Sissi, the Young (Ostrich) Empress

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Sissi, the Young (Ostrich) Empress* 

"Can one say that Sissi ignored the fear of seeing clearly? Certainly not. She speaks of the 'inner masquerade' to which she must constrain herself, or again of the 'comedy of our illusions' that we must constantly address. She postulates the illusion, like all those who won't kill themselves, even though they have seen through to the nothingness of life, this 'malady,' as she calls it."

— I find these lines remarkable, she said, setting down the book. Who wrote them?

— You cannot know him, dear Archduchess. He is a certain Cioran, a Romanian who has always loved Sissi.

— Me too, I loved her, said Archduchess Sophie. This must seem strange to you, no? I suppose you've seen those films where they cast me as the villain.

— Your Majesty, I've seen them, and I consider them first-rate hogwash.

— Well, please consider, continued the reassured Archduchess, that if I hadn't devoted myself to shouldering the only negative role, there would have been nothing to tell and nothing to film — no film, no Sissi, nothing. The screenwriters had no ideas.

I was pleased to receive the Archduchess Sophie, the only bearable character in the awful Sissi series. I like they way that she, alone, seemed exasperated by the tons of caramelised emotion and opulent sentimentality which, in the mid-fifties, had swamped Western Europe. Corseted in a series of blue dresses, with the sharp eye and sarcasm of an Austro-Hungarian Darrieux, she was, in 1956, the only one to escape — already! — the soft consensus. Later, I would still be upset with the vile trilogy to have given such a deliberately dumb image of a character as extraordinary as Elisabeth of Bavaria.

— I suffered, believe me, continued the Archduchess. Suffered to have acted (very badly) the stuck up mother-in-law who likes neither beer, nor the Hungarians, nor sauerkraut, and who can think of nothing better to do than kidnap her daughter-in-law's child in the name of raison d'Etat! Suffered from this Austrian production with its old UFA veterans, worn down to the bone by Viennese operetta and Nazi comedy.

— Archduchess! The film dates from 1956!

— You are not actually thinking, dear friend, replied Sophie with an icy look, that the aesthetic of Sissi: The Young Empress is any different in nature than those Tyrolean comedies of the late Nazi cinema, with chalets, Agfacolor, modern ingenues, and blond Aryan ski instructors?

— I'll grant you there is a servile way of filming power, in constipated counter-angle shots, and a paternalistic way of filming ordinary people as bumpkins of another race. An aesthetic of the courtier, if you like.

— Nazi, I tell you.

— Archduchess, you are too Godardian!

— Very well, I'll be quiet, said the Archduchess, plunging back into her reading of Cioran.

But watching again this cartload of nonsense left me with a retrospective unease. I was thinking that it was with these idiotic Sissis that the Austria of the post-war period had managed to sneak back in among respectable nations, and I wondered what Waldheim had thought of this at the time. I was thinking of poor Romy Schneider, forced to go through Visconti in order to cancel Ernst Marischka, before having, like the the true Sissi, a dark destiny. I was thinking of the good people of France who had never had the courage to tell us that they had liked the German films under the Occupation, and who, later, had made of Romy, daughter of Magda, their repressed Teuton. I was thinking of those old Germans who, in the early eighties, were taking advantage of the Berlin Festival, to watch again in secret (it was at the Astor cinema) the pretty Nazi films of their youth.

I was starting to understand, little by little, why the syrupy stiffness of this Sissi: The Young Empress still repelled me so much**. Certain films repel less on account of their intrinsic worthlessness than because we have the enduring feeling that at the very moment they shower us with their nirvana of vignettes, something truly vile continues to take place. There are images — those of the Sissi films, for example — that exist only to render others unimaginable. Images to distract the gaze.

And yet, Cioran: "Can one say that Sissi ignored the fear of seeing clearly? Certainly not."

* Translator's note: The French title of the article is "Sissi Impérautruche", a pun on the French title of the film Sissi Impératrice, literally:"Sissi, Empressostrich."

** This chronicle was written as a direct reaction to an article published in Libération celebrating the film in some sort of ironic "second degree". There is no second degree, except in mathematical equations.  

 First published in Libération on December 29th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

Zeffirelli, Tchi Tchi

Another text from Recrudescence.

Zeffirelli, Tchi Tchi 

It's an experiment anyone can conduct. You decide, at a certain moment, not to settle for the poor sound of Verdi on television and to remember that La Traviata is also being broadcast in stereo on the radio station France-Musique. You choose, by chance, the beginning of the second act, the only happy moments of Alfredo ("De' miei bollenti spiriti..."), and you get France-Musique to lend its efforts and its decibels to Channel 2. Very quickly, you let out a cry: the presence of the music is suddenly such, that you wonder how you managed, just twenty seconds ago, to be content with that emaciated sound. The music is everywhere, and also the small sound effects in the film: carriages, horses, and even a small pond where Stratas and Domingo play at "happiness" in the purest Hamiltonian tradition of Coca-Cola ads (of which you know the only aria: "It's the real thing…").

Very quickly too, you become aware that what had seemed so grand and so beautiful, the Zeffirelli décor with all its gold (first act), its ochres (second act) and its blues (third act), is actually quite small. Just like the small screen that is hosting all these colors. It's enough for the music to take on a little amplitude for the image of the filmed opera to be sent back to its fundamental modesty. The image is indeed there, functioning like a simulation screen or an aquarium where the fish curiously seem "in sync" with the music. It offers the music lover a spot, as good as any, to rest its gaze. A spot where muted bodies act as a slightly out of steps pantomime of the opera we are hearing. The old-style music lover who followed "from the score" can give way to the one who will follow the opera on a "monitoring screen." 

And what a surprise then to recognise the bodies of the people whose voices you are hearing. Thus, it's not enough that the singers are betrayed by the TV sound, nor that they be mercilessly dubbed when they sing, they also have to appear on the monitoring screen as simulacra of themselves. Could this "diminished" image of themselves constitute a "plus"? No doubt that for Zeffirelli the answer is yes. 

The filmed opera, as practiced by the author of the immortal Jesus of Nazareth, rests on an iron principle, as strong as it is implicit: nothing is more horrible than the spectacle of singers. Nothing is more tedious, long or awkward than these open mouths, these thoracic cages filling up with air, these eyes that roll back or flutter. Everything that will "naturalise" these excesses is therefore a "plus." The good plus, if you will, is less of a plus. Less stunning intensity in the singing, more ordinary finesse in the movements of the body (always Coca-Cola). When Violetta sings at the end of the first act the famous "Sempre libera...," you sense it's already too much and that the body of Teresa Stratas must roll around in the décor to illustrate the feelings that Stratas' voice continues to carry but in her off-screen voice (unless we should rather speak of "off the chain voice"). 

There is a temptation of the music video in this Traviata. A video where we'd see the singers acting badly, but "in person," in "natural" roles, while their "supernatural" voices would be content to accompany them from afar. You wonder what taboo prevents Zeffirelli from going further in this direction. Why does he settle for a few subjective shots, half-dreamed, where Alfredo's future as a married man is prefigured? Why is he so timid? 

Stanislavski was already complaining, in 1925, that most actors "while singing at a certain tempo and rhythm, walk according to different one, gesture according to a third, feel their emotions according to a fourth. How, with this disconnect, can one achieve the harmony without which there is no music and which, first of all, demands a certain order'?" Yet, when Sobel found the right distance to show how Stratas played and sang Lulu, he was simply doing his work. Television was doing its own work, which consists (at best) of showing what the work of others consists of*. But when Zeffirelli settles for constantly replacing the spectacle of (dubbed) singers by the "music video" acting of the same singers who have become (pinned) "actors", he merely proves that he respects neither the singing nor the actor. Nor cinema, which, it seems, ought to know two or three things about that impossibility.

