Rossellini, Louis XIV, the first

There are times as rare as they are beautiful when you stop asking whether what you’re watching is TV or cinema, because it’s irrelevant. If television weren’t the mushy disaster to which we are all too well accustomed, it would more often accommodate images like those of The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966) and everybody would be happy. What’s most extraordinary is not that Rossellini’s TV film should be regarded as a great film and a great moment in French television history, what’s most extraordinary is that Rossellini’s lesson has been neither replayed nor understood, nor studied in the slightest. For like everything presented with an elegance that seems totally natural, The Taking of Power rests on certain iron rules. 

Let’s take a scene at random. The deer-hunting scene with the young King and his court, dogs on the scent of an animal, a few bits of landscape and bushes. Let’s take one shot from this scene – the zoom on the dogs furiously swimming behind their prey – and ask a simple question: why is there such emotion and intensity in this zoom shot? Let us make the question the more emphatic given that the scene then diverges, abandoning the hunt and following the King who goes off to shag Madame de La Vallière in the undergrowth before the eyes of the chattering court. Why is it that from then on, we have the feeling that prior to this scene no dogs had ever yelped, swum or hunted? 

Perhaps the answer is this. It is by force of contagion, or through training, that these dogs have the appearance of being the first hunting dogs in the history of humanity. It is because (almost) all the other events narrated in the film are filmed like events, as if taking place for the first time. What makes Rossellini stand out (or Renoir with La Marseillaise) from other TV evocations of costumed History is that he’s only interested in those past events which their protagonists immediately perceived as events which shook them up. Rossellini and Gruault focus their attention on the way Louis XIV reinvents the rules for the exercise of power. They show the upset Queen mother, Fouquet arrested and the court stunned, ordered to silence and dress-up. They show all this as if it were a putsch and because of this, we get the sense of a last-minute glimpse of what daily life was like at the French court just before the putsch. Cinema is an art that always fails in reconstructing the past, but what it can do is seize the moment when something is passing. 

This is why Rossellini has always been interested in heroes. Not in the cretinous sense of the ‘superman’, but of in the sense that things will never be the same after them. In the didactic telefilms of his last period, the hero is the one who resets the pendulum from scratch, or initiates some founding gesture, or thinks some unprecedented thought*. The cinema, the art of the present, exists to play its part, that of recording a zero point of departure and simultaneously recording the enchanted or defeated attitudes of the period’s witnesses. The secular panoply of Rossellini’s heroes goes by way of Jesus, St Augustin, Descartes, Cosimo di Medici, Alberti, Pascal, Socrates, Marx and Louis XIV: all-or-nothing figures. ‘That’s something I feel is very important,’ R.R. affirmed. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you have to take risks all the time. Put in another way, never be bored.’ The fact is that for a gambler, it’s always the first time. 

‘I have often observed,’ remarks the young Louis XIV (the amazing Jean-Marie Patte), ‘that my first thought was the right one.’ Every action in the film, following the immutable moment of Mazarin’s death, is a ‘first’. The first roaming King’s councils, the first time Louis puts the Queen mother back in her place, the first time Colbert spells out his programme and above all a first in fashion, with the King as a guinea pig setting an example that brings about an abrupt transition from the hardly austere fashions of the Fronde to the furbelowed follies of a Court fettered to Versailles and ruined with ribbons. 

In these conditions does it matter whether the actors are relatively good or their acting wooden? Do the usual drawbacks of the costume drama matter? From the moment when Rossellini had the intelligence to narrate how, from one day to the next, there were men who neither knew where to put themselves nor what to put on, the subject and the medium are a perfect match for one another.  

That’s how even dogs enter history. 

* There is at least one limit to the Rossellini system: he’s obliged to only select first grade inventors, prophets or thinkers as heroes, because only them have created in their lifetime a feeling of a break with their contemporaries. Deep down, disdainful of both blind romanticism and cunning subconscious, Rossellini acts as if information had always circulated in a way that the great historical turns were accessible to the actors of History. For a film maker who had started by showing ordinary individuals caught in ignorance, it’s such a radical change that one could wonder if, pursuing this new stand headlong, Rossellini had not created another dogmatism.

First published in Libération on 5 December 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Leone at war

If, like perception, a film is a pausible hallucination, some films really are hallucinations. They persist as an image, a single image. Or a theme tune composed by Morricone. Everybody has seen them, believe they’ve seen them or believe that everybody had seen them. They’re no longer distinguished from the impact they had, the landscape they’ve opened up or the clones that have followed them. So much so that when we come across them on the small screen we are staggered to find again that state of freshness they – and we too – had at their birth. This is the case for instance with Sergio Leone’s first three westerns (called ‘spaghetti westerns’ no doubt because one hundred per cent durum wheat is probably the stuff good humanists are made of, including their director) and with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which Channel 3 showed on Monday evening. 

The film starts with what in the end was left of it, with that exhibitionism that makes entrances into shot and into the action comparable (this has been observed so often that it’s a cliché) to the great arias of verismo opera. Three actors who belong to three worlds of the cinema (Wallach comes largely from working with Kazan, Van Cleef was Ford’s second string and Eastwood isn’t Eastwood yet) indulge in three jubilatory recitatives and slowly prepare to argue about a lost haul of $200,000. Everything is enacted through their eyes (rather than their acting), eyes that are there more to be seen than to see. Whether widened, narrowed or mean, these organs of sight do not prevent their owners from missing the only reality of the time: the Civil War. 

For this is where the TV re-viewing of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly turns out to be a fascinating experience. The real film does not resemble the memory it left behind. There aren’t three but four characters, and where it takes forty minutes to introduce the first three, it takes even longer to allow the fourth – the war – to creep into the picture and carry more and more weight. So much so that between the moment when we learn that the booty is buried in Sad Hill cemetery and the moment when we finally reach it, the word cemetery (and its image) has changed meaning. It’s the film that undertook to remind us that in a cemetery there are more corpses of dead soldiers than buried treasures. How subtle is Leone’s didacticism; there’s no mention of a war, it’s encountered during the film and suddenly you realise it’s been there for a long time and is horrifying. 

What’s beautiful and makes this a great film about War in general is that Sergio Leone isn’t mixing genres. Either out of artistic honesty or out of a prescient intuition of what awaits the cinema. He offers a new way of showing bodies floating in dust coats and figures adrift in the desert of a landscape too vast for them. Tautological figures, disconnected from virtually everything, their only know-how being a touch of cunning and a lot of style when it comes to handling objects. Faces that advertising, fashion and music videos have looked at a lot thereafter. At the same time, once the screen fills up and the war crams it with little flesh and blood soldiers, Leone films differently. In wide shot, with the greatest reserve and a respect for distances and characters that can only remind us of that other great sentimentalist who had little time for photogenic slaughter: John Ford. Precisely as if Leone were prolonging Ford’s legacy for a few years while simultaneously showing the new landscape, the one coming after and altogether of a different order. 

It can happen (though this is a defect) that a film contains several films. It is rare that a film is located precisely at the crossroad between a classical art whose secret will soon be lost and baroque proposals whose recipes will be a huge hit. It is rare that a director is honest (or schizoid?) enough to simply juxtapose, without any possible reconciliation, what is no longer quite compatible. It is even rarer that instead of suffering from this split, his talent thrives on it. It is later perhaps that the Leone of Once Upon A Time in America will suffer, when he will want to restore the classicism at the heart of a cinema that will by then have absorbed Leone’s mannerism beyond recognition. In 1966, it is different. Sergio Leone is both ahead of everyone and late behind everyone, he is therefore on time. 

First published in Libération on 1 December 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

The essential Buñuel

Buñuel’s films are like Buñuel, who is unlike anything. Buñuel didn’t impose his stamp on the different systems of film production he passed through, instead he highlighted what was Buñuelesque in each of these successive systems. What is Buñuelesque of course is that the obscure parade of objects neither initiates nor exhausts desire and that there is a fundamental asymmetry between men’s desires and women’s (the former is a puppet and the latter is double and, in That Obscure Object of Desire, quadruple). But what is Buñuelesque in the end is that things are sufficiently complex (and funny) in themselves to avoid the need to further complicate them. Whatever is given at the outset, Buñuel strips it to the bones of its internal logic. This is why his last films are so enigmatic: this is indeed bourgeois middlebrow French cinema, the ironic no-frills X-ray of a doomed genre to which the old master has given, in extremis, extreme unction.  

