Samuel Fuller, Bad reputation

Third and final text of the series on Samuel Fuller translated with Andy Rector: a short text by Daney published in 1982.

Samuel Fuller, Bad reputation

Take Sadoul’s excellent little Filmmakers Dictionary (Dictionnaire des cinéastes, Editions du Seuil). Open the last edition to page 112 and read the article on Samuel Fuller. You will first find ten lines written by the late Sadoul himself: “dyed-in-the-wool anti-communism”, “racist themes”, in short: hate. After a paragraph break, comes thirty-seven lines full of praise written in 1981 by Breton and Marie. It’s a different vocabulary: “fanatical individualism”, “narrator instinct”, “in the tradition of Griffith”. Nobody says bad things about Fuller anymore, not even communists. Post mortem, Sadoul’s dictionary goes to Canossa and changes its mind on Fuller (and acknowledges it). Recently in 1982, the French Cinematheque organised a tribute to Fuller and on the day of the inauguration, Sam and his cigar came to exchange a few friendly words with a moved audience. It was the world premiere of White Dog. Fuller has not forgotten that his career as an auteur started in France. A strange career for a strange auteur. 

In the U.S.A., Fuller faced the problem of being an auteur in an anti-auteur system. Of being singular where ordinary individualism prevails. Of being a born narrator, evil-thinking and often inspired. Of being obsessed with two or three questions as old as Griffith and American cinema. I quote: the immediate transfer of History into stories, the live transplantation of documentary onto fiction, the art of the rapid catharsis, the “theme of the hero and the traitor” (with a predilection for the traitor), the archaeology of the American nation (and therefore racism). So, it’s in France that Fuller’s small frenetic films, often B series, were noticed. 

In France, Fuller faced the problem of being reduced to the anti-Communist content of his scripts at a time when the Cold War had dulled even the film critics’ wits. Sadoul got it wrong again and Fuller became an ideal target for those who thought themselves, self-righteously, on the Left. Anti-communist, therefore fascist and racist: nothing was spared. Sensitive cinephiles could see that this unclassifiable filmmaker who was very naturally making a very inventive cinema, converting the constraints of small budgets in creative licence, and only telling his stories, was the opposite of an ideologist. Divided, they concluded that the “form” of Fuller’s art was brilliant but that its “content” was very reprehensible. Pathetic.

One can be very American (and Fuller certainly is) by spinelessly celebrating the values of White America: puritanism and familialism. Some are even “WASPophile”. Never Fuller. He asked himself, more bluntly, from which crimes American came, and why this territory was populated by survivors: Indians, Blacks, Asians, Jews, and why it inherits from all the genocides. Fuller is a mythologist, a precious dismantler of the melting pot, someone always looking at the zero point in a story. This is why he is ahead of everyone in the critical thinking of modern westerns. His wonderful Run of the Arrow (1957) comes a good thirteen years before Little Big Man (and it’s a whole lot better). 

The paradox of Fuller, a journalist, traveller, writer of pulp novels and war stories, always news-hungry, is to have arrived ten or fifteen years too early in the landscape of American cinema. If he hadn’t demonstrated some very “Fullerian” vitality and optimism, he wouldn’t have found the strength to be present when, finally taken seriously, he was able to take up the thread of his broken career again and give us first The Big Red One and then White Dog. Especially White Dog. 

First published in Libération on 9 July 1982. Reprinted in La maison cinema et le monde, vol.2, P.O.L., 2022. Translated with the help of Andy Rector. 

White Dog, Samuel Fuller

Second text on Samuel Fuller translated in collaboration with Andy Rector. My personal favourite.

White Dog, Samuel Fuller

It’s the story of a racist dog. A good opportunity to revisit Fuller and what he talks about: precisely racism.

The study of racism is not more racist than knowledge of sugar is sweet. Yet, Fuller has always been suspected of being “contaminated” by his topic of predilection: the stupidity of racist delirium. Today, we tend to clear him of that view entirely. Fuller, racist? Of course not, we say shrugging our shoulders, exasperated. We are right to shrug our shoulders, but not to be exasperated. When a filmmaker doesn’t content himself with anti-racist discourse but looks deeper into the question and, acting like the old anarchist mole that he is, creates fiction, philosophy and cinema from it, one has the right to take what he says seriously. 

