Rebel Publisher
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Grove’s Evergreen paperback version of the screenplay, translated from the French by Richard Seaver, confirms this film’s role in changing the connotations of the term “literary” as a descriptor for the postwar cinematic aesthetic (as well as affirming the term “cinematic” as a descriptor for the New Novel). Like the Gallimard version from which it is derived, it achieves this reevaluation partly in its very publication, which, by including Duras’s script as well as a preface, synopsis, and a set of appendices all written by her, presumes that the textual materials antecedent to the film’s production are also important to its reception. However, the Evergreen version goes further than the Gallimard version by including seventy illustrations, selected by Robert Hughes, which foreground the collaborative dynamic between writer and director in ways that are unique to this genre. Unlike either the script or the film alone, Grove’s Hiroshima mon amour allows the reader to examine in detail the relations between the two.
These relations are illustrated through the innovative design and layout of these paperback books. In her synopsis, Duras emphasizes that the purpose of the film’s famous opening sequence juxtaposing images of the two lovers with images of the Hiroshima museum and parade is to show how “every gesture, every word, takes an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning,” and this accretion of metaphorical meaning, achieved in the film through montage, is spatially reduplicated and, in essence, disarticulated, in the filmscript through the creative juxtaposition of image and text.7 The images, in particular, are distributed in such a way that the page, instead of functioning to delimit or restrict, becomes a space to explore and exploit. Many of the images are unframed and off center, running flush with the edge of the page, and their positions relative to each other and the text vary from page to page, encouraging the reader to stop and contemplate the variety of meanings enabled by these juxtapositions. For example, in an early scene we see the images from the hospital and the museum, flush with the left margin of the verso page, sandwiching the image of the lovers embrace, flush with the right margin of the verso page. This visual framing of the embrace is in turn juxtaposed with the corresponding section of Duras’s screenplay on the recto page:
(The hospital, hallways, stairs, patients, the camera coldly objective … Then we come back to the hand gripping—and not letting go of—the darker shoulder.)
he: You did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
(Then the woman’s voice becomes more … more impersonal. Shots of the museum … ) 8
The typographical interplay between the descriptions of the shots, rendered parenthetically in italics, and the dialogue, set off by uppercase speech prefixes, is mirrored in the juxtaposition of the images on the facing page (Figure 37). This series of juxtapositions encourages the reader to understand the literary text as antecedent to the film, to see Duras’s words, which unfold with a certain poetic informality, as a set of instructions for the organization of Resnais’s shots. They also allow the reader to appreciate books as supplemental to films. This supplementation became a crucial component in the emerging academic study of film, which presumes that reading film criticism and theory in book form is necessary for a full appreciation of cinematic form and meaning.
Similar possibilities are presented by the film script for Last Year at Marienbad, this time with more direct implications for the relation between the New Novel’s predilection for description over narration and the New Wave’s preoccupation with tracking shots and depth of field. Roland Barthes had already established, in a foundational essay originally published in Critique in 1954, that “Robbe-Grillet requires only one mode of perception: the sense of sight.”9 Grove’s Evergreen Original version of Last Year at Marienbad provides a privileged venue through which the reader can evaluate such a claim. Translated by Richard Howard from the version published by Éditions de Minuit, Last Year at Marienbad features more than 140 illustrations, again selected by Hughes. The very first image, a photograph of Robbe-Grillet gazing through an open set of venetian blinds, was also used for the cover of the Black Cat repackaging of the two novels (Figures 38 and 39).
Figure 37. Layout of text and images in Hiroshima mon amour (1961, pp. 16–17).
These initial images of screenwriter and director confirm the degree to which Last Year at Marienbad was almost instantly canonized as a classic of collaboration. In the juxtaposition of Robbe-Grillet’s vaguely menacing gaze, directed outward toward the reader through the blinds that divide his face, and Resnais’s more relaxed pose, looking off to the left, we also see some of the tensions inherent in this collaboration, tensions Robbe-Grillet’s claim obscures in the introduction that follows these images: “Alain Resnais and I were able to collaborate only because we saw the film in the same way from the start.”10 As François Thomas affirms in his contribution to the Criterion Collection’s booklet, this introductory essay perpetuated a myth of “perfect harmony” that is belied by Resnais’s contemporaneous claim that, as Thomas notes, “Robbe-Grillet’s writing was so precise that a robot could have directed the film by itself.”11 Grove’s screenplay allows the reader to see how obsessively detailed Robbe-Grillet’s writing was and how this descriptive detail, a hallmark of Robbe-Grillet’s novelistic method as well, translates so effectively into the long tracking shots that characterize the film.
Figure 38. Images of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais in the
Evergreen Original edition of Last Year at Marienbad (1962, p. 6).
Figure 39. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Black Cat edition
of Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet (1965).
