The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  In fact, Dreyer was offered a conventional script (based on Joseph Delteil’s book about Joan), but he put it aside and turned instead to the court records of her trial. So the Passion has no biographical arc (and no Arc), no triumphant battle scenes, and not the least flourish. Instead, it is a series of interrogations reminiscent of the Stations of the Cross (as Pauline Kael noted). It is a film about faith and its testing ordeal, with just gestures toward the fifteenth century. In France there are always elderly castles, but Dreyer chose to build a new Rouen, not true to period, not modern, but a concrete abstraction, offset by accurate costumes and the words uttered at the trial. The designs were by Jean Hugo and Hermann Warm (who had worked on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari).

  But that background was like a painter’s wash on a canvas. The real subject of the film are the faces, chosen with the utmost care, filmed in unusually large and confronting close-ups, often from slightly above or below to enhance the spiritual sensibility. The actors were not allowed makeup, and the photography (by Rudolph Maté) took advantage of the panchromatic black-and-white stock that had just become affordable and that permitted a new sense of carnal intimacy. The faces in Dreyer’s films are as alive and throbbing as cell life—that is where the passion lives. The Passion of Joan of Arc has another resource. The film is silent (though it has had many musical scores added), and the titles that give the liturgical dialogue are not just informational cutaways, but a level of inner voice, a screen imposed in the minds behind the faces. The Passion is one of the few silent pictures in which the lack of sound seems a positive and even a measure of modernity. Thus the film is “musical”—it is heard and felt—without any score being applied.

  Beyond that, it has Renée Jeanne Falconetti (credited as Maria Falconetti) as Joan, in a performance so absorbing of the audience and so exhausting it still holds a place among the greatest performances on film. She was from Corsica, a stage actress who made very few films, and nothing after Dreyer’s trial. Instead, she did light comedies on the stage. Like Louise Brooks, she came and went in less than two hours, and left burn marks. Dreyer filmed her remorselessly until he found what he wanted. But did he know what he was searching for until he saw it in her face? It is nowhere near enough to call this acting: it is submission, it is ordeal and transcendence—the process of making the film is akin to Joan’s cross-examination.

  Over the years, critics everywhere have continued to rank the film very highly. For much of that time the version we had was incomplete—until 1981, when a print of Dreyer’s cut was found in the closet of the janitor for a Norwegian mental institution. Is that a miracle—no matter that you don’t believe in such things? Or simply a sign of the fragility and chanciness with which great films, or bad ones, may survive? Which cupboard is so safe or dead we don’t need to look there? We are capitalists, gatherers, hoarders, collectors, and museum makers, but our story is of the things we have lost. Like Rosebud. Every time it looks, photography always hints, is this lovely face alive, “alive,” or dead yet? The question hangs over Falconetti, the woman who moves in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, and the next astonishing newcomer you will see on a screen.

  The Passion of Joan of Arc is the movie that Anna Karina’s Nana goes to see in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). She weeps at it, and knows it is about her. You will find the same pitiless conclusion—or rapture. Dreyer believed in God, but he trusted that movies are for people who know the screen is their mirror. Looking at Falconetti, you learn how to see. So it is a picture that ends blindness and reiterates that essential, primitive message the cinema cannot abandon: look at this.

  Then, only months later, in the same infinite Paris, look again—if you dare, if you can stand the idea of a cutthroat razor slicing through a woman’s patient eye, and if you can tolerate the more tumultuous violence of suggestion that lurks in a film called—with deliberate, insolent stupidity, and in a blithe boast of worthlessness—Un Chien Andalou. Could there be anything nastier, dirtier, or more rabid? “Beware of the dog,” wrote a young man on seeing the film. “It bites.” His name was Jean Vigo. But what is a film doing biting when so much of the movie world wants to assure us that a movie is just a sweet (wholesome) kiss?

  Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, in Spain, about a hundred kilometers from Zaragoza, in 1900. He was the child of a wealthy landowning family, part of the establishment in a country that led an eighteenth-century existence. He was too bored to be actively rebellious at first and he gazed on the institutions of his life—the Church, the brothel, the army, his family—with equal dismay. He had an ear for music, but his father discouraged that, so he thought he would study insects, or primitive life. With that aim, he set off for the University of Madrid, where he would meet a generation ready to explode. It included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. It was the moment of widespread European disillusion with order, and it was the era of movies playing their games on screens or on white sheets put up in student rooms. Buñuel watched in the early 1920s and soon discarded the suggestion that movie was a record of reality. It was a dream, a frenzy, a secret imprint of madness. The young man from the provinces and the past had glimpsed the future and the passion in disorder. While hardly knowing the word yet, he was on the brink of “surrealism.”

  Film was the vague guide to his dissolute life. He assisted Jean Epstein and other serious members of the French avant-garde. And so, one way or another, he and Dalí agreed to make a little movie. Dalí was the younger of the two, by four years, but he was more handsome and far more charismatic than the rather surly, morose Buñuel. He had an easier time with women. He painted already in his showy way. He was probably more sophisticated about dreams. I put it this way because auteurship has elected to determine that Buñuel made Un Chien Andalou—because Buñuel would become a “great” director (Los Olvidados, 1950, Viridiana, 1961, The Exterminating Angel, 1962, Belle de Jour, 1967), while Dalí is now treated as somewhere between a madman and a charlatan (as if those were not interesting and legitimate responses to our world). They wrote the script together, or in fierce competition. Buñuel seems to have shot the film, and I suspect he learned far more from it. But the attitude was vitally Dalí, too.

  The script is a fascinating document. Later on the boys would claim that they made Un Chien Andalou up as they went along, accepting every caprice and interruption. But it is actually a coherent, organized little picture—albeit one that thrives on the notion of connections beneath the surface of rationality or “plot.” They said they used their dreams, and maybe they did, but in a wakeful, clever way. All that made them brilliant and dangerous was the insistence that the film would be about sex and death and the awareness that those forces waited for mankind in the wings of a moth and the face of a girl in the wind.

  In a casual, absentminded way, Buñuel seems to have scrounged 25,000 pesetas from his mother, to match a dowry being given to his sister. And so they filmed, without skill or grace, but serenely confident that any image was beautiful and disturbing in that it was life excised from life and put up on a screen to be examined. They knew that no one watches a story so much as the process that comprehends story. It is the first modern film, and it still stings like a whip.

  This is the script:

  Once Upon a Time…

  A balcony. Night. A man is sharpening a razor by the balcony. The man looks through a window at the sky and sees…A light cloud passing across the face of the full moon. Then the head of a young woman with wide open eyes. The blade of the razor moves towards one of her eyes. The light cloud now moves across the face of the moon. The razor-blade slices the eye of the young woman, dividing it.

  This is the film:

  The man (Buñuel himself) is a suave Spanish thug such as you might expect to see in a brothel—not a customer, but “security.” He wears a striped shirt in a film full of stripes—things like that can mean more than reading all the books ever written on Bonaparte. He smokes a cigarette. Nearly everyone interesting in early movies smoked a c
igarette—and the steady withdrawal of smoking from our movies does coincide with their drop in quality. Showing a cigarette on-screen is beautiful and absurd; it is life and death—think of Bogart and Bacall lighting up together at the end of The Big Sleep (1946). It is also a great dream of sucking on fire (that may have sexual connotations). The man is menacing and adorable: this is 1929, and it is the future of cinema. The woman is very cute, and as patient and open-eyed as someone watching a movie. The slicing of the eyeball still sends some people running out of the dark, but in fact, Buñuel used a dead sheep with a bit of makeup. The edit that goes from the woman’s face to the sheep’s eye is as tidy and correct as the basis of sequential editing would like every film to be.

