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Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in THE HOUSE IS BLACK

This article began as a lecture delivered on April 1, 2001 at the conference “Women and Iranian Cinema,” held at the University of Virginia and organized by Richard Herskowitz and Farzaneh Milani. Two years later it appeared in French translation in Cinéma/06, then in a booklet accompanying Facets Video’s DVD release of The House is Black in 2005, and it will also appear in my forthcoming collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (University of Chicago Press, 2010). — J.R.

The Iranian New Wave is not one but many potential movements, each one with a somewhat different time frame and honor roll. Although I started hearing this term in the early 1990s, around the same time I first became acquainted with the films of Abbas Kiarostami, it only started kicking in for me as a genuine movement — that is, a discernible tendency in terms of social and political concern, poetics, and overall quality  – towards the end of that decade.

Some commentators — including Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa — have plausibly cited Sohrab Shahid Saless’s A Simple Event (1973) (1) as a seminal work, and another key founding gesture, pointing to a quite different definition and history, would be Kiarostami’s Close-up (1990) (2). Other touchstones would include Ebrahim Golestan’s remarkable Brick and Mirror (1965), Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), Massoud Kimiaï’s Gheyssar (1969), and Parviz Kimiavi’s The Mongols (1973). But I’d like to propose a lesser-known short film preceding all of these, Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962) — a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony outside Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan. For Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it is “the best Iranian film [to have] affected the contemporary Iranian cinema,” despite (or maybe because) of the fact that Farrokhzad “never went to a college to study cinema” (3). It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the first Iranian documentary made by a woman. It won a prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963 and was also shown at the Pesaro Film Fesrival three years later. For me it is the greatest of all Iranian films, at least among the 60 or 70 that I’ve seen to date. More than any other Iranian film that comes to mind, it highlights the paradoxical and crucial fact that while Iranians continue to be among the most demonized people on the planet, Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized as the most ethical, as well as the most humanist.

Farrokhzad (1935-67) — widely regarded as the greatest of all Iranian women poets and the greatest Iranian poet of the 20th century, who died in a car accident at 32 — made The House is Black, her only film, at 27, working over 12 days with a crew of three. The following year, in an interview, she “expressed deep personal satisfaction with the project insofar as she had been able to gain the lepers’ trust and become their friend while among them.” (4) I mainly want to consider it here for its anticipation of “the Iranian New Wave” as I know it. On a more personal level, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I worked with three others in subtitling The House is Black in English prior to its screening at the New York Film Festival in 1997, on the same program as Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Though it was dismissed in a single sentence by the New York Times’s reviewer, it clearly made a strong impression on many others who saw it there and in subsequent screenings at the annual Robert Flaherty Seminar and at Chicago’s Film Center, before the print was returned to the Swiss Cinémathèque. The same version is what is now being released by Facets Video, and though it doesn’t appear to be quite complete — one abrupt edit looks like a censor’s cut, and a few stray details visible in some other versions are missing   — this is the best version of the film available in North America. (5)

A few relevant facts about the film: its producer, Ebrahim Golestan (born in 1922) — also a pioneering filmmaker in his own right, as I’ve already noted, as well as a novelist and translator (who translated, among other things, stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Chekhov into Persian) — was Farrokhzad’s friend and lover for the last eight years of her life, and she worked with him as a film editor before making her own film. (6) Her most notable editing job was on A Fire — an account of a 1958 oil well fire near Ahvaz that lasted over two months until an American fire-fighting crew managed to extinguish it. As Michael C. Hillmann accurately describes it, the film juxtaposes the fire with “the sun and moon, flocks of sheep, villagers eating, harvest time, and the like”.

