The French Line

by Richard Roud, Sight and Sound Autumn 1960

NOTE : Few background tips, first. Today, Hitchcock's Vertigo and his other major American movies are widely accepted as one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, but this was not always so. In the 1950's, Hitchcock's Hollywood movies, many of which were blockbusters of their time, were not considered as anything more than an clever entertainment in both in U.S. and Britain.
However, in France, there was more serious interest in Hollywood movies not only as cultural manifestation of the most industrial nation in the world but also as great works of arts in themselves. One of the most vociferous groups of French critics to champion these Hollywood movies of Hitchcock, Lang, Sam Fuller, and Howard Hawks, to name few, was the critics of the French film journal Cahiers du cinema, which emerged to be perhaps the most single influential film journal during the all-important decade of 1960's. In fact, as Thomas Elsaesser noted on the elevation of Hollywood movies to the ranks of great art, "Legend has it that the feat was accomplished almost single-handed by motivated and volatile intellectuals from Paris sticking their heads together and pulling off a brilliant public relations stunt that came to be known as Cahiers du Cinema and nouvelle vague".
At first, the British (and subsequently American) critics tended to brush aside these views as French idiosyncracies, in fact Jerry Lewis was one of autuers praised by the French critics, but in 1960, when the former Cahiers du cinema critics became directors who created their own remarkable films thereby inaugurating the New Wave, the British critics had to take notice. They began to reexamine Cahier group's auteur policy and its analysis of Hollywood movies, and this article is an such an example of how the British critics reacted to Hollywood movies and auteur policy with all its brilliances and excesses before and at the early period of the New Wave.

Every year the French monthly Cahiers du Cinema asks thirty critics to choose what each of them thinks to be the ten best films of the year. Allowing for the differences in release dates, the lists are often fairly close to those of English critics on a corresponding level. Last year, for example, one found high on many French critics' lists Ivan the Terrible, Hiroshima mon Amour, Les Quatre Cents Coups and Wild Strawberries. But half of the French critics also included Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. It would be fair to say that Rio Bravo passed more or less unnoticed in England: some critics thought it was efficient, some boring, some too long, some pleasant...But hardly anyone here would have included it in his 10-best list, let alone placing it second after Ivan (Jean Domarchi), or third after Ugetsu Monogatari and Ivan (Leenhardt) or fourth (Eric Rohmer) or even seventh (Claude Chabrol).
Rio Bravo was not, however, the only surprise in the French lists. I wonder how many English critics would have included Hitchcock's Vertigo, Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow, Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die, or Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades. One's first reaction might be to conclude these men must be very foolish. And indeed, until a year or two ago, one might have got away with it. But today it would be difficult, I think, to maintain that film-makers like Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, and Jean-Pierre Melville are fools.
Furthermore, the fact that their lists also contain films of which we think highly (Ivan the Terrible, Ugetsu Monogatari, etc) gives pause. On closer consideration one can see that it is really only as to American films that their standards differ. Not only do they not like some of the American films admired by English critics (A Man is Ten Feet Tall, A Hole in the Head), but they revere American film directors such as Paul Wendkos, Edgar Ulmer or Gerd Oswald.

Losey, Lang, Preminger and Cottafavi (an Italian) are the greatest of the great. - Michel Mourlet
Fuller is to Welles as Marlowe is to Shakespeare. - Luc Moullet
Hitchcock is one of the greatest inventors of forms in the history of cinema. Only Murnau and Eisenstein can perhaps stand comparison with him on this ground. - Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol
To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray's Party Girl is to turn one's back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as an autuonomous art. - Fereydoun Hoveyda
Hawk's oeuvre is an epic of intelligence; his adventure films are a homage to man's knowledge and will. - Jacques Rifette

In case the point is not year clear, let me add that when the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique was awarded for the first time last spring, the prize for the best foreign film of the year went to Fritz Lang's Moonfleet. The second prize was given to Pather Panchali (which, let us note, had been characterised by Francois Truffaut - after seeing only the first three reels - as Europeanised and insipid).
If, however, one admits that by and large the tastes of the Cahiers team of critics coincide with ours (as "Anglo-Saxons", to use one of their favourite words); and if one admits, as one must, that some of them have made remarkable and even great films, then rather than throwing up one's hands in the air or dismissing them all as mad, one should try to see why and how their judgments of American films differ so substantially from ours.