Like all films where nothing exists but the logical sequence of situations, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) transfers very well to television. Nothing distracts from the essential, since only the essential is left. To the point where you suddenly have that obscure desire to make a list of all the objects Buñuel has dispensed with. What you then get is a strange picture in the negative of everything that usually encumbers our perception (wrongly held as ‘natural’) of the cinema. 

Music, of course. No music in Buñuel. No need for music. A need, conversely, for very precise sound effects (which he usually does himself). It is the heady sound, the even rhythm of a continuous dream with no little music hinting that it may become nightmare or comedy. The Buñuelesque dream is not the dream of the bear cub in The bear, it has the exaggerated clarity of a (shred of) dream that we talk about because we can remember it. And this dream is talked about because there is nothing in Buñuel that does not happen between human beings. 

Music would be wrong for another reason. It would create what the director – this is Buñuel’s ethic – refuses more than anything: complicity, connivance between the audience and the film. It’s a matter of understanding (and laughing) not judging. Never does a scene really begin until there are at least two characters on the screen; it is between them, and them alone, that it takes place. Buñuel, the last great director of the unconscious drive and of the social, has no business with the solitude of this or that individual. With him you’ll never see any of that facile stagey business where at the end of a scene the camera seizes on the pout or the grin of a character that remains alone. Martin, Don Mateo’s servant, supplies a very funny example of this: he would like to comment on the action, put in his pennyworth, in short represent the spectator (and good sense) in this story which he witnesses in silence though not without reflection. Twice he even interferes (each time muttering misogynistic aphorisms). Twice he is drily called to order. ‘No comment’ (musical or otherwise) could be the film’s watchword. 

If we were to continue this little game of spotting, by their absence, the easy things Buñuel denies himself, we’d also be talking about shot-counter-shots or subjective shots. There aren’t many. As if the eternal intertwining of woman and puppet were the picture’s sole subject, the eternal subject and the only one worth anything. And as if, from the very fact of being eternal, this subject were no longer to be treated as a modulated sequence of rising and falling intensities but as an obsessive drifting that can only end – for the time being – for want of combatants. 

This is Buñuel’s last film. There’s a lot of talk about terrorism and even about an ARGIJ (Armed Revolutionary Group of the Infant Jesus) which would be no blot on the current landscape. Terror isn’t absent from the film; it is subtly displaced forwards in the brusqueness with which the camera endlessly nabs the characters at the point when they’re setting out on their endless encounters ‘with one another’. It is in the way the film ends, accidentally, because there must be an ending, in the public alleyway. It is with a smoke screen hiding the characters from us that Luis Buñuel closes what he had begun by slicing an eye. Like in the theatre. 

First published in Libération on 29 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Clair, grandad of the music video

In the small room of the hero, a wall. On the wall, a photo that is falling off. In the photo, a vamp who’s had her day. On the doorstep, the hero about to go out seeing that the photo has fallen yet again. On his face, boredom. On the pavement below, the real young woman who loves him. Beneath the rooftops of Paris, garlands that are pinned to the sets like captions to photos. And over Paris, the most poetic of objects: rain. It is the 13th of July, the eve of the 14th. 

If the picture wasn’t really grey and the lighting so meticulous, if the actors’ heads weren’t cut off halfway, if the sound wasn’t typical of the early talkies, in short if the film hadn’t long been classified in the category of ‘classic cinema’, one may well hesitate. For what is Quatorze Juillet (1933) really about? It’s certainly not a great film, not even René Clair at his best (that’s Paris qui dort), quite simply an excuse for Maurice Jaubert (music), Lazare Meerson (sets) and Georges Perinal (director of photography) to exercise their huge talents - thanks to a nothing script and a vacuous subject. On a recent re-viewing, Beauté du diable wavered between pre-TV mini-drama and the aesthetic of the trailer. René Clair was a director so enamoured of shortcuts that anything that lasted was hell for him. Thirteen years earlier, emerging from the art of silent films and the Twenties avant-garde, Quatorze Juillet, shot at Epinay for Henckel and the German-owned Tobis, is not so much a film of cinema as – yes, blasphemy! – an ancestor of the music video. 

There’s no lack of common features. In both music videos and René Clair’s films there’s never enough time for any kind of build-up. The poetry lies not in the exploration of what is in front of the camera but in the rapid procession of objects – ‘captions without words’ – that are already ‘poetic’. Only one thing ever happens at any time, as dry and ephemeral as a promise already forgotten. Nothing is intimately connected with either the actor or the character, but everything depends on a kind of collective poetic capacity embodied in the sets (Clair) or in the movie quotations (the music video). Love is an abundance of kissing couples. Boredom is an abundance of yawning extras. Paris is an abundance of taxi drivers with simultaneously abundant witty chat. 

It’s this reduced appetite for singularity* which makes René Clair a director so notably dated. Though a critic of mechanisation, he went no further than a conception of poetry that was itself mechanical, closed off to anything that is not already coded by folklore, blind to anything that goes beyond puppetry with the actors. This is why we feel embarrassed for those who, in all seriousness, weigh up the respective merits of Clair and Renoir. Of the latter, everything remains. Of the former, nothing would be left if it weren’t possible - through a spiralling, rhyming effect due to History – to see in him one of the ancestors of the modern music video.  

So it is Jaubert’s music, Perinal’s images and Meerson’s sets that are the real trumps of the film (to which should be added the very modern acting of the magnificent Annabella). These elements share a mission between the three of them: to make us forget that cinema is now the talkies and that, for Clair, it’s a disaster. Why? Because sound cinema created the problem of duration for directors. Recorded duration, no longer reconstructed, a disaster for those who – like the directors of music videos of today – worked by sequencing images rather than shots. Renoir or Grémillon fundamentally needed this ‘sound bath’, but not Clair. For this ‘bath’ was a step forward towards singularity – hence towards de-folklorisation – of people and groups. Dreadful. 

‘We can’t but shudder when we learn that certain American industrialists of the most dangerous sort see talking cinema as the spectacle of the future and that they are already at work to bring about this fearsome prophecy’, wrote the future auteur of Quatorze Juillet in 1927. Five years later, thanks to this bogus musical with just the right amount of noise in it, he managed not to shudder too much. Sixty years later the music video arrives to plug the same gap, but the other way around. Except that this time it’s as if it was sound cinema that was condemned, and that in the resulting aphasia, it was yet again towards music that we sought recourse. No longer to delay the appearance of speech but to cover it up. René Clair’s revenge in a way. 

* ‘Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such – this is the lover’s particular fetishism.’ This sentence by Giorgio Agamben (The Coming Community) is damning for René Clair’s entire filmography.  

First published in Libération on 28 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Mad Max, Opus 2

One of the drawbacks of watching films again on television is that, in their immense majority, they only belong to two categories: American cinema and French cinema*. Even if we accept that these two are – from the beginning – two real poles of the history of cinema, we must realise that everything that doesn’t come out of the Franco-American power struggle is doomed to a sad TV-oblivion. The idea of a prime time Soviet, Indian, or simply British film, is akin to Third-Worldism and to the fantasy of a retarded cinephile. In that way, television aggravates this desertification of the world, which happens to be – no surprise, it’s always been like this – one of the great themes of the contemporary non-American cinema. From La région centrale (Michael Snow, sublime) to Stalker (Tarkovsky, not bad) through to, why not, the Australian Mad Max 2 (1981).

