Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

Roland Barthes had a column too; it was called “Mythologies” and ran regularly in Les Lettres nouvelles during the mid-1950s. In 1957, the columns were collected into a still-famous book by the same name, but Barthes continued to write “Mythologies” for a few years after the book’s publication. Recently, poking around in his Oeuvres complètes, I discovered that one of these late columns was on Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le Beau Serge, which Barthes saw on its February 1959 Paris release and which I happened to be just rewatching in Criterion’s crisp new digital restoration. I immediately “liked”—could not resist—the double accident whereby, having stumbled on an encounter between a favorite critic and a favorite auteur, I found myself viewing Le Beau Serge “at the same time” as Barthes. I might have learned of Barthes’s column on Le Beau Serge almost thirty years ago when Jonathan Rosenbaum offered some brief extracts from it in Sight and Sound (winter 1982–83); but I did not, and having missed my first opportunity I was determined to seize my second with a vengeance. Since Barthes’s essay was not available in English, I decided to turn over what might have been my column on Le Beau Serge to translating and annotating his.

I would have given a lot to have amputated Le Beau Serge from its story. I’m not even sure that this story has a meaning for its author. It almost seems that the plot becomes melodramatic because at bottom it doesn’t matter: truth lies in the style, the content being merely a concession. By a structural paradox, the essence of this narrative is nothing but an accident of its form; hence the total divorce between the truth of signs—the whole modern manner of looking precisely at the world’s surface—and the sham of themes and roles that absentmindedly recycle the crudest bourgeois folklore from Paul Bourget to Graham Greene. Now, a nonchalant way of looking can give rise to sarcasm or tenderness, in short, to truth; but a nonchalant relation to the subject matter yields only a lie. No art but film could survive this contradiction for long. The ingenuousness of the theme would speedily ruin the modernity of the form; what’s dreadful in cinema is that here the monstrous is viable. One might even say that at present our whole avant-garde thrives on this contradiction: true signs, false meaning.

All the surface detail of Le Beau Serge is dead-on (except when it sets out to render the story; the fake falling snow, for example): the fields, the village, the hotel, the square, the clothes, objects, faces, gestures, everything that subsists under the gaze, everything that is literal, everything that signifies an existence without signification, or whose signification is far removed from the consciousness of its participants. A fundamental elegance informs the film’s whole beginning; miraculously, nothing is produced, except the subtle contradiction of rural existence, pinched (as it must be to allow spectacle) by the sudden arrival of a young bourgeois in duffel coat and flutter scarf, who reads Cahiers du cinéma over bad bistro coffee. So long as it doesn’t give birth to the monster of the Anecdote, this delicate friction is exact, in other words, sensual. For my part, I would have gladly dispensed with the Sentiment; I would have been content to watch for hours the unfolding of this double existence sheltered in supremely intelligent signs; would have savored the minuteness of a description whose object was not the village itself (nothing more tiresome than rural realism involving a drunk), but rather this patient dialectic that unites the urbanity of the young dandy with the deformity of “Nature.” In sum, what’s good about this film is what one might call its microrealism, the subtlety of its choices; Chabrol has a power of getting things right. For example, in the soccer game that the children play in the street, he knows how to find the fundamental gestures, those that persuade us by what Claudel called the “explosion of the obvious.” Formally—in its descriptive surface—Le Beau Serge partakes of the Flaubertian.

The difference—a substantial one—is that Flaubert never wrote a story. With a profound understanding of his purposes, he recognized that the value of his realism lay in its insignificance; the world’s significance was that it signified nothing. The genius of Flaubert is the consciousness and the courage of this tragic deflation of signs and signifieds. By contrast, Chabrol, having put his own realism in place, proceeds to invest it with pathos and morality, in a word. whether he intends it or not, an ideology. But there is no innocent story; for over a hundred years, Literature has been wrestling with this fateful condition. With a touch both excessively ponderous and excessively casual, Chabrol refuses all restraint in storytelling; he narrates prodigiously, he produces a parable: you can save someone if you love him. But save him from what? What is wrong with Handsome Serge? Is it the fact that he has had a deformed first child? That he is a social failure? Or is his trouble more generally that of his village, which is dying from having, from being nothing? It is through the confusion of these questions, through the indifference to their answers, that art on the right defines itself, always invested in the separateness of human troubles, never in their connection. The peasant farmers drink. But why? Because they are poor, they have nothing to do. But why this poverty, this abandonment? Here, the investigation stops or evaporates; the peasants are no doubt essentially animals, that’s their nature. Obviously, we are not asking for a course in political economy on the causes of rural poverty culture. But an artist should know that he is wholly responsible for the finality he assigns to his explanations. There always comes a moment when art immobilizes the world, preferably as late in the work as possible. I call “art of the right” this fascination with immobility that causes the artist to describe outcomes without ever asking himself—I don’t say about their causes (art cannot be determinist), but about their functions.