White Dog (which I can’t bring myself to call by its French title: Dressé pour tuer [Raised to Kill]) is not only his most beautiful film in a long time, but also a sort of pure sketch. A rundown of the question. And an overwhelming rundown, making current American film production appear empty and fussy by comparison. In White Dog, the action film and the philosophical fable progress together. What is physical is never not allowed to become intellectual, and vice versa. By dint of didacticism. 

I am not telling the story of the film. I am laying out its initial equation. It is necessary. A white man conditions a puppy to attack black people. The white man is racist, the dog becomes so. It sees the human species divided into two colours and becomes a “white dog”. One night in Hollywood, the lost dog is hit by the car of a young actress. Julie takes in the dog, saves it from extermination (the pound), heals it. The dog loves the actress and it’s his turn to save her, from a rapist. And then, one day, drama: we discover that the dog is a “white dog”.

A black anthropologist-trainer-maverick works in a sort of mobile zoo for Hollywood. Significantly, he is called Keys. He has made the deconditioning of white dogs his business. What threatens him as a black person has become his passion as a researcher. He needs a “white dog”. “This dog is the only weapon we have to destroy racism in the world”. Guinea pig, stake in the experiment, subject of the cure, bag of symptoms, the dog becomes all this. It all happens in the gaze. Keys, the black man, manages to decondition it, with ninety-eight percent success. 

For Fuller – all his films vouch for this – racism is a matter of education. Nobody is (or was born) racist. Many become so. Fuller doesn’t believe in natural violence, he knows it is nurtured. Since he is a violent filmmaker, he was always considered instinctual. This is an error. Violence in Fuller’s films (and this is why he is modern) is what exists between beings, the consequence of mimesis, the space between bodies, the space of news and media. Paradoxically, this “dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist” has an almost Pavlovian, “mechanistic Marxist” conception of racism. If all evil (or good) comes from education, it must be possible to re-educate. 

Fuller is not left-wing, but an old anarchist who believes in the primary innocence of beings. Outside: mimetic violence, inside: definitive childhood. Angels, children, beasts: men. Another danger: there is only a small step from innocence to purity (and we know that racism is a delirium based on purity). The line is thin, but Fuller has never crossed it. 

Sam Fuller loves victims, there lies his ambiguity. Including victims of racism. The scene is sublime when the real owner of the dog shows up with his two little girls and a box of chocolates. This pig is a kind old man. Sublime the way Julie doesn’t say anything to him (she insults him) but talks to the terrified little girls: “Don’t listen to him, don’t believe a word of what your grandfather told you!” Fuller is clearly in the same line as Griffith, some place in the scenario of the “massacre of the innocents”. 

How to overcome racism? How far do Fuller’s illusions go? White Dog seems to journey toward a happy ending, with the thesis of deconditioning seemingly satisfying everyone (even though it is worrying and suspicious: haven’t we seen recently the “de-conditioning professionals” of the Moon cult?). Keys achieves ninety-eight percent success. The final test: to unleash the dog (in a kind of arena) in the presence of Julie, Keys and his associate, Carruthers, a big, friendly (and white) man. I will not say what happens. 

Fuller doesn’t believe in deconditioning any more than a psycho-analyst believes in curing in a matter of days. The script is good but lacks time. Even cured, the dog is not cured of its violence, but of the racist dimension of it. It must learn not proceed through generalisations, and the only way to manage this is to teach it the “singular” aspect of each human being. One by one. And when it comes to capturing the singularity of beings, there is no one like Fuller, a fervent individualist. The dog has learned to love Julie who saved it, and then Keys who “tamed” it. The dog loves two beings in the world = the world is reduced to two beings. There remains the others, the much larger group – of white and black persons – that it doesn’t know, that it no longer knows. The dog will not manage to accede to the concept of “the human species”. It has switched from a bad generalisation (racism) to the inability to generalise. Its violence is no longer automatic and cold, it is transformed into a violence of love, which only knows those who love it. Who ever thought that love isn’t also a form of violence? No one. Not Fuller anyway. This is why the film is overwhelming. This is why the dog must be put down. For Fuller there is, side by side, an unabated optimism (he believes in good education, in science) and a modest certitude: the violence of love is already superior to the violence of racism. Love is a form of progress over self-hatred. But it too can kill. 

