Where
North Americans tend to denigrate their popular and low culture, in France, in some
circles, there is almost an opposite tradition of appreciating the popular forms
of American life (cf. their well-known interest in crime thrillers, Faulkner,
Poe or Jerry Lewis). This gesture proposes a different way to look at a familiar subject, is genuine, and is iconoclastic against a rigid academicism. Cahiers has only done two 'best
of the decade' group lists and those were in the 90s and 2000s (cf. their lists), and one thing that distinguishes them from other forms of film criticism, however much their editorial team changes, is their constant interest in film as an art and in particular their interest in popular American cinema to illustrate this. On their 90s list
the American directors that were included are De Palma, Eastwood, Kubrick,
Lynch, Cronenberg, and Burton. On their 2000s list it included Lynch, Van Sant,
Cronenberg, Spielberg and Malick. If one looks at the activity of all of these
directors since they started filmmaking, being received at Cahiers, and where they are at now... it would look like Steven
Spielberg has reached the point of being one of the most important American
directors at the magazine. For one to get Cahiers one must get Spielberg. He’s an important director. Here are
the early Cahiers reviews of
Spielberg’s films as he was making them. – D.D.
***
Jaws.
l’écran du fantasme,
Cahiers Critique by Pascal Bonitzer
and Serge Daney (Cahiers, March-April
1976, N.265).
Bonitzer’s
review is in three parts: Splash, Jaws, and Catch.
“1.
Splash. “It shakes you, and grinds and then… eats you!” It’s the shark, the great white, described by Quint at the
first apparition of it. We are tempted to also see this as a definition for
this type of cinema. This scene illustrates: it shakes you, this is its first
degree, the suspense and how it scares you; it grinds you, this is its second
degree, the sympathy for its hero in face of danger, the human community who,
in a dark cinema, in front of this horizon of water and the tension from the
beast within it, who are being united; and then it jumps outs! One more time
the law of the Heart, a social paranoid, a familial petit bourgeois that is
insidiously bitten, to the rhythm of the great jaws of the shark. We can then
apply the phrase of Quint more largely to the entire social system, to the
society of the great white (the shark
isn’t called this for no reason), to the society, this “fleur carnivore”, which was one the slogans of May ’68.”
“The
power of the metaphor: the shark’s jaws opens the film towards multiple
interpretations. The social impact of this kind of cinema is like a fishing
hook to catch phantasms, deliberately mythic, resolutely epic (in comparison,
to European cinema, and even more so to French cinema, which for the majority,
appears like a cinema of the bedroom, and especially when it wants to be
mysterious a la Melville, Verneuil or Labro).”
In conclusion
Bonitzer writes,
“What exactly
is it in definitively? Exactly what it is in The Exorcist (where there were three priests) but where Jaws is much more closer to The Birds: it’s the sensory pleasure of
sexual attraction that it knows how to conjure, and the great shakes that that
panic has on the body.”
**
Daney
in his review brings up the connection between the violence in Jaws and pornography through Jacques
Lacan’s concept of jouisansse (Daney
and the magazine in this period is still under the spell of psychoanalytic
analysis). Like the English critic Robin Wood, Daney’s writing is characterized
by a military-vest wearing social criticism. Jaws is compared to other catastrophe films like The Infernal Tower. Of note is how
Daney begins his review by describing a production still (an issue for him
throughout his career) of Richard Dreyfuss during the making of the film,
“The
smile of its star Richard Dreyfuss justifies itself. Jaws is first off the biggest commercial success of the cinema. But
paradoxically, in terms of the Parisian box office, in its four week run, has
lowered incredibly. 309 158 spectators in its first week (including myself,
S.D.), 241 160 in its second, 177 785 in its third, 124 144 in its fourth. This
free fall is just another aspect of its program: the vision of the film is
nothing but part of its ultimate operation of the process of becoming a brand
(publicity, style, t-shirts etc.). It is, in itself, an indifference.”
“The
smile of Dreyfuss has other reasons. It’s a smile for a behind-the-scenes
photograph. Its function is to be distributed to film magazines, which is a
derisory support, because the magazines would prefer a photograph of a scene
from the film, or even better, a photogram of the film itself. Its function is
to say, with a smile, that the underwater cage that he’s in (special effects,
décor) put in place in the film is real, that the cage is a real one. The photo
during the film’s making, it’s the way for Hollywood to give a way to see, not
the process of the making of the film, but the reality of the troubles of
production, and through this, and these troubles is the last word from this
imperial metropolis in terms of images and sounds.”
