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Deadly deviations, subversive cinema: the influence of Hollywood film noir on the French new wave

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Deadly deviations, subversive cinema: the influence of Hollywood film noir on the French new wave

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DEADLY DEVIATIONS, SUBVERSIVE CINEMA:
THE INFLUENCE OF HOLLYWOOD FILM NOIR ON THE FRENCH NEW WAVE

by

James Rowlins

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(FRENCH)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 James Rowlins
ii

Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without a number of highly
esteemed individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation director,
Dr. Karen Pinkus, for her many excellent suggestions, her thorough and diligent readings
and her tireless efforts in helping me perfect my chapters. I am particularly grateful to her
for remaining my advisor after transferring to Cornell University. My sincere thanks also
extends to the other members of my committee, namely Dr. Panivong Norindr, whose
insights into French cinema of this era proved invaluable, and Dr. Akira Mizuta Lippit,
with whom I have had many enjoyable and stimulating conversations about the New
Wave and film noir, among other subjects.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents, in particular for providing me with
the time and space to write up my research in 2010 and also for their generosity and
moral support throughout my graduate studies. I would like to extend a special thanks to
Professor Alain Borer, who has been a close mentor and dear friend over these past years.
Additionally, I am indebted to the departmental secretaries Valentina Stoicescu and
Patrick Irish, who consistently went above and beyond the call of duty to provide me with
the resources I needed. The helpful staff at the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley and
at the Cinémathèque Nationale in Paris also deserve a mention. Finally, I would like to
thank my close friends and peers Olivier Roland, Claire Nettleton, Lucille Colombie-
Toth and Anna Krivoruchko, whose company, bonhomie, wit and wisdom helped shape
the pages of this dissertation.
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract v

INTRODUCTION 1
(i) Redefining the New Wave: The Primordial Influence
of the Hollywood Aesthetic 3
(ii) Crime and Criticism: The Hollywood Aesthetic and
the Politique des Auteurs 11
CHAPTER ONE
Godard’s Retrogressive Radicalism: The Influence of American
Film Noir on A bout de Souffle 29
(i) Shattering Genre Conventions 33
(ii) Notions of Radical Authorship in A bout de souffle 53
(iii) Contrived Simplicity: Godard’s Use of B-series
Production Technique 63

CHAPTER TWO
The Aesthetics of Actuality: The Influence of American
Film Noir on New Wave Realism 88

PART 1: Actuality and the Absolute Truth Claim 88
(i) In the Beginning there was Lumière 95
(ii) Stepping Stones towards an Actuality Aesthetic:
French Film Noir and Jean Vigo 101
(iii) Film Noir Semidocumentary: “The City in its Actuality” 111
(iv) Du Rififi chez les hommes, Touchez pas au Grisbi and
Bob le flambeur 123
(v) Jean Rouch: Foregrounding Truth and the Problem of Fiction 131
(vi) Italian Neorealism: Bazin and Phenomenological Realism 136

PART 2: The Actuality Aesthetic in New Wave Cinema 141
(i) Painful Politics, Past and Present: Algeria 149
(ii) The Americanization of the Parisian Landscape 160
(iii) Moments of Malaise: The True Pain of Youth 166
(iv) Chapter Conclusions 180

iv

CHAPTER THREE
Dangerous Games: The Influence of the Hollywood Genre Movie
on New Wave Representations of Gender 185
(i) Gender Games in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood Genre Movies:
The Femme Fatale and “Child-Man” 191
(ii) Louis Malle’s Playboys and Playgirls: Les Amants 212
(iii) François Truffaut’s “Hommes-Enfants,” Femmes Fatales and the
“Whirlwind of Life:” Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim 222
(iv) Godardian End Games: Pierrot le fou 237

CONCLUSION 249

Filmography 256

Bibliography 259

v

Abstract

This dissertation develops a comprehensive study of the influence exerted by
Hollywood “genre” cinema, in particular the B-series film noir, on the French New
Wave. Initially, I ask if this relationship is not the principle identifying criterion of New
Wave cinema. It is, after all, a matter of record that Hollywood’s cheaply-made B-movies
were championed by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma as permitting authorial self-
expression and as encouraging cinematic innovation and evolution. Genre cinema
subsequently remained a preoccupation for the New Wave auteurs, who made no fewer
than fifty gangster and crime films between 1958 and 1965, including many of the New
Wave’s most iconic films.
I therefore embark on a comparative study that considers in great detail the New
Wave’s reprisal and adaptation of the film noir format, with my analyses focused not
only on character and plot conventions, but also on the tropes, aesthetics and filmmaking
production techniques common to both cinemas. I show how the two cinemas cross-
pollinate, especially given that the French polar itself exerted influence on Hollywood
film noir and that French critics were among the first to identify the new tendency
towards making film noir in postwar Hollywood. I also draw a number of important
conclusions. Primarily, I show that while the New Wave borrows extensively from
Hollywood aesthetics, its manipulation and subversion of American film noir
conventions are also at the very heart of the politique des auteurs. This politique is
characterized by a profound dissatisfaction with their era, the Americanization of French
vi

society, France’s involvement in Algeria, and a reticence about the impending sexual
liberation movement.
I contextualize my project within the current debate in film and French studies
regarding the legacy of the New Wave, particularly in light of a tendency to cast doubt on
the movement’s involvement with “the political,” as well as to dispute the New Wave’s
status as a defining moment in French cinema.

1

Introduction

The fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave was celebrated in 2009 and
2010, marking the half-century since Les Quatre cents coups and A bout de souffle were
premiered in France. The anniversary, which was commemorated in the all the major film
capitals of the world by special screenings and presentations, also gave rise to a number
of new works of scholarship on the period. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies’
Cinema Journal, notably, commissioned a special feature entitled “In Focus: The New
Wave at Fifty,” with the intention of introducing readers to “these new approaches that
both stretch the boundaries of what we think of as ‘the French New Wave’ and challenge
some of the basic tenets, even clichés, associated with it” (Vincendeau 137).
The biggest single debate to emerge from these recent works of scholarship
concerns the taxonomical definition of the New Wave and developing new criteria for
establishing the movement’s official filmography. Vanessa Schwartz observes in Cinema
Journal that “the more recent trend in the interpretation of the New Wave has been to see
it as a cultural historical phenomenon rather than as an aesthetic school” (147). This
cultural-historical approach considers events, such as the Cannes film festival of 1959
and the premier of the first works by Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut and Godard, as
defining moments of the New Wave. It also considers the movement to be born of the
social, economic and technological conditions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such an
approach highlights, among other factors, the new funding available to young filmmakers
by the Centre National de Cinéma and the availability of the new portable 35mm
2

cameras, such as the Auricon, Arriflex and NPR, the new portable magnetic-tape
recorders for capturing sound on location and the faster film stocks permitting outdoors
and naturally-lit filming.
Defining the New Wave as a cultural-historical phenomenon engenders a number
of problems. First, it means that the New Wave becomes something of a closed book in
terms of the films deemed to be part of the official “canon,” arbitrarily excluding works
that appear outside of the dates that scholars agree to mark the beginning and end of the
period.
1
Second, such an approach is not particularly helpful in determining the complex
taxonomical questions pertaining to which of the works made during this period should
be included in the New Wave’s official filmography. The historian Ivan Jobs explains
how difficulties arise given that:
... the term “New Wave” was imposed upon these varied directors by the
press; there was no movement per se, no central organizing theme nor
programmatic declaration grouping these filmmakers together, other than,
perhaps, a general iconoclasm for the established film industry...The late-
fifties phenomenon of an emerging youthfulness in film production,
subject matter, and audience, to which Cannes was attuned, was
sometimes referred to as le jeune-nouveau cinéma-explicitly “young” with
“new.” In the end, nouvelle vague, or New Wave, was the moniker that
held, and would be impulsively applied to a broad range of films
continuing through the following decade ... (30)
2

Film historians particularly disagree about how the so-called “Left Bank” cinema, with
whom Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker are associated, differs from New

1
Susan Hayward, who considers the New Wave to be largely a reaction to the preceding cinéma de papa,
and ultimately a “misnomer made into a myth” (231), considers the “first” New Wave to have existed
between the years 1958 and 1962, followed by “second New Wave” between the years 1966 and 68.
2
As has been well documented, the term “nouvelle vague” originated from Françoise Giroud’s survey,
commissioned by L’Express of 1957 and conducted by the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique, “designed
to determine the young’s ideals, influences, beliefs, opinions, and perceptions regarding both their personal
lives and the life of the nation as a whole” (Jobs 32).
3

Wave cinema, and about whether directors as diverse as Jacques Demi and Jacques Tati
should be admitted to the New Wave canon.
The alternative to this historical approach is concerned with auteurism and film
aesthetics, and seeks to group New Wave films according to their shared stylistic
attributes and narrative characteristics. This is, essentially, the approach I have adopted in
this research project. Indeed, while initially searching for a new angle through which to
explore the auteurs’ engagement with their generation’s politics, I inadvertently
discovered that Hollywood cinema is so omnipresent and central to their preoccupations
that it can be conceived of as one of the movement’s fundamental attributes, and even as
a means through which a definition of the New Wave might be elaborated. I will
therefore outline the key reasons for exploring this relationship over the next few pages.

(i) Redefining the New Wave: The Primordial Influence of the Hollywood
Aesthetic

No fewer than fifty gangster and crime films were directed by filmmakers
associated with the New Wave between 1958 and 1965, including many of the New
Wave’s most iconic films. The crime film was undoubtedly the genre most favored by the
auteurs, a fact which has no small bearing on my choice of genre through which to
explore Hollywood’s influence on the New Wave. However, it should also be
acknowledged that the New Wave appropriated and “imported” other genres directly
inspired from the American model, including the musical comedy, the dramatic comedy
4

and even the historical drama and science-fiction.
3
This admiration for the American
genre movie is evident throughout the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, which are worthy of
some consideration before going on to consider the significance of this evolving
relationship as the critics progressed to the ranks of filmmakers.
A cursory glance through the pages of Cahiers du cinéma from its founding in
1951 through to the late 1950s suggests, by virtue of the sheer prevalence of articles, that
American cinema was of utmost importance to the critics. Indeed, a clear majority of
articles during this period were devoted to Hollywood productions, seconded by articles
on film personalities and actors, most of whom were also American. The critics’
admiration for Hollywood cinema varies, but all were to some to some degree effusive. In
his contribution to the December 1955 Cahiers special, “Situation du cinéma American,”
Eric Rohmer proclaims that “la côte californienne [est] bien cette terre d’élection, cette
patrie que fut Florence au quattrocento pour les peintres ” (12).
4
Despite conceding that at
one point he had been “mistrustful” of American cinema, Rohmer goes on to praise the
modernity and “classicisme de forme et d’inspiration” (15) exemplified by the films of
Howard Hawks. For Rohmer, American cinema could be defined by “les deux mots
d’efficacité et d’élégance” (12).
Indeed, the Cahiers critics’ unabashed appreciation for Hollywood film noir,
more often than not cheaply produced B-movies of the policier, polar (crime film) or
thriller subgenre, markedly distinguished Cahiers from its rivals. Film criticism in France

3
Examples include Une femme est une femme (1961), Jules et Jim (1962), Alphaville (1965), Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), Viva Maria! (1965).
4
“Situation du cinéma Americain,” was a reoccurring feature in Cahiers du cinéma.
5

in the 1950s was a politicized space, and it was far from a given that a major publication
would take American cinema seriously, let alone have its critics pen impassioned reviews
of little known B-series screwball comedies, musicals or films noirs. Ecran Français, for
instance, was a prominent journal which published reviews by the luminary critics André
Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and Pierre Kast, and yet it was overtly hostile to American
cinema.
5
Other journals of the time such as Positif, Arts and Esprit also disparaged
Hollywood films as a rule.
André Bazin, who at times was more reserved in his praise of American cinema,
nevertheless attributed in his article, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” the
“triumph” and “overwhelming superiority” of Hollywood to its reliance on “five or six
major kinds of film” (28) including comedy, the dance film, the crime film, horror and
fantasy. Hollywood’s prediction for making films adhering to the rules and traditions of
an established genre began to interest the critics more and more, especially as the critics
began to directly address the question of how to improve the staid French film industry.
First, the critics noted with considerable interest the popular dimension of American
genre cinema. As Bazin observed with regard to the Western, the genre’s success can be
attributed to its roots in American popular culture and “an artistic evolution that has been
in wonderfully close harmony with its public” (cited in Hillier 81). Bazin was particularly
interested in the Western given that, in spite of its relegation to the B-series, or even
“série Z” (26) as he claims in “Evolution du western,” it retained in his eyes the ability

5
L’Ecran Française’s hostility towards American cinema eventually prompted these critics to stop writing
for it.
6

both to achieve a kind of classical perfection as well as to make say meaningful things
about the condition of man.
While ensuring a guaranteed level of popular success, the Cahiers critics did not
consider the genre format to impede the auteur’s ability to impart a degree of personal
and artistic vision through his films. In truth, as Jim Hillier observes, the “dominant
Cahiers perspective on genre was a confused and contradictory one” (Hillier 81).
6

Indeed, the critics’ position and understanding of the workings of genre would arguably
become more fully formulated as filmmakers. However, the critics were united in their
enthusiasm for the crime film and Hollywood film noir thriller, whose richness and
complexity was celebrated by Claude Chabrol in his 1955 Cahiers article, “Evolution du
film policier.” In this article, which I will return to shortly, Chabrol argues that classic
films noirs such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, High Sierra
and Out of the Past, express nothing less than the “expression sincere des préoccupations
et des idées de leurs auteurs” (30). With regard to Nicholas Ray, Rohmer wrote that he is
“one of the few [Hollywood directors] to possess his own style, his own vision of the
world, his own poetry; he is an auteur, a great auteur” (cited in Hillier 76).
It is no coincidence that the critics’ favorite American auteurs, namely Billy
Wilder, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, all made
films noirs. In the subsequent section, I will elaborate in detail on the precise and specific
significance and future importance of the critics’ fascination with Hollywood crime films,
although I will begin by outlining some basic reasons here. First, consider that films noirs

6
Hillier writes that “during the 1950s ... genre was not a crucial concept for Cahiers in making sense of
American movies” (80).
7

offered an obvious antithesis to the “tradition of quality” films targeted in Truffaut’s
incendiary attack on the French film industry of the 1950s, which privileged insipid
literary adaptations and bourgeois psychological realism. In contrast, American films
noirs, in particular the B-series films made by the “poverty row” studies with record-
breaking speed and small budgets, offered titillating entertainment to a mass audience.
Rivette and Rohmer perceived such films to embody the “art of action,” which implied “a
rejection of social conventions, balanced by contemplation – and as a style, a violent
confrontation with narrative conventions” (Hillier 74). The critics also considered
Hollywood cinema, in particular the crime film, to offer a critical perspective and even a
realism wholly lacking in French cinema. Writing in Cahiers, Roger Leenhardt referred
to this as a “direct engagement with reality” (cited in Hillier 73). As I will demonstrate in
my second chapter, this aspect of American cinema was absolutely fundamental to the
New Wave’s appropriation of the Hollywood aesthetic.
7

It is no surprise that the French directors whom the Cahiers critics most admired
had a strong connection with American cinema. Moreover, many of them, such as Jean
Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville, had directed French
policiers. In their interviews with these veteran filmmakers, the critics ubiquitously asked
about their views on contemporary American cinema, especially Hitchcock. The critics
developed a very close relationship with Becker and Melville, with the latter becoming a
mentor to the critics as they transitioned to filmmakers. As I will discuss in my second

7
Hillier underscores that the Cahiers perspective on American cinema was “the precise opposite of the
conventional Anglo-Saxon view of American cinema at the time (and even now) – a view in which
American cinema was seen to be largely ‘escapist,’ removed from contemporary reality” (73).
8

chapter, Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) and Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956),
can be seen to influence New Wave aesthetics to such a point that they can be considered
“precursor” works to the movement.
Another crime film that that was of central importance to the New Wave was
Jules Dassin’s Du Rififi chez les hommes (1955). The script was adapted from a crime
novel by Albert Simonin, whose novels bear a strong similarity to American pulp and
noir fictions, differing only in their use of French settings, protagonists and slang.
8
Jules
Dassin was an American film director who began his career by making commercially
successful films for MGM, such as the spy film Nazi Agent (1942). Later in the 1940s,
Dassin entered into a partnership with the liberal crime journalist and producer Mark
Hellinger, making the prison drama Brute Force (1947), followed by the film noir
“semidocumentary,” The Naked City (1948). These films’ scrutiny of “the way social and
economic conditions force people to act the way they do” (Phillips 7) made Dassin a
target for House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee, and was
subsequently blacklisted by Hollywood and forced into political exile.
9
Arriving in
Europe in the 1950s, Dassin was eventually offered the job of directing Pathé’s Du Rififi
chez les hommes after Jean-Pierre Melville relinquished the job.
The Cahiers critics expressed enormous enthusiasm for Du Rififi chez les
hommes, perceiving it as being “capable of reinvigorating a popular cinematic genre that
had began to seem tired and out of touch” (Phillips 86). The French polar was not

8
Touchez pas au grisbi was also adapted from a novel by Albert Simonin.
9
Dassin was able to make his last film for 20
th
Century Fox, Night and the City (1950), before being
blacklisted by the Hollywood studios.
9

enjoying a postwar renaissance in any way comparable to the success of American film
noir, and Dassin’s directorship was seen as injecting vital new energy into a flagging
genre. Among the critics, André Bazin wrote the most extensive reviews of Dassin’s film.
Primarily, he praised its energy and originality, which stood in stark contrast with “most
current French noir films [that] are nothing more than recipes, or even dustjackets” (cited
in Phillips 87). For Bazin, the film’s variations from the generic norms of the 1950s
French crime film, as seen in the film’s mature exploration of the psychology of male
comradeship and its heightened attention to the economic and living conditions of the
protagonists, made it a showcase for a genre film that had avoided the pitfall of
“redundant repetitions” (87), commonly seen in such films.
Beyond invigorating genre conventions, Bazin was greatly interested in the nature
of the realist aesthetic of Du Rififi chez les hommes, writing that “the profound nature of
the film is aesthetic” (cited in Phillips 90). Bazin’s claim is based on a number of
observations. First, while acknowledging that the crime film is founded upon mythology,
Bazin goes to great lengths to show how such a myth is supported “by a documentary
exactitude [which] reinforces its credibility and maintains a useful confusion between
reality and that which it is a substitute for” (90).
10
In addition to the detail and rigor with
which Dassin’s camera scouts and scrutinizes the Parisian urban landscape, Bazin was
especially impressed by the famous heist sequence, filmed using long takes and deep
shots lasting a full twenty-five minutes without diagetic dialogue or music. Phillips
explains that this sequence is undoubtedly “the most Bazinian section of the film in terms

10
Phillips comments that “it is this ‘confusion’ that [Bazin] saw at the root of the aesthetic, moral and
political brilliance of Rififi” (90).
10

of there being a pronounced observational style ... and an almost phenomenological
interest in the unfurling of real time” (44).
In chapter two, I will elaborate upon the importance of such devices and show
how Dassin’s realism was pivotal in shaping the New Wave’s own realist aesthetics as
well as its ambitions to produce a moral and political critique of its times. Indeed, it is
noticeable that the critics often attributed their admiration for other directors to their
works’ realist aesthetics. This is particularly the case with Roger Vadim, whose 1956
film Et Dieu créa la femme was immediately celebrated by Cahiers as something of a
revelation in view of its representation of youth and sexuality. The primary reason for
their enthusiasm for Vadim’s film lies in its portrayal of, in the words of Truffaut, the
“première jeune femme de son temps du cinéma français” (cited in de Baecque 174).
11

Truffaut goes on to praise Vadim’s attempt to “copier la vie,” and Bardot’s performance
characterized by “les gestes de tous les jours, gestes anodins comme jouer avec sa
sandale ou moins anodins comme faire l’amour en plein jour” (175).
12
For the critics, Et
Dieu créa la femme differed fundamentally from French “tradition of quality”
productions, which in the words of Godard, had failed to in its duty to show “les filles
comme nous les aimons” (176).
The critics’ admiration for Et Dieu créa la femme lies in its essentially American
attitudes towards sex and youth. Moreover, Bardot’s portrayal of the orphan Juliette,
whose carefree ways excite the jealousy and rivalry of the men in Saint Tropez, is

11
All references to de Baecque refer to L’Histoire-caméra, unless otherwise stated.
12
De Baecque claims that Truffaut’s review of Et Dieu créa la femme “est à lire comme une déclaration
politique” (174).
11

undoubtedly indebted to American models of behavior and Hollywood representations of
feminine sexuality. In Riding the Wave, the historian Ivan Jobs observes:
Above all, though, Bardot’s appeal and controversy derived from her
untamed youthfulness. The vamp and femme fatale were not new to
cinema – one need only think of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich – yet the
combination of the enfant terrible and the femme fatale shockingly mixed
chidlike candor with torrid sensuality... By artfully combining the ingénue
and the vamp, Bardot revealed an uncomplicated attitude toward sex that
manifested desire as impulse, or, simply, appetite. (203)

Ivan Jobs’ allusion to the femme fatale is perspicuous, for while Brigitte Bardot exudes
sexuality comparable to that of Marilyn Monroe, the male protagonists’ attraction for her
character proves dangerous and nearly fatal in a way that evokes the American film noir
femme fatale. Even a film, therefore, that outwardly appears to owe little to the
Hollywood genre format can be seen to be deeply influenced by the generic
characteristics of American cinema.

(ii) Crime and Criticism: The Hollywood Aesthetic and the Politique des
Auteurs

Thus far, I have outlined some basic reasons for the Cahiers critics and future
New Wave filmmakers’ admiration for Hollywood genre cinema, in particular the crime
film. The second component of my dissertation endeavors to show how the New Wave
filmmakers’ appropriation, adaptation and ultimately subversion of the Hollywood
aesthetic, far from being evidence of a benign reverence of all things American, is at the
heart of the auteurs’ ambition to produce a politically-charged critique of their times. In
this regard, my project has a significant crossover with Alistair Phillip’s ambition to show
12

how Du Rififi chez les hommes is revealing of “the fluid interaction between postwar
American and French cinema at a time of contradictory admiration and hostility on the
part of the French in the leading up to the Nouvelle Vague” (1). In his analyses, Phillips
aims to show:
In particular ... the extent to which the thriller became the key site from
which to observe the tensions felt by an industry that sought to counter the
increasing cultural and economic hegemony of American popular culture
with the creative possibility of refracting crime cinema through a
distinctively national lens. (1)

While this relationship is complex, I will demonstrate in my own considerations how the
auteurs’ love for Hollywood cinema belies a stringent criticism of American cultural,
economic and political values and their increasingly predominant influence on French
society.
I will elaborate on the meaning and importance of the Cahiers’ doctrine of la
politique des auteurs in detail in my first chapter with regard to Godard’s A bout de
souffle. It is a complex term that defies any single definition, although it is commonly
understood to pertain to the filmmaker’s ability to impart a substantial degree of personal
style and subjectivity into his or her film. In L’Histoire-caméra, de Baecque argues that
Truffaut’s claims, such as that “le film de demain ressemblera à celui qui l’a tourné,” are
a manifesto for a “cinéma du ‘je’ et du ‘petit sujet,’” and should be read “comme un
pamphlet politique” (174). However, it is debatable whether this interpretation of the
politique des auteurs necessarily translates into a “political” commitment, and indeed,
“politique” is often omitted from considerations of the notion.
13

Annette Michelson has argued that the politique des auteurs referred first and
foremost to a “policy” (vi) where the auteurs collectively fought for independence and
control from the systems of production and distribution of established by the large
American-style film studios.
13
Indeed, as filmmakers the New Wave filmmakers rapidly
become aware that authorial freedoms had to be measured against material constraints,
such as financing, studio control and governmental censorship. In seeking to divest the
all-powerful studios, whom the auteurs perceived as being akin to other forms of
hegemonic power and synonymous of American culture imperialism, the auteurs looked
to their favorite Hollywood directors whom they considered to retain “individuality and
personal vision by conforming to, yet transcending, genre and commerce” (Hillier 76).
Nicholas Ray was of central importance to Cahiers given that he embodied for the critics
“a conception of the film-maker working within the system, always rebellions, often
doomed, and a particular response to the modern world, as well as a particularly affecting
style” (76). For the critics, Ray and his fellow directors were adept at manipulating the
studio system in order to produce their great authorial works.
The New Wave directors’ extensive interest in the B-series films noirs made by
the “poverty row” Hollywood film studios can be attributed to the possibilities they saw
afforded by the studio system and genre format to secure film financing, distribution and
ultimately an audience for promising auteurs. As I will consider in chapter one, film noir
became the favored genre of the smaller-budget production, partly because it “embodied
more artistic style and originality” (Lyons 4) than other genre formats. Of the three main

13
Michelson writes that “we can ... now see this ‘policy’ [la politique] for what it was: a concerted attempt
to stem the advancing tide of American hegemony in the international market of the film industry” (vi).
14

studios producing B-series films noirs, Republic was considered “the shining gem of the
Poverty Row studios” (46), with Monogram and PRC producing considerably cheaper
fare. However, even these studios were home to talented directors, such as Edgar G.
Ulmer whose B-series noir Detour (1945) I analyze in detail. In the best of cases, the
poverty row studies afforded young directors the possibility of learning “their craft and
develop[ing] distinctive directorial styles that could overcome shallow script material,
low budgets, and tight production schedules” (49).
14

Of course, this is arguably something of a romanticized understanding of the
workings of the poverty row studios. Lyons observes that studios such as Monogram
continued through the 1950s to “grind out low-budget fare, exploiting fading stars in
genre pictures” (48).
15
In a sense, it is unimportant that the “poverty row” output was for
the most part generically poor as the Cahiers critics were attracted to films noirs for other
important reasons, outside of their production values. In trying to determine why
Nicholas Ray was the their most beloved director, Fereydoun Hoveyda observed that the
critics became aware that all their favorite auteurs were in fact all talking about the same
things: “solitude, violence, the absurdity of existence, sin, redemption, love, etc.” (cited
in Hillier 76). Indeed, the film noir and crime film genre movie was especially loved by
the critics in light of its existential treatment of the human condition against a backdrop
of postwar modernity.

14
Anthony Mann, for instance, began his career at PRC and went on to become an acclaimed Hollywood
director.
15
Moreover, most directors “accepted themselves as hacks and were content to grind out inferior product
for the money” (Lyons 49).
15

Film noir is in many ways the antithesis of mainstream Hollywood cinema. As
Paul Schrader explains, film noir protagonists were considered by postwar audiences to
be “an aberration of the American character” (241) by virtue of their cowardly, anguished
and villainous heroes and anti-heroes. Indeed, histories of film noir habitually begin by
recounting the backlash against the “amelioristic cinema” (231) of the war years and the
need to channel postwar disillusionment into “the sordidness of the urban crime film”
(232). However, postwar film noir can be seen to provide some continuity from
depression-era dramas, some of which were exceedingly gritty.
16
Contrary to latter-era
films noirs, these early crime films presented a de-glorified image of the gangster and
invariably had moralistic overtones, reinforcing the message that crime does not pay.
Film noir would deviate from this convention, preferring narratives where, according to
the French critic Raymond Borde, “blackmail, informing, theft or drug trafficking weave
the plot of an adventure whose final stake is death” (5).
The “hard-boiled” tradition of detective pulp fiction, which first saw life in the
1920s in the form of popular magazines such as Black Mask, also exerted a strong
influence on Hollywood film noir. In the 1930s Black Mask began publishing novels by
Paul Cain, whose protagonists were hard-boiled existential antiheros. Lyons writes that
one of Cain’s antihero protagonists, Gerard A. Kells, was the “true existential man ...
Kells knows his options; he knows the difference between morality and immorality but is
simply amoral” (16). Cain’s novels are very far from being works of philosophy,
although they do address “existential” questions pertaining to the individual in a godless

16
The most famous, such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), starred James
Cagney.
16

and meaningless world, the notion of individuality and personal freedom in relation to the
other. In his commentary on Breathless, Dudley Andrew explains that film noir “spoke
forbidden secrets (murder, betrayal, incest) ... in a murky way whose very indirection was
a sign of its deeper, darker truth ... its contradictory tone, both hushed and hysterical,
expressed unconsciously the existential angst of the times” (12).
In my considerations, I will show that New Wave protagonists’ distaste for their
times and rebellion undoubtedly has a philosophical dimension. Indeed, the New Wave
auteurs will imbue their own genre films with existential motifs, and more consciously
than their American film noir counterparts, they will directly allude to Sartre and Camus
notions of freedom, individual responsibility, engagement and revolt. Moreover, Andrew
also comments that “Godard’s central intuition” can be seen to be come from “Jean-Paul
Sartre, the dominant moral presence in the Paris he inhabited” (5).
17
Outside of the
existential dimension to the early New Wave, however, Andrew Dikos observes in his
book Street with No Name that for Godard and Truffaut, film noir “signified the capacity
for attractive rebellion” (225) and that this influence resulted in films which were “tinged
with ... subversiveness” (223).
In order to fully comprehend the critique present within the New Wave, it is first
important to underscore the inherently subversive nature of the American films noirs the
auteurs took their inspiration from. Indeed, film noir was undoubtedly among the most

17
Other critics too have pointed to Sartre’s influence over the New Wave. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, in his
book Godard et la société Française des années 1960, claims that Godard was “profondément marqué par
le Sartre de Qu’est-ce que la littérature ?” (224). Geneviève Sellier observes that “New Wave heroes live
an absurd everyday life directly inherited from Camus’ L’Etranger” (96).
17

“maligned” of all Hollywood genres.
18
Andrew comments that “film noir was itself a
marginal genre, almost an experimental one in relation to the Hollywood system of the
1940s and 1950s” (12). Revealingly, the history of film noir is intertwined with that of
censorship in America. In spite of the huge popularity of mass-market pulp fiction in the
1930s, it was not until the 1940s that such novels began to be adapted for the big screen
given that scripts consistently failed to obtain the Hays Production Code “purity seal”
(Lyons 18), required of all Hollywood productions.
19
However, in 1944 the Code
received a forthright challenge from Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s Double
Indemnity, whose big box office success significantly weakened the Code’s censorial
power and unleashed a “torrent of noir production” (42).
It is a matter of fact that the term “film noir” originated in France, where French
audiences and critics were struck by the “noirceur” (blackness), both visual and moral, of
the first wave of Hollywood productions to reach France at the end of the war.
20
It was
the French critic Nino Frank who first coined the term in a 1946 article “A New Kind of
Police Drama: the Criminal Adventure,” and Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton
were the first to attempt to comprehensively define and catalogue film noir in a scholarly
work, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941 – 1953, published in 1955. In this book,
Borde and Chaumeton observe that if policemen are present in a film noir, “they are of
dubious character,” while private detectives are “midway between order and crime” (7).

18
Dudley Andrew calls it “astonishing ... that Godard routinely calls on maligned genres, the Western and
the musical, to help address the most serious philosophical issues of the day” (7)
19
The Production Code was devised in 1930 as a means for the studios to avoid direct government
censorship by pledging not to “lower the moral standards” (Doherty 44) and agreeing to submit details
regarding films’ plot and visual content to the infamous Production Code Administration.
20
Films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Murder My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity
(1944) and The Woman in the Window (1944).
18

The hero “lets lets himself be led astray” and the heroine is “vicious, deadly, venomous,
or alcoholic” (12). Moreover, the genre’s foremost icon, the femme fatale, is invariably
“frustrated and guilty, half man-eater, half man-eaten, blasé and cornered, [and who] falls
victim to her own wiles” (9).
Borde and Chaumeton introduce film noir as the “film of death” whose principal
identifying sign is that it engenders in audiences “a shared feeling of anguish and
insecurity [and] a specific sense of malaise” (13). The critics are somewhat vague and
imprecise, however, when it comes to explaining what it is that creates this sense of
malaise, and their descriptions verge on the poetic. They write that there is “something
dreamlike” in film noir’s “incoherent brutality” (11). Moreover, in the noir world, “good
and evil often rub shoulders to the point of merging into one another” (12). One of the
critics’ most enduring descriptions of film noir is as “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent,
and cruel” (2). The term “strange” corresponds to the French word insolite, which as
James Naremore notes poses a difficult in translation given that it can convey various
ideas including that which is “unusual, peculiar, unaccustomed, odd; even uncanny” (4).
L’insolite can also entail “going against the rules,” and this too is a defining
characteristic of film noir.
21
In almost all respects, film noir might therefore be said
above all to be concerned with deviation, that is to say, a “departure from accepted norms
of behavior” (Merriam-Webster). Deviation also connotes “abnormal,” “perverted,”
“twisted” and “degenerate” behavior (Roget); characteristics which can be seen to
transcend film noir narratives, characters and visual aesthetics. James Naremore observes

21
Le Trésor de la Langue Française (2004) defines the terms as “[ce] qui provoque l'étonnement, la
surprise par son caractère inhabituel, contraire à l'usage, aux règles ou par sa conduite inattendue.”
19

that film noir is in essence “an antigenre, representing the flip side of the average
Hollywood feature” (xiv) and “at almost every level, invert[ing] Hollywood formula”
(xv). Given that film noir seems to be defined by its almost total opposition to the
preexisting rules established by the mainstream Hollywood aesthetic, Naremore therefore
considers film noir to be an “antigenre,” rather than a fully-fledged genre in its own right.
Film noir’s ambiguity as a genre and its enigmatic identity and are arguably traits
that speak of its inherently subversive nature. American film noir was the bastardization
of a host of established drama-based genres, perhaps most significantly the Hollywood
gangster movie which had established itself as a “sub-genre” (Sanders 85) by the mid
1930s. I have already referred to film noir’s close links with pulp fiction and American
“existentialism.” Raymond Durgnat traces the origins of film noir even further back, to
the nineteenth century when the “classic tragic spirit [was split] into three genres:
bourgeois realism, the ghost story and the detective story” (37, 38). As I will consider in
my final chapter, the generic figure of the femme fatale can be traced to medieval
literature and art. Film noir’s visual aesthetics, moreover, were strongly influenced by
early twentieth century German Expressionism.
Prominent film scholars have weighed into the debate pertaining to whether film
noir deserves its own genre category, with a consensus emerging that it is not a fully-
fledged genre but rather an amalgamation of an unquantifiable number of genres and
influences. These scholars consider film noir, moreover, to have so many variants that it
will always resist attempts to impose a hermitically-tight definition. In their Panorama,
Borde and Chaumeton avoid the question by referring to “la série noire;” a term which
20

has gained some currency, particularly as Hollywood effectively ceased production of
films noirs by the end of the 1950s.
22
In his influential article from 1970, “Paint it Black:
The Family Tree of the Film Noir,” Durgnat argues categorically that film noir should not
occupy its own genre category, given that film noir can refer to films belonging to four
distinct subgenres belonging to the crime genre; notably the gangster movie, the private
eye movie, the man-on-the-run movie and the spy movie.
23
He concludes that film noir
“takes us into the realm of classification by motif and tone” (38) and therefore can in no
way constitute a genre.
Indeed, in the 1970s when considerations of genre were at the forefront of film
scholarship, a consensus emerged that narrative should be the prime criterion upon which
to classify a film. As Thomas Schatz explains, genre is “essentially a narrative system”
(691) whose fundamental components are “plot, setting, character” (695). Film noir was
largely deemed to be an “extremely unwieldy period” (Schrader 230) which does not
merit the genre epithet. At most, critics could agree that film noir was a “specific period
in film history” (230), but that did not constitute a genre in view of its multiplicity of
plotlines and its overlap with other established genres.
24
Moreover, stylistic aesthetics
were not considered to be relevant factors in determining a film’s genre. A school of
theorists has tended to conceive of genre as an almost infallible means for categorizing
and critiquing films. In Film/Genre (1999), for instance, Rick Altman maintains that

22
Critics also commonly refer to the film noir “cycle.” Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is commonly
cited as the first film noir. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1959) is considered among the last.
23
This stance is shared by Paul Schrader in his article “Notes on Film Noir.”
24
While Borde and Chaumeton did not specifically concern themselves with the question of whether film
noir is a genre, they encountered difficulties elaborating a single definition of film noir given that the action
“is confused [and] the motives uncertain” (12).
21

genres are essentially permanent, “have clear, stable identities and borders” (16), that the
films belonging to particular genres “share certain fundamental characteristics” (24) that
“undergo predictable development” (21).
A different set of theorists conceive of genre as a fluid entity, and genre theory as
a means for accounting for the effects of transgressing the “rules.” Steve Neale has
convincingly argued that while “genres may appear to be bound by systems of rules ... an
individual genre movie inevitably transgresses those rules in differentiating itself from
other movies in the same genre” (cited in Malty 76). Given that almost all genres overlap
and that all films differ in some respect from others of the same genre, Neale considers
that the study of genre should invariably be about the study of difference and of
cinematic evolution. In his 1984 essay, “Is A Radical Genre Criticism Possible?,” Alan
Williams insists that films cannot be treated as “tidy bundles of works that can be studied
as if they were stable units,” and attacks Thomas Schatz, author of Hollywood Genres:
Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (1981), for seeking only to “codify,
quibble, and clarify” (122) in his analyses.
25

In Film Theory: An Introduction (2000), Robert Stam concurs that “genre
taxonomies in film have been notoriously imprecise and heterotopic, having some of the
qualities of Foucault’s Chinese encyclopedia ... while some genres are based on story
content (the war film), others are borrowed from literature (comedy, melodrama) or from

25
Williams writes: “Schatz is not out to break new ground, but to codify, quibble, and clarify. This is
neither surprising nor reprehensible in a book that began life as a Ph.D. dissertation, it is limiting. The
validity of his enterprise is largely determined by the validity of American genre studies ... And there’s the
rub” (122).
22

other media (the musical)” (14).
26
Like Williams and Neale, Stam believes that there is
no reason why the system of genre categorization should have been imported from
literary theory, and argues that cinematic genres should be constructed not just according
to questions of plot and character, but stylistic aesthetics too. Crucially, Stam argues:
The most useful way of using genre, perhaps, is to see it as a set of
discursive resources, a trampoline for creativity, by which a given director
can gentrify a ‘low’ genre, vulgarize a ‘noble’ genre, inject new energy
into an exhausted genre, pour new progressive content into a conservative
genre, or parody a genre that deserves ridicule. Thus we move from static
taxonomy to active, transformative operations.” (130)

However flawed rules and conventions associated with cinematic genre may be, Stam
considers that these can serve as “discursive resources,” for theorists and filmmakers, for
innovating and energizing cinema and for critiquing the ways things have previously
been done.
In my considerations, I will demonstrate how the New Wave auteurs conceived of
film genre, and specifically Hollywood film noir, as an entity of non-conformism and a
“trampoline” for creativity. The mechanics of engendering a critique through the use of
genre are complex and will constitute the focus of many of my analyses in this
dissertation. Given the already “subversive” nature of Hollywood film noir, I will show
that the auteurs’ manipulation of film noir conventions adds an additional layer of

26
In his book, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1982), Alistair
Fowler advocates an alternative approach to the classification of literature. He asserts that literary genre is a
“concept with blurred edges,” and that highly elaborate systems for mapping genre often result in works
being classed of the same genre “without necessarily having any single feature shared in common” (41).
Despite a skepticism regarding critics’ ability to categorize a work, Fowler (citing the taxonomist of the
English language, Dr. Johnson) argues that there are processes at work which can be identified, mapped
and used to account for creative innovation and to explain how a work “subverts the rules” (42). One of
Fowler’s innovations in this work is to develop a “generic repertoire” (56) comprising not merely of
conventions of narrative, but of kind (the novel, play, poem etc), mode (comic, tragic, dramatic, etc.) as
well as other formal and aesthetic properties.
23

subversion to their work. To help decode these processes, I will draw upon a wide range
of theorists. In my second chapter, I will invoke Erich Auerbach’s analyses of nineteenth
century French realism, showing how genres have class connotations and how the erosion
and subversion of genre boundaries can have social and political implications. I will also
enlist the writings of Jacques Rancière, who argues in writings such as Film Fables
(2001) and The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) that art and cinema’s potential to be political
stems from the tensions that exist between genres and representational “régimes.”
In determining the meaning and significance of the New Wave’s relationship with
Hollywood genre cinema, I will at times consult the auteurs’ own critical writings. In
Cahiers du cinéma of December 1962, Godard revealed an awareness of the potential
implications of subverting film genre norms by commenting:
In France, as I have already said, one can’t mix genres. In America, a
thriller can also be political and include gags. Because it is American, this
is acceptable ... but try the same thing with things French, and they howl.
This is why a French thriller never tells you anything about France. Of
course, the mental departmentalizing also corresponds to a
departmentalization of social truths. One mustn’t mix the genres, but one
mustn’t mix people either. They must be kept separate.
(Godard 194)

In addition, I will consider the critical reception received by New Wave films, both in the
1960s and more recently. Revealingly, one reviewer wrote in Le Figaro in 1963 after
seeing Vivre sa vie that “Godard’s method consists in defying conventional rules by
perplexing the viewer every ten minutes” (cited in Sellier 66). The reviewer’s criticism,
which is echoed in many other reviews, suggests that Godard’s manipulation of genre
conventions was not universally understood by his contemporary audiences.
24

I will also reference the film scholars and critics who have considered questions
of genre in the specific context of Hollywood film noir and the French New Wave.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s claims, notably, claims in his video essay Breathless as Criticism
that A bout de souffle is a “critical manifesto on behalf of American genre cinema.”
However, while many critics have focused on Godard’s iconoclastic début feature film
having a bearing on the New Wave’s relationship with Hollywood, there is much
confusion and disagreement about the exact significance of this liaison. Writing in the
context of the “paradoxes or tensions ... between old and new, between pop and
modernism” (14) in the New Wave, James Naremore observes in his article
“Authorship:”
Breathless gives its auteur an opportunity to identify with both Michel
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) a French wise guy who is infatuated with
everything American, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), a sensitive, rather
intellectual young woman from America who fears that she might be
getting too deeply involved with the underworld. The two facets of the
director’s imaginary identity are represented in the form of a perversely
romantic and failed relationship, much like the ones in Hollywood film
noir; and the relationship is echoed in a dense pattern of allusion to two
different kinds of text: genre movies, mostly associated with Michel, and
high-cultural literature, music, or painting, mostly associated with Patricia.
(14)
27

In common with other critics who acknowledge the complexity of A bout de souffle,
Naremore believes the film to be imbued with a “conflicted or ambivalent” (14) dialectic,
reflecting Godard’s confused and ultimately “perverse” relationship with Hollywood and
American culture.

27
Naremore has less difficulty than Godard in accounting for Truffaut’s directorial style as “ris[ing] out of
two apparently incompatible approaches to cinema: Renoir’s free-flowing tolerance, which breaks down
generic conventions, and Hitchcock’s ‘murderous gaze’” (14).
25

My first chapter seeks to inject some clarity into the debate regarding Godard’s
relationship with “everything American” by asking exactly how radical A bout de souffle
was. I show, in essence, that Godard’s admiration for American film noir and Hollywood
genre cinema does not translate into a love for American culture. While his tribute and
admiration for the Hollywood aesthetic can be judged sincere, the elements that Godard
“borrows” from Hollywood cinema; namely the film noir character and plotlines, are
used to express a revolt against the nascent Americanization of Paris and French life.
Godard’s appropriation of the Hollywood aesthetic is highly deliberate, and his
subversion of genre conventions is rigorously intellectual, serving to place genre cinema
at the heart of the concepts of the politique des auteurs. One of the most revealing aspects
of this study pertains to Godard’s calculated use of Hollywood B-movie production
techniques, enabling him to make his début film cheaply, swiftly, and with only a
minimum of outside involvement. I research how Godard and his cinematographer Raoul
Coutard’s use of film stock and Hollywood developing processes were key to this
endeavor; an aspect that has not previously figured into scholarly treatments of A bout de
souffle.
In chapter two, I explore the film noir aesthetics that directly shaped the New
Wave’s realist critique of its times. In this study, which is the focus of my dissertation, I
show how the auteurs represent their era with a view to critiquing the malaise
experienced by French youth, the ill effects engendered by the “new capitalism”
transforming the Parisian landscape, as well as France’s involvement in Algeria. The
auteurs tackle these issues through their actualités, or representations of the lives of
26

young Frenchmen and women as they go about their everyday lives in the city. The
“actuality aesthetic,” as I name it, thus seeks to objectively represent the political through
subjective representations of the individual. In the first part of this consideration, I trace
the aesthetic to prior cinemas, such as French poetic realism. However, I demonstrate
how Hollywood directors are also concerned with representing actuality, and how
American film noir was one of the major bodies of work to exert an influence on the New
Wave realist aesthetic.
In my final chapter I show how the Hollywood genre film is the central
component in the auteurs’ treatment of the biggest issue to preoccupy them; evolving
relations between men and women in 1960s France. In my analyses, I show how the plot,
character and cinematic style conventions of B-series films noirs, are re-inscribed into
New Wave films by Louis Malle, François Truffaut and Godard, with a specific focus on
the generic personages of the femme fatale and the fatalistic “child-man.” I pay particular
attention to the reoccurring visual trope of the carnival ride, present in both American
film noir and New Wave films, signaling an impending upheaval in the traditional family
ménage. In doing so, I argue that the auteurs’ representations are revealing of a deep-
seated psychological anxiety and fear about the impending changes to the “rules of the
game” between the men and women, as well as conclusively demonstrating that in New
Wave cinema, questions of gender are intrinsically linked to questions of genre.
In addition to showing how the Hollywood and New Wave aesthetics are
intrinsically and fundamentally linked, this dissertation therefore shows how the New
Wave appropriation and subversion of the film noir aesthetic abets and serves the
27

auteurs’ general discontent and rebellion against their era and its values. Beyond merely
“reacting against the status quo” (Neupert 41), I will draw upon critics and scholars who
perceive of the New Wave as being, broadly, a political cinema. In chapter one, for
instance, I expand in detail on the observation by Franck McConnell that “Godard was
never more political or more liberally and satirically profound that in his first film,
Breathless” (12). In chapter two, I concur with Antoine de Baecque who argues in
L’Histoire-caméra that while no New Wave work “ne faisait directement du cinéma
politique,” each film “concevait ... politiquement le cinéma, c’est-à-dire, comme le
révélateur de la vérité surgie d’un présent enfin contemporain” (178).
In daring to use the term “political” in conjunction with the New Wave, I am
consciously entering into something of a polemic. This is for a number of reasons. First,
while it can be shown beyond doubt that the auteurs represent the political issues of their
times, we will see that their critique is neither simple nor unproblematic, and that it is
often very difficult to be exact about the nature of their political engagement. De Baecque
comments that the “Nouvelle Vague est un paradoxe politique … quand elle est style, elle
penche à droite ; quand elle est réalisme, elle regarde vers la gauche” (197).
28
De
Baecque argues, moreover, that while New Wave ideology was inspired from the pages
of Cahiers du cinéma, which was unquestionably “à droite” (152), sometime during the
course of the 1960s “la Nouvelle Vague passait ... de droite à gauche” (198). Contrary to
this assumption, my readings, which highlight Godard’s early critique of the
Americanization of France in A bout de souffle, as well as Rohmer’s criticism of

28
One critic writing for Positif in 1965 attacked Godard for being a “‘fasciste’ et ‘zombie’” (cited in de
Baecque 155).
28

American-style capitalism in Le Signe du lion and Rozier, Varda and others’ criticism of
the French involvement in Algeria, suggest that the auteurs’ inclination towards “left-
leaning” and radical politics is observable from the very outset of their filmmaking
endeavors.
We will see, therefore, how my arguments contradict something of a consensus
among contemporary scholars, which considers New Wave filmmakers to have a
“fascination for ‘things American’” in the early 1960s, followed by an extreme and “total
estrangement” (Ross 46) from all aspects of American culture by the end of that decade.
My observations also oppose a further school of criticism that considers the New Wave to
be “apolitical,” with the alienation expressed and the auteurs’ need to narrate a
confessional self being “personal and not political” (Hayward 232). It is of interest that
there was also a consensus among critics hostile to the New Wave in the 1960s was that it
was “désengagée” and “un cinéma qui n’a rien à dire” (de Baecque153).
29
While the
nature of the auteurs’ radical leanings and political involvement may continue to provoke
debate among scholars, it is my hope that this dissertation demonstrates, not merely that
New Wave cinema has “something to say,” but also that there is still much to be said
about the New Wave.

29
A critic in Positif of February 1962 wrote: “La Nouvelle Vague n’a rien à dire, mais elle le dit bien”
(cited in de Baecque 153).

Chapter 1

Godard’s Retrogressive Radicalism:
The Influence of American Film Noir on A bout de Souffle

On its release in March 1960, A bout de souffle was immediately hailed by critics
as a “landmark” film and since this time it has become both synonymous with and
totemic of the New Wave. In this chapter I will seek to establish the precise nature of the
film’s relationship and importance to the development of the New Wave. Furthermore, in
the context of the film’s recent half-centenary, I will be examining A bout de souffle’s
legacy with the aim of determining just how far-reaching Godard’s break from the status
quo was. Contrary to recent attempts to contextualize A bout de Souffle as being, at most,
a tentative steppingstone towards a future, radicalized Godardian cinema, I will be
considering Dudley Andrew’s claim, made in his commentary “Breathless: Old as New,”
that Godard’s ambition for his first feature was to “invent the cinema in its entirety”
(10).
1
We will see how Godard sought to achieve this “invention,” or “reinvention,”
through an intellectual and practical appropriation of Hollywood film noir’s codes and
conventions, and as such, I will be positing A bout de souffle as one of cinema’s most
comprehensive case-studies of genre manipulation.
In the course of this chapter I will nevertheless be employing the term “radical”
with considerable caution and paying fine attention to what this categorization entails.
Specifically, we will see that Godard’s attempts at reinventing cinema are almost entirely
comprised of a reworking of prior cinematic forms and aesthetics, and that A bout de

1
All references to Andrew refer to “Breathless: Old as New,” unless otherwise stated.
30

souffle is fundamentally rooted (in terms of its narrative, aesthetics, and production) in
bygone traditions of cinema, foremost of which is film noir. We will therefore see why
any claim to the film being radical must first be prefaced by the adjective “retrogressive,”
that is to say, a tendency towards regression, a “movement backwards” (Random House
Dictionary) and a predilection to “return to an earlier, inferior, or less complex condition”
(American Heritage). Indeed, while Godard’s first feature contains many aspects that can
be deemed forward-looking and that break from the status quo, we will see that A bout de
souffle never ceases to dialogue with the past and is even imbued with a profound
nostalgia for former times. I will argue, moreover, that the dichotomy present in A bout
de souffle between the past and future, in particular as regards cinematic aesthetics, can
be seen to be a defining characteristic of the New Wave as a whole.
Prior to outlining my main arguments, I wish to take a brief look at the critical
and public reception Godard’s first feature has received over the years. It came as no
surprise that with A bout de souffle’s release in 1960, Cahiers du cinema championed
Godard as the standard-bearer of the New Wave, considering the film to brilliantly
incarnate the ideals developed over almost a decade of film criticism. Cahiers was
particularly delighted that A bout de souffle received enthusiastic reviews by critics in
popular journals such as Paris-Jour and France-Soir, and in Cahiers’ inaugural article
dedicated to the film Luc Moullet writes that Godard had realized the New Wave’s most
coveted ambition, to make films “non pas seulement destinés au public des cinémas d’art
et d’essai, mais qui puissent atteindre avec succès les écrans magiques du Gaumont
31

Palace” (cited in Esquenazi 68).
2
However, while A bout de souffle certainly received
positive reviews in a wide cross-section of cinema journals, the film achieved only a
moderately successful 259,000 box office sales during its first seven weeks. Moreover, a
recent documentary entitled Deux de la vague (2010) offers proof that A bout de souffle
was not universally appreciated at the time of its release. In archival footage of movie
theater patrons interviewed after seeing Godard’s film for the first time, it would appear
that the majority did not enjoy the experience. One viewer dismisses it as “terrible” and
“grotesque,” another patron declares it to be “gratuitous dirt,” and a young man
comments that “it isn’t a serious film.”
Writing in the context of A bout de Souffle’s half-centenary, A. Scott asks himself
if the film is not simply “a lark, a joke, a travesty of everything earnest and responsible
that the cinema can (and perhaps should) provide?” (10). Indeed, in recent criticism of A
bout de Souffle the tendency has been to emphasize the film’s popular credentials and to
attenuate its revolutionary aspect. Julian Barnes, writing of his experience of seeing the
film again after twenty years, concludes that while Godard’s first feature “knocked the
heads off a few statues it none the less carried on building the cathedral” (39). Other
critics such as Kristen Ross have written about A bout de Souffle in terms of its
admiration for American culture and cinema, observing that Godard’s protagonist,
Michel Poiccard, “steals only T-Birds and Cadillacs, and worships Humphrey Bogart
[and] the film’s style slides back and forth as though its director shared his hero’s
fascination for ‘things American’” (44). According to Ross, this playful enjoyment of

2
“Gaumont Palace” is a euphemism for popular French cinema.
32

American culture wholly contrasts with Godard’s later film’s such as Week End (1967),
which manifests a “total estrangement” (46) with Americana.
Nevertheless, in spite of A bout de souffle’s apparent generic conformity, a
plethora of moviegoers, critics and scholars have maintained over the years that A bout de
souffle is an iconoclastic and radical work of cinema. Among the cinema filmed in Deux
de la vague, at least one middle-aged man thinks it is “ahead of its time.” A. Scott
acknowledges that A bout de Souffle figures among the “touchstones of modern art that
signified a decisive break with what came before” and which, like James Joyce’s Ulysses,
have “held onto their reputation for radicalism” (10). In spite of his own doubts Scott
himself concedes that there is “still nothing else quite like it” (10). In their efforts to
explain why A bout de Souffle should be deemed “radical,” scholars frequently cite the
film’s technical and cinematic innovations. A bout de souffle is frequently said by writers
to exude unpredictability; a feeling that anything can and will happen, and a sense of free
flowing energy and brazen youthfulness which, as we will see, some critics have
identified as “political.” Dudley Andrew, for instance, writes that “what is original [in A
bout de souffle], what can only be original, is the film’s energy” (18).
Dudley Andrew attempts to reconcile his reading of A bout de souffle as wholly
innovative with his observation that Godard’s film is “fundamentally generic” (12), and I
will be thus be drawing upon Andrew’s analyses in my own reading of the film. In the
first part of this chapter, I will be examining the premise that A bout de Souffle’s claim to
being an iconoclastic “touchstone” of contemporary cinema and a radical work lies first
and foremost in its appropriation of and subversion of American film noir genre
conventions. Various scholars have broached this idea, and yet it has been given only
33

superficial justification, or it has been explored only as a doubtful hypothesis. A. Scott,
for instance, speculates how an ostensibly “thin and derivative film noir” could have the
“power to defy conventional expectations about what a movie should be” (10) without
reaching any firm conclusions.
After attempting a comprehensive account of the mechanisms employed in A bout
de souffle to “shatter” and manipulate American film noir genre conventions to
subversive ends, I turn my attention to Godard’s understanding and implementation of
the central Cahiers doctrine known as la politique des auteurs. In the final part of this
chapter, I provide a detailed account of aspects of the production of A bout de souffle, and
the lengths to which Godard went to emulate Hollywood B-movie production methods.
In each section, I consider the innovative elements that break from the status quo and
those that are fundamentally indebted to prior cinematic traditions, with the aim of
reinforcing my overall characterization of A bout de souffle as a work of retrogressive
radicalism.

