At the outset, a sinister story. That of a fellow named Paul Gégauff, who around 1955 was living in Barcelona, where he was serving as a straw man for a jewelry trafficker. In the unanticipated absence of his silent partner, Gégauff abandoned the local Ritz for more and more wretched hotels, which he left, one after the other, without paying his bill. Every day, the dandy who had become a bum walked eight kilometers on foot to the bank to pick up money that did not come. He was on the point of being forced to tie up the soles of his shoe with string. After four months, the payment of a large sum finally saved him. It was from this nightmare that Rohmer took his inspiration for a scenario for a feature film—for which he wrote even the dialogue, contrary to what we see in the credits. Gégauff merely listened to the dialogue imagined by Rohmer and “validated” it. His contribution consisted above all in inspiring the characteristics of the main character, his way of living at others’ expense while draping himself in a flamboyant phraseology.
The Gentleman Tramp
This dimension appears clearly in the first synopses of Sign of Leo. The model is recognizable, and so is the painter:
Paul loves his freedom more than anything. […] Is he lazy? It seems rather that he fears the slavery of a specific task. He believes in his destiny, but at the same time he feels an anguish that increases with age. He senses that a person like him is out of place in a modern society, and he has a sense of guilt that he conceals under cynical behavior. He congratulates himself for being good for nothing, likes to pass himself off as a buffoon, a spineless and frivolous character […]. He has real talent as a violinist, but has never made up his mind to work on his art and to play concerts. He has a friend who is his exactly symmetrical counterpart. François C…, a journalist who is as frugal as Paul is prodigal, as hard-working as Paul is negligent. But their friendship is solid. Each finds in the other his complement.1
From the start, then, we have the masculine couple who will be at the heart of the Moral Tales. On the one hand, the bon vivant who expends a disorganized energy; on the other, the voyeur who remains in the background while awaiting his time. Developed in Suzanne’s Career, La Collectionneuse, and even Pauline at the Beach, this autobiographical duo is less prominent in Sign of Leo, as is the satire of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés freeloaders, which was very present in the early versions of the scenario. While lingering on “Paul’s” buffooneries (a parody of academic discourse that he babbles sinisterly in his decline), Rohmer dissects like a cruel ethnologist the habits and customs of a tribe. The all-nighters in Pigalle, where one is received by an “enormous old woman” and a striptease artist “with saggy flesh.” The renunciations, once one has sobered up and it’s every man for himself. The temptations to steal the silver, or whatever might be valuable. The first versions of the scenario were written under the sign of cynicism, including the party that concludes the story, where Paul drowns his recovered fortune in alcohol. “Misery seems not to have left any mark on him, either physical or mental. He accepts good fortune as he accepted bad. Or more precisely he deserves both of them.”2 And Rohmer cites Euripides, as if the better to emphasize this ironic fatalism.
Had Sign of Leo followed this line, it would be situated somewhere between Marcel Carné’s Les Tricheurs and Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, in their disillusioned chronicling of postwar generation that had lost its landmarks and its beliefs. There were to remain only a few traces of this line, like the surprise party that occupies the first third of the film, in which a few failed bohemians are timidly mocked. For example, the character Fred, a would-be artist played by Paul Crauchet, who is the scoffing observer of this whole little world adrift (in this respect as well, the earlier versions of the dialogue went further in dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s: “Are you a musician, too?” “No, I’m a painter.” “You are? Do you exhibit?” “I must have painted my last canvas, wait…it will be five years ago this July”3). Or that already very well-known unknown person (Jean-Luc Godard), who listens over and over to the same fragment of a Beethoven quartet, as if to give material form to the fetishist deviation of the relationship to art. These private jokes are scattered throughout this sequence (some of them can hardly be deciphered now), but it expresses, like the café arguments that punctuate the film, Rohmer’s vaguely disgusted view of this hollow period in his life.
And of Gégauff as well. His somewhat diabolical aura remains present here and there. Jean Parvulesco (who is himself cited in Sign of Leo, with the allusion to a tall, bald Romanian named Radesco who engages in shady deals) later recalled this deliberately inflammatory figure: “Gégauff took the lead. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he shot a pistol into the ceiling! But our life was very simple: when we didn’t know where we could sleep, we went to a hotel, and we left in the morning without paying.”4 Pierre Cottrell confirms this with greater precision: “Gégauff did crazy stuff! During a dinner with Rohmer and Truffaut, he shot a revolver at the chandelier in the Royal Saint-Germain (the future Drugstore)…Rohmer never reproached him for this, he accepted all his extravagances.”5 To the point of citing them almost literally in his film: the nighttime rifle shot aimed at Venus, and when dawn came, his antics to avoid the hotel owner. Like his faith in astrology, which he knows little about and which seems also to be inspired by Gégauff: an empirical and emphatic way of “trusting in his star” (located in his case in the constellation of Leo) in order to sublimate the accidents of fate.
