Transgression and Money on Screen: 1970s and 1980s French Films on High Finance

Diane Gabrysiak

This article examines the taboo around money in cinema and how its representation in a set of mainstream 1970s and 1980s French films on high finance often, paradoxically, links the display of money to terrible consequences. Money shown on screen does not just represent an object of everyday life; rather, it is a potentially lethal tool, a step too far in the narrative, symbolizing all the ills of the characters and often determining the rest of the story. Despite the relative absence of finance as a topic in cinema, a few significant French films centre on the world of money and high finance, introducing the dimension of money as abstract capital used in large-scale transactions. They emphasize the opposition between the materiality and palpability of paper money, and the immateriality of transactions in the financial world. Le Sucre (Jacques Rouffio, 1978), L’Argent des autres (Christian de Challonges, 1978), La Banquière (Francis Girod, 1980), and Mille milliards de dollars (Henri Verneuil, 1982) all focus on the business of ‘currency about currency’.1 Here the value of money, since the abandonment of the gold-exchange standard in 1971, is not aligned with a higher value (gold) and only refers to itself. In these films about the invisibility of large-scale transactions, money visible on screen, usually as banknotes, often refers to impurity, illegality or a transgression of some kind. Showing money thus creates a gap, a separation, between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ characters — characters soiled by paper money made visible on screen and directly connected to them — and between one story that can potentially go anywhere 1. Judith Williamson, ‘“Up Where You Belong”: Hollywood Images of Big Business in the 1980s’, in Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture, ed. by John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 151–61 (p. 158). IJFrS 12 (2012) 66 GABRYSIAK

and another that ineluctably leads to death and destruction. Here, as in Georges Bataille’s study of transgression in art, transgression happens through representation itself.2 The present article offers an overview of both money and transgression through a consideration of their etymology. It also uses the work of Jean-Joseph Goux on the meanings and history of the word money, as both moneta — a tool of exchange, as well as the specific monetary unit of a country with no moral connotation — and pecunia, or money as hoarding, a notion loaded with moral connotations.3 A further aim is to understand how the selected films capture processes that govern the functioning of money in its own meta-world. The representation of money is examined in its different forms, with a focus on its negative connotations when shown on screen, where money itself is a sign of transgression. This in turn reinforces the conception that anything that has to do with finance and banking is rather mysterious and therefore morally neutral, in contrast with the materiality of paper money, seen as dirty and evil. High finance is the sum of all processes involved in the management and administration of money. It is a system that encompasses the making of investments as well as the provision of banking facilities, the circulation of money and the granting of credit, all within a given legal structure. Here money figures not only as a tool of exchange; it is also, indeed mainly, capital to be invested, through which both the notion of trust and the market continuously attempt to fix the volatile value of stocks, bonds, commodities and money itself. It usually appears as written or spoken numbers, in contrast to actual cash used in everyday life, and functions as a kind of pure abstract construct.4 The four films 2. See Diane Gabrysiak, ‘Georges Bataille: Art, origine et transgression dans les peintures de Lascaux’, Romanica Silesiana, 5 (2010), 108–21. 3. Jean-Joseph Goux, Frivolité de la valeur (Paris: Blusson, 2000), pp. 235–47, hereafter FV in the text. 4. See Laurence Duchêne and Pierre Zaoui, L’Abstraction matérielle: L’Argent au-delà de la morale et de l’économie (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), pp. 74–97, for a longer discussion of the history of money in France and Europe, and its immateriality in high finance, as well as La Monnaie souveraine, ed. by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998). TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 67