One of the advantages of watching films again on television is that, in their immense majority, they’ve all been made ten years ago or so and it’s therefore possible to see all the points they already had in common at the time. That’s how we can already take enough stock to identify what makes Mad Max 2 a contemporaneous film to Diva. Where Beinnex was trying to film emotions stored in objects stacked up in loft-like studios or in clichés engraved in memories by advertising, George Miller filmed feelings stored in diverse objects generously offered to all possible destructions along the roads and deserts of Australia. 

In both cases, it’s the unfolding of the array of things, its sentimental exhibition or its murderous demonstration, that is essential to the film. Whether it’s behind closed doors or in open spaces, it’s all about the extensive use of a finite number of objects. As if, faced with the difficulty to invent stories and characters, one had drummed up the return of the accessories and props that have served the history of cinema, even if it means one last round of honour, for one’s pleasure (Spielberg will do the same with his toons). A few years before the first classics of ‘perfect void’ like The Bear, there were filmmakers who played for a while with this pleasant paradox: to film in the places that are both encumbered and deserted. Emptied and overpopulated. For example, the Australian desert. 

Mad Max 2 begins very well, with the voice over and the fake black and white archive from after the end of the world. But Mad Max 2 ends up rather flat, at the end of a pursuit where monotony takes over even pyrotechnics. In fact, the film begins where the documentary finishes and finishes where the myth should start over. It only exists for a short moment, between the trauma of the past and the utopia of the future. The myth is biblical, with a community under siege, united by the most precious good: oil. But oil is a metaphor for the human essence, eventually preferred to the folkloric barbarism of the tribes. Mad Max 2 still belongs to the films that play the human against the inhuman, meaning that they hold the human as a value and the inhuman as the spectacle. Max is the perfect fellow traveller for these new oil-thirsty Christians.

Caught between two poles, the film never ‘functions’ as well as when it settles (with humour) in a form of perversion: how this motley crew of good and evil characters, all individuals, abandons itself, with utmost fury, to the most banal violence, in an array of things unveiling simultaneously their inner workings and their strangeness. The binoculars co-exist with the spyglass, the crossbow with the flamethrower, the snake with a flying machine, the boomerang with the microphone. Nothing is more stimulating for the audience than the mandatory choice one must constantly make between the identification of a machine (what’s this?) and the spectacle of its efficiency (how does it work?). All anthropologists know this and George Miller’s fake anthropology is still, at the start of the eighties, one of the most inventive. The price to pay is that, after a while, this unbridled functionalism stops being surprising and ends up being rather tiresome. And it’s when tiredness has won (over Max and the audience) that the script brings the rabbit out of the hat: the morale of the story and the meaning of History. 

* It’s worse than that. No only non-French and non-American films are disappearing from television, but between ten and twenty years of the history of cinema are fading away from the conscience of the new cinephiles. I’m talking of the ‘new cinemas’ of the sixties and the seventies. It’s a fair bet to think that the first films made by Glauber Rocha, Tanner, Oshima, Skolimowski, Eustache, Ferreri, Kramer, Olmi, Bene, Passer, Perrault, Iosseliani, Fassbinder and others are unknown today. The author, upset, hopes this is just a purgatory. 

First published in Libération on 22 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Beineix, Opus 1

At the start of the eighties, an unknown director was redefining, in spectacular fashion, Good and Evil at the cinema. The audience, alone, loved Diva which the critics shunned*, merely reproaching Jean-Jacques Beineix for having indulged in a fussy exercise in ‘applied advertising’. Beineix is the last director about whom anything resembling an ‘aesthetic debate’ has taken place in France. After The Moon in the Gutter, in fact, people wearied of the Manichean opposition between the art of cinema and the advertising aesthetic. It’s not that they’ve been reconciled, but because, in the end, the ads have won. Hence the current desert (no more debate, no more criticism, just blah, blah, blah). 

The reason the debate folded was that the question wasn’t properly asked. For advertising is more than an ‘aesthetic’, it’s a way of being and perceiving, evaluating and judging, a view of the world in short. Diva’s success came from the fact that Beineix was the first to attempt to moralise the advertising heritage, by offering a new dividing line between the unsellable (the soul, creativity) and the pre-sold (objects, clichés). 

I can hear the most Nietzscheans among my readers getting impatient. What about Good and Evil in all this? Let’s start with Evil. There’s a very negative character in the film: one of the two killers working for the vile Saporta. An insalubrious little thug thoroughly deserving to end up dead in a lift cage, not so much because he loves nobody but because he loves nothing. ‘I don’t like Beethoven’, ‘I don’t like parking lots’, ‘I don’t like lifts’. To dislike any object or decor to that extent, that’s Evil. 

As far as Good is concerned, besides the young music-loving post office worker, there’s the strange deus ex machina played by Bohringer. If he unravels all the plot threads and makes the happy ending possible, it’s because he represents the consciousness and masterly incarnation of objects and sets. The man who has turned his loft into a masterpiece and who can theorise about caviar and butter toasts can only be on the side of Good. There’s no need to know more about this character. The camera only needs to move discreetly around him to give us a guided tour of his personalised museum. Each of us, perhaps, should live in a personalised museum where every object would have its private and public space. Could that be Beineix’s lesson? 

The best proof of this is given near the end of the film in the episode of the white Traction Avant that is put at the disposal of the vile Saporta, and seems tele-guided by Bohringer’s voice. It’s quite a funny moment when all the plot threads come together thanks to this ideal object which was in the hands of the cops and the villains before passing into the hands of the museum curators: a Traction Avant. What irony of this voice simultaneously mimicking advertising, guided tour and clichés; the Traction Avant as an indestructible object which will explode and will immediately be replaced by another one. As the little Vietnamese girl says at the start of the film: ‘You wouldn’t think a Rolls can have an accident!’. Objects like this are the soul of the world. 

So there was a moment in recent cinema - exemplified by Diva - where there began to be more stories and desires crammed into sets and objects than into characters. A moment when everyone wanted to go back the studio. Not to build another street but to discover that the word ‘studio’ now had two meanings: the place where you film (to make ‘true artifice’) and the place where you look at yourself living (in the midst of ‘artificial truth’). 

Seeing Diva again one Sunday morning on Canal Plus is of course a confirmation of just how much the film is in its element on television. Why? Because in 1980 Beineix had the very accurate intuition that one shouldn’t get all worked up about cast-iron screenplays, but instead had to compose, detail by detail, films that are little TV programme schedules unto themselves, disparate and customised for the era of random channel hopping. In the Diva index there are several sub-programmes: a thoroughly French but barely sketched thriller, a meditation on the artist and his audience, fillers, a documentary about Paris loft life, etc. Beineix was honest enough not to attempt to convey something between all these elements. Indeed, if there is something that advertising cannot film and whose very memory it has entirely lost, it is precisely what there is between people and things. 

* For all that, it isn’t easy for a director to be adopted by the public and not applauded by the critics. All criticism is good for now is to baptise this or that audio-visual product as a ‘film’. All it has left is this scant symbolic function. The dreary thing is that a director who has not had the ‘luck’ to be recognised (by those for whom, more often than not, he has no recognition, and sometimes wants to see skinned alive) may never get over it and things may turn sour. This happened with Jerry Lewis, who was forever scorned by American critics, or with Pagnol, Guitry or Lelouch. Often, these directors get canonised. They are forgiven for having been popularly successful in the first place, once the popularity is no longer there. Recently, the resentment has speeded up to the extent that it’s the cinema as a whole which can no longer allow itself to leave it to the fullness of time for justice to be done. Hence the pathetic Cesars, the expeditious self-acquittal of the ‘profession’ under the mocking and ecstatic eye of television. 

First published in Libération on 21 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Griffith shows us a thing or two

Why is it so essential to see the great classics of silent cinema on television? Because with their intertitles (that tell) and their images (that show), they prove that a true filmmaker can only be one that shows. Griffith is not only a giant because he has set out once and for all, and for everybody, the two or three basic hypotheses of cinema, but because he has shown things that we have never seen again since. Borderline things, always. Things stretching toward their limit. Innocence that calls for sullying. Cruelty that calls for lynching. Widespread warfare that calls for peace. Griffith filmed like boxing, before and after the limit. His only goal is to capture the face of the condemned who, once pardoned, believes he’s already dead. ‘He has’, write James Agee, ‘an incommensurate appetite for violence, cruelty, and for this twin brother of cruelty: a kind of obsessional sensibility which, if we followed it, could become almost repulsive.’ Griffith as an obsessional shower, halfway between Dickens and Bataille.  

