Gesture in French Post-New Wave Cinema

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Marion Schmid whose experience and expertise was essential when I first undertook this research project as a PhD thesis in 2015 at the University of Edinburgh. Her support, advice and feedback, along with her capacity for patience in listening to my ideas proved extremely helpful. I am also grateful to her for introducing me to Chantal Akerman’s cinema and including me in the interdisciplinary research network ‘Film and the Other Arts’. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the network, especially Professor Hugues Azérad, who has always been very supportive of my project.

I also want to thank Dr Daniel Yacavone and Dr David Sorfa. Their theoretical rigour and thought-provoking questions on my topic helped me improve the quality of my arguments. I am also indebted to Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce for his detailed feedback on my second chapter, as well as Professor Martine Beugnet and Dr Claire Boyle for their enlightening remarks and insights on my thesis. Moreover, I am grateful to Professor Ágnes Pethő for offering me the opportunity to publish parts of Chapter 3 in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film & Media Studies in an article entitled ‘Gestural Intermediality in Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen (1983)’ (2018).

All my gratitude goes to Elly Grayson, Dr Paul Leworthy and Annie Rutherford, who offered their time to proofread the chapters of my book. I would like to address a special thought to Elly whose constant support gave me a lot of energy to finish this work with enthusiasm. Last but not least, I would like to dedicate my book to my parents Helena and Olivier. Without their love and support, this book would not exist.

Introduction

After the Second World War, in the wake of André Bazin’s influential ideas, a young generation of French critics and aspirant directors such as François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette strongly condemned the conventions of the established cinema of qualité française.¹ They attacked its stilted codes of representation and obsolete theatrical and literary traditions, including the conventionalism of the actors’ poses, attitudes and gesticulations.² In reaction against this outdated classicism, the generation of the New Wave praised French auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati, who were able to reveal remarkable stylistic potentialities of the body in the mise-en-scène of their films. Influenced at once by American cinema, in which the characters’ behaviours lead the mise-en-scène, and Italian neorealism, that stresses the presence of the body in its interaction with the physical reality of the world, the New Wave authors were seeking truth in their actors’ body language. From their first short films onwards, they were preoccupied with inventing singular ways of filming and performing gestures.³ At the end of the 1950s, the New Wave authors created a physical cinema in which gestures became the sensitive expression of their modernist aesthetics. While refashioning Hollywood genres, such as the codes of film noir in Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and of musicals in Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherboug (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), they also invented a modern theatricality, weaving references to Brechtian aesthetics, art history and literature – more specifically the Nouveau Roman – notably in Agnès Varda’s pioneering first long feature La Pointe Courte (1955), Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) and Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961, written by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet).

The New Wave revealed ‘the new bodies of young actors’⁴ like Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau and Anna Karina, who found a fertile ground for their expressivity in the city. In order to capture the gestures of everyday life, New Wave filmmakers developed modern acting styles in urban spaces – such as the Parisian streets in Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962) or the city of Nantes in Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961) – viewed as places of social interaction, chance, agency and continuously renewed possibilities. In this dynamic environment, attitudes and gestures could drive the narrative without necessarily resulting from the logical succession of action and plot that usually structures classical screenplays.⁵ As if echoing Diderot who, in the eighteenth century, encouraged painters to go out of their studio in order to observe movement from life,⁶ New Wave authors also left the studio to shoot on location and film the characters in their wanderings, encounters and interactions with the real. By filming the everyday world and gestures in a stylised way, the New Wave forged the audience’s imagination to the point of becoming a myth, with a long-lasting influence.⁷ At its peak between the late 1950s and early 1960s, and starting to decline in 1962,⁸ the New Wave was an ephemeral movement.⁹

In contrast to the abundant literature devoted to the New Wave, scholarship about the post-New Wave has been more sporadic. Critics and scholars usually use two main approaches to outline the developments of the New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s. Either the term post-New Wave is used to name the generation of filmmakers who followed the New Wave from the mid-1960s onwards. Or the post-New Wave is regarded as essentially rooted in the sociocultural context of post-May 1968. On the one hand, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Mary and Jean-Michel Frodon opt for the genealogical approach. The terms post-New Wave (‘après-nouvelle vague’)¹⁰ or, less frequently, new New Wave (‘nouvelle Nouvelle vague’)¹¹ point to the emergence of new authors, considered as the ‘heirs’ of Truffaut and Godard, including Philippe Garrel, Jacques Doillon, Jean Eustache, André Téchiné, Maurice Pialat and lesser-known directors such as Pierre Zucca.

