie, La Vie rêvée des anges, Rosetta, La Promesse, L’Humanité and La Vie de Jésus. For example, in Le Vie rêvée des anges, Isa visits the comatose Sandrine. In La Vie de Jésus, the main protagonist, Freddy, suffers from epilepsy while a secondary character, Michou’s brother, Cloclo, is immobilized and dies of AIDS. In both cases, a one-way communication is established; others speak (through words and gestures) to those hospitalized and remain unsure of being understood. In La Vie rêvée des anges, a car accident kills a mother and relegates the daughter to a coma, just as in L’Humanité a car crash causes the protagonist’s fiancée and child’s death. Jeunet also integrates this preoccupation with the loss or hindrance of mobility in numerous characters: a blind man, a boss who limps, a neighbour who suffers from a rare bone disease. Even Amélie supposedly suffers from a heart problem which forces her parents to forgo travel. Televised images such as a dancer with a wooden leg, a baby swimming, a horse and the cyclists of the Tour de France and a soccer game reinforce a preoccupation with movement. Physical mobility provides a means of escape and a certain level of autonomy, as seen in long sequences of people on foot or motorcycles in La Vie rêvée des anges, Pharaon’s exhausting bike ride in L’Humanité, Freddy and his friend’s long moped rides in La Vie de Jésus. Perhaps the clearest example highlighting mobility and bodily comfort in contemporary French cinema comes from Dominik Moll’s thriller Harry un ami qui vous veut du bien/A Friend Like Harry (2000) where an old car without air-conditioning provokes a murderous plot. In Amélie, movement and its contrary, stagnation, dominate. For the most part, obsessed characters or those unable to find the right medium for self-expression are sedentary, associated with one particular physical space, such as the Parisian barfly and unpublished author of the local café, the alcoholic concierge, the recluse or the retired widow. Whereas certain protagonists never go beyond the mere stereotypes which

202

Michelle Scatton-Tessier

places propagate, others escape compartmentalization by frequenting diverse areas in the city (Gina, Nino and Amélie) and, at the film’s end, those who travel about achieve emotional balance (Hipolito, Amélie, her father and Nino). The final sequence of Amélie and Nino, filmed at high speed, in which the two travel through the streets of Paris on his scooter, brings together the stereotype of romantic closure and the dynamic complex of emotional well-being and mobility. As certainties diminish, the body tends to take on an increasing importance. It is no longer maintained merely to attract or seduce, as we see in the highly-stylized films of the 1980s cinéma du look (Vincendeau 2001: 24). The cult of the body, which has its roots in the 1980s, has developed progressively into a perception of the body as a means to achieve immediate physical pleasure and personal balance (Mermet 2003: 69). The body is viewed both as a way to attract others and to achieve well-being. Those simple and immediate corporeal pleasures suggest a regression to an earlier stage of childhood, a turning away from adult responsibilities and uncertainty. The preoccupation with bodily functions and malfunction, suffering and mortality, is coupled with a growing interest in the bodies of others. Such voyeurism takes several forms in contemporary cinema, illustrating a fascination for the natural body and the ordinary. Graphic images of sexual intercourse remain a common element of those films that comprise a so-called cinema fascinated by the sordid. The extreme closeups of intercourse in La Vie de Jésus, Leos Carax’s Pola X (1998), Breillat’s Romance or even staged copulation in L’Humanité all recall an influence of the 1970s-pornographic style of ‘unglamourized’ (Powrie 2002: 82), crude images of sexual activity in which sex appears as a series of coldly robotic and repetitive motions. Likewise in Amélie sex appears also as a mechanized, but comical game. Objects move, lights flicker and cappuccino machines produce steam during Joseph and Georgette’s sex scene, in a scene which recalls Jeunet’s Delicatessen (1991). Sex organs and sexualized bodies become childish entertainment. Penises are plastic, wrapped in boxes and kept in view behind the counter. Young women leisurely serve coffee and dance in a back-room peep show. Orgasms are serialized. Amélie, who does not enjoy sex, satiates her sexual curiosity by imagining how many people are having orgasms at any given moment. In most of the above-mentioned films, protagonists are, somehow and to some extent, hindered from freely expressing their desires. In Seul contre tous, the daughter is autistic. In L’Humanité, the protagonist Pharaon speaks little and appears to be living in a state of perpetual shock. Maria in La Vie rêvée des anges, refusing to confide in Isa and becoming increasingly more isolated, jumps eventually to her death. In Romance, Marie is dyslexic. In Amélie, fathers do not speak to their daughters. Communication among protagonists occurs through a circuit of images, messages, riddles, and quotations. Even the waitress Gina’s interrogation of Nino to see if he is suitable for Amélie is mediated by French proverbs in which evidence of one’s shared cultural heritage provides proof of acceptability and character. Revenge comes not from verbal confrontation, but from the manipulation of objects or electricity. Things provoke emotion, memory and reveal affiliations. As Mireille Rosello states, we are in a

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

203

system obsessed with the incessant consumption of commodities (Rosello 2002: 4). Amélie presents the margins of a society where the gratuitous exchange or recycling of objects, and not consumption, holds an important role. It is primarily a film about recovery. The subplots of Bredoteau, Nino, Madeleine Water, the concierge and Amélie’s father build from the recovery of sacred objects, whereas those of Georgette, Amélie’s father and, to some extent, Amélie herself entail a restoration, however temporary, of healthy social activity. People do not create, but recreate, reconstruct and rearrange. They glean traces of the presence of others, those alive and those lost. Nino is a loner who collects photos of human footprints in concrete, tape-recorded samples of odd laughter and discarded identity photos. ‘The Glass Man’ pathologically repaints Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party. The need of others’ presence is, thus, fulfilled through human image; the gaze is returned through a medium. The obsessive collecting of photos and repainting of the Renoir allows the reconstructors to create fictive relationships. Thus, images of strangers replace the presence of family and friends. The exchange of money, video-cassettes, boxes, satchels and the manipulation of household items, garden gnomes and electricity relay disapproval and affection. Paintings, groceries and lottery tickets give pretence for relationships to develop. Everything local reassures in Amélie, replicating a nostalgic view of a more traditional French neighbourhood, a universally accepted, exported version of the capital. In this instance, Amélie may be perceived as a calculated reaction to films like La Vie rêvée des anges, L’Humanité, Rosetta, Les Amants criminels, among others, in which little if any clarification of the past is expressed and concrete future plans are relatively non-existent. Here, plots exploit the immediacy of the protagonist’s present situation. The past provides no solace. Extreme close-ups replicate a suffocating present or the immediacy of pleasure. Flashbacks are few. Beginnings start in mid-action; endings give little closure. At a time when extended families offering advice and support are rare, protagonists stagnate; some stumble blindly without definite future goals. Such would also be the case in Amélie, were it not for the presence of the crafty heroine. Amélie is first and foremost linked to the past. Her birth and biography are set out for the viewers so that we can better understand her present behaviours. Her retro-coif and garb identify her with the tailored silhouette of the likes of Chanel, yet with a modern touch (she wears Dr Marten-like shoes). Amélie reactivates memory for both Bredoteau and ‘the Glass Man’. She rewrites a love affair for the concierge. In fact, Amélie’s quest begins with the verification of past facts, forcing neighbours to prove the accuracy of personal memory and records. Amélie does not really transform people herself; she propels them backwards, providing a necessary distance for them to reconsider their existence so that closure and behaviour change may take place. It goes without saying that television and video have taken a central role in the lives of the French, although nowhere near to the extent we witness in the United States. In general terms, television discourages interaction among people, though it may provoke discussion, bring people

204

Michelle Scatton-Tessier

physically together or even give the illusion of ‘togetherness’. In La Vie rêvée des anges, L’Humanité, La Vie de Jésus and Amélie, protagonists sit alone, favouring the screen above discussion. In Jeunet’s film, television holds a key role in the recognition of individuals and communication for ‘the Glass Man’ and the heroine. In fact, Jeunet announces the protagonist’s rebirth as local do-gooder by incorporating imaginary television footage of Amélie’s national funeral, done in the style of televised magazine Étoiles et Toiles with presenter Frédéric Mitterrand. Amélie’s thoughts and daydreams, usually exposed in cinema through voice-over or dream sequences, are conveyed through televised images or fictional documentary-like sequences. Amélie’s projection into the lives of Lady Diana, Mother Teresa and the likes of Florence Nightingale reinforces the need for a recognition not found in the family unit or comparable social group. The genius in Jeunet’s film is his balance of the virtual and physical worlds. Protagonists seek traces of the human body through the manipulation of media (audio and video recordings, painting, photography, etc.). The personal use and appropriation of media devices become a means of selfexpression in a world of individuals who find it difficult to communicate.

Le fait divers The strongest thread linking Amélie to those films emphasizing a sordid naturalism is the exploitation of one of the most popular elements of the written press, the French fait divers, originating from fait (fact of action) and divers which not only indicates the diversity of the acts, but more importantly, the story’s ability to entertain the reader (divertir). The fait divers, or ‘current local event’, events such as an accident, disturbance, crime, suicide, disappearance, fire, regional flood, draws on and creates curiosity for others’ dismal situations and exploits an exaggerated interest in graphic accounts of sex, violence and crime in general. It often remains anchored in the local, and thus of little importance to the majority of readers, yet because it draws on universal sentiments, fears or curiosities, it allows for the reader (or viewer) to appropriate the interests of a localized group. Through curiosity alone, one comes to identify with a particular individual or group. Popular in its tone and accessibility, these stories link to the roman noir often based on such sordid local events. The boundary between a fait divers and an événement (an event) is, at times, difficult to grasp and relies on a much subjective interpretation; differing from a fait divers, an événement touches upon the political, economic, scientific or cultural nature of things. The inquiry into the rape and murder of a young girl that fuels the plot in L’Humanité or the murder of a young beur which ends La Vie de Jésus may fall under the heading of fait divers. Media coverage of suburban violence and the beating of a young beur by the police which provides the background in La Haine is another example, although here the media coverage of this localized incident attempts to turn it into a cultural event. In Romance, the protagonist’s blowing up of her apartment in which her husband is sleeping would constitute a fait divers, just as the heroine’s possible suicide at the end of Rosetta or that of Marie in La Vie rêvée des anges would be more local incidents than of national news. Scenarios developing

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

205

from faits divers, whether real, such as Les Amants criminels, or fictional, often build into detective stories or other quest narratives, leading to films, such as L’Humanité, fascinated with a microscopic view of our base behaviours and angst. Amélie is influenced by numerous real faits divers. A suicide from the top of the Notre Dame, a rare event, kills the heroine’s mother. A garden dwarf is gone, possibly liberated by the infamous Garden Gnome Liberation Front. The concierge, Madeleine’s husband, robs his employer and flees the country with his mistress. A supposed postal bag found near Mont Blanc years after the crash of a plane brings mail long past due. In addition, Amélie’s trajectory develops from, and as a reaction to, a cultural event, the death of Lady Diana in September 1997, which would have otherwise remained a fait divers had it not involved a woman very much in the public eye. The presence of fait divers in Amélie links perfectly to petisme in that these current events, presented in a comical fashion, entertain. By reducing loss and personal tragedy to a series of seemingly unrelated incidents, Jeunet shifts the viewers’ attention away from the incidents themselves. What we experience is a mere zapping. This zapping reduces the impact of each event by disconnecting the image from its original context. Flashes of aircraft and car crashes, a suicide, the death of an international figure, violence in schools, homelessness, begging in the metro, malaise in public spaces, and the presence of graffiti merely touch upon strong concerns of contemporary urban French society. This zapping reflects Jeunet’s approach to the construction of his film, in which actual footage was gleaned from the television series ‘Le zapping de Canal +’, providing a concentration of images shown on French television on a particular day. The director recuperates sequences and faits divers, just as protagonists salvage and exchange objects, and recreate with found images. It is not surprising that Jeunet’s film celebrating the petit quartier populaire should exploit the faits divers, since the history of Montmartre recalls an attraction for sordid stories in a close-knit popular community living on the margins of the French capital. The film draws on two veins: one which offers nostalgia and a polished unrealistic version of Parisian life, another which taps into a renewed interest in the social and a sordid voyeurism of the late 1990s. It draws on, yet does not wallow in, the same symptoms of a social malaise expressed in these recent naturalist films. Amélie combines an attraction to aestheticism and to ordinary people in common situations, creating a fabulous story of misery and glory in ordinary lives. It offers a close look at our vulnerability, albeit with a sentimental lens. Jeunet’s controlled mixture of nostalgia and caricature, zapping us through an everyday riddled with accidents and obstacles, creates a quick-fix remedy serving as a very ambiguous alternative to a reality increasingly marked by individualism. References Beugnet, M. (2000), ‘Le Souci de l’autre: réalisme poétique et critique dans le cinéma français contemporain’, Iris, 29, pp. 52-66.

