Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who died Saturday, was the most recognizable face of the French New Wave, thanks to the roles given her by Jean-Luc Godard. (He wanted her to do a nude scene in Breathless, but she refused. "But I just saw you in a bathtub in a commercial," he argued. She wasn't nude, she countered, but covered in soap suds.) The lilt of those films, their youthful - if overweening - insouciance, their anarchic air of flaunting convention, is inimitable and by now a fixture of film history. Godard may not have been a master of his craft, but he was determined to demonstrate to everyone his contempt for official cinema. Karina's mad dash through the Louvre in Band of Outsiders with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur is as iconic - if not nearly as moving or meaningful, because the film wasn't nearly as good - as Jeanne Moreau's run, wearing men's clothes, across a footbridge in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (it helped that both films were shot by Raoul Coutard, unarguably an artist).

Like Hanna Schygulla, who held a similar position in relation to Fassbinder, Karina broke free of Godard's control and enjoyed a career of her own - more lucratively, if far less critically acclaimed. (It wasn't a contest, but the argument over Godard's relative importance was laid to rest long ago. Truffaut won.) Funny how auteurists even now try to downplay her performance in Visconti's beautiful adaptation of Camus's The Stranger, simply because their dogma won't allow them to recognize the film's excellence. (It's so unlike every other Visconti film - which is probably why I love it.) Her performance, as Meursault's unfortunate girlfriend, was touching.

But she is being extolled, yesterday and today, for Pierrot le fou, Masculin Feminin and Alphaville, films as redolent of their time as Sonny Rollins's first recordings. It seems to me intensely sad that lately the only time people want to argue about the meaning of the word "cinema" is when a venerable filmmaker dares to question the validity of trashy superhero movies. (What made it far worse was when he explained what he meant to the halfwits who worship at the Marvel - or Disney's Star Wars - altar.) As long as people who take the subject seriously want to explore what real cinema is, they will find out soon enough how integral a part Anna Karina played in cinema's greatest decade, which was actually only about seven years, 1959-1966. I am sorry that the flesh and blood woman has passed, but her image, her lovely face and form, are as immortal as Garbo's, Monica Vitti's, and Setsuko Hara's. Vivre Karina. (Vivre cinema.)

Detour

I have somehow managed, until the age of sixty-one, to avoid the subject of the film noir. At the outset, I feel obliged to say that I am not a fan. The origin of the term and its elaborate definition is, of course, entirely French. They were discovered and applied by American critics long after the genre had disappeared. I don't want to go into what defines film noir, as codified by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their "seminal" book Panorama du film noir Américain 1941–1953, but over my lifetime I've seen a good number of films now classified as film noir, whether I knew it or not. The problem with such classifications (which is really what "auteurism" is all about) is that they fail to make the films to which they are applied any better than they were before the concept was invented. The films were unremarkable - and unpretentious -, cheaply-made B-movies when they were first released, and no amount of puffery has made them any better.

One could argue that there are better examples of film noir, made with more money, bigger stars and higher production values, but that is beside the point. Detour (1945) is cited as one of the most perfect examples of the genre precisely because it was made cheaply and in a hurry, with a no-name cast, by an Austrian-born director who arrived in Hollywood with F. W. Murnau and who refused to leave. Edgar G. Ulmer's career as a director went on a lengthy detour of its own because of his dalliance with another director's wife. That director was the nephew of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, and they blackballed Ulmer's chances of ever taking part in a major production. By the time Detour was made, he had become a fixture of skidrow production companies, one of which was called Producer's Releasing Corporation, whose acronym became better known as Pretty Rotten Crap.

Prior to watching my copy of Detour, I watched the introduction to the film that aired on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller. Believe me, such an introduction, while attempting to entice viewers who aren't fans of such a film, was almost enough to talk me out of watching it at all. Muller spoke about the film's schlock elements like they were cardinal virtues and how, once he had first heard about Detour when he was a teenager, he eagerly awaited seeing it, before home video or cable channels existed, on some late night TV broadcast. This kind of obsessive fandom was harmless as long as it wasn't taken too seriously. But then postwar French film critics, who were doing everything they could to trash the generation of French film directors who might have had any connection whatever to the defeat of France in 1940 and the four year German occupation, and who alternatively attempted - unsuccessfully, I believe - to elevate American pulp literature and movies to a level of High Seriousness, seized on the deceptively more adult, and more cynical crime melodramas of the Forties and Fifties. By now, thanks to the intervention of French film criticism (which includes the auteur dogma), American university students can write a PhD thesis on some of the worst Hollywood melodramas of the film noir era that turns them into profound cultural documents like Winesburg, Ohio or The Great Gatsby.