In other respects, Rohmer sought to erase everything that might make it possible to identify him too closely with Gégauff. Whereas the first synopses were explicit (“Rotten with gifts, he neglected to deepen any of them. He once published a collection of short stories and a few articles and gave a violin recital. But he was an unstable person who believed only in his lucky star”6), the film shows only an intermittently inspired musician. For the Paul lost in the no-man’s-land of Barcelona (and whom Rohmer decided not to play himself), the film substitutes an American lost in Paris: Pierre Wesserlin, played by Jess Hahn. He is also a bon vivant. But the sudden disappearance of all friends and all money leads toward a sort of silent Way of the Cross.
The reason is that Rohmer was interested less in the anecdote than in the parable. An expiatory parable, perhaps, through which he exorcised the “idle youth enslaved to everything”7 that had been both his and Gégauff’s. This was another reason to hide his sources, sometimes at the risk of a certain schematism in the conduct of the narrative. How can we explain, for instance, the abrupt departure of Pierre’s girlfriend as soon as summer begins? The first manuscripts were more precise on this point, having a furious father come to get his daughter. How are we to understand that it never occurs to Pierre, in the course of his slow and certain decline into dereliction, to bail himself out by becoming a porter at Les Halles? These implausibilities decrease the fable’s credibility, especially since they are followed by rather crude transitions (a journalist friend’s expedition to the Sahara, reduced to a meager montage of stock shots) or disorienting shifts in tone (the final episode with Jean Le Poulain doing his great number as a lyrical beggar). They were to have, as we will see, a significant effect on the critical reception of Sign of Leo. They would have been better understood by avoiding a naturalistic interpretation: the very one that could still be applied to Chabrol’s or Truffaut’s first works. In his first full-length film, Rohmer did not seek so much to describe a social reality as to recount a spiritual itinerary.
This itinerary involves an element dear to Gégauff: music. But there, too, Rohmer seeks to cover his tracks, making his protagonist a composer for the violin. Sketched out straightaway, then abandoned, the musical theme returns at regular intervals—as if to manifest the persistence of a faithfulness to itself. A kind of underground advance that contradicts the misfortune in which the character seems to be mired. At the same time, Rohmer avoids giving this theme any kind of illustrative or sentimental value. He asked the avant-garde composer Louis Saguer (whom he had met through Jean-Louis Bory), to write something for him in the style of Bartok:
So he composed a score…that wasn’t exactly serial, but whose tonality was not classic. And he did this after having only read the scenario, recounting the walk through Paris taken by a man doomed to become a bum. His music is very beautiful! I wanted it to be present throughout the film, and I am grateful to him for having encouraged me to forgo it at certain junctures…For example, when Jess Hahn walks down the rue Mouffetard, he advised me to use only the sound of his steps.8
Regarding this musical motif, we could speak of a melody that is looking for itself through stridency, that follows its path obscurely, no matter what the interruptions, hesitations, or misfires. From this point of view, as promulgated by “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre” (and as his book De Mozart en Beethoven was to repeat), in Rohmer music becomes the language of being, in its conflict with material contingencies. As in his theoretical writings, it proves to be the “true sister” of cinema—since these two arts are both founded on time and movement. The throbbing solo of the violin corresponds to Pierre’s incessant walk for his survival. As if the true subject of the film were the unrolling of the celluloid that overflows a stone setting: the deserted Paris of the month of August, frozen in its clichés for tourists and its impassive monuments.
At the heart of this postcard configuration, the character of Pierre Wesserlin incarnates an unprecedented faith. It is no longer the Christian faith (even if the crossing of the desert of Stromboli remains Rohmer’s great inspiration). And no doubt it is not faith in astrology, which is no longer much more than an illusion and the occasion for a fit of outrageousness (the shot aimed at Venus), for which the protagonist will be punished. The faith that governs the film seems to be based entirely on the powers of cinema: movement through which an individual detaches himself from a city that has become a mausoleum, the better to affirm his own vitality and also the act of viewing. The fresh way of seeing that Wesserlin, through the very fact of his decline, imposes on beings and things: birds taking flight over the Seine, the shimmering of the sun on the surface of the water. Rohmer’s first great film is not only a postscript to “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre” that takes the place of a program for the work to come; above all, it tells us (with many detours) about the birth of the filmmaker’s vocation.