* This point is open to discussion. Although a well-known lazybones, your author often deplores the disappearance of work in films or with others. But if it's possible to compare Zeffirelli's simulacrum to other ways of treating singing — slightly more realistic ways (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Moses and Aaron or Anne-Marie Mieville's Mon cher sujet) — it's because it's still about physical work. In a world where mediation jobs ("services", "communication") are ever more numerous, it's perhaps inevitable that work not only loses some of its moral (and Christian) aura but also becomes completely abstract. Many things are now working on their own and for us: machines, robots, signs, images. 

First published in Libération on December 21st, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.  

Downstairs, Study

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Downstairs, Study

The film begins and we know nothing about it. It dates from 1932 and it's not even a classic. Its star (John Gilbert) is faded, forgotten, dead. The name of the director has the look of a gag (Monta Bell). The voice that says a few words by way of introduction doesn't even say if it's a good, rare or mediocre film. The voice isn't selling anything, doesn't want anything. The voice, in truth, is less interested in the man who could (or should) have directed Downstairs (Erich von Stroheim) than in the one who wanted Downstairs (Irving Thalberg).

If Brion* does such good work on television, it's that he is fundamentally for Thalberg and against Stroheim, for the boss of the factory and against the accursed artist. Brion does not really demand of television to posthumously avenge the cinema "auteurs" but to host, half a century later, the "high-end" factory products dreamed up by the great decision-makers of the era. One would need to compare Thalberg, not to Stroheim, but to those who today hold — in principle — a comparable power. But, when it comes to Bouygues or a Berlusconi, will someone one day write lines about them as vibrant as these (by Godard)? "A director of television thinks at most two hundred films per year. Irving Thalberg was the only man who, every day, thought fifty-two films. The foundation. The founding father. The only son. And history had to go through this: a young body, fragile and beautiful, as described by Scott Fitzgerald, for it to begin to exist: namely, the power of Hollywood: the power of Babylon: a dream factory."

A film about which we knew nothing except that it was just airing, one night, on TV: Downstairs is a lovely "documentary" on this dream factory. In it you see how the factory also produced sketches. Incomplete dreams, half-awake, dreamed in their "broad outlines" and with rare details. Dreams that smell of the grease of the factory, of the star's breath and the master's eye. Once we've understood that Downstairs is more of a "study" than a film, we can watch it in a friendly manner. After all, it's not every day that we use television to calmly study a fragment of ancient cinema.

In Downstairs, a hypothesis is tested. John Gilbert, 37, ex-sex bomb of the silent era (famous for his extremely expressive nostrils, an acting style that appealed to Garbo): can he accede to the spoken word, and from there, to more complex roles? Gilbert plays the role of Karl, a lawless chauffeur who seduces chambermaids and blackmails their mistresses. Karl, at war with everyone, never lets up, and if he obtains meagre results in villainy, if he remains after all a small predator in a small costume, with a smoldering look and raw nerves, it's not his fault. It's John Gilbert's fault, whose muffled voice is revealed and betrayed by the sound recording. It's Albert's fault, the well-meaning domestic, who smashes his head in. It's the fault of the screenplay which doesn't go far enough, and of Thalberg who wanted this kind of storyboard "à la Stroheim, but without Stroheim."

The sketch, nevertheless, has the (austere) quality of the early days of the talkie. In 1932, there isn't yet a ton of music in films, we listen to the radio, to the voices, the surprises of wireless broadcasts. In 1932, we're moving away from Griffith-like social epics or De Mille-like high society dramas. No more classes fascinated to excess by their erotic struggle. In Downstairs, what condemns Karl to mediocrity is that the rich, the "upstairs" people, are just typical and dull bourgeois. You have to see, at the end of the film, how stupefied they are to see their class interests defended by their servant Albert.

John Gilbert died — alcoholic and without illusions — four years after this fatal Downstairs where he tries, with furious energy, to stir up trouble for the other characters of the film. But those are so comfortable in their desires, that all of Karl's undermining work never goes beyond domestic scenes. It's infuriating. As for Monta Bell, a friend of Stroheim and the film's signatory, he films rather well this story which can't quite manage to find its actors; he atomises it into a thousand details and naturalistic inserts where bodies, at certain moments, manage to exist. Flashes of a pair of dusty trousers, a fiery skirt hem, or a treasure hidden in stockings. But in 1932, only the English Hitchcock knew how to play with such things.

* Translator's note: Patrick Brion (the voice in the previous paragraph) was the host of Cinéma de minuit, a late night broadcast of classic films on French television.

First published in Libération on December 20th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991. 

Tireless Cranes

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Tireless Cranes 

If When the Cranes are Flying* were a question, the answer would be: from the third shot of the pre-credits sequence. In the sky, we see their impeccable V formation that will not return until the very end of the film. Those cranes have, truth be told, flown more than once over the screens of the world, and Mikhail Kalatozov's film is perhaps the only Russian film to have become part of the life of the French. To the point that, dubbed by the Paris Soundtrack Company (SPS), it loses nothing. The grandmother with white hair who exclaims "I can't believe I forgot that I still have some saucisson; I'll go get it" is an essence of a grandmother, at home in every kitchen and credible in every language.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1958, the film was loved for various reasons. Reasons of thaw, first of all (two years after the Khrushchev report). Reasons of lyricism, too (because of the theory of the "emotional camera" owed to its chief cinematographer, the famous Sergei Urusevsky). It was enough then for a film not to speak of the war in heroic and pompous terms for it to seem like a true sign of thawing. That the love story between Boris and Veronika suddenly benefits from an abuse of camera movements normally reserved for war epics was enough to make The Cranes are Flying a film with a difference. That Tatiana Samoilova was allowed to wait until the very last shot to melt her private grief into the collective emotion was a real breach in the official logic of martyrdom of Stalinist cinema.

The informed cinephile opinion however was less keen. It said that the poetry of the film felt fabricated, that the shreds of aged avant-garde surprised but remained unconvincing. It said that this falsely youthful film would likely age badly and also that it wasn't enough to cancel out so many Stalinist horrors. Nevertheless, the kid who was fourteen in 1958 would rediscover, thirty years later, the intact sensation of what had seemed to him for a short moment the very essence of cinema: the amplified noise of the tic toc of the clock, the dying character reliving his life between birch trees, and the streaks of crude light on the faces of the lovers. 

Why is it not in vain that those old cranes are being broadcast again, with dubbed French calls (yes, the crane "calls") on Channel 1? Because Gorbachev has succeeded Khrushchev and that, with yet another thawing, it is with the same tireless innocence that we are once again looking eastward. Except that from the USSR, it is no longer only the films that come to us, but also news reports that we are still watching — owing to the fact that these are the first and that we are not yet accustomed to them — like films.

It was strange to watch again The Cranes are Flying after all the evening news broadcasts on all six channels, each with its report on Armenia. All the more strange since the war evoked by Kalatozov and the Armenian earthquake are both catastrophes. Was it finally possible to "critique" the Cranes, as if their flight had found its landing place? To at least compare the way an apartment building bombed in the forties is filmed in 1958 and the way, thirty years later, Soviet authorities behave on the site of the Armenian earthquake. Of course, this belated reverse-shot sends Kalatozov's film into the most mannerist aestheticism. Does it prove right those who had seen more tricks than sincerity? But to those who used to say "so what?", it also proves them right.

