Cinema on Fire
Essay
Cinema on Fire
Essay
BY
Tom Paulus
On Rivette, Duras, and how to make films politically.
Like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (but not Éric Rohmer), Jacques Rivette was actively involved in the “events” of May ’68. For Rivette and his colleagues at Cahiers, and for a large part of the French film world, May started in February, with “L’affaire Langlois“: the board of directors of the Cinémathèque française had received direct order from de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux, to relieve Henri Langlois of his duties as secretary general. Malraux, a hero of the Resistance and, at the time of his flirtation with communism, a leftist icon, had already become persona non grata at Cahiers after the censoring of Rivette’s The Nun (1966), which had prompted prompting Godard’s famous open letter, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, addressing Malraux as the minister of “Kultur“ and prime minister Pompidou as “Gestapo.” Malraux intended to replace the whole board of the Cinémathèque—including Langlois’s closest collaborators, Mary Meerson, Lotte Eisner, Marie Epstein—with civil servants, under the pretext of redressing Langlois’s disastrous management. Immediately a Cinémathèque Defense Committee was established, headquartered at Cahiers, and managed mostly by Truffaut, whose task mostly consisted of collecting signatures in protest and missives from important filmmakers Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang and Carl Theodor Dreyer—threatening to withdraw their films from the Cinémathèque if the situation was not corrected.
A first demonstration organized by the Defense Committee was held in front of the Palais de Chaillot, the temple of culture that housed the Musée de l’homme and the Théâtre national populaire. The demonstration—which also included Nicholas Ray, next to other prominent actors and filmmakers both young and old (Carné was there to represent the ancien régime of the French cinema, the cinéma de papa)—ended with the police charging into the crowd. The demonstrations that followed, this time in the Rue de Courcelles, the site of the Cinémathèque, included student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The presence of the kingpin of the student radicals at Nanterre (the university where Godard’s new love, Anne Wiazemsky, was enrolled), the so-called enragés, was symbolic for establishing a direct connection between what was initially perceived as a fait divers, a folkloric manifestation that eventually led to Langlois being reinstated in April, and the widespread revolts that followed: the occupation of the Sorbonne by the enragés, the massive street protests, the take-over of the Odéon as a public forum, the solidarity strikes all over France and the take-over of the Renault factory by the workers. Equally symbolic was Rivette’s “charge” during the initiatory rally at the Palais de Chaillot: as narrated by Wiazemsky in her memoir, Rivette had taken the initiative to storm the Palace, shouting: “Tous au TNP! Occupation du théâtre!” Having managed to force his way inside the theatre, Rivette jumped up on the stage, only then turning around, in triumph. He realized—his face, Wiazemsky writes, that of a small boy on the verge of tears—that no one had followed him, that his “troops” were constituted by Wiazemsky, her brother Pierre, and an unknown third party. Godard would later scathingly refer to the incident as “Rivette’s taking of the Winter Palace.”
The event was symbolic, not because it illustrates the enthusiastic, nervous, mischievous charm of a filmmaker all too often painted as a morose intellectual (the actor and filmmaker Jean-François Stévenin, who in Out 1 plays a deranged version of Marlon Brando’s Wild One persona, called his director “Eastwood cool”), but because of the object of that enthusiasm: the theatre. The Théatre national populaire, during the ’30s and the postwar years, had been a symbol of the left: under the direction of Jean Vilar, the theatre was conceived as a public service, offering performances at prices and times especially attuned to students. Vilar’s idea of a theatre with a social mission had inspired the theatre company of Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito) in Rivette’s first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1961). With its communal ethos, it aspired to return to the Greek and Elibethan theatre, as illustrated by the prominent staging at the TNP of Shakespeare adaptations and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, next to the French classics of Racine, Molière and Corneille, and contemporary plays by Boris Vian or Beckett. In Paris Belongs to Us, Lenz’s company rehearses Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in his next film, L’Amour fou (1969), the company of Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and Claire (Bulle Ogier) prepares a staging of Racine’s Andromaque, with Racine’s themes of jealousy, deception, and selfishness echoing those of the film, based on Rivette’s relationship with co-writer Marilu Parolini.
The rehearsal of the play in L’Amour fou was shot on 16mm by André S. Labarthe and his crew from the Cinéastes de nôtre temps television series as an actual documentary, to be inserted into the fictional subject of the Bergmanian or Antonionian dissolution of the couple. Rivette’s method on this film had been inspired precisely by his work on four programs for the series produced by Labarthe and Janine Bazin on Jean Renoir, Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir (1966) and the three-part Jean Renoir, The Master (1967): as director and interviewer, Rivette is seen together with his crew in the same shot with Renoir and Michel Simon; there are shots of clapboards, of someone putting a hand over the camera lens, and even of a blank screen as the camera battery is reloaded. Moreover, since the programs were unscripted, Renoir and Simon were left completely free to talk about whatever came to their minds, frequently wandering off on a tangent. What Rivette discovered on that shoot was freedom, the complete opposite of the classically prepared, structured and scripted The Nun:
Yes, the three weeks I spent with Renoir filming the programmes for Cineastes de notre temps, right after shooting and finishing La Religieuse, made quite an impression on me. After a lie, all of a sudden, here was the truth. After a basically—artificial cinema, here was the truth of the cinema. I therefore wanted to make a film, not inspired by Renoir, but trying to conform to the idea of a cinema incarnated by Renoir, a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself. What I liked most about this film was enjoying myself shooting it.
