Montage in the Films of Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1947-1957

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Historical Assemblages: Montage in the Films of Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1947-1957

Ivan Čerečina

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sydney 2019

Thesis completed under the supervision of Dr. Susan Potter Department of Art History

This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.

Ivan Čerečina

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...... 11

AN AIR OF RENEWAL: DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING IN POST-WAR FRANCE ...... 12 MONTAGE PERMITTED: AN AESTHETIC OF MONTAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-WAR FRENCH CINEMA ...... 28 MONTAGE AS HISTORICAL METHOD: BENJAMIN’S HISTORICAL LEGIBILITY ...... 50 OUTLINE ...... 60 CHAPTER 1. “LES NERFS D’UNE ÉPOQUE”: NICOLE VEDRÈS AND THE RENEWAL OF THE FILM DE MONTAGE TRADITION ...... 68

THE PRE-WAR FILM DE MONTAGE TRADITION: THE SOVIET SCHOOL AND FRENCH MILITANT FILMMAKING ..... 74 ALTERNATIVE METHODS: MONTAGE ACCORDING TO JACQUES BRUNIUS AND ANDRÉ BAZIN ...... 87 MONTAGE ON PAPER: VEDRÈS’ IMAGES DU CINÉMA FRANÇAIS ...... 97 PARIS 1900 TAKES SHAPE: ORIGINS AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENTS ...... 106 FROM REFUSE TO RÉCIT: REVELATORY MONTAGE POETICS IN PARIS 1900 ...... 123 PARIS 1900 AND ITS AFTERLIFE ...... 138 CHAPTER 2. CRITICAL FUTURES: MONTAGE WITH AND AGAINST THE ARCHIVE ...... 140

AFTER HIROSHIMA: LA VIE COMMENCE DEMAIN ...... 143 FUTURE STRUGGLES: LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI ...... 165 MEMORIAL STAKES: NUIT ET BROUILLARD ...... 186 CONCLUSION ...... 210 CHAPTER 3. CULTURAL RE-ANIMATION: FRAGMENTATION AND RE-ASSEMBLAGE IN ALAIN RESNAIS’ VAN GOGH AND GUERNICA ...... 211

MONTAGE AS METHOD: MALRAUX AND REPRODUCIBILITY ...... 215 MONTAGE IN POST-WAR POPULAR EDUCATION: THE RE-ANIMATION OF CULTURE ...... 227 PIECING TOGETHER MYTH IN VAN GOGH ...... 241 A HISTORICAL RUPTURE: FRAGMENTATION AND DISCONTINUITY IN GUERNICA ...... 254 CONCLUSION ...... 274 CHAPTER 4. TIME AND PLACE: MONTAGE IN EARLY MARKER ...... 278

MARKER AS WRITER AND EDITOR, AND FIRST CINEMATOGRAPHIC VENTURES, 1946-1954 ...... 281 MONTAGE ON PAPER: MARKER AS EDITOR AT LES EDITIONS DU SEUIL, 1954-1958 ...... 293 PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE: MARKER’S EARLY TRAVEL FILMS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COLD WAR ...... 308 “THE PRICE OF THE PICTURESQUE”: DIMANCHE À PEKIN ...... 314 “IN THE LAND OF THE DIALECTIC”: LETTRE DE SIBÉRIE ...... 330 CONCLUSION ...... 347 AFTERIMAGES: LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD ...... 350 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 359 FILMOGRAPHY ...... 382

CENTRAL CORPUS OF FILMS, IN ORDER OF RELEASE: ...... 382 OTHER FILMS CITED: ...... 382 APPENDIX 1. CITATIONS IN THEIR ORIGINAL LANGUAGE ...... 387

INTRODUCTION ...... 387 CHAPTER 1 ...... 388 CHAPTER 2 ...... 390 CHAPTER 3 ...... 392 CHAPTER 4 ...... 394 APPENDIX 2. MONTAGE IN POST-WAR FRENCH FILM: A BIBLIO-FILMOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ...... 395

TABLE OF FIGURES

FIGURE I: ADAMO, THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE IN THE CONVENTION ON 27 JULY 1794...... 37 FIGURE II: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM GEORGES BATAILLE'S DOCUMENTS JOURNAL...... 46 FIGURE III: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM MARKER'S COLLAGE FOLDERS...... 46 FIGURE IV: DOK JOURNAL COVER DESIGNED BY CHRIS MARKER, PUBLISHED IN 1950...... 47 FIGURE V: EL LISSITSKY, KURT SCHWITTERS, 1924...... 47 FIGURE 1.1: POSTER FOR PARIS 1900...... 71 FIGURE 1.2: CLASS DIVIDES IN ESFIR SHUB’S THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY (1927)...... 80 FIGURE 1.3: FINAL IMAGES OF GERMAIN DULAC’S LE CINÉMA AU SERVICE DE L’HISTOIRE ...... 83 FIGURE 1.4: ARCHIVAL PEDAGOGY: CONSECUTIVE IMAGES IN LA VIE EST À NOUS ...... 85 FIGURE 1.5: JACQUES BRUNIUS, COLLAGE EN NEUF EPISODES (COLLAGE, 1942)...... 90 FIGURE 1.6: MONTAGE OF TEXT AND IMAGE IN IMAGES DU CINÉMA...... 100 FIGURE 1.7: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM IMAGES DU CINÉMA FRANÇAIS...... 104 FIGURE 1.8: OPENING SHOT OF PARIS 1900 AND CHÉRONNET'S PHOTO ALBUM...... 108 FIGURE 1.9: A SEQUENCE ON WOMEN’S FASHION AND WORK IN PARIS 1900...... 116 FIGURE 1.10: ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE BOOKENDS AN EARLY COMEDIC SKETCH ...... 119 FIGURE 1.11: FOUR IMAGES FROM THE CRUCIAL TURNING POINT OF PARIS 1900...... 131 FIGURE 1.12: SOLDIERS LEAVING FOR THE FRONT AT THE END OF PARIS 1900...... 135 FIGURE 1.13: A TRAIN DEPARTING TO AN EXTERMINATION CAMP...... 136 FIGURE 2.1: A SHOT FROM LA VIE COMMENCE DEMAIN ...... 147 FIGURE 2.2: ORIGINAL CONTRACT FOR LA VIE COMMENCE DEMAIN ...... 148 FIGURE 2.3: ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE IN LA VIE COMMENCE DEMAIN’S FIRST INTERVIEW SEQUENCE ...... 152 FIGURE 2.4: ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF DIALOGUE BETWEEN AUMONT AND SARTRE ...... 153 FIGURE 2.5: A MONTAGE OF ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE IN LA VIE COMMENCE DEMAIN...... 157 FIGURE 2.6: ARCHIVAL IMAGES ACCOMPANYING LABARTHE'S SPEECH AT UNESCO...... 158 FIGURE 2.7: IMAGES FROM ATOMIC POWER! ...... 161 FIGURE 2.8: COMPARISON OF STATUES IN REPRODUCTION ...... 169 FIGURE 2.9: ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE OF FRENCH GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS IN LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI ...... 173 FIGURE 2.10: AN IVORIAN WOODEN MASK SEEN THROUGH A GLASS CASING ...... 174 FIGURE 2.11: ART AND COMMERCE IN LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI...... 177 FIGURE 2.12: ART FORMS AND COMMERCE IN LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI...... 177 FIGURE 2.13: WILSON TIBÉRIO AND FOOTAGE FROM A FRENCH COLONIAL DOCUMENTARY...... 180 FIGURE 2.14: VISUAL CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN LABOUR STRUGGLES AND “L’ART DU COMBAT.” ...... 185 FIGURE 2.15: “MÊME UN PAYSAGE TRANQUILLE.” ...... 195 FIGURE 2.16: “1933. LA MACHINE SE MET EN MARCHE” IN NUIT ET BROUILLARD...... 198 FIGURE 2.17: ARCHIVAL IMAGES OF THE DEPORTATION IN NUIT ET BROUILLARD...... 201 FIGURE 2.18: DEPORTATION AND ARRIVAL, BRESLAUER, JAKUBOWSKA AND RESNAIS ...... 203 FIGURE 2.19: RESNAIS' FINAL TRACKING SHOT, RECEDING FROM THE RUINS OF BIRKENAU...... 205 FIGURE 3.1: MALRAUX PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1953 BY MAURICE JARNOUX ...... 225 FIGURE 3.2: PROGRAM OF "JOURNÉES NATIONALES DE PEUPLE ET CULTURE" ...... 232 FIGURE 3.3: STILL FROM VAN GOGH AND VINCENT VAN GOGH, LE MOULIN À POUVRE ...... 247 FIGURE 3.4: ESTABLISHING SHOTS ACROSS THREE PAINTINGS AT THE OPENING OF VAN GOGH ...... 248 FIGURE 3.5: COMPARISON OF FOUR CONSECUTIVE IMAGES FROM VAN GOGH TAKEN FROM THREE PAINTINGS ... 251 FIGURE 3.6: THE CROSS-MEDIAL PRESENTATION OF "GUERNICA" AT THE 1937 WORLD’S FAIR IN PARIS...... 258 FIGURE 3.7: FRONT PAGE OF THE FRENCH NEWSPAPER CE SOIR THE DAY AFTER THE ATTACK ON GUERNICA. .. 259 FIGURE 3.8: SUPERIMPOSITION OF PICASSO'S BATELEURS OVER A PHOTOGRAPH OF GUERNICA IN RUINS...... 264 FIGURE 3.9: RESNAIS' RAPID MONTAGE OF PICASSO’S DEPICTIONS OF THE BODY IN GUERNICA...... 267 FIGURE 3.10: A VISUAL REFERENCE TO SERGEI EISENSTEIN’S BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN IN GUERNICA...... 268 FIGURE 3.11: A SECOND VISUAL REFERENCE TO BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN IN GUERNICA...... 270 FIGURE 3.12: VISUAL REFERENCE TO BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN IN LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE...... 273 FIGURE 3.13: FRONT COVER OF CHRIS MARKER'S L'HOMME ET SA LIBERTÉ...... 276 FIGURE 4.1: MARKER'S COVER DESIGN FOR THE GERMAN DOC EQUIVALENT, DOK, PUBLISHED IN 1950...... 283 FIGURE 4.2: OPENING TITLE CREDITS OF OLYMPIA 52 ...... 286 FIGURE 4.3: POSTER FOR OLYMPIA 52 DESIGNED BY MARKER ...... 286 FIGURE 4.4: BARBARA ROTRAUT PLEYER IN OLYMPIA 52 ...... 289 FIGURE 4.5: THREE CONSECUTIVE SHOTS IN OLYMPIA 52...... 292 FIGURE 4.6: TWO DOUBLE-PAGE SPREADS FROM MARKER'S COLLAGE ALBUMS ...... 294 FIGURE 4.7: A THREE-IMAGE MONTAGE FROM THE PETITE PLANETE ISSUE ON GREECE...... 298 FIGURE 4.8: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM UN FILM DE FEDERICO FELLINI: LA STRADA ...... 299

FIGURE 4.9: COVERS FROM LES EDITIONS DU SEUIL'S PETITE PLANÈTE COLLECTION EDITED BY MARKER ...... 299 FIGURE 4.10: DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD FROM PETITE PLANETE’S ISSUE ON CHINA...... 302 FIGURE 4.11: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM THE PETITE PLANETE ISSUE ON IRAN...... 305 FIGURE 4.12: FRONT PAGE OF MARKER'S CLAIR DE CHINE PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 1956 IN ESPRIT...... 317 FIGURE 4.13: PHOTOGRAPHS IN GATTI'S CHINE AND MARKER'S DIMANCHE À PEKIN...... 318 FIGURE 4.14: DIMANCHE À PEKIN’S TWO OPENING SHOTS...... 320 FIGURE 4.15: A CUT FROM A CHILDREN’S BOOK IN PARIS TO A ROAD IN BEIJING IN DIMANCHE A PEKIN...... 323 FIGURE 4.16: A CUT FROM A BICYCLE TO A WOMAN WITH BOUND FEET IN DIMANCHE A PEKIN...... 325 FIGURE 4.17: ANIMATED IMAGES AND CHINESE NATIONAL DAY FOOTAGE IN DIMANCHE A PEKIN...... 328 FIGURE 4.18: DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD FROM ARMAND GATTI'S SIBÉRIE - ZÉRO + INFINI ...... 332 FIGURE 4.19: PAN LEFT ACROSS A LINE OF BIRCH TREES TO REVEAL A LINE OF TELEGRAPH POLES ...... 335 FIGURE 4.20: A LOCAL TRAFFIC CONTROLLER STANDING AT AN INTERSECTION IN ANGARSK ...... 336 FIGURE 4.21: SEQUENCE OF CONSECUTIVE IMAGES IN LETTRE DE SIBÉRIE ...... 338 FIGURE 4.22: LOOPED SEQUENCE IN LETTRE DE SIBÉRIE, REPRODUCED IN COMMENTAIRES ...... 340 FIGURE 4.23: LETTRE DE SIBERIE’S ‘IMAGINARY NEWSREEL.’ ...... 343 FIGURE 4.24: THE END OF LETTRE DE SIBÉRIE’S ‘IMAGINARY NEWSREEL’ SEQUENCE...... 346

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thanks must go to my supervisor, Susan Potter. I am exceptionally grateful for the support that she showed me, her intellectual generosity and receptivity, and most of all, that she had the faith in me — and the patience — to get me to push myself during the difficult writing stages.

The lion’s share of the research for this thesis was completed in various archives in France, and was facilitated by grants from the University of Sydney, the Power Institute, and La Ville de Paris. My thanks go to these organisations, and also to Benedicte Alliot of the Cité Internationale des Arts, Chrystel Dozias of Le Centre International d’accueil et d’échanges des Récollets, and Claire Berger-Vachon of La Ville de Paris for their support on the ground.

In Paris, some of the mal d’archive that faces the intrepid researcher was assuaged by the exceptionally accommodating and helpful personnel at the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, the Cinémathèque française, the CNC’s Archives françaises du film, the Forum des Images and Peuple et Culture. From these institutions, I would like to thank in particular Eric Le Roy, Catherine Beaumont, Emilie Cauquy, Florence Tissot, Daniel Bremaud, Gilles Veyrat, Hamidine Kane, Pascal Legrand, and the indefatigable Pierrette Lemoigne. Florence Dauman of Argos Films and Laurence Braunberger of Les Films du Jeudi were also extremely generous with the access they permitted me to their production companies’ collections of scripts and production notes.

Elsewhere, Yves Christen of the Fonds municipal d’Art contemporain in Geneva transmitted useful documentation on Chris Marker’s early work. Christophe Chazalon was kind enough to read and give extensive feedback on a draft of Chapter 4.

At the University of Sydney, Richard Smith was instrumental to the development of the scope and ideas of the thesis in its early stages. I also benefited greatly from discussions with fellow students Keva York, Blythe Worthy and Elena Sarno at different stages of the research and writing process. Thank you to Aleksandra Nikolic of the university’s Interlibrary Loans section for chasing up countless requests for articles and books from overseas collections over the years. And thank you finally to my colleagues at the Brain and Mind Centre, Marilena DeMayo and Patrick Locke, whose support in the final writing stage was crucial to getting the work over the line.

The eagle-eyed Rebecca Hazleden did an outstanding job copy editing the thesis before submission.

This work was also nourished by correspondences and discussions with a range of people both at home and abroad. Without their insights, I suspect that there would be no thesis. Thank you to Derek Allan, Damarice Amao, Dudley Andrew, Conor Bateman, Raymond Bellour, Christa Blümlinger, Karla Calviño, Christophe Chazalon, John Conomos, Sarah Cooper, Marcelo de Paiva, Sam Di Iorio, Bernard

Eisenschitz, Daniel Fairfax, Julien Faraut, Jean-Michel Frodon, Nathaniel Greene, Martin Hullebroeck, Vinicius Jatobá, Iwona Kurz, Dany Laferrière, Sylvie Lindeperg, Alena Lodkina, Andrea Paganini, John Raimo, Nadine Salabert, Jie Schiffler, Peter Vukmirovic Stevens, Thomas Tode, Steven Ungar, Valérie Vignaux, Alexander Wells, and Phoebe Weston-Evans.

Finally, to my family, who make this and all the rest of it possible, and to whom this thesis is dedicated: thank you. To Michael, who exhibits that finest of human qualities – curiosity – in abundance. To Mila, who shows me the light and lightness of intellect, and the good grace to know that it isn’t everything. And to Branko and Vesna, who showed me all this, and more, i kome dugujem sve.

Abstract

This thesis examines montage in the early films of Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, identifying its central importance as an aesthetic and historiographical method in a corpus of films directed over the course of a decade in post-war France. It explores their common artistic influences, personal ties, and shared aesthetic preoccupations in developing a poetics of montage in this period, one that privileges the assemblage of shots as a means of expressing a temporal flux between historical phenomena and the cinematic image. With the trio’s montage-centric filmmaking out of step with post-war French criticism’s embrace of a realist aesthetic of mise-en-scène, this thesis instead traces points of commonality between their work and inter-war practices of montage in the plastic arts, literature and cinema, particularly those associated with surrealism.

Vedrès, Resnais and Marker adapt this modernist, avant-garde heritage of heterodox assembly to their own, reflexive historiographical method, with the novel correspondences created through cinematic montage used to reflect upon the itinerary of images over time when examined from a future vantage point.

Walter Benjamin’s work on the historical legibility of images, theorising the emergence of a consubstantial relationship of past to present produced by montage, offers a useful conceptual framework for understanding the temporal complexities of these filmmakers’ historical assemblages. Bringing together images that range from archival photographs and footage, reproductions of artworks, and contemporary travel footage, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker suggest the deeper, often non-chronological historical resonances that link images of other times and places with a later moment of assemblage. Montage thus emerges in their work as a historiographical method that expresses new, critical

relations between their post-war present and broader currents of cultural, aesthetic and political history, bringing to the surface the subterranean correspondences between images of the past and contemporary phenomena of the French Fourth Republic. Their films engage with the escalating tensions of the Cold War, French colonialism, the traumas of WWII and France’s attendant restructuring of its social and cultural fabric in terms of their more profound and lasting links to earlier 20th century history, staking a claim on the deeply unstable contours of post-war France as it grapples with its after-effects of the recent past. Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s films of this period thus instantiate a model of image-based, cine-historical discourse on the present, in which the intellectual collisions of montage make available an archaeological vision of the contemporary moment as being built on the ceaselessly mutable foundations of the past.

Note on Translations

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Where possible, I have cited existing English language translations, and made a note if my own translation diverges from them in a significant way.

I have also included an appendix for longer citations in their original language.

Introduction

Historical Assemblages examines the central importance of montage as an aesthetic and historiographical principle across a corpus of documentary films directed by the French filmmakers Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais and Chris

Marker between 1947 and 1957. Beginning their careers as filmmakers following the seismic shock of WWII, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker develop a poetics of cinematic montage in this period that calls attention to newly apparent, critical correspondences between a range of past historical phenomena and pressing political and cultural concerns in post-war France. The three filmmakers adopt the relational aspects of cinematic montage to think through their contemporary moment in terms of its historical links as well as its political horizons, staking claims on how this moment emerged from the mutable foundations of the recent past and what lay ahead in an uncertain future. This thesis posits the three directors not as constituting a school or movement of documentary filmmaking in this period, but rather as a trio who shared aesthetic preoccupations, common artistic influences, personal ties, and most importantly, commonalities in their conception of the malleability of the relationship between image and historical event. It draws on Walter Benjamin’s writings on historical legibility as a conceptual framework for understanding how these filmmakers demonstrate the profound synchronicities and correspondences between different time periods through the operations of cinematic montage.1 Assembling images that range from archival photographs and footage, reproductions of

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2002), 462-463. The concept of the legibility of images in Benjamin’s work is discussed in more detail later in this introduction.

artworks, and contemporary travel footage, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker suggest the deeper, often non-chronological historical resonances that link images of other times and places with a later moment of assemblage, exploring how these resonances revise habitual understandings of the present’s relationship to the past. Montage emerges in their work as a historiographical method that expresses newly legible relations between broader currents of cultural, aesthetic and political history and contemporary phenomena of the French Fourth

Republic. Their films thus engage with the escalating tensions of the Cold War,

French colonialism, the traumas of WWII and France’s attendant restructuring of its social and cultural fabric in terms of their more profound and lasting links to earlier 20th century history, staking a claim on the deeply unstable contours of post-war France as it grapples with the after-effects of the recent past.

An Air of Renewal: Documentary Filmmaking in Post-war France

Vedrès,2 Resnais and Marker emerge onto the scene as filmmakers in the midst of what is a complex and deeply unstable period of French cinematic and critical culture following the end of WWII. All three filmmakers make their first professional films in the first decade after the Liberation following the country’s occupation by German forces during the war: Vedrès in 1947 with her portrait of the Belle Époque, Paris 1900, Resnais in 1948 with his art documentary, Van

2 There seems to be a long-standing confusion about the spelling of Vedrès’ name, which even in recent scholarship has been given as “Nicole Védrès.” This confusion was likely due to her surname appearing as both “Vedrès” and “Védrès” in the credit sequences of her films and in the articles attributed to her in the French press. Nicole Vedrès/Védrès was the pen name of Nicole Henriette Désirée Charlotte Cahen dit Nathan dit Rais; thus there is no question of an “officially” correct spelling. I have opted for the spelling “Vedrès” as this is the spelling most commonly used in the most up to date literature, even if this discrepancy still exists.

Gogh, and Marker in 1952 with Olympia 52, his under-seen documentary on the

1952 Helsinki Olympic Games.3 The corpus of films I examine ends with Marker’s

Lettre de Sibérie, released in 1957. The early films of these three filmmakers thus belong to a period of French cinema history — roughly aligning with the dates of the constitutional Fourth Republic (1946–1958) — that critics and film historians often write about in terms of two, interrelated aspects. The first is of a crisis of cinema production following the war, the result of the re-organisation of the French film industry and the strengthening of its film-related unions.4 The second is of an attendant flourishing of the culture of French film criticism, aided by the rise of French cinephilia and the ciné-club, the writings of critics such as

André Bazin, and the launch of important film journals, with Cahiers du cinéma leading at the front. Diagnoses of contemporary crises and prognoses for a brighter future abound amongst famous essays in post-war French film criticism:

3 While Paris 1900 was Vedrès’ first film project, both Resnais and Marker had made amateur films before Van Gogh and Olympia 52. Resnais made a series of 16mm artist portraits on Paris- based painters and sculptors such as Max Ernst, Christine Boumeester and Óscar Domínguez from 1946–1947, all of which are now held in the Centre Georges Pompidou’s film collection. Some Resnais filmographies begin with a short film by the name of L’Aventure de Guy made in 1936, when Resnais was 14 years old. Marker made a number of now-lost 8mm films from around 1946 onwards, including a film that Resnais recalls being titled La Fin du monde vue par l’ange Gabriel. This was communicated to Thomas Tode in a 1995 interview with Alain Resnais, originally republished in German as “Rendez-vous des amis: Alain Resnais,” in Birgit Kämper, Thomas Tode, eds., Chris Marker – Filmessayist (Munich: CICIM, 1997), 205-217. Thank you to Thomas Tode for sending me the original French transcript of the interview.

4 This aforementioned crisis of production, the narrative continues, was produced in large part by broader shifts in economic policy by the French government in the mid-to-late 1940s and the subsequent changes in structures of support for the nation’s film industry — changes that were often unfavourably met by industry professionals. See Jacques Portes, “Les origines de la légende noire des accords Blum-Byrnes sur le cinéma,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, Vol. 33, No. 2, April-June,1986, 314-329; Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “L’arrangement Blum-Byrnes à l’épreuve des faits: Les relations (cinématographiques) franco-américains de 1944 à 1948,” 1895, revue de l’AFRHC, no. 13, December 1993, 3-49; Irvin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113-121. The introduction of protectionist policies by the newly formed Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie shut out young, prospective directors from making their first narrative features, a situation that scholars have linked to the rise of the aesthetically staid and out-of- touch cinéme de qualité of the mainstream in this period. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb, “The economy of 1950s popular French cinema,” trans. Susan Hayward, Studies in French Cinema, 6, no. 2, 2006, 141-50; René Prédal, Le cinéma français depuis 1945 (Paris: Nathan, 1991), 15-30.

one thinks of the hopes for a “birth of a new avant-garde” — the oft-forgotten subtitle of Astruc’s caméra stylo essay (1948) — and Bazin’s “Defense” and

“search for” the new avant-garde (1949–50), a search that was implicitly carried on in Jean Cocteau’s short-lived Obectif 49 ciné-club (1948–50) and its anti-

French mainstream programming practices.5 Discussing this critical excoriation of the mainstream of French cinema by critics of the early post-war period,

Ginette Vincendeau aptly identifies the “classic avant-gardist strategy” at its centre, which “aimed at creating ‘a distinction’ … within the new generation and the next.”6 But, as Vincendeau notes, the success of this strategy and the influence of its story has had a significant impact on subsequent scholarly work on French post-war cinema, creating what she terms a “historiographical vacuum around the New Wave” that has been “remarkably successful at

5 Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde, la caméra-stylo,“ L’Ecran français, no. 144, March 30, 1948, 98-99. Reprinted and translated into English as Alexandre Astruc, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo” in The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 17-23; André Bazin, “Decouverte du cinéma – Défense de l’avant-garde,” L’Ecran Français, 182 (December 21, 1948); André Bazin, “L’avant- garde nouvelle,” — appearing originally in 1949 in the festival program notes of the Festival de film maudit in Biarritz, reprinted in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 10, March 1952, 16-17; André Bazin, “A la recherche d’une nouvelle avant-garde,” Almanac du théâtre et du cinéma, 1950 146- 152. Bazin's contribution to this debate are briefly outlined by Grant Wiedenfeld in the context of a discussion on “marginal” cinematic forms in post-war France. See Grant Wiedenfield, “Bazin on the Margins of the Seventh Art,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory & its Afterlife, eds. Dudley Andrew, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 262-267. For more on the debates on the avant-garde in post-war French film culture, see François Albera, L’Avant- garde au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 113-138. On Objectif 49, see Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 147-158; Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma. Histoire d’une revue. Tome 1: À l’assaut du cinéma, 1951-1959 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), 41-50; Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb, Objectif 49: Cocteau et la nouvelle avant-garde (Paris: Séguier. 2014), 47-63.

6 Ginette Vincendeau, “Introduction,” Cinema Journal, 49 (In Focus: The French New Wave at Fifty), no. 4, Summer 2010, 136. Famous examples of this criticism of the crisis of mainstream French cinema include François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31, January 1954, 15-29; Alexandre Astruc, “Les chances du cinéma français,” in Du stylo à la caméra… et de la caméra au stylo: Écrits (1942-1984) (Paris: Éditions de l’Archipel, 1992), 298-301; André Bazin, “Y a-t-il une crise du cinéma français? (suite de notre précédent numéro),” Radio Cinéma Télévision, no. 356, November 11, 1956. On the diagnoses of various crises in French cinema, see Jeremi Szaniawski, “Waves of Crisis in French Cinema,” in Opening Bazin, 240-245.

perpetuating itself” in the six-or-so decades since.7 Accounts of French filmmaking and film culture of the 1940s and 50s are often reduced to the story of two opposing camps from different generations, a narrative of “Oedipal revolt”

– or at least, a search for father figures8 – in which the young critics take on the established industry and its cinéma de papa, with the youthful victors emerging to form the internationally feted nouvelle vague at the end of the 1950s.9 An irresistible teleology emerges: though there are a few minor turn-offs and detours, all roads lead to the New Wave.

However, the films of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker, as well as their interpersonal connections, aesthetic influences, and unique production histories, require us to provide some nuance to these dominant scholarly and historical

7 Ginette Vincendeau, “Introduction,” 136.

8 Truffaut’s programmatic text does mention a handful of working French film directors of the previous generation whose films he admires, including Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tati, Abel Gance and Max Ophüls. François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” 26.

9 “Oedipal revolt” is Diana Holmes’ term. Diana Holmes, “Sex, Gender and Auteurism: The French New Wave and Hollywood,” in World cinema's 'dialogues' with Hollywood, ed. Paul Cooke (London: Palgrave, 2007), 157. While not all histories of French cinema have been as openly critical of the worth of the films produced in this period, even those with a more forgiving view of late 40s and 50s French cinema have committed in curious ways to this historiographical vacuum. For example, Colin Crisp’s The Classic French Cinema, 1930-1960 groups the first 15 years of post-war French cinematic production within a continuum that begins with the pre-war sound film. Allowing for a diversity within industrial production within this period — and acknowledging the disruption of this continuum produced by the war, during which “all spheres of French society were so radically aberrant that no continuity of practice could be expected” — Crisp affirms the existence of a “classic cinema with distinctive stylistic traits deriving from a distinctive commercial and industrial base” that exists across the three decades. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930-1960 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), xi-xix. From a Francophone perspective, René Prédal’s history of French cinema since WWII demonstrates a similar historical perspective on the post-war, pre-New Wave cinema in terms of continuity with the pre-war cinema. He writes that “1945 thus constitutes a point of orientation but it does not represent a major date in the history of French cinema. Rather, it represents another step, the restarting of a movement whose trajectory was only barely made to deviate by the war.” René Prédal, Le cinéma français depuis 1945, 28-29.

narratives of post-war French cinema. Theirs is a story less of generational revolt than one of cross-generational creative alliances, and the aesthetic practices and philosophies that they develop are significantly out of step with those that figure in the majority of literature on post-war French cinema. In outlining this historiographical trend in scholarship on post-war French cinema, my aim is not to controvert the work of other historians, but rather to point out that this totalising narrative of the New Wave has had a somewhat detrimental effect on how scholars have written about Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s work, and indeed many young filmmakers that emerge in this period. By outlining some of the problems with the existing frameworks used by scholars to categorise the work of these filmmakers in the context of French post-war cinema, I will propose that a more useful historical framework for discussing Vedrès, Resnais and Marker together is to discuss their emergence in the distinct, “parallel” production and critical context of post-war documentary film in France.10 In placing them within this current of documentary filmmaking, these filmmakers can be historically situated in terms of a productive aesthetic lineage back to the inter-war avant- gardes, a lineage that I do not see as necessarily needing to extend forward to the more well known breakthrough of the New Wave at the end of the 1950s in

France.11 An account of the three filmmakers’ production context and

10 François Thomas describes the short film format, where the majority of documentary films are released in France, as creating “une voie parallèle” with the feature film for French filmmakers in the 1940s and 50s. See François Thomas, “Avant propos,” in Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968. De l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 12.

11 Recent scholarship by Steven Ungar on Marker and Resnais’ filmmaking in the 1950s and 60s has also traced their work in this period — and particularly Les Statues meurent aussi, Nuit et Brouillard, Toute la mémoire du monde, and Le Joli mai — back to the inter-war period, specifically to practices of French-based socially engaged documentary filmmaking of the late silent era. Looking less at the unifying aesthetic approaches than at the thematic and political

interpersonal connections in this period offers a counter historical narrative that dissolves the apparent gap between inter-war and post-war generation of

French filmmakers and producers, offering instead a more complex, cross- generational view of intersecting production practices, and creative and aesthetic affinities.

While Vedrès has for too long been absent from the major historical accounts of post-war French cinema — a situation that is thankfully starting to change12 — the more canonical work of Marker and Resnais has been repeatedly

concerns of these films, Ungar places Resnais and Marker in a current of post-war French documentary filmmaking that “reclaim[s] the ambitions and burdens of an interwar corpus of documentaries filmed from 1928 to 1937.” Steven Ungar, Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), ix. It should be noted however that Ungar, following Antoine de Baecque, places Marker and Resnais’ post-war innovations within a teleology that ends up with the French New Wave. He writes that “[f]ilms by these Left Bank filmmakers and by others such as René Vautier and Eli Lotar contributed to short-subject documentary practices that cleared the way for early films by Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer more readily identified with the French New Wave.” Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, xxii; Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une génération (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 64. This is a position that was adopted by some earlier French film historians, notably Georges Sadoul in Le cinéma français (1890-1962) (Paris: Flammarion, 1962), 125. In the following discussion, I will be distancing myself from this position taken up by these scholars that places these filmmakers as precursors to the New Wave. For a discussion of where the alternative aesthetic trajectory that I have sketched here continues beyond this period, see “Afterimages: Looking Back, Moving Forward.”

12 There has been a recent upturn in scholarly work on Vedrès’ filmmaking in France, largely in response to Marker’s acknowledgment of her influence on his work in the late 1990s (see below). See Laurent Véray, “Nicole Vedrès, pionnière de l'essai documentaire,” in Frontières de la nonfiction. Littérature, cinéma, arts, eds. Alison James and Christophe Reig (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 141-157. This essay is expanded with some crucial archival research from the Ludmila Savitsky collection at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Véray’s recent, slim monograph, Laurent Véray, Vedrès et le cinéma (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Place, 2017). A longer monograph by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues published in 2018 focuses entirely on Vedrès’ Paris 1900: Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947). Kaléidoscope des jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018). See also Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier (Images du cinéma français de Nicole Védrès, 1945),” Trafic, no. 100, Winter 2016, 35-39. In English, see Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History”,” Representations, no. 130, Spring 2015, 84-118; Monica Dall’asta, “Looking for Myriam: A Secret Genealogy of French Compilation Film,” Feminist Media Histories, 2, no. 3, 2016, 29-53. Vedrès’ films have also become more easily accessible: the first ever retrospective on Vedrès’ filmmaking was organised for the 2017 Cinema Ritrovatto festival in Bologna on the occasion of a new 2K restoration of Paris 1900, and in April 2018, the French distributor Doriane Films released a DVD bringing together all of Vedrès’ films (two features and two short films).

tied to the New Wave movement, and particularly to what critics and historians have referred to as the “courant rive gauche” or Left Bank. In the Anglophone world, the publication in 1962 of a short piece by Richard Roud in Sight and

Sound introducing this so-called Left Bank had a decisive influence on the way film historians have subsequently categorised Marker and Resnais’ work. Roud’s piece, an effort to break down the filmmakers of the New Wave into “smaller and more meaningful groups”, argues that Resnais and Marker, together with Agnès

Varda, constitute a socially-engaged, left-leaning and literary-minded current that exists within the more famous parent movement.13 But while Roud’s piece has ambitions towards clarification and nuance, it is decidedly vague when it comes to identifying the exact aesthetic and philosophical principles that would indicate why this trio forms a coherent unity, and he does little to justify precisely why the three directors would need to be grouped together with the

New Wave aside from matters of temporal coincidence.14 The filmmakers themselves associated with the Left Bank were perplexed by the term’s

13 Richard Roud, “The Left Bank,” Sight & Sound, no. 32, 1, Winter 1962/1963, 24-26. In a short 1977 essay revisiting the notion of the Left Bank, he broadens the group to include Marguerite Duras, specifically her (then) most recent film, Le Camion. Richard Roud, “The Left Bank Revisited,” Sight & Sound, 46, no. 3, Summer 1977, 143-145.

