by Tony Judt
The diminishing standing of public authorities in matters of morality and personal relationships in no way supposed a decline in the role of the state in the cultural affairs of the nation. Quite the contrary. The broad Western European consensus of the age held that only the state had the resources to service the cultural needs of its citizens: left to themselves, individuals and communities would lack both means and initiative. It was the responsibility of a well-run public authority to deliver cultural nourishment no less than food, lodging and employment. In such matters Social and Christian Democrats thought alike, and both were heir to the great Victorian-era improvers, though with far greater resources to hand. The aesthetic revolt of the Sixties changed little in this respect: the new (‘counter-’) culture demanded and obtained the same funding as the old.
The 1950s and 1960s were the great age of the cultural subsidy. Back in 1947 the British Labour government added sixpence to local taxes to pay for local artistic initiatives—theatres, philharmonic societies, regional opera and the like: a prelude to the Arts Council of the 1960s, which spread public largesse across an unprecedented range of local and national festivals and institutions, as well as arts education. The financially strapped French Fourth Republic was less forthcoming, except to traditional, prestige venues for high culture—museums, the Paris Opéra, the Comédie Française—and the state-monopolized radio and television stations. But after De Gaulle returned to power and installed André Malraux as his Minister for Culture, the situation there was transformed.
The French state had long played the part of mécène. But Malraux conceived of his role in a wholly new way. Traditionally, the power and purse of the royal Court and its republican successors had been deployed to bring artists and art to Paris (or Versailles), sucking the rest of the country dry. Now the government would spend money to place performers and performances in the provinces. Museums, galleries, festivals and theatres began to sprout across provincial France. The best known of these, the Avignon summer festival under the direction of Jean Vilar, began in 1947; but it took flight in the course of the fifties and sixties when Vilar’s productions played a major part in the transformation and renewal of French theatre. Many of France’s best known actors—Jeanne Moreau, Maria Casarès, Gérard Philipe—worked in Avignon. It was there, as well as in such unlikely venues as Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, Rennes or Colmar, that the French artistic renaissance began.
Malraux’s encouragement of provincial cultural life depended of course on centralized initiative. Even Vilar’s own project was typically Parisian in its iconoclastic objectives: the point was not to bring culture to the regions but to break with the conventions of mainstream theatre—‘to bring life back into theatre, into collective art . . . to help it breath free again, released from cellars and drawing rooms: to reconcile architecture and dramatic poetry’—something that could be more easily accomplished away from Paris, but with central government funds and ministerial backing. In a genuinely decentralized country like the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, culture and the arts were a direct outgrowth of local policy and regional self-interest.
In Germany, as elsewhere in Western Europe, public spending on the arts expanded quite dramatically in the post-war decades. But because cultural and educational matters in West Germany fell under the authority of the Länder, there was considerable duplication of effort. Every Land and most significant towns and cities had an opera company, orchestra and concert halls, a dance company, subsidized theatre and arts groups. By one estimate there were 225 local theatres in West Germany by the time of reunification, their budget subsidized by an amount varying from 50-70 percent, either by Land or by city. As in France, this system had its roots in the past—in Germany’s case the pre-modern micro-principalities, duchies and ecclesiastical fiefs, many of which had maintained full-time court musicians and artists, and regularly commissioned new works.
The benefits were considerable. Despite the cultural self-doubt of post-Nazi West Germany, the country’s generously financed cultural institutions became a Mecca for artists of all kinds. The Stuttgart Ballet, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Cologne Opera and dozens of smaller institutions—the Mannheim National Theatre, the Staatstheater of Wiesbaden and so on—offered steady work (as well as unemployment benefits, medical coverage and pensions) to thousands of dancers, musicians, actors, choreographers, theatre technicians and office staff. Many of the dancers and musicians especially came from abroad, the US included. They, no less than the local audiences who paid subsidized rates to watch and hear them perform, benefited hugely from the flourishing European cultural scene.
Just as the 1960s never really happened in many places until the early seventies, so the stereotyped 1950s—staid, stuffy, sterile, stagnant—were largely mythical. In Look Back in Anger, John Osborne has Jimmy Porter revile the phoniness of post-war prosperity and self-satisfaction; and there is no doubt that the veneer of polite conformity that was not swept away until the end of the decade was intensely frustrating to many observers and especially the young.147 But in fact the 1950s saw much original work—a lot of it, in theatre, literature and cinema especially, of more enduring interest than what was to follow. What Western Europe had lost in power and political prestige it was now making up for in the arts. Indeed, the late fifties were something of an Indian summer for the ‘high’ arts in Europe. The circumstances were unusually propitious: ‘European quality’ (the scare quotes had yet to acquire the ironic deprecation of later decades) was being underwritten for the first time by large-scale public funding, but was not yet exposed to populist demands for ‘accessibility’, ‘accountability’ or ‘relevance’.