When you see the film again, you end up understanding why it still works. It's that Kalatozov and Urusevsky seem to have made two films in one. One for pleasure and another one. When they launch into a scene in a frenzy, with vanishing lines, successions of spaces, sprints of actors, flights of cranes and unhinged music, it creates a certain sensation: the sensation of being moved. Yet (it's the other film), this sensation is never picked up again — neither worked through nor developed — in the scene that immediately follows. It remains (in memory) because it was born without a sequel (in the film).

The Cranes are Flying does not rest on an idea of progression or dawning awareness but on the childlike fear Veronika has of suddenly seeing something bigger than herself (a body or a crowd). block all of her space and prevent her from running. That's all.

* Translator's note: the French title of the film is Quand passent les cigognes (When the cranes are flying...)

First published in Libération on December 19th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991. 

The King Was Naked

 Another text from Recrudescence.

The King Was Naked

— Let me ask you a poser, said the film. Do you know the title of the film that in 1936 was number one at the French box office?

— César, obviously. Why this question?

— And the sixth?

— Modern Times, I think.

— And the third?

— I'm stumped. Some forgotten dud no doubt.

— No, me. Me, The King. I was a smash hit and, in your place, I'd take look at what resembled a hit film fifty years ago. It'll make a change from masterpieces. It's interesting for a critic to also see films that were successful in their time, no? Besides, Pierre Colombier, who signed me, was one of the great prolific craftsmen of the era (eight films in five years), the man behind Ignace (which was close on the heels of La Grande Illusion) and Ces messieurs de la Santé. My screenwriter, who was no other than Louis Verneuil, drew from a play by de Flers and Caillavet that my success brought back to the stage.

— You only talk about "success", I grumbled ill-tempered. If only you knew how ugly old hit films can be. In fact, I suspect you are some loud theater turned into film, worth nothing except for a few rare numbers by actors.

— Yes, but what actors! went on the film, clearly seizing any excuse. In 1936, Gaby Morlay was the number one favourite actress with the public, and Popeye the sixth. Francen was sixth, Raimu tenth, and André Lefaur twenty-sixth. It's in Cinématographie française, I can provide you with the lists. 

— King, you know that a film is more than a poster!

— It's precisely because I know it that I'm telling you the plot. It's the story of the king of a fantasy country, Jean IV de Cerdagne, who makes an official visit to Paris. It's also the story of a rich "democrat" member of parliament (in the play, they even used the word "socialist") who ends up Trade Minister. Francen is the frivolous king, Raimu the rich member of parliament. Francen, for once, is not sinister and Raimu is Raimu. How does the MP become minister, you ask?

— I'm not asking anything.

— By getting cuckolded twice by the king. Once with his wife (Morlay, giddy) and once with his mistress (Popesco, exotic). Cynical and funny. With, I'd even say, something of a pre-Bébête Show.

— In 1936, in the middle of the Popular Front, you weren't more politically engaged than that?

— I'm a satire, admittedly anti-parliamentarian (the era wanted that). No one finds favour in my eyes, but I am not at all ideological. I'm sometimes fierce, and my dialogue sparkles with auteurs' quips. For example, when the king serves champagne, he says: "It's the first time that I serve... that I serve a purpose." Hilarious, no?

— No.

— I admit that I've aged, continued the film. But there must be a documentary aspect in the way that, at the time, class differences were marked quite strikingly by differences in voice, accent, and tone. Can you imagine the jibes that Raimu and Lefaur hurl at each other (in the role of the Marquis de Chamarande)? You picture Raimu saying: "You consider yourself, Sir, as the owner of your property, while I consider myself, myself and my descendants, as the custodian of mine. This is why your fortune is a capitalist one while my fortune is a democratic one." Grand, no?

— Not bad, given the era.

— I see, said the film, that your ill-will is real and that I'll have trouble convincing you. I could tell you that — was it the effect of the Popular Front? — Colombier changed his aristocratic first name Pière to Pierre and that after 1940, he stopped directing.

— That's not enough, I said.

— I could even tell you — but let this stay between us — as an aside, that Hitler liked me.

— I feel you're ready to say just about anything, I protested.

— No, no. You just have to read page 136 of Geneviève Guillaume-Grimault's book (Le Cinéma du Front Populaire, published by Lherminier). Do you have the book? Yes, read the bottom of the left column.

— "Francen tells that, according to Goering, Hitler would often have a copy of the film screened." Normal for an anti-parliamentarian satire, no?

— You're harsh, said the film. You're harsh for a film that's showing tonight on Channel 2's Ciné-Club, a sign that Claude-Jean Philippe* found me very good.

— Don't make things worse, please.

* Star usherette of Channel 2's Ciné-Club who did well from Cinema, of which she unfortunately has given a laughing and breathless image. Always made us ashamed. 

First published in Libération on December 12th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.  

A Hopeless Verneuil

 Another text from Recrudescence.

A Hopeless Verneuil

What is more formidable than a Romanian farmer? Let's take one from the 1940s. There he is, dancing pleasantly like a Zorba. But he gets cruelly caught by History who won't let go of him for another ten years, after so many twists and turns that they become comical. This good Christian is detained (out of malice) in a camp for Jews from which he escapes only to find himself in Hungary, and then in Nazi Germany before it is liberated by the Americans. We'll recognize the thread of the very famous novel by Virgil Gheorghiu, The Twenty-Fifth Hour. A film was made of it in 1966. Henri Verneuil is the name of the guilty party.

What is more polyglot than a Romanian farmer? When he follows in their escape a few Jews from the labor camp, Johann Moritz (that's his name) ends up in Budapest, where he is quickly arrested by the police. They torture him, and what's beautiful is not that he doesn't talk, it's that he says — in what looks like perfect Hungarian — that he knows nothing. Where did this Romanian farmer learn Hungarian? A mystery. Later, transferred to Germany where a military disciple of Rosenberg sees in him a pure Aryan specimen, he becomes a SS sentinel. What's beautiful is not that his face is on the cover of Signal, it's that he speaks what looks like perfect German. Later still, when the Americans plant their flag on this same camp and he is summoned by a chewing-gum-chomping commanding officer, it's in what looks like perfect English that he defends his now incomprehensible cause. Could our hero have learned both German and English?

One will say that this debate is outdated and that in 1966 the demands of international coproduction imposed on producers this homogenisation of languages. What one won't say is that the French television viewer of 1988 will see the film in a version where all the intertitles — giving the dates and places of the action — are written in English and not subtitled. Moral: it is easier to cross the maelstrom of History than to watch The Twenty-Fifth Hour on television.

Why is this serious? Because there are millions of people in the world who have been caught in the whirlwind of History and were unable to respond to what was being said to them because they didn't speak the language*. Because it was possible to die for a misunderstanding or for a sentence wrongly interpreted. Because the victors always impose their language, and because the Americans, victors in the domain of cinema, imposed theirs on international cinema and its valets** — Verneuil, in this case. Because, as a result, nothing remains of the film's subject, which was supposed to be the absurdity of the human condition, and all that's left is the comedy of the misunderstanding.

There would be many other ways to talk about this grotesque and justly forgotten film. It belongs to a category with devastating effect that one could call "the absurd in twenty lessons." Always in full possession of the necessary and sufficient knowledge to situate oneself in the story (and in History), the spectator watches how a poor soul, a Romanian farmer, who understands nothing about events that are beyond him and that never even manage to leave a mark on him. Result: instead of holding us as witnesses to the criminal absurdity of situations, the film has us follow someone who understands nothing because he's first and foremost an idiot. Anthony Quinn is incidentally perfectly at ease in the role.

