JonathanRosenbaum.com

Raymond Durgnat

Originally published in the May-June 1973 issue of Film Comment; it’s reprinted, along with my 2002 Afterword, in my latest collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia.

Reprinting this piece has been prompted by two exciting pieces of news: the relaunching of a Raymond Durgnat website, thanks to the efforts of one of Durgnat’s old friends, Sue Ritchie, and the long, long overdue second edition of Durgnat’s irreplaceable 1970 book A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Influence, which the British Film Institute is bringing out next month, thanks to the efforts of another old friend, Kevin Gough-Yates, who provided a new Introduction (and has also been behind the earlier creation and the recent recreation of the Durgnat website).

The website, at raymonddurgnat.com, currently includes a biographical sketch, a very detailed, hefty, and rather awesome bibliography, four poems by Ray (all of them veritable collectors’ items), four “additional resources and links,” a Raymond Durgnat Forum that awaits commentary from visitors, and nine full-length articles that can be linked through the bibliography. One hopes that many more attractions, especially texts, can be added in the future, for a world is still waiting to be found in Durgnat’s writing. For me, he is not only the greatest and most important of all English film critics but far and away the most underrated and neglected.

Another book to look forward to in the foreseeable future (or so I think and hope) is Images of the Mind: The Essential Raymond Durgnat, a superb and definitive collection of previously uncollected essays that has been edited by Henry K. Miller and easily rivals my two other favorite Durgnat books, Nouvelle Vague: The First Decade (his first, 1963) and WR - Mysteries of the Organism (1999, the last to be published while he was still alive) — the latter of which is happily still in print (along with The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, 1974, and A Hard Look at “Psycho”, 2002). — J.R.

Raymond Durgnat was born in London of Swiss parents in 1932. He studied English literature at Cambridge, was a staff writer for the British Elstree Studios, and did research in film at the Slade School of Fine Art. He is currently head of General Studies at St. Martin’s School of Art. In 1963, he cited Jerry Lewis and Clara Bow as his favorite movie stars and published Nouvelle Vague: The First Decade, an analysis of the films of 34 French directors that has long been out of print and remains the most thorough single work ever done on the subject, in English or French.

Seven more books on film by Durgnat have been published over the last decade. He has also written an uncountable number of uncollected articles and reviews, including a first-rate appraisal of six Josef von Sternberg films for Movie (under the name of O.O. Green, which permits Durgnat to quote appreciatively from his own work twice), an indispensable genre survey (“Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir”), and a book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock that appeared serially in Films and Filming (February-November 1970). (1) In 1969, he listed as his ten favorite films Quai des brumes (Marcel Carné, 1938), La Ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950), Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, 1932), Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), The Saga of Anatahan (Sternberg, 1953), Allegretto (Oskar Fischinger, 1936/43), Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), The Thief of Bagdad (Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan & Michael Powell, 1940) and French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955); and as his ten favorite directors Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Tex Avery, F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, Dreyer, Sternberg, Renoir, Vidor and Tony Conrad.

RAYMOND DURGNAT: I was a staff writer for Associate British Pictures at Elstree Studios, did postgraduate research in film at the Slade School of Fine Art, and lectured in film at the Royal College of Art. Faber and Faber is publishing a thorough revision of the Films and Filming Hitchcock series as The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. As for the Movie Sternberg piece, I’d been asked by another interested party to write for Movie anonymously, so what looks like nutty self-indulgence was my only way of getting a credit out of it.

2

Many (if not all) critics tend to fall into two categories, which might be called the Big Game Hunters and the Explorers. The Big Game (read: masterpiece) Hunters are basically out for trophies to possess, stuff, and hang on their walls; the Explorers usually poke around simply to see what they find. The Hunters are a relatively Apollonian group — disciplined, academic and generally traditional in their aesthetic values: immediate examples that come to mind are Robin Wood, (2) James Agee, William Pechter, Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, and historians like Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry and Lewis Jacobs. The Explorers, a more Dionysian group, are relatively cranky, kinky and eclectic: Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, Robert Warshow and Raymond Durgnat are four eminent examples.

If the Hunters are mainly concerned with what Farber has called White Elephant Art — monoliths, like Kubrick’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that leave lasting traces — the Explorers are more drawn to Farber’s contrasting category of Termite Art, which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” (3) For the last ten years or so, Durgnat has remained the most active and far-reaching Explorer in British criticism. He is something of a wandering troubadour in his profession — in the variety of publications that he writes for, the range of subjects that he takes on, and even in the wayward drifts and occasionally strangled clauses of his prose style, a dense thicket of uncertainly placed commas and quotation marks that only rarely seems to do justice to the speed and rhythm of his thought.

RD: “Uncertainly placed commas” — I can’t proofread — “and quotation marks” — this was the result of an unhappy, early compromise between my academic bent and journalistic constraints. Quotation marks were meant to imply “I know this is a loose use of the word, but it has sense”. Now I either define it or don’t, and trust the reader to get the idea.

His penchant for surrealism and sociology has made his critical approach closer to that of the French magazine Positif than to the general orientation of Films and Filming, a slick English fan magazine where he has presided as house intellectual for over a decade. But in fact, his idiosyncratic methods and manners place him well beyond the pale of any established school of critical thought. In a letter replying to an unfairly abusive review of his book Films and Feelings in Sight and Sound, Durgnat asserted at one point, “I’m out to follow an argument, not seduce people”. (4) Walking alone, he tends to cast a long shadow.

RD: I was close to Positif, especially in its 1960-7 period. Surely Positif is an established school, and surely I’m within their pale, albeit writing from an Anglo-Saxon tradition (nearer I.A. Richards than F.R. Leavis).

An essential aspect of his wanderlust is that he rarely stays with any one subject for long, at least not in the rigorous, methodical way that characterizes André Bazin, Warshow or Wood. Even when he devotes a book to a single figure, like Luis Buñuel or Georges Franju, his characteristic approach is multilayered and varied, a continual shift of strategies, rather than the systematic pursuit of any single argument.

RD: The business of criticism seems to me ‘matters arising’, and naturally varies from film to film. I’d rather be wrong but open up a perspective than be prematurely right, i.e., dismiss opportunities for the full intellectual, sensual, emotional experience of reflective hesitation — which seems to me to be of the essence of art, as opposed to brusquer communication (e.g., moral saws, the human sciences).

On the few occasions when he does stick to one procedure — as in his study of character traits in Johnny Guitar in Films and Feelings and his sociological commentary on Panama & Frank’s Li’l Abner in The Crazy Mirror — the results are usually somewhat flat and academic. (A more successful example, also in Films and Feelings, is his extended psychological-political analysis of This Island Earth, which anticipates Susan Sontag’s essay on science fiction films, “The Imagination of Disaster”, in many important respects.) (5) As Robert Mundy points out, Durgnat “is often at his best writing about moments, rather than about films or directors”. (6) He can also be quite strong on individual aspects of films, as the following sampling of quotes demonstrates.