Prior to working on A Fire in 1959, Farrokhzad studied film production as well as English during a visit to England. Shortly afterwards, she traveled to Khuzestan and worked on films there in several capacities — as actress, producer, assistant, and editor. (7)

According to Karim Emami, a writer and translator who worked for Golestan Films during this period, her first experience in handling a movie camera was shooting streets, oil wells, and petroleum pumps on a handheld super-8 camera in Agha-Jari, shooting from the interior of a touring car — an image that immediately calls to mind Kiarostami, Taste of Cherry in particular. She also appeared in the Iranian segments, filmed by Golestan, of an hour-long 1961 National Film Board of Canada TV production, Courtship — a discussion of the rites of betrothal in four separate countries — playing the sister of a working-class bridegroom in Tehran. She acted in another Golestan film that was never finished called The Sea, and another, in 1961, called Water and Heat or The View of Water and Fire. She also made one other film after The House is Black — “a short commercial for the classified ads page of Kayhan newspaper” which Emami regards as relatively inconsequential. (8) She is also said to have worked on still another Golestan film entitled Black and White, and plays an almost invisible cameo in his Brick and Mirror — the pivotal part of a young mother who abandons her infant.

In an interview last year, Kiarostami credited Golestan as the first Iranian filmmaker to use direct sound — a common attribution, I believe. But it’s worth noting that The House is Black, which clearly uses direct sound in spots, was made prior to Brick and Mirror, raising at least the possibility that Farrokhzad might have been a pioneer in this technique in Iranian cinema.

Defying the standard taboos and protocols concerning lepers — especially the injunction to avoid physical contact with them for her own safety — Forugh Farrokhzad wound up permanently adopting a boy in the colony named Hossein Mansouri, the son of two lepers, who appears in the film’s final classroom scene, taking him with her to Tehran to live at her mother’s house. Yet some of the film’s first viewers criticized it for exploiting the lepers — employing them as metaphors for Iranians under the shah, or more generally using them for her own purposes and interests rather than theirs.

When I first heard about the latter charge I was shocked, for much of the film’s primal force resides in what I would call its radical humanism, which goes beyond anything I can think of in western cinema. It would be fascinating as well as instructive to pair The House is Black with Tod Browning’s 1932 fiction feature Freaks — which oscillates between empathy and pity for its real-life cast of midgets, pinheads, Siamese twins, and a limbless “human worm,” among others, and feelings of disgust and horror that are no less pronounced. By contrast, Farrokhzad’s uncanny capacity to regard lepers without morbidity as both beautiful and ordinary, objects of love as well as intense identification, offers very different challenges, pointing to profoundly different spiritual and philosophical assumptions.

At the same time, any attentive reading of the film is obliged to conclude that certain parts of its “documentary realism” (perhaps most obviously, its closing scene in a classroom, as well as the powerful shot of the gates closing, which occurs just before the end)–working, like the subsequent films of the Iranian new wave, with nonprofessionals in relatively impoverished locations — must have been staged as well as scripted, created rather than simply found, conjuring up a potent blend of actuality and fiction that makes the two register as coterminous rather than as dialectical. (Much more dialectical, on the other hand, is the relation between the film’s two alternating narrators — an unidentified male voice, most likely Golestan’s, describing leprosy factually and relatively dispassionately, albeit with clear humanist assumptions, and Farrokhzad reciting her own poetry and passages from the Old Testament in a beautiful, dirgelike tone, halfway between multi-denominational prayer and blues lament.)

This kind of mixture is found equally throughout Kiarostami’s work, and raises comparable issues about the director’s manipulation of and control over his cast members. Yet without broaching the difficult question of authors’ intentions, it might also be maintained that the films of both Farrokhzad and Kiarostami propose inquiries into the ethics of middle-class artists filming poor people and are not simply or exclusively demonstrations of this practice. In Kiarostami’s case, it is often more obviously a critique of the filmmaker’s own distance and detachment from his subjects, but in Farrokhzad’s case, where the sense of personal commitment clearly runs deeper, the implication of an artist being unworthy of her subject is never entirely absent.