  What was the woman looking at before her eye was sliced? At the movie, at the screen, at its mirror? She was wanting to see herself. And in the seventeen minutes of Un Chien Andalou, there is an unsentimental parable of our search for sexual expression, with rapid intimations of infancy, homosexuality, lust, guilt, “happiness,” and mortification. (It would play perfectly with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.) It would be so much easier to dismiss if Un Chien Andalou were truly as crazy and pointless as the boys liked to say. But you can’t make a senseless film if anyone is watching. Watching seeks sense, and the pressing implication of the picture is to say, oh, please, don’t let’s peddle the old lies about good entertainment, movie stars, and a great evening out—this is a frenzy, bent on sex and violence, and we are growing older as we watch. Do you laugh or cry at that, or are you driven to murder? Art is not a recreation, a consolation, a pastime, a business (though it is all these things); it is the stone on which your knife is sharpened.

  The little movie played in Paris in the summer of 1929. Buñuel, at early shows, went behind the screen and tried to play records of tango music and Wagner’s Liebestod to “help” or place certain moments. Some people were horrified and angry. There were small demonstrations. The surrealists rallied to Buñuel and Dalí and claimed them for the movement. An aristocrat gave them more money (close to a million francs finally) to make L’ge d’Or, which is longer (sixty-three minutes) and better (I suppose), as if being better has anything to do with it. What these two films demonstrate is the cinema’s short and ready fuse for insult and offense (for those open to it) and the uncanny subterranean power of association—so much more valuable and delightful than the montage theories pounded out by the Soviets—that everything cuts together, that on the screen, all images and ideas are playing or resting (like data in a computer). For the first time, a film whispers to us—you could play this film with The Passion of Joan of Arc, not just in a double bill, but at the same time, overlapping images, a perpetual dissolve. Because the screen is a place where all films live anyway. And they are fucking each other all the time. Just think of a movie where Bogart’s Dixon Steele from In a Lonely Place (1950) is being pursued by his Philip Marlowe from The Big Sleep. No wonder he’s so worried; no wonder he’s so cocksure. No wonder he’s dead. But see how lifelike he is. The movies are about this great ontological riddle, and they are only modestly contingent on art, entertainment, or money.

  And Luis Buñuel? He made one other film after L’ge d’Or, Las Hurdes (1933), a rather plaintive, conventional documentary about distress in rural Spain, with only a few jokes. Then he stopped. He didn’t make another film for fourteen years, and then, in 1947 in Mexico, he made something called Gran Casino and then made his way toward his string of masterpieces culminating in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Here, finally, he had arrived at a title that was a perfect slogan for cinema. The human tragedy is not our diligent wars, our arbitrary floods and earthquakes, our ordinary outrages of cruelty (though they can be entertaining). It is that desire is sometimes obscured, and impeded.

  That was not all. The French screen of the early 1930s had another glory, and it came from the Jean Vigo who had warned about the Andalusian dog and its ability to bite, even if it left no teeth marks.

  Jean Vigo was born in Paris in 1905 (our heroes are getting younger) and he would be dead in 1934. He was a sickly, impoverished child, suffering from the lung trouble that would kill him. He also observed the fate of his father, a virulent leftist-anarchist known as Miguel Almereyda, who was imprisoned during the Great War on charges of conspiring with the Germans, and who was found in his cell strangled.

  Fighting to clear his father’s name, Vigo entered the Sorbonne and discovered movies. He was a camera assistant and then, with money given by his father-in-law, he began to make his own picture. As his own cameraman, he took on Boris Kaufman, the younger brother of Dziga Vertov, who had just arrived in France. They made an essay film, À Propos de Nice (1930), and then another, Taris (1931), about a champion swimmer. Next came Zéro de Conduite (1933), a forty-one-minute picture about life (or imprisonment) in a French school, filled with the anarchist loathing of institutions and in love with what film can do. There is an ecstatic slow-motion pillow fight.