The Last Laugh
More than anything, the auteur of Sign of Leo likes to conceal his cinematic origins (which clearly distances him from Truffaut and Godard). These origins nonetheless inspire, at the heart of the narrative, discreet homage to artists admired in his youth, like Marcel Carné, whom the July 14 scene cites explicitly, with his superhuman bus straight out of Hôtel du Nord, or others he still admired, like Murnau, whose The Last Laugh was the matrix of the present film just as much as Stromboli was. In his own way, Rohmer returned to the radicalness of the German Kammerspiel by choosing to reduce the anecdote to the essential. In The Last Laugh, a porter in a grand hotel loses his privileges before recovering a miraculous fortune. In Sign of Leo, a Left Bank bohemian loses all social dignity before an incredible final dramatic reversal. In Rohmer as in Murnau, the ambition is immense: to film an individuality that is defined only in solitude. And the silence is even more deafening in the 1959 film, because sound films had existed for thirty years.
To meet this challenge, Rohmer called upon a historic figure in French cinema: Nicolas Hayer, who had been head camera operator for Jean Cocteau, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Christian-Jaque. Should we see in this as a vague expressionist temptation? We might think so on seeing Jess Hahn come down a stairway striped with long shadows (in the great tradition of Le Corbeau). To do so would be to forget that Hayer had just worked for Jean-Pierre Melville, who convinced Rohmer to hire him by talking about his “logical” conception of light. Even if it is less advantageous for actors and actresses, the source of light has to be justified. To the conventional methods (which consisted of using a bank of overhead spotlights), Hayer preferred a diffuse, indirect lighting based on reflectors, which he was to use for Sign of Leo (and which Nestor Almendros was to adopt for Rohmer’s later films). The apparatus remained rather heavy, but it responded to the New Wave’s desire for simplicity. Philippe Collin, Rohmer’s second assistant on this film, recalls Hayer as the “great Russian lord.” But Hayer “began to be unhappy because people swore only by Henri Decaë (not yet Raoul Coutard, because he made Breathless six months later!). It was marvelous to see this guy who had had the most extensive equipment and who now made it a point of honor to do without it: at night, he lit the boulevard with three floodlights, and told me: ‘Your friend Decaë wouldn’t dare do that.’ Another evening, at the bottom of the rue Mouffetard, he hooked up his three floodlights and said to me: ‘I filmed Trois Télégrammes here with Henri Decoin. On each balcony, I had an arc light. But it was just as good that way, you could see just as much.’ There was at the same time humor, a little nostalgia, a prodigious technical knowledge…and a more sensitive film.”9
The Spirit of the New Wave
From the point of view of the conditions of filming, Sign of Leo is indeed a product of the New Wave. First of all because of these voluntary financial constraints. Made under the auspices of AJYM (a production company established by Chabrol to support his comrades’ debuts), the film was made with the materials at hand—with the sounds of airplanes in interior scenes, reflections of the technical team in the display windows of shops, pals recruited at the last minute to make up for the lack of actors. For example, Chabrol’s new girlfriend (Stéphane Audran) and his delegate producer (Roland Nonin) playing implausible proprietors, vociferously demanding their money from a disoriented Jess Hahn. The latter’s trajectory is peopled by these more or less recognizable figures, who without looking like it, reconstitute the friendly constellation of the new cinema. Marie Dubois exchanges banalities on the terrace of a café, Françoise Prévost cultivates a sphinx-like silence, traveling companions (Jean Douchet or Pierre Rissient) melt into the anonymity of the crowd. “I went to see the filming two or three times,” Rissient writes. “In particular, at a café on the Champs-Élysées, the Lord Byron. I must be visible from the back somewhere in that sequence. The extras (or the passersby) mixed with the technical team, it all remained very informal, very convivial.”10
A small budget? Certainly (the film was made for 35 million old francs [about $70,000] in forty-five days, between June and August 1959). In addition, there was Rohmer’s thriftiness, already legendary. On the shoot, he was nicknamed “Court-au-flan” (“Run for the flan”) because he spent his time running and eating cakes. And it is said that he had a taxi stop in front of a certain hotel on the Champs-Élysées and then took a side exit and disappeared without paying. So many marks from past years that accompanied this film of farewells to bohemian life. But this thriftiness was also an ethics: faithful to the program he had set for himself (“[to] find his style in the texture of the real itself”11) Rohmer refused to fabricate a show. He made do. With what he had at hand, with the imponderables and accidents of everyday life. Les Deux Magots is not available? No matter, we’ll film in a Latin Quarter café that has the same chairs. Do parked cars clutter up the frame? We’ll move the camera. The street Jess Hahn is crossing is suddenly deserted (because a man has just jumped out of a window, drawing all the attention of passersby)? Let’s take advantage of that to film the shot.