One craves, perhaps, a venture into those dark interiors where the fantasies of The Thief of Bagdad interpenetrate with those of Peeping Tom. Whence their centrifugality? The comparison with the director of The Citadel is pertinent. Vidor, intellectually, perhaps, ess cagey and sophisticated than Powell, has retained an authenticity of emotional excess which endows his films with their genuine mysticism, founded on human energy. But Powell lived in a class, and a country, and a generation which suspects, fears and undermines emotion. Thus his diversity of qualities rarely finds their holding center. (7)

[Emil] Jannings allowed himself to stray as far from “realism” as comedians do — one can speak of “slow” expressionism, like Jannings’, and ‘fast’ expressionism, like Chaplin’s (or Jerry Lewis’). The middle term between them is exemplified by Catherine Hessling in Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926), where she gives what is both the best and worst performance in the history of the French cinema. With her petal-light limbs flung out into Napoleonic postures, her bee-sting mouth pouting in her heart-shaped face, her eyes narrowed till the pupils disappear under a palisade of lashes, her fluttering precocity and jagged stances, this awkward blend of Chaplinesque, quicksilver and marionette fixity comes, if only the spectator will adapt his response, to make at least as much sense as modern “Method”-ism. (8)

Hell [in Hellzapoppin’ ], by an atmospheric pun, is a combination of the traditional Hell (devils with horns roast blonde angels trussed to spits), and of a modern factory, where devils pedal away at grindstones and produce “Canned Guy” and “Canned Gal” (just at this time, of course, America was arming for war, and soon to draft people into munitions factories). (9)

Of course, not all of Durgnat’s strengths can be observed in short quotations. It is his special knowledge of and sensitivity to the surrealist tradition in France, for instance, that makes his study of Franju particularly valuable, and richly evocative in a way that most Anglo-American criticism of Franju is not. And on a few occasions, when Durgnat grasps a film as the meeting ground of several interconnecting influences, traditions and social forces, he is able to treat it as a complex but homogenous unity: his essays on Kiss Me Deadly (10), and Judex (1963) in the Franju book, are probably the best things that have been written on either film.

Finally, one can value Durgnat for the wealth of movies that he’s seen, and the unknown delights that he often brings to our attention. While I find it difficult to share his enthusiasm for Li’l Abner — particularly since nothing he says about it even remotely convinces me to go back to it — I can only applaud his frequent allusions to such unjustly neglected works as Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1930), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (Roy V. Rowland, 1953), It’s In the Bag! (Richard Wallace, 1945) and the cartoons of Tex Avery, even if none of these has received the extended treatment from Durgnat that one would hope for.

RD: Is “going back to it” the only response a critic can hope for? I had a different end in view: to spell out some of the ways in which comedy calls on reality. Lawrence Alloway, of all people, couldn’t understand what I was trying to do in the not dissimilar piece on This Island Earth, a film which I’ve no particular enthusiasm for, either. I was out to show that there are more meanings in ordinary meanings — of the shallow type required for entertainment — than usually spotted by critics, who imagine that only important art can involve people and make poetic and ideological points. I’m looking at movies which are run-of-the-mill yet saturated with something too shallow really to be myth (in the full sense), but too ambivalent to be merely cliché. I’m trying a kind of micro-criticism, more concerned with the molecules of a film’s meaning than the implications of its meaning.

3

When Durgnat attacks Pauline Kael’s “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience” (11) at some length in Films and Feelings for its puritan assumptions, one feels the confrontation of two critics on a common turf. Quite simply, Kael and Durgnat are two of the most accomplished sociological film critics since the death of Robert Warshow, and the differences between their approaches are instructive. It is frequently said of Kael that she reviews audiences as much as films; one might add to this that her moral evaluations of each tend to precede her analyses. In Durgnat’s case, analysis of what theoretically takes place between the film and the audience comes first, and any moral evaluation of this occurrence is usually either postponed or suspended. Within the terms of Durgnat’s sociology, concepts of good and bad, right and wrong are relatively non-existent — or at least non-essential.

RD: No, they’re essential, but… no more so than some other non-moral spiritual axes. Does my work really give an impression of amorality? Surely I often talk morally, even in the case of This Island Earth.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Durgnat doesn’t evaluate films, or that he avoids moral judgments: he periodically makes his tastes and preferences known, and some of his judgments – like his notorious dismissal of Godard — are couched almost exclusively in moral terms:

Godard wears dark glasses to hide from the world the fact that he’s in a constant state of ocular masturbation, rubbing himself off against anything and everything on which his eye alights. The flickering glance of his camera is the constant dribble of premature ejaculation. It is an unseeing stare. Godard keeps babbling on about the world being absurd because he can’t keep an intellectual hard-on long enough to probe for any responsive warmth. (12)

RD: This passage of mine was rude so that the reader wouldn’t take it too solemnly as a moral point. At that time, the consensus was taking Godard as a sort of sage of solipsism. I wanted to say that his films weren’t just about triumphs over the medium, but about a predicament too absurdist to be tragic in the traditionally dignified way. And, after all, he did a right-, or rather left-about turn intellectually soon afterwards. This sort of Portnoy’s Complaint of the bourgeois intelligentsia is the shadow side of the ‘reflective hesitation’ I was advocating earlier — hence the suddenly violent metaphor! Besides, those same “Asides” do describe Godard’s first two features as “masterpieces”, which is high praise, surely.

But while Kael discusses contemporary films as interactions and encounters between screen and audience, Durgnat isolates mythic and archetypal structures that bind the two into an indissoluble whole.

RD: The danger is of binding them into an over-schematized, stylized whole — merely a set of conventions. But the alternative sense, of “baseline possibilities” within which each audience reacts differently, is neatly suggested by your “court” metaphor.

If film watching suggests the back and forth movement of a tennis game, Kael’s eye is on the players, while Durgnat’s is on the court.

RD: I wonder if three subjects for moral judgment are being telescoped here: (1) The moral impact on an audience of a film (what real spectators, in groups, make of it, in fact); (2) The moral assumptions and conclusions of a film when fully and correctly apprehended by a kind of ideal spectator, an ami inconnu; and (3) Durgnat’s own moral attitudes. Obviously, they interconnect in his writing. But so far as (1) is concerned, Durgnat’s moral polarity revolves around the question of honesty and insight (good) as against mystification and easy cliché (bad). Thus, Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 is a better description of capitalist processes than George Stevens’ Giant. But nihilist or Fascist films may be good insofar as they undermine everyone else’s complacencies, and state uncomfortable truths.

4

Durgnat’s unwavering hatred for the elitist and middlebrow stances of Sight and Sound, which crops up periodically in his work, has probably provided his career with as much sustained focus as Robin Wood’s admiration for F.R. Leavis has unified the thrust of Wood’s work.

RD: I’d say ‘consistent disagreement’; I hope I don’t read as if I’m negative or rooted in hatred. It’s true that Sight and Sound has often given me a useful chopping block, and that it did deserve attack, if only because it was both so generally accepted, and itself so extremely destructive and dismissive, during its very bad period (1956-68, roughly). Probably there isn’t any sustained focus for my work, in the sense of an overriding preoccupation, because, like your traditional liberal humanist, I’m interested in everything to do with art — and with art because it has to do with human experience. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto [‘I am a man, and consider nothing human to be foreign to me’], as Terence said circa 150 BC.

The striking contrast between Durgnat and Wood, who are quite likely the two most ambitious English film critics in their generation, is a remarkably complementary one in many respects. The somewhat explicit relationship of Wood to Freud is balanced by the more implicit (but equally crucial) link of Durgnat to Jung. In a certain sense, Freud/Wood seek to civilize the unconscious by exposing its mysteries and terrors to the light of day, while Jung/Durgnat are more bent on achieving a truce and partnership between night and day, mystery and logic.

RD: I know the contrast is only an analogy, but I’m nearer Freud than Wood in my pessimism about moralistic rationalization, and about any hope of civilizing the unconscious. Wood, like F.R. Leavis, is puritanical, and I’m not; but it’s worth remembering that puritanism is only one moral position, and a minority one. I suspect that Buñuel’s mixture of Jesuitical casuistry, inverted Marxist “pessimism of the intelligence”, and the surrealist inversion of Freud is beyond the capabilities of the puritan position, however evolved. To understand Buñuel, you have either to be innocent of puritanism, or to have taken it beyond the point where its internal incoherencies appear. Otherwise, you either dismiss it or just goggle at the shock and riddle of it all.

This sharp division was particularly evident when conflicting reviews of Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) by Durgnat and Wood were printed side by side in Movie. (13) Durgnat’s response is characteristically sympathetic: By liberal standards, the film is a fairy tale, its psychology is strange indeed. But its serene indifference to liberal notions is the condition of its insidious freshness. It can treat a psychopathic case in the Lubitsch style because bourgeois manners are psychopathic anyway. Wood concludes, on the contrary, that: For an adherent of an ‘ism’ explicitly dedicated to revolution, Buñuel, on the evidence of his films, seems remarkably defeatist, steering his characters towards their preordained hopelessness by eliminating any possibilities of health. Earlier in the review, he states: I don’t think that Buñuel feels anything much for Séverine as a human being; if the film evokes no disgust for her, it evokes no compassion or affection either. What one does take away is a pervasive nastiness.