Is Verneuil on the side of those who know everything? Perhaps, but also on the side of those who don't feel anything. For when the Hungarians ask the "volunteers for Germany" to decorate their convoy with little flowers picked up in the field, one clearly sees it's a scene of dark humor. What one sees less well is why at that moment the music becomes pastoral, all violins and lyricism. Second degree? One can, quite frankly, doubt it. The Pavlovian hypothesis is unfortunately far more plausible. There comes a moment when a filmmaker, when never giving a damn about his subject, lets himself create these sound slip ups.

The film is twenty-two years old. One hopes there'll never be another one like it — ever. It's too sad. The only (malicious) thing that one ends up thinking about this Twenty-Fifth Hour is that if all Romanian farmers are as stupid as Johann Moritz, one can understand how they found themselves so easily under Ceaușescu's boot. But this is a malicious thought***.

* In his conversations with Ferdinando Camon (published by Gallimard), Primo Levi recalls his experience of the camps: "Few of us, Italian Jews, understood German or Polish, or so little of it. I knew a few German words. Language isolation, in these conditions, was lethal. Nearly all the Italians died for this reason." 

** This point is open to discussion. It's possible to consider "dubbed French" as a language unto itself, twice foreign. It denotes both the strangeness of the French people toward the language of the dominant classes and the strangeness of the French language to American cultural domination. Dubbed French, just Arabic, verlan or slang, is part of the confection of this atonal and almost Bressonian language, that of rap or which is spoken by the young boy in Doillon's Little Gangster. The fight for original versions is therefore not over; it's just forgotten. 

*** The truth is more nuanced. If the events of Winter 1989 revealed a Romanian people very much damaged by History, this people still turned out to be a lot cleverer than Johann Moritz since they learned quickly how to convert their revolution into a telefilm which, at first at least, had a lot of success. 

First published in Libération on December 7th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991. 

Who Likes Maurice Cloche?

Another text from Recrudescence.

Who Likes Maurice Cloche?

Nothing is more embarrassing than the way certain films go about winning their case in appeal, against all decency, as if time would inevitably end up being on their side. Nothing stranger than their obstinacy in always "eyeing us up" — Thursday evening, for example.

— What are you doing there, all alone on Channel 5?

— I'm plugging a hole, said the film with feigned nonchalance. But I am worth much more than that. I'm entirely built around the actor Fernandel and my name is Rooster Heart. I'm forty-two years old.

— Are you an auteur film? I tossed out, to mask my ignorance.

— If I tell you who made me, protested the film, you'll zap me right away. Nobody likes Maurice Cloche.

— Indeed, I said, cooled down, the Clochian oeuvre seems able to justify by itself the old rallying cry: "To the lions, the Christians!" The unbearable Monsieur Vincent dates from 1947, and you, you're from the vintage of '46.

— I won't plead the cause of Cloche, said the film with good sense. I'll just point out that his body of work alternates between edifying and madcap films. I'm part of the madcap ones.

— Prove it, if you are a film.

— Here goes. I tell the story of Tulipe Barbaroux, a typography worker, in love with the boss's daughter, who decides to die when the latter wants to marry her off to a rich stutterer. You have to picture Fernandel in a grey smock with his lock of hair, singing on the staircase: "I have a heart that goes tick-tock."

— Sure, I said. But I also imagine Cloche's style in this working-class operetta, and I'm terrified.

— That's precisely why I veer off suddenly and I switch to dark humour. Tulipe decides to kill himself but keeps botching it. He prints his own funeral notice, gets smartly dressed, swallows a tube of sleeping pills, between flowers and wreaths, and wakes up with this fine phrase: "What is this caress? Is it you Saint Peter?"

— I can see Fernandel playing all that with quite a punch, I admit...

— Needless to say, the film went on, that he carries me entirely. Because, when it comes to the mise en scene, Cloche is lugubrious. Just imagine — to seem more eccentric, he multiplied tilted shots and unusual angles that make me tip over — yes — tip over into a fantastical dimension. For, having regained consciousness, Tulipe meets a mad scientist, called Pugilas. And Pugilas discovers that Tulipe possesses a "monstrous hypertrophy of the auricles and ventricles", in short too much heart, and decides to graft in place of his heart an animal's heart: a rooster's heart. The operation succeeds.

— Clearly, I murmured, it's rather unusual.

— I won't even mention (the film was growing excited) the wake-up scene where Tulipe in pyjamas clucks with a rooster accent "When the sun appears at the window."

— Say nothing to me.

— Well, this rooster's heart changes him completely. From a timid guy, he becomes a real Don Juan. You see crowds of women running after him, like in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.

— Please, remain polite.

— So much so that he must flee and Pugilas sends him to Venice. On the train, Tulipe meets the boss's daughter and her stuttering husband. She throws herself at him, the husband surprises them and challenges him to a duel. Then the film tips over into Lubitschian entertainment.

— Another comparison like that and I'll zap you, I threatened.

— Lubitsch revisited by Cloche, if you like. There's a masked ball with Jacques Hélian's great orchestra, a rendez-vous with a princess on the stroke of midnight, and Tulipe disguised as Harlequin...

— And, naturally, I said ironically, the film tips over again.

— How do you know?

— Go on, tell me the ending.

— Obviously (the film was darkening), the screenwriters had ventured so far into the far-fetched and the tonal rupture that they were obliged to use an old trick.

— Say nothing to me, I can guess. It was all just a dream. Tulipe Barbaroux wakes up and they bring him only good news: he won at the races and becomes a business partner to his boss, and gets to marry the daughter (she had broken off with the rich stutterer); Tulipe Barbaroux wakes up another man, a bold rooster, blessed with fortune. Is that it?

— So what? What harm is there in that? pleaded the film, suddenly pitiful and aged. It was 1946, we were coming out of the war, you had to have a good time.

— And what if, clever one, we interpreted this screenplay as a metaphor about the sleep of France, about its dreamed and fake rooster-like heroism, about its cowardliness...

— That would be harsh, admitted the film.

That's how I watched Rooster Heart by Maurice Cloche. It was bad.

First published in Libération on November 19th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

A Good Lelouch? Yes

Another text from Recrudescence.

A Good Lelouch? Yes

If we knew quite well how a bad Lelouch looked on the big screen, we didn't yet know how a good Lelouch would appear on the small one. Since Monday evening with Love is a Funny Thing (1969) on channel 3, we have a better idea. A good Lelouch being, by definition, a strange object, its tele-viewing could only accentuate its strangeness and add to its value. 

Right, people will say, but what exactly is a good Lelouch? A good Lelouch, we will answer without batting an eye, is a Lelouch which, instead of ostensibly under-playing the great mawkish sentiments (the dreadful threat of sing-alongs about suppressed modesty on a background of love for life), over-plays very finely petty little feelings. It's when he films hollowed moments that Lelouch is interesting, not when he believes he's filming between the lines. And it so happens that the star couple of Love is a Funny Thing (Belmondo as a friendly coward and Girardot in cutting sincerity) was already caught, at the dawn of the seventies, in that phenomenon that we keep observing: cinema no longer really knows what to do with its last stars. They are ringing hollow!

One can see Love is a Funny Thing as a documentary that changes subjects once or twice along the way. A documentary on the "world of cinema" on one side and a documentary on "America" on the other. And since documentaries, although a very respected genre, still bore everyone, Lelouch asked two very popular and very French actors to serve — through them and their weak love story — as common threads. Thanks to them, we enter without fuss (Lelouch prefers music to sound and harmony to fracas) into these two supposedly enchanted worlds: Cinema and America. French and knowing to be so, the two stars are already recycled in gracious performance and luxurious begging. "Don't forget the tour guides!" they seem to tell us at every moment.

