As Edouard Sivière’s Tumblr account Les Cahiers Positifs beautifully illustrates: The early years of Cahiers was a fascinating period for
film criticism, which was very literary and built upon the beau langage du dix-huitième, but whose heterogeneity, aside from
broad interests like Italian neo-realism or the role of women in cinema, took a
while to unify into a singular editorial position. Antoine de Baecque describes
the magazine in these years as an outlet for the variety and eclecticism of post-war Parisian
cinephilia.
The transition for Cahiers
to refine their editorial line came with Hitchcock. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze would
label this group of Hitchcocko-Hawksiens the ‘école Schérer’ and it would
consist of Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol and Truffaut. The first apparition of this
turn came with Godard’s review Suprématie
du sujet of Strangers on a Train
(which I transcribed below from Godard
on Godard), which he reviewed under his pseudonym Hans Lucas (German for Jean-Luc). It’s an important early text
just like how later would be Truffaut’s Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (Jan ’54, N.31).
André Bazin’s interest in American cinema lied more towards Welles
and Wyler and he participated in important public debates on the importance of
Hollywood films to gain it respectability. This shift towards Hitchcock and Hawks, under the influence of
Alexandre Astruc, would bring an emphasis on mise
en scene and the film’s formal elements, as well as canonize two of the
magazine’s most important filmmakers. Rohmer would create continuity between
both generations with his essay De trois
films et d'une certaine école (Aug-Sept ’53, N.26) by writing about Renoir,
Rossellini (two of Bazin’s favorites) and Hitchcock, and highlighting their
religious beliefs and formal mastery.
Godard is in interesting case. He was never too close with
Bazin and was introduced into the magazine by Rohmer and Rivette, who he would
follow in judgments. Godard would write two
important Hitchcock Critiques (the other one is on The Wrong Man). His writing was challenging and iconoclastic. For example, he was one of Cahiers’ early champions of John Ford
who was not liked in this period (see: Leenhardt’s A Bas Ford, Vive Wyler). And finally, Godard's writing would identify an emerging
cinematic modernism which he would later bring to his own filmmaking starting with À bout de souffle. – D.D.
***
The supremacy of the
subject by Jean-Luc Godard (Cahiers
March ’52, N.10)
Hitchcock’s most recent film will doubles arouse
controversy. Some critics will say it is unworthy of the director of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Shadow of a Doubt, others will find it
mildly amusing and praise its qualities until they take on an air of false
modesty. But those who have for Alfred Hitchcock, for Blackmail as much as Notorious,
a vast and constant admiration, those who find in this director all the talent
necessary for good cinema, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Outrageously decried by some while the rest ignore him – what is it about
Hitchcock that merits attention?
Here is the
subject of Strangers on a Train: a
young tennis champion, already well known, in love with a Senator’s daughter
and wanting a divorce meets a stranger on a train who offers to get ride of his
wife – she refuses to divorce him – on condition that the tennis champion does
away with his hated father. As soon as the tennis-player leaves the train he
forgets his strange companion. But the latter, believing himself pledge,
strangles the more than flighty wife and insists that the tennis-player fulfill
his side of the bargain he believes was made in the train. Now free, but
terrified by the stranger’s audacity, the tennis-player eventually manages to
convince the police of his innocence and marries the girl he loves.
This
subject owes so little to anecdote or the picturesque, but is instead imbued
with such lofty ambition, that probably only the cinema could handle it with so
much dignity. I know no other recent film, in fact, which better conveys the
condition of modern man, who must escape his fate without the help of the gods.
Probably, too, the cinema is particularly suited to recording the drama, to
make the best not so much of the myth of the death of God (with which the
contemporary novel, alas, is by no means backward in taking liberties, as
witness Graham Greene) as the baleful quality it suggests.
However, it
was necessary that in the sign – in other words, that which indicates something
in whose place it appears; in this case, a conflict of wills – the mise en scene should respect the
arabesque which underlines its effect, and like Dreyer or Gance, should use it
with delicate virtuosity; for it cannot shock through mere empty exaggeration.
The significant and the signified are here set so high (if the idea is involved
in the form, it becomes more incisive, but is also imprisoned like water in
ice) that in the exploits of this criminal, Hitchcock’s art cannot but show us
the promethean image of his murderous little hand, his terror in face of the
unbearable brilliance of the fire it steals.
(Let me
make myself plain: it is not in terms of liberty and destiny that
cinematographic mise en scene is measured, but in the ability of genius to
batten on objects with constant invention, to take nature as a model, to be
infallibly driven to embellish things which are insufficient – for instance, to
give a late afternoon that Sunday air of lassitude and well-being. Its goal is
not to express but to represent. In order that the great effort at
representation engulfed in the Baroque should continue, it was necessary to
achieve an inseparability of camera, director and cameraman in relation to the
scene represented; and so the problem was not – contrary to Andre Malraux – in
the way one shot succeeded another, but in the movement of the actor within the
frame.)