First published in Libération on 9 July 1982. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1982-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Andy Rector and Laurent Kretzschmar.

The Fury of Storytelling - The Big Red One

First of three texts on Samuel Fuller. These translations were done in collaboration with Andy Rector with a view to create a bigger "Fuller Special" at Kino Slang which unfortunately got held up. It's also another text from La Rampe (Daney's first book). 

The Fury of Storytelling - The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller)

One day, maybe, we will see The Big Red One. Not the truncated version bearing this title that represented the U.S.A. at the Cannes Festival, but the four-hour saga that is, if not Samuel Fuller’s best film, his most ambitious project. The film that we are seeing today, thirty-five years after its auteur conceived it (“before Cahiers even existed” he says himself jokingly), is but a portion of the film that Fuller just shot. So, it’s a double discrepancy.  

Audience at zero

If his films were loved by a section of French film critics in the 1950s, if Fuller was endorsed by the Cahiers as a modern filmmaker, it is because he was, more than any other American (except Welles), obsessed with the contemporary. Even when he was narrating past events, he always knew how to create this impression of “for the first time”, of the cinema at its beginnings. As if, before him, no one had ever filmed, nor seen any films. On the one hand, Fuller was interested in the secrets and paradoxes of History (his heroes are always impostors: a fake baron, a fake gangster, a fake Sioux, a fake madman). On the other, his stories always had a founding dimension. His first film, I Shot Jessie James, stages a man destined to act out again, for the theatre, events that he had been the hero of. Also, at the end of Run of the Arrow, this statement to the audience: “the end of this story can only be written by you.” Fuller, both a war reporter and obsessed educator, starts with this idea that the audience knows nothing, or almost nothing. Telling in a few words who the Baron of Arizona, Sergeant O’Meara, the Werwolf, or Hitler is, Fuller never builds on the supposed existing knowledge of the audience. He considers the audience to be, like him, self-taught and in a hurry. So much so that educated and self-righteous audiences, offended to be deemed more ignorant than they are, have always hated Fuller’s films, finding them basic or simplistic, and covered them with insults. What is disturbing with Fuller (or, for others, what is stunning and convincing) are less his ideological convictions (clearly, Fuller is not left-wing, loves his country and hates communists) than this concoction between news and fiction. News: everything that has a name (Fuller is obsessed with proper nouns); fiction: everything that is wearing a mask (nothing excites him more than double-dealings). 

This concoction is not an ellipsis, that elegant way of gaining time. It is something else. Again, in Run of the Arrow, how to quickly show that the Civil War just ended? One could show the front page of a newspaper, or a distressed extra announcing the news, but Fuller is not interested in this type of speed. What interests him is to film Lee’s surrender, played by an extra, walking quickly, without grandiloquence, toward another extra. The historical event in itself, but as an insert. 

This is the modernity of Fuller: the vertigo of the contemporary and the temporary lack of perspective on things. In a small, tiny-budget but admirable and prophetic film (Verboten!) he joins the Rossellini of Germany, Year Zero, and we still think of Rossellini when seeing The Big Red One. The soldiers and the audience discover at the same time the war, and much more than the war: the landscapes and the populations that serve as background to the war. We think of Godard too, except that Godard’s passion for denotation (calling a cat a cat) always threatens to prevail over the desire for storytelling. It is the exact opposite with Fuller: storytelling will prevail over everything else, will distort and divert everything. J.-L.G. narrates very little; S.F. narrates too much. One slows down, the other forges ahead. But the result is the same: they both become marginal, dangerous, and unsavoury filmmakers. 

