Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Among the systems of signs and symbols that Barthes drew attention to, a special place was reserved for film (Garbo, Eisenstein, Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar), and here there was an irony, an important one. For the first three decades after World War II, Hollywood was actually not as important as it is now: the most interesting creative innovations were going on elsewhere – and they were structural. Second, and herein lies another irony, the European film business, and the French film industry in particular, which was the most creative of all, was building the idea of the director (rather than the writer, or the actor or the cameraman) as author.

  Hollywood went through several changes after the war. Box-office earnings for 1946, the first full year of peace, were the highest in U.S. film history and, allowing for inflation, may be a record that still stands. But then Hollywood’s fortunes started to wane; attendances shrank steadily, so that in the decade between 1946 and 1957, 4,000 cinemas closed. One reason was changing lifestyles, with more people moving to the suburbs, and the arrival of television. There was a revival in the 1960s, as Hollywood adjusted to TV, but it was not long-lived, and between 1962 and 1969 five of the eight major studios changed hands, losing some $500 million (more than $4 billion now) in the process. Hollywood recovered throughout the 1970s, and a new generation of ‘movie brat’ directors led the industry forward. They owed a great deal to the idea of the film director as auteur, which matured in Europe.

  The idea itself had been around, of course, since the beginning of movies. But it was the French, in the immediate postwar period, who revived it and popularised it, publicising the battle between various critics as to who should take preeminence in being credited with the success of a film – the screenwriter or the director. In 1951 Jacques Doniol-Valcroze founded the monthly magazine Cahiers du cinéma, which followed the Une that films ‘belonged’ to their directors.62 Among the critics who aired their views in Cahiers were Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut. In a famous article Truffaut distinguished between ‘stager’ films, in which the director merely ‘stages’ a movie, written by a screenwriter, and proper auteurs, whom he identified as Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tati and Max Ophüls. This French emphasis on the auteur helped lead to the golden age of the art cinema, which occupied the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.

  Robert Bresson’s early postwar films had a religious, or spiritual, quality, but he turned pessimistic as he grew older, focusing on the everyday problems of young people.63 Une Femme douce (A gentle Woman, 1969) is an allegory: a film about a simple woman who commits suicide without explanation. Her grief-stricken husband recalls their life together, its ups and downs, his late realisation of how much he loves her. Don’t let life go by default, Bresson is saying, catch it before it’s too late. Le Diable probablement (The Devil Probably, 1977) is one of Bresson’s most minimal films. Again the main character commits suicide, but the ‘star’ of this film is Bresson’s technique, the mystery and unease with which he invests the film, and which cause the viewer to come away questioning his/her own life.

  The stumbling career of Jacques Tati bears some resemblance to that of his character Mr Hulot: he went bankrupt and lost control of his film prints.64 Tad’s films included Holiday (1949) and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), but his best known are Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967). Mr. Hulot returns to the screen in the earlier of the two, again played by Tati himself, an ungainly soul who staggers through life in his raincoat and umbrella. In this manner he happens upon the family of his sister and brother-in-law, whose house is full of gadgets. Tati wrings joke after joke from these so-called labour-saving devices, which in fact only delay the forward movement, and enjoyment, of life.65 Hulot forms a friendship with his nephew, Gerald, a sensitive boy who is quite out of sympathy with all that is going on around him. Tati’s innovativeness is shown in the unusual shots, where sometimes more than one gag is going on at the same time, and his clever staging. In one famous scene, Hulot’s in-laws walk back and forth in front of their round bedroom windows in such a way as to make us think that the house itself is rolling its eyes. Playtime (1967) was as innovative as anything Tati or Bresson had done. There is no main character in the film, and hardly any plot. Like Mon Oncle it is a satire on the shiny steel and gadgetry of the modern world. In a typical Tati scene, many visual elements are introduced, but they are not at all obvious – the viewer has to work at noticing them. But, once you learn to look, you see – and what Tati is seeing is the ordinary world around us, plotless, which we must incorporate into our own understanding. The parallel with Barthes, and Derrida, is intentional. It is also more fun.

  The new wave or ‘Left Bank’ directors in France all derived from the influence of Cahiers du cinéma, itself reflecting the youth culture that flourished as a result of the baby boom. There was also a maturing of film culture: beginning in the late 1950s, international film festivals, with the emphasis on the international, proliferated: San Francisco and London, in 1957; Moscow two years later; Adelaide and New York in 1963; Chicago and Panama in 1965; Brisbane a year after that; San Antonio, Texas, and Shiraz, Iran, in 1967. Cannes, the French mother of them all, had begun in 1939. Abandoned when Hitler invaded Poland, it was resumed in 1946.