(i) Shattering Genre Conventions

The title of this section evokes Chabrol’s call to arms made in an article entitled
“Evolution du film policier,” published in the Cahiers du cinéma of December 1955, in
which the future director attributes the demise in the American film noir cycle to the
genre’s “very limited number of dramatic situations” (cited in Hillier 159) as well as its
adherence to “strict rules” and generic conventions (160). These conditions had led to a
once vibrant, exciting genre to be “in a state of putrefaction” (163). Chabrol praises a
number of film noir directors, however, whose films were able to break free of the
34

genre’s constraints by “shattering its formulae” (162), such as Otto Preminger’s Laura
(1944) and Robert Altman’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Although Chabrol’s role in A bout
de souffle as “technical advisor” was by all accounts merely a token involvement, there is
no doubting his moral and intellectual support for Godard’s filmmaking début. In fact, I
will endeavor to show that Godard’s first feature is a response to Chabrol’s call for a
reinvigoration of this genre, in order to make the “thriller of tomorrow” (163).
In my consideration of Godard’s appropriation of the plot, narrative and stylistic
conventions of the B-series gangster film, I will nevertheless demonstrate that A bout de
souffle stops short of “shattering” the genre conventions of the crime movie. At the heart
of this “failure,” as Godard will perceive of it, is the apparent contradiction between on
the one hand, Godard’s sincere admiration for early American films noirs and his desire
to infuse elements of these films’ subversiveness into A bout de souffle’s narrative, and
on the other hand his need to critique the genre’s shortcomings. Indeed, Chabrol affirms
that film noir “carried within it the seeds of its own destruction” (cited in Hillier 159),
and attributes the genre’s demise, as we have seen, to its over-reliance on clichéd
narratives which “by force of repetition, ended up no longer producing either shock or
surprise” (159); the implication being that film noir evolved into a form resembling the
more conventional cinema genera it originally supplanted.
As we will see in some detail, Godard shares Chabrol’s appraisal of the state of
film and the reasons for the genre’s demise, and in A bout de souffle Godard is
unambiguously critical of the noir genre.
3
This aspect is commented upon by the genre

3
We recall Godard’s belief that “writing film criticism was, for him, already a kind of filmmaking”
(Morrey 8).
35

theorist Franck McConnell, who argues that Godard’s satirical treatment of the genre is at
the heart of the film’s claim to being radical. He writes:
Surely, we can argue that Godard was never more political or more
liberally and satirically profound that in his first film, Breathless, in which
the depersonalizing conventions of the gangster film ... are systematically
corroded and rearranged by the director’s anarchic focus on the
stereotypical nature of those conventions.” (12)

According to McConnell, Godard’s focus on the “stereotypical nature” of gangster film
conventions, the sort of tired and predictable plot and narrative that Chabrol argued led to
the death of the film noir cycle, is at the very heart of A bout de souffle’s claim to being
politically profound.
4
Godard’s focus on these conventions is “anarchic,” that is to say,
“not regulated by law” (Random House Dictionary), also suggesting that Godard’s
treatment of these stereotypes entails an act of rebellion. It is indeed by drawing attention
to the ways in which American film noir had become clichéd and arbitrary in their use of
stereotypes and hackneyed, predictable narratives, that Godard’s generic sabotage
becomes a work of subversive and even “political” parody.
I believe that Franck McConnell’s analysis provides an aphoristic and epiphanic
insight into the working of genre in A bout de souffle, and I will return to his observations
later. However, while film noir may have evolved into something predictable and
repetitive, the genre began life as an inherently subversive genre, and this held a real
attraction for Godard.
5
Indeed, at the outset there is nothing ironic or token about
Godard’s dedication to Monogram Pictures, signaled by the famous title card reading:

4
McConnell’s remarks pertaining to Godard’s appropriation of the American “gangster film” are perhaps
guilty of one imprecision by referring to just one genus of the film noir family (the gangster film), whereas
Godard draws upon several film noir genera in his film.
5
As discussed in the introduction, film noir emerged as the amalgamation and bastardization of various
literary and cinematic genres and subgenres.
36

“CE FILM EST DEDICÉ À LA MONOGRAM PICTURES.”
6
In his Criterion Collection
video essay, Jonathan Rosenbaum states that this dedication is “a critical statement of
aims and boundaries.” I will expand on the meaning of this claim throughout this chapter,
as I embark on a comparative study of A bout de souffle with B-movie films noirs such as
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).
In the first part of this section, I will be reviewing some of the principle
characteristics of the films noirs that had a tangible impact on A bout de souffle. It would,
in fact, have been possible to have structured this chapter around the B-movies referenced
directly by Godard in interviews. A few months prior to filming, Godard praises a
sequence in Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945) in which the actress “rushes so fast
through the customers that one sees the assistants’ hands … pulling [diners] aside to
make way for it” (Godard 134). Preminger’s films undoubtedly had a bearing on A bout
de souffle, not least because Godard became acquainted with Jean Seberg from
Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958). His film noir Whirlpool (1949) is also playing in a
movie theater at one point in the film. A bout de souffle also pays homage to Humphrey
Bogart, with a close-up Belmondo admiring his idol in front of the movie poster for The
Harder they Fall (1956). Other films from the Bogart canon, such as The Maltese Falcon
(1941) and High Sierra (1941) are alluded to in A bout de souffle’s dialogue and plot.
While Godard references and parodies at least one western (Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns),
it is nevertheless B-series films noirs whose influence is most discernible. Dudley
Andrew observes that “Belmondo’s dream of going south to Italy with his girl and his

6
Monogram Pictures one of the “poverty row” studios that specialized in the production of gangster B-
movies and television series between the years 1931 and 1953.
37

swag recalls the ‘escape over the border’ dreams of so many forties’ antiheroes, like the
fated couple of Gun Crazy … [which] may well have inspired the taxi scenes in
Breathless” (14) and is the basis of an anecdote that Belmondo recounts to Seberg.
7

I have nonetheless opted to confine my observations to the film noir genre as a
whole, and not the individual films which may or may not have influenced Godard. This
is foremost because tracing these influences is inherently a matter of speculation.
Monogram Pictures was disbanded in 1953 when the studio was acquired by Allied
Artists. Godard began his career as a cinema critic around 1956, meaning that there is
little if any criticism by Godard of the Monogram Pictures’ films he enjoying watching in
the Parisian cinémathèques as a student. As discussed at the outset, film noir as a popular
genre was also in its death throes by the mid-1950s, and no longer constituted a majority
share of any major studio’s output. The most noteworthy films noirs to emerge at this
time were authorial variations on noir themes, such as films by Hitchcock and Touch of
Evil (1958) by Orson Welles.
While Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is commonly cited as the first film noir,
the production cycle of films noirs did not truly begin until the mid 1940s, with the
success of Double Indemnity unleashing a “torrent of noir production” (Lyons 42). It is
from this point onwards that we can observe the “depersonalizing conventions” of film
noir, beginning with Nino Frank’s observation that Hollywood film had darkened over
the war years to the point where studios had begun making, literally, “black film.” Frank
had primarily identified an aesthetic tendency towards dark mise-en-scène and the use of

7
Dudley points out that Joseph H. Lewis’ film Gun Crazy (1949) is “a B variation on the theme eloquently
initiated by Fritz Lang in You Only Live Once” (14). Gun Crazy is also cited as the inspiration for Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), a film that Godard decline an offer to direct.
38

heightened chiaroscuro within studio-lit compositions; a tendency that had become part
of a “stylistic schema” (Schrader 235) and a stylistic “trademark” of film noir.
Historically, this came about in part thanks to the presence of the many German émigrés
who had arrived in Hollywood during the war and who had grown up artistically with
Expressionism and who were “great masters of chiaroscuro” (233).
Robert Siodmak’s film The Killers (1946) is particularly emblematic of this
stylistic aesthetic. In the opening sequences, two men identifiable only as black
silhouettes are driving a car, before emerging onto a surreally obscure urban exterior of a
roadway and diner. The light emanates from one source only, thus creating the
impression of an oneiric and surreal hell in which killers operate and condemned men
passively await their execution. In the interior shots too, the Swede lies in an obscurity
interrupted only by the shadows of the messenger sent to warn him, before he too is
totally enshrouded in darkness and a hail of bullets. Films noirs such as Out of the Past
(1947), D.O.A. (1950) and The Big Combo (1955) are also particularly noteworthy for
their shrouding of doomed protagonists in allegorical darkness, as are Nicholas Ray’s
They Live by Night (1948), Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Orson Welles’ The Lady
from Shanghai (1947) and A Touch of Evil (1958).
Thomas Schrader extrapolates regarding this stylistic convention which would
become the principal identifying hallmark of film noir:
The actor and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is
often hidden ... and his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks...
In film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow.
When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor it,
of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the
protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their best efforts.
(235)
39

The stylistic predilection for obscurity and shadows enshrouding protagonists in darkness
was, of course, commensurate with the increasingly dark narratives favored by film noir.
In his seminal study, Raymond Borde defined film noir as “the film of death in all senses
of the word” with plots invariably featuring the death of the male protagonist “at the end
of a tortuous journey” (5). The male hero (or antihero) would often be accused and
convicted of a crime he did not commit, although in film noir everybody is guilty to some
degree. Indeed, film noir would be deemed an “aberration of the American character”
(Schrader 241) for depicting the American immigrant mélange of races and ethnicities as
having given birth to wholly dystopian characters.
Beyond the mere fact of the doom-laden plot, film noir developed a range of
character and plot devices which enhanced the sentiment of existential anguish. Andrew
Dikos observes that protagonists act in such a way as to deny themselves “conventional
social and domestic happiness” and they are inclined to killing and murder “in defiance
of modern social mores and law” (7). The femme fatale became a near-ubiquitous staple
of the genre by the mid 1940s. The “femme noire” as she was originally identified, was
an “archetypal transgressive woman” (Lippe 170) and a two-dimensional figure
incarnating a “host of domineering women, castrating bitches, unfaithful wives and black
widows [who] seemed to personify the worst of male sexual fantasies” (Porfilio 87).
8

Films noirs have an exclusively urban setting, and usually take place in the year
contemporary to filmmaking. Shots often foreground icons of twentieth-century
modernity such as nightclubs, bars and seedy hotels (upscale hotels too), neon lighting,

8
I give specific consideration to the femme fatale in chapter three.
40

cigarettes, alcohol, guns, designer clothing etc. Telephones often have an ominous quality
(a ringing phone generally portends bad tidings), and great prominence is given over to
representations of the car, which is at times fetishized and the means of choice for
protagonists’ flight from a crime scene, gangsters or the police. The film noir narrative,
often related by a dead or dying protagonist who has fallen victim to some dark
machination, is merely a realistic reflection of the “coldhearted and treacherous” (14)
American metropolis that induced in its inhabitants “a loss of individual identity” (14)
and a profound sense of alienation.
The use of voice-over narration in combination with the flashback is arguably
film noir’s most “depersonalizing” form, as well as one of its most predominant and
identifying traits features.
9
The nature of the device varies slightly from film to film. In
The Killers, Double Indemnity and most famously in Sunset Boulevard, the protagonist’s
death is presented as a fait-accompli at the outset, and the narrative backtracks to the
events leading to the character’s inevitable demise. D.O.A. (1949) offers a nuanced
variation of this, where the main character, Frank Bigelow, knowing he has been
poisoned, actively seeks to discover why his life has been arbitrarily cut short. In case of
those narrating from the grave, the voice is detached not merely from its body but also
from time and space, and thus “lingers hauntingly … somewhere between timeless
consciousness and the present” (Dikos 177). Nino Frank observed that the flashback
device “permits the fragmentation of the narrative” (18); a fragmentation that

9
Celebrated films which use the flashback narration and/or voice-over narration include Sunset Boulevard,
Out of the Past, The Killers, Detour, Double Indemnity, Dead Reckoning, Laura, The Lady from Shanghai,
Murder My Sweet, D.O.A., etc.
41

Dimendberg finds to be “well attuned to the violently fragmented spaces and times of the
late-modern world” (6).
The B-movie films noirs were not remarkably different from the larger studio
productions, at least in terms of plot and narrative. However, because of the time and
material constraints imposed on the directors by the studios, B-series films noirs often
bear visual imperfections and occasionally mistakes. A somewhat typical example of a B-
series film noir is Detour (1945), which I will analyze at length in subsequent
considerations. Detour was directed by the Czech émigré director, Edgar G. Ulmer, who
having fallen foul of the larger studios, was forced to take a job at PRC, which made by
far the cheapest B-movies and permitted him only 15,000 feet of film stock (166 minutes)
and a week to make the film. The film is full of very visible mistakes; the background
repeats itself over and over again as the protagonist, Al Roberts, drives though Arizona
and California, the actress playing Vera (Ann Savage) has different hair arrangements in
the same sequence and she flutters an eyelash when she is supposed to be dead. Roberts
picks Vera up at a gas station in the desert, and when she gets into his and falls asleep,
Roberts admires her “natural, homely beauty.” Then Vera suddenly wakes up, and in
turning to face Roberts, she stares directly into the camera. There may have been an
element of intentionality on the part of Ulmer in Detour, as the effect is to present Vera in
a very sobering light, which is in tune with her character. As I will discuss later, it is
often difficult to determine if shots were planned by the director, or the serendipitous
byproduct of an “accident.”
Returning to my analysis of A bout de souffle, it is a matter of record that Godard
encouraged a reading of his first major film as a popular genre film and widely
42

proclaimed his intention to make “une sorte de film policier imité des séries B
américaines” (cited in Esquenazi 5). In a 1962 interview Godard claimed that he had had
no other ambition for A bout de souffle than to make an “ordinary gangster film,” adding:
“I had no business deliberately contradicting the genre... If the House of Atreus no longer
kill each other, they are no longer the House of Atreus” (Godard 174). Indeed, A bout de
souffle nominally adheres to many of the narrative norms of American film noir. Having
shot a policeman, Poiccard has committed the defiant and self-destructive act required of
the noir antihero. Like his idol, Humphrey Bogart, Michel Poiccard waltzes from hotel
room to apartment via bars and cafés, smoking cigarettes, stealing luxury American
automobiles, trying to recover money and wooing a beautiful American woman, Patricia
(Jean Seberg). In the end, Patricia also fulfils the role of the femme fatale by betraying
Poiccard to the police. Godard’s first feature remains essentially his sole film whose
narrative can be resumed in an essentially straightforward way.
The first and most flagrant divergence from film noir genre conventions is the
element of farce that appears throughout A bout de souffle. On face value, these comedic
elements could appear to detract from the film’s claim to seriousness. There are a number
of outright jokes in A bout de souffle too. It is Godard himself in a cameo appearance who
denounces Poiccard to the police when he sees his photo in a newspaper. In another
iconic sequence, a young lady selling the Cahiers du cinéma asks Poiccard if he hasn’t
“anything against youth?” Poiccard replies that in fact he “prefers old people.” The
policemen in charge of tracking Poiccard are linen and dark-suited mobsters, one tall, one
stocky and brandishing a cigar, and in the final sequences they are both wielding
submachine guns. Furthermore, the film’s ending, where Poiccard “dances” to his death,
43

is comically overplayed, and incongruous to the tragedy that is unfolding, at least by the
conventions of modern dramaturgy.
10

Poiccard’s fascination and impersonation of Humphrey Bogart, consisting of
repeatedly rubbing his thumb over his lips, is also in some regards strange.
11
However,
Belmondo is never entirely credible as a film noir “hard man,” but rather incarnates “a
totemistic compendium of movie-gangster busywork: the boxer’s gait, the squint, the hat-
wearing, chain-smoking, telephoning, driving, singing, shouting, mugging …” (Andrew
199). As is particularly evident in the chase-sequences, where Poiccard loses his police
tail in the bathroom of a Champs-Elysées cinema, and when he is yelling instructions to
the taxi driver, and has him stop the car so that he can lift up the skirt of a Parisian
woman, Poiccard is constantly imitating the behavior of the American gangster while
being, in essence, something completely other.
Beyond any levity afforded by these moments there is undoubtedly a serious and
subversive function to A bout de souffle’s parodies, which contrasts markedly with the
Hollywood B-movies which aspired to be taken seriously while at times being
unintentionally funny due to errors in continuity or sloppy acting. Susan Hayward has
asserted that “parody is the domain of oppositional cinema” (230), and there is extensive
evidence of this within A bout de souffle. Indeed, in spite of his sincere admiration for the
B-movie, we will see at length that Godard set out to demonstrate in A bout de souffle
that the genre film could and should have more complex ambitions. As I will develop
further under the heading of authorship, Godard also uses parody to make sure the viewer

10
One could argue, however, that these final instances produce more of an Aristotelian tragicomedy effect.
11
This gesture apparently references Humphrey Bogart’s own tick of running his thumb over his lips, and
not any particular film role.
44

is not made aware of the cinematic devices, mechanisms and intertextual (and “inter-
cinematic”) composite layers that make up the cinematic experience. In “tipping his hat”
to the Hollywood B-movie’s cheap narrative conventions and accidental aesthetics,
Godard is pointing to his own creation as being “everywhere a construct aware of its own
constructedness” (Winston Dixon 22).
12

One of the most striking manifestations of Godard’s ambition to transform the
genre movie into something more significant and profound occurs three minutes into A
bout de souffle Michel Poiccard stares directly into the camera while driving to tell the
viewer who does not like the sea, the mountains or the city, “allez vous faire foutre!”
There is nothing accidental about this shot, and indeed the frontal stare occurs on two
further occasions in A bout de souffle. In the first instance, the camera lingers on the
frontal gaze of Patricia, who strikes a highly eroticized pose, seductively putting her
glasses into her mouth after flirting with the famous writer Parvulesco. In the film’s final
image, Patricia stares enigmatically into the camera as she asks what Poiccard had meant
in saying “c’est dégueulasse” just before dying.
This is not the first time in the history of cinema, of course, that actors have
directly addressed the camera. There is inadequate space here to embark on a full account
of these instances, although a brief review is revealing of Godard’s intentions in using
this device. First, consider that the convention of directly addressing the camera is as old
as cinema itself, with the subjects filmed by the early pioneers of cinema (Edison, Marey,

12
In this regard, A bout de souffle arguably contains traces of the Brechtian dimension that is extensively
deployed in Godard’s later films. Brecht’s theories are of course loosely characterized by the
“defamiliarizing” and “distancing” of the spectator from the falsely comforting illusions of totalizing
fiction.
45

Muybridge and the Lumière brothers) explicitly acknowledging the presence of the
camera. The early “actuality” films and silent films also feature a number of instances
where the actors address the camera directly. One of the first British films, The Big
Swallow (1901) by James Williamson, has a man pictured in progressively closer close-
ups, until he appears to “swallow” the camera with his mouth. In a way, the B-movie
practice of allowing actors to fleetingly address the camera, as in Detour, can therefore be
considered a return to these early traditions, given that this practice was certainly
inadmissible in the “quality” Hollywood pictures.
The direct “camera stare” served a number of functions in these early films.
Foremost, they tended to occur at moments of extreme pain or pleasure, so that the
spectator could fully see the emotion on display. Charlie Chaplin frequently used this
device, for instance in The Kid (1921) to convey to the audience the deep bond between
that exists between the kid and the tramp and the bitter social ironies of their situation.
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) is also worthy of a mention in this context,
for while Renée Falconetti does not intentionally stare into the camera, the extreme close-
ups of the actresses’ tormented physiognomy provide an extraordinary example of the
emotive capabilities of the human face captured on film.
13
In later incarnations, the device
was used in Hollywood comedies and film parodies such as the Carry On series, in order
to break the so-called fourth wall to comedic effect by “winking” at the spectator,
playfully subverting the rule dictating that the spectator not be acknowledged.
In L’Histoire-caméra, Antoine de Baecque specifically identifies a tendency in
postwar European cinema to use “le regard caméra” (20) as a means of insinuating the

13
Godard will incorporate a sequence from La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc in Vivre sa vie (1963).
46

historical trauma, and argues that this is the foremost function of the device. De Baecque
first observes the “camera stare” in Alain Resnais’ Holocaust documentary Nuit et
brouillard (1955), in which the “morts vivants” (61) interned in concentration camp stare
piercingly and harrowingly into the camera. De Baecque writes:
Dès lors, les yeux qui fixent l’objectif et nous regardent sont partie
intégrante du siècle et des films, témoignant au plus haut point de la
rencontre de l’histoire et du cinéma … Ces regards caméra dans Nuit et
brouillard … disent que le ciné a dû changer, a changé, parce que plus
personne ne pouvait rester innocent après ces images. (20, 60)

De Baecque argues that the reemergence of the frontal camera stare is related to the
scenes captures in Nuit et brouillard, and that henceforth the form would be indelibly
associated with severe historical trauma.
14
In Europa 51(1952), for instance, Rossellini is
able to convey the trauma of Irène’s internment in a mental institution by having the
camera on the frontal gaze of her fellow patients. De Baecque also studies the “camera-
stare” in images of bomb survivors in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
While there is no explicit connection between the narrative of A bout de souffle
and the traumatic events of the Holocaust, the film’s final image of Patricia staring into
the camera is certainly imbued with pathos and lends itself to a reflection on her personal
trauma, sense of guilt and loss of innocence. The frame is thus intricately inscribed in a
complex narrative on the changing relations between the sexes in contemporary France,
and I will return to the analysis of this image in later discussions. Poiccard’s camera stare
also serves to situate A bout de souffle is a lineage of cinema that extends from the early
actuality films, silent cinema and the film noir cycle, but which bypasses, or indeed

14
In Monika (1953), Ingmar Bergman also had his leading actress stare directly into the camera, signifying
her interior torment and admission of moral guilt. Godard wrote that this sequence is “le plan le plus triste
de l’histoire” (de Baecque 58).
47

rejects many of the so-called “advances” in filmmaking practice. Its prime function is
therefore to signal Godard’s brazen effrontery of “quality” cinematic convention, and to
inform the viewer that his or her preconceptions of what a movie “should be” will be
challenged throughout the film.
Despite sharing the basic and superficial characteristics of the film noir antihero,
the figure of Michel Poiccard, as played by Michel Belmondo, provides us with a major
and insightful divergence from gangster film noir conventionality. This may not be
apparent at the outset, where Poiccard appears to be a two-dimensional hoodlum whose
role is defined by his apparently careless killing of a cop who was about to apprehend
him, his need for money and his desire to escape to Italy with a woman he claims to be in
love with. However, the apparent conventionality of the plot as well as Poiccard’s
“normality” is so carefully contrived that the discerning viewer can but understand that
this very predictability belies a more intelligent and profound ambition on the part of the
director.
15

Godard claimed in an interview in 1961 that in searching the “right theme” for his
first feature, he “finally became interested in Belmondo… I saw him as a sort of block to
be filmed to discover what lay inside” (Godard 175). Godard’s directorial aspirations for
Belmondo thus differ in at least one important regard from film noir directors’
relationship with their B-movie actors and actresses. Indeed, the early stars of film noir,
actors were cast precisely because of their familiarity with the stock characters they were
asked to interpret in film after film and their willingness to become identified with these

15
The choice of character name “Poiccard,” is also indicative of the character’s contrived normality; while
the name is similar to commonplace French surnames such as “Picard” and “Poincare,” it is also quite
distinctive.
48

roles. Certainly, Hollywood directors never talked about their actors as “blocks” waiting
to be discovered. Male actors therefore became typecast as film noir antiheros; most
typically as private-eye detectives, disaffected cops or hoodlums on the run from the
police or other gang-members. Female actresses, on the other hand, had to content
themselves with the two roles essentially afforded them in film noir; that of the crime
victim or that of the femme fatale.
16

Indeed, one of the most far-reaching claims made by Godard in interviews is that
A bout de souffle is not a gangster film noir at all, but primarily a “documentary on Jean
Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo” (Andrew 166). In my subsequent chapter I consider at
length the implications of the New Wave and Godard’s “documentary” ambitions in
representing youth culture, contemporary Paris and the politics of his generation. A bout
de souffle is in many ways exemplary of what I will term the New Wave’s “actuality
aesthetic;” a mode of representation that uses the basic framework of the B-series film
noir in order to provide a realist and unambiguously politicized portraiture of postwar
youth culture. In Godard’s first feature film, for instance, the choice of filming locations
is undoubtedly laced with a flagrant criticism of the perceived postwar Americanization
of Paris. In fact, close attention to Poiccard shows that he is in fact revolted by the
transformation of his country into a showcase for postwar liberal capitalism. Poiccard
finds that his entire material world is defined by American iconography and cultural
imports (les Americaines, implying both the cars and Patricia), and the viewer can be in
no doubt that Poiccard is deeply offended by this state of affairs. “Ça détruit la morale,”

16
Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart became two of the most iconic film noir leading actors; with
Mitchum’s career beginning with and then becoming synonymous with the genre. The infamous “queen of
the Bs” (Lyons 3) included the actresses Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer and Coleen Gray.
49

Poiccard remarks as he rails against the supposed superiority of dresses from Prisunic, a
French equivalent of the American-styled supermarket and a left-bank building rebuilt in
a modernist post-war “faceless” style, and thus articulating a moral revulsion that in
American film noir remains for the most part “unspoken.”
17

A bout de souffle is also a key instance of a New Wave auteur manifesting his fear
of the nascent sexual revolution, which I consider at length in my forth chapter. Poiccard
is profoundly suspicious of Patricia’s liberated, “American” sexuality, and he is
constantly equating the financial market place with the new rules of sexual engagement,
for instance telling Patricia that he once sold cars in New York before asking her how
many men she had slept with. In the film’s final sequences, Poiccard cuts an increasingly
forlorn and fatalist figure, and his final goofy renditions of his Bogart-boxer and his
“funny faces” routine seconds before dying are pathetic. At the end, Michel Poiccard’s
hamartia, his tragic error, is to have believed that his seduction of Patricia was enough to
ensure her loyalty to him, and his attraction to all things American is therefore the biggest
single cause of his demise.
McConnell observes that “Belmondo’s first words to his audience, after stealing a
car, are J’aime la France: his immersion in the American thriller has turned him into a
tourist in his own country, the first of those alienated hommes révoltés who will become
Godard’s most important contribution to the narrative traditions of the film” (13).
McConnell here underscores another fundamental transformation operated by Godard on

17
It is interesting with regard to A bout de souffle’s critique of the Americanization and capitalization of
France that one of vehicles Michel Poiccard overtakes on his way to Paris is a BP tanker. I revisit in detail
the New Wave’s representation and critique of these issues in chapter two.
50

his film noir protagonist. In addition to highlighting Poiccard’s alienation and
disaffection with modernity by transforming him into a “tourist” in his own environment,
Godard transforms Michel Poiccard into an existential protagonist with attributes
resembling Sartre and Camus’ literary characters living absurd lives and imbued with a
proclivity for freedom and revolt.
18

In his essay “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” Robert Porfirio
highlights films noirs’ irrefutably “existential” aspect, as does Stephen Faison in his book
Existentialism, Film Noir and Hard-Boiled Fiction. American film noir existentialism
refers primarily to its representations of man’s “encounter with nothingness” (Barrett 23)
in an inherently evil world, and a sense of hopelessness born of the Great Depression and
the war. In A bout de souffle, on the other hand, Poiccard’s “encounter with nothingness”
is grounded in a far more precise, philosophical discourse, often capitalized as
Existentialism. Godard makes a number of direct references to the philosophy throughout
the film, such as in the art studio where Poiccard picks up a copy of Maruice Sachs’
Abracadabra, that proclaims on its front cover that we are all “des morts en permission”
(cited in Andrew 16), as well as in the long hotel bedroom sequence where Patricia asks
Poiccard, citing Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, which he would choose between “le chagrin
et le néant?”
Indeed, Poiccard can arguably be conceived in Sartrian terms as an Existential
hero. He is “nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre 28), and his character

18
Dudley Andrew, whom I have already cited regarding Sartre’s influence over Godard, writes that in
making a crime film, Godard chose “the genre that most promoted and prolematized freedom, the film
noir” (12).
51

incarnates revolt; against modernity, authority and society’s rules.
19
It is significant with
regard to A bout de souffle’s engagement with Existentialism that Godard chose not to
adopt the film noir convention of narrating the story in the form of flashbacks, from the
point of view of a dead or dying Poiccard. The break from convention may appear subtle
(and indeed not all films noirs employ the flashback), yet it serves to deprive the viewer
of the certainty that Poiccard will be captured or killed, even if the viewer knows that by
convention he will. Indeed, nothing about Poiccard’s fate is predetermined and one could
argue that Poiccard is the embodiment of Sartre’s mantra of being “condemned to be
free” (34).
It is important to stress that Existentialism is merely one field of ideas among
several exerting influence on Godard in A bout de souffle. Nevertheless, Sartre’s
influence is highly indicative of the serious and profound nature of Godard’s complex
engagement with conceptual ideas and philosophy, which belies his superficial
appropriation of the B-movie genre format. It is noteworthy that Godard and Sartre also
shared a similar concern with gaining recognition for cinema as an art form with serious
ambition and intent. In Les Mots, Sartre argues that it is precisely cinema’s origins as a
trivial and popular art form, “né dans une caverne de voleurs, rangé par l’administration
au nombre des divertissements forains” that makes it the medium of choice for
representing the twentieth century, “un siècle sans tradition, qui devait trancher sur les

19
Moreover, Poiccard’s downfall ensues from his need and desire for Patricia and by extension a struggle
between opposing consciousnesses and the realization that “being-with-others” requires to some degree
“being-for-others.”
52

autres par ses mauvaises manières” (cited in de Baecque 23).
20
As I will endeavor to
show at length in my subsequent considerations, Godard in his New Wave period
profoundly believed that the “trivial” and carnivalesque medium of cinema to be the art
most attuned and able to represent the twentieth century realities.
In several interviews during the 1960s, Godard talked about his intention in A
bout de souffle to “make something very precise … a thriller movie or gangster movie
[resembling] Scarface,” but on seeing the final outcome he felt disappointment, as if he
had made “Alice in Wonderland” (Interviews 29). Godard’s disappointment stems
perhaps from not having succeeded in wholly shattering or rewriting the rules of the
crime film genre. He had undoubtedly made something that deviated from the
conventions of American film noir, yet which retained elements of the genre’s initial
predilection for being “out of the ordinary” and going against the rules. Godard
supplanted American film noir, “a narrative cinema of simplicity and primitive charm”
(Winston Dixon 20) with a more complex generic formula combining elements of
imitation and parody and resulting in a film that has the seminal elements of a wide-
ranging critique of postwar French modernity. However, at the heart of Godard’s
approach is a return to the forms, narratives and genre conventions of prior traditions of
cinema.
In this next section, I will consider if Godard can be deemed more radical, and
less retrogressive, in his mise-en-scène of the author-film director and in his
interpretation of la politique des auteurs.

20
Sartre writes that cinema is “le nouvel art, l’art roturier préfigurait notre barbarie” (cited in de Baecque
23).
53

(ii) Notions of Radical Authorship in A bout de souffle

It has proven impossible to manipulations of genre conventions in A bout de
souffle without referring extensively to Godard in his role as film director. As Esquenazi
asserts, Godard made use of the crime genre as a “resource” in A bout de souffle, while
clearly intending his first feature film to be “un film d’auteur” (7).
21
In this section, I will
endeavor to clarify what it meant for Godard to make an auteur film at the time of A bout
de souffle. On the one hand, conforming to the general understanding of the term, I
believe that Godard sought to impart an element of personal vision into his first film, as
well as to emulate and pay tribute to the pantheon of directors beloved of Cahiers du
cinema, foremost Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles but also Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir and
others. In this respect, la politique des auteurs can be seen to be a retrogressive concept.
On the other hand, I believe Godard’s ambition in A bout de souffle bespeaks a far more
complex relationship to authorship. Indeed, I will aim to show that Godard’s first film
contains a seminal deconstruction of notions of cinematic authorship, in a move that can
be shown to anticipate the radical reflections on authorship developing during the 1960s
by thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.
La politique des auteurs is a conceptual term (often rendered in English “auteur
theory,” thus losing the reference to “politics”) which was progressively adopted by
Cahiers du cinéma after Truffaut first coined the term in his 1955 article “Ali Baba et la
‘Politique des Auteurs.’” Each of the critics had different notions of what the la politique

21
“En se servant comme d’une ressource du genre policier, il veut faire d’A bout de souffle un film
d’auteur” (Esquenazi 7).
54

des auteurs entailed and adopted the politique at different stages, but Truffaut was
undoubtedly its most prolific defender.
22
For Truffaut, a film d’auteur implied that a film
bear the stylistic traits reflecting the decisions and personality of the director. As de
Baecque explains in Histoire d’une revue, this principle became known as “le
volontarisme de l’auteur” (149). Furthermore, a true auteur de films has a vocation,
almost a “calling” for cinema that could only have manifested itself through filmmaking.
Perhaps most significantly, an auteur’s work must be seen as “une œuvre en train de se
faire” (149); an ongoing body of work that cannot fully be appraised until it is complete.
The merits of the auteur became, therefore, the primarily criteria for critiquing a film,
and “la politique des auteurs se construit donc sur la volonté d’intimité avec un créateur
dont on défend tous ses films, même ceux méprisés pour leur genre ou leurs défauts”
(149). Truffaut’s choice of Jacques Becker’s Ali Baba (1954) to introduce his theory of la
politique des auteurs was somewhat provocative, given that most critics regarded the film
as a poor film. For Truffaut, however, Ali Baba had to be seen as a simply one aspect of
Becker’s filmmaking, and praised as a film made by a man “qui ne concevait pas d’autre
voie que celle choisie par lui, et dont l'amour qu'il portait au cinéma a été payé de retour”
(149).
As we will see, Godard in A bout de souffle undoubtedly reveals a more complex
and convoluted understanding of la politique des auteurs than Truffaut. However, as a
critic, Godard shared Truffaut’s great admiration for Hitchcock, Chaplin, John Ford,

22
Alexandre Astruc was also instrumental in developing auteur theory. In L’Ecran français of 1948, he
coined the term “caméra stylo,” and in 1954 he wrote of Hitchcock in these terms: “Quand un homme
depuis trente ans, et à travers cinquante films, raconte à peu près toujours la même histoire … il me paraît
difficile de ne pas admettre que l'on se trouve, pour une fois, en face … d’un auteur de films” (de Baecque
148).
55

Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann, and Godard himself was particularly enamored with
Nicolas Ray and Orson Welles. Indeed, both Orson Welles and Nicolas Ray were upheld
by the Cahiers critics as directors who managed to affirm a personal perspective in their
films through their maîtrise (mastery) of their craft. In Orson Welles in particular, the
critics felt that they had come closest to finding a director who was able to express
through his films, as John Caughie has characterized cinematic authorship, “uniqueness
of personality, brash individuality, persistence of obsession and originality” (cited in
Hillier 76). Rivette remarked on Welles’ “egocentric conception of the director,” and his
ability to produce “personal” works by “not paying much attention to ... rules and
conventions” (75).
As previously mentioned, Godard and the other Cahiers critics found Nicholas
Ray, in the words of Rohmer, to be “one of the few [auteurs] to possess his own style, his
own vision of the world, his own poetry” (cited in Hillier 76). Ray’s vision seemed
particularly attuned to the film noir genre, making five films noirs between 1949 and
1952.
23
In each of these films, the protagonists undergo existential soul-searching while
pitted against the system, generally the police force. Ray, who began his directorial career
by making a series of low budget B-movies, would inspire the future directors in more
practical ways too. Thanks to his reputation as a competent and innovative director, he
was able to cast Humphrey Bogart in two of his movies. Moreover, he did not shy away
from injecting personal elements into a picture, notably casting his wife Gloria Grahame

23
Knock on Any Door (1949), A Woman’s Secret (1949), They Live by Night (1949), In a Lonely Place
(1950) and On Dangerous Ground (1952).
56

in In a Lonely Place.
24
In a review of Ray’s film Hot Blood (1956), Godard went so far as
to write that “if the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of
being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to” (cited in Hillier 116).
Godard was not displeased with the media furor that accompanied the release of A
bout de souffle and that heralded the arrival of an auteur, and as a matter of fact, Godard
had used his experience and contacts from his years working at the publicity and press
division of Fox to coordinate A bout de souffle’s successful media launch. As Annette
Michelson writes in her foreword to Godard on Godard, A bout de Souffle was
“presented and received ... as the individual, personal tribute of one young Author to a
production system perceived as a narrative tradition through a succession of oeuvres
d’auteurs” (vii). Geneviève Sellier documents in Masculine Singular how the French
press was quick to appraise (and praise) the personal, authorial dimension of Godard’s
work and did not even sense the need to critique A bout de souffle’s status as a genre
crime movie. Jean Dutourd writes in Carrefour that “Godard has painted a little bit of
himself in the portrait of his hero” (cited in Sellier 53) and Pierre Macabru writes in
Combat that Godard’s film “describes the customs ... of the director’s own milieu” (53).
Perhaps most revealingly, François Nourissier in Les Lettres françaises comments that
Godard’s “breakthrough was to have made, in spite of the crime-story plot, a love story
whose truthfulness of tone ... far exceeds the framing of the anecdote” (54). In other
words, Godard has produced a work of greatness in spite of the cumbersome conventions
and formalities of the crime genre. It would appear, therefore, that in their earnestness to

24
Godard also gave his wife, Anna Karina, a leading role in six films.
57

proclaim an authorial triumph, French critics denigrated Godard’s use of genre formulae
as either irrelevant, or else as an obstacle to Godard’s creative expression as an auteur.
However, close attention to certain sequences in A bout de souffle reveals that
Godard rejected this simplistic understanding of the auteur, and that he already shows
awareness of far more complex paradigms of authorship. Indeed, any claim to authorial
originality on the part of Godard must be mitigated with the realization that Godard was
ambitiously deconstructing received notions and certainties regarding subjective notions
of authorship. We have already seen evidence of a more complex reflection on authorship
in the trail of meta-references, and the scores of allusions to films, art and literary figures,
from Balzac to Faulkner. In light of this, Annette Michelson has gone so far as to claim
that Godard’s feature was mistakenly presented as a film d’auteur, when in fact it was
“prime example of intertexuality” (vii). In essence, we will see that A bout de souffle is
not merely a crime genre movie, but rather a rigorous treatise on intellectual authorship.
Franck McConnell argues that Godard’s “adversary relationship with the
primitiveness of his genre” (12) is at the heart of his complex inquiry into cinematic
authorship in A bout de souffle, concluding that “Breathless gives us, with remarkable
purity, the myth of creative genius divorced from and in conflict with history, with genre”
(12). McConnell’s formula is deftly aphoristic, and he cites a specific instance, that when
“Godard himself plays the anonymous bystander who tips off the police to fugitive
Belmondo’s whereabouts, bringing to birth the film’s absurd and predestined
catastrophe,” (12) as evidence of his claim. In this sequence, Godard plays an anonymous
bystander who recognizes Poiccard’s likeness in a newspaper photo and who tips off the
police.
58

On face value, Godard’s cameo appearance speaks of a director who was keen to
draw attention to his presence and to inscribe his authorial self into the fabric of his own
work in the same way that Hitchcock did in each of his films. Godard’s cameo
appearance can also be construed, however, in an entirely different light. First, it can be
seen a comical critique of the predictable and hackneyed gangster film convention, where
the inevitable “closing in” and capture of the protagonist is preempted by a betrayal.
Moreover, Godard’s interpretation of himself as the film director who personally
intervenes to denounce his protagonist to the police is an exaggerated and ironic
representation of the director who knows and controls everything.
Indeed, as I will develop further in the next section, A bout de souffle provides a
case-study of artistic collaboration. The original story was conceived by Truffaut, who
had wanted to make a film based on the life of Michel Portail, a “gentleman-crook” who
killed a policeman en route to Paris from Le Havre in 1952. Truffaut had the idea of
adding a detective and American journalist, who would also be the love interest. This
vague, four-page outline that was purchased by Georges de Beauregard for a token one
million francs and subsequently reworked by Godard who claims to have discarded most
of Truffaut’s content.
25

26
While Godard had in fact carefully mapped out the shoot, the
actors’ dialogue was not penned until the night before or even the day of filming and
often in collaboration with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Belmondo in particular
was allowed to improvise, but in terms of his movements, gestures and dialogue, which

25
Richard Brody notes that “the story at this point was not a script or even a story outline” (56). One
million francs was substantially below the market rate for scripts at this time.
26
In a letter from Godard to Truffaut, as testified in Deux de la Vague, Godard writes to his friend just
before filming began: “Je pense qu’encore une fois tu seras assez surpris. Je pense même que tu n’aimeras
pas ce film. En bref, ça va etre l’histoire d’un garcon qui pense à la mort et d’une fille qui n’y pense pas.”
59

was carefully written down to ensure that it matched the post-synchronized sound
recordings. It is a matter of record that Jean Seberg often disagreed with Godard’s
decisions. For instance, she was dissatisfied with Godard’s intended ending, where she
was supposed to laugh at Poiccard and to pick his pockets as he lay on his deathbed.
After much discussion, Godard allowed Seberg to convey a measure of chagrin, although
on seeing the images, she accepted Godard’s request to inject some levity into her
voiceover when subsequently recording her dialogue.
While it is possible that the mise-en-scène of the cinematic “super author” with
unhindered ability to narrate his story could be construed as a fantasy on the part of
Godard, I believe instead that it should be considered to be intentionally unbelievable and
ironic. Indeed, a second scene featuring Jean-Pierre Melville in the role as a novelist
named Parvulesco goes even further in exposing the myth of the all-knowing “super
author,” and I believe this sequence to portend a serious critique and deconstruction of
the very founding principles of authorship. On first viewing, the scene appears quite
incongruous to the main narrative as there is little obvious reason for Patricia to ride to
Orly airport to interview the novelist Parvulesco. He is flanked by journalists who are
intent on filming and recording his pronouncements on art, love and modern living. He is
self-assured and apparently all-knowing; defending a novel that he is sure “recevra un
accueil assez réservé à cause du puritanisme français.” The author is brash, virile, quick-
witted, witty, philosophical, self-assured to point of being obnoxious, pro-American and
he outshines the nervous and insecure old guard, represented here by the quirky
assortment of journalists. His greatest ambition, in answer to Patricia’s question, is
60

“devenir immortelle, et puis mourir.” Patricia is visibly charmed by his replies, and the
sequence ends with an eroticized close-up of Patricia’s face.
The sequence comprises a cacophony of voices and literary or cinematic
references: Rilke, Casanova, Cocteau’s Orphée. Godard’s own voice rather feeble voice,
disguised as that of a journalist, can just about be heard over din of the other journalists’
and Patricia’s questions. Melville’s character is auspiciously based on a real French-
Romanian writer named Jean Parvulesco, a journalist for Combat who was a close friend
of Godard’s and who had published articles supportive of the New Wave. The character,
however, is not played by Parvulesco himself, but rather Jean-Pierre Melville, who had
established himself as an auteur and whose films exerted a considerable influence over
the future Cahiers filmmakers.
27
Indeed, the character is not “supposed” to be
Parvulesco, who was not a published novelist at this time. Furthermore, there is some
ambiguity about the character’s nationality, and it is unclear if he is supposed to be
French or American which is quite possibly a reference to the fact that Melville, who was
born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, had adopted his new name as a tribute to the American
author, Herman Melville.
On one level, Godard offers himself through Melville’s character a self-
portraiture as an auteur, and the sequence could also be interpreted as a brazen homage to
authorship. As we will see, however, this would be misconceived. Rather, the portraiture
is of course a fantasy projection of the director’s power and influence, and this meta-
representation should be seen as a parody of the auteur; an absurd caricature of the kind

27
As a director, Melville had already demonstrated in Bob le flambeur (1956) how French cinema could
take formulaic ingredients of the American gangster crime movie and forge these into a flim d’auteur.
61

which does not exist in real life. We can deduce from this that Godard is fully aware of
the impossibilities inherent in proclaiming himself to be as an author “the fount, the
origin of all meaning” (Bennett 21), or even ascribing himself artistic singularity. Indeed,
other aspects of this sequence strongly suggest that Godard is already contemplating his
role as auteur and his medium in Barthesian terms; drawing together a “tissue of
quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (Bennett 146) forming an
“irreducible plurality” (159) as defined in Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, “The Death of the
Author.”
The segment featuring Melville in A bout de souffle also serves to illustrate many
of Foucault’s notions of authorship elaborated in his 1970 essay “What is an Author?”
Melville’s own choice of name and his screen appropriation of “Parvulesco” highlights
“the paradoxical singularity of the author’s name” (Foucault 106). Furthermore, the
onscreen appearance of Melville highlights the perceived need for an “author,” even
when this is clearly an impossible simplification and so blatantly an artificial
construction. Indeed, in spite of the elaborate deception and facade, the journalists in A
bout de souffle are eager to hand on to every word spoken by the acclaimed novelist
“Parvulesco,” just as the press will critique Melville and Godard’s films in terms of being
an authorial “brand.” As Foucault analyzes in regard to literature, the author’s name
alone suffices to “mark off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its
mode of being,” and becoming indicative of “a certain discursive set and … the status of
this discourse within a society and a culture” (107). Godard’s mise-en-scène of
authorship in A bout de souffle thus exemplifies Foucault’s principle of the “author-
62

function,” while simultaneously exposing the falsely absolute and erroneous nature of
this construction.
Godard’s iconoclastic début feature film is, in conclusion, a deliberately self-
referential work of cinema. In addition to reworking and subverting conventions of plot
and style, Godard’s simultaneous affirmation and deconstruction of authorship had the
effect of, in the words of Wheeler W. Dixon, calling “audience attention to the inherent
reflexivity of his enterprise, and the manipulative and plastic nature of the cinema” (22).
In his later filmmaking, in particular the Dziga-Vertov years (1968 – 1972), Godard will
embark upon a sustained and rigorous inquiry into cinematic authorship, characterized by
an inquiry into authorship predicated on the “realization of the collective nature of film
production” (Michelson vii) and systematic doubts about “the very existence of ‘the
Author’” (vii). The cinema of this era, “whose values are counterposed to those of
orthodox cinema” (Wollen 79), fully deconstruct and reject notions of single authorship
by virtue of the destruction of all “narrative transitivity” (79), intertextual narratives and
the foregrounding of the camera and are generally acknowledged by film scholars to be
radical.
28

In spite of its status as an auspiciously “popular” gangster film, A bout de souffle
can thus be shown to contain the seminal elements of Godard’s future radical inquiry into
cinematic authorship. Indeed, it is not without good reason that the body of Godard’s
(“the author’s”) work and career is generally considered by scholars to be tantamount to a
sustained attack on the received notion of what an author is. We note that this inquiry is

28
Refer to the entirety of Peter Wollen’s essay on Godard’s Vent d’Est (1970). Scholars writing in The
Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000 write of Godard’s “radical questioning
of history ‘as such’ (64), his “radical calling into question of the image” (176), etc.
63

initially rooted, however, in an exploration of authorship predicated on subsequently
discredited notions of the all-knowing director, based upon the early Cahiers naïve
appreciation of Hollywood film directors. In this aspect as in others, A bout de souffle is
therefore both radical and retrogressive in its outlook.
A bout de souffle is often cited in film classes as being one of the most
iconoclastic and innovative films of the early 1960s due to its break from the status quo
of filmmaking practice. In this next section I will examine if A bout de souffle’s most
substantial claim to radicalism lies, therefore, in its production technique.