206

Michelle Scatton-Tessier

Biais, J-M., Charbrun, L., Olivier, V., Stehli, J-S. and Vidalie, A. (2003), ‘Santé, travail, vie privée, environnement: comment vivre avec l’incertitude’, L’Express International, 5-12 February, pp. 52-57. Caviglioli, F. (2003), ‘L’Angleterre saisie par le gore: morbide Albion’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1997 (13 February), pp. 42-45. Garbarz, F. (1997), ‘Le Nouveau Social du cinéma français’, Positif, 442, pp. 74-75. Kaganski, S. (2001), ‘Amélie pas jolie’, Libération, 31 May. Mermet, G. (2003), Francoscopie 2003, Paris: Larousse. Pardo, C. (2000), ‘Crimes, pornographie et mépris du peuple: des films français fascinés par le sordide’, Le Monde Diplomatique, February, p. 28. Powrie, P. (2002), ‘Transtitial Woman: New Representations of Women in Contemporary French Cinema’, L’Esprit Créateur, 52: 3, pp. 81-91. Pride, R. (2001), ‘Magnificent Obsession’, Filmmaker, 10: 1, pp. 52-55. Rosello, M. (2002), ‘Auto-portraits glanés et plaisirs partagés: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse et Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain’, L’Esprit Créateur, 52: 3, pp. 3-16. Vincendeau, G. (2001), ‘Café Society’, Sight and Sound, 11: 8, pp. 22-25.

Suggested citation Scatton-Tessier, M. (2004), ‘Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 197–207, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.197/0

Contributor details Michelle Scatton-Tessier is Assistant Professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA, with a part-time appointment in Film Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in French Film and Literature from the University of Iowa, 2001. She writes primarily on representations of women’s appropriation of public and private space in French literature and film. Most recently, she has published on television programmes for women in 1960s France and on pedagogical tools for teaching French film courses relating to la condition des femmes. Contact: Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 601 South College Rd, Wilmington, NC 28403-5954, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Le Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

207

!! PRIZES ANNOUNCEMENT !! Studies in French Cinema is offering the second of its annual prizes for the best student essay on French Cinema: The SFC-Intellect Undergraduate Essay prize This prize is awarded for an original essay in English on any aspect of French or francophone cinema. The prize consists of £50 cash, and free admission to the Studies in French Cinema annual conference in the year following the award. The conditions are as follows: • The essay (written in English) must be 2500–4000 words long (notes and references included). • It must have been written by an undergraduate student registered at the time of submission at an institution of higher education in the United Kingdom or Ireland. •

It must be submitted in its original state, preferably without assessor comments. A photocopy is acceptable

.• The student’s name and institution should not appear anywhere on the essay. • A form must accompany the essay which will include the mark awarded and an attestation from the tutor verifying the mark, the originality of the essay, and the date of its first submission. For guidance, we suggest that essays receiving less than a mark of 75 per cent should not be submitted. Essays should be submitted to Professor Susan Hayward, Department of French, Queen’s Building, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QH, using the cover-sheet which can be found on the SFC website. They will be judged by a sub-committee formed from members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards of Studies in French Cinema. SUBMISSION DATE 1 JULY 2005

Studies in French Cinema: Student Essay Prizes Prize applied for (please delete): Name of applicant: Title of essay: Original submission date:

Postgraduate

Undergraduate Institution:

Length of essay (inc. notes/references):

Mark awarded:

ATTESTATION TO BE COMPLETED BY THE CANDIDATE: I confirm that this essay is submitted in its original unrevised form, and that it is all my own work. Signature: Date: ATTESTATION TO BE COMPLETED BY THE SUPERVISOR/TUTOR: I confirm that the information provided by the candidate above is correct. Name (please print): Signature: Date: Email Address:

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.209/0

Surviving the reign of the father: the family and the law in Georges Franju’s feature films Kate Ince University of Birmingham Keywords

Abstract This article examines the patriarchal family as an institution in Franju’s feature films. For his feature films Franju usually chose narratives that privilege the lawdriven, institutional character of the patriarchal family, and although his questioning of it is not as coruscating as his critiques of the Army and the Church in Hôtel des Invalides and La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret/The Sin of Father Mouret, there are still some suggestive overlaps between his depictions of these three institutions. The films examined here are five of Franju’s first six features, La Tête contre les murs/The Keepers/Head Against the Walls (1958), Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes without a Face (1959), Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962), Judex (1963), and Thomas l’Imposteur/Thomas the Imposter (1965). The conclusion of my discussion is that the patriarchal families shown in these films may not be open to thoroughgoing restructuring, but are certainly not shown to be particularly secure. The aspects of the patriarchal family in Franju’s cinema I discuss here are his female characters, their relationships with male characters, the structure of the family in his films, and the relationships of which the family is forged. To date there has been no sustained attempt by either francophone or anglophone film critics to address these areas, which, although predictable when viewed as part of the critical neglect that has dogged Franju’s work since 1970, is surprising from the standpoint of the wealth of writing in gender studies that has grown up over the same period. Four of Franju’s feature films dramatize particularly meaningfully the limitations and violences enacted by a patriarchal family structure: La Tête contre les murs/The Keepers, Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes without a Face, Thérèse Desqueyroux, and Judex. Before discussing those of Franju’s feature films in which the patriarchal family - and seemingly, therefore, a phallocentric symbolic order - is the central structure, I shall look briefly at Thomas l’Imposteur, which differs from this pattern. Cocteau’s novel and Franju’s film adaptation are in part a family drama, in which the family in question consists, at least to start with, just of a mother and her daughter, the Princess de Bormes and Henriette. This is no father-dominated family, since the Princess is an independent and eligible widow, but the plot of Thomas involves some very Oedipal dynamics. It is to the Princess that Thomas first poses as the nephew of General de Fontenoy, and by so doing

SFC 4 (3) 209–218 © Intellect Ltd 2004

209

family law patriarchy psychoanalysis character, relationships

he becomes first part of her band of war ‘helpers’ - the ambulance convoy that travels into German-occupied territory - and quickly a kind of adoptive son, giving incestuous overtones to the relationship that slowly develops between Thomas and the frail and delicate Henriette (one which echoes the brother-sister incest of Cocteau’s poetic novel Les Enfants terribles, written not long after Thomas l’Imposteur in 1929 and famously adapted for the cinema by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1949). A triangulation is set up around the character of Thomas that is not at all traditionally Oedipal, since mother and daughter are competing for the affections of the son. They do not do this openly, but after Thomas’s true identity is discovered and he is sent away to the Belgian front, both appear to miss him equally, and accept with alacrity the opportunity to visit him created by the Princess’s chief admirer Pesquel-Duport. A second, much more traditional Oedipal triangulation is set up around the character of the Princess, involving Thomas and Pesquel-Duport, who professes envy of her affection for the boy-soldier. Apparently quite content with her status as desirable widow, the Princess is particularly firm with Pesquel-Duport, whom she puts down with the characteristically formal and negatively formulated (and intoned) sentence, ‘Of all my admirers, you are the one I dislike the least.’ Despite the markedly Oedipal character of these relationship patterns, however, and the link made between Oedipality and narrative by both Freud and many psychoanalytic literary critics, feminist and nonfeminist, the final outcome of Thomas l’Imposteur is not propelled by them. Thomas meets his death on his way to pick up a message that he never discovers is a love letter from Henriette, and she sickens and dies two months later in a sanatorium, from ‘a non-fatal nervous illness’ explained by Cocteau to mean that she poisoned herself (one of the closing images of Franju’s film is her empty invalid’s bed). Thomas l’Imposteur is therefore left without its ‘children’, and with a couple of ‘parent’ figures who are not a true couple, a picture of non-fulfilment very typical of the negativity and indeterminate sexuality that figures in so many of Cocteau’s images and narratives, across all the media for which he wrote. So the family dynamics of Thomas l’Imposteur are, if not positive, much more open than those of La Tête contre les murs, Les Yeux sans visage, Thérèse Desqueyroux, and Judex, an openness that can be put down to Franju’s fidelity to the narrative of Cocteau’s novel. Interestingly, with all the other four films I am discussing here under the rubric of ‘the family’, Franju either altered the source story from which he was working, or (in the case of Thérèse Desqueyroux) took a different view of the fortunes of his female protagonist by refusing to endorse Mauriac’s sequel to his novel. Since La Tête contre les murs and Les Yeux sans visage are only loosely based on the novels from which they were drawn, it is telling that the ‘adaptation’ (from a film rather than a book in this instance) Franju altered the most with respect to the family is the one in which the law is most clearly associated with a masculine protagonist, in the figure and name of ‘Judex’, the judge or ‘law-giver’. Franju’s adaptation of Feuillade’s serial entirely omits the history that gives Judex his motivation for seeking revenge on the corrupt banker Favraux. Feuillade’s Judex is morally driven, since his Corsican mother has

210

Kate Ince

compelled both Judex and his brother to swear to avenge their father, who committed suicide after being ruined by Favraux, a revenge plot entirely missing from Franju’s film (in other respects a highly faithful re-creation of Feuillade’s story). Franju thus leaves out an entire Oedipally oriented history in order to render his film less ‘plotty’ and more visually poetic, and to give more mystery to Judex’s character. In so doing he completely omits the world of masculine competition over business and success, considerably softening the vision of cut-throat male rivalry that dominates both Feuillade’s Judex and his earlier Fantômas. (It is significant, however, that Favraux remains a killer of fathers, through his attempted murder of Kerjean, the old man who turns out to be the father of Diana Monti’s lover-assistant Moralès.) In Franju’s Judex, his chief character’s main motivation for kidnapping Favraux is to rescue Jacqueline, and in view of this shift in characterization (Judex becomes an ineffectual hero who eventually achieves his aim as much through accident as through design) and Franju’s partial transfer of narrative agency to Diana Monti, it is fair to say that he ‘feminizes’ Feuillade’s narrative to a considerable degree. The other way in which Judex attenuates and problematizes masculinity is not of Franju’s making, since it is a narrative element also found in Feuillade; this is the division of Judex’s character into the dark, handsome, dashing figure he cuts as Judex and his second identity as the grey-haired, doddering old butler Vallières. Franju’s comments on Judex’s behaviour show him to be aware of the moral ambiguity of the law that Judex represents; he pointed out that Judex’s protective and defensive quest to punish corruption and cruelty uses techniques hardly less villainous than those of his enemies; Judex is at least as much of a ‘salaud’ as Favraux (Fieschi and Labarthe 1963: 17), a sadist who kidnaps, imprisons and tortures his foe (Beylie and Schapira 1984: 8). But this ambiguity extends not only to oppositions between youth versus age and ‘spectacle’ (Judex’s magic tricks) versus secrecy (Vallières’s identity is only revealed late in the film), but to the very figure of the law itself, which is rendered unstable by being divided in two. It is difficult to state with conviction that the law figured by the character(s) of Judex is a paternal law of the kind that structures Lacan’s symbolic order, since neither Judex nor Vallières are actually fathers. The coincidence of the identity of law-giver with Judex’s name certainly supports the notion of a linguistically oriented masculinity, and both Feuillade’s and Franju’s films associate masculinity firmly with the law. But although both films end happily, this is because of a fortunate narrative outcome for the female protagonist Jacqueline and for the JudexJacqueline couple, not because of any modification to the uncertain identity of Judex. In Franju’s as in Feuillade’s Judex, the figure of the law is divided and unstable and the fortunes of the family uncertain, and there is little in either film to suggest the inevitable prevalence of a fixed, immutable, or transcendent Law of the Father. The same cannot be said of the family and institutional dynamics that structure the narrative of Franju’s first feature La Tête contre les murs, a bleak and unrelieved film noir. François Gérane suffers his fate of internment in a psychiatric asylum at the hands of no less than three institutions, the family, the law of the land, and the institution of medicine, and

Surviving the reign of the father...