The dissolution of the borders between fiction and documentary had been a concern for the nouvelle vague cinéastes, influenced as much by Rossellini’s neorealism and Jean Rouch’s ethno-documentaries as by Bazin’s theories, from the first. Rouch had gone further than Rossellini, because he had introduced the presence of the filmmaker in the documentary, thereby pointing to the constructed nature of even the most “direct” cinema. Around the time of the release of L’Amour fou, Jean-Louis Comolli, who had followed Rivette at the helm of Cahiers, published his long essay, “Le détour par le direct” (February-April 1969), that praised filmmakers like Rouch and his Canadian counterpart Pierre Perrault for showing that the very act of filming is already a productive intervention. Comolli’s text was part of the ideological move away from Bazinian realism towards a modernist fronting of form, which was deemed especially salient in a quasi-documentary context, as illustrated by Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963), a rarely seen experimental film that became an objet fétiche in this period of formalist engagement. In a roundtable discussion on ‘Montage,’ organized by Cahiers at the Centre Dramatique du Sud-Est in Aix-en-Provence in February 1969, Rivette, with Jean Narboni and new collaborator Sylvie Pierre, discussed the roots of the new modernist cinema in Eisenstein, whose Marxist-formalist film theory was being translated into French and published at Cahiers from ’69 onwards. One of the films under discussion was Something Different (1963) by the Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilova, whom Rivette and Michel Delahaye had interviewed for Cahiers the previous year. Something Different, which intersperses two separate narratives: one following Vera, a fictional housewife living in Czechoslovakia, and another following Eva, an Olympic gymnast played by real-life Olympic gold medalist Eva Bosàkovà, was seen as an example of “dialectical” filmmaking. For Rivette, who had toyed with dialectics in his film criticism from the late ’50s (probably under the influence of the resident Hegelian Marxist at Cahiers, Jean Domarchi), saw the themes of the film as contradiction, transformation, and metamorphosis, formally reflected in an “an abstract organization of very concrete things.” Chytilova’s Daisies (1966)—one of the sources for Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)—confirmed that her films are often structured around two characters, “who are different but also somewhat the same.” Chytilová agreed that “the number two, which is the smallest quantity, is that which allows us to say the most things.” In the “Montage” roundtable the same centrality of contradiction is discovered in Eisenstein (The Old and the New), Straub-Huillet (Not Reconciled) and even Warhol (Chelsea Girls). And it is not hard to recognize the dialectical inspiration of the final version of L’Amour fou, which Rivette had spent close to a year editing, with its doubling between fiction and non-fiction, 35mm and 16mm, cinema and theatre.
So, dialectics and (formalist) Marxism then. Still, we should note at this point that Rivette’s trajectory as a ‘political’ filmmaker was completely different from Godard’s, considered as the exemplary Eisensteinian filmmaker by Narboni after La Chinoise (1967). For brevity’s sake, let’s say that the politics of the “Young Turks” at Cahiers in the ’50s, under the stewardship of Rohmer, were right wing-anarchist (the context is too complicated to elucidate here and involves personal background as much as anything else, but decisive factors were certainly, on the one hand, the presence of the agent provocateur Jean Parvulesco, a close friend of Godard and Rohmer’s who called himself a fascist mystic, and, on the other, the outrage in the world of literature, after the war, at the execution of the collaborator Robert Brasillach, who had also authored a history of cinema, which led to violent discussions on the politicization of literature, with Sartre the most prominent advocate of the Leftist engagé writer). Godard, who would become heavily politicized after the start of the Vietnam war and successive proofs of government repression and corruption— the censoring of The Nun, the Langlois affair, the political scandal of the Ben-Barka affair (the subject of 1966’s Made in USA)—was still on the fence at the beginning of the ’60s.
At that point Rivette had already had his political awakening during the Algerian War of Independence. Paris Belongs to Us, with its plot hingeing on an unspecified international conspiracy, can be read in general terms as a critique both of the Cold War, McCarthyism and the rise of security-oriented state bureaucracy in the US (Rivette himself claimed that it was inspired by the Budapest crisis at the end of 1956, which explains the connection to the music of Bartok heard in the film). But released, after many delays, at the height of the Algerian War, it was taken by many as a critique of state-governed fascism and the rise of the military juntas in France. Rivette came into close contact with the war and with the FLN (Front de libération national, the Algerian nationalist liberation front) through Cécile Decugis, the editor of The 400 Blows and Breathless, who was given a five-year prison sentence for having rented an apartment under her name for members of the front. Rivette did everything in his power to better her living circumstances in the prison of la Roquette and to have her granted the status of political prisoner (Truffaut gave financial help). From prison she sent several letters to Rivette between March and October 1960. In a note from this period, “C.D.” is described as “fierté, énergie, courage, character.“ Rivette named Ogier’s character in 1989’s The Gang of Four, a secret revolutionary operative, after “C.D.” In an unpublished note from 1960, Rivette wrote, “Duty of the artist: to criticize contemporary French civilization, and the abuses of the state. First subject: the abuses of police power.” (“Devoir de l’artiste: critiquer la civilisation française contemporaine, et les abus de l’état. Sujet premier: l’abus du pouvoir policier.”)
Duras was an obvious interlocutor for Rivette given that the recurring themes of madness and erotic obsession in her work were close to those of L’Amour fou, as was her interest in the dynamics of the couple or the group
In this period, it was Rivette who faulted Godard for failing to take a stance in Le Petit soldat (1960, released 1963). But while Godard would become a radical Maoist after the events of May, Rivette would follow a less sectarian path. The story of Godard’s recruitment into the UJCML (Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes), established in 1966 by Robert Linhart, through Linhart’s friend Jean-Pierre Gorin, is well-known, as is the theoretical influence from the Althusserians at the Ecole normale supérieure. What attracted Godard was the “clarity“ of the “scientific“ ideas proposed by the Marxist-Leninists, but mostly the energy, youth and vitality of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung had launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in an attempt to reenergize the fading ardor of revolutionary Communism after the Krutchev thaw. The “shock troops” of the Cultural Revolution, pitted both against Party stalwarts and urban bourgeois (represented in France by the staid, bureaucratic Soviet communism of Maurice Thorez and Waldeck Rochet’s PCF), were composed of high school and university students. The fortysomething Godard, who had just married a 21-year old, felt close to them. Rivette could understand the second motivation, and also shared Godard’s Brechtian stance that political films had to be made politically, that their “message“ is conveyed through form and not in spite of it. But he objected to the passivity of the UJCML during the May events (deemed bourgeois) and Althusser’s steadfast fealty to the Communist Party.
In an interview with Cahiers, with the Althusserians, Commoli, Sylvie Pierre, Jean Narboni, in July ’68, following the first screening of L’Amour fou, Rivette expressed his deep disappointment with the films made about May, mostly by political collectives that had sprouted after the beginning of the student protests. Most of these films films glorified the striking workers at factories like Flins and Saint-Nazare (Rivette does not mention Chris Marker’s Medvedkine Group film, Classe de lutte, made in collaboration with the workers at the Rhodiaceta factory at Besançon, which had not yet been released). He finds them self-satisfied, as “Stalinist“ as the party member hearing the speeches of his leaders or reading L’Humanite (the Communist Party daily). The only film he liked, La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder, was made by the students of IDHEC in June, the month the Gaullists had announced elections and had ordered workers to return to work. The film, shot in one take, “raw,“ followed a woman worker being urged by her boss, trade union representatives and fellow workers to go back to work; she resists and weeps, while those around soothe her and try to convince her that the strike was not for nothing, that the return to work represents a victory for the workers. In a completely spontaneous, non-programmatic fashion the film manages to question the legitimacy of communist organizations that had condemned the May revolts and supported the return to order and shows the confused, stunned, emotionally exhausted reactions of workers who felt betrayed by proletarian leadership. Another favourite film from the period, Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), depicting a syndicate of revolutionary terrorists attempting to overthrow the government in the near future, was produced by the New Left Newreel collective but rejected by the group for distribution because they found its exploration of revolutionary violence unsuitable for political organising. Usines Wonder, Rivette says, “because it is terrifying and painful.” And that is the only role of cinema, “to upset people,” to be pessimist instead of complacent. A revolutionary cinema needs “to take people out of their cocoons and to plunge them into horror.”