Those who went to bed at 2 a.m. on Monday morning know what Orphans of the Storm (1921) is about, its reversal of reversals. The impossibility to forget the incredible sentence by Henriette Girard, condemned to death, asking the Committee of Public Safety to speak less loudly since her sister ‘who’s blind*’ is in the audience. The impossibility to reunite the two orphan girls as long as democracy hasn’t triumphed in France. Robespierre’s throat-slashing gesture and Danton’s cavalcade. The debauchery of the aristocrats later followed by the dance of the mad populace. Of all the Hollywood films on the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm is not only the most staggering, it’s also the least frivolous. 

If cinema is first and foremost the act of showing, it will always depend on those who have the passion to show. A filmmaker shows the world in a film and this film becomes part of the world that, in turns, ought to be shown. It’s – in principle – the task of the distributors, the bosses of film festival or cinematheques and the television schedulers. Yet, no matter how numerous are those who ‘schedule’, fewer and fewer – and all the more precious – are those who ‘show’**.  

Sunday night Orphans of the Storm is indeed an event. We would never have seen it unless some of these stubborn ‘showers’ hadn’t joined forces to gift us the most beautiful possible version of Griffith’s film, unless Patrick Brion (for Channel 3) and Jacques Robert (for Fechner Audiovisual) hadn’t simply done their job. Are those who have got used to seeing silent films in bad conditions (in theatres or on television) conscious to have seen for once – thanks to a scholarly reframing – the complete image of Griffith’s film, in its real aspect ratio (1.33:1)? Will they have guessed that instead of displaying – in a comic frenzy – 24 (or 25) frames per second, the shots from Orphans of the Storm were closer to the 20 frames per second of their era? Who among the theatre managers (including art house venues) provide such care to the ‘product’? 

Hats off to Robert and Brion. And hats off to Dominique Blondeau who composed the soundtrack. He is described by Robert as a phenomenon ‘like few others in the world, one who barely reads music but has an innate sense of cinema and music, a bit like Jean Wiener, so often used by Langlois.’ Compared to the lazy or pretentious soundtracks that regularly inflate silent films, Blondeau’s music is of great intelligence. The musician doesn’t attempt to outdo the images nor defuse their strength. He follows the images in a loyal and soft illustration, underlining them with a fine tune, a tone lower.  

Why is it so essential to rediscover the great classics of silent cinema on television? Because they are so remote from us and we are so remote from the great hypnotised auditoriums that saw them so long ago. The nostalgia of the packed and delighted auditorium can work for the cinema of the forties and the fifties but not for the cinema of the twenties. Conversely, television (as it functions quite a bit on hypnosis) maintains intact our ability to be astonished and our desire to understand why.  

* Michel Chion had the clever idea of talking about a ‘deaf cinema’ rather than a ‘silent cinema’. ‘Silent’ cinema probably never existed. First because of the music in the auditorium, second because of the hallucinatory auditive images.  

** Christian Metz had the clever idea to specify that an image of a revolver doesn’t signify ‘revolver’ but something like ‘here’s a revolver’. The author, for a short while, thought of a ‘great deictic theory’. He now thinks that his was stating the obvious: at the cinema, one can only see what has been shown and only what has been seen can be shown. The rest is television. 

First published in Libération on 8 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Archimède’s TV-drama

Like all duds, Archimède le clochard is ageless. Born old, it can't age any further, nor gain, thanks to television, some sort of posthumous youth. Indeed, bad films have this in common with bad wines: they are eternal plonks that have turned sour well before they had a chance to age. Good films can age. Well or badly, that’s another story, the story of cinema if you want, as it is (ageing) men that make cinema. In short, one mustn’t confuse the wrinkles of a dud for the dignity that comes with old age. The wrinkles were there at the start, age comes with time.  

Let’s take the age of the captain, for example. When he shoots Archimède le clochard, Jean Gabin is only 54 years old. He is therefore a lot less old than his mouthy tramp character, who must be at least ten years older. Because he is still sprightly, he struggles all the more to play a sprightly old man. Let’s take the age of the second in command. Gilles Grangier is only 47 when he directs this grovelling document with Gabin as the imposed subject and Archimède le clochard as the pretext. At this age today, we still talk about the status of a ‘young filmmaker’; at that time, we already anticipated that of an ‘old hand’. French cinema wasn’t only old, it was ageing.  

Let’s take the film now. The film too is ageing. But films are not men: while the actor furiously anticipates his age, the film regresses towards a golden age. Gabin furiously plays at ageing in the very studios where he was once young: this interwar Paris-studio that Grangier, Page (director of photography), Colombier (sets) and the great Albert Valentin (script) tailor just for him but already at the minimum. We easily recognise the small bars, the parade of the sandwich board men, the Halles before Rungis, the cops with a cape: they are the features of the era, the wrinkles of the film.  

Those who take refuge in the past always have the same defect. They don’t want to see in the image of this refuge-past what already threatens them: youth. They can’t stand it, even in flashbacks. In Archimède le clochard, we could search to no avail for a child, a teenager or a young adult (apart from the beautiful Dora Doll, whose role is of no interest). Nothing in the story, the sets, the choice of extras must remind us that there are always several generations at the same time* in a story and that nothing is more perilous than to clear out everything around a single one. 

This ‘Make way for the old!’ needs studios to occupy of course. The studio is the only place where an extra must show years of experience. This is why – beyond Grangier’s absence of talent and Gabin’s laziness – there is in Archimède le clochard the kind of peace that succeeds the settling of scores and little genocides, when everybody has been reduced to silence and this silence spreads around a unique monster. This monster can willingly play all the roles (with a Muscadet and an audience of astounded wrecks), but at the condition that it has been reassured of the disappearance of all the roles it can no longer play.  

Duds are ageless but they still carry dates. So we’re stupefied when we verify that Archimède le clochard was released in France in 1959. This is the year of The 400 Blows and a year before Breathless. The New Wave is very quickly going to bury this cinema of quality, the only anti-youth cinema that has resisted for so long. Of course, Truffaut or Godard had talent and strong ideas about cinema, but what strikes us today when seeing again this anti-Boudu is that Archimède is of a much more trivial order.  

It was enough to film (no matter well or badly) the young people of the sixties to trigger the immediate collapse of the house of cards that was the tradition of quality, definitively stifling and disgusting. And it’s perhaps because it knew this that this cinema, pathetically nestled under the wing of the great actors of the thirties who had become horrible dinosaurs**, was so somnambulant and zealous in its therapeutic dedication. For second degree amateurs, Archimède le clochard is the rather sad documentary of a great actor condemned to be the symbol, the dead end, of an academic and heinous cinema that couldn’t find the trick to become on time what it was from the start: merely mediocre television.  

* Pialat rightly noted that ‘historic’ films didn’t ring true since they functioned thanks to the sets of the era, meaning to the sets of only one era. Strict realism would imply recording in one go all the eras of a single set. But there is a hurdle: in a ‘medieval’ film, nobody will spot the coexistence of a house from the 12th century and a house from the 9th. Is it the same for the different generations living at the same time? If we judge this by the increasing difficulty to host three generations of characters in the same story, the answer seems to be yes.  

** All the great post-war actors (from Gabin to Fresnay and Fernandel) were sacred, aged and reactionary monsters. They were scary. It was impossible for a child to identify with them. Conversely, the seducers with greying hair of the American cinema (from Cary Grant to Henry Fonda and James Stewart) didn’t come across as dinosaurs. There they were the ones that were loved. 