A Certain Arrangement of Lines and Colours

First of all, the French critics are practically indifferent to the content of a film - or at least they claim to ge. Claude Chabrol has stated categorically that the important or "big" subject was worth no more than the unimportant one. He even goes on to say that the smaller that subject is, the more it can be treated greatly. In other words, whereas in England a film with a good (i.e. noble, humanistic, socially aware, humanitarian) subject has already won half the battle, in France the more noble a film's subject the more suspiciously it is regarded. The greatest link between all the schools of French film criticism is an insistence on the supremacy of form over content.
This is only to be expected in a country where, I think it safe to say, form has always been considered of prime importance in the arts. Many French literary critics prefer Racine to Shakespeare solely on the grounds of form. Furthermore, whereas in England the supreme art has always been literature, in France it has, at least in the last century, been as much painting. And there is no denying (pace John Berger) that in painting, form is, as far as the two can be separated, paramount over content. The great war-cry of the late nineteenth century in France was Maurice Denis' statement that before being a battle scene or a nude, or whatever, a painting is above all a certain arrangement of lines and colors. As painting in France has become more and more abstract, this argument as gained general acceptance. In France the cinema has never need, as it were, to work its passage towards respectability. Almost from the outset, French critics felt bound to discuss films on as serious a level as that on which the other arts are discussed; and this means, inevitably, on the formal level.
But is their postulate as to the primacy of form really valid, even for them? Is it not clear that they also like the American film for its subject matter, for its themes, most of all, perhaps, for its potrayal of the American "world"? It may be difficult for English people to think of Detroit as El Dorado, but it is undeniable that American life in all its forms exercises a very strong hold over present-day young French intellectuals.
Ever since Descartes, French culture has been one of restraint, rationalism and moderation. Since the weight of inherited culture lies more heavily in France than almost any other country, the reaction against it as bound to be equally strong. For our present purposes, the first important reaction came at the end of the last century with men like Jarry an lautreamont, precursors of Dada and surrealism, who revolted against the cult of rationalism and good taste and even against "art". This reaction built up in the early 1900's; and, significantly, it was then that the cult of America really began. One of the first to comment on it was Jean Cocteau, who declared that he found it just as silly as the fin de siecle cult for Venice. But certain tides cannot be stemmed. Soon the ships of the French Line began to bring over the first jazz and ragtime records. Stravinsky played them to Picasso: from that moment, they were in. The next American export to conquer France came from Hollywood: Chaplin, DeMille (The Cheat), Rio Jim (alias William S. Hart), Griffith and Stroheim. It took the American cinema, after all, to convince men like Renoir that the movies had any possibilities as an art form.
Finally, France began to adopt modern American literature: Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner. Indeed, Faulkner was appreciated earlier in France than in England and America. While Sanctuary was considered here to be a pot-boiler, in France, it was hailed by Malraux as "the incursion of Greek tragedy into the detective story".

