I had the huge pleasure of discovering Jean Vigo’s films in a single Saturday afternoon session in 1946, at the Sevres-Pathé, thanks to the Ciné-Club “La Chambre Noire,” organized by André Bazin and other contributors to La Revue du Cinéma. When I entered the theater, I didn’t even know who Jean Vigo was. I was immediately overwhelmed with wild enthusiasm for his work, which doesn’t take up two hundred minutes of projection time.
At first, I liked Zéro de Conduite best, probably because I identified with Vigo’s collegians, as I was only three or four years older than they. Later, after I’d seen both films again and again, I definitely came to prefer L’Atalante, which I never leave out when I’m asked: “What, in your opinion, are the ten best films of all time?”
In a way, Zéro de Conduite seems to represent something rarer than L’Atalante because masterpieces devoted to childhood, in literature and in film, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They knock us out on two grounds: besides the esthetic response, there is the autobiographical, the personal response. All films about children are period films because they send us back to short pants, school days and the blackboard, summer vacations, our beginnings.
Like all “first films,” Zéro de Conduite has its experimental aspect. Lots of ideas that are more—or less—integrated into the scenario are shot through with a kind of “let’s try it and see what happens” attitude. I am thinking of the college celebration when dummies are mixed with real people on the platform, which is also a fairground booth. That could be out of René Clair of the same period; in any case, it is a dated idea. But for one set piece like that, there are nine superb inventions, droll, poetic, or shocking, but all possessing great visual power and a still-unequalled bluntness.
When he shot L’Atalante shortly afterward, Vigo had clearly learned his lessons. This time, he achieved perfection, he made a masterpiece. He still used slow motion to draw out poetic effects, but he didn’t try for comic effects by speeding up the action. He no longer had recourse to dummies; he focused his lens only on the real and transformed it into fairy tales. Filming prosaic words and acts, he effortlessly achieved poetry.
The lightning-like career of Vigo is like Radiguet’s on the surface. Both were young authors who died prematurely and left only two works. In both cases, the first work is openly autobiographical and the second seems further removed from its author, based more on external material. To underestimate L’Atalante, because it was created to order, is to forget that second works are almost always that. Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel is an order of Cocteau to Radiguet, or of Radiguet to himself. As a matter of principle, every second work is important because it allows us to determine whether the artist had only one work in him, that is, whether he was a gifted amateur, or a creator, whether he was someone who had a lucky break or someone who is going to develop. Finally, there is the same line of development, the passage from realism and revolt to preciousness and estheticism. (I use these terms in their most favorable sense.) Even though we can dream of what a marvelous Diable au Corps Jean Vigo would have directed, I don’t want to stretch the comparison between the writer and the filmmaker. But studies of Jean Vigo often cite Alain-Fournier, Rimbaud, Céline, and with good reasons.
L’Atalante has all the qualities of Zéro de Conduite, along with maturity and artistic mastery. Two of the major tendencies of cinema—realism and estheticism—are reconciled in the film. In the history of cinema, there have been great realists like Rossellini, and great esthetes like Eisenstein, but few filmmakers have been interested in combining these two tendencies—most have treated them as if they were contradictory. For me, L’Atalante grasps the essence of both Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and Visconti’s White Nights—two films which can’t be compared, which are diametrically opposite, but which represent the best in each genre. Godard accumulates bits of truth and binds them together to make a kind of modern fairy tale; Visconti begins with a modern fairy tale in order to rediscover a universal truth.
I believe that L’Atalante is often underestimated as being concerned with a small subject, a “particular” subject, as opposed to the great “general” subject of Zéro de Conduite. In reality, L’Atalante deals with a major theme, and one that has seldom been treated in films, the beginnings of a young couple’s life together, their difficulty in adapting to each other, the early euphoria of coupling (what Maupassant calls “the brutal physical appetite that is quickly extinguished”), then the first wounds, rebellion, flight, reconciliation, and finally acceptance. L’Atalante doesn’t treat any less a subject than Zéro de Conduite.
If you look at the history of French movies as the talkies began, you find that between 1930 and 1940 Jean Vigo was almost alone with Jean Renoir the humanist, and Abel Gance the visionary, although the importance of Marcel Pagnol and Sacha Guitry has been underestimated by historians of cinema.
Clearly, Vigo was closest to Renoir, but he forged further into bluntness and surpassed him in his love of the image. Both were brought up for the task in an atmosphere that was both rich and poor, aristocratic and common. But Renoir’s heart never bled. The son of a painter who was a recognized genius, Renoir had the problem of doing nothing to blemish the name he bore. He came to the cinema after giving up ceramics, which he thought was too close to painting.
Jean Vigo was also the son of a famous but controversial man, Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist militant who died in prison under mysterious and sordid circumstances. An orphan who was bounced from one institution to another under an assumed name, Vigo suffered so much that his work cries out of necessity. Every biographical detail chronicled in P. E. Salès Gomès’ admirable book on him confirms what we imagine about Vigo from watching his films. His great grandfather, Bonaventure de Vigo, was a magistrate in Andorra in 1882. His son, Eugene, died at twenty of tuberculosis, leaving one son, Miguel. Miguel’s mother, Aimée Salles, remarried—she married Gabriel Aubès, a photographer in Sète; later, she went insane and in 1901 had to be institutionalized. The young Miguel took the name Almereyda, both because it sounded like the name of a Spanish grandee and because it contained all the letters of the word merde (shit). Miguel Almereyda married Emily Clero, a young anarchist militant, who already had five children from an earlier informal relationship. All the children died young, one by falling out of a window. In 1905 she gave birth to Jean, who was born to a hard life. Orphaned, he had for his whole inheritance his paternal great grandfather’s motto: “I protect the weakest.” His films were a faithful, sad, funny, affectionate and brotherly, sharp illustration of that motto.
The motto indicates a fundamental point shared by Vigo and Renoir: their passion for Chaplin. Since the “histories of the cinema” do not pay much attention to the chronology of films and the influences of filmmakers on one another, it is impossible to prove what I believe to be true—that the construction of Zéro de Conduite (1932), with scenes divided by titles that comment humorously on life in the dormitory and the refectory, was very much influenced by Renoir’s Tire au Flanc (1928), which was itself directly inspired by Chaplin, most particularly by Shoulder Arms (1918). By the same token, when he called on Michel Simon for L’Atalante (1933), Vigo must have had in mind Simon’s role in Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des Eaux (Boudou Saved from Drowning) the previous year.
When we read the recollections of the moviemakers of the silent generation, we notice that almost all of them came to films accidentally. A friend had asked them to be extras, or an aged uncle had taken them to visit a studio. This was not, however, the case with Jean Vigo, who was one of the first filmmakers by vocation. He was a spectator who fell in love with films, began to see more and still more movies, established a film club to bring better films to Nice, and was soon making them. He wrote to absolutely everybody, asking for a job as an assistant: “I’m willing to sweep up the stars’ crap.” He bought a camera and produced on his own his first short subject, À propos de Nice.
It has often been remarked that the line of Zéro de Conduite is broken by gaps that are usually blamed on the hellish working schedule. I think these gross ellipses can also be explained by Vigo’s feverish haste to get at what was essential, and by the state of mind of the filmmaker who has just been given his first chance. He can’t believe it; it’s too good to be true. He shoots the film wondering whether it will ever see the light of day. When he had been merely a spectator, he thought he knew what was good and what was bad. Now that he is a filmmaker he is assailed by doubt. He thinks that what he is doing is too special, too far from the old norms, he wonders whether his film will even be shown. That’s why I imagine that Vigo, learning that Zéro de Conduite was forbidden totally by the censors, and once the moment of shock was past, might have seen it as a confirmation of his own doubts. Perhaps he thought, “I knew I hadn’t made a real film, like the others…”
Later, when he presented Zéro de Conduite in Brussels, anticipating the eventual criticism of those famous “gaps” in the story line, Vigo allowed a misunderstanding to develop in the mind of the public: not only that the film had been prohibited by the censors but that it had also been tampered with—which is not true. So, Jean Vigo doubted himself, despite the fact that he had scarcely exposed 150 feet of film when, without realizing it, he became a great filmmaker, the equal of Renoir, Gance and Buñuel, who also began at the same time. Just as we say a person is fully formed between the ages of seven and twelve, so we can also say that a filmmaker shows what his career will be in his first 150 feet of film. His first work is himself, and what he does later will also be himself, always the same thing, sometimes a masterpiece, sometimes something less good, even some failures. All of Orson Welles is in the first reel of Citizen Kane, Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou, Godard in Une Jeune Coquette; and all of Jean Vigo is in À propos de Nice.
Like all artists, filmmakers search for realism in the sense that they search for their own reality, and they are generally tormented by the chasm between their aspirations and what they have actually produced, between life as they feel it and what they have managed to reproduce of it.
I think that Vigo would have more reasons to be satisfied with his work than his contemporaries had. He was far more advanced in evoking different realities: objects, surroundings, personalities, feelings, and above all the physical circumstance. I wonder whether it would be an exaggeration to speak of Vigo’s work as the cinema of smells. The idea came to me when a reviewer, putting down a film I liked, Le Vieil Homme et l’Enfant (The Two of Us), said to me, “It’s a film that smells like dirty feet.” I didn’t answer at the time but I thought about it again and said to myself, “Here’s an argument that smells reactionary and might easily have been used by the censors who prohibited Zéro de Conduite.” Salès Gomès points out that many articles hostile to Vigo’s films contain expressions like “It’s like water out of the bidet” or “It verges on scatology,” etc. In an article on Vigo, André Bazin employs a most felicitous phrase when he refers to his “almost obscene taste for the flesh.” It’s true that no one has filmed people’s skin, human flesh, as bluntly as Vigo. Nothing that has been seen for the past thirty years has equaled the professor’s fat paw on the tiny white hand of the child in Zéro de Conduite, or the physical embraces of Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté as they prepare to make love, even more so when they have finished and parallel shots show them each returning to his own bed, he to his barge, she to her hotel room, both still in the grip of passion. The prodigious score of Maurice Jaubert plays a role of the first importance in this scene. It is a sequence both carnal and lyrical, an exact rendition of lovemaking at a distance.
As both a realist and an artistic filmmaker, Vigo avoided the traps of realism and estheticism. He managed explosive material, for example, Dita Parlo in her wedding gown on the barge in the fog; the jumble of dirty clothing in Jean Dasté’s closet. In both, he steered clear of trouble thanks to his own delicacy, his refinement, his humor, his elegance, intelligence, intuition, and sensitivity.
What was Vigo’s secret? Probably he lived more intensely than most of us. Filmmaking is awkward because of the disjointed nature of the work. You shoot five to fifteen seconds of film and then stop for an hour. On the film stage there is seldom the opportunity for the concentrated intensity a writer like Henry Miller might have enjoyed at his desk. By the time he had written twenty pages, a kind of fever possessed him, carried him away; it could be tremendous, even sublime. Vigo seems to have worked continuously in this state of trance, without ever losing his clearheadedness. We know he was sick when he made his two films and that he directed some sequences of Zéro de Conduite lying on a cot. It is easy to conclude that he was in a kind of fever while he worked. It is very possible, indeed plausible. It is certainly true that one can be considerably more brilliant, more intense, and stronger when one has a “temperature.” When one of his friends advised him to husband his strength, to hold himself back, Vigo answered that he felt he lacked the time and that he had to give everything right away. It seems likely that Jean Vigo, knowing the game was almost up, was stimulated by this measured time. Behind his camera he must have been in the state of mind Ingmar Bergman referred to when he said, “One must make each film as if it were the last.”
—1970 (unpublished)
This time “the film of the week” is twenty-eight years old. It isn’t every week that one has the opportunity to criticize a film like Napoléon. Not every month, either…nor, alas, every year. Therefore it would be a bit ridiculous to analyze it like a current production, sorting out the good elements from the less good, looking for some flaw in Abel Gance’s main structural support. Napoléon must be discussed as a whole, an unassailable monument. It must also—this is essential—be spoken of with humility. What contemporary film, French or foreign, that has been praised unanimously by the press and public, will be shown in twenty-eight years and arouse the applause of a theater filled with filmmakers and critics as Napoléon did yesterday evening?
Gance first thought about making Napoléon in 1921. He had just completed La Roue and was in New York to present the first version of J’accuse, which Griffith was going to have distributed in America by Allied Artists, whose membership included Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Griffith himself. Preparations began in 1923, and in 1924 the Société Napoléon was established. The world premiere took place April 7, 1927, at the Paris Opéra on a triple screen.
Napoléon took four years of work, three for the shooting alone. Before writing his scenario, Abel Gance read more than three hundred books and other documentation on Bonaparte: the Memorial, the correspondence, the proclamations, the works of Thiers, Michelet, Lamartine, Frédéric Masson, Lacour-Gayet, Stendhal, Elie Faure, Schuermans, Aulard, Louis Madelin, Sorel, Arthur Lévy, Arthur Chuquet, and others.
The film cost eighteen million francs, an enormous sum for that time. Two hundred technicians were employed: operators, photographers, architects, decorators, painters, assistants, assistant directors (stage managers), electricians, explosives experts, gunsmiths, makeup artists, historical advisers, etc. Forty stars act in the film. Certain scenes contain as many as six thousand extras. One hundred and fifty sets were constructed either in the studio or outdoors and the scenes were shot on location in Brienne, Toulon, at Malmaison, on Corsica, in Italy, at Saint-Cloud and in Paris. The film was to have had three episodes: Bonaparte’s youth; Bonaparte and the Terror; and the Italian campaign. Only the first two were made. During the preparation for the film eight thousand costumes, four thousand rifles and other weapons, tents and banners were stockpiled at Billancourt. At the same time a whole area of Paris with its twisting streets was reconstructed.
For the role of Bonaparte, Abel Gance tried out René Fauchois, a playwright; Pierre Bonardi, a writer; a singer, Jean Bastia; and two actors, Van Daële (who, in the end, played Robespierre) and Ivan Mosjoukine. The last refused the part because he was Russian and he felt that Bonaparte could only be interpreted by a Frenchman. In the end, Albert Dieudonné was chosen. He was a writer, an actor, and a director. Antonin Artaud was chosen for the part of Marat, fated to perish under the dagger of Eugénie Buffet, the beautiful Charlotte Corday.
The first camera work took place in Brienne on January 15, 1925. Abel Gance was the first to use subjective images in an original way. He had supports constructed so that he could mount cameras on horses. Camera platforms were pulled along on dollies at a dizzying speed. During the shooting of horseback chases in Corsica, there were two tragic deaths from falls. During the famous snowball fight at Brienne, where the child Bonaparte proved his skill as a precocious tactician, Gance had a net installed to hoist loaded cameras into the air so that their trajectory could follow the snowballs.