(iii) Contrived Simplicity: Godard’s Use of B-series Production Technique

In this section, I will endeavor to show that Godard’s admiration for his favored
American directors lay principally in the fact of their authorial independence from the
Hollywood studio-system. Their prime achievement was to have made films that
ostensibly corresponded to the conventions of the genre movie and which reached a wide
audience, while also being unequivocally films d’auteur. Through his studied
appropriation in A bout de souffle of the production methods and techniques used by the
Hollywood B-series directors, in particular Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, Godard
sought to achieve an unparalleled degree of creative freedom for a debutant director in
France at this time.
In her foreword to Godard on Godard, Annette Michelson convincingly argues
that Godard’s entire conceptualization of the politique des auteurs, from A bout de souffle
onwards, revolves around the struggle between the director and the studio system. She
writes that for Godard in his early career as director, “freedom means doing what one
64

wants to do when one wants to” (vi), without succumbing to exterior pressures. Godard
considered Orson Welles and Nicolas Ray, moreover, to have achieved this level of
freedom.
29
Michelson goes on to argue that Godard’s early divorce from studio
dependence and his championing of directorial autonomy outside of the studio system
should be seen as part of “a concerted attempt to stem the advancing tide of American
hegemony” (vi). Indeed, Godard’s opposition to the hegemonic studio systems arguably
speaks of his resistance to other forms of authoritarian control, specifically American
political, economic and cultural imperialism.
30

My approach to documenting Godard’s usage of the B-series production
techniques is in part inspired by that that outlined by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi in his work
Godard et la société française des années 1960. Esquenazi argues that in order to truly
define the “contours” of a film, one needs to understand all of the processes involved in
its creation, which he refers to as the film’s “symbolic economy” (4).
31
In practical terms,
this means doing an inventory (“un bilan”) of the principal resources, “les moyens” et
“les resources” (7) used by the director and his production team. It also requires
enumerating “l’ensemble des contraintes” (4), that is to say the principal restrictions both
material and conceptual imposed on the film at each stage of production up to and

29
The reality of the matter, as Anette Michelson, Kristen Ross, Victoria de Grazia and have demonstrated
at length, the American studio system, of which Welles and Ray were a part, was closely modeled on the
“assembly line and scientific marketing techniques worked out in the auto industry” (Ross 33). These
techniques were closely associated with Fordism, a system of mass producing commodities which offered
the studios in the 1920s and 30s, in the words of Victoria de Grazia, “an entirely new paradigm for
organizing cultural production on industrial lines” (cited in Ross 37).
30
I am inclined to agree with Annette Michelson that for Godard in the early 1960s, la politique des
auteurs implied first and foremost an opposition to all manner of established bodies of authority; bodies as
diverse as the studio system, the Gaullist régime and the institutions of capitalism.
31
“Afin de réussir à en dessiner les contours, nous devons comprendre comment s’organise le processus de
production d’un objet signifiant comme un film, ce que l’on pourrait appeler son économie symbolique”
(Esquenazi 4).
65

including the film’s release and distribution. In the case of A bout de souffle, one of the
main “constraints” was Godard’s declared intention of imitating the B-movie
conventions, comprising of “leurs personages [et] leurs modèles de narration” (5). In
essence, Godard’s movie equally had to fall within the boundaries of the crime movie
genre, as his finished film had to in some way adhere to the character and narrative
conventions associated with the genre.
In my observations, however, I will emphasize how Godard endeavors to
transform apparent constraints into “resources” for maximizing his directorial control. In
common with his subversive appropriation of Hollywood generic conventions, we will
see that Godard’s usage of American production techniques is very deliberate and
studiously contrived. As Dudley Andrew comments, “no film would try harder than
Breathless to fix simplicity straight in the eye” (8). Thus conforming to my overall
reading of the film, any claim that A bout de souffle achieves a “radical” break from the
status quo as regards its production must be tempered with the acknowledgment that it is
rooted in and inspired from a past cinematic tradition.
In tracing the “contours” of A bout de souffle, I might have explored various
avenues of production and the influence exerted by the American B-series film noir. For
instance, the Hollywood films achieved popular success more than in part due to the
“striking performance by a less recognized screen star or actor” (Dikos 7), and the New
Wave filmmakers adopted a similar strategy to casting, recruiting many previously
unknown yet talented young actors and actresses into their films.
32
I might also have

32
Both cinemas also relied upon the involvement of a handful of established stars essentially in order boost
their film’s media exposure.
66

explored the nature of film financing and the circumstances that led to powerful
producers (both in 1940s Hollywood and late 1950s France) being able to offer directors
significantly increased freedom from studio control. I could also have looked at the
conditions of A bout de souffle’s release and distribution, with Colin McCabe writing
with regard to Godard’s first film that “never can a film that cost so little have had such a
huge launch” (122).
I have chosen, on the other hand, to consider the influence of economic
circumstance on the film production methods employed by Hollywood in a broader
context. Indeed, I will aim to show that the artistic freedom achieved by the Hollywood
directors through the B-movie was a largely serendipitous result of filmmaking
conventions born out of economic and material circumstances of 1940s America. Godard
and the New Wave auteurs would subsequently emulate these conventions, with the very
deliberate aim of bypassing studio control and affecting a sense of authorial freedom.
Both the history of film noir and of the French New Wave can be told materially,
and this is broadly what I will be attempting in this section. In his book Death on the
Cheap, Arthur Lyons criticizes film scholars for neglecting to consider film noir as a
“product of history [and] also a product of Hollywood” (2). Lyons asserts that the history
of film noir can be written almost entirely from a material point of view, that is to say, it
can be accounted for in terms of the historical circumstance and events which created the
favorable conditions for its birth. In resuming this argument, I am partially agreeing with
Lyon’s argument, although I am less interested in the polemics concerning film noir
scholarship than in the overall relevance of his findings to my study of A bout de souffle.
Specifically, I will explain how the lack of adequate studio lighting was one of the
67

biggest single factors in the creation of an aesthetic (and genre) which became imbued
with subversiveness by virtue of its dark, dystopian visuals and narratives.
Noir’s emergence by the mid-1940s as the preeminent B-movie genre is generally
ascribed to various factors, and histories of film noir habitually begin by recounting the
backlash against the “amelioristic cinema” (Schrader 231) of the war years and the need
to channel postwar disillusionment into “the sordidness of the urban crime film” (232). It
so happened that there “were no greater masters of chiaroscuro” (233) than the German
émigrés of the war period, who had grown up artistically with Expressionism and who
were adept at directing “unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto a realistic setting”
(233). A further stylistic contributor to the development of film noir was the “hard-
boiled” tradition of detective pulp fiction which first saw life in the 1920s in the form of
popular magazines such as Black Mask, which marketed itself on the strengths of its
private eye stories featuring Race Williams. In the 1930s Black Mask began publishing
novels by Paul Cain and Cornell Woolrich, whose protagonists were hard-boiled
existential antiheros and whose tales of addiction, alcohol abuse, voyeurism and greed
would later be adapted into at least thirty noir films.
33

However, despite numerous attempts to adapt Cain’s and Woolrich’s novels, this
trend in fiction did not cross over to the big screen in any substantive form in the 1930s,
given that film noir did not begin to emerge until the mid-1940s.
34
Studio politics and the
Hays Production Code are often cited as reasons for this delay. The Production Code was
devised in 1930 as a means for the studios to avoid direct government censorship. In

33
Woolrich novels notably inspired Hitchcock’ Rear Window and Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black.
34
RKO’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) commonly cited as the first film noir.
68

return, the studios voluntarily pledged not to “lower the moral standards” (Doherty 44)
and agreed to provide copies of scripts before beginning production to the infamous
Production Code Administration. There was considerable resentment among Hollywood
directors about the Code, which by 1934 required films to receive a “purity seal” (Lyons
18), but by and large the code was respected until it received a direct and forthright
challenge from Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s Double Indemnity (1944); the noir
story of an insurance salesman who is talked into committing murder and insurance fraud
by the adultrous Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck).
35
Double Indemnity’s big box
office success unleashed a “torrent of noir production” (42) and henceforth every studio
had a B unit, with RKO’s division being the most influential.
There is, however, an alternative history which posits economic circumstance as
the primary factor in the emergence of film noir. The Great Depression had hit cinema
audiences hard, and the movie theaters had lost an estimated fifty million spectators since
the heyday of the 1920s, and large studios such as Universal were on the brink of
bankruptcy. The double feature emerged in New England as an advertising ploy to give
customers the impression of getting value for money, and by 1935, eighty-five percent of
U.S. movie theaters had converted to the idea. In essence, the studios were boosting
production in order to generate a bigger market, and B-movies quickly emerged as the
most economical way of filling the extra demand. RKO and Universal led the way with
the production of cheap horror, comedies and whodunits, and before long, Hollywood
studios could not cater for the demand for B pictures alone. Hence, “poverty row” studios

35
After initially being refused, the script for Double Indemnity underwent careful revisions in order to
respect the “letter of the law.” It became a showcase for noir fondness for double-entendre and cleverly
allusive references to sexual and criminal activity without being explicit.
69

such as Monogram, Republic, and PRC were formed in the late 1930s to provide
dedicated B-movie output.
In the 1940s, several genres were favored to the B-movie format, including
comedies, musicals and the western. Film noir, however, emerged around the mid-1940s
as the predominant B-movie genre. Arthur Lyons argues that the fundamental reasons for
this state of affairs lay almost entirely in the filmmaking conditions of the time. B-movie
budgets did not exceed $100,000 (they were often capped at a quarter of this figure), with
the War Production Board imposing stringent limitations on the timeframe for shooting
(often two weeks or less) as well as the amount of film stock available to them.
Furthermore, studios had ceased to receive any revenue from Europe for their movies at
the start of the war, while production costs were soaring. The studios thus had their hands
tied, and necessity proved to be the mother of invention. As Lyons explains, “film noir
was made to order for the B [movie] ... It was cheaper to produce because it required less
lighting and smaller casts and usually entailed story lines that required limited-scale sets”
(4). The main attraction of the film noir narrative was its compact and ubiquitous
character lineup; the killers, con men, cigarette girls, crooked cops, gum shoes and
femmes fatales, which were at once new to audiences of the 1940s and could be
reorganized with ease into a seemingly infinite number of new scenarios and plots. In
many instances, sequences showing police chases and heists were literally recycled from
one picture to another. Neither did these pictures require big movie stars, although they
did enlist stars whose careers were on the wane.
The lighting was arguably the biggest single factor to account for the poverty-row
studios’ predilection for film noir productions, as well as the development of the genre’s
70

visual aesthetics. Good studio lighting was expensive and at a premium during wartime,
and the B production units were often left with no alternative other than to film with
“inadequate” studio light, as well as to shoot “night by night.”
36
The émigré filmmakers
were adept at using low-key lighting, and borrowed from the visual styles of German
expressionism to achieve the trademark noir shadows, ominous and surreal street
backdrops, as well as the classic “wet street” appearance. Combined with the innovative
approach of American directors such as Orson Welles and cinematographers such as John
Alton, film noir rapidly became an amalgamation, or “hybridization” (Lyons 40) of visual
styles and narrative forms. However, at the origin of film noir’s composite aesthetics
were straightforward material concerns. The fact that cheap sets looked less rudimentary
in obscurity, the gangsters more threatening and the femme fatales more chilling was a
“serendipitous” byproduct of necessity.
Nino Frank’s observation that Hollywood film had darkened over the war years
was thus both figurative and formal; he had identified an aesthetic tendency towards
making literally “black film.” One such film was Edgar Ulmer’s Detour. When projected
from a 35mm print, one notices very quickly a marked variation in image quality, hue
and resolution between scenes. The credits open to the backdrop of a road scene bearing
the trademarks of 1940s black and white panchromatic film stock, which was the norm of
the time and provided soft and natural-looking sepia and which remained the preferred
trade stock until color became the norm. By the second minute, however, the opaque

36
The main Hollywood studios filmed night scenes during daytime with artificially darkened lights in a
process known as “day by night.” The actor Robert Mitchum who starred in many films noirs
commentated: “Cary Grant and all the big stars got all the lights [while] we lit our sets with cigarette butts”
(Lyons 2).
71

black and white image suddenly loses hue and depth, and the interior studio shot (a bar)
looks as if it belongs to a silent era 1920s film.
37
While it is possible that different
qualities of film stock were used, the change in the image quality is almost certainly due
to varying levels of lighting in between takes. This switch is seen most dramatically nine
minutes into the film when the protagonist, Al Roberts, is accompanying his girlfriend
back home on a dark (grey) foggy night in New York.
38
When they arrive at her home
(presumably nearby and on the same set) the image suddenly becomes even darker and
more nebulous, and the two protagonists are reduced to near silhouettes as Sue pleads
with Al to understand her reasons for leaving him to go to Hollywood (“I’m young and
we’ve got all the time in the world to settle down ... We’ll be together again someday”).
The visual imagery suggests that they have arrived in the lower depths of hell, and will
not be leaving any time soon.
It is likely that Ulmer was consciously experimenting with light in certain
sequences of the film. Al is portrayed as the condemned man; in one scene his eyes
illuminated with light filtered through blinds (allegorical prison bars), and later they are
profiled in the rearview mirror of the fateful car journey. However, the unevenness and
incongruities in the film’s cinematography strongly suggest that accident also played a
large part in the final outcome, and certainly given the shortage of available film, Ulmer
could only attempt two or three takes per sequence at most. The overexposed desert
becomes a heavenly, otherworldly space; that is until Ann Savage makes her appearance

37
In the 1920s this effect was due to the orthochromatic film stock, which was only sensitive to the
brightest natural light, and registered only blue light, so anything colored red showed up on the film as
black.
38
This sequence was clearly filmed in studio. Films noirs made considerable use of studio sets up until the
late 1940s.
72

at a gas station. Shortly after their meeting, Vera reveals she knows that Roberts is not
who he says he is (he had assumed the identity of the car owner, Charles Haskell who had
died of natural causes the night before), and pressures him into scamming Haskell’s rich
and dying father. The dénouement occurs in the shadowy confines of their Hollywood
hotel room, where the two protagonists cast progressively longer, darker shadows until
finally Roberts, having accidently strangled Vera by tugging on the telephone cord, is
fully enshrouded in shadowy darkness as he leaves the hotel and finishes his narration.
Detour’s noir imagery and manipulation of chiaroscuro, while imperfect and at
times “accidental,” is nonetheless its greatest contribution to the genre-in-the-making. It
is one of the first instances where the constraints imposed on the filmmakers by a lack of
adequate lighting is turned into artistic merit. One could speculate at length as to which
aspects of Ulmer’s film were accidental, and which were designed on purpose, but this
would be difficult to determine with precision and ultimately serves no larger purpose.
The net effects are the same; a stylistic convention has been established in Detour, one
which would rapidly become a staple of noir’s generic repertoire. As Thomas Schrader
extrapolates:
The actor and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is
often hidden ... and his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks...
In film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow.
When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor it,
of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the
protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their best efforts.
(235)

These elements of the “stylistic schema” (235) have become a stylistic “trademark” of
film noir by the time of The Killers (1946). In the opening sequences, two men
identifiable only as black silhouettes are driving a car, before emerging onto a surreally
73

obscure urban exterior of a roadway and diner. The light emanates from one source only,
thus creating the impression of an oneiric and surreal hell in which killers operate and
condemned men passively await their execution; in the interior shots too, the Swede lies
in an obscurity interrupted only by the shadows of the messenger sent to warn him,
before he too is totally enshrouded in darkness and a hail of bullets.
The Killers truly marks the consolidation of this aesthetic, whose principal
stylistic hallmarks will be observed time and time again both by the B-series films noirs
and the bigger studio productions. Films noirs such as Out of the Past (1947), D.O.A.
(1950) and The Big Combo (1955) are particularly noteworthy for their shrouding of
doomed protagonists in allegorical darkness, as are Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night
(1948), Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
and A Touch of Evil (1958). In such films, the directors drew upon the stylistic
conventions developed in the early days of B-series film noir production, where as we
have seen, good studio lighting was an expensive commodity. A priori, Godard and the
future Cahiers directors’ interest was aroused by the American auteurs’ ability to forge
an artistic style and vision while working under the auspices of the Hollywood studio
system.
By dedicating A bout de souffle to Monogram Pictures, Godard is specifically
paying tribute to the role played by B-movie in permitting authorial and artistic
expression. As Dickos succinctly explains, “Hollywood studios made B crime dramas
requiring little dollar investment and consequently several noir films of the 1940s and
1950s achieved a degree of artistic liberation through the very limitations imposed upon
their production” (184). In tracing the influence of B-movie production practices on A
74

bout de souffle, there can be no doubt that Godard’s main motivation in reprising the B-
movie format was to achieve a similar or indeed greater degree of financial and artistic
freedom.
Indeed, in their postwar observations, the Cahiers critics saw in film noir above
all the possibility it afforded to make films cheaply and swiftly, and the power that this
potentially gave to the aspiring filmmaker. In fact, while Positif critics Nino Frank and
Raymond Borde were taken aback by the genre-breaking quality of the Hollywood crime
drama after the war, the future Cahiers filmmakers were ostensibly interested in the more
material aspects of Hollywood production. Nicolas Ray, in particular, was championed
for embodying a “particular conception of the film-maker working within the system”
(Hillier 76), while also deemed by Truffaut to be a “craftsman, lovingly fashioning small
objects out of holly wood” (cited in Hillier 108). The critics’ attention was thus captured
by the tremendous possibilities opened up by the American B-movie as regards being
able to make good films affordably, quickly, and on their own terms.
A bout de souffle is for all intents and purposes the realization of this ambition.
Godard understood from the beginning of his filmmaking career to represent the single
biggest obstacle to the “autonomy and the integrity of the work” (Michelson vi), and
desired to surpass the American auteurs’ achievements in circumventing the studio
system. Godard had in fact achieved in practical terms what none of the Hollywood
directors could ever have conceived of; being financed and disturbed independently of
the major studio system by a single producer (Georges de Beauregard) who by accounts
75

was eager to assume the risks involved in producing a first feature by Jean-Luc Godard.
39

In return, Godard was prepared to make his feature for 510,000 FF, which was at best a
third of the average total budget for a French production at that time. These conditions,
while to some extent self-imposed by Godard and represented a total departure from the
norms of French film production in 1959.
Indeed, Godard practiced simplicity in order to achieve a level of independence
and autonomy which had rarely, if ever, been attained by either American or French
directors, and would usher in an era of independently produced cinema with a large,
mainstream audience (i.e. the first two years of the New Wave). Of all Godard’s films, A
bout de souffle is perhaps the most literal interpretation of Godard’s claim that to make a
movie “all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun” (MacCabe 97).
40
I will outline the
details of several of these processes over the following pages, but one can already
mention here that in addition to the reduced budget, Godard rarely asked for more than
two or three takes of a sequence, and made the film with a technical team of less than
fifteen people, often using no more than two or three camera technicians on set when
spatial conditions were cramped.
41

However, in contrast to the simplicity imposed upon the film noir directors,
Godard’s minimalist approach to the production of his first feature was in essence a
deliberate choice. While A bout de souffle may exude modernity, as testified to by the
critics and moviegoers cited at the outset, we will see once again how this is engendered

39
As attested to by Colin MacCabe, A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (pages 108 – 123)
40
MacCabe comments that Godard has insisted this slogan belongs to D.W. Griffith, but he has been
“unable to locate the original” (391).
41
For instance, when shooting the sequences in Patricia’s apartment, filmed in a small hotel room. Coutard
has explained that he only had “twenty centimeters” to maneuver the camera and they did not have room to
install additional lighting.
76

through the most elaborate of efforts to turn back the clock to earlier modes of
filmmaking, foremost the production modes of Hollywood film noir. In this regard, it is
revealing that the film noir scholar Raymond Borde attacked A bout de souffle on its
release for representing “the most painful regression of French cinema” (Neupert 34).
Borde perceived American film noir to have emerged organically from the material
circumstances of its time, arguing in his Panorama of American Film Noir that “film noir
is noir for us; that’s to say … it responds to a certain kind of emotional resonance” (5).
Borde, on the other hand, failed to see any meaningful correlation between film noir
aesthetics and Godard’s low-budget stylization in A bout de souffle, which he found to be
artificially regressive. While disagreeing with Borde’s reasons for critically dismissing A
bout de souffle, I nonetheless believe that his observation places us at the heart of
Godard’s early filmmaking aesthetic.
Indeed, a study of the making of A bout de souffle quickly reveals that very few if
any aspects of its production were left to chance, and any impression that Godard adopted
an anarchistic approach to directing his first film, or that he made up the story “on the
fly,” is totally erroneous. Raoul Coutard has recounted in interviews how Godard
arranged several weeks in advance for the shoot to take place in chronological order,
while the assistant director, Pierre Rissient, described by Coutard as a “man of
meticulous accuracy,” has also insisted in interviews that the shoot was conducted “with
great precision” (MacCabe 116). Indeed, by all accounts the shoot was completed on
schedule (lasting slightly less than one month) and on budget with no major incidents.
77

Revealingly, there is evidence to suggest that rumors telling of chaos on the set of A bout
de souffle originated from Godard himself.
42

While many of these processes employed in A bout de souffle to affect simplicity
have been documented, I believe that it remains to be demonstrated just how deliberate
and contrived many of these “innovations” were. As a first example, I have previously
alluded to Godard’s practice of not giving the actors their lines until shortly before
filming. This ensured that the actors did not have the chance to become particularly
familiar with the dialogue, and in fact, Godard got into the habit of feeding the actors
their lines as the camera rolled, which had the effect of causing a slight delay or
hesitation in their delivery.
43
The lines weren’t recorded “live,” however, but re-recorded
and dubbed in later, synchronized with their lip movements. Thus, the outwards
“simplicity” of these scenes and the impression that the actors were making up their lines
as they went along belies a substantial degree of unseen directorial control and post-
editorial manipulation, and these techniques can be seen to be characteristic of Godard’s
approach as a whole.
A brief account of Godard’s approach to the post-production editing of A bout de
souffle also illustrates how contrived the film’s “freestyle” aesthetic was. Asked by David
Sarris how he came upon the “electrifying jump cuts,” Godard explained:
The first cut of Breathless was two and half hours and the producer
said, “You have to cut one hour.” We decided to do it
mathematically. We cut three seconds here, three here […] We’ll

42
Colin McCabe recounts how Godard antagonized his money backers by finishing shoots within a couple
of hours, and heading to Fouquet’s (a luxury restaurant), prompting a furious memo from his producer,
George de Beauregard. He also cancelled a shoot one day, claiming to be sick, but was then found by de
Beauregard relaxing in his favorite café.
43
Coutard calls the effect “saccadé,” meaning “halting” or “spasmodic.”
78

look at each shot and we’ll keep only what we think has more
energy. If it’s at the end of the shot, we’ll throw out the beginning. If
it’s at the beginning, we’ll throw out the end. (Winston-Dixon 16)

Both Raoul Coutard and the assistant director, Pierre Rissient, have talked about their
total surprise on seeing the finished version of A bout de souffle, which hardly
corresponded to how they had imagined the film. Faced with the need to cut an hour of
footage, Godard eschewed the conventional method of eliminating scenes altogether, but
instead instructed his two editors (Cécile Decugis and Lila Herman) to remove snippets
from each one. This resulted in some sequences becoming short in the extreme; for
instance the killing of the policeman which lasts less than ten seconds. Long sequences
remain long, such as the bedroom scene, but are fragmented, “missing bits” and
disconnected. The net result is that the film appears unpolished, in the model of
Hollywood B-movies and the early silent films, but there is no denying that this effect is
engendered by carefully-contrived montage.
I now wish to focus on an often-neglected aspect of A bout de souffle’s production
relating to lighting and film stock processing, to provide further evidence that there was
little haphazard about Godard’s appropriation of American B-movie filmmaking
techniques. Key to this consideration is the figure of Raoul Coutard, who was
recommended to Godard by Georges de Beauregard.
44
Coutard had learned his trade
during the French Indochina War, and upon his return to France had found work as the
cinematographer in three films produced by Georges de Beauregard. Coutard was

44
Godard had intended to employ Michel Latouche as his cinematographer. However, Latouche did not
have a union affiliation, and therefore lost out to Raoul Coutard. Coutard was subsequently the
cinematographer on approximately twenty New Wave films, including all of Godard’s films from 1959 –
1967 with the exception of Masculin-Féminin.
79

certainly an industry outsider, and in recent interviews he has insisted that he only had the
most minimal experience of cinematography before A bout de souffle. An interview with
Coutard in Sight and Sound (1966) provides a fascinating historical insight into the
lengths to which the cinematographer went to distance himself from the received industry
idea of “cinema lighting” (9). Indeed, for the elite French Society of Photographers,
quality could only be achieved in scenes lit “amidst a network of lamps” (9). Coutard,
however, found there to be an “artificial and gimmicky” quality to these shots, which had
the effect of removing the subject from real life through artifice. Coutard talks, moreover,
of the “collective circus” and “gigantic act” that had become part and parcel of the
cameraman’s “performance” (9), and speaks of an industry that had become accustomed
to extravagance and ritual and that was more concerned with creating aestheticized
images and beauty for beauty’s sake than with capturing anything that might be deemed
authentic.
As a matter of fact, it was rapidly becoming easier for cinematographers of the
late 1950s to achieve the highly professional, “quality” images they sought thanks to vast
improvements in film stock. However, in spite of these advancements, French
cinematographers prior to the New Wave persisted in using the traditional, Hollywood
approach to lighting, which involved a “three-point” system requiring a main studio light,
backlight, and third light to eliminate shadows. However, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
explains, New Wave cinematographers “broke with convention” (Nowell-Smith 73) in
this regard, making use of the faster film stock to eliminate superfluous lighting:
Nouvelle Vague cinematographers such as Raoul Coutard and Henri
Decaë … devised simpler systems, using fast film to reduce the amount of
additional lighting needed and only two basic light sources, one for
80

simulating directional light (such as that of a street lamp or sunlight
streaming through a window) and one, diffuse and placed close to the
camera, to fill in the shadowy parts of the screen. Resultant scenes were
not ‘perfectly’ lit but their visible imperfection adds immediacy to the
scene, reminding the spectator that for the scene to be there, the
cameraman had to be there first. (74).

Indeed, as will we see, Coutard and Godard went to great lengths to cultivate a visual
aesthetic of imperfection.
In his interview in Sight and Sound, Coutard recounts how Godard summarily
instructed workers on set to “rediscover how to do things simply” (9). Coutard had to
interpret this call for simplicity, which was invariably accompanied by a host of more
obscure and complex instructions from Godard.
45
Coutard’s mission, as he understood it,
was to peel back the many layers of artifice which had been imposed on cinematic
subjects in the name of “quality.” He aimed therefore for unobtrusively “natural”
lighting, with a maximum usage of daylight which has “an inhuman faculty for always
being perfect” (10). Coutard saw this as following in the footsteps of the early
photography of Petit and Nadar, whose naturally-lit images Coutard finds to be of
enduring interest due to their naturalistic quality.
However, the visual aesthetics of old Hollywood and B-series film noir were
without a doubt the prime referent for both Godard and his cinematographer. This is most
clearly evident in the sequence in which Belmondo pays tribute to Bogart in front of the
movie poster for The Harder they Fall. Jonathan Rosenbaum has commentated that
Belmondo’s cigarette smoke enshrines Bogart’s image in a kind of “holy incense.”
Indeed, captured on high-speed film stock, the plumes of smoke are at once a tribute to

45
Coutard interpreted the directive to mean he should stop “trying to be interesting” (9)
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the smoke-filled ambiance of Bogart’s films noirs, and a demonstration of the superior
technical processes available to Coutard and Godard. In the frame showing Poiccard
standing in front of Bogart, Coutard captures Belmondo’s reflection as well as that of a
number of patrons leaving the cinema in the glass, some of whom appear to stop to watch
what is going on. One cannot know if this was intentional or not on the part of Coutard,
although the camera then quite deliberately pans to the cinema entrance, where the
refracted reflection of the hapless policemen pursing Poiccard can be seen in the glass
doors. The image is then dissolved using the “iris” fadeout, which was an editing device
frequently employed in Hollywood silent films.
Indeed, Coutard and Godard were quite specifically aiming to fuse a Hollywood
B-movie narrative with the aesthetic properties of even older silent-era cinema. Godard
explained in various interviews in the 1960s with regard to A bout de souffle and other
black and white films made with Coutard that they had intentionally sought to obtain the
same “photographic quality as the early Chaplin films, with the black and white contrasts
of the old orthochromatic stock” (Godard 200). Stunned by a barrage of criticism of the
“lousy photography” (199) in Les Carabineers (1963), Godard gave this detailed account
of the processes involved in obtaining the desired retrogressive effect:
Les Carabiniers was shot with Kodak XX negative, which is currently the
best stock on the market for density, as sensitive as the old Plus X, as fast
as the old TRI X and with better definition … This negative was
developed with infinite precision by the G.T.C. laboratories at Joinville –
the cradle of cinematography- under the direction of M. Mauvoisin, who a
few years before was the first to put a special bath at our disposal for
treating the Ilford HPS of A bout de souffle and the Agfa Rekord of Le
Petit soldat. The positive prints were simply made on a special Kodak
high contrast stock… Several shots, intrinsically too grey, were duped
again sometimes two or three times, always to their highest contrast, to
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make them match the newsreel shots, which had themselves been duped
more than usual. (200)

Godard’s account offers a rare insight into one of the most intricate aspects of his films’
production, notably the choice of film stock and its chemical processing. In Les
Carabiniers, as well as the five other black and white films made in collaboration with
Coutard, Godard insisted on using the most advanced film stock available and then set
about creating the vintage, retrogressive effects at the postproduction development stage.
The processes involved in making A bout de souffle appear retrogressive were
even more elaborate then in Les Carabiniers. Coutard explains how they decided on a
film stock, the Ilford H.P.S. brand, after running extensive tests, only to find out that it
was only available for still photography. Unwilling to give up, they purchased 17½ meter
reels of the stock, destined for being sold as ordinary camera film roll, and stuck the reels
together with tape.
46
Coutard was then faced with the challenge of finding a movie
camera whose sprocket holes would accept the taped-together photo film, and after some
modifications, he succeeded in force-feeding the film into the handheld Cameflex.
However, on seeing the early footage, Coutard advised Godard that due to the film
stock’s high speed 400 ISO, the final result would be lighter and greyer than the film noir
aesthetic they were striving for.
47
Thus, when it came to developing the stock they
experimented with several photo-developer solutions, before settling on a chemical,
Phenidone, which was not commonly used by any of the major film-processing
laboratories. After much persistence and negotiations with the head of the G.T.C.

46
17½ meters of 35mm film stock will only record about 45 seconds film footage. Normally a film reel
extends to approximately 800 meters in order to record 30 minutes of film.
47
Godard’s has stated that during production the entire crew, “including the cameraman, thought the
photography was revolting” (Wheeler-Dixon 20).
83

processing laboratories, Mr. Mauvoisin, Godard and Coutard managed to commandeer an
out-of-service machine that allowed them to use Phenidone and develop the film at a
faster rate than was standard.
The resulting aesthetic remains a little lighter and greyer than most films noirs,
mostly due to the extensive outdoors photography. The effect is generally consistent
throughout A bout de souffle, with two notable exceptions. First, the sequence in which
Poiccard escapes on foot after shooting the policeman is considerably darker. Second, the
sequences towards the end of the film in which Poiccard and Patricia drive a stolen car
from Les Champs-Elysées down to La Place de la Concorde and Montparnasse at night
provide some very typical, chiaroscuro film noir imagery of the city, its glaring
streetlights and neon signs. Coutard has claimed that the entire success of A bout de
souffle was due to “the fact that Godard stuck together these 17½ meter lengths of Ilford
stock ... and miraculously obtained the use of this machine at the G.T.C. laboratories”
(11). As we have seen, however, there was very little “miraculous” about any aspect of A
bout de souffle’s filming and production, and we can conclude with some certainty that
by the time the final cut had been completed, very little had been left to chance.
Dudley Andrew has written that A bout de souffle “is crammed with reinvention”
(11), and on a technical level there is indeed little disputing that Godard’s directorial
début is full of innovation. I have refrained from documenting the most ubiquitously cited
aspects of A bout de souffle’s production, such as Coutard’s use of a wheelchair and mail
cart instead of a cumbersome tracking dolly in order to follow Belmondo and Seberg
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strolling down the Champs-Elysées.
48
As Richard Neupert observes, critic after critic
“marveled at such revolutionary simplicity,” and within a few years, “almost every film
school in the world adopted the practice” (41). Paradoxically, it is this return to
simplicity, which we might characterize as “retrogressive,” that certainly gave Godard’s
film the allure of being so new, of being totally different from the polished, big-budgeted
“tradition of quality” films the French public had become accustomed to viewing.
I do not believe that the contrived nature of the New Wave’s emulation of prior
forms of filmmaking, notably the B-series film noir, negates or belittles its claim to being
a far-reaching break with the filmmaking practice of their time. However, it is essential to
underscore that Godard and Coutard’s efforts to return to the simpler filmmaking
methods such as those employed by the directors of Hollywood B-series films noirs was
affected and contrived. Whereas film noir was in essence the result of material,
economical and to some degree sociological factors of its era, I believe that the New
Wave sets itself apart by virtue of the complexity of its origins; being at once born of, and
out of opposition to its time. It is in this regard that A bout de souffle must be seen as
retrogressively radical.
At this juncture it is possible to revisit Dudley Andrew’s observation, cited at the
outset, that Godard intended in his first feature “to invent the cinema in its entirety” (10).
Based on my observations in this chapter, this claim has to be treated as untenable if it is
not prefaced with a substantial account of Godard’s usage of prior cinematic traditions.
On a technical level, we have seen that Godard’s foremost preoccupation was to recreate

48
On several occasions, Coutard hid himself completely inside of the cart so that passersby would not stop
and stare at the camera.
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the aesthetic visual properties of the B-movie film noir and Hollywood silent cinema, and
that he did so using highly elaborate and contrived processes both during the filming and
at the postproduction stage. We have also considered Godard’s ambition to “shatter” the
crime film genre by rewriting and parodying tired old Hollywood codes and conventions
and by trying to recapture the spirit of the film noir cycle’s original, generic
subversiveness, even though the final outcome did not result in a complete rupture from
the genre’s clichés. We have also that while A bout de souffle contains the genesis of a
radical deconstruction of cinematic authorship, Godard demonstrably retains an
attachment to the notion of the “master” author, embodied by American directors such as
Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles.
In essence, my categorization of A bout de souffle resonates with Susan
Hayward’s description of the postmodern film. Hayward defines postmodern cinema as
fundamentally “a reaction against the established forms and canons of modernism” that
also represents “the erosion of the distinction between high and popular culture” (206). In
the case of French cinema, Hayward traces the birth of postmodern cinema to the “new
moment of capitalism” ushered in at the start of the beginning of the Fifth Republic.
49

Most relevantly to this discussion, Hayward highlights the inherently composite and dual
nature of the postmodern, stating that “the postmodern looks back, is retrospective, is not
defined as other, but as postmodern, as coming after” (207). She adds that “in its lack of
history it rejects history, and because it has none of its own – only that of others – the
postmodern stands eternally fixed in a series of presents” (207). In debating A bout de
souffle’s claim to postmodernism, Dudley Andrew remarks that “Breathless of all films

49
The Fifth Republic was founded on 4 October 1958. A bout de souffle was made in the summer of 1959.
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insists on its presentness,” adding that Godard called this “‘reinvention’ so that
everything would appear to be expressed as if for the first time” (18).
While the designation of A bout de souffle as “postmodern” is broadly
complementary to my own observations, I believe that my formulation of Godard’s
“retrogressive radicalism” to more aptly capture the nuances and complexities of this
landmark film. There is notably a tendency to label films that are stylistically innovative
as “postmodern,” with the implication that they are morally and politically vacuous.
However, as Hayward states categorically, the postmodern “does not refer to style” (206).
More importantly still, I do not believe that any sense of “presentness” in A bout de
souffle is due to a negation of the past, of or history. On the contrary, A bout de souffle
represents a present that is perennially caught between the past and the future. In other
words, Godard exhibits a profound admiration for the aesthetic cinematic forms of the
past, while conveying a sense of apprehension about the future.
While it is important to acknowledge that Godard and the New Wave are to some
extent separate entities, I believe that A bout de souffle’s retrogressive radicalism is
pivotal to understanding a general attitude present within the New Wave, and is a key
identifying characteristic of the movement as a whole. This, indeed, is the first claim
regarding the New Wave based upon my comparative study of the Hollywood B-movie.
In my subsequent considerations, I will aim to show how the New Wave draws
extensively on multiple aspects of the American B-movie aesthetics, such as the
“actuality” aesthetic present within film noir. In spite of their cinematic debt towards
Hollywood, we will also see further evidence that the New Wave’s admiration for
American filmmaking technique at no point translated into an admiration for American
87

values and ideology. To the contrary, the aesthetics of actuality are imbued with a subtle
yet scathing critique of American-style capitalism, “modernization” and the sudden
influx of American cultural icons and economic models.

Chapter 2

The Aesthetics of Actuality:
The Influence of American Film Noir on New Wave Realism

Part I: Actuality and the Absolute Truth Claim

In critical writings on A bout de souffle, it is ultimately the film’s “documentary”
quality that is most frequently cited as being it’s most radical attribute. Annette
Michelson, for instance, has written that Godard’s “well-known insistence upon the
confusion of genres, upon the unity of documentary and fiction” is one of the most
consistent aspects of his cinema, and evidence of his “tenacious rejection of the divisions
and compartmentalizations current in film theory” (viii). Godard himself claimed in an
interview with Le Monde (March 18, 1960) that A bout de souffle is not a work of fiction
at all, but “really a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo” (cited in
Andrew 166).
Godard’s second New Wave film, Le Petit soldat, gives voice to a yet more
radical proposition. “La photographie, c’est la vérité, et le cinéma, c’est vingt-quatre fois
la vérité par second,” are words spoken by Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) while
photographing Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina) in her apartment. While this statement is
not a direct quotation from Bazin, it encompasses many of his key notions. We recall that
in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin claims that “the photographic image
is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it”
(169), with cinema achieving the ultimate goal of incarnating “objectivity in time” (168).
In this chapter, I will show that the New Wave auteurs were enticed and attracted by
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Bazin’s ideas, and at their boldest, they will claim that their films are objective actualités
that represent life “as it is.”
I will elaborate on the reasons behind my choice of the term actualité, as opposed
to cinéma-vérité or a “documentary aesthetic” in the context of the New Wave
throughout this chapter. The term, defined as the “état de ce qui est actuel” (Dictionnaire
de l’Académie Française), shares the basic connotations of the English word “actuality,”
meaning a “fact or condition that is real” (Collins). In its primary usage, “actuality” is
therefore a synonym of “reality.” As an aesthetic, we will see that it refers to an ambition
in art to produce flawlessly mimetic reproductions of reality.
1
The resulting works are, of
course, realist representations of reality, although as we will see, the term
“representation” does not adequately convey the radical ambitions articulated by Bazin in
his essay of 1945, nor the audacity of the New Wave auteurs in integrating Bazin’s ideas
into their filmmaking.
In order to fully comprehend the fundamentals of the actuality aesthetic, it is first
necessary to review the key principles outlined by Bazin in “The Ontology of the
Photographic Image,” as well as situate these ideas in the particular intellectual context of
the twentieth-century discourse on aesthetics and art criticism. At the heart of Bazin’s
essay is the troubling affirmation that the invention of photography had changed art
irrevocably. Bazin observes that due to its inherently mimetic properties, “photography
has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness,” adding that “photography
and the cinema ... are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in [their] very essence,
our obsession with realism” (168). Cinema in particular represents the apotheosis of this

1
I will give more detailed consideration to the definition of “aesthetics” later in this chapter.
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“obsession,” given that “for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of
their duration” (169). For Bazin, cinema’s mimetic properties, combined with its ability
to convey the unfolding of time, imbued it with an unparalleled ability to duplicate the
outside world.
Bazin is not the only critic, of course, to comment on the implications of modern
technology’s vastly improved capacity for representing reality mimetically. In A Course
on Aesthetics, Renato Barilli affirms that “today we can record the epidermis of things,
the grain of fabrics, without any graphic or chromatic mediation, but through the high-
fidelity transcription furnished by the photographic eye” (96). Barilli adds that “until the
invention of cinematography, time was an aesthetic value, or perhaps the principal aspect
of living existence” (96). Outside of the visual arts, Erich Auerbach argued, in his work
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, that Western literature
follows a historical trajectory towards the increasingly sophisticated and mimetic
representation of reality; a tendency that has its origins in Homer, bears a considerable
influence from the New Testament, and continues through the ages until it reaches its
“ultimate apotheosis in the French realistic authors of the nineteenth century – Stendhal,
Balzac, Flaubert, and then Proust” (Said cited in Mimesis, xiv).
2

Neither is Bazin the only theorist to identify the nineteenth century as the origin
of a “crisis” in realism. Jacques Rancière writes in his work Film Fables that cinema
“revokes the old mimetic order because it resolves the question of mimesis at is root – the

2
Among the French nineteenth-century realists, Auerbach cites Flaubert as laying the “foundations of
modern realism” (491), in view of the author’s ability to narrate his fictions in a seemingly “impartial,
impersonal, and objective” (482) manner. I will return to the importance of nineteenth-century realism to
the actuality aesthetic in part two of this chapter.
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Platonic denunciation of images, the opposition between sensible copy and intelligible
model” (2). Rancière goes so far as to say that life, defined as “a long and continuous
movement made up of an infinity of micro-movements ... had finally found an art capable
of doing it justice” (2). Cinema’s capacity to record space and time mimetically,
however, had a profoundly disruptive effect on artistic production. In Rancière’s own
terminology, the advent of photography and cinema towards the end of the nineteenth
century led to the demise of the “representative regime” of the arts.
3
Having “destroyed
the mimetic barrier” (23), an “aesthetic regime” of art emerges that Rancière argues is the
fulfillment of Schiller’s “aesthetic state ... a pure instance of suspension, a moment when
form is experienced for itself” (24).
Rancière is commenting upon the revolutionary and radical possibilities of
photography and cinema in the specific context of the early days of cinema. According to
Rancière, film lost touch with its radical potentiality soon after this early period of film
production by renouncing its ambition to create a pure “language of images” (3), thus
following a trajectory towards becoming a “thwarted fable” (11).
4
However, Rancière
considers that “a few exemplary figures and propositions punctuate” this trajectory, by
virtue of their continued interest and belief in “the essence of the cinematographic
medium” (11). This includes:

3
In Aesthetics and Politics, Rancière defines the “representative regime” as essentially the “mimetic
principle” within art predicated upon the “Aristotelian elaboration of mimēsis” (21).
4
Rancière’s notion of cinema as a “thwarted fable” refers to the realization that filmmaking was destined to
become a craft and a commercial industry, as well as a means of storytelling that embraced the older,
traditional forms of narration predicated on Aristotle’s notion of muthos, or plot. Rancière thus argues that
cinema failed to achieve a radical break with prior forms of representation, concluding that film in fact “did
more than just restore ties with the old art of telling stories: it became that art’s most faithful champion”
(3).
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the burlesque automaton – whether Chaplinesque or Keatonian – that
fascinated the generation of Delluc, Epstein, and Eisenstein before
resurfacing at the core of André Bazin’s film theory and inspiring
systematizations being worked out today; the gaze cast by Rossellini’s
camera at “non-manipulated things” ... There are some brilliant pages in
Bazin where he tries to demonstrate that Charlie’s mime is the incarnation
of cinematographic being, of the form silver nitrate prints on strips of
celluloid... (11)

Of all the theorists who have contemplated “purity” in the cinematic image, including
Deleuze, Rancière considers Bazin to be the foremost believer in cinema’s capacity to
rediscover the “essence of the image” and to provide “a glimpse into the spiritual secret
of being” (12).
A re-reading of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” would seem to justify
Rancière’s observation. In this article, Bazin develops his argument pertaining to the
purity of the photographic image using a discourse infused with esoteric and quasi-
religious language. Bazin writes that “only the impassive lens is able to present, stripping
its object of all those ways of seeing [the world] ... that spiritual dust and grime with
which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all of its virginal purity to my
attention and consequently to my love” (170). Bazin goes so far as to argue that:
... a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is
capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something
more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The
photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the
conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted
... the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its
becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the
model. (169)

93

Bazin seems to equate the photographic lens with figurative the eyes of God. Not merely
is the lens capable of rendering its subjects objectively, but the resulting image exceeds
the status of mere representation; it is the subject.
5
Bazin comes very close, moreover, to
suggesting that the process of capturing the subject photographically infers it with a kind
of immortality.
Given that almost every twentieth-century theorist of aesthetics and art theory
draws a firm distinction between the representation of a subject or model, and the subject
itself, Bazin’s claims can appear highly eccentric. As Barilli points out, even the most
“specular mimetic systems (images reflected in a mirror or reproduced with
photochemical processes or artistic techniques indebted to these systems of ‘high
fidelity’)” fall short of achieving perfect mimesis, a fact proved by “utterly indifferent”
(88) reaction of animals when placed before such images. Barilli also explains that there
can be no such thing as purely representational art, defined as “the task of making present
in a reduced and comfortable format the vastness of the real” (87), or on the other hand,
purely expressive art concerned uniquely with the artist’s subjective treatment of reality.
Instead, “representation and expression cannot help but intersect” (87). Indeed, “even so-
called realist works rely heavily on conventions and symbolism” (88).
Bazin, in fairness, did not adopt a single or simplistic approach to film criticism.
He ends “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” by invoking the idea that “cinema is
also a language” (170). Throughout his extensive Cahiers du cinéma film criticism, Bazin
paid an almost unparalleled attention to the specifics and mechanics of film production.

5
In making his argument about photography’s objectivity, Bazin draws upon the fact that the lens is
referred to in French as l’objectif, a nuance lost in English.
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During the 1950s, Bazin came to endorse the notion of film as a work of authorship, with
the director spearheading a work that reflects to some degree his personality and
subjective intentionality. The theory was largely elaborated in relation to Hollywood
cinema, and the Cahiers’ favorite directors such as Hitchcock, Chaplin, John Ford,
Howard Hawks, Nicolas Ray and Orson Welles. As I have considered in the previous
chapter, the auteur doctrine (also known as “la politique des auteurs”) was the most
influential and widely accepted theory shared by the Cahiers critics and future New
Wave filmmakers, even if A bout de souffle ultimately reveals a more complex and
nuanced understanding of cinematic authorship.
I also demonstrated how A bout de souffle contains the seminal elements of a
radical challenge to conventions of plot and genre, as well as to the norms of cinematic
craftsmanship. As mentioned at the outset, this chapter considers the implications of
statement in Le Petit soldat that cinema is truth twenty-four times a second. The idea that
cinema is capable of achieving an objectivity and purity of representation and expression
that transcends the entire technical operation behind the production of images, is
undoubtedly the most radical proposition entertained by the New Wave. It is, perhaps, the
most powerful claim that can be made with regard to cinema.
It goes without saying, of course, that while Godard and the other New Wave
filmmakers experiment with the notion of cinema as absolute truth, they are obliged to
concede from the outset of their filmmaking endeavors that it is an untenable hypothesis.
Indeed, in spite of their ambition to make a total break with the insipid literary
adaptations that dominated 1950s French “quality” cinema and their desire to subvert
Hollywood genre conventions, the New Wave directors were very conscious of the need,
95

at some level, for plots, credible acting, competent craftsmanship and cinematography
that would secure them box-office success they sought. As I have already shown in
regard to A bout de souffle, early New Wave films retained a sufficient relationship with
cinematic conventions so as to beg the question of how radical they actually were.
In this chapter, I will demonstrate that while the New Wave auteurs acknowledge
that their representations fail to achieve either purity or objectivity, they consciously
adopt strategies that provide the illusion of achieving cinematic truth and that pretend to
show the world “as it is.” This is, in essence, the basis of the “actuality aesthetic,” as I
seek to define it; subjectivity masquerading as objective truth. In the first part of this
consideration, I will be considering the enormous power derived from claiming film
representations to be imbued with absolute truth. I will also demonstrate how the
actuality aesthetic is the culmination of a long trajectory of realist works, of which
Hollywood films noirs and their representations of “the city in its actuality” (Dimendberg
19) are the foremost influence. The trajectory of works I have outlined, beginning with
the Lumière brothers’ films, are films that either aspired or proclaimed to represent truth
mimetically and objectively, that demonstrated a concern for cinematic purity, and that
were deemed by the Cahiers critics to be a direct precursor to their future works of
cinematic actuality.

(i) In the Beginning there was Lumière

It is not my intention in this section to enter into the polemic surrounding the
origins of cinema, and certainly any notion of a “year zero” of cinema is by definition
96

reductive.
6
The Lumière brothers’ reputation as the inventors of cinema is due in no small
part to their status as wealthy and well-connected industrialists, with the means to
promote and manufacture the cinématographe and to develop their films. The central
interest of the Lumière brothers’ films to this chapter is that their early films were
generally by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma to be the pioneers of cinematic realism.
Moreover, the Lumière films, which were known as actualités and not “primitive
documentaries” (Girgus 5) as is often claimed, wielded enormous influence over the
subsequent development of the actuality aesthetic.
Amédée Ayfre, a Cahiers critic and close associate of André Bazin, wrote in 1952
that “film realism has its beginnings with Lumière, a man who never imagined his
invention could be anything but an instrument for reproducing the real world” (cited in
Hillier 182). The Cahiers critics nonetheless displayed a critical awareness regarding the
limitations of the Lumière brothers’ attempts to record reality. Ayfre concedes that “the
mere fact that [Lumière] positioned his camera in a particular spot, started or stopped
filming at a particular moment and recorded the world in black and white on a flat
surface” (182) as being evidence that he had failed to achieve an objective or perfectly
mimetic copy of reality.
Ayfre is here describing the central aspect of the Lumière brothers’ approach to
representing reality; mise-en-scène.
7
The term is borrowed from the theater and employed
by the Cahiers critics to describe, in the words of Fereydoun Hoveyda, “the technique he
employs ... through which everything on the screen is expressed” (cited in Hillier 9). In

6
Marey devised his chronophotographic gun in 1892, and Edison and Muybridge produced moving
photographic images prior to 1895, the year of the Lumière brothers’ first films.
7
I will return to the concept of mise-en-scène throughout this chapter.
97

concrete terms, mise-en-scène refers to “composition, harmony, the placing of actors and
objects, the movements within the frame, the capturing of a movement or a look” (10).
Hillier remarks that “the way Cahiers conceived mise-en-scène tended toward an
aesthetic which privileged realist, or illusionist, narrative” (10).
8
For the Cahiers critics,
therefore, mise-en-scène was basically the technical means through which the illusion of
reality is created.
The concept of mise-en-scène is well illustrated with regard to Sortie de l’usine
Lumière à Lyon, which was the first film to be recorded and projected by the brothers and
is composed of a forty-six second silent one-take sequence showing the real-life situation
of workers exiting the Lumière factory in a suburb of Lyon. The sequence shows the
Lumière workforce, who are well-dressed, both young and middle-aged, mostly female,
leaving the factory in a civil and orderly procession. The workers appear to be chatting
with one another, exchanging cordial “goodbyes,” and at the end of the sequence, we
catch sight of two cyclists and a horse-drawn carriage.
There is good reason to believe that the people leaving the factory, who are
dressed in late nineteenth-century attire, were genuinely employees of the Lumière
Corporation. Indeed, there can be no doubt that the films’ images essentially correspond
to a real-life event. The fact that the sequence is uninterrupted, moreover, means that the
viewer is inclined to believe that he or she is witnessing a “true” representation of
workers leaving a Lumière factory. As we will see in subsequent analyses, the depiction
of events in “real time,” as well as the representation of subjects in their genuine

8
Hillier adds that the concept of mise-en-scène “establishes itself as a – perhaps the – central and essential
concept in Cahiers and in later criticism influenced by Cahiers” (9).
98

surroundings, are key components of the actuality aesthetic. The film arguably gives the
impression of portraying the objective truth about an event and by all accounts, the first
viewers were utterly convinced of the film’s realism.
9

In spite of the semblance of objectivity, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière is, of course,
imbued with an authorial point of view, if not to say subjectivity. This is evidenced
through any number of choices pertaining to mise-en-scène made by the brothers that
inevitably impact and “filter” the reality represented. As the workers appear happy and in
good spirits, we might conclude that the working conditions at the factory were good, and
the workers well provided for. However, it is a given that the Lumière brothers would not
seek to represent their factory in unfavorably. Moreover, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière
exists in three versions, as the exercise was repeated several times throughout the year
1895. We can therefore conclude that the subjects were highly aware of the experiment
taking place; a fact that would inevitably impact upon their behavior as subjects. One
might presume, for instance, that they dressed in their best attire for the occasion, or were
required to do so.
One further aspect of La Sortie de l’usine Lumière worthy of commentary is the
choice of location; the very factory where the cinematic process was initiated. This
speaks of a self-reflexivity about the enterprise at hand that one could interpret as a
willingness to dispel the “illusionary” quality of early cinema. In another early Lumière
film, Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon, too, the filmed subjects are
seen tipping their hats to the camera, providing further evidence of a willingness to

9
While accounts of viewers running out of the Café de Paris in fear after seeing the first Lumière films are
largely apocryphal, there is no doubt that early spectators were profoundly impressed by these first films.
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foreground the filmmaking process. In my subsequent considerations, I posit this basic
self-reflexivity as a fundamental component of the actuality aesthetic. In later
incarnations, of course, the processes required to foreground the filmmaking process
become far more complex.
The early Lumière films were made at a time that precedes the formal
categorization of films into works of fiction or non-fiction, or documentary, and the
subsequent dichotomy that emerged between these categories. While the Lumière
brothers themselves referred to their films as vues, they were screened, promoted and
subsequently known as actualités.
10
It was the commercial “branding” of the actuality
film that established it a fully-fledged genre of cinema. This is testified to by the
catalogues of films for sale and available for projection at the turn of the century, that
provided customers with a selection of actualities divided into categories such as “Sports
and Pastime Views, Military Views, Railroad Views, Scenic Views, Views of Notable
Personages” (Neale 169), among others.
11

The early actualities were films that documented real-life occurrences and events,
as opposed to fictional stories, which constituted the alternative “genre” in the early days
of cinema. Neale observes that the actuality categories “far outweighed fiction in the
period prior to 1903-1904” (169) and that fictional films did not begin to rival the
actualities until approximately 1905. At this early stage, however, there was a great deal
of crossover between the genres, with the fictional works resembling the actualities in

10
Writing in the context of the centenary of the projection of the first Lumière films, Pascal Ory asserts that
the congress-goers at the l’Union des sociétés françaises de photographie, who were shown a film of the
conference proceedings recorded the day previously, witnessed “les premières actualités de l’histoire” (31).
11
As evidenced in Biograph’s “Advance Partial List” of films for sale in 1902 and Kleine Optical
Company’s catalogue for 1905 (see Neale 169).
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several key respects. This crosspollination between fictional and non-fictional films in
early cinema is alluded to by Godard, by virtue of an onscreen lecture delivered by Jean-
Pierre Léaud in La Chinoise (1967):
Aujourd’hui je vais vous parler des actualités. On les voit tous les jours au
cinéma … C’est une fausse idée … On dit que c’est Lumière qui a inventé
les actualités. Tout le monde disait qu’il faisait des documentaires …
Méliès … fiction, rêveur, phantasmes allégoriques. Je pense que c’est le
contraire ! Lumière était un peintre – il filmait les mêmes choses que les
peintres peignaient à l’époque, Charo, Manet, Renoir – des gares, des
jardins publics, la sortie d’usines, les gens qui jouaient aux cartes, les
tramways. Le dernier peintre-impressionniste de l’époque. Méliès
…Voyage sur la lune. Le roi d’Yougoslavie … visite au président
Fallières. [Ce sont] les actualités de l’époque. Reconstituées, mais des
véritables actualités.
12

While Méliès’ Voyage sur la lune is generally deemed to be a work of fantastical fiction,
it in fact represents, albeit allegorically, very real, political events taking place in France
at that time. Conversely, the Lumière films cannot be considered to be purely objective
actualities. There is, indeed, a distinctly artistic quality to their films that bears the
influence of late nineteenth-century impressionism.
13
Given the ability of actuality to
materialize into works of both fiction and non-fiction, the representation of “actuality”
could no longer be confined to a single genre category.

