André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958 - Front matter

andré bazinSelected Writings 1943 – 1958 X with an essay by jacques aumont translated by timothy barnard caboose Montreal prepared without financial assistance, public or private. This edition, including choice of texts, translation and annotations, copyright © 2018 Timothy Barnard No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission. Cataloguing information for this volume can be found on the last page. First edition. Published by caboose, www.caboosebooks.net Designed by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard. Typeset by Marina Uzunova in Sabon Next, designed by Jean François Porchez. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper which meets ANSI standards.  Contents This Is Not a Theorist: Notes on André Bazin vii Jacques Aumont A Note on the Texts il Timothy Barnard 1943 For a Realist Aesthetic 3 1944 On Realism 5 1945 Ontology of the Photographic Image 9 Espoir: On Style in the Cinema 17 1946 The Myth of Total Cinema and 31 the Origins of the Cinématographe 1947 The Technique of Citizen Kane 41 The Science Film: Chance Beauty 49 1948 Cinematic Realism and the 53 Italian School of the Liberation William Wyler, the Jansenist of Mise en scène 83 Orson Welles’ Contribution 109 Landru—Charlie—Monsieur Verdoux 117 1949 Cinema and Painting 153 1951 Depth of Field, Once and for All 163 Diary of a Country Priest and 171 Robert Bresson’s Stylistic System  Theatre and Film (1) 191 Theatre and Film (2) 211 Death Every Afternoon 241 1952 French Renoir 247 Découpage 267 For an Impure Cinema: 289 In Defence of Adaptation 1953 The Real and the Imaginary 315 No Script for Monsieur Hulot 321 1956 A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery 329 Assembly Prohibited 337 1957 On the ‘Politique des auteurs’ 345 1958 Thoughts on Film Criticism 363 Glossary of Terms 375 1. General Terms 376 2. Découpage 378 3. Montage 396 4. Fait 414 Acknowledgements 423 Name index 425 Title index 433 For a Realist Aesthetic Intellectuals are people who do not like to be interrupted. When the movie screen began to talk, they turned silent. It was not out of politeness. They like to make out that it was out of scorn or despondent love. I believe it was out of spite. Let us agree that the screen’s boorishness was enough to vex our aestheticians. So many bold ideas, so many articles and stormy discussions, so much advice offered, so many incontrovertible oracles, all to end up with such ingratitude. By rejecting their control, the cinema gave in to a kind of third-rate realism. Once this happened, things would end badly. Cinema’s theorists and pedagogues were not wrong on every count, but I believe that the lack of any attempt at systematic think- ing about cinema over the past fifteen or twenty years is the sign of a resignation whose root cause may lie in an inability to understand film fully. For the cinema, like every nascent art, should be analysed in its specific complexity, in the totality of its relations with the social milieu outside of which it would not exist. Without prejudice to the notion pure art, we can at least point out that it cannot apply to the popular arts, tasked by nature with functions foreign to aesthetic laws. In our mechanical civilisation, in which we are consumed by the technical quality of our labour, a labour standardised by politi­ cal and social constraints, cinema, before any artistic concern, is there to meet our repressed indefeasible collective psychic needs. When these fundamental needs are finally clearly understood, critics, using this concrete data, will be able to aspire to develop an aesthetic at once theoretical and practical. This aesthetic alone On Realism Photography’s specific properties relative to painting are conferred on it by its mechanical genesis. For the first time, the realism of the image has achieved complete objectivity, making photography a kind of ontological equivalent of the model. (This is why the human body, a frequent subject in all the visual arts, is almost necessarily obscene or pornographic on screen.) We should distinguish from the outset, however, the technical ‘realism’ of the image from the ‘realism’ of its plastic or dramatic content. Thus Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) is no less ‘realist’ in the former sense of the word than Le Corbeau (1943), because these two films have been cast in the ob- jectivity of the photographic medium. And yet the marvellous and fantastic in the former film by Marcel Carné stand in contrast to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘realist’ observation. Technical ‘realism’ thus lies at the very heart of cinema. It may constitute its essence. It may also constitute its weakness. Every art of duration involves the constant recreation of the work around a permanent literary or musical kernel. Every evening in the footlights, a play is reborn in new form out of its text. Its ­immortality is inseparable from the actuality of the living ‘presence’ of its execution. There have been and will be as many ‘Phèdres’ as there have been performances of this tragedy. A dramatic work contains a soma and a germen. It is only as a result of this that it is what it is. In other words, if all we possessed of ‘Phèdre’ was a talking film of its first performance, Jean Racine would no longer exist. This is because the film emulsion necessarily fixes the artwork in a particular historical and social context (the final bath in film Ontology of the Photographic Image Psychoanalysis of the visual arts might see the practice of embalm­ ing as fundamental to their birth. The origins of painting and sculpture lie in the mummy