In Corsica, at the end of a chase, Dieudonné had to leap from his horse into a boat. He fell alongside into the water. Like Bonaparte, the actor didn’t know how to swim. He cried out, “Save Bonaparte, save Bonaparte.” The end of shooting in Corsica coincided with the local elections, and the native population was so fired up that the Bonapartist party won over the Republicans.
For the scenes of storms at sea, in which Bonaparte fights the elements with only the tricolor for a sail, the Mediterranean Sea had to be created inside a studio.
Although there was no sound, Gance chose a singer to play Danton, who sang the “Marseillaise” in the Constitutive Assembly. The extras had to chant the national anthem twelve times in a row. Emile Vuillermoz described this memorable day of shooting in Le Temps:
These improvised actors had taken their role terribly seriously. Their costumes had given them a new soul and mentality. The current from Abel Gance, that admirable conductor of people, electrified the mass…These men and women of the people instinctively rediscovered their ancestors’ feelings…The director played on their nerves as a conductor plays on his musicians…At one point, when he went to a lectern to give them a few technical explanations in his gentle, soft voice, he was greeted spontaneously by an admiring cheer as these tamed human beings gave themselves over entirely to their leader.
Watching the production of this tiny revolution, one understood the mechanics of the great revolution itself. If Abel Gance had had ten thousand extras under his command that day, all intoxicated with history, their minds disoriented with the drunkenness of obedience, he could have sent them to attack any barricade, he could have mounted an invasion of the Palais Bourbon or the Elysée and had himself proclaimed dictator.
One day Gance and several others on the set were wounded by a small case of cartridges that exploded in a corner of the studio. Without a word, he took a taxi to the clinic, and a week later he was back at work while the others were still convalescing.
When they were shooting the taking of Toulon and the harbor was captured by the English, for a few hours the English flag replaced the French tricolor. One evening, a nurse told Gance, “We had forty-two injured today.” He replied, “That’s a good sign; the boys are putting their hearts into it; the movement in the film will be excellent.” When Bonaparte passed to review his troops, the extras were supposed to cheer and shout “Vive Bonaparte,” instead of which they cried out “Vive Abel Gance.”
For some scenes it was impossible to hire enough extras. At such times production secretaries went into the streets of Paris to hire out-of-work laborers at the gates of factories, students in the Latin Quarter, and derelicts sleeping in the markets at night.
In 1934 Abel Gance added sound to Napoléon. He filmed a number of supplementary scenes, which allowed him to transform silent scenes. He also made many “insert” shots and created “eloquent” roles: Robespierre, Saint-Just, and above all Marat, played by the man who might have become the greatest French actor—Antonin Artaud. The critics of the time chose to put down the sound version of Napoléon, and I want to be careful to dissociate myself from them. Without it we would have been deprived of such extraordinary scenes as the long monologue of Théroigne de Méricourt (Sylvie Gance), and all the shots of Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Sokolov, and many others. I believe that Gance’s prodigious gift for direction required the talking pictures in order to reach its full measure.
When he wrote the scenario for Napoléon, Abel Gance perceived for the first time that the screen was too narrow for the scale of the subject and so he invented the “triple screen”—nothing more or less than a combination of CinemaScope and Cinerama, which arrived from America thirty years later. The siege of Toulon and the departure of the army from Italy were filmed with three cameras, thus giving the viewer a 100-degree angle of vision. The side images are totally different from the central scene; acting as a frame, they comment on and support the main image. In the scenes of the departure of the army from Italy, we can watch about ten shots which give a sensation of bold relief and proximity unequaled by the twelve or fifteen CinemaScopes shown in Paris in the last year and a half.
“I filmed Napoléon, because he was a paroxysm in a period which was itself a paroxysm in time,” Abel Gance said.
In fact, the film is a long lyric poem, a sheaf of paroxysms, a continuum of animated bas-reliefs. Only Griffith in Orphans of the Storm and Jean Renoir in La Marseillaise have reevoked the episode of the Reign of Terror as well.
There is not a single scene in Napoléon which does not make us think it is the key to the film, no shot that is not filled with emotion, no actor who does not give his best. Despite his years, Abel Gance remains the youngest of our directors.
—1955
There is nothing very original left to say about La Tour de Nesle. Everyone knows it is a film that was made to order on an absurd budget, the best part of which remained in the distributor’s till. La Tour de Nesle is, if you will, the least good of Abel Gance’s films. But, since Gance is a genius, it also is a film of genius. Gance does not possess genius, he is possessed by genius. If you gave him a portable camera and set him in the midst of twenty other newsreel makers outside the Palais Bourbon or at the entrance to the Parc des Princes, he alone would deliver a masterpiece, a few hundred inches of film in which each shot, each image, each sixteenth or twenty-fourth of a second would bear the mark of genius, invisible and present, visible and omnipresent. How would it have been done? Only he would know. To tell the truth, I think that even he would not know how he did it.
I observed Abel Gance during the making of La Tour de Nesle. He gave it eight hours of work a day. There is no doubt that the films on which he spent twenty-four hours a day are better. Still eight hours is eight hours. I remember the closeup of Pampanini gazing at herself in the mirror, at first talking to herself, then silent. Seven inches separated the mirror from the face, the face from the lens. Seven inches from the mirror and the face and the lens, off camera, stood Abel Gance. Leaning toward the motionless woman, Gance mouthed the words that a French substitute would dub for the Italian actress: “Look at yourself, Marguerite of Burgundy, look at yourself in the mirror; what have you turned into? You are nothing but a slut!” (I paraphrase from memory.) Gance read this absurd monologue in a kind of lyrical whisper. This was no longer direction, it was hypnotism! As I watched the film later, I waited for this scene. The result was magnificent—her face distorted, her eyes bulging, her mouth open in a gaping scar, the lines of nightly dissipation etched on her face, she was the greatest actress in the world, like Sylvie Gance in Napoléon, Micheline Presle in Paradis Perdu, Ivy Close in La Roue, Line Noro in Mater Dolorosa, Jany Holt in Beethoven, Viviane Romance in Vénus aveugle, and Assia Noris in Fracasse. Go and see Pampanini in La Tour de Nesle and then go see her in something else and if you don’t see immediately that Gance was a genius, you and I do not have the same notion of cinema (mine, obviously, is the correct one). People have said to me, “Pampanini? All I see is grimaces!” I will permit Jean Renoir to reply, “A well-done grimace can be magnificent.”
When a great director has been without work for twelve years and is forced to make a movie based on such a scenario, there are two possible solutions: either parody or melodrama. Gance chose the second—a more difficult solution but also the more daring and, in the last analysis, more intelligent and profitable. “I wanted to make a cloak-and-dagger Western,” the director admitted.
That aside, the film is extraordinarily sound and youthful. Gance moves La Tour de Nesle with hell-for-leather speed. There is a steady pace, sustained first of all within scenes and then from one scene to the other, thanks to very skillful editing. The shots that were made with the help of a pictograph are very beautiful, and recall the miniatures in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V.
The Centrale Catholique, which takes upon itself the duty of rating the morality of films, was in a complete uproar. Erotically, La Tour de Nesle went far beyond what people were used to seeing. They had to invent a new code to warn parents whose children might wander in by accident. Recently, answering a question on eroticism, Gance said, “If we had had a free hand in terms of eroticism, we would have made the most beautiful films in the world.” It is regrettable that once again censorship showed itself so stringent. The film does not fulfill the promises of the photos posted at the entrance to the movie theater. Our expectations are frustrated, we are deceived in our hopes. Surely cinema is also eroticism.
Gance has been spoken of as “failed,” and recently even as a “failed genius.” But we know that “failed” (raté) means “bitten and spoiled by rats.” The rats swarmed around Gance but they were as unable to absorb his genius as they were to destroy it. The question now is whether one can be both a genius and a failure. I believe, to the contrary, that failure is talent. To succeed is to fail. I wish to defend the proposition that Abel Gance is the failed auteur of failed films. I am convinced that there is no great filmmaker who does not sacrifice something. Renoir will sacrifice anything—plot, dialogue, technique—to get a better performance from an actor. Hitchcock sacrifices believability in order to present an extreme situation that he has chosen in advance. Rossellini sacrifices the connection between movement and light to achieve greater warmth in his interpreters. Murnau, Hawks, Lang sacrifice realism in their settings and atmosphere. Nicholas Ray and Griffith sacrifice sobriety. But a film that succeeds, according to the common wisdom, is one in which all the elements are equally balanced in a whole that merits the adjective “perfect.” Still, I assert that perfection and success are mean, indecent, immoral, and obscene. In this regard, the most hateful film is unarguably La Kermesse héroique because everything in it is incomplete, its boldness is attenuated; it is reasonable, measured, its doors are half-open, the paths are sketched and only sketched; everything in it is pleasant and perfect. All great films are “failed.” They were called so at the time, and some are still so labeled: Zéro de Conduite, L’Atalante, Faust, Le Pauvre amour, Intolerance, La Chienne, Metropolis, Liliom, Sunrise, Queen Kelly, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, La Vénus aveugle, La Règle du Jeu, Le Carrosse d’Or, I Confess, Stromboli—I cite them in no particular order and I’m sure I’m leaving out others that are just as good. Compare these with a list of successful films and you will have before your eyes an example of the perennial argument about official art.
It’s good to go back and again see Abel Gance’s Napoléon upstairs in Studio 28. Each shot is like a bolt of lightning that illuminates everything around it. The spoken scenes are marvelous and not—as is still being said today in 1955—unworthy of the original silent scenes. “Sir Abel Gance,” as Jacques Becker says! We won’t find again very soon in the world of cinema a man of his breadth, ready to take on the whole world, to mold it like clay, to fashion his own witnesses out of sky, sea, clouds, earth, and hold all in the hollow of his own hand. To put an Abel Gance to work, you have to look for a backer in the class of Louis XIV.
—1955
My judgment that Jean Renoir is the greatest filmmaker in the world is not based on a public opinion poll, but purely on my own feelings. It’s a feeling, I might add, that is shared by many other filmmakers. And after all, Renoir is the quintessential moviemaker of the personal. The conventional division of films into dramas and comedies becomes meaningless when we consider Jean Renoir’s films, which are dramatic comedies.
Some filmmakers think that they should put themselves “in the place” of the producer, or of the public, as they work. Jean Renoir always gives us the impression that he has put himself in the place of his characters. That’s why he had been able to offer Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carrette, Louis Jouvet, Pierre Renoir, Jules Berry, Michel Simon their most beautiful roles. Not to mention the numerous actresses that I’ll speak about later, at the end of this speech (as one keeps the best dish for dessert).
At least fifteen of Jean Renoir’s thirty-five films are drawn from others’ work: Hans Christian Andersen, La Fouchardière, Simenon, René Fauchois, Flaubert, Gorky, Octave Mirbeau, Rumer Godden, Jacques Perret. Nonetheless, in each we inevitably rediscover Renoir’s tone, music, style, without betraying the original author in the slightest. Renoir absorbs everything, understands everything, is interested in everything and everyone.
Our love for all of Jean Renoir’s work—I speak for all my friends at Cahiers du Cinéma—has often led us to use the word “infallibility,” which never fails to irritate lovers of “masterpieces,” those people who demand a homogeneity of intention and execution that Renoir has never attempted—in fact, quite the contrary. His work unfolds as if he had devoted his most brilliant moments to fleeing from the masterpiece, to escape any notion of the definite and the fixed, so as to create a semi-improvisation, a deliberately unfinished “open” work that each viewer can complete for himself, comment on as it suits him, approach from any side.
As with Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, who are his heirs, each of Renoir’s films marks a moment of his thought. The whole body of his films makes up his work. That’s why it’s really crucial to gather them together in a festival such as this to appreciate them better, as a painter collects and shows his older and more recent canvases together, covering several periods, each time he holds an exhibition.
A lecturer will have a success or a failure according to whether or not he is in form on any particular night. Renoir has never filmed speeches, just conversations. He has often avowed how easily he was influenced by other filmmakers like Stroheim or Chaplin, by his producers, his friends, the authors he adapted, his actors. Out of the grace of this continual exchange there came thirty-five natural and alive films, modest and sincere, as simple as saying hello. To use the word “infallible” about his work, which contains not one whit of pretense, is not an insult, whether we are discussing a tentative film like La Nuit du Carrefour or a completely realized one like Le Carrosse d’Or.
The first films in this retrospective all star Michel Simon, who was probably Jean Renoir’s favorite actor: “His face is as passionate as the masks of ancient tragedy.” Watching La Chienne (1931) you will be able to verify the truth of this judgment, but in Boudu sauvé des Eaux (1932) the same Michel Simon will show you how he can raise the comic to the level of fable. All the words that evoke laughter can be used about Boudu: droll, buffoon, burlesque, incongruous. The theme of Boudu is vagabondage, the temptation to try to pass from one class to another, the importance of the natural; Boudu was a hippie long before the word was invented. The fact that the film was taken from a banal vaudeville play by René Fauchois makes Renoir’s success even more astonishing.
Watching Michel Simon, moviegoers have always felt that they were not just watching an actor play a role, but watching the actor himself. His best roles were double roles: Boudu is both a vagrant and a child discovering life; Père Jules in Vigo’s L’Atalante is a frustrated barge captain and a refined collector; Irwin Molyneux, the businessman of Drôle de Drame, secretly writes bloody novels; and, to come back to Renoir, Maurice Legrand in La Chienne is an insignificant and docile cashier but also, without knowing it, a great painter. I am persuaded that filmmakers entrusted Simon with these difficult double roles—which he always played magnificently even when the films were weak—because they felt that this great actor incarnated life and the secret of life. Jean Renoir was the first to make this truth evident. When Michel Simon acts for us, we penetrate to the core of the human heart.
In 1934, when Jean Renoir undertook the production of Toni, he had already tried naturalism (Une Vie sans Joie), romanticism (Nana), burlesque (Charleston, Tire au Flanc), historic films (Le Tournoi). At the same time, French cinema was wrestling with the concepts of psychology, something Renoir was to turn his back on throughout his life.
Toni is a pivotal film, a departure in a new direction. Ten years before the Italians, Renoir invented neorealism, the painstaking narration of a truly random deed, told in an objective tone and without ever raising one’s voice. In his Histoire du Cinéma, Georges Sadoul writes correctly that the crime in Toni is “an accident, not an end.” The characters drink a glass of wine or die in the same manner; Renoir shows us each fact in the same way, without superimposing eloquence, lyricism, or tragedy. Toni is life as it comes. If the actors cannot keep from laughing in the middle of a scene, it is because everyone enjoys himself in front of Jean Renoir’s camera. They seek real life so ardently that they end up finding it, even at the risk of a sequence that, having begun seriously, ends in merriment.