As with Hiroshima mon amour, the illustrations Hughes selected for Last Year at Marienbad are creatively positioned within the space of the pages, provoking a fruitful engagement between image and text that is possible only in this hybrid form. Thus, in its rendering of the long opening shot of the immense chateau’s interior, we see Robbe-Grillet’s precise instructions for camera movement and shot length, interspersed with X’s lengthy description of the “silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings,” in turn framed by images correlated to this descriptive detail running along the bottom of both pages and in the upper third of the recto page, flush with the edges of each page.12 The arrangement of the images encourages an analogy between the interior of the chateau as rendered by the camera and its description as rendered by the text. The degree to which the obsessive descriptive detail of Robbe-Grillet’s novels can be correlated to the camera’s perspective as thematized in the formal innovations of postwar cinema, to which Robbe-Grillet was increasingly drawn in the 1960s, becomes abundantly evident in this book, which provides a rare opportunity to perceive the two in direct juxtaposition (Figure 40). This correlation is reduplicated and reinforced by the degree to which X’s opening narration, and indeed most of his dialogue, is itself obsessively descriptive and reads like instructions for the motion of the camera. Both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet claimed, in response to the many perplexed queries they received in the wake of the film’s release, that the meaning of the film requires audience participation; but the book confirms that the film’s form was almost tyrannically determined by Robbe-Grillet’s meticulously detailed script. By making Robbe-Grillet’s extensive instructions available to the reader, the Evergreen Original version of Last Year at Marienbad reveals how his innovations in narrative form achieve a certain apotheosis when they are translated into a cinematic language, but it also serves to remind the reader of the written text as, paradoxically, a verbal description that precedes the existence of the image it details.
Figure 40. Layout of text and images in the Evergreen Original edition of Last Year at Marienbad (1962, pp. 18–19).
Film
Though they were able to obtain scripts from Duras and Robbe-Grillet, as well as Pinter and Ionesco, in the end Evergreen Theater, Rosset’s second foray into fi
lm production, made a single film: Samuel Beckett’s short Film, for which the author made his only visit to the United States in the summer of 1964. While generally considered a minor work in the Beckett canon, Film was well received on the festival circuit, garnering the Film Critics Prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the 1966 Tours Festival, and the Special Prize at the 1966 Oberhausen Festival.
Although Film lacks any dialogue—it features the silent film star Buster Keaton in his last role—the Evergreen Original, issued in 1969, nevertheless capitalizes on Beckett’s by-then uncontested stature as a literary auteur and provides a behind-the-scenes account of the film’s production that further builds on the concept of the necessary supplement developed in Grove’s earlier filmscripts. Beckett’s authorship and authority are emphatically emphasized by the design of the text. Kuhlman’s front cover features a pink-tinted photograph of Beckett gazing up through a strip of film (Figure 41), and the first illustration, opposite the copyright page, is of him sitting in the tiny room in which most of the film’s action takes place. The text includes his complete script, which is not as detailed as Robbe-Grillet’s for Last Year at Marienbad but is meticulous in its technical details (despite Beckett’s lack of experience in filmmaking) and includes instructions for portions of the film omitted from the final cut. The lavishly illustrated script, which, like Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, creatively exploits the space of the page to juxtapose word and image, is followed by Beckett’s production notes, featuring a variety of technical diagrams specifying lines of sight, camera angles, and the disposition of figures within the room. These extensive technical details both emphasize Beckett as the auteur behind Film and establish his instructions as necessary for an understanding of its meaning. In particular, his specification of an “angle of immunity” beyond which the camera cannot move until the final scene provides a technical clue to the film’s meaning, which can only be inferred from watching it.13
Beckett’s notes are followed by an essay by Alan Schneider—already Beckett’s go-to director in the United States—“On Directing Film,” specifying his objective of achieving a “faithful translation of [Beckett’s] intention,” explaining why the initial exterior shots had to be omitted, and providing a detailed behind-the-scenes account of the film’s production.14 Schneider’s essay, which consistently refers to Beckett as “Sam,” is also illustrated with production shots that show Schneider, Beckett, and Keaton, as well as Rosset and Seaver, on the set. The final shot is of Keaton and Beckett standing side by side in the austere room, gazing at each other somewhat skeptically, Keaton with cigar in hand (Figure 42). These behind-the-scenes shots, along with the essay, illustrate the collaborative nature of filmmaking while simultaneously rendering it as secondary to the solitary act of writing. Placed as they are after Beckett’s scenario and notes, and grounded in Schneider’s stated philosophy of fidelity to Beckett’s intentions (according to Rosset, Schneider “was obsessed by trying to do precisely what Beckett wanted him to do”15), these images render the making of Film as a story in itself, one that illustrates the subordination of collective endeavor to singular intention. If, in the many festival screenings of Film, Keaton frequently displaced Beckett as the center of attention, the book of Film corrects this misperception, firmly establishing Beckett as the literary auteur behind the cinematic product.
