Minnelli: Two new translations (now online)

* * * Updated post with links to the texts via Google Book Search * * *


Surprise New Year present!

Joe McElhaney just announced via the comments on the last blog entry that his upcoming book Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment will contain new translations (by Bill Krohn) of two Daney articles:

The Pirate isn't just decor
Originally published as 'Pirate n'est pas que décor' in Libération on 15 October 1988 and republished in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aleas, 1991.

Minnelli caught in his web
Originally published as Minnelli pris dans sa toile' in Libération on 21 October 1988 and republished in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aleas, 1991.

With several others translations coming soon, 2009 is starting well!

The star and the leftovers

I've finally found the time to proof-read this little text on Bardot and Et Dieu créa la femme. Daney also refers to it in the Journey of a Cine-Son interview.

The star and the leftovers 

It was the day before a bad flu confined me to bed. I was determined to take a look at Et Dieu créa la femme (Vadim, 1956), curious to watch again the movie that launched Brigitte Bardot and prepared the Nouvelle Vague. 

- “Am I only this?” complained the movie. “Will I never be something else?” 

- “I am sure your charm is intact”, I said between two coughing fits. 

And it was true. The charm was intact. Not the obsolete charm of the past, but the innocent charm of the present. By watching again movies on television, one verifies more and more to which extent there was already a lot of pre-television (management, digestion, edification) in old movies and in numerous “classics” (La beauté du diable being a recent example). This makes it all the easier to spot the movies where the authors had called on the audience to witness the birth of something. There is cinema when the emotion of the beginnings prevails and there is television when it is about seasoning the leftovers. It may be because Bardot, ultimate star of French cinema, has never been seen recycled on television, that there is some curiosity to watch her beginning in a small, almost amateurish movie, produced during the ice age of the Qualité Française by Raoul Lévy and directed by Roger Vadim: Et Dieu créa la femme. 

What is beautiful in this rather modest movie is that the characters are like the audience of the film: they discover, suddenly astonished, that the shameless Saint-Tropez starlet has not only the means to seduce them (because she is beautiful) but also to make them sound hollow (because she is a star). Her thirst for the absolute renders relative the virile parading of the little males who thought too quickly they were in a sexy movie. The movie, which had started on a quasi-bucolic mode, suddenly falls into the unknown, to the great displeasure of its characters. The three men (Jurgens, Marquand and Trintignant) learn with various levels of success that such a woman cannot be possessed. The woman discovers that she is not like the others since she doesn’t know how to lie. 

We have stopped a long time ago to be saddened or disappointed by Vadim’s subsequent movies. In Et Dieu créa la femme, we can see that his filming is already without energy, his script without rhythm and that he tells a story with no nerves. We cannot even say that he looks at Bardot with the exaltation of a bashful lover. But this does not matter much. For the strength of the movie lies mainly in its dialogues. Because Bardot says sentences that only she could have said at the time and that are enough to protect the modernity of the movie. From “I don’t like to say good bye” or “I work at being happy” to “what a nitwit this rabbit!” (1), Bardot’s short sentences are strong because they are, already, without possible reply. 

Did Vadim write this dialogue or did he simply make himself available to the promise of this voice? It doesn’t matter since he was present at the moment of the birth of a myth, and that this presence, still today, makes Et Dieu créa la femme a small event in the history of French cinema. It doesn’t matter because Vadim was himself just starting his career and he’s not yet affected by his future appalling know-how. In 1956, the simple act of filming a dialogue which is not the then predominant tit-for-tat of filmed theatre, a dialogue which calls less for a reply than for silence and which leaves the other characters stunned, was forcing Vadim to make proper shots and (almost) to rethink movie making. 

On television, the actor is a function. In cinema, the actor was also an enigma. It is not exaggerated to defend that every time a filmmaker has stuck to this enigma, this has disrupted – not always intentionally – the “language” of cinema. It is not exaggerated either to consider the stormy transformations of this language as a consequence of a succession of love stories, singular enough to be lived and universal enough to be offered to the public. Is this vision a bit rosy? Indeed, but when one looks at today successful movies – from Le grand bleu to L’ours – which stabilise the image of a possible consensus between the audience and the general public, one understands better why none of these movies actually innovates in film making. They do very well without actors – and a fortiori without stars (2). Post-advertising aesthetics: as soon as the product is the star, there is no point putting it in competition with only one of its components.

(1) A sentence which Bardot must regret today considering her terrifying discourse on the purity of animals opposed to the human stain.

(2) It must be possible to re-tell the history of cinema starting from the singularities of great actors. That is what the Canadian Paul Warren did in The Secret of the American Star-System.

The French version of this text was originally published in Libération, 12 November 1988 and can be found in Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997,  pp.34-35. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar. 

In Stubborn Praise of Information (now online)

This text is now available online. It's a fantastic piece, one of a pair of articles written after the first Gulf War (the other one is here) which marked the time when Serge Daney decided to quit writing about television after years of doing so for the French newspaper Libération .

In Stubborn Praise of Information
Originally published as "Eloge têtu de l'information" in Libération on 31 October 1990 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, television, information, Aléas 1991. Published in English in Continuous Project #8, CNEAI, France, 2006.