No hesitations, no time lost. It was in the same spirit that Rohmer abandoned his initial idea of filming in Cinemascope. Or refused to do take after take, to the dismay of his camera operator, Pierre Lhomme: “It shocked me a great deal that we made only one take, in the event that it wasn’t good—but Rohmer referred to destiny. If a shot wasn’t the way he wanted it to be, that was because it couldn’t be. I told him: ‘Éric, we almost have what you wanted, let’s do a second take and you’ll be happy. At least you’ll be able to choose.’ That annoyed him. Toward the end of the filming, I got my way because a trust had been formed between us.”12 There again we can see the fear of wasting film. This was also a kind of “wager,” both superstitious and Pascalian, through which Rohmer transcended his fears of filming and the (future) montage. But this act of faith in the moment was inseparable from a belief in the real as the raw material of cinematic experience.
In this sense, Sign of Leo is a fiction film that is almost indistinguishable from a documentary. First of all, a documentary on Paris, which Rohmer showed more concretely than any other filmmaker, even the representatives of the New Wave. Far from the adolescent or amorous romanticism that continue to imbue The Four Hundred Blows and Breathless, Rohmer filmed the city as an opaque setting, as a mass of impenetrable if not hostile stone. Far (this time) from the artifices of Hôtel du Nord, he took his team to a real July 14 dance, which Nicolas Hayer lit as best he could, and recruited an unknown woman on the spot to play a role: Macha Gagarine (soon renamed Macha Méril). That was one of the great audacities of this Sign of Leo, in which Rohmer concealed reminiscences of Murnau under a cinema vérité in the manner of Jean Rouch. In it he asks the man in the street to come check his scenario, for instance in the sequence of the theft committed by the main character at a grocer’s stall. Since only the actor and a few extras knew what was going on, the vehement quarrel that followed had every appearance of being real. Not to forget Jess Hahn’s claim to have been an adventurer and a bum, which probably inspired (along with his American accent, his imposing build, and his loud voice) the choice of this unusual actor.
This impure mixture of registers was to become the most distinctive mark of Rohmer’s style. From the outset, it appears as a deliberate commitment that Rohmer strongly reaffirmed in response to questions asked by his friend Parvulesco:
I never cheated with Paris geography, or with the time of day, with my camera (or sometimes cameras) always hidden from passersby. […] In general, in this film I tried […] to achieve a perfect harmony between the performance of the professional actors and that of the passersby […]; a pure documentary uses true elements, but by juxtaposing them without a genuine unity, it does not attain the “truth of art,” while a film that is “rigged” (by the studio, the use of actors, etc.) will attain only a conventional truth. What interested me was to avoid the problems and combine the merits of the two methods, and what encouraged me most was the very great difficulty of the enterprise. I don’t know whether I fully succeeded, but I think that at least at certain points I introduced the rigor indispensable for a work of art into the freedom of the real recorded live.13
An Anti-filmmaker
“The very great difficulty of the enterprise.” The expression seems inadequate to describe the failures of communication between Rohmer and the participants in his film. From his point of view, it was fascination that prevailed on seeing this text that he had found so hard to write performed by an actor (amateur or professional). From the actor’s point of view, it was a relative frustration that prevailed, that of being less an actor than an object of the camera’s gaze. Regarding Rohmer’s nondirection of his actors, one anecdote will remain legendary. The night when the walk to Pigalle was filmed, the director and his team got into a car that followed another full of actors who were supposed to make a hell of a racket. They were getting ready to start filming when the actors turned to Rohmer. “But tell us, what are we supposed to do?” they asked. “Act, act!!!” he replied. “There was nothing to do,” Philippe Collin commented. “They just had to act like jerks.”14
In reality, Rohmer simply asked his actors to be, just like nature or architecture, at the risk of a total absence of diplomacy in his way of speaking to them. If a new actress playing a secondary role wanted to know how to dress, he limited himself to checking, in front of her, the instructions in the scenario: “ ‘She is dirty and badly turned out,’ you’re fine the way you are.” If an extra made so bold as to ask: “Since the film is in black and white, should I put on a colored shirt?” “Oh! You know, you can do what you want. If I take you on, it will be to fill out the frame.” This casualness extended to his technical collaborators. Walking down the avenue de la Grande-Armée alongside the camera operator, the director spoke to him (with the staccato volubility that characterized him) about the shot to be filmed: the one in which Jess Hahn has to walk home from his miserable expedition to Nanterre. An indefatigable talker and an excellent runner, Rohmer went so fast that Pierre Lhomme had to hurry—to the point that he ran into a lamppost. When Lhomme caught up with Rohmer, the latter was still talking as though nothing had happened. They rejoined the members of the team, who were stupefied to see the young man’s face bleeding. Neither he nor Rohmer had noticed.