12
Godard developed similar ideas during a number of interviews. In 1966, he said: “It’s said that Lumière
is documentary and Méliès the fantastic. But when we see their films today, what do we see? We see
Méliès filming the reception of the King of Yugoslavia by the president of the Republic. In other words,
news. And at the same time, we see Lumière filming his family playing belote in a style reminiscent of
Bouvard and Pécuchet. In other words, fiction” (cited in Temple 44).
13
It is particularly noticeable that many of the early color photographs taken by the Lumière brothers of
their daughters Andrée and Suzanne and niece Henriette between 1908 -10 bear a striking resemblance to
those of the young girls painted by Renoir around the turn of the century.
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(ii) Stepping Stones towards an Actuality Aesthetic: French Film Noir and
Jean Vigo

Indeed, it was not long before the actuality film was superseded by the explosion
of fictional genres, and the category of film known as “actualities” was a relatively short-
lived phenomenon. The predominant trend in filmmaking, both in France and
internationally, moreover, was not towards the recording of real-life, or even towards
making works of cinematic realism, but Méliès-style works of fantasy, as well as
comedies and “histories,” which presented lavish reenactments of historical events. As
mentioned, a wide breach quickly emerged between what were subsequently called
“documentaries” and fictional films. The avant-garde constituted yet another category of
film, which in the 1920s and 1930s was heavily influenced by the absurdist aesthetics of
German Expressionism or surrealist symbolism.
In spite of the apparent lack of interest in cinema as a realist mode of expression,
the first thirty years of film production undeniably saw vast improvements in the
technical capabilities of cinema to represent the world. The ability to capture reality on
film was particularly enhanced by the invention of cameras that could record images fast
enough to be projected at twenty-four frames per second, the speed that has been the
industry norm since 1926. The advent of lighter, more portable cameras that could be
mounted on dollies and cranes and that could be positioned at closer and further
proximity from subjects aided the rapid development of a more sophisticated syntax of
cinematic construction. Furthermore, more complex lenses were better able to convey
perspective and “depth of field,” where the resulting image conveys the distance between
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objects while preserving the focus. The editing process too became more sophisticated, as
filmmakers learned to manipulate the developed image. Finally, the advance in sound-
recording technologies led to the first “talkies,” which had all but replaced silent film by
the early 1930s.
French poetic realism of the 1930s and the films of Jean Vigo are of interest to
this chapter as the movement marks a return to a concern for cinematic realism. In
striving to represent the world “as it is,” however, the filmmakers from this era were
equally concerned with cinema as an aesthetic and a poetic art form. This conflation of
aestheticized and realist cinema, moreover, greatly interested to the Cahiers critics and
future filmmakers. In an interview from 1970, Truffaut acknowledged the influence of
Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) over Les 400 coups and paid tribute to Vigo’s
“secret” ability to achieve “real, crude, natural images” (Truffaut 62).
14
Godard dedicated
Les Carabiniers to Jean Vigo, whose four surviving works are generally considered to
have set the tone for the 1930s films of Julien Duvivier, René Clair, Marcel Carné and
Jean Renoir, among others. Truffaut also maintained a lifelong friendship and admiration
for Renoir, conducting numerous interviews with the veteran filmmaker from between
1954 and the 1970s.
On face value, poetic realism’s dual realist and poetic dimensions can appear
oxymoronic, especially if “poetic” is understood to mean the embellishment, dreamy or
lyrical treatment of reality. Indeed, French poetic realism was a highly aestheticized
cinema, characterized by its “textured facades, gradation of grays, and graceful

14
Referring to this “secret,” Truffaut added: “The one who has fathomed it most completely is Godard, and
Breathless is the closest in spirit to Vigo of any French film” (François Truffaut: Interviews 62).
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equilibrium between naturalism and stylization” (Fournier Lanzoni 74). Poetic realism
bears the distinct influence of the avant-garde and expressionism, and this is borne out in
its predilection for “pessimistic atmosphere[s], the (doomed) quest for happiness, and …
tragic destiny,” and its use of “chiaroscuro lighting, background artifices [and] evocative
visual imagery” (75).
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the genre most favored by the poetic realist
filmmakers was the crime movie. Among the classics of poetic realism are Carné’s Quai
des brumes (1937), the story of a pacifist military deserter who seeks to save and protect
a troubled girl, and Le jour se lève (1939), the story of a factory worker who has killed a
sadistic bourgeois.
15
Indeed, while poetic realism predates the American film noir cycle
by several years, the films of poetic realism are often considered by critics to be
“celebrated examples of film noir” (Fournier Lanzoni 82). In common with American
film noir, the undisputed male hero of poetic realism, ubiquitously interpreted by Jean
Gabin, was a “tough, introverted character haunted by a tragic fate often evolved in a
hostile urban underworld” (76). He also typically died at the end of each film, thus
sharing the fate of the American film noir protagonist. As we will see in subsequent
considerations, there is a definite correlation between the French films of the 1930s and
American film noir of the 1940s and 50s.
In spite of poetic realism’s heightened aestheticism, the movement is arguably
defined by its realist ambitions. However, it is important to stress that the poetic realist
filmmakers never staked a claim to the representation of objective reality, but rather the

15
André Bazin considered Le Jour se lève and Quai des brumes to be “two of the most successful dramas
of the decade, possessing ‘the ideal qualities of a cinematic paradise lost’” (Fournier Lanzoni 82).
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overtly subjective treatment of political problems. The major influence on its realist
aesthetic can be seen to be nineteenth century literary realism and naturalism, with their
predilection for representing the ills of modernity, urban decay and the bourgeois
subjugation of working class protagonists. One specificity of poetic realism is the
filmmakers’ active political support for the Popular Front, a broad coalition of left wing
parties which came to power in France in 1936.
16
Jean Renoir was considered to be
among the most politically engaged of the poetic realists, and he was commissioned by
the government to make a film commemorating the French revolution, La Marseillaise
(1938), which was also financed by trade union members. However, as the Popular Front
unraveled and the inevitability of war with Germany became apparent, the directors’
collective visions began to reflect the more pessimistic national mood, and they turned
their attention to more existential, metaphysical reflections on life.
17

The plots of several works of poetic realism clearly reveal support for the Front’s
political objectives. For instance, Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) tells the
story of tyrannical bourgeois businessman, whose mismanagement of a printing press
leads the workers to have to set up a cooperative in order to avoid bankruptcy, albeit in
the face of adversity from their nemesis.
18
However, most directors expressed their
support for the Popular Front simply through their decision to set their dramas in the
working class social milieu and faubourgs, aiming to “show real life” as lived out on the

16
Much has been written about the relationship between the Popular Front and poetic realism, which
evolved considerably during its tumultuous four years in power. See, for instance, Andrew Dudley’s
Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture.
17
After Quai des brumes (1938), Jean Gabin was widely seen as a “symbol of the Popular Front” (Fournier
Lanzoni 76); his character’s demise as emblematic of France’s impending fate.
18
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was in fact made before the Popular Front came to power.
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streets with “wet cobblestones, suburban commuter trains in the early morning, factories’
smoke mixing with fog [and] small cafés in popular districts” (Fournier Lanzoni 74). The
auteurs of poetic realism sought, essentially, to convey the political climate of their day
through representations of everyday protagonists living everyday lives.
Jean Vigo’s politics were arguably more complex than those of the poetic realists.
While he undoubtedly had left wing sympathies, his films were completed several years
before the Popular Front came to power and do not relate to the specifics of French
politics. Much has been made of his childhood experiences fleeing political persecution
due to his father’s activities as an anarchist, and indeed, Vigo’s two fictional films, Zéro
de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934), are imbued with anarchistic themes. Zéro de
conduite is the story of four schoolboys who are interned in an absurd and sadistic
boarding school and who plot to stage a revolt on the day of an alumni reunion. There can
be little doubt that Vigo drew upon his own personal experiences of mistreatment as a
schoolboy in order to present the school system as nothing less than “incarceration
disguised as education” (Porton 196). The film’s denouement, where the students embark
on a surreal, otherworldly procession out of their dorm, was widely interpreted as a call
for revolution, not just against school authorities, but against the whole sordid, bourgeois
establishment.
L’Atalante (1934) tells the story of a young provincial girl, Juliette, who marries
the captain of a barge ship. Juliette is initially frustrated by married life on the barge,
which the couple share with the eccentric and anarchistic Père Jules (Michel Simon). Her
tedium is punctuated by a visit to Paris, where the young couple are overwhelmed by the
thrills offered by the city’s dance halls and cabarets. Later, Juliette is lured back to the
106

city by a seductive salesman who promises to show her “la ville Lumière à tous les
étages.” Juliette, however, soon finds herself alone in the city, and a static camera eyes
Juliette in various situations. First, we see Juliette gazing through the window of a
jewelry store at items such no doubt cannot afford. We next see her staring at a puppet
show behind a glass display, her own reflection merging with that of passersby.
Afterwards, we see Juliette alone in the midst of bleak industrial wastelands as she
realizes the barge has left without her. She is subsequently shown walking hurriedly past
long lines of unemployed men, and being accosted by suspicious strangers. Then, as she
tries to purchase a train ticket at the station, a man snatches her purse. When Juliette cries
for help, the thief drops her purse, but this goes unnoticed by a lynch mob of mainly
bourgeois men, who beat the man until the arrival of the police.
The lynching of the thief was staged by Vigo in order to make a point about the
bourgeois cruelty and herd mentality. However, the outdoors images in subsequent
sequences of Juliette’s roaming through Paris were not directly orchestrated by Vigo. In
these sequences, groups of impoverished and visibly cold men line the snowy streets in
the hope of being given food, shelter or work. These images show a city surrounded by
desolate industrial wastelands and disused or abandoned trains and warehouses. It is a
hostile urban environment where deviance is the norm, and Juliette is approached by a
number of either sick or ill-intentioned strangers. Even if some of these characters were
actors or extras, the viewer is satisfied that these scenes correspond to a basic reality
regarding 1930s Paris.
As I will show with regard to other films, the presence of an indisputable element
or grain of “truth” is a key component of the actuality aesthetic. In l’Atalante, we might
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consider that the street scenes filmed by Vigo speak of a basic and irrefutable truth
regarding depression-era Paris. However, it should also be acknowledged that the
viewers’ impression of Paris as a city where poverty and alienation are rife is certainly
colored by Vigo’s choices of location and mise-en-scène, which ultimately reflect Vigo’s
subjective point of view. This impression is further confounded by Juliette’s fictional
predicament. While the use of fiction does not disqualify a work from being affiliated
with the actuality aesthetic, it should be acknowledged that fictional scenarios are one of
the devices used by auteurs to narrate actuality and to imbue it with subjective
commentary.
Outside of Vigo’s fictional work, A propos de Nice (1930) provides an
extraordinary showcase for the film camera’s ability to capture the actuality of a city and
to narrate these images through a very sophisticated array of filmic devices and approach
to mise-en-scène without any recourse to a fictional scenario. The film was made by Vigo
in collaboration with the cinematographer Boris Kaufman, the younger brother of Dziga
Vertov celebrated for his contribution to Soviet “kinopravda.”
19
As we will see, A propos
de Nice is not easily categorized as belonging to any particular genre, although it has
some commonality with the “city symphony” genre that was popular in the 1920s and
1930s.
Michael Temple has shown in some detail in his analysis of A propos de Nice that
Vigo’s film does not require a “story” in order to achieve a “biting social critique” (24)
and to convey the impression of a pre-revolutionary society “whose days are numbered”

19
Kaufman also worked as Vigo’s cinematographer in Zéro de conduite and L’Atalante.

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(27). For the most part this sentiment is conveyed through the filming and mise-en-scène
of life as seen on the streets of Nice in the spring of 1930. Indeed, in the first ten minutes
the camera lingers on wealthy vacationers filmed in and around the Promenade des
Anglais, while also recording the efforts of the street cleaners, vendors and waiters. In the
second half of the film, Vigo takes his camera to the poorer backstreets of old Nice, and
films the market traders and children at work and play. As in the aerial footage of the city
and its coastline which appear at the outset, the basic veracity of these images cannot be
disputed. Furthermore, Vigo for the most part resists the temptation to frame these
vignettes in such a way as to exaggerate the sight beheld; for the most part the bourgeois
do nothing more offensive than to idle, albeit while others are working, and in spite of the
piles of rubbish seen in the old town and the sight of one child afflicted with a disfiguring
skin condition, these scenes are “far from miserabilist” (24).
The spectator is nonetheless encouraged to form a critical judgment on the images
he or she observes by virtue of the array of camera angles and shots employed by Vigo
and Kaufman. Indeed, as Michael Temple observes, A propos de Nice became a
“laboratory of formal expression,” with the urban environment offering “an exciting
forum of political expression” (13). First, Temple notes that A propos de Nice makes
extensive use of both the “plongée,” or high-angle overhead shot, and “contre-plongée”
(21), or extreme low-angle shots, filming for instance the wealthy from high above but
the poor from below, having the effect of emphasizing the divide that are evidently exists
between the social classes. However, the most innovative sequences in A propos de Nice
are arguably those filmed on the Promenade and which were recorded by mounting a
lightweight 35mm Debrie Parvo camera onto an improvised dolly which Vigo and
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Kaufman promenaded along the boulevard to create a “travelling” moment. They were
thus able to observe and record passersby without alerting them to the presence of the
camera. We see, among other sights, immaculately dressed men and women in their
finery and dressed in the fashions of the day, as well as a distinctly working class man
dressed in a cap and dirty overcoat walking at a fast pace and an old man driving a
vending cart selling the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
The presence of newspapers is particularly noteworthy, and later on we see a
number of vacationers reading or amusing themselves with their newspapers. The
newspaper functions as a figurative reminder of the film’s broader context, notably the
Wall Street crash of 1929 and other world news that inevitably impacted upon the
readers’ lives, and we are thus reminded how the lives of the city’s residents are
interconnected with the broader political climate of the era.
20
In New Wave films,
newspapers and news broadcasts also serve to draw the spectator’s attention to current
events and the contemporary political climate. We have already seen, for instance,
Coutard and Godard’s technique of mounting the camera in a stroller and filming Patricia
selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysées.
Vigo pioneers other devices in A propos de Nice that are key to narrating reality
and that would wield a considerable influence over New Wave filmmakers. Temple
suggests that Vigo’s extensive close-ups of the vacationers going about their activities,
“drinking, smoking, nibbling away [their] boredom” and vainly “preening” (23)

20
There is a great deal to be said about representations of newspapers; their temporarily in relation to the
temporality of film. This question is considered, for instance, in Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of
Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Havard University Press, 2002).
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themselves could only have been achieved by a concealed camera.
21
At the same time,
Vigo also goes to some lengths to foreground the filmmaking process in order to make
the spectator aware of the mechanics involved in recording reality, and the inherent
limitations of the project. We are shown, for instance, a man who photographing the
vacationers with a tripod on the Promenade. Vigo includes himself in the sequence
towards the end with the carnival dancers. Some of Vigo’s subjects are clearly aware of
the presence of a camera, such as the bourgeois couples who “look at the camera with an
awkwardly compromised air” (25). Temple also comments that A propos de Nice features
“one of the best looks-to-camera in French cinema: an alley-cat star[ing] straight back at
Kaufman from its gutter” (25).
22

While Vigo’s work wielded considerable influence on the development of the
actuality aesthetic, it should be noted that he also employed filmmaking techniques that
will be rejected by future exponents of the aesthetic. For instance, we note in A propos de
Nice Vigo’s fondness of a technique known as “intellectual montage.” Instances of this
occur when images of an ostrich and a crocodile appear alongside images of the
vacationers, and the film’s dizzying denouement which juxtaposes the carnival’s giant
papier-mâché dolls with a series of images of military men, naval ships in the port of
Nice, a funeral procession and images of flowers being picked and then thrown during
the carnival. The film ends on a spectacular crescendo of images, centered on erotized
representation of carnival dancers, filmed from below and at different speeds, juxtaposed
with an extreme close-up of an emotional old lady, baroque statutes and mausoleums,

21
Vigo and Kaufman’s notes from the shoot relate only to the content of sequences and not to the technical
aspects of filmmaking.
22
I will discuss the importance of foregrounding the filmmaking process in subsequent considerations.
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images of the “eternal” conveyed by the sky and the sea, and giant industrial chimneys.
The precise interpretation of this montage is a matter of some debate, with Temple
concluding that it is imbued with “a formal and political ambivalence” (27).
23

The images that make up this dizzying montage are imported from outside of the
streets of Nice, and therefore constitute an artificial mise-en-scène.
24
Moreover, they
draw attention to the unambiguously subjective powers and high level of control exerted
by the filmmaker-auteur. I will later consider how the extensive use of montage and the
overt manipulation of images belong to a filmmaking tradition that runs contrary to the
actuality aesthetic. As Hillier explains, “...mise-en-scène became a sort of counter to
theories of montage, privileging the action, movement forward and illusion of narrative
against any foregrounding of the relations between shot and shot ...” (10).

(iii) Film Noir Semidocumentary: “The City in its Actuality”

The legacy of the cinema of Jean Vigo and poetic realism was a fully-fledged
realist aesthetic; arguably the first in film history. While the poetic realist filmmakers
considered themselves foremost to be realists, they used an array of filmic devices
including fiction, mise-en-scène and cinematographic technique to render the world both
subjectively and poetically. The poetic realists felt that their artistic ambitions were best
served by the crime film genre. Considering the influence of poetic realism on film noir,

23
Temple asks if, for instance, the giant parading dolls represent “the people as revolutionary excess,
threatening to overcome the restrictions of bourgeois society,” or if they embody “the safely ritualized
symbols of a politically controlled moment of licensed disorder?” (26).
24
The same can be said of the various “trick shots” in the film, such as the dolls used to represent the
casino-players, and the young lady filmed dressed and then naked while sitting in the same position.

112

Raymond Borde writes that the “‘three greats’ (Duvivier and, above all, Renoir and
Carné) had created a certain noir realism” (23). This description of poetic realism
resonates with Mark Conard and Richard Porfirio’s description of American film noir as
“stylized crime realism” (25). In this section, I will indeed show how certain Hollywood
films noirs are imbued with “aestheticized” realism.
While there is considerable disagreement among scholars regarding the extent of
poetic realism’s influence over American film noir, many critics have commentated on
the striking similarity of tone, mood and the sets used in both cinemas. One can easily
see, for instance, how this description of poetic realism could equally apply to American
film noir:
A succinct summary of major themes in poetic realism could be presented
as follows: … the pessimistic atmosphere, the (doomed) quest for
happiness, and finally the tragic destiny. The chiaroscuro lighting,
background artifices, evocative visual imagery, and wittiness of dialogue
resulted in a distinctive lyrical style. The cinematographic stream was
characterized by its unity, its codes, and its very artifices. (Fournier
Lanzoni 75)

Moreover, scholars tend to agree that both poetic realism and American film noir are, to
various degrees, a conflation of Expressionism, surrealism and realism, in particular the
gritty, urban and moralizing realism favored by late nineteenth-century French authors
such as Balzac, Zola and Maupassant.
American film noir’s realist dimension is not, however, universally acknowledged
by critics in view of the genre’s proclivity for highly stylized visuals. Conard and Porfirio
observe that there is a “dynamic tension” between film noir’s “nightmarish, surreal
stylization” and its more “true to life” aspects that has led scholars to “underrate” (24) the
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genre’s claim to realism, adding that “while it has been recognized as somehow involved,
realism is undoubtedly one of the more consistently underappreciated elements of noir”
(24). In justifying their claim, Conard and Porfirio cite the depth of psychological realism
attained by film noir protagonists, as well as a “tone and mood” (25) that convey an
irrefutable darkness about the human condition, mirroring “an often unacknowledged and
significantly unpleasant chunk of human existence” (25). The Cahiers critics also
believed Hollywood film noir to tell basic truths about the human condition. We recall
that Fereydoun Hoveyda accounted for his fellow Cahiers critics’ fascination for
American film noir in terms of the “themes” explored in this cinema, namely “solitude,
violence, the absurdity of existence, sin, redemption, love, etc.,” (Hillier 8), which they
believed to correspond to a basically truthful depiction of postwar America.
Various critics have argued, therefore, that films noirs should be considered to be
fundamentally realist in view of their representations of what one might call the
“zeitgeist.” Schrader writes that films noirs’ predilection for showing “a more honest and
harsh view of America” amounted to a “resurgence of realism” (Schrader 232) in postwar
American cinema. Andrew Dickos also observes that “the concerns of the troubled,
dislocated noir protagonist have most often been based in a sensitivity to the human
condition as defined by the anxieties of modern American culture - a thesis always at
least implied in noir cinema” (190). While some of the issues facing film noir
protagonists are of an existential and arguably universal nature, these problems are
explored in the specific context of 1940s and 1950s America; an era characterized by
urban dwellings, mass consumerism and new modes of mass production, a widening
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disparity between the lower and middle classes, and the rapidly evolving nature of the
relationship between the sexes, among other developments.
Certain films noirs, of course, were more concerned with representing the reality
of their times than others. In this section I focus on a film noir subgenre that came into
being in the late 1940s known as the semidocumentary and that is particularly noted for
its realist aesthetics. As the name suggests, the semidocumentary is a hybridized
conflation of the nascent film noir genre and the documentary, or more specifically, the
newsreel broadcast that had become a regular feature of movie theater programs from
1935 to approximately the end of World War II. The two principle figures associated
with the wartime newsreel were the producers of the March of Time news broadcasts,
Louis de Rochement and Henry Hathaway, both of whom went on to produce and direct
several semidocumentaries, notably The House on 92
nd
Street (1945) and Kiss of Death
(1947).
Examples of semidocumentary films noirs are The House on 92
nd
Street (1945)
and A Street with No Name (1948). The first of these films was produced by de
Rochement and directed by Hathaway and tells the story of the triumphant infiltration by
a double agent for the FBI in a Nazi spy ring. At the outset, the spectator is told that this
is a true story “adapted from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and
“wherever possible ... photographed in the original locale,” and starring “actual FBI
personnel.”
25
However, the film is highly unusual among films noirs given in view of its
strong agenda in seeking to represent the work of the FBI in a positive light and in

25
The film’s claim to have employed the “actual FBI personnel” involved in the case is largely overstated,
given that it is the veteran Hollywood actors Richard Widmark and Lloyd Nolan who play the principle
roles in this reenactment
115

demonstrating its “technological omnipotence” (Dimendberg 38). The result is that “by
the end of the story, the viewer felt that whatever peril existed was vanquished – and
could be vanquished – by the strength and integrity of [America’s] democratic
institutions” (Dickos 188).
26

The Naked City, directed by Jules Dassin in 1947, is considered to be a “prime
example of the semidocumentary style” (Dickos 76), while also having a great deal in
common with fictional films noirs of this period. The film tells the story of a model, Gene
Dexter, who has been murdered in her apartment. Veteran detective Dan Muldoon and
his rookie partner Jimmy Halloran take up the case. During their enquiries, suspicion falls
on various insalubrious characters having some connection with the model and a spate of
burglaries. Upon finding the dead body of a renowned thief, suspicion falls on his
partner, Garzah, a harmonica-playing wrestler. In the final sequence, Garzah is located
and a rapid manhunt ensues culminating in a dramatic standoff on the Williamsburg
Bridge, where the murderer is shot and falls to his death. At the end, the narrator informs
the spectator that “Gene Dexter’s name, her face, her history, were worth five cents a day
for six days ... There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of
them.”
The film’s plot, which is an amalgamation of several real news stories from 1947
including the murder of a New York model, is the first evidence of a “documentary”
aspect. Dickos observes, moreover, that The Naked City realistically showcases “New

26
The case for The House on 92
nd
Street and A Street with No Name belonging to the film noir family is
highly tenuous, and indeed the film is arguably an imposter to the genre. We recall that the “happy ending”
has little place in film noir, nor does a reassuring voice-over narration. A Street with No Name goes so far
as to feature introductory comments from J. Edgar Hoover.

116

York City as the ultimate existential challenge to the civilized man” (Dickos 76). In the
first sequences, the narrator’s comments are accompanied by impressive aerial
photography of lower and midtown Manhattan, followed by nighttime shots of Wall
Street, an empty movie theater, a factory, the port, an apartment interior, the subway, a
plane flying overhead, a newspaper office, a radio station and an upscale cocktail lounge.
The spectator is then invited to witness the murder taking place in Gene Dexter’s
apartment.
In his analysis of the film, Dimendberg explains that in common with other
semidocumentary films noirs, The Naked City purposefully identified “a specific city”
(26) as the location of the film.
27
This tendency can be traced to the B-series films noirs,
which lacked the resources to hide their surroundings with elaborate studio backdrops
(we recall, for instance, Ulmer’s Detour, partly filmed in downtown Hollywood).
Dimendberg cites, in fact, an observation in the Daily Variety magazine as early as 1944
that it is “becoming a rule that if a studio isn’t making a picture with the name of a city in
a title the studio isn’t adhering to the call of the times” (21). It was only later that it
became a film noir genre convention to clearly identify the city in which the action takes
place, with certain cities, notably Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, emerging
as the undisputed hubs of film noir.
28
This trend can be seen as one aspect of the

27
This compares to A Street with No Name, which refuses to acknowledge Los Angeles as its setting,
despite depicting many of the city’s recognizable landmarks.
28
Los Angeles was the favored location for films noirs (Double Indemnity, 1944, Murder My Sweet, 1944,
and the many movies based on Raymond Chandler’s stories featuring detective Philip Marlowe), followed
by San Francisco (The Maltese Falcon, 1941, Out of the Past, 1947, D.O.A., 1950). Many iconic films
noirs are also set in New York, including Phantom Lady, 1944, He Walked by Night, 1948, Laura, 1944,
and Pickup on South Street, 1953.
117

semidocumentary’s influence over the film noir cycle and its evolution towards more
realist aesthetics.
29

The fact of identifying the city of New York is only the most peripheral element
of The Naked City’s realist aesthetic. Indeed, beyond having merely “realist” ambitions,
the film’s producer, Mark Hellinger introduces the film by claiming that it tells the “story
of the city itself,” and shows New York “as it is.” This extraordinary claim, which speaks
of an ambition to represent the city both objectivity and in its entirety, places The Naked
City at the heart of the actuality aesthetic. With regard to this claim, Dimendberg writes
that The Naked City is a prime example of a film that “aspires to represent the city in its
actuality through synoptic views of the metropolis” (19). Indeed, Hellinger’s ambition
clearly manifests itself primarily through the film’s impressive outdoors photography and
its concerted effort to impart a truthful impression of life in the city.
Consider that The Naked City was shot almost entirely outdoors in one hundred
and seven locations around Manhattan. In addition to the aerial views of Manhattan, the
film features street scenes recorded at Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Amsterdam
Avenue, parts of Central Park and Times Square. In one sequence, children are seen
playing at the corner of West 20
th
Street and 8
th
Avenue. Various buildings and
landmarks are also clearly identifiable, such as the post office at 421 8
th
Avenue, the
subway station at Lexington Avenue and East 103
rd
Street, the 10
th
Police Precinct, and
the State Office Building on 80 Center Street. Many of these sequences feature New
Yorkers going about their day-to-day business, and in most cases filmed without their

29
Schrader observes that even after the semidocumentary ceased to exist, several of its defining features,
such as non-studio and outdoor filming, “remained a permanent fixture of film noir” (232).
118

knowledge, with Dassin’s cinematographer William H. Daniels filming using a concealed
camera mounted on the back of a moving truck and on several occasions, hiding the
camera inside a pavement newsstand. According to some apocryphal accounts, Dassin
even employed a juggler and instructed a man to climb onto a street lamp while giving a
patriotic speech in order to distract the crowds from the filming.
In spite of the film’s comprehensive efforts to record New York “as it is,” it goes
without saying that Hellinger and Dassin fail to achieve this. Dimendberg’s comment
regarding the The Naked City’s aspiration to “represent the city in its actuality” (19) can
thus be seen to be a more accurate and revealing articulation of the film’s realist
ambitions, which are akin to the “actuality aesthetic” as I seek to define it. This
categorization refers primarily to the filmmakers’ stated ambition to render the city
objectively, and their subsequent attention to recording life in the city in a seemingly
unmanipulated fashion. However, the filmmakers’ incontestably, if subtly, narrate this
“actuality” by virtue of their choice of locations, mise-en-scène, camera angles, etc., as
well as the fictional elements of the plot. The locations, in particular, irrefutably imply an
authorial point of view and point to a high degree of subjectivity.
Dimendberg, notably, comments on Dassin and Hellinger’s heightened interest in
the more working class neighborhoods of New York, such as the Lower East Side,
characterized by “backyards, dilapidated lots, alleys, and tombstones” (70). The film’s
final manhunt takes place in the district of New York near to the Williamsburg Bridge,
where the murderer is seen running down Delancey Street prior to his failed attempt to
cross the bridge into Brooklyn. While this district is clearly poor and proletariat,
Dimendberg observes that this neighborhood also appears to be “a haven of ethnic
119

difference and cultural integrity” (70), thus conforming to the film’s contradictory
tendency to present New York as both a site of crime and poverty as well as a beacon of
modernity. Furthermore, The Naked City undoubtedly shares film noir’s fascination with
the darker, alienating qualities of the modern, urban metropolis. Dimendberg notes that
The Naked City shares “the proclivity of the film noir cycle for urban topoi on the verge
of destruction” (64); filming sequences, for instance, in the Third Avenue elevated
subway, since demolished, the Turtle Bay neighborhood, which was demolished to house
the United Nations headquarters, as well as the “putrid-smelling slaughterhouses along
the East River” (64).
To fully understand The Naked City’s realist aesthetic, one has to consider the
film alongside the eponymous work of photojournalism by Arthur Fellig, known as
“Weegee.”
30
Indeed, both the film and Weegee’s photography express a cynical pleasure
in the resilience of New York in the face of poverty, malevolence and criminal activity.
Weegee’s 1940s photos are often cited as a precursor to candid photojournalism and
paparazzi photography, and in spite of his obvious pride and love for New York, Weegee
describes his own photographs as “lewd, louche, and licentious” (248). Indeed, Weegee’s
first photo album, Naked City, is replete with images of seedy, gritty crime and poverty-
ridden New York, and includes pictures of murder victims laying on sidewalks,
prominent mobsters and murders, some of whom are female, the victims of auto
accidents covered in blood, nighttime fires and evacuations, transsexual prostitutes and
all sorts of criminals. Weegee’s equipment included a portable police-band shortwave

30
Producer Mark Hellinger bought the right to use the title “The Naked City” from Weegee, whose
collection of photojournalism, Naked City, had been published in 1945.
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radio, which enabled him to arrive at crime scenes often before the police themselves, a
basic 4x5 Speed Graphic camera with a small aperture and flashbulb and a portable
darkroom in the trunk of his car so that his images could be taken directed to newspapers
and included in the next day’s edition.
31

Weegee’s photography was undoubtedly sensationalist. William McCleery, the
editor of one of the papers that printed Weegee’s photos, wrote that “Weegee’s subjective
portrait of New York must be regarded as a work of creative art,” adding that as an artist,
he had “his his own conception of what constitutes beauty, and in some cases it is hard
for us to share his conception” (6). However, on spite of Weegee’s photography’s
subjectivity and artistic qualities, it is also a fundamentally realist work. We might go so
far, moreover, as to identify some of the basic tenets of the actuality aesthetic in
Weegee’s photos, almost none of which are “staged” or manipulated after development.
Weegee wrote that he considered a photograph to be “a page from life, and that being the
case, it must be real” (Weegee 12). The point of view implied in Weegee’s photography
stems primarily from his choice of subject matter, as well as the juxtapositions that occur
naturally within the composition of the frame; for instance, police officers with criminals,
the living and the dead, the wealthy and beautiful and the less privileged.
32

It is a matter of fact that Dassin and the screenwriter Albert Maltz had originally
wanted to follow Weegee’s aesthetic more closely by emphasizing the “architectural
beauty and squalor that exist [in New York] side-by-side” (Dimendberg 73). However,

31
Weegee’s photos appeared in the mainly tabloid newspapers such as New York Tribune, New York Post,
PM, New York Sun, Daily News and Journal-American, among others.
32
In a famous photo known as The Critic (taken in 1943), two society ladies in ermines and tiaras are
juxtaposed with an unkempt street lady, although this differs from most of Weegee’s photos given that it
was, in fact, “staged.”
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given that Dassin was faced with accusations of being a Communist sympathizer,
Universal Studios “reedited the film against the wishes of Dassin, cutting the many
comparisons between wealth and poverty that the director claimed to have added to the
script” (72). Whether intentionally or not, the resulting film remains more reliant upon
framing, camera angles and its “true story” plot rather than upon the excessive use of
montage. The film’s realist critique is therefore primarily achieved through images and
mise-en-scène alone.
The Naked City’s narrative is also worthy of mention in the context of the
actuality aesthetic. In spite of Hellinger’s claim to hold all of the city’s secrets, the very
fact of his “voice of God” narration serves to highlight the very absurdity of such a claim,
thus foregrounding the processes of recording reality on film.
33
At the beginning of the
film, Hellinger introduces himself and informs the viewing public that the film they are
about to see is “frankly is a bit different from most films you’ve ever seen.” He
continues:
... It was written by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, photographed by
William Daniels, and directed by Jules Dassin. As you can see, we're
flying over an island, a city, a particular city and this is the story of a
number of its people… It was not photographed in a studio. Quite the
contrary. Barry Fitzgerald, our star, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don
Taylor, Ted de Corsia and the other actors played out their roles on the
streets, in the apartment houses, in the skyscrapers, of New York itself...

In her analysis of The Naked City, Sarah Kozloff writes that this narration “could hardly
be more self-conscious, more self-reflexive” (42). First, consider that Hellinger goes to
considerable lengths to make the viewer aware of the people and processes involved in

33
In part two of this chapter, I will consider how this foregrounding process is a key component of the New
Wave actuality aesthetic.
122

the film’s production, not least by listing the names of the screenwriters, director and
actors who participated in the shoot. During this sequence we also hear the faint din of a
propeller noise, reminding the spectator that the aerial views of New York were achieved
through mechanical and technical apparatuses. Kozloff remarks that as the film
progresses, Mark Hellinger narrates the movie in the manner resembling “the spiel of a
guide on sightseeing bus” (47); proclaiming to know everything about the city, while
making it abundantly clear that his tour does not even come close to showing the city in
its entirety.
Regarding both Weegee and Dassin and Hellinger’s claims to represent the
“metropolis unadorned, stripped of secrets and pretenses” (47), Dimendberg offers this
analysis:
In its very promise to expose the bare truth, the catachresis “naked city”
evokes a Gordian knot of language, desire, and visual mastery whose
overdetermined character belies any claim to expose an unmediated urban
reality. How could so evocative a term and its promised divulgence of
once-secret knowledge not heed a particular agenda, even in one only
faintly grasped? Exploring the nexus of the 1945 book The Naked City by
the photographer Weegee and the 1948 film noir of the same title brings
into focus the technological, rhetorical, spectatorial, and narrative
strategies each employs to represent the city in a direct and unexpurgated
manner.” (48)

From our brief consideration of these two works, we are able to concur with the
Dimendberg’s conclusions. In spite of both the photo and film works’ stated ambition to
represent unadulterated reality, these works mediate and subjectify their representations
of reality with the aid of complex narrative strategies. Their “particular agenda” in doing
so, however, is not easily understood or wholly defined.
123

(iv) Du Rififi chez les hommes, Touchez pas au Grisbi and Bob le flambeur

Future proponents of the actuality aesthetic will become clearer and more adept at
defining their realist “agenda,” that is to say, at selecting the targets and articulating the
aims of their authorial and subjective commentary. In his subsequent films, Jules Dassin
in particular will refine his strategies for representing and mediating cinematic reality,
and produce works that outwardly critique aspects of postwar urban modernity while
simultaneously masking the fact of his overt authorial subjectivity. As discussed in the
introductory pages of this dissertation, Dassin’s film of 1955 made in Paris, Du Rififi chez
les hommes chez les hommes, was of pivotal importance to the French New Wave.
34
In
this consideration, I will show that the film shares a fundamentally similar approach to
representing reality as New Wave films, and as such deserves to be recognized as a
precursor New Wave work.
Under suspicion in the United States for being a Communist sympathizer, Dassin
went to London at the end of the 1940s where he was free to abandon the conventions of
the semidocumentary in favor of what is sometimes categorized as “European film noir.”
The resulting film, Night and the City (1950), was in many respects a transitional work
for Dassin.
35
It tells the story of Harry Fabian, an American-born hustler and “artist
without an art” whose scheme to control wrestling in London inevitably brings him into
conflict with powerful figures in London’s East End and preempts his inevitable
downfall. It is also the “story” of a shattered and skeletal postwar London, portraying a

34
Dassin directed Du Rififi chez les hommes for a subsidiary of Pathé studios. Dassin was commissioned
by the French studio after Jean-Pierre Melville turned down the commission.
35
In spite of Dassin’s “exile,” Night and the City was produced by Twentieth Century Fox.
124

“noir landscape of London’s East End and its denizens, the rawness of good and bad luck
made there, the shrewdness of its takers, and the hard payments to life in the street”
(Dickos 81). As Dickos observes, Night and the City is very much a film of “fusions;” the
“perfect fusion of mood and character” (80), as well as fusion of “the classic
expressionism of film noir lighting with on-location shooting,” as particularly seen in the
film’s outdoors chiaroscuro finale.
36

In spite of Dassin’s incursions into Expressionist stylization in Night and the City,
the general tendency in his European films noirs is undoubtedly towards an increased
emphasis on photographic realism. As we will see in Du Rififi chez les hommes, Dassin
henceforth eschewed narrative strategies associated with the overt manipulation of
reality, notably “voice of God” narrations, the extensive use of montage, and highly
dramatic, fictional plots.
37
Instead, Du Rififi chez les hommes is characterized by an
approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography that achieves a subtle, nuanced and
sophisticated mediation of the realities represented. Indeed, it is specifically Du Rififi
chez les hommes’ usage of mise-en-scène that allows one to account for the film in terms
of the actuality aesthetic.

36
“... from steep high-angle shots that magnify Harry at his moments of exhilarating invincibility, to a low-
angle camera that captures traffic scenes and the Thames waterfront, and on to an extreme high-angle shot
of the city at the end of the film that becomes a visual dirge for the lost man inside Harry Fabian…He runs
and runs, down the lamp-lighted streets, through alleyways, up seedy hotel stairways, and past the
nightclubs that have been a part of his life... His flight up the lighthouse steps is a chiaroscuro
fantasia...“Oh, Anna,” he cries, “the things I did!” It is an audacious and pathetic gesture, and Harry Fabian
emerges ennobled by its heartbreaking honesty, a stark representation of the man tragic aloneness” (Dickos
81-82).
37
It is interesting to note that while Dassin was chased from America for his alleged Communist
sympathies, Dassin did not align himself with overtly Communist filmmakers in his European career, such
as the Italian neorealists.
125

Du Rififi chez les hommes is the story of four bandits who carry out an audacious
theft of jewels from a prestigious Parisian jeweler. Andrew Dickos observes that in
comparison with previous cinematic representations of Paris, such as poetic realism,
Dassin’s film is:
More beautiful, yes, and more dismal too... The postwar moment of Paris
during its 1950s vogue offered a Paris of enormous cinematic texture,
evoking the tragic remnants of its recent past just beneath a renewed
vitality and displaying the sterile middle-class consumerism that would
begin to engulf Parisians by the end of the decade (and in which the New
Wave filmmakers would exult with both romance and cool criticism)...
(78)

As Dickos aptly observes, foremost among the realities represented by Dassin is the new
capitalism and consumerism which began to take root in 1950s Paris, and which is
generally considered to have coincided with a nascent “Americanization” of French
society. Related to this, Dassin is also concerned by issues such as the prevalence of
postwar urban poverty, a growing sense of alienation among those left behind by the
economic upturn, and France’s growing awareness of its standing as a diminished
colonial empire.
Du Rififi chez les hommes scouts the urban landscape in order to present a portrait
of postwar Paris that subtly emphasizes the increased Americanization of the Parisian
landscape. This is initially evident in the film’s choice of locations. We note for instance
that while the heist takes place in the very heart of the French capital near the Place
Vendôme, this area is populated with British and American boutiques, such as the
jewelers Mappin & Webb, an international silk merchant’s boutiques that we are told has
“branches in New York and London,” and an outlet belonging to the Franco-American
126

conglomerate Kodak-Pathé. The significance of the presence of these particular
enterprises speaks, in a subtle way, of the increasing “anglo-saxon” capitalist presence at
the heart of Paris, with the cinema studio outlet an allusion to the dominance of American
cinema.
38
Additionally, in the sequence where Tony must steal a car for the heist, the
Place de l’Opéra is lit only by the glare of neon signs in the manner of any number of
film noir set in Los Angeles or New York.
Du Rififi chez les hommes chez les hommes is often considered as being part of a
“trilogy” of precursor New Wave works, including Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au
Grisbi (1954) and Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956). These films can be seen to share
fundamentally similar approaches to representing the city and the realities of their day.
Set primarily in Paris and its close suburbs, they are, in the words of Dickos, “intriguing
underworld tone poems to a city that instinctively absorbed the noir sensibility, perhaps
as no other outside America” (78). In common with poetic realism, these three films
employ film noir genre plot conventions, aesthetics and “poetic” sensibility in order to
mediate their representations of the city. Contrary to poetic realism, however, the
“trilogy’s” fictional plots are very much a secondary consideration, practically detached
from their prime objective of mapping the urban Parisian landscape with the rigor and
scrutiny. In the words of Gilles Martain, for the most part these films “implant fiction
onto reality, like a brightly colored image on a wall” (cited in Phillips 85); that is to say,
like an artificial decoration that does not even purport to be realistic.
39
On the other hand,

38
Jacques Tati was already beginning to make his far more trenchant critique of the Americanization of
Paris in his 1950s films, reaching an apogee with Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime 1967.
39
Fictional elements are nevertheless used in tandem with shots of urban Paris in order to “narrate”
actualities, as will demonstrate shortly.
127

each film in the “trilogy” has a “distinctive quotidian realism” (Phillips 85), and is
foremost concerned with penetrating the apartments, homes and intimate spaces inhabited
by Parisians and representing everyday life as lived in the city.
Appropriately, the films of the “trilogy” are mostly set in Montmartre, which was
undisputedly France’s epicenter of “pleasure and crime” (Hewitt 71). In the 1950s,
however, Montmartre was also “an urban culture in transition” (Phillips 51), as well as
“under threat” (Hewitt 72), not least by the arrival of American standards of
entertainment and “high-living”. In Du Rififi chez les hommes, Tony le Stéphanois’
cramped and rancid apartment contrasts with the American-style luxury enjoyed by
customers in the cabaret club, l’Age d’Or. It is Bob le flambeur, however, which offers
the most striking visual trope of the newfound influence of American culture in the locale
of Montmartre. The film opens with images of Montmartre at dawn, beginning with a
view of the Sacré-Coeur church and then showing the funicular and filming the neon
lights of Pigalle and Bob as he emerges into the streets after a night of gambling. At a
portable sandwich bar, an American sailor loudly calls out to an inebriated young lady,
“promenade sur la moto?” The girl obliges, and the camera lingers on the couple as they
circle and exit the square, thus inviting the spectator to contemplate the scene.
It is the sequences set within interior domesticity, however, which provide the
viewer with an insight into the effects of the sociological, economic and cultural shifts
occurring on everyday life in France. In Du Rififi chez les hommes, the spectator is
invited into the homes of each of the thieves, which in the case of Mario is small but
elegant apartment, but in the case of Jo le Suedois, a cramped and inadequate apartment
for his young family on the edge of one of the less salubrious Parisian arrondissements.
128

Phillips sees here a contrast of “domesticity with criminality,” and in common with The
Naked City, a portrayal of “the vernacular as much as the monumental and the intimate as
much as the anonymous” (7). Phillips asserts that the “tensions” arising from such
contrasting representations encourage the viewer to read the film “in terms of class” and
to consider “the way social and economic conditions force people to act the way they do”
(7). Indeed, seeing the poor environs in which Tonio is growing up, the viewer is led to
understand that it is necessity and the want of a better life that motivates Jo le Suedois to
participate in the heist.
Each film in the “trilogy” also leaves central Paris, albeit momentarily, to film
sequences in the Parisian banlieue. In Du Rififi chez les hommes, the main character Tony
le Stéphanois (Jean Servais) is lured into a rival gang’s hideaway in the Parisian suburbs
in order to rescue the kidnapped son of his fellow gang member and to recuperate the
stolen gems. One senses that the plot is mere a ruse for Dassin and his cinematographer,
Philippe Agostini, to bring their camera into the rapidly changing banlieue of Saint-
Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, which is filmed in some detail in the sequence showing le
Stéphanois’ journey from the Port Royal train station. In the final sequence, the injured
Tony rescues the kidnapped Tonio and must drive him back to his home on the Parisian
rive gauche. The camera is mounted inside and on front of the moving car and provides
vertiginous images of the journey from the suburbs into central Paris; showing at once the
unspoiled countryside, the “old France” settlements and the beginnings of what will soon
become new, American style suburbs, and finally the solemn grandeur of Paris.
The images of the banlieue and of Paris in this sequence are presented in such a
way as to give the spectator the impression that he or she can form his or her own
129

judgment of the new developments in Paris. However, in this particular instance the
critique is more than partially achieved through the fictional context of le Stéphanois’
imminent death. Le Stéphanois is undoubtedly a sympathetic and noble character, albeit
one from a bygone age, and his death at the point of delivering Tonio to safety
underscores the fact that he has no place in modern Paris. His death can be directly
attributed to, one might claim, the process of modernization taking place in France. It is
also noteworthy in this sequence that the young Tonio, who is oblivious to his savior’s
troubles, pretends to be a cowboy, pointing a toy gun into the air and at Tony’s head. This
cowboy act can be interpreted an allusion to Dassin’s own troubled status as an exiled
American director in France, while also serving as a symbol of the predominance of the
American influence exerted over the rapidly changing urban landscape, as well the
filmmaking industry in France.
Of the three films, Touchez pas au Grisbi employs the most plot and character-
driven approach to representing social and political issues of 1950s France, specifically
related to the end of France’s colonial empire.
40
However, the film does not achieve a
critique of this question by direct allusion to political or historical events. Instead, the
figure of Max, a newly retired gangster pictured in cardigans and spectacles played by
Jean Gabin, can be seen to figuratively embody France at this time. In his article “Gabin,
Grisbi and 1950s France,” Hewitt writes that Becker’s film has “an entire historical and
cultural dimension ... in which the Montmartre underworld, with Gabin at its head, is
poised between a glorious past ... and an uncertain future, threatened by modernity ... and
the growing incursions of the ‘Other’” (74). It is thus significant that Max’s nemesis, a

40
This includes, for instance, events such as the defeat at Dien Bin Phu and the onset of the war in Algeria.
130

mob that is poised to take control of his territory by exploiting his age and ineptitude, is
made up of a North African, Ali, and others from “the South.”
Hewitt argues that Gabin’s venerable past also becomes “emblematic of the
French cinema as a whole as it struggled to survive under the new dispensation created
by the pax Americana” (72). Indeed, Jean Gabin’s role as Max provides a clear reference
to the works of poetic realism, considered by most critics in the 1950s (including those of
Cahiers of cinéma) to be the last truly great moment of French cinema. Indeed, Touchez
pas au grisbi singlehandedly revived the career’s Jean Gabin, which had never regained
the heights of his 1930s roles as the working-class tragic hero. The parallel is all the more
interesting given that the films of poetic realism, as we have seen, employed the film noir
and crime genre with overtly political ambitions. While Dassin’s, Melville’s and
Becker’s films did not overtly engage in French politics, nor proclaim to do so, they
nonetheless achieve a strong social critique of their times.
In the second part of this chapter, I will endeavor to show how the New Wave
filmmakers will further develop Dassin’s techniques in order to mediate and to critique
Parisian actuality with yet both more subtly and acerbity. I will also consider how New
Wave films return to the question of being able to represent the world as it actually is; an
element which is not especially present within Melville and Becker’s crime films. Du
Rififi chez les hommes chez les hommes, however, is worthy of a final mention in this
regard, with Bazin writing that “the profound nature of the film is aesthetic” (cited in
Philips 91). Indeed, the film is in many ways a case study of Bazin’s favored
cinematographic techniques for conveying reality on screen and for affording the
spectator the maximum opportunity for reconstructing and “experiencing” reality. The
131

film is principally famed for its heist sequence, which lasts twenty-five minutes with no
dialogue or non-diagetic music and which is, in the words of Phillips, “an extraordinary
feet of filmmaking and most Bazinian section of the film in terms of there being a
pronounced observational style that is heavily reliant on the long take and an almost
phenomenological interest in the unfurling of real time” (44).
41
I will shortly discuss the
significance of Bazin’s interest in cinematic phenomenology in the context of Italian
neorealism.