Impossible not to tell a story

So there was an “auteur” Fuller, an independent that the Hollywood machine ended up rejecting, a “European” Fuller if you will. And there was also an “American” Fuller, super-American even, less because of his political ideas than for his ability to heat up to the point of incandescence a fundamental aspect of American cinema: the impossibility not to transform everything into a story. Into a founding story moreover, a founding of the American identity. Fuller is devoted to fiction like others are devoted to drugs: beyond any taboo, any decency. He is “hooked” on fiction. 

This fury was freely unleashed in the B movies of the 1950s. Paradoxically and against all expectations, it is this fury which prevented Fuller, who was ahead of everyone else, from reaping the benefits of the fires he had contributed so vigorously to starting. He lacked the taste for comfort, the art of arranging a “good place” for his audience in order to unify it against something (that’s what Penn, Peckinpah, or Pollack will know how to do); he wasn’t ideological enough. It is a paradox because ideology (ready-made speeches, idiotic propaganda, doublespeak and clichés) is his very topic, his preferred subject. This is another common point with Godard: he is both interested and horrified by political-speak. His films are pyrotechnical machines that stem from the tongue and set fire to speeches. 

A necessarily ambiguous fire. During the Second World War, the journalist Fuller and the educator Fuller become one: he writes novels that soldiers read at the front, he must speak with the words of the tribe. War for him is perhaps just the extreme experience of the richness of sensations and the insufficiency of language. And to feel “in the present” one must speak with the words of everybody, the words of the GIs, the words of the media, while at the same time experiencing in a barbaric and refined way the inadequacy of these words with what is really happening. To question these words or to put them in quotation marks may raise the level of debate and intelligence, but it is a loss to the vertigo of feeling in the present, meaning to live. Fuller’s films start from what seems stable, fixed, erect and in costume, so a typical American worldview (a spontaneously racist worldview), and destroy along their way any sense of belonging or identity. More through an excess of fiction than out of critical distance. I don’t believe that the great Americans (Griffith or Welles) proceeded in any other way: never by putting quotation marks on the words of the tribe but rather through malfunction, excess or waste. 

As for Fuller, he will go to the end of the idea of catharsis which is the necessary consequence of this fury of storytelling. Catharsis allows one to live with what shouldn’t be (seen) repeated. It has nothing to do with the “work of mourning”, this suspicion that between fiction and document, dream and proof, one must invent new distances and new rituals. Modern cinema, which was built from the work of mourning (Syberberg, Godard), has been European. But not American cinema which is always forging ahead toward catharsis (The Deer Hunter). In-between the two, Fuller is the only one who dared, twenty years before Holocaust, to bring together in the same film (Verboten!) these two types of images: stock-shots from the Nuremberg trials and images from his own B movie. 

The danse macabre as film form

The Big Red One is therefore, in its current form, a traditional war film, superbly filmed, precise and dry: a film “like they don’t make anymore”. But what we can guess about the original project leads us to imagine a wider, disproportionate film: the crossing of the entire Second World War, seen through the successive missions of a regiment, of a squad of four men plus one, “the Sergeant”, played by Lee Marvin, devoid of any expression. These four indestructible characters cross countries they don’t know (Algeria, Sicily, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and finally Germany), meet other soldiers, friends or foes, collaborators or resistance fighters, and in the end, it still comes down to them to free, open and discover the death camps. 

Fuller’s traditional idea of the war is that it can be reduced to a single question: to kill or to be killed. The rest would be mere intellectual chit chat. An idea as irrefutable as it is shortsighted. Yes, his films have always revolved around the question of identification (to another, to an ideal, to the ideal other) and the aberrations of the eternal “I love you, I kill you”. Fuller’s heroes’ double-dealings are protecting them from the horror of an encounter with a double (like William Wilson) which could lead to their death. They are already double. But the war is the moment when, despite everything, this encounter is very possible indeed, when one constantly risks crossing the gaze of the other, of this enemy that is an enemy only by game and by name*. With Fuller, one of the most violent filmmakers, violence is always mimetic. It is the violence of the masks that no longer hold (his entire body of films mirrors the prodigious opening scene of The Naked Kiss: during a fight, a woman loses her wig – she is bald). It is the violence of the ideologies that don’t hold up much better (in the sense that, according to Zinoviev’s strong expression, ideology is something that one “adopts”, as a sort of voluntary mask).