under discussion offer a particularly interesting view of this contrast, at a time when ‘finance […] has superseded manufacture as the supposed cutting edge of capitalism’.5 La Banquière, a period drama, tells the story of Emma Eckhert (Romy Schneider). The character was inspired by the Parisian banker Marthe Hanau, a controversial figure of the 1920s and 1930s, and a woman with a visionary approach to savings, investing and money in general.6 Emma creates her own savings bank and manages to increase interest rates dramatically for her ever-increasing number of mostly first-time small investors. The creator of a newspaper, La Défense du Franc, she falls prey to the Third Republic’s corrupt political system. The extent to which her profits are based on insider trading, as well as her construction of what would come to be called a Ponzi scheme, largely contribute to her fall. The comedy Le Sucre focuses on sugar speculation at the commodities exchange. Adrien Courtois (Jean Carmet), a retired tax inspector, seeks investment advice for his wife’s inheritance. By chance, he meets up with Renaud d’Homécourt de la Vibraye (Gérard Depardieu), also known as Raoul, a financial advisor and broker. Raoul works for an obscure brokerage company headed by the unscrupulous Karbaoui (Roger Hanin). Soon enough, the naive Adrien succumbs to Raoul and Karbaoui’s attractive proposals, charmed at the prospect of easy money available at seemingly low risk. He speculates all of his wife’s capital on sugar shares, going so far as to sign over blank orders. Unbeknownst to him, however, sugar prices have been artificially set to rise and inevitably at one point begin to collapse. Adrien loses everything. His investigation, in which he is helped by Raoul, reveals the underhand schemes of the commodities exchange as well as the collusion of banks, brokerage houses, influential speculators and the political establishment.

5. Williamson, ‘“Up Where You Belong”’, p. 158. 6. Dominique Desanti, Marthe Hanau: La Banquière des années folles (Paris: Fayard, 1968). 68 GABRYSIAK

On a different note, the drama L’Argent des autres relates the struggle of Henri Rainier (Jean-Louis Trintignant) against his former employer, Miremant (Michel Serrault), director of the Swiss family bank, Banque Miremant. During the course of his investigation, Rainier tries to understand the workings of an industry he previously thought was honest and transparent, only to discover that the reality is quite otherwise. Finally, in the thriller Mille milliards de dollars, the journalist Paul Kerjean looks at the world of high finance through the activities of the corporation Garson Texas International (GTI). The film’s title intimates the net worth of the twenty most important corporations in the world. As Kerjean digs into the company’s history and discovers its Nazi past, he finds his and his son’s lives threatened. He is soon able to unveil the criminal and financial manipulations — all for the sake of profit — of one of the world’s most powerful companies. These four films provide the most prominent examples fora discussion of money shown on screen, and of financial scandals as depicted in French cinema of the period. They are set in banks, at the stock market, at the commodities exchange, in stock-brokers’ and asset-managers’ offices, as well as in the offices of newspapers and magazines. They show board meetings as well as corporate events: the annual GTI convention, for example, in Mille milliards de dollars, and the corporate New Year’s Eve party on the train in La Banquière. They all deal in some way with investment and risk, interest rates, brokerage, venture capital, savings and dividends, and show financial expertise in operation, as well as the management of money — other people’s money. Shot under the presidencies of Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, these box-office successes were not, however, conceived as politically activist in tone.7 Dubbed ‘fictions de gauche’,8 they carried a light 7. Caroline Babe, ‘Henri Verneuil: “Je me contente de dénoncer”’, Le Matin, 10 February 1982; Francis Girod, ‘La Banquière: Saga of a Stock-Exchange Crash’, Cinéma français, 36 (1980), 4–9 (p. 6). 8. Expression coined by Serge Toubiana in Les Cahiers du cinéma, 275 (April 1977), 47–51, while reviewing Yves Boisset’s film Le Juge Fayard dit le shériff (1976). TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 69

message for a moderate left-wing audience at a time when power was in the hands of conservatives. Their point was not to construct an elaborate political statement: ‘Il ne s’agit plus de s’indigner contre tel régime totalitaire étranger, mais d’attaquer de front le système politique français, en s’inspirant des affaires contemporaines les plus brûlantes.’9 Denouncing scandals is central in L’Argent des autres, for example, with the director de Challonges’s denunciation of ‘gaullisme immobilier’ (MPCF 35), and in Le Sucre, which expresses and reinvigorates a traditional stance against the ‘powers of money’ in a corrupt world. This group of films functions in the mainstream cinema circuit with its large- scale budgets, high-profile stars and immediate wide release. Here, Rancière remarks, ‘ce qui reste c’est l’idée nue de la “machination” […] orchestrée d’en haut par une machine occulte et toute puissante’.10 Several of these films refer to scandals from the 1920s and 1930s and in this they mirror a trend in films on finance that emerged in France in the late 1920s, starting with Marcel Lherbier’s L’Argent (1928).11 They also confirm the fascination that scandals involving the financial and political spheres have always had in France, scandals that filmmakers have delved into to create mainstream sagas (MPCF 64–65). This fascination would explain why the main characters are in some way marginal or marginalized within the larger picture of the established financial industry: the unknown journalist Kerjean in Mille milliards de dollars; the small-town speculator Adrien and the middleman Raoul in Le Sucre; the obscure executive Rainier in L’Argent des autres and the transgressive woman banker, Emma, in La Banquière. By retaining a certain marginality throughout, these figures offer an almost pedagogical position, as Dehée suggests when discussing Mille millards (MPCF 205). The characters take us on a journey in order to understand and denounce the complex and ‘perverted’ world of finance, together