Rivette was also highly impressed by Marguerite Duras’s post-May film, Destroy, She Said, released at the tail end of ’69, because he found it “uncomfortable” and “frightening.” In November, Duras, who for her part had expressed admiration for L’Amour fou, agreed to be interviewed by Rivette. Duras was an obvious interlocutor for Rivette given that the recurring themes of madness and erotic obsession in her work were close to those of L’Amour fou, as was her interest in the dynamics of the couple or the group. Politically, Duras was an apostate communist, expelled from the Party in 1950. Through her husband, the camp survivor Robert Antelme, author of L’Espèce humaine, a testimony on the horror of Dachau, she was involved with the Arguments group. Also among the group was the man who would become her lover and companion, the Italian immigrant Dionys Mascolo, who was thrown out of the PCF for his protest against the view that a political party should not interfere in cultural affairs. Arguments, a journal for politics and philosophy, was created in 1956 by Edgar Morin (together with Roland Barthes and the literary critic Colette Audry), the sociologist whose book on the “somnambulant” state of the German psyche after the War, L’An zéro de l’Allemagne, based on his experience as a military attaché to the occupying French Army stationed in Germany (he had arranged the repatriation of Anthelme from Dachau), had provided Rossellini with a title for his film on postwar Germany. That same year Morin had published The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, a sociological-anthropological take on the cinema that attempts to account for the way the cinema speaks to our needs and desires, that put him on Bazin’s radar. The experiment in “urban anthropology“ that he set up with Rouch, Chronicle of a Summer (1961), put him on that of Cahiers (the film featured Rivette’s lover-to-be, Marilu Parolini).
The main theoretical influence on Arguments was Henri Lefebvre, Morin’s collegague in the Sociology department at Nanterre, where he was also Cohn-Bendit’s professor. Like Duras, most in the group had been dispelled by the CFP for their attempt to broaden the reach of communism from the economical sphere of work and production, to an anthropological-sociological investigation of “Total Man.“ The term was borrowed from Nietzsche and from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of the “total social fact,“ the necessary interweaving of diverse strands of social and psychological life. Arguments attempted a rapprochement between the Marxist critique of alienation and the Heidegerrian critique of the “technical world.“ Like Heidegger (and like Heidegger’s student, Herbert Marcuse, the main philosophical source for the American counterculture and New Left), Lefebvre took issue with the modern fury for quantification, classification, structuration, systematization, that he saw reflected in the mania for automatism and urban planning (and in the technocratic, authoritarian planning of Soviet communism). Lefebvre’s critique of urban planning brought him into contact with Debord, who in ’56 was about to found the Situationist International. At Nanterre, the influence of Lefebvre and Morin would mix with that of the Situationists, in the aspiration of the students to turn their politics into a “festival.“ The title of Duras’s film refers to the anarchist/libertarian and Situationist slogans graffitied on walls during the May revolts. The inspiration of these slogans, like a large part of the Situationist endeavor, was Nietzschian: the destruction of the old must precede construction of the new, proclaimed the philosopher who said of himself, “I am dynamite!”, ideas that were picked up by the Russian revolutionary anarchists like Bakunin, who said that “to destroy is to create!” Before joining the Althusserians, Godard had made a film, Weekend (1967), that expressed exactly the anarchist desire for the tabula rasa, for an embrace of “nothingness” (Nietzsche emphasized that you can only resolve the ‘nihilism’ of the present period by pushing it to its breaking point, a homeopathic logic that can be seen to operate in the avant-gardes of Dada and surrealism, who wanted to push further the nihilism of the War) and the “end of cinema.”
In the interview with Cahiers, Duras reiterates the politics of Arguments, expressing dedicated opposition against all restriction of thought, be it from the left or the right (“the destruction of all police. intellectual police. religious police. communist police”). She is also in total agreement with the Arguments group concerning the need to change “Total Man,” not just his economic circumstances. When Rivette asks her whether her film expresses any hope, she replies, “Yes. evolutionary hope. But at the level of the individual, of inner life.” Nevertheless, true change, she believes, can only be effected by a return to zero, an emptying out of man that also involves the total refusal of any kind of action and knowledge, of authority. A revolution, she feels, must never become a theoretical or “scholastic” exercise. Like her novels, Destroy, She Said wants to destroy (cinematic) language , return it to a state of silence. This inspired the title of the interview: “Destruction and language.” Duras had picked up these ideas from Nietzschians like Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, frequent guests at the soirées she and Mascolo organized in their home on the rue Saint-Benoît. She had also been influenced by Barthes who, in the pre-structuralist phase of Writing Degree Zero had championed an “écriture” without style or substance, without “meaning,“ referring mainly to its own materiality, sensuous surface, like abstract painting or post-symbolist literature (Mallarmé, Joyce, Kafka, the nouveau roman) and its equivalent in the modern cinema of Bresson, Resnais, Antonioni, Godard. The Brechtian-formalist aspects of Destroy, She Said were what interested Rivette’s co-interviewer, Jean Narboni, at that moment still completely in thrall to Eisenstein. Form was what highest on the agenda of the “political modernists” of the late ‘60s: Straub, for instance, said about Not Reconciled (1965) that he and Huillet had always refused to let any message whatsoever slip into their films: “we destroyed them as we went since we didn’t want to inflict or impose a message onto the viewer.” Rivette showed the same preoccupations, referring during the interview to Jean-Pierre Faye, the former Tel Quel editor who had broken with the journal over its absolutist commitment to Maoism and had created a new publication, Change, in which he wanted to pick up the original focus on the relation between poetry and linguistics; the inaugural issue was devoted to montage and Eisenstein.