How to end?

The big difference between life and cinema is that at the end of a film, a small bit of writing, the words THE END, strike through an image. This is the truth of the relation between image and writing. Following the itinerary of the Sergeant, Fuller asks himself under which conditions there could be an end to wars. The answer is literal, tinged with dark humour: there wouldn’t be any more wars if only one war could truly end. But it only takes one soldier, somewhere, to ignore the armistice just signed (this is the story of the hero of Run of the Arrow or of these Japanese soldiers still “holding on” to some Pacific islands) to create a fatality of the return of wars. Just one more bullet and the fury of storytelling starts again. It happens twice to the “Sergeant”, in 1918 and in 1945. Fuller’s obsession – the typical obsession symptom –, is the bullet shot one second too late and the war hero turned into a common law murderer. But how can one know that the “war is over”?

The Big Red One, Fuller’s magnum opus, is haunted with the desire to end, to write the words “the end” for good.  Hence the final happy ending, moving because improbable. “To kill or to be killed”, this warrant officer’s wisdom, is a false choice. In one way, the one that kills dies too, he commits suicide. He becomes Death itself, which ignores the double game. The double game is what saves mimetic violence: only impostors are alive. Otherwise, underneath the features of the four soldiers of the film, too beautiful and too vulnerable, one must see the face of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. To join in the camp of the survivors, to have killed the other inside oneself, is to be truly dead.

* In the French text: que par jeu (que par double je). Literally: "only by game (only by double "I").

Translators' note: while translating the text with Andy, we toyed with the idea of keeping some French word references in the English text. I've removed them in the final version to preserve fluidity. But, in the spirit of disclosure (and to show the impossible compromises we had to make), we have used "storytelling" and "story" for récit, "contemporary" or "news" for actualité or informations, "concoction" for précipité and "double game" or "double-dealings" for double jeu. 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 311, May 1980. Reprinted in La Rampe, cahier critique 1972-1982, Cahiers du cinéma – Gallimard, 1983. Translation by Andy Rector and Laurent Kretzschmar.

Wim’s Movie

A new translation of Serge Daney. It's another text on Wim Wenders (see here and here), another text on Nicholas Ray, and one more translation from Daney's first book, La Rampe. A big thank you to Srikanth Srinivasan for suggesting it and helping translate it.

Wim’s Movie (Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray)

1. There are two unforgettable lines in the films of Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, aka Nicholas Ray, aka Nick. In 1957, in the Libyan desert of Bitter Victory, Richard Burton observed bitterly: “I kill the living and save the dead”. The year before, James Mason wanted to kill his son screaming “God was wrong!” (wrong to stop Abraham’s hand). The film was Bigger Than Life. These two lines are a program unto themselves. Mason’s line, in Ray’s cinema, is the version of the father, a father who has become insane, threatening, unfit: a deviant. Burton’s line is a son’s impasse, the double bind that he cannot escape, at least not unscathed: kill the living father or save him dead. The subject of Ray’s films is less revolt than the impossibility of revolt, the endless dispute between two men, a young one and an old one, the adopted and the adoptive. The old one “plays” the father, takes the blows, fakes his death, deprives the “son” of his revolt. The hystericised son must sustain the father’s desire, and therefore attribute a desire to the father. In this respect, Wind Across the Everglades is a wonderful film. Nearly all of Ray’s films tell this story, all end badly, or rather they do not end, or on a fake and hurried happy ending. This, the forced alliance toward filiation, or filiation experienced as an alliance, was the cinema of Nicholas Ray. But at the dawn of the 1980s, it is also a way to narrate the “history of cinema”. 