The most obvious parallel to The House is Black in Kiarostami’s career is his recent documentary feature ABC Africa (2001) about orphans of AIDS victims in Uganda — a film which goes even further than Farrokhzad in emphasizing the everyday joy of children at play in the midst of their apparent devastation, preferring to show us the victims’ pleasure over their suffering without in any way minimizing the gravity of their situation. (9) But it’s no less important to note that one of Farrokhzad’s poems is recited in toto during the most important sequence of Kiarostami’s most ambitious feature to date, whose title is the same as the poem’s, The Wind Will Carry Us (2000).

The importance of Farrokhzad in Iranian life and culture — where even today, and in spite of the continuing scandal that she embodies and represents, she’s commonly and affectionately referred to by her first name   — points to the special status of poetry in Iran, which might even be said to compete with Islam. The House is Black is to my mind one of the very few successful fusions of literary poetry with film poetry — a blend that commonly invites the worst forms of self-consciousness and pretentiousness — and arguably this linkage of cinema with literature is a fundamental trait underlying much of the Iranian new wave.

I hasten to add that “film poetry” is one of the most imprecise terms in film aesthetics, whether it’s used to describe Alexander Dovzhenko or Jacques Tati, so a few precisions are in order about why I’m using this term here. Much of what I have in mind is the suspension — or extension — of what we usually mean by “narrative” or “story” so that a certain kind of descriptive presence supersedes any conventional notion of an event. After a leper is seen walking outside beside a wall, pacing back and forth, intermittently hitting the wall lightly with his fingers, we hear Forugh very faintly offscreen reciting the days of the week over this image, the rhythm of her voice sounding a kind of duet with the man’s repeated gesture. Two notions of time are being superimposed here so that they become impossible to separate: an event lasting a few seconds and a duration stretching over days (and, by implication, weeks, months, and years).

Similarly, in the film’s penultimate sequence, while a one-legged man limps on crutches between two rows of trees towards the camera, we hear Forugh’s voice evoke a cluster of other images, some of them with very different time frames, over this single movement: “Alas, for the day is fading,/the evening shadows are stretching./Our being, like a cage full of birds,/is filled with moans of captivity./And none among us knows how long/he will last./The harvest season passed,/the summer season came to an end,/and we did not find deliverance./Like doves we cry for justice…/and there is none./We wait for light/and darkness reigns.” Again there is a kind of duet, ending this time in a kind of rhyme effect as her last two lines give way to the loud, clumping sound of the man’s footsteps in the foreground as his dark body directly approaches the camera, dramatically blotting out everything else.

Although the film is mainly framed by two scenes in a classroom, the second of these is briefly interrupted by what can only be called a poetic intrusion — a shot I’ve already mentioned that is unrelated in narrative terms but enormously powerful in descriptive terms: a crowd of lepers is suddenly seen outdoors, approaching the camera, only to be blocked from us when a gate abruptly closes on them, bearing the words “leper colony” (or more precisely “leper house,” tied more directly to the film’s title). In narrative terms, this shot has no relation to what precedes and follows it apart from the most obvious thematic connection: lepers. Yet it functions almost exactly like a line in a poem –parenthetically yet dramatically introducing the brutality of our social definition of lepers and how it shuts them away from us — before returning us to the classroom.

That Farrokhzad was the first woman in Persian literature to write about her sexual desire, and that her own volatile and crisis-ridden life (including her sex life) was as central to her legend as her poetry, helps to explain her potency as a political figure who was reviled in the press as a whore and placed outside most official literary canons while still being worshipped as both a goddess and a martyr. Despite her enormous differences (above all, in gender and sexual orientation) from Pier Paolo Pasolini, it probably wouldn’t be too outlandish to see her as a somewhat comparable figure in staging heroic and dangerous shotgun marriages between eros and religion, poetry and politics, poverty and privilege — and a figure whose violent death has been the focus of comparable mythic speculations. She and her film remain crucial reference points because of their enormous value as limit cases, as well as artistic models. And as far as I’m concerned, if the Iranian New Wave begins with The House is Black, there’s no imagining where it can still lead us.