The despair of Handsome Serge derives, in one way or another, from the overall social structure of France; that would be the foundation of an authentic art. And because a work of art is not a diagram, a balance sheet, or a political analysis, it is through the relations between characters that we grasp the totality of the world that has made them. In Visconti’s La terra trema, the relation between the two brothers takes on Sicilian capitalism at close quarters; and it is the weight of an entire society that crushes the impossible love between their sister and the young mason. Since Chabrol has chosen to give his characters merely psychological relations, his village remains in the realm of folklore. It’s a “human” drama, in a “particular” setting—a formula that expresses perfectly that inversion of the real which Marx described apropos of bourgeois ideology; in reality, it’s the drama that is “particular” and the setting “human.”

In sum, what the anecdote lets Chabrol evade is the real. Unwilling or unable to give his world a depth, a social geology on, say, the model of Balzac (the new cinema has only contempt for the “outmoded” ponderousness of engagé art), he nonetheless refuses Flaubertian askesis, the desert of a realism without signification. Too refined to accept “politics,” he is too complacent to give an ethical sense to this refusal. The melodrama (the hackneyed episode of the snowstorm-cum-childbirth) is an enormous bellows into which he has puffed his irresponsibility. To be good? Does Chabrol believe that there is no more to be said if only one wants to be? It’s when Chabrol’s film ends that the real problem begins. The task of being good is not absolved of its modalities, which are universally interdependent: no one can be good all alone. A shame that these young talents don’t read Brecht. They would find in him the image of an art that knows how to bring out a problem at the exact point that they believe they have done with it.

2. In 1959, this appraisal of a young director’s first film by an intellectual who had just begun making his own name must have possessed only passing interest. Barthes’s little-known essay was never collected during his lifetime, and Criterion is quite pardonably behindhand in getting around to Chabrol’s uneven debut. But now that, over the course of time, Barthes’s essay has come to register an early—and almost the only—encounter between two cultural monuments (the renowned critic, the legendary cineaste), what was merely unmomentous then must strike us as monumentally disappointing. The two brilliant figures, alas, met when neither was looking his best. If only Chabrol had been the Chabrol of La Femme infidèle or La Cérémonie; or if only Barthes had already written A Lover’s Discourse or Camera Lucida; then perhaps the critic would have recognized in the director another supreme analyst–practitioner of the unbearable porousness of intimate relations (see my earlier column on Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle).

3. Chabrol would have been the first to concur with Barthes’s judgment on Le Beau Serge, harsh as it is; he quickly came to say the same things about the film himself: it was “stupid,” and “its realist side” all that genuinely redeemed it. And as it happened, he was the first to concur, having rejected Serge’s redemptive theatrics before Barthes had written even a word against them. For on the very day that “Cinema Right and Left” appeared, Chabrol’s second film, Les Cousins, premiered on the Champs Elysées a couple of blocks down from where Le Beau Serge had been playing for a month. In this second film, Chabrol abandoned the Catholic humanism that irritated Barthes in the first, while retaining the wildly transferential intimacy—here configured as cousinhood rather than friendship—between the two protagonists, who, to drive the revisionist point home, were played by the same actors (Gérard Blin and Jean-Claude Brialy) used for Handsome Serge and what British English allows us to call his “mate,” the bourgeois intellectual François.

4. Unlike Barthes’s other mythologies, which either pitilessly lacerate their objects, or (more rarely) celebrate their charm, this one displays an ambivalence thanks to which its final dismissal of the film’s rhetorical swelling cranks out some comparably willful oompah: Visconti as an example of Brechtian cinema? It is as if nothing less vehement could muffle Barthes’s exceeding delight in the film’s descriptive surface. “Personally, I could have watched it forever”: is there a more unequivocal sign of fascination, of the essentially imaginary quality of what is somewhat disingenuously called “microrealism”? Speaking in a subjective voice, and moved by a desire to remake the film—dispensing with the Sentiment, amputating the Anecdote—Barthes is manifestly engaged in a fantasmatic activity, in protecting what is perhaps better named his own private Chabrol.

In doing so, he makes several striking mistakes, which only confirm the depth of his psychic investment. He collapses “what is good” in the film into its “first images,” its elegant pre-narrative “beginning”; it is there, he insists, that the delicate friction between bourgeois and rustic worlds is semiotically “sheltered” before being spoiled by the story (refugié: an odd word to employ for the function of signs, as though this function were to hide meaning, to install it in a sort of Alpine hut that the French do in fact call a refuge, where, in its gelid state, it would be safe from melting into expressivity). But the children play soccer a full forty minutes into the film, and the copy of Cahiers du cinéma (on the cover: Juliette Greco in The Sun Also Rises) appears on the café table almost twenty minutes after that. The film Barthes says he could have watched “for hours,” he did watch for one hour at least. And conversely, in his recollection, the film he must have enjoyed during this hour lasted for no more than a few minutes. It is as though there were something punctual about the pleasure he takes in the film: some single, half-traumatic, half-jouissant event that he is reluctant to see rise from the microrealist flatlands of insignificance to the embarrassingly explicit emotional peaks of melodrama. We cannot of course know what this event might be—being imaginary, it is perforce enigmatic—but some of the psychobiographical elements it picks up on are not, as Poe might say, “beyond all conjecture.” Since those first images that Barthes begins by recalling contain no soccer game, no Cahiers, and not even a duffle coat, it is worthwhile to ask: what do they show? Nothing, it seems, but the passage of a bus along a country road and, projected over a single piece of luggage strapped to the roof rack, the credits. What has Barthes seen in them?