Al (Tom Neal) is a hitchhiker who stops at a greasy spoon in Reno. When a trucker puts a nickel in a jukebox and it plays the song, "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me" (played by Artie Shaw), Al lapses into reverie of when he was a piano player in a New York club where he and a singer named Sue (Claudia Drake) were in love and planned to get married. Out of nowhere, Sue announces she's going to California, leaving poor Al to play solo at the club. Again out of nowhere (the film has an unhealthy disrespect for plot), Al decides to hitchhike across the country to be closer to Sue. He makes it as far as the Arizona desert where he's given a ride by a well-dressed guy named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) in a convertible. Haskell tells him about a woman he gave a ride to not long before who left bloody scratches on his hand. And he keeps having to pop little pills every now and then. After stopping at a roadside diner, Al takes over the driving while Haskell sleeps. When it begins to rain, Al needs some help putting up the convertible top, but Haskell doesn't respond. Because he's dead. So, in the driving rain, Al does what anyone else would do - he takes Haskell's wallet and his driver's licence in case he gets stopped by a cop (licences didn't have photos on them in those days), changes clothes with the corpse, hides it in the brush by the side of the road and keeps on driving to LA. Just as his plan to take his masquerade only as far as San Bernardino is underway, enter Vera (Ann Savage) - the same she-devil who scratched Haskell's hand. Al gives her a lift and within minutes she recognizes the car as Haskell's. Al confesses to robbing him when he found out he was dead, and Vera decides to blackmail him all the way to LA. After a few utterly predictable twists, the movie returns us to poor Al in the Reno diner, whose voice-over narration takes us up to the abrupt conclusion to this mercifully short (68 minutes!) thriller.

Once, when François Truffaut adapted the David Goodis pulp thriller Down There in 1960, a trash novel was transformed into a refreshingly personal, idiosyncratic work of film art. When Truffaut was asked by Charles Thomas Samuels "[Why do] you usually adapt trash novels to the screen?" his response was clever in a Cahiers du Cinema way: "I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis and William Irish have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field ... So you see, I don't film trash." The fact is, Truffaut used trash as a jumping off point for a brilliant film.

Truffaut, as the originator of the auteur policy, insisted that a film's underlying material was less important than its treatment in the hands of a true film auteur. So, ostensibly, they can create something that demonstrates, in Truffaut's words, "a personal vision of life or of cinema." Detour poses the question: did Edgar G. Ulmer triumph over the severe limitations of his material or was he defeated by them? Detour has cheapness stamped all over it. About 80% of it was shot in a studio, including the many "process shots" of the actors in a car driving down a highway that's projected onto a screen from behind (so that what's in front of the screen doesn't cast a shadow on it). Among Detour's many gaffes is seeing two actors, both wearing big hats (de riguer in 1945) breezing down a highway in a convertible with its top down. (In one scene, Tom Neal is driving at night, struggling to stay awake, while Edmund Macdonald sleeps with his hat resting over his face.) Or Neal hitchhiking and then climbing into the driver's side of a truck or riding beside a driver with the wheel on the right side of the car. The film had to be reversed to maintain continuity and make it look like Al was going in the right direction - right to left (west), according to the superimposed map. All of the elements of the film that were already formulaic in 1945 seem especially tired under Edgar G. Ulmer's direction. So, how could something so cut-rate as Detour wind up with such a following of devoted fans? 

In his negative review of Sydney Pollock's film version of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Stanley Kauffmann examined the curious history of the novel's publication history:

"When the book was published, it had a fair sale, but when it was subsequently published in France, it was a critical and commercial sensation, and Horace McCoy not very well known here became an outstanding American writer there. My own impression is that his French success was one more example of old-style inverse anti-Americanism. To praise what was second-rate and brutal about America, like facile gangster films, was a way of patronizing." (1)

I recall a college professor in the late 1970s trying to explain how Jerry Lewis, generally regarded as the worst sort of movie fool, was revered by French critics. He said that, to the French, Lewis's bumbling idiot character was seen as the quintessential American: uncouth, uncoordinated, incoherent - always smashing into things and screaming. That was how the French saw Americans.

In his beautiful memoir, My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel wrote:

"While we're making the list of bêtes noires, I must state my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinema, for example. As the honorary president of the Centre de Capacitación Cinematografica in Mexico City, I once went to visit the school and was introduced to several professors, including a young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I asked him what he taught, he replied, 'The Semiology of the Clonic Image.' I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute havoc in underdeveloped countries. It's the clearest sign, in my opinion, of cultural colonialism."

If a movie could be made by a machine, it would look something like Detour. Everything is perfunctory, from Tom Neal's painted-on five o'clock shadow to the impenetrable Manhattan fog outside the Break O' Dawn club to Ann Savage mugging hysterically to live up to her made-up name. Nothing reminds me more that Hollywood was a movie assembly line - what D. W. Griffith, without a trace of irony, once called "a Detroit of the mind." In this respect, Detour is rather terrifying. Remove every element of original thought or conscientious craft from filmmaking and you'll wind up with something like it. It is industrial grade entertainment, made for an audience that, by 1945, would go to the movies no matter what was playing. Producers knew it. Detour is the result. What perplexes me is the awful obviousness of this. I've heard the phrase "it's so bad it's good" used in connection with many things over the years, always to things that have no practical use. Because who would buy a bad television, a bad washing machine, or a bad automobile unless it was a defective lemon advertised as a good one? In that case people would get their money back or call the police. Not so with innumerable bad movies like Detour now being held up as masterpieces. It was Pretty Rotten Crap in 1945, and now it's a Pretty Rotten Classic. In 1992, Detour was selected as one of 100 American films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A 4K restoration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences premiered in Los Angeles at the TCM Festival in April 2018, and a Blu-Ray and DVD of the film was released in March 2019 from the Criterion Collection. The French are having a good laugh.