It's one of the best translations I’ve seen along with Chris Darke's piece. It really conveys the sharpness of Daney's style in English

Many thanks to the anonymous comment on this blog pointing to this piece and to Seth Price, the translator, for allowing this text to be available online.

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.

Montage Obligatory

Rouge has just published a translation of Daney's 1991 piece on the television coverage of the Gulf War which made him give up writing about television. It's one if his last articles for Libération before he left the newspaper to found Trafic.

Montage Ogligatory, Rouge, #8, 2006

Original article is "Montage Obligé - La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran" published in Libération in April 1991 and reprinted in Serge Daney’s Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, television, information, Aléas 1991, reprinted 1997.

Walsh draws kings

One of the reasons films still carry a lot of punch on television is that we can sense a great physical energy in them. Not the stalling frenzy of TV series where, exhausted by all the zoom shots, we no longer know if the actors have moved within the frame, or if our optic nerve is on orbit. Not the repressed anxiety of the half bodies that read world news or announce continuity between shows. Nothing like that, but instead the sense that one must have been young and healthy to make these old films. It's one of the least proclaimed truth of cinema: nervous impulse and resistance to tiredness are irreplaceable*. Of all the art forms, cinema remains the one that requires to be 'in good form'. Otherwise, one couldn't explain the impressive number of first films that will remain the best of their authors. 

One of the reasons the unexpected re-discovery of Raoul Walsh's The King and Four Queens is a great surprise, is that you can see tiredness in it. In 1956, Walsh had been making films for forty-three years and Gable for thirty-two. And Jo Fleet might only be thirty-seven years old but her role as the MacDaid widow implies that she's at least twenty years older. The least fit in the group is Clarke Gable, who will die four years later. And it's around a slow and flickering King that Raoul Walsh organised his mise-en-scène. Stripped down, minimal, and very refined: a real 'lesson' in mise-en-scène. That being said, the film was never considered a great one. It's perhaps inferior to the other film Walsh directed in 1956, the little known The Revolt of Mamie Stover with Jane Russell, which the author of these lines must confess he secretly worships. The King and Four Queens is the type of entertainment that cinema pioneers could allow themselves to make at the dawn of their long career. 

This reminder is not to move the reader to pity. Walsh's laziness and the fatigue in King are one thing, ours is another. When seasoned veterans start working 'economically', it's because they can afford it. They have accumulated enough experience to signify the energy (and, in Walsh's case, a kind of geometric rage) that begins to lack, in order to fulfil their contract with dignity. The advantage of the now decried 'politique des auteurs' was to provide the loyal cinephile with precise information on the state of natural wear and tear of a material used for a long time. Wear and tear of the actors, of the stories, of the landscapes. But it also showed how what was lost in wild energy was regained in elegance and speed. 

The script of The King and Four Queens is more than clever; like all of Walsh's scripts, it is structured as a Freudian rebus, topped up with the charm of an equation reduced to its essential parts. A woman, mother of four bad boys who are all dead but one, is surrounded by four young widows while waiting for the survivor (nobody knows which of the four he is) to come collect the treasure she has buried somewhere. The Bible under her arm, dressed in grey, her round face distorted by a childish and distrustful rictus, Jo Van Fleet is the most beautiful character of the film and her concluding lines are grandiose: 'after that, I wash my hands.' The four women are torn apart between their desire for money and for the man that will come and free them. Sabrinao, Oralia, Ruby and Birdie swoop on the mysterious Kehoe (Gable) who has come to resolve the equation that makes their heart melt.  

In this film with no fights and where people talk a lot, Gable, thanks to two or three winks and movements of a zen turtle, practices a real psychoanalytic listening (a rather short version of it). Each woman produces for him some symptoms, totally obvious but instructive. Walsh only lays them out like coloured spots in a ball scene. With a beautiful simplicity and this art to quickly reach the essential, he has fun connecting scenes where any spontaneous gestures has been banished. That's ok, since what matters is to let the repressed desires return.  

Dan Kehoe leaves with the treasure and one of the daughters. A very relative happy ending since he must return (almost all) the money to the sheriff. A very Walshian happy ending since the great Raoul never had any other message: he who can do more, can do less.

  

* It's perhaps one of the fundamental differences with traditional arts. No filmmaker can have the energy of Titian or Picasso when reaching old age. One exception: the great Manoel de Oliveira. 

First published in Libération on 9 January 1989. 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.

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.

Doped up Marilyn

The real star of Let’s Make Love isn’t Marilyn Monroe. It goes by the name of Demerol, Amytal, Nembutal or Phenobarbitone. At the start of shooting this film, Marilyn is really not well, and doctor Greenson, a Freudian, is appalled by the pharmacopia he discovers at his patient’s house. Did Fox believe that the silly-goose role was still just right for her in 1960? Did Cukor really hope to transcend the ineptitude of the script? Did Brynner, Grant, Hudson and Heston show foresight in successively turning down the masculine lead? Had Arthur Miller kidded himself about the state of the couple he and Norma Jean were in? Hadn’t the musical comedy turned into a bare sprinkling of cosy cabaret numbers, necessary intimist, given the paralysis that had overtaken the genre? 