211

the powers that these three structures wield over his life overlap in several ways. So it is because of petty crime committed against his father - the theft of some money and the burning of some official papers M. Gérane should not have brought home - that François is interned in the first place, according to a law that allows this to be done on the authority of a family doctor, a law of which François is unaware. M. Gérane requests that this be done based on knowledge gained in his career as a senior lawyer, and he does so in front of François, who rashly seems to consider that his father would not use the law against his own son, because it would damage his reputation. François’s relationship with his father is thus an entirely negative one, and as he commits his crime he is already an outlaw in his family, having gained access to his father’s turreted mansion by jumping over its wall and finding an unlocked door that does not require the key he presumably does not have. François’s residence in a rural asylum away from Paris brings him into contact with two further figures of male authority, the doctors Varmont (Pierre Brasseur) and Emery (Paul Meurisse), psychiatrists who espouse entirely contrasting views of how to treat the mentally ill. (Little actual treatment of patients apart from the dispensing of sedating injections is seen in La Tête contre les murs, but in some group scenes of the inmates’ behaviour and in the debate about psychiatric methods staged by the differences between Varmont and Emery, the film does have a strongly topical - for 1958 - and documentary component.) Although not a cruel man, Varmont holds the view that the first duty of psychiatry is not to help or cure the patient, but to protect the public, which makes him a staunch upholder of permanent internment, even in cases of such minor ‘delinquency’ as François’s. During his initial assessment of François, he shines a light in his eyes, questions him roughly and aggressively, and listens to only a few words of response before declaring him ‘unstable’, and suffering from ‘behavioural and character difficulties’. A little later, he sums up François’s problems as ‘a fine example of hatred of the father’, as if this were in itself a pathology. Emery, by contrast, is reputed for taking an interest in his patients’ personalities, and believes the vast majority of France’s 120,000 mental patients could be cured, given the right treatment. His methods involve encouraging them to take up creative activities (he proudly demonstrates indications of recovery in the symbols of life they have modelled in clay) and the proscription of punishment of any kind, such as is inflicted on François when he attempts escape for the second time (he is shot in the leg). In a head-to-head discussion between Varmont and Emery that takes place just after this, Emery asks to be allowed to take François on as a patient, but is refused by a Varmont displaying unmistakable signs of paternal possessiveness. When he repeats to Emery his belief that patients such as François must be locked away in order to protect society, Emery responds, ‘That’s what the police are for’: Varmont uses his power to intern François as if he were a police officer and a judge, as well as a doctor. Most chillingly, however, Varmont is a substitute authoritarian father for François, a role made clear in a scene where he slowly injects him with a barbiturate to put him to sleep, questioning him in the meantime about

212

Kate Ince

his relationship with his parents, and using an extremely condescending ‘we’ mode of address to refer to actions only his patient has carried out. The music that accompanies this scene (composed by Maurice Jarre like the rest of the music for La Tête contre les murs) is a simple nursery-style piano melody that otherwise only plays as François breaks into his father’s house. It clearly identifies Varmont’s ministerings to François as those of a father lulling his son to sleep, but in a most sinister manner. And the story it accompanies is even more sinister, since from François’ account of his mother’s death, which occurred when he was eight years old, it appears that his father might have murdered her. As François tells it, his father informed some acquaintances that his mother drowned in a pond in the grounds of their property, but told others (including his son, who was looking out through a window at the time) that she had committed suicide. François recounts that his mother used to scream when his father touched her and cry when he talked to her, behaviour that sounds like that of a woman who has suffered violence. And although François saw his father lead his mother back towards the pond where she met her death, his father claimed later that she had been alone. This suspicious if inconclusive narrative is investigated a little further in questions Varmont puts to M. Gérane on the one occasion he visits his son in the asylum, but the doctor is quickly reassured by Gérane’s corroboration of his wife’s suicide by drowning, and by learning that the matter was not considered questionable enough to merit a legal inquiry. Varmont declares himself happy that Gérane suffered no more than slander, and the exchange leaves an impression of a mutually reinforcing and self-satisfied world of male professionals concerned only to protect their own interests. Metaphorically speaking, then, La Tête contre les murs features three fathers, two of whom are ‘bad’ and one who is good (or better), but powerless to help François: in the psychiatric system in which Varmont and Emery work, neither of them can choose their patients. (Despite his sympathy and liberal views, Emery also fails to help François’s friend Heurtevent, who commits suicide after their failed escape attempt and repeatedly refused requests to be taken on as Emery’s patient.) The world of Franju’s film is a bleakly masculinist one, in which the law and society itself, through its institutional representatives, will not tolerate any derogation from its severely imposed rules. This equation of society with the law is made explicit by M. Gérane when he visits François in the asylum, and says that society is a game whose rules must be observed. François admits that he has never had much interest in doing so, to which his father replies that he would try the patience of a saint. But whatever François’s misdemeanours, his punishment is out of proportion, since the odds have been stacked against him from the start. M. Gérane is a severe and ungenerous parent, and also seemingly an outright misogynist, who accuses his late wife of violence, cruelty and bad faith, and objects even to François’s girlfriend Stéphanie visiting him. Apart from Stéphanie, whose implication in François’s fate is minimal, there are no female characters in La Tête contre les murs against whom his misogyny can be measured, but it lingers as a malevolent force in the film, reinforcing its film noir characteristics. More importantly for the film’s protagonist, paternity and the

Surviving the reign of the father...

213

family are associated with a restrictive and unloving law that expects more from its children than it ever gives, and punishes them for failing to comply. The narrative of La Tête contre les murs might well be described as illustrating a phallocentric symbolic order, then, and offers much to an analysis of masculinities. However, the most important challenges to phallocentric fictions are usually posed by female narrative agents, and this is as true of Franju’s cinema as it is generally. The rest of this article will therefore be devoted to readings of the two of his films that feature independent and rebellious female characters, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Les Yeux sans visage. What part do the patriarchal family and the paternal law play in these two films? Thérèse Desqueyroux is not an unambiguously feminist heroine, since as Thérèse tries for a final time to explain to her husband Bernard as she bids him farewell at a Paris café in Franju’s film, ‘there are two Thérèses’. The first is the bourgeois property-owning Thérèse who marries into the Desqueyroux family to assure the union of two pine forests, and genuinely belongs to her class and region of upbringing; the second is the independent, intellectual Thérèse who is stifled by life in the Landes region and marriage, and not suited to motherhood. At the end of both novel and film the second Thérèse gets her chance to live an independent life in Paris in the apartment Bernard pays for in order to maintain her health and hush up the scandal of her attempt to poison him, but her freedom is only acquired after a close encounter with the law, during the trial for her crime she undergoes. Her closest contact with the law as institution is in fact in the person of Bernard, a qualified lawyer, but this aspect of his identity hardly figures in Franju’s film, where it takes a definite second place to his obsession with property and propriety. The association of the law with masculinity in Thérèse Desqueyroux, and the encounter with it by a woman aspiring to freedom, is once again suggestive in relation to Lacan’s phallocentric symbolic order, but as in Judex, the law proves to have no real power or authority. The verdict at Thérèse’s trial is a ‘non-lieu’, a nonverdict that comes about because Bernard, fearful of the damaging effect gossip about Thérèse’s crime would have on his family and his reputation, declines to testify against her. Both the institution of the law itself and Bernard as its symbolic and actual representative (a lawyer and her husband) prove to be completely ineffectual: the ‘non-lieu’ that ends Thérèse’s trial figures an aporia of the law, a suspension of judgement that leaves Thérèse’s guilt and responsibility for her actions uncertain. And if Mauriac revealed his discomfort with this ending by returning to the character of Thérèse in his later novel La Fin de la nuit, Franju declined so to do, and stated publicly his preference for the spirited, independent Thérèse granted her freedom at the end of Thérèse Desqueyroux. The feminist reading offered by Les Yeux sans visage is more complex, perhaps unexpectedly complex compared to the pulp drama of the narrative, in which a high-ranking surgeon attempts to repair his daughter’s disfigured face by transplanting onto her the faces of young girls abducted to his remote suburban villa by his assistant. It is only one of multiple interpretations the film offers, many of which are intertextually linked to

214

Kate Ince

other stories and films. A recent approach sees it as an allegory of events in European history, either of Nazi imperialism (Dr Genessier’s blockhaussurgery as concentration-camp ‘sanitorium’) or of France’s Algerian war, underway at the time the film was made (here, Dr Genessier’s torturervictim relationship with his daughter Christiane becomes an analogue of the relationship of colonial to colonized power, including the actual torture of Algerian freedom fighters by the French military; see Hawkins 2000: 65-85). The way to these approaches may have been opened by reviews such as Bruno Gay-Lussac’s which suggested that Les Yeux sans visage was not a horror film but ‘a fabulous story of modern mythology’ (Gay-Lussac 1960). Such readings are not mutually exclusive and can all claim their share of validity: however, in view of the centrality of the character of Christiane Genessier to the film’s narrative, and her audacious act of revolt with which it closes, it is astonishing that no feminist reading focused on her entrapment and subsequent freedom has ever been attempted. The suppression or non-investigation of the film’s feminist potential is also suggested by a recent article on the film claiming that it is ‘without politics’, and declaring that viewers ‘should hesitate [...] to consider [Christiane] a reliable source of information about her father’, while maintaining that Louisa’s word ‘is at least as good as Christiane’s’ (Bowman 2002). This approach identifies with the parents of the ‘family romance’ against Christiane (according to Bowman, the only reliable testimony about Genessier’s character we have is that he loves his daughter). My reading will disagree categorically with Bowman’s both by insisting that the film can be read politically, and by making a feminist reading that identifies with Christiane’s point of view. At the end of Les Yeux sans visage, Christiane cuts free Paulette Mérodon (the police’s ‘plant’ in their investigation of Genessier) from the operating table, then with the same scalpel, the instrument of her father’s regime, stabs Louisa (Alida Valli), her father’s assistant and perhaps his lover, in the neck. Apparently uncomprehending and offended, Louisa croaks ‘Why do that?’ as her eyes fill with tears and she slides to the floor. Christiane then moves into the tunnel-shaped extension to her father’s secret operating theatre housing the dogs on which he practises his surgical experiments, and releases them from their cages one by one. As they bound outside to freedom, Genessier approaches from the villa’s grounds, and the dogs go for him, pulling at his arms, mauling him, and finally leaving him motionless on the ground with a bloody, ruined face. It is important that although Christiane brings about and may be said to be responsible for her father’s death, she is not the agent of his destruction or of the termination of his unethical surgical procedures: this is effected by his animal ‘slaves’ in their revolution against Genessier’s tyranny. Christiane’s act can be read in similarly political terms: it is too late for humanity to be restored to her in the shape of a viewable face (Genessier’s transplant surgery has failed), but not too late to arrest the repeated violence being done to other young women abducted to her father’s villa, in the appalling traffic in human faces set up by his illicit operations. Christiane acts for other women, not just for herself.

Surviving the reign of the father...