9. Yannick Dehée, Mythologies politiques du cinéma français 1960–2000 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), p. 34, hereafter MPCF in the text. 10. Jacques Rancière, ‘La Visite au peuple’, Cahiers du cinéma, 371–72 (1985), 106–11 (p. 107). 11. On the two waves of films about finance, see Jean-Michel Frodon, L’Âge moderne du cinéma français: De la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 591. 70 GABRYSIAK

with its secret and lucrative arrangements with the political sphere. It is important, then, to notice how money as finance sets the atmosphere and filters through virtually every aspect of the stories. This atmosphere establishes the films, from their opening, as being about money’s overwhelming significance as capital rather than a simple tool of exchange. La Banquière and Le Sucre both take place when high profits on the stock market seem just within reach. Their stories are about speculation, and rely on the stock market, the ‘capitalization market’, in other words the epicentre of finance and financial activities, as their central locus. The stock market is located above the two other markets since it is neither commercial exchange, governed by the principle of equivalence between money and commodities, nor the market where the relationship between capital and labour is played out (in the form of profit and wages), but is rather a market where ‘values’, thatare themselves shares of invested capital, are sold and purchased.12 The stock market is set against the market of commodities and the market of labour; it is situated ‘above’ all other commercial activities and, like a heartbeat, gives them their pulse. In La Banquière, all of Emma’s business tactics centre on the stock market as her prime means of amassing money and of raising the customary interest rates paid to her clients, in the face of a more conservative, less risk-taking traditional banking establishment. In a radio interview she comments on this power as a new phenomenon of the 1920s — ‘nous entrons dans une période où les profits en bourse vont dépasser toutes les prévisions’ —which allowed her the year before to offer a 9.32% interest rate while traditional banks were still only offering between 1% and 1.5%. Scenes that actually take place at the stock market emphasize its centrality as well as the euphoria born of high market performance, whether it is the frenzy of Moïse (Jacques Fabri) — with his horde of traders racing up the grand staircase of the Bourse de Paris — or ourselves, ushered by the camera into the precincts of the trading room, where we witness the wild uncontrollable rise of the shares of an oil company, Royale des

12. Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Values and Speculations: The Stock Exchange Paradigm’, Cultural Values, 1.2 (1997), 159–77 (p. 161). TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 71

pétroles, at a time when oil itself has become the ‘new gold’. In Le Sucre, the first scene at the stock exchange also illustrates the latter’s position in the film. Here, the superimposition of the broker Raoul in buy-sell frenzy, with a see-through chart in red illustrating exploding sugar prices, emphasizes the dominance of stock market performance and its central role in the film: sugar shares are fetching heretofore unheard- of selling prices and it is these high levels of trade that determine the film’s development. Each increase in share price is also superimposed on filmed images of some kind of meter. The size of the numbers in red grows in parallel with the cost per share. The film titles already indicate their concern with money and finance: banking in La Banquière, other people’s money in L’Argent des autres, and a vast sum in Mille milliards de dollars. From their first shots, the films are about money and fill the stories with an ambiance of speculation and investment, financial operations whose scale requires capital. The word ‘capital’ refers to accumulated wealth and, because of its Latin root capitalis — of or pertaining to the head — indicates a principle or source. This in turn connotes the idea of something essential, fundamental and pre-eminent, and for this reason capital figures as something central to the whole notion of business. Inthe opening credits of Mille milliards de dollars the ‘o’ in the word dollar has been replaced by a US silver dollar. These credits are interspersed with night-time long shots of stereotypical financial district high-rises that accentuate both their isolation in space and their dark and shady quality, and suggest a link with the remote and dark character of the large-scale financial operations that will unfold in the film. L’Argent des autres opens with long shots of a dazzlingly white, brightly lit hospital- like space functioning as an executive recruitment centre. This scene is immediately contrasted with long shots of the silent, dark corridors of the Banque Miremant that show an oppressive and almost frightening obscurity occasioned by a sudden electrical outage. Once again the darkness of the bank’s corridors suggests the darkness of the bank’s own financial operations. The opening sequence of Le Sucre is both an illustration of the title and an indication of what the film is about. In 72 GABRYSIAK