***
Close Encounters of The Third
Kind. Cahiers Critique
by Jean-Claude Biette (Cahiers, April
1978, N.287).
A mixed
review of the film, Biette compares it to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and emphasizes its use of the cinema screen in
relation to the televisions that are included within the film (“Beyond the
class fights, wars, and massacres that each tele-spectator incessantly sees
images of, it is finally possible to see, with total fidelity to its
presentation and realization of the big screen, that the terrestrial humanity
has a purpose and that its History, however delirious it may appear, has a
sense.”), and he notes the subtlety of Francois Truffaut’s acting in the film.
***
1941. Notes sur d’autre films review by
Serge Daney, (Cahiers, May 1980,
N.311).
The
highlight of Daney’s review,
“The
best Spielberg film? … From its original concept, 1941 has an ambitious tentative, of being a burlesque super-production that, in its own failure (the film isn’t
that funny), is more interesting than
any other Spielberg film. For one reason because the burlesque, better than
terror (Jaws) or science-fiction (Close Encounters), allows Spielberg’s
misanthropy to be free (without saying anything about his misogyny) … And for
other reasons because the burlesque allows Spielberg to reflect on cinema, and his own cinema.”
***
Raiders of the Lost Ark. A dossier Lucas/Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark with three texts: George Lucas, un cineaste conceptual by
Olivier Assayas, an interview with Lucas by Mitch Tuchman and Anne Thompson
(originally published in Film Comment),
and La grace perdue des aventuriers
by Olivier Assayas (Cahiers, October
1981, N.328).
Olivier
Assayas begins his essay on Lucas as a conceptual filmmaker,
“There
is a Cioran aphorism that I can’t seem to find its original trace that said
something like: “one must be worried about what one wants to become because we
will become just that.” It would be hard to find a better application of this
than in the trajectory that has brought George Lucas from the editing table to
his present situation as the chief of a powerful counter-point to Hollywood.”
Assayas
discusses Lucas. His most conventional film, American Graffiti; his coldest film, THX 1138; and that, “Since his beginnings, Lucas has never wanted
to do like other people.” Assayas discusses Lucas in relation to the other
cinephile-directors of his generation and that he is distinguished from them by
not revering classical Hollywood or the false radicalization of the times.
Lucas
is seen as a constant experimenter. Assayas highlights the radicalness of
American Zoetrope with Coppola and Lucasfilm, and their conviction of creating
an alternative system. And with his renewing, changing entirely the industry. This
is in contrast to other directors of his generation like Friedkin, de Palma,
Scorsese, Schaffner and Spielberg.
“His
quintessential disdain for content in favor for formal and structural
preoccupations used to be typically associated with the underground filmmakers
that Lucas voluntarily cites as influences. Therefore the giant machine that he
is today trying to create is in this respect comparable to the micro-systems of
the avant-garde in that it is destined not for the production of works but
towards the delimitation of an autonomous place of survival.”
Assayas
concludes,
“George
Lucas is foremost a conceptual artist. He learnt quickly that in the system
that he has created there was only enough place for one filmmaker: himself, an
auteur whose dispositive prioritized his own oeuvre. A creator of machine, a
creator of objects. The others can deal with films.”
**
In the
interview between Lucas and Tuchman and Thomson (which is translated by Assayas)
they discuss Industrial Light and Magic, Lucas’s role as a producer, relationship
with Coppola, work on Star Wars: Empire
Strikes Back, ideas on experimental films, work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, what he likes, realities of filmmaking, and
watching rushes on cassettes.
**
Assayas
was an important voice in this post-Maoist period and whose reviews and ideas
reflect an important transition at Cahiers
(cf. his de Palma review as well). The Positif
review by Robert Benayoun is also incredible, where he, in a good Surrealist
tradition, describes the film in terms of the pleasure it invokes, how the
French intellectuals are better at appreciating this than Americans ones, and
its relation to the silent films serials.
In his
review of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The lost grace of the adventurer,
Assayas describes the influence of TV’s seriality on these Lucas-Spielberg
films, and how this is re-stabilizing cinema, which for a long time has been
unstable. If cinema is an industry than it needed entrepreneur’s to believe in
it. Raiders is contrasted to
Franklin Schaffner’s Sphinx (with Raiders being the better of the two).