Notes

1. See “Sohrab Shahid Saless: A Cinema of Exile” by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, edited by Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker, London: National Film Theatre, 1999, pp. 135-144.

2. See “Confessions of a Sin-ephile: Close-Up” by Godfrey Cheshire, in Cinema Scope (Toronto), Winter 2000, issue 2, 3-8.

3. “Makhmalbaf Film House” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, translated by Babak Mozaffari, in The Day I Became a Woman (bilingual edition of screenplay), Tehran: Rowzaneh Kar, 2000, 5.

4. Michael C. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press/Mage Publishers, 1987, 43.

5. A still better version — with French subtitles, taken mainly from the print shown in Oberhausen, and authorized by producer Ebrahim Golestan — was issued on DVD along with A Fire as part of the [then] biannual French magazine Cinéma (#07, printemps 2004) edited by Bernard Eisenschitz and published by Editions Léo Scheer. (This is the source of the frame reproductions used here with this essay.)

6. See also “Ebrahim Golestan: Treasure of Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema” by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Rouge #11, 2007 (www.rouge.com.au/11/golestan.html).(2009)

7. Michael C Hillmann, op. cit., 42-43.

8. Karim Emami, “Recollections and Afterthoughts” (undated lecture delivered in Austin, Texas), quoted on Forugh Farrokhzad website, www.forughfarrokhzad.org (unfortunately no longer available at this address).

9. See also Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 37-40, 83-84, 119-123.

– Cinéma/06 (France), automne 2003; developed from a lecture delivered on April 1, 2001 at the conference “Women and Iranian Cinema,” held at the University of Virginia and organized by Richard Herskowitz and Farzaneh Milani; also published as essay in booklet accompanying DVD issued by Facets Video (U.S.) in 2005; see also www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=8338.

A Little More on Truffaut

Yesterday, while reseeing François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in years at the Gene Siskel Film Center, just before doing a Skype interview with Ray Bradbury in California along with Bradbury’s biographer, Sam Weller, I was struck for the first time how different Truffaut’s and Bradbury’s historical groundings were. Bradbury’s novel, first published in the early 50s, clearly reflected the Cold War, whereas Truffaut’s English-language film (his only one) of 1966, two years before his secret discovery via detectives that his father had been a Jewish dentist, seems largely informed by his childhood experience of the German occupation of France, which he would only depict directly 14 years later, in The Last Metro.

The most surprising aspect of this for me is that I never thought of it earlier — but it becomes especially clear during the scene in which Montag (Oskar Werner) and Clarisse (Julie Christie) in a cafe secretly spy through a window an informer pause before mailing his malicious report on a neighbor to the police/fire department (which in the world of Fahrenheit 451 is the same thing), meanwhile making comments on his behavior (some of which are reproduced below in the subtitles). It also seems evident in the number of old, early-40s books that one sees being burned in the many book-burning sequences, as well as in the dingy scenes set in old-fashioned basements, attics, etc. [7/11/10]

Truffaut & Me & Bazin (a memoir, a review, and three letters)

The first and last parts of what follows are taken (and in a few cases adapted) from my book Discovering Orson Welles. — J.R.

In spite of my five years of living in Paris, my grasp of French has always been mediocre — a weakness that over the years I’ve come to regard as a sort of disability, because I’ve made many efforts to overcome it. That François Truffaut had a similar (and similarly embarrassing) problem with his English set the stage for a rather awkward and uncomfortable afternoon in Londonr between the two of us — with his assistant Suzanne Schiffmann often serving as mutual interpreter – after I’d signed with Harper & Row to carry out this translation of Bazin’s book on Welles, as well as a new Foreword to that book that Truffaut was writing. Truffaut undoubtedly came away from that afternoon with some understandable skepticism about why I’d been hired to do this job, while I emerged, somewhat defensively, with the impression that he was closer to being a nervous and irritable businessman than the sort of critic and director that I had formerly revered.