14 It is perhaps worth noting in passing that there is an element of publicity to the original publication of Roud’s piece that may be partly responsible for the shortcuts that he takes in grouping these directors together. The piece was written, as Roud himself notes, on the occasion of a retrospective of the three directors’ work at London’s National Film Theatre, at a moment when the British public knew comparatively very little about these directors (Varda and Marker in particular). This curatorial context likely had some bearing on the need to compare the three directors to better-known contemporary French filmmakers. Richard Roud, “The Left Bank,” 24. A similar critical move to tie Vedrès’ work to the incipient New Wave appears in the postface to Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues’ monograph on Paris 1900, written by Roland-François Lack. While Lack concludes that the New Wave ought not to be considered “l’éclosion d’un cinéma vedrésien”, its quest to trace out the “analogies”, “rapports”, “influences” and “citations” of her work to New Wave filmmakers – no matter how tenuous the link – is yet another example of the aforementioned ‘historiographical vacuum’ created by the famous cinematic movement. See Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès, 175-195.

persistence.15 In a letter dated 5th August 1974 replying to a PhD student from

Indiana University who was preparing a thesis on the subject of the Left Bank group, Chris Marker wrote that there was a “fundamental problem” in the young student’s topic:

The so-called ‘Left Bank current’ is a myth, an invention of critics afflicted with an obsession for classification and denotation at all costs. During the time of the New Wave (which was largely a myth as well, although at least one that corresponded to a temporal criterion), there was apparently a need to group together all of the ‘unclassifiable’ filmmakers. I don’t know who came up with the idea for this aberrant family that neither me nor most of the other filmmakers you cite belong to.16

Subsequent studies on French cinema and the New Wave by Rémi

Fournier Lanzoni, Chris Darke, Robert Farmer and Richard Neupert that continue to refer to the presence of a Left Bank have done little to clarify the usefulness of this grouping, and have opted instead to simply add other names of contemporary, ‘literary’ filmmakers to the original trio.17

15 Both François Truffaut and Alain Resnais found the term unhelpful. See Vincent Lowy, “Rive droite, rive gauche: face à la « Nouvelle Vague »,” CinémAction, no. 165, December 2017, 54-63. 16 The student in question is William F. Van Wert. The correspondence is published in Christophe Chazalon, “Correspondance partiellement publiée de Chris Marker,” Online. http://chrismarker.ch/correspondance-partiellement-publiee-de-chris-marker.html. Accessed 25th October, 2018.

17 Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2002), 208-209; Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2nd ed.) (Madison, Wisconsin: 2007), 299-354; Chris Darke, “The French New Wave,” in Film Studies, ed. Jill Nelmes (London: Routledge, 1996), 421-450; Robert Farmer, “Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, September 2009. Online. http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/marker-resnais-varda-remembering-the-left- bank-group/. Accessed 25th October, 2018. Henri Colpi, William Klein, Jacques Demy, Georges Franju and Jean Cayrol have also been cited as part of the Left Bank, a combination of filmmakers that has done even less to clarify what such a grouping could mean.

Rather than looking to the future of the New Wave or attempting to organise its Left Bank group, a more pertinent historical context for Marker and

Resnais — which also draws attention to the significance of Vedrès — is that of the aforementioned strand of French documentary film production that develops immediately after the end of WWII. In the domain of post-war documentary filmmaking — almost synonymous with short filmmaking in France in the 1940s and 50s18 — filmmakers and producers also voiced ideas around the need for aesthetic ambitions and a renewal of personnel, while also trying to foster inventive filmmaking. However, these discussions around renewal and associated filmmaking practices in the domain of documentary film production reflect a quite distinct vision of continuity across generations compared to the contemporaneous critical discourse on the cinéma de qualité sketched above.19

Responding to the above-described strictures of feature film production in the

18 In France, there was a somewhat indiscriminate practice of naming all short films ‘documentaries’ in both official documentation and the cinema press that dated back to the Occupation and which would last well into the post-war era. Though this may have been partially due to laziness — there were a small number of short fictional works being produced as well — it reflects the fact that the short format became the almost exclusive domain of documentary filmmaking in this period. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas describes this mixing up of terms: Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “Structures du court métrage français, 1945-1958,” in Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968, 29-30. This thesis examines Nicole Vedrès’ Paris 1900, La Vie commence demain and Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie as part of its corpus of films, all of which are feature-length documentaries, and which are three of the very rare exceptions to the general rule that equates the short format with documentary filmmaking and the feature with narrative filmmaking in the French cinema of the 1940s and 50s.

19 There has been a considerable amount of scholarship in France in the last 25 years on these marginal cinema formations in the documentary and short film, building in large part on François Porcile’s pioneering 1965 monograph on the subject: François Porcile, Défense du court métrage français (Paris: Le Cerf, 1965). See Luce Vigo, Émile Breton (dir.), “Le Groupe des trente, un âge d’or du court métrage?” Bref, no. 20, Spring, 1994, 23-42; Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds, Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968; Anthony Fiant and Roxane Hamery, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968 (2). Documentaire, fiction: allers-retours (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). For a concise English language synthesis of some of the research presented in these works, see Steven Ungar, “Quality Wars: The Groupe des Trente and the Renewal of the Short Subject in France, 1953-1963,” South Central Review, 33, no. 2, Summer 2016, 30-43; Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, 171-179.

post-war period, a nascent generation of young French filmmakers was obliged to work in the more marginal short film format, which was subject to far fewer professional restrictions for first time filmmakers than the feature, and which became the chief domain for documentary filmmaking in this period.20 Notably, the short film was supported by an experimental funding structure called the prime à la qualité from 1953 onwards, which awarded films for “the quality of their direction or the interest of the subject that they treat,” and which were deemed to be “of notable value in the artistic, documentary, educative, cultural and social domains.”21 The ephemeral Groupe des Trente, representing the interests of short film producers and directors from 1953 onwards, formed around the issue of supporting ‘quality’ short filmmaking as a means of renewing personnel within the film industry, penning their manifesto-like “Déclaration du

Groupe des Trente” in 1953 on this very issue.22 Vedrès, Resnais and Marker, who would all direct short films in this period, would go on to join the Groupe in

20 The introduction of short films as part of the pre-feature screening “première partie de programme” was a product of legislation introduced during the Occupation. A decree-law introduced on 26th October 1940 dictated that short films would henceforth be part of all commercial cinema programs. This decree-law was renewed in 1946, and the short film remained part of commercial cinema programs throughout the Fourth Republic. See Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “Structures du court métrage français, 1945-1958,” in Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968, 29-46; François Porcile, Défense du court métrage français, 17-28.

21 Maurice Mathieu, “Les relations juridiques entre l’Etat et le cinéma,” La Revue administrative, 8th Year, no. 43, January-February, 1955, 30. Three of the films studied in this thesis were recipients of this quality premium: Nuit et Brouillard, Dimanche à Pekin, and, somewhat strangely while it was still banned from being exhibited in its non-censored form in cinemas, Les Statues meurent aussi in 1959. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this censorship. A complete list of recipients of the quality premiums is featured in Sophie Hofstetter, “Les courts métrages bénéficiaires de la Prime à la qualité (1953-1959),” Master’s thesis, Université Paul Verlaine de Metz, 2008.

22 This declaration was initially published in La Cinématographie française, no. 1550, 9 January, 1954, 9. It was subsequently reprinted in Bref, no. 20, Spring 1994, 40-41. An English translation appears in Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, 237-239. On the issuing of quality premiums to support short filmmaking in France at this time, see François Porcile, Défense du court métrage français (Paris: Le Cerf, 1965), 17-32; Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, 171-179.

the 1950s.23 Yet a look at some of the other signatories of the Groupe des

Trente’s “Declaration” reveals the names of directors who had been working in the industry for decades, including Jean Lods, Eli Lotar, Jean Mitry and Jean

Painlevé, part of the old guard of French experimental and documentary filmmaking that has its roots in the late silent era. Clearly, then, this desire for renewal in the (short) documentary form cut across generational lines in a way that was quite distinct to the oppositional lines being drawn up at the same time by the Cahiers critics.24

The make up of the Groupe des Trente short film organisation not only indicates the existence of a cross-generational front of French film directors interested in supporting a vanguard of experimental, short-documentary filmmaking in France, but also the presence of producers to support them in this endeavour in the post-war period. Among the signatories of the Groupe’s 1953 declaration were producers who had turned their focus to the production of documentary films after the war in an effort to support young filmmakers, including Claude Jaeger, Jacqueline Jacoupy and Pierre Braunberger.25

23 Both Vedrès and Resnais were signatories of the original Groupe des trente declaration, while the opening credit sequence of Marker’s Dimanche à Pekin (1956) indicates that he had by then become a member of the group.

24 Steven Ungar also notes the multi-generational nature of the membership of the Groupe des Trente. Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, xvi. Continuing this network of connections to the inter-war period, Ungar also draws a link between the Groupe des Trente’s activities with the Popular Front-era Ciné-Liberté co-operative and its “populist alternative to the commercial studio system.” Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, 173.

25 On Braunberger, see Pierre Braunberger, Pierre Braunberger, producteur: cinémamémoire: propos receuillis par Jacques Gerber (Paris: Centre national de la cinématographie, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987). Of the films examined in the thesis, Braunberger would produce Paris 1900, Van Gogh and Guernica. While his signature does not appear on the original 1953 Groupe des Trente declaration, producer Anatole Dauman of Argos films was also crucial to supporting innovative documentary filmmaking in France from the early 1950s onwards. Of my corpus of

Braunberger in particular presents us with an important case, in that he had been producing films from the late silent era — including the early works of Jean

Renoir, and Luis Buñuel — before turning his focus to documentary filmmaking after WWII. Although the war had temporarily put a stop to his work,

Braunberger’s renewed film production activity from 1945 was marked by an adjustment to the changes in the landscape of the post-war French film industry and the challenges this created for new filmmakers. In producing Paris 1900

(1947) and Resnais’ debut commercial film Van Gogh (1948), Braunberger was pushed, as he reflected in a 1949 interview, to support filmmakers who looked to expand beyond French cinema’s outmoded “structures, genres and styles” by launching a “systematic, daring appeal to younger filmmakers.”26 In his support of a new generation of filmmakers, Braunberger would turn to the production of documentary films, expressing a similar discourse on the need for aesthetic renewal and new blood in the industry that would be shared by other ephemeral organisations of the period, such as Objectif 49 and the Groupe des Trente.

Braunberger’s first major post-war production was Nicole Vedrès’ Paris

1900, a film that brought together an intergenerational production team

films, Dauman produces Nuit et Brouillard, Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie. On Dauman, see Anatole Dauman, Anatole Dauman, Argos films: souvenir-écran [propos receuillis par Jacques Gerber (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989).

26 Quoted in P. M., « Renouvellement par appel aux jeunes : politiques des Films du Panthéon, » La Cinématographie française no. 1314, 4 June 1949, 9. Braunberger corroborates this in his memoirs: “Bref, j’ai commencé à penser que le cinéma français devait impérativement se renouveler de fond en comble, s’il voulait avoir une chance de survie. J’ai senti que sur le plan formel, cela était possible en prenant exemple sur le cinéma d’Orson Welles, en se référant à notre expérience avec Myriam et aux discussions que j’avais eues au sein du groupe Objectif 49, 50 puis 51 – Cocteau m’ayant demandé de participer à la vie de cette association dont il était le fondateur.” Pierre Braunberger, Pierre Braunberger, producteur, 143.

consisting of people who had worked in French film production dating back to the 1920s, as well as a group of younger directors, editors and assistants who had made their entry into the French film industry in the post-war period.

Braunberger brought on Jacques Brunius and Myriam Borsoutsky to the film as archival researcher and editor respectively, two important and relatively unheralded figures in Anglophone scholarship of inter-war French cinema.27 An artist, writer and filmmaker closely aligned with the surrealists, Brunius had directed a number of innovative short films in the 1930s that would act as a precursor to post-war French montage practices traced in this thesis.28 The film’s editor, Myriam Borsoutsky — or, simply “Myriam”, as her name would appear in the credit sequences of this and most films she worked on — had worked primarily on the films of Sacha Guitry in the 1930s, and was closely affiliated with the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographique (IDHEC, France’s first film school) from the mid-1940s onwards. Resnais was studying editing at

IDHEC when Myriam recommended him as an assistant to Vedrès on Paris 1900

27 Brunius had previously worked with Braunberger on Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1936), and the producer brought him in to help find footage to appear in Paris 1900 from British film archives. There has been a recent influx of literature following the release of Brunius’ collected films on DVD: Jacques-Bernard Brunius: Un cinéaste surréaliste. France: Doriane Films, 2012. DVD. Recent literature in France includes: Nathaniel Greene, “Jacques-Bernard Brunius, pionnier du film de montage,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 70, Summer 2013, 54-81; Alain Keit, Brunius et le cinéma (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2015). Brunius’ writings were also recently collected in Jacques-Bernard Brunius, Dans l’ombre où les regards se nouent: écrits sur le cinéma, l’art, la politique, 1926-1963 (Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2016). The influence of Brunius’ films of the 1930s on the film de montage and the art documentary is explored in chapters 1 and 3 of this thesis. On Myriam, see Monica Dall’Asta, “Looking for Myriam,” 29-53. Myriam would go on to co- direct La Course de taureaux with Pierre Braunberger in 1951.

28 In a 2006 interview, Resnais cites Brunius’ Violon d’Ingres (1939) as a key influence on his documentary films: “Les documentaires, généralement, c’était très ennuyeux avant la guerre. Et tout à coup il y avait eu ce documentaire de Brunius. […] il m’a prouvé qu’on pouvait faire des courts métrages intéressants, qui ne soient pas juste la mise en boîte des sardines.” Suzanne Liandrat- Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 183-184.

for what would be his first film project; Resnais reflected late in his life on the crucial importance of both Myriam and Vedrès as well as the importance of Paris

1900 to his eventual career as a film director.29

Aside from placing Vedrès and Resnais in contact with one another as well as an old guard of filmmakers and producers, Paris 1900 also constitutes a film fondateur for a reinvigorated practice of montage in post-war French documentary filmmaking, whose aesthetic lessons would be adopted by Resnais and Marker in particular in the following decade. Indeed, while Marker had not worked on the project, the influence of Paris 1900 and Vedrès’ work as a whole would be crucial to his development as a filmmaker. On the occasion of a 1998 retrospective dedicated to his work at the Cinémathèque Française, Marker was invited to curate a program of films by other directors that had “marked, nourished and stimulated” him over the years, which were to be screened alongside his own films. In his program notes, Marker puts special emphasis on

Vedrès’ importance to him, insisting that he “owe[d] everything” to her. Marker continues:

To say that, in two films, Nicole taught me that the cinema could be compatible with intelligence might be taken for pretentiousness, and rightly so perhaps. Who does this guy think he is? Does he think the others were all idiots? So, let’s clear things up. It’s not the intelligence of filmmakers that is in question here, but rather the idea — quite uncommon at that time — that intelligence itself could be the foundation of a film; that is, that it could be the raw material that

29 For more on the connections between Resnais, Myriam and Vedrès, see Suzanne Liandrat- Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 178-182. Resnais opines that: “L’influence de Myriam a été déterminante. Si elle ne m’avait pas envoyé à l’IDHEC, je serais libraire.”

montage and voiceover would chip away at in order to fashion an object that we call a film. […] Perhaps we must simply strip the word intelligence of this added value that we impose upon it that either over or undersells its virtues, and consider it instead as an aesthetic category. We might thereby conceive of the cinema as the inheritor not just of the novel or the theatre — or even in rare cases, of the poem — but also of the essay. Of course, one finds poor essays in the cinema, just as one does in a bookstore… All of this may seem banal to us today. But before Paris 1900 and La vie commence demain, that wasn’t at all the case.30

Marker’s homage to Vedrès here squarely situates the revelation of her filmmaking as a product of the special alchemy of montage and voiceover that she was able to produce in her films, an aesthetic lesson that would clearly be of great importance to Marker in his own filmmaking throughout his life. Marker also traces her first two films as important milestones in the promotion of an aesthetic lineage of the cinematic essay, a form that privileges montage and writing as central structuring principles. This choice of words on Marker’s part has had a significant influence on recent Vedrès scholarship, which largely continues this line of thinking in addressing her work in terms of the essay film tradition.31 In contrast to this recent trend in Vedrès scholarship, my sense is

30 Introductory program notes for the retrospective dedicated to his work at Paris’ Cinémathèque Française, January 7-February 1, 1998. Reprinted in: Chris. Marker, “Marker mémoire,” Images documentaires, no. 31, 2nd trimester, 1998, 75-76. The appreciation of the work seems to have gone both ways. Vedrès also expressed an appreciation of Marker’s work in a 1962 questionnaire for Image et Son on French short filmmaking: “Au mieux, l’écrivain fait tout comme Chris Marker (il n’est que à lire son recueil intitulé Commentaire [sic.], pour voir qu’il sait écrire sur pellicule aussi bien que MacLaren peint, grave, du son à même le ceulloïd [sic.].” Quoted in Image et Son, no. 150- 151 (Dossier: Le court métrage français), April-May 1962, 45.

31 For example, Laurent Véray — citing Marker’s above homage — refers to Vedrès as the “pioneer of the documentary essay,” and Paula Amad’s recent article on Paris 1900 aims, in her words, to restore “Védrès and the archival film mode to their right place in the history of the essay film.” Laurent Véray, “Nicole Vedrès, pionnière de l'essai documentaire”; Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History”,” 88. See “Afterimages” for a discussion of the ways in which film programmers have situated Vedrès’ work in the history of film.

that discussing her work in terms of montage32 provides a more productive — not to mention, precise — analytic framework than the ever-more epistemologically slippery term ‘essay film.’33 Throughout this thesis, I will argue that the innovations in montage as both an aesthetic and historiographical principle that Vedrès first introduces in Paris 1900, are adopted and developed by all three filmmakers in the rest of the films examined in the thesis, each of them building on the methods of historical assemblage first glimpsed in Vedrès’ film. Furthermore, examining these films in terms of shared practices of montage not only helps us to see these works in creative dialogue with one another, it also helps us to situate all three filmmakers in the context of contemporary and anterior cinematic and artistic practices based on montage across different media.

32 I have opted to use the term ‘montage’ in the place of ‘editing’ throughout this thesis as a way of signalling the continuity between the work of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker and practices of assembly in other art forms, especially in the plastic arts and in literature. These points of continuity are discussed in more detail later in this introduction.

33 There has been an explosion of writing on the essay film in academic film studies in the last 25 years, particularly in the Anglophone world. See for example Phillip Lopate,“In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film,” in Beyond Document: Essays on nonfiction film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 243-269; Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009); Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Montero, Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, eds, Essays on the Essay Film. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). My sense is that with the number of divergent definitions of what constitutes essayistic filmmaking, the term has lost much of its effectiveness as a conceptual framework. Scholars and critics have also tended to implicitly use the term ‘essay’ as an honorific with regards to the discourse on documentary filmmaking; a certain degree of sensitivity and reflexivity in documentary filmmaking seems to earn the tag. As such, its accuracy and usefulness as a conceptual framework seems compromised, or would at the very least require a lengthy diversion of the present argument into questions of definition and sub- categorisation.

Montage Permitted: An Aesthetic of Montage in the Context of Post- war French Cinema

If the production context of documentary filmmaking in France encouraged creative alliances with a generation of filmmakers and producers from the inter- war period, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s critical reflections on montage in their filmmaking also looked back to the 1920s and 1930s, adopting practices of assembling word and image developed in literature, cinema and the plastic arts in various European avant-garde and modernist movements. While I will discuss these cross-medial influences in more detail later in the introduction and in other parts of the thesis, tracing the trio’s engagement with a cinematic heritage of the theory and practice of montage — particularly of the Soviet montage school of the 1920s — helps us to add further nuance to our understanding of their work in the context of post-war French aesthetic debates on filmmaking. It also allows us to re-think some of the orthodoxies of scholarship on the aesthetic formations of this period of French filmmaking, and to draw out the counter- historical narratives that inform the development of their work.

The work of all three filmmakers in this period reflects the influence of the theoretically inflected conceptualisation of montage developed by Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s. Adopting the French term in the 1920s, which up until that point had simply signified ‘editing,’ Soviet filmmakers and film theorists had developed a conceptual approach to the joining of individual film shots that exploited the productive potentials of this process. Here, in order to understand precisely this productive aspect of montage that they envisioned, it is useful to remember the linguistic origins of the term, which predate the cinema. Used

outside of the domain of filmmaking, ‘montage’ refers to the assembly or connection of parts to create a whole, as in a wall built with bricks or a car assembled from parts. In this same way, Soviet filmmakers saw montage as an additive process: contra the implications of reduction in editing — embodied in the notion of the ‘cut’ that refines a sequence by shortening the length of shots — the cumulative process of assembly in montage was the very structuring principle of their films.34 Developing on this conception of cumulative assembly,

Soviet filmmakers theorised the different sequential constructions that could be forged by combining shots, with several competing (and sometimes conflicting) approaches emerging in this period. Vsevolod Pudovkin, building on Lev

Kuleshov’s famous experiments demonstrating the shifts in contextual meaning of assembled shots, developed a theory of ‘linkage montage,’ which brought together parallel spaces, contrasts and leitmotivs.35 Eisenstein, by contrast, famously refuted Pudovkin’s theory of linkage, writing of montage instead as “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots,” ideas which could stimulate affect and pathos, or could elicit intellectual associations.36 Vertov, finally, developed a theory of the ‘interval’ in montage, in which Eisenstein’s collisions were adopted to conceive of the “perceptual relationship of one shot

34 Reflecting this etymology, one of the early translations of the word montage into English was ‘mounting’. See Timothy Barnard, ed., André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943-1958 (Montreal: Caboose, 2018), 396.

35 See V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958), 75-78.

36 Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” in Film Form Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 49.

composition to another.”37 Despite their differences, these theorisations of montage by the Soviets share, as Judith Mayne has pointed out, a foundation in the Russian formalist notion of ostranenie, the ‘making-strange’ or

“defamiliarization of habitual artistic perception” in the suggestion of “new structural formations of its depicted objects and events.”38 In other words, what the Soviet theorists shared — and indeed, what Vedrès, Resnais and Marker would carry forward in their own filmmaking — was precisely a belief in this transformative capacity opened up by the assembly of shots, and the ability to see visual phenomena anew through the very processes of assemblage.

This renewed engagement with the inter-war aesthetic history of montage puts Vedrès, Resnais and Marker at odds with the dominant contemporaneous critical discourses on film form that take place in France at this time. In influential circles of French criticism throughout the 1940s and

1950s, montage, in the sense that Eisenstein and the other Soviet theorists had envisioned it, and even what might be more conservatively referred to under the rubric of editing in general, was being de-privileged in favour of a realist cinema aesthetics based on a re-thinking of the importance of mise-en-scène.39 From

37 Dziga Vertov, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 8.

38 Judith Mayne, “Eisenstein, Vertov and the Montage Principle,” Minnesota Review, no. 5, Fall 1975, 118.

39 Bernard Eisenschitz points out Resnais and Marker’s engagement with montage as being in contradistinction to dominant aesthetic discourses in France in this period: “Comme Godard et comme Resnais (l’un saluant en l’autre « le deuxième monteur du monde après Eisenstein »), Marker pense le cinéma en termes de montage plutôt que de « fenêtre ouverte sur le monde », récupérant l’héritage des avant-gardes soviétiques des années vingt (si peu connues en France avant la traduction du livre de Ripellino sur Maïakovski et le théâtre). A l’inverse, la critique nouvelle, le jeune cinéma français sont dominés, au début des années soixante, par l’idée de mise en scène, qui

André Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic Image” published in 1945, through to the writings of Eric Rohmer (writing at this point using his given name,

Maurice Schérer), Roger Leenhardt and Alexandre Astruc that appeared later in the 1940s and 1950s,40 French critics show an avowed interest in formulating a model of realist film aesthetics that championed a cinema of mise-en-scène, privileging the respect of space and, where possible, the integrity of the shot over the suggestive registers of montage pioneered by the likes of Eisenstein and

Vertov. Perhaps the most famous example of this move away from montage came in the form of André Bazin’s essay, “Montage interdit” [“Editing Prohibited”], published in Cahiers du cinéma in December 1956, in which the critic demonstrated his opposition to the representation of certain kinds of on-screen action in space via cutting.41 Though some scholars have misunderstood Bazin’s

rejette le cinéma de montage.” Bernard Eisenschitz, “Chris Marker. Quelquefois les images,” Trafic, no. 19, Summer 1996, 48. As Antoine de Baecque notes, French cinephilia associated with the Cahiers group rejected modernist currents in the arts more generally in favour of a return to classicism : “Les Cahiers ne baignent pas dans le moderne d'emblée, refusant par exemple assez longtemps le « nouveau roman» des années cinquante. Dans ce domaine, comme dans d'autres, les choix, très sûrs, seraient plutôt inscrits dans la tradition, étapes dans une histoire de l'art que couronnerait non pas la peinture abstraite, la musique concrète ou l'écriture moderne, mais le classicisme, donc le cinéma, le seul art qui, en 1950, puisse naturellement figurer un visage, un corps, un objet, sans le déconstruire par l'abstraction ou la recherche de l'avant-garde.” Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma, Tome 1, 30.

40 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16; Maurice Schérer, “Le cinéma, art de l’espace,” La Revue du cinéma, no. 14, June 1948, 3-13. On Leenhardt’s realist cinema aesthetics and their relation to more well-known French critical interventions on realism, see Colin Burnett, “Under the Auspices of Simplicity: Roger Leenhardt’s New Realism and the Aesthetic History of Objectif 49,” Film History, 27, Issue 2, 33-75; Dudley Andrew, “A Film Aesthetic to Discover,” CiNéMAS, Spring 2007, 17, nos. 3-4, 55-60.

41 André Bazin, “Montage interdit,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 65, December 1956, 32-36. In the article, Bazin critiques a number of films that had been recently released from directors such as Robert Flaherty and Jean Tourane and their method of dissecting cinematic space through cutting. For Bazin, these films had shown that there were “certain cases in which editing, far from being the essence of cinema, is indeed its negation.” With this in mind, Bazin goes so far as to posit the following maxim as an ‘aesthetic law’ of the cinema: “When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, cutting is ruled out." Bazin’s article was first translated into English by Hugh Gray under the title “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, 42-51. In keeping with my line of discussion, I

1956 article as demonstrating the critic’s ‘anti-editing’ or ‘anti-montage’ stance – a position that misreads both this essay and Bazin’s writing on cinema more generally45 – Bazin’s article might instead be more reasonably read as part of a turn away from a focus on editing as a productive aesthetic principle in the aesthetic debates that reign in French criticism of the period.46 Nowhere is this

have chosen to translate the title as “Editing Prohibited” in the body of the text and to modify Gray’s translations of the French word ‘montage’ – rendered as ‘montage’ in Gray’s text – to ‘editing’. To my mind, Bazin’s article is not a criticism of montage in the Soviet sense of ‘assemblage,’ but rather of certain methods of cutting in depictions of particular kinds of action or narrative circumstances.

45 Indeed, recent critical re-readings of Bazin’s “Montage Interdit” essay in particular have provided a good deal of nuance to Bazin’s thinking on editing. See for example Jean Narboni, “L’artifice en nature,” Trafic, no. 100, Winter 2016, 78-82; Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, “Scansion XX. Une ironie tenace aux dépens de la mort,” in André Bazin, Écrits complets II, ed. Hervé Joubert- Laurencin (Paris: Éditions Macula, 2018), 2013-2015. These critical interventions reflect a broader push in recent film scholarship to reconsider – often through close readings of both canonical and newly available texts by Bazin – the foundations of Bazinian film theory in an effort to combat what Hervé Joubert-Laurencin refers to as ‘bazinisme[s],’ that is: “la récitation paresseuse et trompeuse des thèses prétendues de Bazin.” Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le sommeil paradoxale. Écrits sur André Bazin (Montreuil: Éditions de l’Œil, 2014), 16. See in this regard Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le sommeil paradoxale, particularly 14-97; Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, no. 3, Spring 2006, 443-481; Daniel Morgan, “Bazin’s Modernism,” Paragraph, Vol. 36, no. 1, February 2013, 10-30. As recent Bazin scholarship has noted, the critic’s writings on non-narrative cinema often praised directors’ methods of montage, understood there not in the sense of cutting up cinematic space but in the sense of an assembly of images closer to the Soviet definition above. This certainly explains why Bazin wrote so positively of the films of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker discussed in the thesis. In an effusive review following its release, Bazin compared Vedrès’ film to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. André Bazin, “Paris 1900: À la recherche du temps perdu,” L’Ecran français, 30th September, 1947, 6; Reprinted in Le Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague, 1945-1958, ed. Jean Narboni (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998). Paula Amad discusses the ontological tensions of Bazin’s support of the film, arguing that Bazin places the film in line with the “mid-century cinematic modernism” of Welles and Rossellini’s “reborn realism.” See Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History,” particularly 99-104. Bazin was very favourable to Resnais’ early art documentaries, particularly Van Gogh. See Chapter 3. And finally, Bazin’s mostly positive reviews of Marker’s films, almost in spite of the challenges that they offer to realist film discourse, are charted in Jennifer Stob, “Cut and spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the metaphors of horizontal montage,” Studies in French Cinema, 12, no. 1, 2012, 35-46. Despite her cogent analysis of Bazin’s writing, it should be noted that Stob somewhat regrettably refers to Dimanche à Pekin as being “composed uniquely of filmed still photographs and a voice-over,” an error that would be cleared up by even a cursory viewing of the film. On Bazin’s response to these three filmmakers, see also Steven Ungar, “Radical Ambitions in Postwar French Documentary,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, eds. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 254-261.

46 For more on this debate on montage in Cahiers du cinéma, see Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma, Tome 1, 76-77; Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 76-82.

attitude towards editing clearer and more systematic than in the film criticism of

Maurice Schérer of the late 1940s and 50s, which constituted an aggressive turn away from the valorisaton of cinema as a “temporal art;” that is, as an art form praised for the “rhythmic values moving images could assume, and of the temporal patterns editing could construct” typical of much inter-war film criticism.47 Marco Grosoli’s recent close analysis of Schérer’s theoretical writing on film aesthetics of the period demonstrates how the future film director –

influenced by a return to the Kantian roots of phenomenology as well as its application to the relationship between cinema and the novel by Alexandre

Astruc – constructed a theory of film as a “novelistic art of space.”48

This de-privileging of editing in the writing of critics like Bazin, Astruc and Schérer has been reflected in the subsequent scholarly accounts of French post-war cinema, in which theoretical reflections on editing have been limited largely to pointing out this shift in focus in the canonical texts of the period.

Simply put, editing – and importantly, montage with it – has scarcely constituted a productive theoretical framework in accounts of French film theory and practice of the 1940s and 1950s.50 In centering its focus on montage, and indeed

47 Marco Grosoli, Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948-1953): From ‘École Scherer’ to ‘Politique des auteurs’ (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 19, n. 14. Indeed, Rohmer’s key programmatic text on film aesthetics written in 1948 was aptly titled “Cinema, an Art of Space.” Translated as Eric Rohmer, “Cinema, an Art of Space,” in The Taste of Beauty, ed. Jean Narboni and Eric Rohmer, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19-29.

48 See in particular Marco Grosoli, Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948-1953), 37-104.

50 There have been some recent exceptions. See Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History”; Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present: Statues Also Die with Night and Fog,” South Central Review, 2, no. 33 (Summer 2016), 15-29; Steven Ungar, “Radical Ambitions in Postwar French Documentary,” 254- 261.

arguing for its renewed importance and re-thinking in a discrete but nevertheless influential lineage of post-war French cinema, the present study sheds light on an alternate trajectory of midcentury French film theory and practice that has Vedrès, Resnais and Marker at its head.51 In the spirit of counter readings and questioning critical commonplace, I suggest that one of the key points of entry into understanding this alternative trajectory can emerge in a close reading of what was a landmark essay for post-war French film critics writing on a realist cinema of mise-en-scène: André Malraux’s “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma.”52 As we will see, the aesthetic propositions contained in

Malraux’s essay are taken up and subtly transformed first by Vedrès in a key

51 The wider implications of this alternate trajectory are discussed in the thesis’ conclusion. See Afterimages.

52 André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” Verve, 2, no. 8, 1 June, 1940, 69-73. “Esquisse” constitutes Malraux’s sole dedicated theoretical contribution on the cinema in a career as an art historian that was otherwise engaged with the traditional plastic arts. Written in 1939, it was originally published in the art history journal Verve in 1940 before later being republished as a standalone essay by Gallimard in 1946 and as part of his Psychologie de l’art, Vol. 1 in 1947. Thanks to its republication after the war, as well as Malraux’s significant standing as a public intellectual, novelist, and art historian, “Esquisse” was widely read by French film critics after the war, and is cited by numerous film critics and philosophers of the period, including André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Georges Auriol, Maurice Schérer, Alexandre Astruc and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dudley Andrew writes that Malraux’s essay “stood as the most influential view of the seventh art produced in France until Bazin and Edgar Morin came along after the war.” Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Benjamin, Bazin: A Triangle of Hope for Cinema,” in Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls?, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 116. On the publication history of Malraux’s essay, the context of its writing, and its influence, see François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 76, Summer 2015, 136-154. Malraux’s essay is also reproduced in full at the end of Albera and Morel’s article, with indications pertaining to changes made to the essay in various re-publications. Malraux’s essay was translated into English by longtime Malraux translator Stuart Gilbert in the original Verve publication; this English translated was republished as “Sketch for a Psychology of the Moving Pictures,” in Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, ed. Susanne K. Langley (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1958), 317-327. However, as Timothy Barnard has noted, Gilbert’s translation obscures many of the nuances of Malraux’s discussion of film form. Timothy Barnard, Découpage (Montreal: Caboose, 2014), notes 12, 18, on pages 62, 63. I will be citing the original French text reproduced in François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 145-154.

theoretical text, and then by all three filmmakers in their contemporaneous conceptualisation of cinematic montage.

Discussing Malraux’s “Esquisse” in terms of the development of montage aesthetics may on the surface seem like a somewhat puzzling choice; as Timothy

Barnard has convincingly argued, Malraux’s essay above all constitutes an argument for the essence of film as an art form in découpage more than in montage or even editing per se.54 Indeed, building on the experience of directing his only film, Espoir (an adaptation of his own novel of the same name, completed in 1939 and released in French cinemas in 1946), Malraux’s essay famously argues that cinema’s revolutionary moment — in which it breaks from the history of representational art stretching from western painting through to photography — occurs when Griffith invents the close-up, and thereby liberates the camera to break up and sequence images of a single dramatic scene.55

Malraux’s focus, then, is on the creative sequencing of shots envisioned by the director before and during the shooting of a film by shifts in camera set-ups, rather than the selection and assemblage of individual shots on the cutting room floor.56 However, the importance of Malraux’s essay to my discussion of the

54 Timothy Barnard, Découpage, 6-8.

55 François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 148-149. This account would clearly influence the first section of Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic Image” essay and its description of the development of the photographically reproducible arts in the context of the history of western painting. Further reflecting this influence, in the 1958 reprint of the “Ontology” essay, Bazin slightly alters the final line of Malraux’s essay — “Par ailleurs, le cinéma est une industrie” — to be: “D’autre part, le cinéma est un langage.” On the intersections and divergences between Malraux and Bazin, see Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Opening Bazin, 153-166; Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Benjamin, Bazin,” 115- 140; Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 68-70.