2. In Wenders’ film – this Nick’s Movie that became Lightning Over Water before becoming Nick’s Movie again at the very last moment – Ray has, for Wenders, become a Ray character. This film marks the culmination of the renowned politique des auteurs, a politique invented (here, in France) to defend films like Ray’s and which was itself formulated in a strange, oedipal way: a failed film by an auteur was always more interesting than a successful film by a non-auteur. In other words, the auteur is always right since we are talking about the father figure here. Today, we know what this politique des auteurs has become: on the commercial side, it’s the forced marketing of signature effects, and on the filmmaker side, it’s the often hypocritical cult of the dead. Nick’s Movie is all this but also more than this: less a film about filiation than filiation made film. Wenders believes himself incapable of separating the two films: the one desired by Ray and the one commissioned by Coppola. On the one hand, an auteur’s film, a work that is European, open, even gaping, poor, experimental: a documentary on New York’s loft apartments. On the other, a craftsman’s film, professional, meticulous, expensive, a revival of the California found in film noirs and Dashiell Hammett’s novels. Wenders has “managed” to locate himself simultaneously in two extreme situations for a contemporary filmmaker: not to have chosen your subject and to have been chosen by your subject. But the two experiences communicate with one another: the young German filmmaker learns in the end from the subject Ray the skills that he needs to confront the Coppola machine. He turns a part of America – a wounded, dying part – against America itself. He is not the first one to do this: there is already a long history. In Contempt, Godard played Lang’s assistant on the set of The Odyssey for a paranoid producer called Prokosch. Lang was a fallen old master, a monument of cinema but also someone who had suffered a lot in Hollywood. Then we saw Welles in Chabrol’s film, Fuller in Godard’s (and Wenders’), Fassbinder playing in Sirk’s university films etc.

3. I am not talking about the influence of the older filmmakers on the new ones, or of cinephile generosity (although we have seen Scorsese supporting Minnelli and others trying to help Tourneur produce a new film). I am talking of the presence – the physical presence – of certain filmmakers in films of the new wave (the French New Wave firstly, and then the Italian and the German ones). And not just any filmmakers, but those, born in America around 1910, who had their careers cut short, stymied or simply destroyed. Between 1960 and 1965, filmmakers as important as Welles, Mankiewicz, Kazan, Sirk, Ray and Fuller fell silent or lost the favours of audiences, and therefore of the studios. They had often become too singular or too modern for Hollywood. At the time, we saw it as the consequence of the crisis in American cinema or the malice of the Majors. But this phenomenon was also symbolic. For the first time in the history of cinema, a generation born in cinema (unlike the previous generation, that of the pioneers) no longer works and has lost the right to say “filmmaking, our profession”. Faced with the exceptional longevity of their elders (Dwan, De Mille, Walsh, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock), their horizons have shrunk, their time has gone fast, and even though they still have a lot to say and to film, they have been reduced to silence. 

Illustrations from La Rampe. Bitter Victory (top) and the set of Nick's movie (bottom). 

4. This had never been the case, at least not in America. And it happened at the time of the emergence of European “new waves”, of the first cinephile filmmakers. We hadn’t really noticed at the time that these young auteurs, who had invented the said politique only to be its beneficiaries, weren’t sure at all that filmmaking would be, for them, a profession. It is not impossible that, faced with the demands of modern cinema (which focuses on experience rather than know-how), the very idea of a profession came across as regressive, outdated. Yet, twenty years later, despite the cold war that they are engaged in, Godard and Truffaut have this in common: they have never stopped filming, with or without an audience, for the audience or against it. Filmmaking is their profession. As Truffaut says: “what makes me happy about making films is that it offers me the best possible use of my time”. But Truffaut made sure this was true, true for him. It likely will be the same for Wenders or Bertolucci, Fassbinder or the Straubs. In Europe, what is decisive is not box-office success but the capacity of filmmakers to build the machine which, despite occasional failures, can continue to reproduce itself. This is how an aesthetic can take shape. But there is no such thing in the USA (except perhaps for Cassavetes): the broken generation of the 1960s didn’t know how to operate in any other way – it was Hollywood or bust. If not for his lifetime contract with MGM, Minnelli is prematurely finished, Kazan and Fuller have taken to writing, Sirk has comeback to Europe, Tourneur just died in France, Ray has sought exile, Welles has been showboating, and even Wilder, Preminger and Mankiewicz are facing difficulties. I believe that the young European filmmakers have then exorcised their fear of not being able to make films forever by granting their American elders a sort of filmic survival. So as to truly be their heirs. A paradox: The American Friend is always the case of an American father who has run into trouble. 