They are therefore neither good nor bad, they are — in every sense of the word — elsewhere. The only problem is that this elsewhere, it too has become hollow. It's terrible, but elsewhere is no longer what it used to be. Too late for cinema navel-gazing on itself. Too late for the American dream or exotic America. Too late for the France-centric conquest of the West. Lelouch, no doubt, wasn't thinking of getting beyond simple demystification (showbiz people love to multiply the proofs of their normality) but in doing so (let's remember it's a good Lelouch), he carelessly handed over the doctored keys to his own aesthetic.

For there is something joyful in the two scenes where Belmondo (who plays a film composer) is filmed at work, in the process of adding emotion to a weak scene with great sweeps of violins, or later, explaining to Girardot how one writes music for an Indian attack scene. First, it's rare that a film shows work. Also, it's rare that a film shows bad work. Finally, it's rare that a filmmaker dares to offer himself so unreservedly to self-criticism. As for America in Love is a Funny Thing, it is no longer at all a land to discover or to mythify; it's simply a country still surprising enough where it's possible — between two planes, two affairs, two films — to do a bit of tourism, with the missus.

Lelouch's frankness is, it too, likeable. It captures from its very beginnings a socio-aesthetic phenomenon: the resistible rise of the touristic idea at the expense of the old metaphysic of the voyage. It lacks grandeur, certainly, but, as early as 1969, it freed up a way of filming that is entirely real: that of ordinary tourism with its false emotions, its clichés, its bad English accent, the anecdotes one will embellish when back at home, the airport waiting lounges and hotel lobbies all alike, the jet-lagged flirting, the stupid laughs in Las Vegas, and all the false naturalness of the little French people's timid bravado when showing off in "ze states".

This produces a film that has the atonal charm of the seventies, the decade when we began to abandon pathos. In the management of "almost" dead times and the impossible surprise, Lelouch certainly doesn't have the fierce anti-effectiveness of a Ferreri. But by dint of never filming big things head-on, he just about managed to record little things, at an angle. Hats off!

First published in Libération on November 16th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991. 

The Bacchantes Stripped Bare

Another text from Recrudescence.

The Bacchantes Stripped Bare

Is a naked woman in Agfacolor still a woman and, if so, is she really naked? Seeing again the plump and pallid apparitions in Ah les belles bacchantes! (Jean Loubignac, 1954), one felt like a witness to a debate that must have been both very intense and secret: the domestication of nudity by the "sexy" cinema of the fifties. Lascivious yet "natural", the "100 most beautiful women in Paris" announced in the credits emerge from the scenery, take a few steps on stage, walk through the "tableaux" before returning backstage as though their bodies — quite naked for the era — were nothing more than a nice little gag conceded by older sisters to a public of easily dazzled young lads.

These are the things (plump nudes in greenish Agfa) that bring a smile when seeing again these Belles bacchantes, a bottom-of-the-barrel film which, before becoming definitely naf, had a cult status for a time. A trailer heralding a potential French "burlesque" with Dhéry and his Branquignols as its standard-bearers at the start of the fifties. These nudes generate more smiles than the official gags of the film — a well-worn story of a show's rehearsal featuring an overzealous director (Dhéry), a frivolous patron (Maillan), a weaselly cop (de Funès), a damp tenor (Blanche), a common plumber (Bussières), etc. All terrible incidentally, even when the rest of their careers would prove they were all very good.

Ah les belles bacchantes! has always struggled to feature in any sort of "history of cinema." It's enough to re-watch it in its tele-miniaturised form to understand why. The film has the limits (and the charm) of what knows nothing of cinema. On the one hand, it belongs body and soul to the older tradition of the cabaret revue. On the other hand, it anticipates what will later become television burlesque, built on "numbers" and parodies, much as the Collaro Show represents it today with good energy. Nothing has changed in one sense, except the nudes.

Seeing films on television has the advantage of freeing us at last from that moronic and futile question: "Is this cinema?*". A great many "films," in fact, were nothing other than the functional recording of existing shows, and their quality already depended on that of the shows in question. And if it is true that the quality of television depends on the intrinsic interest of what it transmits (television formats everything but creates nothing), many films were, in a sense, always already "television." It is not filmed theatre that is a scandal, it is the inanity of many plays that were filmed (think of Après l'amour by Maurice Tourneur). It's the weakness of the revue rehearsed (Ah les belles bacchantes!) which makes Ah les belles bacchantes! a weak film. Because in 1988, what we are seeing is a documentary whereas Dhéry and Loubignac thought they were shielded by parody's winks.

The film dates from 1954, three years after Les vacances de M. Hulot and three years before Mon Oncle. The reference to Tati, aesthetically crushing, is justified "sociologically." It is still the France — cowardly and convalescent — of the postwar era, with its scrawny burlesque (the Prévert brothers excepted), caught between the ineptitude of movement and the fear of the body. Tati is a genius because he understood there was no point aping the Americans; one had to shorten movements and de-sexualise bodies. Is Tati, some will ask, "cinema"? of course, one can put it that way. Not in the sense that Tati would have adopted the specificity of the Cinema as a noble program, but rather because he too is recording something, like Dhéry. The only difference, but it is a considerable one: what Tati records (a modernising France) exists but is not yet visible. Tati is the one who has to invent it, to give it to see (and above all to hear). "To invent what exists"** is a beautiful programme which one can, if one wishes, call "cinema." Dhéry was content, for his part, to parasitise what was about to cease existing.

There are some truly curious moments in these Bacchantes when, incapable of embellishing anything and always taking everything literally, the authors reach a certain absurdity à la Mocky or à la Ferreri. The absurdity of the brain death. The characters bear the names of the actors who embody them, and in the empty theatre (the author of the revue being hidden beneath a tarpaulin) the numbers slide painfully toward malaise. Aspiring to zaniness, like a French Hellzapoppin, the film only strikes today through its downtime moments. Those moments, where embarrassment tends to win over a tenuous pleasure, hold together not by the actors, nor by the way they are (badly) filmed, but rather by a quality of silence to which we are no longer accustomed.

Where does this silence come from, this naked silence, as disarmed as the pre-cited nudes? It is then that we suspect the horrible truth. No one would venture today to broadcast (on television) a supposedly burlesque film without saturating it with canned laughters***. So much so that what these not-very-pretty Bacchantes unwittingly testify to is the (courageous) era when films, too, were stripped bare.

* The author is trying to hold to an old professional habit, which consists of ignoring any "normative" definition of cinema. For how long?

** If "to invent what exists" is a possible definition of modernity, "to re-enact what had seemed to be" would be one for mannerism.  

*** This point is open to discussion. Is there such a thing as a television carnivalesque? The answer seems to be negative. Yet, the recent (and horrible) comic montages hastily put together by André Halimi tend to show that there is no limit to the mutual erasure of the "artist" and the audience. For the first time, sketches whose beauty relied on a sense of rhythm (those of Fernand Raynaud for example) are cut short, edited, gutted out, combined with others, with no respect for anything. Like a second disappearance of an already lost comedy. But also the disappearance of the audience, replaced by canned laughters, or made to behave like robots and applauding on request (and without shame). This head-on confrontation of protheses, under the surveillance of a television bent on destroying what came before it, clearly shocks the author of these lines. But why not see in this mockery of the double disappearance a Bakhtinian effect and a new "carnivalesque", tailor-made for the new media?

 First published in Libération on October 13th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

The Devil, Master of the Screenplay

A text from Recrudescence.