“George
Lucas founded in one part his success on this rather simple idea, which is that
the cinema-going public, which has been educated by television and comic books,
wanted to find on the big screen the habits of their reading patterns. Where
the cinema continues to persist to draw its inspiration from a Romanesque form,
which was the dominant form for the previous generation – who were still
reading – Lucas, not without being demagogic, captures a fundamental attachment
of the adolescent spectator for a structure of episodes and of familial
characters that constitutes the connection between one film and another.”
“In
short, if the screenplay of this exotic adventure is presently dead in its
contemporary form, its cadaver still needs to be torn apart. Raiders of the Lost Ark does not refer
to these adventures as they are, neither to the dreams of a generation who saw
the explorer or archeologist as a modern hero, but instead more to the
references and accessories of its cinematographic tradition, which it
exhaustively exploits.”
On the
film’s final shot Assayas writes,
“The
last shot of the film shows the ark of the film’s title put enclosed in a
wooden box and that is transported on a Fenwick, and the camera pulls back and
we discover a bunch of identical cases archived ad infinitum in a giant hangar. Its difficult not to say that this
is a great metaphor for the cinema of adventure as Lucas and Spielberg sees it:
a studio a little dusty where one must just enter and open up a few cases that
have been closed for too long to give life again to these emotions that have
been forgotten.”
***
E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial. The cover and featured
dossier, Spielberg, E.T. and Comics: The
E.T. Summer by Bill Krohn, and Peut-on
etre et avoir E.T. by Jean Narboni (Cahiers,
December 1982, N.342).
Krohn,
the new American correspondent in this period, discusses E.T. in relation to its American reception and distribution. The
piece is part journalistic - it reads more like Variety than Cahiers -
and its more observation than criticism. Krohn cites the reception of the film
by the general press, and contextualizes the difference in reception by the
Americans from the French. Krohn sees how E.T.
is already a more personal film for Spielberg than was Raiders. He emphasizes the Disney (Fantasia) and Chuck Jones (Duck
Dodgers) influence on Spielberg and E.T.,
and there are striking illustrations to back up his points. Krohn also brings
up for the first time Spielberg’s earlier films, Sugarland Express and Duel,
which were never reviewed in Cahiers.
Part of
Krohn’s review is transcribed in Clelia Cohen’s nice Masters of Cinema book on
Spielberg (which I’m citing below),
“Perhaps the best way to get at what is new
about the film is to look at the tradition it grows out of. Where does Spielberg
come from? From animated cartoons – he has never made a secret of it in his
interviews… the names he most frequently mentions are Walt Disney (‘The first
film I remember seeing was Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves’) and Chuck Jones, a maverick Disney animator who
became the undisputed master of animated slapstick at Warner Bros., where he
directed Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in some of their best films, and created
Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Jones, whom Spielberg invited to act as
‘technical consultant’ on 1941,
seems to be the primary influence… E.T.
is a Chuck Jones character living out a Disney scenario – orphaned, adopted,
dead and resurrected, rescued at the end – without ever losing his anarchic
comic energy, or the touch of mystery that all Jones’s ‘special’ creations
share. (The children in the film are also the kind of children – hip and
foul-mouthed – that Jones, but certainly not Disney, might have imagined
watching his work. (Morphologically, E.T.
is distantly related to the Martin character in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, who consists of a bowling
ball with huge expressive eyes, a spindly body and an oversized pair of tennis
shoes, but his nearest ancestor is probably the Magic Frog in Jones’s
masterpiece, One Froggy Evening (1956).
In that cartoon, a construction worker who unearths a frog from the cornerstone
of a condemned building is startled when the creature breaks into a
high-stepping rendition of ‘Hello, My Honey’ in a voice like Al Jolson’s. Sure
that his fortune is made, the man rushes to a theatrical agent with his find,
but the frog refuses to sing for anyone but him. By the end of the film his
greed and the frog’s obstinate refusal to perform have reduced him to penury
and landed him in the madhouse. The ending of E.T. is more optimistic. Elliott’s first response when he finds his
Magic Frog is selfish – ‘I’m going to keep him,’ he says fervently – but E.T., on the point of death, is able to
teach him the necessity of sooner or later letting go … Spielberg’s hands, Jones’s
dark fable has become edifying, sentimental; it has been re-Disneyfied, and
this does not necessarily imply a criticism. Spielberg’s strategy is the
strategy of a whole generation, who have created a cinema haunted by modernism
(Jones, for example, or Welles) and aspiring to classicism (Disney or, for
example, Ford): their Masters’ Masters, to put it very schematically.”