First published in Libération on 5 November 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

The last temptation of the first Rambo

Once it has become impossible to separate a film from the mass phenomenon it has become, once a celluloid hero has become an all-purpose emblem, there are advantages to seeing the film again on television, as a simple guest to the small screen. Rid of its aura, it becomes again what it started as: sounds and images among other sounds and images. It even happens that the film loses nothing in this modest recycling. 

Appalled by the recent offsprings, Rambo 2 and 3, we remain cool-headed enough to recognise the initial qualities of Rambo 1 (directed by Ted Kotcheff). How did John Rambo, the Vietnam hero, become a maddened beast, the films asks. How did Rambo, the film, degenerate into ever sillier sequels, is asking the same question. How come it’s probably no longer possible to follow through ideas is yet again the same question, asked this time of cinema as a whole. It applies both to Rambo and Rocky, meaning Stallone, who went from great to grotesque in each of them. These days, tapping a vein means betraying it at the first opportunity. Before being a vengeful brute, Rambo was a hunted animal in a state of legitimate defence. Rambo in fact doesn’t exist and if he starts out so gentle and sensitive, it’s because at the time (1983) America hadn’t yet made peace with its war and Jane Fonda hadn’t yet apologised to veterans. When America finished its Vietnam mourning, Rambo gained back in biceps what he had entirely lost in neurons. The series has no inherent logic: it’s an opinion poll in progress. 

This doesn’t stop the telly-vision of the first Rambo from being one of the nicest things. Everything is clear in this film with its qualities of primitive American cinema, with the action set at the centre of the picture and the motivations at the centre of the dialogue. Everything is clear because the only not-so-clear thing (the still recent Vietnam war) is only mentioned at the end of the film, when Rambo, in tears, is about to give himself up. In the meantime, everything that happens takes the form of a trauma, mirroring the much criticised ‘acting’ of Sylvester Stallone. 

Rambo isn’t just a film about someone who has almost lost the power of speech, it is fundamentally a silent film. Silent about all the big questions whose formulations it delays as much as possible. Silent about buried causes and ultimate motives, silent in the face of violence and nature. We should be grateful to Stallone to have re-invented for this film an acting style with wide-eyes and gazes as expressive as semaphores. This makes him like the actors in the early westerns, totally silent, traumatised at the slightest thing and twitching in the midst of hostile nature.  

If Rambo were a western, Rambo would be an Indian. Not the vanquished Indian of De Mille’s films but the angry Indian who has returned to challenge his former conquerors now vanquished by Vietnam. This western section is the best part of the film, and the most significant. Rambo has no need of a script because Rambo is its script, its memory that is. The recent memory of the Vietnam trauma, the ancient memory of the Indian genocide, quite simply the memory of the American people insofar as they are not to forget that they too are a warrior people. It is when they encounter Rambo (a shade roughly), and thanks to the war he declares to them by himself, that the forces of law and order of a small American town learn how to fight again. This is Rambo’s sacrifice; this is his Christ-like dimension. The suffering for him, the awakening for the others. In this sense Rambo is a true Christ and his ‘last temptation’ (that of merely being a man like any other) coincides with the ‘first blood’ (the blood he was made to shed, initially, by pure cruelty). Here’s someone who at least saves the world, instead of living the snobbish torments of contemporary individualism, like his future little Scorsesian brother. 

This is the real reason why so many have identified with his masochistic bodybuilding physique. All those for whom individualism is still a luxury recognise themselves in redeeming heroes, and they are never too particular about the ultimate nature of what is redeemed. For these too serious heroes who make them laugh redeem them from one thing at least: boredom. 

First published in Libération on 28 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

That’s cinema

Talking about A Strange Place to Meet, a person whose opinions count* recently declared two things. One: it’s very good. Two: that’s cinema. But the latter statement wasn’t made with the vengeful admiration that was once held for exhilarating shows (‘Now, at least, that’s cinema!’) but as a simple observation. It seems that we know better today what resembles ‘a film of cinema’. Not a telefilm, or a televisual prowess, but, more and more, ‘a strange place to meet’.  

Witness by Peter Weir is therefore a film of cinema. A beautiful film by the way, as if dreamt by an Australian in the United States. With a strange place and enough human beings to be able to meet. Since Witness, everybody knows the place: this Amish country that lives in another century (the 19th), with its own beliefs (religious, rigid, egalitarian and pacifist), close to Philadelphia and yet aside from the industrial world (no cars, no phones, no television). The Amish in Peter Weir’s film come straight out of a costumed Ford’s film** or, because of their Nordic language, of an elegiac Dreyer’s. Yet, we are in 1984.  

Rachel and Samuel, the mother and the child, leave the Amish country to go – they believe – to Baltimore. That’s forgetting the script which makes the child the witness of a murder and the detective in charge of the investigation (Harrison Ford) their obligatory partner for the rest of the film. But the investigation takes a different turn and the film with it. Having discovered that the criminals were crooked policemen who had ‘lost their (moral) bearings’ (including his boss), the injured detective takes refuge where no one can find him: in the Amish country. He’s safe there (for a while) because this (strange) place is outside time. Follows a long digression – the film -  where he meets the Amish community, the works and days, and of course Rachel (the beautiful Kelly McGillis). 

A film starts in one direction, forks, changes its mind, takes a deviation and comes back – wise to the world – to its starting point. This freedom to digress, usually accepted for writers, so cruelly lacks filmmakers that we’re grateful to Peter Weir to have, even modestly, found it back. All roads of a film inevitably lead to the words ‘The end’, yet nothing becomes more sinister over time than the ‘simulated’ driving along the highways of cast-iron scripts and high-growth concepts. It’s what happens along the way that makes the charm of traveling. It’s the way things pretend not to happen that makes them actually happen.  

Today, a film ‘of cinema’ is perhaps this: to leave the beaten tracks of the highways and to follow again the paths that fork, even those that lead nowhere or bring you back to square one. To lose time in order to gain time, to invent lost time. That’s what we tell ourselves when we fall under the charm of Witness because the film has this rare quality to progress everything at the same time, without excessive haste.  

Whoever digresses will end up coming back, that’s for sure. But at the right time. There are many scenes in Witness that have this strange freshness of the old cinema, when you had to wait for the beginning of a new scene before being sure that nothing more would happen in the previous one. Of this way of hosting an event in the last third of a scene, of this art of fluid and fatal rebound, Ford (John) was the greatest filmmaker. There is a little bit of all this in Witness and, watching the film on television, you suddenly measure how much television had deprived us of this wait for an always possible event and always more beautiful – even minimal ones – that it finds us sufficiently awake to see it happen.  

Ford wanted to be modest and modesty is a fundamental value of the Amish. Also Ford (Harrison) is the most modest of stars and you can’t imagine the film without him. He belongs to this very precious species of American stars who are as distant from the Actor’s Studio and its psychological playacting as the Amish country is from the rest of America. He plays a bit like John Wayne, with a body always more flexible than it seems and a very quick way to judge, in a blink of an eye, the space that belongs to him. This film is decidedly Fordian.   

* The Capricorn Serge July, director of Libération.  

** This was before the deplorable Dead Poets Society. Let’s observe that if that film had been made by Ford, it’s Robin William’s character that would be ‘causing problem’, not the students. 

First published in Libération on 24 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Cop in the box

The TV is on but no one’s watching it. It drones, blasts and cackles (in short, it’s working) in another room. Yet, a doubt takes hold: is this faint muffled sound really the TV? What if it had turned off all by itself? What if it had started quietly dreaming aloud, zombie like? So, to check it out: we watch. And we see. 

In a train, a yellow-haired giant carries a black attaché case full of white powder and settles into his compartment for the night. From a helicopter flying over the train, a man climbs down a rope, slips into one of the toilets, takes off his flying suit and undoes his sneakers to emerge in a dressing gown, forces the door open using a big magnet, knocks out the sleeping giant, steals the attaché case, goes back into the toilet, gets dressed again, comes out and heads back to his helicopter. All this in real time, without a word*. It isn’t Mission Impossible, it’s Un flic, Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film (1972). 

