Nationalism and the Cinema in France

Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995

Hugo Frey

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782383666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation's sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the 'political myth' and 'the film event' are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, François Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.

CHAPTER ONE

The Cinema of Self-promotion

Patriotic Subtexts in ‘Films about Films’

This chapter provides a new analysis of selected major works of French cinema that focus on the process of filmmaking itself. The opening pages describe the mythic content and reception of François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (1973). It is a work that exemplifies how the cinema can be plainly international in intention and format but also function to contribute to the circulation of implied nationalist values or myths. This work is then compared with the films and film events dating from the Centenary of Cinema, which was celebrated in 1995. The working hypothesis of the chapter is that modernist meta-film is a significant vector for asserting nationalistic-sounding value judgements, albeit quite gently and with high levels of sophistication and euphemism.

Patriotism in the International World of the Cinema: La Nuit américaine

For readers unfamiliar with the plot, Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine recounts the making of the melodrama, Je vous présente Paméla. Though seemingly quite convoluted, the basic structure of Truffaut’s script is relatively straightforward to summarize. Leading man Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is in love with script girl Liliane (Dani); however, she prefers English stuntman Mark Spencer (Mark Boyle). Emotionally unstable Hollywood star of the film Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) pities him and he instantly falls in love with her, telephoning her husband to tell him the good news that he is soon to divorce. Just when that mess is seemingly resolved, veteran actor Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) dies in a car accident. Despite these trials and tribulations, the director, Ferrand (played by Truffaut), and his assistants, script girl Joëlle (Nathalie Baye) and props specialist Bernard (Bernard Menez), successfully complete Paméla. It is a bittersweet ending but as the professionals depart from the set they know they have finished the work: a new piece of cinema is born.

La Nuit américaine is a transnational work aimed at French and North American film markets. Warner Brothers, London, produced it and its cast includes international stars with careers in Hollywood and Europe. References to American cinema proliferate. Truffaut noted that besides admiring Le Schpountz (Pagnol, 1938), he appreciated Vincent Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Stanley Donen’s Singing in the Rain (1952).¹ The film is dedicated to Lillian Gish and it also cites work from Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh.² Aumont was cast because he had the ‘perfume of Hollywood’ about him.³ Furthermore, when discussing how to market the film, Truffaut emphasized its clever title. He suggested that the best way to sell his picture was as an encounter between France and the U.S.A., a ‘nuit d’amour franco-hollywoodienne, entre Léaud et Bisset’.⁴ That was a far more commercial reading of the film’s title than explaining the technical filmmaking term, nuit américaine, that is used to describe shooting film ‘day for night’.

In their private correspondence Jean Renoir told Truffaut how he was greatly looking forward to this picture. After watching it, he praised him for learning English, explaining: ‘Nowadays, one can fly from Paris to Los Angeles in about ten hours. Our audience is international and we are working for the audience.’⁵ La Nuit américaine captures precisely the international mood to which Renoir referred. Following its release at Cannes it was widely distributed and dubbed into English to maximize audience revenue in the U.S.A.⁶ When it was shown there Truffaut toured to promote it, attending screenings at the New York film festival where it was a huge success, grossing more than all of Truffaut’s combined previous sales there.⁷ The American success of the work was not over and when the moment came Truffaut was delighted to be awarded an Oscar for the work. At the same ceremony at which the veteran Cinémathèque director Henri Langlois also won a special award, Truffaut purred in gratitude to his hosts: ‘I am very happy because La Nuit américaine speaks about people from the cinema like you, it’s your award. But if it’s ok with you I will keep it for you.’⁸ In Paris, film trade magazine Le Film français greeted the news with pride. Following Luis Buñuel’s success the previous year with Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) the victory was further great news. Editor Robert Chazal wrote that the triumph meant that from then on Truffaut would be able to make films with complete freedom from producers. Truffaut and Buñuel were successful because their subjects were universal themes (bourgeoisie, the cinema) that were unrestricted by a national context. Chazal highlighted further that the strategy the French should learn was to tackle universal subjects but through the original French style.⁹

However, the work and its reception history are quite complex. It seems to me that there is sufficient evidence to regard Truffaut’s film as being as patriotic as it is cosmopolitan. In fact, it was Truffaut himself who explained this duality in the preface to the published script where he writes, ‘I wanted to make a French film, exclusively so, but even so I wanted one to strongly sense the presence of Hollywood’.¹⁰ Alongside all the universal, Hollywood-related themes, throughout La Nuit américaine Truffaut made a series of nuanced nationalistic assertions.

Let us turn first to content and a narrative analysis of nationalist political myth. The script hints at the patriotic subtext that was a part of the work. Let us review in close detail: it is the case that all of the threats to the making of Paméla come from non-French people. It is English stuntman Mark Spencer who steals Liliane from French film star Alphonse. It is English Hollywood star Julie Baker who is described as being psychologically unstable and who sleeps with Alphonse. She goes to his room and is the predatory protagonist at the beginning of the evening. It is the American film producers who demand Paméla be completed quickly. In a further short scene Ferrand (Truffaut) complains that all that is on in the cinema in Nice is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Other foreigners intrude too, notably, when a funny German film producer pesters Ferrand to make more politically informed works, or erotica. One can continue: Alexandre dies in the car accident after picking up his non-French friend from the airport; the insurance agents who are sent to adjudicate on financing the movie arrive from London, the novelist Graham Greene featuring in a cameo role. Ferrand, Joëlle and Bernard work against all these foreign threats to complete their film. The only sexual liaison on set that does not cause chaos is between Joëlle and Bernard, who quickly make love with each other just off the roadside. The perils ranged against Paméla are all non-French, or to be precise, are caused when French and non-French people come into collaborative, and romantic, contact with each other. One might conclude that through light comedy Truffaut is sketching out the political myth of clash of civilizations, between the French and the non-French. These encounters conclude happily, although they are complicated and stressful and provide the mythopeic force, or narrative core, for the development of the work.