**
While
Narboni, a Seventies Cahiers writer, discusses
E.T. more in terms of its marketing
and distribution in France (this is probably how its current editor Stéphane
Delorme must have saw it, which he remembers nostalgically) and he argues for
the necessity of a film criticism that can look beyond this promotion and
omnipresence. The title of the piece, Can
one be and have E.T.? comes from a question Narboni asks himself,
“Childhood, can one both experience and have it?”, which will also be
referenced when Cahiers would get
more into Spielberg in the 2000s in particular by Jean-Sébastien Chauvin. Narboni
calls E.T. a mature film and he
describes it in philosophical terms with references to Nietsche and Lyotard.
“I
would say without any doubt that E.T.
is an intelligent film, inventive, emotive and sly, and the best Spielberg film
in my opinion, as it fulfills every checkmark of the cinematographic machine,
and its much superior, for example, to not go too far back, to the falsely
lucid Raiders of the Lost Ark and
even to Poletergeist, whose splendid
original idea, exploited by Tobe Hooper with the intelligence and delicacy of a
chainsaw, gets worse with each minute of the film.”
Narboni
concludes,
“In one
way, the story of Spielberg’s film resembles a poem: fantasies and the fears of
solitary children, many years later, are remembered by the filmmaker who he
would later become, manipulated, poeticized, illuminated by a blue night – all
of this makes this golden dream, E.T.,
a beautiful film."
***
Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Cahiers Critique, Photocopie, by Charles Tesson (Cahiers November
1984, N.365).
Tesson's review is short enough
and is pretty negative. It is as well the first reference in Cahiers
between Spielberg and Indiana Jones to Tintin, which Spielberg would
later make into a film. Tesson is also critical of what he sees as the film’s “Yankee
imperialism” and is disgusted by its dinner sequence.
“For the first time in
Spielberg’s career, there is a following up to the original, a reprisal, a
regression... The conception that governs this new film is summed up in its
entirety by this: to offer a re-duplication of an original (Raiders) which was already a copy. The
problem is that Indiana Jones has no ambition to be demystified... Temple of Doom is to Raiders what an
ice-cube is to a diamond... But what ever happened to Tintin? Of Tintin's
spirit, of his taste to travel and of exotic adventures, Spielberg only held on
to, without even worrying about it, his worst qualities: an afflicting
colonialism."
***
The
Color Purple.
Cahiers Critique, Notre père, le ciel, by Iannis Katsahnias (Cahiers October
1986, N.388).
Katsahnias, one of the great Cahiers
writers of the 80s (cf. his de Palma reviews, whose reviews make an interesting
comparison point to those of Spielberg) makes an interesting case for The
Color Purple. Katsahnias focuses on the film’s
emotional charge, its nostalgia, its cartoon-like qualities, and Spielberg's
use of wordplay. Katsahnias compares the start of The Color Purple to
that of E.T. and how the close relationship between the sisters are
deeply rooted in childhood. Katsahnias is already citing Narboni's previous
article on Spielberg (cross-referencing in Cahiers’ post-80s would
become a staple). Other references that Katsahnias bring up in relation to the
film include Ingmar Bergman, Marvin Gaye, Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice),
King Vidor (Hallelujah), Blues Brothers, and Prince.
“More then ever, Spielberg is
loyal to himself. Like always, Spielberg has always practiced an adult cinema
along with the seriousness of a child. Because the films of Spielberg are first
off nostalgic and nostalgia only aims towards subjects after they have reached
a certain age. Who can say, for example, that Marcel Proust's childhood
memories (yes, I know, the comparison is uneven) constitute a book for
children?”
It is also worth noting that Thierry
Cazals would review in the Notes sur d’autres film section, Amazing
Stories, which Spielberg contributed to.
***
Empire
of the Sun. Notre
Mere, L’Amerique, Cahiers Critique by Joël Magny (Cahiers, March ’88, N.405).
