Notes on Palombella Rossa

Second text on the same topic. These are notes left on Daney's computer and published posthumously in the book The Exercise Was Beneficial, Sir.. The other text is the finished article published in Libération.

Notes on Palombella Rossa

Notes on Palombella Rossa before this film alone becomes all of the cinema. 

* A film taking place poolside where no one pushes another or falls by accident to create a gag. It is definitely no longer the burlesque body (the one who falls and gets back up). After Tati, Sellers and others, one step further into non-corporeal comedy. Result: since it’s clear that the person running around the pool isn’t going to fall into it, we look at them differently (as with the official dressed in white, a beautiful and ridiculous tightrope walker). Result: the exposed body is simply that of the sportsperson, without any exaggeration through bodybuilding and/or mockery. Moretti’s body is of a singular beauty (similar to that of swimmers, with slender and hairless muscles). In fact, the body is returned to a relative autonomy: it functions rather well. It’s on the side of the mind that things get really decided (the body doesn’t call out its reasons; it obeys, it does what it can and it knows what it is able to do).

A big part of the beautiful things in this film comes from this emancipation from the old burlesque. Its own difficulties relate to the creation of a mental burlesque. And if, even when we least expect it, there are people fully clothed in the pool, it’s at the end of the match and via a common movement (a ritual?) of the crowd jumping into the water. There’s both a displacement and a generalisation of the gag.  

* Basic democracy. We are also freed from the hierarchy of characters (main or supporting characters, extras), since all characters are equal in rights and prior to the first image. Example: the way M. meets his own daughter Valentina (ciao papà!) comes a little from Ferreri or Buñuel, who also subscribed to the always-already-democratic filming. But unlike Fellini who treats his “apparitions” like objects forever located in a single brain, M. ensures they belong simultaneously to two orders of reality: for him and for them. One can no longer talk of the auteur and his fantasies, since his fantasies are the result of a situation which needs two persons to create, even temporarily, a figure.  

* Figure. When M. rejects the clingy small Catholic man who chases after him, the two of them, for a short moment, form a “couple”, and the camera is precisely where the choreographic figure is being recorded. The temptation to “be one” with something (the team, the water, the political party, the people, as if “in your element”) is as eternal as eternally frustrated. With Valentina (head butts), the journalist (the slap), the junior player (Gennaro), etc., one must always find the figure which allows things, stylistically, to last a little while. But what’s even better is that M. also forms a couple (always an improbable one) with ghost characters (the old “fascist worm”), childhood memories, parts of himself, etc. As Deleuze says, he is therefore “very populated inside himself”, and the mental burlesque is probably related to this crowding so specific to the modern individual. 

* Nothing lasts. The idea of the game of water polo (with, still, a sort of countdown) is clearly handy since it allows the creation of mini-moments (or cluster bombs). But these moments are not, like with Godard, slow-motion-to-better-see or “miracles lasting a few more seconds”; they are aesthetic and poetic hypotheses, meaning they break up the idea of a consciousness which intensifies by itself. That’s the privilege of the comic, who must fundamentally confiscate and re-distribute.

* Shifting effects. It’s obvious that, unlike puritan moralists, M. accepts the “law of [narrative] shifting” as unavoidable. He is perhaps the first one to use it with something in mind. I call “law of shifting” this feeling, which has always exasperated me, and which consists in granting certain elements (most often the soundtrack, but also slow motion) a right of pre-emption over the following scene, meaning playing on our reflexes conditioned by advertising or pornography. As in The Mass is Ended (the priest, the ball, the dribbling, the fall), there is now the following series: I’m afraid, I charge forward, I dribble, I lose the ball immediately. Those shifting effects are therefore very sophisticated, since they play on the same obsessional mechanism that explains the missed penalty (right, (left), right, left!): they work only for a very short time, a time conquered from others. The most beautiful example, rather Pasolinian, is Elvis Presley’s song which imposes silence. Here again: freedom, figure. 

* Water. Filmed as never before. Although we know that water polo also takes place under water, M.’s camera refuses to go below the surface. A rejection of depth, which makes this film cinema’s response to the audiovisual (The Big Blue). Water is a surface, often filmed from above, like a game of Go, but a special surface that must be crossed over, laboured with one’s own body (boustrophedon). Besson’s ideology is the “silence of the depths”: he targets a simple audience who wouldn’t know the sea as a mother figure (mer = mère). With M., it’s impossible to ignore: the relation to the mother of course, but not because she represents a refuge-like element, but because she didn’t allow the child to “change sport”. A modern, authoritarian mother, not the fundamental mamma or the absent Mother. Interesting question: knowing what we know about Freudianism, must we interpret the characters’ clumsy denials as if we were psychoanalysts?