It’s rare for a film’s sound not to end up smashed to pieces when it shifts to TV. It’s the law of the jungle here, that’s to say whoever roars the loudest**. A worthless law, since, besides its weak technical quality, TV sound never goes beyond the level of descriptive sound effects. A law one can react to by shouting even louder (which advertising does) or, more seldom, by making less noise. Because ‘less noise’ on TV is as disturbing as when you suddenly no longer hear a child play. 

The Melville of Un flic is that very serious child who has chosen his toys once and for all, who is dead set on them and will never budge. Long since broken, the toys in question are amazed they can sustain the shock of a story again, resisting once more the tests of time and images. Resistance interests Melville. Men’s Resistance against the Occupation, and then the resistance of bodies to what degrades their image. 

Melville’s toys are men and the (zero sum) game is based on masculine friendship. But this (which we know) is not the crucial thing. The crucial thing is that in 1972 Melville takes narcissism to the limit and doesn’t even pretend to bring in young people (or women: Deneuve is minimal) to his story. He has the cool nerve just to film people of his own age (he’s 55), guys in their forties or fifties who are competent but slow, professional but encumbered. 

If the film weren’t so sombrely hieratic, it would be burlesque. The burlesque comedy of an aesthete who contrives to multiply an accessory (a suit, glasses, a face, a Burberry, a colour, a background noise) times two, times three, times four, times n. Although the film’s star, Delon is hard put to escape from this game of mirrors where everything is cloned***. So much so that the characters’ emotions, rather than being kept in beneath the mask of the actors, are constantly coming out and proliferating from shot to shot. It only takes two characters at a distance from one another to light a cigarette at the same time for all the familiar reference points to falter (and not just the old metaphysics of Good and Evil, now somewhat dilapidated). All it takes is for someone to look and an object comes to meet him, always the ‘right’ object, always the one that needed to be seen and which awaited only that: being seen. This is what happens to a flawless world: it proliferates within its limits. 

Why is it so beautiful? Because it’s vulnerable, because it ‘connects’ everything and ‘holds’ nothing. Because it is so easy to speak of ‘mannerism’. Why is it so beautiful on TV? Because on TV, the all too visible intimism of Melville’s cinema becomes pure and simple intimacy. This intimacy is no longer a moral ‘value’ (shame, whatever), it’s the very stuff of Un flic, the sole reality whereby the small screen can serve as a box for precious things. The small screen becomes a jewel box. 

What’s in the box? Delicate things, indeed. Quavering inserts, seconds of gravity, breaths of pathos. Soberly dressed killers who go to some lengths to get some sleep for their over-muscled bodies. Men who are never more naked than when they’re engaged in the incidental toils of keeping fit. The clumsy eroticism of the heavily built and the maternal gaze of the drag queen upon her big man****.  

In Un flic, Melville no longer idealises, nor sublimates, nor moralises. Like all great directors, he ends up settling for filming what - that’s to say who - he loves. 

* Real time works here only because it only covers ordinary events from a script perspective. For the mysticism of real time and the blackmail around absolute present, see the Gulf War on television.  

** If television was a pet dog, sound would be its leash.  

*** At the time when Melville directs his last films, I barely noticed them. Cruel irony, since at the time when Cahiers where all about détournement and re-use of the codes of dominant cinema, the only French film maker who successfully managed this operation of internal neutralisation of the star system is precisely Melville. Bourvil is not revealed as a great actor in Le cercle rouge (he was already one), but reaches the genius of singular anonymity. The same goes for Delon and Montand. A great injustice.  

**** I must confess that at the time, I only liked Tadzio. A great injustice (bis).

First published in Libération on 21 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Stella, ethics and existence

‘What do films become when on television?’ 

‘They become what they are of course.’ 

‘But what if they are nothing?’ 

‘If they are nothing, they might be television.’ 

 ‘But is television really nothing?’ 

We could go on like this for hours but it wouldn’t stop us from spitting this out: Stella by Laurent Heynemann is almost nothing. Stella (1983) is skeletal. 

Merely existing as a film, Stella is a tele-film with ethics. Reduced to its core, without the matter and thickness that make a film, unsteady with the image and wobbly with the sound, it is perfect to introduce a television debate. In the same way human beings can donate their body for science or medicine, films can recycle their old reels on television. To best introduce a debate on television, better be skeletal and talk about ethics*. 

Nicole Garcia (Stella) is not quite skeletal when she leaves a concentration camp at the beginning of the film. She loves Yvon (Thierry Lhermitte) who joined the Gestapo to save her, and as long as she loves him, she will turn a blind eye to what others say or think. But from the pale rogues with no hope to the impeccable resistance fighters, all of them – even the most repulsive ones – have this in common: ethics. And since nothing is really happening to them (more than an action film, Stella is a film where the concept of an event is unknown), they have nothing else to do but to expose him, with such literary words disguised in sober sentences and such monochord tones that it’s embarrassing. 

Stella forces us to take on earlier than planned this difficult question: does television exist, and if yes, how do we know? That an increasing number of ‘films’ are accidentally released in theatres (where they usually don’t last) is now a phenomenon unanimously accepted (and even faded). That there was an entire dispositif which was only made possible because of the theatres (with spectators and their identification, with time and distances, the whole and the details, the light and the shadows) will eventually become obvious. That these films will be (slightly) better off on television goes without saying. For television doesn't need this dispositif (it has its own) and calls upon something totally different: the goodwill of the TV citizens and its ability to judge – and even to condemn. Hence its need for skeletal products to trigger debates (between guests) or verdicts (with questions from the audience). 

Where’s the disaster? With the actors of course. There’s nothing more depressing for an actor than to offer their character to the tribunal of History without having a chance to defend** it, even if the character is indefensible. There’s nothing more sinister than Lanoux, once again spineless, than Brialy, losing even more of his panache, than Lhermitte, playing another monster, than Denner acting as the clever one and Nicole Garcia as the lucid but tormented soul. But what else can they do other than underplay their roles or cast on everything around them the detached gaze of the one that judges? As if on television, characters mimicked the way they know they will be watched: like easy allegories. 

Some will say that Heynemann avoids Manicheism and belongs a new generation of (left-wing) film makers who – finally! – accept that those stories of collaboration, resistance and ethnic cleansing are not so simple. The problem is that he makes them complex instead of revealing their complexity and that the necessity to abandon all-white resistant fighters and all-black collaborators comes with a lack of interest in anyone. It’s probably why all the characters talk in the same way, as if actors’ style had become obscene when all we need are a few well-known extras. 

We should be worried for this type of products. They no longer belong to the menu of cinemas and they are only listed on television for their roles as starters. Sometimes, we feel an incredible cruelty making us think that a few commercial breaks would really help Stella. We would then have the feeling of a secret rhythm and scansion, of a thread often lost but always rediscovered. One more step and we might change channel. 

* All of those who didn’t like the debates in political cine-clubs have now been avenged by Nanni Moretti in Sogni d’oro. 

** Conversely, I remember how much I was touched by the actor Yves Alfonso who, at the release of Doubles Messieurs, had defended so well ‘his’ character, and only the character. 

First published in Libération on 19 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Neo-Tosh

Patrick Brion isn’t just a TV voice, he’s an educator. By following Sunday night’s transmission of Marie-Antoinette with King Without A Crown, he showed us why it was in all seriousness that the American cinema of the thirties felt the obligation to also take on the legacy of Europe and the Old Regime (queens, kings, courts and other fripperies). Marie-Antoinette (1938) is a lazy hotchpotch directed by Van Dyke, decorated by Gibbons and with Shearer mincing about in the lead, and King Without A Crown (1937) is an educational short film, directed by Jacques Tourneur and probably concocted on the basis of Jack Conway’s Tale of Two Cities (1935). 

It’s the ending of Tourneur’s little film (as elliptical and convoluted as a mock Raoul Ruiz in search of mock TV) which provides the key to the gross piece that preceded it. King Without A Crown relates the story of Eleazar Williams, one of the innumerable possible Louis XVII’s, an American clergyman by profession. The film closes on an image of a cinema audience and a voice-off thundering: ‘Could there be a descendent of the Dauphin among you!?’ One realises that in these conditions, Barrymore’s Louis XV in Marie-Antoinette is particularly ill-advised when he proclaims the famous ‘After me . . . the deluge!’. This imbecile should have said: ‘After me . . . MGM’. 