According to Claude-Jean Philippe, Rohmer was later described by the first assistant on the film, Jean-Charles Lagneau, as “an absolutely ridiculous director. That was his view, and he was a professional.”15 More kindly, Pierre Lhomme recalled Rohmer hurrying to Notre-Dame because he had taken an ordinary piece of crumpled paper (thrown into the Seine to meet the needs of the action) for a signal. Or confining himself in a perpetual monologue that did little to clarify his intentions. Thus we can understand why the weakest sequence is also the most complex: the surprise party, where couples meet and exchange couplets. However, it benefits from the use of direct sound (unlike the rest of the film, which was made with a shoulder-held camera that was easier to handle outside). “Rohmer had never seen a silent Éclair 300 camera,” Pierre Lhomme writes. “He was very impressed, and for once he wanted to look through the viewfinder. On the back of this camera, there is a button controlling the shutter. He put his eye to it, thinking it was the viewfinder!”16
On the screen, this sequence proved to be strangely stiff. The ballet of bodies and desires looked like a depressing wax museum. It was as if Rohmer had suddenly become uneasy when he had to direct a scene with several characters instead of filming Jess Hahn’s solitary wandering around Paris. This had to do with his hatred of artifice and at the same time with a persistent timidity—which prevented him from communicating clearly with his actors, of asserting himself as a “group leader” in the traditional sense of the term. “He realized,” Pierre Rissient explains, “that he was not made to direct scenes with lots of actors. In La Collectionneuse he went to the opposite extreme. I think his best camera angle is not intersecting fields but (on the basis of a dialogue) face-to-face fields that oppose or confront one another. He is not a filmmaker of the sequence shot or the wide-angle shot.”17 Neither was he a filmmaker with a preestablished storyboard, with a script that controls everything, and very precise duty sheets. These were constraints that production imposed on him here, as in the time of Les Petites Filles modèles, and that he was to find a way to dispense with later on.
A Cursed Film?
It’s clear: Rohmer was not (and never would be) a great communicator. Neither with his technical team nor with the few journalists who visited the shoot—and with whom he absolutely refused to talk. If we except one or two previews in Cahiers (in which the libertine aspect of the film is sometimes emphasized, sometimes its mystical import), Sign of Leo did not meet with the odor of sulfur and the murmur of impatience that surrounded the birth of Breathless. To be sure, in private the film elicited laudatory commentaries, like that of (precisely) the director of Breathless, which was made immediately afterward (the two filmmakers even considered “slipping” their main characters into each other’s films!). Between two montage sessions, Godard attended a confidential showing of Sign of Leo at Joinville’s laboratories. To his editor Cécile Decugis, who was enthusiastic about the beauty of the scenes shot around Notre-Dame, he replied by indicating his own rushes: “Yes, it’s better than that. Besides, Rohmer is one of the two or three most intelligent Frenchmen.” A remark that she reported to Rohmer fifteen years later and that bowled him over. Of course, on the basis of the title, Chabrol was able to sell this Leo somewhere in Africa. But no French distributor agreed to buy such a bizarre thing, being put off by the directorial awkwardness and the austerity of the central part (a lone man, walking through Paris for almost an hour)—in contrast to the juvenile and sentimental themes that guaranteed the success of the New Wave.