Wood’s rejection of Belle de jour seems partially a function of the callousness with which he feels other people, including Durgnat, respond to it; George Kaplan attacks the potato-sack sequence in Frenzy (1972) with a similar attitude. (14) Speaking for myself, I was revolted by the audience’s reactions to the murders in The Godfather when I saw it, and disliked the film at the time for its capacity to elicit these responses. But are such judgments really legitimate to the films themselves, as opposed to how the audience chooses to take them? Wood asserts that in Belle de jour, “there is no attempt… to explore the potentialities of life; there is no sense of what normality is or more important, could be”. But surely the film does attempt to explore at least some of life’s possibilities; and a sense of what normality both is and could be is precisely what Buñuel conveys, in his treatment of Séverine’s acceptance of her masochism. It is hardly necessary to agree with Buñuel’s definitions of normality in order to accept the film.

RD: I agree with you, but your tone implies that normal people can hardly be expected to agree with Buñuel’s definitions of normality. I think many normal people would. We know that his “normality” involves a fullness of passion, an amour fou, a “real”ization of the essence of dream-life, as against hypochondriacal notions of emotional decorum. If you can accept Marlene Dietrich’s saloon girl in Destry Rides Again (1939), or Norman Mailer on the wisdom of prostitutes, you can accept Buñuel’s Séverine. Buñuel’s film is full of saddening ironies, and I’m sure he knows it. It’s sad and intricate because we can sense that Séverine and her husband should accept her repressed life and they don’t, forcing her to live it out in that imperfect, indeed tragic, way. Buñuel is asking us to consider the myopia, errors and cowardice which everyone in the film shows, at one time or another — just like us — all tangled up with misdirected hopes and acts of courage — just like us — and ending in frustration — which is common enough.

Real people are not the size they assume on large movie screens, and music doesn’t accompany our lives in quite the same way as soundtrack scores; birds are not intent on destroying mankind, and many of the temporal and spatial conditions of life in Only Angels Have Wings are patently unreal; if Wood can accept these and countless other conventions — including, say, the brutal sexist assumptions of Klute — why can’t he accept the compassion that Buñuel so visibly displays towards his heroine, by having her deepest desires gratified? (15)

RD: I don’t quite see her afternoons as quite so fine as “deepest” might suggest, although I agree with your general drift. A major reason for art is to enable us to share — and sensitize ourselves to both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It’s what you’re slowest to approve of that teaches you the most. (I don’t say that whatever you disapprove of is therefore good.)

For Wood, the discovery of what he considers to be positive moral values in a film is a prerequisite to his appreciation of it — a requirement that Durgnat seems in no way bound to. When Wood finds what he’s looking for, he can take hold of a film with a precision that few other critics can master, conveying its total impact with a passionate clarity that seems well beyond Durgnat’s range. But when he confronts those films whose “positive values” are problematical, at least from a traditional standpoint, it often appears that he either dismisses these films unjustly — as he does with Belle de jour — or supplies them with moral resonances that they don’t have; which I think he does, even more damagingly, with Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956). (16)

RD: Do you really think that there is just one tradition of positive values in our culture? Then how do you square, say, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Kafka, Bessie Smith? I’d have thought that one of our problems was precisely the cynicism induced by our multitude of conflicting moral and spiritual cultures, and the very great difficulty of creating a synthesis which is neither weak nor narrow.

Bigger Than Life is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle class aspirations because it defines madness – the drug-induced psychosis of Avery (James Mason) – as taking these values seriously. Each emblem of the American dream implicitly honored and worshipped by Avery in the opening reel is systematically turned on its head, converted from dream to nightmare, by becoming only more explicit in his behavior. The dramatic function of his incurable disease and his taking of cortisone, carrying the respective promises of death and superlife, is to act on the slick magazine ads that Avery and his wife try to inhabit in much the same way that expressionist lighting works on actors’ faces (or, to cite an analogy from the film, the X-ray of Avery’s torso); it highlights details that are already actively present.

Wood seems somewhat aware of this aspect of the film, and shows much sensitivity towards certain manifestations of it; but his Leavis-inspired concern for moral centers ultimately leads to a taming of the film’s subversive implications. After noting persuasively that the basic creative tension in Ray’s work is between “conscious, rational control” and “the promptings of spontaneous, anarchic impulse”, he minimizes this tension by avoiding the film’s anarchic thrust, virtually turning Ray into a safe social democrat. “It would be quite wrong to see Bigger Than Life as a simple endorsement of the American bourgeois family,” he soberly states, in a tragicomic understatement that brutalizes the film’s meanings (does he consider it a complex endorsement?). To say this about one of the most scathing portrayals of the American bourgeois family that the cinema has given us! Turning away from the film’s powerful negativity and despair in his search for “an impulse towards the formation of human norms”, he reaches for the unconvincing closing scene of family reconciliation – an ending that, as we learn from an interview with Ray, was composed hastily just before it was shot, and is completely unsatisfactory to the director himself. (17) Wood then concludes that the film’s “message (in so far as a complex work of art can be said to have one) is not ‘Be satisfied with what you’ve got’ but ‘Work with what you’ve got, empirically and realistically. And know yourself’”.

RD: Oh, I obviously must see Bigger Than Life!

But does Bigger Than Life really offer us the luxury of such Sunday school lessons? One could probably summarize two of Mr. Wood’s other favorite films with equal justice by saying that Marnie teaches us that “Honesty is the best policy”, while the message of Rio Bravo is “A friend in need is a friend indeed”.

RD: Perhaps Wood does take some moral as a precondition of a film’s being artistically satisfying, but he does distinguish the full experience from the moral summary thereof.

The weaknesses and strengths of any critic are likely to be bound up with one another: without Wood’s moral piousness and liberal squeamishness, or Durgnat’s occasional solipsisms and unwieldy structures, one suspects that the talents of each would be less than they are. Yet the feeling persists that these two gentlemen could learn a lot from each other.

RD: I’ve disagreed with Robin Wood throughout my Hitchcock book. I hope I’ve done so in a way that shows how much I respect him, and how much I’ve learned from him — which is a lot. Critics hope to be learned from (or else why write?) and to learn (or else why read?). It would be interesting to know whether Robin Wood has ever learned anything from Raymond Durgnat, or whether he thinks Durgnat is as morally sick as Rosenbaum’s account implies he ought. Certainly, another neo-Leavisite, David Holbrook, thinks Durgnat is revolting (“d for dirt, or Durgnat, section”). I wrote about Belle de jour without knowing Robin Wood was writing about it too, and remain unconvinced, along Rosenbaum’s lines. Yet the feeling persists that Rosenbaum’s real interest is his “friendly enemy” relationship with Wood, and that the Durgnat bit is a framework around it! Perhaps Durgnat disappears behind his own eclecticism, and even the critical persona can’t be seen — or seems relatively sloppy or boring. I’d hate to think it really was!

Afterword (2002)

Having written this almost thirty years ago, when I was living in Paris, I’m surprised to discover that I still agree with a lot of it, even though it seems to be written by someone else. It led, quite unexpectedly, to the first exchange I ever had in print with another film critic — an event masterminded by Richard Corliss, the editor of Film Comment at the time, who sent Ray the galleys of my article, and then kindly sent me the galleys of his responses. Under the circumstances, I’m still grateful to Ray for letting me off so easily. In fairness to him, I should stress that his comments were intended by him to be run as footnotes to some of my points, so he wasn’t prepared for the prominence they were given in the magazine as a separate article titled “Apologia and Auto-Critique”. As he put it to me when we met for the first time, in London, a few months later, he felt more comfortable “sniping” at me from the sidelines — a preference that points to what I regard as his dependable underground instincts, which I suspect have accompanied him throughout his career.