America and the Existentialists

What was it that the pre-war generation liked about these authors? Form, yes, in the case of Faulkner. But Gide, although he reluctantly admitted that Dashiell Hammett was not in the same class as Hemingway or Faulkner, said that he regarded Hammett's Red Harvest as a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocities, cynicism and horror.
This appreciation of American literature was intensified (and almost codified) after the war by the Existentialists. The American novel, reported an astounded American critic, was esteemed in France, because, as the product of the most advanced industrial nation, it afforded particularly powerful images of the brutal milieux and the lonely heroes, the alienation and dehumanization which are typical of the modern world in general. Hemingway and Faulkner were specially appreciated nor for their grasp of ideas or the subtleties of their psychology but because of their power over physical fact, their translation of the brute, irrational, "given" quality of the world, the concrete feel of things. Comparing Proust with Faulkner, Sartre commented that "Proust is a classic, and a Frenchman: the French may lose themselves over the weekend but they always end up by finding themselves again." The taste for clear ideas, eloquence and intellectualism constrained Proust to preserve at least a semblance of chronology and logical coherence. This was why Sartre preferred Faulkner to Proust rather than, as one might have imagined, the other way around.
After the war the discovery of the new Italian and American cinemas provoked a renewal - even, as Roger Leenhardt puts it, an inflation - of cinematographic thought in France. The number of articles and books on the cinema was suddenly multiplied by a score. And the younger critics were not only ardent but erudite. They all possessed - or pretended to possess - great literary and artistic culture. (It is not for nothing, incidently, that France publishes more Morceaux Choisis), or Great Pages from Great Authors, than any other country.) Hence, when they first began to see American films, they already had in their minds an image of America which had been created by Faulkner, Hemingway, etc. This, of course, is quite different from the case of the average English critic, whose image of America is tinged by tolerant condescension.
Take, for instance, the case of Tarnished Angels. Directed by Douglas Sirk, the film is an adaptation of Faulkner's novel Pylon; and Cahiers found it to be the most faithful film adaptation of any Faulkner novel. The characters and situations of the novel were changed considerably; certain themes which were dear to Faulkner and his generation were disregarded. Nevertheless, said Luc Moullet, because the greatness of Faulkner is to be found in the gratuitousness of Pylon, therefore the gratuitousness of Sirk's constant short, lateral, almost invisible tracking shots is a faithful translation of the form of Pylon. Mise-en-scene (of which more later) corresponds to novelistic subtlety. Art is only a question of artifice, says Moullet. "Therefore let us praise an artifice which is cultivated without regrets, which thus acquires a higher degree of sincerity...The true is as false as false; only the archi-false becomes true." (!)
Although the above quotation is just another example of Moullet's love for the rather worn-out paradox (A Bout de Souffle is profound because it is superficial), the fact remains that as a translation of the hard and spare world of Faulkner, as well as rendering of a life in a provincial city of the Thirties, Tarnished Angels is a remarkable formal effort; and this was generally recognized in France. Here it was relegated to to the Film Guide page of SIGHT AND SOUND; and as it was not judged to be of special interest to SIGHT AND SOUND readers, it was given no star. In the same issue, however, Celui qui doit Mourir was awarded two stars because it was considered to be a "brave attempt at a grand scale tackling of enormous subjects', though it was finally discounted by SIGHT AND SOUND because of the "unbridged gap between form and content". This brings out the greatest differences between Cahiers du Cinema and this magazine: if driven to it, Cahiers will choose form (Tarnished Angels) and SIGHT AND SOUND content (Celui qui doit Mourir). For the French, intentions do not count: there is no such thing in art as a minor genre.
This is not just a question of "commitment". In France, Rene Guyonnet, a Left Wing "committed" critic, has put the problem very clearly:

Many people begin to smile when one rhapsodises on the beauty of Rio Bravo or Kiss Me Deadly. This is because their conditioning by literature and literary values leads them to see in Aldrich's films only an illustration of a novel by Mickey Spillane, a writer for whom they feel only a probably justified contempt. Or, in the case of Rio Bravo, they feel that a Western can only be succession of chases and bang-bang-bang - that is, a breath of fresh air and a fountain of youth. Eh bien, non!...There is, beyond the appearance of stupidity, a meaning to be understood ( a meaning which does not necessarily raise the question of the fate of humanity, but one which is nevertheless worthy of consideration). It is critic's job to extract this meaning...
It is easier, I know, to appreciate films like Stars or Come Back, Africa whose classic humanism and generosity of themes is obvious - even though, perhaps, the cinematographic language is not on as high a level as the themes. Even a film like Panther Panchali, which demands a sensitivity to the poetry of images and of music, should not present many difficulties, for nothing interposes itself between its poetry and the spectator. But Westerns and film noirs are perhaps the best test of the film critic because their value is so often a matter of form, technique, iconography: all the elements which separate the cinema from literature.