The Devil, Master of the Screenplay  

We often hope that French films will give us the euphoria of a burst of speed. That they'll get their little world going and get us carried away. Hoping that, thanks to this unexpected sprint, we forget that their world is small and that they are inhabited by puppets. The "chase sequence" is the lost dream of French cinema, the broken link between the burlesque of the early days and the dead end of the Comédie-Française. René Clair, who came through burlesque and ended up at the Académie, had the misfortune of pulling it off once with Le Million (1931) — in the same miraculous way Bob Beamon broke the world long-jump record once and for all. Ever since, everyone has been running after that record, including René Clair. 

Beauty and the Devil (1949) poses the following slightly absurd question: what if the well-known "crisis of the screenplay", far from having emerged just a few years ago, had begun right after the war? Born from the regret of no longer being able to tell stories the way they were told before, and from the dread of new stories from which nothing good was to be expected? From the fear of History and the scepticism about the post-atomic world? It's worth knowing that the character of the knight Henri-Faust (Gérard Philipe) was seen by the left-wing intelligentsia of the time as a kind of Joliot-Curie — the man who had opposed the military use of his research and who was about to be removed from his position as High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. The man who hadn't sold his soul to science-turned-Devil. 

The crisis of the screenplay occurs when there is no more story, and only the screenplay is left, only the fatality of the screenplay. That's why the Devil is the ideal character for the "crisis of the screenplay" — because he is the very face of fatality. Since he knows everything about everyone, the Devil is the best possible screenwriter. And since he enjoys the spectacle of a manipulated humanity, he is also the best possible audience. He stands both upstream and downstream of the film, condemning the filmmaker to the refined academicism of the sceptic ("what's the point?"), and the spectator to the dreary contemplation of a show that has already been performed. All that's left is the elegance of despair: the fake euphoria of a chase sequence and a burst of speed. 

Going fast to make us forget we're going nowhere is a programme like any other. A moralist's programme, one that the very idea of a "happy ending" fundamentally disgusts. In his own way, René Clair fights against the fatality of the screenplay, but despite Salacrou's help, he doesn't succeed. He doesn't succeed because by 1949, it's a bit late. Ten years earlier, the chase sequence in The Rules of the Game was sublime because it anticipated the war by a few months. The one in Beauty and the Devil is lacklustre because four years have already passed since the first atomic bombs. 

All that's left is the lazy deployment of great actors. Let loose Gérard Philipe, and especially Michel Simon, on Léon Barsacq's sets to get that trembling of life — that acceleration produced by actors traversing a flimsy diorama of polished prints. The only real moments of cinema in Beauty and the Devil come from Michel Simon, because he alone plays, and outplays, all of Clair's plans (in both senses of the French word: plans and shots). Pure accelerations owed to a genius actor who commands every possible rhythm. 

Forty years on, or nearly, what does this amount to on television? Two stressed actors in a frozen film. Common sense would, of course, dictate that we expect nothing more from the film than those two performances. But common sense would equally dictate that they be "extracted" from this bloodless film like set pieces of bravura. At the very limit: instead of occasionally interrupting Beauty and the Devil with adverts, it would be better to interrupt an hour and a half of adverts with a few great moments of Michel Simon. At the limit, of course. 

There is, all the same, one true moment in Beauty and the Devil — a beautiful accelerated sequence that goes beyond the "crisis of the screenplay." Before a large mirror that serves as his "viewing screen," Mephisto-Simon shows Faust-Philipe what awaits him for the rest of his days. Silent and powerful, the virtual images of a screenplay already written and a film already made file past — a screenplay against which Faust finds the strength to rebel. What moves us then is less this last-minute triumph of free will than the aesthetic of the trailer — which is, deep down, René Clair's own aesthetic.

First published in Libération on 7 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des sacs à mains, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

The Diagonale Archipelago

New quarterly film magazine Narrow Margin centres its second issue on Diagonale, the French alternative film production company created by Paul Vecchiali and others in the late 1970s. The issue includes a short text by Serge Daney reviewing Archipel des amours, one of the film produced by the company. A good opportunity to buy a copy of the new magazine!

The Diagonale Archipelago

First published in Libération on  19-20 March 1983. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, volume 2, P.O.L., 2002. Translated by "H. A." (likely Hicham Awad from the Narrow Margin editorial board). 

Serge Daney in 2025

Time for the annual round-up of Serge Daney news. Time also to acknowledge that this blog is twenty years old: the first post was in November 2005, so getting on a bit. 

The year properly kicked off with Ted Fendt's incredible gift of two transcripts of Daney's Microfilms radio broadcast (guests: Rivette and Straub). Then followed 12 new translations from various sources.

Some random texts appeared here and elsewhere:

• Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!
• City of Pirates
• Pialat’s Dream (Van Gogh)
• Two new Translations on Tennis
• Cinema, Life and Solitude

Two texts on manga:

• Manga, Sake for the Eyes
• Sake for children

The "Romania" series:

• Freeze-Images
• The Judges and the Assassin
• Romania, Year Zero
• Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to TV

In September, the London ICA hosted a Serge Daney film cycle, accompanied by a special edition of Sabzian. This blogged played its part with a translation of an extract of Pierre Eugène's book on Daney (Pierre was one of the participant to this rare gathering of "Daneyans"– a term coined by Nicholas Elliot).

Few other news. Pierre Eugène mapped Daney's travels. Emmanuel Burdeau mentioned again his project of a book on Serge Daney ("perhaps the most important book that I'll ever write"). As far as we know, Christine Pichini may still be translating the volume 2 of Cinema House, and Nicholas Elliot may still intend to translate Cine journal when the rights are sorted (both for the publisher Semiotext(e)). Let's hope these projects progress or come through in 2026. 

Happy new year to you all!

Sake for Children

So, it turns out that the previous post (Manga, Sake for the Eyes, Art Press, 1986) was merely a shorter rewrite of a longer piece published in Libération in December 1982, the year Daney visited Japan. 

Sake for Children 

December 1982, Tokyo. Manga is ancient, Manga is erotic. It might even outlive Japanese cinema. 

Take a vending machine–any one, at random. Insert 200 yen. Wait for the dull thud of a falling object. Listen to the machine being a good sort and thank you: Domo arigato gozaimasu! (thank you very much). Bend down toward the fallen object: it could be a pack of cigarettes, a can of beer or a magazine. Open it: it’s a manga? You are at the heart of the matter–your investigation into the “Japanese look” can begin. 

What is manga? Stories in drawing, graphic novels poorly printed on low quality coloured paper. Manga is everywhere: sold in kiosks and bookshops, discounted in the second-hand booksellers of Kanda, left behind on café tables or in public baths. Little known abroad, studied unofficially by a few French japanophiles more or less “tatamised” (Thierry Lagarde in Tokyo and Jacques Lalloz in Kyoto), manga is a considerable phenomenon. 

One in four Japanese people reads manga regularly. Thirty millions copies are published every week, month and bi-weekly. As always with Japanese media, the centre is very strong and the periphery is absolutely uninteresting. Five large publishers in Tokyo own most of the market and a single title (Big Comic, created in 1969) sells one million copies. Each publisher diversifies its target audiences according to age and sex. The kiddies, teenage boys, young girls, adult males and married women are reached at variable speeds. 

Each week, 6.6 million manga are published for teenage boys and 1.5 million for young girls. Baseball or Samurai vs sentimental romance. Girls read more slowly than boys so each month, the proportion is reversed: 6.4 million for the girls and 1.5 million for the boys. Every fifteen days, 2.5 million manga are bought, read and thrown away by “slightly older” adults. Of the total, ero-manga are estimated to account for an admissible ten per cent–3 million copies sold and immediately transformed into sexual fantasies. Beside Garo, a magazine for enlightened manga-philes, we count at least 300 small magazines, almost fanzine-like, printing between 5,000 and 30,000 copies. Manga artists (called mangaka) are almost always independent workers. Every man for himself and the jungle for all. Manga is much more than a craze or a wave, it’s a tidal wave. 