Ray has argued that the dated aspects of films directed by William Wellman are more valuable than the relative “timelessness” of those directed by Howard Hawks because they have more to tell us about the worlds they came from — which is another way of saying that film criticism can and should be a way of writing about the world. (18) By the same token, I’d like to think that this ancient essay of mine about Durgnat might be worth reading today precisely for its outdatedness — not only in relation to Ray and myself, but in relation to the world we were both inhabiting in the early ‘70s. When I wrote it, “Durgnat” was simply a prominent name in my well-thumbed library of film books and magazines, shipped from New York to Paris — a library that hadn’t yet included his hefty books on Renoir, Hitchcock and King Vidor, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema and WR - Mysteries of the Organism (the latter my second favorite Durgnat book to date, after Films and Feelings), not to mention an uncountable number of articles in English and American magazines, including many that I still haven’t managed to track down.

In other words, Ray wasn’t yet a friend or one-time housemate (as he became in a San Diego suburb in 1977, when both of us were teaching in the same department nearby), but he was already a major reference point. (19) Consequently, it was easy to misread him as a person even more than as a critic. Knowing that he had Swiss parents, I regarded him in part as a conduit into French culture — the New Wave and surrealism, Franju and Renoir — and therefore as a guide of sorts into the international underground, without imagining that he was also capable of wearing Union Jack socks, as I would discover a few years later, and English to the core. Similarly, viewing Durgnat as a refreshing opponent of the puritanical streak in ‘60s Anglo-American film criticism, as represented by Penelope Houston (in his memorable polemic “Standing Up For Jesus” — a critical touchstone for, among many others at the time, the late Jill Forbes, whom I knew in Paris) (20) as well as Pauline Kael (in his extended response to her “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience” in Films and Feelings), I misread his opposition as “unwavering hatred” rather than good-natured snipe-shooting — and was pleased to discover later that his critique of Kael actually led to a friendly correspondence with her.

By the same token, I was much too eager to square Ray off against Robin Wood — an indication of my temperament rather than his, which understandably led him to the incorrect suspicion that Robin was the real focus of my piece. In fact, this was merely an effort to shoehorn an argument about Bigger Than Life that was preoccupying me at the time into an article where it didn’t belong — justified (or, at least, rationalized) in my mind by Ray’s own almost Sterne-like digressions. But I should have realized that no two writers ever digress in the same way or for the same reasons, and three decades later, I hope Ray will accept my apology for confusing my bugaboos with his own. Such are the perils of mimetic criticism, to which fledgling critics are especially susceptible.

Note: Ray Durgnat died on May 19, 2002, around the same time that this article and afterword, as part of an online tribute to him, were being posted.

***

Notes (mostly by Adrian Martin):

1. O.O. Green, “Six Films of Josef von Sternberg”, Movie no. 13 (Summer 1965), 26-31, reprinted under Durgnat’s name in Ian Cameron (ed.), Movie Reader, New York: Praeger, 1972, 94-99; Durgnat, “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir”, Cinema (UK) no. 6/7 (August 1970), 48-56, reprinted in Alain Silver & James Ursini (eds.), Film Noir Reader, New York: Limelight Editions, 1996, 37-51, and also condensed into a chart (under the title “The Family Tree of Film Noir”) in Film Comment (November-December 1974), 6-7; the Hitchcock essay series appeared in Films and Filming (February-November 1970).

2. For Robin Wood’s response to this characterization see the chapter “Big Game” in his Personal Views, revised ed., Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, 17-42.

3. Manny Farber, Negative Space, New York: Da Capo, 1998, 135.

4. Philip French, “A World on Film and Films and Feelings”, Sight and Sound (Autumn 1967), 210-11; Raymond Durgnat, “Correspondence”, Sight and Sound (Winter 1967/8), 52.

5. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Dell, 1969, 212-28.

6. Robert Mundy, “Raymond Durgnat”, Cinema (US) Vol. 7 No. 2 (Spring 1972), 59.

7. Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London: Faber and Faber, 1970, 215.

8. Durgnat, Films and Feelings, London: Faber and Faber, 1967, 89-90.

9. Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image, Latimer Trend and Company, 1969, 174.

10. Durgnat, “The Apotheosis of Va-Va-Voom” in Eros in the Cinema, London: Calder and Boyars, 1966.

11. Pauline Kael, I Lost It At the Movies, New York/London: Marion Boyars, 1966, 31-44.

12. Durgnat, “Asides on Godard” in Ian Cameron (ed.), The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, London: Studio Vista, 1969,153. It is worth mentioning that later, in the same collection, Durgnat comes to the defense of Godard in his essay on 1+1 (1968).

13. Wood and Durgnat, “Belle de jour”, Movie no. 15 (1968).

14. George Kaplan, “Alfred Hitchcock: Lost in the Wood”, Film Comment (November-December 1972), pp. 46-53. [Editor’s Note: Kaplan was in fact Robin Wood.]

15. The words of a traditionalist critic might be helpful here. Samuel Johnson has argued that anyone entering a theatre can imagine that a couple of chairs and fake pillars are, say, Ancient Egypt: “Surely he who imagines this,” Johnson wrote, “can imagine more.” Why, then, couldn’t he imagine that Séverine attains fulfillment at the end of Belle de jour?

16. Robin Wood, “Film Favorites: Bigger Than Life”, Film Comment (September -October 1972), 56-61.

17. Movie no. 9 (1963), 19-20.

18. Durgnat, “Hawks Isn’t Good Enough”, Film Comment (July-August 1977), 13.

19. Editor’s Note: Subsequent to their meeting, Rosenbaum, Durgnat (and David Ehrenstein) collaborated on the roundtable discussion “Obscure Objects of Desire” in Film Comment (July-August 1978), 60-64, available online at www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=15471; and Durgnat discussed the first edition of Rosenbaum’s Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, New York: Harper and Row, 1980 (available online at www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft3s2005n8;brand=ucpress), in the review essay “Nostalgia: Code and Anti-Code”, Wide Angle Vol. 4, No. 4 (1981), 76-8.

20. Durgnat, “Standing Up for Jesus”, Motion no. 6 (Autumn 1963), 25-42. — Film Comment, May-June 1973; Notes and Afterword originally published in (but subsequently removed from) the online Senses of Cinema, issue no. 20, May-June 2002; see also www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=15842.

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Tati’s Democracy: An Interview and Introduction

This article and interview was originally published in the May-June 1973 issue of Film Comment, roughly half a year after the interview took place. I went to work for Tati as a script consultant several weeks after I had the interview, but well before it appeared in print. A few years ago, this piece was reprinted online in the Southern arts magazine Drain. —J.R.

Tati’s Democracy
An Interview and Introduction

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Like all of the very great comics, before making us laugh, Tati creates a universe. A world arranges itself around his character, crystallizes like a supersaturated solution around a grain of salt. Certainly the character created by Tati is funny, but almost accessorily, and in any case always relative to the universe. He can be personally absent from the most comical gags, for M. Hulot is only the metaphysical incarnation of a disorder that is perpetuated long after his passing.

It is regrettable that André Bazin’s seminal essay on Jacques Tati (”M. Hulot et le temps,” 1953, in Qu’est-ce que Ie cinéma?, vol. I) has been omitted from both volumes of his criticism in English; regrettable, too, that Bazin didn’t live to see Tati’s masterpiece. To some degree, PLAYTIME can be regarded as an embodiment and extension of Bazin’s most cherished Ideas about deep focus, long takes, and the “democratic” freedoms that these techniques offer to the spectator.