large block capital letters, the title flashes between shots of sugar beets, the raw material of white sugar production. In close-up, a crane seizes the beets and heaps them onto the growing pile, giving an impression of overwhelming abundance. From a low angle, beets seems to fall from the sky, and this is followed by an even more expansive panoramic shot of an enormous mass of them, ready for on-site transformation, all set in a stark semi-industrial environment. This scene of plenty is indeed what the film is about: sugar, a concrete, palpable commodity with high use-value, is contrasted in the rest of the film with an immaterial paper commodity-share of little use-value, to be bought and sold for money on the commodities exchange, and referring only remotely to sugar. The title itself suggests that ‘the sugar in the film is that commodity on paper that can spread fortunes or ruin on the stock market’.13 High finance, then, is central in setting up the atmosphere of these films, often beginning with the titles themselves, whether it is at the stock market, in banks or in other finance-related scenes. It works as an almost abstract representation of money. Money here consists of ever- circulating capital. These films, however, constantly play on the contrast between the vast and immaterial sums of high finance and the all-too- palpable, smaller but still very real sums of money actually shown. The distinction between monnaie and argent, established by Goux in Frivolité de la valeur,14 a specificity of the French language originating in Latin, permits a better understanding of two different dimensions of money: one that is seen as useful and one that is considered corrupt and corrupting, thus bringing to the fore the notion and the possibility of transgression. If this distinction is not so obvious in English — since the word money sometimes translates as monnaie and other times as argent (FV 236–37) — it can still be used to examine the moral connotations of money shown on screen. In Latin, moneta and pecunia correspond to two distinct but not mutually exclusive understandings of monnaie and 13. Gene Moskowitz, ‘Le Sucre’, Variety, 223.1 (1978), 28. 14. See also Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée, 1984), pp. 44–55; and Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Catégories de l’échange: Idéalité, symbolicité, réalité’, in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle I. L’Univers philosophique, ed. by André Jacob (Paris: PUF, 1989), pp. 229–33. TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 73

argent. Moneta is an exchange tool, a measure of value, and the act of exchanging itself. It was originally a cult title for the Roman Goddess Juno, and it is in her temple and under her sovereign authority that money was coined and minted. As Marc Shell underlines when discussing the etymology of money, Moneta, like denarius, nummus, and nomismos (Greek), carries the notions of payment in ready money, of coined money, and of counting and measuring value.15 Pecunia, on the other hand, is what belongs to someone and carries the idea of fantasy and treasure:

biens, fortune, avoirs, possessions, richesse, argent comptant, monnaie, argent, somme d’argent, jour du paiement; c’est aussi la déesse du gain et l’un des attributs de Jupiter. Et, significativement, le mot pecunia, venu de pecus, ‘bétail’, garde la trace sémantique d’un avoir ayant une valeur en soi, un bien réel et même vital, en dehors de sa valeur d’échange. (FV 237)