56 Timothy Barnard, Découpage, 7.

theorisation of montage practices of this period is condensed in an almost throwaway comment at its halfway point. In the third section of “Esquisse”,

Malraux briefly turns his attention to the links between sound cinema and radio, or rather, “composition radiophonique” as he specifies.57 Here, Malraux describes a curious, and, to my knowledge, fictitious radio program, in which a stenographer’s transcription of Maximilien Robespierre’s Committee hearing before his overthrow and execution during the Great Terror in 1794 is adapted for a dramatised radio play (Fig i, below). Malraux draws a distinction between how he envisions the text of Robespierre’s hearing being adapted for radio and for cinema, seeing in this hypothetical process of adaptation something of the individual essences and aesthetic preoccupations of each medium:

Of course, there are privileged moments that emerge from every instance of chaos; but in confronting this very same chaos, each art form determines for itself what these moments will be. For the radio, the pivotal moment might be the silencing of Robespierre’s voice, drowned out amidst the tumult; for the cinema, however, it might be the distracted gestures of a sentry intent on bundling some kids out of the room, or on reaching for his tinder-box at that very same moment…58

In this part of Malraux’s essay, the author’s reflections on cinema’s unique dramatic potentials through the fragmentation of diegetic space are given a

57 François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 149-150.

58 François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 150. This discussion of the adaptation of Robespierre’s text for radio is in fact the only time that the word ‘montage’ is used in Malraux’s essay: “Il ne s’agissait pas de choisir des acteurs pour dire les phrases du Moniteur; mais, d’abord, de tirer de la « sténographie » du Moniteur certains instants de la séance célèbre, d’en faire un montage.” François Albera and Jean-Paul Morel, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” 150. My emphasis.

slightly different accent. In contrast to the earlier example of Griffith’s movement of the camera to close in on his lead actor’s face — which seems to the modern viewer a well-worn, affective component of cinematic scene staging — Malraux here asserts that the camera is drawn to the seemingly inconsequential, fragmentary detail of action as part of its dramaturgic arsenal. Indeed, it is precisely in this attention to the small and insignificant gesture of the guard searching his pocket for a tinder-box — an example of one of the cinema’s

“privileged instants” — that Malraux sees the cinema’s unique dramatic potential, or as he would put it, its psychology.

Figure i: Adamo, The Fall of Robespierre in the Convention on 27 July 1794. (Max Adamo, Oil on canvas, 1870)

Malraux’s brief aside on the Robespierre hearing and the detail in cinema makes an unexpected re-appearance halfway through Nicole Vedrès’ key theoretical text on cinematic montage, “Les feuilles bougent” [“The Rustling

Leaves”], originally published in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes

in 1948.59 In the middle of a reflection on methods of assembling archival footage in the historical film de montage, Vedrès includes the above citation on the Robespierre hearing, radically re-reading its aesthetic implications.60 Where

Malraux argues for the dramaturgic power of the fragment in a découpage combining snatches of action through successions of images, Vedrès subtly shifts this Malrucien formulation to a model for historical representation through montage, one that combines what she terms the insignificant “à côtés” (“offcuts”) of the past as part of its method of constructing a cinematic discourse on history.61 More than just a cursory citation of a well-known contemporary essay,

Vedrès’ re-reading of Malraux on the cinematic fragment forms a central aspect of her thinking in this essay, in which she develops a complex, multi-layered argument on cinematic realism, the archival image, and the place of montage in expressing historical change. By closely examining Vedrès’ essay and her re- reading of Malraux, we not only get a better sense of where the montage aesthetic that she develops can be situated amongst better known discourses of the period on film aesthetics; we can also think more clearly about the importance of montage in the model of historical filmmaking that she posits in this essay, and which Resnais and Marker expand upon in their own films.

59 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 35, 3rd Year, August 1948, 348- 354. A slightly extended version of the essay appeared five years later: Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité,” in Cinéma: un œil ouvert sur le monde, ed. George-Michel Bovay (Lausanne, Clairefontaine: Albin Michel, 1952), 133-139. A final version, almost identical to the original 1948 essay, was published under the original title “Les feuilles bougent” as part of a collection of Vedrès’ journalistic writing: Nicole Vedrès, Paris, le… (Paris: Mercure de France, 1958), 51-62. The original 1948 version of the essay is reprinted in the DVD booklet of Doriane Film’s recent release of Vedrès’ films. I will be referring to the original version of the essay throughout this thesis unless otherwise indicated.

60 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

61 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

As with Malraux’s “Esquisse”, Vedrès’ “Les feuilles bougent” is framed as a series of aesthetic reflections prompted by her experience directing her first film,

Paris 1900, a film de montage re-assembling footage and photography from the

Belle Époque. Much of the essay is concerned with the question of cinematic realism and of the ability of archival images to tell us something about the past, reflecting on the processes by which she and her assistant, Alain Resnais, attempted to create their own portrait of this bygone era through period footage and photographs. Understanding the place of montage in her essay requires us first to understand the nuances of her position on cinematic realism, and how she sees the link between the archival image and the creation of historical discourse. At the beginning of the essay, Vedrès returns to one of the primal scenes of the medium in the marvelling of its first audiences at the rustling of the leaves in the background of the Lumière brothers’ first films, arguing that the subsequent major aesthetic advancements of the medium (Soviet cinema of the

1920s, Italian neorealism) constituted a series of attempts to return to the shock of the real contained in the rustling of the leaves of these very first films.62 But rather than emphasising the distinction between the involuntary realism of the

Lumière films and the realism as style of later film movements, Vedrès argues that this difference is perhaps not as clear as is often thought: paraphrasing

Fernand Léger, Vedrès asserts that “each era has its own realism”, which applies as much to Rossellini as it does to the late 19th century actualité camera

62 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 348-349. It is at this point that Vedrès includes the first of two citations from Malraux’s “Esquisse”: “Ce qu’appellent les gestes de noyés du monde baroque n’est pas une modification de l’image, c’est une succession d’images; il n’est pas étonnant que cet art tout de gestes et de sentiments, obsédé de théâtre, finisse dans le cinéma...”

operator.63 To demonstrate this point, she recounts her experience of selecting and watching fictional films and newsreels from the turn of the century during the production of Paris 1900. She noticed that both the fictional sketches and newsreels that she and her assistant Resnais examined seemed to them almost visually indistinguishable from one another, with all the footage, no matter its provenance, bearing the stylistic mark of the era during which it was shot — what Vedrès describes as a “typiquement mil neuf cent” look.64 In looking at these images from the vantage point of the mid-1940s, Vedrès notes that the very distinction between the involuntary realism of the former and the stylised realism of the latter became blurred and somewhat meaningless. Yet if these images of fiction and non-fiction bore a shared stylistic imprint of their era, their ability to represent major events appeared deeply insufficient; they shared something of the atmosphere of the period without in and of themselves providing a coherent relationship with what one might in hindsight expect them to reveal. This experience provided a significant lesson for Vedrès: she argues that when “confronting history” in archival filmmaking, one cannot depend on any kind of baseline realism of the cinematic image to automatically impart unto the future viewer an inherent, identifiable historical signification to be immediately prised from the image.65 Rather, the role of the filmmaker is to select and to assemble these decidedly opaque cinematic images of a past time in

63 In “Le nouveau réalisme continue” (1937), Léger writes that “each era has its own [realism]: it invents it, more or less, in relation to preceding epochs. Sometimes this is a reaction, at other times a continuation of the same line.” Reprinted in Fernand Léger, Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Editions Gonthier, 1965), 175.

64 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 350.

65 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

such a way that they become potentially historically meaningful in the present; in a word, these images were hardly useful without montage. But what kind of images should one choose? And how should one assemble them? For Vedrès, given that even the images of seemingly significant events “ne se détachaient même pas du chaos ambiant“, it would fall to the filmmaker to “seize upon” the traditionally minor, ephemeral “à côtés” [“offcuts”] in order to make something emerge from this chaos of opaque historical images.66 It was precisely in the montage of these slippery, minor archival images that the “ambient chaos” of these visual sources could be overcome.

It is at this point in Vedrès’ essay that the citation from Malraux’s

“Esquisse” on the Robespierre play appears: cinema’s force comes from its ability to show us the detail, the sentry reaching for his tinder-box.67 Yet the context in which Vedrès places this citation is radically distinct from its original function as a metaphor in Malraux’s essay for dramatic representation in the cinema. Malraux’s focus on the detail remains, but Vedrès demonstrates a conception of assemblage of fragments that reflects the productive, transformative processes of montage in the Soviet tradition I mentioned earlier; here, the fragment is the building block of a kind of cinematic writing of history.

Indeed, Vedrès compares montage to writing, drawing an analogy between the selection and ordering of archival images with the novelist’s arrangement of words and punctuation. Just as the basic building blocks of language require the

66 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

67 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

author’s organisational prowess to form into the lines of a novel, the archival image must also be selected and organised with other images in order to come into meaning.68 Yet Vedrès is not simply describing a philosophy of the archival image in which the meaning of the fragmentary “à côté” is endlessly deferred and manipulated by the processes of montage. Rather, what Vedrès’ essay privileges is precisely the importance of the very process of selection of a fragment, and the significance of the filmmaker having chosen a piece of footage over another in this confrontation with history. Vedrès describes her and Resnais’ “prédilection plus ou moins consciente pour telle ou telle sorte d’image” which led them to select certain pieces of footage, often of seemingly ephemeral events, while freely admitting that for another filmmaker, the choice would have surely been different.69 More than acknowledging a personal subjectivity in the process of historical representation, Vedrès here shifts the focus of assembling fragmentary images — as Sam Di Iorio has perceptively pointed out — “from the nature of the material to the moment of its viewing.”70 What was crucial for Vedrès was the very fact of having been drawn to a particular fragment of footage of the past, with the filmmaker’s decision to assemble this or that image implicitly re- evaluating its historical relevance and recognising in it something that speaks to a later, corresponding moment in time. In short, these ‘offcuts’ of the past become newly historically meaningful by dint of this very attraction from a future vantage point; for Vedrès, her selection and assemblage of images reflects not an attempt to reconstitute or even illustrate the past, but rather is a means of

68 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351-353.

69 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 350, 352.

70 Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 25.

expressing a relationship to the past sparked by the retrospective moment of the image’s viewing.

While I will draw out some of the more complex historiographical implications for montage filmmaking prefigured in “Les feuilles bougent” in the following section, Vedrès’ reflections on the method of selection and assembly of archival footage in the essay point to an important aesthetic influence on all three filmmakers: surrealism, both in literature and the plastic arts. In Vedrès’ description of the mysterious draw of ephemeral images of the past, one is reminded of the “trouvailles” of Breton’s narrator in his novel Nadja; there, the narrator’s regular trips to flea markets “in search of those objects that can be found nowhere else, [that are] outmoded, fragmented, useless, almost incomprehensible” became for him an expression of the psyche in the subject’s attraction to an object in the material world.71 For Vedrès, the draw of a particular image expressed a relationship to a moment in the past, and a chance to reflect upon the signification of this newly apparent pull for the future observer. Indeed, if other artistic and literary practices built around montage and collage would feed into the work of these directors in different ways — including photomontage, musique concrète, comic books, and various collage practices combining text and image — surrealism remains an important touchstone for Vedrès, Resnais and Marker due to the applicability of its aesthetic characteristics of re-purposing, waste and juxtaposition to the

71 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (Grove Press, Inc.: New York, 1960).

historically-inflected montage filmmaking they develop in this period.72 While post-war surrealism in France had lost much of the influence on the intellectual and artistic sphere that it held in the inter-war period, the return of the movement’s leader, André Breton, to Paris in 1946 and the organisation of the first major post-war exhibit in the following year demonstrated the movement’s continued relevance in the period.73 Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s engagement with surrealism in this period once more runs counter to dominant contemporary discourses in French film culture: save for the short-lived journal

L’Âge du cinéma, founded in 1951, and to an extent, the writing of those associated with the revue Positif (1952), surrealism for the most part gave way to other theoretical models in post-war French film criticism and theory, a situation far removed from its considerable influence on French criticism in the

1920s and 30s.74 Rather, the interest in surrealism of all three filmmakers

72 For discussion of the influence of comic books and musique concète on Marker’s work see Ch. 4. On collage and Vedrès, see Ch. 1.

73 On the place of surrealism in post-war French intellectual spheres, see Ellen E. Adams, “At the boundary of action and dream: Surrealism and the battle for post-Liberation France, French Cultural Studies 2016, 27, no. 4, 319–334.

74 There are some notable exceptions in this period, chiefly Positif editor Ado Kyrou’s Le surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1953). Kyrou’s monograph offers a possible definition of surrealism in cinema, but the examples he uses (Méliès, von Sternberg, the Russian and French avant-gardes of the 1920, Buñuel) concentrate on glimpses of surrealist aesthetics in other periods and national contexts. The 1963 re-edition of the monograph praises the work of Resnais of the 1950s and early 1960s, and particularly his second feature, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, which he qualifies as a film that is “surréaliste dans sa folie baroque, dans sa volonté de détruire, de completer le temps, de ménager ainsi des recontres inconnues.” Ado Kyrou, Le surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963), 206. For more on Kyrou’s monograph, see Raymond Bellour, “Flash-back,” Trafic, no. 100, Winter 2016, 57-61. L’Âge du cinéma notably published one of André Breton’s rare texts on cinema in an issue dedicated to surrealism. André Breton, “Comme dans un bois,” L’Âge du cinéma, numéro spécial surréaliste, nos. 4-5, Autumn- November, 1951, 26-30. On the links between L’Âge du cinéma and Positif, as well as their relation to surrealism, see Thierry Frémaux, “L’aventure cinéphilique de positif (1952-1989),” Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 23, July-September 1989 (Dossier: “Mai 68”), 21-34. On French critics’ opposition to surrealism in this period, see Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma, Tome 1, 142-143

reflects a broader, cross-medial conception of filmmaking in relation to the other arts that the three share, often due to their parallel activities in other art forms: though Resnais never ventured outside of filmmaking, Vedrès was already a published novelist and respected journalist by the end of the war, and Marker’s work in this period and beyond vacillates between writing, photography, filmmaking and several other artistic forms.75 All three also had personal connections with the post-war French surrealist milieu. Vedrès belonged to the same intellectual circles as one of France’s chief surrealist writers, Jacques

Prévert, and her 1945 book Images du cinéma français included a foreword by the poet Paul Éluard, who in turn wrote the commentary for Resnais’ Guernica five years later.76 Marker, for his part, was Antonin Artaud’s secretary for a brief period after the war, and a program he co-directed for French television in the early 1950s adopted the surrealists’ interest in the oneiric, with each episode based on recounted dreams sent in by audience members.77

75 By the time Paris 1900 was released, Vedrès had authored or co-authored three monographs and the novel Le Labyrinthe ou le jardin de Sir Arthur (Paris: Éditions de la revue “Fontaine,” 1947). For a discussion of Marker’s non-filmmaking activity across different media, see Chapter 4.

76 Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 29. Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français is discussed in detail in Chapter 1.

77 See Christine Van Assche, “De l’assemblage surréaliste au dispositif museal,” Chris Marker (2018), 118. The title of the television program, La Clé des songes, is a reference to a painting by René Magritte of the same name.

Figure ii: Double-page spread from Georges Bataille's Documents journal.

Figure iii: Double-page spread from Marker's collage folders. Made in the 1950s and recently discovered in the filmmaker’s personal archives. Photographed by the author at the Cinémathèque française, Paris, May 4th, 2018.

Figure iv: DOK journal cover designed by Chris Marker, published in 1950.

Figure v: El Lissitsky, Kurt Schwitters, 1924. Gelatin silver print, 4 1/4 x 3 7/8" (10.8 x 9.8 cm)

Beyond these personal connections to the milieu, surrealism’s influence on the work of all three filmmakers is evident in their practices of montage, which privilege the processes of disconnection and disruption of the habitual connection between visual and narrative unities in order to draw out new metaphors and associations. This influence manifests itself in a range of works by the three filmmakers across different media, demonstrating a conception of montage that extends beyond the bounds of filmmaking and into other visual and literary practices. In Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français (1945) — her book on the history of French cinema featuring hundreds of production stills — as well as Marker’s numerous book publications at Les Editions du Seuil in the

1950s, we see the strong influence of surrealist collage by the likes of Max Ernst and the experiments with text and reproductions of photographic images in surrealist revues such as Georges Bataille’s Documents journal from 1929–1930 and Albert Skira’s Minotaure (1933–1939)78 (Fig. ii, above). The Cinémathèque française’s recent discovery of collage folders that Marker made in the 1950s, which combined newspaper clippings, film stills and postcards from around the world, demonstrates a new example of what Christine Van Assche describes as a surrealist poetics that runs through Marker’s work, with its “procédés poétiques d’assemblage d’éléments contradictoires, issus de ses collections hétéroclites

78 Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français is discussed in more detail in Chapter 1. As François Albera notes, the processes of assemblage and montage in avant-garde art journals such as Regards and Documents became progressively more widespread in the interwar period, featuring in popular press magazines such as Life and Match by the late 1930s. See François Albera, “Georges Didi- Huberman, Quand les images prennent position. L’œil de l’histoire, 1,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 57, 2009, 3. Steven Ungar discusses photographer and filmmaker Eli Lotar’s photo montage sets of the municipal slaughterhouse in Paris’ La Villette, published in the journals Documents, Variété and Vu between 1929 and 1931, in the context of later post-war social documentary film practices that include Vedrès, Resnais and Marker. Steven Ungar, Critical Mass, 112-124.

d’objets.”79 (Fig. iii, above). Marker would also create photomontages in this period reminiscent of influential Dadaist and surrealist works by John Heartfield and El Lissitsky, including the poster for his first film, Olympia 52, and the cover of the German popular education review, DOK (Figs. iv–v above). Finally, Resnais continually referred to the importance of surrealism to his development and thinking on cinema, qualifying comparisons of his work with the Soviet montage filmmakers in terms of what he saw as their shared aesthetic pre-occupations with surrealism:

Eisenstein[’s cinema] is much closer to [Comte de Lautréamont’s idea of] the meeting of the umbrella and the sewing machine on a dissecting table. And as I feel very close to the surrealist discipline, I feel my work is closer to Eisenstein’s. Each shot has a life of its own.80

As we will see throughout the analysis of the films in the chapters to come, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker would continually build and provide variations on these surrealist principles of assembling disparate objects and images to create what Breton would describe in the first Surrealist manifesto as

“certain forms of previously neglected associations.”81 The shock of a new

79 Christine Van Assche, “De l’assemblage surréaliste au dispositif museal,” Chris Marker (2018), 117. Van Assche also notes: “Dans les années 1950, Marker s’est intéressé aux méthodes esthétiques décrites par les surréalistes et appliquées dans la poésie, les arts visuels et le cinéma. Nous constatons qu’il n’est pas tant fasciné par les débordements psychiques préconisés par André Breton, même si l’un de ses premiers films en coréalisation (avec Jean Kerchbron, Charles Serpinet, et avec les conseils d’Alain Resnais), au titre rendu célèbre par René Magritte, La Clé des songes (1950), est une tentative de relier un scénario aux investigations fantasmagoriques de ses auteurs.” Christine Van Assche, “De l’assemblage surréaliste au dispositif museal,” 117.

80 André S. Labarthe, Jacque Rivette, “Entretien avec Alain Resnais et Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 123, September 1961, 8.

81 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26.

association created through a cinematic montage bringing together seemingly disparate and incongruous images runs through their work in this period. We see it moving from Vedrès’ notion of a montage of ‘off-cuts’ to create a revelatory understanding of an image of the past, Resnais’ taking apart and re-assembling of past artworks and film footage to demonstrate non-habitual associations between images, and Marker’s discontinuous and abrupt montage that places images into dialogue with broader politico-historical narratives.

Montage as Historical Method: Benjamin’s Historical Legibility

If Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s work reflect the influence of cross-medial modernist practices of montage, most notably those associated with surrealism, montage also figures just as productively in their work as an historical method.

The aesthetic principles of this modernist montage lineage — the privileging of the seemingly insignificant, the creation of new metaphors and associations, recontextualising of fragments — are fundamental parts of an historically reflexive methodology that the three directors develop in their films of this period, in which they express the historical correspondences and synchronicities between their own time and the different events and social organisations of the past. In adopting montage as both an aesthetic philosophy and as a critical, reflexive historical method, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker reflect what French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman identifies as a broader tendency by mid- century modernist artists to use montage to address changing political and

historical realities.82 As Didi-Huberman notes, the rise of montage as the

“modern method par excellence” across the social sciences and the arts in the late

1910s and 20s was as much a response to the changing conditions of modernity and its effect on perceptions of space and time as it was a need to create a form to confront the cataclysmic disorder wrought by the First World War. The flowering of Dadaism and surrealism after WWI, with their aesthetics of collage, the readymade, and the recuperation of waste, as well as the writing of Louis

Aragon, John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin are for Didi-Huberman examples of works that express the profound ‘disorder’ of this historical moment by developing a formal procedure based on “the dislocation and re-composition of things.”83 In these parallel operations that both decompose the traditional unities of art and re-assemble them into new arrangements, modernist artists called attention to and complicated the ‘network of relations’ that had previously structured categories such as narrative and visual harmony. As an example, Didi-

Huberman points to Bertolt Brecht’s theory and practice of epic theatre, in which the disjointed sequences of scenes and events on stage — here described as a

‘montage of texts’ spoken by characters — were structured to show “the relationship of things shown together and connected according to their

82 Georges Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Toronto: RIC Books; Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2018), 78-82.

83 Georges Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History, 78-79. Didi-Huberman, following Ernst Bloch, also cites the writing of James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Julien Green and André Breton as examples of literary montage. Though Didi-Huberman doesn’t point this out, this post-WWI period is also when filmmakers in Europe, and particularly in the Soviet Union, begin to explore a filmmaking form alternatively referred to as archival or compilation documentary in the Anglophone tradition, and the film de montage in French histories of cinema, which features the re-employment of previously produced footage to create new correspondences. This film de montage context is further explored in Chapter 1.

differences.”84 This ‘relationship’ is what comes to light in Brecht’s ‘montage’ of texts, precisely because of his method of highlighting the differences rather than the connections between scenes and events.

Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s films of the 1940s and 50s carry on this avant-gardist heritage of montage practices dating back to the inter-war period, adopting its procedures of dislocation and re-combination of the Aristotelian unities of art to bring to light the habitually hidden ‘network of relations’ between their own, unstable post-war reality and the past. That their films are made after another cataclysmic disaster in WWII, and in large part haunted by the atrocities of the camps and nuclear attacks, offers more than just a historical parallel with the inter-war avant-garde. It demonstrates, rather, a continued application of the formal procedure of montage to demonstrate new, non- habitual correspondences and latent affinities between historical phenomena of different eras. In the range of subjects that they take on, all three filmmakers are primarily concerned with demonstrating how the various historical narratives and discourses of the past inform their present moment, often in unexpected ways. Montage functions in their films as a means of creating a relational historical method, critically examining those very relationships to the past in order to ask questions about their present.

Walter Benjamin’s notion of historical legibility, which runs through his reflections on the philosophy of history in the Arcades Project, can help to

84 Georges Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History, 60.

conceptualise this approach to montage as a relational historiographical principle in the films of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker of the post-war period. At its origins a portrait of modern industrial Paris that grew to encompass a much wider set of reflections on 19th century history and culture, 85 Benjamin’s Arcades

Project was also deeply invested in investigating how montage itself could be used as part of a critical method of historical materialism. Assembling what he termed the ‘rags’ and ‘refuse’ of 19th century cultural commodities, Benjamin’s

Arcades combines literary citations with anecdotal accounts of urban life, and catalogue-like descriptions of luxury consumer products, all of which are broken up by the author’s own aphoristic blocks of commentary that broke from any pre-established model of historical prose writing. Benjamin’s method in combining these fragments was that of ‘literary montage’, a principle of construction whose debt he explicitly identified with the surrealist authors in the

French tradition (Aragon, Breton), and which had echoes in other surrealist practices in the plastic arts (collage).87 If surrealist montage created a

“defamiliarization effect of seeing otherwise meaningless material objects suddenly removed from the context that determines their meaninglessness”, the application of this principle of montage to a critical historiographical model would draw on these effects of shock and disorientation to complicate traditional

85 As Susan Buck-Morss notes, Benjamin’s Arcades Project grew out of what was initially going to be a 50-page history of Paris. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), 5.

87 On the influence of surrealism on Benjamin’s historical method in The Arcades Project, see Max Pensky, “Method and time: Benjamin’s dialectical images” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185-187; Simon Baker, Surrealism, History and Revolution (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 31-35; Margaret Cohen, Profane Illuminations: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), especially 9-10, 57-76.

historical categories, particularly those of refuse and significance.88 The struggle for what is the refuse of the past and what is significant was for Benjamin fundamentally under contestation: it was the task of the materialist historian to interrogate the process by which one object is confined to the ‘trash’ of history, and another is recognised as being key to its progression leading to the present.

Refusing this fixity of relations between past and present and removing these rags and refuse of historical appearances from their “embededness in a particular context”, Benjamin’s Arcades would force these fragmentary texts into a new, productive set of relations; as a result, the narrative logic of history that wrote them off as insignificant would be called into question.89 Subject to a

“violent expulsion from the continuum of historical process”, as Benjamin puts it, and placed into relation with other historical refuse, the desired effect would be a historical shock — much as the surrealists had sought an aesthetic shock — that would profoundly alter how the past had been comprehended from the vantage point of the present moment.90 For Benjamin, the adoption of a model of montage that privileged the traditionally insignificant was a means to express a unique vision of historical temporality: it was the key to his attempt to “break with vulgar historical naturalism” and the “empty, homogeneous time” filled with consequential events that it presupposed.91 Benjamin had argued that his

88 Max Pensky, “Method and time,” 186.

89 Indeed, part of Benjamin’s attraction to this methodology, given his focus on 19th century Paris, was precisely the massive accumulation of “alienated things” and objects in a system that, due to conditions of capitalist production and technological process, was “continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 466.

90 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475.

91 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.

model of montage-based, materialist history “leads the past to bring the present into a critical state”, instantiating a critical relation between moments in time by recalibrating the relation of historical appearances as they had figured in an existing narrative tradition of history.92

As Benjamin scholars have argued, Benjamin’s interest in the cultural commodities of the 19th century was a testament to what he saw as “a profound synchronicity” between the changes of this past era and the “convulsive political upheavals marking the Europe in and about which he was writing during the

1930s.“93 It is precisely with a mind to conceptualising this synchronicity between two periods of time that Benjamin introduces his notion of historical legibility in Convolute N of the Arcades Project, a condition of historical knowledge that he refers to in terms of ‘images’.94 Introducing the idea in

Convolute [N3,1], Benjamin writes:

92 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 471.

93 Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin, “Editors’ Introduction” The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap University Press, 2008).

94 Benjamin does not specify whether the images he refers to are technologically produced or imagined. As Sigrid Weigel points out, the problem of how to interpret this statement, which Benjamin scholars have grappled with, is partly due to issues around translation. She notes that in the Arcades Project, Benjamin uses the word “Bild,” which in German “does not distinguish between image and picture.” She goes on to argue that “Benjamin’s use of the word refers to a meaning of Bild that precedes the distinctions among mental, visual, and material images as well as the differentiation of scripture and pictures and the separation of concept (Begriff) and metaphor.” Sigrid Weigel, “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith, Christine Kutschbach, Critical Inquiry, no. 41, Winter 2015, 344.

What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity.’) … For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. […] The image that is read — which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability — bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.95

In this cryptic passage, Benjamin extends his method of critical materialist historiography and his discussion of synchronicities between two moments of time to incorporate a discussion of the mix of temporalities of the image, which he conceived of in terms of a dual ‘historical index.’ Benjamin contrasts the dual historical index of the image to Husserl’s notion of ‘essences’, which the latter spoke of in terms of ideas that cannot be reduced to individual factuality, ideas that are “non-individual,” “super-empirical”, and, most importantly, “non-temporal.”96 Contrary to the “ideal dimension irreducible to facts”97 of essences, the image is instead marked by a dual historical index that ties it both to a moment in the past (the moment in which it was created) and to a future moment where it will “attain to legibility.” Crucial, then, to the condition of an image’s legibility is the passage of time that separates the initial moment of production of an image and the later moment of ‘reading,’ in which the image

95 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462-463. My emphasis.

96 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), 87.

97 Andrea Zhok, “The Ontological Statues of Essences in Husserl’s Thought,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 11, 2012, 101.

enters into “the now of a particular recognizability.”98 What Benjamin’s notion of legibility implies, then, is that the image itself can be a valuable tool for the historian in tracing the profound historical correspondences between two times.

As Benjamin scholars Jennings, Doherty, and Levin argue, this argument that past cultural forms “become legible only at a later moment — one that corresponds to them and only to them” was above all part of a belief that they could show “the particular — and particularly endangered — character of our own embeddedness in history.”99 The very fact of this legibility — and thus, of this profound correspondence between historical moments — would be just as revealing about the contours of the present moment of reading as it would be of the past moment that the image inhabits.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that Benjamin’s statements on legibility presuppose the work of a historian or future onlooker who is able to produce a legibility of the image; notice that Benjamin does not indicate that the image is ‘legible’ at a certain point in time, but rather that it may “attain to legibility” at a corresponding, future moment. Far from an automatic occurrence, legibility is, as Samuel Weber notes, a ‘structural possibility’ of the image, a structural possibility that could be realised by his critical historiographical method based on modernist montage practices.100 The very purpose of this

98 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462-463.

99 Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin, “Editors’ Introduction,” 6.

100 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6. Weber discusses this conceptual process as one that is at least in part linguistically based, tracing through his monograph what he describes as Benjamin’s pattern of “forming nouns from verbs.”

method was “to cultivate a particular capacity for recognizing such moments” at which the legibility of the image would be available, moments that were — as

Benjamin put it — defined by crisis.101 For Benjamin, montage is key to producing a recognition of the crises in historical images: its processes of juxtaposition and assemblage would be able to demonstrate a disruption in the smooth continuum of historical progress through new, non-habitual relationships between historical appearances. As Georges Didi-Huberman notes, this recognition of crisis in the image produced by montage is above all a recognition of a complication of established historical narratives linking past and present. The historical knowledge produced by this method of montage constitutes not an “act of moving toward the past in order to describe it and seize it ‘as it is’”, but rather, one that forces an “uneasiness in a [historical] tradition that, until then, has offered the past its more or less recognizable picture.”102

This moment of reading — when the historian looks back on an image from the past in a more or less distant present — is an opportunity to critically re- assemble historical images and to demonstrate these newly legible synchronicities between two historical moments separated in time. Released from the cycle of previously approved interpretation and classification, these images become the basis for new historical assemblages, in which the revelation of an initially imperceptible, alternative historical trajectory in the present moment becomes visible in them.

101 Max Pensky, “Method and time,” 181.

102 Georges Didi-Huberman, Remontages du temps subi. L’Œil de l’histoire, 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010), 16.

In Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s films of this post-war period, cinematic montage constitutes a method of producing historical legibility, the directors’ assemblages of images expressing newly apparent correspondences between a range of historical phenomena and their post-war present. In the range of subjects that they examine — from the Belle Époque to the camps, the history of painting to the changing face of socialist countries after WWII — their recognition of Benjaminian crises in the images they assemble complicates existing historical discourses by suggesting a series of critical ramifications for their post-war cultural and political context. Continuing on from a lineage of cross medial, modernist montage practices developed in the earlier parts of the

20th century, the three filmmakers privilege the moment of assemblage of heteroclite, historically polyvalent images to re-think the networks of historical relations that connect historical phenomena of different eras. Montage is a means for them to demonstrate newly legible appearances in cinematic images that indicate profound synchronicities between their own time period and earlier moments in history, suggesting the persistence of past historical formations in the realities of a variety of contemporary concerns specific to the post-war period. Across this corpus of films, Vedrès, Resnais and Marker work with a wide variety of images, including archival footage, photography, reproductions of artworks, and contemporary travel footage, developing a distinct set of montage practices to identify newly legible historical correspondences with the present. In Paris 1900, Vedrès’ re-assemblage of film footage and photography dating back to the Belle Époque suggests the presence of an overdetermination of epochal significations in ephemeral, quotidian visual sources. Her next film, La Vie commence demain, alternates archival footage and

photography with newly shot footage, a process also adopted in Resnais and

Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi and Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard; all three films use this alternation between archival and non-archival images to explore the persistent traumas of recent historical catastrophes and the political horizons that lay ahead. In his Van Gogh and Guernica, Resnais turns to the legibility of past cultural forms, fragmenting and re-assembling reproductions of paintings and sculptures through cinematic montage to create new, politicised ways of seeing works from art history. And finally, in his Olympia 52, Dimanche à Pekin, and Lettre de Sibérie, Marker submits his own travel footage to an auto-critical re-sculpting via the processes of voiceover and montage, revealing the legibility of interconnected historical temporalities and narratives in contemporary footage filmed in three different countries.

Outline

This thesis, divided into four parts, examines the approaches to montage in the early works of these three filmmakers as both an aesthetic principle and historical method, charting their demonstration of newly legible correspondences between historical phenomena through the assembly of images. In Chapter 1, I examine Nicole Vedrès’ development of what I term a revelatory montage poetics in Paris 1900, her re-assemblage of seemingly insignificant, visual ‘off-cuts’ filmed during the Belle Époque imparting upon these images a sense of the tragic character or ‘nerves’ of this bygone era. It argues that Vedrès’ montage aesthetic marks a break with the film de montage or archival documentary tradition that dates back to interwar Europe, acting as a

film fondateur for a renewed conception of montage in documentary filmmaking in the post-war period that would inform the films of Resnais and Marker in the following decade. It examines the historiographical traditions of the film de montage dating back to the 1920s and 30s, during which filmmakers’ strong ties to nationalist and leftist political milieus influenced a form of montage in which the image illustrates a pre-conceived analysis or chronology of past events. It posits that both the theory and practice of archival montage of the surrealist artist-filmmaker and future Vedrès collaborator, Jacques Brunius, as well as

André Bazin’s critique of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight in 1946, suggest an alternative conception of the film de montage in a French context that departed from the positivist and rigorously narrative historiographical framework dominating inter-war montage practices. It is this alternative aesthetic and historiographical line that Vedrès pursues after the war. I begin my examination of Vedrès’ unique conception of montage by looking at an early book publication

— Images du cinéma français (1945) — and its collage-like mix of written text and photographic images on the page, followed by an account of Paris 1900’s complex production history. I outline the conceptual importance of surrealism in both projects, and particularly the role of chance — what Breton called the trouvaille — in the process of selecting and assembling pre-existing images.