It can be argued, of course, that Tati has offered his audience too much freedom, and overestimated the capacities of several spectators — one reason, perhaps, why five years after its Paris opening, PLAYTIME has yet to receive an American release. “An absolute masterpiece of a confounding and vertiginous beauty,” Jean-André Fieschi reported in Cahiers du cinéma shortly after it premiered. “Never, perhaps, has a film placed so much confidence in the intelligence and activity of the spectator: the challenge was too great to find a commensurate response.” Quite simply, the richness of PLAYTIME is not available to anyone on a single viewing. At best, one can discover that this richness is present; at worst, the viewer can become so bored by what he doesn’t see that he fails to notice that a radical change in the language of cinema is being proposed. (Something comparable happened to many critics when 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY opened in the U.S. less than four months later.) In any event, the film can seem funny or unfunny, empty or full, lively or dull, beautiful or ugly in one viewing; but it cannot come across in its entirety. As Noël Burch observes in Praxis du cinéma (Gallimard, 1969), “Tati’s film [is] the first in the history of cinema that must be seen not only several different times, but from several different distances. It is probably the first really ‘open’ film. Will it remain the only one?”

A group of female American tourists wander through a studio-built Paris of interchangeable steel and glass buildings; one girl, the youngest member of the group, searches for the “real” Paris. Meanwhile, M. Hulot wanders through the same buildings, mainly in search of a M. Giffard, occasionally crossing the paths of the Americans and various other groups. Midway through the film, Hulot finds Giffard, re-encounters an old army friend, and joins all the other characters at the premature opening of an expensive restaurant; as the awkwardly designed establishment gradually falls to pieces, everyone gets acquainted. In the morning, Hulot buys a going-away present for the American girl, which she opens on the bus ride back to Orly airport: a plastic bouquet of lilies of the valley that closely resemble the streetlamps on the autoroute.

Jacques Rivette has remarked that “PLAYTIME is a revolutionary film, despite Tati; the film has completely effaced the creator” — an idea echoed by Tati himself in the following interview, when he asserts that “PLAYTIME is nobody.” But how, exactly, is it revolutionary?

In conventional film narrative, there is always a clearly defined separation between “subject” and “background.” A character moves through a setting, and our attention is focused on the “action” — what the character does; when this setting figures in the action, it becomes a part of the subject. But in PLAYTIME, where every character has the status of an extra, every scene is filmed in long shot, and the surrounding décor is continually relevant to the action, the subject of a typical shot is everything that appears on the screen. Many shots, particularly in the restaurant sequence, become open forums where several potential points of interest compete independently for our attention. Whatever we choose to ignore automatically becomes “background,” but this arranging of priorities is often no more than a reflection of our own preferences, i.e., which movie we want to see this time around. If we sit tight and wait for gags to come, we won’t find very many. But if we let our eyes roam, wander and gambol about the screen, scanning the totality of the action, we’ll discover multiple relationships between people, people and objects, live moments and dead moments, real gags and potential gags that are hysterically funny: a geometric vaudeville. Viewed individually, details might be dull or interesting; seen together, they become cosmically funny — comic in a philosophical sense.

This vision is not merely revealed in the film, but formulated as a philosophical-aesthetic proposition. Indirectly, through a series of minor events, Hulot proposes this concept to the American girl. As Tati indicates in the interview, this lesson has a lot to do with human, accidental curves breaking the monotony of regimented straight lines. The opening of the film is oppressively linear in terms of the actions displayed. The initial gag, delineated in the second and third shots, is the sharp left turn taken by two nuns in the passageway of an anonymous building (which we subsequently discover is Orly); and all the various movements of the tourists being led around are equally rigid and unswerving.

Perhaps the first beautiful movement in PLAYTIME occurs when Hulot does an involuntary dance turn on the slippery floor of a waiting room, while the tip of his umbrella momentarily serves to anchor him. This little slide, which lasts only a second or two, is virtually the only instance of physical grace that Tati allows himself as an actor in the entire film: the whole legacy of his music hall experience is alluded to and dispensed with in a single fleeting gesture. (The extraordinary contrast between Tati’s directorial ambitions and his modesty as an actor, which crops up frequently in the interview, is basic to his ideas about comedy; in this respect, the larger role played by Hulot in TRAFIC is a conscious regression, undoubtedly dictated by commercial necessities.)

Later in the film, at a gadget exhibition, the American girl turns around — shifting her gaze in an arc away from the architecture’s linear dictates — to notice a “gag” (Hulot and some small mishap he has engendered) that makes her laugh. And in the restaurant, which theoretically collapses and comes to life because of the architect’s failure to take precise measurements, the regimented lines of movement increasingly turn into a whirlpool of dance curves. At the same time, in order to maintain any “global” sense of the entire action as we search out various details, it is virtually essential that we curve the trajectory of our gaze: if our eyes attempt to traverse the screen in straight lines, we simply miss too much. (Significantly, a neon arrow that is straight at one end, curved at the other, flashes over the restaurant’s entrance, and is the basis for several gags.) Pursuing the action in straight lines, we become victimized, imprisoned by the architecture, much in the way that Giffard, rushing directly towards one of the characters resembling Hulot (the film has several) in an early sequence, run smack into a glass door. An alternative method of looking is Tati’s “message.”

In the restaurant, the apparent conflicts between separate points of interest become resolved when we realize that all the wandering strands are bound up in the same fabric, and every detail on the screen is privileged in relation to the whole, which gradually assumes the shape of a turning circle. This concept culminates in a climactic “circus” vision of city traffic as an endlessly turning carousel, with all the surrounding action serving to complete, rather than deviate from, the commanding image: the raising and lowering of cars in an adjacent garage suggesting the vertical movements of merry-go-round horses, and the horizontal procession of pedestrians serving to “frame” the carousel.

Getting to Tati’s office from the center of Paris takes a little less than an hour. Arriving in a suburban neighborhood, one finds oneself in a disconcerting architectural mixture of new and old that inevitably suggests the landscape of MON ONCLE (1958). Tati resides in one of the newer structures, a trim office building with glass doors and a cafe-bistro down-stairs, where he often has lunch. Around the period of MON ONCLE, Tati’s film company occupied all of the second floor. Today, after the various expenses of PLAYTIME have caused his company to go bankrupt, his operations have been limited to two rooms on the same floor.

If Tati’s films tend to defy verbal transcription, some of the same problem exists with his conversation. While he talks, a remarkable flurry of explanatory gestures and expressions accompany his words like a continual subtext — the habitual motions of a skilled pantomimist accustomed to showing what he means more than saying it. Throughout our interview, his body and voice would continually slide from explanation into demonstration, illustrating a point by becoming a character or even an object in one of his films, and reproducing part of the dialogue or sound effects with uncanny precision. I had no sense of Tati clowning to amuse me: when he converted a letter opener into a screwdriver to represent the efforts of a modest mechanic, or imitated a car going into second gear with his voice, it always seemed less like a performance than an automatic expedient for explaining something.

Although we spoke for nearly two hours, I regret that we never got around to any detailed discussion of his first three features, and that Tati tended to resist giving more technical information about the composition of his soundtracks.  On the latter subject, however, his assistant, Marie France Siegler, was particularly helpful. She spoke to me about his prolonged efforts to get the precise sound he wanted for the splitting of a waiter’s trousers in PLAYTIME, tearing every kind of conceivable material in the recording studio until the right noise emerged; occasionally using his voice to achieve certain other sound effects; and in general, highlighting parts of the sound to direct the audience — visually and conceptually — in various subtle, almost subliminal ways.

Our interview took place in late November, two weeks before TRAFIC began its commercial run in New York. Tati had just returned from an extensive tour of the United States, and I began by asking him for some of his reactions.

JACQUES TATI:  It’s very difficult to explain. When you live in another country, like I do, it’s so pretentious to give advice about what people must or mustn’t do, to say “That is right” or “That is wrong.” My reactions to New York, for instance: of course it’s a little bit tough, of course it’s a little bit difficult; but it’s also very true. I mean, in all other big cities, the reality is a little bit hidden, they try to show more of what is good than what is bad. In New York, with all this competition, with everything going on there, it’s open, you see it. There’s every situation, and I like in a way this absolutely important life (I don’t say creation, maybe that is too much). It’s real, and when you come to another city afterwards, it’s as if you’re going on a holiday.