I hasten to add that I wasn’t bluffing when I’d praised Bazin’s 1950 monograph on Welles in 1971 as the best criticism published about him —- or at least not entirely. (This was a few years before I encountered James  Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles, the first edition of which was published in 1978.) Like many other American film buffs of that era, I’d spent long hours reading it and many other French critical texts with what I’d retained from my college French courses and a French-English dictionary. During my years in Paris, I also read such books as Noël Burch’s Praxis du cinéma and Roland Barthes’ Le plaisir du texte and paged through countless issues of Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and other magazines and film books in the same manner.

So when I received an offer from Harper & Row to translate Bazin’s Orson Welles —- specifically, the posthumously published book of that title brought out by Editions du Cerf in 1972, which I knew less well than the 1950 Chavane monograph — after I moved from Paris to London, I was faced with a quandary: the job was too appealing to turn down, but I also knew that I could perform it adequately only with enormous effort, as well as help from some of my more bilingual friends in London. I also rationalized that here at last was the sort of challenge that could hopefully force me to master the language once and for all. So with a queasy mixture of optimism and resolve, I gritted my teeth and plunged in.

Ultimately, I used all the possible means at my disposible. After protracted stretches of wrestling alone with the text, I commissioned literal translations of some chapters from the late Jill Forbes —- a fellow film buff in Paris who taught French literature in London —- and spent many hours revising them, then annotating or correcting many of Bazin’s factual errors, which proved to be far more numerous than I’d anticipated. (I also commissioned my Paris friend Gilbert Adair, a passionate Cocteauvian, to translate Jean Cocteau’s charming Preface, and credited him for it.)

Finally, and most importantly, I benefited from the generosity of my flatmate at the time, Tom Milne — a superb translator who had already tackled Godard’s criticism and regularly subtitled French films for the BBC —- who went over my drafts line by line with the original and made many revisions and suggestions.

During the same period, I wound up having a much easier time corresponding with Truffaut, especially once we hit on the logical procedure of writing one another in our respective languages. While he was working on his own excellent Foreword and both soliciting and following most of my editorial suggestions (such as my arguments on behalf of  THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, which he had treated somewhat dismissively in his first draft), he was also furnishing me on a regular basis with other texts of Bazin about Welles and encouraging me to incorporate the most interesting passages from them as footnotes. I was nevertheless a bit put off by a couple of details in his Foreword, which appeared towards the beginning and at the very end. He concluded the essay with the line, “On the plane between Paris and Los Angeles,” which was sheer invention (if memory serves, he was on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, at the time, shooting L’Histoire de Adèle H.) —- not a serious fib, but still slightly perturbing to me at the time. What bothered me more was the sentence concluding his third paragraph: “This little volume, superbly prefaced by Jean Cocteau, quickly went out of print and became a collector’s item, and in 1968, shortly before his death, sparked by enthusiasm for TOUCH OF EVIL, Bazin prepared a revised and expanded edition, published here in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s translation.”

Though I was ridiculously slow to realize this, this sentence was not only a fib —- in this case an unwitting one – but one that revealed that Truffaut hadn’t bothered to read or at least reread the two Bazin volumes in question, because the 1968 book wasn’t at all a “revised and expanded edition” of the 1950 one but a completely different text. It was also a markedly inferior one — written in obvious haste, and in some cases copying out passages from a poorly translated French version of an already not very reliable book in English by Peter Noble. But given my embarrassment about not having spotted this sooner, and my even greater sense of intimidation about confronting Truffaut with this discovery, I kept silent about it.