The problem was Duras’s politics. Narboni, the Maoist, objected to her anti-partocratic nihilism, while Rivette, like Faye, continued to see great potential in the incentive to change form, to change language instead of destroying it. But Duras maintained her commitment to the tabula rasa, asserting that “there must be no more sentences.” In the interview she refers not only to Blanchot, but to the hippie youth culture, and their repulsion against knowledge and culture. In the Woodstock festival she recognized a blissful, almost mystical state of being and doing nothing, a via negativa towards transcendence. Duras refuses the qualification that Rivette offers of her position as a “religious conception of revolution” which to his mind is very dangerous, pointing out that religion, after Nietzsche, has become secular and that the void is something you live. Rivette is affronted by her suggestion to close all schools, all universities, in favor of ignorance. But Duras is only suggesting a temporary state of “cleansing.“ In her ascetic brand of anarchism there is no abandoning of the principle of society: on the contrary, a return to zero entails a perspective for renewal. The utopian aspect of her ideas is familiar from Lefebvre’s politics of possibility (as is her celebration of the “festival” of Woodstock), which she sought to reconcile with the nihilism of Blanchot: before committing yourself to act, before you can do anything new, you have to undo what has come before; you have to reach the zero point, the neutral point, where sensitivity regroups… and rediscovers itself.”
Duras’s words resonated as Rivette was preparing his next film, the 13-hour experiment in “Total Freedom,“ Out 1 (1971). Even more radically than the “dialectical” L’Amour fou, Out 1 poses the question of how to make a film politically: making films politically means making films that are sourced collectively, that are made, planned, produced together, not necessarily on the basis of a political agenda. The mere fact of democratic collaboration makes a (utopian) political film. On Out 1, script-less unlike L’Amour fou, which had been mostly written, all the actors were invited to participate in a “conversation“ intended to flesh out a limited number of rudimentary starting points borrowed from existing material, thus undermining the authority of the filmmaker as sole creator, as “auteur.“ In the Cahiers interview from ’68, Rivette had already announced that
what is important is the point where the film no longer has an auteur, where it has no more actors, no more story even, no more subject, nothing left but the film itself speaking and saying something that can’t be translated: the point where it becomes the discourse of someone or something else, which cannot be said, precisely because it is beyond expression. And I think you can only get there by trying to be as passive as possible at all the various stages, never intervening on one’s own behalf but rather on behalf of this something else which is nameless.
Rivette is talking about how the film is discovered in editing, how it follows its own course, which might bear no relation to what you had planned. If editing is “seeking the affinities which come to exist between those various moments in film, which exist completely on their own,” then the integrity of the material, that resists any structuring intent, is even more central this time.
“Passive” registration was enabled by the “neutral” 16mm camera with which the film was now completely shot. Rivette’s models on Out 1 were the American underground films of John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Kramer and Warhol. All these filmmakers had embraced a collective, “amateur” approach: their films were made artisanally, outside the regular commercial circuit of production or distribution, whether by friends (Cassavetes), Co-ops (Clarke), cultural factories (Warhol), or New Left groups (Kramer). Using direct cinema means to tell (docu)fictional stories, they emphasized the constructed nature of all “realist” cinema by including pieces of black leader, sound tests and camera loads, or by having actors or extras look directly into the camera. By including the filmmaker in the fictional world, like Rouch in his “shared anthropology,“ they also tried to affect the distance between film and audience, an aspect I will come back to. Clarke’s The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1963), and The Portrait of Jason (1967), often seemed like rehearsals rather than finished films, with the handheld camera, the frequent zooms and out-of-focus shots, the voice of the filmmakers heard offscreen and the changing of the film reels happening on camera (in Jason), constantly signaling “roughness.” This was the style Rivette had essayed in the programs on Renoir and the importance of the New York new wave for the post-nouvelle vague cinema is further underlined by the fact that Labarthe also made programs on Cassavetes and Clarke—in the episode dedicated to Clarke, Rome is Burning (1970), directed by Labarthe and Noël Burch, we recognize a typically shy Rivette among the guests in Clarke’s New York apartment, sitting next to Yoko Ono!
To give the finished film the look and life of the “rushes“ was something Rivette had become obsessed with: the question of how to close the gap between the film and the life from which it derives. Already on L’Amour fou, Rivette had experienced that the inclusion of 16mm material gave the shots back the power they had in the rushes and which they lost in the end-to-end: “some shots still didn’t get back the strength they had in the rushes. But in every film, whether it is very mise en scene or very documentary, I’ve always noticed this wasting away of strength with regard to the rushes.” The mammoth length of Out 1 was one result of this obsession. It was inspired, on the one hand, by Langlois’ habit, at the Cinémathèque, to show an entire Feuillade serial in one sitting, and, on the other, by his presentation of the eight-hour rough cut of Rouch’s Petit à petit (1969)—Rouch’s rushes, so to speak—which Rivette thought highly superior to the 4-hour version readied for television, let alone the 90-minutes version for theatrical release. Rivette’s concern with preserving the “vitality” of the shots was related to desire to preserve chance, contingency and openness (clear from the numeral behind the title, indicating future episodes to come) in what is by necessity a formalized, “finished“ whole. These concerns were also reflected upon in the context of his interest in serial music: where The Nun and L’Amour fou had been inspired by Webern and Schoenberg - the former having originated from a play on words: drawing inspiration from the variable rhythmic “cells” in the tone-row, which Noël Burch especially had also discovered in Eisenstein and Méditerannée, Rivette had wanted to make a “cellular” film about cells full of nuns—Out 1 would fully embrace the aleatory music of Stockhausen and Cage, presenting the actors with the flimsiest of schemas which they can fill in at leisure, their freedom becoming part of the “narrative structure” of the piece, just like the aleatory instrumentalist is presented with a single sheet of paper with a series of note groupings amongst which the performer is then free to choose.
The free pleasures of “play,” that Clarke and Cassavetes found in the “jam sessions” of jazz, for Rivette was the most important aspect of the film, also in terms of its political identity. The libidinous aspects of the liberatory potential of play was familiar from the Marcusian counterculture and its celebration of ‘festival’, but Rivette was more immediately concerned with the anarchist potential of infantile regression. He had recognized the political value of child’s play in the films of the Hungarian Marxist Miklós Jancsó, a favorite of Jean-Louis Comolli (who directed a Cinéastes de notre temps episode on Jancso and the Hungarian cinema in 1969). In the “Montage” roundtable of that same year, Rivette contributed the following:
What struck me about both Sirocco and Technique and Rite, in so far as objectively they are perhaps the least ‘successful’ though not the least fascinating of his recent films, is their element of juvenile play. These are ten-year old children playing at spies or at war just like cops and robbers (or like Le Petit Soldat). In all these Jancsó films it is really recreation time: the children are in the playground during break between classes, dividing up into groups, forming into rings, it's the political game to the letter: politics as a game, a game as politics, with the whole arsenal of revolutionary signifieds congealed, put back into circulation. And when I say juvenile, it isn’t meant pejoratively in any way, this may be a partial view of Jancsó’s films, but it’s more and more how I see them. Recreation time, but in the widest sense of the word; as Cocteau said, ‘When a child leaves the classroom, we say it is for re-creation,’ I think this is the value of Jancsó’s films: within a revolutionary state, he plays the role of re-creation.