The states are different: San Francisco is another life, and so is New Orleans. Dallas is a lot of money, so the people there show that they have a lot — because they have it. But most of the time, I’ve been in touch with students at the universities, and what impressed me was how much they’re learning about film: they know what a picture is, they know old pictures, they discover old talent. I think it’s a very important move, and that Mr. Langlois was right to say to the major companies, “Don’t throw those old pictures out, because one day you may find that artistically they are sometimes important.”

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM:  At the universities you visited, did you generally show PLAYTIME as well as TRAFIC?

JT: Not always. In San Francisco, they devoted two days to all my features. I showed PLAYTIME last — I always show PLAYTIME after TRAFIC. On the basis of my intentions, TRAFIC could have been shot before PLAYTIME. PLAYTIME will always be my last picture because of the dimension on the decor, regarding the people. There’s no star, no one person is important, everybody is; you are as important as I can be. It’s a democracy of gags and comics — the personality of people regarding an architecture that people have decided for us to live in, without asking us whether we agree or not. In the end, we all win in the sense that we still talk to each other; if anything goes wrong, we’re still partners, and some small people are still allowed to be important.

The construction is very strong. When people say that there’s no construction in PLAYTIME it makes me laugh, because the moment you take two shots out of the picture . . . It’s a little bit like a ballet. At the beginning, the people’s movements always follow the architecture, they never make a curve [with his hands, Tati traces an elaborate series of straight lines and right angles], they go from one line to another. The more the picture continues, the more the people dance, and start to make curves, and turn around, and start to be absolutely round — because we have decided that we’re still there. That’s what I like. Some people may not understand because they’re always putting a mark on somebody; they say, “Oh, that’s Mr. So-and-so and he is going to be funny for the whole evening.”

The images are designed so that after you see the picture two or three times, it’s no longer my film, it starts to be your film. You recognize the people, you know them, and you don’t even know who directed the picture. It’s not a film you sign like FELLINI’S ROMA. PLAYTIME is nobody. I don’t say that it’s easy to do. The dimension of the camera is the dimension of what your eyes see; I don’t come close up or make tracking shots to show you what a good director I am. I want your eyes to put you in such a situation where you come to the opening of the restaurant, as though you were there that night.

A lot of people don’t like PLAYTIME; they don’t even stay to the end. But some who please me, particularly very important directors, like it very much. . . . The star is the decor. We are all — French, English, American, Canadian, everywhere — starting to live in this same international décor. That’s why I shot it in 70mm. In 70mm, you have the right dimension on the New York airport, Orly, the expressways. Of course, you can do it now even in 35mm.

I’ve been fighting all my life for my sound tracks. They’re obliged to be magnetic one day; it’s a joke for distributors to make them optical. With optical, beyond a certain point you get distortion; with magnetic you get all the range you want. It’s so silly that distributors today don’t imagine that magnetic will be the next step in sound. Each time we had a sound on magnetic and had to transfer it to optical, it became so hazy, with no dimension to it. Even in 35mm today, if you have stereo — when a car comes on the right of a screen, you’re obliged to hear it on the right; when it’s in the middle, you have to hear it there; and when it leaves on the left, you have to hear it on the left. But nobody wants to fight, because it’s too much work for the projectionists and distributors. So what are they doing for cinema today?  Nothing.  They just sell it like they sell spaghetti or Danish beer. They don’t care about what we’re trying to do, or respect artistic control.

JR: Could you describe some of the methods you use in composing your soundtracks?

JT: Well, first, I can do it because my dialogue isn’t important; the visual situation is for me number one. The dialogue is background sound as you hear it when you’re in the street, in Paris or New York — a brouhaha of voices. [Tati demonstrates by appearing to mumble several things at once.] People say, “Where are we going?” and you don’t exactly know where they’re going. I also like to push my visual effect a little on the sound track. In MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY, the sound of the car is as important as the shape of the car, because even when the car isn’t visible, the sound of the motor shows that it’s coming—it’s the personality of that car by sound effect. In PLAYTIME, when Hulot sits in the modern chair, it is a visual effect, but the sound’s as interesting as the shape of the chair: whoooosh. . . . The time will come when a young director will use sound creatively; you’ll have a very simple image with very little movement, and the sound will add a new dimension, like putting sound in a painting — whoooosh.

JR: Your films are always shot silently, and the sound composed separately?

JT: Yes, I’m obliged to do that, because when you’re composing something visually, you have to talk all the time.  If you have a professional actor, that’s different, because you give him a line and he has to say it as well as he can. Now in my case, I play very much with objects — chairs, dogs — you’re obliged to talk to a dog: “Come here — sit.” Now you can’t keep that sound (“Attention! Restez-là. Don’t move. Please: stop!”), and I talk very often with my actors to make them feel more at home.  It’s more like life if you play with them and joke with them.

JR: I’ve heard that PLAYTIME was cut by fifteen minutes after its Paris premiere.. . .

JT: That was for the distributor. There was so much money involved in the picture, they thought that if it was shorter it would do better. Of course it didn’t help any. Either you accept it or you don’t; if it’s not your visual idea of yourself, you leave the cinema after a quarter of an hour. If you like it, understand it, it’s like impressionist painting, you find more in it to interest you — sound, movement, people — when you go back to it. I’m like you: I like it. I’m proud of PLAYTIME; it’s exactly the picture I wanted to make. With all my other films, I could make changes, shoot things differently if I was doing it now. Not with PLAYTIME — I did it and it’s done. I’ve suffered a lot because of it, physically and financially, but it’s really the film I wanted to do. And the original version, the long version, is the only one that I believe in. In Los Angeles, I showed it to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in a cinema seating seven or eight hundred people, although only two hundred were there. The reaction was amazing; everybody came and kissed me afterwards, it was such a warm situation. It wasn’t just politeness. Something did happen.

JR: How did you create the restaurant sequence? It looks like it must have been extraordinarily difficult.

JT: I had to work out each part and direct each character separately. It took me seven weeks to shoot it. First I’d set up all the different movements in the background, then I’d set up each action in the foreground, looking through the lens while composing each shot so I could see everything at once. I had to shoot it all in sequence; there was no other way.  A lot of people think that the camera doesn’t move at all; actually it does move, but always to show what your eye would naturally follow, so you don’t notice it.

JR: How did the décor of PLAYTIME — the city set constructed on the outskirts of Paris — come to be built?

JT: For my construction, we couldn’t go to the Drugstore and Orly and stop work there, it would’ve been impossible. And I wanted this uniformity: all the chairs, for instance, in the restaurant, in the bank — they’re all the same. The floor’s the same, the paint’s the same. It cost a lot of money, of course, but it’s there — and it’s not more expensive than Sophia Loren.

JR: How do you feel about the buildings in the film? You make a lot of jokes about them, yet in the night sequences they often look quite beautiful.

JT: It depends. In New York sometimes, when you’re very high up and look out the window, you have a marvelous vista of lights — it’s very impressive. But if you go down the elevator at say, six in the morning, what you see isn’t so impressive. It looks like you’re not allowed to laugh or whistle or be yourself: you have to push the button where it says “push,” there’s not much way of expressing yourself. But when you see all those lights at night, you want to create music, paint, express yourself, because it’s another dimension on the reality, it’s like a dream. You don’t see who’s living in the buildings or what’s happening there. When you arrive on the plane at night in New York, and see all those marvelous lights and shapes, you think that it must be a dream to live there: you’re sure that the food must be wonderful, the girls must be lovely. But then when you arrive there, the food isn’t all that good, and the girls aren’t as nice-looking as you expected. It’s all that way. The lights always change the dimension on reality at night.