The work of the actors in Toni is pure pleasure: the little cries of Celia Montalvan when Blavette licks her back after she is stung by a bee, Delmont’s remarks and Dalban’s ebullient tricks, all of these share in the truth Jean Renoir tried to find by any and all means, a truth of gesture and feeling which he achieved more often than any other filmmaker.
Une Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country—1936) is a film of pure sensation; each blade of grass tickles our face. Adapted from a story by Guy de Maupassant, it is the only true cinematic equivalent of the art of the short story. Without using a single line of commentary, Renoir offers us forty-five minutes of a poetic prose whose truth makes us shudder or gives us goose bumps at certain moments. This film, the most physical Renoir made, touches us physically.
La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion—1937), the least contested of Renoir’s films, is built on the idea that the world is divided horizontally by similarities, not vertically by frontiers. If World War II and especially the horrors of the concentration camps seem to have weakened Renoir’s ennobling thesis, the present attempts at “Europeanization” show that the strength of his idea was ahead of the spirit of Munich. But La Grande Illusion is nonetheless a film of its own time, as La Marseillaise was, because in it men fought a war based on fair play, a war without atom bombs or torture.
La Grande Illusion is a film precisely about chivalry, a film about war considered, if not exactly as one of the fine arts, at least as a sport, or an adventure in which the question was to measure oneself as much as to destroy. German officers of Erich von Stroheim’s stamp were soon dismissed from the Third Reich’s army, and the French officers as portrayed by Pierre Fresnay died of old age. The great illusion was to believe that that war would be the last. Renoir seems to consider war as a natural scourge that has its own beauties, like storms or fire. It was a matter of waging war politely as Pierre Fresnay does in the film. For Renoir, the idea of the frontier must be abolished in order to destroy the spirit of Babel, to reconcile men who will always, nevertheless, be separated by birth. There is a common denominator among men: woman. Unquestionably, the most powerful moment of the film occurs after the announcement of the recapture of Douaumont by the French, when the “Marseillaise” is sung by an English soldier dressed as a woman who takes off his wig as he sings it.
If, in contrast to most of Renoir’s films, La Grande Illusion was immediately received with enthusiasm by everyone everywhere, it may be because Renoir made it when he was forty-three years old, that is, the same age as his audience. Before La Grande Illusion, his films at first appeared aggressive and juvenile, then disenchanted and bitter. In addition, we have to admit that La Grande Illusion was, by 1937, somewhat behind the times when we realize that only a year later, in The Great Dictator, Chaplin was to give us a portrait of Nazism and of wars that does not respect the rules of the game.
The definitive print of La Marseillaise (1938) comes to us from far away, from Moscow to be exact, where the only complete version existed. Those who are young enough will discover a work that is the equal of La Grande Illusion, made the year before. The critics received it badly on the basis of the “law of alternation,” which dictates that an artist may not produce two consecutive masterpieces.
Renoir’s work was always guided by something that is rather like a secret—it might be called a professional secret: sympathy. In La Marseillaise this sense of sympathy enables him to escape the traps of historical recreations. His extraordinary gift for life allows him to give us a film which lives, which is inhabited by individuals who breathe and experience real feelings.
La Marseillaise is constructed like a Western, his only “trail” film. We follow the battalion of five hundred Marseilles volunteers who left their homes on July 2, 1792, and marched to Paris, where they arrived on the 30th, the eve of the publication of the Manifesto of Brunswick. The film ends shortly after August 10, just before the battle of Valmy. There is no central hero, no star roles as opposed to bit parts, but there are a half-dozen interesting, plausible, noble, and human characters representing the court, the Marseilles volunteers, the aristocrats, the army, the people.
To balance the Marseilles volunteers, the individuals we see growing noble and becoming poets as they come in contact with the revolutionary ideal, Renoir insists on the prosaic and everyday side of Louis XVI, magnificently played by Jean’s brother, Pierre Renoir. This king, who gives concrete meaning to the expression “to be overtaken by events,” is interested in dental hygiene: “I’d really like to try that brushing.” Two hours before he flees from the Tuileries we see him eating for the first time the tomatoes the Marseilles volunteers have brought to Paris: “I say, they’re excellent.”
I referred to a historical Western. As in all good Westerns, we find the structure of an itinerant film; action-filled daytime scenes alternate with more static nighttime scenes, which are always convenient for discussions around a campfire, discussions about ideology or feelings. But whether they are about food, revolution, feet tired from marching, love, or the use of weapons, everything in La Marseillaise illustrates the idea of French unity and even makes it convincing. Just as Griffith’s most illustrious film is called Birth of a Nation, this one might be called La Naissance de la Nation.
La Bête Humaine, made in 1938, is the story of an assistant station-master, Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), who is afraid of being fired because he has quarreled with a superior. He asks his young wife, Séverine (Simone Simon), to intervene with a “big shot,” a sort of godfather whom she knew as a teenager and who was a great friend of her mother’s. When Séverine returns, everything has been fixed up, but when Roubaud realizes what the price is, he goes mad with jealousy and works out revenge which will end with him killing the godfather in front of Séverine on the Paris-LeHavre train.
On the train the murderous pair have been noticed by Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), a railroad employee. During the investigation, Roubaud sends Séverine to insure Lantier’s silence, and again quite naturally, these two become lovers, after Lantier has figured out and confirmed by fragments what really happened. Séverine wants Lantier to kill Roubaud, with whom life has become impossible since the murder. Lantier cannot make up his mind to kill Roubaud, but while in a rage he strangles Séverine and the next day jumps to his death from the locomotive on which he was chief engineer.
In Emile Zola’s novel, Jacques Lantier was in the countryside, watching a train pass, and saw the crime of Roubaud and his wife in a flash. It is Renoir who places Lantier in the corridor of the train and has him observe the accomplice in the crime. Renoir’s version was adapted by Fritz Lang in 1954 when he directed a remake of La Bête Humaine in Hollywood under the title of Human Desire. Lang had already stepped into Renoir’s shoes a few years earlier, when he directed Scarlet Street (La Rue Rouge), a remake of La Chienne.
As we think about it, it seems that Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang had in common a taste for the same theme: an old husband, a young wife, and a lover (La Chienne, La Bête Humaine, The Woman on the Beach for Renoir; Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window, Human Desire for Lang). They also have in common a predilection for catlike actresses, feline heroines. Gloria Grahame is the perfect American replica of Simone Simon, and Joan Bennett is a heroine in the films of both Renoir and Lang. There the comparisons stop. The director of La Bête Humaine and the director of Human Desire are not after the same thing. Renoir treated Zola’s novel with what we customarily call asceticism. Recently he explained it this way: “What helped me to make La Bête Humaine are the hero’s explanations of his atavism. I said to myself, it isn’t very pretty, but if a man as handsome as Jean Gabin said that outdoors, with the horizon behind him and perhaps some wind, it might have a certain validity. This is the key that helped me to make this film.”
That’s how Renoir works, seeking constantly to find a balance, a comic detail to compensate for a tragic note: clouds float by behind Gabin as he talks about his “illness,” locomotives pass outside the window of the tiny bedroom where Fernand Ledoux begins to suspect his wife.
La Bête Humaine is probably Gabin’s best film. “Jacques Lantier interests me as much as Oedipus Rex,” Renoir has said, and Claude de Givray has described it to perfection: “There is the triangle film (Le Carrosse d’Or), the circle film (Le Fleuve)—La Bête Humaine is a straight-line film, that is, a tragedy.”
La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) is the credo of film lovers, the film of films, the most despised on its release and the most valued afterward, to the point that it became a commercial success on its third re-release in normal distribution and in its uncut version. In this “comedy drama,” Renoir expresses a great number of both general and concrete ideas, without insisting on them, and in particular expresses his great love for women. Along with Citizen Kane, La Règle du Jeu is certainly the film that sparked the careers of the greatest number of directors. We look at this movie with a strong feeling of complicity; I mean that instead of seeing a finished product handed to us to satisfy our curiosity, we feel we are there as the film is made, we almost think that we can see Renoir organize the whole as we watch the film projected. For an instant, we think to ourselves, “I’ll come back tomorrow and see if it all turns out the same way.” It’s why some of the best evenings of the year would be spent watching La Règle du Jeu.
After the failure of the film—which had been cut by fifteen minutes at the insistence of the distributors, and then had been prohibited by the authorities for fear it would demoralize the French (we were on the eve of the declaration of war)—Jean Renoir, probably very depressed, left for Hollywood, where he made five films in eight years. The Woman on the Beach (1946) is the last of his Hollywood films. It is a curious and interesting movie, but we don’t find those exact qualities that are most often praised in Renoir’s French work: a sense of familiarity, fantasy, what we call his humanism. It seems likely that Renoir decided deliberately to adapt himself to Hollywood and make a completely American film.
The main difference between European and Hollywood films—and this is true of Renoir’s work on both sides of the Atlantic—is that our films are first of all films of personalities, and the American productions are primarily films about specific situations. In France, our instinct is toward verisimilitude and the psychological, while Americans prefer to deal strongly with what happens, with a place and time, and not to stray from the situation. Since a film is nothing more than a celluloid ribbon about 6,000 inches long that passes before our eyes, one can compare it to a journey. So, I could say that a French film moves forward like a light cart on a windy road while an American film rolls along like a train on its tracks. The Woman on the Beach is a train film. It is a film about sex, physical love, desire, all expressed without a single nude scene. Nonetheless, it won’t do to say that Joan Bennett is sensual; actually, she is sexual. What I like about The Woman on the Beach is that we see two films in it. The first never mentions love, the characters only exchange polite remarks. But the meaning is not in what they say but in the looks they exchange, looks that express troubled, secret matters very precisely.
Cinema is never purer, never more itself, than when it uses dialogue like contrapuntal music to allow us to enter into the characters’ thoughts. That’s how I’d invite you to watch the three tremendous actors in The Woman on the Beach: Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford. Watch them as if they were animals, wild beasts stalking the shadowy jungle of repressed sexuality.
Le Carrosse d’Or (The Golden Coach, 1952) is a key film of Renoir’s because it connects the themes of a number of his others, certainly the notion of sincerity in love and in one’s artistic vocation. It is a film constructed like the “box game,” one inside the other, a film about theater in the theater.
There was unfairness in the way the critics and public received Le Carrosse d’Or, which may be Renoir’s masterpiece. In any case, it is the noblest and most refined film ever made. It combines all the spontaneity and inventiveness of the prewar Renoir with the rigor of the American Renoir. It is all breeding and politeness, grace and freshness. It is a film of gestures and attitudes. Theater and life are mingled in an action that is suspended between the ground level and the first floor, just as commedia dell’arte swings back and forth between respect for tradition and improvisation. Anna Magnani is the wonderful star of this elegant film; the color, rhythm, editing, and actors are all worthy of the soundtrack dominated by Vivaldi. Le Carrosse d’Or is itself absolutely beautiful, just as beauty itself is the subject of the film.
I described Renoir’s other masterpiece, La Règle du Jeu, as an open conversation, a film in which we are invited to participate; it is quite a different matter with Le Carrosse d’Or, which is closed, a finished work—you look without touching. The film has already a definitive form; it is a perfect object.
French Cancan (1955) marked Renoir’s return to French studios.
I am not going to recount the plot; it simply concerns an episode from the life of a certain Danglard, who established the Moulin Rouge and created the cancan. Danglard devoted his life to the music hall, discovered young talent, dancers and singers, and “made” them stars. He becomes for a time their lover and they become possessive, jealous, capricious, unbearable. But Danglard never allows himself to become attached; he is married to the music hall and he cares only for the success of his spectacles. This single-minded love for his metier and the desire to inculcate it in the young artists he discovers and showcases is his whole reason for living.
You will recognize the parallel between this theme and that of Le Carrosse d’Or: the demands of the spectacle triumphing over sentiment. French Cancan is a homage to the music hall as Le Carrosse d’Or is to commedia dell’arte. But I must admit my preference for Le Carrosse d’Or. The weaknesses of French Cancan, although they are not Renoir’s fault, are nonetheless harmful because for one thing they affected the cast. Gianni Esposito, Philippe Clay, Pierre Olaf, Jacques Jouanneau, Max Dalban, Valentine Tessier and Anik Morice are all excellent, but Jean Gabin and Maria Félix do not seem to give their utmost.
Still, French Cancan marks an important date in the history of color films. Jean Renoir did not want to make a merely pictorial film and so French Cancan is an anti-Moulin Rouge film. In the latter, John Huston mixed colors by the use of gelatine filters. In Renoir’s film there are only pure colors. Each shot in French Cancan is a popular poster, a moving “Epinal image,” with beautiful blacks, maroons, and beiges.
The final cancan is a tour de force, a long bravura scene which usually has the audience on its feet. If French Cancan does not have the importance of La Règle du Jeu or Le Carrosse d’Or, it is still a brilliant and spirited film in which we once again discover Renoir’s power, wholesomeness, and youthfulness.
Eléna et les Hommes (1956) is Renoir in his greatest period; Jacques Jouanneau is magnificent playing with Ingrid Bergman, Jean Marais, and Mel Ferrer. In Eléna we can see the realization of Renoir’s ideal: a rediscovery of the spirit of the primitives, the genius of the great pioneers of the cinema: Mack Sennett, Larry Semon, Picrat, and—why not? Charlie Chaplin. With Eléna cinema goes back to its origins as Renoir returns to his youth.
To answer those who argue that Renoir’s last films are too far removed from the realities of the world we live in, I shall sum up Eléna et les Hommes: On the eve of the Great War, Bastille Day is being celebrated by a crowd wild with enthusiasm for a certain General Rollan. After a stupid diplomatic incident has created a war mentality, the general’s entourage tries to take advantage of the occasion to overthrow the government. In the streets the people are singing, “And thus has destiny placed him on our path…” Two years after Eléna was released, de Gaulle pronounced his famous “I have understood you,” referring to the Algerian agitation being carried out by his partisans. So it is true, you see, there is always a general somewhere. Renoir’s general (Jean Marais plays Rollan) has at least two advantages: he prefers women to power and he knows how to make us laugh.
Eléna tells the truth about the princes who govern us, who have made the decision to govern us and do what is good for us in spite of ourselves. If it seems surprising that this realistic film is also a fairy tale, let’s listen to Renoir’s reply: “Reality is always a fairy tale. To make it not a fairy tale, some authors take a great deal of trouble and present it in a downright odd light. If we leave reality alone, it is a fairy tale.”
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) is one of Renoir’s ill-fated films, like his Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1946), which is equally ferocious. The often misused expression “actor’s director” here takes on its real significance as Jean-Louis Barrault, who is almost unrecognizable in a role that he practically dances, frenetically attacks passersby in the street.