This led in turn to a growing resentment against Truffaut that eventually found expression in a brief diatribe in a “London and New York Journal” for the July-August 1976 Film Comment, reprinted on pages 26-27 of my collection Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (California, 1995):

“THE STORY OF ADELE H. , or GIDGET GOES HEGELIAN. Truffaut’s pretty, nonobsessive postcards about obsession are a gift to the eye in Nestor Almendros’s photography, but a dull bromide to the mind. Apart from offering a veritable film festival to the spectator who wants to wallow in self-pity and call it literary, the camera’s habit of cutting away to another quaintly posed setup every time the heroine’s perversity starts to become interesting only underlines how steadily Truffaut has been veering away from any serious risks. A crowd pleaser in the tradition of Chaplin, he has yet to make his MONSIEUR VERDOUX or A KING IN NEW YORK because he always looks for the easy way out.

“Much as his collected movie pieces . . . exclude all his polemical writing, and his editing of Bazin has tended to follow suit — with comparable implications of historical whitewash — this movie takes the tang out of its heroine’s madness by giving us a healthy, talented ingenue in place of an actress. Of course, one can understand Pauline Kael believing this to be a great work of art, just as one can understand many American intellectuals believing that Kael is a great aesthetician. Given the right sort of climate and training, anything’s possible, even the Nixon administration and snuff movies.”

This over-the-top outburst provoked the following exchange of letters with Truffaut. Both of Truffaut’s letters were written in French; the English translation here is Gilbert Adair’s, reproduced from Truffaut’s Letters (Boston/London: Faber and Faber, 1989, 461-464), which is now out of print:

9 Nov. 76

My dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your last letter and your kindness with regard to the book on Othello [Put Money in Thy Purse].

I would be a hypocrite and would feel ill at ease if I did not tell you how sad I was when I read an article of yours in Film Comment two months ago.

You don’t like Adèle H. That is your privilege as a critic, as it is not to admire Isabelle Adjani. Except, why, when I asked nothing of you, did you say such nice things to me about Adèle in a letter written when you returned from New York?

With regard to my book, Les Films de ma vie, it contains several negative pieces: on Albert Lamorisse, Anatole Litvak, Jacques Becker (Arsène Lupin), Mervyn LeRoy and René Clément….Moreover, if I decided against publishing my negative criticisms of Yves Allégret, Jean Delannoy, Marcel Carné, etc., it is because these directors are now old men […] and it would be needlessly cruel of me to hamper their efforts to continue working. It’s a situation you will understand better when you are a little older. That said, I accept your criticism of the book.

The writings of André Bazin: there, I really don’t understand what it is you object to. The choice of texts? That was determined by what the publishers would accept or refuse and by the fact that Bazin himself had made a selection of his best articles for his book, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?. As I think I already told you in a previous letter, my aim in publishing Bazin’s articles was a twofold one: to acquaint british and American film students with his work and also to help Janine Bazin who found herself in difficulties when French television cancelled her series of programmes Cinéastes de notre temps.

If I had written you you two months ago after reading your article, my letter would probably have been violent and unjust. Since then, my anger has subsided, but not a certain sadness, since I continue to feel that there was an incompatibility between the spirit of your article and the friendly tone of your letters. Dr Jonathan and Mr Rosenbaum?

In any event, I remain grateful for the care and attention with which you translated the Bazin-Welles; I hope the publishers conduct themselves in a more satisfactory fashion during the final stage of the project and I wish you the very best of luck,

Truffaut

P.S. I’ve been detained in Montpellier by the shooting of my new film, The Man Who Loved Women, it will therefore be impossible for me to come to the London Film Festival.

***

12 November 1976

Dear François,

I’m very sorry about the distress that my remarks in Film Comment have caused you. They have brought home to me Faulkner’s remark that the critic addresses himself to everyone except the artist. My anger was chiefly directed against a particular critical climate in America, which included the reception of L’Histoire de Adèle H. and Bazin — what I believed to be an essentially unreflecting attitude that overlooked too many things and accepted too much too easily. Frankly, I did not expect that you would read these remarks, and feeling relatively powerless, I did not believe that they would have much effect on anyone: they were a kind of protest against a myth — or what I believe to be a myth — that will surely outlast me.