complex. The religion of Osiris, which strove above all to surmount death, saw survival as tied to the ­material preservation of the body. In this way it satisfied one of human psychology’s most fundamental needs: to defend against time. Death is nothing more than the victory of time. To artificially fix bodily appearance is to snatch it from the course of time, to stow it in the hold of life. It was natural to preserve this appearance in the very reality of the defunct, in its flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue was a mummy, tanned and encrusted in soda. But pyramids and labyrinthine passageways did not provide sufficient assurance that the tomb would never be pillaged; further measures had to be taken to protect against danger and increase the likelihood of safeguarding it. Small terra-cotta statues, alongside wheat for the departed’s sustenance, were thus placed near the sarcophagus. These statuettes were a sort of replacement mummy, ready to take the body’s place if it were destroyed. And so, in statuary’s religious origins, we can see its primordial function: to save being through the appearance of being. Forms of this complex could be found in every primitive civilisation. The clay bear riddled with arrows in prehistoric caves was nothing other than a magical substitute for the living beast. The parallel course of art and civilisation freed the visual arts from these magical functions (Louis XIV did not have himself embalmed, but merely had his portrait painted by Lebrun). But Espoir: On Style in the Cinema Film critics must have a lot of difficulties with epithets. Their literary colleagues are not obliged to review every novel produced. Literary classifications and hierarchies are relatively well established, and columnists deliberately disregard a large part of what is writ- ten: second-rate crime novels, serial romances for provincial news- papers, adventure novels for train station book stalls. Nothing obliges them to read these books, because their audience does not read them. As cultured individuals, they presume their readers are cultured as well. Film critics, with greater or lesser fortune, work for an audience overwhelmingly with no film culture and for whom the films of Jean Renoir and Émile Couzinet belong to cinema in equal measure. Suppose that Jean Blanzat had to review each week five or six novels like those of Madame Delly a or Jean de la Hire; every two or three months a book by Pierre Benoit or Henry Bordeaux, and just once or twice a year a novel by André Malraux, William Faulkner, André Gide or Roger Martin du Gard: in what style, with what words would he dare to take up these latter works? And yet this is the situation of the film critic, to whom is in- variably attributed a hypochondriacal bad faith in trying to remain vigilant and tirelessly to render judgements which literary critics would disdain even to formulate if they had to read novels of the same quality. Let me be clear: I am in no way speaking ill of cinema. I even believe, all things considered, that film production as a whole is better than literary output as a whole. But old academic habits, an intellectualising culture which critics respect and perpetuate, The Myth of Total Cinema and the Origins of the Cinématographe In this large volume,a Georges Sadoul has succeeded in preserving the clarity and interest of his story without sacrificing scholarly accuracy. I do not have the space to summarise the technical part of his book other than by alluding to it, so will limit myself to remind- ing readers that following Joseph Plateau’s experiments in optical physiology the invention of cinema still depended on the develop- ment of photography, and in particular on that of a light-sensitive surface. Then, to pass from photography to cinema, there needed to be a flexible emulsion and mechanical inventions to ensure its regular intermittent movement. By developing a device which satisfactorily joined different stages of research in optics, chemistry and mechanics, Louis Lumière earned his place in film history. Until 1880, the use of a sensitive layer of wet collodion made photography a slow and complicated technology. Nothing less than the Central Pacific Railroad’s millions and the lavish caprice of Leland Stanford were required to enable Eadweard Muybridge to take twelve instantaneous and automatic pictures of a galloping horse. Cinema would probably not have developed further if photography had not made decisive progress around the 1880s with silver gelatin bromide, which made possible Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments with the photographic gun and chronophotography on a fixed plate. Today these strange, ghost-like images still have a disquieting beauty. But heavy, fragile and cumbersome glass plates provided no solution to the mechanical problem of intermittent movement. The Technique of Citizen Kane Let us discuss once again, then, Citizen Kane (1941). Now that the final echoes of the critics’ remarks seem to have died out, we can take stock. I will leave aside the comments of those who understood nothing, and challenge the accounts of the technicians—directors, cinematographers, set designers—who could barely restrain them- selves in the face of such a provocation. All other judgements range between these two extremes. Orson Welles has reinvented cinema and Citizen Kane is as important as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1925)—or Orson Welles is a great fellow but, as talented as he is, his film is just a clever bluff. Georges Sadoul speaks of a monstrous puffball which no doubt sprang up in a downpour of money one night in Hollywood. He sees nothing truly new in it stylistically