To bring to life a human being who is pure invention, to make him glide rather than walk, to give him the gestures you have imagined, to load him down with an abstract and mad brutality, that is a filmmaker’s dream. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier is this dream realized, just as Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (made the same year) was born out of the simple but visually powerful idea that it would be amusing to photograph a windstorm in the country, as the wind blows up the women’s skirts.
Women are at the center of all Renoir’s work. At the risk of simplification, let us cut a path through Renoir’s simultaneously benevolent and cruel jungle. A good but weak and sensual man under the domination of a beautiful woman—whether or not she is his wife—a woman of lively temperament, but a difficult disposition, a more or less adorable hussy; you have Nana, Marquitta, Tire au flanc, La Chienne, La Nuit du Carrefour, Boudu sauvé des Eaux, Toni, Madame Bovary, Les Bas-Fonds, La Marseillaise, La Règle du Jeu, The Diary of a Chambermaid, The Woman on the Beach, Le Carrosse d’Or, French Cancan, Eléna et les Hommes.
The “ménage à trois” rarely captured Renoir’s interest, but he was the inventor of the “ménage à quatre.” In his world, a woman loves and is loved by three men, or a man loves and is loved by three women. The films constructed on the first formula are: Une Vie sans Joie, La Fille de I’Eau, Nana, La Nuit du Carrefour, Boudu, Toni, Madame Bovary, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Bête Humaine, La Règle du Jeu, The Diary of a Chambermaid, French Cancan and Le Carrosse d’Or, which carries the system to perfection with each man representing one of the three kinds of men a woman meets during her life. The following films rest on the second principle: Marquitta, Monsieur Lange, La Bête Humaine (the third woman here is Louison, the locomotive), La Règle du Jeu, French Cancan and The River, which—analogously to Le Carrosse—is a perfect illustration of the system.
Renoir’s films draw their animation from real life; we know who the characters are making love with, a fact that was cruelly absent in movies before 1960. Renoir hasn’t much taste for deaths in films because they have to be faked: you can harass an actor to get him to play an agitated character, but if you kill him, you’ll have the Actor’s Guild on your back. Nana, Mado, Emma, the pretty Madame Roubaud and so many others had to be done away with, but when they died, each time Renoir held up to us what are most alive, songs. The women whom Renoir kills so regretfully agonize in the everyday accents of popular songs: Ninon’s little heart is so tiny…
Some simpleton attacking Rossellini’s Amore said that “the actor must subject himself to the work, rather than the work being subjected to the actor.” Ever since Une Vie sans Joie, which is a film in the form of an engagement ring offered to Catherine Hessling, all of Jean Renoir’s work contradicts this statement. He made films to order for Jannie Mareze, Valentine Tessier, Nadia Sibirskaia, Sylvia Bataille, Simone Simon, Nora Gregor, Anne Baxter, Joan Bennett, Paulette Goddard, Anna Magnani, and Ingrid Bergman, subjecting his work to the actresses—and these are among the most beautiful films in the history of moviemaking.
Jean Renoir does not film situations but rather—I ask you to remember the circus attraction of the Hall of Mirrors—characters who are trying to find their way out of the Hall, bumping into the mirrors of reality. Renoir does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and he does not invite us to adopt these ideas or to sort them out no matter how quaint or illusory they may be, but simply to respect them.
When a man makes himself ridiculous by his stubborn insistence on striking a certain pompous pose, whether he is a politician or a megalomaniac artist, we say that he has lost sight of the bawling baby he was in his crib and the groaning wreck he will be on his deathbed. It is clear that the cinematographic work of Jean Renoir never loses sight of this naked man, never loses sight of man himself.
—1967, Introduction of a Renoir Festival at the Maison de La Culture of Vidauban
When I think of Carl Dreyer, what comes to mind first are those pale white images, the splendid voiceless closeups in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) that play back exactly the acerbic dialogue at Rouen between Jeanne and her judges.
Then I think of the whiteness of Vampyr, though this time it is accompanied by sounds, the cries and horrible groans of the Doctor (Jean Hieromniko), whose gnarled shadow disappears into the flour bin in the impregnable mill that no one will approach to save him. In the same way that Dreyer’s camera is clever in Jeanne d’Arc, in Vampyr it frees itself and becomes a young man’s pen as it follows, darts ahead of, prophesies the vampire’s movements along the gray walls.
Unhappily, after the commercial failure of these masterpieces, Dreyer had to wait eleven years, eleven years out of his life, before shouting “Camera! Action!” when at last he made Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath), a movie that deals with sorcery and religion, and is a synthesis of the other two films. Here we see the most beautiful image of female nudity in the history of cinema—the least erotic and most carnal nakedness—the white body of Marthe Herloff, the old woman burned as a witch.
Ten years after Day of Wrath, at the end of the summer of 1956, Ordet overwhelmed the audience at the Lido Biennale. Never in the history of the Venice Festival had a Golden Lion been more justly awarded than to Ordet, a drama of faith, more exactly, a metaphysical fable about the aberrations dogmatic rivalries lead to.
The film’s hero, Johannes, is a visionary who thinks he is Jesus Christ; but only when he comes to recognize his delusion does he “receive” spiritual power.
Each image in Ordet possesses a formal perfection that touches the sublime, but we recognize Dreyer for more than a “cosmetician.” The rhythm is leisurely, the interplay of the actors stylized, but they are utterly controlled. Not a frame escapes Dreyer’s vigilance; he is certainly the most demanding director of all since Eisenstein, and his finished films resemble exactly what they were in his mind as he conceived them.
There is no active mimicry from the actors in Ordet; they simply set their faces in a particular manner, and from the outset of each scene adopt a static attitude. The important actions take place in the living room of a rich farmer. The sequential shots are highly mobile and seem to have been inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. (In a number of interviews, Dreyer has mentioned his admiration for the director of Rear Window.) And in Ordet, white predominates again, this time a milky whiteness, the whiteness of sun-drenched curtains, something we have never seen before or since. The sound is also splendid. Toward the end of the film, the center screen is occupied by a coffin in which the heroine, Inger, is laid out. Johannes, the madman who takes himself for Christ, has promised to raise her from the dead. The silence of the house in mourning is broken only by the sound of the master’s steps on the wooden floors, an ordinary sound, the sound of new shoes, Sunday shoes…
Dreyer had a difficult career; he was able to pursue his art only because of the income he had from the Dagmar, the movie theater he managed in Copenhagen. This profoundly religious artist, filled with a passion for the cinema, chased two dreams all his life, both of which eluded him: to make a film on the life of Christ, Jesus, and to work in Hollywood like his master, D. W. Griffith.
I only met Carl Dreyer three times, but it pleases me to write these few lines as I sit in the leather-and-wood chair that belonged to him during his working life and was given to me after his death. He was a small man, soft-spoken, terribly stubborn, who gave an impression of severity although he was truly sensitive and warm. His last public act was to gather the eight most important men involved in Danish cinema to write a letter protesting the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française.
Now he is dead; he has joined Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, Eisenstein, Lubitsch, the kings of the first generation of cinema, the generation that mastered, first, silence, and then sound. We have much to learn from them, and much from Dreyer’s images of whiteness.
—1969
The startlingly brilliant image of the prewar films is what I love above all else. The characters are small, dark silhouettes on the screen. They emerge onto the set, pushing open doors three times their size. There was no housing crisis at that time and the streets of Paris were Bastille Day all year long. There were “apartment to rent” signs on all the buildings.
The grandiose sets of the films of those days rivaled the stars for top billing; the producers paid a lot of money for them and they had to be noticed. The man who smoked the big cigars wanted his money’s worth and I am sure he would have fired a director who dared to shoot his whole film in closeups. At that time, when you didn’t know where to put your camera, you put it as far away as possible; now, when in doubt, it’s planted smack under the actor’s nostrils. We have passed from modest mistakes to pretentious ones.
A nostalgic introduction is not out of place in Lubitsch’s case because he firmly believed it was better to laugh in a palace than to weep in the shop around the corner. As André Bazin said, I’m probably not going to have time to be brief.
Like all artists of stylization, Lubitsch, whether consciously or not, was drawn to the great writers of children’s stories. In Angel, a painful and embarrassing dinner brings together Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, her husband, and Melvyn Douglas, her lover of a single night she’d thought she’d never see again, but whom her husband has brought home by chance. As so often with Lubitsch, the camera deserts the “stage” side as things are heating up to take us to the “courtyard” side where we can enjoy what’s going on even more. We’re in the kitchen, for instance. The butler is coming and going from the dining room; he brings in Madame’s plate: “Odd, Madame didn’t touch her cutlet.” Next, he brings in the guest’s plate: “Huh, neither did he.” (This chop has been cut into innumerable tiny pieces but not touched.) The third plate arrives, empty: “Well, at least Monsieur seemed to enjoy his chop.” We recognize “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: Papa bear’s bowl was too hot, Mama bear’s too cold, but Baby bear’s was just right. Do we know any literature more fundamental than that?
So this is the first trait common to the “Lubitsch touch” and the “Hitchcock touch.” The second has to do with their manner of approaching the problem of the script. On the surface, it is simply a matter of telling a story in images; this is what they insist in interviews. But it isn’t true. They’re not lying for fun or to make fools of us, they’re lying to simplify matters, because reality is too complicated and it’s better to spend one’s time working and perfecting oneself. We are dealing with perfectionists.
The truth in their work is that it is a matter of not telling the story, even of searching for a way not to tell it. There is, of course, a plot, which can be summed up in a few lines, usually the seduction of a man by a woman who does not want him or vice versa, or an invitation to a night of sin or pleasure—the same themes that Sacha Guitry uses—but the essential consideration here is never to treat the subject directly. So, if we are kept outside the closed doors of the bedroom when everything is happening inside, stay at the office when everything is going on in the living room, remain in the salon when the action’s on the stairway, or in the telephone booth when it’s happening in the wine cellar, it’s because Lubitsch has racked his brain during six weeks of writing so that the spectators can work out the plot along with him as they watch the film.
There are two kinds of moviemakers—as there are two kinds of painters and writers—those who would work even if they were stranded on a desert island with no possible public, and those who would give up, wondering “Why bother?” There would be no Lubitsch without an audience—but, watch out—the audience is not something apart from his work; it is with him in creating, it is part of the film. On Lubitsch’s sound tracks, there are dialogue, sounds, music, and our laughter—this is essential. Otherwise, there would be no film. The prodigious ellipses in his plots work only because our laughter bridges the scenes. In the Lubitsch Swiss cheese, each hole winks.
Though all too often used incorrectly, the expression “mise-en-scène” does boil down to something, in this case a game that can only be played by three parties and only while the film is being projected. And who are the three parties? Lubitsch, the film, and the public.
So, there’s nothing in common with a film like Doctor Zhivago, for instance. If you said to me, “I have just seen a Lubitsch in which there was one needless shot,” I’d call you a liar. His cinema is the opposite of the vague, the imprecise, the unformulated, the incommunicable. There’s not a single shot just for decoration; nothing is included just because it looks good. From beginning to end, we are involved only in what’s essential.
There is no Lubitsch plot on paper, nor does the movie make any sense after we’ve seen it. Everything happens while we are looking at the film. An hour later, or even if you’ve just seen it for the sixth time, I defy you to tell me the plot of To Be or Not to Be. It’s absolutely impossible.
We the viewers are there in the darkness. What is happening on the screen is brilliant. It may have tended to break at a certain point, so, to reassure ourselves, we anticipate the next scene visibly by searching our memories. But Lubitsch, like all geniuses of contradiction, has already examined all the previous solutions so as to offer one that’s never been used before—an unthinkable, bizarre, exquisite, and disorienting solution. There are outbursts of laughter as we discover the “Lubitsch solution”—our laughter is uncontainable.
We could use an expression such as “Lubitsch’s respect for the public,” except that this motto has all too often served as an alibi to justify the worst documentaries and simply incomprehensible stories. Let’s forget that and consider another example.
In Trouble in Paradise, Edward Everett Horton eyes Herbert Marshall suspiciously during a cocktail party. He tells himself that he’s seen this fellow somewhere. We know that Marshall is the pickpocket who, at the beginning of the film, had knocked out poor Horton in a palace bedroom in Venice in order to rob him. Clearly, Horton will remember at a certain moment, and with nine out of ten filmmakers—lazy bunch that we are—what do we almost always do? We show the fellow asleep in bed; all of a sudden he wakes up in the middle of the night, slaps his forehead: “That’s it! Venice! The dirty bum!” But who’s the bum? The one who’s contented with such an obvious solution. That was not Lubitsch’s way. He worked like a dog, bled himself white, died twenty years too early. Lubitsch shows us Horton smoking a cigarette. Visibly wondering where he could have met Herbert Marshall before, he takes a last draw on his cigarette, crushes it in a silver ashtray shaped like a gondola…a shot of the gondola ashtray…we return to Horton’s face…he gazes at the ashtray…a gondola…Venice. My God! Horton finally understands! Bravo! And the audience rocks with laughter. Perhaps Lubitsch is standing in the shadows at the rear of the theater watching his audience, dreading the slightest delay in their laughter, like Fredric March in Design for Living, or glancing toward the prompter who watches Hamlet move toward the ramp and gets ready, if necessary, to whisper, “To be or not to be.”
I speak of what can be learned, about talent, about what can be for sale and its eventual price tag. But what cannot be learned or bought is the charm and mischievousness, ah, the mischievous charm of Lubitsch, which truly made him a prince.
—1968
Has The Great Dictator—which Charlie Chaplin made in 1939-1940 and which the European public first saw in 1945—“aged”? The question is almost absurd and can only be answered Yes, of course, naturally. The Great Dictator has aged, and that is wonderful. It has aged like a political editorial, like Zola’s J’accuse, like a press conference. It is an admirable document, a rare piece, a useful object that has now become an art object. Chaplin would be quite correct to reedit it if it would bring him enough money to finance his next film, Charlie on the Moon.
What is striking about The Great Dictator today, in 1957, is Chaplin’s desire to help his fellow men see more clearly. I despise the set mind that rejects ambitious work from someone who’s supposed to be a comic. The impulse is good, however, even if it generally begins with snobbism, for it often happens that, as soon as snobs burn what they adore, adoration is justified.
Whenever I hear, “Now that Chaplin is taking himself seriously, his work is finished,” I can’t help thinking that his work is beginning. An artist can create works for himself to “do himself good,” or to “do good” for others. Perhaps the greatest artists are those who simultaneously resolve their own problems and those of their public. We have to begin by being born and then by knowing ourselves, and after that comes recognition. The comic artist doesn’t wait for us to come to him; he comes to us as clown, mime, buffoon, songster.