(v) Jean Rouch: Foregrounding Truth and the Problem of Fiction

We have seen in Dassin’s films and in the works of poetic realism how a film that
has a fictional plot (muthos in Aristotelian terms) does not disqualify a work from making
a truth claim. Nevertheless, fictional storytelling (encompassing the notions of mythos
and fabula) is undeniably, by its very nature, characterized by the imaginary and the
untrue. Therefore, in proclaiming cinema’s ability to represent life “as it is” and in
claiming to actually represent the lives of young Frenchmen and women through fictional
means, New Wave filmmakers would have to address the role of fiction in its production
of cinematic truth, and to demonstrate how it is not an antipode to their powerful realist
ambitions.
In this domain, the influence of the anthropologist filmmaker Jean Rouch is
central to the New Wave’s actuality aesthetic. Jean Rouch is closely associated with the

41
The long, uninterrupted takes of the men at work during the theft combined with deep focus and “deep
space” shots of the men as they penetrate the jewelers are also techniques greatly admired by Bazin.
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New Wave, with some film historians considering him to be a “New Wave director.”
42
In
her work Jean Rouch, Maxime Scheinfeigel describes Rouch’s relationship to the New
Wave as “un voisin, un ami, parfois un complice” (64). Rouch, of course, is associated
with cinéma-vérité, a term that was coined by the sociologist Edgar Morin during their
collaborative work Chronicles d’un été (1960). As we will see with reference to Moi, un
noir (1958), Rouch also employs fictional elements to narrate truths as he saw them, but
also to foreground the very processes of eliciting truth. His contribution to the New Wave
actuality aesthetic is, in essence, to demonstrate how fictional modes of expression can in
fact serve and strengthen a film’s truth claim.
Moi, un noir is a film about the lives of young exiled Nigerians who have come to
live in the Abidjan suburb of Treichville. As we will see, it differs from earlier films
Rouch had made in Africa in a number of key respects. In Les Maîtres fous (1955), for
instance, Rouch had traveled to Ghana to film the tribal rituals of the Hauka movement; a
dance during which the participants mimic and mock the pageantry of their British
colonial rulers. In the film, Rouch is clearly aware that “his African subjects lived double
lives,” and his voiceover narration acknowledged and “explored this double life but ...
without reflexivity” (Nowell-Smith 87).
43
In order to render the reality his subjects’
“double lives” more accurately, Rouch’s innovative strategy in Moi, un noir was to invite
his subjects to act out fictional roles which they believed to correspond to their situation,

42
In the late 1950s, Rouch was older than most of the Cahiers critics and was already an established
anthropologist filmmaker. Rouch did, however, collaborate extensively with the New Wave producer,
Pierre Braunberger.
43
Most of the participants lived in modern African cities and had in actual fact never previously taken part
in the tribal rituals. On showing the film at festivals, Rouch discovered that his voiceover narration
offended both African and French audiences.
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and to narrate the film with their own voiceover commentary. As Rouch explains at the
beginning of the film: “Je leur ai proposé de faire un film où ils joueraient leur propres
rôles, où ils auraient le droit de tout dire, tout faire. C’est ainsi qui nous avons improvisé
ce film.”
Rouch does not dispense with his authorial voiceover commentary all together,
and in his opening comments he announces that his film tells the story of “cette jeunesse
sans emploi, coincée entre la tradition and le machinisme.” However, Ganda soon takes
over with his voiceover narration and Rouch refrains from subsequent intervention. For
the purposes of the film, Ganda adopts the name “Edward G. Robinson,” and refers to his
Nigerian friends as “Eddie Constantine,” “Tarzan Johnny Weismuller” and “Elite.” We
learn that the young men are living in exile in the wake of their unsuccessful participation
in a West African conflict. Robinson is unemployed and single, and spends his days
looking for work and doing handyman jobs for cash. Constantine, on the other hand, is
relatively successful, both with women and financially. On Saturdays, they go in
Tarzan’s taxi to the beach, and in the evening Robinson boxes in a gymnasium. He also
dance and is voted le roi du goumbé with his dance partner, Dorothy Lamour. However,
while celebrating his victory he becomes inebriated, and is arrested for fighting.
Ganda’s voiceover is by far the most interesting aspect of Moi, un noir, revealing
information that Rouch would certainly have otherwise overlooked. The single most
striking aspect of his voiceover pertains to the substantial influence of American cultural
iconography on the young Africans living in Treichville. Ganda takes great pleasure in
his chosen pseudo-identity, the actor Edward G. Robinson who portrayed gangsters and
“hard men” in 1930-50s Hollywood, and he delights in welcoming the viewer to
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“Treichville, la Chicago africaine.” The viewer also senses his profound admiration for
his friends’ pseudo-identities; Eddie Constantine, “agent fédéral Américain,” Tarzan
“Johnny Weismuller” (the actor and Olympic swimming champion), and the 1940s
Hollywood pinup, Dorothy Lamour. Through Robinson’s narration, we learn that one of
the community’s most treasured commodities is the taxi belonging to “Tarzan,” who
drives Robinson and his friends to the beach where they admire the girls wearing
Western-style bikinis. We also observe that the community’s shared spaces bear the
hallmark of American culture, such as the cinema showing a Roy Roger’s Western and a
Hollywood B-movie, The Magic Carpet. We see Ganda at the boxing ring, where he
drinks coca-cola, and in the “Mexico City Bar,” where he drinks American beer.
Ganda’s fictional voiceover, in conjunction with Rouch’s cinematic images, tells
of a remote and poor community that has not escaped the enormous cultural and
economic influence of the United States. In spite of the fictional element, one is easily
convinced that there is an irrefutable grain of truth in this representation. Rouch’s
approach to representing the lives of young Nigerians, therefore, might be categorized as
telling the “truth of a lie.” Indeed, in allowing the participants to represent themselves
fictionally (through “lies”), Rouch believed it was possible to come closer to revealing
basic truths about his subjects. It was especially important that the “lies” be of the
participants’ own choosing, thus revealing how they saw themselves and who they
wanted to be.
44

44
Referencing the idea that the perception and representation of oneself is inherently different from being
oneself, Godard wrote in his Cahiers review: “En appelant son film Moi, un noir, Jean Rouch qui est un
Blanc tout comme Rimbaud, déclare lui aussi que ‘Je est un autre’” (cited in Scheinfeigel 74).
135

Scheinfeigel writes that Rouch’s ethnographic documentaries of the 1950s are
imbued with “une tension vers la fiction par laquelle doit en passer l’expression d’une
vérité qui n’est plus celle de la réalité en soi mais celle de la réalité en cinéma” (146).
Scheinfeigel also draws her readers’ attention to the fact that Deleuze considered Rouch
to be a “forger” of truth, exploring his subjects’ lives with the aid of fictions and self-
reflexivity in such a way that destroys “tout modèle du vrai pour devenir créateur de
vérité” (151).
45
While inviting his participants to assume fictional roles is enlightening
about their lives and circumstances, the viewer is also simultaneously made aware that
the film does not represent their actual lives. In this way, Rouch endeavored “to place a
permanent question mark over all attempts to claim truth status for representations of
seen and heard phenomenal reality” (Nowell-Smith 89). The very fact of this “question
mark,” however, arguably adds a further stratum of truth and authenticity to Rouch’s film
project.
When Moi, un noir won the Delluc Prize in 1958, Godard was quick to note that
the jury president had paid tribute to “an extraordinary film in homage to the possibilities
of a new cinema” (Godard 104).
46
Indeed, the film appeared at the same time as works of
the New Wave, and as I will consider in the second part of this chapter, it is a direct
precursor to Chroniques d’un été, a work of cinéma-vérité that is an intrinsic part of the

45
It is of interest to this chapter that in L’Image-temps, Deleuze asserts that Rouch’s deployment of fiction
to represent cinematic reality has much in common with the cinema of Orson Welles, whom he also deems
to be a “forger” of ... cinematic truth. According to Deleuze, both Welles and Rouch transcend the
boundaries between documentary and fiction, and he elects Welles and Rouch to be emblematic of his
“crystalline images.”
46
“[Moi, un noir] est une porte ouverte sur un cinéma nouveau” (Scheinfeigel 147).
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New Wave’s actuality aesthetic.
47
The involvement of Rouch’s “documentary” subjects
in their own representation would subsequently become one of the central tenets of
cinéma-vérité. However, in his future film projects, Rouch will not allow his subjects to
reenact events in their lives but will instead encourage them to play out their own lives in
“real time” in front of the camera.

(vi) Italian Neorealism: Bazin and Phenomenological Realism

As previously discussed, the Cahiers critics and Bazin in particular were enticed
by the notion that cinema, whether fictional or documentary, could mimetically represent
life and in doing so transcend the medium of film, capturing reality itself. In this regard,
the critics looked, not to American cinema, but to Italian neorealism. Italian neorealism
was certainly the most important school of realism in postwar European cinema, and as
such a major center of interest for the Cahiers critics in the 1950s.
48
Jim Hillier claims
that over and above American cinema, Italian cinema “represented something which new
French film-makers could aspire to” (177). De Baecque too observes in Histoire d’une
revue 1991-1959 that some of the Cahiers critics were enamored with the neorealist
theorist and screenwriter Zavattini, specifically “sa volonté de prolonger le néo-réalisme
vers un ‘cinéma social’ de pure observation du réel quotidien” (166). The critics were

47
Moi, un noir, however, does not adhere to all of the principles of cinéma-vérité given that Rouch
deceives the viewer in several regards. For instance, Robinson was in actual fact narrating events which
occurred to him some years previously and that he is representing his experience of life in Treichville as he
remembered it.
48
However, at the time Cahiers was founded in 1951, neorealism had already begun its decline as a force
in cinema, and there is a sentiment among even the most admiring of Cahiers critics that neorealism that
somehow the movement had deviated away from its original path.
137

also united in their admiration for Roberto Rossellini, whom they saw as upholding the
values and aesthetics associated with early Italian neorealism.
Beyond merely admiring Italian cinema’s realist aesthetic, Bazin and Cahiers
interest in neorealism was due to its capacity, as they saw it, for “pure observation.”
Specifically, Bazin had begun to conceive of Italian neorealism as an idealized platform
for elaborating his theories regarding phenomenology. Sam DiLorio offers this
explanation:
Bazin’s criticism consistently frames cinema as a phenomenological tool.
In well-known essays such as ‘The evolution of the language of cinema’,
[Bazin] praises films that allow spectators to experience events in the
same way as they would in life... While never forgetting that cinema was a
construct, [Bazin’s] essay maintains that the greatest films were able to
maintain an illusion of non-intervention and that, at its best, the cinematic
image could act as a window onto a coherent and convincingly real world.
(27, 28)

DiLorio explains that “Bazin, more than any other writer, ... provided the template for
phenomenological film criticism in France” (28), although other figures such as the
Catholic intellectual Amédée Ayfre and Edgar Morin also developed film criticism in
relation to phenomenology.
49
In his 1952 Cahiers essay “De Sica: Metteur-en-Scène,”
Bazin writes that “neorealism knows only immanence... It is a phenomenology” (cited in
Hillier 176). He also went so far as to claim that Ladri di biciclette created “the perfect
aesthetic illusion of reality [that] there is no more cinema” (176).
The perceived ties between phenomenology and neorealism are also developed by
Amédée Ayfre in his article “Neorealism and Phenomenology” featured in Cahiers du

49
DiLorio cites critics such as Dudley Andrew who have “recognized [the] strong phenomenological
current in postwar French film criticism” (27).
138

Cinéma of November 1952. In his analysis of Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1948),
Ayfre argues that the film’s true interest lies in the film’s “concrete, all-embracing
depiction of the human attitude of a child in a given situation ... The child simply lives
and exists there before us, captured in his ‘existence’ by the camera” (cited in Hillier
184). Ayfre goes so far as to claim Rossellini is able to represent human attitudes “in
[their] totality” (184), and earlier in his article, that neorealism has all but shown itself
capable of transcending the gap between the “representation and the real” (182).
50

Rancière writes in Film Fables that Bazin believed Rosselini’s films to achieve,
not only “‘pure’ situations,” but also to realize “the fundamental vocation of the
automatic machine to follow, ever so patiently, the minute signs that allow a glimpse into
the spiritual secret of beings” (12).Similarly, the other Cahiers critics and future New
Wave filmmakers’ found Rossellini’s films to be imbued with an ethereal, almost
spiritual dimension. Rohmer wrote of Viaggio in Italia (1954) that “certainly, no
documentary camera could have recorded the experiences of this English couple in this
way, or ... in this spirit” (cited in Hillier 206). Rivette, for his part, wrote in his extensive
“Letter on Rossellini,” writes regarding Rossellini that at is “impossible to see Viaggio in
Italia without receiving direct evidence of the fact the film opens a breach, and that all
cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it” (cited in Hillier 192).
51
Furthermore, in
Rohmer and Truffaut’s 1954 interviews with Rossellini, Hillier observes that the critics’
questions imply that “there is, almost, a definite ‘truth’ to be got from the director” (178).

50
A “gap” that Ayfre claims was established by the very first Lumière films (see Hillier 182).
51
In Le Mépris (1963), Godard will pay tribute to Rossellini by imitating many shots from Viaggio in
Italia, while also invoking Bazin in the opening credits, (wrongly) attributing this quotation to him: “Le
cinéma substitue à nos regards un monde qui s'accorde à nos désirs.”
139

It goes without saying that Bazin and Cahiers’ admiration for neorealism stems
from an idealized understanding of the movement, if not to say a profound misreading.
Indeed, the neorealist approach to realism differs fundamentally from that endorsed by
the Cahiers critics and future filmmakers. At the heart of this difference is the Italians’
proclivity for dramatizing “real life” events and their adherence to a documentary
aesthetic that broadly corresponded to Grierson’s notion of the documentary as the
“creative treatment of actuality” (Barsam 96).
52
This “creative treatment” often entailed
the practice of filming fictional reenactments of real-life or “actual” occurrences, rather
than endeavoring to capture moments of unfolding reality. Specifically, we recall that the
plots of the most significant works of neorealism such as Roma, città aperta (1945),
Germania, anno zero (1948) and Ladri di biciclette (1948) revolve around contrived and
artificial situations, with the latter set in a reconstruction of occupied Rome. Although
Rossellini insisted that cinema should be a “miroir, une sorte de buvard de la realité”
(Scheinfeigel 45), he consistently favored the reenactment of past events. In his
“ethnographic” film Stromboli (1950), for instance, Rossellini films the villagers’
traditional practice of collective fishing; a practice that had been abandoned some thirty
years previously.
Furthermore, the Cahiers critics certainly did not share neorealism’s proclivity for
Marxism, nor its focus on representing proletariat existence. Indeed, in seeking to
“expose the poverty and social malaise of a postwar Italy in shambles” (Fabe 105),

52
Grierson claimed to “look on cinema as a pulpit,” and promoted a vision of the documentary film maker
as one who could “lead the citizen through the wilderness” (Barnouw 85) and a means by which “the state
could ... control and manipulate the audience” (89). Grierson is thus widely credited with “the politicizing
of documentary” (100), and he did not shy away from using the term “propaganda.”
140

neorealist films did not purport to represent Italian society objectively or in its entirety,
and plots ubiquitously revolve around the marginalized; the shoe-shiners, the
unemployed, priests and pensioners, etc., victimized by bourgeois authority. At the end of
the 1940s, there was a fierce debate about the movement’s future, and a strong
determination among intellectuals, such as the communist Guido Aristarco who headed
the Cinema nuovo journal, for neorealism to “evolve from chronicling everyday life to
being a more substantial and literary representation of the great historical and ideological
movements of contemporary history” (Wagstaff 38). Therefore, not only did the
neorealists’ Marxist leanings differ from the Cahiers critics own political ideology, but
its overt political posturing would not find an echo in New Wave cinema.
53

Bazin and the other critics’ interest in Italian cinema, particularly as a showcase
for phenomenological realism, can therefore be seen to be surprising. It is perhaps all the
more peculiar given that Cahiers du cinéma had at this stage begun to reflect on
cinematic realism in more specific terms, as being composed of a language, mise-en-
scène and auteurs.
54
While Bazin was a hugely influential mentor to the Cahiers critics,
the New Wave filmmakers would quickly distance themselves from his most far-reaching
ideas pertaining to phenomenology, realizing these to be incompatible with the “realities”
of the filmmaking process and their awareness that, in the words of Godard, “realism is

53
In L’Histoire-Caméra, Baecque categorically states that the Cahiers critics were stylistically and
ideologically “identifié à droite” (152).
54
Bazin’s flirtation with phenomenology, in particular, was widely criticized in the 1960s. In 1968, Annette
Michelson penned a provocatively essay entitled “What is Cinema?” in which she expressed dismay at
Bazin’s “apotheosis of neorealism as something far more than a style, as the privileged mode of
ontologically focused consciousness itself” (24).
141

never ... the same as reality” (Godard 185).
55
In the second half of this chapter, I will
nevertheless demonstrate how Bazin’s theories inspired and underpinned the auteurs’
claims to filming life “as it is” and the actuality aesthetic.

Part 2: The Actuality Aesthetic in New Wave Cinema

Fundamentally, the actuality aesthetic refers to film works that purport to
represent life mimetically, objectivity and truthfully. In this regard, the aesthetic bears the
strong influence of André Bazin, whose notion of cinema as “objectivity in time” (168)
entails a belief in film as art’s foremost means for representing life “as it is.” In this
second part of the chapter, we will see that while New Wave films irrefutably express
authorial and critical views on a wide range of political and other issues, the auteurs go to
considerable lengths to mask their films’ subjectivity, presenting “their actualities” as
objective truths. This approach to filming reality is the essence of New Wave’s actuality
aesthetic, as I will illustrate with regard to an eclectic selection of New Wave films by
Jean Rouch, Jacques Rozier, Eric Rohmer, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, among
others.
The phrase “their actualities” originates from Antoine de Baecque, who writes in
L’Histoire-caméra that the New Wave filmmakers set out to make “leurs ‘actualités’ en
filmant des corps jeunes de leur temps” (173). This project corresponded to an ambition,
articulated by Godard in 1958, to show “des filles comme nous les aimons, des garçons
comme nous les croisons tous les jours... bref, les choses telles qu’elles sont” (cited de

55
Bazin died on November 11, 1958, the very first day of filming of Truffuat’s Les quatre cents coups.
142

Baecque 178). Of course, the New Wave filmmakers were not the only writers and artists
of the era who aimed to represent things “as they were” while also critiquing their times.
Roland Barthes, for instance, produced a coded and subjective attack on the era’s
bourgeois cultural icons and value systems in his work Mythologies (1957), a compilation
of essays critiquing the mythologies perpetuated by 1950s actualités including
advertizing, photographs, press articles and other. In the avant-propos, Barthes wrote:
“Le matériel de cette réflexion a pu être très varié (un article de presse, une photographie
d'hebdomadaire, un film, un spectacle, une exposition), et le sujet très arbitraire: il
s’agissait évidemment de mon actualité” (9).
56

In spite of the evidently subjective nature of their actualities, the New Wave
auteurs nonetheless remained enticed by the notion of cinema as objective truth. In the
first part of this chapter, I referred to the claim spoken by Godard’s protagonist in Le
Petit soldat that “la photographie, c’est la vérité, et le cinéma, c’est vingt-quatre fois la
vérité par second.” Throughout Le Petit soldat, Godard consciously experiments with
notions of cinematic phenomenology, broadly defined as the idea that the representation
of a human face can incarnate, in the words of Amédée Ayfre, “human attitude in its
totality” (cited in Hillier 183). Anna Karina’s character in this film is named Veronica
Dreyer, which is almost certainly an allusion to Carl Theodor Dreyer whose film, La
Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), is famed for its close-ups of the actress Maria
Falconetti’s extraordinarily pained and distressed face. We will see that Godard will once

56
Roland Barthes was a frequent collaborator to the journal Tel Quel, founded in 1960, literally meaning
“as it is.” The journal aspired to achieve a radical critique of its times by giving a voice to poets, artists,
philosophers and writers, and is therefore worthy of a mention in this context.
143

again fix his camera on Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie, in an attempt to render her
cinematographic “essence.”
However, it is important to stress that while Godard is toying with these notions,
the idea that cinema can attain objective reality is proposed as a subject for interrogation,
and not a statement of incontestable truth. The apparent simplicity of the auteurs’
ambition to represent the world “as it is” belies a rigorous, self-reflexive inquiry into the
nature of cinematic truth and the mechanisms involved in its production. In this regard,
Rouch and Morin’s notion of cinéma-vérité and their hypothesis that the camera can
“penetrate the depth of daily life as it is really lived” (230) and represent “real life” (232),
is at the heart of this inquiry. We will see that Rouch and Morin’s legacy to the New
Wave was to show that cinematic “truth is not simple” (Nowell-Smith 89), and indeed,
we will see that New Wave films contain a complex discourse on truth production that
acknowledges the limitations of achieving cinematic truth.
Its many innovations notwithstanding, the New Wave’s actuality aesthetic owes
much to the films I have considered in the first part of this chapter. As de Baecque
observes in L’Histoire-caméra, the “réalisme hautement revendiqué par la Nouvelle
Vague apparenta à la révolution technique du retour vers un cinéma plus primitif” (178).
I showed that it is foremost Hollywood film noir that pioneered an approach to
representing and commentating the actuality of its time; one that provides a clear model
for the New Wave’s own actuality aesthetic. To this end, I will demonstrate how the
techniques and aesthetics developed by films noirs such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City
and Du Rififi chez les hommes for mapping and scrutinizing the actuality of the city, with
the latter casting an eye on the new modes of capitalism and consumerism and the
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nascent “Americanization” sweeping postwar France, are adapted and enhanced by the
New Wave filmmakers, who seek to surpass the American auteurs by being even more
critical in their scrutiny of life in the city.
As in Hollywood film noir, New Wave actualities are recorded using
sophisticated techniques of mise-en-scène and an array of narrative and cinematographic
strategies, such as portable handheld cameras capable of deep focus framing and long
takes. The notion of mise-en-scène, which Jim Hillier claims was “the central and
essential concept in Cahiers” (9) and the prime “means by which the auteur expressed his
thought” (11), is particularly central to New Wave’s actuality aesthetic. Hillier invokes
Fereydoun Hoveyda’s definition of mise-en-scène as, broadly, the “technique invented by
each director to express the idea and establish the specific actuality of his work” (9).
Mise-en-scène is therefore closely associated with the idea of “technique,” derived from
the Greek word techne, also meaning “art.” Barilli observes that even though “no trace of
‘technique’ remains in the etymology of ‘aesthetics’ itself” (35), techne is as fundamental
to our understanding of art as its Latin equivalent ars. Furthermore, while the notion of
aesthetics entails a “consortium” (8) of poetics and rhetoric, Barilli invokes Baumgarten’s
definition of aesthetics as a “science of the senses” (35) in order to stress the centrality of
technique and artistic practice in studies of aesthetics. The study of technique, or “the
how,” is also at the heart of my consideration, with the actuality aesthetics, in essence,
the means through which the New Wave directors endeavor to present their films as
truthful and objective actualities.
In A Course on Aesthetics, Barilli also emphasizes the modern tendency within
the study of aesthetics to depart from the “Renaissance and romantic filters that make
145

[art] out to be something rare and precious” (4), and which established a hierarchy
between the beaux arts and the “low” or “servile arts” (4), or those requiring a high
degree of technique and manual labor. In time, all aspects of “common experience” (16),
activities that are the “basis of everyday life” such as breathing and eating, have come to
be considered as part of aesthetic experience. In artistic representation, this led to an
increased occurrence of representing personal scenes from everyday life, as opposed to
the universal or sublime. Many theorists have argued that artistic representations of the
everyday scene are intrinsically imbued with political purport. Depictions of everyday
life, for instance, are a key part of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art, defined in
Politics and Aesthetics as seeking to abolish the “hierarchical distribution of the sensible
... the hierarchy of the arts, their subject matter, and their genres [and] promoting the
equality of represented subjects” (81).
There are many examples of movements across the arts whose representations of
everyday life have been deemed to be political. Barilli cites, for instance, the “historical
avant-gardes (futurism, Dadaism, constructivism),” whose works “explore the tactile
possibilities of the everyday scene” (97). The New Wave can be seen to be most tangibly
influenced by the nineteenth-century literary realists, who pioneered the subtle
integration of political subject matter into their narratives about the everyday lives of
Frenchmen and women, while purporting to be objective. The approach is well illustrated
by Stendhal, who interjects into the narrative of the Le Rouge et le noir to assert that, “la
politique au milieu des intérêts d'imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un
concert” (427). Earlier in the novel, Stendhal is at pains to define his novelistic venture as
a “chronicle de 1830,” and a mirror reflecting, “tantôt l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des
146

bourbiers de la route” (406). Despite his claim to objectivity, Stendhal’s commentary on
the political affairs of his era is undoubtedly subjective and imbued with an “attitude,”
which according to Auerbach, “had sprung from resistance to a present he despised”
(481).
Stendhal and Balzac achieve a critique, argues Auerbach, by injecting an
“existential and tragic seriousness into realism,” as well as their pioneering “mixture of
styles [...] mixture of seriousness and everyday life” (481). Auerbach considers that the
realist aesthetic culminates with Flaubert, who was the most expert at representing scenes
from everyday life and whose “realism becomes impartial, impersonal, and objective”
(482). In his analysis of a scene from Madame Bovary, such as one describing Emma at
dinner with her husband Charles replete with banal details of their dinner arrangements,
Auerbach demonstrates how Flaubert “presents a picture [of] man and wife together at
mealtime,” while also showing how it is “subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma’s
despair” (483).
57
Many critics have expanded on Auerbach’s close readings of Flaubert’s
narrative technique in Madame Bovary, finding it to be imbued with a “cinematic”
realism. Rancière writes in Film Fables that “it really does seem that Flaubert framed his
micro-narrations like ‘film shots:’ Emma at the window absorbed in her contemplation of
the bean props knocked down by the wind ...” (8).
58

57
After further analysis, Auerbach concludes: “The situation, then, is not presented simply as a picture, but
we are first given Emma and then the situation through her. It is not, however, a matter – as it is in many
first-person novels and other later works of a similar type – of a simple representation of the content of
Emma’s consciousness, of what she feels as she feels it” (484).
58
Rancière reminds us, moreover, that “Flaubert dreamed of writing a book without subject or matter, a
book that would be held together by nothing more than its ‘style’” (8).
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Likewise, New Wave representations use an array of realist techniques that inject
apparently banal everyday scenes with a strong and forceful critique. In illustrating these
devices, I will thus be refuting the arguments of the critics and intellectuals who, as
discussed at the outset of this dissertation, consider the New Wave to be the antithesis of
politically engaged cinema and “un cinéma qui n’a rien à dire’” (de Baecque 153) that
abstains from any questioning of the social or political order. Contrary to Susan
Hayward’s claim that the New Wave was foremost “personal and not political” (232), I
will show in my close readings that the auteurs were never more political than when
filming the personal lives, activities and surroundings of their protagonists.
In making this argument, I will be concurring with Antoine de Baecque, who
argues in L’Histoire-caméra that the New Wave actualities representing the lives,
ambitions and frustrations of youth should be conceived of politically. De Baecque
begins his argument with this analysis of the future directors’ short films, made during
the 1950s:
Les courts-métrages de la Nouvelle Vague proposaient une
expérimentation inédite, extrêmement fragile et éphémère, dans laquelle la
forme même des films (leur tournage, leur technique, en un mot le regard
qu’ils imposent) devenait un moyen d’enregistrer à l’écran de la politique.
Une manière de filmer, d’éclairer, de repérer des lieux, de faire bouger les
corps saisissait la politique précisément là où ne pouvait la capturer le
cinéma à l’ancienne: dans la jeunesse d’une époque vue à travers un style
personnel. (174)

The subject matter of these early short films was the everyday lives and dramas of youth,
and therefore not “politics,” per se. However, de Baecque argues that the way in which
the auteurs filmed youth; the form of their films and the techniques employed, such as
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the lighting, choice of location and movements captured, style and gaze, constitutes a
political aesthetic.
Despite variations in their personal styles and preoccupations, de Baecque
believes that each of the New Wave directors had “ont un rapport non évident à leur
époque” (174). He affirms that “la Nouvelle Vague n’illustrent pas son temps, elle en
captait le malaise… là réside sa politique” (174). For de Baecque, this sense of malaise,
which is “vis-à-vis du temps présent ou de l’histoire” (157), is unequivocally engendered
by political events and situations, in particular the conflict in Algeria, as well the process
of decolonization of former French territories that was afoot and the beginnings of mass
immigration. It also pertains to the “Americanization” of the Parisian urban landscape
and society; arguably the most fundamental development in postwar French society.
While it is not always possible to categorize the auteurs as belonging to a specific
political ideology or adhering to a particular position, we will see irrefutable evidence
that their films harbor a protest against France’s involvement in Algeria, a profound
distrust of the rampant Americanization of Paris and the domestic and international
policies of the French government.
My analyses in the remainder of this chapter focus on five New Wave films that I
believe to be particularly illustrative of the New Wave actuality aesthetic, made in
consecutive years from between 1959 and 1963: Le Signe du lion (1959), Chronique d’un
été (1960), Adieu Philippine (1961), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) and Vivre sa vie (1963). My
observations are structured around each of the central themes I have identified as being
preoccupations for the young auteurs relating to the war in Algeria, the Americanization
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of the Parisian urban landscape and the angst and malaise experienced by New Wave
youth.

(i) Painful Politics, Past and Present: Algeria

Godard wrote in Arts magazine in 1962, “la politique en 1960, c’était l’Algérie”
(cited in de Baecque 158). In June 1958, Charles de Gaulle had been granted emergency
powers by the National Assembly specifically to deal with the Algerian crisis, but two
years later no resolution was in sight. By 1960 the conflict in Algeria was in its sixth
year. As the literature and press of the era testifies, the “events” in Algeria cast a dark
cloud not just over French politics but also life in metropolitan France, particularly as
conscription had been extended to thirty months for all French males of age and French
war casualties were rapidly mounting. Algeria, moreover, was a difficult subject to
broach in film, not least because any direct representation of the conflict automatically
incurred censorship.
59

The Algerian conflict can thus be seen to occupy a “spectral” presence in New
Wave cinema, as I will illustrate through a consideration of Chronique d’un été, Adieu
Philippine and Cléo de 5 à 7. First, we will see that one of the favored means for
representing the war in Algeria was as an awkward dinnertime topic of conversation. By
alluding to the Algerian conflict in this manner, the auteurs aimed to represent it in the

59
In L’Histoire-Caméra, de Baecque records eighteen instances of censorship between the years 1958 and
1962 of films “pour avoir montré ou mentionné la guerre d’Algérie” (185). None of these films, which
included New Wave works such as Le Petit soldat (directed by Godard), Muriel (directed by Resnais
1963), La Belle vie (directed by Enrico), L’Insoumis (directed by Cavalier) and Adieu Philippine (directed
by Rozier), would be released until after 1962 when the Evian Accords ended hostilities. Militant films
such as Octobre à Paris by Jacques Panijel, which reenacted the demonstrations and massacres of
Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961 were shown clandestinely, but were confiscated in police raids.
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same manner that the French public experienced it; that is to say as a matter that was
perennially at the forefront of French people’s minds while also being a subject discussed
only with great difficulty. We will also see how filming conversation and open debate
cultivated the illusion of presenting the matter both neutrally and objectively, and as
such, is the first device that conforms to the principles of the actuality aesthetic. I will
nevertheless show how the auteurs’ representations reveal the conflict to be a cancerous
actuality having real and terrible consequences for the generation of young men
conscripted into the French army and stationed in Algeria.
The idea of broaching the conflict in Algeria through dinner table discussion
could at first appear to be more of a literary device than a cinematic one. As discussed,
Flaubert and the other realists made use of the dinner table situation in their portraitures
of nineteenth-century France in order to present authorial commentary in a seemingly
objective manner. Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, in particular, contains multiple scenes
in the salons of M. Renal and M. de la Mole which appear to be insightful about national
politics, yet in fact mask Stendhal’s biased political stances. In works of cinematic
realism, we have already seen how realist filmmakers such as Jean Vigo and Jules Dassin
filmed not only outdoors, but also domestic interior spaces in order to critique the social
conditions in which their protagonists lived. The New Wave goes further still in
elaborating a critique both of contemporary living conditions and issues of national
political importance by penetrating the doors and walls of family foyers.
A first instance of this can be seen in Chronique d’un été, Rouch and Morin’s
cinéma-vérité project in which the anthropologist and sociologist survey the lives of a
select group of Parisians including students, laborers, migrants and close friends. As a
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work of non-fiction, the film is imbued with a degree of “authenticity” that fictional New
Waves films will have to cultivate through other means, as I will later discuss. Early into
the film, Rouch and Morin convene the participants of their cinéma-vérité project to have
a “real-life” dinner table conversation about France’s involvement in Algeria. Seated at
the table amidst wine and food are Rouch and Morin, three young men (Jean-Marc, Jean-
Pierre and the future Marxist intellectual, Régis Debray), a young woman named Céline,
an older man named Rophé and the cameraman Viguier. Morin himself leads the charge
against the war, deriding Jean-Marc for being “an aesthete” for saying that the Algerian
conflict would shortly become “a great subject for films.” Céline is the most outspoken
and clear in her position, calling for an end to “this absurd war.” Rophé, on the other
hand, supports the war, arguing that France should not “abandon ... her rights.”
Viguier was not formally invited to join into the discussion, but he becomes
visibly angry at what he perceives as the youths’ apathy and therefore intervenes into the
discussion to lambast the youths for “not playing [their] part ... because [their] hearts are
not in it.” Viguier’s attack on Jean-Pierre in particular takes something of a tangent, and
their intense debate about the “myth of youth” is clearly a subtext for their opposing
positions regarding the war. Towards the end of the discussion, Morin intervenes to
declare that the participants’ responses to the question and France’s attitude generally
towards the crisis is “très vaseux,” or “muddy,” implying both a lack of clarity and moral
salubrity. The sequence ends with Régis Debray contemplating the problem of individual
action and the dangers of “abstract words.”
The sequence is revealing of the participants’ attitudes towards the conflict in a
number of ways. First, it demonstrates that the mere mention of the conflict was
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sufficient to unleash a torrent of passionate argument, the likes we do not see in
discussion of other issues. Indeed, when Rouch announces the topic, the immediate
chorus of “on y va” makes the spectator understand that this topic, while not discussed
trivially or frequently, was at the forefront of the participants’ minds, and as the
discussion becomes protracted, the camera records the palpable tension and anxiety
which arises in the participants, who drink and smoke heavily throughout. The first
“truth” captured by Rouch and Morin in this sequence can therefore be said to be the
anxiety and malaise induced by the conversation itself, and a national debate
characterized by reticence, passion and equivocation.
By allowing a free and open discussion in which even the cameraman can
participate, Morin and Rouch encourage the spectator to believe that they have arrived at
“objective” cinematic truth. The cameraman’s visibility, moreover, is part of a concerted
effort on the part of the filmmakers to render the processes involved in filmmaking
transparent; a key tenet of cinéma-vérité. The fact the discussion does not arrive at any
definite “truth” about the conflict further cultivates the impression of objectivity. This
general impression nevertheless belies a considerable degree of subjective bias on the
part of Rouch and Morin, whom, it cannot be ignored, lead the discussion, sum up and
conclude the debate, with Morin pronouncing a moral judgment on the perceived
shortcomings of the participants’ interventions. Other factors point towards the
sequence’s clear lack of objectivity, such as the arbitrary and unscientific selection of the
guests convened to be filmed discussing “the events” over dinner. Moreover, the very
presence of a camera, as Rouch and Morin will have to acknowledge, acts a stimulant on
their subjects, intensifying emotions such as anxiety and therefore “distorting” reality.
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A comparable sequence occurs in Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine, which
chronicles the life of Michel, a young camera technician who is due to depart for his
military tour of duty in Algeria. As a work of fiction, the film employs a variety of
different means to critique the conflict. Primarily, it does this by announcing at the very
outset, by virtue of a title card, that the film takes place “dans la sixième année de guerre
en Algérie.” This information, combined with the spectators’ knowledge that Michel
must leave for his military service, serves to infuse the war into every sequence of the
film. The final segment of the film, in particular, where Michel travels to Corsica for a
vacation with his two Parisian girlfriends, is entirely overshadowed by Michel’s
imminent enlistment. However, it is important to stress that the film scrupulously avoids
any direct or dramatic treatment of the Algerian war, alluding to the conflict directly on a
handful of occasions.
Indeed, the sequence that achieves the most forthright critique of the war is a
dinnertime scenario in which Algeria only alluded to indirectly. In this sequence, Michel
runs into Dédé, a former close friend who has just returned from his military service in
Algeria. Dédé appears pensive and timid, and responds lukewarmly to Michel’s warm
greetings (“Dédé! T’es bronzé!” ... “Ne châtie pas. Ça fait drôle de te revoir”). Michel
invites him to dinner, where he receives a hero’s welcome from Michel’s family, who are
ecstatic to see him and offer him everything they have to eat and drink. Dédé, however, is
quickly excluded from the conversation, which turns to the “shocking” news that Michel
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has purchased an automobile.
60
It is only Michel’s vague protestation that he is leaving
(“je me tire dans deux mois”) that calms his parents, and the conversation moves on to
his job in television (“un truc d’avenir”), advances in science (“le stupnik”), and their
sentiment that France is in chaos. Meanwhile, Dédé cuts a shrunken and diminutive
figure, and when invited to give his news, he poignantly replies, “Oh rien, rien … rien.”
While the conversation is by all appearances banal, the viewer cannot fail to
notice that Dédé’s posture is that of a broken man. His silence, moreover, tells of untold,
“unspeakable” horrors. His presence among lower middle-class Frenchmen and women
of the older generation is celebrated for its apparent significance; he is alive and well. His
obvious discomfort, however, transform Dédé into a potent reminder of a painful and
foreboding political situation; one that will soon affect them in a very direct and personal
way. The conflict in Algeria is thus represented as being an issue that is too painful for
open discussion, yet one that permeates and poisons everyday life in typical French
households. De Baecque comments that Dédé’s reticence to speak is emblematic of “tout
le mal-être d’une génération,” adding that “ce quasi-mutisme est l’emblème de la
Nouvelle Vague et de son rapport à la guerre d’Algérie: en dire certes le moins possible,
mais signifier beaucoup” (186).
Agnès Varda’s approach to representing the Algerian conflict in Cléo de 5 à 7
bears similarities to Adieu Philippine in terms of its general approach in critiquing the
war in Algeria. The film chronicles the life of Cléo Victoire, a young pop starlet who is
awaiting the results of a biopsy, from between the hours of five and seven o’clock. As in

60
Maurice’s father becomes very animated on the subjet of Michel’s new car, exclaiming: “La vie est trop
facile maintenant pour les jeunes. Ils se croient tous en Amérique!” The dinner table forum thus conveys
other New Wave actualities.
155

Rozier’s film, the conflict is alluded to on only a handful of occasions, while nonetheless
managing to permeate the film’s atmosphere. This is achieved through Cléo’s encounter
with a uniformed soldier named Antoine, who is enjoying his last hours of leave before
returning to Algeria that evening. Despite being garrulous and jovial, Antoine barely
mentions his situation, only telling Cléo that to give up one’s life in war would be “un
peu triste” and that in Algeria, “vous auriez tout le temps peur.” The spectator’s
awareness of his potential fate, in conjunction with Cléo’s fear of having cancer, thus
establishes Algeria as a cancerous actualité.
The other references to Algeria occur earlier in the film. First, the spectator
overhears a conversation between two patrons in the Café Dôme frequented by Cléo.
Over the din of music and café tittle-tattle, one man is audibly heard to say: “C’est
stupide, ces événements d’Algérie. Foutus politiques. On ne sait plus exactement où on
en est.” Next, in “Chapitre IV: de 17h.18 à 17h.25,” Cléo takes a taxi from Châtelet to her
home in Montparnasse, and the journey is represented in approximately real time. As the
taxi turns onto the Rue de Condé, the taxi driver turns on the radio, and a newscaster
announces that Algerian Muslims have been rioting in the Constantine region, resulting
in twenty deaths and sixty casualties. The news bulletin features a second news items
concerning Algeria, notably the news that the Commandant Robin, who had participated
in an uprising in Algiers on 22 April, had been sentenced to six years in prison.
61

The newscaster announces other stories, such as unrest among farmers and
demonstrations in Brittany, as well as news of President Khrushchev’s gift to President

61
Robin had participated in a putsch led by four retired generals who were “rebelling against General de
Gaulle’s policies on Algeria, which they deemed to be too pro-independence” (Orpen 18).
156

Kennedy of a puppy born from a “space dog” and a report on Edith Piaf’s health. While
on face value the radio broadcast could appear inconsequential, this sequence in fact
employs rather sophisticated strategies for critiquing the war. First, consider that while
the story pertaining to President Khrushchev’s gift are commentated upon by Cléo, the
segment of the broadcast pertaining to Algeria is heard uninterrupted, ensuring that it has
the viewer’s full attention, thus underlining its weightiness and importance. Furthermore,
Valerie Orpen reports that this news bulletin “really existed and had been broadcast by
Europe 1 on 21 June 1961” (18). Orpen surmises, moreover, that it must have been
“shocking” for the audience to hear a “genuine ... reference to events in Algeria” (18).
Indeed, the inclusion of a news broadcast in the middle of “an entertainment” would
certainly have surprised cinema-goers, unaccustomed to such a practice. The fact that this
broadcast pertained to the war in Algeria, by all accounts so rarely discussed in public,
would indeed have had a shock effect on contemporary audiences.
Orpen also argues that a criticism is achieved by the implicit contrast between the
“smooth and pleasant taxi ride” in a beautiful and sunny Paris, and the news telling of a
situation “hundreds of miles away [where] people are dying every day” (18). It is
noteworthy in this regard that the sequence is largely filmed in an uninterrupted long take
with the camera mounted to the right of the driver, replicating Cléo’s point of view. As
the newscaster begins his bulletin, the taxi turns onto the Rue de Vaugirard and the
French Senate, a clear icon of French government and political power, becomes visible
on the left. It is the passersby outside the Jardin de Luxembourg, however, who catch our
attention. We see them fleetingly, walking along the sidewalk and going about their daily
business; many of whom smartly dressed and demure. The effect is to indelibly anchor
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these men and woman to the “events” occurring in Algeria, and to taint by association the
spaces they inhabit with a war being waged in their name.
While the Algerian conflict was arguably at the forefront of the auteurs’ minds,
New Wave films also portrays other political and historical actualities and employ a
variety of strategies in order to develop a critique. Consider, for instance, the roundtable
discussion in Chronique d’un été that follows the dinner table discussion of Algeria.
Rouch and Morin are shown meeting in an outdoor terrace somewhere in Paris with
Régis Debray, Marceline and a group of new participants including Landry and Raymond
who are from the Ivory Coast. At the start of the sequence, Marceline provocatively says
that she is not sexually attracted to black men, and the conversation turns to racial
stereotyping and political unrest in Africa. When Landry talks about African solidarity in
the face of colonial oppression, Marceline makes an analogy with treatment of Jews in
different countries. Rouch intervenes to ask Landry if he has noticed the number tattooed
on Marceline’s arm. After some jesting as to what the number could represent, Marceline
informs the Africans that she has the tattoo because she was deported to a concentration
camp during the war. Rouch asks the visibly shocked Africans if they know what a
concentration camp is, and Raymond replies that he had seen a film about it.
In the following sequence, Marceline is seen alone on an almost deserted Place de
la Concorde. She is walking with her eyes downcast, and speaking in disjointed sentences
(“we’ll go down there, we’ll work in the factories, you’re young, you will come back”). It
eventually becomes clear that she is recounting the memory of her deportation. The
backwards tracking shot, which very clearly shows the Place de la Concorde, then
becomes a close-up, as Marceline recounts the time she was able to see her father after
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six months of interment. The scene then cuts to Les Halles, where Marceline is seen at
some distance, uncertain on both her feet and in her narration, which is even less fluent
than before (“I was almost happy ... to be deported with you ... I love you so much ...”).
As she recounts her father’s death in the camps and her difficult return to Paris, the
camera travels away from her quickly, causing Marceline to appear as a diminutive dark
silhouette in an archway of light encased within the immense indoor market hall.

This sequence is the first instance in my consideration where the influence of the
film noir aesthetic and strategies for mapping the urban landscape are clearly visible.
Indeed, the image of Marceline is strikingly evocative of film noir chiaroscuro, and
comparable images can be found in a great many films noir denouements when
protagonists meet their ends.
62
In film noir, protagonists are hunted and tracked because
of some fictional evil that have committed, or else some ill fate inflicted upon them. This
sequence in Chronique d’un été achieves a devastating poignancy by channeling its
evocation of film noir whilst alluding to the very real spaces where the deportees were
rounded up and transported to the camps.
The sequence is also a moment of cinéma-vérité, adhering to the central principles
and ambitions outlined by Rouch and Morin at the start of their project.
63
The scene aims
to represent, in essence, the truth of a woman being filmed recounting her memory of a
deeply traumatic experience. The spectator does not know if Marceline specifically
remembers La Place de la Concorde or Les Halles as being the site of her deportation, or
even if these specific sites were historically significant. Marceline was a young girl at the

62
One might invoke, for instance, the famed denouement in The Big Combo, when the sadistic Mr. Brown
is cornered in a deserted warehouse.
63
I will later consider the basic tenets of cinéma-vérité in further detail.
159

time of her deportation, and therefore from a historian’s point of view, her testimony
might be considered to be inexact and unreliable. Furthermore, Marceline is conscious of
being filmed and is therefore “performing” her experience in front of the camera.
64

However, there is no doubting the fundamental veracity of Marceline’s narrative, which
pertains to a historical reality. The actuality represented is that of this event’s tragic
legacy as lived, remembered and experienced by a woman in her thirties living in 1960s
Paris.
Parenthetically, this sequence is also characterized by an important technical
innovation on the part of the sound engineer, André Coutant. During the filming in Les
Halles, Coutant attached a microphone to Marceline and connected it via a long wire to a
sound recorder, which was synchronized with the camera. Morin comments that thanks to
this innovation, they were able to capture her “speaking in rhythm with her step” and to
show how she is “influenced by her setting” (cited in Rouch 252). He adds that “with
postsynchronization and the best artist in the world, you would never be able to achieve
that unrelenting rhythm of someone walking in a place like that” (252). This
corresponded to Rouch and Morin’s self-declared ambition of making cinéma-vérité an
“authentic talking cinema” (252). Furthermore, this is one of the first instances of
synchronized sound in 1960s French filmmaking, and the beginnings of a technique that
would be used extensively in New Wave films from 1961 onwards.
65

64
This awareness is indeed part of Rouch and Morin’s strategy of encouraging “each person to play out his
life before the camera” (232)
65
Maxime Scheinfeigel writes that the importance of this innovation cannot be understated: “On peut
entendre le cinéma d’observation prendre son envol vers un accomplissement auquel il aspire depuis
longtemps: tout de suite faire entendre sans médiation ce que les protagonistes disent… faire tomber dans
les oreilles des spectateurs le grain inaliénable, authentique de chaque voix enregistré” (59).
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(ii) The Americanization of the Parisian Landscape

Film noir, as we have seen, represented the darker, dehumanizing aspects of the
modern American metropolis through a conflation of expressionist visuals and a scrutiny
of the urban landscape. I outlined in particular how Dassin’s The Naked City was typical
of film noir’s proclivity for filming “urban topoi on the verge of destruction”
(Dimendberg 64); a defining characteristic of the semidocumentary noir. It is interesting
that Rouch and Morin filmed the sequence of Marceline recounting her memories of
deportation in a site condemned for demolition, given that the indoor market at Les
Halles filmed in Chronique d’un été was demolished at the end of the 1960s and replaced
with the subterranean shopping mall that stands there today. In this section, I will show
how this is just one way in which the New Wave directors borrowed from American film
noir in its approach to representing “the city in its actuality” (19). In particular, we will
see how the New Wave undertook to represent and critique the alienating features of
postwar, “Americanized” Paris.
We have already seen examples of this in two films previously analyzed. In
chapter two, I considered how A bout de souffle is imbued with a tangible criticism of the
rising influence of American culture on French society. As Franck McConnell observes,
“Belmondo’s first words to the audience, after stealing a car, are J’aime la France,” and
notes that “his immersion in the American thriller has turned him into a tourist in his own
country” (13). The transformation of Michel Poiccard into a “tourist” within France
speaks of a manifold opposition to the effects of Americanization, as perceived by
Godard. Poiccard’s frustration at Patricia’s liberalism translates into a disdain for other
161

kinds of American imports, such as American-inspired architecture. “Ça détruit la
morale,” Poiccard says of a left-bank building rebuilt in a modernist post-war style.
66

Patricia’s sexually liberated mores, moreover, lead to Poiccard’s downfall. As I will
consider in the next chapter, Godard and the auteurs’ anxiety about the changing
relations between men and women can be seen to be directly related to their reticence
regarding the Americanization of France.
67

Varda’s Cléo de5 à 7 also achieves a critique of the influx of American fads and
fashions being imported into France. Cléo’s world revolves around the narcissistic
pleasures of fame and shopping, and her apartment is adorned with American fashion and
beauty products. Cléo, who has achieved success as a pop singer based on the new,
American model of fame, is prone to caprices that make her the image of a Hollywood
starlet.
68
Incidentally, the actress, Corrine Marchand, was more known to American
audiences than to the French at the time, having appeared in photo shoots for Life,
Esquire and Playboy magazines. As I will further comment upon in the next section,
Marchand’s status as a bona fide pop singer at the time can be seen to lend a certain level
of authenticity to Varda’s actuality.
Varda also highlights her protagonist’s self-evident superficiality, as seen in the
sequence comprising of the radio news bulletin discussed in the previous section. The
news concerning casualties in Algeria is preceded by a radio advertisement for “un

66
It is noteworthy that the hotel (Hotel de Suede at 15 Quai Saint Michel) in which the lengthy bedroom
sequence between Patricia and Michel Poiccard takes place was demolished and rebuilt shortly after
filming.
67
In the next chapter, I will consider the auteurs’ critique and attitudes towards the “Americanization” of
relationships between the sexes.
68
Whereas singers from the previous generation, such as Edith Piaf, were first and foremost cabaret
singers, Cléo is known mainly thanks to her success on the radio and in the music charts.
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shampooing au whisky” which has apparently revolutionized hair care for American
women. In her analysis of this sequence, Kristen Ross highlights a contemporary cartoon
in which a soldier is bathing a torture victim with detergent, alongside the caption: “Il
faut que la torture soit propre” (109).
69
Ross thus asserts that Varda is evoking the
“torture, shampoo” metonym and making an association between the “sale guerre” (108)
in Algeria and American-style consumerism. In this respect, Varda’s actuality bears a
strong correlation to Barthes’ Mythologies, where allusions to the war in Algeria are
juxtaposed with articles devoted to hygiene and cosmetic products. As Ross observes, the
proliferation of the discourse on cleanliness speaks of a France that “is hungry for purity”
and that “yearns ... to be clean” (73).
Of all New Wave films, Rohmer’s debut feature film, Le Signe du lion, provides
one of the most striking examples of the techniques employed by the auteurs in the
mapping of the Parisian urban landscape with an eye to recording and critiquing the city’s
metamorphosis into a modern, capitalist economy based on the American model. Le
Signe du lion is, moreover, a key transitional film bridging American film noir and the
semidocumentary, in particular the films of Jules Dassin, and the New Wave. Indeed, like
Dassin’s Night and the City, Le Signe du lion tells the stories of Americans who become
ensnared and entrapped in increasing Americanized European metropolises through a
combination of capitalist ambition and bad luck.
On first appearance, Le Signe du lion might appear entirely reliant on its plot and
characters to achieve its critique. It tells the story Pierre Wesselrin, an American of

69
Ross also invokes Simone de Beavoir’s Les belles images, where the main character “attempts to finish
reading an article she has begun in a magazine concerning the ongoing torture in Algeria; inevitably her
thoughts turn to shampoo” (Ross 108).
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European ancestry living in Paris. Wesselrin is a bon vivant and musician, who has
cultivated wealthy playboy-type friends who fuel his epicurean lifestyle despite himself
having limited wealth. At the beginning of the film, he receives a telegram saying that a
rich aunt in Austria has died, so he throws a party and invites all his friends. The film
now skips to a few weeks later, to July 14. Wesselrin has vanished, and his friends are
curious as to his whereabouts. It transpires that his rich aunt had disinherited him, and he
has been forced out of his apartment into second-rate hotels, which he has no money to
pay for. As his friends are away for the summer he is forced to wander the streets in
search food, money and respite, to sleep rough and finally to beg. He is rescued by a
tramp who performs vaudeville acts on the Left Bank, and eventually they attract the
attention of Wesselrin’s former friends, who find their former friend collapsed on the
floor. Wesselrin feels abandoned by his jet-setting friends, and by society at large. In the
final sequence, he rants and rails: “La société! Bonjour la société! Faut admirer la
société! À Saint-Germain, c’est tous des connards!” Indeed, Wesselrin’s suffering is
caused in no small part by the callous chacun pour soi mentality exhibited by his French
friends, and a total lack of compassion on the part of Parisian merchants and hotel owners
who refuse to extend Wesselrin credit. Ironically, while Wesselrin may be a bohemian
who has chosen to live as an expatriate in Paris, he can be seen to fall victim to his
adopted homeland’s extreme willingness to embrace “American” modes of capitalism
characterized by a total disregard for the wellbeing of those who have no capital or who
have fallen through the social security net into destitution.
It is interesting that it is often difficult to distinguish between Americans and
Parisians in the film. Wesselrin himself is both American and European. The blonde lady
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with whom Wesselrin dances on the night of the fête nationale speaks has a flawless
American accent, although she is French. Philippe, an acquaintances who reluctantly
lends Wesselrin one hundred Francs, has all the affects (suits, Citroën DS, vacations in
Saint Tropez) of a successful American businessman. Wesselrin is an embarrassment to
all those who have embraced the new models for prosperity, including the young
American tourists he encounters on the riverbank. As he sinks into desperation, Wesselrin
becomes increasingly embittered towards “tous ces gens,” and at a point of exasperation
he savagely mimics a young female American passerby. The viewer empathizes with
Wesselrin’s resentment, and shares his judgment on the young men and women, for
instance, pictured idly contemplating their next purchase on credit or discussing their
relationship issues.
The viewer’s perceptions of Paris in Le Signe du lion are thus visibly colored by
Wesselrin’s fictional dilemma, and fiction is certainly a means employed by Rohmer to
narrate his actuality. There can be little doubting that the Americanization of Paris
represents a dystopia for Rohmer. However, in common with later New Wave films,
Rohmer goes to considerable lengths to present his point of view as objective truth. He
does this, primarily, by virtue of his extraordinary use of on-location filming. Indeed, Le
Signe du lion rivals all subsequent New Wave film as regards outdoor photography in
Paris, with approximately seventy five minutes of the film shot on location outdoors. The
final forty-nine minutes of the film are composed of largely uninterrupted sequences of
the film’s protagonist’s journey by foot from the eastern banlieue into central Paris, a trip
that takes him from Nanterre through Neuilly, onto the Champs Elysées, through the
Jardins des Tuileries, along the Quais de Seine and on to Odéon, Mabillon, the Rue
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Mouffetard markets and the Pont Neuf. The sequences showing Parisians going about
their everyday business are not orchestrated or staged, and the spectator is easily
convinced that Rohmer and his cinematographer Nicholas Hayer’s images of the early
morning market traders setting out their stalls, the tourists and passersby, the patrons of
the Left Bank cafés, the lovers on the bridge, etc., are a truthful depiction of late 1950s
Paris.
Outside of the fictional story, Rohmer employs other strategies to narrate these
images of Paris and to infuse them with his subjective point of view. One way that he
does this is by inviting the spectator to subtlety eavesdrops on the conversations
overheard by Pierre Wesselrin. At nighttime, for instance, Wesselrin hears a bourgeois
couple nonchalantly discussing “le charme de la Bretagne,” compared with “le soleil de
Saint Tropez.” During the daytime, Wesselrin overhears mostly women talk about dieting
(“à ton âge, quand même! Tu vas perdre ta ligne”), salaries (“ça va, ton travail? Tu
gagnes combien, cinquante milles? Non, quarante-cinq sans compter la sécurité”) and
vacations (“j’adore le soleil… L’année dernière en Corse …”). Rohmer’s narration here
bears some resemblance to the strategies employed in Dassin’s The Naked City, featuring
imaginary interior monologues for New Yorkers (the radio disc jockey, the theater
cleaner, etc.) who are alienated from life in the city. In common with Du Rififi chez les
hommes, however, Rohmer does not provide a direct authorial voiceover narration,
endeavoring to anchor and to elicit his critique primarily through cinematographic images
of the city.
These overheard conversations could easily pass for contemporary advertising
rhetoric, and Rohmer is here mimicking and reproducing the sounds and sights of Paris in
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1959, as he observed them. It should nonetheless be noted that these segments were
recorded in a studio and appended to the outdoors sequences at the editing stage. As a
seminal New Wave film, Le Signe du lion can therefore be considered to be more
“outspoken” in its treatment of youthful discontent and in its criticism of the
Americanization of France, employing a number of strategies that openly point to
Rohmer’s subjectivity. In the next section, I will return to the auteurs’ preoccupation
with representing the world “as it is,” and the tremendous potential power of such a
claim.