On the other hand, some scholars consider the political and sociocultural events of May 1968 in France as the dividing line between the New Wave and the post-New Wave. Although Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Resnais and other artists and intellectuals came together in February 1968 to defend Henri Langlois – the co-founder of the Cinémathèque française – after his dismissal by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the political events of 1968 ultimately accentuated the process of fragmentation of the group. According to Ginette Vincendeau, ‘May ’68 introduced a break with New Wave issues and concerns, with the rise of the political agenda.’¹² The rupture within the original group of the Cahiers du cinéma manifested symbolically through the falling-out between its two major figures, Truffaut and Godard.¹³ More precisely, the sociocultural, ideological and political context of May 1968 fundamentally influenced the aesthetics of the post-New Wave. According to Jill Forbes,

[t]‌he ‘post-nouvelle vague’ is also the period after May 1968 and it would be difficult to overstate the impact of this great social and cultural caesura on the cinema. May 1968 forced filmmakers to confront the influence of mass communications and to ask questions about the ‘truth’ and the ‘reality’ of the image. It presented filmmakers with the challenge of television and made them consider the politics of representation. It introduced new social actors to the screen and to film making, it called for the reinterpretation of history and, in exposing the problematical absence of the ‘people’ which in Marxist literature had long been unquestioningly assumed to exist, it forced all those working in the culture industries, but especially in the cinema, to reconsider the nature of this par excellence ‘popular’ art.¹⁴

Framed in the context of post-May 1968, the post-New Wave encompasses not only the pioneering auteurs of women’s cinema like Nelly Kaplan and members of the Zanzibar Group (1968–70) such as Serge Bard, Garrel and Jackie Raynal, but also more established filmmakers like Rivette and Godard who radicalised their methods of filmmaking in the wake of May 1968, in continuation or rupture with their earlier films. According to Forbes, the label of French post-New Wave also includes a category of transnational filmmakers ‘who position themselves in relation to French cinema’, such as the Belgian Chantal Akerman, the Swiss Alain Tanner, the French couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet who made films mainly in Germany or the Franco-Chilean director Raoul Ruiz.¹⁵

However, instead of highlighting May 1968 as the boundary between the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, Forbes suggests considering the post-New Wave in its continuity with the New Wave: ‘the post-1968 French cinema’ (which Forbes uses as synonym for ‘post-nouvelle vague’), without overtly mourning the end of the New Wave nor denying its legacy, ‘built on its achievements’.¹⁶ Post-New Wave filmmakers continued to explore the representation of the body, stylise gestures of everyday life and shoot on location. Albeit in different ways, filmmakers of both eras also tackled political issues. During the New Wave, Godard and the Left Bank filmmakers Resnais, Chris Marker and Varda were preoccupied with urban change, the emancipation of youth, the Algerian war, the politics of memory, the critique of consumer society, social conditioning and, more exceptionally in Varda’s cinema – the only woman in a predominantly masculine milieu¹⁷ –, the emergence of the female gaze. Radicalising the cinematic exploration of similar political concerns in the ideological and sociocultural context of post-May 1968, some post-New Wave authors not only sought to make films about political matters, but also attempted to find ways of producing and shooting films politically: ‘The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically,’¹⁸ argued Godard, by now working with the Dziga Vertov Group.

In the post-May 1968 era, many directors preoccupied with politics reflected on the necessity of reorganising the film crew as a political community, developed self-reflexive and metacinematic strategies to unveil the political nature of representation and reconsidered their relationship with their actors. The practice of filmmaking became a collaborative process engaging a community of artists and technicians, rather than promoting the author’s individuality within the market-oriented system.¹⁹ Consequently, ‘both a political and aesthetic self-consciousness’²⁰ lies at the core of films such as Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, see Chapter 2), Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno’s Anatomie d’un rapport (Anatomy of a Relationship, 1976) and Godard’s political works made with the Dziga Vertov Group. From 1967 to 1974, Marker initiated the Medvedkin groups in Sochaux and Besançon, which gathered workers and film technicians who made militant films together and expressed their voices collaboratively. From the mid-1970s onwards, Alain Cavalier also decided to rethink the means of production and the conditions of filmmaking of his cinema. For example, he wrote the screenplay of the road-movie Le Plein de super (Fill’er Up with Super, 1976) in close collaboration with the actors and shot the film with a reduced crew and a small camera, avoiding the constraints of conventional shootings. Like Rivette, Cavalier aims to stimulate the agency of his actors, who thus become responsible for the narrative and get involved in the mise-en-scène.