The readers of manga are among the most curious sights on Tokyo streets. No laws prevent them from hiding in the back of a bookstore to check out “this week’s issues. This practice is called tachiyomi (reading at the storefront). Buyers or not, they gather in silent groups to lose themselves (or find themselves) in these soft and cheap images where Japan deliriously dreams of itself. Unlike pachinko, this other solitary game, it’s not the frustrating steel ball that the tachiyomi enthusiast follows, but his own gaze going from image to image, right to left, top to bottom and page to page, at astonishing speed. He is a “reader” but in the technological sense: he doesn’t really read, he performs a sort of electronic sweep of the page–he scans it. Later, in the subway, the reader will amuse himself between two snoozes, or get aroused between two stops, depending on whether the manga is funny or erotic. En masse and in secret, the Japanese person is at home in these images. And to take a closer look at these images (forgetting all caution) is a way of meeting him a little. 

For this is a popular production. Gripping and lazy, repetitive and full of surprises, wildly uneven. To read through a manga is to encounter without warning a pearl-strip among many dirty-strips, it is to lose one’s way between lousy nude photos, unreadable ads and silly games. Genius mangaka rubs shoulders with botching amateurs and cheaters who draw from photos. But the pleasure is intense. One can discover one’s favourite authors, follow them incognito from week to week, and enjoy a production that hasn’t reached “cultural dignity”. In Japan, what is popular tends to last. Whether deviant fans of subculture, nostalgics of the “B-movie spirit”, shrewd sociologists or Japan-loving gaijins: manga is made for them. 

Unlike an inept and mawkish television with its six national channels (but no cable) and a cinema losing momentum, manga is the direct line connecting Japanese people to their fantasies–a never-ending self-analysis. No heavy unconscious here, nothing happens metaphorically or “in a certain way”, and symptoms are strong. Everything is here, exposed in drawings, told without precautions. This is where one must seize in vitro the making of the “Japanese look”, between these thousands of bodies of ink and paper and the mutant faces that sometimes make one question whether Japan belongs to the Asian continent. 

Sexual plots deliberately sadomasochistic, backstage stories of baseball or sumo, shameless “pee-pee”, rebellious samurai, voyeurist chronicles of the big city, small scatological cartoons, longings for the prince charming, sci-fi and eternal myths: everything can be recycled into manga. Its link to historical truths is more than tenuous, its educative value low, its morality insignificant. Manga are almost always frenzied: delirious and diluted. 

Where else (beside fashion?) could one find such stylistic freedom, such joyful invention, such plastic vitality and comparable audacity? Nowhere else, it seems. The art and the manner to design pages, to decompose the action and carve bodies are just as obviously japanese as the “pages à manger”—the fake prepared dishes displayed in restaurant windows. And that excessive taste for the impossible angle, the obscene detail or the emptied-out space is recognisable to us. It once made the grandeur of the late “Japanese cinema”. Has it taken refuge in manga? 

One evening, unable to resist, I went to visit Professor Yoshiya Soeda, the author of three books on manga and an authority. In his small studio in Shin-Koenji, covered with scholarly books, he graciously answered my questions. Yes, manga continues the cinematographic style today, in its own way. There are excellent reasons for this: during the 20th century, old manga (didn’t we recently see Hokusai’s in Paris?) and young cinema travelled together for a while. These travelling companions have a beautiful shared history. Flashback to the thirties. 

Now imagine the Japanese street. Silent cinema screenings are animated by a benshi (1). The benshi is the man (in flesh and bone) who lends his voice, his sounds and his commentary to the film’s actions. Facing this animated manga that is a film, the benshi learned to place his text and his onomatopoeia like a talking fumetti on an image that can’t help itself. The Saturday night audience, Durassian before its time, goes to see images in order to listen to their favourite benshi. In his autobiography (2), Kurosawa evokes the romantic figure of his eldest brother, Heigo, leader of the Tokyo benshi union at the time of the arrival of the talkies (1931) — who committed suicide. The benshi was the great victim of talkies. 

Imagine the Japanese street again. There, for a gathered audience of children, unfolds the kamishibai or “paper theatre”. Showmen of graphic novels edify the masses. Now, kamishibai artists saw films and were influenced by the “cinematographic language” then in full upheaval. And largely because they were left-wing, they adapted the tricks of Soviet montage to make agit-prop in the streets. Despite the success of talking cinema and the requisition of artists for the needs of imperial propaganda, the kamishibai didn’t die immediately. Professor Soeda even proposes the date of 1957 and names the party responsible for the coup de grâce: television. 

Modern manga (although it had existed since the twenties) is the direct heir of the cinephile “paper theatre” before the war. Its first golden age coincides with the fifties. Then, a new generation of mangakas was adapting to (smaller) formats and different (faster) speeds. An audience of ageing children was continuing to read manga. Infantilisation began. Osamu Tezuka, Shirato Sampei, Ishimori [sic] Shotaro, Tsuge Yoshiharu, Takita Yu and many others transformed fairground and marginal manga into a prosperous medium. 

Content-wise, their manga were willingly epic and moral, well-intentioned and with a sort of humanist boy-scoutism that was the dominant trait of the era. This candor of postwar “good resolutions” was gradually lost making space for more cynicism and indifference, but today’s manga fans regret it: it reminds them of their childhood (like Hergé or Jacques Martin for us). 

On the other hand, plastic invention was continuous and plots were “to be continued” endlessly. For years, Sampei compiled his admirable Ninja Bugeishō (“Ninja Martial Arts Notebooks”). A fitting return, Oshima brought them to the screen in 1967, simply filming the drawn pages as they were. Tezuka, the most famous of all, with his French beret and Osakian joviality, never stopped inventing little message-carrying characters, some of which (like Tetsuwan-Atom, which became “Atom-boy” in the USA) became known worldwide. In 1951, after the death of his son, he created Robot-boy whose adventures continued for seventeen years! Tezuka’s sensibility is humanist and even ecological: Robot-boy fights against the military use of the atom and pre-emptively against anti-robot racism. Today, in another serial-saga, Tezuka has launched his characters in quest of a mythical bird, none other than the Phoenix (Hinotori). 

Despite benefitting from an affectionate respect (the complete works of Tezuka are being published again), this generation of mangakas has been surpassed. From the seventies, manga experienced a second boom. It learned to manage its audience, following them in their growth, in their relative enrichment, their nouveau riche culture, their depoliticisation. The sixties had seen the triumph of weekly manga and the return of adult ero-manga. During the seventies, a young female audience was won over, and today it’s women who are about to be seduced. 

By diversifying its targets and feminising its audience, manga lost its heroic character. Some, including Tezuka himself, complain: these kawai manga sadden them. We're moving toward stories drawn from everyday life, down-to-earth, even regionalist. We no longer ask big questions but vulgarly tell small stories. Or we fall back on a stock of universal stories, like "The Three Musketeers" or this series by Ryoko Ikeda, Rose of Versailles, which was such a success that adventurer producer Mataichiro Yamamoto and Shiseido beauty products commissioned a film version from Jacques Demy (it became Lady Oscar, 1978). 

So what does a successful mangaka look like today? Like Mizushima Shinji. One day, we learn he's exhibiting at Ueno, on the top floor of the Matsuzakaya department store. We go. It's good publicity for him ("a handshake equals ten copies sold," he tells me) and a good image for the store since Shinji is one of the richest and most famous mangakas in Japan. The exhibition looks good too, with original pages under glass panels, ready-to-be-signed boards, ink stamps with the effigy of characters invented by Shinji. In red, green, blue, a whole little world of baseball players in tracksuits, from the round-eyed brute to the shaggy, loud kid. A world dedicated to an eternal "we won!" that delights schoolchildren. 