All these questions loomed large around the TV-viewing of Let’s Make Love on Sunday night. Everything this film had been designed to cover up came back like the return of a thing long and painfully repressed. Everything which, on the big screen in 1960, might have worked as illusions, now owned up to not just wrinkles but a pretty sorry state of decomposition. The facelift hadn’t held. Confirmation, yet again, that the American films of the fifties and sixties, often only held together by a desperate show of glitter and glamour, are the ones that TV undoes the most pitilessly. Seeing Let’s Make Love on TV is like watching a documentary about Marilyn doped up, Cukor gone soft and Fox moronic. It isn’t without interest, but it’s not much fun. 

When you quote somebody or something, it’s wise to open inverted commas. What (who) ever you can’t get to hold together, you separate with inverted commas, which are yet another, almost voluntary, way of joining them. There’s a hint of that in Let’s Make Love when Milton Berle, Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly are paraded on in succession like a little museum of quotations. Like Hawks making Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Cukor must have quickly realised that Marilyn, a quotation embodied in the flesh and the tormented soul, was there for nobody, save the camera. More intuitive than all the others put together, Marilyn plays her part as it ought to be played in this studio system that’s as sick as her, and which, what’s more, won’t survive her. 

This is why this film can be kept like a good memory. Precisely because of that ‘inverted commas’ effect, which makes the first musical number in the film (Cole Porter’s ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’) linger in the mind quite apart from the film it introduces. Because of Marilyn’s blue sweater. Because of ‘Specialisation’, which is a good number. Because of the moments when the oomph returns and the grace with it. 

Shot in Cinemascope, Let’s Make Love suffers more than others from the transfer to the small screen. It doesn’t hover between the two black bands of letterboxing, it itself is the band unrolling between two big dark blocks which clasp it yet again in the manner of inverted commas, transforming its viewing into a clinical case study. Dark (not black) blocks which on Sunday night flickered ceaselessly between black, very dark green or a purplish hue. An effect due to the whim of a single television set (mine)? Or underhand colourisation, where the application of video colour abruptly tip the thin band of De Luxe colours into the almost batrachian vision of a world gone runny lengthwise? That night the TV didn’t show Cukor’s film, it provided information on the way colour films of thirty years ago couldn’t keep their make-up from smudging. 

We mustn’t, it needs to be said, compare this film with others by Cukor. Not that its subject isn’t eminently ‘Cukorian’, but because Cukor has often given a personal inflection to the ethos of the milieu (showbiz) which was his own habitat, with an additional dash of lucidity. For Cukor, the only natural elements in the world are whatever you concoct artifice with. Cukor knows something about the truth of Hollywood, and in exchange he has accepted that Hollywood should stop him from saying it too loudly. His viewpoint is expressed briefly by Jean-Marc Clément, the Frenchy millionaire in the film: ‘You can only ever give what you have’. Cukor has made some very fine films based on this kind of stoicism. Except that to make them he needed its opposite. What do you call someone who knows (like Lacan) that love is, on the contrary, making a gift of what you do not have? The star, obviously. 

First published in Libération on 13 December 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

John Ford for Ever

Still salvaging texts from Steve Erickson's old website. Perhaps my favourite Daney text: looks simple, easy to read, but demanding so much from cinema and the spectator.

John Ford for Ever

A common and questionable idea has it that on television close-up shots are king. If it was true, the man who one day shouted “I don’t want to see nose hair on a fifteen-meter screen!” would not stand a chance on the small screen. John Ford wasn’t fond of close-ups, or of expository scenes, which amounts to the same thing. He filmed very quickly and spent only 28 days directing She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (and not La charge héroïque, the ill-translated and stupid French title). It was in 1949; he was his own producer and did whatever he fancied. Forty-one years later, the film ‘passes’ perfectly from the big to the small screen (on Channel 1). Elementary, you say? Not quite.

Gilles Deleuze one day reminded the youngsters of the FEMIS school of cinema that their work as filmmakers would consist in producing ‘blocks of duration-movement’. And if Ford’s blocks remain so perfect, it’s because they respect the most elementary of golden numbers: they only last the time it takes a practised eye to see everything they encompass (1). The time to see all there is to see is the right duration and the right movement for an eye as disciplined in the art of looking as Ford’s horsemen are in the art of riding.

A principle so simple that it allowed Ford to complicate, refine and even convolute things while always giving a feeling of timeless classicism. It isn’t the action which determines duration, it’s the perception of an ideal spectator, of a scout who would see from afar all that there is to see (but nothing more).

Rapid contemplation is the Ford paradox. It’s impossible to watch his movies with a lazy eye because we then no longer see anything (except stories of romantic soldiers). The eye must be sharp because in any image of a Ford’s film, there is likely to be a few tenths of a second of pure contemplation before the action starts. Someone goes out a wood shack or leaves the frame, and there are red clouds over a cemetery, a horse abandoned in the right hand corner of the image, the blue swarming of the cavalry, the distraught faces of two women: things to be seen at the very beginning of a shot, because there won’t be a ‘second time’ (too bad for the sluggish eyes).

Ford is one of the great artists of cinema. Not only because of the composition and the light of his shots but more deeply, because he shoots so quickly that he makes two movies at the same time: a movie to ward off time (stretching his stories, for fear of ending) and another to save the moment (the moment of the landscape, two seconds before the action). He enjoys the show ‘before’ (2). So, with Ford there is not point looking for characters who, in front of a beautiful landscape, would say “How beautiful!” The character is not to whisper to the spectator what he should see. That would be immoral.