The idea of re-creation—as pause and renewal—is also what Duras discovered in the non-productive attitudes of hippie youth culture. We also find clear echoes of Roland Barthes’s turn to the revolutionary pleasures of textual jouissance (“the whole arsenal of revolutionary signifieds congealed, put back into circulation”) and bliss in S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text, or in his “fetishistic” reading of Eisenstein film stills in “The Third meaning”. But what Rivette calls “extasy”, we will see, is also related to the pleasures of terror and anguish, as in the aesthetic theory on the sublime. Primarily, the pleasure of play is experienced in L’amour fou in anarchist terms, as the joy of destruction: in an unforgettable moment of regression, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Ogier proceed to rip their clothing with a razor and demolish the walls of their apartment with an axe. Rivette has suggested that this “folie à deux” was inspired by Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), in which Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers ingest a potion that turns them into troublesome pre-teens. That regression and destruction are the most important themes and pleasures of slapstick, is made clear by Rivette when he recalls that Kalfon originally “wanted to pay homage to Laurel and Hardy with a yogurt and cottage cheese duel,” which unfortunately there wasn't enough time to film. Rivette had written about Monkey Business in an early and influential text, “Génie de Howard Hawks” (1953), which at the time he took perhaps a little too seriously as “a fable…which sets out…to chronicle the fatal stages in the degradation of a superior mind.” But it pays to bring to mind again the diagnosis of a “spirit of infantilism” in Hawks, the “foulness” and “debasement” it creates, in the context of the films Rivette and Godard were making at the end of the sixties: by showing the intrusion of the inhuman in man himself, Hawks attacks the notion that “adolescence and childhood are barbarous states from which we are rescued by education. The child is scarcely distinguishable from the savage he imitates in his games: and a most distinguished old man, after he has drunk the precious fluid, takes delight in imitating a chimp.” The monkeys, the Indians, the goldfish, in the film show Hawks’s obsession with primitivism, “which also finds expression in the savage rhythms of the tom-tom music.”(Watching the scene of Grant making himself up as an Indian, Rivette is reminded of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, but it seems to me he is thinking more of Dietrich’s notorious gorilla number in 1932’s Blonde Venus).
Rivette mentions Le Petit soldat as an example of Godard’s films showing young people playing at adult roles (fictional or not), but revolutionary regression is more memorably incarnated, in Weekend, by the members of the “Front de Libération de la Seine-et-Oise,” modern-day maquinards who wage guerilla war against Parisians motoring in the suburbs, killing their victims and then eating them. These banlieu primitivists unleash the libidinal forces that, in modern forms of civilisation, were deflected or “sublimated.“ Godard’s fondness for the subversive pleasures of burlesque are apparent throughout this black comedy, that mixes slapstick and anarchist politics in the manner of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933), a film and a filmmaker highly praised by Godard. The famous traffic-jam sequence in the film makes reference to the automotive destruction derby in Laurel & Hardy’s Two Tars (1928). The carnivalesque violence and libidinous attacks of slapstick were an endless source of inspiration for the avant-garde, for the Dadaist-surrealist revolt against rationality and middleclass dignity. Artaud anticipated Rivette’s take on Hawks by writing about an earlier Monkey Business—the one with the Marx Brothers—that it combined an ecstasy of liberation, the moment when everything goes mad, runs wild, revolts, with “something disquieting and tragic.” The schoolboy pranks that lead to revolution in Duck Soup (1933) are certainly not fundamentally different from Duchamp placing a urinal in a museum or painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, or from the Lettrist Michel Mourre, a lapsed Dominican novice, disrupting Easter High mass at the Nôtre-Dame in full priest get-up, reading a sermon declaring that God is dead. Call it Groucho Marxism. Breton further elucidated the connection between slapstick and violence in his famous mot that the “simplest surrealist consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,” a phrase included in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, in which Chaplin is mentioned next to Rimbaud, Hegel, Marx and Trotsky.
The members of the “Front de Libération de la Seine-et-Oise”, Kalfon, Yves Beneyton and Valérie Lagrange in full hippie get-up, were all part of the same theatre group. Together with Ogier and Michèle Moretti, who joined Kalfon for L’Amour fou, they belonged to the troupe of Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin, known as “Marc’O,“ a former Lettrist avant-gardist close to Debord, who had also participated in the Nôtre-Dame incident with Mourre. (Another member, Pierre Clémenti, was one of the faces of the countercultural cinema of the late ’60s and early ’70s, appearing in the films of Garrel, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Partner, Pasolini’s Pigsty, and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Wheel of Ashes). After the dissolution of the Lettrist group, Marc’O started a theatre school at the American Center at the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, where he developed a theory of theatre and acting inspired by Artaud and Grotowski. The most important ethos of the school was that the primacy of the text should be subverted and the actor made a creator rather than just a performer, a “worker” on an assembly line. Rivette and Godard had known Guillaumin as a frequenter of the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, and later as a prominent presence during the May events. Godard would involve him in the Italian adventure of Wind from the East (1970), but it was Rivette who would come to owe him most. In Marc’O’s most successful plays, Les Bargasses and Les Idoles, which Rivette had seen at the Théâtre du Studio des Champs-Elysées (where he had put on the theatrical version of The Nun in 1963), he found the kind of spontaneity, a highly physical style of performance by actors unpolished by the “Conservatoire“ style and bursting with youthful energy, joy and fearless improvisatory zest, that he had missed in his own films and that he had also discovered in the cinema of Rouch, Cassavetes and Renoir. Les Idoles, a savage satire of star culture that followed Debord’s critique of mass media marketing in The Society of the Spectacle, was also adapted, by Marc’O himself, into a film of the same name in ’67, featuring the original cast, with Ogier, Clémenti, Kalfon as the leads and Lagrange and Moretti as the supporting players. The film was a pastiche of musical comedy and the “rock” films of the Beatles and the Monkees, that in its freely roving long takes tried to recreate the original experience of the play, which featured live musicians, singing, pantomime, and dance.