Frail and excluded from stadiums despite his passion for baseball, Shinji took his revenge by drawing and reports an annual turnover of 240 million yen. Enough to employ several assistants (150,000 yen per month for seven years: after that, they fly on their own) and to pose sportingly with them. Behind a glass window, before the amazed eyes of an audience of all ages, the assistants demonstrate their craft. A true Japanese tradition in this case: one works on details, another handles shadows, a third the outline. 

When interviewed, Mizushima Shinji doesn't shine with modesty. He's not interested (he says) in Western modern art, traditional Japanese art, or even other people's mangas. He only likes what he does (what he's been doing for ten years without renewal). "My manga is very amusing," and he speaks of it like a soft drug. His manga is "sake for children." 

Obviously, he's exaggerating, success has gone to his head. But if it's true that manga is the sweet daily delirium "made in Japan," its use seems irremediably in-country (3). Universally known in Japan, Tezuka, Sampei and the others are almost ignored elsewhere. They don't complain about it (except Tezuka who's preparing a breakthrough in France). As much as fashion opens Japan to the outside world (that is, the West), manga is the expression of a closed microcosm. 

Strange archipelago, this Japan? Free from any concern about speaking to the rest of the world, having everything to sell to it, and no stories to tell to it. Active and empty. Anti-America, in other words. A strange premonition seizes the traveler. That of a culture both very ancient and very provincial, which enters the 21st century in the leading pack but without an image of itself, sleepwalking in its pragmatism, exposed to blunders (see the episode of rewriting school textbooks) or to a disarming chauvinistic candor ("we are Japanese — therefore incomprehensible") (4). 

Will the electronic peasant of the 21st century be Japanese? Is he already in a world that confuses information (fast, very fast) and communication (slow, very slow)? Does he no longer need images to communicate with what is not him? No, that's not possible. 

(1) On benshi, see the recent book by Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Towards a Theory of Japanese Film, (page 79 of the French version published by Gallimard/Cahiers du cinéma).

(2) Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (published in French by Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil). 

(3) The only Japanese stories sold abroad are animated movies. Their only strategy is aimed at tiny children. Many mangakas are repressed filmmakers. Tezuka, from the sixties, made several feature-length animated movies (animecheun, as they are called in Japanese), sometimes released in the USA (Cleopatra, A Thousand and One Night, Phoenix 2272). Beside the fact that this is another aspect of the "Japanese look", it is clear that for any manga lover, the move to animation equates the death of everything they liked in the discontinuous art of graphic novels. 

(4) There is an anecdote. Philippe Pons, like others, relates it in his small book (Japon, Seuil): "When the foreigner speaks in Japanese, he is looked at with surprise, and, to begin with, he will be answered in broken English or with gestures signifying that he is incomprehensible." QED.

  

 First published in Libération on 15 December 1982. Reproduced in Ciné journal, Cahiers du cinéma, 1982. 

Manga, Sake for the Eyes

New translation of a 1986 text on manga for the magazine Art Press. Thanks to Ryan Waller for suggesting it on Bluesky. The text seems to come from a visit to Japan which, according to Pierre Eugène's map, Serge Daney visited in 1982.

Manga, Sake for the Eyes 

It is impossible to stroll in Japan without catching Japanese people in the act of tachiyomi. “Reading at the shop front” (the meaning of tachiyomi) is common practice, as is reading in the metro (for those not sleeping) or discreetly buying a manga from a vending machine. Those thick illustrated books bursting with colour, thrown away after being leafed through, are an integral part of daily life. One in four Japanese read manga—whether they are men, women, teenagers, seeking sentimentality or perversions innocently presented. You could say that Manga are like “comic books” (the biggest publisher is called Big Comics), but they are more trivial, basic and frantically produced at the rate of 30 million copies a week. They form the graphic landscape of daily life, and since the Japanese economic boom of the sixties, they have sustained the fantasies of every population category, including Japanese people abroad—even in Paris, you can find troves of manga in the Palais-Royal district, always garish, oscillating between shoddiness and refinement.  

On the metro platform 

There are manga genres: noble, popular, coded, exuberant. The world of baseball provides Mizushima Shinji with countless little stories in which athletes are disheveled and turbulent young people winning countless victories against thugs. Samurai stories have inspired Shirato Sampei to create the famous Ninja Handbook (Ninja Bugeichō), worthy of Kurosawa and brought to the screen by Oshima. Humanist and pacifist themes have long inspired Osamu Tezuka, today a real institution, with characters like Atom-boy and Robot-boy that became so successful they were known in America. But manga also function as illustrated sentimental romance novels (for teenage girls, who became avid readers in the seventies), bloody crime novels in black and white, and trivial, burlesque visions of daily life in which Japanese attempt to mock themselves—doing so especially cruelly since they hold the monopoly of this self-derision. Finally, 10% of manga are ero-manga: short sex stories, crude and naive, quickly read and abandoned on the metro platform—“sake for the eyes”. 

Manga are not recent. We know of the great “manga” of the early nineteenth century, which looked more like science manuals or catalogues. In the 1930s there was kamishibai, a paper theatre, with street artists unveiling illustrated epic stories (often with political undertones) for passersby. Kamishibai was killed by television, but it managed to coexist with cinema. The persons showing the drawings occupied the same situation as the benshi, the narrators of silent films. Modern manga were born after the second world war and have kept gaining momentum. After the economic boom, in the no longer famished Japan of the seventies and early eighties, manga reflected the era with kawai (“nice”, “cute”). Much to the chagrin of those like Tezuka, who had made manga a powerful channel of pedagogy and righteousness, today’s manga embrace a mix of mannerist violence and the era’s mushiness and pastel colours.  

No second degree 

Manga gets its strength from its innocence. There is very little “second degree” in these fast series of compulsive drawings. Great narratives, as elsewhere, have made way for monotonous staging of speedy fantasies (victory, fear, terror, rape). Since it’s a pro domo production, minimum precautions are in place, and the gaijin seeking to “connect” with the preconscious of contemporary Japan need only leaf through the thousands of quickly forgotten pages to read all about it. 

A popular art, almost anonymous, manga has its stars and its scribes, its fans (a magazine, Garo, aims to build a scholarly subculture) and its observers (Professor Yoshiya Soeda has already written knowledgeably on the topic). In any event, even stars (like Mizushima) work in studios, on a production line, with an artisanal organisation. The link between the great tradition of drawing and the most talented mangaka is still there. And there’s a real craft of the line, the interlacing, the angle and the detail that still endures with manga. Having survived Japanese cinema, manga have retained from cinema this incredible refinement in the search for frames and angles, sequencing and reframing—closer to the Belgium school than to American cartoons.  

It is of course with erotic manga that this art of the graphic mise-en-scène reaches its highest level of sophistication. A paradoxical sophistication, since the stories of ero-manga are unrestrainedly crude. The body of women becomes the theatre of unlimited settling of scores, ranging from pure and simple sadism to no less pure and simple butchery. Pedophilia, high school girls in panties, urethral eroticism, phallic overestimation, and stupid scatology are from the outset given for what they are. At the same time, the demands from censors are such that artists, who are not allowed to represent genitals, use framing as a real art of hiding—meaning they return it to one of its essential functions. If the laziest artists leave a blank for the unfigurable parts, the more inventive ones restore to “figuration” some of its fundamental ambiguity: that of a defiguration.  

First published in Art Press in December 1986 (issue 109). Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, volume 3, P.O.L., 2012.