In his public statements about the work, Truffaut emphasized that La Nuit américaine and the fictional Paméla were similar: they are both about identity and paternity.¹¹ And, from what we know of Ferrand’s film, Paméla, the same implied nationalism is evident. Paméla is an English girl whose marriage and love affair with a French father and son bring tragedy. She is the foreigner from Yorkshire who destroys the French family. This is a plot line that inverts Simone Signoret’s casting as a femme fatale in the Yorkshire-set Room at the Top (Clayton, 1958) where the French actress is used to signify exotic danger. And, to digress, coincidentally, twenty years later Louis Malle’s Damage (1993) unintentionally remade Paméla. Malle’s little-appreciated love triangle changed round the nationalities that featured in Paméla. In Damage (again, following Room at the Top) it is the French vamp (Juliette Binoche), working for Sotheby’s in South Kensington, London, who destroys the British upper-middle-class family by seducing son and then father (Jeremy Irons).¹²

If one explores further, there is an anti-American subtext to other Truffaut films of this period. For instance, in Domicile conjugal (1970) Truffaut wittily satirizes American corporate life (see further on this in chapter 4). Similarly, La Peau douce (1964) includes two symbolically significant scenes that are comparable to the ideology of La Nuit américaine. Therein the air hostess Nicole (Françoise Dorléac) makes fun of an American traveller who has been so frightened of turbulence that he makes himself sick from the whiskey he drinks to steady his nerves. Secondly, her lover, Pierre (Jean Desailly), is disappointed when she sports blue jeans and so she changes quickly into a skirt to please him. Une belle fille comme moi (1972) provides further amusing material. Therein Truffaut mocks an Americanophile Frenchman who is unable to make love without listening to the engines of the Indy 500 car race.

On several different occasions in his career Truffaut had expressed his own reservations about working in cooperation with Anglo-American cinema. Let us recall that he found filming Fahrenheit 451 in London taxing (1966), and his diaries from that time were published together with the script of La Nuit américaine. When in 1963 he contemplated directing Bonnie and Clyde he planned on casting the Canadian French speaker Alexandra Stewart to assist him.¹³ Jacqueline Bisset who he used for La Nuit américaine was an actress who was fluent in French. Despite the title, no significant U.S. actors were employed on La Nuit américaine.

Truffaut’s treatment of his alter ego, Ferrand, suggests a kind and caring man, the father of the film, whose love of cinema could not be any greater. He is portrayed taking everyone forward together to achieve a successful picture. He is able to calm his anxious, romantic and chaotic stars. Against the odds, he completes the work on time, adding the aesthetically pleasing touch of the critical final scenes for Paméla being shot in fake wintery snow. The film offers a catalogue of examples of Ferrand’s/Truffaut’s creative brilliance. The director is shown to be ingenious, quick-thinking and artful. La Nuit américaine added to his international reputation as a French filmmaker of the highest rank, a status that for many people also signified French grandeur. Jean-Michel Frodon was right to call the film a publicity spot for Truffaut.¹⁴ It is also the transformation of film director into something akin to a national hero.

Truffaut quotes freely from well-known works of French cinema throughout the film. For instance, according to Truffaut, his film was made in the tradition of Prévert. Also looking back to the 1930s, it is a part reworking of Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939), and there are citations too from Truffaut’s own La Peau douce.¹⁵ Characters in the film are named Chagrin and Pitié, after the banned television documentary about Clermont-Ferrand under Nazi rule. Reference is made as well to the long-forgotten Georges Simenon adaptation about a country under foreign occupation, La Neige était sale (Saslavsky, 1954). The tragic car accident theme echoes the real-life death of Françoise Dorléac. This intertextual material all referring to French film history gives audiences the chance to engage with the work on a level deeper than that of its comedy plot. The references establish a link too between the artist and the domestic audience, creating a shared set of knowledge that belongs to the national community who are able to read the references and decode them correctly. The effect underlines the impression that Truffaut is the master artist, a figure representative of French art at home and abroad. The inference generated is that he is a cinephile in complete command of his métier.

Using conventional measures of state power (demography, economy, military security, imperial stretch) the French twentieth century is one of relative decline. As Paul Kennedy illustrated in his famous work, its relative ranking as a great power was year on year being curtailed.¹⁶ Outward forms of conventional power had been lost in the trenches of the First World War. Full control of the geographical territory without external influence was obliterated with Nazi occupation in 1940 and Indochina and Algeria fell within twenty-five years. In place of conventional measures of national power, patriots, politicians, diplomats, artists, intellectuals, including filmmakers, turned to culture and the arts to imagine that their nation’s grandeur continued unaltered. Literature, philosophy, ideas, was the ground where national pride could be constructed. H. Stuart Hughes explains:

[A]s the French withdrew from foreign commitments to the cultivation of their own garden, the nation’s sense of cultural primacy became, if anything, still more pronounced. For an assertion of the artistic or philosophical pre-eminence served as psychic compensation for the relinquishment of an active international role. … Paris might have lost its position as the hub of international doings, but it still ranked as the cultural capital of the West.¹⁷

In a small, and localized, way La Nuit américaine contributed to this same process, providing compensation for decline by demonstrating the skills of its leading cineaste.

Certainly, the style of filmmaking depicted in La Nuit américaine is biased towards commemorating French practice. The picture lovingly praises how a small group of people working together can complete a film. That ...