I’ve just re-read my letter to you of last April 22nd, which ended by saying that I admired many things in L’Histoire de Adèle H. (and was written about a month before I wrote those two paragraphs for Film Comment). I do admire many things about the film, and was not being insincere when I mentioned this in a letter. I admire it enough, in fact, to feel a very strong disappointment that it did not pursue some of its obsessional aspects further — something that I didn’t mention in my letter because I felt it would have been rude in that context for me to say so. Whatever my misgivings about your recent work, the fact that I connect it with Chaplin’s is — for me, at any rate — very high praise indeed. When I saw L’Argent de poche last week, I was struck by this relationship again, above all in the teacher’s speech at the end, which reminded me a great deal of Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator – above all, because of its sincerity.

Perhaps the split that you see in my behavior — Dr Jonathan and Mr Rosenbaum — is based on what seems to me a kind of split in your own work. In much the same way, the ‘real’ Bazin for me is the Bazin who wrote the original Chavanne edition of Orson Welles more than the one who revised it by eliminating much of the theory and polemics and largely replacing it with information (much of it incorrect) taken from the French translation of Peter Noble’s Welles book. And my misgivings about your publication of Bazin’s texts — which I support in all other respects — is that it completely avoids problems of this kind, as if they didn’t exist. In spite of your admirable desire for me to incorporate other writings nu Bazin on Welles in the book, I feel that the book still represents Bazin’s contribution incompletely, and I regret the absence of any acknowledgment in your introduction that much of what he eliminated in the Chavanne edition remains very important, theoretically as well as historically. In this respect, I felt that you were ‘passing on’ the book but not presenting it in the way that you present Welles’ own work — which I feel that you do very well and effectively. Perhaps I should have written to you about this at the time; shyness prevented me from doing so.

None of this, I should add, has anything to do with the help, encouragement and kindness that you have shown me in relation to the Welles book at every stage, all of which I continue to appreciate. And I can only express my regrets that my instinct as a critic conflicted with our own relationship, for whatever my misgivings about certain aspects of your work, I bear you no ill will. As someone whose own early criticism once led him to be barred from the Cannes Film Festival, I’m sure that you know a great deal more than I do about the perils and consequences of being an aggressive critic, but lately I’ve been discovering quite a few of these on my own.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Rosenbaum

***

Montpellier, 29 November 1976

My dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your letter of 12 November, I was very touched by it. My only regret is that we didn’t write to each other more often about Bazin’s book on Welles. It was André S. Labarthe who put together the French edition, and my sole involvement was finding an American publisher, who accepted the book only on condition that I write a lengthy preface.

Bazin himself had revised the text of the Chavanne edition for a chapter on Welles in a book that was to be edited by Pierre Leprohon, and the project fell through.

If I had known that you regarded the Chavanne edition as superior, Janine Bazin and I would have given you the go-ahead to combine the two editions. Now it’s too late.

I am unable to write at greater length, as I am shooting a film, but I remain

yours truly,

françois

***

Truffaut and I met again only once after that, some years later — briefly and cordially, at a New York Film Festival party, after I’d moved back to the states.

I take no pride in this whole episode, since it seems to me that Truffaut and I were both to blame for what finally emerged as Orson Welles: A Critical View (Harper & Row, 1978) —- the product, I now conclude, at least in part, of our mutual paranoia stemming from my poor grasp of French (even though it still includes a mainly first-rate Foreword by Truffaut, and some passages of considerable interest by Bazin). But I’ve recounted this story in such detail because it seems to me emblematic of the kind of misapprehensions and misunderstandings that sometimes yield what we call film history, which includes the history of film criticism. And the degree to which Welles and our view of him have often been casualties of this kind of carelessness shouldn’t be underestimated.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN on DVD and the Irretrievable Past

It’s delightful to have Kino’s new “deluxe” edition of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, one of my all-time favorite examples of Hollywood romanticism, glamor, and lushness (as well as Technicolor), based on the film’s 2009 restoration, which I saw and Bologna and wrote about a little over a year ago. But while watching this edition’s extended comparison of the original with the restored version, I’m somewhat taken aback by the fact that the film I remember seeing in 1951, when I was still in grammar school, is closer to the unrestored version:

It’s obvious that the restored version is superior in terms of definition, lighting, and color. But rightly or wrongly, I remember the film in 1951 as being darker, at least in my mind’s eye — a film bathed in black more than auburn hues.