JR: In TRAFIC, the camping car seems to function much like the restaurant in PLAYTIME — something that stands between people, so that they’re not able to get together until it breaks down. If this isn’t too presumptuous a question, what is your attitude towards cars?

JT: Well, first of all, they change the personality of people. Take a very nice gentleman whom you’ll meet in a bar: as soon as he gets in his car, he changes absolutely; he has to be very strong not to change. Secondly, the more the engineers work for us, the less we have to do when we drive a car, . . before, people participated in the driving; they knew by the sound of the motor how to change gears—rmrmrm, into second, and so forth. You participated, and you had to be a good driver. Now, with the new American car, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re a bad or good driver. What they call comfort and new techniques have become so exaggerated that I tried to create a car that was absolutely ridiculous, where you can take a shower, make coffee, shave — but it’s not practical at all, it’s the worst possible car to take on a holiday, because it brings you so many problems. And when you become so remote from what’s designed for you, the human connections between people start to go — like with the police in the film. I’m always — in each shot, each moment — trying to defend the simple man, who tries to fix something with his hands.

JR: I was wondering about the references to Apollo II in TRAFIC, which the characters watch on television ….

JT: To copy and make a joke about what they see on television, the people start to work more slowly. For them, the moon flight isn’t a great achievement; in relation to their private lives, it’s a flop.

JR: Do you go to films often?

JT: Yes. I always go to learn — I’m not a professor, I’m more a student, even at my age. There’s so much in cinema now — it’s a big garden. Of course, I’m touched more by comedy, but that’s a big garden too.

JR: How do you feel about the comedies of, say, Jerry Lewis? Or Woody Alien?

JT: I liked BANANAS very much. I laughed, and it’s difficult for a film to make me laugh. I recognize it’s good, but it’s not the way I want to express myself. I work more by observation: you see, when a president or a prime minister does a little something that’s funny, that makes me laugh much more than a comic does. I can make Hulot do all the jokes, because I come from the music hall and I can do it quite well, but it’s not my way. I’d rather show an important man doing something funny, because then people will look around and say, “Why is he speaking so loud? He isn’t really that important.” I mean, comedy can put a lot of people down. Now the other day, when President Nixon came on, after he won the election — with a very small detail he could have been very, very funny, not serious at all. He came on [Tati imitates Nixon’s demeanor] with this big smile, and it wasn’t natural at all—and if he’d slipped on one of the steps, it would’ve been hilarious. The same thing happened with De Gaulle once when he did something on television: it was so funny, because it was the General who did it. A small detail, it wouldn’t have been as good for Laurel and Hardy, but it was good for De Gaulle…. In comedy, even if people still laugh when a comic comes on and does a lot of clowning, I don’t believe it too much now. I mean, it wouldn’t be very important fifteen or twenty years from now. The pictures that are still really great today are Keaton’s, because he didn’t exaggerate at all: he had a face, no smile — a very modern adaptation. I saw the other day the real people who played in the restaurant in PLAYTIME, and I’m sure that ten years from now, a waiter will be the same; he’ll argue the same way, make the same  gestures. I think PLAYTIME will be better a few years from now, when more and more people have received that new décor in their lives. People don’t change as much as other people imagine. They change by publicity, commercials, but not inside. A great doctor once told me, “Tati,” he said, “you’re 100 per cent right to defend the people, because the moment you enter a hospital, whether you’re badly sick or not, your personality comes out, whether you’re strong or afraid. Advertisements, a Frigidaire, a new car, that’s all art. . . . Each personality becomes clear to anyone who’s visiting a hospital. Every human comes back to being human when he realizes that it’s something important.”

JR: The behavior that you show in your films is always public behavior — you nearly always show/people in crowds, rarely in a private situation. Have you ever thought of making a psychological film?

JT: Maybe I’m not strong enough to do it. Maybe, if I could help, if somebody will. . . . Chaplin didn’t do anything in making THE GREAT DICTATOR: he had a joke on Hitler, so what? To educate the people — I don’t educate them, I try to place them in a situation where they laugh for a reason. I always have to respect the public; I figure if it makes me laugh, maybe it will also make you laugh. But to go on and do something more — of course we could, but it’s not just one man who must do it, it’s a group. We have to talk to other generations — people from my generation, those behind me, and even the generation behind you: then maybe we could create something.

JR: Coming back to Paris last week, I noticed all the construction along the Seine. The superhighway that’s going to be built next to Notre Dame and the skyscraper going up in Montparnasse both seem to come out of PLAYTIME. The funny thing is, I don’t know anybody who wants that autoroute there.

JT: No, nobody. Yes, it’ll be faster and very practical — that’s all the planners care about. But the people who’ve got the money make the decision. I don’t know what the next move will be in the elections, but there isn’t one party strong enough today to really change policy. An independent group can argue a little bit like you, but there has to be more and more. Because they’ll never be more clever than the people in charge — the ones in charge will saturate us, they’ll do more and more each time. The more they speak on television, the more ridiculous they are. Pompidou is worse now than he was at the beginning. You hear him on television, he says everything and nothing — he doesn’t say anything. He says, “Okay, it’ll be good,” but you know it won’t be good. We’re always having to accept — that’s why the new generation has said no. They want the truth; you can’t lie to them. They’re against war because they find it silly that so much money is spent on destruction when most of the people need food, and there they have such an important argument. But they have to be very strong. I give you my opinion, which isn’t more important than any other. But if people take drugs and then don’t see the reality, or forget about it, it’s no help. They’re making a little bit of a ghetto for themselves.

JR: Maybe a lot of these problems are the problem with democracy, which in another way may not be the problem that PLAYTIME has had — because comedy has conventionally meant everybody laughing at the same things at the same time; whereas in PLAYTIME, for an audience really to respond to it, different people have to laugh at different things at different times.

JT: That’s how I felt. And I feel it very strongly. If we accept a new shaving cream without realizing it isn’t a good one, and we accept a comic picture to be constructed a certain way because that’s the way people will laugh, and if we accept everything, we’re going to be part of a regiment. Because the people who have a lot of money have very strong arguments. When you see people on American television, the way they speak and move and wear their clothes, their wigs — they all have wigs, you can see them — nothing is real.  That’s why what they create isn’t warm, or natural.  When you see all that cream they put in the commercials — I watched from 9 A.M. to 11:30 and I saw only cream, everywhere: cream on the bread, cream on the shoes, cream on the face, cream on the potatoes, cream to be dirty — chocolate cream, that looks like I don’t know what. At 12:30 I had an appointment for lunch and I said, “Really, I’m not joking, I  can’t eat.”

JR: If one wants to protest, say, the highway.going up next to Notre Dame, what does one do?

JT: Yeah, we tried — we went, my assistant went to make a demonstration, nobody cared for it.  Making an autoroute there is the silliest thing you can imagine. In thirty or forty-five years they’ll find it was so wrong, because it’s so well-built and arranged now. Boys play guitars there and the girls go and have little love affairs with them. That’s Paris. That’s why I did PLAYTIME.

—Film Comment, May-June 1973

Paris Journal (May-June 1973)

From Film Comment (May-June 1973). — J.R.

LES IDOLES, Marc’O’s film version of his theater piece, originally opened in Paris in May, 1968, when many of its spectators were out in the street presumably had other things to think about. It was released again early this year; but after a nominal run in one of several new mini-cinemas that have springing up lately all over the Left Bank, it seemed to vanish into oblivion a second time, only to re-emerge in a neighborhood house in early February, where it is currently playing. Talent does usually seem to find a way to reassert itself. Marc’O’s sarcastic parody about the making and merchandising of pop has nothing particularly profound or original to “say” about its subject, but it happens to have three of the liveliest performances in the modern French cinema.

Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, and Pierre Clementi, as the three pop stars, dive into their parts with such enthusiasm and expertise that the screen comes alive their electric energies, and one is to speculate on how much more spectacular they must have been on the stage. (Despite some clever attempts at adaptation, LES IDOLES stubbornly remains another variant of filmed theater — a good thing to have, under the circumstances, but like Shirley Clarke’s even ingenious recording of THE CONNECTION, it cannot really offer an equivalent to the excitements of a live performance.) A theoretical problem about parodying French rock is the fact that, at least to American ears, most of it tends to sound parody anyway; but Ogier, Kalfon, Clementi overcome this obstacle with dazzling variations on the very notion of Star Presence. Clementi’s Mick Jagger imitations are somewhat less inspired, but are still marvelous fun to watch; Ogier intermittently captures and squeezes the soul of yê-yê until it squeaks;  and in one virtuoso comic number, apparently Lewis-inspired, Kalfron beats his own master by leagues in evocations of sheer hysteria. And as extra added attraction, Bernadette Lafont makes an engaging guest appearance a singing nun at a pop wedding.

TRAITEMENT DE CHOC. Alain Jessua’s feature, starring Annie Girardot and Delon, is a somewhat sympathetic but after LA VIE A L’ENVERS (LIFE UPSIDE DOWN) and JEU DE MASSACRE (THE KILLING GAME), a considerable disappointment. Six years have elapsed since Jessua shot his second film (which is probably his best), and according to recent interviews, at least four of these years were spent in America, where Jessua tried in vain to get several film projects off the ground, notably a science-fiction script called “The Blue Planet” and a political film called “The White Panthers.” Although it is useless to speculate on whether any particular aspects of the older projects found their way into TRAITEMENT DE CHOC, the new film does attempt to cross-breed a science-fiction horror plot with a political allegory, and the virulence of the central premise does suggest that Jessua has more than a few fish to fry.

Annie Girardot arrives at the super-luxurious Institut de Thalassothérapie on the picturesque Belle- fle-en-Mer. The sanitarium, presided over by Doctor Delon, resembles a ritzy resort, and offers experimental treatments designed to relieve depression and bring back the patients’ youth. As she starts undergoing the treatments, and acquaints herself with the other rich clients, Delon, and a few of the Portuguese immigrants who are working on the premises at menial jobs, she begins to notice strange things going on around her, etc., etc., until a Grand Guignol denouement reveals that the Portuguese workers are being drugged and disemboweled, in order to provide her and the other privileged clients with fresh cells — at which point she stabs Delon to death in his nether regions with a syringe. I’d feel a little less guilty about unveiling this “surprise ending” if Jessua himself hadn’t given the game away with such ostentatious, camera-nudging hints in the first reel; and although his horrific climax does manage to provide a few jolts — à Ia Franju, but without the poetry — the effect is marred by the use of an unconvincing dummy of a Portuguese cadaver that is too silly even to qualify as a Roger Corman reject, and winds up provoking at least as many giggles as shivers.

Jessua’s allegorical message, and his more specific assaults against many of the assumptions of modern medicine, are strong and persuasive, at least in theory, but they tend to be worked out pretty laboriously on the screen. The additional problems of locating a potentially radical statement within a patently commercial framework become insuperable, and too many banalities and frivolities — none of them objectionable in themselves — keep getting in the way: a bossa nova score that is intended to relate to the Portuguese characters, brief glimpses of Delon and Girardot in frontal nudity . . . just the sort of thing to keep the paying customers happy — and TRAITEMENT DE CHOC is currently pulling in more customers than any other first-run film in Paris — but they compromise the blunt edges of the critique, and all but reduce Jessua to a superior version of Dr. Delon, who also has ideals and seeks to please his clients.

Each of Jessua’s three features deals with some form of mental aberration that is treated rather abstractly. If the social aberrations that are covertly dealt with in TRAITEMENT DE CHOC had been handled less abstractly, the protest might have registered a lot more meaningfully. As it is, the Portuguese workers seem to wind up being servants and victims of the plot, as well as of the hospital — faceless devices in the service of both mechanisms, which the presence of the phoney-looking dummy only helps to spell out.

According to standard marketing procedures, a film is “new” in relation to when it is released, not when it is made. Sometimes this can work in a filmmaker’s favor: Tati’s PLAYTIME, still unreleased in the states, is newer than TRAFFIC, and I’m told that several people who saw it at the last San Francisco Film Festival assumed it had been made afterwards, not four years before. The fact that LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR, a thriller shot by Jean Renoir forty-one years ago, has not yet been released in the U.S., thus entitles me to announce it as a new Renoir film. But even without this rather tenuous argument, it is probably the newest French film I’ve seen since PLAYTIME or L’AMOUR FOU — that is, the most alive to the future possibilities of cinema. I don’t even think it would be exceptionally perverse to call it, after LA RÈGLE DU JEU, the most exciting film in the entire Renoir canon. Yet apart from fairly regular screenings at the Cinémathèque, I don’t know of anywhere else in the world where it’s possible to see it.

This early sound adaptation of a Georges Simenon mystery (entitled Maigret at the Crossroads in English translation) might well qualify as the blackest film noir in the French cinema: black in its creepy nocturnal moods; black in its characters, which include as many poetic oddball types as one could find in THE OLD DARK HOUSE; and black in its extremely confusing, quasi-paranoid plot, with the sort of missing explanations of who killed whom and why that characterize THE BIG SLEEP (although Simenon’s novel, unlike Chandler’s, clears up most of the confusion). But perhaps what is most remarkable about the film is its unprecedented use of direct sound.

The soundtrack and its articulations are crucial to the narrative from the very beginning. During the credits, a musical theme that subsequently figures directly in the plot — a gramophone record played by the leading female character (Winna Winfried) — alternates with the abrupt, brutal noises (and accompanying images) of a car motor, a sautering iron, and shots from a pistol: a précis of key sounds in the film. But in order to understand the function of sound in the story proper, it is necessary to consider the visual style it plays against: an elliptically cut give-and-take between dark exteriors and smokily lit interiors that keeps most of the characters, settings, and plot in a mysterious moral and spatial limbo. In such an impenetrable atmosphere, even Inspector Maigret (Pierre Renoir) fumbles in his search to solve a pair of murders. But if the lighting and cutting are respectively expressionist and metaphysical in effect and implication, the direct sound is neo-realist and concrete, constantly locating and leading us into specifics of locale and plot that the visual style usually obscures.

Most of the action centers around a truck stop, garage, and neighboring houses. Early in the film, when Maigret and an assistant stand conversing on a street, the increasing volume of a car that approaches from off-screen sets up a contrapuntal tension worthy of Hitchcock (the car nearly runs them down) and establishes a strong sense of spatial depth beyond the frame that transforms the nature of what we see. (For an interesting consideration of sound used in an antithetical way, to dislocate the spectator in relation to the image, cf. Phyllis Goldfarb’s analysis of TOUCH OF EVIL in “Orson Welles’s Use of Sound,” Take One, Vol. 3. No. 6.) Elsewhere, repeated sounds of water dripping from a faucet, accented by brief cutaways to the source, play against the rhythms of a police interrogation, as do shots of newspaper headlines from various editions about the murder in question, which we see and hear being swept away by water into a gutter; heavy rain persists throughout much of the action around the truck stop, and the sounds of pans catching leaks add an unnerving obbligato to several other scenes. The grating noise of a mechanic sharpening a tool interferes — deliberately, as we later discover — with a phone call Maigret tries to make in the garage, and additional aural colorations are provided by the strange foreigh accents of Georges Koudria and Winna Winfried.

I don’t mean to suggest that all my enthusiasm for LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR is based on strictly formal elements. Winna Winfried’s vamp performance happens to be one of the sexiest things I know of in the French cinema, and I would gladly choose its eroticism over that of every film cited in FILM COMMENT’S recent “Cinema Sex” issue — although, admittedly, pornography often has a lot more to do with science (instruction) than art (eroticism). And there’s a car chase through winding streets at night-shot from the front of the car in pursuit, in virtually a single take — that is one of the purest and loveliest kinetic pleasures that Renoir has ever given us. Come to think of it, that’s pretty sexy too.