but rather ‘an indulgence in poorly assimilated vague recollections. The film is an encyclopaedia of bygone techniques. There we find, in turn, the sharp-focus foregrounds and distant backgrounds seen in Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train, 1896); Georges Méliès’ taste for imaginary backdrops in canvas and pasteboard; a blend of rapid montage and superimposi­ tion that was all the rage in 1920; acrobatic tracking shots as in 1935; sets with ceilings borrowed from Greed . . . the newsreel montage invented by Dziga Vertov. . . . One senses that he is intoxicated by the novelty of his means and technique’. a Virtually every one of Sadoul’s comparisons is factually accu­ rate—except one, which is of crucial importance: to compare Gregg Toland’s special lenses to Louis Lumière’s single lens seems to me a misuse of language. The depth of field of the train entering The Science Film: Chance Beauty The festival least spoken about, around which the least publicity was done, to which the fewest millions of people turned out and at which the fewest of bottles of champagne were uncorked 1 was also indisputably the best of the year. It took place in a small theatre with 250 seats at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where the Inter- national Scientific Film Association held its congress for three days. But I fear that in 1948 Jean Painlevé will be obliged to show his films a floor below, in the main cinema of the Palais de Chaillot.a Because word is starting to get around that microbes are the best actors in the world. Next year people will be asking for their auto- graph. Already people practically came to blows at the final screen- ings to squeeze into the tiny hall. As for we poor critics, we were there as a body. It is so rare for us to go to the cinema for enjoyment. I can see that you expect from me a definition of the science film. Based on the program booklet, I am obliged to reply that its domain extends from wiping out the Tsetse fly to facial surgery on people with serious war injuries; from the sine wave of alternating current to the biology of freshwater animalcules; and from the use of the circular weaving loom to Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s underwater landscapes. And in so saying I would be forgetting the actions and gestures of the coconut monkey, the division of grasshopper sperm cells and how radar works. Jean Painlevé would not contest this eclecticism, because, on some fallacious but very enjoyable pretext, he mischievously added to his program Arne Sucksdorff’s admir- able poetic documentary Människor i stad—En kortfilm från Stock- holm (The Rhythm of a City, 1947). Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation Film festivals in Brussels and Cannes, Parisian ciné-clubs and screenings in other large cities have already created a large enough audience for recent Italian film to ensure that no one is unaware that these films have become the great event of post-war cinema. The historical importance of Roberto Rossellini’s film Paisà (Paisan, 1946) has rightly been compared to that of several classic film masterpieces. Georges Sadoul has not hesitated to place it alongside Nosferatu (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924) and Greed (1925). I endorse this panegyric wholeheartedly, although the reference to German Expressionism should naturally only be meant with respect to the greatness of its achievement and not to its underlying aesthetic. It would be more appropriate to recall the appearance of Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) in 1926. Critics have also frequently contrasted the realism of Italian film today with the aestheticism of American and, to a certain extent, French cinema. Was it not by virtue of their shared realist impulse that the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko were both artistically and politically revolutionary, unlike either the aestheticism of German Expressionism or the bland idolisation of Hollywood stars? Paisà, Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1946), like Potemkin, have inaugurated a new phase in the now-standard opposition between realism and aestheticism in film. But history does not repeat itself: we should note the particular form this aesthetic conflict has taken today and the new solutions to which Italian realism, in 1947, owes its victory. William Wyler, the Jansenist of Mise en scène Studied in detail, the mise en scène of every one of William Wyler’s films is distinctly different, in both his use of the camera and the properties of the photography. Nothing is more unlike the plastic qualities of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) than that of The Letter (1940). When you think of the climactic moments in Wyler’s films, you realise that their dramatic material is extremely varied and that the felicitous découpage he devises to bring this material out varies considerably from film to film. Whether we are speaking of the red evening gown in Jezebel (1938), the shaving scene dialogue in The Little Foxes (1941), Herbert Marshall’s death in the same film, the death of the sheriff in The Border Cavalier (1927), the tracking shot at the plantation at the beginning of The Letter or the scene in the out-of-service bomber plane in The Best Years of Our Lives, we do not see a taste for constant themes such as we find, for example, in John Ford’s cavalry, Tay Garnett’s brawls or the marriages and chase scenes in René Clair. Wyler has no preferred settings or landscapes. At most, there is a clear predilection for psychological scripts played out against a social backdrop. And although Wyler has become a master of this kind of