Vedrès’ aforementioned “Les feuilles bougent” essay and Benjamin’s philosophy of historical materialism are offered as further conceptual frameworks for my close analysis of key scenes in Paris 1900, in which the director’s assemblages of seemingly disinterested images express the profound seismic shifts that appear to be hidden within these images when re-examined from afar.

In Chapter 2, films by all three directors are examined — Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain (1950), Resnais and Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi

(1953) and Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) — in which archival footage appears alongside footage shot by the directors themselves. The chapter focuses on the re-use of a body of state-sanctioned pedagogical and scientific films, colonial propaganda newsreels and documentaries, and footage shot by Allied and Axis forces of the deportation and of the camps during WWII, and examines how this body of archival images is re-employed by the three filmmakers in order to examine possible political horizons for the future as a response to recent traumatic world events (the atomic bomb, colonialism in Africa, genocide in Europe). It examines the alternation of archival and non-archival footage as a means of both identifying newly legible historical significations in images of the past in light of the philosophical, political and memorial currents of post-war

France, as well as newly emergent political possibilities for the future that they reveal. In La Vie commence demain, Vedrès’ reportage on the intellectual and philosophical climate of post-war France is tempered by a cautionary reminder of the various catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. Vedrès combines contemporary footage of interviews with leading post-war figures in philosophy, arts and the sciences with archival footage from United States, British and

French pedagogical, military, and educational films, the dialogues on the present and future in its interviews alternating with a suite of archival images of the past.

I examine the particular potency of Vedrès’ employment of U.S. military footage of nuclear tests and of fighting in the Pacific during WWII as a reflection on the escalated threat of nuclear war in the late 1940s, and the future-facing discourse of the film’s penultimate sequence set at the UNESCO headquarters. In Les

Statues meurent aussi, Resnais and Marker place footage from colonial documentaries and newsreels shot in former French colonies alongside their own images of works of art by the black diaspora held in European museums, historicising the contemporary production and distribution of these artworks in light of contiguous histories of European colonialism. Reflecting the anti- colonialist and pan-Africanist ideologies of the project’s commissioning body,

Présence Africaine, the two directors re-employ an archive of state-backed, pro- colonial images to create a dialectic relationship between the colonial past and a possible, post-colonial future for the creation of black art. And finally, Resnais’ re-use of photographs and footage shot by Allied and Axis forces of the deportation, camps and their liberation in Nuit et Brouillard attempts to ascribe to these images a legibility that goes beyond the confinement of the camps to the past and instead speaks to the possible renaissance of the ideologies that birthed them in post-war France.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus of the thesis from the re-employment of archival footage to the fragmentation and re-assemblage of reproductions of painting in its focus on Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948) and Guernica (1950), discussing how the breaking down of the original pictorial unity of the works and their putting together into a new form through cinematic montage creates a novel relationship to the œuvres of these painters. In the associations he creates through cutting between details of paintings, Resnais subjects these bodies of work to a re-animation through cinematic montage, the demontage (in the sense of a taking apart of a whole) of the original space of the canvas matched with a re-montage (a putting back together), creating a cinematic synthesis that

inscribes an alternate meaning and temporal valency of the artworks of the past.

Resnais’ fragmentation and re-assemblage of artworks is conceptualised as a continuation of a broader cultural politics of montage in post-war France, which includes the montage practices of André Malraux’s art history books and the

‘animation’ of culture forms through fragmentation by leftist popular education organisations such as Peuple et Culture and Travail et Culture. I argue that

Resnais’ art films develop out of these concurrent efforts to introduce a new audience to the history of the plastic arts and literary forms through montage, adopting their fragmentary montage methodology in his demonstration of the newly legible historical significations of past cultural forms. I examine the role of fragmentation and re-assemblage of visual montage in André Malraux’s

Psychologie de l’art series, and draw a comparison to the pedagogical methods of popular education organisations, which aimed to broaden access to the history of art and culture through a fragmentary re-montage of works. Peuple et Culture’s concept of ‘mental training’ [entraînement mental], its pedagogical techniques, and the fragmented structure of its publications are identified as part of the organisation’s underlying engagement with art and cultural history through montage. It is within this cultural context and with the funding of a popular education organisation — Les amis de l’art — that Resnais directs Van Gogh, which subjects reproductions of the Dutch painter’s canvases to a process of fragmentation and re-assemblage in order to inscribe these details within a reflection on the artist’s tragic life and the place of art within it. Guernica extends the aesthetic experiments with fragmentation of Van Gogh, drawing on the aesthetic principles of montage from the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s to fragment details from Picasso’s œuvre and re-assemble them in disruptive

arrangements of images. Through this abrupt and discontinuous approach to montage, Resnais forges historical resonances that extend beyond the canvas, reflecting on the memory of the bombing of Guernica in light of an upswing in popularity in fascist politics in post-war France.

Chapter 4 focuses on three early films by Chris Marker — Olympia 52

(1952), Dimanche à Pekin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (1957) — in the context of his contemporaneous development of cross-medial montage practices in the

1940s and 50s. I argue that in these three films, Marker continues the discordant associations of image and text that he develops in works of photography, collage and book publishing in the same period, using montage and voiceover to create abrupt historical ruptures in his contemporary images of place. I examine

Marker’s connection, like Resnais, to the popular education milieu described in

Chapter 3, and the influence that their montage practices have on his early publications, as well as their involvement in the production of his first film. In

Olympia 52, we see glimpses of his temporally layered historical view of contemporary places that he will develop further in his later films of the decade; his insertion of brief, flash-like cuts to images from the history of the Olympic

Games ascribing his vision of the Helsinki Olympics within a complex network of post-war European geo-politics. I also describe some of Marker’s contemporaneous and anterior influences in the development of his montage practice in the 1950s, including Dadaism, surrealism, comic books and musique concrète. I demonstrate how these strands of popular and high art forms based on assemblage come together in his book editing work on Les Editions du Seuil’s collection of quasi guidebooks, entitled Petite Planète. In these books, Marker’s

discordant arrangements of text and image on the page encourage the reader to consider contemporary national realities in light of the often conflicting narratives of the past that predate them. In discussing the context of the Cold

War and its influence on his last two films of the decade, Dimanche à Pekin and

Lettre de Sibérie, I introduce historian Harry Harootunian’s notion of ‘non- contemporaneous contemporaneity’ that he developed in his writings on historiography and comparability. Harootunian’s analysis of how the political context of the Cold War tended to occlude historical narratives that did not sit comfortably with notions of modernity and progress in turn informs my reading of Marker’s two later travel films, which bring to light precisely these multiplicities of historical narratives and temporalities in his contemporary portraits of place. In Dimanche à Pekin, Marker places impressionistic footage of a walk through the Chinese capital over the course of a day in contrast with detours into the country’s history that pre-date the founding of the People’s

Republic seven years earlier. Montage becomes a way for Marker to complicate the West’s image of Mao’s China, cutting back and forth between the spectacle of the organised tour of Beijing and signifiers of a more distant past that still figure in contemporary life in the country. In Lettre de Sibérie, Marker responds to the complexities of Cold War relations between the West and the Soviet Union at a moment when views of the Soviet Union had become especially partisan.

Examining the sharp shifts in address and the collisions between shots bringing together seemingly incongruous images, I demonstrate Marker’s attempts to avoid partisan judgment in his highlighting of the provisional and historically contingent nature of the images he brings back of Siberia.

Chapter 1. “Les nerfs d’une époque”: Nicole Vedrès and the renewal of the film de montage tradition

The advent of cinema does not constitute an aesthetic revolution; by contrast, it represents the culmination of a series of phenomena that succeeded one another in the domain of the performing arts. Its invention corresponds to that which was demanded by the nerves of an era more so than its spirit.

- Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité” (1952)1

As I study this age which is so close to us and so remote, I compare myself to a surgeon operating with local anaesthetic: I work in areas that are numb, dead — yet the patient is alive and can still talk.”

- Paul Morand, 1900 (1931)2

Nicole Vedrès’ Paris 1900 was released in French cinemas in 1947, at the beginning of a period that sees a renewed interest amongst filmmakers and critics alike in the employment of archival footage, photography and other historical documents in documentary filmmaking in France. Responding to the release of wartime productions from Allied nations in the years immediately following the Liberation, French critics became particularly interested in what had come to be termed the film de montage — in English, the compilation film or archival documentary — in which, as Phillipe Este elegantly put it in 1946, the

1 Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité,” in Cinéma: un œil ouvert sur le monde, ed. George-Michel Bovay (Lausanne, Clairefontaine: Albin Michel, 1952), 134.

2 “A étudier cet âge si proche et si lointain, je me compare à un chirurgien opérant par anesthésie locale; je travaille en des régions insensibles, mortes, et le malade, cependant, vit et peut encore parler.” Paul Morand, 1900 (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1931), 6-7.

director “emploie pour sa réalisation non pas une caméra mais une cinémathèque.”3 Accounting for the spike in production of films de montage at this post-war juncture, Este writes that the subgenre “trouve son climat aux

époques troubles”, in which the cinema is “placed in the service” of impactful causes, comparing the production and assemblage of images to a munitions factory or a truck running arms to the front.4 Also writing in 1946, André Bazin makes a similar parallel between the cinema and “époques troubles”, commenting on the historically determined link between “the taste for actuality footage” and wartime.5 Noting the recent, sharp uptake in ‘film reports’ that showed French viewers historically consequential images, ranging from fighting on the fronts to the signing of peace treaties, he posits that, “The days of total war are fatally matched by those of total History.” Bazin writes that in providing a visual mould of seismic historic events, the cinema had come to show us a “tremendous exfoliation” of historical events that had been “secreted by thousands of

3 Philippe Este, “Divagations sur le film de montage,” in Le Livre d’or du cinéma français, ed. Charles Ford (Paris: Agence d’information cinégraphique, 1946), 147. Films that had a particular impact on the French critical landscape include Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942-1945) and William Wyler’s Memphis Belle (1944); the Soviet archival montages of the eastern concentration camps, particularly of Majdanek, as well as Dovzhenko’s Ukraine in Flames (1943); and from France, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Le Retour (1945), Roger Leenhardt’s Départ pour l’Allemagne (1946), and the Actualités françaises-produced compilation of newsreel footage from western concentration camps, Les camps de la mort (1945). French critic and historian Georges Sadoul was particularly attentive to these releases in the immediate post-war years, writing dozens of reviews in Les Lettres françaises from December 1944 through to July 1946. My thanks go to Bernard Eisenschitz for alerting me to Sadoul’s interest in the film de montage in this period.

4 Philippe Este, “Divagations sur le film de montage,” 147.

5 André Bazin, “A propos de « Pourquoi nous combattons »,” Esprit, 6, no. 123, June 1946. Reprinted in English as “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel” in Bazin at Work: Major Essays from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (London: Routledge,1997), 188. I have altered Cardullo’s translation here, which renders “le gout de l’actualité” as “the taste for such documentary news.”

cameras”: “as soon as it forms,” he continues, “History’s skin peels off again.”6

Bazin’s evocative formulation speaks, in other words, to an ‘archival impulse’ that he had detected in image production culture at this juncture of post-war French history, in which the cinematic image had become more directly implicated in registering and preserving the century’s historical changes.7 If, following philosopher François Niney, we understand the archival image as a state of ‘becoming’ for the image rather than an implicit property, French critics in this post-war period were noting a re-energised practice of image production and re-use in the cinema that assured this very archival becoming.8 Filmmakers and producers seemed to be attentive to historical change in a way that they had previously never been, stockpiling historically consequential images that makers of retrospectively facing cinematic forms such as the film de montage would task themselves with re-assembling and making sense of. Diverse modes of archival re-employment would henceforth be adopted in French filmmaking of the 1940s and 50s. Sylvie Lindeperg has traced the re-employment of a corpus of wartime footage produced during WWII in a range of documentary films of the period; dramatised historical films were beginning to include snippets of archival footage alongside historical reconstitutions; and we might even think of the post-

6 André Bazin, “On Why We Fight,” 189. For a sharp discussion of Bazin’s essay, see Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History.”” Representations, no. 130, Spring 2015, 90-93.

7 The term ‘archival impulse’ comes from art historian Hal Foster. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. 110, Fall 2004, 3-22.

8 François Niney offers the following maxim: “On ne naît pas image d’archive, on le devient.” François Niney, “Que documentent les images d’archives?” in L’image d’archives. Une image en devenir, eds. Julius Maeck and Matthias Steinle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 44.

war art documentary as exhibiting a fascination for an ‘archive’ of historical art forms.9

Figure 1.1: Poster for Paris 1900. Reproduced courtesy of Les Films du jeudi.

9 On the employment of actuality footage from WWII in French cinema, see Sylvie Lindeperg, Les Écrans de l’ombre: la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cinéma français (1944-1969) (Paris: CNRS- Éditions, 1997); Sylvie Lindeperg, La Voie des Images: Quatre histoires de tournage au printemps- été 1944 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2013). For a discussion of the art documentary, see Chapter 3.

Vedrès’ Paris 1900, constituted of hundreds of fragments of period footage, photographs, and sound recordings, as well as a handful of filmed curiosities from the era colloquially known as the Belle Époque (here, confined to the years

1900-1914),10 seems on the surface to respond to this French post-war “goût de l’actualité” and its archival impulse. The film’s opening intertitle cites the film’s use of hundreds of ‘authentic’ images from French and international sources in its “chronique de la Belle Époque”; a poster produced for the film’s original release seems to vaunt its composition “avec des documents authentiques et sensationnels” as a central attraction for the potential spectator11 (Fig. 1.1, above). In spite of these surface indications, Paris 1900 offers a far more complex vision of cinematic engagement with history than these promissory claims to an authentic reconstitution of the past might suggest. Though it responds broadly to this contemporary French archival impulse of the post-war era, I maintain that one can best understand the nuances of Vedrès’ historical vision as a response to and, ultimately, a renewal of practices of archival filmmaking — that of the film de montage — that pre-date this period. Tracing Paris 1900’s aesthetic lineage

10 For a discussion of the Belle Époque as a chrononym, see Dominique Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la Belle Époque (Paris: Fayard, 2017), 58-66. Kalifa also notes that the term “Belle Époque” has designated a range of different time periods centering around the year 1900, and finishing with the onset of WWI in 1914. Dominique Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la Belle Époque, 11-19. On the first uses of the term ‘Belle Époque,’ see Jean Garrigues and Philippe Lacombrade, La France au La France au XIXe siècle, 3rd edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), 165; Dominique Lejeune, La France de la Belle Époque, 4th edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), 4.

11 An earlier version of this intertitle was to further stress this ambition towards producing a “scrupulous authenticity,” assuring the spectator that they will be able to “relive the past, just as it had been captured.” [FONDS PANTHEON, “PARIS 1900,” FOLDER “COMMENTAIRE + LISTE TECHNIQUE/ AFFICHES / PUBLICITE / COUPURES DE PRESSE”]. Information on earlier versions of the film’s intertitles and script, as well as information on shots comes from the Les Film du Jeudi archives in Paris, which now hold many of the production materials (production notes, scripts, correspondences) for films produced by Pierre Braunberger.

back to inter-war archival montage filmmaking, I argue for the formal and conceptual inventiveness of Vedrès’ film in contradistinction to this lineage. Her recalibration of the subgenre’s methods of assembling archival images radically reconfigured existing historical discourses of archival filmmaking, producing a renewal of the aesthetic and historiographical implications of montage at this critical post-war juncture. What I term Vedrès’ revelatory montage poetics that she develops in this film would echo through the corpus of Resnais and Marker’s films in the following decade, distinguishing Paris 1900 as a film fondateur for a renewed montage practice in this period.

In arguing for Paris 1900 as constituting a break in an existing tradition of montage filmmaking and setting the stage for an examination of films that followed it, this chapter thus looks both backward and forward. It traces Vedrès’ challenges to established aesthetic and historiographical principles of archival montage filmmaking in her creation of a surrealist-influenced, revelatory poetics of montage in Paris 1900. I examine the under-studied but influential cinematic montage experiments and writing of surrealist Jacques Brunius in the 1930s and

40s as a counterexample to this dominant inter-war film de montage practice, arguing that Brunius’ conceptualisation of montage constitutes, together with

André Bazin’s contemporary post-war film criticism, a productive alternative path that looks forward to Vedrès’ work. Breaking with the historical positivism and underlying political didacticism typical of an inter-war tradition, her portrait of the Belle Époque tends less towards the re-employment of images to illustrate a pre-figured historical narrative or analysis, and more towards triggering unexpected, often non-linear historical correspondences with her post-war

present through the re-assemblage of images of the past. An examination of

Vedrès’ access to non-institutional, unorganised collections throughout the film’s production history frames a discussion of Vedrès’ associative approach to montage in terms of surrealist principles of chance and the explicable pull of the seemingly insignificant historical object. Vedrès places an emphasis on the assemblage of typically minor, ephemeral images to express what she terms “les nerfs d’une époque” (“the nerves of an era”), demonstrating the imperceptible, unconscious historical significations that underscore the more easily traceable acts of individual agents and social, cultural and political changes. Exhibiting a sensitivity to the effects of the passing of time on the images that she re-employs,

Vedrès identifies the newly legible, alternative historical significations that have become apparent in looking back at them. A temporally disjunctive network of historical correspondences tying together the Belle Époque and post-war France emerges, the immediate post-war context providing a Benjaminian critical point of reading that inscribes this footage of the past within a tragic register.

The pre-war film de montage tradition: the Soviet school and French militant filmmaking

Paris 1900 belongs to a tradition of documentary filmmaking in Europe based on the re-use of existing footage that dates back to the immediate aftermath of

WWI, which in its earliest incarnation was linked to the growing corpus of wartime footage and of the political unrest of the continent in the inter-war years. In his study of the history of the re-employment of archival footage,

Laurent Véray identifies the post-armistice years of 1918–1919 as a key foundational moment for archival filmmaking in Europe, with the commissioning

of dozens of films re-editing newsreel footage from the frontlines of WWI into longer, composite montage works.12 This association between the film de montage and wartime footage would continue through the silent period, and there would be a renewed interest in the subgenre around 1927–1928 at the 10th anniversary of the end of WWI. Here, the commemorative context of these projects would influence the shift in historical scope that was produced by the re-use of this archival footage, with the immediacy of the wartime newsreel footage becoming the basis for a more distant narrative account of the involvement of various nations in the Great War.13 This commemorative historical purview would also be applied to more explicitly political ends in other parts of Europe in the late 1920s, with the film de montage conceived of as a powerful tool for historical revisionism to support nationalist and left-wing political ideologies in the Soviet Union and France.14 In their redeployment of archival footage, these films de montage of the interwar period establish chronologies and analyses of major historical events, placing archival footage into a broader, ideologically organised narrative logic of history. The language

12 Laurent Véray, Les images d'archives face à l'histoire: De la conservation à la création (Paris: Canopé/CNDP, 2011), 108-9. Véray notes that during WWI, cameramen were first permitted to film on the frontlines during the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. Laurent Véray, “Fiction et «non-fiction» dans les films sur la Grande Guerre de 1914 à 1928. La bataille des images.” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 18, 1995. Special issue: “Images du réel. La non-fiction en France (1890-1930),” 238. For more on the history of archival filmmaking, see Christa Blümlinger, Cinéma de second main: esthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux médias, trans. Pierre Rusch, Christophe Jouanlanne (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013); Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (New York: Routledge, 2014)

13 Laurent Véray, Les images d’archives face à l’histoire, 112-114.

14 See Laurent Véray, Les images d’archives face à l’histoire, 108; Francois Albera, “Cinéma soviétique des années 1924-1928: le film de montage/document, matériau, point de vue,” in Une histoire des cinémas de propagande, ed. J.P. Bertin-Maghit (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2008), 83-91; Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Bloomington University Press, 2013), 155-188.

employed in these films (both intertitles, and later, with the coming of sound, voiceover commentary) tends to shape and give coherence to the archival footage, marshalling footage to identify it explicitly with a phenomenon of the past: ‘these images show this’ — the importance of which is made explicit: ‘the effects of which we now know.’

These inter-war archival films can be understood to adopt the historiographical model of Cicero’s historia magistra vitae, in which a sequence of events of the past is made into an intelligible, logical progression that leads up to and constitutes a kind of historical education for the present moment.15 The didacticism that Reinhart Koselleck reads as inherent to this historiographical model of the historia magistra — depending as it did on the meaningful sequencing of past events such that they offer a historical lesson in their arrangement16 — permeates the archival documentaries of this inter-war period, and as we will see, was taken up in highly politicised production contexts. The place of the archival image and its arrangement through montage in this historiographical model might also be located as a reflection of the shift in the

19th century that occurs with the “momentous discovery of the document”, in which historians began to more thoroughly mine political correspondences and state documentation to reconstitute “the chain of facts and events … almost

15 On Cicero’s historia magistra as a modern historiographical model, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 26-42; François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 38, 72-76

16 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 28-31.

automatically before our eyes.”18 As Fernand Braudel notes, this historical model is adopted as part of new political history that emerges in the latter half of the

19th century, which becomes “centered on the drama of ‘great events’” as permitted by a thoroughgoing examination and reference to state and legal documents.19 The adoption of this mode of political history in the film de montage is thus indicative not just of the highly politicised production environment of these films, but also the co-opting of the archival image as a document providing rhetorical authority to a politico-historical discourse that had recently in other domains achieved a new degree of scientific rigour.

Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Empire (1927), commissioned for the

10-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, represents a landmark film of

European inter-war archival documentary production and a model of the aforementioned model of didactic historiography through archival montage.20

Linked with the Soviet Union’s factography movement as well as Aleksei Gan’s constructivism, Shub’s work followed the former’s rejection of fictional and theatrical traditions in favour of the un-staged, while also countering Vertov’s more extreme deformation of footage through montage with an assembly of

18 Louis Halpen, quoted in Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 28-29.

19 Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 28-29.

20 For more on Shub in the context of Soviet cinema of the period, see Francois Albera, “Cinéma soviétique des années 1924-1928”; Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film, 155-188. François Albera, “François Albera, La Chute de la Dynastie Romanov: de E. Choub à C. Marker,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 1, nos. 89-90, 2008, 20-29. Of all the films commissioned for the 10-year anniversary by major directors – Eisenstein’s October, Pudovkin’s The Last Days of St. Petersburg, Barnet’s Moscow in October – Shub’s film is unique in that it depends on the re- editing of archival footage as opposed to historical recreation as the central organising principle of the film’s account of the revolution.

shots that largely respected the original duration of the footage she re- employed.21 A quite pure interpretation of this factographic model, Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is composed almost entirely of footage filmed between

1913 and 1917, accumulated from the archives of Soviet production companies and museums, from films destined for public viewing (i.e. newsreel footage of major events) as well as others intended for private use (the equivalent of home movies of the aristocratic class), providing a wide overview of life in pre- revolutionary Tsarist Russia.22 Assembling footage from these two sources,

Shub’s film continually demonstrates the class divisions present in feudal

Russian society: a memorable cut early in the film shifts from footage of women of the aristocratic class sweating after dancing a mazurka to a peasant wiping his brow while working in the field, accentuating the underlying socio-economic disparities of the period via the graphic similarity of the two images (Fig. 1.2, below). In conjunction with this analysis of Russian social organisation, Shub establishes a chronology of events and identifies key players (politicians, religious figures) of the period leading up to the February revolution, stretching from the commencement of World War I through the progressive breakdown of the military hierarchy as the war continued. Crucially, it is Shub’s intertitles that play much of this organisational role of the archival footage, either describing the

21 For a discussion of these aesthetic debates, see Alexei Gan, “Recognition for the Cine-Eyes,” reprinted in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, trans. Richard Taylor, ed. Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1988), 105-107; Esfir Shub, “We Do Not Deny the Element of Mastery,” Novyi Lef, nos. 11-12, November/December 1927, 58-59. Reprinted in The Film Factory, 185-186. François Albera, “La Chute de la Dynastie Romanov,” 20.

22 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was one of three archival documentaries Shub was commissioned to make, along with The Great Way (1927) and The Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoy (1928, now lost). According to Malitsky, Shub was obliged to shoot 1,000 feet of the film’s total 6,000 feet herself, meaning that the film isn’t entirely dependent on archival footage as is sometimes asserted. Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolutionary Nonfiction Film, 163-164.

important personalities, places and events that appear in the footage that follows, or providing an analytical description of national politics.23 The movement from descriptive intertitle to footage aligns itself with the factographic principle of an ‘accumulation’ of facts, placing, in Shub’s words, “an emphasis on the fact” which is shown “to enable it to be examined, and having examined it, to be kept in mind.”24 For Shub, then, archival montage functions as a means of organising these images — rendered by the intertitles as ‘facts’ — into a narrative of development that sustains a Bolshevist ideological analysis.

These archival images of the pre-revolutionary period are thus organised such that — in Koselleck’s terms — they “elicit [their] secret motives”, forming a procession that logically leads to and is logically apprehended by the revolutionary tumults of 1917.25

23 For example, the lack of representation of the proletariat in the State Duma is given in an intertitle listing figures for representation, which is followed by footage of the parliament and its representatives.

24 Esfir Shub, Zhizn’ moia-kinematograf [Cinematography – my life] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972). Reprinted in Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film, 174.

25 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 34.

Figure 1.2: Class divides in Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927).

Continuing on from the aesthetic and historiographical model established in the Soviet Union with Esfir Shub in the late 1920s, the film de montage is adapted to the highly politicised milieu of non-commercial filmmaking in mid-

1930s France. In this slightly later historical context, the assembly of footage also illustrates narratives of historical continuity and progression, which are in turn adapted to the exhortation of national political causes of this historical juncture in inter-war France. In this context, one of the most notable early examples was

Germaine Dulac’s Le cinéma au service de l’histoire [The Cinema in Service of

History, 1935], which shares with Shub’s film a historical didacticism that is also influenced by the nationalist political ideology surrounding its production.26

Made while Dulac was working in newsreel production, she was brought on by

26 Within the context of French filmmaking, some earlier experiments dating back to the late silent era now appear to be lost, including Jean Epstein’s Photogénie (1925) and Paul Gilson’s Manière de Croire (1930). These are noted by Jacques Brunius in Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1987), 76. It is worth pointing out that in her study of the film, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues very briefly mentions Dulac and Shub’s film analysed here as potential precursors for Vedrès’ Paris 1900. However, she distinguishes Vedrès’ work from the work of those two pioneers of archival documentary filmmaking in insisting that “sa démarche n’est pas disciplinaire”; there is no further explanation of what this distinction quite constitutes. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947). Kaléidoscope des jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018), 22.

Gaumont’s newsreel production branch and the film’s writers, René Célier and

Albert Tiery, to direct a film that was to be, as per the opening intertitle, a

“summary of the political, economic and social lives of the people of our generation.”27 Drawing on newsreel archives and footage from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, this summary charts the major events of European history from

1903 up until the mid-1930s that have been recorded by the cinema, starting with important political figures (the French president Fallière standing side by side with Serbia’s King Peter I), technological innovations (aviation), and national commemoration (a parade through Brussels in commemoration of the death of Leopold II in 1909). Dulac’s montage of this footage and Célier’s commentary establishes a chronology that informs a political analysis of the events depicted: the élan of discovery and technological progress of pre-WWI

Europe (that would in turn be used to assure its own quasi-destruction), the shifts of power on the continent and the war itself, and finally the rise of political demagogues in its wake.

Just as Shub’s analysis of pre-revolutionary Russian history in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty bore the unmistakeable imprint of Bolshevist ideology,

Dulac’s pro-French, pacifist politics bear heavily on Le cinéma au service de l’histoire and the historical narrative that she organises from the re-used

27 For more on the production history of Dulac’s film, see Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 190-194; Raymond Borde and Pierre Guibbert, “Le cinéma au service de l’histoire” (1935). Un film retrouvé de Germaine DULAC,” Archives, nos. 44-45, November/December 1991, (Dossier Germaine Dulac), 1-20; Laurent Véray, “Le cinéma d’actualité témoin de l’histoire ou, selon Germaine Dulac, le Cinéma au service de l’Histoire (1935),” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. Special issue, “Germaine Dulac,” June 2006, 205-230.

footage.28 Here once more, it is language that plays a large part in the formation of this historical narrative. One of the most frequent rhetorical figures of the voiceover is the deictic “voici le/la” (“here is”), instantiating the primacy of the spoken word in the film’s production of a historical discourse and the illustrative function served by the arrangement of the film’s re-used footage. This regular indexing of the image to a past event via voiceover also reflects the film’s instrumentalisation of archival images in the creation of an authoritative account of the past “as it was” (in Ranke’s terms), an account whose end goal is to provide an analytic synthesis from which the historian can extrapolate a lesson for their present.29 This notion of a single, past historical index of the image runs counter to Benjamin’s assertion that we ought to understand the image as something that “belong[s] to a particular time”, but also as something that

“attain[s] to legibility only at a particular time.” In Dulac’s film by contrast, the image is immediately and unchangingly legible: indeed, it assures the clear illustration and transmission of historical events and figures, and the role of the filmmaker is to arrange and to comment upon the images such that these events and figures seem to fall into a pre-determined narrative structure. The image’s function in illustrating historical phenomena assumes a legibility that is self- evident, one that emanates unproblematically from within the image, and which is unchanging with time. Tellingly, the film’s closing passage is announced with a shot of a book whose pages have finished turning, with Célier intoning, “Before

28 For a discussion of Dulac’s political engagements in the mid-1930s, see Laurent Véray, “Le cinéma d’actualité témoin de l’histoire ou, selon Germaine Dulac, le Cinéma au service de l’Histoire (1935).”

29 Ranke quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.

we turn the last pages of this history book, let us identify the philosophy of these events”30 (Fig 1.3, below). These last moments — a quite literal example of the

Ciceroneon historia magistra — provide a suggestive encapsulation of the historiographical perspective of the interwar film de montage, aligning the re- organisation of archival footage with the authority and rhetoric of a narrative of progressive, written history. The montage of archival footage is thus subservient to this a posteriori narrative framework, functioning to illustrate and give added authoritative weight to a narrative of the continuous and logically sound advance of the past.

Figure 1.3: Final images of Germain Dulac’s Le Cinéma au service de l’histoire

Elsewhere in France in the 1930s, another major film de montage current existed in the cinematic productions of militant, non-commercial filmmaking co- operatives such as Ciné-Liberté, which were associated with the leftist coalition

30 “Avant de tourner les derniers feuillets de ce livre d’histoire, dégageons la philosophie des événements.”

formed during the Popular Front movement of the mid-1930s.31 Bringing together directors such as Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-

Bresson, the films produced by Ciné-Liberté documented party meetings, large- scale protests, and the activity of unions, and they also produced propaganda films designed to rally Popular Front voters. The films themselves took on a number of different forms that drew on a range of types of footage, sometimes combined within the same films: we see fictional films featuring a mix of professional and non-professional actors, recordings of political speeches and rallies, as well as more traditional film de montage passages, edited together from older archival footage, photographs, and excerpts from other political documentaries. As Valérie Vignaux notes, the diversity of forms of political filmmaking and particularly, as we will see, the discursive organisation of montage and commentary, reveals once more the influence of the Soviet school of the 1920s, aligning the leftist politics of the Ciné-Liberté films with the cinematic forms that its Soviet predecessors had established.32 The didactic tendencies that I have traced in Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and Dulac’s

Le Cinéma au service de l’histoire are even more prominent in these films; the

31 Between 1935 and 1938, politically engaged film co-operatives such as Ciné-Liberté and Mai 1936 produced a number of films commissioned by the French Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Confédération Générale du Travail (France’s largest union). These films were produced and distributed outside of the domains of the French film industry. See Danielle Tartakowsky, “Le cinéma militant des années trente, source pour l’histoire du Front populaire,” Les cahiers de la cinémathèque, no. 71, December 2000, 15-24; Ginette Vincendeau, Keith Reader, eds., La Vie est à nous: French Cinema of the Popular Front, 1935-1938 (London: National Film Theatre/British Film Institute, 1986); Valérie Vignaux, “Ciné-Liberté, une coopérative cinématographique entre engagement et émancipation,” La vie est à nous, Le temps des cerises et autres films du front populaire (Paris: CINE ARCHIVES, 2016), DVD booklet, 33-34.

32 Valérie Vignaux, “Ciné-Liberté, une coopérative cinématographique entre engagement et émancipation,” La vie est à nous, le livre, 39.

politico-historical analyses of the past in these films produce a politicised pedagogy for the present moment.

Figure 1.4: Archival pedagogy: consecutive images in La Vie est à nous

The most well known of the Ciné-Liberté productions, La vie est à nous

(Life Is Ours, 1936), was directed by a collective of filmmakers that included

Renoir, Becker and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, and is emblematic of the militant filmmaking produced in this milieu, both in its compendium of political

filmmaking forms and its expository political demonstrations. Funded by the

French Communist Party in the lead up to the 1936 elections, La vie est à nous places side by side fictional sequences showing exploited workers and working class children, political speeches, passages of edited newsreel footage and excerpts from other political documentaries, as well as a Brechtian chorus that extracts lessons from the sequences that we see.33 The first two reels of the film, constituted of traditional film de montage sequences edited by Jacques Brunius, reveal the didactic function of montage in the film’s wider, leftist analysis of the political iniquities produced by capitalism in France. The opening sequence features a voiceover commentary adapted from a speech by the communist party leader Maurice Thorez, citing France’s geographical situation and industrial development as the reason for the country’s wealth, and which is accompanied by illustrative archival footage.34 Interestingly, this passage is part of a fictional mise-en-abîme, with the offscreen voiceover commentary revealed by a cut to be spoken by a teacher to a classroom of young students (Fig. 1.4, above).35 The move to give these configurations of commentary and image a diegetic justification of sorts through a pedagogical arrangement (a teacher speaking to a class of children) is indicative of the function of archival footage used here: to educate, and to illustrate a set of problems, that are then to be acted upon — another historia magistra, appropriately produced this time for the benefit of a

33 See Pascal Bonitzer et al., “« La Vie est à nous », film militant,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 218, March 1970, 44- 51.

34 Bernard Eisenschitz, “La Vie est à nous, film d’actualité,” La vie est à nous, le livre, 22.

35 Bernard Eisenschitz notes the film’s innovative mix of fictional and non-fictional material: Bernard Eisenschitz, “La Vie est à nous, film d’actualité,” 23. The collapsing of this archival footage within a fictional mise-en-abîme pre-figures Nicole Vedrès’ second feature-length documentary, La Vie commence demain, discussed in Chapter 2.

fictional classroom.36 Moreover, in the conception of this sequence, the text of

Thorez’s speech is clearly privileged as the primary organising element, with

Brunius later writing that he was first given this text before being tasked with finding accompanying images.37 The imposition of the PCF’s political narrative, rendered in the film as an analysis of the past for a national Popular Front political pedagogy, sees the continued subservience of montage in this inter-war period to the illustration of a posteriori historico-political analysis.