* Speak / shout / shut up / sing. How to avoid “journalistic jargon”? A beautiful topic. M. is never satisfied with the languages he comes across. Smooth-talkers infuriate him. He must (an idea taken from P. K., as found in Chaplin’s Great Dictator) create from scratch the conditions within which he can deliver a message. The amnesia at the start (in relation to “the Tuesday event”), the effort to remember what one might have said, the refusal of the language of the interview, the manic repetition of a sentence (che significa oggi essere communista?) which regains its meaning via its repetition, the song as a life-saving escape.

* Individualism. “Siamo uguali, siamo diversi.” Before the second accident (before the end, with the real red lob), M. goes mad while driving his car, unable to combine the two terms of modern individualism: uniqueness on the one hand, equality on the other. 

* Relation to cinema. When Doctor Zhivago is on the television, everybody, as if going to mass, goes to see the end of the film, and cheers on the characters in a sport-like manner. His cinema rejects the fetishism of what has been fatally recorded and wrapped up.

Wonderful voluntarism, mad optimism. A point of view which turns its back to the melancholic versions of “that has happened” and puts cinema at the heart of popular culture. 

* Comedy. Before, it was a singular being, “one too many”, a scapegoat for the group, carrying one’s truth, etc. M. is the continuation of the hero of The Party: he’s not in the right place but that’s alright. Still a player at 35, cumbersome and problematic with his crowd of people “at home”, he doesn’t obstruct the normal course of things. Old idea: from now on, with us, it works; what’s meant to work is working; it’s no longer possible to laugh (or complain) about the malfunctioning of the world, it’s rather its functioning that generates anxieties and laughter.

Published as a chapter in L’ Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur., P.O.L., 1993.

Cinema and the Memory of Water

Two texts published together on this blog about the connection Serge Daney made between two "aquatic" films in the late 1980s: The Big Blue by Luc Besson and Palombella Rossa by Nanni Moretti. The first text below is the finished article published in Libération in 1989; the second comprises the notes Daney kept on his computer about the films and which were published posthumously in the book L'Exercice. 

 

Cinema and the memory of water 

In the 1990s, when we will look back into the popular metaphors of the 1980s, we’ll find that they were aquatic. “Nothing but water, everywhere!” we will say, remembering all the things that floated (in every sense of the word). From exchange rates to TV images (the “image tap”), from the return of synchronised swimming to the Olympics to the promotion of “board sports”, and (to end in a flourish) to the liquidation of Communism in Eastern Europe versus the liquefaction of the subject in Western Europe. It is the same message: the new individual, this anti-hero of democratic mass societies, this “floating atom emptied by the circulation of models and thus infinitely recyclable” (Lipovetsky), is fundamentally someone who needs to know how to swim. 

How could it be otherwise in a world often described as “ultra-fluid” by Baudrillard, by far the best journalist of the decade? Common metaphors (e.g. “it’s going swimmingly”), however, also point to our surprise at not drowning, and to the resigned euphoria of keeping ourselves above the surface, thanks to a few tight moves and despite going under many times, far from the beach and the cobblestones of the 1970s. Culture can now rightly be called a “broth”, with merchandise as the supreme floater, and the soup (and not only Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s) having more merchants than ever.  

How is cinema staying afloat in this broth? Not very well. Yet, two “stories”, one about a freediver and one about a communist water polo player, have left a mark in recent years. One, The Big Blue (1988), was an instant success with what is left of the general public; the other, Palombella Rossa (1989), allowed those who still need cinema to be counted (1).

The two films have nothing in common except that they talk very differently of the same thing. In each, there’s an aquatic and charming hero, and a “bath” from which the first film escapes “through the bottom” and the second by squatting the surface. In both there’s a difficulty in communicating, which makes the first film almost aphasic and the second sick in the language. From an Oedipal point of view, there is dad at the bottom of the ocean and mum by the pool, with no women or sex, and even in relations with other males, it’s a distant competition. One is unbeatable, the other was born beaten, but each has one “other” to dominate: himself. Those heroes, confronted with what Eric Conan called “the zero degree of otherness”, are truly of our time.