It is in the name of this putative American Louis XVII that in 1938 (a year after Thalberg’s death) the smart, upstart Hollywood of MGM takes on the wife of Louis XVI. You only have to have Marie-Antoinette played by Norma Shearer, the Thalberg widow out of a comic strip drawn by Greuze, to leave the audience not knowing which way to turn between the (supposedly sublime) concept of the queen and the (decidedly shopgirlish) bearing of an actress’s body. This rather Brechtian trick is well known. While the petty bourgeoisie of in-house stars gets the king and queen parts, the proletariat of in-house extras plays the grimacing part of the French people (that is to say, the vilest sort of plebs there is). An improbable aristocracy and an unspeakable people are thereby subsumed into the otherwise crude hierarchy of the Hollywood star system. 

Marie-Antoinette is one of those films where the American dream (the middle-class one) is clothed in the old noble garments of European history. The charm of these films is also their limitation, for if you can manage to believe that Tyrone Power is Axel Fersen, it’s still better that he doesn’t have too many scenes to play. 

One TV magazine recommended to watch this film with a curious glance, as a kitsch item. For all those wearied of this smarty-pants approach, Marie-Antoinette remains in 1988 the toshy film is was in 1938 (and the savoir-faire of Van Dyke – who at the time became known as the man for working wonders with the impossible – changes nothing). In 1988 it has merely become a neo-tosh item, and what’s more, difficult to watch. One minute (like a good little Frenchman) it’s a matter of being a stickler for historical truth and raising eyebrows at the frivolities of the script. The next, it’s like watching an unwitting documentary on the unpalatable Norma Shearer with her way of acting for the camera and never with her co-stars. 

In cinema, a good film is a film that can yield up perhaps two or three readings, depending on different periods and audiences. A bad film yields only one: the first. And since, forty years on, there is nobody in the audience who is imbecilic enough to read the film as its original audience did, all that’s left is recourse to the ‘kitsch’, that mock second reading whose byword could be ‘bring your own sandwiches’. 

This doesn’t stop Marie-Antoinette from having the average qualities of American film-making and for these characteristics to function in such a void that they’re in plain sight for everyone. For example, the way of making anything follow on from anything, willy-nilly, as if was just simplistic cause and simplified effect and there was nothing more important than hysterically joining up the links in an endless chain, of no interest to anyone anyway, with neither start nor finish. One character alone, though, suspects that this story is scarcely worth the trouble of being lived and divulged, and this is the worthy Louis XVI, played by Robert Morley, all pouts and whites of eyes. There’s a moment when Van Dyke (whose specialty is more the adventure film) gives way and films the future Louis XVI nearly beating up Louis XV-Barrymore as he sits there, pox-ridden in his armchair. An unexpected bit of body contact. We can breathe. 

First published in Libération on 18 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Translator’s note: the French title is ‘néo-cruche’. ‘Cruche’ is a derogatory name for a stupid person. I've kept the translation 'neo-tosh' (from Cinema in transit) which isn't ideal but difficult to replace.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Three years after the Dragon

What is near and what is far? There are questions which may well not survive the art of cinema. How do things go about reaching us from the ends of the earth? And how are we to see them coming? Populations, news and drugs are a part of these things. They are at the heart of Year of the Dragon (1985) and of Michael Cimino’s films. Seeing again Year of the Dragon, on Canal Plus, three years on, makes us realise just how much this question will never be one for television. On television, what is far is always-already-there, an ‘old faithful’, with neither aura or fripperies. TV’s real exoticism is what happens ‘at home’, when by chance something happens which we were far from suspecting. With cinema, things went quite differently and it wasn’t unusual for great directors (Cimino is sometimes one) to take on journalists’ issues. Funny kinds of journalists, convinced that ‘everything is meshed’ and you only have to pull a thread to bring – why not? – the whole world to you. A world they would be crazy enough (paranoia is the word) to fit into one film. 

‘This goes back a long way’ is the leitmotiv of captain White, the furious hero disguised as Mickey Rourke in Year of the Dragon. This what? This everything. The activities of the Chinatown gangs, which go back to the Sino-American mafia, which goes back to the Hong Kong triads, which goes back several thousand years in China and to the historical presence of Chinese in the United States. Not to speak of the drugs arriving from Bangkok on a Polish ship, the Kazimierz Pulawski, a quirk of fate when you think that White also comes from a long way away – from Poland to be precise – with a painful detour via Vietnam. Resentment too goes a long way back, like anger which is better tasted cold and grudges which push back the limits of the world. 

We remember the ‘controversy’ that greeted the film on its release: was it racist or not? On TV you can see more clearly how much the racism is only a petty rationalisation of what Cimino still has it in him to film with the voraciousness and folly which any director worthy of the name can’t but possess, and which always exceeds his ideological limits. 

Year of the Dragon has to be seen as a (sometimes futile) exercise in style on this question of what’s close and what’s a long way away. This is the effect TV has on the film. What has to be seen is how Cimino tries everything before getting to the only confrontation which could tie up every loose end in the film. What has to be seen is the way Cimino builds up his scenes from big camera movements, within which there’s a proliferation of actions which aren’t simultaneous (as on TV), but parallel (as in the cinema). Once, the crucial question was how to get close to things. But where the zoom has replaced the actors’ movements with the movements of our eyes, Cimino thrusts Rourke like a living zoom into the thick of what suddenly shifts from ‘too far’ to ‘too near’, from jealousy to phobia. 

So, for Cimino, it’s also necessary that what’s far recedes as what is near gets closer*. About halfway through Year of the Dragon there are some extraordinary scenes. Criticised by all the other characters in the film, analysed and completely exposed, Stanley White collapses under the strain and becomes a wreck for several scenes. That’s when Cimino abandons him without warning and follows his enemy, the seductive Joey Tai, the young Chinese mafia leader, on a ‘business’ trip into the Thai (or Burmese?) forests. An incredible episode where we are compelled to ‘identify’ with this character, who is after all the villain of the film. Cimino succumbs to a very strange temptation, that of replacing his deadbeat lawman with his sworn enemy and granting him a nice piece of adventure movie. 

The result is that when we return to New York and the Polish choir at the funeral of White’s wife, we get something like a poignant illustration of the kind of movies Cimino’s unconscious dreams about. Movies with ever-wider concentric circles, where the threads connecting what’s close and what’s far are woven before our eyes, where the whole world communicates with itself. This was, incidentally, his stroke of genius in The Deer Hunter, moving without warning from Vietnam to Pennsylvania, and it’s this kind of thing that made Cimino (up until The Sicilian) so special a director. 

This is only a temptation though. Whether to enlarge the circles to infinity or to plunge into the target’s heart, where only one of the two men can survive? Year of the Dragon opts for the second solution, the one more in keeping with its stale moralism, but against the nature of Cimino’s talent. 

* The ultimate image of the double phobic movement: the vertical shot down the clock tower staircase in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

First published in Libération on 14 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Ghosts of permanence: from cinema to television

In the autumn of 1988, Serge Daney started to write about films on French television in a column called 'Ghosts of permanence' for the newspaper Libération. A large selection of these texts featured in Daney's fourth book Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main. Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting translations of many of these texts, quite rapidly and in chronological order, attempting to match the rhythm of the column (every other day or so). Keep checking the blog. Here's the intro he wrote in Recrudescence.

Ghosts of permanence: from cinema to television 

To Jean-Claude Biette * 

This daily chronicle of ‘films on television’ came about from an irritation. For years, I’ve heard my old fellow cinephiles saying that a film on TV ‘is not the same thing’. Something, it was suggested, was irremediably lost. ‘Something’ which, in the event, nobody would venture to describe. To all of them it seemed certain that, on television, all that would be left of a film like The Ten Commandements would be a multi-coloured genocide, while India Song would be a triumph on the small screen. As if the passage from projection to broadcasting, from big to small screen, from chemical optics to electronic was solely about the opposition between intimacy and spectacle. 