5. En route to an answer, let me note that Barthes turned to Le Beau Serge a second time in a 1960 essay entitled “The Problem of Signification in Cinema.” Speaking there of how François’s social position is signified in the film (glasses = the intellectual, Cahiers = the cinephile) he once again praises the elegant manner in which Chabrol’s signifiers escape rhetorical emphasis. But in this “visual lexicon,” as he calls it, Barthes lists one item that goes unmentioned in “Cinema Right and Left,” though it belongs—and belongs only—to the film’s first images. This is a Swiss tag on François’s luggage. To see the tag at all requires sharp eyes, since it is hidden under the credits, but it owes to the same fact a certain semiotic privilege. For if we do notice it, it is together with the words of the title, Le Beau Serge; and this juxtaposition of Serge’s literal epithet and François’s not-just-literal baggage is our first instance of the delicate friction between the “handsome” peasant farmer, with his intimidating but sexually thrilling brutality, and the frail bourgeois intellectual who has been recently residing in a sanatorium for tuberculars. For it is François’ ill health that the Swiss tag (in this, very different from his Camille-like coughing in the snow) signifies with such admirable discretion. Barthes treats the sign to an even greater discretion as a reminder of the sanatoria (one in Leysin) to which another frail bourgeois intellectual—himself—lost a whole decade of his youth; in Le Beau Serge, François can at least compensate for former deprivation by adopting adolescent fashions (the flutter scarf), but in “Cinema Right and Left,” Barthes cannot even utter the word “young” without edging it with a sour sarcasm (“young talents,” “young bourgeois”). This is the cousinage that he might have recognized—and that his text, as if possessed of the psychic porosity of a Chabrolian character, or a Barthesian son, is expressing despite itself. In Barthes’s later thought, the Flaubertian “desert of signification” will evolve into the precious muting of meaning that he calls the Neuter; likewise, the photographic particulars he singles out here (the Swiss tag, the flutter scarf, the soccer game) are destined to be refined into the cognitively futile, but emotionally piercing, details he will name punctums, those unpredictable prickings that stab at what, for lack of a better word, we call the heart.

6. Barthes was no doubt prompted to offer his glibly concluding Marxist dicta by the same motive that impelled Chabrol to end his film with a facile religious melodrama of suffering and redemption; flashing such union cards—Les Lettres nouvelles in one case, Témoignage chrétien in the other—is perhaps the real necessity imposed on young talents, who thus shelter what might otherwise be spurned as an insufficiently socialized originality. To the early Barthes, taking positions on the left offered the security of being in the right; hence the compact, complacent, Voltaire-like tone of Mythologies; but hence, too, the militantly suppressed vulnerability whose release will be responsible for the anguished tonalities of his greatest work. That release is anticipated in “Cinema Right and Left.” The essay disappoints only because it fails to be a mythology like the others, straining to the breaking point a form that Barthes had both originated and perfected. Here, despite the difference of uniform so stimulative to militancy, Barthes lets himself be seduced by Chabrol into a strange and unexpected intimacy with his Other, a secret, shameful sharing that he can only express in the rhetorical swings from rapture to rupture, love to murder. He might almost be a character in a Chabrol thriller.

In the 1960 essay, Barthes adds this reflection to the inventory of signs characterizing François: “their unity lets it be understood that this young bourgeois intellectual is playing at a ‘role,’ with that slight emphasis on its signs which Sartre has analyzed in a famous page of Being and Nothingness, apropos of the café waiter.” Already, on second thought, Barthes begins to reassign to François the bad faith that, in his mythology, he blamed on Chabrol; it would be only the protagonist’s wish—a wish to act out the part he has taken on—that the melodrama is fulfilling. Already, Barthes seems to recognize the Chabrolian irony that betrays François’s grandstanding as just that. And a good thing, perhaps, for otherwise Chabrol must have had the last laugh. The film’s final image is a close-up of, precisely, Serge laughing … and laughing and laughing. At first, we understand his laughter simply, as an overflow of joy (the second son is born healthy), the laughter of one who has been “saved.” But in its unusual prolongation, it becomes more akin to the hysterics of a madman; and as the image blurs and blanches, even the Handsome Serge (whose teeth are a bit too prominent for this treatment) morphs into a death’s head, in anticipation of Hitchcock’s radiographic rendering of Mother/Norman’s grin at the end of Psycho. As Serge seems literally to have died from laughing, Barthes’s biting question gets revealed as, also, Chabrol’s: “save him from what?”