To the public whose heart he’s made beat to his own rhythm the comic artist owes everything, including his ideas as a man. I hate hearing people say about Chaplin, “He’s heard too many times that he was this or that; naturally he ended up believing it.” If he has been told that he is a poet or a philosopher, it’s because it’s true, and he was right to believe what he heard. Without willing it or knowing it, Chaplin helped men live; later, when he became aware of it, would it not have been criminal to stop trying to help them even more?
The extraordinary audience that Chaplin’s genius captured bestowed enormous responsibility on him; it wasn’t that he believed he had a mission, but that he really was entrusted with one; and, in my opinion, few public men, politicians or pundits, have acquitted themselves of their mission with his integrity and effectiveness.
The Great Dictator was certainly the film that caught the imagination of the greatest number of viewers in most countries in 1940. It was certainly the film of the moment, a scarcely exaggerated nightmare of a world gone mad, of which the film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) was to be the most exact account. Never has a film grown old more nobly, though we can imagine that it will be politely applauded or received coolly by twelve-year-old moviegoers who know nothing of Hitler, Mussolini, Goering and Goebbels.
In one of his most famous articles, André Bazin called The Great Dictator Chaplin’s settling of accounts with Hitler for having committed the double crime of confiscating Charlie’s mustache and of elevating himself to the level of the gods. By forcing Hitler’s mustache to reintegrate Charlie’s myth, Charlie destroyed the myth of Hitler. In effect, in 1939, Hitler and Chaplin became the two most famous men in the world, the first incarnating the forces of evil, the second those of good. That’s why they had to be brought together in the same film to better oppose one another and, seventeen years after The Pilgrim, recreate a marvelous pantomime of David and Goliath.
Pierre Leprohon has published an absorbing work, a chronological essay, that tells of Chaplin’s refusal, when he was in Venice in 1931, to go to Rome where Mussolini had arranged a reception in his honor. A month earlier, at a gathering at Lady Astor’s London home, Chaplin had expounded on the economic crisis: “The world is suffering from government interference in the private sector and from exaggerated expenditures by the State. I would propose a nationalization of the banks and a revision of many laws, like those that govern the Stock Exchange. I would create a governmental office for economic affairs which would control prices, interest rates, and profits…My policy would favor internationalism, worldwide economic cooperation, the abolition of the gold standard and of general inflation…” In 1934, Chaplin had a scenario for a film on Napoleon that had been proposed by a young Italian journalist. In 1935 he announced his definitive decision not to make the Napoleon film and added, “In addition, I shall never again play Charlie, the little tramp.”
Chaplin kept his word; he began to write and prepare for The Great Dictator. All during 1938 there were any number of attempts to keep him from shooting the film. German diplomatic representatives and several American organizations put pressure on him. The film was finished in the spring of 1940 but was not seen until six months later. Meanwhile, Chaplin was criticized by the Dies Committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As long ago as 1940! This dates the beginning of the American war against Chaplin, which continued relentlessly until 1952.
The Great Dictator is not only a defensive farce but also a very precise essay on the Jewish crisis and the mad racist program of Hitlerism—a little like Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise—in which two series of sketches alternate, Hitler’s palace and the ghetto. As objectively as possible when one’s defending one’s own life, Chaplin sets the two worlds in opposition, mocking the first fiercely, smiling tenderly at the second with scrupulous respect for ethnic truths. The sequences in the ghetto glide by, malicious, artful, almost as if choreographed; those in Hitler’s palace are jerky, mechanical, frantic to the point of derision. The persecuted are shown with a furious appetite to live, a resourcefulness that skims over cowardice (the scene of drawing lots for the sacrifice); on the part of the persecutors, there is an imbecilic fanaticism.
At the end of the film, in the purest theatrical tradition, the little Jewish barber is brought in to replace the “Great Dictator,” whose double he is—without a single remark having been made on the subject—an ellipse of genius. When it comes time to deliver his great discourse, he weeps over primary truths, which I’d be the last to complain about, preferring them to the secondary. The events that wracked our continent not long after the release of this film prove well enough that if Chaplin opened so many doors in this film, they were not open for everybody.
The critics, especially Bazin, have pointed out that the final speech of The Great Dictator marks the crucial moment in all of Chaplin’s work. It is then that we see the progressive disappearance of Charlie’s mask and the substitution of the face of the man Chaplin, without makeup, his hair already graying. He sent the world a message of hope, he cited the words of the Gospel about the oppressed people who waited for happiness in the realization of the Messianic dream.
Chaplin didn’t want the film to end focused on his face but on the image of Paulette Goddard, to whom he gave his own mother’s name, Hannah (a name spelled the same backward). The device exquisitely sums up the spirit of the film. Hitler is the Jewish barber in reverse. So, he invokes his mother at the end of his speech, as Goddard, looking sublime as she is lying on the ground, raises herself to hear his call: “Lift up your eyes, Hannah. Look toward heaven, Hannah, can you hear me? Listen!”
Okay, Charlie doesn’t make us laugh any more. On the other hand, his critics make me laugh. The silliest reviews of A King in New York pan it for its plot. You might as well damn the New Testament for lack of suspense. I bring up the New Testament deliberately. King Shadow, recently dethroned, arrives in New York having barely saved his head and the Royal Treasury. But the next day he learns that his prime minister has absconded with the money. The king is ruined. Is the author Charlie Chaplin, or is it Saint Matthew recounting the parable of the talents? A man about to set out on a journey entrusts his fortune to his servants, one of whom plays the same dirty trick on him so that he remonstrates with him: “Wicked and lazy servant! Why didn’t you take care of my money?”
There is a dinner party at the home of a famous celebrity hostess and the king is betrayed. A hidden television camera is recording the dinner and the king’s clowning. Without realizing how it has happened, Shadow becomes a television star. When he visits a progressive school, the king meets a twelve-year-old boy whose replies astonish and confound the adults. We may call them the “doctors.” On a winter evening, as he’s going home, Shadow comes upon the boy, who is freezing to death in rags. Ruppert, the boy, tells Shadow that his parents have been arrested for being Communists and have been sentenced because they’ve refused to denounce their friends. Inside the king’s house, Ruppert undresses to take a bath and Shadow goes out to buy him some clothes—another image from the New Testament, the possessed man who was cured. “This man was without clothes at that time to symbolize the fact that we had lost our original faith and justice, which had been like a vestment of light that had covered us in our state of innocence.” Shortly, McCarthy’s man comes to take the boy away and lead him to Herod, “this hypocrite prince, who concealed the design he had conceived to kill the child he was forced to recognize. For God told the Magi that they should seek the child out, so that they could come and tell the news later.”
Shadow is called in turn before the Un-American Activities Committee. The merchants of this temple cannot be driven out, as Jesus had thrown out the buyers and sellers in the Temple, overturning the tables and chairs. Shadow, entangled in a fire hose, lands in front of the wicked judges and floods them with water. The water is purifying, and Shadow is acquitted. Very likely it is God who advises this new Magi-king in a dream to “take a different road to return to his country” to escape the Herod who would confiscate his passport. But the saddest thing that’s happened, also the most important, is that the boy has already told the investigators what they wanted to know in order to get his parents freed. The moral isn’t as simple as that of Jules Dassin’s Le Christ Recrucifié (He Who Must Die). What it’s saying is that, if Christ came back today to a land of stool pigeons, he’d end up collaborating with McCarthy.
I’m not saying this interpretation is definitive. But if you can’t prove something is beautiful, you have to offer some explanation.
If you stick an arbitrary label on a work, you don’t want to have to change it. If Chaplin, at his age, went on playing the clown in those famous cast-offs, it would be a disaster. That’s not hard to understand. Anyhow, a man who’s made seventy-five films, some of which are among the most famous and admired in the history of movies, doesn’t need advice about how to construct a plot.
I don’t see any great difference between the first and the second parts of A King in New York. I didn’t expect to laugh. We all read the newspapers, and I was well aware of Chaplin’s misfortunes in America. I knew what his new film was about and I knew how profoundly sad his preceding films were. We could have known that A King in New York would be the saddest of all, also the most personal. The man who made The Gold Rush can, if he wants to, make his public laugh or cry at will; he knows all the tricks; he’s an ace, that’s sure. If we neither cry nor laugh at A King in New York, it’s because Chaplin made up his mind to touch our heads instead of our hearts. The awful gentleness of this film makes me think of Nuit et Brouillard, which also rejected the simplemindedness of the propagandist or the hater.
Take two examples. If Chaplin had wanted to make the audience weep, he could have easily drawn out and dramatized the scene where the boy admits to Shadow that he has denounced his parents’ friends; all he had to do was remake a reel of The Kid. If Chaplin had wanted us to laugh as he showed the preparations of the investigation committee, he would have dwelt on the moment when the investigator powders his face and makes up for the TV cameras. He could have made him gag three times on the powder puff. That would have gotten a laugh, but would have ruined his film, which is more ambitious. He shows us the scene only once, briefly, in a monitor.
The film doesn’t broaden out or force itself on the viewer. There are no scenes that are amusing or ironic or bitter. It is a rapid and dry demonstration of a single point, almost like a documentary. The shots of New York and the two images of airplanes that Chaplin inserts are like a montage of documents. A King in New York is not comparable to a novel or a poem; it is more like an article, a few pages from a journal called “Charlie Chaplin comments freely on political reality.”
If Chaplin chose to dream up a king, it’s because he’s lived a king’s life. He is received like royalty everywhere and he doesn’t need to invent abusive photographers, nosy journalists, and rude receptions. In real life Chaplin is constantly forced to act out a part so he won’t spoil the image created by his hosts in Paris, London, or New York. What he seems to be saying is that his acts are funny for everybody but him; he’s more like a Hamlet, there to grate on us, not to make us laugh. In the film, someone says, “He’s just an ordinary person, but if you warm him up a bit, he can be quite funny.” This ironic clarity runs throughout.
At the beginning, in that scene about the money that has disappeared, Chaplin is making fun of himself, his famous stinginess, his paranoia about being robbed. Charlie is sentimental but Chaplin is not. For the first time, he shows us the real relationship between the king and women. No more romance, no more flowers—instead, Dawn Addams, an American doll so enticing and enflaming that the king jumps on her literally. Everything we know about Chaplin’s love life, little girls thrown into his arms by irresponsible mothers who proceed to attack him in court to support themselves for the rest of their lives—it’s all summed up in three minutes.
If A King in New York is not amusing, it’s because Joe McCarthy’s America represents a depressing world. It’s an autobiographical film and there’s no complacency about it. If it’s a sadder slice of life than the ones that went before it, it’s because Chaplin understands that the most agonizing problem of the time is not poverty or mistakes in the name of progress, but an organized attack on freedom in a world of informants.
“The work of art,” Jean Genêt says somewhere, “must resolve the drama, not merely present it.” Charlie Chaplin resolves the drama. It’s a gift of great lucidity.
—1957
Charles Chaplin is the most famous filmmaker in the world, but his work may be on the point of becoming lost to the history of cinema. As the distribution rights to his films expired, Chaplin forbade them to be shown. He had been cheated from the start of his career by innumerable pirated releases. New generations of moviegoers came along who knew The Kid, The Circus, City Lights, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight only by reputation.
Then, in 1970, Chaplin decided to put almost all his work back into circulation, which will make it possible once again—as you’d walk along the railway ties from one station to the next—to follow the development of his thought.
In the years before the talkies were invented, writers and intellectuals the world over were cool to, even disdainful of, cinema which they regarded only as popular entertainment, at best a minor art. They made one exception: Charlie Chaplin; it is easy to understand how that was offensive to the admirers of Griffith, Stroheim, Keaton. The quarrel may have revolved around whether cinema was an art, but to the public, which never asked such a question, the debate among the intellectuals didn’t matter a whit. The enthusiasm of the audiences—it’s difficult to imagine its proportions today (we would have to extend the cult of Eva Peron in Argentina to the entire world)—made Chaplin the most popular man in the world in 1920.
If one marvels at this, sixty years after Chaplin’s first appearance on the screen, it’s because it possesses a telling logic, a logic of great beauty. From its beginnings, cinema has been made by privileged persons, even if in 1920 it was scarcely a matter of practicing an art. Without singing the famous May, 1968, couplet about “cinema/ the art bourgeois,” I would point out that there has always been a cultural and biographical gap between those who make films and those who watch them.
Charlie Chaplin, abandoned by an alcoholic father, spent his first years in the anguish of seeing his mother taken away to an asylum, and experienced the terror of being picked up by the police. He was a nine-year-old vagrant hugging the walls of Kensington Road, as he wrote in his memoirs, living “…on the lowest levels of society.” This has often been described and commented on, but I’m returning to it because all the comments may have caused the extreme harshness of his life to be lost sight of, and we really ought to take note of how much explosiveness there is in total misery. In his chase films for Keystone, Chaplin runs faster and farther than his music-hall colleagues because, if he is not the only filmmaker to have described hunger, he is the only one who knew it at first hand. This is what his audiences all over the world felt when his films began to be circulated in 1914.
I am almost of the opinion that Chaplin, whose mother was certifiably mad, came close to complete alienation and that he escaped thanks to his gift of mime, a gift he inherited from her. In recent years there have been serious studies of children who have grown up in isolation, in moral, physical, or material distress. The specialists describe autism as a defense mechanism. But everything that Charlie does is precisely a defense mechanism. When Bazin explains that Charlie is not antisocial but asocial, and that he aspires to enter society, he defines, in almost the same terms as Kanner, the schizophrenic and the autistic child: “While the schizophrenic tries to resolve his problem by quitting a world of which he had been a part, autistic children come progressively to the compromise which consists in having only the most careful contact with a world in which they have been strangers from the beginning.”
To take a single example of displacement (the word recurs constantly in Bazin’s writing, as it does in Bruno Bettelheim’s work about autistic children, The Empty Fortress), Bettelheim says: “The autistic child has less fear of things and will perhaps act on them, because it is persons, not things, who seem to threaten his existence. Nevertheless, the use that he makes of things is not that for which they were conceived.”
And Bazin: “It seems that objects accept Charlie’s help only when they are outside the meaning society has assigned to them. The most beautiful example of such a displacement is the famous dance of the loaves of bread in which the objects’ complicity explodes into a free choreography.”
In today’s terms, Charlie would be the most “marginal” of the marginal. When he became the most famous and richest artist in the world, he felt constrained by age or modesty, or perhaps by logic, to abandon his vagabond character, but he still understood that the roles of “settled” men were forbidden him. He has to change his myth, but he must remain mythic. So, he prepares to do Napoleon, then a life of Christ, and then gives up these projects to shoot The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, and A King in New York, via the Calvero of Limelight, a clown who is so down-and-out that he asks his manager at one point, “What if I continued my career under an assumed name?”
