"We Miss André Bazin," by Francois Truffaut

Not sure about the rarity of this piece. It was written in 1983 for Dudley Andrew's biography, André Bazin, and Truffaut had already written a different foreword for the 1978 English edition, which he titled "Yes, We All Miss André Bazin." That foreword is much shorter, and has four or five sentences in common with the 1983 foreword. My guess would be that he rewrote the foreword for the French translation five years later, except for that Truffaut uses some anglicisms and English loans uncommon for his style. He also did this when writing the preface to Rosenbaum's translation of Bazin's Orson Welles, which was intended for translation. Nevertheless, English reeditions from the early 2000s include the 1978 foreword, and I've only been able to find the 1983 version in French, in the collection Le plaisir des yeux (compositing Truffaut's prose from after the period covered in Films in My Life). The 1983 version is more revealing, more relevant to our time, and one of Truffaut's best writings.

About 15 years ago, a sketch in the New Yorker showed a team of Hollywood executives around an oval table. Pens in the air, scratching their foreheads, they're looking at a blackboard which reads, "The extraordinary life of...?"

If we admit that the Americans have the greater talent for biography, then we should not expect from Dudley Andrew an "extraordinary life," but simply a scrupulous portrait of a man who was remarkable in his kindness, intelligence, and humour.

André Bazin no doubt would never have imagined his life and work the subject of a book, nor this book to be written by a young American - a professor in cinema - who would cross thousands of miles to question his friends. Nevertheless, I see in this spiritual biography an extension of Bazin's project, which he defined in 1943: "We already have a professor of the 7th art at the Sorbonne, and one day we'll have an 800 page thesis on the Comic of American cinema between 1905 and 1917, or something approximating that. And who would dare to claim that it isn't serious?"

If, instead of Bazin the critic, I prefer to speak of Bazin the "film writer," it's because he never treated his work like a job. Even if he lived off of a pension or from some step-aunt's inheritance, he would have written about the cinema. It was his pleasure, and a necessity one with his pedagogical vocation. His best articles are generally the longest, and sometimes he would carry twenty to thirty sheets of manuscript paper to Esprit or the Cahiers du Cinéma, and he would say "I haven't had the time to shorten them."

While evident that Bazin wasn't the only one to analyse the nature and values of the moving image, he was alone in his interrogation of the role of the critic. When Janine Bazin and I compiled his first texts (1943-45) in The Cinema of the Occupation and the Resistance, we were surprised to find five or six addressing solely the purpose of criticism. Later, when Pierre-Aimé Touchard's prediction that "In ten years Bazin will be the greatest film critic" would be achieved, these types of articles still regularly appear, culminating in the famous "On the festival considered as an Order."

Since he started writing in 1943, in The Student Echo, Bazin was shocked to see that, in the mainstream press, films were only ever summarised: "We looked in vain through the majority of our film journals for an opinion on the décor or the photography, judgements on the use of sound, on the precision of the editing. In a word, on those things which make the cinema the cinema... It seems this singular art has no past, no dimension, like the imponderable shadows on the screen. It's high time one invented a cinematographic criticism in relief."

Bazin himself would provide this "criticism in relief." Anyone owning all twenty editions of The Cinema Revue have noticed that the serious discussions start around no. 9, with Bazin's first contribution, The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux. When a film moves or impassions him, he returns to it two, three times, not hesitating to question his own judgements.

Some films are lovable from the first viewing because they happily embrace the elements which we know, and adjust them with a new harmony in such a way that we are moved before we are surprised. Renoir's beautiful film, A Day in the Country, corresponds to this definition. Other films (neither better nor worse) embrace new or known adjusted elements, and so we're surprised before we're touched. Another Renoir corresponds to this definition: The Diary of a Chambermaid, which gives Bazin the occasion to mix his criticism and auto-criticism.

Who other than Bazin has had the courage - not once, but ten times - to revisit his first judgements and reconsider them not because of changes of humour, but in pursuit of a deeper analysis? On the 15 June 1948, taken aback by The Diary of a Chambermaid (Renoir being his favourite director), Bazin writes in L'Ecran francais: "Renoir has made both enormous and derisory efforts to recreate about his heroes the uniquely French world in which they live and die. But we can feel the artificial "sunlights" on Burgess Meredith's rosebushes, and the entire film is soaked in this aquarium lighting characteristic of Hollywood studios, under which everything, the actors included, turns into a Japanese floral arrangement." Some years later, Bazin reviews The Diary and is astounded. He writes a new text and loyally cites his first article: "I've pursued the unhealthy curiosity to reread what I wrote in L'Ecran Francais..." He continues and comments on the new viewing: "Then The Diary of a Chambermaid started, and in the first few minutes I had the unhappy impression of recognising my error and how absurd it was to persist in wanting to see a realism which was not in this most oneiric film, the most deliberately imaginary if Renoir's oeuvre... As for this aquarium lighting which troubled me so, I've found it again, only as the light of an interior inferno, a sort of telluric phosphorescence, like that imagined by Jules Verne which lights his voyagers in the center of the earth. It's perhaps the first time that we see Renoir step away from the workings of the theatre into pure theatricality."