As soon as it was released, The Big Blue was a problem for professional cinephiles. Too inconsistent aesthetically, it became this sad thing: a social phenomenon. And it was not the phenomenon that was analysed, but what it revealed about its young audience, who, delighted, went to see it ten times (2). Yet, The Big Blue is not like Jean de Florette or Camille Claudel, the pompous facelift of an outdated cinema, nor is it a big symptom whose aesthetic shortcomings force us to abandon it to sociologists. If it gives such a sense of “hitting the mark”, it is precisely because it has something to do with aesthetics. The only question is whether this is still the aesthetics of cinema. 

Let’s come back to the water and dive a little further. What is disarming about The Big Blue is that Besson seems satisfied with the look long given to the sea in just about any TV commercial (remember the terrifying Ultra-Brite). This is less because he would be incapable of filming it than because the sea, for him, is just that: a synthetic “big blue” over which one glides without making waves. Whereas Beineix still suffers from his artist’s ego, Besson already uses the disguise of cinema to produce the “synthetic beings” that are postmodern individuals. In this sense, he is the first true post-advertising filmmaker, one who inherits, in all innocence, all the “visual concepts” of advertising and therefore does not suffer from lacking a personal style, lining up cliché after cliché. Yes, shooting a film remains an adventure and a sporting challenge, but it’s no longer an adventure of the gaze. The sea is calm, its bottom empty, and there is nothing to see (3). 

What does advertising tell us? That things have already been looked at, that these gazes have been archived and the world has already been seen. Besson already knows what the sea, a diver, a woman, a dolphin, an Italian (or even a Peruvian) look like. Just as he intuitively knows what the “hero” of the mass democratic individualism will look like: a body without organs, asexual, beyond language or desire, programmed to perform a single movement. An attractive robot, a self-validated automaton. 

With all due respect to the media, The Big Blue isn’t necessarily yet another “new wave” in the history of French cinema. It is perfectly possible to imagine that film theatres cannot be “saved” from sinking solely by audiovisual products (neither auteurs’ nor producers’ films but “promauteurs’” films), halfway between Disneyland and the son et lumière shows of recycled European culture. The mistake would be to think that such products carry no content or aesthetics. The interest of The Big Blue is on the contrary that it forces us to recognise that the "proximity" between cinema and advertising, long exciting if a little murky, may no longer be required, because cinema is too weak and advertising too strong. 

The start of the 1980s saw the legitimation, first culturally, then aesthetically, of advertising. But towards the end of the decade, we began to witness its propagandist use. Advertising canons are now used to deal with “big themes”, that is, to declare war on Evil (from anti-drug videos to TV charity business), to unify the audience on the “good side”, and in doing so to manufacture the synthetic “body” of those white knights. 

The Big Blue (with a touching candour which was definitely absent from the wily The Bear) is part of this manufacturing. The contemporary individual can no longer be conceived through the old categories of the “person” (postwar, neo-realism) or the “subject” (post-1968, new waves); it also requires a founding myth, and it is logical that this myth too has something to do with water. Once again, it is from the bottom of the ocean that the missing link appears. Like a small Botticellian coelacanth, the orphan diver has this friendly and smooth thing (a dolphin) as a father. In this way, he is truly contemporary with current ecological and vitalist trends. If animal individuals have “rights”, these include the right to be, mythologically, fathers to human individuals. 

It’s with all this in mind that we must repeat, with all our remaining energy, that Palombella Rossa is a great film and that Nanni Moretti is the most precious of filmmakers. Palombella Rossa is, in a way, cinema’s response to the audiovisual. It is a minority response, because cinema is now in the minority (an active one, we hope). Besson’s film hits the mark because it offers a very large audience the spectacle of an autonomous individual, whereas Moretti’s film truly resonates because it speaks to a modest audience about a plural individual, cumbersome and problematic, player and played, talker and talked to, insufferably linked to others. 

Let's come back to the water and dive again. This water is not mythological but social, the crowded water of a swimming pool where a number of scores are settled simultaneously, with childhood, with another team, with politics, with words, with journalism, with cinema, with memory. Where the mythological founding demanded a certain depth, the social link is a question of surface and, increasingly, of interfaces. Of the two films, the “superficial” one is the deepest because we live in a world where everything private comes up to the surface and becomes “public” (advertising, or publicity, is precisely the aesthetic and economic agent of this “surfacing”).