In other words, pecunia is money as one’s own. In this sense, ‘alors que “monnaie” [moneta] a un sens exclusivement objectif, qui n’implique aucun jugement psychologique ou moral, “argent” [pecunia] implique une relation personnelle avec la monnaie, qui devient une richesse’ (FV 237). Pecunia is money possessed or desired by someone, money as invested with a quality or tied to an owner who suffers or enjoys, loses or wins, accumulates or spends it. Pecunia retains an emotional character while moneta remains more neutral. That is why, when one talks of a sum, it will always be a ‘somme d’argent’; whereas, when the discussion is on the nature and structure of economic exchanges, one will talk of the ‘histoire de la monnaie’, ‘dévaluation de la monnaie’, ‘monnaie métallique’, ‘monnaie de papier’ or ‘monnaie fiduciaire’ (FV 236–37). In those cases, monnaie is the object, placed at a distance by theoretical reflection, and not explicitly connected to an owner directly affected by his relationship to argent. Monnaie here is

15. Marc Shell, ‘What is Truth? Lessing’s Numismatics and Heidegger’s Alchemy’, Modern Language Notes, 92.1 (1977), 549–70 (p. 563). See also Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 74 GABRYSIAK

the object of the vast, immaterial financial operations taking place in the films, while argent (pecunia) concerns the contrasting display of cash money attached to specific characters. This distinction clearly separates argent, the object of a moral judgment (argent propre, argent sale, argent roi), from monnaie, which concerns both the act of exchanging and money within the financial and economic systems. Transgression, in its relation to money, is directly linked to the idea of ‘la couleur de l’argent et la transparence de la monnaie’ (FV 239) — that is, when visible, shown in colour and in its materiality, argent (pecunia), which also, in French, carries with it the notion of a material substance, has negative connotations. Meanwhile, in simple transactions, ‘monnaie (et le mot est une pièce de monnaie) dit à la fois la chose monétaire en général et le reste d’une opération monétaire, par exemple la monnaie qu’on rend ou la “petite monnaie” (change en anglais)’.16 Monnaie thus retains some degree of neutrality. This notional distinction offers a useful approach to the contrast between immaterial and neutral finance on the one hand and, on the other, material and morally connoted money. Against the immateriality of finance as a background and theme running through all four films, money as banknotes, coins or even cheques and credit cards, is rarely shown as such. When it is shown it becomes meaningful and creates a sense of materiality in a world of stock market speculation where share transactions are a ‘sign of immateriality, difference, non-presence’.17 The stocks themselves, as ‘empty signifiers’, are contrasted with actual money.18 As David F. Bell remarks about Zola’s L’Argent, in the Stock Market, the distance between the sphere of material reality and that of financial operations increases dramatically. This tendency is further radicalized by the fact that buying and selling operations are possible in which the speculator never actually takes delivery of the shares in question, never actually possesses them.19 16. Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps I: La Fausse Monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991), p. 133. 17. Goux, ‘Values and Speculations’, p. 170. 18. Goux, ‘Values and Speculations’, p. 170. 19. David F. Bell, Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 131. TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 75

Banks and stock markets, large buildings and lavish offices, are all there to represent money, to refer to money indirectly rather than to show it concretely. Board meetings, trading scenes and other concrete images of money-making (receptions, parties, dinners, luxurious clothes and cars), as well as cash money itself, are featured in order to counterbalance the complexity and immateriality, the virtual character, of financial operations. There is not, however, any direct display of cash in the films that corresponds to the sums discussed or referred to. The filming of Emma inLa Banquière bribing Sir Charles (Alan Adair) with two wads of banknotes tossed inside his briefcase — recompense for his insider information concerning new oil findings in Aden — contrasts with the millions she makes speculating. In fact, most of her assets are not in ‘real’ money but in shares, options and buildings: a mixture, in other words, of material and virtual possessions. In cash, she keeps ‘only’ two million francs in her Boulogne country-house safe. None of these films show suitcases stuffed with banknotes or gold. The actual displays of cash, however, are striking and often filmed in close-up: bundles of banknotes in La Banquière and Le Sucre, or gold coins in the animation film-within-a-film in L’Argent des autres. The banknotes in Le Sucre, connected with the broker Karbaoui’s undeclared stock market profits, are initially laid out on a large table, some destined for the vault and others stuffed into large black trash bags to be closeted for safe keeping. In L’Argent des autres, money appears in a short animation film presented by the businessman Chevalier d’Aven (Claude Brasseur) to his major backers and investors to celebrate the first billion raised by the Héritage Foncier, a mutual fund of his creation for small investors. Money here is portrayed as an object with no particular use in itself except as regards its own potential reproduction and multiplication. Although set in the 1970s, after the end of the gold- exchange standard marking the inconvertibility of the US dollar and thus of all other currencies, this film, when it refers to potential profits, presents louis d’or, gold coins symbolic of another era and redolent of monetary security and stability. By this means the animated film- within-a-film emphasizes savings as producing profits in the form 76 GABRYSIAK