215

Elizabeth Cowie notes in her ethical reading of the film that Christiane’s action in choosing to free Paulette and other, future victims ‘is figured by Franju’s closing images as also her freedom for herself ’: Christiane’s ethical choice is ‘not only - and perhaps not even primarily her action to prevent another girl’s defacement’, because it is also a choice to accept her self as mutilated, ‘to turn away from the fascination with the beautiful constituted for her by her father’s desire’ (Cowie 2002). My reading differs from Cowie’s Lacanian one in the greater emphasis I am placing on otherness (selflessness) in feminine desire: I agree that Christiane acts in part for herself, but I consider her act to be ethically feminist (rather than just feminine) because its primary aim is to prevent the defacement of other (future) women. Christiane’s act can also said to be feminist because it counters the results of her father’s will to power (her disfigurement is the result of a road accident caused by her father’s ‘need to dominate’), and it is clear from the way Franju choreographs and films the dogs’ revenge on Genessier - the first dog to attack him paws repeatedly at his crotch - that his inhumanity is ‘phallocentric’. In my view, the resonance and significance of Christiane’s revolt is best understood in relation to the Frankenstein myth it resembles (many commentators have noted this), and can only fully be appreciated when gender (which plays a significant part in the Frankenstein story) is taken into account. The links of Les Yeux sans visage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its many cinematic transformations lie not in Genessier’s status as the stereotypical ‘mad scientist’ of horror films, an identity assumed even by critics as subtle and wide-ranging as Durgnat, who argues that Genessier is a guilty and desperate criminal, but also quite sane and genuinely concerned for his daughter (Durgnat 1967); they should be located, rather, in Christiane’s status as monster or Genessier’s ‘creature’, and in the iconography of the figure of Louisa. Louisa too has suffered disfigurement of some kind, and been ‘repaired’ by Genessier. She is loyal to him because he has saved her ‘face’, and kind to Christiane as a fellow-victim of injury to appearance; it is because she understands only loyalty and not its wider implications that she cannot comprehend Christiane’s revolt. To disguise her surgical scars Louisa wears a choker made up of several rows of pearls, a visual marker that identifies her with the figure of the bride of Frankenstein, the separation of whose head from her body is one of her primary characteristics (see Ince 2000: 82-89). If Louisa is Frankenstein’s bride, then Genessier is in a sense also Frankenstein: just as the name circulates between the scientist Victor Frankenstein and his creature in Shelley’s novel, monstrous characteristics circulate in Franju’s story. Christiane stabs Louisa in the neck, between the strands of pearls in her choker, a direct assault on her identity as a bride of Frankenstein, and thus her complicity with Genessier’s regime. Louisa’s key role in the narrative of Les Yeux sans visage supports a reading of patriarchy often made by feminist critics and implicit in Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order, namely, that phallocentric power makes itself felt as violence or loss in all social relationships, including relationships between women. Louisa appears to be and indeed is a kind of substitute mother to Christiane (whose real mother we are never told anything

216

Kate Ince

about), but all her kindness to Christiane amounts to is repeated coaxing to wear the mask that makes her appearance socially acceptable, in other words to collude with Genessier’s patriarchal regime. Vital too is that the abductions of young women that supply Genessier with his surgical victims are carried out by Louisa, who is thereby identified as a pure collaborator with patriarchy’s crimes. Her final abduction of Paulette Mérodon takes place only after Paulette has been officially discharged from the patriarchal space of medical investigation (it is achieved by Louisa offering her a lift from outside the hospital to the bus stop from which she would return to Paris). Through the person of Louisa, Genessier’s criminal activities are entirely mediated by women, hidden from public view and official record, the visible world of patriarchy. And Louisa’s feminine gender is an element added by the film’s scriptwriters, Franju, BoileauNarcejac, Claude Sautet and Jean Redon: in Redon’s novel Celle qui n’était plus on which Les Yeux sans visage is based, the surgeon’s assistant is a man, and the surgeon himself is an alcoholic and rather deranged, much more a character of pulp fiction than the sober and chilling Genessier (Chevrie 1986: 46). Les Yeux sans visage’s revolutionary family romance is at least in part Franju’s invention. The very prominence of the heterosexual family in Franju’s features indicates a heightened sensitivity to human sexuality and gender. As my readings of Judex, La Tête contre les murs, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Les Yeux sans visage have shown, the patriarchal family of these films from the nouvelle vague moment may not be open to the thoroughgoing restructuring suggested by more recent French cinema (see Ince 2002), but it is certainly not shown to be particularly secure. Franju’s questioning of the patriarchal family implies a protest against society’s victimizing institutions, and suggests an equality in male-female relationships that is a rarity in French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, although entirely consistent with Franju’s personal views on social inequalities. To call his vision of sexual subjectivities and relations ‘feminist’ would probably be overstating the case, and rather anachronistic in view of the emerging second-wave feminism in 1960s France. But his films do convey a distinct vision of a gendered society, a symbolic sexual existence that can only be explained by a symbolic order more symmetrical than the Lacanian one, a non-phallocentric order that relations with the other sex/gender help to found. References Beylie, C. and Schapira, C. (1984), ‘Méliès, Franju, via Feuillade: entretien avec Georges Franju, L’Avant-Scène cinema, 325: 6, pp. 2-11. Bowman, C. (2002), ‘A film without politics: Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage’, http://www.kinoeye.org/02/13/bowman13.php. Accessed 20 February 2004. Chevrie, M. (1986), ‘Les figures de la peur’ (interview), Cahiers du Cinéma, 389, pp. 45-47. Cowie, E. (2002), ‘Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage’, http://www.kinoeye.org/02/13/cowie13.php. Accessed 20 February 2004. Durgnat, R. (1967), Franju, London: Studio Vista. Fieschi, J.-A. and Labarthe, A.S. (1963), ‘Nouvel entretien avec Georges Franju’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 149, pp. 1-17. Gay-Lussac, B. (1960), Review of Les Yeux sans visage, L’Express, 10 March (no

Surviving the reign of the father...

217

pagination available). Hawkins, J. (2000), Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ince, K. (2000), Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg. —- (2002), ‘Queering the family: fantasy and the performance of sexuality and gay relations in French cinema 1995-2000’, Studies in French Cinema, 2: 2, pp. 90-97.

Suggested citation Ince, K. (2004), Surviving the reign of the father: the family and the law in Georges Franju’s feature films’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 209–218, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.209/0

Contributor details Kate Ince is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has co-edited books on women’s erotic writing, Samuel Beckett, and Marguerite Duras, and written a study of the performance artist Orlan. Her book on Georges Franju will be published by Manchester University Press early in 2005, and she is now working on a paper and a chapter on the film-makers Catherine Breillat and François Ozon. Contact: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham. E-mail: [email protected]

FREE ONLINE ACCESS TO INTELLECT JOURNALS From 2004, access to the electronic version of our journals is available free of charge through www.extenza-eps.com for institutions that subscribe to the printed version. An institutional subscriber will need to supply the IP address of the computer network. Once enabled, access is permitted to any user from the designated IP address range, so there is no password to remember. There is no limit to the number of electronic users at the institution. Full texts of articles in PDF format are provided. You can search the full text or specific features – such as title, author, keyword, Boolean and nested searches. A set of metadata for each article is also included in the CrossRef system as well as SwetsWise, EBSCOhost and OCLCFirstSearch. Users without affiliation to a subscribing library may gain electronic access to any of the Intellect articles available online by paying for them individually.

218

Kate Ince

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.219/0

The book as motif in One Plus One Kevin J. Hayes University of Central Oklahoma Abstract

Keywords

‘The Heart of Occident’, the central sequence in One Plus One, Jean-Luc Godard’s playful yet politically-charged depiction of the Rolling Stones, shows several different transactions that occur within a paperback exchange. Though set in an actual shop, Godard depicts what these transactions ultimately mean in terms of ideology. With the producer of the film playing the part of the bookshop’s proprietor, this sequence functions as an analogy for the film as a whole. The corruption of the capitalist marketplace presents a parallel to the corruption of commercial film-making.

books Godard graffiti magazines One Plus One pornography Rolling Stones

One Plus One (Godard, 1968) attracted many liberal, college-age audiences in the United States of America at the time of its initial release. During its Boston-area premiere, for example, every showing of the film in Harvard Yard sold out, and in other college towns it played ‘to the acclaim of the student population’ (Fager 1970: 704; Loercher 1970: 6). Since then, however, One Plus One has attracted few enthusiasts. Wim Wenders named the film among his guilty pleasures, but most people who have anything to say about it now generally express disdain. Save for the sequences depicting the Rolling Stones rehearsing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, which has since achieved status as a rock classic, One Plus One does seem a little dated. One recent commentator has called it ‘a succession of unconnected, pretentious, often crass scenes’ (French 1998: 10). This judgement may be overharsh. Viewed in terms of its depiction of the relationship between the written word, print culture, popular music, and the cinema, One Plus One marks an important development in Godard’s understanding of the processes of production, publication, and consumption. One Plus One continues the trajectory of Godard’s Cinétracts (1968) and Le Gai savoir (1968), for it, too, calls into question the validity of print for expressing truth (Hayes 2000a: 28-31). Unlike them, however, One Plus One separates manuscript culture from print culture. Whereas the book covers and handwritten messages in the Cinétracts and Le Gai savoir often appear within the same frame, their texts juxtaposed at right angles, One Plus One keeps the two distinct. Contained within the covers of commercially published books and magazines, written texts, the film implies, have lost their relevance. The only printed texts in One Plus One that seem to retain a capacity for meaningful expression are those that appear during the initial Black Power sequence, ‘Outside Black Novel’: LeRoi Jones’s Blues People and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. These two printed works take on importance, however, only as they are read aloud among the black mili-

SFC 4 (3) 219–228 © Intellect Ltd 2004

219

tants, and even these books disappear from the second Black Power sequence, ‘Inside Black Syntax’. As print culture disappears in ‘Inside Black Syntax’, graffiti serves as the only surviving form of written expression. The wrecked cars that litter the Battersea scrap-heap where both sequences were filmed - symbols of the degeneracy of Western capitalism - have been spray-painted with the names of several leaders of the Black Power movement for the second sequence. Taken together, the two Black Power sequences convey the importance of setting aside printed works, even when they are written by and about black militants, in favour of a more heartfelt, grassroots form of verbal expression unmediated by a commercial press. For the most part, the only relevant, meaningful written texts in One Plus One come in the form of graffiti. The graffiti throughout the film indicates the importance Godard attached to manuscript culture as a means of public expression. The film’s title comes from a slogan that students spray-painted in public places throughout Paris in May 1968. While the film is structured around a Rolling Stones studio session during which the band rehearses and records ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the Stones sequences alternate with separate sequences, many of which are intercut with shots of an androgynous Anne Wiazemsky spray-painting graffiti in public places around London. The first occurs intercut within the initial Rolling Stones sequence and shows her painting graffiti on her hotel-room window: S HILTON A LIN Her message associates worldwide American commercial enterprise with Soviet political power and, in so doing, introduces a theme that recurs throughout the film. Other graffiti she spray-paints reinforce the value of Maoism for aesthetic expression: MAO R T As Wiazemsky initially appears spray-painting her hotel-room windows, a male voice (Sean Lynch) speaks for the first time and introduces himself as a refugee from Bolivia who is hiding out in a London toilet to elude the police. To kill time, he tells us, he picks up a Western political novel - a ‘Catch-22-type novel’ one contemporary viewer called it (Fager 1970: 704) - and begins reading its pages at random. A reviewer who characterized One Plus One as ‘a wryly sophisticated film’, explained: ‘Woven into the sound track there are readings from a ridiculous pulp-fiction book that combines the clichés of pornography and James Bond slave-girl stuff with the star names of politics and public life’ (Gilliat 1970: 105). These voice-