treatment, whether adapted from literature, as in Jezebel, or from the stage, as in The Little Foxes, and although his work as a whole leaves the slightly bitter taste of dry psychological analysis, this does not detract from his magnificently expressive images, whose sensual technique calls up retrospective contemplation. A filmmaker’s style cannot be defined Orson Welles’ Contribution What have Orson Welles’ films contributed? What is their origina­ lity, and what in addition is the importance of their director, in an aesthetic history of cinema? I say ‘aesthetic’ history deliberately, because the confusion between art and technique has often been the source of the confusion in our debates. For what is at issue here is not ‘depth of field’ as such, or ‘ceilings’, exceptional shot length or even the obvious harking back to various styles of lighting, set design and camera angle discovered twenty years earlier by the German schools, but rather, in my view, a new structure to film language, new relations between the camera and the object. When reflected on the screen, this brings about new relations between this object and the viewer. It would be easy to demonstrate, by taking examples from Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), that their dramatic découpage and their technical découpage, while they have not cast cinema’s underlying elements into radical up- heaval, have already shown themselves to be singularly inventive forces in mise en scène. In particular, the frequent use (which is remarkably subtle and masterly in The Magnificent Ambersons) of what we might call the anti-highlighting of the subject has never been taken so far. By this I mean the refusal to let the viewer clearly see the peak moments of the scene. We must not confuse this dramatic technique, closer to understatement, with ellipsis, which is repeatedly and perhaps wrongly claimed to be cinema’s fundamental rhetorical device. Landru—Charlie—Monsieur Verdoux A minor bank employee, shown the door after thirty years of good and loyal service, seeks to ensure a calm and worry-free life for his disabled wife and child. A taste for speculation on the stock market, alongside his family obligations, leads him to obtain money by seducing women (generally widows of a certain age) and marrying them under fictive names before killing them to get his hands on their modest wealth. He practises this activity for several years before being recognised by the sister of one of his earliest victims. Although practically he has the possibility of fleeing, he gives himself up to the police, demonstrates indifference and even scornful irony at his trial, and in the end is guillotined. sources Landru Charlie Chaplin had long ago announced his intention to make a film on Landru (and also another on Napoleon: we will see that for all intents and purposes he has carried out this second project with The Great Dictator [1940]). We must thus see Landru as his immediate model, even though Chaplin obviously sought in Landru only a model in the way a sculptor asks someone to pose. The author of the final work is, just the same, the sculptor and not the model. The true source of Monsieur Verdoux (1947) is not Landru, but rather the reason Chaplin became interested in Landru. And yet it is of great interest for understanding the film to know in Cinema and Painting Films on art are one of the most indisputably new forms of docu- mentary of the past six or seven years. They may be the only one, for since Étienne-Jules Marey and Louis Lumière, Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Jean Vigo, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Buñuel and Jacques B. Brunius, I do not see how the documentary has invented anything fundamentally new. It has been able to give nuance or add to some of its achievements, at times with a great deal of originality and talent, especially in the scientific field, which is reliant on technical progress. But it has not annexed new territories. We could mention excellent documentaries on art dating back a decade, but apart from the fact that they addressed sculpture and architecture almost exclusively, as these arts are undoubtedly deemed more cinematic because of their position in space, they limited themselves to a description that was external to their subject. The genre’s prototype was René Lucot’s unavoidable Rodin (1942), a film whose devastating effects were all the greater given that its complete lack of taste and unfailing aesthetic misreadings were admirably masked by a formal demagogy and a false pedagogy which naturally did not fail to lead viewers astray. Happily, these reproaches are not valid for all documentaries of the same kind, even though in the end the best of them are only a didactic improvement on the photograph album. Jean Lods’ film Aristide Maillol, sculpteur (1943) initiated a new approach to the problem, even though the film’s initial idea can already be seen in a primitive and elementary form in Sacha Guitry’s biographical documents. But Guitry’s only aim was to Depth of Field, Once and for All Discussion of depth of field has calmed down enough to be able to return to the question one last time and take stock. I note first of all that the reason hardly anyone speaks about depth of field anymore is because it has entered our customs. Its use has become common, but decidedly more discreet than that of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941). Not more systematic, as in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but latent and as if in reserve in the filmmaker’s stylistic arsenal. Most of all, we have become accustomed to depth of field, and its intrusion in a sequence does not strike us any