Magny, who recently published a
great interview book with Jean Douchet L'Homme cinéma, describes Empire
of the Sun as one of Spielberg's "adult films", along with The
Color Purple. It is the story of a British family in Japan who experience WWII
first hand, as seen from the perspective of their child, Jim Graham. The film’s
interest lies in its contradiction between its childhood universe (e.g. its
story and screenplay) and its transition from childhood to adulthood. Spielberg
is re-doing the post-war Romanesque and melodrama. By substituting the main
character to that of a child, Spielberg is able to emphasize the hermeneutics
of the world, its heroism and naivety. The rupture of the Second World War is
symbolically represented by a child being separated from his parents, which is the
inverse of Sugarland Express. Magny emphasizes Spielberg's reoccurring
tropes, use of light, moral forces, and the airplanes (Spielberg’s own father
was a pilot in WWII). Magny, though, is very critical of the conclusion of Empire
of the Sun,
“The cinema of Spielberg is
closing in on itself. Childishness takes its rights all over again. There is a
superficial aesthetic, full of sappy hearts, like America itself, re-isolates
itself, closing the parentheses of war: just like the Force (God or the Bomb)
is on their side, the little Americans can continue to suck their maternal milk
and their Spielbergian chocolate.”
***
Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade. Le
Cinema de papa, Cahiers Critique by Nicolas Saada (Cahiers, October ’89, N.424).
Saada
highlights how this film is the most ambitious, sympathetic, and moving one of
the trilogy - it's conclusion (before the unnecessary fourth contribution) -,
as it humanizes the character with the father relations. It is more adult than
the others, as it builds on Lucas's Empire
Strikes Back. There is a new melancholy in the film since the franchises
started, they’ve grown. Saada highlights the light tone of the
film, but how it lacks a visual imagination and the special effects of Lucas’
ILM. This disappoints Saada.
Saada provides an interesting
reading of the Sean Connery character,
“When Indie addresses his father
and asks him: “Where were you? Why did you never take care of me?” It's also
Spielberg who is addressing Sean Connery, the first James Bond, (the series that Indiana
Jones was giving a retro homage to): “Where were you, during the ten years
of Spielberg's career, the elders of Hollywood?” Spielberg has for a while been
treated like a clever child, “strong in themes”, he gets into subjects and
makes people cry. At the time though, Spielberg consciously picked up the
mantle of the old Hollywood cinema of the Forties, the one of Michael Curtiz
and the first Walt Disney films, only to be railed against by the majority of
American film critics, that only saw him as a small-time filmmaker.”
In conclusion, Saada writes,
“With this last film, Spielberg
and Lucas rejoins their fathers: Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade then marks the end of a period, that of a
brilliant childhood of the two wonder-boys of the American box-office.”
**
Saada also has a piece La couleur de
l’argent (N.434) on the state of American cinema, which addresses a
changing taste in American cinema at the magazine, where Spielberg comes up
(and is compared again to Michel Curtiz) and is said that he stands out due to
the general mediocrity of most of Hollywood’s output. In the article Saada also
praises McTiernan’s Die Hard, which
he sees as a contraband, where a director subverts the genre-projects assigned
to him. And Saada speaks of the changing filmmaking realities in the U.S. since
Cahiers did their Made in U.S.A.
special issue at the beginning of the decade. Saada speaks of the decline of
the Lucas-Spielberg duo, and the influence of the work of their screenplay
writer Lawrence Kasdan on them. Instead Saada champions as an alternative
Carpenter-Landis-Dante. The text concludes the decade, a summing up of sorts,
which prophesizes the rise of the super-productions and new young directors
taking over.
***
Always. Notes sur d’autres film by
Iannis Katsahnias (Cahiers, March
1989, N.429).
Katsahnias asks why would
Spielberg want to remake Victor Flemming’s A Guy Named Joe? Today even though there are many
fans of Always (cf. Delorme, Berthomieu) it is still generally
overlooked by most Spielberg fans or seen as corny. Katsahnias highlights that
the difficulty of heroes in American cinema is that there are so many parodies
of them. Katsahnias’s review of Always
is pretty negative.
The conclusion is especially painful,
“In this reversion in his own
filmography, Spielberg appropriates a subject to publicly acknowledge his
incapacity to be a part of this world of adults. It is sad and pathetic to see
his powerlessness.”
Up next Spielberg will re-invent
himself in the Nineties with the impressive double-bill of the devastating Schindler's
List and the awesome Jurassic Park. More on this later…