Alternative Methods: Montage According to Jacques Brunius and André Bazin

Aside from demonstrating the dominance and refinement of this model of political didacticism in the film de montage, La Vie est à nous also sparks a crucial theoretical reflection on the subgenre by its aforementioned editor, Jacques

Brunius. In a short essay entitled “Documentaires d’avant-garde et films de montage”, written in the mid-1940s, Brunius offers a brief history of archival montage filmmaking and a discussion of his experience of working on La Vie est à nous, which led him to posit aesthetic alternatives to the inter-war practice of montage filmmaking..38 Brunius’ criticisms of existing montage filmmaking practices are echoed in André Bazin’s contemporaneous review of Frank Capra’s

36 A similar move occurs in the film’s second reel, where Brunius himself plays a company board member who presents an illustrated discourse to his colleagues during a meeting.

37 Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 79.

38 The essay can be found in Brunius’ as yet untranslated collection of essays on French experimental cinema, En marge du cinéma français., originally published in France in 1954 with a new edition put together with notes and commentary by Jean-Pierre Pagliano in 1987. Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 75- 81. Though the manuscript was completed in 1947, fragments of the book first appeared in English translation as part of the collection Experiment in the Film, ed. Roger Manvell (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949). For more on the book’s complex publication history, see Jean-Pierre Pagliano’s foreword to the aforementioned 1987 re-edition of En marge du cinéma français, 7-18.

Why We Fight series released in France just after the end of WWII, offering a measured reflection on the historiographical implications of the film de montage model I have traced from the inter-war period. Considering Brunius and Bazin’s perspectives on the film de montage side-by-side gives us a sense that in response to this inter-war tradition, an alternative model of montage filmmaking was being proposed within a French context in the period following WWII. An examination of Brunius and Bazin’s critique of the subgenre allows us to better historically situate the post-war innovations of Nicole Vedrès’ Paris 1900, which carry forward these contemporaneous theoretical aspirations into the realm of practice.

A surrealist poet, theatre director, film critic, film director, editor and actor, Jacques Brunius’ contributions to the film de montage in his documentary films of the 1930s and his writing in the 1940s have recently been re-appraised in France.39 While Brunius’ activities as a film editor and director were scattered across a relatively small number of documentary films of the 1930s — the aforementioned La Vie est à nous, Records 37 (1937), Violons d’Ingres (1939) —

Brunius’ surrealist pedigree deeply influenced his conceptualisation of what I am calling a revelatory poetics of the film de montage, a poetics we see glimpses of in his films and even more so in his writings on montage.40 Having made collage works that mixed painting, drawing and more traditional cut and paste

39 See “Introduction,” note 27.

40 On the films Brunius edited and directed in the 1930s, see Nathaniel Greene, “Jacques-Bernard Brunius, pionnier du film de montage,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 70, Summer 2013, 54-81.

techniques (Fig. 1.5, below), Brunius’ documentary film works bear the imprint of these surrealist assembly methods, typified by what Nathaniel Greene has aptly described as a method of “heteroclite composition.”41 Beyond just mixing types of footage in his films — fiction and documentary, combinations of footage shots for the film and footage shot for others, re-use of footage from other documentary films — Brunius’ films are also marked by a striking heterodoxy of subject matter. Privileging thematic or more abstractly associated links over argument or linear historical narratives, Brunius’ films move between diverse subjects according to a catalogue-like organisational strategy.42 We see this catalogue-like movement in his 1939 film Violon d’Ingres — his homage to

France’s inventors, craftsmen and artists who pursue their creative endeavours in their leisure time — in which Brunius shifts from personality to personality, individual case to case, often bringing together sequences that are marked more by surface difference between subjects than their similarities. Both the heterodoxy of materials that Brunius combines and the methods that he uses to organise his films echo through montage-centric documentary filmmaking in the post-war period, from the chance-like method of selection and surrealist- influenced assemblage of archival footage in Vedrès’ Paris 1900 to the influence on Alain Resnais’ entire documentary film output in the 1940s and 50s.43 Though

Brunius increasingly worked for radio after moving to London in 1940, he

41 Nathaniel Greene, “Jacques-Bernard Brunius,” 61. Some of Brunius’ collages are reproduced in the 1987 re-edition of En marge du cinéma français.

42 Brunius’ catalogue-like structuring of his films recalls Lev Manovich’s discussion of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as an example of ‘database’ cinema. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 209-212.

43 Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 183.

remained involved in the world of cinema after the war by taking on occasional smaller acting and production roles and, importantly for our discussion, by continuing to write on film. Indeed, it is from London that Brunius makes two more important contributions to the film de montage tradition, one practical, and the other theoretical. In the first instance, Brunius became involved in the production of Vedrès’ Paris 1900 after he was called upon to source archival footage from the British Film Institute.44 The second was the publication of the aforementioned essay “Documentaires d’avant-garde et films de montage”, written in the same year as the release of Paris 1900 and in which the history of the subgenre is considered in light of this landmark production.

Figure 1.5: Jacques Brunius, Collage en neuf episodes (Collage, 1942).

44 Nicole Vedrès, “A la poursuite de Paris 1900,” L’Ecran français, no. 140, 2nd March 1948, 3. Jacques Borel was the pseudonym adopted by Brunius when he started working for Radio London in 1940. Jean-Pierre Pagliano, Brunius (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1987), 38. Brunius was close with Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, being involved with its founding, and was most likely recommended by Langlois to help source this archival material in London. He was also the uncle of Yannick Bellon, who was assistant editor to Myriam on Paris 1900.

In this essay, Brunius stakes a claim for an alternative aesthetic heritage of the film de montage that aligns with the history of surrealism, particularly that of collage, and argues that this alternative current runs counter to the French militant political tradition with which he was briefly involved in the mid-

1930s.45 Arguing that by the mid-1940s the re-assemblage of newsreel footage had for the most part been rendered banal by the ‘commercial popularisation’ of productions such as the American March of Time series, Brunius instead traces an avant-garde heritage of the film de montage back to the (now lost) films of

Jean Epstein and Paul Gilson.46 These early experiments with recutting newsreel footage had purportedly exhibited the strong influence of collage techniques in the plastic arts, and Brunius recalls making film de montage experiments in the mid-to-late 1930s as a continuation of this surrealist aesthetic. Evoking Max

Ernst’s collages as an influence on his assemblage of strips of discarded newsreel footage, Brunius writes that his interest in the film de montage as an aesthetic form lay in bringing together footage wherein “no prior intention had intended for this connection”, revelling precisely in the heterodoxy of the constitutive shots he assembled.47 In recounting his re-employment of “the most innocently realist of shots” to create surrealist confrontations of images, Brunius conceives

45 In the mid-1930s, Brunius joined the surrealist group, many of whom grew closer to the engagé lefist artist organisations (such as the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaire) of the Popular Front. For more on Brunius’ political engagements during this period, see Jean-Pierre Pagliano, Brunius, 37.

46 Brunius includes within this documentary lineage of the avant-garde Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), René Clair’s La Tour (1928), André Sauvage’s Etudes sur Paris (1930), Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice (1930), and Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (1932).

47 Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 76.

of the montage of newsreel footage as a means to describe reality in terms of associative metaphors and analogies produced in the collision of shots. For

Brunius, this associative montage aesthetic is conceptualised in terms of a recalibration of the relationship between cinema and reality. He writes that:

[R]eality cannot be captured in its slow, dull everyday passage, nor can it be captured in its misleading, frenetic and shapeless multiplicity. Each can become interesting when […] its essential fragments are isolated and magnified, and we can thus proceed to the connections imposed by their correspondences, similarities, analogies, contrasts and echoes. In the cinema, a simple cut can replace the word ‘like’, the words ‘just as’, the word ‘to’… 48

Insisting on the possibilities opened up by assembling heterodox newsreel footage, Brunius sees montage as analogous to the creation of a poetic image, in the sense of a bringing together of two distant realities in order to conjure the image of a separate, third phenomenon. With the introduction of sound — understood in terms of its constitutive elements of speech, music, and noise — the director envisaged an even greater range of associative possibilities opening up in this regard to “trigger a set of ideas and images.”49 Lautréamont’s famous surrealist formulation of “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” is transposed by Brunius as a key aesthetic principle of the film de montage, envisaging the revelatory role of montage in transforming footage of everyday life through intellectual associations. As

48 Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 77. This concept of montage as a form of writing is also expressed in Vedrès’ “Les feuilles bougent” essay, discussed in the Introduction and later in this chapter.

49 Jacques-B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 78.

Brunius notes in the above quotation, these intellectual associations created in the shock of montage are tied to a kind of revelation of reality, which produces something more than just the flow of its “dull everyday passage” or a “shapeless multiplicity” of innocently realist images. Rather, in the association of footage whose heterodoxy highlights the element of discontinuity and dislocation between parts, Brunius argues that something of reality’s texture might be revealed in the gaps and interstices bridged through montage.

While only glimpses of this surrealist montage practice are evident in the films that Brunius worked on, Brunius’ essay points to the existence of an alternative theoretical current of the film de montage in post-war French filmmaking. For Brunius, writing in 1947, this alternative montage practice had been well and truly eclipsed by the dominant political didacticism we have traced back to the inter-war period, and his essay is less prognostic than it is a somewhat bitter reflection on the course that archival montage filmmaking had taken. Indeed, the only film he can cite that has pursued this surrealist lineage is

Vedrès’ Paris 1900, the sole inheritor of an aesthetic lineage that has otherwise disappeared.50 While Brunius’ dissatisfaction with the direction taken by the majority of film de montage productions runs counter to critical consensus in

France after the war,51 his opinion is echoed by André Bazin in a long piece

50 We might take this statement with some caution, given that Brunius had worked on the production of Paris 1900.

51 The critical favour in which the subgenre found itself can be seen in the reviews following the release in France of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series in 1945 after the ban on U.S. wartime productions was lifted. See for example Georges Sadoul, “Un chef-d’œuvre d’un genre nouveau,” Pourquoi nous combattons, Lettres françaises, no. 37, 6th January, 1945. For Philippe Este writing in 1946, the genre “had finally produced its masterpiece” in Capra’s films. Philippe Este, “Divagations sur le film de montage,” 147.

published in the journal Esprit criticising Frank Capra’s popular, multi-part Why

We Fight series produced during WWII.52 Made at the behest of the United States

War Department, Capra’s Why We Fight series is comprised of footage from U.S. newsreels, official United Nationals films, and “enemy motion pictures.” The resulting film series was screened for U.S. troops fighting in WWII to educate them on their motivations for fighting in the largely European and Asian war.53

Reflecting this propagandistic production context, Capra fashions a narrative arc out of this footage, and with the help of the film’s commanding voiceover, pits antagonising ideological forces against one another into a central dramatic conflict between historical players. In his review of these films, Bazin critiques

Capra’s narrative arrangement of archival footage and voiceover, arguing that the films are indicative of the broader historiographical limitations of the film de montage subgenre as a whole. For Bazin:

The principle behind this type of documentary essentially consists in giving to the images the logical structure of speech [la structure logique du discours], and in giving to language itself the credibility and proof of photographic images. The viewer has the illusion of watching a visual demonstration, whereas this demonstration is in reality only a succession of equivocal facts held together merely by the cement of the words that accompany them. The essential part of the film is not in its projection but in the soundtrack.54

52 André Bazin, ”On Why We Fight.”

53 Kathleen German “Frank Capra's Why We Fight Series and the American Audience,” Western Journal of Speech Communication, no. 54, 1990, 237–48. German notes that the films began to be shown to general audiences in both the United States and abroad towards the end of the war.

54 André Bazin, “On Why We Fight,” 190. I have altered Cardullo’s translation of the word discours from ‘language’ to ‘speech’.

Bazin argues that, by using the archival footage as a visual crutch for the film’s voiceover, Capra limits the function of the image to the authorisation of speech, becoming simply an illustration of an overarching, a posteriori historical analysis. Despite the excess inherent in the moving image — an excess that is perhaps all the greater given its distinct origins — Capra’s film places the burden of historical representation on speech, albeit a speech that has the added authority of photographic images. If, for Bazin, Capra’s assembly of footage is ultimately dictated by the order and logic of speech, this assemblage occurs at the expense of the archival image’s unique textures. Extrapolating to questions of historiography, then, commentary and montage in Capra’s films obscure the archival image’s temporal ambiguity and sublimate it to a clearly forward facing discourse of historical progression. The image of the past is constrained to a narrative pedagogy forged from a later perspective — one that, in Capra’s film, responds above all to an ideological claim on horizons of the future: we must fight because the images have shown us this.

Bazin and Brunius’ criticism of inter-war film de montage practices and their implicit aspirations for another kind of montage filmmaking focus on distinct elements of the subgenre. For the former, the issue is largely a question of the limits of the dominant, language-centric historical method that had developed, which ultimately gives short shrift to the signifying potential of the archival image. For the latter, it is an aesthetic impasse of the subgenre that has been reached after its more ostentatious beginnings. Bazin and Brunius’ ideas intersect in their desire for a form of assemblage that expands the representative potentials of archival footage at the moment of its re-use, one that goes beyond

the accumulation and organisation of this footage to illustrate reality or be put to use to demonstrate a historical narrative. It is in the very confrontation of images that one can detect their hope for the production of a signification that exceeds the bounds of an a posteriori, linear narrative discourse and something closer to a revelatory poetics, in which what is suggested between images takes on a special significance. For Brunius, calling for a surrealist confrontation between pre- existing images, sound and text, there is an interest in the détournement of the purported (historical) realism of the archival document re-used, seeing the potential through montage to evoke another reality that emerges in the assemblage of heterodox shots. In turn, Bazin’s criticism of a mode of filmmaking that reduces the representational function of the image to the illustration of an accompanying text similarly expresses a desire for the archival image to retain some of its historical polysemy, an excess that cannot be entirely weighed down by “the cement of the words” that would otherwise confine it to a logic of historical development. Here as well we can detect Bazin’s desire for the assemblage of images to engage with other, non-linear forms of historical temporality. By tasking the assembly of images with illustrating historical chronology, and by “burdening chronology with significance” in Kracauer’s terms, directors had subsumed the temporal possibilities of the film de montage to the representation of “the homogenous flow of time as a medium of consequence.”55

55 Siegfried Kracauer, “Time and History,” History and Theory, 6, no. 6 (“History and the Concept of Time”), 1966, 69, 70.

Considering together their critiques of the problems of montage as a formal property and montage as a historical method allows us to understand where Brunius and Bazin’s critical intervention in the post-war period intersect, marking a conceptual break with the film de montage model that had by then gained ascendancy in Europe and the United States. Their criticisms of the subgenre at this critical post-war juncture also give us a conceptual armature for considering Vedrès’ work that emerges contemporaneously, which takes up and responds to their aspirations for an alternative path of historical assemblage in the film de montage. It is to this aesthetic and historiographical break that we turn now, tracing the permutations of a revelatory montage poetics that develops in Vedrès’ work straddling the world of literature and cinema in the mid-to-late 1940s.

Montage on Paper: Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français

While the end of the Second World War marks the beginnings of her short career as a film director, beginning in the latter half of 1945 with work on Paris 1900,

Vedrès had up until that point worked largely with the written word, employed variously as a historian, journalist and writer in the 1930s and during the

Occupation.56 Remaining within the world of literature, Vedrès worked on three

56 Vedrès notes that she had worked for seven years organising the political papers of the family of French politician Jules Ferry in the 1930s. Portrait de Nicole Vedrès (Film, 1964, dir. Roger Boussinot). During the war, she contributed to the socialist, collaborationist journal Le Rouge et le bleu, so-called women’s magazines (Panorama), and towards the end of the war, in the communist or communist-sympathising journals Action and Les Temps modernes. Laurent Véray, Vedrès et le cinéma (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Place, 2017),16-17. While Vedrès would go on to direct one more feature (La vie commence demain (1950) and two short films (Amazone (1951) and Aux frontières de l’homme (1953)), she remained very active in the world of literature during and after her brief career in film, writing a number of novels and a play, as well as hosting the literature-themed show Lecture pour tous on French television from 1953 to 1962. On Vedrès’

monographs on French cultural history in the period from 1943 to 1945 that blend her written text with photographic reproductions and illustrations which she selected: Un siècle d’elégance française (1943) La sculpture en France depuis

Rodin (1945, co-written with Léon Gischia) and Images du cinéma français

(1945).57 In the last of these monographs — Images du cinéma français — we see the emergence of an experimental, collage-like montage aesthetic, whose revelatory associations of text and image on the page not only recall the surrealist journals of the inter-war period such as Documents and Minotaure, but all prefigure her unique approach to filmic montage starting with Paris 1900.

While the luxurious design, numerous photographic reproductions and broad historical subject matter of all three books recall the illustrated photo album, the last of the books, Images du cinéma français, presents some subtle breaks with this album format.58 A history of the first fifty years of French cinema, the book was commissioned to accompany an exhibition of the same name organised by the Cinémathèque Française, which provided a large number of the 250 production stills included in the book, which come from a range of

literary output, see Annette Smith, L’œuvre de Nicole Vedrès: Variations sur un thème tellurique, Doctoral Thesis, University of Sorbonne, Paris, 1970.

57 Nicole Vedrès, Une siècle d’élégance française (Paris: Les Editions du Chêne, 1943); Nicole Vedrès, Léon Gischia, La sculpture en France depuis Rodin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945); Nicole Vedrès, Images du cinéma français (Paris: Les Editions du Chêne, 1945).

58 Un siècle d’élégance française features a number of double pages of colour photographic reproductions, a rarity in this era of publishing. As Bernard Eisenschitz points out, Images du cinéma français’ large format and expensive fabrication technique were quite a luxury given the shortages in the French publishing industry following the Second World War. Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier (Images du cinéma français de Nicole Védrès, 1945),” Trafic, no. 100, Winter 2016, 35. On Images du cinéma français, see also Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947), 34-53.

then-canonical and esoteric films to accompany Vedrès’ written text.59 Despite its survey-like title and institutional links, Vedrès’ desire was to situate the book

“not as an impartial history or anthology” but something that reflected her own personal interests and cinematic taste, reflected in the often obscure choice of films and her increasingly ambitious layout of photographic reproductions and text.60 Indeed, just as the personal focus of Images du cinéma français departs from the traditionally panoramic historical purview of the photo album, so too does the layout and relationship between text and photographic reproduction represent a shift away from the typically illustrative function of the image in these books.61 While the photographic reproductions were largely separated from the text and confined to the end of chapters in her first two monographs, in

Images du cinéma français, Vedrès’ text is cut up, jostling for position alongside the images that themselves at times overlap and cut into the text (see Fig. 1.6, below). These photographs are placed in complex relationships to one another

59 The book was published in February 1945, and Langlois’ exhibit at the Cinémathèque française ran from 28th December 1944. On the links between Vedrès’ book and Langlois’ exhibit, see Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 35-36; Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la Cinémathèque française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 194. Laurent Véray also notes that a small number of the images included in the book came from private collections. See Laurent Véray, Vedrès et le cinéma, 44-54.

60 Jérôme Allain, “Images du cinéma français,(1945) de Nicole Vedrès, un discours par l’image,” 2016, , 4-6. Letter from Nicole Vedrès dated 30th April, 1943, quoted in Jerome Allain, “Images du cinéma français (1945) de Nicole Vedrès, un discours par l’image,” 5. Though Vedrès makes reference to some of the canonical works of French cinema in the book, she also includes, as Bernard Eisenschitz notes, production stills from films that were at that time lost and were impossible to see. Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 35. As we will see, this focus on a mix of minor and major films in the book prefigures Vedrès’ choice of footage of both ephemeral and traditionally well-known events in Paris 1900.

61 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 35. While Vedrès was commissioned to write on the first fifty years of French cinema in conjunction with an exhibit at the Cinémathèque française, her text is a much more personal navigation through this history than the task and the title of the book might suggest. The selection of films (both canonical and relatively obscure) as well as the much more poetic rather than expository tone of the text – the preface is written by surrealist poet Paul Éluard – reflect Vedrès’ desire to situate the book not as an impartial history or survey, but rather something that reflected her own personal interests and cinematic taste.

and to the text itself: looking at the book, the reader’s eye moves between scattered photographs that suggest pictorial rhymes across pages, or from text to neighbouring photograph or vice versa to tease out the linkages between the two.

Figure 1.6: Montage of text and image in Images du cinéma.

What is particularly striking about Vedrès’ shift away from the traditional illustrated album format in Images du cinéma français is the importance that she places on the photographic reproductions themselves to account for the developments and mutations of the medium in its first fifty years in France. As in

André Malraux’s contemporaneous Psychologie de l’art volumes on the great

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‘metamorphoses’ of art history across time,62 Vedrès’ use of production stills from the Cinémathèque’s archives aims to trace aesthetic and thematic tendencies within the French cinema as much through the resonances and contrasts revealed about creative works through the image as through her text.63

In contrast, however, to Malraux’s Psychologie series and its inclusion of photographs of the artworks themselves, Vedrès’ book makes use of production stills (that is, photographs taken on the set, often recreated after the shot has been completed) as opposed to film stills — images similar in composition but by necessity different from those in the films themselves.64 The distinction is crucial in conceptualising Vedrès’ use of these reproductions, in that it indicates a move away from the use of photographic reproductions as an illustration of a particular visual phenomenon of cinema history — an image literally taken from a (strip of) film — and instead towards evoking or suggesting the shape that cinema has taken over time, using an image at one remove from the original.65

These close cousins of the images from cinema history are placed in evocative rhymes with Vedrès’ paragraphs across the pages, with Vedrès often

62 Malraux’s series of art history books, the first volume of which would appear two years later in 1947, would also place a great deal of importance on reproductions in charting developments in the plastic arts. Malraux’s Psychologie de l’art series is first published across three volumes with the Skira imprint in Lausanne: Le Musée imaginaire (1947); La Création artistique (1948); La Monnaie de l’absolu (1950). See Chapter 3 for a discussion of Malraux’s Psychologie de l’art books.

63 In this regard, Michael Witt argues for Vedrès’ book as an important precursor to Jean-Luc Godard’s engagement with the history of cinema with a “balanced mix of images and words” in his Histoire(s) du cinema. Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 194-195. Godard himself would create a book version of the Histoire(s) du cinéma project, which operates using a similar conceit of collage of text and images transferred from the screen back to the page.

64 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 37-38.

65 Liandrat-Guigues aptly refers to the discrepancy between the film still and the production stills used in Images du cinéma français as creating an “association libre” that often departs from the content of the films themselves. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès, 38.

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purposefully separating production stills from the text addressing the same film.

We see this for example in the section that Vedrès dedicates to French cinema’s dramatic tradition, which, she argues, achieved its maturity and the apotheosis of its “instinct plastique” with Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève (1939). She writes that in this dramatic tradition:

[A]ll of [the director’s] means [are] put to use but are limited to the creation of a singular climate, of a psychological atmosphere that no longer owes anything to action or mimicry. An image laden with a sense of that which is to come: that is what Delluc was after in Le Silence and it’s what Carné achieved in Le jour se lève.66

Rather than placing a production still from Carné’s film alongside this block of text, Vedrès instead places production stills from other French films of the 1920s and 1930s across the following four pages.67 Only after turning through these pages do we get an echo of the elliptical description of the image

“laden with a sense of that which is to come”, with a double page of production stills from Le jour se lève (Fig. 1.7, below).68 On the left, we see a moment from the midpoint of the film — where Jean Gabin’s character awaits the arrival of the police in his room — and another from the film’s ending on the right, after the

66 Nicole Vedrès, Images du cinéma français, 106-107. Here, Vedrès is referring to Louis Delluc’s, Le Silence (1920) and Marcel Carné Le jour se lève (1939).

67 Across the following four pages, Vedrès includes production stills from Jacques Feyder’s Thérèse Raquin (1927), Louis Delluc’s La Femme de nulle part (1922), Marcel L’Herbier’s Le Carnaval des vérités (1920), Louis Delluc’s Le Silence (1920), and Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931).

67 Nicole Vedrès, Images du cinéma français, 102-105. Bernard Eisenschitz notes a similar separation of text and image across multiple pages later in the book with the reproductions of Georges Monca’s La Proie (1917). Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 37.

68 Vedrès’ staggered deployment of photographic reproductions within the text recalls André Breton’s experiments with the layout of image and text in his surrealist novel, Nadja.

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character has taken his own life in this same room. Here, there is an almost imperceptible shift in Vedrès’ organisation of text and images from the illustration of an idea to a looser, associative set of resonances to be established in the blank spaces and distances between parts. In the gap between the two images — a gap that is heightened by the vertical shift in the layout on the page

— the film’s major plot points are reconfigured as an expression of the expectation and tension that hangs over action, of the event as indelibly pervaded by the surrounding atmosphere. Similarly, Vedrès’ poetic formula describing the psychology and visual style of the French dramatic film is not so much contained within as it is amplified by these two images, echoing across the production stills in the preceding pages before being given a surplus of signification by the eventual appearance of the production stills from Carné’s film. Though the shift is subtle, we see here the seeds of a conception of montage that privileges the interstice, of the correspondences that can be forged in the space left by a disconnection of individual parts.

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Figure 1.7: Double-page spread from Images du cinéma français. Jean Gabin in Le jour se lève:"une image chargée du sens de ce qui va survenir” (“an image laden with a sense of what is to come.”)

In its disjunctive, associative assemblages of photographic reproduction and written text, Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français prefigures Vedrès’ montage practice in Paris 1900. That she is working with an archive of photographs and on a historical subject is all the more significant, in that it situates this associative approach to montage as an integral part of a historiographical method. These production stills, sharing an indelible link with a history of cinema production, function not as illustrations or memory aides to support a pre-conceived historical narrative, but rather themselves participate in the writing of history from a future moment. Discussing the implications and discreet influences of

Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français in a recent article, Bernard Eisenschitz credits

Vedrès with inaugurating a “practice of images” in the book that would have echoes in the theory and practice of montage in French cinema in the years to come:

[Vedrès] creates a discourse out of Langlois’ unformulated conception and invents a practice of images which undoubtedly marked him before having a ripple effect on filmmakers themselves, a process of inexhaustible implications that would be felt by Bazin, Marker, Godard … The fixed image takes on its own value rather than as an element of montage. That which she uses as footage is not simply found but, thanks to the disorder of the Cinémathèque, preserved, refined, inventoried, chosen and finally cited and shown. It’s the beginning of a process of montage that liberates [un montage qui libère].69

69 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier,” 36.

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As Eisenschitz point out, the suggestiveness of Vedrès’ montage of these photographic reproductions lies in a kind of double movement, wherein the images retain their value and uniqueness as belonging to a historical moment, but through montage are also ‘liberated’ from their position as links in a chronological chain. Introducing fragmentation and divisions as an integral part of creating a new set of relations between an archive of images, Vedrès introduces a conception of montage here as a means of bringing these images into a relationship with the present, re-animating them with the novel correspondences one forges from a future vantage point. Vedrès’ dislocated montage practice creates a distinct set of problems for the historian-assembler faced with the task of assembling archival images. In place of modes of illustration and depiction, how might these images function as a way of speaking about the moment in history in which they are produced? What might they tell us in light of the passage of time that separates us from their moment of production? What might the role of montage be in making this temporal disjunct a productive site of historical inquiry? Vedrès’ assemblage of production stills in

Images du cinéma français thus opens up a reflection on the practice of montage as both an aesthetic principle and historiographical method that would be taken up in her first film, Paris 1900.

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Paris 1900 Takes Shape: Origins and Conceptual Developments

In its creation of a “chronicle of life in Paris between 1900 and 1914”,70 Paris

1900 built upon Images du cinéma français’ aesthetic experiments with the archive, with Vedrès adapting the assembly of film production stills on the page to an extended montage of period film footage. Echoing Vedrès’ move from the world of literature to that of cinema in taking on the project, the very origins of

Paris 1900 were intimately linked with the reception of Images du cinéma français within the sphere of Parisian post-war cinephilia. After the book’s publication in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the

Cinémathèque Française, the producer Pierre Braunberger approached Vedrès to direct a film that he envisioned as an ‘ethnographic document’ of fin de siècle

Paris that used excerpts from films shot in the city. Braunberger, who had been carrying the idea for such a film with him since the war, recounts that he had initially conceived of the film as being composed of excerpts from fictional films from the early history of cinema, as he felt that there were very few cinematic

‘ethnographic documents’ of the city that dated back to this period.71 After having first approached Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque

Française, to sketch out a plan for the project, Braunberger opted instead for

Vedrès after seeing her recently published Images du cinéma français book.

Vedrès’ specialisation in the history of the French Third Republic72 and recent

70 From the film’s opening intertitle.

71 Pierre Braunberger, Pierre Braunberger, producteur: cinémamémoire: propos receuillis par Jacques Gerber (Paris: Centre national de la cinématographie/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), 139. Vedrès corroborates this account just after the film’s release. Nicole Vedrès, “Mystères de Paris 1900,” Ciné-club, no. 3, December 1947, 4.

72 Vedrès work on the Ferry family papers in the 1930s had given her an intimate knowledge of the history of Paris during the 3rd Republic. Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

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engagement with the archives of cinema history in Images du cinéma français made her particularly well suited to the project, and she was engaged to write the film’s commentary as well as source its footage.

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Figure 1.8: Opening shot of Paris 1900 and the front cover of Chéronnet's photo album.

While Paris 1900 was initially conceived of as a response to a perceived lack of cinematic ‘ethnographic documents’ of turn of the century Paris, the project entered more broadly into dialogue with a budding historiographical intervention in France to re-engage with the period that had retrospectively come to be known as the Belle Époque. Though the term first appears just after

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the end of WWI, it gains currency as a historical chrononym in France during the

1930s, signifying the period from the late 19th century following the Franco-

Prussian War and ending with the onset of WWI. In his recent monograph on the historiography of the Belle Époque, Dominique Khalifa notes that early efforts by

French historians to account for the period were forced to navigate the heady mix of romanticism and nostalgia that had steadily crept into the national imaginary.73 Vedrès’ film was named in homage to one such cautious, early history of the period, Louis Chéronnet’s illustrated photo album, A Paris… vers

1900 (1932), with the film’s opening image of the Roue de Paris (built for the

1900 World Fair) a clear visual nod to the cover of the Chéronnet album (see Fig.

1.8, above).74 In his introductory text that precedes the book’s 60 photographic plates, Chéronnet presents a tempered and at times melancholic view of the period that contrasts with the romanticism that had entered into the French remembrance of the Belle Époque. Under the influence of writer Paul Morand’s equally sceptical monograph, 1900, published a year earlier,75 Chéronnet traces the fraught remembrance of the period, which had become further complicated by divisions along generational lines. According to Chéronnet, for those born around or before the turn of the century (as he and Morand were), the Belle

Époque was “a lost paradise, a heaven from which they fell onto this troubled planet”, and the romanticism for this period was as much marked by the trauma

73 Dominique Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la Belle Époque, 58-66.

74 Louis Chéronnet, A Paris... vers 1900 (Paris: Éditions des chroniques du jour, 1932). Vedrès speaks about the influence of Chéronnet’s photo album in Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

75 Paul Morand, 1900.

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of what followed as it was by a desire to recuperate “an unrealised dream” [un rêve à se réaliser].76 As Chéronnet reflects, this dream had become all the more difficult to shake because of its “slow crystallisation” in the new currency that its cultural forms had gained in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the paintings of Henri

Rousseau and Jean Hugo, the café concert and even early French cinema. Indeed, for Chéronnet, the very technological mechanism of photographic reproduction had buttressed this romanticisation of the Belle Époque:

Furthermore, there would be much to say about the increase in our romantic sensibilities as a result of photography’s contributions. Our forefathers, who had nothing but miniatures and paintings — that is to say, artistic works — to reconstitute the past have never known the painful acuity that the photographic or cinematographic document possesses. Its weight and implacability change the qualities of our dreams.77

In contrast to this bittersweet and slightly painful remembrance for his own generation, Chéronnet asserts that for the next, the Belle Époque “appeared as an incomprehensible nothingness.”78 For Vedrès, born in 1911 and roughly a decade younger than Morand and Chéronnet, this era was outside of living memory, but its cinematographic documents — those bearers of ‘painful acuity’ for those who had lived through the period — were there to be mined. From the standpoint of post-war France, the Belle Époque may have seemed like the distant past, but it had left behind an especially evocative set of traces in the

76 Louis Chéronnet, A Paris… vers 1900, 8.

77 Louis Chéronnet, A Paris... vers 1900, 9, footnote 1.

78 Louis Chéronnet, A Paris... vers 1900, 8.

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form of the footage that had been produced from the period. For Paris 1900,

Vedrès assembled footage from over 700 films dating back to the period from

1900 until the eve of the First World War;79 the process of sorting through these period films and assembling them into some kind of order was a way for Vedrès to fashion an historical account from the ‘incomprehensible nothingness’ that its traces constituted for her generation.

If the manner in which Vedrès selected footage for the film was thus to be of a particularly heightened importance to her ‘chronicle of life’ during the Belle

Époque, her method of collection was far from orderly, depending much less on the systematic search that such a task might presuppose than it did on happenstance. Amassed over the course of 18 months, Vedrès completed this enormous undertaking of pre-selecting images with the help of a student in the first ever editing class of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques

[IDHEC, France’s first film school], Alain Resnais, whose work as assistant to

Vedrès on Paris 1900 was to be his first ever professional film credit.80 While

Vedrès and Resnais’ first port of call for finding footage was the Cinémathèque

Française, this era of early cinema — including fiction — was not at that stage

79 As previously mentioned, the film also includes photographs of notable figures of the period that hadn’t been filmed while they were alive, including Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Claude Debussy amongst a handful of others. Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 35, 3rd Year, August 1948, 350. As Liandrat-Guigues points out, three of these photographs – depicting Boni de Castellane, Pierre Louÿs, and Robert de Montesquieu – were re-used from Vedrès’ own Un siècle de l’élégance française. The only non-period footage that appears in Paris 1900 – that is, footage that wasn’t shot during the period 1900-1914 – are the extracts from Sacha Guitry’s Ceux de chez nous (1915), and a brief shot of a rotating statuette from the collection of Jacques Damiot, filmed by Vedrès and Resnais. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947), 16.

80 Vedrès recalls that it was Myriam that had recommended Resnais, who was yet to finish his studies at IDHEC. Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès. Resnais corroborates this account in Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 179.

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well preserved or represented in the Langlois archives.81 Thus, the pair was obliged to look for the footage for the most part outside of institutional holdings, traveling around France by bus to prospect for footage from amateur collectors.82 As Vedrès recalls, the very knowledge of where to look for this footage was opened up by a curious, piecemeal network of underground, semi- legal collections: a trip to visit one private collector’s dubiously obtained collection would lead them by word of mouth to another collector, and so on.

Similarly, the relative disorder that marked their journey was matched by another kind of disorder when confronted with the film reels themselves. The reels were of course unmarked with regards to name, date, or content, and in order to determine their potential interest, Vedrès and Resnais had to inspect the negatives with the naked eye.83 The lengths that the pair went to were more extreme in some instances than others: in an interview given to the newspaper

Libération just after the film’s release, Vedrès recalls digging up three reels of

81 As Paula Amad has noted, these ‘gaps’ in the Langlois archives are indicative of film archiving practices of the time. A more systematic process of archiving film material – indeed the very concept of a cinematic, ‘counterarchival classificatory drive’ – begins after WWII, in the 1940s and 1950s. See Paula Amad, “Film as the ‘Skin of History,’” 87, 94-97. On this notion of the counter-archive, see Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

82 The credits include a note thanking the following museums and commercial film archives: the Musée Carnavalet, the Cinémathèques Pathé, Gaumont-Actualités, Éclair-Actualités, Boulogne, Gaumont British News Pathe Picture Ltd., as well as the British Film Institute and the Société “L’Image.” Though Vedrès was thus working with access to some inventoried footage, her interviews from the period as well as the production notes held in the Films du jeudi archives demonstrate the extent to which non-inventoried, private collections were of central importance to the film.