5. I find the word “cinephilia” too limiting to explain this phenomenon. Nor is it a case of an abstract history of forms or a list of influences (because genuine influences are always oblique). It’s about the status of these filmmakers, their history, where they come from and the mythical history they have fabricated for themselves. It’s also about something that cinema, and only cinema, can do – better than painting – because it is a figurative art, meaning that it can make figures come back, come back from a past where they have represented something unique for someone else. Actors are those privileged figures: they are essential to the dialogue between filmmakers. Because of them, cinema cannot be the mere succession of styles or schools, and the phenomena of filiation take shape through nostalgic, ageing images of the same bodies. The body of the actor spans all cinema, it is its true history. This history is never told because it is always intimate, erotic, made of devotion and rivalry, of vampirism and respect. But as cinema gets older, it is this history that films bear testimony to. The encounter between Ray and Wenders and the film born of this encounter are a chapter in this history. Comolli had clearly seen – in a text in Cahiers that was mistaken for a joke – that, in 55 Days at Peking, Ray played the role of a paralysed American ambassador, as a metaphor for his situation as the auteur of a film that was getting out of his hand. End of his official career as a filmmaker and beginning of his career as an “actor”. An exhibitionist actor who was aware of it and who watched himself age in the films of others, and sometimes in his own films (see the perfectly named We Can’t Go Home Again). What was modern was the survival of a filmmaker as an unemployed body, a crazed guest star, a ghost. And the most modern, in this sense, was Welles. Conversely, what was classic was the elision of the body of the filmmaker (or its ironic presence: Hitchcock): what is more unthinkable than the appearance of Mizoguchi, Ford or Hawks in their own films? Nothing. Toubiana was right to say (in an article for Libération) that Ray has bequeathed his body to Cinema like others bequeath theirs to Science. Except that Cinema doesn’t exist, it’s always a filmmaker – and in this case, it was Wim Wenders.

6. This is why the attitude that consists of criticising Nick’s Movie for moral reasons seems to me short-sighted if not unjustified. What is abject in cinema is the figurative surplus value, the “supplementary image” that a protected auteur extracts from the spectacle of an exposed actor (exposed to ridicule, indecency or death). It consists of ignoring the non-reciprocity of the filmic contract. But what happens if the exposed actor, having also been an auteur and understanding both sides, has generated this spectacle, if he has desired it? And if he has bequeathed this spectacle as well? Opposite Ray, there is another introverted, rather ill-at-ease actor: Wenders. The game is equal between them because they have something in common: they are both posers. Since the very beginning, Wenders has been a filmmaker of seduction, not exhibition but a discreet, imperceptible posture where the most neutral of images confer to those within the image and to the one who has put them there the secret pleasure of knowing that they are being seen or caught “not posing”. A “double posturing” that irritated me in Wenders’ first films and in The American Friend but I like the fact that, instead of cultivating it further, Wenders has made it the very subject matter of Nick’s Movie. For one gets the feeling that the encounter between Ray and Wenders is turning out to be a genuine encounter. Between father and son probably, between peers for sure. Ray knows the stakes of this game of hot cockles between the one who poses and the one who is made to pose, between the one who kills and the one who dies (in Bitter Victory, also featuring in The American Friend: it’s the one dealing the fatal blow who screams, and who screams in place of the other). Just watch the end of the film and the exhaustion on Ray’s face. There is nothing left to say, he says “Cut!” Wenders (off-camera) says, “Don’t cut!” Ray: “Don’t cut.” It’s a game where no one wins but which saves the film from pure and simple necro-cinephilia. There is such an awareness of the camera among everyone involved that it is as if its presence became the only driving force of the film, pushing the viewer to the periphery, depriving him of his “slice of death.”