(1) Stanley Kauffman, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Claude Goretta

The Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta died on February 20. As sometimes happens, news of the death of an artist I admire, a writer, musician, or filmmaker, reaches me late here on my island that time overlooked. I didn't get the news about Goretta until last week. Fortunately, someone at The Guardian knew something about film and had a memory longer than a gnat's to recall how Goretta had, more than forty years ago, made at least one film for the ages. In my memory, The Lacemaker (1977) invites revisitation, and amply rewards it.

The Guardian obit is replete with the biographical details one is accustomed to find: "born 23 June 1929; died 20 February 2019." (89 years, 8 months) But it is skimpy with insights into the man. For that, an interested cinephile will have to turn to what interviews are available online. Along with Alain Tanner (who, undeservedly, got the most attention) Goretta rode the New Swiss Cinema (was there an Old Swiss Cinema?) for as long as it lasted - less than a decade it turned out. Goretta emerged from Swiss television in the late '60s and returned to it in the late '70s. The last production of his that I have seen was an excellent biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was from Switzerland) called Les Chemins de l'Exil (1978). Then - nothing. I never heard of him again - not until last year when I found a short film he made with Alain Tanner in London in 1957 called Nice Time, and also located a film he made in France in 2000 called Thérèse et Léon, an affectionate portrait of Léon Blum, French prime minister of the doomed 3rd Republic, and his wife. It reunited Goretta with Dominique Labourier, who played Gérard Depardieu's wife in Pas si méchant que ça (1975). Goretta's reputation, however, rests squarely on three films, L'Invitation (1972), Pas si méchant que ça (Not as Bad as All That, stupidly retitled The Wonderful Crook by its American distributor) and his masterpiece, La Dentelliére, The Lacemaker. All three were Swiss/French co-productions, which enabled Goretta to use French actors, Jean-Luc Bideau, François Simon (son of Michel Simon), Gérard Depardieu and especially Marlène Jobert and Isabelle Huppert. It also ensured that his films would be seen in the wider, French-speaking world.

In The Invitation, co-workers let their hair down at a party, with consequences that are somewhat predictable (it anticipated Bruce Beresford's much more biting Don's Party). If The Invitation showed more promise than substance, Pas si méchant que ça delivered, but with a very light touch. Gerard Depardieu is Pierre, the son of a furniture maker who gets in over his head when his father becomes ill and he has to take over the running of the company. He discovers that the company is in serious debt and, rather than close down and lay off all its employees, he resorts to a life of crime - robbing a bank, a post office, and a supermarket. And instead of finding customers to buy the furniture his factory turns out, he trucks it to deserted waste ground and incinerates it. Pierre is attracted to Nelly, a postal employee (Marlène Jobert), after he traumatizes her in an attempted robbery. He settles into a double life, with no apparent conflicts. But the police are soon on his trail and, inevitably, they catch him.

Goretta wrote an original script for Pas si méchant que ça, but for his next next film he relied on a script by the author of an award-winning novel. The Lacemaker is a wonder in so many ways. Its subject is a shy, innocent young woman who works in a hair salon in Paris. So disarmingly unspectacular, more still and unhurried than a Dardennes Brothers film, it is one of the best films of the '70s. That Pascal Lainé chose to make Béatrice (or Pomme to friends) the center of the universe for the whole length of a novel was a challenge, but Goretta's even greater accomplishment of giving - gifting - the length of a film production of weeks and dozens of people to her is even more amazing. Young(ish) filmmakers eager to capitalize on the modest success of their first feature efforts would never turn to such an unshowy, unassuming, utterly tender and attentive portrait of a young woman deeply damaged by her first contact with heartlessness, an apple bruised by life, by an experience that everyone else, it seems, treats so casually, so callously. Heartbreak? It's to be expected. The world will never align with our fantasies, with romance novels. Life always falls short of the ideal. When François, an upper class young man with whom Pomme has fallen in love, learns that she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and visits her there, and comes away knowing how deeply his thoughtlessness had hurt her, he is moved to tears. And so is the viewer.

So why, then, did Goretta sink into obscurity after such critical success? The answer isn't hard to discover. François Truffaut made an even bigger critical splash with his first three films, but as gratifying as this recognition surely must have been for Truffaut, it didn't make him very much money, and it didn't get him any closer to becoming what he evidently most wanted to be - a professional filmmaker with an assured future ahead of him. To achieve that, Truffaut had to forsake the world of little art films for more consciously commercial products.