The intentional confrontation between these two articles, rather than implicating us in a self-effacing revision, intensifies our understanding. Here then is not only Bazin's integrity, but also the quality of his perception, since, leaving aside the problems with his initial judgement, the description of Renoir's film in the critical account is unequivocally better than any which an unconditional fan - like my friends and I at the Cahiers - could have written. From here, it's not too far before we're suggesting a politique des auteurs-critiques, by which a negative article by a Bazin is a better description of a film than any paean by one of us.

This "aquarium lighting" is an important idea, isolating one of the most arresting contrasts of post-war cinema: that of Hollywood and neo-realism. Indeed, it was to escape this lighting that Ingrid Bergman, moved by Rome, Open City, left Hitchcock for Rossellini.

To recognise the virtues of a certain theatricality gilding and amplifying a film's imagery, as an echo chamber aggravates the human voice - a greater stylisation than any surface realism maintained throughout an entire production - was the beginning of much of Bazin's best work, on Welles (Macbeth), Cocteau (Les Parents Terribles), and Pagnol (Letters from my Windmill). No doubt today's producers and directors would profit from reading these 30 year old texts. Take, for example, Bazin's words on an adaptation of The Doctor Despite Himself, botched by its efforts to "do cinema":

"Moliere's play only makes sense against a forest of painted canvas, and the actors' game follows the same condition. The footlights aren't from an autumn sun. One is limited to playing the fagot scene before a curtain, since at the foot of a tree, it no longer exists... The director wanted to imbue it with reality, to offer a perspective for us within the scene. Unfortunately, these clumsy ruses had the opposite effect, only declaring the irreality of the characters."

Bazin finds a timeless example of adaptation from the theatre in Les Parents Terribles, which, on film, excludes all exteriors, even when the characters move from one building to another: "As a filmmaker Cocteau has understood the necessity to add nothing to his decor, and that the cinema is not here to multiply, but to intensify... The essential here being the dramatic fact of claustrophobic cohabitation. The thinnest ray of sunlight, indeed any light that isn't electric, would have destroyed this fragile and fatal symbiosis... The theatre by essence can never be conflated with nature, or else it will dissolve and cease to be."

Even if the industry is indifferent to critical analyses beyond the points of "See it!" or "Don't bother!" it's clear that these remarks on theatricality, read well and observed well, would have allowed Gaumont to shoot Mozart's Don Giovanni on two billion centimes instead of three, and even take back one instead of losing two, since this was a flagrant example of a film failing by its ruinous and naive abandonment of the required "scenic" convention, rather than by its theatricality.

Two years earlier, far from aiming to "do cinema," Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute in an old theatre, not offering the artificial mise en scene of an opera so much as the representation of an opera. Modestly commissioned for Swedish television, the film became an international success, and I don't hesitate to call Bergman's work method Bazinian.

The expression "left intellectual" is laughed at today, and not only by those lamenting French Algeria - so how should we react to the notion of a "left catholic"? Bazin was a left catholic intellectual, and none who knew him would deny the perfect intimacy between his thoughts and his actions.

When he was leaving for a trip with Janine, he phoned some of his worse-off friends to offer them his house, or when he was staying at Vincennes and picked up three people waiting for the bus in the rain and took them to Paris, was it the catholic Bazin or the leftist Bazin? I couldn't say. It was Bazin, and I sometimes tell myself that two good reasons to believe in the equality of man are better than one.

Dudley Andrew's book revealed to me that Bazin, near the end of his adolescence, was distressed and anguished to the point of consulting a psychiatrist. I never knew this and couldn't have suspected it, probably because my relationship with him was pretty egotistical on my part, even as I loved him deeply, and also because when I knew him, he was stable, happy in his private life thanks to Janine, and reassured in his professional life, being already internationally known and respected. Bazin took to his work like a duck to water. You will never find an overly harsh article. At his most severe, you might find, "The premise was interesting, unfortunately mishandled because of..."

When Bazin died, he had been writing for fifteen years. Never jaded, never skeptical, and always social. He wrote in 1943, "The aesthetic of the cinema will be social or the cinema will go without aesthetic." But one would never have found in him a trace of "social vanity," since he had neither the desire to be someone else, nor to do anything else. His great talent eventually introduced him to the most famous filmmakers, on equal terms which came about automatically, though he always denied his relationships with Renoir, Rossellini, Cocteau, Fellini, and Orson Welles.

My first work with Bazin, circa 1947, was accompaning him in factories where, in the half hour following lunch and preceding the return to the workshops, he showed the workers two short Chaplin films, and found himself face to face with his audience. Knowing these films frame by frame and having nothing more to discover from them, he studied the audience's reactions and found there conformation of what he had written four years earlier: "Any elite aesthetic is radically incompatible with the functioning laws of the cinema. The cinema needs an elite, but this elite will have influence only insofar as it understands, with realism, the sociological demands of the seventh art." One of his first articles, dedicated to a commercial failure - fashionable with the Saint-Germain-des-Prés crowd, called Adieu Léonard and directed by Pierre Prévert, whose brother Jacques wrote the scenario - well illustrates his anti-snobism: "That one could have raved about this scenario proves to what point one has forgotten the possibilities of the cinema, since if it had any idea it could only be qualified by the style of its execution. This fantastical satire, a little ridiculous, could only come to life in a universe where rhythm and poetry imposed on us a superior verisimilitude of artifice; however, we never end up freed of logical contingencies, and can never accept freely the world which is imposed on us." At the end of the article Bazin shows his lack of personal animosity against Prévert: "To forget the film, we went to rewatch for the fourth time Le Jour se leve: hello, Prévert!"