To return to the Cahiers group, the only trouble about their appreciation of Kiss Me Deadly was that it led them to elect Robert Aldrich then and there to their pantheon of the truly great: Hawks, Ray, Anthony Mann, Preminger, etc. And once a director is accepted by Cahiers, it automatically follows that all his subsequent (and even previous) works are also ipso facto magnificent. The Big Knife, Attack, Autumn Leaves, Ten Seconds to Hell: all were duly praised by Cahiers according to that system of criticism which derives, I believe, from Chateaubriand (who was also, curiously if irrelevantly, the first French writer to introduce the cult of America): the critique des beautes. That is to say, the critic concentrates entirely on the beauties of a work of art rather than attempting impartially to point out both the good and the bad elements.

La Politique des Auteurs

It takes a long time and many disappointing films before the Cahiers team will change their mind about a film-maker who has once been admitted to their pantheon. Ever since their 31st issue, the politique des auteurs (whereby you choose those you are for and those you are against) has perhaps been the basic guiding principle of the magazine. But Cahiers now seems ready to desert Aldrich. The first disappointment came when they realized that Aldrich didn't really like Kiss Me Deadly himself. And I think it is now generally realised that the very special quality of the film derives partly from the peculiar tension set up between Aldrich's hatred of his subject and his determination to use this story to get across his own views about democracy, the police and fascism. ("Art is born of constraint and dies of freedom." said Andre Gide.) In any case, Truffaut sold the pass a few months ago in New York when he declared to an interviewer that he thought Aldrich's later films were rather disappointing. This may not seem like much to us, but it is the first crack in the critical armour of the magazine.
The best example of the degree to which the politique des auteurs can be carried is the Hitchcock case. Chabrol and Rohmer decided long ago that Hitchcock was more than "master of suspense". He was a great moralist, and a Catholic moralist to boot. There is rather pitiful interview on record in which Truffaut and Chabrol asked Hitchcock why he had told an English interviewer that he preferred his English film to the later, "more significant" American ones, when he had told them the year before that he really preferred the American pictures. Hitchcock answered that he really preferred the later films but had just told the English critic the opposite to be nice. Whereupon Rivette, Chabrol, Truffaut, etc. breathed a sigh of relief; rather incautiously, it seems to me, since it never apparently occurred to them that Hitchcock was perhaps only being "nice" to them as well.
Here is an extract from the book Rohmer and Chabrol devoted to HItchcock:

The art of HItcocock is to make us participate in the vertigo felt by the characters - and this by the fascination exerted on one by any abstracted quasi-geometrical figure - and beyond this vertigo to show us the profundity of moral idea. The current which passes from the symbol to the idea always passes through the condenser of the emotions...Thus the emotion is a means, not an end...it is beyond form and this side of idea. That is why it always leaves us with a bitter taste in the mouth, and the feeling of a Unity ever discernible in the middle of chaos, an original light which reflects on the sombre facets of Evil some of its most beautiful rays.

If this were not enough, Cahiers once devoted fourteen pages to a thematic index of objects in Hitchcock's films: glasses, throats, clocks, cats, dogs, eyes, knives, keys...
The disquieting thing about this Hitchcock idolatry is that it seems to have incited Claude Chabrol to make his worst film, A Double Tour, which is an adaptation of an American thriller re-set in France and treated more or less a la Hitchcock. But Chabrol is so far alone in extending his admiration to imitation. Alain Resnais loves Rio Bravo, but he made Hiroshima, mon Amour, of which the least that could be said is that the content is equal in importance to the form. Truffaut praised KIss Me Deadly, but Les Quatre Cent Coups is about as "humanist" a film as one could imagine. (Whether Truffaut's Tirez sur le Pianiste will be something different will be interesting to discover.)