  The new wave directors were characterised by their technical innovations brought about chiefly by lighter cameras which allowed greater variety in shots – more unusual close-ups, unexpected angles, long sequences from far away. But their main achievement was a new directness, a sense of immediacy that was almost documentary in its feel. This golden age was responsible for such classics as Les Quatre Cents Coups (Truffaut, 1959), Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), A bout de souffle (Godard, 1960), Zazie dans le métro (Louis Malle, 1960), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais, 1961), Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962), Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), La Peau douce (Truffaut, 1964), Bande à part (Godard, 1964), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Alphaville (Godard, 1965), Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966), Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (Godard, 1967), Ma nuit chez Maud (Eric Rohmer, 1967), La Nuit américaine (Truffaut, 1973, translated into English as Day for Night).66

  Most famous of the technical innovations was Truffaut’s ‘jump-cut,’ removing frames from the middle of sequences to create a jarring effect that indicated the passage of time (a short time in particular) but also emphasised a change in emotion. There was a widespread use of the freeze frame, most notably in the final scene of Les Quatre Cents Coups, where the boy, at the edge of the sea, turns to face the audience. This often left the ending of a film open in a way that, combined with the nervous quality introduced by the jump-cuts, sometimes caused these films to be labelled ‘existentialist’ or ‘deconstructionist,’ leaving the audience to make what it could of what the director had offered.67 The ideas of Sartre and the other existentialists certainly did influence the writers at Cahiers, as did la longue durée notions of Braudel, seen especially in Bresson’s work. In return, this free reading introduced by the nouvelle vague stimulated Roland Barthes’s celebrated thoughts about the death of the author.68

  The film guides say that Hiroshima mon amour is as important to film history as Citizen Kane. As with all great films, Hiroshima is a seamless combination of story and form. Based on a script by Marguerite Duras, the film explores a two-day love affair in Hiroshima between a married French actress and a married Japanese architect. With Hiroshima so closely associated with death, the woman cannot help but recall an earlier affair which she had with a young German soldier whom she had loved during the occupation of France, and who had been killed on the day her town was liberated. For loving the enemy she had been imprisoned in a cellar by her family, and ostracised. In Hiroshima she relives the pain at the same time that she loves the architect. The combination of tender, deliquescent lovemaking and brutal war footage matched her mood exactly.69

  Les Quatre Cents Coups is generally regarded as the best film ever made about youth. It
was the first of a series of five films, culminating in Love on the Run (1979). ‘The Four Hundred Blows’ (a French expression for getting up to no good, doing things to excess, derived from a more literal meaning as the most punishment anyone can bear) tells the story of Antoine Doinel at age twelve. Left alone by his parents, he gets into trouble, runs away, and is finally consigned to an observation centre for delinquents. Truffaut’s point is that Antoine is neither very bad nor very good, simply a child, swept this way and that by forces he doesn’t understand. The film is intended to show a freedom – geographical, intellectual, artistic – that the boy glimpses but only half realises is there before it is all swept away. Never really happy at school (we are shown others who are unthinkingly happy), the boy enters adulthood already tainted. The famous freeze-frame that ends the film is usually described as ambiguous, but Les Quatre Cents Coups is without doubt a sad film about what might have been.70

  A bout de souffle (Breathless) has been described as the film equivalent of Le Sacre du printemps or Ulysses; Godard’s first masterpiece, it changed everything in film. Ostensibly about the final days of a petty (but dangerous) criminal, who initiates a manhunt after he guns down a policeman, the film follows the movements of a man (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) who models himself on Bogart and the characters he has often seen in Hollywood B gangster movies.71 He meets and falls in love with an American student (Jean Seberg), whose limited French underlines his own circumscribed world and personality. Their very different views on life, discussed in the pauses between frantic action, gave the film a depth that sets it apart from the B movies it both reveres and derides. Michel Poiccard, the Belmondo character, knows only too well the failures of life that Antoine Doinel is just waking up to. It too is about what might have been.72

  L’Année dernière à Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais, scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a sort of nouveau roman on screen. It concerns the attempts by X to convince A that they met last year in Marienbad, a resort hotel, where she promised (or may have promised) to run away with him this year. We never know whether the earlier meeting ever took place, whether A is ambiguous because her husband is near, or even whether the ‘recollections’ of X are in fact premonitions set in the future. That this plot seems improbable when written down isn’t the point; the point is that Resnais, with the aid of some superb settings, beautifully shot, keeps the audience puzzled but interested all the way through. The most famous shot takes place in the huge formal garden, where the figures cast shallows but the towering bushes do not.73

  Jules et Jim is ‘a shrine to lovers who have known obsession and been destroyed by it,’ a story about two friends, writers, and the woman they meet, who first has a child by one of them and then falls in love with the other.74 Considered Truffaut’s masterpiece, it is also Jeanne Moreau’s triumph, playing Catherine. She is so convincing as the wilful third member of the friendship that when she drives into the Seine because Jules and Jim have not included her in a discussion of a Strindberg play, it seems entirely natural.

  Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her) was described by the critic James Pallot as ‘arguably the greatest film made by arguably the most important director to emerge since World War II.’75 The plot is not strong, and not especially original: it features a housewife who works part-time as a prostitute. It is a notoriously difficult film, dense with images, with endless references to Marx, Wittgenstein, Braudel, structuralism, all related to film, how we watch film, and – a theme underlying all Godard’s and Truffaut’s work – the place of film in how we lead our lives. Two or Three Things I Know about Her is also regarded as a ‘Barthian film,’ creating and reflecting on ‘mythologies’ of the world, using signs in old and new ways, to show how they influence our thought and behavior.76 This was an important ingredient of the French film renaissance, that it was willing to be associated with other areas of contemporary thought, that it saw itself as part of that collective activity: the fact that Godard’s masterpiece was so difficult meant that he put intellectual content first, entertainment value second. And that was the point. In the third quarter of the century, so far as film was concerned, traditional Hollywood values took a back seat.

  In 1980 Peter Brook’s Centre International de Créations Théâtricales, in

  Paris, was given the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It was no more than he deserved. In many ways, Brook’s relation to theatre was analogous to Boulez’s in music. Each was very much his own man, who ploughed his own creative furrow, very international in outlook, very experimental. In the CICT Brook brought a ‘research’ element to theatre, much as Boulez was doing at IRCAM in music.77

  Born in London in 1925, to parents of Russian descent, Brook left school at sixteen and, in wartime, worked briefly for the Crown Film Unit, before being persuaded by his parents that a university education would, after all, be desirable. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he began directing plays, after which he transferred to Birmingham Repertory Company (‘Birmingham Rep’). In an age before television, this was a very popular form of theatre, almost unknown now: new productions were mounted every two weeks or so, a mix of new plays and classics, so that repertory companies with a stable of familiar actors played an important part in intellectual life, especially in provincial cities outside London. When the Royal Shakespeare Company was formed in 1961 in Stratford-upon-Avon and Brook was invited to take part, he became much better known. At Birmingham he introduced Arthur Miller and Jean Anouilh to Britain, and coaxed classic Shakespearean performances out of John Gielgud (Measure for Measure) and Laurence Olivier (Titus Andronicus).78 But it was his sparse rendering of King Lear, with Paul Scofield in the title role, in 1962 that is generally regarded as the turning point in his career. Peter Hall, who helped found both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in Britain, asked Brook to join him, and Brook made it a condition of his employment that he could have ‘an independent unit of research.’

  Brook and his colleagues spent part of 1965 behind locked doors, and when they presented the fruits of their experiments to the public, they called their performances the ‘Theatre of Cruelty,’ as homage to Antonin Artaud.79 Cruelty was used in a special sense here: Brook himself once said, in his Manifesto for the Sixties, ‘We need to look to Shakespeare. Everything remarkable in Brecht, Beckett, Artaud is in Shakespeare. For an idea to stick, it is not enough to state it: it must be burnt into our memories. Hamlet is such an idea.’80

  The most celebrated production in the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season was Brook’s direction of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. The full title of the play explains the plot: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Weiss himself described the play as Marxist, but this was not especially important for Brook. Instead he concentrated on the intensity of experience that can be conveyed in theatre (one of Brook’s aims, as he admitted, was in helping the theatre to overcome the onslaught of television, which was the medium’s driving force in the middle years of the century). For Brook the greatest technique for adding intensity in the theatre is the use of verse, in particular Shakespeare’s verse, which helps actors, directors, and audience concentrate on what is important. But he realised that a twentieth-century technique was also needed, and for him the invention was Brecht’s, ‘what has been uncouthly labelled “alienation.” Alienation is the art of placing an action at a distance so that it can be judged objectively and so that it can be seen in relation to the world – or rather, worlds – around it.’ Marat/Sade showed Brook’s technique at work. When they began rehearsals, he asked the actors to improvise madness. This resulted in such cliché-ridden eye-rolling and frothing at the mouth that he took the company off to a mental hospital to see for themselves. ‘As a result, I received for the first time the true shocks that come from direct contact with the physically atrocious conditions of inmates in mental hospitals, in geri
atric wards, and, subsequently, in prisons – images of real life for which pictures on film are no substitute. Crime, madness, political violence were there, tapping on the window, pushing open the door. There is no way. It was not enough to remain in the second room, on the other side of the threshold. A different involvement was needed.’81

  It was after another Shakespearean success, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the RSC in 1970 (and after he had directed a number of productions in France), that Brook was offered the financial assistance he needed to set up the Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale (CIRT), which later became CICT. Brook’s aim in doing this was to move away from the constraints of the commercial theatre, which he regarded as a compromise on what he wanted to do.82 Brook attracted actors from all over the world, interested as he was not only in acting but in the production and reception of theatre and in ways in which research might add to the intensity of the experience.