It wouldn't be pointless to recall here than in Bazin's time, critics saw films on the first day with the public. They didn't write their articles prompted by a press release, so had to reconstruct scenarios themselves, interpret the intentions, and evaluate what distance was between the intentions and the results. Mixing in with the paying public didn't prevent Bazin from feeling solidary with the film when it was unjustly received or misunderstood, as in the case of Les Dames du bois de Boulogne.

Do I always agree with Bazin? Surely not. Indeed, I'm hostile to documentary cinema, of which Renoir says somewhere that it is "the falsest genre of the cinema." I adhere less to his idea, most evident in his early career, of the hierarchy of genres: "Goupi Mains Rouges is a half perfect work, while Les Visiteurs du Soir has its faults, but the genre of Becker's film is aesthetically inferior to Carné's." To follow Bazin down this path would lead one to consider King Vidor superior to Lubitsch. Now, one could find in earlier writings some remarks contradicting this hierarchy, such as in 1948: "Despite how it seems, comedy was the most serious genre in Hollywood, insofar as it reflected through comedy the moral and social beliefs of American life."

What's happened since Bazin's left? First of all, television has pulverised the myths, destroyed the stars, and broken the spell. The generalisation of colour has made the average quality of images regress, and rendered the reading of films at once more simple and less bewitching. Indeed, the percentage of nourishing and ambitious films has dropped.

Unfortunately, today's criticism - in any case its regular exercise - has nearly entirely lost its influence, principally because of television. When cinema had the monopoly over moving images, the function of criticism was to evoke these images with words, and if a film irresistibly drew in the public, no unanimously negative critical opinion would have dissuaded them from going to judge for themselves, simply because any film constituted a visual mystery. Today, three poorly chosen extracts are shown on television in one of these programs which the Minister of Communication assures us "promote" the cinema, and these are enough to dissipate the visual mystery and fix the destiny of a film. Under these conditions, and without giving the impression of having noticed, the critic has come to hold, in the cinematographic game, the same role as the ecological movement in the political game: theoretical, inefficacious, and morally indispensable.

In Bazin's time, the average film lacked ambition. The role of the critic was to stimulate directors by drawing their attention to the possibilities which existed in themselves, and of which they were not conscious. Today, it's the opposite, and one regularly sees ambitious films mutilated and failing to take flight because of the weakness of their execution. This is not an exclusively French phenomenon, and Bazin, if he were still living - he'd only be 65, after all - would be the most capable of establishing a greater harmony between our projects, attitudes, goals, and style.

For the sake of this preface I'm forced to write about Bazin with distance, as if he was a man like any other for me, when really André was the man I loved above all others. He and Janine adopted me when I was in great distress, and brought to an end the worst period in my life. I don't want to bring this up in too much detail, perhaps because I've written it out already, elsewhere, but through Andrew's book the reader will see what a marvelous man Bazin was, his extraordinary good faith, and his love for every living thing. Bazin had no enemies and could not have any, since his nature lead him to reformulate, with deeper understanding, the point of view of his adversary, before putting forward his own argument. Everyone became better in coming into contact with Bazin. If we disagreed, we observed it with tenderness.

André has been dead for 25 years. One would think that the passage of time would soften the feeling of his absence, but that's not the case.

We all miss Bazin.

Godard's Second Letter to Freddy Buache

We all know Godard's 1981 short film "Letter to Freddy Buache" (with English subs here https://vimeo.com/11523072), but there's also an undated "Second Letter to Freddy Buache" from among Godard's correspondence. It is not uncommon for Godard to employ titles and collages in personal correspondence, and this is no exception. The letter is partly his own writing, with excerpts from the text by Fassbinder which Godard mentions pasted between paragraphs. What is Godard's will be in italics.

Dear Freddy,

In the Spring of '78, the author of these lines received some words from his colleague Rainer Werner Fassbinder, intended to save him from stammering too much during a conference in Zurich about what remained of the only cinema in Europe which once dared to resist American cinema.

One can't talk about the meaning of life without using erroneous, inexact words. But there are no others. If there is something, it's movement. One fine day a solar system was formed which is no longer in movement because its movement is restricted. For it to move again, there would need to be some destruction. This is why man was invented. But this was done without prior planning. We are no longer allowed to say in any way, "we're here to..." The plans of the mighty are achieved in our study of those causes which seek only to form value systems, to ground meaning. All stories and all mythologies are the results of these projected causal chains. But if we were to destroy the cogs of this system, the regulated forces of gravity would no longer concord. Thus everything collapses. And suddenly there's movement, and so there's something. But we're here to stay, producers of values. That's why we're here.

