Elsewhere

I don't give a fuck about the merry-go-round decorated by Walt Disney, the lunch on the grass with imitation plastic clothes, the chewing-gum green of a ball of wool. I don't give a fuck about any of the lapses in taste piled up by Astruc, Claude Renoir and Mayo. Or about Roman Vlad's saxophone either. Which actually isn't bad. But anyhow, the real beauty of Une vie lies elsewhere.

In Pascale Petit's yellow dress shimmering amid the Velazquez grey dunes of Normandy. That's wrong! Not Velasquez grey? Not even Delacroix grey, howl the connoisseurs.

To no purpose. Already Christian Marquand is leaning over the break-water, holding out his hand to Maria Schell. The 'connoisseurs' are thrown by a film that moves so quickly like the fastest racing cars are those that brake best: Une vie is like them. One thought one knew Astruc, and constructed theories without noticing that the sequence was over and had already taken off in another aesthetic or moral direction. One talked of Velasquez without noticing that Pascale Petit's dress was Baudelaire yellow, and Maria Schell's eyes Ramuz blue. Why Ramuz? Because behind Maupassant's puppets, behind Jeanne and Julien, it is the face of Aline or Jean-Luc persecuted that Astruc is filming. There is nothing surprising about this. His admiration for the author of Les signes parmi nous has long been known. But why a moment ago the author of L'albatros? Because the first shot of Une vie stamps the whole film with Baudelarian effigy. Because Maria Schell runs headlong towards the sea and Pascale's dress is like an echo illustrating the most celebrated verses of the man who said to Manet, 'You are supreme in the decadence of your art.' One might mention Thomas Hardy, as well as Faulkner and the Charlotte Rittenmayer of The Wild Palms, here transposed into the character played by Marquand; but Astruc himself has already talked of them so much - too much - that the admirers of Le rideau are now looking for difficulties and being surprised to find none. All of which proves what? That people talked of painting without noticing that Une vie was a novelist's film; and of taste without noticing that it is a barbarian's film.

My defense of the film against those who admire it for the wrong reasons is now done. Against the rest, the task is easier, for Une vie is almost the opposite of an Astruc film in the sense that he has been labelled with a prefabricated aesthetic form from which he is now escaping.

It is of no consequence that the version now showing in cinemas does not correspond to the one envisaged in the scenario. It is of no consequence that the montage has systematically cut off each scene in mid flow. One may admire Une vie as it stands. And as it stands Une vie is the opposite of an inspired film. The madness behind the realism, said Astruc in an interview. But this has been misunderstood. Julien's madness lies in having married Jeanne, and Jeanne's in having married Julien. Full stop and finish. He was not trying to film La folie du docteur Tube, but to show that for a man of wood and a woman of soul to marry is madness. As a matter of fact, Une vie disconcerts Astruc's keenest partisans, just as Le plaisir disconcerted those who thought they knew Maupassant. Where they expected Astruc the lyricist, they found Astruc the architect.

Une vie is a superbly constructed film. So, to illustrate my point, I shall borrow images from classical geometry. A film may be compared to a geometrical locus; that is, a figure constituted by all points which satisfy a particular equation of relation to a fixed element. This ensemble of points is, if you like, the mise en scène, and this particular equation common to each moment of the mise en scène will, therefore, be the scenario, or if you prefer, the dramatic situation. There remains the fixed element, or possible mobile one, which is none other than the theme. But the following thing happens. With most directors, the geometrical locus of the theme they are supposed to be dealing with extends no further than the situation where it is filmed. What I mean is that although the action of their films may take place over a vast area, most directors do not think their mise en scène beyond the area of the set. Astruc, on the other hand, gives the impression of having thought his film over the whole perimeter required by the action - no more, no less. In Une vie, we are only shown three or four landscapes in Normandy. Yet the film gives an uncanny feeling of having been planned on the actual scale of Normandy, just as Tabu was for the Pacific, or Que Viva Mexico! for Mexico. The references may be exaggerated. But they are there. The fact is too remarkable not to be pointed out, and it is all the more remarkable in that Astruc and Laudenbach have deliberately made difficulties for themselves by only showing, as I have just noed, three or four aspects of the Norman woodlands. The difficulty is not in showing the forest, but in showing a room where one knows that the forest is a few paces away; an even greater difficulty is, not in showing the sea, but a room where one knows the sea is a few hundred yards away. Most films are constructed over a few square feet of décor visible in a viewfinder. Une vie is conceived, written and directed over twenty thousand kilometers.