The same can be said of a filmmaker who was more of a contemporary of Goretta's. Jean-Jacques Annaud made two films, La Victoire en chantant (known as Black and White in Color in the US) and Coup de tête, that got him enviable critical attention, but very little else. So he absconded into international productions starting with Quest for Fire, and, while managing occasionally to make a good film (like The Lover), the artist who made those first marvelous films hasn't been seen since.

I don't think Goretta compromised himself. I simply think that a reputation for small, quiet, unspectacular films like The Lacemaker wasn't the most promising way to establish one's career. He made twenty-five films after The Lacemaker, short films and features, most of them for Swiss television. Like the Guardian obit says, "Much of Goretta’s subsequent film work, including his second adaptation of a Ramuz novel, Si le Soleil Ne Revenait Pas (If the Sun Never Returns, 1987), remained little known outside francophone countries." We need to be reminded now and then that our access to even the finest film work is contingent on forces quite beyond the fairest or most sensible control. Now that he is gone, perhaps more of Claude Goretta's films will be more accessible. It can only contribute to our esteem of this fine filmmaker.

Adieu Philippine

Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.

The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.

Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.

At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.

The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.

Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.

I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.

I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.


(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."

The Judge and the Murderer

Bertrand Tavernier's The Judge and the Murderer was his third film (his third masterpiece), after The Clockmaker (1974) and Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). It is set in the 1890s - Zola's era (Zola is denounced from a pulpit in an early scene) - and yet it feels magnificently modern. The settings and costumes sometimes resemble the subjects of French painters of the period, like Georges Seurat, the inventor of pointillism. And Tavernier's style also seems pointillistic, applying countless details, like colored dots, that, when we step back from them, take on the shape of real people and places.

Based on an account of the murderer ("assassin" in French means "murderer") Joseph Vaché (called Bouvier in the film), The Judge and the Murderer concerns an egocentric judge named Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) who seizes the opportunity to make a name for himself in his Provence town by catching and prosecuting a man who has made his progress from Normandy all the way to the southeast corner of France, leaving behind him a trail of grisly murders, mostly of young girls and boys. But the man in the film who commits these terrible crimes, Bouvier (Michel Galabru), obviously cannot help himself since he has to live with two bullets in his brain that, when they move around in the non-solid brain tissue, give him seizures and drives him momentarily insane. This diagnosis may sound glib, but it was never admitted as evidence in the man's defense.

Bouvier's life is set on its unfortunate course when he is kicked out of the army because of a suicide attempt. Still wearing his uniform, he pursues an attractive maid named Louise, with whom he has become infatuated. But his increasingly erratic behavior, like following Louise into a church during Sunday service to impress on her, even as she is taking communion, to accept his advances, become intolerable. Louise spurns him, and in retaliation, Bouvier shoots her three times and himself twice in the head. He is placed in an asylum where an attempt is made to operate on his head wounds, but the attempt is abandoned when the doctor is confronted with an apoplectic patient, screaming obscenities and anarchist slogans. Bouvier is released as "cured," despite his protestations that he is not. As soon as he is released, he begins his long trek south and his murders commence. Upon his capture, the actual killer, Vaché (both Bouvier and Vaché are common names for a "shepherd") confessed to eleven murders, but may have killed more than twenty-seven. His name became associated with Jack the Ripper, as "the French Ripper" and "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("the South-east Ripper").

Tavernier has a taste for detective fiction, which was reflected in his choices of novels by Simenon and Jim Thompson, but also in his narrative structure. In The Judge and the Murderer, Rousseau becomes obsessed with solving the murder cases (which often included rape and sodomy) that led to the capture of Bouvier. He catalogs their forensic details with a thoroughness that was unprecedented. In fact, the solving of the Vaché case is often credited with the creation of forensic science. 

The quite modern problem presented by the story of Joseph Bouvier is one of responsibility. Is Bouvier responsible - legally, mentally, and morally - for his crimes? Legally, there wasn't much room for such a question in late 19th-century France. Insanity pleas were a novelty, but mental incompetence was an obvious factor, because of the brain damage, albeit self-inflicted, that Bouvier suffered as a result of the two bullets he shot into his head. Bouvier confesses to eleven murders, and even cooperates with the investigation, somehow confident that his insanity plea will save him from the gallows. Rousseau, however, is determined that it shall not, and orders that Bouvier be examined, but only so that he should be declared competent. Tavernier gives Bouvier various opportunities to shout political slogans that establish his anarchist allegiances. When his conviction and sentence become clear to him, he vows that he will not take part in his execution. Accordingly, he is dragged by his guards to the gallows. Joseph Vaché was guillotined on New Year's Eve 1898.