As Vincendeau explains, ‘[…] trends in literary theory (Roland Barthes) and philosophy (Michel Foucault) were dealing severe blows to the notion of the auteur.’²¹ At that time, it is notable that the dogmatic vision of the politique des auteurs was even questioned and redefined in the Cahiers du cinéma.²² Yet, Forbes argues that ‘[t]‌he auteur film continued to be a distinctive category within the French cinema and this was a trend which, if anything, was exaggerated after 1968’.²³ Although the crisis of authorship impacted on the cinematic practice of many post-New Wave filmmakers, such a crisis was also strategically staged by some of them in their films, in order to reflect on their marginal position in the film market and reaffirm their authority as artists. As I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, self-representation enables directors such as Akerman and Godard to critically reflect on their practice of filmmaking and on their condition as authors working at the margins.

Permeated as they are by the ideological, sociocultural, artistic and intellectual context of their time, post-New Wave films were made in a period of French history marked by the political and economic decline of the Trente Glorieuses, a term coined by French economist Jean Fourastié which refers to the economic prosperity of French society between 1946 and 1975.²⁴ As Kristin Ross explains, French society drastically changed in the years and decades following the application of the Marshall Plan, piloted by the United States after the Second World War in order to fund the economic reconstruction of European countries.²⁵ Influenced by Henry Ford’s systems of mass production and mass consumption, state policies favoured the massive development of capitalism through the accelerated modernisation of industries.²⁶ This fast-growing modernisation introduced new everyday gestures in French society, as Tati’s films reveal in an acute way.²⁷ From the postman of Jour de Fête (The Big Day, 1949) who tries to apply rationalised methods of mail delivery to Monsieur Hulot in Playtime (1967) who wanders in an ultramodernist setting, Tati provides a playful and critical depiction of the impact of Fordism on the everyday gestures of French people. As Ross writes, ‘[Tati’s films] make palpable a daily life that increasingly appeared to unfold in a space where objects tended to dictate to people their gestures and movements – and that for the most part had to be learned from watching American films.’²⁸

In response to these rapid developments, new preoccupations with the anthropology of everyday life emerged in post-war French thought.²⁹ Analysing the impact of capitalism on French modern society, Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre pioneered the study of everyday life in academia.³⁰ In addition, novelists such as Simone de Beauvoir or Georges Perec, as well as filmmakers like Tati depicted and criticised the alienating structures propagated by mass consumerism.³¹ Such a criticism took a political turn during the events of May 1968, considered by Ross as ‘a protest against Fordist hierarchies of the factories and the exaggerated statism that had controlled French modernization’.³² Bringing out the dissatisfaction of a large part of the French population towards the increasing role of capitalism in the conditioning of everyday life, May 1968 ‘marked the political end of that accelerated transition into Fordism’, Ross explains.³³ Ultimately, the 1973 oil crisis foreshadowed the end of the triumphant economic success of the Trente Glorieuses.³⁴

Made in the aftermath of May 1968, the utopian film L’An 01 (The Year 01, Jacques Doillon, 1973) celebrates the end of market economy, mass production and mass consumption. In this emblematic film of the post-New Wave, society refuses collectively to comply with the principles of capitalist society and aspires to think about alternative ways of life. Released the same year, Claude Faraldo’s satire Themroc (1973) also expresses the rejection of capitalism and authority through the subversive gestures of a working-class antihero (Michel Piccoli) who disrupts social rules. Both films reveal the extent to which the questioning of alienation, conditioning and high productivity became more radical in French culture after May 1968. While Beauvoir, Perec and Tati critically examined the transformation of society and the emergence of new behaviours in the 1960s, post-New Wave films often focused on the crisis of everyday gestures. According to film critic Gérard Lenne, this crisis, which is anticipated by Pierrot’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo) self-destructive gesture at the end of Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), corresponds to a more general crisis in French film after 1968, especially after the end of the New Wave.³⁵