I’ve always had the feeling it was nothing of the sort and that if, in the passage from the auditorium to the living room, there was, if not a metamorphosis, at least an anamorphosis, it would be a more subtle and less expected one. That in this passage of films under the X-rays of TV, something was lost (in terms of embodiment, seduction, of a certain captivating brilliance), but that something else at times was preserved, indeed gained (in terms of the nervous system, the skeleton, a certain head-on violence). In short, one had to take a closer look, and in person, with the certitude that, whatever the case, future generations will discover cinema with its loss. 

A daily column was the best tool of enquiry. For one thing because French television is – France oblige – very cinephile and day in day out there were all kinds of films to choose from – some of them, a rarity, in the original version. For another thing because, from rare late night cine-club items to obscure filler films and the eighties top grossers that could now be seen with hindsight, one could rediscover in this column the charm and flavour of old-school criticism, for whom a film, before being targeted or labelled, was only a film (one film one vote). Plunged into the trivial promiscuity of television, films ‘breathe’ better than on the lone pedestals of cinematheques. 

The other reason for this column was the somewhat disenchanted verdict I had reached by the end of my previous column (Le salaire du zappeur). My Lumière-Rossellini-Bazin-Godard hypothesis, which held out some hope of seeing on television the eventual continuation of one strand of cinema (the strand concerned with, not to say obsessed by, the concept of ‘information’), seemed to me more and more refuted by the way in which the power of the media was evolving. Looking at the mechanisms of run-of-the-mill French television ‘as a cinephile’, I had been struck by the triumph of parochial values and their enactment, to the detriment of what I saw more and more as the posthumous beauty of cinema: nothing less than a relation to the ‘world’. Television was not a continuation of cinema, for the good reason that it was not a machine for creating, nor even for producing, but instead for racketeering (at worst) or (at best) for showing. 

A film on television is neither cinema nor television, it’s a ‘reproduction’ or else an ‘information’ about a prior state in the coexistence between men and images, the images that nourish them and the images that give them life.

* The column 'Ghosts of permanence' was created in the early 80s by Daney's fellow film critic (and future filmmaker) Jean-Claude Biette.

Notes on the translation: For most of the texts, I've re-worked the translations from the manuscript Cinema in transit, an unpublished English-language anthology which I got from Steve Erickson. In practice, this has meant correcting typos, adjusting the style and tackling mistranslations (there were quite a few) which I've checked against the original text. I've also translated some other texts from scratch with the invaluable help of Otis Wheeler.

Serge Daney in Portuguese

While an anthology of Daney in English remains a distant dream, the rest of the speaking world continues to publish translations. After books in Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese, Italian and others, the Portuguese publisher Angelus Novus released last year a selection of Daney's writings: O Cinema Que Faz Escrever: textos críticos. The translators have sent over the table of contents which you can read below with links to existing (English) translations.

Choosing these 26 texts must have presented the obvious headache (the French edition of Daney's complete writings run into nearly 3,000 pages) but this small selection hits the spot in many ways. The book opens with 'The tracking shot in Kapo' - Daney's last and most encompassing text, covering his life as a cinephile in relation to modern cinema - and ends with 'Montage Obligatory' - one of the key texts written while watching the first Gulf War on TV and which made Daney abandon "traditional" criticism and found the more literary review Trafic.

In-between are the best known theoretical texts from the 70s (most of them already translated in English), a few great film reviews of international authors (e.g. Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Paradjanov), and a pretty perfect selection of Daney's key texts from the late 80s and early 90s where he developed his opposition between the image and the visual (including "The last image" from the landmark exhibition "Passages du cinéma"). I particularly like the short section called "The Portuguese pole" with three reviews of films by Reis/Cordeiro, Oliveira and Rocha, as if Daney's many travels and writings on international cinema allowed any country in the world to create a small Daney collection of their own.


O cinema que faz escrever: textos críticos
Serge Daney

Presentation

The Tracking Shot in Kapo
Trafic n.º 4, Autumn 1992

CINEMA IN THE PRESENT I

Amphisbetesis (François Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 222, July 1970

The screen of fantasy (Bazin and animals)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 236-237, March-April 1972

A tomb for the eye (Straubian pedagogy)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 258-259, July-August 1975

The t(h)errorized (Godardian pedagogy) AKA The therrorized (Godardian pedagogy)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 262-263, January 1976

The organ and the vacuum cleaner (Bresson, the devil, the voice-over and other things)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 279-280, August-September 1977

In Praise of Emma Thiers (Jean-Claude Biette's Realism)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 285, February 1978

The cruel radiance of what is (Johan Van der Keuken)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 290-291, July-August 1978

D’une rosière à l’autre" (Jean Eustache, La Rosière de Pessac I et II)
Cahiers du cinema n.º 306, December 1979

Wim’s movie (Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 318, December 1980

THE PORTUGUESE POLE

Loin des lois (António Reis et Margarida Cordeiro, Trás-os-Montes)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 276, May 1977

Que peut un cœur? (Manoel de Oliveira, Francisca)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 330, December 1981

Exil, amour et tatami portugais (Paulo Rocha, L'Île des amours)
Libération, 20 May 1982

CINEMA IN THE PRESENT II

Jacques Rivette, Le Pont du Nord
Libération, 26 March 1982

Not reconciled (Jerry Lewis' Smörgasbord)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 347, May 1983

Exil en Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovski, Nostalghia)
Libération, 4 June 1985

Paradjanov remonte au créneau (Sergueï Paradjanov,  Legenda o surasmoj kreposti)
Libération, 4 December 1986

Rohmer côté court (Éric Rohmer, Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle)
Libération, 4 February 1987

REVISIONS
The eye was in the tomb and watched Franju (Georges Franju, Les yeux sans visage)
Libération, 25 September 1986

Mizoguchi, The Good Distance (Kenji Mizoguchi, Akasen chitai)
Libération, 10 April 1987

La première fois (Roberto Rossellini, Francesco, giullare di Dio)
Cahiers du cinéma, Hors-série Roberto Rossellini, 1989

HALT, IMAGE, VISUAL

Le mot de la fin
L’Âne, n.º 7, Winter 1982

From movies to Moving AKA From projector do parade AKA From defilement to filing past
La Recherche photographique n.º 7, 1989

Le cinéma et la memoire de l'eau
Libération, 29 December 1989

La dernière image
Passages de l’image Catalogue, dir. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, Christine van Assche, Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1990

Montage obligatory (The war, the gulf and the small screen)
Cahiers du cinéma n.º 442, April 1991

Serge Daney in 2016

Time for the annual round-up. Not a big year, so let's keep it short.

Two new translations: Daney's reviews of Fellini's Ginger and Fred (one for the cinema release and one for the TV broadcast).

Elsewhere:

• An anthology of Daney's writings was published in Portuguese (O Cinema Que Faz Escrever). I'm trying to track down the table of contents.
• Trafic, the film review founded by Daney a year before his passing, reached its 100th issue. An evening of celebration at the French Cinémathèque will include the showing of one of Daney's rarest video work, La preuve par Prince. 

Happy New Year everyone.

What Out of Africa produces

I've been chasing this one for a long time but I've finally got my hands on a copy of the Summer 2011 edition of the Dutch journal F.R. DAVID which contains a translation of Serge Daney's review of Out of Africa when shown on French television in 1988. A savage little text nailing the "aesthetics of advertising" and a disastrous use of soundtrack (substituting Mozart with John Barry).

What Out of Africa produces
Originally published in Libération, 11 October 1988. Reprinted in F.R.DAVID "spin cycle", Summer 2011, de Appel, Amsterdam, 2011, pp. 185-188. Translation by John Kelsey. Fist published in English in Made in USA.

You can find an alternative translation on Steve Erickson's website. I'll dropped the publisher a note to ask if I can post the text on the blog.