The character of Rousseau, magnificently played by Philippe Noiret, becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the drama proceeds and his cynical treatment of the prisoner in his charge becomes clearer. Two characters, Villedieu, an attorney, and Rose, a village girl who is Rousseau's mistress (Rousseau is unmarried and lives with his mother), offer the viewer some contrast to the limitations in Rousseau's character - although he bullies both of them. Villedieu is beautifully played by Jean-Claude Brialy, and his reasonable objections to Rousseau's determination to make justice do only what he wants drives him to despair and, for this and undisclosed reasons, he kills himself. Rose, though initially passive, grows so intolerant of Rousseau's abuses (there is a scene in which Rousseau, perhaps inspired by Bouvier's crimes, sodomizes her), she leaves him and, at the close of the film that returns us to history, visits Bouvier's first victim, Louise, and joins a village strike, singing the words of a popular Communard song, as soldiers arrive to suppress the strike.

The script for The Judge and the Murderer is credited to Jean Aurenche and Tavernier, from an original idea developed by Tavernier and Pierre Bost. Aurenche and Bost, a legendary script-writing team in France, were unfairly black-balled in 1954 by then-Cahier du Cinéma critic François Truffaut. Attempting to perhaps correct this injustice, the two were coaxed out of retirement by Tavernier in 1974 to help him write The Clockmaker, which was based on a Georges Simenon novel. Bost died in December 1975, before the script for The Judge and the Murderer was completed. Aurenche would assist Tavernier one more time, co-writing Coup de Torchon (1981). And in loving tribute to Bost, Tavernier adapted his novel Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir for his film A Sunday in the Country (1984).

The Judge and the Murderer, like other Tavernier films, has been especially difficult to get hold of since its initial release. I first saw it (twice) on Telefrance in the early '80s, and I've since managed to locate it online, but aside from a Conoisseur Video version and a Laserdisc, it remains unavailable on DVD. This is a problem because the film is not only one of the best French films from the 1970s, but it was met with respectful incomprehension, with notable exceptions, by American critics. For example, in her New York Times review, Janet Maslin was obviously confused: "Judge Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) takes on the task of deciding whether the murderer, Sgt. Joseph Bouvier (Michel Galabru), is a madman or a fraud." Nonsense. Rousseau is not only convinced that Bouvier is a homicidal maniac, he is determined that the detail of his insanity will not save him from the guillotine. The sensational details of the murders (which he coolly relates to his unfazed mother) made national headlines in France, and Vaché's story gripped readers. Later, Maslin states: "after Bouvier is apprehended, the Judge examines him over and over, trying to determine whether the man's claims of insanity are to be believed." (1) Rousseau knows that Bouvier must be insane, but he doesn't care. He tricks Bouvier into convincing everyone else that he is sane so he can condemn him.

Tavernier evokes the period brilliantly, especially through the virulent anti-Semitism that provoked the Dreyfus Case. Bouvier, in fact, emerges as a strange kind of hero of the story, since he is the victim of the injustice forced on him by Rousseau. Incredibly, he arouses in the viewer more sympathy than Rousseau does. Noiret and Galabru become adversaries in the grim struggle over Bouvier's "insanity" defense. The level of acting between them is peerless. Philippe Sarde supplied the film with music that is movingly passionate, especially the ballads written for the film and sung by Jean-Roger Caussimon. This multi-layered and powerful film leaves the viewer with much to ponder about justice and responsibility. 


(1) Maslin also makes an incomprehensible statement regarding the film's "period": "Mr. Tavernier's 'The Clockmaker' and his 'Let Joy Reign Supreme' belong to the same period as this 1975 film". Does she mean that the three films were made at the same time or set in the same period? The Clockmaker is set in contemporary (1974) France, while Let Joy Reign Supreme is set in the 18th century.

Hauteur

One of the reasons why I'm convinced that Stanley Kauffmann is the best film critic of his time (1958-2013) is because he never wasted his time attacking any of his colleagues. His contemporaries, among whom were John Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, were too often sidelined by their gainsaying of one another's opinions - to the extent that their fighting (critically useless) became famous in itself. As passionate in the defense of their opinions as they too often were, it is the opinions themselves that will stand or fall.

Kauffmann quietly went about his job holding every film and filmmaker up to his own standards of quality, regardless of their broader "significance" to the medium, to the culture at large, to history, or to art. He had plenty to say over a career of 55 years, but he had nothing to prove. On the rare occasions when Kauffmann found it necessary to take a stand - for example, on the subject of the "auteur theory" introduced by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema and by Andrew Sarris in translation - it was always in the context of evaluating specific films for consideration. Reading Kauffmann's second collection of film criticism, Figures of Light,(1) which covers the crucial period 1966-1970, an era that saw often unfortunate shifts in international film production, I occasionally found him commenting directly on the claims of the auteurists, and you couldn't find a more concise and more thorough dismantling of the theory anywhere else.

He concentrates his argument in his discussion of Targets, the film debut of Peter Bogdanovich, a few of the post-Jules and Jim films of François Truffaut, and of one of the auteurists' most highly touted masterpieces, Max Ophuls' Lola Montes.

Regarding Targets:


Peter Bogdanovich is twenty-nine, the author of several brochures for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and of numerous articles about film. He has now written, directed, and produced Targets and also plays a substantial role in it. As a film, it's minor; as a phenomenon, significant. So far as I know, Targets is the first picture made in Hollywood by an American critic of the auteur school. France has had many new auteur directors in the last decade, but Bogdanovich is the first American auteur to appear in the city that is a particular heaven for auteurs. All those Hollywood elements of commerce and popularity-groveling that seem restrictive to many of us have meant little to auteurs.