Figure 41. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen Original
edition of Film (1969). (Photograph by Steve Schapiro)
Figure 42. Behind-the-scenes shot of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett
in the room set in Film (1969, p. 92). (Photograph by Frank Serjack)
From Seeing to Studying
In the same year that Grove published the filmscript for Film, Robert Hughes became general editor of a short-lived Black Cat series of film books. Each edition features a prefatory “note” that Hughes adapted to the specific film, and each note is preceded by an epigraph from Jean-Luc Godard: “The most fantastic thing you could film is people reading. I don’t see why no one’s done it … The movie you’d make would be a lot more interesting than most of them are.”16 While the quote recommends filming people as they read, the book promotes people reading film, with Godard providing the cultural imprimatur legitimating the intellectual seriousness of the endeavor.
Hughes’s groundbreaking series not only provided books about films but also revealed the degree to which the academic study of film would be predicated on a preference for the term “reading” over “viewing.” His note opens by clarifying how the historically specific need for the hybrid genre he’s producing illuminates this shift: “Making books from movies (apart from novelizations) is a relatively recent enterprise. But until everyone has inexpensive access to prints of his favorite movies and can ‘read’ them whenever he likes, this is one means toward understanding a particular film.”17 Not only does Hughes affirm that one cannot fully understand an avantgarde film through a single viewing at a theater but he further indicates that the form of attention required for such an understanding is analogous to reading a book.
However, these books are significantly different from the Evergreen Originals for Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, which had fairly coherent and detailed scripts written by established novelists. For these books, “the principal text consists of a meticulous description of the significant action and a translation of the actual dialogue of the completed film rather than that of the ‘final’ (or original) shooting script, which often varies greatly from the final version of the film.”18 Furthermore, though Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and Beckett were all cinematic amateurs with little knowledge of the vocabulary of filmmaking, by 1969 the directors of these films were internationally recognized as masters and innovators of cinematic form, and Hughes in these books introduces a set of technical terms for camera position and movement, as well as specifies shot length in seconds. Finally, for each of these books Hughes hired a consulting editor—David Denby for The 400 Blows; Donald Richie for Rashomon; Pierre Billard for Masculin Féminin; and Georg Amberg for L’avventura—who figure as “experts” on the specific film. These consulting editors, most of whom worked in the emergent American field of cinema studies, selected the numerous frame enlargements and extensive supplemental materials that they saw as necessary to a full understanding and appreciation of each film.
The materials appended to The 400 Blows provide a scholarly introduction to the Cahiers du cinéma that was not only central to the genesis of this film and the career of its director but also to the methods and vocabulary of American film studies in its formative period. The script is followed by “A Collage from Cahiers du cinéma,” the first item of which is the journal’s obituary to André Bazin, followed by contributions from (and an interview with) Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, interspersed with reproductions of the journal’s covers from the late 1950s. This section is followed by two additional interviews with Truffaut and a selection of American criticism. Both the order and the substance of the essays indicate the degree to which the American critics writing for Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly were taking their cues from Cahiers du cinéma, translations from which the Evergreen Review had exclusive rights during this period.
The form and content of these film books also illuminate how the auteurism associated with these directors altered literary models of creation and reception. The script for Masculin Féminin is followed by the two Maupassant short stories that Godard had been commissioned to adapt, but these stories are included only to affirm the degree to which Godard deviated from them, as illustrated by the selection of documents that follow: the first a contract between Argos Films and Robert Esmenard of the National Literary Fund, which owned the rights to Maupassant’s stories, specifying that “the name of the author must always be projected on the screen and incorporated in the publicity in normal and visible lettering”; and the last a letter from Esmenard conceding that the film dif
fers from the two stories to the extent that “no allusion to Maupassant should be made in the screen credits for Masculin Féminin.”19 This passing of the proprietary torch is followed by selections from Godard’s “Script” (the scare quotes are in the text), the “working text” that he keeps in “a large sketch book with a blue cover.”20 This meticulous attention to Godard’s written guidelines is further elaborated in the following accounts of Godard’s directing methods, which specify that “the only thing the rest of the crew has as a guide, as a sort of work plan, is a thin notebook of a dozen pages or so, divided into what they call ‘work sequences’ … but when the real shooting starts, Jean-Luc Godard gets out his big sketchbook (an 8” × 12” spiral notebook with a blue cover).”21
The last section, “Criticism: France, England, and the United States,” opens with a review by Georges Sadoul placing the film in its “proper literary category”: “It is not theater, it is not a novel … ; like Diderot’s work, it is much less a ‘satirical’ tale than an essay”;22 and it closes with Pauline Kael’s review for the New Republic, which comments on the degree to which the characters in the film are Americanized in a way that makes them part of “an international society; they have the beauty of youth which can endow Pop with poetry.”23 There are thus two narrative arcs that structure the paratextual materials following the script of Masculin Féminin: one running from its literary antecedents to its cinematic results, and one running from its French to American critical reception. The two arcs form a larger story of what one might call, borrowing from Pascale Casanova, the littérisation of avantgarde cinema, which was a necessary precondition to its academic canonization. This Parisian littérisation is both illustrated and exemplified by these film books, a hybrid and transitional genre that provides a unique insight into the process whereby films were presented as texts that needed to be read both closely and repeatedly and whose difficulty requires reading other supplemental materials to be fully understood.