And the characters are busy enough postponing retirement and the end of the twists and turns of the story. This theme emerges in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and will keep coming back. Ford’s characters (soldiers included) are but the traveling acrobats of their beliefs – beliefs which tend less and less to lead to promise lands, even if they draw the figure of riders on a bright red sunset sky or in the moonlight. This image is in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon of course. This circular parade, going from left to right, is collective and never-ending.

But there is another movement, more mysterious, which comes from the deep end of the shot, and always emerges in the middle of the image (3). As if this film maker, who had built everything on the refusal of close-ups and expository scenes, on occasion let something come toward his characters. Thus, we find one close-up in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. We can see Nathan Brittles-John Wayne-Raymond Loyer (4) talking to his wife, long dead and buried two feet away, explaining that he has only six days left before retirement and that hasn’t made any decisions. Then the shadow of a woman appears on the grave. It’s only a harmless young girl but for those who have learned to watch Ford properly, this brief moment frightens. It’s the past that returns in the middle of the image, without warning, ‘à la Ford’. Needless to say that when an image has not only edges but also a heart, the small screen welcomes it with due consideration.

(1) I got this remark from the Portuguese film maker A.P. Vasconcelos.

(2) We could venture to say that, reversely, a film maker taking stock to show us the beauty of the landscape ‘after’ is immoral.

(3) The author of the article has reaffirmed his ‘Fordism’ at the page 62 of the excellent special issue of Cahiers du cinéma on John Ford.

(4) Raymond Loyer is the French voice of John Wayne in dubbed movies (translator’s note)

First published in Libération, 18 November 1988 and also found in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Laura’s aura

What was the right sentence? ‘Ok, old bastard, you can start filming Monday,’ or ‘You can start filming Monday, starting from scratch’? Who shall we believe: Leonard Mosey in his book on Zanuck or Preminger in his autobiography? When Zanuck, the Fox tyrant, finally gives the green light to Preminger, Laura (which will be a box office and critical success before turning cult-film) is a poor and damaged thing. The number of people that became upset along the Laura-project is incredible. Vera Caspary, because his novel was first confined to Fox’s ‘B’ department. Brian Foy, the boss of this department, who detested the script but was overruled by Zanuck. Clifton Webb, a theatre actor, who was asked – supreme humiliation – to do a screen test. Mamoulian, who was chosen to direct the film and only accepted it reluctantly, to make a bit of money. Dana Andrews who, for his first starring rule, was held in contempt by Zanuck. Mamoulian’s wife who painted Laura’s first portrait but saw her work replaced by a large modified photography. Judith Anderson who took herself for Medea and was asked to play more economically. And Zanuck himself who, having forced an ending of his choosing, finally had to give in. Only Preminger, producer and eventually ‘auteur’ of this pile of muffled hatred, was right to take it on the chin and hold firm. Laura is not only the film that established his reputation as a director but, bizarrely, will stay as the leading film of this troubled period for Fox.  

These anecdotes are not meant to devoid Laura of its merits but to remind us of the rule of the game (and the beauty of cinema): films are not only the results of their conditions of production, they are – sometimes – their reflection. To watch and watch again Laura is to understand how, as early as 1944, nothing is simple anymore in Hollywood. We’re witnessing in real time the birth of mannerism. And because it’s in real time, we see on Gene Tierney’s and Dana Andrew’s inexpressive faces and amateurish acting, their real innocence as they sink (and us with them) in a world of useless complications, alternative truths and bouncing lights.  

What’s Laura if not the story of a gaze to come, Mark MacPherson’s gaze (played by Dana Andrews) on the Laura in flesh and bones that replaces the Laura in portrait as the storm rages outside? Throughout his relentless and fast-paced investigation, Dana Andrews only has eyes for the small baseball game that he carries in his pocket, as if his own eyes were steel balls that refused to move to an object that don’t deserve them. Dana Andrews – we will never say enough how much the great American cinema of the fifties owe to his closed and stubborn acting – is one of these actors that listens with his eyes. He listens (to the others’ lies) until he finds, in front of him, an object worth looking at: Laura. And when she (who exists so little) is facing him, he becomes immediately, in the great tradition of Premingerian heroes, the one that has, all in all, only one gaze for himself (we shall never forget Jean Simmons’ gaze at the end of Angel Face, how could we?). 

Mannerism is not being fussy, it’s taking samples. The characters in Laura belong to a world where people talk a lot but communicate very little because the organs of communication suffer a handicap. If a cop only has one gaze, the writer only has one voice, his, and a voice over on top of that. Waldo Lydecker’s voice (Clifton Webb’s) opens the film, accompanies his holder until he dies, to the sound of his own radio programme. As for Laura, she exists so little that the film is consumed in trying to make her image exist, for lack of anything else. Of Laura, we know the two houses, the portrait, the fatal negligee, the rapid career: all the samples taken on a bland character, a young women enjoying success but who doesn’t know – at all – what a man is.  

We called ‘mise en scene’ this know-how that saves appearances once the organs of fascination have become independent of the bodies they adorned.  