220

Kevin J. Hayes

over readings recur frequently throughout One Plus One, though they most often sound as Wiazemsky goes about her graffiti-making tasks. The Western political novel’s characters include Leonid Brezhnev, who makes passionate love to John Birch’s daughter; Walt Disney, who holds a general’s rank and has a run-in with Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense whose name Godard had used earlier for a murder-loving character in Made in USA (Godard, 1966); Foster Dulles, who becomes friendly with Princess Beatrix after ordering her a Molotov cocktail; Princess Grace, who has gained a reputation as a sharpshooter; Aleksey Kosygin, who admires a hippie girl with the power to neutralize laser pistols by setting up a force-screen; Gamal Nasser, whose daughter asks the daughters of Aleksey Kosygin and Andrey Gromyko to be bridesmaids at her wedding; Richard Nixon, who maims Che Guevarra and then regrets not having his spaceforce admiral’s uniform to escape from the Politburo more easily; Peter O’Toole, who is associated with Franco; Pope Paul, who seduces the wife of the Venezuelan ambassador; Nelson Rockefeller, who, as a captain, does battle with Castro the Rebel; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who listens to the sweet nothings Barbarella whispers in his ear; and Frank Sinatra, who has successfully completed his first mission for the Soviets. The various excerpts from this so-called political novel follow a similar pattern. In most instances, the Bolivian refugee announces the number of the page he is reading; the non-sequential page numbers verify the random nature of his reading. After announcing the page number, he then reads a passage describing one of many fantastic exploits involving numerous prominent twentieth-century figures - political leaders of East and West, film stars and film characters, communists and capitalists, dictators and revolutionaries. These prominent political figures engage in a variety of behaviours, though most involve either lewd conduct or international espionage, terrorism, and intrigue. In other words, the Western political novel combines politics and pornography. In addition, it conflates several other discursive genres associated with cheap print: detective fiction, mystery, romance, and science fiction. Many of the passages from this so-called political novel link the United States with the Soviet Union, an association some may find difficult to comprehend nowadays, yet one which was not uncommonly held by European Maoists at the time. After the split between the Soviet Union and China in the early 1960s, the Soviets adopted a policy of peaceful coexistence with the United States. The Chinese renounced this policy, which they found contradictory to fundamental Communist ideology and tantamount to a new form of social and economic imperialism. Following the Chinese, the European Maoists, Godard among them, condemned the American-Soviet policy. One Plus One and the revolutionary films Godard would make during the ensuing years reflect Maoist disdain for what appeared to be collusion between the two superpowers (McCabe 1980: 55). The orally-related political novel has a visual equivalent in One Plus One, for one particular sequence, ‘The Heart of Occident’, is set in a bookshop containing magazines and books reiterating themes the narrator

The book as motif in One Plus One

221

conveys as he reads his Western political novel and providing visual equivalents for the various discursive genres the narrator’s readings embody. Not all have appreciated the value of this particular sequence, however. One reviewer disliked its ‘polemical brashness’ (Loercher 1970: 6). Yet the sequence is crucial for understanding Godard’s attitude toward the commercial publishing industry and, by extension, the music and film industries. Shifting from the recording studio to the bookshop, the film switches from a site of production to a site of consumption. The setting recalls the bookshop that served as a setting for Une femme est une femme (Godard, 1961), which had displayed numerous books and magazines with clearly legible titles (Hayes 2000b: 66-68). The similarity between the two settings emphasizes their differences, however. In Une femme est une femme, Godard stressed the personal interaction that occurs within the bookshop, yet in ‘The Heart of Occident’, he indicates the economic and ideological transactions that occur. While previous commentators have generally characterized ‘The Heart of Occident’ sequence as the pornographic bookshop sequence, this characterization is somewhat misleading because, among the numerous magazines and books depicted, only a fraction of the magazines are explicitly pornographic. To be precise, the place is a paperback exchange, and the sequence was filmed within an actual book exchange, for several of the magazine covers are legibly stamped: EXCHANGEABLE AT HALF-PRICE PLUS BOOKS The actual paperback exchange where the sequence was filmed provided a ready-made setting, which, like the ready-made urban settings in Alphaville (Godard, 1965), let its director imbue an existing location with its ultimate significance. As the sequence develops, the commercial exchange the retail shop represents becomes the site of an ideological exchange where customers must pledge allegiance to the fascist cause in order to complete their transactions. Though setting the sequence in an actual book exchange, by no means did Godard film the place as he found it, for the books and magazines that appear displayed on its shelves have been carefully chosen and arranged. One particular title, Joseph Kessel’s Belle de jour, makes Godard’s hand in the arrangement obvious. The book appears somewhat incongruous in a paperback exchange. For one thing, it is a hardback. Furthermore, Kessel’s work, unlike most of the other books on display, was not a popular, contemporary novel. It had initially appeared forty years earlier and had since earned a reputation as a minor classic of French modernism. While Kessel’s novel, which tells the story of a married woman who turns to prostitution, shares an affinity with the assorted pornography in the shop, Kessel’s writing demands more respect. The copy of Belle de jour inside the paperback exchange makes a specific private reference. The novel had been adapted as Belle de jour (Buñuel, 1967) the year before, and starred Catherine Deneuve in the title role. At

222

Kevin J. Hayes

one point in the film, a character holds a copy of the New York Herald Tribune while walking down a boulevard and exclaims, ‘New York Herald Tribune, New York Herald Tribune’ in the manner of Patricia Francini (Jean Seberg) in À bout de souffle/Breathless (Godard, 1960). Buñuel’s playful allusion thus pays homage to Godard (Hayes 2001: 184). Including a copy of Kessel’s novel in One Plus One, Godard, in turn, pays tribute to Buñuel. While he obviously could not resist the temptation to include this reference to Buñuel, in so doing Godard did endanger the overall message of the sequence. Endowing one book with personal and aesthetic value, Godard ran the risk of undermining his point that Western print culture no longer held value for expressing pertinent ideas. The other books inside the paperback exchange, many with clearly legible titles, provide a good indication of what the cheap press offered consumers during the mid to late 1960s. Since the books seem designed to present a collective impression, it is unnecessary to mention every legible cover title, but a selected list provides a good sampling: Jean Arnoldi’s Fausto’s Keyhole, a story of a Roman hairdresser who is prey to the whims of his perverse father and his sadomasochistic fiancée, yet whose world is changed by a Daisy Miller-type American girl; Joseph Burstein’s The Sexually Maladjusted Female; Ronald Kirkbride’s Tamiko, a novel of exotic love set in Japan; Rachel Lindsay’s The Taming of Laura, a Harlequin romance; Robin Maugham’s The Rough and the Smooth, a story of a conniving teenage girl who ensnares a credulous attorney; No Adam in Eden, a sentimental, romantic saga rife with corruption, sexual violence, and twodimensional characters written by Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place, one of the most popular novels of all time; Sam Ross’s The Tight Corner, a fast-paced mystery story set in the Mississippi Delta; Singapore Kate, by Digby George Gerahty, whose novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Standish and set in exotic locales, included one adapted as Elephant Walk (Dieterle, 1954); Thomas Henry Tracy’s lurid collections of trials, The Seventh Commandment; Thirteen Cases of Divorce and Adultery; and various other mystery novels by Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Micky Spillane. The world according to such pulp fiction is one filled with betrayal, corruption, cruelty, greed, hate, intrigue, lust, murder, perversity, revenge, and selfishness. The books have little artistic or intellectual content. By and large they are works written and published for the mass market, for a generation of readers whose minds have been numbed and attention spans shortened by hours of nightly television viewing. None offer the tragic grandeur or poignant insights associated with great literature. They are not books for the fit, though few, but rather for the masses, unfit and unwilling to face intellectually challenging literature. While the books depicted may be intellectually vacuous, the magazines combine vacuity with moral reprehensibility. ‘The Heart of Occident’ opens with a close-up of a few magazines on a display shelf. It slowly pans left to show the covers of many others. As Godard depicts numerous magazines, a predominant theme emerges. One cover displays three Nazi officers assaulting a woman barely clothed in slinky lingerie. Two of the Nazis hold her down while a third attempts to use his baton as a phallus. The

The book as motif in One Plus One

223

illustration apparently accompanies the story, ‘One Hour to Stop the Nazi Rape of St Romaine’. The cover lists additional contents: ‘Trapped on an Island with 40 Nympho Brides’ and ‘Sex Thoughts of Women: How You Can Read Them’. The illustration and legible article titles clearly reveal that the magazine is designed for male readers searching for sexual fantasy. A nearby magazine displays two scantily-clad women imprisoned in rough wooden cages with Nazis attempting to force a third into an empty cage. As the cover indicates, the issue also contains an article entitled, ‘Love Techniques: How Women Rate Them’. A third cover displays a beautiful woman with long blonde hair and ample cleavage, wearing fatigues and a swastika armband and brandishing a whip as a muscular GI, tied hand and foot and suspended in the air, awaits whatever punishment she has planned for him. Later in the sequence, a different magazine announces a feature story entitled, ‘I Gave My Body to Hitler’. In an earlier sequence in One Plus One that borrows its title from All about Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950), a manipulative interviewer had asked Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky) to confirm his statement that ‘when sex becomes problematic in walks a totalitarian’. Eve Democracy agreed with the statement, and the magazines in ‘The Heart of Occident’ verify the idea. Combining fascism with eroticism, these magazines reinforce the association between politics and pornography which the narrator’s political novel had established. Specifically, the magazines indicate a disturbing phenomenon concerning the state of sexual fantasy during the late 1960s: the Nazi, paragon of cruelty and evil, had become a glamorized figure in the sadomasochistic fantasies of occidental man. As the different cover illustrations show, men who fantasized about sexual conquest and brutality often identified with Nazis as they assumed the dominant role in their sadomasochistic fantasies. Alternatively, as one cover illustration indicates, some saw themselves in a submissive role with a female Nazi dominatrix taking charge. Political control and sexual domination had become one and the same, and both were wrapped up with Western notions of free enterprise. Commercial magazine publishers recognized the lucrative potential of people’s private fantasies and sought to capitalize on them by making them public. They glorified images of the Nazi purely for their own monetary gain. ‘The Heart of Occident’ begins in medias res. As the first magazine cover appears, an angry woman’s voice sounds. She exclaims, ‘If you don’t answer next time, he’ll come and kill you.’ Who is this woman? To whom does she speak? Why do they not answer? To what are they supposed to answer? Who will kill them the next time if they do not do as they are told? The answers to these questions become clear as the sequence progresses. From the opening shot, the camera continues panning across the magazine covers. The shot places us inside the paperback exchange and makes us surrogate customers: it displays the magazine covers in much the same way a customer might scan the shelves on which they rest. As the camera pans the magazine shelves, a man’s voice sounds. He is reading or reciting text concerning the relationship between war and aesthetics:

224

Kevin J. Hayes

When nations are fighting for their existence on this earth, when the question of to be or not to be has to be answered, then all humane and aesthetic considerations must be set aside, for these ideals do not exist of themselves somewhere in the air but are the product of man’s creative imagination and disappear when he disappears.

After panning the magazine shelves, the camera begins panning the adjacent bookshelves and slowly draws away to reveal an entire wall of books. As the camera continues to draw away, more and more of the shop’s interior becomes visible, and we see a tall blond man reading aloud from a hardback book. The man, the bookshop’s proprietor, is played by Iain Quarrier, the film’s producer. Dressed in purple jeans, shirt, tie, and jacket, Quarrier wears a colour traditionally associated with power, status, and wealth. The cover of the book he is reading never appears close-up, but, as contemporary audiences were quick to recognize, his text comes from Mein Kampf, specifically from a chapter discussing war propaganda. The text he reads provides an interpretative frame for understanding the books and magazines the shop contains. Though Mein Kampf is antiintellectual, anti-literature, and anti-art, Hitler was not averse to using catch phrases from famous literary works to make his point (Mieder 1997: 9-38). In the initial passage the bookshop proprietor reads, he co-opts the phrase ‘to be or not to be’ from Hamlet’s soliloquy to emphasize his idea. Godard had quoted the famous phrase for a humorous purpose in Bande à part (Godard, 1964), yet here the words resonate in a different way. Coming from Hitler’s mouth, Shakespeare’s words have a bitter taste. Hitler emphasizes the importance of creating propaganda that appeals to the masses and that grabs their attention through effective use of form and colour. Propaganda should tell people what to think, feel, and believe. It should be directed toward their hearts, not their minds. Furthermore, it should appeal to the least intelligent and limit itself to expressing a few simple ideas and repeating those same ideas incessantly (Hitler 1940: 227-42). The books and magazines within the paperback exchange, though the products of a free, commercial press working within a Western democracy, nevertheless embody Hitler’s propaganda theory. Their contents appeal to the masses. The graphic cover illustrations and sensational articles quickly catch the consumer’s attention. The magazines especially give the masses a way to think and feel. The nudie magazines tell them it is acceptable to treat women as objects. The muscle magazines, macho comic books, and motorcycle magazines provide a stereotypical view of masculinity. The numerous covers showing scantily-clad women carrying guns link violence with titillation. During the sequence, several customers pass through the shop. The behaviour of each is similar. They browse the shelves, select a few books or magazines, and then hand them to the proprietor. After they approach him, he temporarily stops reading Mein Kampf and calls his secretary, Jackie. She types a receipt and hands it to him, and he gives the books and the typed receipts to the customers, whereupon they receive their books and respond with the Nazi salute. The customers then approach two