more than the back-and-forth of the dated shot–reverse shot did in former times. But hardly any film today—American, French, British or Italian—takes any care when constructing a given sequence in depth. When we think back to the disputes that the defence of depth of field gave rise to just two or three years ago, we can easily remark that they turned on a misunderstanding which each side, to varying degrees, helped maintain. Because in material terms depth of field was initially a technical feat on the part of the cinematographer, it developed as a novelty, and it is quite true that in order to achieve it one needs more lighting, more sensitive film and perhaps a special lens, or at least to stop down the lens as much as possible. All these conditions are the exclusive domain of the cinematographer. Thus the lamented Gregg Toland’s talents dazzle in the films of Welles and Wyler. Historians and technicians, faced with an often juvenile enthusiasm for mise en scène in depth, had an easy time of it contrasting the technique with the old school of Louis Lumière, Diary of a Country Priest and Robert Bresson’s Stylistic System Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) almost physically compels recognition as a masterpiece, touching critics and unsophisticated viewers alike, because it touches our sensibilities—an elevated spiritual sensibility, no doubt, but in the end it speaks more to our hearts than to our minds. The initial failure of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) was due to the fact that there the situation was reversed. This film could not touch us unless we had, if not disassembled it, at least felt its intelligence and grasped its method. Diary of a Country Priest’s achievement is evident from the outset, even though the aesthetic system which underlies and justifies it is the most paradoxical and possibly the most complex that talking cinema has given us. Hence the refrain of critics who were poorly equipped to understand it, yet liked it all the same: ‘incredible’; ‘paradoxical’; ‘an unprecedented and inimit- able success’. In each case, they resist explaining the work and settle for the idea of a stroke of genius, pure and simple. But we have also seen, amongst those whose aesthetic prefer- ences are similar to Bresson’s and who we might have assumed to be his allies, profound disappointment in not finding another bold stroke. At first uneasy and then annoyed when they realised what Bresson had not done, and being too close to him to modify their view on the spot, too concerned with his style to see the intellec- tual virginity that had cleared the field for emotion, they neither understood nor admired it. In short, we see here two extremes of Theatre and Film (1) It has become relatively common for critics to remark the similarities between film and novels, but ‘filmed theatre’ is still often viewed as heresy. As long as Marcel Pagnol, through his pronouncements and films, was its principal advocate and exemplar, his occasional successes could be taken for misapprehensions arising from ex- ceptional circumstances. ‘Filmed theatre’ has remained tied to our memory of the film d’art, which we now see with hindsight as farcical, or to the ridiculous use made of boulevard theatre hits in the André Berthomieu ‘style’.1 As recently as the war, the failure of the screen adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Le Voyageur sans bagages (1944), an excellent play whose subject we might have taken to be cinematic, gave seemingly decisive arguments to critics of ‘filmed theatre’. It took more recent successes, ranging from The Little Foxes and Macbeth to Henry V, Hamlet and Les Parents terribles, to demon- strate that film is capable of creating valid adaptations of the most diverse stage plays. The truth is that the prejudice against ‘filmed theatre’ may not have as many historical arguments in its favour as it might appear when we examine only films that are freely acknowledged to be adaptations of plays. There is good reason to reconsider film history no longer in terms of titles of works but rather according to the dramatic structure of their screenplay and mise en scène. A Little History While critics have unreservedly condemned ‘filmed theatre’, they have praised cinematic forms which, under closer analysis, Theatre and Film (2) The leitmotif of those who scorn filmed theatre, their ultimate and seemingly unassailable argument, is the irreplaceable pleasure found in the physical presence of the actor. ‘What is specific to theatre’, Henri Gouhier writes in his book L’Essence du théâtre, ‘is its inability to detach the action from the actor’. He continues: ‘The stage is home to every illusion, except that of the actor’s presence. Actors appear on it in disguise, with another soul and another voice, but they are there and, at the same time, space recovers its exigencies and duration its depth’.a Thus, and conversely: film is home to every reality except that of the physical presence of the actor. If it is true that this is where the essence of theatre lies, film is in no way able to make a similar claim. If the theatrical text and theatre’s style and dramatic construction are, as they should be, strictly conceived to receive the soul and existence of flesh-and- blood actors, it is completely pointless to substitute their reflec- tion and shadow. The argument is irrefutable: no substitution of values is possible if theatre originates at the level of ontology itself, beyond aesthetics and psychology. The achievements of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau can thus only be disputed (which could only be an act of bad faith!) or inexplicable, a chal- lenge to aesthetics