This form of “musical theatre” would provide the template not only for Out 1 (with Michèle Moretti as Lili, the leader of one of the theatre groups in the film) but for Rivette’s experiments with dance hall or musical theatre settings and “live” playing of musicians in Duelle (1976) and Noroît (1976): in these films Rivette used dancers (from Carolyn Carlson’s dance company) and the jazz combo of Jean Wiener, a veteran of the cinema, who had scored Les Bargasses for Marc’O (his daughter Elizabeth can be seen in Les Idoles). As we have said, the supposedly “self-reflective“ move of revealing the soundtrack in the diegesis, for Rivette was a way to unify the field not only between filmmaker and subject, but between audience and film. In his contribution to the single issue of the Lettrist journal Ion, devoted to the Situationist cinema to come, Guillaumin had written about the importance of the “situation” of the film experience, a “dispositive” that consisted of much more than the relation between screen and spectator, but was also determined by the atmospherics and “temperature” of the room. The Situationist Maurice Lemaître also believed that the gap between passive spectator and the screen should be closed, for instance by introducing actors from the film into the real space of the audience or projecting images onto the bodies of the spectators. A similar situational view of cinema Rivette found in the films of Clarke, who had said in Labarthe and Burch’s program that “the filmmaker, the audience, and the film must all be part of something together, and that I don’t want them separated behind the screen anymore.” Her conception of cinema as a collective event, which Rivette would take up for his characterisation of the Out 1 experience, was in turn inspired by the theatre company that also influenced Marc’O, the Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Molina.
In 1961, Clarke had made a film out of The Living Theatre’s performance of Jack Gelber’s play about junkies waiting for their dealer, The Connection. Their follow-up, The Brig (1963), an anti-authoritarian play written by a former US Marine, was turned into a film by Jonas Mekas, the godfather of the Filmmakers’ Cooperative to which Clarke also belonged. In The Connection, Clarke retained the play-within-a-play format that sees a director and producer trying to stage a production/make a documentary about junkies waiting for their dealer. Rivette loved the film, recognizing its self-reflective aspects from Pirandello, whose Tonight We Improvise the Living Theatre had also performed in 1959, and from Renoir’s Le Carrosse d’or, on which he had been an assistant. The cast of both film and play included four black jazz musicians (including the great Jackie McLean, a junkie in real life), who also play “live,” achieving the confusion between life and art, documentary and fiction that Beck/Molina and Clarke were both looking for. Quickly becoming an emblem of the countercultural theatre of the sixties, The Living Theatre was highly visible not only on European stages but in the European cinema as well. Garrel made a TV documentary, Les Chemins perdus (1966-67), about one of their sojourns in Paris. But it was in Italy that Beck and the Living most made their mark: Beck appeared as Tiresias in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) and performed with members of the group in Bertolucci’s segment of the post-May omnibus film, Love and Anger (1969). Both films share an interest in the political potential of myth, which in the case of Pasolini also took form in a mytho-anthropological project, the documentary, Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970), that was also central to The Living Theatre. Pasolini’s films show how the desire for re-mythologization was fitted to a fascination with primitivism and non-Western cultures, believed to be closer to the elementary patterns, the fundamental orders of human nature uncorrupted by civilization.
For The Living Theatre, revolutionary theatre should return to the ritualistic, festive and communal theatre of the Greeks. Following Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, which Marc’O saw in performance at Boulevard Raspailles in 1964, a show that reprised elements from The Brig as wordless movements and then inserted them into a series of rituals designed to free both performer and audience, an even more radical ritualistic approach was taken for the notorious improvisational audience-participation piece Paradise Now (1968). This “happening” played for four to five hours and prepared the way for that other New York scandal of the period, Dionysus in ’69 by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group. The storyline of the play involved rituals, visions, and actions, that allow the participants to move up an ideal ladder to paradise. The “liminal” nature of the play was accentuated by full body group nudity, onstage drug use, music, dancing and on and off-stage orgies, which were used to suggest a revolutionary, utopian environment of extatic collective creation. The play led to the “banishment” of the group from their New York theatre and the beginning of an exile that primarily saw them in France and Italy. Paradise Now was among the three pieces the Living Theatre was invited to perform at the Avignon Festival of 1968, but after the recent events (Beck and Malina had participated in the occupation of the Odéon theatre) and knowing about the incitement at the end of the play to take things out into the streets, Jean Vilar thought it best to have it replaced by another work, drawing the ire of the Enragés.
The Living Theatre’s Antigone (1967), performed “poor” fashion in street clothes and without a set in Malina’s translation of Brecht’s version of Hölderlin’s translation, brings out the anti-establishment aspect of Sophocles’ play about disobedience and defiance of paternal authority. The mastertext of Greek tragedy in this regard is Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, which enacts the central myth of Romanticism, the (artistic) rebellion against all mastery, against piety and obedience to convention. The play—one of the two Aeschylus plays seen in rehearsal in Out 1—was a favorite of the romantics, and particularly of Wagner and Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that just as Prometheus had been chained by the Gods, Western man had been enslaved by the Socratic/Platonist emphasis on reason and the unchanging world of eternal forms. Man had become alienated from the original energies of the world as found in and conveyed through pre-Socratic ritualistic tragedy, energies related not to stasis and eternity but to becoming, destruction, power and creation. Now that the “death of God” had ended the reign of Platonism, and a revaluation of all values (a new ethics, new politics, new way of living) was the order of the day, it was time to return to the “primitive” world of ecstatic openness and possibility. The ideas contained in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy influenced dramatists as diverse as Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind, Yeats, Shaw, O'Neill, Genet, and Ionesco, as well as modern writers like D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Wallace Stevens, and Albert Camus. They came to modern theatre directors like Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Richard Schechner, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Growtowski via Artaud.
Like Nietzsche, Artaud believed that the plague that threatened the collective body and psyche of Western man, could only be cured by homeopathic means, by a strengthening of nihilism through absolute destruction and subversion of European ideology. The Theatre of Cruelty, as proclaimed by Artaud, was a way to restore our lost sense of ritual and ceremony. It proposed to bind spectators together in a mass spectacle or ritual, trying to find “in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.” Artaud believed in the total and radical liberation of Total Man (“We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater”) through an artistic practice that is non-rational and rejects “the usual limitations of man and man’s powers, and infinitely extends the frontiers of what is called reality.” Like Artaud, fellow exiled Surrealist Georges Bataille tried to recuperate Nietzsche for a leftwing revolutionary project based on the revival of mythic thought, the only antidote, Bataille felt, against contemporary nihilism and socio-cultural fragmentation. It was time, he proclaimed in Nietzschian prophetic fashion, to abandon the civilized, the reasonable, the world of learning and work. In its stead he proposed freedom, rapture and fascination: the Dionysian. The most unusual of Bataille’s numerous experiments in communal Nietzschianism was Acéphale, which existed as a journal and as a “secret society,” Bataille’s alternative to the elective brotherhood of Surrealism. The initiatory rites and rituals of Acéphale were inspired by anthropology, by Marcel Mauss and by Frazer’s Golden Bough (one of the participants, Michel Leiris, another lapsed surrealist, had become an initiate in Dogon rituals as part of an ethnographic expedition that also included Rouch). It was in the context of Acéphale that the sociologist Roger Caillois would develop his own theory of play and “festival,” answering to the waning of sacred ritual in a modern civilization where, as Bataille had argued in pre-Debordian terms, its only traces could be found in warfare or in the ephemeral pleasures of “vacation.”