First published in Libération on 27 December 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

What Out of Africa produces

Steve Erickson just published a new translation of Daney's review of Out of Africa. It was written in 1988 for the French newspaper Libération and is all about television, advertising and cinema.

Daney spotted a very odd moment, where John Barry's soundtrack actually covers diegetic Mozart. It actually sounds incredible. Maybe not a Kapo moment, but certainly a great find. I've not been able to check the actual scene.

What Out of Africa produces
Originally published in Libération, 11 October 1988. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

For a cine-demography

A new translation of an article showing one of Daney's original perspectives on cinema!

A sort of history of cinema comparing the number of spectators and of characters in movies:

• Classic cinema: a lot of people in a lot of movie theatres watching films with a lot of characters.
• Modern cinema: fewer and fewer people in already too many movie theatres watching films with fewer and fewer characters.
• Post-modern cinema: many people in just a few (large) theatres want to see films with just a few characters.

I've just finished the translation and it's available on Steve Erickson's website:


For a cine-demography
The French version was originally published in Liberation, 13 September 1988 and can be found in Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas (http://www.aleas.fr/), 1997.


Since Daney's text is 20 years old, I'm wondering if the metaphor couldn't developed further. Something like a lot of isolated people scattered around the globe (in front of the television, DVDs, internet or at film festivals or in museums) watch many movies with small, minor, ordinary characters. No more heroes except for the fantasy super heroes of Hollywood (Batman, etc.).

The passeur

[UPDATE 25 Dec 2021: This text has now been published in the last edition of Trafic, the review founded by Daney and which lasted 30 years after his death.] 

Wait, what? There's a little known text by Serge Daney called "The passeur"?

Recap for those discovering this blog: "passeur" is a term Daney used to define his position as a critic in his later years and the term has become closely associated with him. Difficult to translate, it can refer to a smuggler, a ferryman (real or mythological), or simply someone passing something to someone else. Here are two quotes where Daney gives clues of what he means:

“I like this small word: passeur. I remember a fantastic article by Jean-Louis Comolli about Eric Dolphy entitled ‘the passeur’. (…) The passeurs are strange: they need borders but only to challenge them. They don’t want to be alone with their treasures and at the same time, they don’t really care about those to whom they pass something. And since ‘feelings are always reciprocal’, we don’t really care about passeurs either, we don’t pass anything to them and we often empty their pockets”. (Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, 1991). 

“As a passeur I stayed midstream, waiting for someone from one of the banks to call me or reach out to me, and since that never happened I began to send little messages, both written and oral, sending news from one bank to the other without myself belonging to either of them” (Persévérance, 1994).

It turns out that Daney played with this term for quite some time, as far back as 1978 when he first used it in a newly found text about Grémillon. Thanks to Pierre Eugène who unearthed this text (via Jeremy Sulpis) and to Andy Rector for helping with the translation.

The passeur 

In 1978, The Action-République cinema took the risk of organising a tribute to Jean Grémillon, a great filmmaker without an audience, struck by some sort of official curse during his lifetime and after his death. Seizing the opportunity to take a closer look, the audience, often young, discovered in Grémillon more than a great filmmaker, they also discovered a passeur who, between two ages of French cinema, obstinately took upon his shoulders the risk of a mutation.  

Before Grémillon, it had been possible to make great films without necessarily being an ‘auteur’. After him, in France, it had become impossible. Before him: a prodigious actors’ cinema. After him: the naked, ungrateful, even unpopular necessity to sign one’s films, not only with a ‘style’ or ‘know-how’ but with one’s body. And that’s a completely different can of worms. Grémillon was the contemporary witness/craftsman/victim of the slow withdrawal of the body of the actor from French cinema. A withdrawal that continued beyond measure, up to the sudden emergence, in the place left vacant, of another body: that of the auteur (today? Godard, Duras, Truffaut…). After the war, it would no longer be really possible for a filmmaker to work, film after film, this filmic material that is the body of the professional actor. And French cinema would start searching for the idea of models, heralded by Bresson, everywhere but with the professional actors (doomed to decadence and then unemployment). Grémillon is the one who, caught between the Renoir-continent and the Bresson-continent (to be simple), will experience uncertainty with regard to actors, with regard to what will eventually be called casting. He belongs to two worlds. It’s enough to see the evolution, throughout his work, of the image of the working-class hero, to which Grémillon is very attached. It begins with Gabin (deeply moving in Lady Killer), followed by the pale Marchal (in Lumière d’été), then the evanescent Girotti (in The Love of a Woman). In the end, all that is left is a vague leather jacket, a cast-off.  

But this cast-off is precisely what has always interested Grémillon. He’s not only the one who ‘came at the wrong time’, born too early or too late, he’s the one who this situation (in-between two stages) tortures and enchants. He’s a passeur in more ways than one: between two ages of cinema, between two wars, between two worlds (the best and the other), between two sexes. In other words, he believes that in better tomorrows, women can take the place of men, and vice versa.  