The book as motif in One Plus One

225

young men seated at the front of the shop. With their youthful faces, long hair, blue jeans, and unkempt appearance, the two are coded as hippies, though Godard denied such an identification. Speaking with an interviewer after One Plus One had been released, he asserted: ‘They were not hippies. Their long hair isn’t necessarily related to hippieness. It could be to clergymen, too. No, they were not hippies. They were just oppressed people’ (Cott 1969: 20). Regardless of Godard’s denial, contemporary audiences understood them as hippies. Facing the two, the customers slap them and each time the hippies are slapped they respond in unison with different left-wing slogans: ‘Peace in Vietnam!’, ‘Viva Che!’, ‘Long live Mao!’, ‘Victory to the NLF!’ The secretary’s name obviously comes from the most famous Jackie of the 1960s, Jackie Kennedy. The name associates the bookshop’s secretary with American imperialism - not with immense personal wealth. Though Jackie Kennedy would marry Aristotle Onassis in the autumn of 1968, the wedding was unimaginable at the time One Plus One was filmed that summer, the summer Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy. That spring, however, Jackie Kennedy had made news because of her visit to Cambodia the preceding year. The print and broadcast media asserted that she had been recruited by Robert McNamara. Her visit, the media reported, was designed to pave the way for further diplomatic exchanges between the United States and Cambodia (Anon. 1968: 53). After the first few customers have undergone the routine and left the shop, the context of the exclamation that had opened the sequence - ‘If you don’t answer next time, he’ll come and kill you’ - becomes clear. The words had been spoken by the secretary, Jackie, and she had directed her message to the hippies, who, apparently, had not answered when a departing customer had slapped them. The ‘he’, the one who will kill them, is the bookshop’s purple-clad Nazi proprietor. The behaviour of the customers reflects the idea of exchange the bookshop represents. With each transaction, two exchanges take place. While no money changes hands, the proprietor does receive a Nazi salute, a gesture professing loyalty to the fascist cause, in exchange for the books. The second exchange occurs between the customers and the hippies. They slap the faces of both hippies who, in turn, answer with one of their characteristic slogans. It does seem somewhat unusual that the Nazi proprietor would let the hippies voice their left-wing slogans, but the situation is not unprecedented within Godard’s work. The hippies are reminiscent of the poolside dissidents in Alphaville who are allowed to speak their minds immediately prior to being executed. Once rebels are safely imprisoned and under control, their speeches become powerless. Captured rebels are like animals in a zoo. Visitors enjoy seeing them exhibit behaviour characteristic of their species. The hippies also give customers a way to enact their sexual fantasies ideologically. In a way, the slap-for-slogan exchange replicates the sadomasochistic Nazi acts depicted on the magazine covers. The customers, having professed their loyalty to the bookshop’s proprietor, assume the Nazi role while the young, long-haired hippies assume the role of submissive females. The customers beat the hippies, who must respond under the

226

Kevin J. Hayes

threat of death. Although the customers’ actions seem a little absurd, their behaviour was not far from the norm during the late 1960s. By no means was it unusual for a crew-cut conservative to call a long-haired male hippie a girl as a self-centred effort to assert his own feelings of masculine superiority, as is recalled in the disturbing café scene from Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969). By entitling the bookshop sequence ‘The Heart of Occident’, Godard emphasizes the centrality of print to Western culture while portraying print as a decadent medium. Equating contemporary print culture with Nazi propaganda, Godard implies that ideas expressed in print can no longer be trusted. Characterizing the paperback exchange as the heart of the Occident, the film provides a view of Western culture whose centre cannot hold. The heart of the West is a hollow place containing vacuous books and functioning as a prison house for representatives of Maoist doctrine. The fact that their gaoler is played by the film’s producer makes what happens inside the bookshop analogous to the film itself. Iain Quarrier was dissatisfied with One Plus One. In the final scene, the film crew appears on a beach, and the Bolivian refugee watches them as he awaits Chairman Mao’s yellow submarine. His voice-over, therefore, is now voice-off, but he never appears on camera. He tosses aside the Western political novel, he tells us, and asserts that reading it had been a complete waste of time. From this point, the film simply fizzles out. Without Godard’s knowledge or permission, Quarrier re-edited the ending himself, adding the finished recording of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ to the soundtrack at the film’s end. He also retitled the film Sympathy for the Devil. Upon learning what he had done, Godard punched Quarrier. In light of the overall thrust of the film, Godard’s anger is understandable. Throughout One Plus One, he emphasizes the collaborative process of production. In his version of the film, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ is always in the process of becoming, but never actually finished. Godard strongly resisted creating a final product. Once finished, a creative work enters the corrupt capitalist system. It becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The books and magazines depicted in ‘The Heart of Occident’ sequence embody these ideas. Like a music recording released as an LP or a commercial motion picture, the published book is a product intended to make money for its producers. The sordidness and exploitative nature of the books in the paperback exchange show that as a work comes on the market, it quickly becomes debased and corrupted. Godard’s rough-hewn ending argues against finishing anything, an idea which another book he uses as part of his mise-en-scène reinforces. As the ‘Outside Black Novel’ sequence begins, one of the black militants is reading a passage from LeRoi Jones’s Blues People. The passage specifically concerns the history of blues and its influence on popular music. Placing this book and its text within a film featuring a great rock band that was heavily influenced by the blues, Godard implies that the text of the book is false or, at least, that the story it tells is incomplete; indeed, that it can never be fully told. As soon as ideas are set down in a publishable form, they assume a fixed quality. Books freeze history at a given moment, but

The book as motif in One Plus One

227

history continues inexorably, rendering books obsolete as soon as they are published. In One Plus One, the books that appear as part of the mise-en-scène, the music that is rehearsed and performed, and the film itself convey similar ideas. As finished products, the books show what happens to the written word in the marketplace. In contrast, Godard deliberately leaves both the song and the film in unfinished states. By adding the finished recording to the end of the film, Quarrier effectively finished both, making them commercial products ready to be brought to market. In so doing, he totally undermined Godard’s message. Small wonder Godard punched him. References Anon. (1968), ‘Mrs Kennedy’s Trip Ascribed to US Bid’, New York Times, 21 May, p. 53. Cott, J. (1969), ‘Jean-Luc Godard’, Rolling Stone, 14 June, pp. 19-22. Fager, C. (1970), ‘It’s a Put-on’, Christian Century, 87, p. 704. French, P. (1998), ‘The Week in Reviews’, The Observer, 18 January, p. 10. Gilliat, P. (1970), ‘The Current Cinema: Godard’, The New Yorker, 2 May, p. 105. Hayes, K. (2000a), ‘Bookcover as Intertitle in the Cinema of Jean-Luc Godard’, Visible Language, 34: 1, pp. 14-31. —- (2000b), ‘Une femme est une femme: A Modern Woman’s Bookshelf ’, Film Criticism, 25: 1, pp. 65-82. —- (2001), ‘The Newspaper and the Novel in À bout de souffle’, Studies in French Cinema, 1: 3, pp. 183-91. Hitler, A. (1940), Mein Kampf, New York: Reynal and Hitchcock. Loercher, D. (1970), ‘Godard and the Rolling Stones’, Christian Science Monitor, 2 March, p. 6. McCabe, C. (1980), Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, London: BFI. Mieder, W. (1997), The Politics of Proverbs: From Traditional Wisdom to Proverbial Stereotypes, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wenders, W. (1992), ‘Wim Wenders’s Guilty Pleasures’, Film Comment, 28: 1, p. 76.

Suggested citation Hayes, K. J (2004), ‘The book as motif in One Plus One’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 219–228, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.2197/0

Contributor details Kevin J. Hayes is Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, where he teaches courses on literature, film, and folklore. His books include Folklore and Book Culture (1997); The Library of William Byrd of Westover (1997), for which he won the first annual Virginia Library History Award; Melville’s Folk Roots (1999); Poe and the Printed Word (2000); and An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887 (2002). His essays on film have appeared in such periodicals as Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, Literature Film Quarterly, and Visible Language. He is currently editing a collection of essays on Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull as part of the Cambridge Film Handbooks series. Contact: Department of English, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

228

Kevin J. Hayes

Studies in French Cinema Volume 4 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.229/0

Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction Maria Tortajada University of Lausanne Abstract

Keywords

Seduction is a complex concept which refers to sometimes contradictory meanings often used to condemn seductive practices themselves. Eric Rohmer’s films offer the occasion to better understand what can be considered as fundamental human social behaviour. However, if seduction can appear as an anthropological concept, it is constructed as one of representation: seduction is the appearance of the seducer’s desire in which the seduced person plays the part of a spectator. There are different models of seductive practices: Don-Juanism, charm, coquetry, dandyism, etc. Seduction through ambiguity is the most frequently explored by Rohmer’s films. It creates doubt, placing the seduced person in an unstable third place. Understanding how seduction operates in Rohmer’s films will allow us to move towards a theory of spectatorship different from that of transparency, associated with classical representation. By analysing Conte d’automne (1998), this essay will demonstrate how seduction operates at the level of character behaviour, as well as at the level of spectatorial affect. Rohmer’s films deal with the principal stereotypes of love and seduction: in this case, the story confronts ideal love and the first meeting through classified ads. Rohmer’s cinema is often associated with transparency, but his films subvert it by ambiguity, by imposing the presence of a mediator, of a third party which disturbs the ideal-couple dynamic inherent in stereotypes of romantic love; in so doing, the film’s spectator is caught in the mechanics of seduction.

seduction ambiguity theory of representation spectator libertinage classifieds ideal love

In this essay I would like to return to issues already raised by me (Tortajada 1999a) with a view to offering a further insight into Rohmer’s exploration of the mechanics of seduction. Rohmer’s films explore the often implicit rules of this model of behaviour, which of course extends beyond his cinema. His films seem to explore the multiple variations and possibilities of seduction, especially the type that I have called seduction through ambiguity, the model of which is principally the libertinage of eighteenth-century French literature in the works of writers such as Crébillon fils or Laclos (see Tortajada 1999a and 2004). These works allow us to understand three very important aspects of Rohmer’s cinema. First, libertinage teaches a way of manipulating signs, how to play with double meanings, implying ambiguity. Second, it proposes a social model which structures the relations of human subjects to law, to action, to others, as well to their own desire. Third, libertinage is a model which imposes logic in the organization of the narrative as well as giving a specific status to the proliferation of speech in Rohmer’s films. Finally, liberti-

SFC 4 (3) 229–238 © Intellect Ltd 2004

229

nage explains how the filmic apparatus is used and the place of the spectator in relation to it, a spectator whom I have called the ‘seduced spectator’. I do not wish to return to these different points here, but will rather explore the characteristics of seduction through ambiguity as they can be established from these points, in order to analyse the mechanics of seduction in a film which I was unable to comment on in my book, the last Contes des quatre saisons/Tales of the Four Seasons, Conte d’Automne/Autumn’s Tale, made in 1998. In these films Rohmer constantly returns to the same topic of a couple’s first encounter, so as to explore the possible variations in this basic structure. In this film he is concerned with an encounter through classified ads. This is the context in which I will describe the peculiar position of the seduced spectator. To conclude, I will open my argument up to consider the theoretical implications of such a theory of seduction in relation to representation and the apparatus.