In The Empty Space, the writer and theatre director Peter Brook followed Artaud and Bataille when he qualified the modern theatre as a “religion without religion.” He called it the Holy Theatre:
I am calling it the Holy Theatre for short, but it could be called The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible: the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts. We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes.
But Out 1 is a post-May film
Brooks’s definition resonates in Rivette’s characterisation of the films he wants to emulate in an interview from April 1973 with the Marxist La Nouvelle Critique, the films of Jancsó, Straub-Huillet, Garrel:
These are films that tend towards the ritual, towards the ceremonial, the oratorio, the theatrical, the magical, not in the mystical so much as the more devotional sense of the word as in the celebration of Mass. Technique and Rite, as Jancso has it, is a good definition. These words should be explored to try to see what lies behind them: rite or ceremony or monumental.
Rivette’s meaning should be taken in the context of Grotowski’s view of the theatre as a means for self-study, for self-exploration, in which the actor needs to call on every aspect of himself and must open himself up to disclose his own deepest secrets. Primary attention should be given to physical actions and organic rhythms, as in pre-Socratic Greek tragedy, the ritual aspects of which have been lost through their reduction to classic texts. The total purification of the theatre that Artaud envisioned, which like the plague can only be resolved by death or cure, must occur through putting an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text. The event itself, in all its material manifestation, must stand in the place of a text and must be addressed to the senses instead of the mind. Out 1, in which we see two companies rehearsing stagings of two Aeschylus plays, the “rebellion” play, Prometheus Bound (staged by the group of Thomas, played by Michael Lonsdale, an actor of whom Rivette’s took notice after seeing him in Destroy, She Said and in the films of Marcel Hanoun), and Seven Against Thebes, according to the “thaumaturgic” methods of Grotowski, Brook, Beck and Malina or Marc’O. In the most radical part of the film, a 40-minute-plus psychophysical exercise in which the actors in the Prometheus group are seen writhing on the floor in ecstatic abandon, encircling a totemic mannequin which they fondle and adulate, Rivette comes close to the Dionysian energies unleashed in Paradise Now.
But Out 1 is a post-May film. Although the film was intended as a divertissement, a game with the elements of the Feuillade serial and its literary ancestors, the paranoia that is the theme of one such sources, Balzac’s History of the Thirteen, quickly took over. Like many of Balzac’s stories, this one about a secret group of preternaturally powerful men, is set during the final days of Empire, during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, a period when underground Bonapartist, Republican or anarchist revolt was strong and revolution was kept to a boil. Another story of the paranoid aftermath of the Revolution, A Murky Business, set during the first Napoleonic Wars of the years 1803-1806, when both disgruntled Republicans and resentful Aristocrats were engaged in conspiracies, had made Rivette a convinced member of the Balzac club established at Cahiers by Truffaut and Rohmer (the latter appears in Out 1 as a pedantic Balzac scholar elucidating the finer points of the story of the Thirteen). The connection forged by Balzac between Revolution and conspiracy, between history and fiction, inspired Rivette at a moment when de Gaulle and Pompidou were looking back on the May events as a cabal of leftist groups aided by the Communist party, and more crackpot conspiracy theorists believed May had been radio-guided by Eastern Germany. Rivette also drew inspiration from Robert Kramer’s Ice, a docufiction hybrid made by the leader of the radical-left Newsreel group, about an underground revolutionary group carrying out guerilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Rivette then created a rapprochement between the general atmosphere of political paranoia, the fear of either a fascist or communist take-over in France, and his discovery, during the filming of L’Amour fou, that “a film crew is a conspiracy, completely closed in upon itself.” As it turns out (spoiler!), the Thirteen in the film are both the product of paranoid fantasy and disappointingly real: most of these former revolutionaries have by now embraced a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. The theatre groups torn apart by paranoia in Out 1 also expresses Rivette’s doubts about the ideal of collective work. Whereas in the 1968 interview he still gave full credence to the ideal of completely collaborative work, by ’73 he sees that the process has become a myth:
The myth in this sort of film-making is of a creative collectivity in which everything is happy and spontaneous and everybody 'participates'. I don't think this is true. Quite the contrary, the atmosphere is usually relatively tense, because nobody knows where they are, everyone is exhausted, filmmaker, actors and technicians are all in a muddle. Nobody really knows what is going on.
Rivette had been hardened by the experience on Out 1, in which many of the actors had reacted negatively to the total freedom of their unscripted parts, and had failed to produce anything they felt of any value in the recorded sessions of complete improvisation (Ogier, in particular, often looks completely lost). The Gaullist restoration of authority that put an abrupt end to the revolutionary utopianism is thematized in Rivette by the inevitable tendency for any type of utopian system to self-destruct. The complete exhaustion after the shoot is captured in a moment of madness straight out of L’Amour fou: Thomas (Lonsdale) sobbing on the beach of Normandy at the end of the film. Léaud, who in the film plays a character who falls prey to paranoid interpretative delirium, pushed himself to the verge of an actual nervous breakdown. Madness was intended as a theme in the film, fed into by the story points taken from The History of the Thirteen and from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, but then madness in the Nietzschian sense, a liberatory madness, the madness of Lewis Carroll’s proto-surrealist The Hunting of the Snark. Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), which historized the scientific norms behind medical inquiry to problematize the conventions of the normal and pathological, had rekindled the love affair of avant-gardist intellectuals with the mentally disturbed, as is shown in the sixties cult of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Sade, Lautréamont, Poe, Artaud, Van Gogh, and their exegetes, Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski. In Destroy, She Said, Alissa is a character who is mad; she is also the one who destroys and brings on madness. The madwoman or madman, for Duras in ’69, is a “person whose essential prejudice has been destroyed: the limits of the self.” “Is there not a risk,” then, “of going under within this moment, that is, of going under in such a way as to be entirely swallowed up?” Rivette asked during his interview with Duras.