Grémillon’s films, like those of Mizoguchi, are subjected to a double logic and the necessity to concede nothing of one to the benefit of the other. On one side, there’s the social class of the heroes, irreducible and final (Grémillon was one of the rare directors who likes to film people at work). On the other side, there is, in the bonus gift promised by Socialism, a redistribution of the roles between men and women, on either side of the desire that binds them to each other. More than Renoir or Daquin, Grémillon took seriously the question of the positive hero (already the case with the convict played by Alcover in the remarkable Little Lise). But in the end, the positive hero can only be a woman. Throughout Grémillon’s work, we witness a sort of mutation. At the beginning, it’s a world of men where women only bring misfortunes. Men are bound to their labour, naive and violent. Women are without ties, from anywhere and nowhere (see how Gabin, a typographer in Lady Killer, follows Mireille Balin, or how the same Gabin meets Morgan, a woman from nowhere, on a lost vessel in Stormy Waters). But instead of using a generalised phallic solution, Soviet-style (where the woman is virilised without the man being feminised), there is in the surprising The Woman Who Dared a new separation, a new division of labour, and of the elements: man to the earth and woman to the sky, the place of pure passage (and that’s why I wish to see a tribute to Grémillon in the final image of Adolfo G. Arrieta’s Flammes). 

These questions are rather buried, one might say. But is this true? What is Grémillon talking to us about in the end? Something that nowadays is avoided, circumvented, forgotten, left to the photo novels, the sentimental press, and cinephilic nostalgia: that human beings are beings of desire, caught in the class struggle. Remove any of the two components of this sentence and nothing makes sense anymore. Grémillon’s films are carried by one question, too simple not to move us: What is a man? What is a woman? Are there distinctive signs which would be anything other than biological markers or social conventions? Where to draw the dividing line, assuming such a line needs to be drawn? What does a man desire in a woman? Nothing more perhaps than what jerks him in motion (in all possible senses and literally). What does a woman desire in a man? Maybe nothing more than that empty cast-off of his, which she will keep when he is no longer there (a signifier, a ‘lady killer’, a mask). 

Grémillon’s films are difficult because they demand that we stay as close as possible to something (desire) that keeps extending itself, like onward marches, surviving itself, gaining over nothing. Between two scenes, two shots, there are not only ellipses, discontinuity, and the edges of the narrative, but the horror when everything is missing and we have to start from zero. No comfort for the enemies of comfort!

Published in Chefs d’oeuvres et nanars du cinéma français 1930-1956, a booklet for the Grémillon retrospective (Dec 1978 – Apr 1979) at the Action République cinema. 

Colourful DeMille

When the Eternal (tired to be off screen) finally talks to Moses, he wears a beautiful spinach green tunic. This green is profoundly different to the apple green gauze underneath which we feel Nefertiti is naked. It’s not the grasshopper green of the tutus worn by a bunch of dancers. Nor the earth green of the cloud that kills Egypt's first-borns, nor the bleached green of the Red Sea when it opens up. Nor especially the beautiful turquoise blue of the headdress of the spineless Baka. This turquoise blue is the type you can still find in very old prints of the National Geographic Magazine. For anyone who is overwhelmed by a colour chart, The Ten Commandments (1956) is more a story of colours than of taste. DeMille’s taste is what it is but the colours are of a different nature, a nature loved like never before by the late Technicolor.  

If Cecil Blount DeMille, a filmmaker little known and without a great reputation, ended up being recognised, it’s less for the religious feeling that his films are strangely devoid of than for the way he tirelessly was able to talk about belief. With DeMille, you only believe what you see, and you only see colours. The man that turns the acid green Nile blood red must have a very powerful God on his side. And a God who sends a teaser in the shape of red cloud followed by a green halo on a mountain, knows that Moses is not colour blind.  

To believe in colours must have been easy after the Eternal had invented Technicolor. It would be harder today as the colour in cinema is everywhere ugly and unremarkable. There was a time when the gelatine of the three positives could be impregnated with the right dye and the matrices were quite happy to discharge their colouring on the mordanted surface of the silver halide film*. Colours then demonstrated a rock-solid stability. Seeing again The Ten Commandments is to understand that DeMille was not only the bigoted and reactionary tyrant who liked to see all his flock of extras piled into a single image, but also the kitsch aesthete that took the liberty to treat colours as extras.  

Stability is the right word to talk about this damaging filmmaker. DeMille is the man of belief, and of blind belief. But also the man of blindness, because blindness is also a belief. In the end, he talks less about sacred love than pagan love and if The Ten Commandments only contained the thoughtful Moses’ saga, the film would be a short one. Thankfully there are these surprising characters, among others: Nefertiti, Ramses and Dathan. These ones are, in a sense, ‘incredible’. The Hebrew God multiplies stunning miracles in front of their eyes and they couldn't care less! Nefertiti can’t see she’s boring Moses, the Pharaoh can’t see that his people are in danger and Dathan finds a way, two seconds after the Red Sea closes back, to continue to excite the people against Moses. Stubborn love, boasting arrogance, and constant nastiness become the real passions. The passion to see nothing of what stands out so obviously. They are as stable in their blindness as the colours of the film are in their stridence.  

In fact, DeMille’s real serious topic, the one he doesn’t deal with and perhaps never even suspected, was composed by Schoenberg in 1932 and filmed by Straub in 1974. It’s Moses and Aaron, the eternal (and painful) story of the quarrels between writing and image. If René Bonnell, thanks to whom we managed to see again (on Canal Plus) the Cecil B version, was logical, he would now schedule the Schoenberg-Straub version, and would thus contribute to the work of civilisation. If only to give Aaron his chance. His chance to doubt** and to be interesting.  