83 Anne Manson, “« Paris 1900, » un film qui sort des caves et des greniers,” Libération, 24th September, 1947.

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footage that appeared in the film from a junk-shop owner’s backyard, where they had remained buried under a rabbit hutch during the Occupation.84

If the improvised nature of the search and the uninventoried disorder facing them evidently provided some logistical difficulties for Vedrès and

Resnais, it also had productive consequences in the film’s conceptual development. Indeed, as Vedrès later recalled in an interview, it was precisely this haphazard method of collection that resulted in the pair broadening their scope of footage from purely fictional sketches to a much broader and richer range of films from the period, especially its actuality footage. Vedrès notes that in the process of looking through the reels of fiction films initially earmarked for

Paris 1900, she and Resnais inadvertently became interested in the newsreel footage that was physically appended to the beginning of the reels.85 Originally a distraction from the initial task, this newsreel footage — which Vedrès describes as her ‘weakness,’ her ‘personal hobby’ — soon began to occupy an especially important part of the project. The producer Braunberger gave Vedrès the go- ahead to include this non-fictional footage, and with it, to shift the purview of the film: from the “farandole des films comiques de l’époque” that was its original raison d’être, Paris 1900 was to present a more complex and varied picture not just of the cinematic production of the era, but of the very era itself. By the end of their search, the range of footage had broadened to include newsreel footage

84 Anne Manson, “« Paris 1900 ,” un film qui sort des caves et des greniers.”

85 As Vedrès recalls, this was a result of early cinema exhibition practices, in which newsreel footage was appended to the start of reels of fiction films. Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

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from major studios such as Pathé, Éclair and Gaumont, fictional films — particularly sketches in the comic burlesque tradition — other documentary films, amateur footage, and a handful of photographs of figures that were not filmed during their lifetime.

This variety of footage, as well as its sourcing from outside of established film archives and cultural institutions, represents a key departure from the inter- war films de montage discussed earlier in this chapter. Whereas the films of

Shub, Dulac and Brunius had almost exclusively used footage that was held in the collections of film studios, newsreel companies and state film archives, Paris

1900 depended to a much greater degree on footage that had yet to be officially inventoried in any way. Indeed, this was footage that had passed from production, distribution and exhibition, and fallen outside of any institutional or archival inventory: by necessity, its collection meant engaging with non- institutional image culture, amassing a new inventory of images over the course of the production. While I will more thoroughly explore this Benjaminian notion of the recuperation of ‘refuse’ later in this chapter, it is worth noting here the modernity and prescience of Vedrès’ method of selection and assemblage in terms of future, archival-based artistic practice. In his 2004 essay on the ‘archival impulse’ in modern art, Hal Foster describes the recent surge of archival artworks that are based on the resuscitation of “alternative knowledge” or

“countermemory”, works that engage with alternative histories both in the

“complex of texts and objects” that they make reference to and in their

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organisation “according to a quasi-archival logic.”87 We might think of Vedrès’

Paris 1900 as exhibiting this archival impulse several decades in advance. Her recuperation of largely uninventoried footage — displaying ephemeral occurrences of what the Annales School of history were referring to at the time as histoire évènementielle alongside more traditionally consequential events88 — means that the film’s very construction constitutes a new archive of sorts of turn of the century Paris. The re-use of footage from Paris 1900 in François Truffaut’s

Jules et Jim (1962) and plans for its inclusion once more in his La Peau douce

(1964), as well as its reappearance in later films by Jean Rouch and Chris Marker indicate to what extent Vedrès’ film had come to constitute a future cinematic archive in a variety of contexts.89

87 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 4.

88 This term, coined by the French sociologist and economist François Simiand of the Annales School of history, was deployed in Fernand Braudel’s studies in the 1940s of the longue durée as a distinct historical temporality. See Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The longue durée,” trans. Immanuel Wallerstein, Review, 2, no. 32, 2009, 171-203.

89 The original script of La Peau douce (1964) indicates that Truffaut had intended to include footage from Paris 1900 there as well, but this sequence was cut from the final film. Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, trans. Alistair Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 74-75. Jean Rouch’s fictional short, Gare du nord (1964), is inspired by the scene of the tailor’s jump from the Eiffel tower. Rouch discusses the influence of Vedrès’ film in an interview broadcast on French television in 1965: Les Ecrans de la ville: emission du 28 octobre 1965 (Produced by Philippe Collin and Pierre-André Boutang, directed by Colette Thiriet). Chris Marker excerpts footage from Paris 1900 in episodes 1 and 2 of L’Heritage de la chouette (1989) and again in Level Five (1997).

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Voiceover: “L’apparition de la première femme à pantalon fit scandale” (The appearance of the first woman wearing pants causes a scandal.)

Voiceover: “Pourtant, le port du costume masculin semble normale pour ceux qui commence à exercer ces métiers d’homme” (Nevertheless, wearing men’s clothing seems normal for those who have started to practice men’s professions.)

Figure 1.9: A sequence on women’s fashion and work in Paris 1900. This demonstrates Paris 1900’s catalogue-like movement between sections, with Vedrès text forging thematic connections between images. Accompanying voiceover included above images.

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One of the most striking aspects of the composition of Paris 1900 is precisely

Vedrès’ organisation of the footage according to a catalogue-like structure, rejecting for the most part the chronological narratives that we have observed in the films de montage of the inter-war period in favour of something that resembles the thematic groupings of an archive’s index. The footage appearing in the film ranges from major civic events (the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower and metro around the turn of the century, the inauguration of president Pointcarré in

1913), to the conventionally minor (men publicly urinating, Parisians leaving for summer vacation, and the garden parties of Parisian high society), while also including personalities from the arts (Pierre-Auguste Renoir), cinema

(Ferdinand Zecca meeting with Charles Pathé), literature (Colette) and theatre

(Sarah Bernhardt) as well as the Suffragette and socialist movements. What ties them together is less a sense of a positivist accumulation of events that form a coherent narrative gestalt, and more a set of thematic or abstract intellectual associations that joins them together as discrete, interconnected historical currents. A section on the art deco style adorning the newly built Paris metro leads in to another on interior decoration before quickly moving to another on women’s ‘conseils de mondanité’ (‘advice for high society’) and fashion. Generally, it is Vedrès’ commentary that forges these thematic associations between relatively heterogeneous sources: footage showing a woman wearing long pants is linked by a cut to another of a woman operating a train, the voice off extracting from these images their feminist subtext and joining them together to form a passage on the position of women in early 20th century Paris (Fig. 1.9, above).

Though the film has a loose chronological order that is established by the periodic appearance of major events — the Exposition Universelle of 1900 at the

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beginning of the film, Armond Fallière’s presidency (1906–1913), soldiers going to the front of WWI in 1914 at the close of the film — these appear as intermittent temporal reminders amongst a more fluid sequence of quotidian events. As such, we can conceive of Vedrès’ film as less a narrative of progression than as something approaching Fernand Braudel’s notion of a back and forth between intersecting, plural historical temporalities.90 Moving continually from the description of anecdotal events to reflections on what Braudel termed the

‘conjonctural’ temporality of history — the intermediate, ‘cyclical phases’ of history, of which the Belle Époque might be considered an example — Vedrès creates an account of the historical period that cannot be so easily contained within a single, linear movement. Instead, we see an assemblage of images that testify to the very plurality of historical temporalities that Braudel staked a claim for in his writing in the post-war period, a plurality that, in his words, must be assembled “to form an overall constellation.”91 As we will see, the footage that

Vedrès brings together depicts these historical temporalities that exist on various scales, and their simultaneity and internal articulations are continually exposed in the constellatory, non-linear movements between images.

90 This was the historiographical methodology that Braudel established in his study of the Mediterranean. For a discussion of the plural historical temporalities present in Braudel’s work, see Dale Tomich, “The Order of Historical Time: The Longue Durée and Micro-History,” in The Longue Durée and World-Systems Analysis, ed. Richard E. Lee (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 9-34.

91 Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 182.

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Figure 1.10: Archival footage bookends an early comedic sketch From Paris 1900.

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The effect of Vedrès’ non-linear, constellatory structure of organisation in

Paris 1900 is that it produces a model of historical engagement that is not concerned with exposing the mechanisms of causality and consequence that join phenomena of the past together, but rather creates a mode of revelatory history that proceeds via the juxtapositions of a decidedly plural past. It is this attempt to preserve and put into relation a scale of historical multiplicities — from micro-history to the conjonctural, the anecdotal to the epochal — that conceptually distinguishes Paris 1900 from its film de montage predecessors, breaking with a model of historical grand narratives, and instantiating a broader break with a positivist model of historiography that sees the recounting of history as the accumulation of events into a progressive pattern.92 It is in the pursuit of this revelatory historiographical model that Vedrès creates another major aesthetic break with the film de montage tradition: that is, in its mix of fictional sketches and actuality footage. While at some moments, the break between unstaged and staged footage is clearly marked — such as an early passage linking newsreel footage of men walking down a Parisian street with a visually similar sequence from the burlesque comic short Poursuite Cambrioleurs

(Fig. 1.10, above) — for the most part, the alternation between sources of footage is virtually imperceptible.93 As I read it, this untroubled movement between fictional and non-fictional footage was presaged in Images du cinéma

92 Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues reads Vedrès’ liberal association of fictional and non-fictional as part of the film’s refusal of any particular “intention scientifique” or ambitions as a “recueil d’informations.” Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947), 19.

93 Another example is the insertion of almost all of Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca’s comic sketch L’amant sur la lune (1903). Roughly half of the film’s footage comes from fictional films, while the other half comprises of various types of non-fiction footage.

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français, in which Vedrès shifted away from the use of the image to illustrate historical phenomena towards the creation of abstract associations that revealed the imperceptible shifts of past periods. In Paris 1900, this continued emphasis on the archival image’s evocative rather than illustrative properties in tracing the contours of the past is expressed in part in this decision to mix fictional and non- fictional footage. By refusing to consign the image to a purely descriptive function, Vedrès engages with a model of archival filmmaking in which the symbolic registers of past images — whether of fiction or non-fiction — might also illuminate historical processes.

In an expanded version of her “Les feuilles bougent” essay published in

1953, Vedrès herself expressed the complexity of the relationship between historical event and image as her justification for mixing fictional and non- fictional footage. She recalled that what struck her about the footage that she and

Resnais collected from the period 1900–1914 was its uniformity in looking back at it from a future vantage point, regardless of its origins:

Whether the footage had been taken by your average cameraman from Pathé, or it had been a scene from the same period shot by an art film director [metteur en scène de film d’art], they resembled one another to an extraordinary degree. So much so that one can put them side by side, and that’s what we did at times, despite the apparent heterodoxy of the process. From the moment that man intervenes, there is always an element of interpretation, even if — one could even say, especially if — he has invented a machine capable of seeing in his place. Man […] only reinvents man.94

94 Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité,” 136.

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For Vedrès, the passing of time permitted her to see the similar representational registers that fictional and non-fictional films drew upon, noting that what appeared to her from her future vantage point was a series of inventions that bore that “typical 1900 touch” as she called it.95 If, as she says, “man … only reinvents man” through the cinema, then all footage from the past — no matter its provenance or ambitions towards providing a record of reality — ought to be treated as emanations of this process of invention; that is, how a period continually invents and reinvents itself through the moving images it creates, from the events chosen to the manner of filming it. For Vedrès, the footage chosen for Paris 1900 was much less evidence of ‘the way things used to be’ — grist for a positivist historical account of a past time — as it was a series of inherently performative traces of what an era of history has left behind of itself.

In re-employing this footage, Vedrès would go beyond the historical models of the inter-war film de montage by adopting a more fluid historical poetics that attempted to illuminate how the immediacy of the ephemeral event related to and was even indicative of concurrent, cyclical phases of history. That which

Vedrès saw as a series of subterranean appearances in these images from her future vantage point — the emergence of something that was typiquement mil neuf cent, as she put it — could not be communicated by a montage purely assembling a depiction of successive events. The place of montage, by contrast, would be to bring to the surface the imperceptible historical movements and relations that she saw in looking back at them more than a generation later.

95 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 350.

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From Refuse to Récit: Revelatory Montage Poetics in Paris 1900

What has emerged thus far in my discussion is the extent to which Paris 1900’s unique production history and the conceptual reflections that it provokes was key to Vedrès’ unique approach to the film de montage as a historical mode of filmmaking. In turning now to the specific operations of montage in her film,

Vedrès’ historical methodology will be aligned with her aesthetic choices, tracking the establishment of what I term a revelatory poetics of montage in Paris

1900. Homing in on the manner in which Vedrès assembles images — both in terms of the images selected and the underlying method of composition joining them together — two salient aspects emerge that shed some light on the nature of montage’s revelatory effects in her film. The first of these aspects is Vedrès’ privileging of the refuse-like, and seemingly insignificant segments of archival footage at key, structuring moments in the film, in which she explicitly reflects on the subtle shifts in cyclical history of the Belle Époque. Taking fragments of footage depicting relatively anodyne events, Vedrès emphasises the secondary, less immediately perceptible significations of this footage, asking what the anecdotal may reveal of the epochal. The second aspect of Vedrès’ montage practice I will draw attention to is the attendant temporal effects produced by her selection of footage depicting ephemeral events. By recuperating these fragments of refuse-like footage and re-employing them as markers of epochal change, Vedrès’ assemblages problematise the historical narrative tradition that has cordoned these images off as faits divers, and instead suggests that their significance be reconsidered outside of this progressive continuum of history. I argue thus that Vedrès’ montage produces an experience of historical temporality that recalibrates a purely chronological relationship between past

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and present, one that we might, by contrast, term a ‘revelatory’ temporality.

To understand Vedrès’ revelatory montage poetics, it is important to consider the process of selecting footage that she and Resnais developed throughout the film’s production phase. Once again, the conceptual bases and practices of surrealism give us a framework for thinking through their decisions.

Considering the lack of organisation of the footage, as well as the haphazard way in which they sorted through it, Vedrès and Resnais’ process of selection would inevitably err towards their own personal predilections and interests rather than any ambitions towards completism; their process of sorting and choosing these images resembled much more the surrealist encounters with the objet trouvé, the found object that “mysteriously attracts the subject” in its ability to express some part of her psychic reality.96 Employing the term ‘archival surreal’ to describe the disorder of footage facing the filmmakers, Amad links this disorder to the pair’s development of a ‘counterpositivist method’ of footage selection and assembly, which refused the “rationalist regime of the catalog” in favour of the chance-like and ‘involuntary’ attraction to certain pieces of footage.97 For her part, Vedrès compared their method of searching for footage to a conceptually ‘archaeological’ approach — mirroring the at times literally

96 Margaret Cohen, Walter Benjamin and Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140. Vedrès conceded that this method meant that they surely also missed what would otherwise be regarded as important footage. Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

97 Paul Amad, “Film as the ‘Skin of History’,” 95. Surrealism is discussed in Amad’s essay on pages 94-97. Liandrat-Guigues also discusses Vedrès’ refusal of rationalist historical discourse in her analysis of the film’s historiographical strategies. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947), 82-84.

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archaeological aspect of the pair’s method of collection — that embraced the element of chance and contingency as central to their very process of looking:

When people asked us “But what are you looking for?” we would say, “We don’t know. Everything!” An archaeologist who digs up a site in Crete doesn’t say to himself “I’m looking for a vase.” He says, “I’m looking for lost centuries.” [Je cherche des siècles]. Well, we were looking for 1900, anywhere we could find it.98

Here, there is an inversion of the practices of selecting footage for archival filmmaking that I traced in my discussion of the inter-war film de montage. If in those films, archival images were sought out in order to illustrate predetermined scripts (as in the cases of Dulac and Brunius) or ideologically driven revisions of the past (as with Shub), for Vedrès, the search for visual material either preceded or was thought alongside the formation of a historical discourse. By inverting this practice of selection, such that the image became a prompt for the development of a historical discourse, Vedrès’ approach avoided what Bazin had criticised as the subgenre’s tendency to sublimate archival assemblage to ‘the cement of the words’ of voiceover. Rethinking the fixity of the relationship between word and image in archival filmmaking, Vedrès’ method opened up new possibilities for the assembly of archival images itself as a moment for historical reflection and cinematic thinking.

This counterpositivist collection method would have implications not just for influencing what kind of footage Vedrès and Resnais chose, but also for

98 Vedrès quoted in Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

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Vedrès’ approach to then assembling this footage. As Vedrès noted in “Les feuilles bougent”, given that the footage of conventionally consequential events seemed to them indistinguishable from the general, ‘ambient chaos’ of the footage they examined, the pair found themselves being increasingly drawn to seemingly ephemeral images, or what she termed ‘à côtés’ [‘off-cuts’].99 But these

‘à côtés’ weren’t just sources of attraction; as Vedrès would later reflect, their function in the film was to give a structural meaning to this ambient chaos of footage:

To organise our account, we needed support points [points d’appui]. These points would act as stepping stones in a story that at its root was not a story, so to speak; after all, the march of time is not in and of itself a subject. For this, we needed to choose sequences that had a certain intensity but which were often of no real historical import.100

By privileging these images seemingly of no real historical import as the structuring markers of her account of this period, Vedrès does not simply mean that she has total agency over the signification of each shot, or that she employs a

Situationist method of détournement that antagonistically re-routs its meaning.101 Rather, as she explained elsewhere, she saw the moment of re-

99 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 351.

100 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 353. Liandrat-Guigues draws a connection between Vedrès’ journalistic writing – with its “souci des particularités prélevées” – and the assemblage of ephemeral images in Paris 1900. Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947), 15.

101 Kaira M. Cabañas identifies Paris 1900 as an ‘unacknowledged’ influence on Isidore Isou’s first Lettrist films, directed in the early 1950s. See Kaira M. Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 36-37. One could certainly also trace aesthetic parallels between the re-assemblage of footage in Paris 1900 and the work of another Lettrist – and subsequently, Situationist – filmmaker in Guy Debord. For

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employment as a means of communicating the sensation she felt in watching these images, attempting to “make felt that strange and unexpected ‘second meaning’” that revealed itself in looking at this pre-existing footage.102 As Vedrès writes in her closing statements of “Les feuilles bougent”, for all of her comparisons of montage to writing and of the exploitation of the symbolic registers of the image, “nothing can take away from this miracle of truth that the cinema’s first spectators could not help but notice: the rustling leaves.”103 As I read it, this closing statement is a reflection of her commitment to preserving what she terms elsewhere in the essay the “palpitation of life” in the archival image, one that appears to the future observer, and which escapes language and the reason of discourse.104 This palpitation constitutes a moment of recognition, as Benjamin put it, in which something appears to the future observer that disrupts the habitual picture of the past, and which breaks through the ‘ambient chaos’ contained within the footage. In other words, by isolating these ephemeral images and assembling them at key structuring points of the film, the filmmaker aimed to express these almost imperceptible, mysterious movements that drew them to the images in the first place, aligning the method of assembly with the communication of this involuntary pulse that unfurls before one’s eyes.

Debord as well, the notion of détournement often implied the re-assemblage of visual materials – from advertising and popular culture in particular – that were also traditionally considered to have “no real historical import.” However, as Antoine Coppola points out, the Situationist re- interpretation of the technique of détournement was above all a means of confronting and criticising broader image culture and its obfuscatory role in capitalist societies. Antoine Coppola, Introduction au cinéma de Guy Debord et de l’avant-garde situationniste, 2nd edition (Paris: Editions Sulliver, 2006), 21, 29.

102 From Vedrès’ explanatory note for a screening of Paris 1900 in 1953 at the Toronto Film Society. Reprinted in Jay Leyda, Film Beget Films (London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1964), 79.

103 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuillent bougent,” 354.

104 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuillent bougent,” 349.

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In Vedrès’ emphasis on archival assemblage as a means to express the discreet movements that one sees when watching the images of the past, I read an implicit description of the revelatory montage poetics of her filmmaking and the relational model of historical temporality that it creates. An expression of the subjective act of viewing these images of the past, montage reveals for Vedrès just these subterranean appearances that one glimpses when looking upon the archival image, an expression of the very passage of time that separates the moment of an image’s production and its later re-use by the filmmaker. Vedrès shifts the emphasis of montage from the illustration of an a posteriori progression of history to an attempt to seize upon and communicate these almost imperceptible movements — what she calls “les nerfs d’une époque” — that emerge in the moment of viewing, seeing montage primarily as a means of expressing one’s relationship to an image from the past. By recuperating these images “of no real historical import” and revising their historical significance,

Vedrès problematises the narrative that had written them off as insignificant, a recuperation that, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated throughout his Arcades

Project, “leads the past to bring the present into a critical state.” As Benjamin had argued, the effect that this recuperation and re-assembly of historical ‘refuse’ produces is primarily to point out newly emergent historical correspondences between distinct time periods. This is precisely how the montage of the ‘à côté’ functions in Vedrès’ Paris 1900. Just as the ephemera of 19th century commodity culture took on a particular potency for Benjamin in demonstrating the synchronicities between the historical formations of mid-19th century and inter- war Europe, Vedrès’ assemblage of archival footage of little ‘true historical

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signification’ became a platform for re-thinking the Belle Époque from the standpoint of post-war France. Released from the cycle of pre-approved interpretation and classification, these images become markers of an overdetermination of epochal significations, in which the revelation of an imperceptible, alternative historical trajectory in the present moment becomes newly legible.

To demonstrate this revelatory montage poetics and the critical relationship it establishes between past and present, I will examine two sequences from Paris 1900, both evocative examples of Vedrès’ re-use of ephemeral fragments of archival footage. Acting as linking passages bringing together thematic shifts or recapitulations of ideas in the film, these sequences structure Paris 1900 — providing the film’s “points d’appui”, as Vedrès called them — while also marking breaks in the more prosaic groupings of footage that surround them, providing a vision of the more imperceptible shifts and historical flows of the Belle Époque as glimpsed from her vantage point. The first of these sequences occurs two-thirds of the way through the film, lasting around 90 seconds and separated across 11 shots. Describing a solar eclipse that occurred in April of 1912 and which was documented in Paris, the sequence begins with two shots from a fictional film from the Pathé archives on the life of the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion, who had in fact observed and documented the eclipse. Vedrès then cuts to three shots from pedagogical films produced by

Gaumont showing crowds watching the eclipse in Paris’ Place de l’Opéra, followed by footage of the eclipse itself. An ominous chromatic descent in Guy

Bernard’s musical score accompanies Claude Dauphin’s much more sombre tone

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of voice in the commentary, as he gravely intones over these images: “La place de l’Opéra connaît une lumière inusité, et quelques uns veulent y voir le présage de la fin du monde.” [“La Place de l’Opéra is bathed in an unusual light, and some see in this an omen of the end of the world.”] Vedrès then cuts to a sequence of newsreel footage produced by Pathé showing the tailor Franz Reichelt and his infamous jump to his own death from the Eiffel tower in February of the same year using a faulty self-made parachute that he believed would allow him to survive the fall (Fig. 1.11, below).

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Figure 1.11: Four images from the crucial turning point of Paris 1900.

Considering it closely, one is immediately struck by the eclecticism of the footage employed by Vedrès as well as the ephemeral nature of the events that it depicts, two aspects of her conceptualisation of archival montage that I have traced throughout this chapter. Fictional recreations of historic events, pedagogical films and newsreel footage are arranged side-by-side, all of which were made to depict two relatively transitory occurrences from 1912: that of a solar eclipse and of a tailor’s jump from the Eiffel Tower. Yet Vedrès would go on to describe this sequence as Paris 1900’s thematic turning point — its ‘Wendung’,

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as she would put it105 — as the film becomes subsequently much darker in its tone after the lightness of the opening two-thirds and its focus on fashion, celebrated socialites and cultural personalities, and artistic movements. Against this romantic vision of the lightness and gaiety of the Belle Époque — embodied in the convivial figure of France’s president between 1906 and 1913, Armand

Fallières106 — the final third describes civil unrest and poverty in France, failed diplomatic efforts Europe-wide, and the militarisation of the continent as it led itself to a war of unprecedented scale. Initially, as Vedrès recalls, she had wanted to mark this change, “où se préfigure la fin du bon temps”, with footage of the socialist politician Jean Jaurès delivering one of his prophetic speeches in this same period, or to show the coming of WWI with his assassination in July

1914.107 However, after being unable to find any such footage of Jaurès, Vedrès decided to change tack and to place the footage of Reichelt’s ill-fated jump from the Eiffel Tower at this juncture of the film, together with the footage of the eclipse. It was in this exchange of ‘seemingly anodyne documents’ that she hoped to indicate a historical turning point in the period, by making use of the images’

‘symbolic, fatal’ undercurrents:

It helped us to bring about, imperceptibly we thought, the idea of an alteration in the voltage of the era: to put across [à faire passer], as if it were gliding by, the idea of death.108

105 Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 353.

106 Vedrès makes this connection explicit in the film, when Raymond Pointcaré takes over from Fallières’ presidency, with the voiceover offering: “L’époque change de visage.”

107Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 353.

108Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent,” 353. My emphasis.

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On the one hand, Vedrès’ montage in this sequence is clearly working on the suggestive registers of the archival image, interested in them less as an illustration of a consequential event than in their ability to evoke the abstract unconscious of the era. She refers to the “idea of an alteration in the voltage of the era”, or again, “the idea of death”, echoing Brunius’ contemporary writings on surrealist-inflected archival montage and its associative, non-realist potentials.

Yet on the other hand, the voiceover commentary accompanying the sequence pointedly identifies the ephemeral events with which the footage is linked, indexing them to a particular time and place. Vedrès thus makes a concomitant effort to identify these faits divers and to recuperate them as part of a broader,

Benjaminian historical temporality of correspondences; the images are both materially linked to a moment in the past (“What were they filming?”) and a future moment of looking back (“What have these images come to mean?”). In recuperating and re-assembling these visual minutiae into a new set of relationships, Vedrès removes them for a moment from their place in the inventory of historical ephemera and makes a claim for their epochal signification. For Vedrès, in looking back at this footage in 1947 — images that she saw as portending to a coming calamity, from the vantage point of a historical moment where another has just ended — these correspondences she forged between historical ephemera were an attempt to bring to the surface the broader historical correspondences with her own era, glimpsed within their very shifts of light and tone. Wrested from the logic of progression and thrust into new relations through montage, the refuse-like archival image becomes for

Vedrès a means of communicating a crisis of the relationship between images of

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the past and a present, between her moment of reading in post-war France and the Belle Époque.

The nature of this correspondence between the Belle Époque’s descent into war and the recent memories of WWII is brought more sharply into focus at the end of the film, in a sequence that doubles as a coda to the downward spiral that had as its catalyst Reichelt’s ill-fated jump from the Eiffel Tower. The film’s last images are of soldiers leaving for the front at the start of WWI, with Vedrès cutting together newsreel footage of young men filing into Paris’ Gare de l’Est station to board a train leaving for the front in August 1914. Over this footage,

Claude Dauphin gravely intones, “A la Gare de l’Est, des cris encore joyeux, des visages mal préparés aux spectacles du lendemain.” In comparison to the aforementioned Eiffel Tower sequence, the footage that Vedrès uses here is less obviously ephemeral, depicting an event that we might reasonably consider to be a part of a narrative account of the mobilisation of French troops at the outbreak of WWI. Yet what is interesting about its employment here is precisely the correspondences that Vedrès draws between this footage and other, intervening historical events, creating a circuitous loop of visual historical analogies. The very last moments of the film show these soldiers waving out of the window of the train as it pulls away from the station, a railway worker looking back at the camera and briefly meeting its gaze (Fig. 1.12, below). Claude Dauphin’s voiceover that accompanies these two images reflects that “C’est pourtant 1900 qui s’achève,” [“Nonetheless it is 1900 which is ending”] an entire era “du bon temps” slipping away contained within this image. Ending the film with an image that almost immediately conjures up the train’s regular appearances in the early

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cinema — from the Lumière brothers at La Ciotat to the American Hale’s tours — there is a reflection on the cinema’s continued presence to witness the intersections of history and new technology throughout the 20th century.

Figure 1.12: Soldiers leaving for the front at the end of Paris 1900.

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Figure 1.13: A train departing to an extermination camp. Rudolf Breslauer's footage, re-employed in Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard.

But Vedrès’ ending doesn’t purely resonate backwards through history; it also calls forward to events closer to her own time, particularly of “other, more recent trains loaded with passengers leaving for a voyage without return,” as

Laurent Véray has aptly put it.109 Indeed, in Nuit et Brouillard, made just under a

109 As Laurent Véray notes, this memory would have a particularly personal colouring for Vedrès: “On imagine également l’impact terrible de ces images de train sur Nicole Vedrès. Elle qui tenta de protéger son père de l’antisémitisme ambiant de Vichy et de l’occupant nazi, de le sauver de la déportation, sans hélas y parvenir … Parti de Drancy dans un convoi de mort, il finira gazé à Auschwitz.” Laurent Véray, Vedrès et le cinéma, 99-100.

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decade later, Vedrès’ assistant, Alain Resnais, would echo this exchange of shots with remarkable similarity when cutting together footage of the deportation of prisoners to Auschwitz shot by the German-Jewish prisoner Rudolf Breslauer at the Westerbork train station in 1944110 (Fig. 1.13, above). The resonance between the two montage sequences constructed a decade apart gestures to the pervasive traumas of WWII, explicitly addressed in Resnais’ film, and implicitly in Vedrès’. In this immediate post-war period, these images of soldiers leaving for the front in 1914 seem to follow a much more temporally complex itinerary, and an attempt to produce a legibility of these images requires this sensitivity to their resonance across different moments. In working with these images, Vedrès’ montage here sparks these cross-temporal associative resonances in an attempt to express this excess of significations that she glimpses in them, which call out beyond their moment of origin and into another, alternate historical circuit that lies at the intersections of cinema, technology and modernity. For Vedrès, this means wresting them from the past, and in forging new historical correspondences between them, giving them an afterlife that responds to a more plural, circuitous vision of history. When Vedrès reflected on the project in an essay some years later, she posited the historical and temporal stakes of Paris

1900 as follows: “In the end, what have we done if not recompose according to our own vision a time that is past [un temps qui était mort], and already fixed in its destiny?”111 As I take it, this is to ask, if the past is fixed in its destiny, and its images fixed into a form, to what extent can something new emerge from the

110 See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this sequence in Nuit et Brouillard.

111 Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité,” 137.

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sorting through and re-arrangement of the images that it leaves behind? Paris

1900 sees Vedrès working through these questions, as she negotiates her own position in looking back at the Belle Époque’s archive. Recomposing a vision of a time that may be past, and images that may be unchanging, Vedrès’ film shows that new histories can still be assembled from its remains.

Paris 1900 and its Afterlife

In tracing the development of Vedrès’ montage aesthetic in Paris 1900, from its influences and origins as a project, and through to her own theoretical reflections and in the assemblage of images in the film itself, it has become clear the extent to which it constitutes a landmark moment in the history of archival filmmaking. Emphasising the importance of the moment of looking back on the image of the past, and of re-assembly as an opportunity to express the historical and temporal flux that one glimpses from this future vantage point, Vedrès’ film exhibits a prescience and modernity that, as other scholars have noted, looks forward to archival filmmaking practices of the last twenty-to-thirty years.112

However, my trajectory in tracking the influence of Paris 1900 on the roughly contemporaneous films of Resnais and Marker — and indeed on her next feature,

La Vie commence demain — in the following chapters is at once more localised in terms of temporal bearings and more varied in terms of the forms of filmmaking

I examine, departing from a focus purely on the film de montage. Thus, while I focus on the montage of archival footage in this chapter, the conclusions that I

112 Laurent Veray has drawn links between Vedrès and more recent, experimental archival filmmaking. Laurent Véray, “L’Histoire peut-elle se faire avec des archives filmiques?,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze (Online), no. 41, 2003, accessed 10th January, 2018. For a more detailed discussion of the aesthetic and curatorial context in which Vedrès’ film has been placed by scholars and programmers, see “Afterimages: Looking Back, Moving Forward.”

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have drawn with regards to the practice of assembling images and their implications for a certain discourse of history will be useful to my discussion of archival and non-archival film practices alike in the corpus I study. As the following chapters will demonstrate, Vedrès’ unique cine-historical discourse of montage and its fluid temporal registers developed in Paris 1900 has a marked influence on the montage practice of this corpus of films in a variety of manifestations. While the re-use of archival footage remains a prominent focus of my study of La Vie commence demain, Les Statues meurent aussi, and Nuit et

Brouillard in the following chapter, my examination of Resnais’ art documentaries in Chapter 3 and Marker’s travel films in Chapter 4 examine the valence of the montage poetics first sketched in Paris 1900 in significantly different registers. What ties them together is a shared cine-historical methodology that attempts to express through montage the complex, circuitous relationships between two distinct moments in time that the image can reveal, a discourse that we have seen in Vedrès’ re-assemblage of an archive of images from the Belle Époque. Vedrès’ sensitivity to her own moment of reading, and her attempts to draw out the historical correspondences with this moment in a manner that avoids the inexorable unidirectional drive of linear narrative history would resonate through the montage practice of these other films in various manifestations in the following decade.

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Chapter 2. Critical Futures: Montage With and Against the Archive

“It is not the literal past that rules us […]. It is images of the past.” — Georges Steiner1

This chapter traces the continued practice of archival montage in films by all three filmmakers directed in the decade following Paris 1900: La Vie commence demain [Life Begins Tomorrow] (Nicole Vedrès, 1950), Les Statues meurent aussi

[Statues Also Die] (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), and Nuit et Brouillard

[Night and Fog] (Alain Resnais, 1956). The decision to examine these three particular films together is partly in recognition of the distinct aesthetic of assemblage that the directors develop across them: where Paris 1900 presented a purely archival mode of montage filmmaking, the directors of these three films place their own footage shot for the purpose alongside newsreels, footage from other documentaries and fiction films. However, my interest here extends beyond the mark of aesthetic distinction produced by the mixing of archival and non-archival images in these films. In closely examining them, I argue that this back-and-forth between pre-existing and original images produces a distinct

1 Full quote: “It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against the past. The echoes by which a society seeks to determine the reach, the logic and authority of its own voice, come from the rear.” In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefintion of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 3.