I imagine, today, in view of this film to compose on the double theme of utopia and Switzerland, that I arrive on the shores of the Limmat, leaving those of Lake Geneva, where this conference is to take place.

We are not able to accept the contrary of what is. Thus we are nowhere near freedom. If we do not allow destruction the way we accept the regulated solar system which petrifies us, then we are not free. This is the case because the individual doesn't know that he can have an ends. I don't mean intellectual knowledge, but rather a corporeal certainty, present in everything he does, and the possibility of understanding this has always been refused him. He only has the corporeal experience when it's too late. If the individual acted as quickly as possible,

By foot, by car, then by train. Making my way, I encounter people as well as landscapes. Of much variety.

on the certainty that he must die, a corporeal certainty, then existential suffering would disappear for him - hate, desire, jealousy. There would be no more fears.

On the train, for example, there's a class of young schoolchildren with their professor of the time, Claude Gallaz, now journalist for the Lausanne tribune. That day, he develops his favourite theme of Switzerland and evil, and the fresh faces of the girls and boys make a counter-point to the bold and somber notions of their tutor.

In the life of every being there is this terrible and marvelous moment, which penetrates like a beacon into the consciousness of few and like a sacrosanct suffering to the subconscious of the greater majority: the moment when one recognises the finitude of one's own existence. But, our heads full of false notions, we have learnt to consider as just, imperative, definitive, and immutable, many false and disgusting things, and, above all, this curious paralysis, unnecessary but manifestly useful, which seizes us at the same time as the desire for a utopia which would seem right to us.

With my eyes and ears, I register everything, that is, the fresh faces, the calm and uniform landscape, the pompous conversations of businessmen, the anxious looks of immigrants, all accompanied by the words sent by RWF which ricochet in a thousand ways around Swiss images, of which they make the legend.

Our relations with others are cruel games, because we don't want to recognise our end as something positive. It is positive, because it is real. The end is the concrete life. The body has to understand death.

We have been taught to take such false and retentive ideas as our own, and even the struggle for certain utopias can only make these ideas endlessly recommence, allowing methods which turn out to be false -- not more false, no, but exactly as false as all the rest.

The final impression felt by the author of these lines at the end of his imaginary voyage - over the course of which life will have escaped to give back to the cinema that which it stole from it, such as Louis Dellue ardently wished from 1925 --

All the same, the terrible recognition of our approaching end - rather than liberating us, which truly could be the case - can serve to consolidate for us the atrocious enjoyment of our happiness in the mediocrity of servitude. The pleasure which this same recognition could offer to every being, this recognition of the ultimate absence of meaning and the essential contingency of all existence, precisely from the sacred moment when this recognition is acquired - This pleasure which should have rendered to each existence its meaning in the freedom of the decision, which is a great force in the struggle for something marvelous, something possible - for something which, in a constructive manner, gives meaning where there is none... We have not learnt to know it as a pleasure, as a joyously freed joy, but rather as an anguish - this anguish which allows us to enjoy servitude without joy. This honourable jungle doesn't seem to possess, beyond suicide, any path which leads beyond, if that isn't one.

        ... the path leading to madness, which one can choose to take. But it's a matter of the "world of madness," as it's a matter of death: the hope which they offer us can satisfy us, but it's not certain. And we only have new fragments of the beautiful anarchy which, in the world of madness, must allow the senses to know freedom.

was contained in another letter from RWF, which I received a short time after, and which ten years later was an article, under the title: For us, birds of paradise, it's going to get harder.

One day, when I will demand of myself a decision, one must hope that I will have courage enough to take the right paths, and not succumb to the tremendous variety of red herrings which are offered us.

Dear Freddy, could this footage serve as a denial?


Jean-Luc Godard

SONIMAGE Suisse
15, rue du Nord
1180 ROLLE
Switzerland

Cocteau on Picasso

From Cocteau’s diary. Lines written in Vallauris while he was staying with Picasso. Picasso was working mostly with ceramics at this time, after having finished La Guerre et La Paix, and Cocteau made plates of his own in the studio. He would also go on to start the plans for The Birth of Pegasus. This time is split by a press tour through Italy, (with the usual grievances of mediocre journalists, superficial admirers, and the exhausting demands of the press). Cocteau then leaves for the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, in which he serves as president of the jury. He admires Clouzot’s Wages of Fear and Disney’s Peter Pan, though is mostly reluctant about his responsibilities as president. This excerpt begins about two months earlier, on the first day of his stay with Picasso.

24 Feb 1953

Lunched in Vallauris. Picasso was at the studio where I later went to meet him with Françoise. Picasso opens a locked door, we enter, and there’s Guerre et Paix (War and Peace). My first impression is the nave of a church, and that walking in one should take off one's hat. I, anyway, take off mine. It’s the work of youth, of incredible violence. Equilibrium between zeal and calm. A marriage between Le Bain turc* and L’entrée des croises a Constantinople**. No form is realist but everything is true, internally true, which is all that counts. And, leaving the room, reality seems pallid, grey, ugly, dead, extinguished.