(iii) Moments of Malaise: The True Pain of Youth

I have established thus far that one of the central actualities of New Wave cinema
pertains to a profound malaise that the auteurs perceived to blight the lives of French
youth. While this malaise is in part existential, engendered by perennial difficulties
encountered during the transition to adulthood, it can also be seen to be caused by the
very real, political circumstances of late 1950s and 1960s France. In Le Signe du lion, we
have seen how Pierre Wesselrin encounters absolute apathy on the part of Parisian
mothers, office employees, lovers and tourists alike, and how this speaks of a critique of
the Americanization of the Parisian landscape. In Cléo de 5 à 7, we have also seen how
Cléo’s fame, based on an imported, American model for stardom, causes her nothing but
unhappiness.
Cléo de 5 à 7 is particularly illustrative of the malaise depicted in New Wave
films. The film’s tone is set in the opening sequence, when a fortune teller, reading
Cléo’s future, predicts a “profound transformation of her being,” signifying her death. As
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we know, it transpires that Cléo is sick and waiting for the results of a biopsy. As de
Baecque comments in L’Histoire-caméra, “la mort plane sur les protagonistes” (189),
and certainly fear and death permeate each and every sequence of the film. Indeed, it is
Cléo’s fear that she is stricken with cancer that prompts her to wander the streets of Paris
dressed in black. Her anxiety is borne out in her gaze, as well as in the gaze of the others
upon her. At one point, a procession of solemnly dressed men and women appear to stare
at Cléo as if she were a ghost at her own funeral. The film ends with a rapid zoom shot
from the point of view of the doctor’s car followed by a close-up of Cléo’s anxiety-ridden
face; a shot that seems to convey Cléo’s life-force leaving her body. The doctor,
moreover, gives information about Cléo’s treatment plan as if announcing her imminent
death.
70

As discussed, the spectator’s knowledge of Cléo’s disease undoubtedly has a
bearing on his or her perceptions. Instead of being endearing qualities, Cléo’s stardom
and superficiality appear to be byproducts of a cancerous narcissism. Furthermore,
Varda’s Paris is indelibly colored by Cléo’s predicament, and the impression is given that
something is profoundly amiss on the Parisian Left Bank. Indeed, the beauty of Cléo’s
ninety-minute journey “through the city’s ‘sensory streets,’ vital and dynamic, with their
mix of people, newsstands and bookstalls, trees and flowers...” (Mouton 3) appears tragic
and portentous. Moreover, when Cléo’s taxi is set upon by mischievous students from the
École des Beaux Arts, who pelt the car with eggs and flower, the viewer might

70
De Baecque writes that the spectator is left in no doubt that “l’issue sera fatale” (189).
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legitimately wonder if the students are protesting the war in Algeria.
71
In light of the
events of May 1968, this sequence, seen from the vantage point of the present day,
appears to have a prophetic quality.
I have also considered how in a similar way to Cléo de 5 à 7, Rozier’s Adieu
Philippine is framed around the spectator’s awareness that Michel is due to begin his
military service in Algeria. This knowledge suffices to infuse with a presentiment that
each moment spent doing such or such an activity, whether it be dancing the cha-cha-cha
or making a refrigerator advertisement involving Eskimos, will be Michel’s last. As the
film progresses, there is a palpable increase in the tension experienced by Michel and
those around him. This is especially evident in the final part of the film set in Corsica,
when Michel consummates his relationship with Juliette and Liliane. The day before
Michel’s departure, the youths go to a bar on the beach at night to dance. Liliane’s dance
in particular, to an electric-jazz rendition a song by Neil Sedaka lasting forty seconds and
filmed from a low angle point-of-view during which she stares directly into the camera,
seems to symbolically convey the fear and sense of precariousness experienced by the
youths.
72

Rozier’s use of symbolism is unusual for a New Wave film, in view of the
auteurs’ preoccupation with irrefutably grounding their representations in the realities of
their times and with producing works that transcend subjectivity. In claiming to represent
the world as it is, the directors faced the initial challenge of justifying their use of
professional actors to interpret their actualities. In this regard, it is interesting that the

71
This sequence directly precedes the radio news broadcast regarding Algeria. If the students are not
protesting the war, one might ask why they are not doing so.
72
The direct camera-stare, as considered in chapter one, is used to imbue sequences with a sense of trauma.
169

three protagonists of Adieu Philippine (Jean-Claude Aimini, Yveline Céry and Stefania
Sabatini) were not, in fact, actors at all, but had been recruited to the project after being
sighted on the streets of Paris by Rozier’s casting agent. In Le Signe du lion, Rohmer
developed the character of Pierre Wesselrin by drawing upon various aspects of the life
of the actor Jess Hahn, an American who had become a French citizen after the war. Like
her fictional personage Cléo, the actress Corinne Marchand was also a bona fide popular
singer. While the songs in Cléo de 5 à 7 were written for the purpose of the film, Varda
goes to some lengths to try to substantiate Cléo’s credentials as a singer. Indeed, the
viewer sees her giving a diegetic performance of her song, Un Cri d’amour, alongside the
famed composer Michel Legrand in his on-screen role of Bob the Pianist.
73

In their ambition to represent their generation authentically and objectively, the
New Wave auteurs were heavily influenced by Rouch and Morin’s cinéma-vérité project
Chronique d’un été. I have already considered Rouch and Morin’s handling of their real-
life “subjects” in order to represent attitudes towards the conflict in Algeria. The
filmmakers’ prime focus in their film was, in fact, the obstacles faced by young men and
women in their personal and professional lives and the anxiety and malaise they were
experiencing. This is certainly the case with the young men profiled, Angelo, Jean-Pierre
and Landry, and in particular Marilou, who is a twenty-seven year old Italian who left her
petit-bourgeois existence in Northern Italy to come to Paris in 1957. The viewer first

73
One of Cléo’s other songs, La Belle P., is heard playing on the radio in the taxi Cléo is travelling in. The
ensuing conversation between Cléo, her assistant Angèle and the taxi driver about the song and the quality
of the recording, can be seen as an attempt by Varda to authenticate the fictional personage of Cléo
Victoire.
170

encounters Marilou as she leaves for work in the offices of Cahiers du cinéma.
74
The
choice of setting is not, of course, coincidental, and unambiguously speaks of Rouch and
Morin’s complicity with the New Wave project of representing the lives of contemporary
youth.
At work, Marilou is pictured in an extreme close-up appearing pensive and
serious, before cutting to Morin and the interview which takes place in her apartment.
Morin informs us that Marilou lives in a chambre de bonne without running water, and
then Marilou begins by recounting her passage from Italy to France. Pictured in close-up
with a cigarette and her head clasped in her hand, Marilou recounts her experience of
living through cold winters without heating, telling Morin that she is sick of these living
conditions.
75
Morin allows Marilou to talk at length, interjecting only twice to ask her if
she is “pursuing some goal.” A tearful and visibly anguished Marilou is once again
filmed in close-up as she talks about her reliance on alcohol and casual relationships.
Morin then asks her what she means by “reality,” and she continues by talking
protractedly about her aspirations for a partner and revealing that she had contemplated
suicide. She finishes by saying: “Vivre où crever même ... en ce moment, je n’ai même
pas le droit de me tuer, vous comprenez, ça serait faux.” A silence of over twenty seconds
ensues, as the spectator observes Marilou, framed in medium profile, attempts to come to
terms with the powerful emotions she is experiencing.
Rouch and Morin were very satisfied with this interview, in spite of the distress
caused to Marilou. They felt they had realized their ambition, announced at the outset of

74
In the transcript of a sequence cut from the film, we learn that Marilou met Morin in 1957 at a public
debate on Stalinism. Marilou had been involved with left-wing political activism.
75
Rouch and the cameraman, Morillère were also present, although they are not visible.
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the film, to make a cinema “vécu par des hommes et des femmes qui ont donné des
moments de leurs existences à une expérience nouvelle de cinéma-vérité.”
76
For Rouch
and Morin, this sequence is cinematically “true” on a number of levels. First and
foremost, it reveals a fundamental reality pertaining to the unhappiness of a young
woman. Marilou is not an actress pretending to be sad, and there is apparently nothing
staged or phony about her anxiety. Rouch and Morin remarked in interviews that they
were struck by the “extraordinary candor” (298) exhibited by Marilou. While the case of
Marilou alone does not prove the mal-être of an entire generation, it is important step
towards substantiating their “thesis” pertaining to the malaise of youth.
That said, Rouch and Morin’s truth claim in this sequence is, specifically, to have
captured a moment of anxiety experienced by Marilou during the filming. Morin
acknowledges, moreover, that the camera and the interview situation act as a stimulant in
this process, causing her to perform a “sociodrama” revealing of “hidden or repressed ...
psychoanalytic truth” (cited in Rouch 232), and to break down and reveal her suicidal
state. Morin writes that “what happened that evening was an unforeseen and distressing
plunge” (235).
77
He does not, however, feel that the artificial elements of the situation
make Marilou’s revelations any less “true.” On the contrary, Morin congratulates himself
on going “beyond the bounds of the conversation or the interview” (298) in this
sequence, by providing a moment of cinéma-vérité that unfolds, unedited, before the

76
The French word “expérience” can mean both “experiment” and “experience.” Rouch and Morin place a
great emphasis on cinéma-vérité as being new, and the word occurs often in their interviews. Morin says of
Marilou, for instance, that she “has been living a totally new experience for the past three years.” Rouch
and Morin state that their ambition is to make “totally authentic [cinema] ... as true as documentary, but
with the same concepts as fictional film, that is, the contents of subjective life, of people’s existence” (252).
77
Morin has claimed that “the great merit of Jean Rouch is that he has defined a new type of filmmaker, the
“filmmaker-diver,” who “plunges” into real-life situations” (230).
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spectator’s eyes. In this regard, Rouch and Morin can be seen to foray into cinematic
phenomenology, which as we have seen, aims to “allow spectators to experience events
in the same way as they would in life” (DiLorio 27).
In Vivre sa vie, Godard employs devices and techniques associated with cinéma-
vérité, while also experimenting with phenomenological realism. In spite of the
complexity of Godard’s reflection on cinematic realism, I will show how this film stakes
a highly elaborate truth claim and goes so far as to contemplate cinema as a medium of
objective truth. In common with other New Wave films, Vivre sa vie also depicts the
malaise and anxiety experienced by a generation of young men and women, presenting
this as an incontestable actuality. It does this, initially, by grounding an auspiciously
fictional story about a young actress who has to turn to prostitution in order to pay her
rent, in detailed, factual research.
Indeed, Nana’s (Anna Karina) life as a prostitute is represented in a five-minute
sequence subtitled: “les après-midi – l’argent – les lavabos – le plaisir – les hôtels.” In
this segment, a pimp named Raoul details the practices of prostitution in response to
Nana’s questions, accompanied by images of Nana “at work.” The text read by Raoul is
an abridged version of research into prostitution by Judge Marcel Sacotte’s (La
Prostitution published in1959), which chronicled the practices and known facts about
Parisian prostitution. The attention to detail in Sacotte’s report is astonishing and includes
maps of areas frequented by streetwalkers, photos of prostitutes in cafés, on street
corners, the interiors of hotels, the cars used by pimps and solicitors, and even contracts
drawn up between the prostitute and pimp.
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In his essay for the Criterion Collection edition of Vivre sa vie, James Williams
writes with regard to Godard’s inclusion of Sacotte’s research:
Godard uses Judge Marcel Sacotte’s influential 1959 study La Prostitution
as his primary document for Vivre sa vie. This book formed part of a
diverse, pseudo-sociological series entitled Où en est ... Sacotte was
presented as an expert, having dealt with two thousand cases of
prostitution since 1950. In fact, he displayed an almost obsessive interest
in the subject, publishing at least two other such studies in the 1970s...
Godard’s script detailed the rituals and activities around the profession,
including medical inspections, varying rates, time restrictions, sanitary
precautions, birth control, the event of pregnancy, holidays, and financial
transactions among pimp, client, and prostitute. Fourteen short passages
from Sacotte’s book were selected by Godard for the voiceover sequence
... Any alteration to Sacotte’s text is minimal and strictly for the sake of
comprehension and continuity.

The appropriation of this text lends an extraordinary detail to Vivre sa vie’s
representation of Parisian prostitution, to the point where one could believe it was a non-
fictional representation of the subject matter. The dialogue between Nana and Raoul is
accompanied by visual sweeps of central Paris, the street café, the hotel rooms used by
the prostitutes and their clients, etc.
78
Williams explains that “Vivre sa vie inherits the
black-and-white iconography of Sacotte’s book, respecting the eclectic and often
idiosyncratic use of visual illustrations, which verge at times on the abstract.” In this
regard, Vivre sa vie invites a comparison with Dassin’s The Naked City, which was
inspired by Weegee’s photojournalism foregrounding the urban decay, sordidness and
malaise of city life.
79

78
Vivre sa vie contains footage of real prostitutes waiting for clients on the Rue Saint Denis.
79
Both Sacotte’s report and Weegee’s Naked City display a taste for the sordid, featuring among other
graphic images, photographs of men murdered at the hands of prostitutes. Both Godard and Dassin were
inspired by the visual aesthetics of their source material.
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At least one critic, Jean-Louis Bory in Arts, was convinced enough by Godard’s
presentation of Sacotte’s findings to describe the film as an “objective documentary”
(cited in Sellier 65). Indeed, it could appear that Godard successfully treats a topical news
item in such a way that is incontestably grounded in reality, “authenticated” by official
research. Of course, it goes without saying that Godard’s choice and presentation of
subject matter is not truly objective, but instead speaks of a highly personal and authorial
vision of the new modes of capitalist production that encouraged women to aspire to
financial independence and even stardom but then forced them into sexual slavery.
80
The
ingenuity of Godard’s critique, and this is at the heart of the actuality aesthetic, is to mask
his overt subjectivity through his ostensible adaptation of Sacotte’s research.
In Vivre sa vie, Godard goes to considerable lengths to mask his authorial
subjectivity, while also seeking to add many different layers of “truth” to his film. A brief
analysis of Karina’s role reveals how Godard sought to fuse Anna Karina’s fictional and
“real-life” personas. “Nana” is, of course, an anagram for “Anna.” Indeed, Godard
evidently sought to represent aspects of his personal relationship with Karina, with whom
he was married at the time. This is evident in Godard’s comments regarding the genesis
of Vivre sa vie, where he openly refers to Karina as his partner and artistic collaborator:
Anna, who accounts for sixty per cent of the film, was a little unhappy
because she never really knew beforehand what she would have to do. But
she was so sincere in her desire to do something that finally it’s this
sincerity which comes through... Between us we brought it off... Working
with her is different... She acted her lines as if she didn’t know what the
questions would be. Ultimately the result is just as spontaneous and
natural. (Godard 186, 187)

80
Godard will frequently equate capitalism and film production with prostitution in later films.
175

One reviewer went so far as to claim that Vivre sa vie was “Godard’s film about Karina”
(cited in Sellier 65). Other critics of the time remarked upon “the forceful personality of
Madame Anna Karina, traversed by all the nuances of feeling, as though she were playing
herself” (66). Moreover, Godard publicized Vivre sa vie in Le Monde by referring to his
film as “adventures filmed by Jean-Luc Godard and acted by Anna Karina” (63).
81

In his endeavor to represent Anna Karina “as she is,” Godard also employed
techniques adapted from cinéma-vérité. Godard insists that most of the film was largely
improvised, with Coutard filming Karina as she stood before the camera and spoke her
lines, as if she were auditioning for the part, as indeed Nana auditions for film roles.
82

The film was also shot rapidly over an eighteen day period, with each sequence
completed in only one or two takes. Thus, Karina’s actions and dialogue have a
spontaneous quality and give the impression of being honest and true-to-life. Moreover,
the camera and the script could conceivably be seen as merely a stimulus for Anna
Karina’s expressions and emotions, in a way that is comparable to the interviewing
techniques used by Rouch and Morin in Chronicle d’un été to provoke the revelation of
cinematic truth. Parenthetically, Nana bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Marilou.
Both women are framed, moreover, almost perpetually in close-up and both convey high
levels of anguish and distress.
Throughout Vivre sa vie, beginning with the opening credits, Godard presents a
series of “studies” of Anna Karina’s face, mostly in close-up but filmed from a multitude
of angels. Godard is undoubtedly experimenting with notions of cinematic

81
In chapter four, I will consider Anna Karina’s contribution to the New Wave in further detail, in
particular her reoccurring role of the “wochild-man” and the femme fatale.
82
Vivre sa vie is one of the best examples of the improvisation techniques used by the New Wave.
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phenomenology, and the idea that the photographic representation of a human face can
incarnate “human attitude in its totality” (cited in Hillier 183). The concept that is given
powerful, dramatic expression earlier in the film, when Nana is pictured watching
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) alone in a cinema. The extraordinary
anguish and raw suffering conveyed by Maria Falconetti’s facial expressions is so
compelling that Nana breaks down in tears. In this sequence, Godard is paying tribute to
the silent era of cinema, which as a Cahiers critic he had held to be a golden age of
“pure,” unadulterated cinematic expression.
Vivre sa vie is in many ways Godard’s most comprehensive experiment with the
idea that the camera is able to represent human beings “as they are.” In Senses of Cinema,
Adam Danks writes:
Essentially this initial fixation upon and investigation of Nana’s image, in
particular her face, from a variety of perspectives, is the essence of Vivre
sa vie... The film itself becomes a record ... a catalogue of postures, poses,
gestures, everyday, real and performed actions. The film doesn’t exactly
present an argument but rather a series of observations, approaches and
reports denuded of many of the trappings of fictional narrative cinema.

The extensive long takes of Anna Karina, from multiple angles and perspectives,
certainly speak of an ambition on the part of Godard to capture and record Karina “as she
is.” The final tableau, which one might conceive of in Bazinian terms as a “photographic
painting,” is a showcase for Godard’s efforts to produce a cinematic and
phenomenological portraiture of his wife.
The sequence begins with Nana’s conversation with a young man starts and ends
to music and subtitled text with no voice-over: “Alors, on fait quoi aujourd’hui? Je ne
sais pas. On va au Luxembourg ne rien faire?” The camera pans to reveal that the book
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the young man is holding is Poe’s Oeuvres complètes, translated by Baudelaire. We are
then treated to a reading of the Oval Portrait, not by the young man, but by Godard
himself, who begins:
J’aperçus dans une vive lumière une peinture qui m’avait d’abord
échappé. C’était le portrait d’une jeune fille déjà mûrissante et presque
femme… C’était une simple tête, avec des épaules, le tout dans ce style
qu’on appelle, en langage technique, style de vignette ... Les bras, le sein,
et même les bouts des cheveux rayonnants, se fondaient
insaisissablement dans l’ombre vague, mais profonde, qui servait de fond
à l’ensemble. Comme œuvre d’art, on ne pouvait rien trouver de plus
admirable que la peinture elle-même... Encore moins devais-je croire que
mon imagination, sortant d’un demi-sommeil, eût pris la tête pour celle
d’une personne vivante... J’avais deviné que le charme de la peinture était
une expression vitale absolument adéquate à la vie elle-même.

At this point in the reading, Godard stops to comment: “C’est notre histoire, un peintre
qui fait le portrait de sa femme. Tu veux que je continue?” When Nana nods her head,
Godard continues his reading of Poe’s story about a painter who became so intent on
rendering lifelike the aesthetic beauty of his bride and muse that he becomes unawares of
her needs and suffering. On completing the painting and exclaiming to the world that he
had captured “en vérité, la vie elle-même,” he discovers that his muse is dead.
During Godard’s reading, the camera lingers on Nana, framing her in close-up
against the window (a thirty second take), then in extreme close-up against a plain white
wall (a twenty second take), and then in a medium close-up against a wall and
photograph (a seventy second take). Beyond merely aiming to represent Karina “as she
is,” Godard appears to be seeking to capture her features, beauty and expression both
with photographic exactitude and lyricism. The sequence seems to lend itself to Amédée
Ayfre’s definition of phenomenological realism, which aims capture human “essence”
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(183) through photographic representation. In Bazinian terms, this sequence might
correspond to a moment of “spiritual expression” (167) and a moment of “pure” cinema.
While the text and the voiceover cannot are “impure” elements of this tableau,
they function as means of foregrounding all the realities present within the photographic
tableau. Godard is very directly equating himself to the painter in Poe’s text; one who
feels a “profond amour” for his muse, but who has become fanatical about his ambition to
render her beauty through art and has become “fou par l’ardeur de son travail.” This
appears to be an explicit acknowledgement of the complexities of Karina’s artistic and
personal relationship with Godard; one that Sellier, incidentally, observes “is more
reminiscent of the history of painting than of cinema” (153). In addition to being the
model in Poe’s tale and Godard’s partner and muse, Karina is still interpreting her role as
Nana in this sequence, as indicated by the young man playing Nana’s new lover. Godard
thus maintains a layer of fictional artifice in his portraiture, which can be interpreted as a
concession that the reality represented in this sequence is, ultimately, that of Godard
filming Karina in her role as an actress in Vivre sa vie.
Godard does not discount the idea that fiction can tell truth. This is, essentially,
the conclusion drawn by Brice Parain, a philosopher of language whom Godard “enlists”
into his film in order to discuss ideas pertaining to truth in language and representation in
a ten-minute conversation with Nana.
83
After giving a synthesis of some of his ideas
pertaining to truth in language, Parain ends by agreeing in principle with Nana’s
aphorism that “la vérité est dans tout, et même un peu dans l’erreur.” In his discourse,

83
Parain’s works include Essai sur le Logos platonicien (1942), Recherches sur la nature et la fonction du
langage (1942) ou Sur la dialectique (1953).
179

Parain argues that lying is “un des moyens de la recherche”, and a fundamental part of
the process of eliciting truth. In the case of fictional cinema, “lying” specifically entails
the film’s fictional elements, but also any kind of affected behavior caused by the
presence of the camera. Anna Karina’s fictional interpretation of Nana, therefore, can still
be deemed to be revealing of “truths” pertaining to her person.
However, in Vivre sa vie Godard is no longer contemplating the idea
hypothesized in Le Petit soldat that photography and cinema are uncomplicated mediums
of truth.
84
In a direct parallel to the sequence in which Bruno Forestier photographs Nana,
telling her that cinema is truth twenty-four times a second, when one of Nana’s clients
says he “does photos” for a living she asks if “c’est comme du cinéma?” “Non, c’est des
photos,” the client replies categorically. I believe Parain’s lecture is also indicative of the
evolution in Godard’s thoughts pertaining to truth and linguistic and artistic expression.
At the beginning of the exchange, Parain agrees with Nana that “les mots nous
trahissent,” arguing that language cannot convey anything resembling “pure truth.” Hegel
and Kant’s dialectical approaches to eliciting and critiquing truth, he argues, were thus a
key development in linguistics. Similarly, Godard no longer believes in the power of the
cinematic image to convey pure truth, and in subsequent works of the 1960s and later
Godard will explore cinema’s relationship with truth production in more elaborate and
complex terms, such as his mantra that “art is not a reflection of reality [but] the reality of
a reflection” (Interviews 29).

84
When one of Nana’s clients says he “does photos” for a living, she asks if “c’est comme du cinéma?”
“Non, c’est des photos,” he replies categorically.
180

(iv) Chapter Conclusions

In spite of Forestier’s famous aphorism about cinema and truth, Le Petit soldat can be
seen to contain the genesis of an approach that goes contrary to actuality aesthetic.
Indeed, in his second feature film Godard will briefly embrace documentary aesthetics,
characterized by the direct fictional dramatization of political events. Le Petit soldat, we
recall, is the story of Bruno Forestier, a French army deserter living in Geneva who is
commissioned by the French government to assassinate an FLN intellectual yet who falls
in love with Veronica, an FLN agent who is captured and killed by the French. Godard’s
approach to filming Forestier’s torture by the FLN is particularly noteworthy. The
sequence, lasting fourteen minutes, comprises a detailed reenactment of the techniques
used to procure information and a long voiceover narration by Forestier. Forestier is seen
handcuffed to a bath, where his hands are burned with a flame and he is electrocuted until
he passes out. After this, his FLN torturers attempt to indoctrinate Forestier, and when
this fails they proceed to “waterboard” him and to electrocute him.
85

In an interview in Cahiers (December 1962), Godard talked about the need for
cinema to “témoigner sur l’époque… Ma façon de m’engager a été de dire: on reproche à
la Nouvelle Vague de ne montrer que des gens dans les lits, je vais en montrer qui font de
la politique et qui n’ont pas le temps de coucher” (cited in de Baecque 158). However, in
electing to directly represent issues related to the war in Algeria, Godard encountered a
number of problems. First, Le Petit soldat did not gain general release until 1962 due to
censorship, at which point it was a box-office failure. Second, it was widely seen as a

85
This is one of the only representations of torture in a film made at the time of the conflict. Pontecorvo’s
Bataille d’Alger, with extensive scenes of French torture, was made in 1965.
181

“thesis film” whose message and interpretation nobody could agree upon. Le petit Soldat
was widely construed as a defense of the rightwing intellectual, the “esthète anarchiste en
guerre avec lui-même” (Esquenazi 100). Even Françoise Giroud, who was generally
sympathetic to Godard, wrote in L’Express (January 1961) that the film was “une sorte de
vagabondage intellectuel autour d’une petite anecdote qui se situe au niveau de la bande
dessinée” (cited in Esquenazi 99). Other critics saw the confusion engendered by Le Petit
soldat as evidence of “un désarroi temporal face au monde et à son histoire” (de Baecque
159).
86

The failure of Le Petit soldat contributed in no small measure towards a shift and
rethinking of the New Wave’s realist aesthetic. Godard and the New Wave as a whole
subsequently refrain from directly dramatizing “the events” related to the conflict in
Algeria, and other events directly related to national politics. Nevertheless, as we have
seen, the New Wave’s desire to address the perceived malaise experienced by 1950s and
60s French youth engendered, more than in part, by the war in Algeria and the rampant
Americanization of French society, did not subside. Henceforth, they eschew a
documentary-style “creative treatment of actuality” and represent the conflict in Algeria,
and other actualities, as they were lived and experienced by the men and women of the
“New Wave generation.” This comprised of showing people, not only “in bed,” but also
in their homes, at the dinner table, at work, on vacation, and going about their everyday
business in the city. I believe this attention and critique of the political issues of their
generation to be one of the key findings to emerge from my research.

86
Esquenazi convincingly argues that Godard was expressing an indifference to either side through
Forestier and was reflecting “une position souvent négligée mais pourtant majoritaire dans l’opinion
publique qui ne souhaite rien plus que l’arret des combats” (95).
182

The New Wave achieves its critique primarily through its adherence to the
actuality aesthetic. Fundamentally, this entails a basic confidence in “the power of
photography,” as outlined by Bazin; a power which is derived from its capacity to “lay
bare the realities” (169). The auteurs were also enticed by Bazin’s most far-reaching
ideas pertaining to cinema as art’s purest and most objective art form, and while they did
not fully subscribe to these notions, Bazin’s theories inspired them to develop a number
of devices and strategies to mask their authorial subjectivity. Tangentially, I showed how
American film noir’s stylized realism, which mapped the city “in its actuality”
(Dimendberg 19) with an eye to representing the alienating effects of the postwar urban
metropolis, was the predominant aesthetic exerting influence on the New Wave. While
film noir developed an existential critique of its times, the specificity of New Wave
cinema was to directly attribute the malaise experienced by French youth to the political
situation of its era, and events such as the conflict in Algeria and the new capitalism
transforming the Parisian landscape.
I believe the actuality aesthetic to be a central and defining aspect of New Wave
cinema. Moreover, the end of the auteurs’ reliance on this approach broadly corresponds
to the end of New Wave cinema. Indeed, at the end of the 1960s Godard was navigating
complex systems of montage which would transition into his “Dziga Vertov period” and
cinema that were in outright opposition to many of Bazin’s early theories.
87
A shift had
occurred which took former New Wave filmmakers away from modes of representing

87
Annette Michelson points out that Bazin did not live to see his “contradictions transcended [and] his
categories modified” (27) at the hands of his former companions, Resnais, Bresson and Godard.
183

actuality, and towards would might be defined as the overt manipulation of actuality, or
montage. Sam DiLorio writes of the 1960s:
This period sees a move away from the Bazin-inspired aesthetics of
phenomenological realism promoted in journals such as Cahiers du
cinéma during the 1950s. By 1969, the same journals had largely
abandoned their phenomenological convictions in favor of materialist
approaches to film that focused not on the ‘innate’ meaning of sound and
image (film as experience) but on the production and arrangement of
filmic elements (film as language).

New Wave filmmakers can be seen to engage increasingly with montage throughout the
1960s. I have already discussed the importance of the innovative editing techniques used
in A bout de souffle. Godard’s third film, Une Femme est une femme (1961), employs a
number of trick shots achieved at the editing stage in order to entertain the viewer.
88

Furthermore, Rouch and Morin, the very pioneers of cinéma-vérité, employ extensive
editing techniques throughout Chronique d’un été.
89

The progressive adherence to the aesthetics of montage and a more directive
treatment of actuality by the New Wave is accompanied by, in the words of Mary Ann
Doane, “another politics” (41); politics which were increasingly more forthright, thesis-
orientated and Marxist. By way of examples, Rouch will abandon his cinéma-vérité
project in 1965 in order to make a stringent critique of the poor living conditions

88
As early as 1956, Godard wrote a treatise on contemporary American cinema entitled “Montage, mon
beau souci” (Cahiers du cinéma 65). Godard’s early interest in montage, moreover, set him apart from
Bazin and the other critics.
89
DiLorio observes, for instance, that a conversation between Morin, Jean-Pierre and Marceline in which
they express anxiety about their lives “appears to be a single-take sequence [but in fact] is composed of two
different scenes filmed months apart” (34). Rouch and Morin, of course, trace the very conceptualization of
cinéma-vérité to Dziga Vertov’s notion of the “camera-thief” and “cine-eye.”
184

resulting from Gaullist housing policy.
90
In Masculin-Féminin (1965), Godard’s
representation of contemporary youth, whom he refers to as “les enfants de Marx et de
Coca-Cola,” includes an interrogation of a young model whom he brutally exposes as
knowing nothing about politics or world affairs. These works adopt a very different
approach to representing actuality than the one I have outlined in this chapter. As such,
their status as New Wave films can be called into question.

90
Rouch’s short fiction, Gare du Nord, is an episode in the collaborative film Paris vu par (1965).

Chapter 3

Dangerous Games: The Influence of the Hollywood Genre Movie
on New Wave Representations of Gender

Geneviève Sellier convincingly argues in Masculine-Singular that relations
between men and women were the primary concern of the young, predominantly male
filmmakers of the New Wave. Sellier has argued, moreover, that the New Wave auteurs
were essentially conservative, moralizing and deeply skeptical about sexual liberation, in
some instances manifesting a reactionary resentment towards the impending revolution.
She categorizes the New Wave as a “patrimonial monument” (2) and claims that the New
Wave auteurs developed ideas about gender with “the uncomplicated expression of a
masculine subjectivity that considers itself universal” (29).
1
This assessment may come
as a surprise to those who associate the New Wave with the sexual liberation movement
in France, especially given that it is often portrayed in popular culture as a celebration of
the freer ways of the 1960s.
I have previously considered how evolving relations between men and women at
the heart of A bout de souffle. Indeed, Michel and Patricia’s troubled love story is
undoubtedly the film’s prime actualité. We first encounter Patricia in the iconic sequence
on the Champs-Elysées, where she is selling the day’s news in the form of the New York
Herald Tribune. The real news story, however, is Patricia, whom Michel has traveled
from Marseille to see and to convince her to come to Rome with him. Patricia is wearing
leggings, a gender-neutral tee-shirt, and as Michel observes, “pas de soutien-gorge.” As

1
Compare with Richard Neupert’s description of the New Wave as a “boy’s club” (121).
186

they wander up and down the avenue, it emerges that the last time they were together she
had left Michel without saying goodbye, which had left him “triste.” The actualité is thus
personal, as well having far wider, political implications, given that Patricia’s betrayal of
Michel speaks of a morbid fear of American-style freedoms, sexual and other. While
Godard goes to considerable lengths to authenticate his representations of the couple as
truthful and objective, there is no disguising the fact his treatment of this subject is both
subjective and imbued with a pronounced authorial point of view.
2

This chapter considers how the New Wave auteurs’ appropriation of the plot,
character and cinematic style conventions, in particular of B-series film noir as well as at
least one western, is revealing of a deep-seated anxiety, fear and trepidation about the
impending changes to the “rules of the game” between the sexes. This fear manifests
itself through a series of dangerous games between men and women, adapted from the
Hollywood genre movie’s narrative and character conventions. My analyses will to some
extent concur with Sellier’s observation that the auteurs sought to “invent an ‘ideal’
woman for men” and that their representations are infused with “a quite paranoid vision
of changes in female behavior” (149). Nevertheless, we will see that the trope of the
game, which entails a playful dimension and a collaboration of kinds, allows for a degree
of variation on Sellier’s assertion that the auteurs’ representations of women stem from a
male-centric misogyny.

2
In his third film, Une Femme est une femme (1961), Godard suggests that he is consciously aware of his
treatment of gender as an actualité. The film tells the story of Angela (Anna Karina), a cabaret dancer who
has an affair with her husband’s best friend. In an opening sequence, Angela walks into the France-Soir
news boutique where her husband works, and is pictured beside the “actualités” shelf, where she picks up a
review entitled “J’attends un bébé.”
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One of the most revealing aspects of the auteurs’ reworking of a genre cinema
stock character is their appropriation of the femme fatale, whose principal characteristics
can be seen to inhabit “New Wave women.” We have already encountered the femme
fatale in my attempts to define film noir, and indeed the character became a near-
ubiquitous staple of the genre by the mid 1940s. The “femme noire” as she was originally
identified, was an “archetypal transgressive woman” (Lippe 170) and a two-dimensional
figure incarnating a “host of domineering women, castrating bitches, unfaithful wives and
black widows [who] seemed to personify the worst of male sexual fantasies” (Porfilio
87). In chapter two, I considered how Patricia fulfills the role of the femme fatale by
betraying Michel Poiccard to the police. In this chapter, I will show how a range of
female characters in a wide variety of New Wave films share the essential generic
attributes of the film noir femme fatale.
Conversely, I will show how the “child-man” (Hillier 107), a term coined by
Truffaut to describe the male victims in films noirs, also find themselves incarnated in
New Wave fictions. Also present in both B-series Hollywood films and the New Wave is
a morbid fascination and fear of the ménage à trois; a scenario where two women vie for
the affections of one man, or two men for the affections of one woman. In the American
genre film this is presented as a vice and deviancy, and in the New Wave this is presented
as a profoundly dystopian situation and a negative consequence of sexual liberation.
Above all, the ménage à trois is presented as an extraordinary danger; one that is signaled
by the fairground trope, which is present both film noir and the New Wave and can be
seen to epitomize the impending upheaval in both American and French societies.
188

The analysis of the femme fatale and ménage à trois within American film noir
and French New Wave films is correspondingly the study of phenomena originally
deemed, by virtue of its designation, to be “French,” appropriated by American cinema,
then “imported” and reappropirated by French cinema. This study is therefore a key
element of the crossover between these two national cinemas. As a matter of fact, Alistair
Phillips notes that the femme fatale “rarely figured as a narrative figure in French film
noir” (51). Numerous inferences can be drawn, therefore, from her sudden appearance in
French New Wave cinema. First, scholars such as E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane
have indentified the femme fatale in American film noir as a being revealing of a deep-
rooted male psychological anxiety and paranoia. The New Wave auteurs’ highly
deliberate and conscious reworking of the femme fatale into their narratives, on the other
hand, arguably speaks more of their psychological anxieties, fears and frustrations. I will
thus be challenging the general perception that the New Wave eschewed psychology in
its representations.
I will also be evaluating the role of the collaboration between the directors and
their actors. In spite of their aspiration to impart an authorial vision, the New Wave
filmmakers often sought the complicity and the approval of their stars, whose characters
became emblematic of the New Wave and whose performances were often seen by critics
as defining the film. We will see that the tendency to encourage strong performances
from female protagonists can also be traced to the Hollywood genre and B-movie, where
“extraordinary” and “shocking” acting and the participation of an “up-and-coming” star
were part of studios’ strategy to secure as large a spectatorship as possible. The resulting
performances, and the influence and prominence attained by actresses (in Hollywood B-
189

movies and the New Wave) do not necessarily negate the sexism of the auteurs’
subjective vision of gender relations, but we will see that their complicity in the
filmmaking “game” is an significant factor in fully appraising the intricately complex,
nebulous and polemical nature of gender representation in New Wave cinema.
Before turning my attention to filmic analyses, I will briefly comment on the
Cahiers critics’ attitudes towards the representation of women. Throughout the 1950s,
Cahiers du cinéma featured countless articles and special editions on “l’amour dans le
cinéma” and “la femme et le cinéma,” with articles such as “nos amis les femmes” and
“A – Z” guides of Hollywood’s leading female stars.
3
The critics manifested a “boyish”
adulation for female French and Hollywood stars, and the pages of Cahiers are adorned
with pictures of beautiful actresses in seductive poses, similar to those in adolescent
pinup magazines of the era.
4

The critics’ rhetoric is at times decidedly adolescent. Claude de Givray precedes
his interview with Brigit Bardot by citing his fellow critic Jean-Georges Auriol’s
definition of cinema as “l’art de faire de jolies choses à de jolies femmes” (42). Defining
beauty and eroticism is a high priority for the Cahiers critics and articles are replete with
quotations from Racine and Stendhal. In one of the more intellectually “macho”
contributions, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze extensively invokes Stendhal’s De l’amour in his

3
The Cahiers du cinéma No. 30 (December 1953) is devoted to “La femme et le cinéma.” It features an “A
– Z” guide to leading female actresses, alongside an image of a woman in a swimsuit with the text “F
comme femme, flame, fontaine, fée, folle, fuite, fusion” (29). The highpoints of each actress’ career is
listed, and their beauty and charm is described. Susan Hayward, for instance, “est celle qui ouvre le mieux
les yeux; elle semble naitre chaque fois qu’elle s’éveille” (34).
4
One recalls the scene in Les Quatre cents coups when Antoine is caught at school with a pin-up on his
desk.
190

study of femininity in French films from 1945 through to 1953, which classifies actress’
role by etat, classe, époque, style, function and thème.
5

In their film criticism, however, the critics occasionally approached gender-
related issues with more nuance. This is seen in Cahiers’ review of Roger Vadim’s Et
Dieu créa la femme (1956), where François Truffaut and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
defended fervently in the face of overwhelming hostility from established French critics
of the time. They lauded, in particular, Vadim’s audacity for showing “une femme de
1956” (cited in de Baecque 175), and their praise of the film even provoked this rare
criticism of the Hollywood realist aesthetic:
Pour ma part, après avoir vu trois mille films en dix ans, je ne puis plus
supporter les scènes d’amour mièvres et mensongères du cinéma
hollywoodien crasseuses, grivoises, et non moins truquées des films
français. C’est pourquoi je remercie Vadim d’avoir dirigé sa jeune femme
en lui faisant jouer avec sa sandale ou moins anodins comme faire l’amour
en plein jour, eh oui !, mais tout aussi réels. (175)

The critics clearly admired Vadim’s film for breaking the taboo of sexual emancipation
in cinema, and were excited by Brigitte Bardot’s performance as the headstrong and
coquettish orphan Juliette, who playfully antagonizes the film’s three male protagonists
(the wealthy Monsieur Carradine, and the two brothers Antoine and Michel), until the
jealously aroused in the men leads to a near-tragedy.
6

In their own films, however, New Wave actresses will not emulate the wanton
carefree attitude, exhibited by Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme. Whether of the crime

5
Another article by Doniol-Vlacroze (“Deshabillage d’une petite bourgeoise sentimentale”) was given a
special prominence in Cahiers, coming directly before Truffaut’s article, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma
français” (Cahiers du cinéma 31, 1954).
6
Simone de Beauvoir saw Et Dieu créa la femme as “the explosive expression of female emancipation”
(Sellier 46).
191

genre or not, an atmosphere of suspicion and danger permeates New Wave fictions,
where games almost invariably end in catastrophe.

(i) Gender Games in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood Genre Movies: The Femme
Fatale and “Child-Man”

The “child-man” and his worldly female companion are reoccurring characters in
American post-war genre cinema. I will illustrate their principle characteristics with
reference to a number of Hollywood films including the B-series films noirs Detour
(1945) and Decoy (1946), Gun Crazy (1950), Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951),
as well as the western Johnny Guitar (1954). I will then show how the characters in these
films, as well as elements of their narrative and visual aesthetics, exert a tangible and
highly significant influence on New Wave representations of masculinity and femininity.
The modern femme fatale arguably begins life as the romantic figure of the la
belle dame sans merci of Keat’s poem of 1819, itself based on a fifteenth century poem
by Alain Chartier. The figure appears extensively in pre-Raphaelite, symbolist and
decadent art and literature, and metamorphosizes into the femme fatale in German
expressionism. I have previously discussed the influence of expressionism on the
formation of film noir, and as film noir developed its generic repertoire, the femme fatale
arguably became its most distinctive feature. I Wake Up Screaming (1941) is generally
cited as the first film noir to feature a femme fatale; Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis), an
aspiring model whose murder leads to her innocent former partner being framed for the
crime. However, Brigit O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) in The Maltese Falcon (1941) is
arguably the first true film noir femme fatale. O’Shaughnessy differentiates herself from
192

previous female protagonists in crime films in that she is not a victim, but a malevolent
perpetrator of violence. At the film’s denouement, it transpires that she had shot and
killed private investigator Sam Spade’s (Humphrey Bogart) partner, while using her
“schoolgirl manner” to seduce all those around her.
The Maltese Falcon therefore differs in one key respect from future films noirs,
given that at the denouement, Spade turns O’Shaughnessy into the police in spite of the
attraction he has for her. By the time the femme fatale emerges as an established
character, she will almost without fail cause the demise of the male protagonist. This is
the case in “classic” films noirs such as Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946),
The Killers (1946), Gilda (1946), The Postman always Rings Twice (1946) and Out of the
Past (1947), where the femme fatale is duplicitous and manipulative, and uses her sexual
allure without compunction to achieve her own ends. As Andrew Dikos writes, the
femme fatale’s “unrepressed sexuality” invariably drives the film’s male protagonists “to
violence and paranoia” (144), making her “cinema’s destructive force sine qua non”
(156).
There is also a fundamental ambiguity and mystery surrounding the femme fatale.
Dikos writes that she is often “more than murderous and greedy” (157), and Mary Ann
Doane remarks that the femme fatale’s “most striking characteristic ... is the fact that she
never really is what she seems to be” (1). Her “mysterious” femininity has been the
subject of a considerable volume of scholarship rooted in psychoanalytical theory.
7

Indeed, films noirs incontestably evoke Freudian themes in their representations of

7
Film noir and the femme fatale have also be explored through a great many angles and theories. E. Ann
Kaplan’s collection of essays Women in Film Noir (BFI Publishing, 1978) includes studies of the femme
fatale in relation to feminism, sexuality, politics, semiotics and postmodernism.
193

gender and sexuality. E. Ann Kaplan observes that the femme fatale is “marked as evil
because of her open sexuality” and must therefore be murdered by a gun or knife,
symbolic of the “phallus which must dominate her by eliminating her” (6). In her book
Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Mary Ann Doane affirms that
the femme fatale is more revealing about male psychological anxiety than female, tracing
the origins of the femme fatale to the hinterland of male paranoia. Simultaneously wicked
and sexually desirable, “she harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or
manageable [and transforms] the threat of the woman into a secret, something which
must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered” (1).
As the femme fatale became an established “stock character” in film noir,
conversely, directors and writers became less interested in adding psychological
dimensions to her character, or in exploring her background or motivations. The B-movie
femme fatale, however, can be seen as a distinct entity from the mainstream film noir and
is worthy of consideration in her own right. The specificity of the B-movie might be seen
as its predilection for accounting for the motives of the femme fatale by providing details
about her social and economic background. The B-movie noir never loses sight of the
factors which have conspired to create the killer, and the femme fatale is therefore as
much the creature of Freudian ideas as she is a material “product” of circumstance and
her times. As I will show in subsequent analyses, it is the B-movie noir whose influence
is seen most tangibly on the New Wave directors’ construction of gender and their
representation of gender games.
In chapter two, I have already written about a B-movie femme fatale, the
pernicious and conniving Vera (Ann Savage) in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945),
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produced by the short-lived Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). The narrative
attempts to account for Vera’s hardened bitterness by alluding to her impoverished
upbringing and life of “hard-knocks.” For instance, when the male protagonist Al Roberts
first encounters Vera, he remarks that she looked like she had just been “thrown off the
crummiest freight train in the world.” Vera is obsessed with money and sees Roberts
primarily as a means of getting it. When the pair arrives in Los Angeles, Vera spends
eighty-five dollars, preparing herself as “bait,” and drives a hard bargain when trying to
sell the dead man’s car.
8
Later on, she is contemptuous of Roberts’ objections to her plan
to defraud a dead man’s dying father. Certainly, Roberts attributes Vera’s greed as the
main reason for his ill-fate, lamenting at the outset: “Money. You know what that is... It’s
the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented.”
Vera is typical in many respects of the B-movie femme fatale and her claim that
she would rather be caught by the police than continue to live in poverty is a refrain that
is echoed by femme fatales throughout B-movie noirs. She is quite clearly driven by a
material desire to get rich and her desperation can be accounted for by the abject poverty
in which she lives. Her need for money, however, is not merely in order to live a life of
luxury. Having learned through life experiences that she cannot trust men, she pursues
money in order to live independently of them. In this respect, the B-movie femme fatale
can be seen as something of an icon of feminist rebellion. As Dikos remarks, she does not
“acquiesce or suffer the traditionally imposed travails of her subordinated function in a

8
“Before I let it go for $1850, I’ll wreck it and collect the insurance first!” she screams at a dealer.
195

male-dominated society,” and her main mission is to achieve the “power to command
recognition on [her] own terms” (156).
9

While incontestably wicked, Ann Savage’s exuberant performance as Vera also
lends itself to a feminist critique. As Christine Gledhill has argued, it is precisely the
“performance of the roles accorded” to actresses such as Ann Savage that permitted them
to “manipulate the image which centuries of female representations have provided” and
“foreground the fact of their image as an artifice and suggest another place behind the
image where the woman might be” (17). Indeed, it is through their performance that
femmes fatales escape the sphere of “male storytelling” (17) and transcend the character
contours envisaged by their male “creators” (writers, directors). This is all the more
flagrant in B-movies, where actors benefitted from much more creative freedom than in
the larger Hollywood studios and indeed where actors were encouraged to use all the
means at their disposal to give remarkable performances.
10

Ann Savage’s performance is not atypical of B-movie femmes fatales, and a
comparably extraordinary performance is given by Jean Gillie as Margot Shelby in the B-
movie Decoy (1946), produced and directed by Jack Bernhard at Monogram Pictures.
11

Arthur Lyons remarks that Gillie is “the ultimate sadistic femme fatale [who] seduces
everybody in the film” (88). Indeed, Gillie’s character Margot Shelby is singularly evil.
In the film, Shelby masterminds a plot to revive her partner, Frankie, from the gas
chamber to extract information about the whereabouts of $400,000 stolen in his last heist.

9
Dikos is here referring to the femme fatale in all film noir movies. I am arguing that this is a particular
trait of the B-movie noir.
10
As seen in chapter two, the B-movie arose from a financial need to “lure back the 50 million customers
who had stayed away from theaters since the advent of the Depression” (Lyons 29). The basic premise of
the B-movie was to reach the widest audience with the smallest possible studio investment.
11
This movie was “missing” for many years, until a copy was found and restored in 2000.
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To revive Frankie, Shelby seduces and cajoles the otherwise ethical Doctor Craig into
receiving the body, and in her pursuit of the hidden moneys, she murders two men and
leaves the doctor for dead, having shot him repeatedly.
As in Detour, a serious effort is made in the narrative to account for the femme
fatale’s behavior sociologically. Thus, in her scheme to seduce Doctor Craig, she speaks
this impassioned monologue:
Do you remember the first time I came to see you in your office? Your
dingy, gloomy office in that dingy dirty street, the rotten smell of the
factory chimneys pressing down on the shabby little houses, the slovenly
old women, the gray-faced dirty little children starting out with everything
against them. I remember that street... I remember every little thing about
it... I know because that's the street I came from six thousand miles from
here in a little English mill town. But it's the same rotten street, the same
factories, the same people, and the same little gray-faced children.