Yes, Moretti belongs to the family of comics who, from Chaplin to Jerry Lewis, take everything (and everything is too much) upon themselves, but he also belongs to that other tradition which, from Keaton to Tati, has given up on saving the world, for the simple reason that the world, to general surprise, doesn’t “sink” (it floats). The water in Palombella Rossa isn’t the great amniotic thing, like a chamber from which we emerge friendly and regenerated, nor is it this gag element into which one falls easily with a big splash. It is now the natural habitat of deregulated societies, of floating economies and attentions, of scintillating interfaces and random encounters (“dribbling” as a figure of the social link, as an art of erasing the opponent). 

In his previous film (The Mass is Ended), Moretti filmed a very small boy who kept swimming back and forth across the pool: not the son of the dolphin coming back from the mother-bottom but the small fish (pescellino) which, no offence to anyone, “masturbates” (4) while sliding back and forth in the interstices of the social. The scene was beautiful because Moretti, himself a swimmer, filmed the way David Hockney paints: the materiality of water, conquered movement and the freedom of the small man (which has nothing to do with the autonomy of the advertising diver). The scene “breathed”; it was the complete opposite of what defines freediving: don’t breathe, hold your breath.

“That’s where we are,” Moretti seems to say. That’s where cinema is, I want to add. It won’t go beyond that, and it will struggle to do even that. It is today our only common thread and our only memory in this postmodern bath, where, for lack of fighters, the democratic idea is triumphing before our very eyes (“cosa significa oggi essere communista (sic)?”), where economic war is raging, where market forces are applied to all aspects of human activity, and where the difficult “subjectifying” of a multifaceted individual, probably disappointing but perhaps “stronger” (5), is taking place. Stronger because porous, mobile and slippery? From the Bessonian water emerges a mutant too slippery and an automaton too perfect not to worry the audience. In the Morettian water, it is a colony of people (Italian, European) shaking themselves off between nostalgia for history and escape into the future, each of them unresolved, as in water polo, this sport where one floats more often than swims. Because to float still requires effort. 



(1) The strange feeling, on leaving the theatre, of a return of the “old school” communal cinephilia. We feel ready again to fall out with a best friend should they not like Palombella Rossa, even if that means ignoring some of the film's weaker aspects: a certain theoretical voluntarism, a certain suffocating desire to say everything. 

(2) The psychoanalyst Jean-Jacques Moskowitz told the author that his young son kept seeing the film over and over to understand it better. But what is difficult to understand in such a simple story? Perhaps this: The Big Blue says that death exists. It says so to children who know the difference between the gesticulations of dying actors on TV or in gore films and real death, whose spectacle is carefully hidden from them. Similarly, Dead Poets Society, another cult film among teenagers, begins with a scene in which the students are told that they will die one day. 

(3) It goes even further. In his third film (sic), Nikita, Besson invents a strange character, played by Jean Reno and called “the Cleaner”. The character’s function is to make sure absolutely no material trace is left after a spy operation goes wrong. He moves through the film like a fanatic, an acid bath under his arm, hence the rather funny medical gags. The Cleaner can be seen as the grim heir to Mister Clean from the ads. At the same time, this desire for a complete clear-out can be read as a determined will to inherit nothing, from either fashion or cinema.  

(4) A furious reference to the concurrent advertising campaign promoting the new version of Cahiers du cinéma: “no more mental masturbation”.

(5) This is of course the central question of our era, and it would be presumptuous to answer it. The author does know that he is among those whom the porosity of post-industrial social relations plunges into a certain gloominess. He is not the only one, but is he right? Do the movement of signifiers, the floating of the signified and the erasing of the referents not allow a society of individuals to better resist its threats, even at the cost of a certain mediocrity and a progressive disqualification of the sacred (through secularisation), of the tragic (through the second degree), of art (through market forces), or even of culture (through tourism)? And what if “handbag thefts” weren’t the worst thing? And what if the “end of history” were but the start of the adventures of “not the worst thing”? Dizzying.