The huge piece, to be shown in Rome with a hundred other canvases†, will, rightly, end up in the Vallauris chapel‡. The pictures [18 panels of hardboard making up two 9-board pictures] will be curved so that they meet at the top of the chapel (the curve beginning from very low). From right to left: the first panel shows War in his chariot, or carriage, or horse-drawn coach, carrying on his back a sort of basket made of black lace, full of skulls. The figure holds in his left hand a disc covered with microbes and surrounded by flying microbes. His brandishes with his right hand a bleeding glaive. The horses of War trample a large, flaming book (the library of Alexandria). Above the horse, dark warriors’ silhouettes shake the shadows of their armour. Facing the horses stands an immense nude figure (Peace), holding a lance and a shield on which one can make out the face of a woman, on which Picasso has drawn a dove with its wings open. On the left picture, a family, all nude, is gathered on the grass. A woman breastfeeds her baby while reading. One man is blowing on a pot of soup. Another is engaged in some mysterious study. To their left, a child drives a plough pulled by a white-winged horse. Then, dancing women. A faun plays the flute, his legs crossed over a shell. A kind of swimming or flying child with an owl on his head forms the centre of balance of a set of three scales, at the ends of which are suspended a cage of fish, a bowl of birds, and an hourglass.

The whole thing is painted freely, thickly, with large strokes. One is offered implicitly the drafts and redrafts. Picasso has left a trail. He says, “One doesn’t advise someone unhappy to wipe his tears.”

He explains to me what he’s done, undone and redone. He says, “It’s always the thieving magpie and the prodigal child – fable.” After lunch at La Galloise I return to the studio and Picasso, having shown me the canvases of Françoise and the kids, takes me to the Ramiés’ pottery studio.

He tells me a story of great importance to him, and says, “You should make something with it.” He’d just painted a face on a plate and noted its resemblance to Huguette, the wife of one of the potters. The face had a beard. “Alright,” he said. “Since it’s Huguette, let’s take out the beard.” He does this and the face no longer looks like Huguette. He puts the beard back and Huguette reappears. I’ll add that this young woman is pregnant.

He shows me one of his innovations in pottery, which consists of sketching on the clay with coloured crayons. Then, he arranges them in the kiln after a “travail de liquide” (any potters out there who know what this is?). The pastel or crayon settles and, to the eye, still appears as pastel and crayon.

I’m back to see Françoise at the house. Excellent canvasses by Françoise. Little girls dancing madly, monsters before groups of male and female musicians.

Picasso over dinner: “I joined the communist party because I thought I’d find a family. In effect, I found a family, with all the bullshit that that means. The son who wants to become a lawyer, the one who wants to win the Prix de Rome. Never join such a family.”

“There’s also,” adds Françoise, “the fact that the communists only respect people outside the Party.”

I ask Picasso what the communists think of Guerre et Paix. “They approve. It’s up to me to put them in line.”

Picasso gives me a tablemat which he decorated at the studio. Madame Ramié gives me a large plate. The head of a ram in relief, very beautiful.

I say to Picasso: “Youth lacks heroism. It’s funny that no young person has managed to kill you.” He responds: “I’ve taken precautions.”

That’s understandable, since any painter next to his Guerre et Paix (and I mean any painter of professed boldness) seems weak, ridiculous.

Picasso: “I don’t know what I’m going to do or what I am doing. And if in the evening I want to discuss what I’ve done with Françoise, nothing comes to mind. Painting is the work of the blind.”

About Chagall, working in pottery: “I give him all my secrets and he thinks I’m trying to sabotage him. If I sold them to him, he’d believe me.”

About Stravinsky (regarding our feud): “He’ll never get that it’s not the same between him and you as between you and me.”

On Oedipus Rex††: “You’re the reason for the scandal, not Stravinsky. He’s able to make more and more beauty, but no longer to make scandals.”

We’re preparing a colour book which will show the whole of Guerre et Paix, including the smallest details. [Fernand] Mourlot is in Vallauris. There’s nothing that Picasso invents which doesn’t immediately become “historic.”

There are only children (exhibition at Muratore’s gallery in Nice) who obtain such power and such freedom. That Picasso should form the bridge between this childish power and the calculations and science of painting is a true miracle.

Guerre et Paix is, once again, a mighty insult to habit. Above all to Rome’s. Hence his delight to have it shown there.

I say to Picasso, “You’re winged horse resembles the horse in Greco’s Cardinal Tavera (currently in the Hospital de Tavera in Toledo).”

Picasso: “There’s no queen bee, rather there’s one chosen randomly and the others feed it until it becomes larger and more important than them.”

He must be right. By chance for Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth is a queen, but it was random. The Japanese men I met yesterday told me that Kikugoro [a famous actor of Kabuki in Tokyo, whom Cocteau met in 1936] is dead (he was Kikugoro IV). Kikoguro V isn’t his son. If the actor esteems his son unable to succeed him, he adopts a young actor who deserves to.

(…)

Yesterday, Picasso spoke of opium. “Besides the wheel, it’s all that man’s discovered.” He regrets that people can’t smoke freely and asks me if I still smoke habitually. I say no, and that I regret it as much as he does. “Opium,” he adds, “provokes goodness. The proof is that no smoker is greedy about his privilege. He wants everyone to smoke.” It’s impossible to be less “in line” than Picasso. Really, he’s a member of the communist party without being a communist. We’re too far from the communists who would kill their fathers and mothers in the name of the cause.