Mise-en-scene

In other words, at least among the older of the Cahiers critics, the films they make themselves correspond more to what we in England like to think of as great cinema: a fusion of significant form with literary or humanistic content. But among some of the newer (as yet, non-film-making) members of Cahiers team, Hollywood is regarded as the cinema: "less intimidated than the Europeans by a whole literary and artistic culture, the truth of mise-en-scene has there attained its furthest development."
It might be a good idea to attempt to define that untranslatable term mise-en-scene. Literally, it is defined as staging, or stage-producing. Alexandre Astruc originally defined the Cahiers use of the term as "a certain way of extending the elans of the soul in the movements of the body: a song, a rhythm, a dance." Critics like Hoveyda and Mourlet take it even further. Film is not the script, the acting, or even the montage: the whole quality of it is this mysterious, elusive mise-en-scene.

The curtains open. The house goes dark. A rectangle of light presently vibrates before our eyes. Soon it is invaded by gestures and sounds. Here we are absorbed by that space and that unreal time. More or less absorbed. The mysterious energy whih "supports" with varying degree of success the backwash of shadow and light and their foam of sound is called mise-en-scene. It is on it that our attention is fixed, it is which organises a universe, which covers the screen - it, and nothing else. Like the shimmer of the notes of a piano piece, like the flow of words of a poem, like the harmonies and discords of the colours of a painting...The placing of the actors and the objects, their movements within the frame, should express everything.

This to them is cinema, and they reject all films which do not aim at this level of sublimity, films which limit themselves to sordid "problems" (neo-realism, I suppose) or to telling stories "with images" (95 per cent, of all films, according to their calculations).
There is nothing wrong with is purist theory. A critic should try to separate the literary qualities of a story from the purely formal qualities of a film - the way in which "the actors and the objects, and their movement within the frame" express the personality, the genius of a director. The trouble, it seems to me, is in their application of this theory. For to these critics, the great film of 1960 (at least up to the time of this writing) was Nicholas Ray's Party Girl. (I suspect that before the year is out it will have been supplanted by The Savage Innocents.)
In an eleven-page essay, Fereydoun Hoveyda discusses Party Girl. Discusses, however, is not perhaps quite the right word, for after a few lines in which he admits that the film was shot from a script imposed on Ray, that it was a "commissioned work", he proceeds to a perfect example of the critique des beautes. Well, let us see what some of these "beauties" are.
First of all, Hoveyda says, "The subject of Party Girl is idiotic. So what?"

If the complications of the stories which unroll on the screens constituted the substratum of the cinematographic oeuvre, we would have only to annex the seventh art to literature and abandon the columns of Cahiers to literary criticism.

To be sure, certain old fogies are always insisting that the critic should take into account the influence of production systems, the importance of the script and of acting. One might just as well take into consideration the influence of the planets and stars, resorts Hoveyda. No: the essence of the cinema is in nothing but the mise-en-scene.
The first "great" thing about Party Girl is the fact that Ray has inserted an enlargement of a Fitzpatrick 16mm. colour shot of Venice into the sequence concerning Farrell and Vickey's "honeymoon" in Europe. Better still, the back transparencies used in the scenes in automobiles are anachronistic, and the transparencies in the scenes at Antibes are ugly and clumsy. Why is this great, you may ask? Because, says Hoveyda, it shows irrefutably that Ray is interested only in interiors and in the internal problems of his characters. This can be proved to the sceptical by the first shots of the film: first, a low-angle shot of a painted flat representing the skyscrapers; then the camera moves down and pans to the left on to the neon night club sign; and then, in a long tracking shot, it advances towards the inside of the building...
And so forth. Three pages later, Hoveyda returns to the charge by Louis Marcorelies that Ray's talent has been wasted in this film on an idiotic subject:

If I have said that the subject of the film was of little concern to me, it was because I think that the mise-en-scene is capable of transfiguring it. If anyone persists in thinking Party Girl an imbecility, I will cry out: Long live the imbecility which dazzles eyes, fascinates my heart, and give me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven!