and the philosopher. In fact the only way to account for these achievements is by calling into question this commonplace of theatrical criticism, ‘the irreplaceable presence of the actor’. Death Every Afternoon One understands why Pierre Braunberger toyed with the idea of making this film for so long. The result proves that it was worth the trouble. But perhaps Braunberger, an eminent aficionado, saw in this endeavour only a tribute and a service to bullfighting at the same time as the making of a film which as a producer he would not regret. From this latter perspective, the film is probably a good stroke of business (and a well-deserved one, I hasten to add), because fans of bullfights will come out in droves and those who know noth- ing about bullfighting will go to see the film out of curiosity. I do not think the former will be disappointed, because the documents are very beautiful; they will find in the film all the most famous toreros, and the footage Braunberger and Myriama have gathered and assembled is astonishingly effective. Bullfights had to have been frequently and profusely filmed for the camera to recreate the work carried out in the bullring so completely. The film has many passes and killings shot at major bullfights with star power, shown at length almost without cuts for minutes on end. Man and beast are not framed in anything more distant than a medium shot or even a medium close-up. Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) did no better. And when the bull’s head passes by in the fore- ground, it is not a stuffed head—the rest of the bull follows! Perhaps in my astonishment I have been taken in by Myriam’s talent. She has succeeded in assembling her documents with dia- bolical skill, and one requires great powers of attention to notice that the bull who enters the field from the right is not always the one who exits from the left. One would have to watch the film on French Renoir I undertake this discussion of Jean Renoir racked by qualms. I had fewer four years ago when we could still speak of the ‘French Renoir’—the Hollywood exile whose American work was of course the result of a misunderstanding. The director of La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) and La Grande Illusion (1937) took it upon himself, moreover, to provide us in advance with the arguments needed to confirm the sorrow into which his exile had plunged us, writing in 1938: ‘I know that I am French and that I must work in an absolutely national vein’. And, criticising the temptation in his early years to imitate the great ‘American masters’: ‘I had not yet learned that, even more than from their race, people draw on the soil that nourishes them, on the living conditions which shape their bodies and minds, on the landscapes which pass before their eyes the livelong day. I did not yet know that a Frenchman, living in France, drinking red wine and eating Brie cheese under the grey skies of Paris, can only do quality work by drawing on the traditions of people who have lived the way he does’.a Had he not taken care to condemn his Hollywood work to sterility, his exile would still have appeared scandalous. Unlike René Clair, everything about the man, as well as his films, appeared in- consistent with American cinema: with both its working methods and its style. Renoir was French cinema; he was what was best about its artisanal methods, its possibilities for improvisation, even its disorder. Everything his collaborators have told us confirms this: he had to work in the inspiration of the moment, with complete freedom. His most delectable inspirations arose in the heat of the Découpage The International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art is twenty years old.a It came into the world at pretty much the same time as talking film, which is a good reference point. Cinema is still no older than a middle-aged man—not even that of an old man. Its great biological and intellectual rhythms seem to be marked fairly closely by twenty-year blocks. In 1910, when cinema was fifteen years old, the age of puberty, a shift began in earnest from cinema’s primitive, pre-artistic stage to one of sustained aesthetic evolution. Between 1925 and 1930 this led to the production of silent cinema’s accomplished masterpieces. In 1928–30 came the great upheaval of sound. The Mostra d’Arte Cinematografica was founded when this revolution was complete—with the triumph of sound. At first glance, the 1950s do not appear to be a significant date, like that of the appearance of talking film, and yet we might think that in the not too distant future they will be seen as the years of colour. Naturally, what happened with sound will not be repeated with colour. Unlike the brutal intrusion of the spoken word, which rendered silent film antiquated at a single stroke, colour’s substi- tution for black and white will be gradual and slow. Agfacolor and Technicolor, the two great processes which have divided the world up between them, are almost as old, industrially speaking, as the soundtrack. In any event their use, particularly in animated film, goes back more than fifteen years. Already before the war a minority of films were in colour, but from a strictly artistic point of view—and leaving aside animated film, which has completely different problems—film history will record only one colour film For an Impure Cinema: In Defence of Adaptation Looking back on the films of the past ten or fifteen years, it is readily apparent that one of the dominant phenomena of cinema’s evolu- tion during this period is its ever more significant recourse to our literary and theatrical heritage. Naturally, there is nothing new in film finding its material in novels and plays, but something seems to have changed. Adapta- tions of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Les Misérables or Les Trois Mous- quetaires are not of the same order as those of La Symphonie pastorale, Jacques le Fataliste (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne), Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) or Le Diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh). Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo provide film direc- tors with little more than characters and adventures, in large meas- ure independent of their literary expression. Javert and d’Artagnan are now a part of our extra-literary mythology; they have a kind of independent existence, of which the original work has become an accidental or almost superfluous manifestation. Conversely, film- makers continue to adapt sometimes excellent novels, but they treat them like highly developed synopses. Film directors also want novelists to supply them with characters, a plot and even—and here we are already on a higher level—an atmosphere such as that in Georges Simenon or a poetic mood such as that of Pierre Véry. But here too it is possible to imagine that the book was never written and that the author is just an especially long-winded scriptwriter. This is true to such an extent that many cheap American crime The Real and the Imaginary Much has already been written about the exceptional qualities of Albert Lamorisse’s film. This enables me to dispense with the most obvious of these to give greater emphasis to a peculiar yet essential aspect of the film. Albert Lamorisse’s originality was already apparent in his film Bim le petit âne (Bim, 1950). Bim may be, with Crin Blanc, le cheval sauvage (White Mane, 1953), the only true children’s film yet made. Naturally, other films—but not as many as all that—are suitable, to varying degrees, for young viewers. The Soviets have made a special effort in this field, but it seems to me that films such as Beleet Parus Odinokiy (Lonely White Sail, 1937) are addressed more to children in their early teens. J. Arthur Rank’s attempts at specialised produc- tion have been a complete failure, both financially and aesthetically. In fact if we were to try to stock a film archive or draw up a cata- logue of programs suitable for children, we would find only a few specially produced short films of variable quality and some com- mercial films, including animation, whose inspiration and subject matter are sufficiently juvenile—certain adventure films in particu- lar. These are not films made for children, however, but simply films intelligible to someone whose mental age is no more than fourteen. American films, as we know, do not often surpass this threshold. This is the case with Walt Disney’s cartoons. Yet it is clear that this sort of film cannot compare with true children’s literature (which, by the way, is not abundant). Long before Freud’s disciples, Jean-Jacques Rousseau realised that this literature is in no way innocuous: Jean de La Fontaine is a cynical No Script for Monsieur Hulot It has become a commonplace to remark that French cinema has seen little in the way of good comedy, at least for the last thirty years. For we should recall that slapstick was born in France at the turn of the century. Max Linder was its exemplary hero, and Mack Sennett brought it to Hollywood. There it rose to even greater heights as a training ground for actors such as Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and, towering above them all, Charlie Chaplin. But we know that Chaplin recognised Linder as his master. Yet French slapstick, apart from Linder’s final Hollywood films, had practically died out by 1914, when it was engulfed by the crushing and justified success of American comic films. Since the coming of talking film, Hollywood—even leaving Chaplin out of it—has remained in command of film comedy: first of all in the regenerated and enriched slapstick tradition, with the work of W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and even, to a lesser extent, Laurel and Hardy; and then in a new genre, one closely connected to theatre: the ‘american comedy’. Spoken dialogue in France, on the contrary, served only as a temptation to adapt the popular farces of boulevard theatre, with disastrous results. If we ask ourselves what, from the 1930s on, has stood out in French comedy, we come up with the names of only two actors, Raimu and Fernandel. But the curious thing is that these two comedic giants appeared in virtually nothing but bad films. If it were not for Marcel Pagnol and the four or five good films we owe to him, it would be impossible to name a single good film worthy of these actors’ talents (with the possible exception of A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery The importance of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (The Picasso Mystery, 1956) is inestimable. Some time will be required to unearth and examine the large body of critical writing it has caused to appear volcanically, and which penetrates deep inside the landscapes of cinema and painting. The first observation which has to be made is that The Picasso Mystery ‘explains nothing’. Going by a few statements he has made and by the preamble to the film, Henri-Georges Clouzot appears to believe that showing how a painting is made will make it com- prehensible to the layperson. If he really believes this, he is wrong, and moreover the public’s reaction seems to have confirmed this: Picasso’s admirers do so all the more, while those who do not like him are confirmed in their scorn. The Picasso Mystery is a radical departure from the more or less directly didactic films on