of ‘real’ money: that is, palpably heavy coins with an indisputable value deriving both from the past and the substance they are made of, accompanied by a song based on motifs typical of financial processes: ‘spéculation, inflation, devaluation’. As Goux remarks, ‘gold currency also has, traditionally, this feature of the material commodity, in that it carries the pledge of its value in itself, in its weight and substance’ (VS 170). The transactions involve large sums, impossible to carry around by hand in cash and also impalpable because they are the signs of a different, virtual economy, and of currencies which are slowly losing any reference to a ‘real’ object (gold). Money is not so much gold or cash to be held somewhere, as it is the capital of the contemporary economy, an abstract representation forever circulating, never hoarded and always at work. When money appears as printed on notes, and its value endorsed by the State, it signals that the story is taking a new turn for the worse, like a bad omen. The materiality of money introduces the idea of trespass, of erasing traces, since cash money, unlike the written records of transactions, leaves no trace of its origin. Beyond the actual amounts shown, money materialized in banknotes announces a break in the narrative, a turn in the expected course of events, a sign of illegality and simultaneously of transgression for the characters involved with it. The notion of transgression is useful in understanding the representation of money as a step into the forbidden, as the crossing of an invisible line. The word ‘transgression’, which first appeared in French in the Middle Ages, is characterized by the notion of overstepping, of crossing beyond a threshold, a limit, an interdiction. As Foucault argues in relation to Georges Bataille’s L’Érotisme, transgression is ‘un geste qui concerne la limite; c’est là, en cette minceur de la ligne, que se manifeste l’éclair de son passage’.20 Transgression happens with the ‘moment sacré de la figuration’,21 20. Michel Foucault, ‘Préface à la transgression (en hommage à Georges Bataille)’, Critique, 195–96 (1963); reprinted in Dits et écrits I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 233–45 (p. 236). 21. Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, in Œuvres Complètes, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–1988), IX (1979), 41. TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 77

in other words, here, through the very action of showing money in all its materiality on screen, rather than showing only numbers or discussing amounts. If Bataille situates the origin of art and the origin of transgression as simultaneous, it seems that in films on high finance, the representation of money and transgression emerge through the same gesture. In fact, the larger the sum displayed, the more evil are both the money and the protagonists connected with it. Throughout La Banquière, money seen is bad and signals bribery and illegality. This is made apparent by the louis d’or at the beginning of the film when Emma, still a teenager, receives a generous tip from one of her parents’ clients after she delivers a hat; by the banknote bribes; by the cheques or stock-options she gives to accommodating board members from the political sphere; and by the cheques paid to the gutter press. The regular display of cash money, always associated with Emma, invariably functions to signal her trespassing beyond the acceptable, the norm. She is going a step too far and the narrative will soon enough take a dramatic turn and showcase her spectacular downfall from the pinnacle of banking to tragic assassination, all orchestrated by the traditional banking establishment, unsullied because not associated with the display of cash money. In Le Sucre, the piles of banknotes in plain view also call attention to the illegality and risky character of the transactions Karbaoui is carrying out. From the moment money is first seen, it foreshadows sinister happenings. In a Paris restaurant, the broker Raoul gives an overstuffed envelope of 500-franc bills to one of his clients, a doctor. Before handing over the envelope, Raoul is sitting on it, as if the money was too ‘dirty’ and disreputable to be anywhere else. It is also a way to protect the money physically, as the loot could easily be stolen. He can neither put it in his pocket (the envelope is too big), nor simply leave it sitting on the table — one does not leave so much cash in plain view for everyone to see. Bewildered by the sheer amount of money (filmed in close-up), the happy speculator-doctor, through Raoul’s clever agency, decides to wager yet again all his profits on another potentially lucrative 78 GABRYSIAK