Made in the summer of 1959, in the spring of 1962 Rohmer’s first feature film had still not been distributed. In the course of the three years, he had only one friendly showing at the Cinémathèque française (and even then it was booed). There were also a few laudatory articles by Pierre Marcabru and Jean Douchet. Finally, the film was (marginally) distributed in a truncated version, under conditions that Rohmer denounced, but a little late. The management of AJYM had been entrusted to the not very scrupulous Roland Nonin, whom Chabrol subsequently accused of having “made off with the cash drawer.”18 In June 1959, Nonin sent Rohmer a draft contract in which we find the following clause: “We will have the right, for compelling reasons, such as legal or administrative orders, the length of the film, the requirements of French or foreign censors, or commercial necessity, to make cuts, both in the course of shooting and during the editing of the film or in the course of its distribution. You accept, without reserves, the present article and commit to not hinder the distribution of the modified film.”19
Did Rohmer sign this one-sided contract? He probably did, even if it was accompanied by a standard formula: “in very precise circumstances, and on the condition that the director has previously given his complete accord, a second version may be prepared, based on a copy of the film, and distributed, concurrently with the first, in a part of the circuit clearly delimited in advance.”20 In any event, in the autumn of 1960 Rohmer was worried when he learned that his film had been re-edited. He contacted the company that was supposed to do the mixing, which referred him to AJYM Films. He then turned to the Centre nationale de la cinématographie (since it was the long version of Sign of Leo that had obtained an authorization and even a subsidy). The litigation office declined any responsibility so long as this new version had not been put into circulation. In May 1962, the film finally came out as Rohmer had conceived it, but letters exchanged with Roland Nonin allow us to glimpse a compromise. Nonin concedes that “it is understood that your version will be shown at La Pagode, in the art and trial cinemas, and in film clubs. In other venues, the choice of version will be left up to the management, and we assure you that no pressure will be exercised to make it choose the other version over yours.”21
In the end, this other version did indeed circulate in the cinephile network. An indignant letter from Jean-Louis Laugier (to the editors of Cahiers) proves that it was shown in Locarno, and that the cuts concerned chiefly the “high-society” part of the film, making the walk through Paris a disproportionately long part of the film. Reduced to a running time of one hour and twenty-five minutes, deprived of Louis Saguer’s austere music (which was replaced by motifs from Brahms and César Franck), this version of Sign of Leo had a career long enough to lead Rohmer to disavow it whenever he had an opportunity to do so. Invited in 1966 to a Finnish festival on the new French cinema, he agreed to show his film only in the cut he claimed:
This version is not the one that the Cinémathèque française owns and that it lends, despite my disapproval, to the Cultural Exchange office. […] It is therefore important that you make it clear that you insist on having the long version, […] of which there now exists only one copy. […] You will understand that after having fought for many years, at Cahiers du cinéma, to defend a cinéma d’auteur and the auteur’s rights to his work, I cannot in any way authorize the showing of a version of my film that has been, despite my wishes and without my knowledge, truncated and altered.22
Despite my wishes and without my knowledge? That is not entirely clear. But in 1966, the time when concessions had to be made was probably only a bad memory.
The Sign of the Cross
The complete version of Sign of Leo thus came out in May 1962 at La Pagode, accompanied by a short (Mayola, by Nicolas Schöffer) and a high-flown press release that repeated a few formulas we have already found in Rohmer’s work: “This is a film about an adventure, about pure physical action. But instead of taking place on a desert island, or in the frozen wastes of the North Pole, it is set in a large city […]. We tried to present it without trickery, without cheating with the geography or the hour of the day: the camera was always concealed.”23 That is precisely a constraint from which the filmmaker was to learn to free himself in his future urban films. For the time being, an effort was made to hide beneath the sheen of the spectacular (or the style of reporting) everything that might be repellent or radical in the film. For his part, Jean Douchet indulged in an enthusiastic exercise in autosuggestion: “I am delighted that distribution difficulties prevented Éric Rohmer’s Sign of Leo from being shown earlier. Only the audience’s evolution, an evolution seen over the past three years, made it possible to appreciate the true value of this austere, difficult, and detached film made in 1959, which I consider one of most important of the New Wave.”24
However, it was the New Wave’s biggest commercial failure—though it came at the end. Hardly five thousand tickets were sold. And among the spectators (Michel Mardore was to write) there was always someone who yelled at Jess Hahn on the screen, telling him to get a job at Les Halles. What made people uneasy was both the main character’s indolence and the implausibility of the situation (right down to the final reversal). A failure of both identification and belief that a certain Bachollet, a former friend from Sainte-Barbe, making himself the interpreter of the vox populi, conveyed in no uncertain terms: “I was bored stiff. People had told me: ‘It’s interesting, but…,’ in short, I’d been warned. But I owed it to you to go see it because people also said no producer would ever bet on you again. I wasn’t bored stiff because we watch people dialing telephone numbers all the way to the end, etc. No, it was the characters who bored me. Their fate didn’t interest me at all, except for one or two guests at the party about whom I’d have liked to know more.”25