Their chief concern is with the way a director handles the material he chooses or is assigned. Many of us think of Hollywood as, in general, the home of hacks or of good men hampered. Here is an intelligent, utterly hip young man who chooses Hollywood. His action and his beliefs have nothing whatsoever to do with that other group of young filmmakers, the Underground or Free Cinema. They are anti-Hollywood. The auteurs are, in one sense, the first pop artists and cultists, but with a difference: they can see a fourth-rate melodrama and know it is fourth-rate as a melodrama at the same time that they glory in the director's use of the camera and his expertness in film mythology.

To argue for more than filmic content in films is taken by some as an argument for literary or theatrical film. But such new directors of the past decade as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, De Seta, Olmi, Jessua, de Broca, Lester, Teshigahara, and Nichols have shown that film can be truly film without being only film. Bogdanovich, however, has grown up in an esthetics that exalts manner over matter - no, it tells us fundamentally that manner is all: that Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and Preminger's The Cardinal and Hitchcock's The Birds and Hawks's Hatari! are excellent artworks because of the directors' styles, that objection to the tacky stories is misplaced because the film is not in the story but in "the relationship between the director and his material" (Gavin Millar). To me, this seems the equivalent of the theatrical legend about the great actor who could pulverize you by reading the telephone book. I have never had the luck to be thus pulverized, but the legend does not maintain that the ideal is to have great actors read telephone books. I am unconvinced that any of those directors is as good when (even because) he uses fourth-rate material as when he uses material and performers that satisfy other expectations in us as well.(2)

On Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid:

Truffaut was a leading formulator of the auteur theory; in fact, as explicit theory, it is usually said to date from an article he wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954. One tenet of that theory holds that material is less important than its cinema treatment, thus these directors have often taken stock genre material, like American thrillers, in order to prove that film art can be made out of the film's "own."

Sometimes (as in Shoot the Piano Player), the transmutation succeeds; more often, the result is only a combination of smugness and camp, accompanied in the theater by the purring of the viewer who gets the "in" references and relishes the exaltation of pop over pompous old "elitist" art. When the transmutation fails, as it does in Mississippi Mermaid and as it does in most cases, the auteur theory shivers. André Bazin, the late French critic who was early associated with the theory and who was Truffaut's mentor, wrote a corrective article in 1957 which is generally disregarded by his disciples. Bazin said: "All that [the auteur supporters] want to retain in the equation auteur plus subject = work is the auteur, while the subject is reduced to zero....Auteur, yes, but what of?" The answer, in regard to Truffaut's recent films, is: Not much.

After detailing the good and the bad things about Max Ophuls Lola Montes, Kauffmann proceeds:

Some of the Lola admirers might agree with all of this; all of them might agree with some of it. Together they reject its relevance. Why? Because they subscribe, with passionate and unquestionable conviction, to a theory of the hierarchy of film values. They believe in selecting and exalting sheerly cinematic values, like the matters I praised earlier, and in subordinating or discounting such matters as those I objected to. To them, this is exultation in the true glory of cinema.

To me, it is a derogation and patronization of cinema. To me, this hierarchy says: "This is what film can do and we mustn't really expect it to do any more, mustn't be disappointed if this is all it does." A chief motive behind the hierarchy is to avoid discussion of the strictured elements forced on filmmaking by the ever-present money men. Lola was commissioned as an expensive showcase for Martine Carol. The money men foisted Miss Carol and a cheap novel by the author of Caroline Cherie on Ophuls, so let's not criticize those elements, let's concentrate on Ophuls' marvelous decor, detail, and camera movement and, by the simple act of appropriate omission, presto, we have a masterpiece.

I disbelieve in this hierarchy. There are money men involved in every art. No one would dream of praising an architect because he designed his interiors well, if he had debased his overall form to please his client's pocketbook. Why a special leniency for film?

Why indeed in the face of the fact that film has proved it doesn't need it, has achieved thoroughly fine work? The worst aspect of this approach is that it crimps the film out of its cultural heritage - the cinematic and the literary and theatrical and psychological and social-political - and says to it, "Just go and be cinematic. If anything else is achieved, good. If not, no great matter." It is an esthetic equivalent of the Victorian ethic of "knowing your place."

This concentration on part of a work leads to inflation of the value of that part. Ophuls, who in some ways was masterly, is extolled as a master of romance. To speak only of Lola, I see him sheerly as cynic, burdened with this trumpery novel and this mammary star and deciding to give it back to the world in spades. One critic envisions Lola in the circus as a presence "redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation." This woman? This artistic creation? The last scene, in which the crowd presses forward to buy kisses of the caged Lola, gave me a vision of Ophuls himself chuckling at the Yahoos who are wonder-struck by this earlier Zsa Zsa Gabor, this "celebrity" in the word's synthetic present-day sense, a crowd scrabbling to pay for a touch of this scandal-sheet goddess. And I also had a concentric vision of Ophuls chuckling at his film audiences, as they press forward to pay for a chance to adulate his caged talent.