Let’s not forget to mention that the “Picassian” creation is of a diabolical order. The devil cannot create, only destroy. One could say that Picasso’s creation is a destruction. Perhaps, but there can never be creation without destruction, the destruction of that which it is. That Picasso disturbs other painters, crushes them, that this raptor devours them, is precisely it. If they dream of his death, they’re wrong to. His works will be more active than the man. Though his death would be a catastrophe. Such genius cannot be reproduced.

(…)

Picasso. He’s established like dogma that anything seeming “well made” betrays a certain will to aesthetics, a lack of elegance of the spirit. He thus scribbles a face on a crowd of well made faces. This “badly made,” which for him is right and which comes after a thousand investigations, deceives the youth who have no inkling of the rhythm of his work. In this way, he “misplaces” the scribbles and discredits, in advance, those able to contradict him, and whom we take for aesthetes. He’s a belligerent warrior, skilled in every ruse, knowing every parry, agile as a matador. Matisse can’t say five words without mentioning his name. He’s the idol and the nightmare of painters. Unique situation. Furthermore, the money committed to him staves off his ruin. He is sovereign, against painters, politics, and all.

************

On the 12^th of March, Louis Aragon published an edition of Les Lettres Françaises in homage to the recently deceased Stalin, including a portrait by Picasso, which met heavy criticism. Cocteau documents this, and explains that Picasso – who in the diary only speaks favourably of Stalin – was rushed by Aragon to finish the portrait, leading him to sketch out what he did within five minutes. Aside from pockets of critics complaining of a painter exploiting his celebrity, every sector of communist France had its ideas on how it would have praised Stalin in a different light than Aragon had. The magazine was pressured to publish in its next edition a spread with letters from the backlash, from which Cocteau paraphrases the general sentiment: “It was necessary to show the genius, the goodness, the paternal kindness, the humour, the nobility, etc., of our Stalin.”

Cocteau himself jots down a few reflections on communism throughout all volumes of his journals, but especially around this time, stimulated by his stay with Picasso and Stalin’s recent death. The tone is consistent with his scepticism of any institution not immediately artistic. Reflecting on Picasso’s place in the controversy around the Lettres Françaises edition, he notes, “When my play Bacchus was attacked by the church, it was the communists who came to my defence. Now that Picasso’s sketch is being attacked by the communists, it’s the church which comes to his defence.”

Below is the front page of the 12^th March 1953 Lettres Françaises, with Picasso’s sketch.

* Ingres, 1862.

** Delacroix, 1840.

† Part of a retrospective of his “political” works (including Guernica, le Charnier, and Massacre en Corée), which toured Italy.

‡ Currently the National Picasso Museum, where one can find Guerre et Paix.

†† Opera by Stravinsky with a libretto by Jean Cocteau.

Le Modѐle des dormeurs / The Model Sleeper, by Jean Cocteau

Sleep is a petrifying

Cataract. The sleeper,

Atop his distant hand,

Is stone tucked under colour.

Sleepers are playing-Jacks,

Sleepers have not high nor low.

They pass away from us,

Their force of arms at rest.

Dreams are the droppings

Of sleep, and those creating dreams

Disturb the petrifying river,

And see in them the bed.

(The petrifying river elucidates

This aura poorly copied

From the antique before me

Of a nude model sleeping.)


                    **

Le sommeil est une fontaine
Pétrifiante. Le dormeur
Couché sur sa main lointaine
Est une pierre en couleurs.

Dormeurs sont valets de cartes,
Dormeurs n'ont ni haut ni bas,
De nous un dormeur s'écarte,
Immobile à tour de bras.

Les rêves sont la fiente
Du sommeil. Ceux qui les font
Troublent l'eau pétrifiante
Et les prennent pour le fond.

(L'eau pétrifiante explique
Cet air maladroitement
Copié d'après l'antique
D'un modèle nu dormant.)

There are so many flaws in this translation I won't be able to list them, but I thought I'd try something a bit more literal -- at least more literal, and structurally consistent with the original -- than Jeremy Reed's translations of Cocteau's poems, which are, as far as I know, the only English translations of Cocteau's poems in print. Maybe his are better after all.

From Cocteau's collection Opéra, containing poems written 1925-1927, printed in Jean Cocteau: romans, poésies, oeuvres diverses, by Le Livre de Poche, 1995

A Full Moon In Paris (1984), by Serge Daney

Eric Rohmer, in a somber mood, seduces his spectator, traps his heroine, and achieves a near impassable mastery.

Aside from the joy of seeing a Rohmer film, there's the joy of seeing one Rohmer film so quickly succeed another. It's the pleasure, by now too rare, of the series. In these times, when French cinema is losing itself in the search for 'crenels,' a filmmaker who each year successfully brings together the elements of a world exclusively his own is, by any measure, to be treasured.