  Vigo was dying—he was always dying—but he made one feature film, L’ Atalante (1934), the name of a barge that works the canals and rivers of northern France, lyrically harsh in Kaufman’s imagery. The young skipper (Jean Dasté) goes ashore and takes a wife (Dita Parlo). The barge moves on, but young love is soon troubled by the wife’s dismay at this unromantic life. She talks to the old man, Le père Jules (Michel Simon), who helps work the barge. She runs away. The skipper goes in search of her.

  This is a bare story about simple people—if such things exist. American cinema liked to glorify “simple” people. It was a way of reassuring everyone that a picture was for them. Think of Chaplin’s little man and then notice his huge ego. This is a keystone in the American lie, that our lives can be small. Vigo believed that every life is just a pale skin wrapped around a seething inner life, and he knew that film could uncover it. L’ Atalante is the first film dedicated to that principle made without concession to literary values or political orthodoxy, and free of the muddle that betrays Sunrise. Vigo died days after its opening—and the film was a commercial disaster. But regularly now it figures in the top tens of the greatest films ever made. Vigo was and remains the model French example of someone who will die for cinema. Zéro de Conduite informs Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups in scene after scene (as it does Lindsay Anderson’s If….). L’ Atalante’s sense of the hopeless necessity of love (the obscurity of desire) affected Godard. Jean-Paul Belmondo does a tribute to Simon in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965). Michel Simon’s performance as the barbaric, filthy, disgusting sailor lives forever, more endearing than movie presidents and the screen’s forlorn trail of Jesuses.

  But Simon’s old man had a brother, a man known only as Boudu, another river creature. And the Boudu we come to now is part of the best story in French film history.

  Renoir

  Almost the first memory for Jean Renoir was seeing himself in his father’s paintings and drawings. One may be enchanted by this family tie, for the pictures done by Auguste Renoir are as loaded with charm as they are heavy with paint. They are “impressionist masterpieces,” so the auction houses say, but pictures that have also been used as greeting cards such as grandparents may send to grandchildren. The faces look like ripe peaches. The paintings are steeped in nostalgia for perfect childhood. They do not ask awkward questions.

  Jean Renoir was born in Montmartre in 1894, the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, so he was looking at these pictures in the late 1890s without quite realizing he had posed for them. His father had noticed him, seen the opportunity of a picture, and taken it—he had snapped it. This was before the boy could read. And in the 1890s, photography began to be a mass practice. Now it affects all of us, nearly all the time. Parents snap their children with cell phones and hold the bright pixels up to the infants’ gaze, like a mobile to play with. “There you are!” they say, before the babies possess these words. There we are. It begins to become a basic form of identity, the level at which exist
ence registers. We are our image. Our reality has been split, and that may be as significant as the more famous bifurcation of the atom.

  This is not the customary way of approaching Jean Renoir. As a rule, he is called the sturdy bridge between French artistic traditions and movie modernism. Renoir is the medium’s great humanist—you can see that in his Octave in La Règle du Jeu, so gregarious, so ready to help everyone, a jolly enabler in life, yet a man who conceals his own sadness. That Renoir does exist, and you can meet him as the author of Renoir, My Father, the book he wrote about life with Auguste, and in The Notebooks of Captain Georges, a novel with the cool eye of Maupassant as well as the longing for affection from Renoir’s best films. But Octave is perceived and treated in La Règle less as a real person than as an ebullient actor-manager trying to keep the house party and the picture in place. Renoir is complicated, and the complexity rests in the way of seeing he achieved, the style that went with it. As well as what he saw. It has not yet been surpassed or improved upon.

  So he was the painter’s son who became one of his father’s subjects. What a happy household! Except that it is clear from the biographies that Auguste was what the auction houses would want him to be: a larger-than-life and obsessed painter of life and beauty who was like a lion on the veldt of family life, children, and house servants. What I mean by that is that if asked whether he would give up painting or the circumstances of his life (for example, family and home), he would have given up the latter, because he could always paint loneliness.