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.