By now Rohmer has well established his crenel, and suffice it to read his collection The Taste for Beauty to know he takes it seriously. First, as a critic, Rohmer established his principles (drawn from a strict 'Bazinism'). Eventually he set the stage for his characters to appear (one could almost say 'to appear for judgement'). He set aside his territory, first theoretically, then erotically. Is this what makes an auteur? At the least Rohmer is a man who has succeeded in filming only that which interests him.

So what's the latest Rohmer film like? Like all the others, we'll say (and rightly: our director is repetitive). Very different from the others, we'll say (and again, rightly, since we've learnt to see, and to taste, the smallest variation in the series). The series frees us from the burden of judging each film as if it were the last; it frees us to 'choose' which film suits us the most. There are no longer any catastrophes among the work of this moralist and prestidigitator. His system is too considered, too substantial, too perfect.  That's why, since the grandiose failure of Percival le Gallois (Rohmer's Land of the Pharaohs, insofar as with these films both he and Hawks stepped too far over the precipice into the turmoil of an elaborately demanding past), we ask less and less whether the latest Rohmer was a success, and more and more whether it pleases us personally.

A Full Moon in Paris is, on first viewing, a dark, bitter, not very funny film, and quite cruel. It's also evidence of Rohmer's irrefutable place as the premier ethnologist of contemporary French society. Like any ethnologist, he lives with a certain contradiction: he loves only his savages, but he sees them always from the exterior, as the perfect sum of the gestures of which they are capable, of the words under which they drape themselves, and the clothes by which they're covered. Our ethnographer has studied only one tribe (let's call it the 'bourgeoisie'), and has specialised in two sub-groups (let's call them the 'grande' and 'petite' bourgeoisie). These are talkative groups, who -- more than just for the sake of it -- speak in order to make cinema about the nature of their desires, which generally means their desire for freedom (in the strict sense of free will). Intrepidly, Rohmer snares them in the trap of their own words and dryly reminds them that their desires don't exist beyond these words they gargle. Every little speech seals the condemnation of he (or rather, she) who has taken the bladders of her discourse for lanterns of reality. As Chandler said, “There’s no trap more deadly than the trap you set for yourself."

When he films the bourgeois (those who don’t really work, are never tired, are elegant), Rohmer adopts a sensual, vacationing tone. When he films the petits-bourgeois (those who deal with schedules, public transport, casual jobs, who labour despite their pretentions), he adopts a cold light, with dead blues, flabby bodies, ugly rooms, and with pity for nothing naïve or indecisive in their world.

It’s to the more ungrateful tribe that the characters of A Full Moon in Paris belong. The action revolves around an apartment, in which Louise (Pascale Ogier) wants to live at the same time that she’s living with Rémy (an actor we should keep an eye on: Tcheky Karyo). Louise thinks that to be a free woman depends on having he option of choosing between these two homes: one for Louise-in-a-couple, the other for Louise-alone. Obviously, she’s made a misjudgement, and the plot will be the elaboration of this initial error.

One can’t recount the film. One can only say that Rohmer leaves nothing vague, as if he felt a sovereign pleasure in showing the smallest mechanism of the trap which will close on Louise; as if he felt a still greater pleasure (almost a perversion) in giving us the impression that the trap might not even close. Rohmer knows, more than anyone, how to make sure the spectator accepts an absolutely artificial premise, so as to better remind him at the end that he was wrong to accept it.

Since the detail of the mise en scene is so rapid, precise, and seductive, we forget to ask where it’s all going. It’s the illusion of true movement which makes us lose sight of the reality of simulated sentiments. That’s the trap. Delicious and bitter, according to whether we identify with the Rohmerian characters, or to Rohmer the puppeteer (though I must admit that nevertheless, I savour most the films of Rohmer in which I also love the characters: La Marquise d’O, Le Femme de l’aviateur).

Throughout her Parisio-suburban comings and goings, Louise encounters a variety of characters. But there’s something which distinguishes her. Louise lies to herself (her second home not being that which brings her closer to her freedom, but rather that which pushes her to her solitude) and that’s why she is at once sympathetic and irritating. The other characters content themselves with lying to her. That’s why they’re wrecks. There are thus two portraits of men in the film which aren’t exactly of “authentic men,” but are two overwhelming depictions of men in their own skin. The good Rémy who builds new cities near Paris and, being a homebody, accepts to live there; possessive Rémy who says to have found in Louise an absolute and will betray her the moment she turns her back. Octave (Fabrice Luchini), the male best friend who, suddenly unable to restrain himself, puts Louise in a difficult situation.

There's a hard tone to the film, and the male-female relations never quite seem to live up to it. There are women who play frivolously with the idea of their freedom (it’s never a matter of “liberation” which, by quite a hypocritical trick, Rohmer supposes already achieved), and men who take themselves for cool casual lovers and return throughout the film to the “bestial scenario” (rape, pathological possession) that Rohmer, admittedly, never films (it’s too messy), but that he touches on from time to time. There is violence in this film, and not just in the unremitting tit for tat of language. There is the violence of the slap which Rémy never gives (though bumping his elbow becomes something of a gag), the interrogatory violence of the jealous and obsessed Octave which nearly becomes a rape. Louise, alone in the scene, dreaming aloud, slave to her caprice, is taken into the helpless network of men. Louise, all things considered, is heroic.