Among critics, the most common reproach concerned those notorious phone numbers dialed all the way to the end. Or to put it another way, the monotony of a narrative that forgoes any kind of dramatic effect: that is Georges Charanesol’s point of view in Les Nouvelles littéraires. At the other end of the journalistic spectrum, Bernard Dort (in France Observateur) shares the good sense of his friend from Sainte-Barbe. He too deplores the insignificance of the pale secondary characters, who are there only to emphasize Pierre Wesserlin’s torment. But it was above all the Christian dimension that annoyed him, as did the Hitchcockian symbol of the evil eye: “Confronted by the failure […] of these films by Rohmer and Chabrol, I cannot refrain from asking another question: here and there, doesn’t the deliberate choice of a metaphysical problematics, the predilection for evil and guilt, betray, ultimately, an inability and a refusal to look the concrete reality of our society in the face?”26
If other critics chose to defend Sign of Leo, it was in the name of that same metaphysical problematics. That shows how much the New Wave remained, in 1962, at the heart of an ardent ideological debate between the partisans of politically engaged cinema and those of the “true values” of religion or tradition. In Cahiers du cinéma, it was a young critic named François Weyergans who was the latter’s standard-bearer: he wrote a lyrical piece celebrating the expiation and purification to which Rohmer subjected his protagonist. Soon, still in Cahiers, Claude Beylie hammered home the nails in the cross: “Sign of Leo is perhaps nothing other than an abbreviated version of the cruel legend of a fall and a redemption, of grace refused and then granted to man, of his wretchedness and his grandeur, of his death and his resurrection.”27 Not surprisingly, Sign of Leo was ranked fifth in Cahiers’ selection of the ten best films of 1962. Even and especially if its editor in chief was…Éric Rohmer. A fellow traveler (Philippe d’Hugues, alias Philippe de Cômes) devoted a detailed study to the film in the very royalist Nation française. He entitled it “Les ‘hitchcockiens’ attaquent” (probably countering the title of Dort’s article: “À la remorque de Hitchcock” [In Hitchcock’s wake]). Like other critics, he compared Sign of Leo with Agnès Varda’s Cleo de 5 à 7—but the better to emphasize the soberness found in Rohmer’s film, so different from the “rowdy, superficial characteristics” to which people wanted to reduce the New Wave. He described the author of “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre” as “a revolutionary in love with classicism, the only one who sought in his writings, as in this first film, to rediscover at the outset the sources of an artistic tradition in order to receive and enrich its heritage.”28
On the extreme right of La Nation française (if that is possible), we find Jean Parvulesco, who found it easy to exploit the esoteric allusions in Leo in order to indulge in one of the mad interpretations that Rohmer’s “solar cinema” regularly inspired in him: “How can we forget […] that in Leo, a spiritual hymn instructing the West’s occult marriage with the resplendent milieu of sunlight, it is the absolutely solar countenance of Michèle Girardon that attracts us, hypnotically, into the very center of the mystery of the end of darkness and night?”29 Not content with this enigmatic gloss, Parvulesco makes his friend talk (like the pedestal table in Suzanne’s Career), putting into his mouth polemical remarks that are rather surprising when one knows the proverbial prudence Rohmer observed as a filmmaker. Thus in an interview that seems to have remained unpublished (and that dates from the time of the “purgatory” in which the film was held), he has Rohmer say that Sign of Leo could not please the audience of the Champs-Élysées, which loved strong feelings, but that it would please audiences in a country like Spain (that is, Franco’s Spain, where Parvulesco was still living in exile), a country “that dislikes—and that is its right—the systematic immorality of some French films.”30 This passage was struck out by Rohmer. He also struck out (and commented on with an exclamation point) the conclusion of a paragraph in which he rejected precisely any political interpretation of his film. Here are the words Parvulesco put in Rohmer’s mouth: “I believe that one can intervene effectively in social and political development only through the direct, lucid action of certain concentrated, monolithically unitary groups following precise strategic and tactical lines; these groups can act for or against order, for chaos or for God.”31
However, in this document Parvulesco sent him, there is one profession of faith that he did not strike out. He would no doubt have done so had the interview been published in France, because he kept his distance (at least when he was behind the camera) from any too explicit profession of faith. “I am a Catholic. I believe that a true cinema is necessarily a Christian cinema, because there is no truth except in Christianity. I believe in the genius of Christianity, and there is not a single great film in the history of cinema that is not infused with the light of the Christian idea.”32 One would think we had returned to the time of Cahiers, when Rohmer was celebrating this “genius of Christianity” in the Rossellini of Europe 51. But (as Rossellini might have done) he took care to qualify the solemnity of his declaration by adding: “A mystical cinema? Yes, if it is true that a clear grasp of immanence leads to transcendence.”33 Blessed be the critics who were capable of reading between the lines of this demand.