art made to date. In fact Clouzot’s film does not explain Picasso, it shows him, and if there is a lesson to be drawn from it, it is that watching an artist work cannot give us the key—I will not say to his genius, which goes without saying, but to his art. Naturally, observing Picasso working and the intermediary stages of an artwork can in some cases reveal the path of the artist’s ideas or let us in on tricks of the trade, but in the best possible cases these are still only paltry secrets—as with the slow-motion shots of the hesitations of Matisse’s brush in François Campaux’s film.a In any event these meagre benefits are not possible with Picasso, who said all there was to say about himself with his famous re- mark ‘I don’t seek; I find’. If anyone still doubted the truth and Assembly Prohibited Albert Lamorisse’s Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon, 1956) and Jean Tourane’s Une Fée pas comme les autres (The Secret of Magic Island, 1956) certainly would not normally be discussed in the same article, despite appearing on the same program in movie theatres. Their only common denominator lies in the fact that they are held to be children’s films. This is a psychological criterion, not an aesthetic one. And even from this perspective, while Tourane’s film will probably delight children under ten years of age, Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, like his film Crin Blanc (White Mane, 1953), is more a children’s film for grown-ups. But this is not the topic I wish to address here. The present article is not a true piece of film criticism, and I will discuss only incidentally the artistic qualities I see in each of these films. My only aim is to analyse, using the startlingly significant example they offer, certain rules of assembly with respect to cinematic expression and even more fundamentally to its ontological aesthetic. From this point of view, my comparison of The Red Balloon and Magic Island is deliberate. Each demonstrates perfectly but in radically different ways the virtues and limitations of assembly. I will begin with Jean Tourane’s The Secret of Magic Island and remark that from beginning to end it is an extraordinary illustra- tion of Kuleshov’s experiment using a close-up of Mozzhukin, for two separate and complementary reasons. We know that Tourane’s naïve project is to make Disney-like films using live animals. Now, it is quite obvious that endowing animals with human feelings is, for the most part at least, a projection of our own consciousness. On the ‘Politique des auteurs’ Goethe? Shakespeare? Everything that goes under their names is supposed to be good, and on se bat les flancs [one strives in vain] in order to find something beautiful in the stupid and unsuccessful, and taste is completely perverted. And all these great talents—the Goethes, Shakespeares, Beethovens and Michelangelos—produced side by side with beautiful things not merely mediocre but repulsive ones as well. —Tolstoy a A Little Difference I am well aware of the perils of my enterprise. Cahiers du Cinéma is seen as practising a ‘politique des auteurs’ (‘authorship approach’).b This opinion, while it is not justified by every article, finds its basis in a majority of them, particularly over the past two years. It would be pointless or hypocritical to maintain that our journal practises a kind of critical neutrality on the basis of a few contrary examples. The very astute letter by Barthélémy Amengual published in our issue 63 c was not wide of the mark. Nevertheless, our readers have naturally remarked that this critical postulate, whether implicit or proclaimed, has not been adopted with equal steadfastness by every one of our regular contri­butors, and that there may even be serious divergences in our ­admiration, or rather in the degree of our admiration. And yet it is true that almost always the most enthusiastic among us carry the day. The reason for this was captured quite well by Éric Rohmer in his reply to a reader in issue 63: d when there is a Thoughts on Film Criticism A problem exists concerning film criticism as such with respect to the work of pure creation, but it arises in basically the same terms for all the arts, and it would be quite presumptuous to try to add something to what philosophers, aestheticians and artists have written on the subject. The sole useful way to address the question with respect to cinema is thus to take it up concretely, at the level of experience and the historical moment. I will simply offer a series of remarks or thoughts on the state and practice of my trade. I have had the good fortune of carrying it out for the past fifteen years now in the most varied forms (given that I consider ciné-club discussions, for example, a form of criticism), and especially in the press at every level, from large-circulation daily newspapers to specialised jour- nals and both specialised and general weekly publications. 1. The Ineffectiveness of Criticism The first remark arising out of this experience, and which I would like to serve as an introduction to all the thoughts which follow, is that the principal satisfaction this work gives me is that it is almost useless. Writing film criticism is a bit like spitting into a river from a bridge up above. I say a bit like because even so there are rare occasions when, in a precise instance, one can prove criti- cism’s decisive or at least tangible role: in the case of art-house cine­ ma, for example (but less so than one might imagine). Criticism has also been able once or twice to launch a film which had been confined to too small a circle. But in that case we must observe that the criticism did no more than supplement the film’s inadequate