Chaplin dominated and influenced fifty years of cinema to the point that he can be clearly distinguished behind Julien Carette in La Règle du Jeu; just as we see Henri Verdoux behind Archibaldo de la Cruz, we find the little Jewish barber who watches his house burn in The Great Dictator standing twenty-six years later behind the old Pole in Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.
His work is divided into two parts, the vagabond and the most famous man in the world. The first asks, Do I exist? and the second tries to answer, Who am I? All of Chaplin’s work revolves around the major theme of artistic creation, the question of identity.
—1974
John Ford was one of the most celebrated directors in the world, but everything about him, even the way he acted and spoke, gave the impression that he never sought out this celebrity and, indeed, that he never accepted it. Always described as rugged but inwardly tender, Ford was certainly closer to the minor characters in which he cast Victor McLaglen than to the starring roles of John Wayne. Ford was an artist who never said the word “art,” a poet who never mentioned “poetry.”
What I love in his work is that he always gives priority to characters. For a long time when I was a journalist, I criticized his conceptions of women—I thought they were too nineteenth century—but when I became a director, I realized that because of him a splendid actress like Maureen O’Hara had been able to play some of the best female roles in American cinema between 1941 and 1957.
John Ford might be awarded (the same goes for Howard Hawks) the prize for “invisible direction.” The camera work of these two great storytellers is never apparent to the eye. There are very few camera movements, only enough to follow a character, and the majority of shots are fixed and always taken at the same distance. It’s a style that creates a suppleness and fluidity that can be compared to Maupassant or Turgenev.
With a kind of royal leisure, John Ford knew how to make the public laugh…or cry. The only thing he didn’t know how to do was to bore them.
And, since Ford believed in God: God bless John Ford.
—1974
If you are irritated by the extravagant admiration of younger movie lovers for the American cinema, remember that some of the best Hollywood films have been made by the Englishman Hitchcock, the Greek Kazan, the Dane Sirk, the Hungarian Benedek, the Italian Capra, the Russian Milestone, and the Viennese directors Preminger, Ulmer, Zinnemann, Wilder, Sternberg and Fritz Lang.
Like the French Quai des Brumes, and a lot of prewar films, You Only Live Once, which was shot in 1936, is about destiny and fate. At the start of the action, we find Henry Fonda just out of prison after two or three small-time crimes such as car theft, determined to follow the straight-and-narrow. He marries his lawyer’s secretary, who has gotten him a job as a truck driver.
You Only Live Once is about interlocking forces: everything may seem to be going well, but the truth is, everything is going badly. If, against his will, Fonda “goes back to his old game,” “falls” again, it isn’t because “once a thief, always a thief” (qui vole un oeuf, vole un boeuf), but because society dictates once a thief, always a thief. In short, since the law-abiding people are determined to see Fonda as a former convict, they have to send him back to prison, first by driving him out of his hotel, then by chasing him from his job. He is falsely accused of a holdup and condemned to the electric chair, but he escapes at the very moment that his innocence is about to be established. He kills the priest who tries to stop him, and he and his wife flee into the woods where they are both killed by the police.
The film is both polemical and broad-minded; it is organized around the principle that law-abiding people are villains. The artist must first prove that there is a sort of beauty in what has been considered ugly, and vice versa. Throughout You Only Live Once, Fritz Lang accentuates the low character of ordinary citizens and the nobility of the asocial couple. Since they have no money, Eddie and Joan get their gas tank filled at the point of a revolver. As soon as they drive away, the station attendant calls the police and reports they have taken the cashbox too. As the car breaks through the first police roadblock, a bullet that should certainly have hit Joan instead hits a can of condensed milk. Milk—purity; their purity protects our heroes for a moment.
In the woods, Joan gives birth to a child. They don’t name the infant: “We’ll call him baby.” Civil status is an invention of society.
There’s no lack of romanticism here, but if the broad outlines of You Only Live Once have aged some, the film itself is unwrinkled because of some unusual insights, a certain directness, which holds up, and a straightforward violence which is still surprising.
Fritz Lang seems to be constantly settling his accounts with society. His main characters are always outsiders, marginal people. The hero of M was portrayed as a victim. In 1933, Lang had to get out of Germany quickly in the face of Nazism. From then on, all of his work, even the Westerns and the thrillers, will reflect this violent break and very soon afterward we see the theme of revenge grafted on to the experiences of persecution. Several of Lang’s Hollywood films are painted on this canvas: a man becomes involved in a struggle that is larger than any one person; perhaps he is a policeman, a scientist, a soldier, a resister. Then someone close to him, a woman or a child he loves, dies and the conflict becomes his individual fight, he is personally affected; the larger cause moves into the background and what takes its place is personal vengeance: Man Hunt, Cloak and Dagger, Rancho Notorious, The Big Heat…
Lang is obsessed with lynching, gun-to-the-head justice, and good conscience. His pessimism seems to grow with each film, and in recent years his work has become the bitterest in the history of film. That’s why his latest films have failed commercially. First there was the hero-victim, subsequently the hero-avenger. Now there is only the man who is marked by sin. There are no longer any likable characters in his recent movies such as While the City Sleeps or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. They are all schemers, opportunists, evil. Life is like a ride on a roller coaster.
In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Lang seems to be pleading for keeping the death penalty. Dana Andrews, a newspaper reporter, allows himself to be accused of a crime just to provide a dramatic climax to his campaign against capital punishment. On the eve of his execution, his innocence is established and he’s freed, but he betrays himself to his fiancée and she realizes that, in fact, he actually did kill a chorus girl. The whole idea of staging a journalistic investigation was a way to cover his tracks and get away with his crime. His fiancée denounces him without hesitation.
The critics were outraged by the plot, but it should not have been surprising from a man whom the world, Nazism, war, deportation, McCarthyism, etc., confirmed as a rebel. His rebellion had turned to disgust.
Lang takes larger-than-life stories and improves on them, not by making them psychologically subtle, or more believable, but by bending them to his own obsessions. Lang expresses himself with great freedom. I know more about Lang, what he is and how he thinks, after seeing While the City Sleeps, a film he made to order, than I know about René Clément after watching Gervaise, in which, although it is a successful and high-quality film, the designer, the writers, and the star are as important as the director.
While the City Sleeps shows us the actions of about ten people whose lives revolve around a large newspaper. The publisher has died suddenly and his son, a degenerate and incompetent snob, offers the job to the one among the three candidates who can track down a strangler of young girls who is at large in the city. This time Lang rejects the mystery film’s technique. Even before the credits, he’s shown us the criminal in action. The most overwhelming thing in this movie is the way Lang looks at his characters with unrelieved harshness; they are all damned. Nothing could be less soft or sentimental, really more cruel, than a love scene Lang directs. In the film, Dana Andrews is the journalist of integrity, the only candidate who refuses to go along with the cynical competition, but does that do him any good, does it make him any better than the other characters? Not at all. Look at his relationship with his virginal fiancée, Sally Forrest, who is anxious to find a suitable husband with a good job. Andrews fits the bill, but he’d rather have her as a mistress than a wife; his behavior becomes a kind of implicit sexual blackmail. His caresses go a little farther each time. Sally lets him feel her legs because, after all, he mustn’t be completely discouraged, but anything more will have to wait until they’re married. Finally, Andrews gives in, after an enthusiastic flirtation with Ida Lupino, the newspaper’s gossip columnist, a “free” woman who wants only to get ahead. The wife of the newspaper’s owner pretends she’s visiting her mother when she goes to her lover’s home. There’s a scene in a massage room when she lies to her husband so blatantly that she has to put on dark glasses to carry it off.
Lang makes ferocious remarks about all his characters, not with satire or parody in mind, but out of simple pessimism. Of all the German filmmakers who fled Nazism in 1932, he’s the one who has never recovered—and added on is the fact that America, which made him welcome, seems to repel him.
Lang did not doubt that man is born wicked, and the terrible sadness of his last films reminds us of Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard: “It is all you can do to imagine that night torn by screams, interrupted by delousings, a night that sets the teeth chattering. You have to sleep quickly. They wake you up with a club, you scramble, looking for belongings that have been stolen…” In that remarkable film, Resnais continues: “They even got to the point of organizing themselves politically; they would argue over the inner control of the camp on the basis of common law.”
Jean Genêt, probably France’s greatest writer, certainly our only moralist, has succeeded better than any in explaining this turning of the honest man to the “common law,” in a prohibited radio talk called “The Criminal Child”: “The papers still show us photographs of corpses overflowing from barns or strewn across fields, caught on barbed wire in the extermination camps; they show torn-out fingernails, tattooed skins tanned and made into lampshades. These are Hitler’s crimes. But no one calls our attention to the fact that in French prisons there have always been torturers who have victimized both men and children. According to the standards of a justice that is humane, or even better than that, it isn’t important to decide who’s guilty or innocent. To the Germans, the French were guilty…The good folk applauded when we were handcuffed and the cops beat us in the ribs with their clubs.” This is exactly the idea—that no one can judge anyone, that everyone is both criminal and victim—that Lang illustrates with such stubborn genius in his work. You Only Live Once is a pivotal film in this regard.
There is only one word to describe Lang’s style: inexorable. Each shot, each maneuver of the camera, each frame, each movement of an actor is a decision and is inimitable. I’ll give you an example: There’s a prison scene in You Only Live Once where Fonda asks his wife, who’s on the other side of the grate, to get him a revolver. As he whispers “Get me a gun,” exaggerating the words with his mouth, we only hear the consonants—just the guttural sounds of the two g’s and the t, which are pronounced with a look of chilling intensity.
You Only Live Once should be seen often, and Lang’s later films should be thought about in light of it. The man was not only a genius, he was also the most isolated and the least understood of contemporary filmmakers.
—1958
After he’d directed the marvelous silent films of Harry Langdon, Frank Capra found fame with It Happened One Night, a movie that has been imitated a hundred times since. Capra’s work is, unfortunately, not well known in France because of poor distribution, but I need only recall Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Watergate thirty-five years ahead of its time), Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life to realize how great an influence this marvelous filmmaker has had throughout the world. His influence can be found in the youthful work of the English “boy” director, Alfred Hitchcock (before 1940) and in the young Swede, Ingmar Bergman, in his period of conjugal comedies before 1955.
Capra is the last survivor of that great quartet of American comedy; Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. An Italian, born in Palermo, he brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia dell’arte. He was a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra’s comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence in life.
The growing harshness of social life after the war, the spread of egoism, the obstinate conviction of the rich that they could “take it with them” made his miracles even more improbable. But, in the face of human anguish, doubt, unrest, and the struggle just to manage daily life, Capra was a kind of healer, that is, the enemy of “official” medicine. This good doctor was also a great director.
—1974
Although Scarface is recognized and holds a place of honor in the history of cinema, Howard Hawks, its maker, has nonetheless been the most underestimated of Hollywood filmmakers. Scarface was no mere stroke of luck, and its obvious beauties shouldn’t make us forget the more subtle beauties of The Big Sleep, Red River or Big Sky. Made in 1930, Scarface, based on the romanticized life of Al Capone and his cronies, abounds in lovely discoveries.
It’s important to remember that Howard Hawks is a moralist. Far from sympathizing with his characters, he treats them with utter disdain. To him, Tony Camonte is a brute and a degenerate. He deliberately directed Paul Muni to make him look like a monkey, his arms hanging loosely and slightly curved, his face caught in a perpetual grimace. All through Scarface you will notice the motif of the cross—it’s on walls, doors, patterns of light—a visual obsession which “orchestrates,” as a musical theme would, Tony’s scar and evokes the idea of death. The most striking scene in the movie is unquestionably Boris Karloff’s death. He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except one that keeps spinning until it finally falls over, the exact symbol of Karloff himself, the last survivor of a rival gang that’s been wiped out by Muni. This isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.
—1954
Is Howard Hawks’s technicolor movie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a work of intellect or is it entirely superficial?
Let me refresh your memories with some of the cornerstone films by this prestigious filmmaker (Howard Hawks was the only director William Faulkner would agree to work with): Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, Sergeant York, Bringing Up Baby, I Was a Male War Bride, Red River, The Big Sky, Monkey Business. His films are divided into adventures and comedies. The former are a tribute to man, they celebrate his intelligence and his physical and moral greatness. The latter are directed at his degeneration and the emptiness in modern society. Hawks is a moralist in his own way, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, far from being a cynical entertainment made for pleasure, is mean and strict, an intelligent and pitiless film.
The outwardly thin story is familiar: Lorelei, the blonde (Marilyn Monroe), and Dorothy, the brunette (Jane Russell), are moving along in life, leaving behind them a trail of devoted millionaires. Lorelei loves diamonds more than anything else, while Dorothy dotes on male muscles. After wandering all over Europe, they both get married aboard ship on their way back to America. Lorelei chooses a dull millionaire and Dorothy a virile but penniless lawyer. There are almost no laughs in this movie, and it’s not that the plot or production are weak—quite to the contrary, it’s that the laughs get caught in our throats. This is where the judgment that this is an “intellectual film” comes near to winning out. On principle, Howard Hawks always pushes things as far as possible, and scenes which may seem merely affected to start with become monstrous as they reach extreme but logical conclusions.
Lorelei and Dorothy cease to be merely extravagant personalities and become essences; they are more than symbols: they are the blonde and the brunette, greed and lust, frigidity and nymphomania. The real intentions of the authors (Charles Lederer, Hawks’s usual scenarist, and Hawks himself) become clear in two central scenes of such a level of madness and abstraction that two whole ballets and two songs can’t do justice to their sense of unreality. First a long sequence in the ship’s swimming pool shows Jane Russell singing, surrounded by about twenty athletes in briefs who are calling her attention to their muscles, showing off their physiques by posing and flexing their arms. The second scene features Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” surrounded by five young men in dinner jackets. Each holds a long diamond necklace in his right hand, and a revolver in his left with which each in turn shoots himself in the head after Marilyn has slapped him with her diamond-studded fan. During this same scene the red lighting fades suddenly, leaving a single projector that diffuses a kind of dim church light; and immediately the twenty men fall on their knees in an ecstatic gesture. Another scene I think is significant shows Lorelei, having just been given a diamond tiara, hiding it behind her back. She holds it absolutely, perfectly horizontally, as if she were simultaneously crowning the “object” of her efforts, or the tool of her work.
This explosive mixture of styles, used by many artists, though by none better than Hawks in films, doesn’t often succeed. Another example is a burlesque sketch, adapted from the O. Henry story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” which Twentieth Century-Fox actually withdrew from circulation because it didn’t make anybody laugh. In that story kidnappers have taken a small boy who is so obnoxious that they vainly offer his parents money to take him back. Hawks had found the story singularly rich, filled with themes he likes—the child-monster and the infantile adult.