commodity: sugar. At this point it is clear by implication that the profits symbolized in the close-up of the envelope presage a comparable scale of financial loss. Here again, the showing of money signals the end of Raoul’s luck and, more seriously, the end of Karbaoui’s business. In both films, the banknotes and all the other displays of material money can be seen as pecunia, as a sum of money linked to an owner who treasures it. Money here is no longer only an instrument, it has been perverted in its use as neutral capital and is now associated with other uses. Transgression thus happens through the representation of money- argent as pecunia, far from the moneta-monnaie of exchanges. Pecunia can corrupt individuals (FV 236) who will then have to pay for their overstepping the mark, as opposed to moneta, or even immaterial money, which does not carry any particular moral connotation. While usually obvious, the distinction between moneta and pecunia in the context of transgression is sometimes fuzzy. In Mille milliards de dollars, for example, the president of GTI, Cornelius A. Woeagen, announces at his annual corporate meeting that he wants the usual birth and death dates on his grave, but also the last annual profit ‘gravé en lettres d’or’, to remind his successors of his achievement. Money here is a goal in itself, and the engraved numbers seemingly refer to both sides of Goux’s distinction between moneta and pecunia: it is monnaie insofar as it is a number that does not involve any psychological or moral judgment, but it is argent insofar as it ‘implique une relation personnelle avec la monnaie, qui devient une richesse’ (FV 236). Woeagen transforms a monetary sum that is not his own into his personal achievement and thus links it to himself and makes it his own. The neutrality of the corporation’s overall money (moneta) is blurred, and the amounts mentioned become personal treasure (pecunia), with what this notion implies of possessiveness, jealousy, corruption, greed and sometimes destruction and death for the characters who get to handle the treasure in question. There is no clear-cut reason as to why money, which is itself an object with no inner qualities, is endlessly shown to be a bad thing in La Banquière, Mille milliards de dollars, Le Sucre and L’Argent des TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 79

autres. There are, however, a few clues that help us better understand this pattern. As Georges Conchon, the scriptwriter of both Le Sucre and La Banquière, remarks, ‘c’est l’argent, chez nous, qui a la mauvaise odeur’.22 It is, however, ironic and paradoxical that almost every use of material money carries negative connotations in a film industry itself necessarily dependent on large amounts of it. This apparent contradiction can be explicitly present in the original idea for a film, as for example with L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1928), which in many ways prefigures the films discussed in this article:

Pour s’accrocher à un film, il faut un héros, qu’on l’aime ou qu’on le déteste, c’est au fond la même chose: Gance a eu Napoléon, il adorait Napoléon, il s’identifiait à lui, moi je devais trouver quelque chose du même genre, or je ne trouvais rien à adorer, mais par contre il y avait une chose que je détestais entre toutes, c’était l’argent [....]. C’était ça le personnage qui me stimulait prodigieusement.23

Paradoxically, while L’Argent continuously shows money to be evil, it stands out as a remarkably big-budget film costing between four and five million francs at the 24time, and the same can be said of Le Sucre, L’Argent des autres, La Banquière and Mille milliards de dollars. It seems that, in all these films, the idea of evil money goes back to a more literary criticism of money linked to the stock exchange, especially money ‘gagné trop rapidement’ (MPCF 66) from speculation, as in Zola’s L’Argent (and its adaptation by L’Herbier) and Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (an inspiration for Duvivier’s David Golder of 1930). According to Dehée, virulence against money acquires a new impetus in the 1970s following the oil crisis (MPCF 70) and also, I believe, following the end of the gold-exchange standard.

22. Georges Conchon, Le Sucre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1977), p. 20. 23. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, ‘Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier’, L’Avant-scène cinéma, 209 (1978), 30–42 (p. 36). 24. Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 513. 80 GABRYSIAK