What is seduction? Seduction is the appearance of desire, the method by which desire exposes itself to the one it wishes to reach. That desire can be various: the erotic desire of the other, or a desire for power, or both, and so on. Seduction can be seen as a way of playing with desire as well as a way of dealing with others. These elementary and essential definitions can include different forms of seduction, such as coquetry, for example, or charm, considered as a passive attitude, or at the opposite extreme, Don-Juanism or dandyism, which often imply tactical manipulations. This definition also includes the fact that seduction is often considered as a behaviour in contradiction with moral law: the etymology of the word suggests ‘leading astray’. But this aspect is not the most essential; there are different types of seductive practice which oppose seducer and seduced: for example, seduction considered as a game, where the partners are playing in complicity, is totally different from seduction, such as Don-Juanism, which implies that the seducer is lying and that the person seduced is a victim. However, what all these different practices have in common is the fundamental relation between desire and its appearance. Taking this further, we can say that seduction is the representation of the seducer’s desire, the one who, willingly or not, produces an effect on the seduced person. It is important to note that the concept of seduction is structured as one of representation, a representation offered to a spectator. This means that there exists a connection between what is being offered as an appearance and what this appearance is referring to: the first takes the place of the other. The connection can vary: it can be false, when the appearances lie about the desire they refer to. This is what Don Juan does to his victims: seduction is then deception. In other cases, the connection can be true, as in trying to pick someone up, in order to obtain not only his or her attention, but also his or her erotic or sexual agreement. There is no ideal love in the pick-up; what both partners are looking for is clear and explicit. A film such as La Punition/The Punishment (Rouch, 1962) explores this type of seduction (see Tortajada 1999b): it tells the story of a young girl who meets three men in a single day. One of them addresses her very crudely: he tells her that he is only looking for what he calls an

230

Maria Tortajada

‘adventure’, and nothing more, nothing to do with love. In this case, the representation of desire - seduction - is literal, and its rule is transparency. That is also why picking up is often considered vulgar, even though it was an important narrative event in the first films of the nouvelle vague. Rohmer uses it very often precisely to create ambiguity between ‘high feelings’, and ‘low behaviour’, however defined. The first implication of defining seduction as representation is that the seduced person functions as a spectator. This fundamental point allows us to use the same concept of seduction, not as a metaphor, to define the social interaction on the one hand and the aesthetic effect of cinematographic representation on the other. To base a theory of seduction on the representation of desire is in a way to elude it, because the seduced spectator, just like the seduced characters, can never be sure of the seducer’s desire. Even if the hero talks about it openly, we can never be sure that he is telling the truth. Such a theory of seduction implies that desire is hidden, and that it is always mediated through its representation. We can only reach it through its signs. A theory of seduction, unlike psychoanalysis, says nothing about desire. This is why most of the studies of seduction, such as semiotic approaches, concentrate their attention on the signs and appearances manipulated by the seducer, as for example, play on double meanings. But the theory of seduction must also take into account the seduced person’s desire and consider the effects of seduction’s representation that are inscribed on the seduced person. Let us come then to the seduced character. With seductions such as Don-Juanism or the pick-up, the seduced person is submitted to the representation of a desire: the success of the seduction depends on the attractiveness of the representation offered and also of the seduced character’s acceptance of the form of desire the seducer proposes. This is not quite the case with seduction through ambiguity. Faced with the ambiguity of such a seduction, the seduced person can only ask unanswerable questions: what is the nature of this desire of which I see the appearances? Am I really the object of this desire? How does this seduction address me, what does its representation want from me? Is it really destined toward me? Such a seduction produces the flickering of appearances, creating doubt, of the play of sense and possibility, opening up to the hope of desire, implying the ambiguity of one’s own place in front of the other, of the spectacle organized by the seducer. Seduction through ambiguity creates a space of uncertainty for the seduced person, who thus becomes what I have called an unstable third person. This is because, faced with the spectacle of seduction, the seduced person is forced into an impossible place: the seduced person is either obliged to share that place with another, even though this place cannot be shared, or forced by the nature of seduction into two different places which cannot be occupied at the same time. Jealousy or rivalry are concrete examples of such a seduction, but by no means the only two. By describing the mechanics of seduction from the place of uncertainty of the seduced person, it becomes easier to separate the definition from the seducer’s intentions, and to grasp the whole phe-

Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction

231

1. Rohmer frequently employs the same actors in different seductive roles. The parts of Marie Rivière in these two films are diametrically opposed: as Delphine, she stays on the side of authenticity, ideal love and transparency; as Isabelle, she manipulates as the third person who mediates between the couple.

nomenon precisely as a dynamic system which concerns, above all, the object of the seduction. This importantly allows us to consider the moral evaluations implied in certain definitions of seductive practices as a specific aspect of a more general behaviour which has to be understood outside value judgements. My goal is not to affirm that the model of seduction through ambiguity exists only in Rohmer’s cinema, but that this director explores this aspect of human behaviour in a very specific way, his aim being to uncover the mechanism of seduction.

Conte d’automne In Conte d’automne Rohmer examines once again the question of how to constitute a couple: how to find a partner. The answer for this film is to put an advertisement in a newspaper and you will find a man. That is exactly what Isabelle recommends to her friend Magali, a woman of about 40, who is now alone with her two grown-up children, passionately committed to cultivating her land and producing wine in the Rhône Valley. But Magali rejects the idea. The question of the ‘first meeting’ always plays a very important role in Rohmer’s films. In this one, Rohmer confronts the specific practice of the classifieds with the stereotype of love or seduction’s first meeting to analyse this contemporary behaviour. ‘First meeting’ can refer, for example, to love at first sight, in an ideal transparency of the relation to the other, or to the ceremony of presentation, which needs the mediation of a friend, or to the banal meeting which occurs in the pick-up, yielding an unknown person, not the ideal person, but just anyone. The classifieds as a practice of seduction is related peculiarly both to the ideal and the more cynical pick-up. It creates the occasion to meet ‘just anyone’, as in the pick-up, but with the illusion or the hope that the person will correspond to the ideal, or at least, to the right one. Moreover, this practice is a way to force chance: it does not eliminate it, but it provokes it to bring about the event. Paradoxically, then, the pick-up needs chance, but at the same time refuses it. Another aspect of the first encounter is controlled by the classifieds: this practice gives the illusion that there is no mediator at the beginning of future love. It proposes an alternative to presentation, which requires a third person, a sort of guarantor of the situation and of the identity of both persons unknown to each other. The tensions between the ideal, chance, and the refusal of the mediator are present throughout the film. Let us consider the first meeting. Magali is out of seduction’s reach, indeed, she refuses it, because she refuses any risk of ambiguity. She is wedded to the notion of authenticity, whether in her job, where her ideal is to improve the quality of her wine, or in her emotional life. She therefore refuses the deliberate mediation of a third person as well the classifieds to help her find her man; as Isabelle wrily comments, Magali ‘thinks that a man will fall from heaven’ (Rohmer 1998: 160). This expression reminds us of another Rohmer’s film, Le Rayon vert/The Green Ray (1986), where Marie Rivière, the same actress who plays Isabelle here, says the same thing in the role of Delphine.1 In Le Rayon vert she confesses, to the friend she had met in Biarritz, that she is waiting for a Prince Charming:

232

Maria Tortajada

Lena: But what is your ideal exactly? What do you prefer? [...] Delphine: [...] I always think that ... that, no, it’s romantic, my ideal. Well, it’s silly isn’t it, it’s just dreams. Lena: You like dinners by candlelight ... Delphine: No, it’s not that, not that at all. I always say to myself that there, in the middle of a wave, and all that, there’ll be... (Rohmer 1986: 64-65)

Delphine’s belief is founded on a version of ideal love, which reveals itself in a transparent and immediate way. Le Rayon vert is particularly concerned with the question of love at first sight and with the evaluation of the transparent relation to the other. The end of the film offers to the spectator a special form of it: it shows the young couple constituted in the contemplation of a unique sunset, the one that will present the green ray able, according to Jules Verne, to reveal the true feelings of the two people who watch it together. However, the film will produce its own transformation of transparency. It changes Verne’s novel, where the characters, at the crucial moment, turned their heads to look straight into each other’s eyes instead of staring at the sun. Rohmer, on the other hand, has the couple contemplate the horizon as if finding there, rather than in each other’s eyes, the revelation of true love. In so doing he paradoxically introduces the mediation of the green ray, as a third party, to guarantee the experience of transparency. This is a major point of Rohmer’ cinema (see Tortajada 1999a: 208-31). In Conte d’Automne, Magali assumes the role of the one who believes in the ideal and transparency, but this film, as we will see, has its own way of replacing transparency by ambiguity. Magali, despite her belief in authenticity, is seduced. She has two friends: Isabelle and Rosine, who is in her twenties. Both will try to bring her a man that she refuses to search out. Rosine and Isabelle are two prototypes of the mediator, important in the theatrical tradition and often represented by the confidants, servants or friends. Marivaux’s theatre, for example, is full of such characters. What happens in this film is that not only do the friends mediate for Magali, but they are also seduced by their own manipulation. This is typical of Rohmer: the film catches the third one in an unstable place, proving that it is possible to seduce oneself. We will show this in the case of Isabelle, before coming to Magali, even though the case of Rosine is very interesting too. The two friends lead to two different manipulations. Rosine first announces to Magali that she wants to present her old boyfriend to her, and does so at a wedding party organized by Isabelle for her own daughter. Magali remains ice-like in front of the man who desperately tries to begin a conversation. The plan fails because it proceeds by explicit mediation. Isabelle, on the other hand, prepares an arranged meeting without saying anything, thus hiding the mediation. She puts a classified ad in the paper, describing the situation and the character of her friend, but she goes herself to the meeting instead of Magali: she presents her own image and her own person as the one to seduce. As

Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction

233

2. This happens twice in the same conversation when Isabelle and Gerald are together in the Montélimar restaurant: ‘Gerald: Too early, I say. You are disconcerting. I can’t situate you very well’ (Rohmer 1998: 158). And after she has told him the truth: ‘On the one hand, I feel relieved because there was something wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t see what it was [literally: ‘I couldn’t situate it’]. But, on the other hand, I’m a bit deceived. Yes, even, for the moment, very deceived. I did more than begin being interested in you’ (Rohmer 1998: 161).

she will say later to Gerald, the man who answers the ad, she has taken her place: Isabelle: Do you want to know why I am here? I’m here as an ambassador for a charming brunette with dark eyes, not too tall and a winegrower. Gerald: Ambassador? What does that mean? Isabelle: It means that I am coming in her place. (Rohmer 1998: 160)

She shows him a photo of Magali - the photographs are very important in the film because they are the way of constituting an image of the partner, an identity - and tries to convince Gerald that she, Isabelle, a tall blonde with blue eyes, is not his type. She tries to substitute one image for another, but the substitution is not so easy. It is obvious for the spectator that during the entire scene both images are in play at the same time: speaking of Magali leads Isabelle to talk about herself too. She is in fact in an impossible place, the unstable place of the third person, the seduced person; she is explicitly trying to exit the scene of seduction, but stays inside. She admits even quite clearly she is playing a dangerous game with Gerald: Isabelle: It’s a little game which amused me. Although it’s a dangerous game. Gerald: For you or for me? Isabelle: For me at any rate. It’s rather risky to meet an attractive man. I could have fallen in love with you. (Rohmer 1998: 161)

By immediately denying the last assumption, she expresses her ambiguous attitude. Her seduced state of mind appears clearly when, at the wedding party, she kisses Gerald after he has just confessed to her that Magali interests him. Through her own manipulation, Isabelle has entered herself into seduction. The film makes very explicit in terms of places the typical form of seduction through ambiguity. For example, Gerald twice says to Isabelle: ‘I can’t situate you very well.’2 And, at the end of the film, when it appears that Magali and Gerald will probably continue together, Isabelle says jokingly when Gerald enters the room where she stands with her friend: ‘So what, you come back for me or for her?’ (Rohmer 1998: 181). The fact is that this seduction is working on her before she meets Gerald. As soon as she has decided to write the advertisement in the paper we see her staring dreamily and fascinated as if she were in love or, more precisely, seduced. What really creates the seduction is not the man, the object of desire, but being in the unstable position of the third person, which is set at the moment Isabelle enters into her double and ambiguous role as both