First pubished in Libération on 29 December 1989. Reprinted in La recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

Philippe Garrel - Serge Saney - Dialogue

New film magazine Still Light contains many good things, one of them a 1991 dialogue between Serge Daney and Philippe Garrel for the release of J'entends plus la guitare. 

Philippe Garrel - Serge Daney - Dialogue

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 443-444 (a special edition for the 40th anniversary of Cahiers), May 1991

 

Life is a Dream

One more text from Recrudescence. The section "Ghosts of Permanence" is now translated. 

Life is a Dream*

André** is tougher than me since he seems to be spared the sleepiness that has been weighing on me. It was already late when we settled to watch The Truth About Bebe Donge, and the film had already started. In between two moments of lucidity, I tell myself that I mustn't forget to ask André what was the truth about Bebe Donge. He watches the film with such strong concentration that I feel he understands the story and thinks nothing less of it. As for me, with the precision of an old road warrior who has learned the little-known art of sleeping during a film, I organise my perception like someone tidies one's desk. A difficult technique, the essence of which is to marshal moments of non-somnolence to cast onto the film a keen, short, and total gaze, in an attempt to outpace it and see it "as it is in itself", so as to stockpile ammunition before sinking back into a clumsy drowsiness.

At the start (I was not yet asleep), André agreed (through gritted teeth) that the film looked good. Not only did Decoin film with elegance, but his use of the sound (Constantin Evagelikos) was, at the time, in 1952, quite modern. The skeleton of the plot comes from Simenon, and one can spot some staggering unsaid and background shots between Darrieux and Gabin. The former (that Decoin loved and married) unsettles in her role of fake ingenue — the poisoner — and the latter is moving in the role of the poisoned cynic. From then on, while I decided to switch from my half-sleep to the flashbacks of the film, I could sense that André, for his part, used his vigilance to hate the film. It became obvious when he signaled to me that he found it "ontologically bourgeois." The worst thing was that he was right.

To sleep during a film has bad press. Especially since most good films tend to lift up any tiredness. Yet there are films that plunge us into a strange sleep, a sleep of good quality where hallucination and real perception become best friends, where the time of the film doesn't clash with that of the dream. These films have learned how to put time on their side: who hasn't slept through The World of Apu, Red Desert, or The Lorry is a grouch who knows nothing about cinema. As for the other films, the undreamable ones, those who confuse the art of sequencing shots with the art of inventing duration, they are best watched with the irritated severity that shone in André's gaze the night of The Truth About Bebe Donge (also, why did we drink that Mâcon?).

And what he saw was the incompatibility between Decoin's manner and the film's subject. An incompatibility which, rather than becoming in itself interesting, transformed the film into a frozen hybrid. The manner is that of a calligrapher or a great couturier, and the subject is that of a harsh beauty. A businessman, a seducer soon past his prime, marries without conviction a young bourgeoise who, despite her spoiled child airs, has an absolute idea of love and of the couple. Ten years later, the woman openly poisons her husband (mercuric chloride) and, from his hospital bed, the man begins to love unto death this woman who does not love him anymore.

The woman's conception is that love is "miracle, dazzlement, grace, birth..." The man's conception is that "love is like the rest — something you build." How can one not see that the man represents the point of view and the interests of Henri Decoin, old road warrior of the French tradition of quality and high-end manufacturer of worldly comedies? And how can one not think, by contrast, of the films of the same era in which Darrieux would find a man — the Max Ophuls of Madame de... — who, instead of elevating her into a dry bourgeois fetish, knew how to accompany her in her passion as an actress?

French cinema of the fifties was obsessed by the extreme states of passion. It confused these limits with that of its own aesthetic. An aesthetic that consisted of pretending to stop a few steps from the supposed abyss of passions while asking great actors to render its appeal and proximity. What is "bourgeois" in this aesthetic is that it has a great need for characters without illusions. They are the cold, lucid gaze of the bourgeoisie upon the follies of its children, and in Bebe Donge, they are summed up by the character of Madame d'Ortemont (Gabrielle Dorziat), the only one coming forward to speak the final words, and the only one who can toss at the criminal Darrieux: "unhappiness suits you so well."

* Translator's note: The French title of the article ("La vie est un Donge", literaly "Life is a Donge") is a wordplay referring to the Spanish theatre play Life is a Dream (La vie est un songe in French).

** The secret can be lifted: we're talking of André Techiné.

First published in Libération on January 10th, 1989. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.

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.