In this sequence, Shelby is flagrantly deploying the female masquerade in order to seduce
Doctor Craig. During the exchange, Shelby nevertheless insinuates that money is her true
objective, and the doctor is merely a means for getting it.
12
Indeed, on her deathbed, she
initiates the flashback sequence with this commentary: “I wanted money. Frankie Olins
had it... Four hundred thousand dollars.” Her tone is determined and sinister, and despite
being moments away from death she clearly derives pleasure at having accomplished her
objective of getting rich.
In common with Vera, there is a Freudian dimension to Shelby, whose
extraordinary ruthlessness and sadism cannot be attributed to poverty alone. In this final
sequence, Doctor Craig’s gun and the chest containing the money are unambiguously

12
Shelby’s outburst was scripted in part to account her British accent, and the passion and sincerity in her
delivery insinuates that Margot’s story is close to Jean Gillie’s, that of an actress escaping European
postwar poverty for the allure of Hollywood. This information imbues the narrative with the realist
dimension characteristic of the B-movie noir.
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fetishized. As she lies dying on a sofa having been shot by Doctor Craig, Shelby
desperately screams for the box: “The box, there it is! Give to me! I want it! Give it to
me! It’s all mine now.” The box and money have therefore become stand-ins for the
phallus, and Shelby’s desire for these things has superseded her desire for men. When Jo-
Jo, the kindly police officer, listens to her tale, Shelby asks him to “come down to [her]
level,” and then laughs madly in his face. After shooting Doctor Craig, Shelby is
chronically hysterical, and while the origins of her condition are not specifically
explored, it is strongly suggested that her “deviant” behavior is in part the result of a
serious psychosexual dysfunction.
Certainly, Shelby has not reached adulthood as a balanced woman, and in her
dying moments she is at once a little girl in need of comforting and a highly dangerous
and eroticized woman. Decoy provides, in fact, one of the first instances of the “devil
woman” and “devil child;” a generic feature of future B noir, sci-fi and horror films.
13

Picked up and laid on a couch like a sickly child, Shelby recognizes “Jo-Jo”. When Jo-Jo
gives her precious box, he tells her like a child not to cut herself on the rough edges, and
she finds Jo-Jo “very funny” and then “rotten” for laughing at her. Her infantile dialogue
is at odds with her appearance, that of a sexually attractive woman experiencing pleasure
and pain on her deathbed. The classical composition, a well-lit Hollywood medium shot,
and the sentimental score also contrast with the sordid nature of the situation, and like Jo-
Jo, the spectator is temporarily beguiled by Shelby’s seductiveness and lured into
believing that her masquerade is benign.

13
Comparisons can be drawn, for instance, with Christina Bailey in Robert Aldrich ‘s Kiss Me Deadly
(1955), and the child-killer Rhoda in LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956).
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While it is somewhat unusual for the femme fatale to exhibit child-like qualities,
it is quite typical for the male protagonist of the B-series film noir to appear infantilized.
We have seen this in Detour, where Roberts becomes Vera’s “plaything,” and while he is
enraged at being trapped, he nevertheless remains obedient to her in the manner of a
child. In Decoy, it is not just Jo-Jo who is reduced to being a boyish figure. We have seen
how Shelby’s masquerade dupes Doctor Craig with the simplicity that one might deceive
a child. Decoy’s plot is somewhat unusual in permitting Doctor Craig to exact a revenge
on Shelby.
14
Indeed, whereas the male protagonist perishes in the majority of films noirs,
the femme fatale is almost never held to account, and it is rare that a wronged male
protagonist achieves retribution.
The B-series male protagonist thus differs from his bigger-budget counterpart, in
that he has often not reached adult maturity, and is often portrayed as a “child-man” who
is gullibly led astray by his worldly female companion. He remains, however, an
immature variation of the film noir antihero, identified by Borde and Chaumeton as “an
inglorious victim ... the masochistic type, his own executioner, someone hoisted by his
own petard, someone who gets tangled up in dangerous situations, not so much through a
concern for justice or through cupidity as through a sort of morbid curiosity” (9).
15
While
the film noir male antihero is not as evil as the femme fatale, he displays a moral
weakness in falling prey to the femme fatale. She acts, therefore, as a trigger that

14
After being shot by Shelby in the woods, he summons the strength to ride back into town and to kill her.
However, he too perishes from his injuries, which are indirectly brought about by his child-like naivety.
15
With regard to the film noir male antihero, Borde and Chaumeton remark that the film noir is “a long
way, then, from the adventure film superman” (9)
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unleashes the male antihero’s downward spiral, revealing his “instinct for death” and
causing him to live under “the umbrella of death” (Dikos 14).
We have already seen that the femme fatale ubiquitously brings about the man’s
downfall. Kaplan observes that her “sexuality intervenes destructively in his life” (Kaplan
6) and Dikos observes that “if she does not defy her man, then she betrays him dishonesty
... after a thorough rebuke of his life” (161). As a couple, they therefore make an
unwholesome ménage (“household”) and their relationship is akin to a dangerously
unstable manège (“merry-go-round,” or “fairground carousel”). Interestingly, there is an
etymological connection between these two French terms, which both originate from the
latin manere, which means “to reside”. Since medieval times, the manège has referred to
the place where horses are exercised and riders trained, and ménage (or maisnage as it
was spelled prior to the eighteenth century) was a house or place of residence.
16
In
modern French, it particularly refers to the couple, or in the case of ménage à trois, a
sexual relationship between three individuals.
In American film noir, it is noticeable that the upheaval in the tradition ménage is
frequently equated with a dangerous carnival ride, which appears as a reoccurring visual
trope signaling an impending descent into danger and peril. There are many instance of
this, but one of the most remarkable is Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951).
17
The
plot revolves around Guy Haines (Farley Granger), a playboy tennis star who is having
difficulty obtaining a divorce from his unfaithful wife, Miriam. A stranger whom he
meets in a train carriage, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), proposes a “crisscross”

16
Ménagerie, a place where wild animals are exhibited, is also a derivative of the latin manere.
17
The ending of The Lady from Shanghai takes place in a fairground, where a dramatic shootout takes
place in the Magic Mirror Maze.
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murder, meaning that he would kill Miriam in exchange for Guy killing Bruno’s father.
Bruno then tracks Miriam to an amusement park, where she is frivolously entertaining
two suitors. After the carrousel ride, Miriam enters the “tunnel of love,” where she
shrieks and screams in mock fright and pleasure. Moments later, however, the excitement
gives way to real fear as Guy wraps his hands around her neck and strangles her; an
incident that is pictured in the reflection of her fallen glasses.
The film also ends in the amusement park, where Bruno and Guy fight one
another in between the wooden horses of the carousel, which spins out of control after the
police accidentally shoot the operator. At one point, a little boy is embroiled in the fight,
and is thrown off the horse. Through a combination of montage and camera trickery
(although a real carousel was used), the camera records the vertiginous movement of the
carousel, as well as the excitement and fear in the faces of the women and children on the
ride, until the carousel crashes and is destroyed to the sound of screams and explosions.
The out-of-control carousel clearly serves as a visual metaphor for the dangers of
deviating from behavioral “norms,” as well as the impending upheaval in relations
between the sexes. Indeed, beyond being a murderer, it is more than intimated that that
Bruno is homosexual. Guy, on the other hand, is a playboy who has not learned to
assume his responsibilities, and whose life choices are entirely dictated by women.
18

18
Sabrina Barton essay, “‘Crisscross:’ Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train” is a seminal essay
regarding gender representation in Hitchcock’s thriller. Barton shows “how the unstable male subjectivity
in Strangers on a Train gets renarrativized as ‘a paranoid fear of the female or homosexual other” (Penley
xvi).
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Another film that film that features a “child-man” as well as allegoric
representations of the fairground is Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).
19
It is the story
of Bart Tare, a disadvantaged child who is sent to reform school because of his obsession
with guns. When he returns as an adult, having served in the army, he attends a carnival
with some childhood friends where he meets “the famous, the dangerous, the beautiful
Annie Laurie Starr” who performs a sharpshooting act. Bart shows himself, however, to
be the more accomplished shooter, and he is employed by the carnival owner. As Bart
and Laurie begin a relationship, however, they arouse the jealousy of the owner and are
dismissed. Finding themselves penniless after a honeymoon in Las Vegas, Laurie
pressures Bart into beginning a crime spree of holdups and bank robberies. After a
particularly audacious hold-up of a payroll office, they become the subjects of a
nationwide manhunt, and they are eventually tracked down and killed in the Sierra
mountain range where Bart had spent his boyhood.
There are instances when Bart and Laurie appear to be in a living an idyllic
adventure. However, the early presence of the carnival as well as a later sequence on the
Santa Monica amusement pier, unambiguously signal their forthcoming tribulations.
Alone in their hotel room, Bart tells Laurie he has just made a deal to secure their passage
to Mexico, and they talk briefly about buying a ranch and raising children. The scene
then cuts away to a rollercoaster ride, where the mounted camera shows Bart and
Laurie’s faces contorted with pleasure and fear. In view of the spectator’s knowledge that

19
Originally entitled Deadly is the Female, the film was made for a relatively modest $400,000 and
produced by a small studio, King Brothers Productions. Lewis was a veteran director for Monogram
Pictures, who were expected to distribute the film. However, Universal was impressed by the film and took
charge of distribution, ensuring that it reached a wider audience than most B-movies.
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the police are closing in on the pair, these images clearly denote their impending deaths,
and while Bart and Laurie go on to enjoy the gentler carousel ride and the dance-hall
slow, these sequences serve only to illustrate the ephemeral nature of their final moments
together. Bart will thus never realize his dream of settling down and having a family, and
will die before he ever becomes a “man.”
In common with Detour and Decoy and other B-movies, the film treads a fine line
between a psychoanalytical and a more “realist” representation of its characters and of
their motivations. On the one hand, a fatherless Bart is shown as a child to have an
obsession with guns, although shooting a chick he subsequently develops a morbid fear
of killing. As he brandishes his gun in a classroom and tells a judge that it makes him
“feel awful good inside,” it is strongly intimated that the adolescent Bart has problems of
a psychosexual nature. One reviewer writes that “no movie has ever so shamelessly
celebrated gun eroticism” (Covino 14), and indeed Laurie is a “gun crazy” blonde who is
visibly excited and derives an extreme pleasure from shooting and has a pathological
need to kill. In the carnival sequence, she shoots her target from between her legs, and
while she is “feminine” in appearance, she also enjoys wearing slacks and wears a manly
suit during the payroll heist. She is also referred to on several occasions as a “wild
animal” and in the end she is tracked down as such.
Laurie is also obsessed with money and material wealth, and leaves the carnival
owner because he is a “two-bit guy.” In a pivotal sequence, she plays and manipulates the
malleable Bart with the ease characteristic of the B-movie femme fatale, deploying both
female masquerade (she is putting on her stockings) and performing sexual blackmail.
Bart is prepared to take a job in a department store for forty dollars a week and even to
203

hawk his guns to pay for a new start. Laurie responds unambiguously: “There isn’t
enough money in those guns for the kind of start I want. Bart, I want things. I want a lot
of things, big things...I want a guy with spirit and guts, a guy who can laugh at anything,
do anything, who can kick over the Tracies and win the world for me.” Bart feebly
ripostes that he does not want to “stare into that mirror and see nothing but a stickup
man,” but bangs his fist in frustration as he knows he will yield to Laurie’s temptation.
The word “man” resonates strangely when spoken by Bart, as neither he nor Laurie are
bona fide adults, but sexualized children living out a dangerous fantasy.
20
This
impression is confirmed in the very next sequence, where Bart shoots at a candy jar when
holding up a hotel, and again when Bart and Laurie hold up a bank dressed as cowboys.
Laurie is unquestionably the “games master,” and Bart is her malleable
“plaything.” Indeed, throughout the film, Lewis seeks to convey his protagonists’
personalities through extensive close-ups, and whereas Laurie’s frequently expresses
cool, calculated determination, Bart’s expresses gentile and boyish bonhomie. We have
seen Bart as both a child and adolescent, and know him to be a good-natured boy who is
the victim of circumstance and an unyielding judge. The representation of a Bart as a boy
is important beyond its Freudian significance, as it consolidates the viewer’s impression
of Bart as a “child-man.” Despite being in his twenties after serving in the army, Bart’s
first moments back home are spent with his childhood companions at the carnival. Then,
when he starts work at the carnival he strikes up a friendship with the circus clown, who
tells him that Laurie “ain’t the type that makes a happy home.”

20
A similar effect is engendered when Bart says he feels uneasy wearing “an honest man’s uniform”
(having stolen a soldier’s clothes).
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When the pair leave the travelling carnival, Bart chivalrously insists that they
have their relationship made official by a “justice of the peace,” but before entering the
wedding chapel Bart poignantly confesses to have “served a term already” in reform
school. Bart naively confounds feminine beauty with virtue, but the spectator is under no
illusion that Bart is making a fatal error of judgment. Dressed in black, Laurie tells him
candidly: “Bart, I’ve never been much good, at least up to now I haven’t. You aren’t
getting any bargain.” As Bart’s nightmare unfolds, Bart refuses to see Laurie as anything
but virtuous, even though she is unequivocally the malevolent driving-force behind the
robberies, in particular the final “big one” that will allow them to escape to Mexico and
“grow old together.” Even when Bart learns in a newspaper that she gratuitously killed
two people in the payroll heist, he convinces himself that he is the guilty party,
exclaiming: “I’ve just let you do my killing for me.” It is only at the film’s denouement
that Bart understands that Laurie is a pathological killer, and he shoots her before she can
kill his childhood friends.
A consideration of the “child-man” in B-series genre cinema would not complete
without a consideration of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954). It is indeed with regard
to this film that Truffaut coins the term “homme-enfant,” writing that the male
protagonist in Ray’s films “is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is
not simply a child” (cited in Hillier 107). Johnny Guitar was undoubtedly one of the most
admired films of Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, although upon first viewing the film in
1954, the critics expressed confusion about why they liked Ray’s film, or indeed what
exactly Johnny Guitar was. Truffaut describes Johnny Guitar as “not really a western,
nor ... an ‘intellectual western’... It is a western that is dream-like, unreal to a degree,
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delirious” (107). In order to make sense of the film, Truffaut looked to Ray’s past body of
films which he claims “tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop
being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than
himself” (107). At the heart of the critics’ interest in Ray was undoubtedly the American
director’s preoccupation with modern masculinity; a “study” that culminates in Ray’s
iconic tale of alienated male adolescence in Rebel without a Cause (1955).
In addition to their admiration for Ray, the Cahiers du cinéma critics had a
particular fondness for the western. In his article “Évolution du western” (1954), Bazin
complains that “les westerns de série Z” (27) were not shown in French cinemas, and
later wrote that the “western continues to be the least understood of the genres” (169). By
way of justifying their interest in the genre, Bazin invited Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, a
historian with expertise on the American West, to contribute to Cahiers. In 1952,
Rieupeyrout explained that the western represented “l’histoire des relations entre
l’homme blanc et l’homme rouge” (14), and told “la vérité de l’homme, vérité du fait
concourent à prouver la valeur du western en tant qu’illustration d’une époque” (12).
Rieupeyrout’s usage of “homme” is significant, given that the western is undeniably the
domain of mankind, with women generally attributed only minor roles, such as
homemakers, companions and “ladies of the night.”
21

Johnny Guitar begins in a saloon, situated on the barren outskirts of an Arizona
cattle town that will soon be connected to the bigger cities via a railroad. A man calling
himself Johnny Guitar enters the saloon, but before he can be received by the “boss,” an

21
One expert on the genre writes: “Women have been barely visible in western films. The male heroes have
always dominated the genre which stresses masculinity and repeatedly tells the story of a special breed of
men — tough and self-sufficient, laconic and humorless” (Mukherjee 99).
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angry posse led by Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) enters the saloon and
demands that Vienna (Joan Crawford) surrender the “Dancing Kid;” a former lover of
Vienna who is accused of staging a highway robbery in which Small’s brother died. The
posse leaves, giving Vienna twenty-four hours to surrender “Dancing Kid” and leave
town. In the intervening hours, Vienna rekindles her relationship with Guitar, whose real
name is Johnny Logan and who had been Vienna’s lover five years previously. The
“Dancing Kid” and his band of three men make an appearance at the saloon, but leave
after the Kid fails to compete with Johnny for Vienna’s affections. When the posse
returns, Vienna is arrested and her saloon burned to the ground, but she is saved from the
hangman’s noose by Johnny’s intervention. The posse tracks Vienna, Johnny and the
Dancing Kid to a hideaway in the mountains, and in a final shoot-out the Dancing Kid is
killed by Emma Small, who is in turn shot dead by Vienna.
By “playing” with the conventions of the western, Johnny Guitar launched an
astonishing attack on the genre’s male-centricity. Indeed, the film was reviewed as a
cinematic odyssey by contemporary American critics, who disapproved of Ray’s
“revisionist” approach to the western and the plot which centers on the female
protagonist, Vienna (Joan Crawford). One critic for the New York Herald Tribune began
his review by stating: ‘Feminism has gone too far (cited in Peterson 3).
22
The main reason
for film’s critical failure stems from the fact that the male protagonists, Johnny Guitar
(Sterling Hayden) and his nemesis, the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), are relegated to

22
“‘Feminism has gone too far,’ the New York Herald Tribune began its review. ‘It has not only male, but
female gunfighters,’ a writer for the New Yorker sneered, declaring: ‘It was probably inevitable that sooner
or later somebody would try to change the pattern of westerns, but I can state authoritatively that this twist
is doomed’” (cited in Peterson 3).
207

secondary roles. Moreover, they exhibit decidedly unusual characteristics compared to
the generic male leads in westerns. True to his name, the Dancing Kid is in fact a child-
man. The townspeople question the Dancing Kid and his band’s claim to adulthood,
given that they have “no farm and no business and yet always have plenty of money to
spend.” The Dancing Kid and his men certainly compete with Johnny in a childish
manner, and the games are permitted and orchestrated by Vienna. Bart, who resembles a
schoolboy bully, challenges Johnny to a drinking competition, and when Johnny refuses
he quips that “when a man can’t hold onto his glass maybe she should drink like a baby
from a bottle.”
23

Johnny too displays certain “childish” qualities, although he is also effeminized.
We learn that he was formally Johnny Logan the ace gun-fighter, but he has traded this
identity for Johnny Guitar. In her article, “The Competing Tunes of Johnny Guitar:
Liberalism, Sexuality, Masquerade,” Jennifer Peterson remarks that the guitar he carries
around with him serves as “a feminizing prop” (13). He is handsome and blond, and
willingly secedes the role of decision-maker, and that of central protagonist, to Vienna.
Moreover he does not enjoy drinking, and when he first comes into contact with the
angry posse, he is drinking tea from a small blue-flowered china cup. The Dancing Kid
too manifests some “feminine” qualities. He provocatively dances with Emma to
Johnny’s guitar music, and once spurned by Vienna, he is seemingly more concerned for
the welfare of his band than with recapturing Vienna’s affections.

23
Another prominent western to feature strong female leads and weak male protagonists is Samuel Fuller’s
Forty Guns (1957).
208

Furthermore, there is some suggestion of homosexual tensions between the
principal characters. As I have already indicated, the Dancing Kid and Johnny are rivals
competing for a character with predominately “male” attributes. At one stage, this
ménage à trois scenario is visually suggested, with Vienna positioned in a medium-close
frame with her back to the Dancing Kid and her front facing Johnny. It goes without
saying that the scenario of a woman entertaining two suitors is essentially unheard of in
the western genre. When Johnny wins a shoot-out with one of the Dancing Kid’s men,
Vienna remarks that he is “gun crazy,” a term which implies a lapse in self-control but
that could also imply an obsession with the metaphorical denotative phallus and therefore
“could be read as a sign of latent homosexual desire” (Peterson 14).
Conversely, Vienna manifests unambiguously “male” attributes. Her masculinity
is evident from the first sequences in Johnny Guitar, where she is introduced as the
saloon “boss.” One of her all-male employees reveals in an aside to the camera: “I’ve
never seen a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and
sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.” Vienna’s attire; dark trousers, dark shirt and a
lace tie, gun holster, manly boots and short, cropped hair is strikingly masculine. When
the posse arrives at the saloon, Vienna stands on the mezzanine level of the saloon,
towering over her would-be assailants. “Spin the wheel Eddie,” she commands, signaling
the beginning of the games. She addresses the angry posse with cool confidence and
209

patriarchal authority, and succeeds in holding off the mob by drawing her gun and
standing her ground.
24

Jennifer Peterson points out that critics who have written about this film (such as
Leo Charney and Judith Halberstam) are deeply divided as to whether to posit “the film
as either a protofeminist narrative of affirmation or as an ominously masculinist narrative
of female containment” (4). At the heart of this debate is the characters’ performance of
their gender roles as “masquerade,” a concept first developed by Joan Riviere. In
Riviere’s original formulation outlined in her 1929 essay “Womanliness as Masquerade,”
the masquerade specifically relates to the female performance of femininity, which can
be “worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals
expected if she [is] found to possess it” (94). In Johnny Guitar, however, we are
confronted with a situation that does not conform to Riviere’s configuration of the
masquerade, and seemingly defies any straightforward readings of the film’s
representation of female subjectivity. This is because Vienna enacts a masquerade that
hides, not her masculinity, but her femininity and foregrounds her manliness and
possession of power.
25

Vienna can arguably be seen to briefly perform the female masquerade, when she
dons an eloquent white dress to confront the posse. This is a highly calculated move to
make Emma appear all the more villainous, and it lasts until her dress catches fire and is

24
It is remarkable how in the early posters and “lobby cards” released by Republic Pictures publicity
division, Crawford appears even more “manly” than her on-screen appearance. Most posters feature her
caricature alongside a picture of the angry townspeople but without Johnny Guitar.
25
There is also a reading that posits Vienna as Freud’s “castrating woman” (Peterson 13); the kind of
woman who suffers acute penis envy, and therefore projects a desire to castrate the men with whom she
becomes intimate. This would explain the townsmen’s trepidation about putting the hangman’s noose
around Vienna’s head (i.e. “decapitating” her).
210

discarded in the escape tunnel, at which point she returns to manly attire and demeanor.
Indeed, Vienna’s posture contrasts markedly with Emma Small’s, who is “stuck in a
hysterical bell jar” (Peterson 10). Femininity as embodied in Vienna’s female nemesis
Emma Small, is represented as a neurotic, unsympathetic and angry force prone to
hysteria and bad judgment. “I’m going to kill you,” Emma informs Vienna in their first
onscreen encounter. When Vienna is chased from her saloon, it is a black-clad and
“demonic” Emma who vindictively sets the property ablaze.
The disturbing and dystopian aspect to Vienna and Johnny’s relationship is
particularly evident in their “love scene,” which plays out like a parody and reversal of all
the generic norms associated with Hollywood cinema. It begins when both characters
have bad dreams and cannot sleep, and try to “chase away the bad dreams” by drinking.
Johnny jealously asks Vienna “how many men” she has forgotten, to which she replies,
“as many women as you’ve remembered.” The traditional role of the man is thus played
by Vienna, and that of the female by Johnny. There then follows what might be described
as a perverse reversal of the classic reconciliatory moment. Johnny instructs Vienna to
“tell him lies,” and proceeds to feed her the lines he wishes to hear. “I would have died if
you hadn’t come back. I still love you like you love me,” Vienna repeats morosely.
Vienna then angrily smashes her glass, and for a brief moment the charade is disrupted
and Johnny and Vienna resume their traditional gender roles. Johnny pleads with Vienna
to rekindle their love: “We’ve both had bad dreams, but it’s all over... Laugh, Vienna,
and be happy, it’s your wedding day!” Suddenly, a tearful Vienna succumbs to Johnny,
exclaiming: “I have waited for you, Johnny. What took you so long?” The spectator
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cannot be sure, however, if this is a “true” reaction on the part of Vienna, or a further,
manipulative masquerade.
There is no disputing the nightmarish and profoundly dystopian atmosphere that
prevails in the film. Vienna’s large, empty saloon provides a surreal, almost Brechtian
backdrop, and a constant sound of the howling wind and thunder permeates the entire
film. Dreams, and more precisely “bad dreams,” are a reoccurring theme in the
characters’ dialogue. “Was I dreaming or did I just see a bank holdup?” asks Johnny as
he and Vienna ride into the surreal dusk of the Sedona desert. In this sequence, Johnny
and Vienna are represented in “warm,” highly-saturated reds and browns against an
almost black landscape and an intensely blue and golden skyscape. This effect, which
contributes to the film’s surreal quality, was the result of a coloring process known as
“Trucolor” that required complex color-scheming, given that greens, oranges and yellows
were distorted in the process.
26
Outside of the studio, Ray and his cinematographer Harry
Stradling could not be certain how colors would be rendered, resulting in the uneven and
experimental visual aesthetics of this sequence and others.
Peterson claims that the “apparent misogyny” in Johnny Guitar is “tempered by ...
a playful gender mobility” (3). There is little denying, however, that the games played in
Johnny Guitar are decidedly dangerous and indicative of a profound fear and anxiety
about masculinity and the state of relations between the sexes. Just as Ray’s experimental
western reflects changes in American society in the 1950s, the New Wave’s genre-
defying films are likewise imbued with a discourse regarding masculinity and the

26
Trucolor was first introduced by the Consolidated Labs division of Republic Pictures in the late 1940s,
mainly to provide an added attraction for its Roy Roger and B-movie westerns. The process was refined
many times throughout the 1950s.
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newfound sexual freedoms of 1950s and 60s France. In my subsequent analyses of Louis
Malle, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, I will show with attention to specific
sequences how Ray’s western and the B-series films noirs exerted a very tangible
influence over the auteurs’ representation of the dangerous games played between men
and women.

(ii) Louis Malle’s Playboys and Playgirls: Les Amants

The anxiety stemming from changes to the “rules of the game” between men and
women can initially be seen in Louis Malle’s representations of playboys and playgirls.
My claim that Malle’s early films are imbued with meaningful gravitas could on face
value appear to be an exaggeration. Malle’s first film as a director, L’Ascenseur pour
l’échafaud (1958), an adaptation of “a B-grade detective story, or polar, loosely
following American noir patters” (Neupert 89) is known in particular for its smooth and
mellow jazz soundtrack recorded by Miles Davis. Malle’s second film, Les Amants
(1958), is a domestic drama that takes place largely in the confines of a wealthy
provincial home. However, we will see that while the narrative and plot of Les Amants
are “truly a playground” (119), the games played within this space between the “child-
213

adults” are both dangerous and sadistic, and conceived in an effort to mask a deep
apprehension about a forthcoming sexual revolution.
27

Les Amants is the story of Jeanne, played by Jeanne Moreau, who lives a quiet
provincial life in Dijon with her husband Henri, a local newspaper owner, and their child.
Bored with the status quo, Jeanne travels to Paris with increasing regularity where she
spends time with her “society” friend Maggy and her polo-playing lover Raoul.
Suspicious of his wife’s behavior, Henri mischievously invites Maggy and Raoul to come
to their house as guests. Returning from Paris to prepare for this “sinister” evening,
Jeanne’s car breaks down and she is obliged to hitchhike a ride from Bernard, a young
archeologist from a wealthy family who disdains the bourgeois milieu. At first she is
irritated by Bernard, but unable sleep later that night, she encounters him in the grounds
of her house and the two begin a night of passion. When dawn breaks, Jeanne and
Bernard astonish everyone by taking off together to begin a new life.
It is noticeable from the opening sequences that Jeanne and Maggy are not
presented as “women” but rather as playgirls. Having abandoned the charge of her child
to the nanny, Jeanne and Maggy spent days idly watching society polo matches, a game
Jeanne admits to not understanding. In one scene Maggy is shown waking at midday, and
the pair remain in bed feeding breakfast to their dog and talking frivolously about Raoul.
Pictured next to her companion, Maggie does not masquerade femininity as effortlessly

27
Only a minority of film scholars consider Louis Malle to be a New Wave director, given that he was not
a Cahiers du cinéma critic and attended the national film school IDHEC. Richard Neupert, however,
believes that Malle’s work should be considered as part of the New Wave given his “fascinated contempt
for the hypocrisies of the middle class; jazz music; suicide; the adult world observed by the dangerously
innocent young; a political background that frames and is reflected in the protagonist’s conduct; characters
trapped in some web of fate; the destructive power of sexual passion; a gift for seizing a society at a precise
moment of social change; the urge to disrupt and disconcert; a refusal to make direct moral judgments” (92,
93).
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as Jeanne, and her “boyish” demeanor and short haircut make her almost as much a
playboy as a playgirl.
28
Jeanne, on the other hand, never ceases to exude childish
femininity. She is pictured on numerous occasions looking into a vanity mirror, and in
one Parisian evening, she is seen to be wearing a girlish frock, hair band and a white veil,
like a child who has dressed up. When she returns to Paris, the maid and her daughter
notice that her hair is now styled “comme une poupée.” At this stage in the film, Jeanne
barely exhibits more adult maturity than her infant child.
The men, too, in Les Amants are for the most part playboys. They are competitive
in all things, especially love, and are petulant or get drunk when they do not get their
way. “Je ne supporte pas d’être battu,” Henri tells Raoul as he deftly embarrasses him by
making a show of amorous affection towards Jeanne. Each child-man has his own “toy”;
Henri has his beloved newspaper, Raoul has polo, as well as his long-hooded sports cars
and Jeanne, and even Bernard has his archeology. Even Bernard does not escape the
“child-man” taxonomy, as he is “short and physically ‘ordinary’” and a “gentle man”
(Sellier 190). In one of his first sequences in the film, he is greatly amused by a game
played by the provincial mechanics, who play a practical joke on Jeanne by pretending to
be deaf. The men in Les Amants are sometimes not even dignified as “child-men”, but
alluded to as animals. Neupert observes that Jeanne “moves between the realms of Henri
(a sort of country rat) and of Raoul (the city rat)” (112). Moreover, Jeanne compares
Henri to a bear throughout the film.

28
We are told that Maggy married a wealthy Parisian, although her husband is never shown. I will resist the
temptation to explore a potential sexual attraction between Jeanne and Maggy, as Maggy is in essence a
one-dimensional character emblematic of haute bourgeois vacuity.
215

The first indication that things are seriously amiss in the Les Amants occurs in an
early sequence, when Raoul takes Jeanne out to the fairground at les Invalides. In the first
image Raoul is shown wielding and shooting a large fairground rifle, and in the next
sequence, they go on the “Hurricane” rollercoaster ride, where they are filmed from the
vantage point of the adjacent pod where Malle’s cinematographer Henri Dacaë had
positioned himself. The couple visibly enjoys the ride, although they are constantly
looking behind them and Jeanne clings to Raoul for support. Jeanne and Raoul are
noticeably incongruous in their evening dress at this popular entertainment venue; they
are thrill-seekers, and while their fun is frivolous and decadent, it cannot be seen as
innocuous or without danger. Indeed, the “hurricane” could not be more of an apt
metaphor for a society in rapid transition and where gender relations are about to be
fundamentally transformed and old conventions “blown away.”
29

As the games progress, Jeanne grows tired of “un mari odieux et un amant
ridicule” and is no longer interested in playing games with either of them. Jeanne’s
dissatisfaction and frustration leads to her manifesting signs of a “possible psychological
dysfunction” (Neupert 113). Various traits point to this “dysfunction,” such as the great
amount of time she spends “gazing into mirrors ... as if trying to fathom who she is”
(113).
30
This impression is confounded by Malle’s technique of having Jeanne Moreau
provide a voiceover narration of her own character’s inner thoughts on at least ten

29
As we will see in relation to Jules et Jim, by the early 1960s the hurricane will be rapidly superseded by
le tourbillion, or whirlwind.
30
One possible explanation to account for Jeanne’s “psychological dysfunction” could be that as an infant
she did not successfully negotiate the Lacan’s “mirror stage”. As Sean Homer explains: “During the mirror
stage ... the child for the first time becomes aware ... that his/her body has a total form... The identification
is crucial, as without ... the infant would never get to the stage of perceiving him/herself as a complete or
whole being” (24, 25).
216

occasions. For instance, in the opening sequence Jeanne tells Maggy she knows nothing
about the game of polo, telling her: “Je n’y connais rien.” Jeanne is then heard in
voiceover: “Non, Jeanne Tournier ne connaissait rien de polo. Elle y accompanait son
ami Maggy. Jeanne et Maggy, amis d’enfance, étaient des provinciales de naissance et
d’éducation…”
This internal dialogue in the third person appears to be “from a more distant
narrator’s perspective” (Neupert 114) and contributes to the impression that Jeanne
suffers from some kind of multiple personality disorder, or else that she is confused about
the distinction between the self and “other.” The presence of an inner voice narration was
highly unusual in French films at the time, and Malle was credited by critics with forging
“a new cinematic form of narration” (114). However, it should not be forgotten that, as
we have seen in Detour and Decoy, film noir protagonists frequently narrate and provide
interior dialogue for their own characters. By film noir convention, the voiceover
narration by a protagonist generally signifies that they are dead, or else that their demise
is imminent. While this is not necessarily Jeanne’s case, the overall impression given is
that things do not bode well for Jeanne.
Another indication of the sense of foreboding that permeates Les Amants is the
representation of Madeleine de Scudéry’s seventeenth-century La Carte de tendre, which
appears alongside the opening credits. The map traces the many facets of a woman’s
relationship from “nouvelle amitié” to the allegorical “mer dangereuse” (passion) and
arriving in “terres inconnues,” and indeed Les Amants undoubtedly breaks away from all
prior traditions to navigate the “unknown territory” and unchartered waters of late 1950s
French society. In this world, the love “games” bear almost no resemblance to those of
217

previous generations. On the other hand, they have tangible similarities with the
“strange” and perverse dystopias represented in films such as Johnny Guitar and the
Hollywood B film noir, which I will aim to demonstrate have supplanted the older
literary canon as a prime source of influence.
First, a sense of dystopia is engendered by the characters’ verbal exchange, where
the norms of social intercourse and conversation are reversed. For instance, Jeanne’s first
conversation with her husband on returning from Paris begins in the spirit of
reconciliation and ends in confusion and despair. When Jeanne arrives home, Henri
initially inquires about her trip. He playfully lambasts her friend Maggy for being
“idiote” and incarnating “le faux chic, dans le faux Paris, le faux tout” while adding,
apparently without irony, that “[il] l’aime beaucoup.” When Henri intimates that he is
aware of Jeanne’s relationship with Raoul by telling her about an article in the “society”
section of his newspaper Jeanne prostrates herself before her husband, but instead of a
confession she praises her lover (“il est surtout tès gentil et intelligent, il te plairait
beaucoup”). She then talks banally about the house and garden. At the end of the
sequence, Henri remarks that Jeanne looks sad. When she denies this, he asks her
pointedly: “Pourquoi n’es-tu pas triste?” This exchange produces a disconcerting effect
on the viewer; one that is comparable, moreover, to the “reverse love sequence” in
Johnny Guitar.
Throughout most of the film, Jeanne and Henri perform an absurd charade of
social mores and impossible gender clichés. Listening to Brahms while smoking a pipe,
Henri condescends to listen to his wife talking about hairstyles, to which he replies in a
grave manner: “Il est du vrai dans ce que tu dis.” Jeanne and Henri disagree, however,
218

about Maggy’s dictum that to be fashionable, “il faut avoir un genre.”
31
In the high
society world of Jeanne and Maggy, having “un genre” entails an elaborate performance
of the female masquerade. However, given that Jeanne is no longer attracted by her
husband or her lover, Jeanne discovers that she has been performing a masquerade for no
apparent purpose. She appears to realize this abruptly, when she arrives at her home for
the dinner party with her husband and lover and begins laughing uncontrollably and
hysterically for over a minute and a half.
While Jeanne’s life with Henri and Raoul is undoubtedly unfulfilled, there is no
evidence to suggest that Jeanne’s subsequent life with Bernard will be happy. This
observation, which is one of the most unsettling aspects of Malle’s film, is supported by a
close analysis of Jeanne’s dreamlike encounter with Bernard and their first moments of
intimacy together which can be seen to be imbued with film noir dystopia, rather than any
kind of surrealist utopia. The sequence begins when Bernard meets a sleepless Jeanne in
the grounds of her country house. After some discussion, the pair’s hands touch and they
embrace by the water mill with Brahms music playing in the background. Jeanne tells us
through her inner-voice narration: “L’amour peut naître d’un regard. Jeanne dans un
instant sentait mourir sa gêne et sa pudeur. Elle ne pouvait hésiter. On ne résiste pas au
bonheur.” During the next ten minutes, which play out in “real time,” Jeanne and Bernard
frolic through prairies, cross a waterfall, release trout caught in a trap and gently drift
down the stream in a rowing boat.

31
In saying “il faut avoir un genre,” Maggy is implying here that women need to have a certain way of
looking, although her comments literally mean; “one has to have a gender.” This could be seen to have
added significance in the context of this chapter, and in view of Malle’s depiction in Les Amants of, as we
will see, a sexual revolution that has failed before it has truly begun. For Malle, it is not truly possible to
escape the confines of gender.
219

While these images may seem utopian, they in fact cannot be dissociated from the
dystopian representations evoked by oneiric states in film noir. A first indication of the
influence of film noir is the presence of the inner-voice narration, which in spite of its
apparently positive message, is delivered in a sinister tone evocative of a femme fatale
confessing her past sins. As regards imagery, an analogy might be drawn with Cocteau’s
Orphée (1949), a fantastical visual allegory recounting Orphée’s journey into the
underworld and his love affair with Death (María Casares) which condemns his wife
Eurydice to eternal life in the underworld. Cocteau, it should be noted, refused any overly
literal interpretations of his somber visual poem.
32
More pertinently, perhaps, Malle’s
representation of a “ghost-like” Jeanne in this sequence who drifts down the river like a
lifeless Ophelia also lends itself to an analogy with German expressionist films, which
drew on evocative and contrasting chiaroscuro images to evoke fear, anxiety and
emotional angst. I have previously considered how expressionism contributed in an
important way towards the development of film noir aesthetics, and in this sequence, the
influence of both expressionism and film noir on Malle’s aesthetic are indisputable.
When Jeanne and Bernard consummate their passion, Jeanne is mostly pictured
alone through a close-up of her face experiencing pleasure and of her hand.
33
Jeanne’s
transformation into a sexually liberated woman occurs, therefore, almost entirely

32
In an interview with André Fragineau, Cocteau complained that the public “wants a meaning for
everything - especially for things whose beauty consists in not having any. People symbolize through a
passion for logic. For lack of any direct meaning, they make up indirect ones, and reassure themselves by
using symbols. With Orphée I avoided symbolism and organized a logic of illogicality” (126)
33
In the United States, critics were shocked by the scenes of nudity and sexual activity, with the critic from
Films in Review writing: “The camera records at length the facial reactions of a woman during cunnilingus
... They should be ashamed” (Neupert 111). In Ohio, a cinema owner was famously prosecuted for
projecting Les Amants. The case was taken to the Supreme Court (Jacobellis v. Ohio), which ruled that the
film was not obscene.
220

irrespectively of Bernard, whose presence is negligible during the sequence. I believe this
is a significant detail, as it implies that these newfound personal (sexual) freedoms do not
necessarily translate into mutual, shared happiness. Indeed, while the sex a release from
the pressure accrued from performing the masquerade, it is not a utopian solution to
Jeanne’s frustrations. Indeed, when Jeanne insists on visiting her daughter’s room to say
goodbye, the spectator’s attention is drawn to the fact that Jeanne is abandoning her child
in the pursuit of her own life, and while Jeanne and Bernard vow to always sleep together
and to be happy, this promise sounds contrived and false.
The absence of utopia in Les Amants is further borne out in the film’s ending.
Jeanne is pictured relaxed and smiling alongside Bernard in his car, although this
contrasts with the grave and ominous Brahms score and the anxiety expressed by Jeanne
in her distant third-person voiceover narration: “Ils partaient pour un long voyage dont ils
connaissaient les incertitudes. Ils ne savaient pas s’ils retrouveraient le bonheur de leur
première nuit. Déjà, à l’heure dangereuse du petit matin, Jeanne avait douté d’elle.” The
contradictions and sense of apprehension which permeate the film from the outset have
therefore not disappeared. Moreover, the effects of Jeanne’s transformation are wholly
undetermined, and in the first moments following the dream sequence, Jeanne and
Bernard continue to exhibit many child-like qualities, such as creeping through the house
like children afraid of being caught. In the very final images, Bernard remains a quiet,
gentlemanly “child-man” who is happily surprised by the night’s events. Jeanne, on the
other hand, stares penetratingly into the café mirror, still unsure of who she is. In the final
sequence, they are both pictured consulting a road map in the café, having literally and
figuratively lost their way now that they have arrived in “les terres inconnues.”
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The sense of portentous uncertainty engendered by the ending of Les Amants was
compounded by Malle’s own uncertainties about how to end the film.
34
The critics and
public were also confused about Malle’s ending, which defied so many conventions of
the romance genre. Malle described his film as “a phenomenon” explaining that “all over
the world the film was thought scandalous” (Neupert 108). In France, the scandal was
considered to be of a moral order, with critics frequently invoking a comparison with
Madame Bovary “to describe the filmmaker’s distanced gaze à la Flaubert on his
heroine’s derisory concerns” (Sellier 190). The film’s extensive engagement with literary
and cinematic traditions further confounded critics. Genviève Sellier complains that
Malle “seems to place himself both within a protofeminist literary tradition ... and within
an enlightened, more masculine, libertine tradition” (189).
35

I believe I have demonstrated, however, that Les Amants is imbued with a
tangible apprehension about the changing state of relations between men and women. For
Louis Malle, the situation appeared to have deteriorated by the time he made Le Feu
follet (1963), the story of a playboy who has become so disillusioned with the women in
his life that he shoots himself in the heart.
36
A comparable anxiety as that manifested in
Les Amants was also endemic to the other young, male New Wave directors, as I will
now illustrate with regard to François Truffaut. Indeed, under the directorship of

34
François Leterrier, Malle’s assistant recounts that “at the moment of shooting it, he couldn’t decide
whether to make Jeanne get out of the car ... and he rewrote it as an ‘open’ ending, where the two lovers,
still under the spell of their night together, preserve, without any illusion, in the intention of leaving
together” (Sellier 191).
35
Sellier is referring to the apparent contradiction in Madeleine de Scudéry, who as a leading “précieuse”
hosted salons for female writers who disdained baroque violence, while ostensibly adapting Les Amants
from an eighteenth-century libertine text Point de lendemain (1777) by Vivant Denon.
36
His suicide note, which is the film’s final image, reads: “Je me tue parce que vous ne m’avez pas aimé,
parce que je ne vous ai pas aimés; je me tue parce que nos rapports furent lâches; pour resserrer nos
rapports, je laisserai sur vous une trace indélébile.”
222

Truffaut, Jeanne Moreau transitions into her role as a “femme fatale” with fatal
consequences for a generation of New Wave child-men.

(iii) François Truffaut’s “Hommes-Enfants,” Femmes Fatales and the
“Whirlwind of Life:” Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim

Truffaut has often been perceived of as the most “macho” of all the New Wave
directors. A critic for La France catholique wrote with regard to Jules et Jim (1962) that
“Truffaut, like Godard, has a rather retrograde attitude – that of a shame-ridden puritan
for whom woman is an incomprehensible demon” (cited in Sellier 60), and Sellier herself
observes that for Truffaut, “women are even more dangerous when they are loving than
when they are tramps” (109). Simone de Beauvoir observed that “Truffaut has the
tendency to construct his female characters as idols or monsters” (cited in Sellier 10). In
this consideration, I will show, in particular with regard to Jules et Jim, how Truffaut
imbues his female protagonists with the main characteristics of the film noir femme
fatale.
I will also illustrate how Truffaut’s male protagonists are portrayed as “child-
men” through an analysis of his second film, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). This film can
also be seen to be the work of a “child-man” director. Indeed, just as Les 400 coups
“plunges the spectator into the tragi-comic world of childhood” and compels him or her
“to look through a child’s eyes at the adult world” (Coleville 446), Tirez sur le pianiste
has a distinctly playful, child-like and at times “adolescent” feel to it. I will thus be
disagreeing with Sellier’s observation that the “wounded male subjectivity” expressed in
Truffaut’s film is a distinctly “adult” (107) one. Truffaut himself said that making a film
223

implied “prolonging the games of childhood” (Coleville 245), and this could not be more
true of a film that tells the story of a hapless piano player who becomes embroiled in a
pursuit involving dangerous gangsters and a fatal romance.
Truffaut declared in Le Monde that the true theme of Tirez sur le pianiste, which
is ostensibly an adaptation of David Goodis’ hard-boiled novel Down There, is “love and
the relations between men and women” (cited in Sellier 107). As a B-series polar, the
film provides one of the clearest examples of the New Wave’s treatment of gender
through the subversion of the American genre movie. Indeed, the film is “simultaneously
[a] detective thriller and intimate journal” (de Baecque, Truffaut 157), while also
conflating elements of the comedy and musical-comedy genres. The subversion is so
comprehensive that Tirez sur le pianiste, with its “black humor, Prévert-like wit [and]
boys’ comic-book aspect” (Sellier 107) is almost unrecognizable as a film noir. It is no
doubt the film’s complex relationship with Hollywood genre cinema and its
preoccupation with changing relations between men and women that led de Baecque to
claim that Tirez sur le pianiste is surely the filmmaker’s “true New Wave film” (Truffaut
157).
Truffaut cast the French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour in the lead role in
Tirez sur le pianiste.

This represents a first and key departure from the norms of B polar,
where the generic male protagonist (Bogart in American film noir and Jean Gabin in the
French polar) is imbued with virility and machismo. With little prior acting experience,
the thirty-six year old Aznavour was a physically slight man who was by all accounts shy
and somewhat introverted. On meeting Aznavour in Cannes in 1959, Truffaut remarked
upon his “fragility, his vulnerability, his humble and graceful figure, which made him
224

resemble Saint Francis of Assisi” (cited in de Baecque 154). De Baecque accounts for
Truffaut’s interest in Aznavour in terms of the two men’s similarities, observing that “the
two men even looked alike: short, with the same bearing and the same expressive face,
they were both vivacious, excitable, and anxious, but with an elegance in gesture and
deportment” (154). Moreover, despite being “pathologically shy”, both men had a
reputation as being “womanizers” (156). In casting Aznavour as his “double”, one might
say that the “child-man” director cast a fellow “child-man” as his protagonist.
In Tirez sur le pianiste, Aznavour plays the quiet and unassuming Charlie Kohler,
a pianist who works in Mammy’s bar. Charlie is in love with a waitress, Léna, but he is
unaware if she shares his feelings and he is too shy to ask her out. One evening, Charlie’s
feckless brother Chico takes refuge at Mammy’s from gangsters who are pursuing him.
When Chico leaves town, Charlie unwittingly finds himself a target for the criminals who
are searching for his brother, and both he and Léna are abducted by two of the gangsters,
Momo and Ernest. There is a twist in the plot when it is revealed that Léna knows that
Charlie is in fact Edouard Saroyan, a piano virtuoso who had enjoyed considerable
success some years previously. In a flashback sequence, Edouard is shown at the height
of his career which we learn was cut short by the suicide of his wife, Thérèse. Thérèse
killed herself because of the guilt she felt at becoming the mistress of Edouard’s agent,
Lars Schmeel. Perversely, by succumbing to Schmeel’s advances she had ensured the
success and fame that would ruin their conjugal happiness. When the flashback is over,
Charlie and Léna spend a night together before leaving to track down Charlie’s younger
brother, Fido. Their pursuit takes them to the Saroyan family home in mountains, and in a
final shoot-out, Léna is fatally shot.
225

The first half of the film is characterized by an adolescent silliness and
playfulness, with “every actor both absurd and sympathetic” (Neupert 194). These
comedic elements nonetheless belie quite a serious discourse on the difficulties of
relations between men and women. Having run into a lamppost, Chico strikes up a
conversation with the stranger who helps him to his feet who recounts how he did not
begin to love his wife until after two years of marriage, when his first child was born.
Sporting a very large bruise on his face, Chico decides that being married “has its
advantages,” and begins to randomly propose to women in Charlie’s dance-hall.
Meanwhile Clarisse, a prostitute and Charlie’s next-door neighbor, receives a slap from a
man whom she has teased with a provocative dance, and a stern-looking doctor is
reprimanded for staring at his dance partner’s chest. This theme is prolonged by a cabaret
song about a plain girl who decides to have a breast-enlargement operation, a song which
is calculated to distract the gangsters so that Chico can make a getaway.
37

This sophomoric humor is also present when Clarisse visits Charlie’s apartment
that night. Clarissa offers her services, casually adding that she could afford him “credit.”
Clarisse and Charlie are evidently involved in a non-committal relationship and are very
comfortable with each other. During a three minute sequence, Clarisse chats to Charlie
about a job she used to have in the circus, a film she had seen starring John Wayne
(North to Alaska) and the reasonable price of her new dress and lingerie, which she holds
up to the camera. As she climbs into bed, Charlie lifts up the sheets to cover her breasts,

37
The song, performed by a well-known Parisian cabaret artist and is replete with puns and sexual
innuendo: “On l'appelait Framboise / Et tout en étant Française / L'était tout de même antibaise / Elle avait
peu d'avantages / Pour en avoir davantage / Elle s'en fit rajouter / A l'institut de beauté, ah ah ah !”
226

saying “au cinéma c’est comme ça et pas autrement!” The lights dim and amidst raucous
laughter and cries, Charlie is heard making a joke about “l’audace des timides.”
This tone of exchanges continues when Charlie and Léna are abducted by the
gangsters the following day. At the beginning of this encounter, Ernst and Momo provide
a purely comedic parody of B-movie hoodlums; their vehicle is doused in milk by Fido’s
mischievous schoolboy friends, and the pair debate whether to show Charlie their gun
before having a heated argument about Ernest’s poor driving skills. This prompts a
misogynistic and juvenile rant from Ernest about contemporary sexual mores. “Les
femmes en veulent toutes!” Ernest proclaims several times, and recounts how his father
was run over by a car when he became distracted by a woman in a miniskirt. While
insisting that he loves women, Earnest wants to know why they insist on wearing skirts,
heels and stockings and do everything possible “pour exciter les males.” Momo concurs,
divulging that he had once worn his sister’s lingerie. Charlie interjects to remind them
that priests also where stockings, but before he can finish his point Lena steps on the gas
pedal and causes them to be pulled over by a police car.
In spite of the levity of these sequences, we cannot simply dismiss Truffaut’s film
as attempt at superficial entertainment, given that at this stage of his New Wave career,
Truffaut saw each and every film as a precious opportunity to define and defend his
theory of la politique d’auteur. We recall, moreover, that Truffaut introduced his concept
of the politique des auteurs in his Cahiers du Cinéma review of Jacques Becker’s
227

lightweight comedy Ali Baba (1954).
38
For Truffaut, arguably more simplistically than
the other auteurs, making a film d’auteur implied that a film must bear stylistic traits
reflecting the personal “genius” and personality of the director. His decision as an auteur,
therefore, to imbue generic B-movie hoodlums with misogynistic views on women’s
behavior cannot be dismissed as irrelevant comedy or wholly disassociated with his own
persona and views.
The flashback sequence can also be seen as an authorial device that is revealing of
Truffaut’s ambitions for this film. In a review from Positif (March 1961), a critic wrote
that this sequence lends Truffaut’s film:
... an usual gravity of tone [which] profoundly modifies the film’s
meaning ... Edouard Saroyan’s tragic deception in love, betrayed by the
woman he loves ... kills him as surely as if he had leaped with her out of
the window... [It is] a neurotic work which multiplies the detours and folds
of repression, but where the triumphant obsessionality ends up manifesting
itself [as] a fear of women, a fear of what the other sex has that is alien,
enemy. (Cited in Sellier 108)

Indeed, the flashback recounts the tragic suicide of Charlie’s first wife Thérèse, who
jumps out of a fifth story window after revealing to him that she enabled his success by
becoming his agent’s mistress. Key to understanding the functioning of this flashback is a
comparison with film noir, where we recall the device is used at the start of a film to
allow the dying or doomed protagonist to recount his downfall, generally at the hands of
the femme fatale. While Truffaut’s eighteen minute flashback does not literally tell of
Charlie’s death, it does account for his demise as a great artist due to the actions of his
wife.