With the premiere in Paris’s Théâtre de Babylone of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, in March 1953, European theatre entered a golden age of modernism. Across the Channel, the English Stage Company at London’s Royal Court Theatre adopted Beckett and East Germany’s Berthold Brecht, as well as performing works by John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, all of whose plays married stylistic minimalism to aesthetic disdain in a technique that was often hard to place on the conventional political spectrum. Even mainstream British theatre became more adventurous. In the late fifties an unparalleled generation of English theatrical knights—Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave, Guinness—was joined by younger performers fresh from the universities (Cambridge for the most part) and a remarkable pool of innovative directors and producers including Peter Brook, Peter Hall and Jonathan Miller.
First proposed in 1946, Britain’s National Theatre was formally established in 1962 with Lawrence Olivier as its founding director and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as his adviser and assistant, though its permanent home on London’s South Bank was not opened until 1976. Together with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre—which was to become the leading sponsor and venue for new British drama—was a prime beneficiary of Arts Council munificence. That did not mean, it should be noted, that theatre became a more popular form of entertainment. On the contrary: ever since the decline of the music halls, theatre had been the purview of the middling sort—even when the subject matter was ostensibly proletarian. Playwrights might write about working-class life, but it was the middle class that came to watch.
Just as Beckett and his work migrated readily to Britain, so British theatre and its leading figures worked very comfortably abroad; after making his reputation in London productions of Shakespeare (most famously A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Peter Brook would establish himself permanently in Paris, straddling aesthetic and linguistic frontiers with ease. By the early 1960s it was becoming possible to speak of a ‘European’ theatre, or at least a theatre that took as its material controversial, contemporary European themes. Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, first performed in Germany in 1963 and shortly afterwards in Britain, attacked Pope Pius XII for his wartime failure to help the Jews; but in his next work, Soldiers (1967), Hochhuth turned on Winston Churchill for the wartime fire-bombing o
f German cities, and the play was initially banned in the UK.
It was in the 1950s, too, that the European arts were swept by a ‘new wave’ of writers and film directors whose break with narrative convention and attention to sex, youth, politics and alienation anticipated much of what the generation of the Sixties came to think of as its own achievement. The most influential west European novels of the Fifties—Alberto Moravia’s Il Conformista (1951), Albert Camus’s La Chute (The Fall), published in 1956, or Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959)—were all in various ways more original and certainly more courageous than anything that came later. Even Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1953) or Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), narcissistic accounts of post-adolescent self-absorption (coloured in Wilson’s case with more than a hint of authoritarian misanthropy), were original in their day. Written when their authors were respectively eighteen and twenty-four years of age, their subject matter—and their success—anticipated the ‘youth revolution’ of the sixties by a full decade.
Notwithstanding the decline in cinema attendance already noted, it was in the course of the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s that European films acquired a lasting reputation for artistry and originality. Indeed, there was probably a connection, as cinema in Western Europe graduated (or declined) from popular entertainment into high culture. Certainly the renaissance of European cinema was not driven by audience demand—had it been left to viewers, French cinema would have remained confined to the ‘quality’ costume dramas of the early fifties, German cinemas would have continued to show romantic ‘Heimat’ films set in the Black Forest, and British audiences would have thrived on a diet of war films and increasingly suggestive light comedy. In any case, European mass audiences continued to show a marked preference for American popular films.
Ironically, it was their own admiration for American films, particularly the sombre, unadorned film noir style of the late 1940s, which stimulated a revolution among a new cohort of French cinéastes. Despairing of the thematic clichés and rococo décor of their elders, a group of young Frenchmen—dubbed ‘The New Wave’ in 1958 by the French critic Pierre Billard—set out to re-invent film-making in France: first in theory, then in practice. The theoretical aspect, adumbrated in the new journal Cahiers du Cinéma, centred around the notion of the director as ‘auteur’: what these critics admired in Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, for example, or in the work of the Italian neo-realists, was their ‘autonomy’—the way they had managed to ‘sign’ their own films even when working within studios. For the same reason they championed—then neglected—the films of an earlier generation of French directors, notably Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir.
While all this suggested intuitive good taste, the theoretical penumbra in which it was packaged was of little interest—indeed often incomprehensible—beyond a very restricted circle. But the practice, at the hands of Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Agnès Varda and above all François Truffaut, changed the face of film. Between 1958 and 1965, French studios turned out an astonishing body of work. Malle directed Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Les Amants, both in 1958; Zazie dans le métro (1960); La Vie privée (1961) and Le Feu follet (1963). Godard directed À bout de souffle (1960), Une femme est une femme (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Alphaville (1965). Chabrol’s oeuvre from the same years includes Le Beau Serge (1958), À double tour (1959), Les bonnes femmes (1960) and L’Oeil du malin (1962).