Over this immense invisible space, Astruc has established his dramatic and visual co-ordinates. Between the abscissa and the ordinate no curve appears which might correspond to a secret movement of the film. The only curve is either abscissa or ordinate, and therefore corresponds the two kinds of movement, one horizontal, the other vertical. The whole mise en scène of Une vie is based on this elementary principle. Horizontal, Maria Schell and Pascale Petit running towards the beach. Vertical, Marquand bending to take his partner's hand on the harbour jetty. Horizontal, the bridal couple leaving after the wedding banquet. Vertical, the knife stroke which rips open the bodice. Horizontal again, the movement of Jeanne and Julien sprawling in the wheatfield. Vertical again, the movement of Marquand's hand seizing Antonella Lualdi's wrists. For Astruc, the mise en scène of Une vie has simply meant emphasizig one of these two movements, horizontal and vertical, in each scene or each shot having its own dramatic unity, and emphasizing it abruptly, so that everything before or after it which does not form part of this abrupt motion is left in shadow.

In Les mauvaises rencontres Astruc was still using this sort of effects, this premeditated violence, in the manner of Bardem: as a shot changed, a door opened, a glass shattered, a face turned. In Une vie, on the other hand, he uses it within a shot, pushing the example of Brooks - or, more especially, Nicholas Ray - so far that the effect becomes almost the cause. The beauty is not so much Marquand dragging Maria Schell out of the chateau as in the abruptness with which he does it. This abruptness of gesture which gives a fresh impulse to the suspense every few minutes, this discontinuity latent in its continuity, might be called the tell-tale heart of Une vie, to show the kinship of the so-called 'cold' film with Edgar Poe, the true master of mystery and the most abstract writer of all.

Une vie is a wonderfully simple film, exactly like Bitter Victory. And simplification does not mean stylization. Astruc is very different here from Visconti, with whom it would be silly to compare him. Certainly Maria Schell was more effectively used in White Nights; but in Une vie she is used more accurately and profoundly. In his time, Maupassant was doubtless a modern writer. Paradoxically, therefore, the best way of capturing the true nineteenth-century atmosphere was to give the whole thing a frankly 1958 atmosphere. In this Astruc and Laudenbach have succeeded magnificently. As proof, I need only cite the admirable line spoken by the admirable Christian Marquand to the woman who has offered him her dowry and her chateau: 'Because of you, I have ruined my life.' Another example: whereas Jean-Claude Pascal carrying Anouk Aimée seemed old-fashioned (in Les mauvaises rencontres), here the same gesture with Marquand and Maria Schell seems modern.

Once one has raved about Pascale Petit (with whom Astruc has worked as much of a miracle as Renoir with Françoise Arnoul in French Cancan), who runs through the forest as gracefully as Orvet and hides under the bedclothes better than Vadim's girls, one has not said it all. The threshold of the unknown: this might be a better title for Une vie than for a science-fiction film. For Une vie forces the cinema to turn its gaze elsewhere.

Jean-Luc GODARD

Cahiers du Cinéma nº 89, novembro 1958, pp. 50-53

One recalls more willingly the summers than the winters. Some disgraces should not be remembered. (...) Life can be at once so beautiful and so vicious like that.

The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo

Alexandre Astruc

“What interests me in the cinema is abstraction” (Orson Welles)

One cannot help noticing that something is happening in the cinema at the moment. Our sensibilities have been in danger of getting blunted by those everyday films which, year in year out, show their tired and conventional faces to the world.

The cinema of today is getting a new face. How can one tell? Simply by using one’s eyes. Only a film critic could fail to notice the striking facial transformation which is taking place before our very eyes. In which films can this new beauty be found? Precisely those which have been ignored by the critics. It is not just a coincidence that Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, Welles’s films, and Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, all films which establish the foundations of a new future for the cinema, have escaped the attention of critics, who in any case were not capable of spotting them.

But it is significant that the films which fail to obtain the blessing of the critics are precisely those which myself and several of my friends agree about. We see in them, if you like, something of the prophetic. That’s why I am talking about avant-garde. There is always an avant-garde when something new takes place . . . .

To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo (camera-pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. This art, although blessed with an enormous potential, is an easy prey to prejudice; it cannot go on for ever ploughing the same field of realism and social fantasy* which has been bequeathed to it by the popular novel. It can tackle any subject, any genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions lie well within its province. I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes lived today, he would write novels”. With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.