In French cinema made directly after the New Wave, normative, codified and pre-programmed behaviours are disrupted by unpredictable nervous gestures that contradict the imperatives of efficiency and standardisation promoted during the Trente Glorieuses. Made after the watershed of May 1968, the films that I analyse in the five chapters of this book offer a particularly pertinent exploration of the crisis of the characters’ ritualised, customary and everyday gestures. In Un homme qui dort (The Man Who Sleeps, 1974), Perec and Bernard Queysanne convey the feeling of anxiety aroused by the mechanisation and automation of gestures in the private sphere of the main character’s everyday life. In Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town, 1968), Jeanne Dielman and L’Homme à la valise (The Man With the Suitcase, 1983), Akerman questions the pressure of gender norms on the female characters’ gestures by filming the progressive malfunction of their daily routines. Within this French corpus, Belgian-born director Akerman occupies a singular position, due to the transnational dimension of her work. Associated with major French post-New Wave directors such as Jean Eustache and Garrel, but also with American avant-garde cinema of the 1970s, Akerman crossed geographical and artistic borders throughout her career.³⁶ In Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983), Godard depicts a fragmented and chaotic world in which human gesture appears as a means of reconnecting the scattered elements of the film. In Roberte (1979), made in collaboration with writer and artist Pierre Klossowski, Zucca shows how codified gestures are disrupted by the impulsive expression of the characters’ and performers’ nervous gestures, to the point of disorienting the spectator’s interpretation. In Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s television series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977–8), the directors focus on the social and ideological codification of two children’s everyday gestures. By referring to the late nineteenth-century technique of chronophotography, they attempt to reveal how gestures can express margins of resistance to social conditioning. In Josée Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel’s Le Moindre Geste (1971) and Renaud Victor’s Ce Gamin, là (1976), made at the instigation of Fernand Deligny’s ideas, two types of gestures are interwoven: on the one hand, the wandering gestures of neurodiverse children and teenagers and, on the other hand, the customary gestures of workers who reiterate the same gestures everyday. Finally, in Out 1 (1971), made in the context of post-May 1968, Rivette experiments with improvisation and explores radical modes of performance, which not only force the actors to invent their own gestures, but also show their difficulties and failures in doing so.

Although the post-New Wave turns out to be indebted to the gestural innovations of the New Wave, the films under discussion develop a contrasting approach to gesture and speech. Occupying a central and playful place in many New Wave films,³⁷ the art of dialogue underwent a deep crisis during the post-New Wave. By referring to the origins of cinema, some films emphasise the muteness of gesture and reflect on its ontological difference with speech. Coined by Michel Chion, the genre of ‘mute cinema’ refers to neo-silent films ‘where characters express themselves through actions, gestures, and looks’.³⁸ If mute cinema can be nostalgic about the origins of cinema, it manifests above all a problematic tension, if not a rupture, between gesture and speech.

Anthony Paraskeva uses the phrase ‘speech-gesture complex’ to consider the discrepancy and dialectical tension between gesture and speech (or the visible and the sayable) in modernism, notably in Kafka’s literature, Brechtian and Beckettian theatre and Charlie Chaplin’s silent cinema.³⁹ In post-New Wave films such as Un homme qui dort and L’Homme à la valise, gestures emerge from the characters’ decisive silence and act out their problematic relationship with society. The characters’ solitude and refusal to interact with others are expressed through nervous gestures, evoking pathologies of the late nineteenth century, including ambulatory automatism and hysteria. The tension between speech and bodily expression also appears in the autistic children’s gestures filmed by Renaud Victor in Ce Gamin, là, and through the process of desynchronisation between the voice-over and the image in Un homme qui dort and Le Moindre Geste. While Godard attempts to revitalise the aesthetics of silent cinema in Prénom Carmen, Zucca and Klossowski also explore the muteness of gestures, as well as the difficulty in deciphering their meanings, through the mise-en-scène of tableaux vivants in Roberte. As Giorgio Agamben argues, the mediality of gestures expresses and communicates something that cannot be put into words, manifesting ‘the being-in-language of human beings’ and their need or desire for communicability.⁴⁰ In post-New Wave cinema, gestures often convey taboos, pathologies, traumas, fantasies and conflicts that prove difficult to translate into words. The crisis of speech mirrors other sorts of crises, such as the crisis of the everyday, the crisis of authorship, the political crisis resulting from the disenchantment after May 1968 and, in a manner that recalls the preoccupation with nervousness at the end of the nineteenth century, a gestural crisis.