Rivette had first-hand experience with people “going under.” In the fallout of May, following personal and political disappointment, Garrel, a filmmaker to whom he was close, was arrested for drug possession during the production of La Cicatrice intérieure (1972) and hospitalized in Italy where he was subjected to electroshock therapy. Garrel would bounce back with Les Hautes solitudes (1974), a silent, black and white portrait of the actress Jean Seberg, the star of Breathless, now a depressive, alcoholic and drug addict; she committed suicide by overdose of barbiturates in 1979. The star of La Cicatrice intérieure, the German model and singer Nico, with whom Garrel had a turbulent and destructive relationship, was another heroin addict (she died a few years later, not from a drug overdose but from a cerebral hemorrhage after falling from her bike while vacationing on Ibiza). Gilles Deleuze, one of the gurus of the antipsychiatric movement, later regretted his politicization of mental illness, given that so many in his generation succumbed to depression, madness, alcoholism and drugs. Deleuze, a lifelong sufferer of respiratory ailments, killed himself by jumping out of a window in 1995. The year before, another figurehead of the May Revolution, Debord, an alcoholic and depressive suffering from neuritis, had preceded him in taking his own life. Althusser, the maître à penser of the Maoists, suffered from bipolar disorder and spent half his life in hospitals and psychiatric clinics. In 1980 he strangled and killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann, during a momentary lapse of reason.
In 1976, during the taxing production of an ambitious quartet of films, exercises in different genres written together with Edouardo de Gregorio and with Suzanne Schiffmann, which he was meant to make back-to-back, Rivette suffered his own mental breakdown, one that disabled him for the rest of the decade. (His return to cinema with Merry-Go-Round in 1981 was a dismal failure; the film starred two icons/washouts of the counterculture, former Warhol “star” Joe Dallessandro, and Maria Schneider, another actress with mental and drug problems). The title of the series, conceived as another experiment in open-endedness in that the films were supposed to “metamorphosize” through their interplay, was Daughters of Fire, referring to the eponymous collection by the Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval. The collection, consisting of short prose works, poetry and a play, was published a year before Nerval’s death in 1854 as an attempt to prove to the public that he was still sane. In 1853 the poet had suffered three nervous breakdowns and spent five months in an asylum. After the publication of Daughters of Fire, he committed suicide by hanging himsel from the bar of a cellar window in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. Nerval was hailed as a visionary by Baudelaire and compared to Balzac, in whom the poet of The Flowers of Evil recognized a fellow Swedenborgian mystic (the reason, maybe, why Rivette later renamed his series, Scenes of Parallel Life, a transformation of Balzac’s Scènes de la vie Parisienne/de province/de campagne/privée). Nerval’s title referred to the primitive Celtic myths and deities that are key to Duelle and Noroît, inspired by the confrontation of Sun and Moon Goddesses over the forty days of Carnival. Although the result is often close to the queer-camp aesthetic Rivette had celebrated in the films of the British experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin, or to Cocteau, a direct source for Noroît, they were also meant as horror films (as, in a way, Dwoskin’s films are).
For me, the most powerful pleasure in cinema is connected with terror and anguish. For some years now I have been re-fascinated by horror films. And in Out this was something I hadn't planned at all at the outset. Initially we thought it was going to be very jolly, and we started out with the actors by criticizing L’Amour fou for its element of anguish, of psychodrama—psychosis, even—saying well, it won't be like that this time but just a jolly game with serial-type fiction; but very soon an element of anguish crept into the film (rather than the actual shooting). So even in a film where anguish hadn't been planned, it reappeared, to such an extent that my editors said to me: “Now you should really make a horror film...
My point is that these moments of (fascination with) madness and abandon occur at historical moments of conflict and tension: whether it’s Nerval and Balzac’s “visionary” tales following on the heels of the Directory, the July Revolution or the coup d’état of 1851, or Out 1 coming after May. In an interview with Serge Daney and Jean Narboni at the occasion of his real return to form with Le Pont du Nord (1981), Rivette said that his retreat into the fantasy worlds of the Filles du feu series was the result of the electoral victory of right-liberal Giscard d’Estaing over Mittérand in 1974. Daney and Narboni detected a similar “withdrawal” in the other members of the nouvelle vague: Godard withdrawing to a studio in Switzerland with Anne-Marie Miéville, Rohmer making historical films in Germany:
I’m telling you, it was Giscard!... I think that, without exaggerating anything, by the end of ’74 there was a very strong feeling, that all of us more or less experienced, of a collective vacuum, and the desire to try to remake ourselves, to close ourselves off from ourselves and those who were close to us.
In her own series of Giscardian films, Woman of the Ganges (1974), India Song (1975), Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976), Duras also “withdrew” to an oneiric universe, a retro world of ghostly atmosphere of floating bodies and faces, an exotic world set in colonial India, in Calcutta, Lahore, Laos, but shot in mansions around Paris, in Nauphle-le-Château, on the beach of Trouville-sur-Mer and in the Hôtel des Roches Noires, places where Duras lived. Her “return” with Le Camion (1977) would precede that of all the others. It is the film in which she finally felt completely free of the guilt that had followed her break with communism. It is a film about madness, but in which madness is a different kind of sign of political engagement: it shows that this world—a world in which there was a Holocaust, a world contained in the desolate industrial landscape in the Yvelines region, a migrant region peopled primarily by Portuguese, who live in depressing apartment buildings—can no longer be tolerated. Let it come to its end, is the film’s forceful political slogan. When Godard made his “return” to feature filmmaking with Every Man for Himself (1980), it is under the sign of Duras’s apocalyptic nihilism. In the film, Paul (Jacques Dutronc), a clear stand-in for Godard shows his students Le Camion and tells them to think of a woman’s words every time they hear a lorry (this frequently happens in a film in which violence against women, who are treated as consumer products, is a frequent occurrence). When his estranged wife Denise (Nathalie Baye) plays back the soundtrack of the film, it is the part where Duras says, “Elle dit: la fin du monde,” that is isolated and rewound. In a conversation with her collaborator Michèle Porte that accompanied the publication of the screenplay of Le Camion, Duras sounded a note of absolute hopelessness that is nonetheless full of life, vigor and fortitude:
It is no longer worth it to make the cinema of the socialist hope. The capitalist hope. No longer worth it to make one about a justice to come, social, fiscal, or other. One of work. Of merit. Of women. Young people. Portuguese. Malinese. Intellectuals. Senegalese. No longer worth it to make a cinema of fear. Of the revolution. Of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of freedom. Of your scarecrows. Of love. No longer worth it to make your cinema. No longer worth it, we should make cinema about this awareness: no longer worth it. May the cinema go to waste, that’s the only cinema. May the world go to waste, that’s the only politics.
This piece was first published in the Zomerfilmcollege 2021 catalog.
Tom Paulus teaches film history and film aesthetics at the University of Antwerp. He is co-founder of the research group Visual Poetics and of the online journal photogénie, and co-curator of the yearly Zomerfilmcollege (Summer Film College), a week-long program of films and lectures by filmmakers, critics and academics. His edited collection Slapstick Comedy (with Rob King) has been published by Routledge in the AFI Film Readers Series.