Let me give the last word, on this matter of exalting a medium in itself, to the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing about McLuhan in the latest Partisan Review, Enzensberger says:

"It is all too easy to see why the slogan "The medium is the message" has met with unbounded enthusiasm on the part of the media, since it does away, by a quick fix worthy of a card-sharp, with the question of truth. Whether the message is a lie or not has become irrelevant, since in the light of McLuhanism truth itself resides in the very existence of the medium, no matter what it may convey...."(4)

Despite Kauffmann's total rejection of auteurism, its pernicious influence persists among an older generation of film critics whose god appears to be Jean-Luc Godard, the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Kauffmann reviews quite a number of Godard's films in Figures of Light, and finds merit in some (Les Carabiniers, Weekend), but not in others (La Chinoise, Pierrot le fou). This is something the auteurists seem incapable of doing. To them, every film made by an auteur is of more or less equal value. In fact, evaluation isn't what auteurists do. They are content to catalog and classify - not to quantify.

In an extensive analysis of Godard's Weekend, Kauffmann quotes an article in support of Godard by Susan Sontag, and concludes:

I cannot summarize all of Miss Sontag's article (it should be read), but, for me, it leads to and away from this sentence: "Just as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for excluding anything from a film." This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a thesis that any enlightened person would support: there are no absolutes in art. The Godardians take this to mean (like Ivan Karamazov) that therefore everything is permissible. Others of us take it to mean that therefore standards have to be empirically searched out and continually readjusted, to distinguish art from autism; that, just as responsive morals have to be found without a divine authority if humanity is to survive, so responsive esthetics have to be found without canonical standards if art is to survive. The last may be an open question, but it is open as long as men continue to make art.(5)

"Standards" and "responsive esthetics" are among the words most foreign to auteurists.



(1) Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Ibid, p. 96-99.
(3) Ibid, p. 255-256.
(4) Ibid, p. 160-164.
(5) Ibid, p. 132-133.

Where Did I Read That Before?

Quite by chance, in August 2010, I read an article in The New Yorker (on its website, that is) by Richard Brody called "Truffaut's Last Interview", reprinting an interview with a seriously ill Truffaut (he died soon after from a brain tumor) purportedly conducted by Bert Cardullo. An observant reader left a comment mentioning the coincidence of the wording in the interviews with material included on the Criterion DVD of The 400 Blows. Since I had the DVD with me, I checked them for similarities and published my discoveries on this blog in October 2010, "Francois and Bert, Parts I & II".

When I brought this to the attention of Gary Morris, who had co-edited the book of interviews with Cardullo, he forwarded my articles, including one I wrote in 2006 for Senses of Cinema which I then republished concerning the first instance of plagiarism from Cardullo that I discovered, to Richard Brody, who discovered even further examples of Cardullo's plagiarizing and published them in another article, "About Truffaut's Last Interview".

This inspired further revelations from other readers, and what I believed, and perhaps hoped, would be my last word on the subject, "An Unravelling" in December 2010. That article inspired yet further comments from readers, including two from just last week, that I have decided to reprint below - if only to get them more out in the open.

Since I am presently living in the Sticks (provincial Philippines), I am in no position to verify any of the claims made. I therefore present them without any editorial caveats. I leave it to someone in a better position than I to assist me in this rather important process. I take the charge of plagiarism very seriously. Even with incontrovertible evidence of it, I try to be careful with the word. After reading from all the links I included here, some might agree that we have been too careful with Bert Cardullo.

Anonymous said...
This is indeed not the only plagiarism that Cardullo has undertaken. The introduction (which he "wrote") to Theater of the Avant Garde, a book he coedited with Robert Knopf, has whole passages in it directly out of Christopher Innes's Avant Garde Theatre. It's so disappointing to look at a career that prolific and realize it is built on theft.
November 17, 2010

Jerry White said...
I read what you wrote in Senses of Cinema, largely because I had read and enjoyed Cardullo's writing. I found what you wrote there sad; I suppose a more intense emotion was probably called for. Anyway, I wonder if you have seen this, specifically the first blurb there: http://goo.gl/NfnPH
December 17, 2010

Dan Harper said...
I suppose the less intense emotion you felt when you read my article is a general one, but I suspect that the cat may finally be out of the bag for Cardullo.
December 17, 2010

Jerry White said...
Well, I think you oughta see this. These are the blurbs on the publisher website for his new book, Screen Writings, published in March 2010:

'Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo, and 'Screen Writings' proves why.' Dan Harper, American film scholar

'A lot of what Bert Cardullo has to say about contemporary world cinema would be interesting to a very wide audience. He is someone with an impressive and stimulating command of the difficult dance of the film review.' Jerry White, University of Alberta

'Bert Cardullo's articles and reviews are invariably intelligent, original, and highly informed. I have been a sturdy admirer of his work for years; he's a solid writer and an equally solid judge.' Frederick Morgan, American poet


The full link is at http://www.anthempress.com/index.php/subject-areas/browse-by-type/anthem-monograph-edited-volume/screen-writings-1.html
December 18, 2010

Dan Harper said...
That blurb is also on the Amazon page. Just shows you how a favorable blurb can be extracted from even a negative review (mine was as favorable as I could make it, under the circumstances).