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focus on a temporal category that attains a new, critical importance across these three films: the future. What these films retain and build upon from Vedrès’ Paris

1900 is the notion of producing a legibility of archival images through montage, revisiting the visual archive pertaining to various historical phenomena whose legacy was being contested after the war, and attempting to make these images newly legible in light of subsequent historical changes. Addressing the culmination of decades of scientific research in the production of the atomic bomb (La Vie commence demain), the ravages of European colonialism and its effects on black cultural production (Les Statues meurent aussi), and the political stakes of memorialising the concentration camps after the war (Nuit et

Brouillard), the directors repurpose the visual archive produced to ostensibly document these phenomena. Their assemblage of images from this visual archive alongside their own footage allows them to identify newly apparent and newly critical correspondences between the historical phenomena in the archive and a range of political concerns that were being raised in post-war France. I argue that their suggestion of the alternative historical trajectories and significations that emerge from the rapprochement of this archive with their newly shot footage is ultimately a means for all three directors to stake a claim on the political horizons for action available to them. Across all three films, Vedrès,

Resnais and Marker suggest possible articulations of the future produced by recalibrating the relation between past and present, recasting a contested visual archive as constituting potentially prescient images for decrypting the course of the future.

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This chapter focuses on future-facing political discourses in all three films. Vedrès, Resnais and Marker enter into dialogue with an archive of images

— largely consisting of scientific, military and state propaganda films — that are heavily marked by the ideological and political imaginaries of those that originally commissioned them. In discussing their re-employment of these archival images, I examine the directors’ distinct, context-specific political concerns, and how this has an impact on their method of repurposing the footage. In La Vie commence demain, Vedrès’ self-described ‘homage to the experts’ and intellectuals of post-war France, the director had access to scientific, military, and pedagogical films from the United States, United Kingdom and

France. Re-cutting this archival footage to accompany interviews with and speeches by contemporary intellectuals, Vedrès tempers their prognoses for the future with a contiguous, cautionary reflection on the destruction wrought by the philosophy of progress and technological innovation throughout the 20th century. Resnais and Marker’s re-use of footage from French colonial documentaries and newsreels in Les Statues meurent aussi places these officially approved images of colonised Africa into a dialectical relationship with a discourse on the effects of colonialism on the production of the cultural forms of the black diaspora in the late colonial era. Their inclusion of French and U.S. newsreel footage depicting labour struggles in the early 1930s and African-

American sportsmen in the film’s final minutes broadens the horizons of the film’s political discourse, staking a claim for the necessity of a combined front amongst the left and the anti-colonial movement moving forward in the post-war period. Nuit et Brouillard’s assemblage of footage and photographs from various newly formed European archives conserving the visual memory of the

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concentration camps of WWII brings images produced both by Axis and Allied forces into dialogue with Resnais’ own images shot at the remains of the

Auschwitz and Majdanek camps in the mid-1950s. His alternation between newly shot and archival images draws past and present into a more immediate, critical relationship, these operations of montage instigating a broader reflection on the persistence of the political philosophies and structures of the univers concentrationnaire after the war.2 In charting the process by which Vedrès,

Resnais and Marker bring an archive of contested images into dialogue with these various contemporary political concerns, I thus demonstrate how their assemblage of archival and newly shot images enables a space to re-think the relation between past and present and thereby articulate potential political horizons.

After Hiroshima: La Vie commence demain

In contrast to Paris 1900’s “vision of a time that is past,”3 Vedrès’ following film, the feature-length La Vie commence demain, is firmly focused on France’s post- war present and the future that lay ahead of it.4 Announcing itself in the opening

2 David Rousset, L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946). Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman re-employ Rousset’s term in their recent collection of essays on Nuit et Brouillard to argue for the existence of a “concentrationary cinema.” This refers “both to a historically-created and realized system of terror that took place in real locations and to a theoretical concept that emerges from this state of affairs as a new political possibility.” Other films cited in this vein of concentrationary cinema include Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Muriel (1963), and Chris Marker’s La Jétee (1962). See Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, “Introduction,” in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, eds. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1-54.

3 Nicole Vedrès, “Le cinéma et le piège de la réalité,” in Cinéma: un œil ouvert sur le monde, ed. George-Michel Bovay (Lausanne, Clairefontaine: Albin Michel, 1952),137.

4 Screenings of La Vie commence demain have been even more rare than screenings of Paris 1900, and Vedrès herself seemed to distance herself from the film later in life. In a 1962 questionnaire

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credits as an “an homage to all of the experts, artists and all those who contribute to the building of a better future”, Vedrès’ film is built around a series of interviews with eminent figures of the contemporary French intellectual scene across the arts and sciences, including Jean-Paul Sartre, psychoanalyst Daniel

Lagache, biologist Jean Rostand, architect Le Corbusier, artist Picasso, writer

André Gide and scientists Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie.5 With its interview- based structure pre-dating the talking head conventions of later documentary filmmaking, Vedrès’ film is doubly innovative in its staging of these interviews within a hybrid docu-fiction form, placing the film’s encounters with these intellectuals within a loose fictional plot.6 At the start of the film, we see a young man from the country (played by Jean-Pierre Aumont) hitchhiking on the side of a highway, hoping to get picked up by a passing car and driven to Paris. Spotting the young man from inside a helicopter, a mysterious gentleman who introduces himself as “the man of the future” (played by André Labarthe) picks up Aumont’s character and flies him to a café in Saint-Germain-des-Près, Paris.7 After dining

for directors about their careers organised by the journal Image et son, Vedrès entirely skips over the film: “J’ai un peu par hasard d’ailleurs, commencé par faire un long métrage PARIS 1900 (documentaire) puis un autre plus court, un autre plus petit encore, et puis plus rien du tout.” Quoted in “Réponses à une enquête” (menée auprès de réalisateurs, producteurs, distributeurs, exploitants, “organismes marginaux” et ciné-clubs),” Image et Son, nos. 150-151, April-May 1962, 62.

5 Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues draws a parallel between Vedrès’ staging of interviews with public intellectuals in the film with the visites d’atelier to famous Paris-based painters and sculptors that were the backbone of Alain Resnais’ 16mm amateur films from 1946-1947. Suzanne Liandrat- Guigues, Paris 1900 de Nicole Vedrès (1947). Kaléidoscope des jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018), 67.

6 These dramatised sections of the film were for the most part negatively received by French critics following the film’s release. For example, François Chalais praises Vedrès’ “skilful editing” and “striking shortcuts,” but maintains that the sketches linking them “are a little bothersome.” François Chalais, “La vie commence demain. Esperons-le,” Le Parisien, 22 August 1950, 2.

7 Labarthe was a noted French scientist and journalist, who had also been involved in a non- Gaulllist branch of the French Resistance. In 1947, he published a book on recent technological

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together, the two meet again in a bar full of young existentialists; after extracting

Aumont from an altercation with one of them, Labarthe offers to introduce the young man to Jean-Paul Sartre to assuage his negative opinions of the philosophical current. One by one, and in similarly fantastical circumstances,

Aumont is introduced to each of the intellectuals appearing in the film; we find out that Labarthe is in fact a journalist using Aumont’s findings from his encounters for a “mysterious reportage.”

La Vie commence demain’s curious fictional mise-en-abîme that pits

Aumont’s character in conversation with the leading intellectuals of the day more broadly reflects the film’s push to aid in the diffusion of specialised fields of knowledge, which was undoubtedly influenced by the film’s partial funding by

UNESCO.8 Founded in 1946, three years prior to the start of production of

Vedrès’ film, UNESCO was fashioned as the cultural and educational branch of the newly formed United Nations, promoting mutual understanding in the global community through the domain of pedagogical initiatives.9 In an interview given just after La Vie commence demain’s release in September 1950, Vedrès echoed

UNESCO’s popularising ambitions in discussing her aims for the film. Pointing

advances in the United States, particularly in the field of aeronautical sciences, from which the film takes its name. André Labarthe, La Vie commence demain (Paris: R. Julliard, 1947).

8 We might note a parallel here with Marker and Resnais’ concurrent involvement with the popular education movement in France. See Chapters 3 and 4.

9 UNESCO helped fund the film and it was with their aid that much of the film’s documentation could come about. UNESCO were also involved in the funding and distribution of art documentaries from 1948 onwards (see Chapter 3), and even had plans to establish a “Centre International de la Photographie” in the mid-1950s for the production and distribution of film and photography works. See Tom Allbeson, “Photographic Diplomacy in the Postwar World: UNESCO and the Conception of Photography as a Universal Language, 1946–1956,” Modern Intellectual History, 2, no. 12, 2015, 383-415.

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out that the 20th century had up until that point seen a rise in “an excess of specialisation” alongside its significant cultural and scientific advancements, she stated that the film aimed to redress this compartmentalisation of knowledge through its interviews with a range of experts.10 This intellectual context of popularisation likely also accounts for the collaboration of André Labarthe, who had founded the monthly scientific journal Constellation in 1948, a kind of

French Reader’s Digest whose goal was to make new discoveries in the sciences known to the broader, non-specialist public11 (Fig. 2.1, below). This context of popularisation of knowledge plays heavily into Aumont’s characterisation in the film. He is introduced to the audience as an everyman who, despite his curiosity, carries with him a certain scepticism about the intellectual and cultural trends of the day, and his conversations are geared towards better understanding of what seems to him at times to be an inscrutable epoch.

10 Pierre Bloch-Delahaie, “L’Age d’or ou le néant. C’est ce que nous propose Nicole Védrès dans ‘La Vie commence demain’,” L’Ecran français, no. 272, 25th September, 1950, 11. Vedrès also highlights these popularising ambitions in Roger Boussinot, Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.

11 See Thierry Cottour, “Constellation et Rencontre (1967-1970). Un malentendu fécond,” in Les Éditions Rencontre, 1950-1971, ed. François Vallotton (Lausanne: Éditions d’en bas, 2004), 137- 147. There had even been an explicit link with the cinema with Labarthe’s work: Les actualités françaises had begun producing newsreel adaptations of reports included in Constellation soon after, some of which are included in La Vie commence demain. We see, for example, an excerpt from an Actualités françaises newsreel showing Labarthe piloting and landing a helicopter on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette in 1948. Vedrès wasn’t alone in her interest in popular digests. In the July 1948 issue of Esprit (no. 146, volume 7), Chris Marker put together a dossier on digests, with a focus on his opening piece on American publications such as Reader’s Digest and The New Yorker. The dossier is comprised of: Chris Marker, “Sauvages blanc seulement confondre,” (pages 1-9), Marker’s translation of John Bainbridge’s essay “Le petit magazine,” (pages 10-31), and André Bazin’s “L’adaptation ou le cinéma comme digeste,” (pages 32-40).

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Figure 2.1: A shot from La Vie commence demain Covers of André Labarthe’s journal Constellation can be seen in the background.

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Figure 2.2: Original contract for La Vie commence demain Copyright Les Films du Jeudi.

By the late 1940s, UNESCO had become involved in film production and distribution, and it was with their help that Vedrès secured much of the archival

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footage that appears in the film.12 Drawing on footage from pedagogical, military and scientific films, as well as newsreels and recut sequences from other documentary films, Vedrès intercuts archival footage with the above-described interview sequences, continuing and expanding upon her archival montage experiments in Paris 1900. While La Vie commence demain’s fantastical plot and contemporary focus seem on the surface quite at odds with the previous project, it was originally conceived of as a continuation of her archival montage filmmaking practice in the latter. According to the film’s contract (Fig. 2.2, above), Vedrès was engaged by the producer Armand Rubin of Cinéma

Productions to make a film de montage that was originally to be titled 1950. This film, the contract stipulates, would be “constituted by the editing together of parts of pre-existing films, and eventually, by shooting any footage that is needed to refine the film,” with Vedrès’ production notes indicating that she tackled the archival research at the same time as the interview sequences.13 This extra footage shot for the film would end up taking the form of the above-described fictional plot, and this back and forth between contemporary and archival

12 UNESCO was also involved in the funding and distribution of art documentaries from 1948 onwards. See Chapter 3. The opening credit sequence also thanks the Information Services branch of the U.S. and Great British embassies as well as the National Film Board of Canada. Though there is little concrete information on the images appearing in the film, Vedrès’ preparation notes for the film held in Les Films du Jeudi archives in Paris indicate that she had consulted scientific films by Jean Painlevé, Jacques Cousteau, and Jean Comandon. Fonds de Pantheon, Conservation des registres du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel – acte déposé le 19/01/1950.” Œuvre, no. 9712, “Travaux de realization du film “La Vie commence demain””.

13 See Fonds de Pantheon, “Conservation des registres du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel – acte déposé le 19/01/1950.” Œuvre, no. 9712, 1. Also, though she is not credited and it was not stipulated in her contract, Vedrès appears in one of the film’s scenes as a secretary to André Labarthe working in the same office as him. Yannick Bellon, who acted as assistant editor on Paris 1900, was also an uncredited assistance on La Vie commence demain. See “Souvenirs de Yannick Bellon,” Propos recueillis par Eric Le Roy, Paris 1900, DVD booklet, Doriane Films, 2018, 25. Bellon would continue this involvement in post-war film de montage practices, directing Varsovie, quand même in 1954. The latter is discussed later in this chapter with regards to Nuit et Brouillard.

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footage that later features in both Les Statues meurent aussi and Nuit et

Brouillard would be born out of this working method combining research and interviews. With the original title 1950 eventually replaced by the more explicitly future-facing title La Vie commence demain, Vedrès adapts her experiments with archival montage to a new hybrid docu-fiction form; the interleaving of on- screen interviews and repurposed images creates a mode of cinematic discourse that once more recalibrated traditional models of historical temporality, and particularly of ways of looking to the future.

Despite the optimism of its final title, La Vie commence demain is a work that is deeply cautious about what this promised ‘tomorrow’ may look like, tempering the propositions and prognostications of post-war intellectuals with a concomitant reflection on the recent traumas of WWII. If, as Bazin put it, the challenge of Paris 1900 was to confront the “paradox of an objective past, of a memory outside of our consciousness”, then La Vie commence demain’s was to place the intellectual currents of the day within this continuum of exterior historical changes.14 Claims on the possibilities for progress opened up by nuclear energy and breakthroughs in human biology are tempered by a reflection on the calamities of WWII, in which scientific and technological advancements were put to use for the degradation of human life in accordance with discourses of ethnic and religious superiority. Typified by the systematised organisation and mass murder of the concentration camps and especially the dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mass destruction of

14André Bazin, “Paris 1900: À la recherche du temps perdu,’’ L’Ecran français, no. 118, 30 September 1947, 6.

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human life in WWII depended on the execution of complex technical apparatuses and decades of scientific research on a scale and degree of destructiveness that had never before been seen. These recent traumatic events, and particularly the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians at the end of the war, hang over the film’s discourses on the future, appearing as a continued menace that indelibly persists in the post-war present. Vedrès’ dual-facing temporal purview — turning both to the future while keeping one eye to the past — is inscribed in the montage aesthetic that she develops across the film. In the tension between archival images of the recent past and the contemporary interview sequences,

Vedrès creates a dialectic between the prognostic and recent history in a porous vision of the present. Images of wartime, scientific tests, and the living conditions of the poor under industrial capitalism act in counterpoint to the film’s interviews with intellectuals on what lies ahead, recasting these images of the past as fleeting glimpses of warning for what could be a catastrophic future.

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Figure 2.3: Archival footage in La Vie commence demain’s first interview sequence

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Figure 2.4: English translation of dialogue between Aumont and Sartre La Vie commence demain.15

La Vie commence demain’s first interview, taking place in Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment, sets the tone for the film’s continual play of past against future, the interplay of archival images and on-screen dialogue creating a fluid temporal register that continues throughout the film. The film’s temporal effects are in large part the result of a shift in the relationship between word and image, moving away from the traditional, dislocated voiceover of documentary filmmaking and instead to on-screen dialogue between characters.16 In the

15 Reproduced in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, eds., The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Vol. 2: Selected Prose, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 203.

16 This shift in the function of the voice in relation to the image was something that Vedrès had pointedly reflected on during the film’s production. In a letter addressed to Picasso dated October 1949 planning the sequence of the film he would appear in, Vedrès expresses a certain weariness for “le principe du commentaire” [“the principle of commentary”] and a desire to accompany the film’s footage with more varied sources of sound. Quoted in “Extrait d’une lettre de Nicole Vedrès à Picasso du 25 octobre 1949 (archives Picasso),” in Picasso à l’écran, eds. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Gisèle Breteau-Skira (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou et Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992), 31.

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sequence with Sartre, Vedrès cuts between the conversation with Aumont taking place in Sartre’s living room to a montage of archival footage, with the traditional detached voiceover commentary replaced by the polyphony of dialogue temporarily rendered as off-screen. Over the course of the sequence, Vedrès’ alternation between contemporary and archival footage grows increasingly more complex, gradually shifting its relation to their discussion on the question of the responsibility of the individual and her relation to society. In the opening of the sequence, Aumont expresses his discontent and feeling of disconnection with the world, citing his grievances that range from railway workers’ strikes that forced him to hitchhike at the start of the film to trends in art and culture, as well as the atomic bomb. Sartre responds with a Marxist analysis of his discontent: as a petit bourgeois salesman, Aumont feels a certain antipathy towards the striking working class, and his broader societal discontentment reflects a typical salesman’s penchant of ascribing the state of the world in terms of good and evil, because his personal standing is at the whim of the good or bad mood of the customer. To begin with, Vedrès more or less illustrates these contrasting philosophical positions with archival footage accompanied by the single voice of each of the men (Fig. 2.3, above). However, as their conversation continues, there is an increasingly conflicting back-and-forth of opposing ideas

(Fig. 2.4, above): Aumont maintains his feeling of disconnectedness and innocence when it comes to questions of culpability for the period’s troubles that

Sartre enumerates, which range from the Cold War and conflict in the colonies to breakdowns in negotiation at the U.N.. To his assertion that Aumont is one of the

“honest people” that can’t be held accountable for these troubles, Sartre counters:

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And you’re not ashamed? I’ve just described our whole epoch to you, and

you tell me that the mighty brotherhood of honest people lets all of this

take its course and never intervenes?

As this back and forth continues, Vedrès cuts away to a longer montage passage — this time accompanied with Darius Milhaud’s somewhat sombre score — that features a suite of diverse newsreel footage: military services, movie stars, children in poverty, religious figures, scenes of war and violence in the colonies file across the screen (Fig. 2.5, below). No longer illustrating separate philosophical positions as it did earlier in the scene, this accompanying montage of archival footage creates a kind of historical bedrock for the conversation, anchoring Aumont and Sartre’s dialogue on responsibility and action in the present. In the almost disinterested unfurling of images of the past, this dialogue on the responsibility of the individual after war begins to feel increasingly receptive to considerations of recent history, the reminder of these events providing an extra existential weight on the matter of choice at this historical juncture. Vedrès’ intervention through archival montage here is to instantiate a feeling of historical time that reflects a porosity of the present, these images of the past persisting and remaining, in a Benjaminian sense, synchronous with the accompanying discourse on one’s available choices.

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Figure 2.5: A montage of archival footage in La Vie commence demain. This anchors Aumont and Sartre’s off-screen dialogue.

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Figure 2.6: Archival images accompanying Labarthe's speech at UNESCO. From La Vie commence demain. Vedrès introduces archival images of fighting in the Pacific during WWII.

A sequence towards the end of the film, which takes place at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, explicitly brings into focus Vedrès’ particular preoccupation with what I see as her chief political concern in the film: the moral and ethical dangers presented by the recent harnessing of nuclear technology.17

17 It should be noted that Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain was not the only feature-length French film of the period to treat the subject of nuclear technology. Two years before Vedrès’ film was released, Jean Dréville made La Bataille de l’eau lourde (1948), a Franco-Norwegian co- production that retold the story of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage, in which Norwegian commandos prevented the German nuclear weapon project from acquiring a chemical compound during WWII, which could have been used to produce nuclear weapons. Like Vedrès, Dréville re- employs some archival footage, though chiefly of German attacks during the war. French nuclear scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie – who also appears briefly in La Vie commence demain – plays himself in Dréville’s film. For a discussion of the film in the context of French post-war discourses

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While Aumont’s visits in the interim to Lagache, Rostand, Picasso, Gide and Le

Corbusier are certainly revealing in terms of the scientific and artistic discourses of the time, the film’s penultimate sequence — in which Labarthe and Aumont attend a UNESCO public conference — constitutes the most explicit expression of

Vedrès’ historico-political concerns in the film and the historical temporalities that they presuppose.18 While the threat of nuclear war is briefly referenced in earlier sections of the film,19 Vedrès confronts the subject head on in the UNESCO sequence, taking the existential questions of action and responsibility from the earlier discussion with Sartre and applying them to a reflection on the complexities of scientific progress and the threat of global destruction posed by the recent detonation of the bomb. After filing into the conference room,

Labarthe and Aumont take their seats amongst the international delegates in attendance. Labarthe poses a question to the speaker, which is the start of a long speech accompanied by Vedrès’ montage of archival images (Fig. 2.6, above).

Labarthe asks:

What can we do to better disseminate the latest teachings on science and technology so that scientific discoveries are not stocked like grenades in an arsenal? What do we plan on doing to ensure that the science of the atom doesn’t lead to atomic war? What can we do before this disaster?

on nuclear energy, as well as its reception in the general press, see Robert Belot, L’Atome et la France: Aux origines de la technoscience françaises (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015), 66-69.

18 In an interview given just after the film’s release, Vedrès spoke about this section on the nuclear energy as being for her the most important part of the film. Pierre Bloch-Delahaie, “L’Age d’or ou le néant,” 11.

19 In the earlier interview with Sartre, Aumont questions whether they are really living in a “Belle époque” – “C’est une belle époque, vous savez?” “Malgré la bombe à l’hydrogen?” Sartre’s response, over images from a test from the Manhattan project: “Jamais, peut-être, il n’y a eu tant de menaces contre les hommes et jamais les hommes n’ont eun une conscience si clair de leur liberté.”

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Labarthe’s concerns here on the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by the harnessing of nuclear technology — on which he had written extensively as one of three French journalists invited to cover the U.S. nuclear testing in the Bikini

Atoll in 194620 — are a reflection of the increased danger and gravity of the situation at the time of La Vie commence demain’s production. Much to the surprise of the western world, the U.S.S.R. successfully detonated a nuclear weapon in Kyrgyzstan on 29th August 1949; much earlier than the West had anticipated, the bomb was now a technology whose secrets were accessible to both belligerents of the Cold War.21 As his speech continues, Labarthe not only reflects on the unparalleled destruction of human life produced by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he also frames them as the end point of over fifty years of scientific research that had progressively been co-opted by governments towards the manoeuvrings of war and eventual civilian murder.

Labarthe’s plea for the outcomes of scientific research not to be “stocked like grenades in arsenals” is a reflection not just of the film’s aforementioned pedagogical push for the popularisation of specialised knowledge, but also on an increasing anxiety over the use of technological developments towards destructive military ends.

20 Robert Belot, L’Atome et la France, 33. Subsequent to this experience, Labarthe wrote a long essay charting the development of 50 years of scientific discovery in the domain of nuclear technology. André Labarthe, Statu quo de la peur (Paris: Editions Défense de la France, 1946). Belot notes that Labarthe’s book was perhaps the first to be published in France for a non- specialist audience that described the history of the development of nuclear energy as well as its consequences for humankind. See Robert Belot, L’Atome et la France, 33-38 for a detailed discussion of Labarthe’s book.

21 On 29th September 1949, Labarthe prepared a newsreel clip for Les actualités françaises entitled “L’U.R.S.S. a la bombe,” in which he described the gravity of this particular development.

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Figure 2.7: Images from Atomic Power! These are inserted in to Labarthe’s speech at UNESCO in La Vie commence demain. A re-enacted sequence (top and middle) precedes a cut to real footage of the Trinity tests in New Mexico (below).

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Vedrès’ re-purposing of recent military and scientific films to accompany

Labarthe’s speech expresses these post-war technological anxieties and mounting Cold War tensions, her montage here registering the trauma of the recent nuclear attacks and their continued threat to global stability. As

Labarthe’s speech continues off-screen, enumerating the human and material destruction wrought during WWII that culminated with the attacks on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki,22 Vedrès assembles a sequence of Allied newsreel footage dating back to the final years of the war: we see naval and aerial fighting in the Pacific, Kamikaze attacks on U.S. warships, and victims of radiation exposure being treated by doctors in Japan. Labarthe’s speech continues with a crescendo in intensity as it turns specifically to the question of the nuclear bomb and the beginnings of the atomic age:

Those who opened this new atomic age and who waited for Oppenheimer to split the atom one night in 1945 in the desert of New Mexico knew that if their calculations were correct, they would have reached the apotheosis of fifty years of research stretching from de Becquerel through to Niels Bohr. But they also knew that they posed to the entire human race the most fearful and yet simple of dilemmas in all of history: life on earth or self-destruction.

While these words are delivered off-screen, Vedrès’ montage of images draws from two notable sources. The first is from aerial footage shot from Allied planes flown over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki days after the bombing, which appeared in a number of newsreels produced and shown in the U.S.,

22 Labarthe’s speech clearly takes its inspiration from his previous scientific texts of the 1940s, especially Statu quo de la peur (1946), which describes in agonising detail not just the development and harnessing of nuclear technology, but a blow-by-blow account of the effects on the two Japanese cities and its inhabitants. See André Labarthe, Statu quo de la peur, 9-24.

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France and U.K. in mid-1945. The second, curiously, is a short educational film produced by the March of Time in 1946 entitled Atomic Power!, in which the scientists responsible for the Manhattan Project’s nuclear testing in New Mexico re-enact the detonation, which is in turn intercut with 16mm footage of the detonation itself23 (Fig. 2.7, above). Comparing the function of this sequence as it appears in the original Atomic Power! and its selective re-employment at the end of Vedrès’ film is instructive. In the original, images of the detonation sequence are followed by a description of the U.S.’s plans to assure international control of nuclear weaponry as per Bernard Baruch’s proposal to the U.N., which posited the U.S.’s de-armament as a possibility only with the assurance of global co- operation. By contrast, Vedrès’ re-assemblage of this footage just four years later, during which time the U.S.’s nuclear monopoly had been broken, reflects a radically distinct historical discourse, casting these images not as an assurance of continued U.S. global dominance, but rather as a possible future realisation of global nuclear catastrophe. Reflecting the seismic global geo-political shifts that had occurred since the moment of their production and the moment of re- employment, Vedrès’ montage of images of these official recreations and footage of the bomb proposes it as a global threat that hangs over any promise of a technologically-enabled golden age, seen in fragmentary glimpses from the past that at that moment appear as warnings about an uncertain future.

For Vedrès the consequences of nuclear technology hang over the film, and images of the destruction that it has wrought haunt this reportage sur le

23 See Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935-1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 291-296.

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present and its prognoses for the future. Even while the film’s closing conversation between Labarthe and Aumont posits the harnessing of nuclear energy as having the potential to liberate humankind’s relation to labour, its role in the destruction of human life on an unprecedented scale during WWII remains contiguous with this vision. The cautious, dual-facing temporality implicit in the film’s vision — looking at once to the past and to the future — is perhaps best encapsulated in the following passage from André Labarthe’s 1947 monograph from which the film takes its name, presenting a striking metaphor for the future of post-war technological development:

The world of tomorrow does not always arrive with a dramatic twist. It is not, each time, a long secret history that is all of a sudden broken like a scandal as was the case with the atomic bomb. Usually, it comes to us slowly, like old age or wrinkles. Utopia isn’t built in a day […]. Rather, it comes about by a series of transitions and whims through which, after many failures, it eventually becomes possible. It is an act of revolution without a point of origin, a fairy tale whose plot advances only by plagiarising the past.24

As in Labarthe’s evocative metaphor of the world of tomorrow that

“advances only by plagiarising the past”, Vedrès’ film acknowledges the need to decrypt the future precisely in disclosing its continuing ties with what has come before. Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain posits the necessity of looking back while moving forward, her interweaving of archival footage and contemporary discourse configuring newly legible significations of images of the past at this post-war juncture. Vedrès’ assembly of these archival images — considered in a

24André Labarthe, La vie commence demain, 49.

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Benjaminian ‘Now’ of their recognisability — suggests that they may yet find their corollary in a still radically uncertain future.

Future Struggles: Les Statues meurent aussi

If the escalating tensions of the Cold War had profoundly influenced the urgency of Vedrès’ cautionary critique of nuclear technology in La Vie commence demain,

France’s other major geo-political issue of the Fourth Republic — namely, the decolonisation movement — furnished Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les

Statues meurent aussi with a pointed political subtext. Resnais and Marker’s commission to make a film on ‘l’art nègre’ — the politicised and context-specific term for the traditional African arts25 — would be marked by contemporary political discourse in France pushing for an end to colonial rule, a discourse that had strengthened in intellectual circles in light of the instability in the colonies in the post-war period.26 The film’s reflections on the production and distribution of artworks by the black diaspora are fundamentally tied to a consideration of

25The term “L’Art nègre” was adopted by Francophone artists of the black diaspora and sympathisers in this period as a political gesture. The adoption of a racial epithet and its combination with the honorific ‘art’ responds to a broader, anti-colonial stance adopted by intellectuals such as Alioune Diop and Léopold Senghor, and was also a means of valorising the sub-Saharan arts. Roland Colin discusses the use of the term in Christine Robert, “La nouvelle fabrique de l'histoire - Anthropologie et Histoire, 3: L’art nègre selon Alain Resnais et Chris Marker dans “Les Statues meurent aussi,” Radio program broadcast on France Culture on 5th July, 2006. See also the chapter “Translating the Word Nègre,” in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 25-38. The term “L’art nègre” was notably adopted by Présence Africaine, who published a collection of essays under this name in 1951 that would in turn influence Resnais and Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi. L’art nègre, eds. Georges Balandier, Jacques Howlett (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1951).

26Following WWII, numerous uprisings took place in the ex-French colonies of Madagascar and Algeria, resulting in the massacre of local populations. By 1953, the year of the film’s completion, France had been at war in Indochina for almost a decade, and it would embark upon another colonial war in Algeria in the following year.

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the broader operations of colonial power structures, instantiating a vision of black cultural production and reception as being inextricably determined by the iniquities produced by colonial power. Responding to this highly politicised post- war moment of decolonisation, the film’s political commitments emerge in the links Resnais and Marker draw between the struggle facing the preservation and production of black art and the fate of the black diaspora more broadly under colonialism.27 Resnais and Marker’s introduction of colonial documentaries and newsreels emphasises the continued impact of a historical network of unequal power relations on the production and reception of traditional African arts. Their disjunctive assemblages of archival images with their own footage of sculptures and statues force a rupture in a purely aestheticised vision of these works of art, reflecting what they see as the persistent figure of the colonial past in contemporary works by the black diaspora. After reflecting on the co-existence of these antagonistic historical forces, Les Statues meurent aussi closes by suggesting a shared political horizon for the decolonisation movement and the

Left in the post-war future, drawing correspondences between modern labour struggles and the fight for independence from colonial oppression.

Much of Les Statues meurent aussi’s above-described political perspective was shaped by the film’s commission by the journal, publishing house and book

27In discussing the film in the context of the engagement of intellectuals in the decolonisation movement, I agree with Sam Di Iorio’s recent assertion that Statues’ identification as an ‘anti- colonial’ film has been overstated in existing scholarship. See in particular Sam Di Iorio, “Les Vivants et les morts,” trans. Pierre Rusch, Trafic, no. 105, Spring 2018, 52-62. Note that, in terms of its ‘anti-colonial’ position, the film is decidedly ambiguous about the exact target of its criticism. While images of French officials do appear throughout the film, the commentary does not specify any particular African colony or colonial power. It does however employ the possessive, first person plural, ‘nous’ (‘we’) when referring to the colonisers of Africa.

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store, Présence Africaine, which approached Marker and Resnais to direct the film not long after its foundation in 1947.28 Founded by the Senegalese writer

Alioune Diop in 1947, and grouping together other African Francophone writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, as well as politically engaged left- wing French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Emmanuel

Mounier, Présence Africaine aimed to promote and provide a deeper understanding of African traditional and contemporary art and literature in the context of the anticolonial struggle.29 Heavily influenced by other contemporaneous pan-Africanist political and cultural movements, particularly the Négritude movement, Présence posited at the outset a unifying vision of

African and diasporic art and culture in the context of its staunchly anti-colonial position, aiming to “define African originality and to hasten its entry into the modern world” as its founder put it in an essay published in the first issue of the journal.30 With its headquarters in Paris’ Saint-Germain-des-Près, Présence

28Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet is listed as one of the co-directors of the film along with Resnais and Marker. However, it appears that his crediting as a director was a sign less of shared authorship than it was of camaraderie; Marker would repeat the gesture for his film Le Joli mai in 1962, in which camera operator Pierre Lhomme is listed as the film’s co-director. Cloquet describes his work on the film in Ghislain Cloquet, “Le Point de vue de l’opérateur sur le film d’Alain Resnais Les Statues meurent aussi,” L’Ecran français, no. 374, 18th September 1952, 1.

29On the history of Présence Africaine, see Sarah Frioux-Salgas, “Présence Africaine. Une tribune, un mouvement, un réseau,” Gradhiva, no. 10, 2009, 4-20; V.Y. Mudimbe, ed., The Surreptitous Speech: Présence africaine and the politics of otherness, 1947-1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 19-42.

30Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura ou les raisons d’être de Présence Africaine,” Présence Africaine, no. 1, November-December, 1947, 7. Owing to this context, there is much in the film that appears especially dated and can be critiqued in light of more recent scholarship in post-colonial studies and the anthropology of art since the 1980s. Most notably, Les Statues meurent aussi commits to what James Clifford has described as the formalist turn of modernism’s engagement with non- Western art that aims to recuperate ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ arts within a broader logic of the development of forms across art history. See James Clifford’s discussion of the controversy of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition “’Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” in James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 188-214. On the issue of formalism in western

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published contributions from African, European and American contributors, locating itself at the “intersection of networks of militants, intellectuals, ethnographers, and art museum collectors.”31 Présence had planned to organise an exhibition on African art at Paris’ ethnographic Musée de l’homme in the late

1940s, but this project was aborted.32 Présence’s commission of Marker and

Resnais to make a film on traditional African art was thus of a piece with the organisation’s goal to provide an intellectual engagement with the African arts, providing a cinematic extension of their activities in literature and curatorial ambitions.33

art’s historical accounts of non-western art, see also Anna Laura Jones, “Exploding Canons: The Anthropology of Museums,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 22, 1993, 201-220.

31 Sarah Frioux-Salgas, “Les Statues meurent aussi: une rencontre entre le réseau des éditions Présence Africaine, Chris Marker et Alain Resnais” in Ode au grand art africain. Les Statues meurent aussi, ed. Elena Martínez-Jacquet (Arquennes: Primedia, 2010), 45.

32 Sarah Frioux-Salgas, “Les Statues meurent aussi,” 45. Frioux-Salgas also places the film’s valorisation of the African arts within the context of conferences and festivals in the 1950s and 60s with similar aims, notably the Congrès des artistes et écrivains noirs organised by Diop and other members of Présence at Paris’ Sorbonne University in 1956, and the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakkar.

33 For more on the connections between the ideas promoted by Présence and Les Statues meurent aussi, see Sarah Frioux-Salgas, “Les Statues meurent aussi”; Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present: Statues Also Die with Night and Fog,” South Central Review, 2, no. 33 (Summer 2016), 16-22; Sam Di Iorio, “Les Vivants et les morts,” 53-55.