* Some are pointing out that this description is sexual. Duly noted.   

** Unfortunately, Bonnell (René) couldn't care less about this chronicle. 

First published in Libération on 16 January 1989. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

John Ford for ever

A new translation of a 1988 article by Serge Daney about John Ford following the showing of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon on French television. It's available on Steve Erickson's website:

John Ford for ever

Originally published in Liberation on 18 November 1988 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997.

I'm still amazed by Daney's ability to capture a unique characteristic (rapid contemplation) of a filmmaker (Ford) in such a concise and simple manner.

Fort Apache was on British TV last Saturday afternoon and, as I exercised the usual Daney trick: count the first 10 shots of a movie to see "if it works", I spotted this amazing panoramic shot of a coach going full speed through Monument Valley: the camera follows the coach from left to right but then abandons it for a moment to look up a big rock formation before getting back down to the coach and the action. The coach actually disappears from the frame in the middle of the action... sheer magic.

Any other rapid contemplation anyone?

Dumbo

Nap time. My kid is watching a DVD of Dumbo. Serge Daney was never fond of animated movies, openly admitting he didn’t get them and famously claiming he never saw Bambi. But he was still able to write good pieces of film criticism such as the extracts from this text about Dumbo in 1989.

The Dumbo case

Dumbo is firstly a hymn to the night. Whether it’s the circus train, the female elephants raising the big top under the rain, the shadow cast over the destroyed big top or the isolated hut where Dumbo’s mother – now a “mad elephant” – is crying, the great moments of the movie happen at night. It’s at night that the mouse whispers to the man the idea of the show where Dumbo will be the star, and it’s at night, after the disaster, that the elephant with too large ears and his mouse friend fall in a well of champagne. Dumbo is this strange animated movie taking place in half-light and the strange story of this fake elephant (1).

(…)

The film is perhaps more beautiful if we look less at Dumbo’s revenge than at a process described in many mythologies: the hero’s double birth. First birth: from day to night. Second birth: from night to day. At first, Dumbo would be wrongly cast in the role of the baby elephant that he isn’t, and then he would be revealed as Dumbo, the unique specimen of a unique species with only one individual: the dumbo. Light ends up revealing the true nature of this celestial entity, after a long and difficult series of nocturnal tests. In a word, Dumbo would not be an elephant.

Why this surprising thesis? Because there is an extraordinary moment in Dumbo. Before he finds himself up in a tree, ready to fly, Dumbo spends one last night on earth, and there, in all innocence, he gets copiously drunk. Amateurs of animated movies, of happy fantasies, or simply of graphic invention, all know Dumbo’s booze-up with its procession of pink elephants on a black background. But this great moment of madness is not without its logic. From the black background against which the laughing elephant-like figures stand out, to the pink clouds of the dawn of Dumbo’s first day, there is a true rite of passage. And it’s a whole series of figures which parade, dance and jig, laughing and grotesque figures which only retain their trunk, or the concept of a trunk, as a distinctive elephant sign. Carnival bipeds, carefree and lewd, with black holes instead of a mask, camel-elephants, pig-elephants, gondola-elephants, car-elephant, all happy to be improbable, true cage of forms of a pagan ritual, joyously watching over the true birth of one of them: the Dumbo. Suddenly, we’re very far from the strokes and the mothers of the beginning of the film.

(1) The author, who has little taste for animated movies, saw Dumbo for two reasons. He was really bored in Malta and he like elephants. He saw the movie in a filthy and empty theatre.

Originally published in Libération on 2 January 1989 and reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1997. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Illegal history

There are utopias we hold dear. To see the first images of a film, one day, without knowing where they go or what they want. To witness something that is born, builds itself, oscillates and gets undone. To renounce to know too quickly who’s good and who’s evil because it’s so much more interesting to simply observe. In short, to keep one’s neurons going and to be surprised to still be that clever, as clever as the man who made the film, Jerzy Skolimowski in this case. 

In 1982, Skolimowski is not unknown in cinephile circles. It’s just that we know nothing of the film that he just shot (very quickly) in London and that is going to represent Great Britain at the Cannes film festival. Moonlighting is seen before we could find out what it is about. For once, the viewing of the film went faster than its pre-digested image. And if Cannes was enchanted by the film, it’s because it fulfilled the buried dream of any film critic: to discover a film as its story unfolds in front of our eyes. The utopia of real time.  

Obviously, the subject of Moonlighting is real time itself. To save money, a powerful Polish dignitary gets his London flat renovated by Polish workers who will spend a month (the length of their tourist visa) to work (illegally) like dogs before returning to Poland where they will be generously paid (even in zlotys). Because he speaks English, a certain Novack chooses the workers (who are not very smart) and manages the operations (with an iron fist). Time and money are counted and the four men have little time to see London apart from a glum bit of pavement (it’s Christmas time), a dull supermarket and the red spot that is the telephone box on the street corner. 

The film is told through Novack’s voiceover and eye-rolling movements (Jeremy Irons, frankly neurasthenic, but great). Novack hates his workers and laboriously makes do with pathetic specimens of the English population (the supermarket supervisor in a red tailor suit is unforgettable). When he learns about the military coup in Poland, he decides to wait until the very last moment (on the road to the airport) to tell the others. 