Hawks’s comedies, whatever label you put on them, are bright and original, derived more from a nice sense of the absurd than from a sense of commercialism. Whether you laugh or grit your teeth, you won’t be bored.
—1954
The story takes place almost three millennia before Christ, under the Sixth Dynasty, when Cheops, the great Pharaoh, has undertaken the construction of the pyramid that will be his tomb. The film follows this work to which several generations of workers dedicated their lives and where “on-the-job accidents” were common.
If Land of the Pharaohs is not Hawks’s best film, it is nevertheless the first one on such a subject and on such a grand scale and such epic dimensions that did not succumb to the more ridiculous forms of Hollywood’s Egyptomania.
The production credits contain the prestigious name of William Faulkner, who worked on the script and the dialogue. The script’s strong point is that all the themes and everything that happens relate one way or another to the actual building of the pyramid, thus avoiding the double trap of diffuseness and sloppy pictorial showiness. There are no poisoned cups, orgies, or fake elegance. The architect, Valsthar, has invented a way of placing the stone blocks of the pyramid so that when Cheops dies and is enclosed in the center of the pyramid with his slaves, it will only be necessary to break two clay pots to cause a stream of sand to start flowing, which will eventually settle the entire building. This is clearly Faulknerian—the work of twenty years finished in a few seconds with a wave of sand. The idea will show you clearly that you’re not dealing with a variation of The Egyptian or The Ten Commandments.
The Warnercolor process doesn’t work very well here but the Cinemascope is once again overwhelming, if only because it allows us during the great crowd scenes to see a little of the famous frescoes showing the workers carving the stones with careful blows of their hammers.
In a genre of films that is often and justly decried, Land of the Pharaohs offers originality and intelligence.
—1955
Jet Pilot is an anti-Soviet propaganda film made in 1950 by Joseph von Sternberg, the eminent director of The Blue Angel, Underworld, Shanghai Gesture, The Saga of Anatahan.
It is a classic American comedy along the lines of the theme of Ninotchka: an idyll between an American aviator and a Soviet aviatrix, and her conversion to the joy of the capitalist world. It isn’t a likable film and it isn’t inspired by any ideology. It only seeks to demonstrate that American aviation is the best, and that life in Russia is a nightmare. So much for the anti-Soviet sentiment; what is worse is that it caters to the stock portfolios of cafe society. This was a film made “on order” by the austere and fastidious von Sternberg. He now denies any responsibility for it, since the editing was done without him and against his wishes several years after he’d shot it. Howard Hughes, the producer, is an avid flier and was the most capricious and tyrannical of its backers. Still, amazingly enough, it is a successful, even a beautiful film.
For Hughes, it was simply a matter of satisfying his three passions of the moment: aviation, Janet Leigh, and anti-Communism. We could say that his three wishes were granted beyond his hopes. Jet Pilot is one of the best aviation films of the period, Janet Leigh is magnificent, and the anti-Communism is of rare wickedness.
Leigh, a great Soviet aviatrix, lands on American soil, supposedly having defected in pursuit of freedom. John Wayne, a famous American pilot, is ordered to play up to her to extract military information from her. Second act: Leigh is discovered to have been a spy, and the authorities are ready to deport her from the United States. Wayne, who’s really fallen in love, marries her and defects to the Soviet Union. Third act: Life there is little better than hell. Wayne, who refuses to give any information about U. S. aviation, is subjected to brainwashing such as we’ve read about in the newspapers. Before it’s too late, Janet and John flee to America, pursued by the entire Soviet air force. The last scene is reassuring. We see them very much in love, eating hamburgers in Palm Springs.
What makes Jet Pilot a good film in spite of itself? The scenes between Wayne and Leigh are directed with an art, inventiveness, and an intelligence that marks each image. And the eroticism is as insidious, subtle, effective, and refined as it is possible to be. I shall never forget the scene where Wayne has to frisk Leigh, who’s wearing a wool-lined flying suit with slanted pockets at her breast and abdomen; or the moment when she kicks her panties through the narrow opening of the door, with the tip of her foot thrust out for inspection. I shall not forget Leigh in her nightgown, in the airplane, in Russia, in good form in every scene. We already knew that it’s women Von Sternberg was interested in; because he also had to film airplanes for half the movie, he was somehow able to “humanize” them with breathtaking skill. When the machine piloted by Janet Leigh appears in the sky, flying beside Wayne’s, and we hear their love talk over the radio, we are in the realm of pure emotion, poetically expressed. The inventiveness and beauty catches in our throats. To be sure, the film’s intention is stupid propaganda, but Sternberg constantly turns it aside so that tears come to our eyes in the face of such beauty, as when the male plane and the female plane seek each other out, find one another, fly one on top of the other, struggle, calm themselves, and finally fly side by side. The airplanes make love.
—1958
P.S. The next year (1951) Howard Hughes again wanted Von Sternberg, this time to direct Macao with the actress Jane Russell, whom the producer-flier had discovered, directed, and launched in The Outlaw. He was unhappy with the first rushes and Von Sternberg was dismissed, to be replaced by Nicholas Ray. Paraphrasing Guillaume Apollinaire without realizing it (“Your breasts are the only shells I love”), Hughes demonstrates in the following memo (reprinted by Noah Dietrich in his book, Howard, The Amazing Mr. Hughes) that an actress’s brassiere demands the same design precision as an airplane.
I think that Jane Russell’s outfits, as they appear in the tests, are damned awful. They are totally unbecoming, and hide everything. There is only one word for them: horrible.
There is one exception: the dress made of metallic fabric…really great. It has to be used.
But it doesn’t work on her breasts, and it might lead people to think—God help us—that they are padded or false. The reason is simple; the line is not natural. You’d think she was wearing a stiff brassiere that didn’t mold with her figure. Especially around the nipples, it gives the impression that a piece of stiff fabric has been inserted under the dress; the contour is not natural.
I am not recommending doing without a brassiere, because I know Russell needs one. But I think that a half-brassiere, or a very light one made of very light material which would let the form of her breast come through the dress would be much more effective.
On the other hand, it would be helpful to put into the brassiere or the dress at the place where the nipples are something a bit pointed since I know that they don’t show naturally with Russell. Since her breasts are completely rounded, an artifice would be desirable, so long as it can be incorporated without destroying the natural line of her breasts. The trouble with what you’ve got now is that at the presumed location of the nipples, there appear to be several, which is not at all natural. Likewise, the silhouette of the breast, from the point to the body, is too conical; it looks like a mechanically manufactured object.
It is difficult to explain, but I am sure you will see what I mean when you watch the film.
These particular observations refer to the dress made of metallic fabric. But they apply to all her costumes in this film and I want them observed in her entire wardrobe. Nevertheless, I want all the other costumes to be cut as low as the law allows so that the customers who pay to see this part of Russell can look at it without its being covered with material, metallic or not.
There are two kinds of directors: those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don’t consider the public at all. For the former, cinema is an art of spectacle; for the latter, it is an individual adventure. There is nothing intrinsically better about one or the other; it’s simply a matter of different approaches. For Hitchcock as for Renoir, as for that matter almost all American directors, a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production. While Bresson, Tati, Rossellini, Ray make films their own way and then invite the public to join the “game,” Renoir, Clouzot, Hitchcock and Hawks make movies for the public, and ask themselves all the questions they think will interest their audience.
Alfred Hitchcock, who is a remarkably intelligent man, formed the habit early—right from the start of his career in England—of predicting each aspect of his films. All his life he has worked to make his own tastes coincide with the public’s, emphasizing humor in his English period and suspense in his American period. This dosage of humor and suspense has made Hitchcock one of the most commercial directors in the world (his films regularly bring in four times what they cost). It is the strict demands he makes on himself and on his art that have made him a great director.
Summing up the intrigue in Rear Window will not by any means convey its inventiveness, which is too complicated simply to recap. Confined to his armchair because of a broken leg, reporter/photographer Jeffrey (James Stewart) watches his neighbors through his rear window. As he watches, he becomes convinced that one of them has killed his bad-tempered, complaining, ill wife. The investigation, as he carries it out, even though he’s immobilized by his cast, is part of the movie’s plot. Now we have to add a bright young woman who would like to marry Jeffrey (Grace Kelly), and then, one by one, his neighbors across the courtyard. There is the childless household devastated by the death of a little dog they believe has been “poisoned”; a slightly exhibitionist young lady; a lonely woman and a failed composer who will in the end join together against their mutual temptations to suicide and maybe establish a home; the young newlyweds who make love all day; and finally the killer and his victim.
I see when I sum it up in this way that the plot seems more slick than profound, and yet I am convinced that this film is one of the most important of all the seventeen Hitchcock has made in Hollywood, one of those rare films without imperfection or weakness, which concedes nothing. For example, it is clear that the entire film revolves around the idea of marriage. When Kelly goes into the suspect’s apartment, the proof she is looking for is the murdered woman’s wedding ring; Kelly puts it on her own finger as Stewart follows her movements through his binoculars from the other side of the courtyard. But there is nothing at the end that indicates that they will marry. Rear Window goes beyond pessimism; it is really a cruel film. Stewart fixes his glasses on his neighbors only to catch them in moments of failure, in ridiculous postures, when they appear grotesque or even hateful.
The film’s construction is very like a musical composition: several themes are intermingled and are in perfect counterpoint to each other—marriage, suicide, degradation, and death—and they are all bathed in a refined eroticism (the sound recording of lovemaking is extraordinarily precise and realistic). Hitchcock’s impassiveness and “objectivity” are more apparent than real. In the plot treatment, the direction, sets, acting, details, and especially an unusual tone that includes realism, poetry, macabre humor and pure fairy tale, there is a vision of the world that verges on misanthropy.
Rear Window is a film about indiscretion, about intimacy violated and taken by surprise at its most wretched moments; a film about the impossibility of happiness, about dirty linen that gets washed in the courtyard; a film about moral solitude, an extraordinary symphony of daily life and ruined dreams.
There has been a lot of talk about Hitchcock’s sadism. I think the truth is more complex, and that Rear Window is the first film in which he has given himself away to such a degree. For the hero of Shadow of a Doubt, the world was a pigsty. But in Rear Window I think it is Hitchcock who is expressing himself through his character. I ought not to be accused of reading things into it, since the honest subjectivity of Rear Window breaks through each shot, and all the more so because the tone (always serious in Hitchcock’s films) is geared as usual to its interest as a spectacle, that is, its commercial appeal. It’s really a matter of the moral attitude of a director who looks at the world with the exaggerated severity of a sensual puritan.
Hitchcock has acquired such expertise at cinematographic recital that he has, in thirty years, become much more than a good storyteller. As he loves his craft passionately, never stops making movies, and has long since resolved any production problems, he must invent difficulties and create new disciplines for himself to avoid boredom and repetition. His recent films are filled with fascinating constraints that he always overcomes brilliantly.
In this case, the challenge was to shoot a whole film in one single place, and solely from Stewart’s point of view. We see only what he sees, and from his vantage point, at the exact moment he sees it. What could have been a dry and academic gamble, an exercise in cold virtuosity, turns out to be a fascinating spectacle because of a sustained inventiveness which nails us to our seats as firmly as James Stewart is immobilized by his plaster cast.
In the face of such a film, so odd and so novel, we are liable to forget somewhat the stunning virtuosity; each scene by itself is a gamble that has been won. The effort to achieve freshness and novelty affects the camera’s movements, the special effects, decor, color. (Recall the murderer’s gold-framed eyeglasses lit in the dark only by the intermittent glow of a cigarette!)
Anyone who has perfectly understood Rear Window (which is not possible in one viewing) can, if he so wishes, dislike it and refuse to be involved in a game where blackness of character is the rule. But it is so rare to find such a precise idea of the world in a film that one must bow to its success, which is unarguable.
To clarify Rear Window, I’d suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.
—1954
John Robie (Cary Grant), an American thief who had worked in France before the war, had such a personal technique that each of his crimes bore his stamp, and he had been dubbed “the Cat.” Eventually caught and imprisoned, Robie, when the prison was accidentally bombed, took advantage of the situation. He escaped, joined the underground and eventually became a Resistance hero.
The film finds Robie some years later, when he has completely retired to a villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence to live in considerable comfort on the profits of his earlier career. His tranquility is soon spoiled by a series of jewel thefts in the great mansions and hotels of the French Riviera, thefts committed by someone as expert as he and in his style.
He falls under suspicion and his retirement and daily routine are disrupted. So the ex-Cat decides that the only way to get back his peace and quiet is to unmask the plagiarist burglar who has baffled the police. To track down his imitator he employs a dialectic Arsène Lupin would not disavow: “To unmask the new Cat, I must catch him in the act during his next theft; to figure out who his next victim will be (since “he” reasons by imagining himself in “my” place) all I have to do is imagine what I would once have done, or what I would do now if I were in his place; that is, in the final analysis, in my own place.” Naturally, Robie succeeds.
I have bothered to tell you the story line of To Catch a Thief in such detail to demonstrate that, in spite of appearances, once more Hitchcock remains absolutely faithful to his perennial themes: interchangeability, the reversed crime, moral and almost physical identification between two human beings.
Without wanting to reveal the outcome of To Catch a Thief, I am sure that it is no accident that Brigitte Auber resembles Grant and wears an identical striped jersey: blue-and-white for Grant, red-and-white for Auber. Grant’s hair is parted on the right, Auber’s on the left. They are look-alikes and opposites at the same time, so that there is a perfect symmetry throughout the work, a symmetry that carries over to the smallest details in the intrigue.
To Catch a Thief is not a black film, nor is there a lot of suspense in it. The framework is different from I Confess or Strangers on a Train, but the basics remain the same and the same relationships bind the characters to each other.
I mentioned Arsène Lupin before because this new film of Hitchcock’s is elegant, humorous, sentimental almost to the point of bitterness, somewhat in the manner of 813 or L’Aiguille Creuse. It is, of course, a crime story that is designed to make us laugh, but nonetheless Hitchcock’s basic idea led him to Jacques Becker’s formula in Touchez pas au Grisbi: the thieves are burned out. The protagonist, admirably portrayed by Cary Grant, is disillusioned, finished. This last job, which forces him to use all his skill as a burglar for the ends of a policeman, fills him with nostalgia for action. You may be surprised that I consider To Catch a Thief a pessimistic film, but you have only to listen to Georgie Auld’s and Lyn Murray’s melancholy music and watch Grant’s unusual performance.
As in Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, Hitchcock’s use of Grace Kelly is critical: here she embodies the character of a superb Yankee Marie-Chantal, and she’s the one who finally catches Grant by getting him to marry her.