234

Maria Tortajada

Isabelle and Magali. Seduction has produced the excitement of desire, which she will renounce as most of Rohmer’s characters do. Let us now consider what happens to Magali, because then something also happens to the film’s spectator. From a narrative point of view, it is possible to consider that Magali meets Gerald by entering the mechanics of seduction without expecting it and without even knowing it. We are partly led to believe that she falls in love at first sight. As soon as the film comes to the wedding party, it shows Magali and Gerald’s encounter and the obvious pleasure she feels in his company. Nobody has presented them, even if the spectator knows that he has gone directly to her in order to meet her, because he already knows her through Isabelle. Attracted by this man, she will, during the rest of the evening, be reduced to jealousy: first, she surprises Isabelle kissing him, and then she is troubled by Rosalie who tells her secretly that she has already seen Isabelle in the company of this man. When she understands that her rival is only a mediator, she is relieved, but angry at having been manipulated. What must be stressed, however, is that she resolves the problem of mediation according to her own values. So she says to Isabelle: ‘It doesn’t matter that you found him through the small ads, what matters is that I noticed him without knowing any of this’ (Rohmer 1998: 180). Magali, the woman of authenticity and transparency restores, at the same time, chance and the ideal meeting of the couple-to-be by excluding the mediator. But what are spectators to think? To a certain extent, they can accept Magali’s version of events, because they have indeed seen how the meeting depended at one and the same time on chance and on mediation, and that it is based in seduction; moreover, that this seduction is a dual seduction incorporating both Isabelle and Magali (to say nothing of Gerald’s seduction, which I do not have the space to explore here). Spectators, too, are therefore faced with ambiguity, with the seduction of representation. The film makes the paradoxical statement where the narrative is concerned that the ideal and transparency go hand in hand with seduction; they cannot exist without a third term. But this is also true of the apparatus and its effect on the spectator, which I shall now go on to discuss, showing how, paradoxically again, Rohmer’s cinema is not a cinema of transparency, even though it uses transparency as a reference. The spectator’s seduction does not only depend on narrative structures, on ambiguous interpretations of meaning with regard to the plot. This seduction also works by placing the spectator in the unstable place of the third person in relation to what is represented. Let us take as an example the way in which Rohmer introduces ambiguity into the first meeting between Magali and Gerald by implying the presence of the spectator. As we shall see, this confirms what I mentioned above, that the first meeting is at the same time dual and mediated. But it also shows that spectators are implicated because they are in the unstable third place; they are seduced by the representation. By their own ambiguous presence, they are able to transform the meaning of the stereotype of love at first sight. After an image of the married couple leaving the church, the sequence continues with the party where Gerald appears. He loses no time: the point of the first moments of the meeting is to show how Gerald succeeds

Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction

235

3. Once again, this is not a pure dual meeting, because the film is setting a presentation through a mediator, the friend and confident, Clarisse (Arielle Dombasle). The film will develop the question of love at first sight as an ambiguous experience; see Tortajada 1999a: 178-87.

in getting himself next to Magali instead of two other anonymous rivals, one of whom appears, through his position in the frame, to be very much part of a pair with Magali. When Gerald manages it, not without some jostling, the film shows the couple in one frontal shot. Then the meeting occurs, for Magali the result of chance. Now standing now next to her, Gerald examines a bottle of red wine he finds on the buffet in front of them, and seems to hesitate: Magali: Would you like to taste it? Gérald : Why not? Magali : Let me pour you some. (Rohmer 1998: 164)

Gerald appreciates the wine and Magali, very proud, announces that it is her wine: ‘Forgive me for promoting it, it’s my wine. I’m a winegrower’ (Rohmer 1998: 164). The two then discover that they have much in common: Gérald: I’m from a wine-growing family. But not from around here. My parents repatriated from Algeria. Magali: And mine from Tunisia. They bought this vineyard, which I inherited. (Rohmer 1998: 164)

Everything seems to fit between them. But the most important thing is the pleasure they seem to have together, the smiles, the sort of complicity they begin to feel, visible through their glances and the slightest movement of their bodies. What structures the meeting is the emphasis upon the couple’s looks, which is of course highly significant because the perfect model of love at first sight shows the pair looking directly into each other’s eyes experiencing love’s transparency. This scene can be contrasted with the first meeting in Le Beau mariage/A Good Marriage (1982), where the same actress, Béatrice Romand, is classified according to the same stereotype based on exchanged looks: there, the two characters stare at each other, offering the spectator their profile in centred frame.3 Here, the sequence plays upon what disturbs glances. Because the sun is in their eyes, the actress is obliged to do three different things. First, she takes her sunglasses on and off so that she alternately shows and masks her eyes, reminding us of what I referred to above as ‘flickering’, the intermittence of seduction, rather than of love at first sight. The second strategy is to use her hand to protect her eyes from the sun, which does not mask them, but stresses the fact that staring at each other is anything but easy, and reminding us of Le Rayon vert which demonstrates exactly the opposite with its intent gaze at the setting sun. The allusion to the sunset of Le Rayon vert is ironic: later in the film, Magali, jealous of Isabelle because she

236

Maria Tortajada

has seen her kissing Gerald, is sitting alone brooding in the park, with her back to the view; Isabelle, who was the passionate observer of the green ray in the other film, comes next to her: Isabelle: So are you sulking? What’s the matter with you? Magali: Nothing. I’m fine. I was looking at the sunset. Isabelle: You mean what’s behind you over there. (Rohmer 1998: 173)

In spite of the pretext she gives, Magali is turning her back to the sunset, which the reference to Le Rayon vert designates as the symbol of ideal love and transparency. She seems to refuse the very principle which underlies her conception of ‘true’ love. Finally, the third and the most important strategy in the meeting sequence of Conte d’automne consists in turning her back to the spectator: Magali continues to speak to Gerald, they see each other, but spectators cannot see her face anymore. Her thick hair functions as a dark screen, and understanding clearly what she is saying requires some effort on the part of spectators. We realize at this moment that the play upon looks is above all destined for the spectator. How can we interpret this? Even though, on the one hand, Magali behaves more in line with seduction than transparency, on the other hand, by turning her back to the camera, Magali seems to reject spectators as if she was excluding all third persons. But, uncomfortable though this shot may be, it does not amount to Brechtian distancing: classical representation and its illusion are not undermined. By rejecting spectators from the meeting, the representation makes them paradoxically play a role in it. The spectator becomes the third person which the story simultaneously includes and excludes at the same level as the characters, a sort of unstable third person, a seduced spectator, oscillating between the position of guarantor of the representation and the position of the implied third person. The instability of this position occurs because it is the implied third person, distinct from the characters. At this point in the film, spectators are not identified with the characters. By the ambiguous presence of the third person, the spectator denies the dual and ideal love encounter and transforms the stereotype by introducing a third party, but without producing a demystification: as I said before, the meeting is both seduction and ideal, a combination which is all the stronger because there is no break in the coherence of the fictional world. The interest of this trope of seduction lies in the way it shows how we can go beyond the dualism of classical representation on the one hand and modernist or postmodernist representation on the other. In the twentieth century, much effort was expended on denying the illusion of classical representation, and developing modernist narrative modes which demystified and deconstructed the illusion, such as Brechtian distancing, mentioned above. Postmodernism has proposed a different way of coping with illusion, not by self-reflexivity and distance, but by combining illusionary structures so that they undermine each other. The dualism real/unreal or

Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction

237

hyperreal can be broken by the theory of seduction. The example of Conte d’automne shows how classical representation can generate its own internal critique. It proposes a third interpretation of the apparatus, a third aesthetic modality. By introducing the third term in different narrative situations as well as in the link which relates the spectator to the representation, seduction imposes ambiguity as a different way, avoiding the illusion of transparency on the one hand and the demystification of representation on the other. We cannot say whether what we see is illusory or not, or, at the level of the plot, whether the seducer is lying or honest. This question becomes irrelevant because the spectacle offered to the seduced character or to the spectator is at the same time true and untrue. This is the paradox of seduction through ambiguity. References Rohmer, E. (1986), Le Rayon vert, Avant-scène du cinéma, 355. —- (1998), Contes des 4 saisons, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. Tortajada, M. (1999a), Le Spectateur séduit: le libertinage dans le cinéma d’Eric Rohmer et sa fonction dans une théorie de la représentation filmique, Paris: KIME. —- (1999b), ‘Draguer, enquêter: La Punition de Jean Rouch’, Cinémathèque, 15, pp. 28-39. —- (2004 forthcoming), ‘From libertinage to Eric Rohmer: transcending “adaptation”’, A Companion to Literature and Film (eds R. Stam and A. Raengo), Oxford, Blackwells.

Suggested citation Tortajada, M. (2004), ‘Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction’, Studies in French Cinema 4: 3, pp. 229–238, doi: 10.1386/sfci.4.3.229/0

Contributor details Maria Tortajada is Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in the Department of History and Aesthetics of Film and is also currently working on a Swiss National Science Foundation research project to update the encyclopedia of Swiss cinema. She obtained her doctorate in Literature from the University of Geneva. She is the author of Le spectateur séduit. Le libertinage dans le cinéma d’Eric Rohmer et sa fonction dans une théorie de la représentation filmique (Paris: KIME, 1999) and the editor and contributor of Cinéma suisse: Nouvelles (Lausanne: Payot, 2000). She is working on a theory of seduction in relation to questions of gender. Contact: Department of History and Aesthetics of Film, University of Lausanne E-mail: [email protected]

238

Maria Tortajada

TRAVEL ANNOUNCEMENT SFC is now offering FIVE Small Travel Awards For Conference attendance Available to PhD Students of French Cinema

We are very pleased to announce the availability of this small award to assist UK PhD students wishing to attend a conference where all or part of the focus will be French Cinema. Priority for the award of these small grants (£25) will be based on the distance needed to travel and the degree of participation (but giving a paper is not a necessary prerequisite for applying) . Send to Professor Susan Hayward, Film Studies, Queens Building, Exeter University, Exeter EX4 4QH.

Name:

Email Address:

Address:

Conference you are attending and where:

Nature of your contribution (ie attendance or giving a paper):

Title of your paper if applicable:

Reason for attending if not giving a paper:

Confirmation of your status (supervisor’s name and signature):

Details also available on our website: www.ncl.ac.uk/crif/sfc/home.htm

Deadlines: 1st May and 1st Dec (in any year)

Index – Volume 4 Bassan, R., Courant, G. and Lebrat, C. French experimental cinema: the richness of the 1970s, pp. 165–174 Evans, C., Fantasies and ambiguous sexuality in Patrice Leconte’s Le Mari de la coiffeuse and La Fille sur le pont, pp. 135–146 Fauvel, M., Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche: unveiling hybrid identities, pp. 147–157 Grandena, F., The provinces in contemporary French cinema: the case of Y aurat-il de la neige à Noël?, pp.113–120 Hayes, K.J., The book as motif in One Plus One, pp. 219–228 Hayward, S.,Signoret’s star persona and redressing the costume cinema: Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952), pp. 15–28 Hewitt, N., Gabin, Grisbi and 1950s France, pp. 65–75 Ince, K., Surviving the reign of the father: the family and the law in Georges Franju’s feature films, pp. 209–218 Lazen, M., ‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place, pp. 187–196 Leahhy, S., Neither charm nor sex appeal...’ Just what is the appeal of Simone Signoret?, pp. 29–40 Martin, F., Silence and scream: Moufida Tlatli’s cinematic suite, pp. 175–185 Mayne, J., Dora the image-maker, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres, pp. 41–52 Moine, R., The star as the ‘great man’ in French cinema: the example of Sacha Guitry, pp. 77–86 Orr, J., Stranded: stardom and the free-fall movie in French cinema, 1985–2003, pp. 103–111 Scatton-Tessier, M., Ce Petisme: flirting with the sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, pp. 197–207 Smith, D., A world that accords with our desires’?: realism, desire and death in André Bazin’s film criticism, pp. 93–102 Sorim, C., The art of borrowing: French popular cinema before the New Wave, pp.53–64 Tortajada, M.,Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction, pp. 229–238 Waldron, D., Incorporating qualitative audience research into French film studies: the case of Gazon maudit (Balasko, 1995) pp. 121–133