7. We believe too easily in the power of the camera to cut through poses, to strip away masks. We are too quick to cry rape. But a camera merely captures masks and reflexes, hidden behind or beyond the “role”. “Live broadcast” is merely the name given to a technique for recording images and sounds. There is no live per se. “Live,” we witness the making of a subtle body, formed of material clues resulting from the idea that the body exposed to the camera has of itself. A subtle body, the vague hope of a mask, a turmoil, a mutation, a hieroglyph: nothing simple. This is more than actorly know-how (if it were the case, then everyone would be an actor) because this subtle body, this protecting body, this extra layer of skin, is the same as the other, barring a hymen (but the hymen is solid). That is why I think Wenders was right to edit Nick’s Movie again. The version shown in Cannes was a long, uneasy and rather chaotic film that could be defended only if we thought that it was the reality of the shooting that was being captured. A shooting that no one had wanted, an orphan film that no one wants to take responsibility for. In a scene that has disappeared in the final cut, the editor could be seen trying to put the film in order. I had the impression that the film was neither Ray’s (who died before the end of the shoot) nor Wenders’ (who, in another scene that has disappeared, is criticised by the team for abandoning the film and setting off to California to attend to his other film, Hammett), but that of the editor, Peter Przygodda, and that the film bore witness to his difficulties and sufferings. Przygodda emphasised Ray’s moribund figure, the stalling of an uncertain shoot, the misery of the team gripped by helplessness and a desire to do well. It is clear that Wenders has betrayed something in editing the film again: Przygodda’s film, the raw documentary. One could find it regrettable, of course. But it’s certain that, in doing so, Wenders has found the real subject of his film, neither Ray’s death, nor the film in a film, but the truth of his relationship to Nicholas Ray. Recall the magnificent scene from Kings of the Road where Zischler, having returned to see his father and unable to talk to him, designs the front page of a newspaper (he is a printer) while the father sleeps. Writing triumphs where speech fails. “While father is sleeping.” While Nick Ray is dying: benefitting from an intermittence. In the final version of Nick’s Movie, such is the presence of Nick Ray: intermittent, mysterious. Sometimes it even seems that he has been long dead. And I love this scene (which could be deemed too explicit but it’s precisely what I like with Wenders: the ponderousness of explanations) where Wenders dreams that he is in Ray’s sickbed himself and that Ray is watching over him: a zombie-like Ray, attentive, slightly comical, like a ghost out of Kurosawa. 

8. Wenders has said that he wanted Nick’s Movie to eventually be a fiction film. This is why he has undone his friend’s (Przygodda) edit. It’s not just a difference in style or a commercial concern, it’s a question of content. There may only be two great subjects in cinema: filiation and alliance. Ray and Wenders have the commonality of trying to mix, conflate and swap the two. I said at the beginning: filiations experienced as alliances or forced alliances toward filiation. Is Wenders Ray’s friend or his heir? His decision to renounce documentary devotion for fiction shows that he has opted for filiation, a filiation that he has the heart to accept. That is how I interpret the return of Wenders’ style in the final cut, including his quirks and facile choices (especially the musical bridges). As if he told himself, at one point, I am going to make this film such that the Officiel des spectacles* can summarise it as: “An elderly man and a younger one, linked by a strange friendship, attempt to make a film together, but the former dies prematurely…”. The film had to become anonymous again. The dead body had to be nondescript, embalmed. The only way to respond to Ray’s perverse injunction (something like: I demand that you betray me) is to be a good son, a good cine-son. 

* Well-known weekly printed magazine listing all the cultural events in Paris with short summaries (translator’s note). 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma in April 1980. Reprinted in La Rampe, Gallimard editions, 1983. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.