But perhaps we need not go on to follow Hoveyda's rhapsodies throughout the remaining three pages of his article. Every remarkable shot is mentioned. (Though not, curiously enough, the one I consider the most beautiful, which occurs when Vicky, suspecting that her friend has committed suicide, rushes into the bathroom. The camera frames the wall at eye level and then slowly descends to the girl, whom we see bent over the tub, her hair and arms streaming down into the blood-filled bath.) To Hoveyda, as to many French critics, x number of beautiful shots equals a great film. As Rene Clair put it thirty-four years ago: the only thing that counts in the cinema is the value of image itself, and not the story which is merely a pretext.
But the problem remains. Unlike a painting, a film exists in time, and there must be something to link all those shots together. "Yes, oh dear, yes. The novel tells a story," said E. M. Forster. And the cinema, too, must tell a story. It would seem, however, that Hoveyda and his clique prefer the unimportant, second-rate, meaningless story: it's generally the mediocre directors, says Hoveyda, who have recourse to the vig themes to try to hide their own inadequacy. His answer to those who accuse him of defending minor B-pictures is simply to retort: "What's wrong with adventure and gangster stories," somewhat like that great hero of Krafft-Ebbing who similarly retorted: "What's wrong with a goose?" One would find it difficult to answer because the question has been incorrectly put. There is, in effect, nothing wrong with a B-picture story. And, to be sure, the great director can transform it into a work of art. But the most satisfying work of art is surely the one in which the content, or story, doesn't have to be transcended.
Unfortunately, when a critic has to quote Hegel and Kant in reviewing a film by Minneli, it is not because, as Hoveyda maintains, the cinema is at least as important as literature, painting and the drama. It is because somehow the critic feels he must dignify his liking of the film by the most impeccable intellectual references. It is a curious paradox that those French critics who delight in non-intellectual, irrational films always feel called upon to discuss them in the most pedantic and academic way possible. The trouble, one feels, is that they like the second-rate but daren't admit it, so the second-rate must be built up by dint of references to Kant, Hegel, et al.

Charlton Heston is an Axiom

Happily, there are signs that a reaction in favour of common sense and intellectual values is on its way. Even Hoveyda, in a recent issue of Cahiers, attacks the MacMahonist aesthetic (so-called because the MacMahon cinema usually features flms by Lang, Losey, etc.) in the person of its leader, Michel Mourlet. Mourlet's gods, it will be recalled, are Lang, Losey, Preminger, Raoul Walsh, Cottafavi and Don Weis, and his ideal is the cinema of violence:

Charlton Heston is an axiom. By himself alone he constitues a tragedy, and his presence in any film whatsoever suffices to create beauty. The contained violence expressed by the sombre phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle's profile, the haughty arch of his eyebrows, his prominent cheek-bones, the bitter and hard curve of his mouth, the fabulous power of his torso: this is what he possesses and what not even the worst director can degrade. It is in this sense that one can say that Charton Heston, by his existence alone, gives a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like Hiroshima, mon Amour or Citizen Kane, whose aesthetic either ignores or impugns Charlton Heston.

Obviously, one can go no further in the erection of a system based on one's own tastes, and one is glad to see such an extremist view condemned by the greater part of the Cahiers team. Of course, their main weakness is that it was only a question of time before their system of rationalising personal quirks and fancies should produce such a cryptofascist and slightly nutty approach to the cinema.
On the other hand, however, over the years they have maintained the basic principle enunciated by Andre Bazin: the cinema is not an illustration of a scenario, it is not literature with pictures added. In spite of their divergence of views (Marcorelles, for example, is as far from Mourlet as Morlet is from, say, Doniol-Valcroze) the one thing they have in common, I think, and that we would gain most by adopting, is the firm belief that form ias at least as important as content. Degas once said to Mallarme that although he had lots of ideas he was finding it difficult to write a poem. Whereupono Mallarme replied: "But Degas, poems aren't made with ideas; they're made with words."

Posted on 8/30/00.

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