Why tell the story? To feel like script writers for a few minutes. Because there are films that will never tire to make others, who have not seen them, wonder how well and cleverly the story is told. To make them guess that the one who has found such an angle – sending back to back his country of origin (Poland) and his country of residence (England) – will have no problem to film – as others should do more often – this ungrateful and fascinating thing that is labour. Seen on a small screen (where, thanks to commercials, there are still grotesque pictures depicting labour), the frenzy with which Skolimowski’s illegal workers take down walls and install plumbing pipes comes across as – yes – refreshing.  

Among the last films we saw, Moonlighting is one that sticks so well to reality that it benefits from its energy. The Polish reality being, rightly, sinister, the film itself is not joyful, even if it’s funny. But Moonlighting is one of the first films which, in the midst of these boring and repeated stories about communication, has the freshness of Christopher Columbus’ egg. Cut off from everything, living like moles, the four Polish men of London need only to go down the street to benefit from one of these miraculous phone boxes where one can call anywhere in the world for very little. They therefore talk to their wives in Warsaw. And when Jaruzelski takes power in Warsaw, Novack nearly crawls down in the rain to contemplate, astounded, the images of tanks in the window of an electrical goods shop.  

These images are beautiful because they are today the most likely to be right. No need to be exiled, drunk, or Polish to encounter on a street corner the countless proofs that the world continues, sometimes elsewhere and almost always without us. This gives a sort of hungerless appetite, a cold desire and a raging nostalgia, which results from the effect that techniques of communication have on those who – like Novack – have the utmost trouble in communicating with themselves.  

First published in Libération on 7 January 1989. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas, 1991.

Part of the Ghosts of permanence series.

Alien: come what may

So, are there films that don’t transfer well on TV? Yes, and Alien is one of them. We can remember the publicity slogan that launched it: ‘Out in space no one can hear you scream’. But the space-time of the cinema auditorium is not the space-time of apartments dimly irradiated by our TV sets. We might well scream in fear when the blood-soaked alien pierces John Hurt’s ribcage, but this scream will none-the-less be weaker than the racket of the commercial break that comes straight after it, exploiting our terror to unfurl (Chanel, Braun, Tefal, Oasis, Mir wool and so many others). Advertising bursts into the body of the film in just the same way the alien ‘exit’ the body of the man. Shame follows on too quickly after fear. This is how one of the most disquieting films of the last decade becomes, on the small screen, nothing more than a curious and awkwardly apprehended object. 

With his background in advertising, Ridley Scott remains rare among filmmakers in systematically seeking out cinematic themes to match the sensory tremor that derived from the rhetoric of advertising. What he was after in Alien was a story that would justify the subliminal procedures of advertising and he found it in the most contemporary terror, the one that brings back the organic oozing right in the midst of spotless machines. 

We shall never know whether, with each appearance of the alien, we have seen enough of it. For some it’s already too much; for others it will never be enough. For everyone, however, there will be no way of getting used to the monster since it only comes in avatars. The paradoxical power of Alien is that it is a film at the edge of the visible, compelling its audience to strain its eyes in the effort of focussing the look. It is a film that requires a big screen. It is above all a film that requires darkness. The bigger the screen the less forgivable the failure to see anything. The darker the auditorium, the more time there is to very gradually acquire night vision. 

Like many films that test our perception, Alien has a script which we rediscover with each fresh viewing. In our obsession with the monster we forget that the human crew are undergoing the same treatment; it is only gradually that we close in on their faces with the hope of reading something in them. The film doesn’t encourage any psychologising along the lines of ‘the human group finding itself in the face of danger’ and if, like Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, forever magnificent), we are drawn to learn more about what the enigmatic Ash has in his head, our desire will be fulfilled to the letter. One of the few close-ups in the film is in fact of Ash’s head, frothing and torn off his robot body and disclosing in an even voice the heart of the story. There is no more interiority, there is only a succession of insides and what’s inside them. 

Why do the adventures of those on board the Nostromo (the alien included) work less well on television? Because the desire to still see something is more quickly dampened by the size of the screen. Because the desire to hear is thoroughly stifled by the anaemic sound of the television set. Because television viewers are less used to having to take bearings than film viewers. Because they haven’t even had time to work out where they are on the Nostromo when it becomes a strange and boundless place for its passengers, a real museum of primeval fears (the basement, the hold and the cubbyholes) inherited from the planet Earth. 

And then, thanks to La Cinq, that inveterate grand butcher of film, we become aware of another reason for our discomfort. Among the many commercials that have interrupted the film, there is at least one that seems to come out of the same plastic universe as Alien. This is the Braun commercial where a man and a razor appear to communicate in a futuristic idyll. Now Alien’s story is in a sense about what would happen to this ‘hero’ were he to be placed in a time-span that wasn’t that of the commercial. Maybe he would happen to cut himself, to discover with horror that the razor is an alien, to find himself spattered with blood (like in Scorsese’s parodic little film The Big Shave), and to transform from the status of pure image to that of visceral heap. 

If in 1979 Alien-the-murky really was a puritanical repulsion of advertising hygienic obsession, then it’s perhaps logical that its TV viewing should vaguely irritate. 

First published in Libération on 8 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.