Rohmer is, in a sense, the contemporary feminist filmmaker, and if he is seen today as an auteur of the current – Rohmer so resolutely a stranger to fashions and who has always been in opposition to the idea of modernity – it’s because his most recent films coincide with feminist discourse's redundancy and erasure. Instead, it’s the old literary theme of the free woman that he had already treated, in a fine 19^th century fashion, in My Night at Maud’s, and which appears, in more modern guises, in the Comedies and Proverbs. Perceval, the mystic fool, was the last male Rohmerian character still able to make errors about his desire. Since then, every man, young and old, has the feebleness of those who know well where they want to go with their desire. The women remain. They alone are blessed with the heavy privilege of not conflating desire and the satisfaction of desire.

The ethnologist is, more fundamentally, a theologian, for whom the scenario of predilection would be that of the immaculate conception. The women are tricked* when they're not present (the Marquise d’O while asleep, Louise when she leaves for her own place), and never whenever they are. And perhaps free women dream only of keeping for as long as possible their childhood bedrooms. Let’s not forget the painful precision with which Rohmer has already depicted a good number of young girls’ rooms. The ethnologist who studies them develops, after all, the role of a Sadeian confessor, or of a love-struck tutor.

The charm of Rohmer’s films is attributable to a simple cause: the difficulty of identifying with his characters. They’re sympathetic and irritating, like spoiled children. It’s thus that Rohmer practices a sort of perverse Brechtism. At first, nearly by convention, he asks us to follow the character who, by his or her caprices, drives the fiction. But the moment that we understand that this character is heading towards an inevitable punishment, and we are constrained to leave him (so as to see him from further away) – this is precisely the moment the auteur anticipated so as to remain in a one-to-one with his character, to console him and to enjoy her tears.

Such is the definition of an auteur film in the modern cinema. The classic auteur (Renoir, for example) made a gift of his characters, and didn’t think he should take them back. Such was his generosity. However, the modern auteur is jealous of his spectator. His art, at the limit, consists of showing us the door. We can call that “distanciation.” In any case, he swallows the key.

4 Sept. 1984

*Daney uses a phrase with an English parallel, "se faire avoir," literally "to be had," as meaning "to be tricked," and in parenthesis notes that one could apply "both senses of the phrase," no doubt  intending to refer to the "bestial scenario" that is also a subject of this article. I haven't translated the phrase directly as "are had" in the article since, without an explanation, it would be an obscure reference that would more quickly bring to mind Daney's connotation than his denotation.

Published in Cine journal Volume II/1983-1986, Petite bibliotheque des Cahiers du Cinema, 2006

Le ciné-fils, by Jean-Luc Godard

A piece of trivia to start the blog, but nevertheless interesting. Originally published in Libération in 1992, this was Godard's obituary for Serge Daney, the great film critic whose translated works you can find in English at sergedaney.blogspot.com.

And so the dialogue is finished. The exchange is over between us and the real, our guide having left, once more going further than we’re able. The academics and the profiteers will lay wreaths as in the days of Romy, Georges de B., Henri, etc.

Once, before France collaborated with Walt Disney, one would say “mister” when one spoke of those who delivered justice when the law was unjust: the metteurs en scene. Mister Serge Daney was a valiant defender of the real: subtle, solid with theory, and ready for any of the attempts at resurrection that make a film. From the despicable laws of Lynch, Palme-d’Ored at Cannes, to the tender poem of the mother Dovjenko ignored by the Politburo; from the craftiness of a Kubrick to the integrity of a Boetticher or the saintly humiliation of the Antigone of Straub/Huillet/Brecht/Holderlin/Sophocles, all were welcomed and respected; the men of the film were absolved by the humanity of the cinematograph.

He remains the true judge of the just weight of words and things, because he presided over our instruction in the proof of the shame of the polished suedes in the cheap L’Amant*. No need of amnesty for the whores, this wrong having been punished by the very fact that the judge dis-covered it.

We thus come full circle: Denis, Charles, Elie, André, André again, Serge. What France alone has been able to give to the world, requiring nothing in return: a critical eye that we all saw recently for the last time, one night in a club near the Etoile, speaking in time with the rhythm of a lack of oxygen. It’s now up to us to look deep within ourselves, to accept and to understand whether we have also loved.

*Godard’s referring to Daney’s description of a cut near the beginning L’Amant which centers around Tony Leung Ka-Fai’s shoes – a cut Daney identifies as one of the more complacent (and easily spotted today) metonymic gestures of an “orphaned cinema.” You can read the article here: home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_lover.html

Originally published in Liberation, 13-14 June 1992, reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Tome 2: 1984-1988) by Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998.

Introduction

This is essentially where I'll be posting new translations of some work that's been overlooked in the French-to-English culture exchange, particularly in literature and film. There should also be some posts covering Greek-to-English soon.
Ideally I'll be updating this blog once a week.
I'm just an amateur translating-wise, and multilingualism-wise at that, so any ideas on how to improve some of the content on here, which is otherwise -- as far as I can tell at least -- unavailable or rare in English, is definitely welcome.
None of the posts are for profit and all source material is credited at the bottom of the page.