I have read that To Catch a Thief has been criticized for its lack of realism. But André Bazin has pointed out the nature of Hitchcock’s relationship to realism:
Hitchcock does not cheat the spectator; whether it is a case of simple dramatic interest or of profound anguish, our curiosity is not compelled by a vagueness about what the threats are. It isn’t a question of mysterious “atmosphere” out of which all sorts of perils might emerge as from a shadow, but of an unbalance: a great mass of iron begins to slip on a smooth slope, and we can calculate quite easily how it will accelerate. The direction then becomes the art of showing reality only at those moments when the suspended perpendicular of the dramatic center of gravity is about to break away from its supporting polygon. Such direction disdains both initial shock and the final crash. For my part, I would certainly see the key to Hitchcock’s style—a style that’s so personal that we recognize it at first glance in even his most ordinary shots—in the wonderfully determinant quality of this unbalance.
To keep up this imbalance, which creates a nervous tension throughout a film, Hitchcock must obviously sacrifice all those scenes that would be indispensable in a psychological film (connections, exposition, climax), the more since it would obviously bore him to death to shoot them. He is inclined to neglect verisimilitude in his mysteries, and even to despise plausibility, especially since a whole generation of misguided viewers credits only plots that are “historically…sociologically…psychologically” plausible.
Alfred Hitchcock has in common with Renoir, Rossellini, Orson Welles and a few other great filmmakers the fact that psychology is the least of his worries. Where the master of suspense achieves realism is in the fidelity to the exactitude and the correctness of the effects within the most improbable scenes. In To Catch a Thief, three or four basic implausibilities leap out at the viewer, but never has there been such precision within each image.
Here is an entry from the record: After Hitchcock had returned to Hollywood to direct the studio scenes for To Catch a Thief, his assistants remained in France to film the “transparencies” on the Riviera. Here is the text of a telegram he sent from Hollywood to his assistant in Nice to have him redo a scene which would last two, or perhaps three, seconds at the most on screen:
DEAR HERBY: Have watched scene where auto avoids oncoming bus. Afraid it doesn’t work for following reasons: as we-the-camera take the curve the bus appears so suddenly that it is already past before the danger is realized. Two corrections: first: move along the long straight road with the curve at the end so that we are warned about the curve before we get there. When we reach the curve, we should be shocked to find autobus appearing and coming straight at us, because since the curve is narrow the bus should be on the left but we-the-camera should never take the curve straight. Second: in the projected shot, only half the autobus appears on the screen. I realize that this is due to the fact that you are swerving. This error can be corrected by keeping camera trained on the left so that at the same time as the auto takes the curve the camera can pan from left to right. All the rest of the shooting is breathtakingly beautiful. Regards to the whole crew. HITCH.
While it may be a minor film in the career of a man who knows better than all the others what he wants and how to get it, To Catch a Thief completely satisfies all his fans—the snobbiest and the most ordinary—and still manages to be one of the most cynical films Hitchcock has ever made. The last scene between Grant and Kelly is classic. It is a curious film that both renews Hitchcock and leaves him unchanged, an amusing, interesting film, very wicked about French police and American tourists.
—1955
Two and a half years ago, my friend Claude Chabrol and I met Alfred Hitchcock when we both fell into an icy pond at the Studio Saint-Maurice under the gaze, at first mocking and then compassionate, of the master of anguish. Because we were soaked, it was several hours before we were able to seek him out again with a new tape recorder. The first one had literally drowned; it was ruined.
It was an extremely concise interview. We wanted to persuade Hitchcock that his recent American films were much better than his earlier English ones. It wasn’t very hard: “In London, certain journalists want me to say that everything that comes from America is bad. They are very anti-American in London; I don’t know why, but it’s a fact.” Hitchcock spoke to us about an ideal film one would make for one’s own pleasure that could be projected on one’s living-room wall the same way one might hang a beautiful painting. We “worked” on this film together.
“Would this ideal film be closer to I Confess or to The Lady Vanishes?”
“Oh, to I Confess!”
“I Confess?”
“Yes, by all means. For example, right now I’m thinking over an idea for a film that attracts me very much. Two years ago, a musician from the Stork Club in New York, returning home after work at about two in the morning, was accosted by two men at his door who dragged him to a number of different places, including several bars. In each place they asked, ‘Is this the man? Is this the man?’ He was then arrested for several robberies. Although he was completely innocent, he had to go through a trial, and by its end his wife had lost her mind. She had to be institutionalized and is to this day. During the trial, one of the jurors, who was convinced of the defendant’s guilt, interrupted the defense lawyer as he was questioning one of the prosecution witnesses; the juror raised his hand and asked the judge, ‘Your honor, do we have to listen to all this?’ It was a small infringement of the ritual, but it caused a mistrial. As preparations were being made for a new trial, the real culprit was arrested and he confessed. I think this would make an interesting movie, if we showed everything from the point of view of the innocent man, what he has to go through, how his head is on the block for another man’s crimes. All the while, everybody is being very friendly, very gentle with him. He insists, ‘I’m innocent,’ and everybody answers, ‘Of course you are, sure you are.’ Completely horrible. I think I’d like to make a film from this news item. It would be very interesting. You see, in this movie, the innocent man would be in prison all the time, and a reporter or a detective would work to get him out. They never make films from the point of view of the accused man. I would like to do that.”
A year ago, we learned from the American newspapers that Hitchcock was in the process of making a film called The Wrong Man. One didn’t have to be a mind reader to figure out that it was based on the event we’d discussed.
Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and of English humor. There is very little suspense in it and almost no humor, English or otherwise. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock’s most stripped-down film since Lifeboat; it is the roast without the gravy, the news event served up raw and, as Bresson would say, “without adornment.” Hitchcock is no fool. If The Wrong Man, his first black-and-white film since I Confess, is shot inexpensively in the street, subway, the places where the action really occurred, it’s because he knew he was making a difficult and relatively less commercial film than he usually does. When it was finished, Hitchcock was undoubtedly worried, for he renounced his usual cameo in the course of the film, and instead showed us his silhouette before the title appeared to warn us that what he was offering this time was something different, a drama based on fact.
There cannot fail to be comparisons made between The Wrong Man and Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped). It would be foolish to assume that this would work to the detriment of Hitchcock’s film, which is sufficiently impressive right from the start not to have to beg for pride of place. The comparison is no less fascinating when pushed to its utmost, to where the divergences between the two movies cast a mutual light on each other.
The point of departure is identical: the scrupulous reconstruction of an actual event, its faithful rendering limited solely to the facts. For Bresson’s film is as far from the account of Commandant Devigny as Hitchcock’s is from the event reported in Life magazine. The reality, for both Hitchcock and for Bresson, was simply a pretext, a springboard for a second reality that is the only thing that interests them.
Since we are discussing the elements they have in common, we should point out that, faced with an identical problem, although they were seeking different solutions, Bresson and Hitchcock coincided on more than one point. For example, the acting. Just like Leterrier in Bresson’s film, Henry Fonda is impassive, expressionless, almost immobile. Fonda is only a look. If his attitude is more crushed and more humble than Bresson’s man who is condemned to death, it is because he is not a political prisoner who knows he has won to his cause half the world who thinks as he does, but an ordinary prisoner in criminal court, with all appearances against him and, as the film goes on, less and less chance of proving his innocence. Never was Fonda so fine, so grand and noble as in this film where he has only to present his honest man’s face, just barely lit with a sad, an almost transparent, expression.
Another point in common—indeed the most striking—is that Hitchcock has almost made it impossible for the spectator to identify with the drama’s hero; we are limited to the role of witnesses. We are at Fonda’s side throughout, in his cell, in his home, in the car, on the street, but we are never in his place. That is an innovation in Hitchcock’s work, since the suspense of his earlier films was based precisely on identification.
Hitchcock, the director who is most concerned about innovation, this time wants the public to experience a different kind of emotional shock, something clearly rarer than the famous shiver. One final common point: Hitchcock and Bresson have both built their films on one of those coincidences that make scrupulous screenwriters scream. Lieutenant Fontaine escapes miraculously; the stupid intervention of a hostile juror saves Henry Fonda. To this authentic miracle Hitchcock added another of his own making, and it will doubtless shock my colleagues. Fonda (in the film, he is of Italian descent and is named Balestrero) is lost. Waiting for his second trial, he cannot find any proof of his innocence. His wife is in a mental institution and his mother tells him, “You should pray.”
So Fonda kneels before a statue of Jesus Christ and prays—“My God, only a miracle can save me.” There is a closeup of Christ, a dissolve, and then a shot in the street that shows a man who somewhat resembles Fonda walking toward the camera until the frame catches him in a closeup with his face and Fonda’s superimposed. This is certainly the most beautiful shot in Hitchcock’s work and it summarizes all of it. It is the transfer of culpability, the theme of the double, already present in his first English movies, and still present in all his later ones, improved, enriched, and deepened from film to film. With this affirmation of belief in Providence—in Hitchcock’s work, too, the wind blows where it will—the similarities culminate and cease.
With Bresson there is a dialogue between the soul and objects, the relationship of the one to others. Hitchcock is more human, obsessed as always by innocence and guilt, and truly agonized by judicial error. As a motto to The Wrong Man he could have used this pensée of Pascal’s: “Truth and justice are two such subtle points that our instruments are too dull to reach them exactly. If they do reach them, they conceal the point and bear down all around, more on what is false than on what is true.”
Hitchcock offers a film about the role of the accused man, an accused man and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with documentaries except its appearance; in its pessimism and skepticism, I believe it is closer to Nuit et Brouillard than to André Cayatte’s films. In any case, it is probably his best film, the one that goes farthest in the direction he chose so long ago.
—1957
In 8½ someone tries to waylay Guido to propose a script that opposes nuclear arms. Like Fellini, I think that the “noble” film is the trap of traps, the sneakiest swindle in the industry. For a real filmmaker, nothing could be more boring to make than a Bridge on the River Kwai: scenes set inside offices alternating with discussions between old fogies and some action scenes usually filmed by another crew. Rubbish, traps for fools, Oscar machines.
Hitchcock has never won an Oscar, although he is the only living filmmaker whose films, when they are reissued twenty years after their first appearance, are as strong at the box office as new films. His last film, The Birds, is admittedly not perfect. Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are imperfectly matched, and the sentimental story (as almost always, husband hunting) suffers from it. But what an injustice there is in the generally bad reception. I am so disappointed that no critic admired the basic premise of the film: “Birds attack people.” I am convinced that cinema was invented so that such a film could be made. Everyday birds—sparrows, seagulls, crows—take to attacking ordinary people, the inhabitants of a seacoast village. This is an artist’s dream; to carry it off requires a lot of art, and you need to be the greatest technician in the world.
Alfred Hitchcock and his collaborator, Evan Hunter (Asphalt Jungle), kept only the idea of Daphne du Maurier’s short story: seaside birds take to attacking humans, first in the countryside, then in the town, at the exits of schools, and even in their homes.
No film of Hitchcock’s has ever shown a more deliberate progression: as the action unfolds, the birds become blacker and blacker, more and more numerous, increasingly evil. When they attack people, they prefer to go for their eyes. Basically fed up with being captured and put in cages—if not eaten—the birds behave as if they had decided to reverse the roles.
Hitchcock thinks that The Birds is his most important film. I think so too in a certain way—although I’m not sure. Starting with such a powerful mold, Hitch realized that he had to be extremely careful with the plot so that it would be more than a pretext to connect scenes of bravura or suspense. He created a very successful character, a young San Francisco woman, sophisticated and snobbish, who, in enduring all these bloody experiences, discovers simplicity and naturalness.
The Birds can be considered a special-effects film, indeed, but the special effects are realistic. In fact, Hitchcock’s mastery of the art grows greater with each film and he constantly needs to invent new difficulties for himself. He has become the ultimate athlete of cinema.
In actual fact, Hitchcock is never forgiven for making us afraid, deliberately making us afraid. I believe, however, that fear is a “noble emotion” and that it can also be “noble” to cause fear. It is “noble” to admit that one has been afraid and has taken pleasure in it. One day, only children will possess this nobility.
—1963
In contemporary London, a sex maniac strangles women with a necktie. Fifteen minutes after the film begins, Hitchcock reveals the assassin’s identity (we had met him in the second scene). Another man, the focus of the story, is accused of the murders. He will be watched, pursued, arrested, and condemned. We will watch him for an hour and a half as he struggles to survive, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
Frenzy is a combination of two kinds of movies: those where Hitchcock invites us to follow the assassin’s course: Shadow of a Doubt, Stage Fright, Dial M for Murder, Psycho…and those in which he describes the torments of an innocent person who is being persecuted: The Thirty-nine Steps, I Confess, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest. Frenzy is a kind of nightmare in which everyone recognizes himself: the murderer, the innocent man, the victims, the witnesses; a world in which every conversation, whether in a shop or a cafe, bears on the murders—a world made up of coincidences so rigorously ordered that they crisscross horizontally and vertically. Frenzy is like the design of crossword puzzle squares imposed on the theme of murder.
Hitchcock, who is six months older than Luis Buñuel (both are seventy-two), began his career in London, where he was born and where he made the first half of his films. In the forties he became an American citizen and a Hollywood filmmaker. For a long time, critical opinion has been divided between those who admire his American films—Rebecca, Notorious, The Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Birds—and those who prefer his English films: The Thirty-nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Jamaica Inn. Hitchcock’s fifty-second film, Frenzy, was a triumph at the Cannes Festival and reconciled both schools of critics, who acclaimed it unanimously, perhaps because it is the first film he’s made in Great Britain in twenty years. Hitchcock often says, “Some directors film slices of life, but I film slices of cake.” Frenzy indeed looks like a cake, a “homemade” cake by the septuagenarian gastronome who is still the “boy director” of his London beginnings.
Everybody praised the performances of Jon Finch as the innocent man and of Barry Foster as the strangler. I’d rather emphasize the high quality of the female acting. In Frenzy, for the first time Hitchcock turned away from glamorous and sophisticated heroines (of whom Grace Kelly remains the best example) toward everyday women. They are well chosen: Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, Vivien Merchant, and Billie Whitelaw, and they bring a new realism to Hitchcock’s work. The formidable ovation given Frenzy at the Gannes Festival redeems the contempt that greeted the presentations there of Notorious (1946), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1957) and The Birds (1963). Hitchcock’s triumph is one of style in recitative; here it has found its definitive form in a dizzying and poignant narration that never comes to rest, a breathless recitation in which the images follow one another as imperiously and harmoniously as the swift notes of the imperturbable musical score.
Hitchcock has long been judged by the flowers he places in the vase. Now we have at least realized that the flowers are always the same, and that his efforts are directed at the shape of the vase and its beauty. We come out of Frenzy saying to ourselves, “I can’t wait for Hitchcock’s fifty-third movie.”
—1973
*This text is a version of the preface to Charlie Chaplin (Editions du Cerf), a collection by André Bazin