Look at
these stretches of heath, these neglected homes, or the somber poetry of modern
cities, those boats on a fairground lake, those immense avenues, and tell me if
your heart does not tighten, if such severity does not frighten you. You are
watching a spectacle completely subjected to the contingencies of the world;
you are face to face with death. Yes, invention holds sway only over language,
and mise en scene forces us to imagine an object in its signification; but
these clever and violent effects are so only to transmit the drama to the
spectator at its highest level – I refer, of course, to the strangling in the
wood and the struggle on the merry-go-round, scenes which contain so many
astonishing realities, such depth in their fantastic frenzy, that I fancy I
breathe in them a gentle odor of profanation. The truth is that there is no
terror untempered by some great moral idea. Should one reproach this renowned
filmmaker for flirting with appearances? Certainly the camera defies reality,
but does not evade it; if it enters the present, it is to give it the style it
lacks.
‘It is
useless to pretend that human creatures find their contentment in repose. What
they require is action, and they will create it if is not offered by life.’
Could not these words by Charlotte Bronte equally well have been written by
Kleist or Goethe? Today the most German of transatlantic directors offers us
the most vivid, brilliant paraphrase of Faust – combining, I mean, lucidity and
violence. Since The Lodger, Hitchcock’s art has been profoundly Germanic, and
those who accuse him of reveling in false and pointless bombast, those mean
spiritis who are foolish enough to applaud the contemptible – whether in the
work of Bunuel or Malaparte – should consider Hitchcock’s constant
preoccupation with constructing his themes: he makes persuasion, a very
Dostoievskian notion, the secret mainspring of the drama. From German
expressionism, Hitchcock consciously retains a certain stylization of attitude,
emotions being the result of a persistent purpose rather than of impetuous
passion: it is through his actions that the actor finally becomes simply the
instrument of action, and that only this action is natural; space is the
impulse of a desire, and time its effort towards accomplishment.
I wager
that the pen of Laclos could not have bettered a look of hatred from Ingrid
Bergman, the Australian of Under
Capricorn, lips flushing with disgust, less with self-shame than from a
desire to make others share her degradation; or a shot from Suspicion where
Joan Fontaine, hair wild, face drawn, feeling that she might be happier and
that it would be better to lose her husband than witness his inconstancies,
resents feeling consideration and even love for him, resents feeling his arms hold
her gently, offering him her mouth, exposing herself to danger without the
secret desire to do so, wondering if she is loved enough. She prefers to
grieve, to weep tears, to languish under offences, to consent to them, make an
effort to yield her heart, be upset because she does so, weave an incalculable
number of difficulties in the certainty of illuminating her doubts instead of
living drearily with them.
One cannot
call the director of The Paradine Case
and Rebecca a descendant of the
Victorian novel. This is why I would also not compare him to Griffith – even
though I find in both directors the same admirable ease in the use of figures
of speech or technical processes; in other words they make the best use of the
means available to their art form – but instead class him with Lang and
Murnau.*
Like them,
he knows that the cinema is an art of contrast, whether it describes life in
society or in the heart. Murnau’s Faust also revealed this incessant change in
which the actor transcends his powers, taxes his senses, falls prey to a
torrent of emotions in which extravagance yields to calm, jealousy becomes
aversion, ambition becomes failure, and pleasure, remorse. If Shadow of a Doubt is in my opinion
Hitchcock’s least good film, as M
was the least good of Lang’s, it is because a cleverly constructed script is
not enough to support the mise en scene. These films lack precisely what Foreign Correspondent and Man Hunt are criticized for. Is so rare
a gift really to be questioned? I believe the answer lies in the innate sense
of comedy possessed by the great filmmakers. Think of the interlude between
Yvette Guilbert and Jannings in Faust, or on more familiar ground, of the comedies
of Howard Hawks. The point is simply that all the freshness and invention of
American films springs from the fact that they make the subject the motive for
the mise en scene. The French cinema, on the other hand, still lives off some
vague idea of satire; absorbed in a passion for the pretty and the picturesque,
in a perusal of Tristan and Isolde, it neglects truth and accuracy and runs the
risk, in a word, of ending nowhere.
Certain
critics, having seen Strangers on a
Train, still withhold their admiration from Hitchcock, the better to lavish
it on The River. Since they are the
same persons who criticized Renoir so loud and long for remaining in Hollywood,
and since they demonstrate so lively a taste for parody, I would ask them: do
not these strangers on a train represent them in the exercise of their trade?
* Might not the astonishing success of German directors in
Hollywood be explained – for the benefit of our sociological critics – by the
strongly international character which enabled the quest for universality in
these mystics to expand freely?
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