In a world where the dollar was the de facto world currency, the dollar bill ‘as a promissory note became a tautological void’.25 Money had been officially turned into signs no longer convertible into gold. All money signs worldwide began to float one against the other without the support of the dollar and its gold-exchange standard. A bank reserve in dollars meant little more than the quotation for the dollar at a given moment in time: the dollar became, in other words, ‘an inconvertible currency with no intrinsic internal value whose extrinsic value with respect to other currencies was allowed to float in accordance with market forces’.26 Money-signs, losing their solid equivalence with gold, suddenly became even less material than they had ever been before. They had become empty signifiers, thus introducing a degree of anxiety and insecurity only experienced before with the loss of the gold standard, as expressed in Greed for example.27 This first anxiety was increased by the ever more immaterial nature of money, the growing predominance of cards and electronic transactions and the slow disappearance of banknotes. What Servet explains in reference to the introduction of the Euro and the elimination of national currencies can help in the understanding of these anxieties: ‘Le changement monétaire nominal a un effet imaginaire qui exprime et mobilise des craintes plus profondes tenant surtout à une perte d’identité et de repères.’28 The printing and issuing of currency is part of a series of state-produced images that together form what Dupré calls the ‘image populaire d’État’, a concept based on the model devised by Althusser of ‘appareils idéologiques d’état’.29 Among

25. Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 88–89. 26. Rotman, Signifying Nothing, p. 89. 27. On the display of gold as an expression of the insecurity generated by the loss of the gold standard, see Luc Dahan ‘Les Rapaces d’Erich von Stroheim’, Cinématographe, 26 (1977), 7–11 (p. 11). 28. Jean-Michel Servet, ‘Promesses et angoisses d’une transition monétaire’, L’Argent: Croyance, mesure, spéculation, ed. by Marcel Drach (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 259–72 (p. 263). 29. Michel Dupré ‘Figures de l’argent (copyright)’, La Voix du regard, 14 (2001), 23–30 (p. 23); Louis Althusser, ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État’, La Pensée, 151 (1970), 3–38 (p. 3). TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN 81

these images (including stamps, logos, etc.), the banknote is central both in its function as sign of value, as instrument of exchange and as symbol of the State’s sovereign authority. It is, like other instruments used by the State, part of an ‘obligation absolue d’enrôler des mémoires locales dans le fonds commun d’une culture nationale’.30 Banknotes and coins serve to define national identity and culture beyond regions, peoples and linguistic diversity: ‘la construction d’une mémoire collective apparaît comme une nécessité prioritaire, un contre-pouvoir aux inerties des différences, un contrepoids aux façons de vivre et de mourir’.31 Issued and created by national institutions and circulating throughout the country, banknotes and coins convey the common national and cultural experience, and inscribe themselves on local memory, providing a link with the national experience. The State also guarantees the value of its national currency, in this case the franc. The disappearance of the banknote, together with the franc’s floating value — paradoxically emphasized in the films under discussion by numerous shots of actual cash money — reduces the possibility for individuals to project themselves collectively in a national symbol, itself backed by gold, and creates an anxiety over what is perceived as a sure sign of stable value.32 While this phenomenon comes mostly from a loss of routine and habits in people’s payment for things and management of their own money,33 it also reveals a deeper shift in the meanings of the notion of ‘money’. Money as pecunia, as treasure, is here slowly being replaced by money as moneta, lacking a strong emotional dimension and detached from expressions often used to refer to it (such as ‘blé’ or ‘fric’). At the same time, immaterial transactions create a new relationship with money, in that payments or transfers become more personal, directly and forever attached to the person who realizes them. In the films discussed, the representation of money as transgression can be read as a clear sign of these anxieties, and of the negative 30. Pierre Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, in Les Lieux de mémoire I: La République, ed. by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 651–60 (p. 652). 31. Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, p. 652. 32. Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, p. 652. 33. Servet, ‘Promesses et angoisses d’une transition monétaire’, p. 267. 82 GABRYSIAK

connotations of a medium suddenly devoid of any kind of substance backing it. On the other hand, the more mysterious and unseen capital of finance retains its neutral significance. Yet these four films are themselves decidedly moralistic, sometimes naïvely so, in their insistence on how bad money is, or how bad people become when they possess it or lust after it. Far from being isolated examples, they show a pattern of negative representation of money that still prevails. As we have reached an age in which the scale of financial transactions is larger than ever, it is interesting to find that the representation of immaterial and obscure money transactions is still contrasted, in more recent mainstream French films, with the morally connoted representation of cash money.34 Birkbeck College, University of London

34. See for example Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2001) or Ma part du gâteau (Cedric Klapisch, 2011).