Could this be a matter of Proustian self-deception? Or could it point to a significant change in the film that I originally saw? I wish I knew. [7/8/10]

Two French Godard Books: Informational Obstacles (and Teasers)

Here are two recent valuable acquisitions I’ve made via French Amazon — Antoine de Baecques’s 940-page biography of Jean-Luc Godard, the first one in French (after two in English, by Colin MacCabe and Richard Brody), published by Bernard Grasset, and Godard’s 107-page “book” version of (or companion to) his recent Film Socialisme, published by P.O.L, his usual publisher, and subtitled Dialogues avec visages auteurs (literally, “Dialogues with faces authors”).

It’s far too early to make any sweeping judgments about either book — which would be presumptuous for me to attempt to do at any point, given my less than perfect French — but a few first impressions are in order. De Baecque’s biography is full of interesting details, in particular ones drawn from formerly unavailable or unfamiliar documents, e.g., a letter from Pasolini to Godard about La chinoise, and, roughly two decades later, a letter from Godard to Norman Mailer about some of his plans for King Lear. But it also appears that De Baecque can’t be trusted very much when it comes to his handling of American criticism about Godard. A minor complaint (which I hope doesn’t sound churlish, given how flattering he is to me elsewhere in this book): he claims, based on the French translation of my autobiographical Moving Places, that I spent “half my time in Paris between 1966 and 1968″ seeing or reseeing Godard films on drugs; but in fact, apart from a couple of summer visits to Paris during this period (during which my Godard viewing goes unmentioned), my extended sojourn in Paris was between 1969 and 1974, and my accounts of watching Alphaville on grass and Band of Outsiders on acid on the pages he cites were actually in New York in 1965 and in London in 1970, respectively.

Far more serious is de Baecque’s groundless claim that Pauline Kael, in her 1966 essay “Movie Brutalists,” attacked Godard’s “genre” films (for de Baecque, these are Breathless, Le petit soldat, and Band of Outsiders) while defending Godard’s socially-minded films (for de Baecque, these are The Married Woman, Masculine Feminine, and Vivre sa vie). But anyone familiar with Kael’s Godard criticism knows that she supported Breathless, loved Godard’s films about youth (especially Band of Outsiders, Masculine Feminine, and La chinoise), and dismissed Vivre sa vie, The Married Woman, and Alphaville, among others. Like de Baecque’s implication that John Simon — who probably has hated Godard’s work more than anyone else on the planet — was one of his most passionate defenders during the mid-60s, this suggests that de Baecque’s reading knowledge of English simply isn’t up to taking on these kinds of critical surveys.

Godard’s book, on the other hand, probably raises as many questions about Film Socialisme as it answers. Like his other P.O.L books, it often reduces the verbiage of his film to Chinese-fortune-cookie-like epigrams. It’s also  important to note that the passages in the film’s soundtrack in German, Italian, Russian, English, and Persian (or is it Arabic?) remain in those languages here, and that the book concludes with a reproduction of a nine-page, handwritten letter in French from philosopher Jean-Paul Curnier to Godard, with three separate passages crossed out, dated 9 novembre 2009. But perhaps the most striking thing here, accounting for the book’s subtitle, is the method of attributing quotations: not by name but by mug shots — among those that I recognize, photographs of Hannah Arendt, Patti Smith, Jean-Paul Sartre, Neal Gabler, William Faulkner (accorded, if I’m not mistaken, two separate photographs and two separate quotations), William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Benjamin. [7/7/10]