It must be understood that up to now the cinema has been nothing more than a show. This is due to the basic fact that all films are projected in an auditorium. But with the development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and hire films written on any subject, of any form, from literary criticism and novels to mathematics, history, and general science. From that moment on, it will no longer be possible to speak of the cinema. There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures, for the cinema, like literature, is not so much a particular art as a language which can express any sphere of thought.

This idea of the cinema expressing ideas is not perhaps a new one. Feyder has said: “I could make a film with Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois.” But Feyder was thinking of illustrating it “with pictures” just as Eisenstein had thought of illustrating Marx’s Capital in book fashion. What I am trying to say is that the cinema is now moving toward a form which is making it such a precise language that it will soon be possible to write ideas directly on film without even having to resort to those heavy associations of images that were the delight of the silent cinema. In other words, in order to suggest the passing of time, there is no need to show falling leaves and then apple trees in blossom; and, in order to suggest that a hero wants to make love there are surely other ways of going about it than showing a saucepan of milk boiling over on to the stove, as Clouzot does in Quai des Orfèvres.

The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought. The creation of this language has preoccupied all the theoreticians and writers in the history of the cinema, from Eisenstein down to the scriptwriters and adaptors of the sound cinema. But neither the silent cinema, because it was the slave of a static conception of the image, nor the classical sound cinema, as it has existed right up to now, has been able to solve this problem satisfactorily. The silent cinema thought it could get out of it through editing and the juxtaposition of images. Remember Eisenstein’s famous statement: “Editing is for me the means of giving movement (i.e., an idea) to two static images.” And when sound came, he was content to adapt theatrical devices.

One of the fundamental phenomena of the last few years has been the growing realisation of the dynamic, i.e., significant, character of the cinematic image. Every film, because its primary function is to move, i.e., to take place in time, is a theorem. It is a series of images which, from one end to the other, have an inexorable logic (or better even, a dialectic) of their own. We have come to realise that the meaning which the silent cinema tried to give birth to through symbolic association exists within the image itself, in the development of the narrative, in every gesture of the characters, in every line of dialogue, in those camera movements which relate objects to objects and characters to objects. All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being or certain objects which form part of his universe. It is by clarifying these relationships, by making a tangible allusion, that the cinema can really make itself the vehicle of thought. From today onwards, it will be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their profundity and meaning, to the novels of Faulkner and Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and Camus. Moreover we already have a significant example: Malraux’s L’Espoir, the film which he directed from his own novel, in which, perhaps for the first time ever, film language is the exact equivalent of literary language.

Let us now have a look at the way people make concessions to the supposed (but fallacious) requirements of the cinema. Scriptwriters who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformation they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. We have no desire to rehash those poetic documentaries and surrealist films of twenty-five years agp every time we manage to escape the demands of a commercial industry. Let’s face it: between the pure cinema of the 1920s and filmed theatre, there is plenty of room for a different and individual kind of film-making.

This of course implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather, that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen. In an art in which a length of film and sound-track is put in motion and proceeds, by means of a certain form and a certain story (there can be no story at all – it matters little), to evolve a philosophy of life, how can one possibly distinguish between the man who conceives the work and the man who writes it? Could one imagine a Faulkner novel written by someone other than Faulkner? And would Citizen Kane be satisfactory in any other form than that given to it by Orson Welles?

Let me say once again that I realise the term avant-garde savours of the surrealist and so-called abstract films of the 1920s. But that avant-garde is already old hat. It was trying to create a specific domain for the cinema; we on the contrary are seeking to broaden it and make it the most extensive and clearest language there is. Problems such as the translation into cinematic terms of the verbal tenses and logical relationships interest us much more than the creation of the exclusively visual and static art dreamt of by the surrealists. In any case, they were doing no more than make cinematic adaptations of their experiments in painting and poetry.

So there we are. This has nothing to do with a school, or even a movement. Perhaps it could simply be called a tendency: a new awareness, a desire to transform the cinema and hasten the advent of an exciting future. Of course no tendency can be so called unless it has something concrete to show for itself. The films will come, they will see the light of day –- make no mistake about it. The economic and material difficulties of the cinema create the strange paradox whereby one can talk about something which does not yet exist; for although we know what we want, we do not know whether, when, and how we will be able to do it. But the cinema cannot but develop. It is an art that cannot live by looking back over the past and chewing over the nostalgic memories of an age gone by. Already it is looking to the future; for the future, in the cinema as elsewhere, is the only thing that matters.

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*Carné liked to use these terms when referring to his pre-war films (Ed.).