38
Universally considered Becker’s worst film, Truffaut wrote in his review that it was Jacques Becker’s
“meilleur film.” He justifies this by stating, “basée sur la belle formule de Giraudoux: ‘Il n’y a pas d’œuvre,
il n’y a que des auteurs’… Ali Baba est le film d’un auteur de films” (Histoire d’une revue 150).
228

Indeed, while not as wicked as a film noir femme fatale, Thérèse nevertheless
stifled Edouard’s life and creativity, and in the end her actions proved “fatal” to Edouard
Saroyan. Like Thérèse, Léna is a strong-minded woman; it is in fact Léna who initiates
the flashback sequence and who narrates the ending and transition back to the present, as
if these were her own recollections and not Charlie’s. Given Léna’s aspiration to take the
place of Thérèse, it is not unconceivable that she suffer a similar fate to her predecessor,
although her absurd death in the mountains still comes as a profound shock to the
spectator who entertains hopes of a redemptive happy ending. It is difficult, therefore, to
particularly take issue with Sellier’s conclusion that Truffaut exhibits an “unconscious
sadism ... in making the two women die in order that we might be better able to
sympathize with the hero’s existential unhappiness” (109).
39

The flashback sequence is also revealing of a morbid fear on the part of Truffaut
of the ménage à trois. At the beginning of the sequence, Edouard (Charlie) is seen
pretending to be a client in the restaurant where Thérèse works, although trouble is afoot
when they have to explain their game to a regular customer in their restaurant. The man,
who is revealed to be the famous impresario Lars Schmeel, tells them that their game is
“merveilleux parce qu’il y a toujours deux gagnants.”
40
The compliment is insincere,
however, as it is revealed that Lars is playing a game of his own; promising a recording
contract for Edouard if Thérèse succumbs to his advances. Later in the sequence, it is
revealed that Thérèse and Edouard’s relationship has soured. She complains that he has
become vain, self-obsessed and neurotic, and he complains that she has become obsessed

39
Sellier adds that the two female protagonists Léna and Thérèse “are as active, and unconsciously
harmful, as the male character is passive and ‘feminine’” (109).
40
The implication is that there can only be two winners in game of love, not three.
229

with the trappings of success. Finally, she confesses her adultery (“grace à moi tu as eu ta
chance ... Lars Schmeel”) and jumps to her death when Edouard leaves the room in
disgust. The Thérèse-Schmeel-Edouard triangle is one of the first instances of a ménage à
trois in the New Wave, a scenario that is represented multiple times and that rarely, if
ever, has a happy outcome.
Truffaut claimed with regard to Tirez sur le pianiste that his “strongest influence
was Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar” (cited in Brunette 132).
41
The remark may appear
tenuous, on face value, until we recall the western’s dystopian vision of dominant
women, “child-men,” and the perils of the ménage à trois. It is also possible to make an
analogy between Jules and Jim and Johnny Guitar based on their respective plots. Both
films are about two men competing for the loved of an attractive, strong-minded and
authoritarian female, with whom they are infatuated. All the male protagonists endanger
their lives in the pursuit of this woman, and a man in each film dies as a result of his love.
Vienna and Catherine are the undisputed “bosses” (or “queen” in the case of Catherine),
and like their films noirs counterparts, they both dress as men at given instances.
Furthermore, when they are not competing for their attention, the men appear child-like
and form deep male bonds and a solidarity that excludes women.
While Jules and Jim is ostensibly a historique and an adaptation of the
eponymous novel by Henri-Pierre Roché set at the turn of the century, I will argue that
Truffaut’s adaptation and direction imbues his lead character, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau),
with the prime characteristics of the American film noir femme fatale. This claim is

41
Richard Neupert suggests that Truffaut was implying that he was impressed by Ray’s subversion of
Hollywood genres and that he wanted to “distort film noir, just as Nick Ray’s film distorted, poetically, the
western” (189).
230

predicated on observations regarding Catherine’s character and behavior in key
sequences, and is an important characterization given that it precludes a reading of the
film as a celebration of belle-époque and 1960s freer sexual mores. Instead, it favors a
reading of the film as manifesting an “archaic fear of the feminine” (Sellier 195), and as
constituting a moralizing tale showing the perilous consequences of meddling with the
traditional ménage.
First, consider that throughout the film Catherine reacts with considerable
violence to slights towards her person. When Jules and Jim ignore her favorable view of a
play they have seen and begin citing misogynistic passages from Baudelaire (“la femme
est naturelle, donc abominable”) Catherine petulantly throws herself into the Seine,
forcing the two men to scramble after her. In an early sequence, she in incensed when
Jules and Jim deign to ignore her conversation while playing a board game, and when
neither offer to scratch her back, she slaps Jules.
42
When Jim tells Catherine that he is
going to marry the Gilberte (“nous allons veillir ensemble,” echoing the definition of love
in the B film noir), Catherine takes a gun from beneath her pillow, locks the door and
tells Jim: “Tu vas mourir, je vais te tuer.” While Jim escapes by jumping out of the
window, Catherine has revealed her intentions, and the sequence foretells Jim’s eventual
death at her hands.
Catherine has previously confessed her “evil” to Jim in a sequence which mirrors
the generic noir convention, seen in Gun Crazy, for the femme fatale to warn the male
protagonist about her pernicious and destructive tendencies. When Jim tells Catherine she

42
In a subsequent sequence, Jim presents Catherine with a “back-scratcher,” a joke which comes to
symbolize Jim’s sexual rejection of his friend’s wife and a decision which will have fatal consequences.
231

is “injuste” for breaking off their relationship, she agrees with him, adding: “Sans doute,
mais je n’ai pas de cœur. C’est pourquoi je n t’aime pas, et que je n’aimerai jamais
personne… Tu souffres ? eh bien, je ne souffre plus.” The visual aesthetics of this
sequence are also reminiscent of film noir. Neupert notices that as Jim and Catherine
embrace for the first time, Jim “steps back, leaving Catherine in silhouette ... except for
[a] bug” (205) on the windowpane, which appears to disappear into her mouth during the
embrace. Beyond the repugnance connoted by insects, the bug also evokes the memory of
the cuckolded Jim, who is writing a book about insects. When Jim falls out of favor with
the “queen” and has to leave the house on the Rheine for the final time, he and Catherine
set out in a dense fog, taking refuge in a dingy station hotel room reminiscent of those
favored by B-series films noirs. In a line reminiscent of film noir dialogue, Catherine tells
Jim: “Dans la chambre d’hôtel on sent toujours en faute.”
In her dealings with Jules and Jim, Catherine’s quest is not for financial gain, but
for influence, power and control, and in the latter stages of the film, she appears to intent
on destroying both men.
43
In this sense, she is even more ruthless than the B-movie
femme fatale, whom as I have shown in my earlier considerations is motivated by
economic necessity as much as her desire to rival and bring down the men in her life. Jim
remarks in jest that he has always considered her to be a “Napoleon,” and Catherine
herself invites this comparison by recounting a dream where she is impregnated by
Napoleon. Catherine’s calculating nature is particularly flagrant in the latter part of the
film, when she intimates to Jim that he will be made to pay for his “infidelity,” because
he previously returned to Paris to see Gilberte. In their subsequent letter exchange, she

43
Catherine is “aristocratique par son père,” and a woman of some means.
232

callously uses their unborn and deceased baby as a bargaining chip to earn Jim’s
sympathies. Having failed to reawaken Jim’s feelings for her, she becomes intent on
murdering him.
Catherine can be seen to go further than the film noir femme fatale, not merely by
dressing in male clothing, but by masquerading as a man. This occurs at the beginning of
the film, when Catherine emerges from a closet dressed as “Thomas,” complete with a
moustache and cigar. After convincing a passerby that Catherine is a man, the narrator
tells us: “Jules et Jim étaient émus comme par un symbole qu’ils ne comprenaient pas.”
This sequence is genuinely one of excitement and discovery, and the features the iconic
picture of the three at play on the iron bridge. However, as the film progresses, however,
Jules and Jim begin to perceive the symbolism and masquerade employed by Catherine
as a threat to them. In the sequence of Catherine’s final infidelity, she is wearing a man’s
tie and bobble hat typical of the “flapper” fashions of the time. Both Jules and Jim look at
her wearily and the narrator tells us that they suspect that she is plotting something
detrimental to them.
Close attention to Catherine’s behavior and attire at the beginning of the film is
revealing of her “deviancy.” When Catherine is first acquainted with Jim, she performs
the female masquerade by dressing in a white Victorian dress and asking for Jim’s
assistance in carrying her baggage to the station. Jim is surprised to see amongst her
possessions a bottle of vitriolic acid, which she tells him is “pour les yeux des hommes
menteurs.” In this sequence, Catherine also destroys a pile of love letters (“des
mensonges”) and in doing so accidentally sets her dress alight. This sequence recalls
Johnny Guitar, when Vienna’s dress catches fire, exposing her masquerade. Unlike
233

Vienna, however, Catherine has a full mastery over the situation, which she transforms
by changing into another dress, seductively asking Jim for assistance. She also wears
brilliant white towards the end of the film, when she executes her plan to cuckold Jules
and Jim with Albert and when she attempts to shoot Jim. The image of the killer dressed
in white is evocative of German Expressionist chiaroscuro and film noir imagery, and
visually illustrates the contrast between her apparent goodness and her inner wickedness.
Even the film’s seemingly light-hearted moments betray a tangible sense that all
does not bode well. The opening credits, for instance, begin with images of Jules and Jim
“at play,” running like children through streets (evoking Les 400s coups), dressing up,
sword-fighting with brooms, etc. Sabine (Jules and Catherine’s daughter) is also pictured
at play, and Bassiak (who plays Albert) is shown joyfully singing and playing guitar.
Catherine is pictured for a mere two seconds, in a close-up and laughing. As the film’s
central character, the brevity of her appearance here is strange, but can be explained by
her deeply ambivalent status as the film’s anti-hero. Indeed, Jeanne Moreau has already
introduced a sinister element by reading a short verse to a blank screen, as if speaking
from beyond the grave, with the words: “Tu m’as dit: Je t’aime / Je t’ai dit: Attends /
J’allais dire: Prends-moi / Tu m’as dit: Va t’en.” Moreover, the lively fairground music
that accompanies this sequence, the kind that would be accompanied by calls of “roll up,
roll up” in a circus, evokes the notion of life as a fairground ride; a trope that in turn
evokes film noir’s allegorical deployment of the funfair to signal imminent danger.
The funfair trope is revisited later in the film when the three adults entertain
Sabine by playing at being “l’idiot du village.” Each person has to outdo the last by
pulling a face resembling a madman, and the three adults contort their faces so as to look
234

ridiculous and grotesque. This is one of the film’s most “cinematic” moments, with the
camera panning around the table in a dizzying carousel movement. Truffaut thus
represents the ménage à trois as a manège (“merry-go-round”), one that is, moreover,
rapidly spinning out of control and veering towards disaster. Incidentally, this sequence
bears some similarity to the incident in Les 400 coups when the young Antoine Doinel
rides on the fairground gravity wheel. The carousel’s movement is filmed from Doinel’s
point of view, allowing the spectator to see the adults who are watching from the viewing
platform, and as the wheel speeds up, the adults’ faces are contorted and appear to merge
with one another, resembling monstrous or inhuman judges. This image is part of
Truffaut’s construction of childhood as a thrilling yet nauseating experience, marred by
adults’ hypocrisy. Incidentally, in both sequences, Truffaut is paying homage to
Hitchcock by borrowing from the vertiginous fairground ending of Strangers on a
Train.
44

In Jules et Jim, confirmation that disaster is afoot also comes by way of the song
performed by Catherine and Albert, “Le Tourbillon de la vie.” The tone is light and
joyous, although the lyrics, which mirror the film’s events and predict the outcome, are
dark. Indeed, the characters are caught in a “whirlwind” of comings and goings, forced
separations and fateful reunions: “On s’est connus, on s’est reconnus / on s’est perdus de
vue, on s’est reperdus de vue / on s’est retrouvés, on s’est séparés / dans le tourbillon de
la vie.” Crucially to my reading of the film, Catherine is explicitly identified as a femme

44
Hitchcock, in turn, was influenced by Truffaut, although he did not wish to be seen to copy from the
French director. In conversation with Truffaut, Hitchcock revealed that “there was a very famous trial that
took place around 1880, and I often thought it might make a good picture, but since Jules and Jim, I’ve
decided to drop it. You see, it also involves a ménage à trois” (Hitchcock/Truffaut 206).
235

fatale by the song’s lyrics, which conflate a description of Catherine with a generic
literary description of the femme fatale: “Elle avait des yeux, des yeux d’opale / qui me
fascinaient, qui me fascinaient / y avait l’ovale de son visage pâle / de femme fatale qui
m’fut fatale / ... / sa voix si fatale, son beau visage pâle / m’émurent plus que jamais.”
45

The whirlwind in Jules et Jim is fueled, not by fate, but a mortal sexual attraction for a
Catherine, and sure enough, Jim’s attraction to her proves to be “fatal.”
Like a film noir femme fatale, Catherine’s demise is met with a profound feeling
of relief on the part of the surviving Jules, who comments dryly that Catherine had
wanted her ashes scattered in the wind but that “ce n’était pas permis.” Indeed, there is
little room for ambiguity in the ending of Jules et Jim, with Jim telling Catherine that
they had failed in invent love” and that their experiment was a lost cause and a failure.
These comments reflect Truffaut’s own comments expressed in a private correspondence,
where he wrote that his film is about “the impossibility of any love combination apart
from the couple” (de Baecque, Truffaut 175). Jules et Jim, moreover, is not Truffaut’s
only film to cast the leading female protagonist as a femme fatale.
46
In their article
“Truffaut’s Gorgeous Killers,” Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston identify a tendency
in the majority of Truffaut’s films to represent women as “profoundly seductive ...
steeped in the archetypal mystery of the belle dame sans merci [who] uses her sexual
liberation like a femme fatale, to destroy a hero who is either sensitive or needy” (2).

45
The mention of her “pale” and “oval” face is certainly a reference to Poe’s The Oval Portrait, the story of
the obsessive artist who in transforming his young wife and muse into art inadvertently kills her. I have
considered Godard’s appropriation of The Oval Portrait in Vivre sa vie in the chapter three.
46
Truffaut film noir La Mariée était en noire (1968) will again cast Jeanne Moreau as a femme fatale, and
La Nuit américaine (1973) also features a femme fatale role.
236

In his adaptation of Roché’s eponymous novel, Truffaut certainly seeks to
manifest an authorial voice and to tailor the material to his own ideas and preoccupations.
De Baecque comments that the figure of Catherine, in particular, widely departs from
Roché’s original portrayal of Kathe, given that, “in the novel, Kathe is an artist and an
intellectual, like the two men, and she earns a living through her work... she does not
commit suicide, she does not murder anyone, and she continues to remain autonomous”
(195). In an interview in 1962, Truffaut said: “Undoubtedly the young woman in Jules
and Jim [the novel] wants to live the same way as a man, but that has to do with a
particularity of her character, and not with a feminist, demanding attitude” (cited in
Sellier 59). Sellier comments that “this is a significant denial, to the extent that the
character in Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel is, on the contrary, explicitly participating in a
struggle for women’s emancipation” (59).
However, before categorizing Jules et Jim as a work of misogyny, one should
consider Jeanne Moreau’s personal investment in the film. After being presented with the
script in 1957, Moreau met Truffaut “regularly to discuss it” (de Baecque, Truffaut 169),
and the actress encouraged Truffaut to shift the focus away from Jules and Jim and
towards Catherine and her love affairs. De Baecque writes that at this time, Jeanne
Moreau “was at the height of her fame, but she had been slightly frustrated by her last
two films” (175) and was looking for a new direction for her career. Jeanne Moreau thus
lent her “star power” to a low budget auteur film in which she had a vested interest. In
this regard, Moreau’s involvement draws parallels with Joan Crawford’s role in Johnny
Guitar.
237

Moreau’s extraordinary on-screen performance also lends itself to a comparison
with Crawford’s interpretation of Vienna in Johnny Guitar, although one might also
make a comparison with the exuberant and commanding performances of B-movie
actresses Jean Gillie and Ann Savage in Decoy and Detour. Commentating on Moreau’s
“overwhelming presence”, Claude Mauriac claimed that “out an auteur film [Moreau had
made] an actress’ film” (cited in Sellier 194). Critics reviewing the film at the time of its
release concentrated almost exclusively on Moreau’s performance.
47
With reference to
the film’s critical reception, Sellier acknowledges that Jeanne Moreau’s performance as
Catherine “made [Jules et Jim] into an event in the construction of the image of modern
femininity” (196). Jeanne Moreau in her role as Catherine, moreover, is undoubtedly one
of the most recognizable and enduring icons of the New Wave.

(iv) Godardian End Games: Pierrot le fou

Truffaut’s relationship with Jeanne Moreau is comparable in some ways to
Godard’s “director-muse” relationship with Anna Karina. I have already touched on this
relationship in my analyses of Vivre sa vie, where Anna Karina interprets the role of
Nana, an aspiring actress who turns to prostitution. Godard made a total of six films with
Karina between 1960 and 1965, and indeed this era is often referred to as Godard’s
“Anna Karina period.” Esquenazi comments that in these films, the couple is undoubtedly
represented under the shadow of “celui que forme Godard avec Karina” and that this fact

47
The reviews, however, were not generally favorable. France-Observateur expressed surprise at
Truffaut’s casting, and complains that “Jules and Jim are relegated to the background, knights in the service
of the new Minotaur: the star ... Jean Moreau (Catherine) has devoured Jules and Jim” (cited in Sellier
194).
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“rend plus poignant encore l’aventure des personnages” (207). This is particularly the
case in Pierrot le fou, which was completely shortly before the couple divorced in 1965.
In Pierrot le fou, Godard loosely employs the “love on the run” film noir
subgenre.

The story is that of Ferdinand and Marianne, two characters that, as we will
see, are essentially Godard’s variation on the “child-man” and femme fatale prototypes.
Compared to A bout de souffle, Pierrot le fou undoubtedly marks a shift in Godard’s
attitudes away from the earlier “playfulness” of A bout de souffle and Une Femme est une
femme, towards a more forthright critique of the perceived ills of American-style sexually
liberal behavior and a newfound pessimism regarding the possibility of harmonious
relations between men and women.
48
Ferdinand’s asceticism and depression contrasts
markedly with Michel Poiccard’s indomitable joie de vivre. Furthermore, as the critic
Gilles Jacob points out, Godard’s later film is a “reversal of Belmondo’s journey in A
bout de souffle” (cited in McCabe169). Indeed, whereas Michel Poiccard attempts to
convince Patricia to come to Italy, a metaphor for unreached utopia, in Pierrot le fou
Ferdinand and Marianne escape to the South of France only to discover that this “utopia”
was both undesirable and unrealizable.
There is, moreover, a distinctly romantic aspect to A bout de souffle that is not
present in Pierrot le fou. We recall that Patricia betrays Michel in a moment of
uncertainty and confusion and is shown to regret her act which puts an end to their
tortured and impossible love. There are also distinctly optimistic and hopeful aspects of A
bout de souffle. Patricia Franchini is a student at the Sorbonne and an intelligent,

48
Many critics have made analogies between Pierrot le fou and A bout de souffle. Colin MacCabe observes
that Pierrot le fou seems to anthologize all of Godard’s films made previously and marks “a sort of
summum, a reworking of all the themes to date” (169).
239

ambitious young woman who is constantly trying to reconcile her attraction for Michel
Poiccard with her sexually liberated ideals. It is particularly significant that Patricia
succumbs to Michel’s seduction, thus rewarding his persistence and feeding his romantic
ideals. The moment is celebrated by the camera, which captures their kiss in a slow
reverse zoom close-up accompanied by the jazz piano riff associated with Michel. The
resulting image, which was used in one of the film’s original movies posters, shows two
almost indistinguishable and androgynous heads fully merged in embrace.
49

On the other hand, there are few on-screen moments of tenderness in Pierrot le
fou, and Marianne is entirely consistent in her rejection of Ferdinand’s romantic ideals. In
a parody of the Hollywood musical number, Marianne sings a song after their first night
about how neither of them had or could promise eternal love: “Jamais ne me promets de
m’adorer toute la vie / n'échangeons surtout pas de tels serments me connaissant te
connaissant / gardons le sentiment que notre amour au jour le jour / que notre amour est
un amour sans lendemain.” When they arrive in the South of France, Marianne tells
Ferdinand that he was “mad” to have left everything for her, adding: “Moi, j’ai des idées
de ne plus tomber amoureuse. Je trouve ça dégoutant.” Marianne tells Ferdinand in
several occasion that she loves him “à sa manière,” which means impulsively and only
when she feels like it.
At the denouement of Pierrot le fou, Marianne’s deathbed “apology” to Ferdinand
is a reversal of Michel’s dying moments in A bout de souffle. Ferdinand is, in fact,

49
Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in his Criterion DVD essay that the sequence preceding Patricia’s
“capitulation” is a parody and “reversal” of a scene in Samuel Fuller’s western Forty Guns (1957). In
Fuller’s film, Eve the gunsmith seduces the avowedly non-violent sheriff, and is pictured through the barrel
of a gun just before his capitulation. In A bout de souffle, Patricia is framed through a rolled-up art poster,
before succumbing to Michel’s advances.
240

responsible for Mariane’s death, which he witnesses before committing suicide. The
moment has nothing of the pathos or sincerity of Godard’s earlier film, given that
Marianne is characterized by a bande dessinée plasticity and her character is void of any
great psychoanalytical depth. Moreover, in common with Laurie from Gun Crazy and the
generic norms of the B-movie femme fatale, Marianne is obsessed with material gain, the
enjoyment of new 1960s consumer products, having fun and living adventurously. Pierrot
complains early in their adventures that Marianne “ne pense qu’à rigoler.” When
Ferdinand allows Marianne to destroy the car they have been travelling in, he cruelly
reveals that there were thousands of dollars in the trunk. “Pauvre con,” Marianne remarks
bitterly, before reflecting on all the places they could have travelled with the money (Las
Vegas, Chicago and Monte Carlo).
Marianne does not forgive Ferdinand for destroying this money, and Marianne’s
yearning for material comforts and a life of luxury leads to their initial separation. In
many respects, Marianne is a parody of women represented in 1960s advertisements and
women’s magazines such Elle and Marie-Claire; women who seem to be, in the words of
François Giroud, “... made for the world of disposable cigarette lighters, dresses that last
for a season, plastic packaging” (cited in Ross 79). Marianne thus has much in common
with her counterparts in works of literary fiction, such as Martine in Elsa Triolet’s Roses
à credit (1959), a young provincial woman “transfixed by the gleam of commodities”
(Ross 91) whose life is tragically destroyed by debt, and Jérôme and Sylvie, whose life
choices are entirely dictated by their desire for “une vie grandiose, pleine de richesse et
241

de belles choses” (Perec 14).
50
However, despite embracing her love of things, Marianne
rejects “the ideology of a newly privatized domestic life centered on the couple” (89),
and in doing so, is imbued with a proto-feminist rejection of a reliance on men in order to
achieve fulfillment.
As mentioned, Ferdinand and Marianne’s reclusive existence by the sea is far
from blissful. The sequence, which takes up more than twenty minutes of screen time, is
certainly a departure from the norms of the B-movie crime film where the protagonists
often dream of such an existence yet never attain it. From the outset, Marianne is
unhappy and bored, and walks aimlessly along the beach while endlessly chanting
“Qu’est-ce que je peux faire? J’sais pas quoi faire!” Whereas Ferdinand finds solace and
satisfaction in asceticism and ethereal contemplation, Marianne finds only tedium and
ennui. In their only real conversation during this sequence, moreover, Marianne and
Ferdinand “discover” that meaningful exchanges between men and women are essentially
impossible, with men thinking in abstractions and women thinking in terms of objects.
51

When Ferdinand smashes the disque she has bought from a nearby store, she screams:
“J’en ai marre de la mer, du soleil, du sable et puis de ces boites de conserve, c’est tout.
J’en ai marre de toujours porter la même robe! Je veux partir d’ici ! je veux vivre,
moi!” Esquenazi remarks that “l’envers ascétique de la vie aliénée tel que le conçoit
Ferdinand ne peut satisfaire Marianne,” and that Marianne’s angry diatribe constitutes
“une terrible accusation féminine contre la sclérose masculine” (219).

50
The new American-styled consumerism is one of the prodiment themes of 1960s French literature; for
instance, Rochefort’s Les Petits enfants du siècle and de Beauvoir’s Les Stances à Sophie.
51
“L’ambition, l’espoir, le movement des choses,” Ferdinand word-riffs, to which Marianne replies: “Les
fleurs, les animaux, le bleu du ciel.”
242

There is an argument that holds Marianne to be a “wochild-man” character, albeit
one who has outgrown the need for her adult-protectors.
52
This reading is supported by
Marianne’s appearance, which from the outset resembles a character from a bande
dessinée; dressed in a school uniform blazer with her hair tied up into a neat bun and
clutching a teddy-bear and a comic strip album Les Pieds nickelés.
53
She retains these
props throughout most of the film, with the album at one point facilitating an assault on
an arms dealer. In spite of her outwards appearance of childish innocence, however,
Marianne engages in extraordinarily “adult” acts of violence (arms-trafficking involving
political terrorists) and she subsequently exploits her sexuality to escape from danger as
well as from Ferdinand. The violence and sexuality may appear “comic book” to the
contemporary viewer, and largely surpasses anything seen in mainstream bandes
dessinées of this time.
Whereas Marianne evolves from a wochild-man into a fully-independent,
liberated woman, Ferdinand is cast from the outset as the “child-man” archetype bearing
similarities to the male protagonists of Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim. The
specificity of Ferdinand is that he is from the bourgeois milieu. At the beginning of
Pierrot le fou, it transpires that Ferdinand has lost his job at the television station and his
wife is pressuring him to use her parents’ (“Monsieur et Madame Expresso”) connections
to secure a professional “grown-up” job. Ferdinand, however, is reticent and tells his

52
Sellier asserts with particular reference to Godard’s “Karina cycle” that the director’s “image of the
woman ... is that of the wochild-man” (154).
53
Les Pieds Nickelés is a French bande dessiné (first created in 1908) which tells the adventures of three
essentially good-natured but otherwise lazy crooks.
243

Italian wife that he would prefer to “stay with the children.”
54
In this sequence, Ferdinand
is also seen in the bath reading Élie Faure’s Histoire de l’art, and he reads aloud a
passage pertaining to the state of the Spanish Kingdom during Velasquez’s lifetime: “Le
monde où il vivait était triste: Un roi dégénéré, des enfants malades, des idiots, des nains,
des infirmes. Quelques pitres monstrueux vêtus en princes qui avaient pour fonction de
rire de même et d’en faire rire des êtres hors la loi vivante, étreints par l'étiquette, le
complot, le mensonge.” Ferdinand calls over his young daughter to listen to a further
extract which begins: “Un esprit nostalgique flotte mais on ne voit ni la laideur ni la
tristesse, ni les sens funèbres et cruels de cette enfance écrasée.” Ferdinand’s wife then
reprimands him for reading her “such things,” as well as for having taken their daughter
to the cinema to see Johnny Guitar.
55

By fleeing Paris and becoming the child-man “Pierrot,” Ferdinand revolts against
adult life in modernity, bourgeois and capitalist conventions and his wife’s
expectations.
56
Henceforth, his life is entirely construed by games, to the point where “il
ne croit qu’en sa propre pensée et n’est plus capable de communiquer autrement qu’en se
prêtant provisoirement à certains jeux écrits par d’autres, le jeu des Pieds Nickelés ou le
jeu de la guerre du Vietnam” (Esquenazi 221). If Ferdinand is solipsistic, he is also a
romantic and a nihilist. In this respect, he has much in common with the film noir child-
man. Like Bart in Gun Crazy, Ferdinand is a boyish romantic who foolishly persists in
his belief in the redemptive power of reciprocated love. In common with the generic

54
Ferdinand’s wife is a cliché of the affluent European woman who aspires to American-style glamour. Her
only conversation with Ferdinand concerns a magazine advert for her “scandal” tights.
55
Ferdinard responds: “Il fallait qu’elle s’instruise!”
56
Esquenazi writes of the film’s anti-capitalist sentiment: “Pierrot le fou manifeste puissamment la
revendication de tous ceux, clercs ou rêvant de l’être, qui ne veulent voir dans la société de consommation
qu’une infirmation de toutes leurs croyances culturelles” (212).
244

child-man victim of Hollywood films noirs, Ferdinand also embarks on a nihilistic and
ill-fated journey of self-destruction. At the outset of Pierrot le fou, Ferdinand states in a
voiceover montage that, “de toute façon, c’est le moment de quitter ce monde
degueulasse et pourri.” Marianne remarks on Ferdinand’s death-wish, suggesting he write
his novel about a man “qui se promène dans Paris, et tout d’un coup il voit la mort,” and
who dies “juste au moment où il croyait que la mort avait perdu sa trace.” This is, in
essence, what happens to Ferdinand.
In a chapter section entitled “la fin de l’amour?” Esquenazi argues that the end of
Godardian “romanticism is brought about by “les femmes [qui] ont pris trop
d’indépendance pour se laisser constituer en modèles d’un ‘amour fou’” (227). In the
case of Pierrot le fou, Esquenazi observes that “Ferdinand et Marianne habitant deux
présents différents: lui réside (ou voudrait résider) dans une temporalité immobile et
éternelle; elle habite un présent fluide et mouvant, toujours actuel” (219). As Françoise
Giroud observed, “il l’aime, alors elle s’ennuie” (219). Esquenazi and many other critics
have expressed disappointment that Godard appears to have abandoned hope of a “real-
life” resolution to his protagonists’ problems, with Ferdinand and Marianne whispering in
a voiceover montage that “la vraie vie est ailleurs.”
57
Indeed, the final image is of the
azure Mediterranean sea accompanied by Ferdinand and Marianne’s reading of
Rimbaud’s poem L’Éternité (1872), suggesting that their souls will be reunited in some
dreamlike space on the planes of eternity.
In spite of its convoluted format and the many influences exacting on Pierrot le
fou, the B-movie crime film and “love on the run” noir subgenre can still be seen to be

57
Esquenazi declares the ending to Pierrot le fou to be “d’une banalité presque écœurante” (227).
245

narrative’s driving force. Indeed, Pierrot le fou was originally called The Demon at 11
o’clock and is a relatively close adaptation of the eponymous hard-boiled crime novel by
Lionel White. While the plot frequently deviates from the central intrigue, it always
returns to the main scenario, as Marianne reminds the spectator after their extended
period of isolation on the beach: “C’est fini le roman de Jules Vernes. Maintenant on
recommence comme avant, un roman policier, avec des voitures, des révolvers, des boites
de nuit.” Marianne also makes a veiled allusion to A bout de souffle by telling Ferdinand:
“J’avais raison il y a cinq ans, on ne se comprend jamais.” Ferdinand and Marianne have
arguably more in common with their Hollywood counterparts than Michel Poiccard and
Patricia. Indeed, as a femme fatale, Marianne is more independent, materialistic and
calculating, and as a “child-man,” Ferdinand is more fatalistic and nihilistic.
While film noir is central to Pierrot le fou, the multiplicity of genres present with
the film provides a further key ingredient to understanding Godard’s sentiments on male-
female relations in 1960s France. In Pierrot le fou, Godard no longer believes in telling
one story, let alone a bourgeois love story, and the breakdown in the relationship between
Ferdinand and Marianne is mirrored in the breakdown of conventional, linear narrative
and Godard’s refusal to adhere to a single genre. Indeed, Pierrot le fou is nothing less
than an explosive amalgamation of genres, featuring two musical sequences, a cameo
appearance by the veteran director of Hollywood westerns Sam Fuller and an allusion to
Johnny Guitar. Ferdinand and Marianne (whose family name is Renoir) make a plethora
of references to American literature (Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce, etc.) as well as to
Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne, and perform gags by Laurel and Hardy and Les Pieds
nickelés. Barthélemy Amengual writes that “Pierrot le fou est ... l’unique film-comic, un
246

film-bande dessinée, un film d’animation” (cited in Esquenazi 216). Pierrot is, of course,
additionally a reference to the eponymous white-faced sad clown of the commdia
dell’arte stage tradition.
58

Susan Sontag identifies Godard’s early tendency towards generic “hybridization”
in Pierrot le fou (cited in Esquenazi 216), although Godard, of course, has been “playing”
with various formulas for representing relations between the sexes through since A bout
de souffle. Prior to 1965, he employed the musical (Une Femme est une femme), the spy
film (Le Petit soldat), the war film (Les Carabiniers), science-fiction (Alphaville), and
the B-series heist movie (Bande à part).
59
Of all Godard’s genre movies exploring
relationships, this latter film is perhaps the most “playful.” Loosely based on the pulp
novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of Franz, Arthur and Odile; three youths living on the
margins of society who hatch a plan to rob Odile’s uncle of a large amount of money
stashed in a villa. Both Franz and Arthur try to woo Odile, which they do in a series of
games played throughout the film, such as running through the Louvre in a “record-
breaking nine minutes and forty-three seconds.”
60
The film ends in tragedy, however,
when Arthur is shot dead in his solo attempt to steal the money, and while Franz and
Odile sail for Brazil with their stolen money, the narrator tells us they must face
uncertainty about the future of their couple.

58
In this sense, Pierrot le fou fits Susan Hayward’s definition of the “postmodern” film, characterized by
the “erosion of the distinction between high and popular culture” (206) and art produced at the juncture of a
“new moment of capitalism” (207).
59
It has been remarked upon how Godard’s early films alternate between “playful” light-heartedness
followed by more serious and intellectual films, with the genre films providing moments of perceived
“levity.”
60
Franz, Arthur and Odile also compare their dancing skills in a café dance hall, where the three dance “the
Madison.” Godard reveals himself to be actively complicit in their games by narrating their adventures and
by famously muting the film’s soundtrack for thirty-six seconds when the three friends attempt a minute of
silence.
247

While Pierrot le fou retains a playful dimension, it also injects a more somber and
even sinister element into its representation of relations between men and women. In his
subsequent films, Godard’s narrative “games” will be entirely of a different order;
acerbic, rigorously intellectual, and Marxist. Indeed, in Godard’s next film, Masculin-
Féminin (1966), the playfulness of his New Wave films is superseded by a “scientific”
approach to documenting the “children of Marx and of Coca-Cola,” a generation of youth
that Godard longer claimed to belong to.
61
Esquenazi observes that “le romantisme
gordardien” is superseded by “la froideur godardienne” as evidenced by “la mise-en-
scène des ‘petites gourdes, glacées et sans cœur de Masculin-Féminin’” (226). Most
tellingly of Godard’s new preoccupations, Masculin-Féminin is ostensibly an adaptation
of two short stories by Maupassant and does not employ the genre movie format. As
MacCabe observes, Godard is “no longer obsessed by Bogart and Hawks” (173). Pierrot
le fou can thus be seen to mark the end of Godard’s playful and subversive appropriation
of the Hollywood genre movie.
By way of conclusion, we have seen how, in the context of a consideration of
gender, New Wave games retain at times a playful dimension. Moreover, the close
collaboration between director and actresses and the empowering “femme fatale” roles
attributed to New Wave stars arguably go some way to defend the movement against the
“misogynistic” epithet. Interestingly, even Geneviève Sellier asks in Cinema Journal if
there is not some scope for re-evaluating her previous position insinuating New Wave
misogyny. She does this by making an analogy between the New Wave auteurs and the

61
An intertitle in Masculin-Féminin (1966) reads: “Ce film pourrait s’appeler les enfants de Marx et de
Coca-Cola. Comprendre qui voudra.”
248

eighteenth-century libertines, who conceived of love as a game that “takes into account,
to a certain degree, the female Other, who is not reduced to the status of mere object, nor
to that of a figure alienated by social conventions” (153). In her analyses, she highlights
two low-profile New Wave films; Philippe de Broca’s Les jeux de l’amour (1960) and
Michel Deville’s Ce soir ou jamais (1961), both of which were written by female
scriptwriters. After critiquing the male actors’ performances and the directors’ overriding
influence, Sellier nevertheless concludes that this “so-called renewal of the
representations of male-female relations ... is simply a readjustment of male domination
rather than an attempt to call it into question” (158).
Indeed, on balance there are few grounds for mounting a serious challenge to the
critical consensus that the New Wave was not progressive in its representation of gender
relations. Not merely do the autuers manifest a scepticism towards the new sexual
freedoms found in 1960s France, but they explore and depict relations between the sexes
as dangerous games frequently comprising a subversive, and often malevolent element. It
has to be acknowledged, therefore, that there is some basis for the categorization of the
New Wave auteurs’ outlook as “masculinist” and misogynistic; a perception that has
become the focus of the prevailing hostility towards the New Wave in recent works of
scholarship.
62

62
It is no doubt with this in mind that Ginette Vincendeau asserts in the Cinema Journal (Volume 49) that
“that there is not a lot to celebrate about the French New Wave” (135).
249

Conclusion

The fact that the auteurs’ weakened interest in the Hollywood genre movie
coincides, to all intents and purposes, with the end of the New Wave goes some way to
support my claim made at the outset that the movement’s relationship with Hollywood is
one of its key defining attributes. Indeed, as seen in chapters two and three, the directors
associated with the New Wave stopped engaging with American genre cinema in a
significant way by the mid-1960s. McCabe observes that Godard’s “break” with the
genre format also coincided with big changes in production methods; Masculin-Féminin
(1965) was made with “a new producer (Anatole Dauman), new stars (Jean-Pierre Léaud
and Chantal Goya), and an almost completely new production team” (172). As Truffaut
began to adopt more conventional cinematic aesthetics, Godard embraced more
experimental forms in his films of the late 1960s and undertook projects which radically
departed from his New Wave aesthetics. If there are any references or allusions to
American film noir in Le Gai savoir (1969), Le Vent d’est (1970) or Tout va bien (1970),
these are fleeting and obscure.
63

Throughout the pages of this dissertation, I have analysed the extensive and
omnipresent dialogue between Hollywood film noir and the French New Wave cinema. I
reviewed how the auteurs were inspired by their love for the American crime film, which
they attributed to its energy and vision, its celebration of the auteur, its predilection for
representing individuality, existential anxiety and the alienating effects of twentieth-

63
Godard’s final film to engage with pulp fiction and B-series genre cinema is Sympathy for the Devil
(1968). He will revisit the film noir genre in Detective (1985), albeit in a very different manner from his
New Wave period. Truffaut made his film noir, La Mariée était en noir, in 1968.
250

century modernity. They were also attracted to the genre’s inherent subversiveness.
Beyond finding inspiration from the plot and character conventions, the auteurs
appropriated, quite deliberately, film noir stylistic aesthetics and production values. The
New Wave thus provides a case-study of how genre, conceived of liberally and in a broad
sense, can become a means for brazing conventions and defying the status quo. As one
critic wrote in L’Humanité, endeavoring to “produce a French version, even if superior,
of the American gangster film,” was akin to positing, effectively, “the lack of culture of
Hollywood as the basis for French culture” (cited in Hewitt 72). Indeed, even after more
than a half-century since their initial screening, one is still acutely aware of the “shock
value” inherent in the auteurs’ reworking of “low” genre noirs films.
Furthermore , and crucially, I demonstrated how the New Wave filmmakers
channelled, reworked and subverted the American film noir aesthetic in order to express
their revolt and discontent with their times and to produce a critique that can broadly be
defined as “political.” To this end, I showed how the auteurs recognized the American
gangster film as containing the genesis of a highly intricate, subtle and clever approach to
framing reality in such a way as to foreground the ills and anguish engendered by
postwar modernity; by representing, in the words of Dimendberg, the city “in its
actuality” (19). Through adapting and refining this formula, the New Wave filmmakers’
made “actualités” that are both personal and pertain to the political, and despite being
manifestly subjective, are cloaked in the powerful illusion of objectivity.
In my final remarks, I will outline the relevance of this research project to future
scholarly endeavors. First, while I have shown in detail how the filmmakers expressed
criticism of a broad range of political issues, defining the politique des auteurs in
251

definitive terms has proved more difficult. This is for a number of reasons. For instance,
while the politique implies a collective stance against such notions as established
authority, there is no unified manifesto, or even a single identifiable political “position”
shared by the auteurs. Furthermore, the filmmakers at times adopt complex, even
contradictory positions. For instance, while New Wave films’ anti-capitalist and anti-
military can be deemed politically “progressive” and left-leaning, the auteurs’ reticence
to embrace sexual emancipation can be perceived as politically conservative and
“reactionary.”
64
Therefore, while I have argued that New Wave criticism is more
developed, political and seminally radical than is generally considered to be the case,
more work is certainly required to define the auteurs’ precise involvement with the
politics of their times.
The New Wave’s relationship with the political upheaval of 1968 also remains a
potentially fertile field for further research. In L’Histoire-caméra, de Baecque claims,
notably, that the New Wave played a “rôle historique dans la constitution de la
mythologie révolutionnaire de 1968” (199). In view of the fractious and subversive
qualities of New Wave films and their at times radical aesthetics, it is logically
conceivable that New Wave cinema not only reflected, but also influenced the climate
that engendered the social unrest which broke out in May ’68. Jean-Pierre Le Goff
invokes this argument in his book, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible, where he speculates
about how Anna Karina’s listless and agitated boredom (“Qu’est-ce que je peux faire?
J’sais pas quoi faire?”) would later translate into affirmative action and revolt against the

64
Moreover, we recall de Baecque’s observation that in its early incarnation, the New Wave was perceived
as an ideologically right-wing movement.
252

institutions responsible for such feelings of social emptiness. Scholars have tended to
avoid cinema’s relationship with May ’68, given that the treatment of this question
inevitably involves a historical and social dimension entailing a number of
methodologies. However, recent research by Philippe Mary and Jean-Pierre Esquenazi,
among others, has gone some way to challenge this reticence by considering New Wave
cinema in the political and sociological context of the 1960s.
65

While this dissertation has focused specifically on the influence of Hollywood
film noir on the French New Wave, I believe there is more to be gleaned from the close
analysis of other genre formats appropriated or parodied by the auteurs. I have touched
upon the Cahiers critic’s admiration for westerns, such as those by John Ford and
Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. New Wave films also parody the Hollywood musical and
romantic comedy genres, and employ devices from a range of Hollywood dramatic
genres and subgenres. A consideration of the influence wielded by these genres, in terms
of plot, character, visual aesthetics and production techniques, would be revealing of
further attributes of the New Wave aesthetic, including no doubt the politique des
auteurs.
Having introduced the idea that the French New Wave is defined by its
relationship with Hollywood genre cinema, it logically becomes possible to elaborate a
new definition of the movement that reevaluates the filmmakers and works included and
excluded from the New Wave “canon.” One might ask, for instance, if the New Wave’s
appropriation of the Hollywood aesthetic is one of the prime factors for differentiating

65
Refer to Jean-Pierre Esquenazi’s Godard et la société française des années 1960 and Philippe Mary’s
article “Cinematic Microcosm and Cultural Cosmologies: Elements of a Sociology of the New Wave”
(Cinema Journal 49).
253

between the New Wave and so-called Left Bank cinema. Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7,
which I have shown to share fundamental similarities with the American film noir
aesthetic, could therefore be reclassified as a New Wave work.
66
By extension, it also
becomes possible to conceive of Chris Marker’s science-fiction, La Jétee, as a New
Wave film. Beyond simply offering a coherent strategy for grouping New Wave films,
exploring all films of this time period, regardless of classification, through the vortex of
their relationship with American genre cinema is potentially revealing of their subversive
and political content. Indeed, it even becomes possible to develop a new classification
that groups the many works, from approximately 1955 through 1965, that imitate, subvert
or parody American genre conventions. Films such as Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de
Cherbourg (1964) certainly meet this criterion, as well as, to some degree, the films of
Jacques Tati.
67

This research project exemplifies how genre conventions can be appropriated,
manipulated and subverted in order to imbue films with critique and how, in the words of
Robert Stam cited at the outset, genre can be used as a “set of discursive resources, a
trampoline for creativity (130).
68
While Hollywood genre systems remain a dominant
force in mainstream cinema, both in Europe and America, there are contemporary
filmmakers who, like their New Wave counterparts, seek to reinvigorate cinema and to

66
Many critics now believe Varda deserves to be considered a New Wave contemporary rather than its
‘godmother,’ or some kind of affiliate of the Left Bank filmmakers.
67
This categorization would also include the films cited frequently as “seminal” or “pre-cursor” New Wave
films, such as Et Dieu créa la femme (1956), and the so-called crime film “triology,” Touchez pas au Grisbi
(1954), Du Rififi chez les hommes (1955) and Bob le flambeur (1956).
68
In Film Theory: An Introduction, Stam writes: “The most useful way of using genre, perhaps, is to see it
as a set of discursive resources, a trampoline for creativity, by which a given director can gentrify a ‘low’
genre, vulgarize a ‘noble’ genre, inject new energy into an exhausted genre, pour new progressive content
into a conservative genre, or parody a genre that deserves ridicule. Thus we move from static taxonomy to
active, transformative operations.” (130)
254

attack the status quo by defying what is expected of them. The contemporary crime genre
remains a particularly vibrant genre, favored by auteurs who aspire to raise ethical and
political questions in their work and to highlight and criticize society’s failings. The
crime film also remains a forum where representations of the personal and the everyday
often pertain to the political and the historical.
69
This approach to representing “the big
subjects” has kinship with the New Wave’s “actuality aesthetic;” a concept that I intend
to develop in the context of contemporary French cinema.
Finally, this dissertation concerns the New Wave’s relationship with American
cinema at a time when the cultural influence of America was particularly dominant. The
study of the crosspollination between the two cinemas, however, neither begins nor ends
at this time. By the end of the 1960s, American audiences were becoming tired of the
musicals, epics and genre films they had become accustomed to, and audiences were
rapidly dwindling. In order to reinvigorate itself, Hollywood began to look for auteurs,
such as Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Milos Forman, Francis
Coppola and Arthur Penn, who could engage with younger cinema-going audiences.
These directors’ films undoubtedly borrow from the filmmaking practices of the French
New Wave. I believe there is further scope, however, to determine the exact nature and
extent of the New Wave’s influence on this Hollywood “renaissance.”
In recent years, moreover, the trend has arguably come full circle, with the
Hollywood aesthetic once again exerting an overriding influence on contemporary French

69
Films such as Caché (2005), Ne le dit à personne (2006), Mesrine (2008), Le prophète (2009) Incendies
(2010), constitute examples of this approach. I believe this approach contrasts with a majority tendency in
contemporary European and American cinemas to represent political and historical issues through direct
dramatic reenactments, as seen in films such as Indigenes (2006) and Le Rafle (2010).
255

cinema. This phenomenon can be compared and contrasted to the situation in French
cinema of the 1950s and 60s. Furthermore, the New Wave’s appropriation and subversion
of American genre cinema also lends itself to a comparison with other national cinemas
that have also engaged with the Hollywood aesthetic. Parallels can be drawn, notably,
with Japanese New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and 60s, and South-East Asian cinema
of the 1990s and 2000s that has used the crime film formula to make distinctively
national cinema.
70
The New Wave’s relationship with American cinema remains,
therefore, a rich and productive field of inquiry of significance to world cinema.

70
Films such as Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Sympathy for
Mrs. Vengeance (2005) fit this category.
256

Filmography

Becker, Jacques, dir. Touchez pas au grisbi. Del Duca Films, 1954. Film.

Bernhard, Jack, dir. Decoy. Pathe Pictures, 1946. Film.

Cocteau, Jean. Orphée. Films du Palais Royal, 1950. Film.

---. Night and the City. Twentieth Century Fox, 1950. Film.

---. Du Rififi chez les hommes. Pathé Consortium Cinema, 1955. Film.

Dassin, Jules, dir. The Naked City. Universal Pictures, 1948. Film.

Fuller, Samuel, dir. Forty Guns. Twentieth Century Fox, 1957. Film.

Garnett, Tay. The Postman Always Rings Twice. MGM, 1946. Film.

Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. A bout de souffle. Les Productions Georges de Beauregard, 1959.
Film.

---. Le Petit soldat. Les Productions Georges de Beauregard, 1961. Film.

---. Une femme est une femme. Rome Paris Films, 1961. Film.

---. Vivre sa vie. Les Films de la Pléiade, 1962. Film.

---. Bande à part. Anouchka Films.1964.

---. Pierrot le fou. Productions Georges de Beauregard, 1965. Film.

Hathaway, Henry. The House on 92
nd
Street. Prod. Louis de Rochemont. Twentieth
Century Fox, 1942. Film.

Huston, John, dir. The Maltese Falcon. Warner Brothers, 1941. Film.

Ingster, Borris, dir. Stranger on the Third Floor. RKO, 1940. Film.

Keighley, William, dir. The Street with no Name. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948. Film.

Lang, Fritz, dir. The Big Heat. Columbia Pictures Corportation, 1953. Film.

Laurent, Emmanuel, dir. Deux de la vague. Films à trois, 2009. Film.

257

Lewis, Joseph H., dir. Gun Crazy. United Artists, 1950. Film.

---. The Big Combo. Allied Artists Pictures, 1955. Film.

Malle, Louis, dir. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Nouvelles Éditions de Films,1958. Film.

---. Les Amants. Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1958. Film.

---. Le Feu follet. Nouvelles Éditions de Films, 1963. Film.

Maté, Rudolph, dir. D.O.A. United Pictures, 1950. Film.

Melville, Jean-Pierre, dir. Bob le flambeur. Organisation Générale Cinématographique,
1956.

Preminger, Otto, dir. Laura. Twentieth Century Fox, 1944. Film.

---. Fallen Angel. Twentieth Century Fox, 1945. Film.

---. Whirlpool. Twentieth Century Fox, 1949. Film.

---. Bonjour Tristesse. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1958. Film.

Ray, Nicholas, dir. They Live by Night. RKO, 1949. Film.

---. In a Lonely Place. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1950. Film.

---. Johnny Guitar, Republic Pictures, 1954. Film.

---. Rebel without a Cause. Warner Brothers, 1955. Film.

Robson, Mark, dir. The Harder they Fall. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1956. Film.

Rohmer, Eric, dir. Le Signe du lion. Aiym Films, 1959. Film.

Rosier, Jacques, dir. Adieu Philippine. Rome Paris Films, 1961. Film.

Rouch, Jean, dir. Les Maîtres fous. Les Films de la Pléiade, 1955. Film.

Siodmak, Robert, dir. The Killers. Universal Pictures, 1946. Film.

Touneur, Jacques. Out of the Past. RKO, 1947. Film.

Truffaut, François, dir. Les Quatre cents coups. Les Films du Carrosse, 1959. Film.

258

---. Tirez sur le pianiste. Les Films de la Pléiade, 1960. Film.

---. Jules et Jim. Les Films du Carrosse, 1962. Film.

Ulmer, G. Edgar, dir. Detour. PRC, 1959. Film.

Varda, Agnès, dir. Cléo de cinq à sept. Paris Rome Films, 1962. Film.

Vidor, Charles, dir. Gilda. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1946. Film.

Walsh, Raoul, dir. High Sierra. Warner Brothers, 1941. Film.

Welles, Orson, dir. The Lady from Shanghai. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1947. Film.

---. Touch of Evil. Universal Studios, 1958. Film.

Wilder, Billy, dir. Double Indemnity. Paramount Pictures, 1944.

---. Sunset Boulevard. Paramount Pictures, 1950.

259

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Creator Rowlins, James (author)

Core Title Deadly deviations, subversive cinema: the influence of Hollywood film noir on the French new wave

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program French

Publication Date 04/25/2012

Defense Date 02/23/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s France,Agnès Varda,Eric Rohmer,film noir,François Truffaut,French new wave,genre film theory,Hollywood,Jean Rouch,Jean-Luc Godard,Jean-Pierre Melville,Jules Dassin,Louis Malle,OAI-PMH Harvest,political aesthetics

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Pinkus, Karen (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email james.rowlins@gmail.com,rowlins@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-11413

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Legacy Identifier etd-RowlinsJam-636.pdf

Dmrecord 11413

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