A Modern Cinema
In this text, Rohmer claims to adhere above all to a contemplative cinema inspired by Nicholas Ray as much as by Renoir and Rossellini. That shows how much he associates this idea (“paint the state rather than the action”34) with that of modernity. If a spiritual truth can be revealed, it necessarily comes through the rediscovered truth of cinematic representation. It even merges with the latter, is lost in it to the exclusion of any intentional message. That is seen very clearly by Philippe d’Hugues when he discerns in Sign of Leo “the phenomenon in a pure state,”35 relieved of metaphorical winks and making us think of the Camus of L’Étranger (a parallel also made by Michel Capdenac in Les Lettres françaises). This phenomenological interpretation gave rise to a lively debate among the writers at Radio-Cinéma-Télévision. Whereas Jean Collet claims to decipher the moral aim that underlies Rohmerian realism, Jacques Siclier takes the opposite view. For him, Sign of Leo is essentially a study of behavior: its logic is that of description, not religious interpretation. André S. Labarthe goes still further. In the motif of the walk he sees only the experience recounted in the film. A pure experience, which is related to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau Roman and echoes Roland Barthes: “Here, the novel [Labarthe is citing Barthes] teaches us to see the world no longer with the eyes of the confessor, the physician, or God, those significant hypostases of the classical novelist, but rather with those of a man who is walking through the city without any horizon other than what is to be seen, without any power other than that of the eye itself.”36 We find here the apprenticeship of the eye that is perhaps the true subject of Sign of Leo. Beyond the invocation of a god, or of absent gods, there is the contemplation of things as they are. Rohmer (who did not much like the Nouveau Roman) makes this contemplation the foundation of modern cinema.
He is an unexpected witness to this modernity, to behaviorism intransigently applied to the movie screen. Marcel L’Herbier, a member of the old guard, addressed a friendly salute to Rohmer across the generations, inviting the “young” filmmaker to speak about his unreleased film on television. But the day after the first showing, it was Nino Frank, the former brilliant critic of the 1930s, who wrote him a moving letter.
If I absolutely had express an opinion, I think that—very demagogically—I would have said that the spectators of this film would be of two kinds: those who have never been hungry, and those who have—and that the judgments the latter might make (which would be primarily affective…) would not coincide at all with the ones made by the former!…For my part, I could not count myself among those who have been hungry…And that amply justifies how much I was upset, and the friendly, admiring handshake I offer you here […]. You must know Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which is already not bad. Your film seemed to me much more sincere and poignant.37
Did Rohmer know this novel? Much later, he considered adapting the same author’s novel Mysteries. What is certain is that he had experienced hunger during the lean years on rue Victor-Cousin and that Nino Frank divined an implicit autobiographical content that the director sought to mask. Whatever his reticence and his fears might be, this has to do with the extraordinary frankness of Rohmer’s style. In the course of an hour, Sign of Leo develops a pathetic odyssey: that of a man abandoned by everyone, whose survival consists in mechanical acts (walking as long as possible, finding a place to sleep, gluing the sole back onto his shoe). One cannot imagine a more complete rejection of the picturesque or a more complete absence of dramatic, even metaphysical alibis: only references to the stars serve as a derisory vestige of them. All this is what gave the film its power and won it an increasing number of admirers. For example, Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to it in 1966 in his short film Der Stadtstreicher, perhaps not only because of the starkness of its situations but also because of the muted, indecipherable irony that runs through the whole epilogue of Sign of Leo—with its happy end too spectacular to be credible. Halfway—who would have thought it?—between Brecht and Beckett.
All this explains the film’s failure in its own time. With this first feature film, Rohmer went farther than neorealism and even than the New Wave, but without greatly benefiting from the attention given the latter in the media or from the effect of novelty (which was no longer very new) produced by furtive filming and images taken from life. At a time when Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol were setting out on their careers, Rohmer was acquiring, with the Sign of Leo, only the reputation of being an austere, difficult, not very likable filmmaker. Not until La Collectionneuse (and its acknowledged glamorous dimension) was this too puritanical image finally corrected. And above all, not until Rohmer ceased to adapt to conventional methods of production, to a professionalism that stifled him, and invented his own freedom. That was to be the Films du Losange adventure.