Rivette’s more interesting work came a little later. Like Varda, best known in these years for Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) and Le Bonheur (1965), he often lapsed into self-indulgence; but this was never true of Eric Rohmer, the oldest of the group, later to become internationally famous for his elegiac ‘moral tales’, of which the first two, La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne, were both made in 1963. But it was the incomparable François Truffaut who would come to incarnate the style and impact of the New Wave. Renowned above all for a series of films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel (Truffaut’s autobiographical ‘hero’)—notably Les Quatre cents coups (1959), L’Amour à vingt ans (1962), and Baisers volés (1968)—Truffaut was not only the main theorist behind the revolution in French cinema, he was also by far its most consistently successful practitioner. Many of his individual films—Jules et Jim (1962), La Peau douce (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) or Le dernier Métro (1980)—are classics of the art.
It was one of the strengths of the best New Wave directors that, while they always looked upon their work as intellectual statements rather than diversionary entertainment (contributors to Cahiers du Cinéma frequently invoked their debts to what was still referred to as ‘existentialism’), their films entertained all the same (no-one ever said of Truffaut or Malle—as it was whispered of later work by Godard and Rivette—that viewing their films was like watching paint dry). And it was this combination of intellectual seriousness and visual accessibility that was so important for foreign emulators. As the response to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) suggests, French film had become the preferred vehicle for international moral debate.
Thus, when a group of 26 young German film directors gathered at Oberhausen in 1962 to proclaim ‘the collapse of the conventional German film’ and declared their intention to ‘create the new German feature film . . . free from the conventions of the established industry, from the control of special interest groups’, they openly acknowledged the influence of the French. Just as Jean-Luc Godard had eulogized Ingmar Bergman in a famous 1957 Cahiers du cinéma essay entitled “Bergmanorama”, in which he claimed that the Swedish ‘auteur’ was ‘the most original film-maker of the European cinema’, so Edgar Reitz and his colleagues in Germany, like young film directors all across western Europe and Latin America, took their cue from Godard and his friends.148
What Truffaut, Godard and their colleagues had admired in the black-and-white American films of their youth was a lack of ‘artifice’. What American and other observers envied in the French directors’ own riffs on American realism were their subtlety and intellectual sophistication: the uniquely French ability to invest small human exchanges with awe-inspiring cultural significance. In Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969) Jean-Louis—a provincial mathematician played by Jean-Louis Trintignant—spends a snow-bound night on the sofa at the home of Maud (Françoise Fabian), the seductively intelligent girlfriend of an acquaintance. A Catholic, Jean-Louis agonises over the ethical implications of the situation and whether or not he should/should not have slept with his host, occasionally pausing to swap moral reflections with a Communist colleague. Nothing happens and he goes home.
It is hard to imagine an American or even a British film director making such a film, much less getting it distributed. But to a new generation of Euro-American intellectuals, Rohmer’s film captured everything that was sophisticated, world-weary, witty, allusive, mature and European about French cinema. Contemporary Italian films, though quite widely distributed abroad, did not have the same impact. The more successful products played too self-consciously off the new image of Italy and Italians as rich and ‘sexy’—often built around the corporeal attributes of Sophia Loren or the comic roles assigned to Marcello Mastroianni as a disabused roué: e.g. in Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) or Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964).
Mastroianni had first played this role, but in an altogether more sombre key, in Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita (1960). Fellini himself had a loyal following in many of the same circles as Truffaut and Godard, notably following the appearance of 81⁄2 (1963) and Giulietta degli spiriti (1965). An older generation of gifted Italian directors had not yet left the scene—Vittorio De Sica directed I Sequestrati di Altona (1962), from Sartre’s play, co-directed Boccaccio ’70 (1962) with Fellini and would go on to direct Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini at the end of the decade—but their work never recaptured the political and aesthetic impact of t
he great neo-realist films of the 1940s with which De Sica above all was forever linked. More influential were men like Michelangelo Antonioni. In L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1962) and Il Desserto rosso (1964), all starring Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s hard-edged cinematography and unappealing, cynical, disabused characters anticipated the disaffectedand detached world of later sixties art, self-consciously captured by Antonioni himself in Blow Up (1966).
Italian cinema lacked the seductive intellectuality of French (or Swedish) films, but what they shared in abundance was style. It was this European style—a variable balance of artistic self-confidence, intellectual pretension and cultivated wit—that distinguished the continental European scene for foreign (especially American) observers. By the end of the 1950s western Europe had not merely recovered from depression and war; it was once again a magnet for aspiring sophisticates. New York had the money and perhaps, too, the modern art. But America was still, as it seemed even to many Americans, a little raw. Part of the attraction of John F. Kennedy, as candidate and as President, was the cultivated cosmopolitanism of his Washington entourage: ‘Camelot’. And Camelot, in turn, owed much to the European background and continental self-presentation of the President’s wife.
If Jacqueline Kennedy imported European style to the White House, this was hardly surprising. European ‘design’ in the later Fifties and Sixties flourished as never before, the imprimatur of status and quality. A European label—attached to a commodity, an idea or a person—ensured distinction, and thus a price premium. This development was actually quite recent. To be sure, ‘articles de Paris’ had a longstanding place in the luxury goods trade, dating at least to the late eighteenth century; and Swiss watches had been well regarded for many decades. But the notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before.