The late Fred Morgan gave Cardullo a job at The Hudson Review in the '80s. It's a mercy that he isn't around any more to see what a mess Cardullo has made of his trust.

But I'm beginning to believe that Cardullo would have to commit murder before anyone else would notice how much "borrowing" (I'm in a generous mood) he's been doing over the years.

Thanks for the link.
December 19, 2010

Anonymous said...
Pages 70-72 and pages 85-86 of Cardullo's "Vittorio De Sica" are plagiarized from Stanley Kauffmann's reviews of "Two Women" and "A Brief Vacation" in "The New Republic" (May 22, 1961 and March 8, 1975 issues). Several sentences are lifted verbatim; Kauffmann's reviews are not quoted, cited, or acknowledged as sources.

Pages 56-58 and page 195 of Cardullo's book "Waves from the East" are lifted directly from Kauffmann's "New Republic" reviews of "Turtles Can Fly" and "What Time is it There?" (March 7, 2005 and February 4, 2002 issues).

Cardullo's two-volume "Screen Writings" is replete with plagiarisms from Kauffmann's old reviews. In Volume 1: pages 94-98 are stolen from the reviews of Olmi's films "The Sound of Trumpets" and "The Fiances" in the August 17, 1963 and February 15, 1964 issues of "The New Republic"; and pages 198-199 are taken almost vebatim from Kauffmann's review of "The Last Picture Show" in the October 16, 1971 issue of "The New Republic". In Volume 2: large portions of pages 16-21 are stolen from Kauffmann's reviews of "The Goodbye Girl" and "Manhattan" in the December 17, 1977 and May 19, 1979 issues of "The New Republic"; and pages 36-46 include several paragraphs Cardullo lifted from Kauffmann's reviews of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Me You and Everyone We Know" (April 5, 2005 and July 11/18, 2005 issues of "The New Republic").

Cardullo's "The Films of Robert Bresson" includes an essay ("Dostoyevskian Surge, Bressonian Spirit") in which he plagiarizes virtually all of Kauffmann's review of "L'Argent" (April 16, 1984 issue of "The New Republic").

Cardullo's "Screening the Stage" is filled with plagiarisms: pages 47-49 are taken from Kauffmann's review of "Betrayal" (February 28, 1983 issue of "The New Republic"); and a large portion of the essay "The Sounds (and Sights) of Silence: 'Way Down East' as Play and Film" (pages 91-99) have been stolen from Kauffmann's essay "D.W. Griffith's 'Way Down East'" in the journal "Horizon" (Spring, 1972).

In the January, 2011 issue of "Notes on Contemporay Literature" the following notice was published:

"This is to inform the readership of 'Notes' that 'Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel in Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,' Vol. 40.4:4-6, by Bert Cardullo, is largely plagiarized from pages 82 through 85 of Professor Sarah Bey-Cheng's book 'Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater' (Routledge, 2004; reprinted in paper 2005). We condemn Bert Cardullo's dishonesty and apologize to Professor Bey-Cheng and our readers that it escaped our editorial scrutiny."

Cardullo is not a scholar, but, rather, a charlatan and thief who has ransacked the work of critics he professes to respect and admire.
March 30, 2012

Dan Harper said...
Your pains-taking (!) is appreciated. There is an interview of Mr. Kauffmann conducted by Cardullo online. I wonder if Kauffmann was even there? My chief reaction is surprise that all this has gone unnoticed for so long.
March 30, 2012

Anonymous said...
Do you know what's disturbing? As a professor, Cardullo had a history of being extremely strict about plagiarism, warning of expulsion and other consequences for those who plagiarized.

Also disturbing? Sarah Bay-Cheng, from whom he stole material as listed above in the comments, was once his student.
April 15, 2012

Digging for the Truth

After contacting Gary Morris, co-editor with Bert Cardullo of the book Action!: Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran, about the suspect interview with François Truffaut included in their book, and reprinted by Richard Brody on The New Yorker last August, he communicated his own misgivings to Brody, who has since unearthed more interviews with Truffaut on Youtube that contain further material that reappears, without credit, in Cardullo's interview. Clearly, if some of the interview is borrowed from other sources, it is enough reason to suspect that the whole thing was borrowed.

I had intended to write in my post François & Bert Part I that it remained for a researcher more intrepid than I to discover if the rest of the Cardullo interview was lifted from other sources. I have been in the Philippines since late 2007, without access to a dedicated PC (I use internet cafes exclusively), so I had neither the time nor the pera to conduct the research myself. Thanks to Gary Morris and Richard Brody, someone else in this business is on top of this serious issue. I shall, of course, keep this blog posted for further developments.