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Figure 2.8: Comparison of statues in reproduction From André Malraux's Les Voix du silence (1951) (top) and stills from Resnais’ Guernica (1950) (mildde), and Les Statues meurent aussi (bottom).

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If Les Statues meurent aussi was thus in part a reflection of this post-war

Francophone intellectual milieu that strove to promote the importance and originality of black art, its purview extends beyond a pure focus on the world of artistic creation, continually placing its reflections on art produced by the black diaspora in the context of a broader analysis of relations between colonisers and the colonised. Though the film clearly demonstrates a continuity with Resnais’ preceding work in the art documentary subgenre — particularly in the high contrast, Malrucian composition of shots capturing sculptures (Fig. 2.8, above)

— what separates Les Statues meurent aussi from the almost quasi-totality of art documentaries of this period is its incorporation of footage from other films.34 A unique aesthetic object, lying somewhere between the art documentary and film de montage, this insertion of archival footage alongside the images of artworks shot by cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet enables the broadening of the film’s subject matter. In a 1972 interview, Resnais described the decision to mix archival and contemporary footage in the film in the following terms:

While working on the film, we realised that we needed a structure that was subtler than just a suite of images of African art. That’s how we started to mix in a little of the reality of Africa [mélanger un peu de réalité africaine], documents that came either from newsreels or from short films shot in Africa. […] [L]ittle by little, we arrived at the structure of the film, wherein we see the progressive replacement of images of African art with cinematic images shot by white people.35

34 I discuss the art documentary in France during this period in more detail in Chapter 3.

35 Quoted in René Vautier, Nicole Le Garrec, “Les statues meurent aussi et les ciseaux d’Anastasie,” in Ode au grand art africain, 36.

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What is particularly striking about the introduction of images of ‘the reality of Africa’ through these archival images is the political subtext that such an aesthetic choice entailed at this moment in time.36 The film’s production team never set foot on the African continent during the shoot — with principal photography taking place in European museums and private collections— so the decision to include these images of ‘the reality of Africa’ necessitated a re- employment of a set of pre-existing film footage.37 Yet for the most part, this footage was deeply marked by the colonial situation: as Paulin Vieyra pointed out in a long exposé on the situation of African cinema published in Présence

Africaine in the late 1950s, the status of all images and sounds recorded in

French colonies were legally bound after the Laval Decree of 11th March 1934 to be inspected by the local colonial administrator.38 This measure, which included

36 Though there is still a lack of information available to scholars on the process by which the directors accessed and chose these images, recent scholarship on the film by Sam Di Iorio has helped to identify some of these images. See Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 17-20, 28. Marker and Resnais include excerpts from French and US newsreel footage, French documentary films shot in its former African colonies produced under the aegis of the French Ministry of Information (François Villiers’ L’amitié noire (1946)) and ethnographic films, such as Jacques Dupont’s Au pays des pygmées (1947), shot during the French government funded ethnographic mission to the Ogooué-Congo river in 1946. Many of the artworks collected during the latter mission ended up in the permanent collection of Paris’ Musée de quai branly, as did several of the works appearing in Marker and Resnais’ film.

37 The film’s opening credits indicate that the works were consulted at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, as well as private collections of artists (Tristan Tzara, Hans Hartung) and collectors (Charles Ratton). The fact that Marker and Resnais never left Europe was likely due to the meagre budget offered by Tadié-Cinéma Productions for the film. See René Vautier, Nicole Le Garrec, “Les statues meurent aussi et les ciseaux d’Anastasie,” 35.

38 “All individuals wishing to produce cinematographic material or sound recording will address a written request to the lieutenant governor of the colony of the relevant territory. This request will contain all relevant civil registry details and professional information about the individual, and he or she will also attach the script for the prospective film that they wish to make or, in the case of sound recordings, words to all songs and/or spoken text to be recorded.” Quoted in Paulin Vieyra, “Propos sur le cinéma africain,” in Présence Africaine, no. 22, May 1958, 109-110. Vieyra

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both French and local productions, was thus a way of controlling all images and sounds produced in the French colonies, and would assure the difficulty of producing any kind of visual or aural critique of the French empire in its colonies. In re-assembling this compromised footage and placing it into new relations, Marker and Resnais were able to gain a critical distance that would have been much more difficult to achieve when shooting these very images. As

Marker has reflected, despite the fact that it was the film’s archival footage that had raised the ire of the censor — specifically the appearance of newsreel footage of civil servants and members of parliament (Fig. 2.9, below) — the latter’s decision to ban the film from commercial distribution was due more to the “form rather than the content” of the images, or as Marker put it, “a certain

‘rule of the game’ or code that had not been respected.”39 In other words, the issue for the censor was not so much the images themselves — which were necessarily above board — but how these images had been re-assembled and commented upon in Marker and Resnais’ film.

was himself subject to this law, shooting his first film, Afrique sur scène (1955), in Paris after being forbidden to film in Dakar.

39 Chris Marker, Commentaires (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961), 9. The film’s censorship became a cause célèbre for French film critics such as Georges Sadoul and André Bazin. See André Bazin, “Encore la censure: les films meurent aussi,” France observateur, no. 349, 17th January, 1957, 19- 20; Georges Sadoul, “Censure à Cannes,” Les Lettres françaises, no. 463, 30th April, 1953, 1.

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Figure 2.9: Archival footage of French government officials in Les Statues meurent aussi President Vincent Auriol watching a dromedary race with Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet in Niamey (top) during a visit to French West Africa in May 1947. Minister of Overseas France Jean Letourneau at a colonial fair in Kankan, March 1950 (middle). Future French president François Mitterrand during an official visit to Abidjan on 5th February, 1951 to inaugurate the building of the Abidjan Port. Mitterrand was at the time Minister of Overseas France in the Pleven government. (bottom).

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Figure 2.10: An Ivorian wooden mask seen through a glass casing From Les Statues meurent aussi.

While Resnais and Marker’s insertion of archival footage into the film was thus a polemical move that disrupted the official French vision of the colonies, it also helped shape the film’s discourse on the effects of colonial rapports des forces on the production and exhibition of black art. This discourse starkly contrasted early 20th century perspectives on African masks and statues of white

European artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso, who had largely attempted to recuperate these artworks within a logic of the development of western historical art forms.40 What Resnais describes as their

“progressive replacement of images of African art with cinematic images shot by white people” in the film instantiates a shift in focus from the art historical and museal to an examination of black diasporic art in the context of broader colonial

40 See Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 4, December 1990, 609-630.

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power relations.41 This shift in focus is suggestively signalled at the film’s two- third mark with a shot of an Ivorian mask being locked behind a glass display cabinet in a museum (Fig. 2.10, above). Marker’s accompanying voiceover commentary — replete with references to death throughout the film — once more invokes its spectre as we see this image:

And then, it’s their turn to die. Classified, labelled, frozen behind glass in collections, they enter into the history of art, that paradise of forms where the most mysterious of aesthetic kinships reveal themselves…42

While the images that follow perfunctorily demonstrate these “most mysterious of aesthetic kinships” — cutting between a Gabonese mask that resembles those worn by Japanese Noh performers, and again a Chadian statuette resembling the idols of Sumer — Marker’s voiceover commentary refutes the usefulness of this very model of formalist art history, which was precisely the kind that earlier modernist artists like Apollinaire and Picasso had practised.43 Instead, Marker aligns the curatorial practices of museums and galleries — which removed these works from their original production and

41 These were the same ten minutes that the censor cut from the film, as noted in the letter from the French censorship committee that Marker includes in his Commentaires. Chris Marker, Commentaires, 185.

42 “Et puis ils meurent à leur tour. Classés, étiquetés, conservés dans la glace des vitrines et des collections, ils entrent dans l’histoire de l’art. Paradis des formes où s’établissent les plus mystérieuses parentés...” As ‘glace’ means both ‘ice’ and ‘a sheet of plate glass’ in French, I have tried to get across this double meaning in my translation,

43 Scholars have also read this sequence as a reference to and even refutation of Malraux’s contemporary writing on art history, particularly Les Voix du silence (1951) and Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952). See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Album de l’art à l’époque du “Musée imaginaire” (Paris: Louvre / Editions Hazan, 2013), 154-172; Sam Di Iorio, “Les vivants et les morts,” 57-62.

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exhibition contexts, often by force — and the model of purely aestheticised contemplation that it encouraged with the demise of the works. As if in direct response to this criticism, it is at this precise juncture of the film that Resnais and

Marker begin to insert long sequences of footage from French colonial documentaries and newsreels. The effect of this abrupt jump to archival footage introduces what Georges Didi-Huberman has aptly termed a series of anthropological, historical and political ‘divisions’ into Resnais and Marker’s considerations of these works of art, moving from questions of aesthetic affinities to reflections on the politico-historical forces that surround these works.44 As Resnais and Marker introduce more of these archival images in the film’s last third, the divisions first created here are widened to form ruptures, the force of the filmmakers’ assemblage of repurposed footage emphasising a co- existing colonial history that intersects with and persists in the history of black art.

44 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’époque du « musée imaginaire »,,” 158.

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Figure 2.11: Art and commerce in Les Statues meurent aussi. Resnais and Marker cut from an image of a woman looking at statues in a gallery window front to footage from a colonial documentary.

Figure 2.12: Art forms and commerce in Les Statues meurent aussi.

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We see an instance of just such a rupture in a sequence describing the consequences of western commerce on black artistic production, with Marker and Resnais abruptly cutting back-and-forth from their own footage and repurposed images from the African continent.45 In this sequence, a woman in what appears to be a major western metropolitan city looks at an indiscriminately organised window display of traditional African masks and statues in a small commercial art gallery. Resnais and Marker then cut to a series of archival images depicting the artisanal production of small statues and masks, with Marker’s commentary asserting that the demands of European commerce have resulted in the creation of a cottage industry of replicas and cheap imitations of traditional forms (Fig. 2.11, above). If the cut from the gallery to the archival footage indicates a shift to examine the conditions of production of the artworks, Marker and Resnais immediately bring this reflection on the conditions of production back to bear on the effects on the very form and subject matter of the works themselves. Archival footage of a sculptor working on a bust is followed by a cut to a car being heaved onto a raft (Fig. 2.12, above), this chain of images accompanied by the following commentary:

Incapable now of expressing the essential, the sculptor aims instead for resemblance. We taught him not to sculpt outside the box [à ne pas sculpter plus loin que le bout de son nez]. But all that we’ve made disappear from Africa hardly matters in our eyes in light of what we have brought to it.

45 Sarah Frioux-Salgas points out that Marker and Resnais’ economic and sociological perspectives on black diasporic art were influenced by ethnographer Georges Balandier. Georges Balandier, “Les Conditions sociologiques de l’art noir,” in L’art nègre, 59-67. Sarah Frioux-Salgas, “Les statues meurent aussi,” 46.

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The filmmakers here clearly indicate that the degradation and eventual disappearance of indigenous artistic traditions are a direct consequence of the impositions of colonial power, their assemblage of images here implicating the economic and ideological imperatives of colonialism in the changing shape and textures of these artworks.46 In a later sequence focusing on what the filmmakers term l’art du combat — a stand-in for modern art forms of the black diaspora that respond to the oppressive conditions of colonialism — Resnais and

Marker repeat this rapprochement of images of artistic creation using archival footage that reflects the historical concerns of European colonialism. A close up of Brazilian painter Wilson Tibério — a representative of this art du combat47 — working on a canvas is followed by a cut to a visually similar scene of men labouring with pickaxes from a colonial documentary, implicating the historical realities of colonialism in the very subject matter of Tibério’s artworks (Fig. 2.13, below). These continual ruptures at the level of the cut disrupt a purely aestheticized contemplation of these artworks, their assemblage of archival materials bringing to the surface a discourse on the concomitant historical forces of European colonial capital that have shaped the production of these works of art.

46 We might see this as a reflection of Présence Africaine’s broader ambitions to describe the ‘originality’ of African art forms as part of their pan-Africanist cultural politics. The anti- métissage implications of this position have been heavily critiqued in the field of post-colonial studies and anthropology since the 1980s, particularly by scholars like James Clifford, cited earlier in this discussion.

47 On Tibério and his connections to Présence Africaine, see Y.V. Mudimbe, The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 372. Resnais and Marker’s choice of Tibério reflects their adoption of Présence Africaine’s conceptualisation of the art of the black diaspora as responding to the “ideal and fraternal bonds between artists working under colonialism.” Sam Di Iorio points this out, citing Léon-Gontran Damas’ Poètes d’expression francaise (1947). Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 20.

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Figure 2.13: Wilson Tibério and footage from a French colonial documentary. From Les Statues meurent aussi.

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After this insistent recuperation of the colonial past in their consideration of black art in the above sequences, Resnais and Marker turn their attention to the future in the final minutes of Les Statues meurent aussi, staking a claim on the horizons of action available to the still-colonised peoples of Africa and those who support them in their struggle for independence. If the introduction of archival footage in the film up to this point emphasises the persistence of colonial histories, the filmmakers’ assemblages of archival images in the film’s final moments recasts footage from the archive as potentially legible signs for deciphering the contours of a future struggle against the forces of colonial power and global capital. Mirroring this shift in focus to questions of decolonisation and international solidarity, the source of footage that Resnais and Marker draw upon in this final sequence subtly broadens from the Franco-centrism of the rest of the film, with the filmmakers including footage of African American sports stars and — perhaps most surprisingly — footage of leftist political activists on

US soil.48 Recent scholarship by Sam Di Iorio has addressed this unexpected association of heteroclite images, arguing that the introduction of this footage of early 1930s protests by workers in Pennsylvania and Florida reflects the broader political engagements of this leftist Francophone post-war intellectual milieu, which saw the global Left’s fight against capitalism as implicit in the struggle for decolonisation.49 Perhaps the most famous expression of this intertwining of

48 The footage of the protests was previously included in America Today (1932-34) and Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s Native Land (1942). Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 17. Elsewhere, footage of the Harlem Globetrotters’ tour of Europe in 1950 continues this widening of focus to include the black diaspora.

49 Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 20. Di Iorio notes that the film’s final newsreel montage also depicts the 1949 Smith Act Trials in the U.S, showing Eugene Dennis, Henry Winston, and other Communist Party leaders being put in a police van.

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leftist political engagement and anti-colonial thought was Martinquais poet and political activist Aimé Césaire’s influential Discours sur le colonialisme, published in 1950 with the French Communist Party-affiliated publishing house Réclame.

In this essay, Césaire identified colonialism as the logical end point of “l’étroite tyrannie d’une bourgeoisie déshumanisée”, and argued for the subsequent need for “une nouvelle société” whose fraternal bonds would be inspired by the Soviet

Union.50 The case of Césaire shows, however, that these positions were in flux throughout this period, particularly in light of the French Left’s complicity in the

War in Algeria starting in 1954. In an open letter to long-term head of the French

Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, published in 1956, Césaire reneged on his position that he espoused in his Discours sur le colonialisme, opining that the

“struggle of people of color against racism[…] [is] of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.”51

Nevertheless, the close of Resnais and Marker’s film adopts to a large extent

Césaire’s initially proposed international alliance between the struggle of colonised peoples and the Left, framing the film’s discourse on black diasporic cultural production as an expression of a resistance that extends to the more explicitly political organisation of protest and dissent.

50 Césaire’s text would be expanded and re-published by Présence Africaine in 1955. Both of these citations appear in the original 1950 text. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 74, 36.

51 Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text, 28, no. 2 (103), Summer 2010, 147. Césaire’s original text was originally published with Présence Africaine in 1956. In the essay, Césaire cites the French Communist Party’s vote in support of the coalition government’s decision to attack the Algerian National Liberation Front as a key motivation for his decision to break with the party. For further discussion of Césaire’s relationship to the French Communist Party, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 69-71, 96-100.

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Five minutes from the end of the film, Resnais and Marker make this leap from the intersection of colonial history in artistic forms to possible avenues of political action on a global scale, beginning to insert footage from U.S. and French newsreels and documentary films dating from the early 1930s through to their present. Throughout this closing sequence — which ranges from footage depicting famous sportsmen such as Jesse Owens and the Harlem Globetrotters to strikes in mid-west America — Resnais and Marker’s associations of diverse images play off the codes of surrealist montage aesthetics, privileging the shock of the non-habitual rapprochement and the suggestive rhymes of novel visual correspondences. In a particularly memorable moment in this sequence, we see footage of American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson fighting in Belgium and Germany in 1950 (where bottles were hurled at him by spectators for an alleged illegal kidney punch) alongside images of a jazz drummer in a studio, followed by footage of the repression of union protests in Florida and Pennsylvania in the

1930s (Fig. 2.14, below). Resnais and Marker join these disparate images together, drawing attention to visual rhymes across them as in the drummer’s striking of the snare drum and the strikers of Pennsylvania brandishing their batons and clubs. This visual rhyme is also matched by a play on words in

Marker’s voiceover commentary accompanying these images, which asserts that the drummer’s role is to “hit back against the blows rained down on his brother in the streets.”52 The political force of this sequence lies precisely in the heterodoxy of its constitutive archival images; seizing upon their visual

52 “…sur le ring ou dans son orchestre, son rôle consiste à rendre les coups que reçoit son frère dans la rue.”

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correspondences, Resnais and Marker’s montage recasts these images from across disparate historical contexts and time periods as potentially prescient signifiers of a shared political horizon. An alternative timeline is projected forward in the assembly of these images of the past, Marker’s voiceover commentary suggesting the potential emergence in this post-ward period of “une nouvelle communauté” — echoing Césaire’s call for “une nouvelle société” three years earlier — in the tandem movement for liberation from capital and from colonial oppression. Standing on the crest of a historic tide of decolonisation and of the fracture of the global left following the death of Stalin that same year,

Resnais and Marker close out the film with a resolutely forward-facing discourse, ending with an aspirational call for community in the future: “Black or White, our future depends on this promise.”

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Figure 2.14: Visual correspondences between labour struggles and “l’art du combat.” In Les Statues meurent aussi. Resnais and Marker cut between a drummer, a Steel Workers' strike in Pennsylvania in the early 1930s, Sugar Ray Robinson fighting in 1950 in Belgium, and another protest in Florida, also in the 1930s.

While Resnais and Marker’s inattention to the more complex, intersecting forms of privilege and power operating at this historical juncture may date this

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final sequence for the modern viewer,53 it is an instructive example of the temporally fluid, political charge of Resnais and Marker’s archival montage in the film. After first introducing an archive of colonial cinematic imagery to force a rupture in their own footage of black artistic creation, they end the film by taking a broader archive of mid-century class struggle and black diasporic expression as potentially prescient signs of a future transnational liberation across class and racial divides. Resnais and Marker’s preoccupation with the political horizons of class struggle and decolonisation in their post-war present places their reflections on black diasporic art in a cross-temporal historical optic, both looking back at its relation to the history of European colonialism and forward to strategies of potential transnational liberation.

Memorial Stakes: Nuit et Brouillard

Two years after the censored release of Les Statues meurent aussi, Alain Resnais was commissioned to begin work on Nuit et Brouillard, his famous and controversial film on the concentration camps of WWII.54 Emerging in the midst of France’s first major institutional initiatives to memorialise the camps, Resnais’ film entered into this contested historical terrain, exploring the consequences of

53 It was precisely this kind of inattention that subsequently led African Francophone intellectuals like Césaire to distance themselves from the French Left.

54 Since the mid-1980s, scholars have rightly moved away from terming Nuit et Brouillard a ‘Holocaust’ film, a tag that had long accompanied it. In part, this follows a general shift away from the use of the term by historians. It also acknowledges that the film’s account of the deportation to the camps does not explicitly distinguish the genocidal specificity of the concomitant destruction of the Jewish and Romany peoples of Europe within the network of concentration camps employed by the Nazis from 1933-1945. For a discussion of this occlusion in the context of the existing historiography of the camps, see Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard » Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 37-44 and particularly 71-80; Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, “Introduction,” 2-8.

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the persistent traumas of the camps and how they had shaped the country’s post-war political horizons.55 Resnais’ film navigates the memorial stakes associated with the camps — and particularly the issue of responsibility and action moving forward — in a country still grappling with its collaborationist past and the rise of a fringe neo-fascist movement in its wake, as well as the ‘sale guerre’ in Algeria.56 As with La Vie commence demain and Les Statues meurent aussi, then, Resnais’ film was as focused on the traumas of the recent past as it was with exploring their consequences and profound synchronicities with the concerns of his own time. Interviewed about the film almost forty years later,

Resnais reflected the centrality of this temporal fluidity to his conception of the film:

What drove us in the film was a desire not to make a ‘monument to the dead.’ I did not want to make something that amounted to, “Oh it’s the past, never again, that will never happen again.” Curiously, one could say that even though the film does nothing but document [ne fait que documenter], it is a film that is obsessed with the future.57

Yet if Nuit et Brouillard was a film that was “obsessed with the future”, as

Resnais put it, this staunchly future-facing outlook would be in part produced by

55 The organisation of memorial exhibits, writing of historical monographs, and reports in France was supplemented by written accounts by French camp survivors such as David Rousset, Jean Cayrol and Odette Améry, which also helped shape the French national imaginary of the camps. See David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946); Jean Cayrol, Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard (Paris: Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1946); Odette Améry, Nuit et Brouillard (Paris: Berger- Levrault, 1945).

56 See Sam Di Iorio “The fragile present.” On the Algerian War of Independence and the use of the term ‘sale guerre,’ see Habib Souaïdia, La Sale guerre (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2001).

57 Resnais interviewed in André Heinrich and Nicole Vuillaume, “« Nuit et Brouillard, » film d’Alain Resnais: 1954-1994,” Radio Program, Broadcast on France Culture 7th August, 1994, 1:17- 00-1:17.38.

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a process of collecting and carefully re-assembling a corpus of archival images, re-employing wartime newsreels commissioned by both Allied and Axis nations, documentary film footage, works of propaganda and photographs selected from various European archives. As in La Vie commence demain and Les Statues meurent aussi, this corpus of archival images was supplemented with contemporary footage, with footage shot by Resnais and the production crew at the remains and memorials at Auschwitz and Majdanek in September and

October of 1955 appearing as a visual counterpoint throughout the film. In this alternation between archival and contemporary images, Resnais puts these visual traces of the past and the physical remains of the site’s present appearance into a more immediate, critical relationship, the film’s political trenchancy coming from what Max Silverman has termed its ‘palimpsest’-like, contiguous inscription of past and present.58 Blurring the solidity of the demarcation between past and present implicit in conventional historiography, the film instead focuses on the memorial afterlife of these archival images in foreshadowing the political concerns of post-war France. In Resnais’ interplay of contemporary and archival images, a reflection emerges on the continuing possibilities in post-war France of what camp survivor and writer David Rousset termed the ‘univers concentrationnaire’, which posited that the underlying philosophical principles of social organisation and human experience of the camps could be reproduced in another time and another place. Resnais’ montage-centric historical discourse explores these newly legible historical parallels, seizing upon the prescience of this archive of wartime images in

58 Max Silverman, “Fearful Imagination: Night and Fog and Concentrationary Memory,” in Concentrationary Cinema, 206.

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mounting a warning against the possibilities of a renascent post-war fascist movement.

Recent scholarship on Nuit et Brouillard has demonstrated the film’s ties to broader, institutionally-backed commemoration of the camps in the mid-

1950s by French historians.59 The film was commissioned by France’s Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, whose co-directors, Olga Wormser and Henri Michel had organised an exhibition entitled Tragédie de la deportation in Paris in November of 1954 as part of the 10-year anniversary of the

Liberation.60 The exhibition was the end result of years of work for the Comité d’Histoire, organising its considerable accumulation of visual and written documentation of the history of the deportation, photographs, texts, and items belonging to deportees retrieved from the camps. After attending this exhibition,

Anatole Dauman of Argos Films approached its two organisers, Wormser and

Michel, with the idea of making a film on the deportation and the Nazi concentration camps; the film was envisioned as a continuation of the exhibition’s memorialising of the camps, marked for release in time for the 11th

59 See in particular Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 19-44.

60 The production history elaborated in this section owes a large debt to three pioneering works of scholarship. The first is that of Richard Raskin in the late 1980s, and particularly his reproduction of the film’s complete script listing the provenance of all of the photographs and footage employed by Resnais. Richard Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard: on the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus University Press, 1987). In the mid-1990s, the film’s assistant director, André Heinrich, made a four-and-a-half hour radio program dedicated to the film for France Culture, which unearthed a huge amount of testimony and important research on the film’s production and reception. André Heinrich, Nicole Vuillaume “« Nuit et Brouillard, » film d’Alain Resnais: 1954-1994”. Finally, Sylvie Lindeperg’s major 2007 monograph on the film builds upon this scholarship and vastly expands it through crucial archival research in France, Germany and Poland. Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard ».

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anniversary of the liberation of the Western camps in 1945.61 Wormser and

Michel accepted Dauman’s proposal and came on to the project as the film’s historical consultants, in part due to their dissatisfaction with the existing corpus of films produced on the subject. They opined that though these other films had an “incontestable valeur historique” — indeed, some of them were shown as part of the exhibition — they believed that a film could be made that made better use of the ‘mass of documentation’ that they had already begun to sift through in their work for the Comité d’Histoire.62 Interestingly, this envisaged film was to bring all three of the directors examined in this thesis together, with producer

Dauman initially contacting Nicole Vedrès to direct the film, and after she declined — citing insufficient funding for such a project — taking on her erstwhile collaborator in Resnais. Though initially hesitant, Resnais accepted the proposition on the condition that his friend Jean Cayrol, a poet and survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen camp, be brought on to write the film’s commentary.

Cayrol would in turn collaborate with Chris Marker in the re-writing and restructuring of the film’s commentary.63

61 Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard »,, 56-59. Dauman would go on to produce several of Chris Marker’s films, including Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie (see Chapter 4).

62 Quoted in André Heinrich, Nicole Vuillaume: “« Nuit et Brouillard, » film d’Alain Resnais” reproduced in Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 43. The envisaged film on the camps was to use some of the documentation and research included in the exhibit, Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 55, 58.

63 Cayrol was interned in the camp after being captured for his role in the French resistance. From his experiences in the camps, would write Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard. Cayrol was a friend of Chris Marker’s, at that time working for Editions du Seuil (Cayrol’s publisher), and the three had known each other since 1950 when they worked together on an eventually aborted project for a film about the life of Christ. Marker’s role in the production of the film was to help structure Cayrol’s words in line with the cutting of Resnais’ image track, putting together a first re-draft and a final version together with Cayrol. Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 119.

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With the film’s personnel in place, Resnais, Wormser and Michel spent several months sourcing photographs and footage for the project from numerous

European archives, a process of archival accumulation and selection that — as with Vedrès’ films and Statues before it — would significantly shape Nuit et

Brouillard’s historiographical perspectives. This search for visual material for the film would involve watching much of the existing corpus of both fiction and documentary films on the deportation to the camps made across Europe, including two French films de montage that re-cut footage shot during WWII by photography and film units of the Allied and Axis nations.64 The first, Les camps de la mort, produced by the French newsreel company Les Actualités françaises and originally released in 1945, assembles footage shot by French and other

Allied war reporters after the liberation of the western camps — including

Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald — from March to April 1945.65 These images of the western camps appearing in Les camps de la mort and a handful of other films produced directly after the war were used as evidence in post-war legal proceedings against German perpetrators. The second film de montage was the

French Communist Party-funded Varsovie, quand même… (1954), directed by

Yannick Bellon, who was Resnais’ classmate in IDHEC’s editing class and fellow

64 Resnais, Michel and Wormser also consulted the corpus of fiction films about the camps and deportation. Notable amongst these films was Polish director Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap [The Last Stage, 1947], from which two images appear in the film and which is discussed below. Lindeperg dedicates a chapter to this process of searching for documentation. Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 55-69.

65 Resnais owned a 16mm copy of this film, and said he “knew it by heart.” Suzanne Liandrat- Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 217.

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assistant on Vedrès’ Paris 1900.66 For Varsovie, Bellon cut together footage from the Polish Documentary Film Studio depicting the city of Warsaw before, during and after its destruction by the Wehrmacht, including German footage of the city’s ghettoisation, the uprisings of 1943 and 1944, and the subsequent expulsion and deportation of the city’s inhabitants. From Bellon’s Varsovie,

Resnais re-used several of the same images that Bellon had re-cut of the deportation of Polish prisoners to transit camps shot by the German army.

Nuit et Brouillard thus ought to be understood as continuing on from these anterior French archival films on the camps, which had already begun re- employing what Jean-Louis Comolli has usefully referred to as the “archives commandées” (“commissioned archives”) of WWII.67 According to Comolli, these archives commandées shot during or immediately after the war had been commissioned with specific ideological and political uses in mind, being produced for the purposes of propaganda (in the instance of the German images re-cut in Varsovie, quand même…) or for post-war, punitive legal proceedings (as in the Allied images re-cut in Les camps de la mort). This second class of images, shot by the Allies from 1944 to 1945 during the liberation of the western camps of Germany, has a particular, envisioned function and temporal scope that is

66 Both were put in touch with Vedrès by the film’s editor, Myriam. See Yannick Bellon, “Souvenirs de Nicole Vedrès” in Nicole Vedrès, Paris 1900, DVD, 2018, 24. Bellon also recalls that she had assisted on Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain — though her name does not appear in the film’s credits — and also contributed to Denise and Roland Tual’s Ce siècle a 50 ans (appearing in the credit as ‘Yanik Bellon’), another film de montage from the same year as La Vie commence demain.

67 In an interview with Sylvie Lindeperg, Comolli asserts that these images are “orientées dans la prise de vue et dans la manière de les utiliser si bien que la question de la propagande est centrale.” Jean-Louis Comolli, Sylvie Lindeperg, “Images d’archives: l’emboîtement des regards,” Images documentaires, no. 63, 1st and 2nd Trimester, 2008, 12.

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worth reflecting on here. These were — with their appearance in the 1946

Nuremberg trials — the first moving images to be used in a legal proceeding, and they were largely filmed by soldiers, war correspondents and photographers under instruction from military inquiry commissions.68 Along with their punitive function — being designed first and foremost to be exhibited in the courtroom69

— these images were commissioned according to a principle of ‘proof by the image’, to use François Niney’s term, presented as an accumulation of atrocities designed for the prosecution of those responsible.70 In sum, they had been designed to serve as evidence in an ephemeral, legal framework, responding with immediacy to the needs for visual proof at a particular moment in time.71 In

68 Claudine Drame, “Représenter l’irreprésentable: les camps nazis dans les Actualités Françaises de 1945,” Cinémathèque, no. 10, Autumn 1996, 12. On the footage produced for the Nuremberg Trials, see Christian ge, Caught on Camera: Film in the Courtroom from the Nuremberg Trials to the Khmer Rouge, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 1-4. In Resnais’ film, we see the images of the Bergen-Belsen camp after it was liberated in April 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division showing prisoners suffering from malnourishment and typhus, or those who were already dead being shoveled into mass graves.

69 “It was with this legacy in mind that Justice Jackson determined the role of motion pictures in the gathering of evidence and construction of the charges against the Nazis. His desire, however, was ‘to establish incredible events with credible evidence’ by putting together a trial in which the ‘documents’ would be deciding factors in proving the guilt of the accused. In fact, the massive and unprecedented character of the crimes committed and their authors’ attempt to cover them up made it necessary to go beyond mere attestation of their reality and to make them the object of a confrontation inside the courtroom. This is how we must interpret the role of the inaugural projection, barely nine days into the trial, of a compilation of images filmed by the Allies in the camps in the West.” Christian Delage, Caught on Camera, 2.

70 La preuve par l’image? L’évidence des prises de vue, ed. François Niney (Valence: Centre de recherche et d’action culturelle, 2003).

71 There are in the film two exceptions to these classes of images found and selected by Resnais and the film’s production crew, with the inclusion of two photographs taken at Auschwitz in August 1944 by a Sonderkommando who has come to be referred to as ‘Alex’. Neither commissioned legal document nor wartime propaganda, they have a unique status amongst the archival images used in the film in that they serve as a form of testimony — though heavily compromised — from the perspective of the victims. As of 2018, they constitute, along with a handful of images in the ‘Auschwitz Album,’ the sole visual testimony of the extermination camps, which were subject to a policy of invisibility by the Wehrmacht. For a discussion of these photographs, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2003), 11-65.

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drawing on this visual archive that is so deeply marked by the ideological and judicial demands of a past moment — reflecting the political imaginaries of nations at war and a desire to prosecute enemies immediately after it — Resnais’ re-employment of these images aimed to reflect some of the historical research and knowledge of the camps that had accrued over the years since their production. Attentive to the excess of historical significations that these images had developed between the moment of their production and his later moment of re-assemblage, Resnais’ task at hand was to take them for their original production contexts and make legible their newly apparent historical significance that he glimpsed in revisiting them.

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Figure 2.15: “Même un paysage tranquille.” Nuit et Brouillard's opening shot.

It is within this optic of constructing legibility that I read Resnais’ decision to insert footage shot at the sites of Auschwitz and Majdanek in 1955, alternating these shots with archival footage and photography in an effort to place past and present into a more immediate, critical relationship that short-circuits notions of chronology and the conventional ordering of past and present historical temporalities. Appearing at relatively consistent intervals throughout the film, this contemporary footage of the Auschwitz and Majdanek sites has less the

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effect of providing an ‘after’ to the ‘before’ of the archival images of the 1930s and 40s than it does of breaking down the very mode of historical thinking that would separate the two, instead suggesting a cross-temporal contiguity of these images. This blurring of temporal distinctions is in part the product of the interplay between Jean Cayrol’s voiceover text with Resnais’ montage; as Sandy

Flitterman-Lewis notes, for the film’s archival footage the narration is in the present tense, while for Resnais’ original footage that he shot in Auschwitz and

Majdanek the narration is in the past tense (save for the ending).72 Yet these inverted temporal effects are even more forcefully created in the very compositions of the images themselves and their relationship to one another.

Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who also collaborated with Resnais on Les

Statues meurent aussi, recalled that he and Resnais had opted to shoot the remains of the camps in the sharp, acidulous colours produced by the

Eastmancolor stock, precisely because of the singular, non-abstracted look that it would give to their contemporary footage:

Our idea was to react against the usual tendency to create an abstract image of the camps. We tried to show people the trees in autumn, those splendid and cheerful colours of these places of torture. […] Resnais wanted vibrant colour [une couleur vivante]. With these colours, he looked to modify the way that one usually looks at these things, which was of a sombre homage, a kind of funeral wreath.73

72 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 200.

73 Ghislain Cloquet quoted in Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 82.

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In contrast to the photographs and footage gleaned from various archives, whose production conditions had sharply indexed them to a past moment in time, Resnais’ desire with the ‘living colour’ on-site footage of the camps was to bring the film into a radically present tense. And while by the mid-1950s, museums had been built on the sites of Majdanek and Auschwitz, it was in large part the untouched, non-commemorative aspect of the sites — the ruins and remains of buildings — that particularly interested Resnais, as opposed to the distance created by the historiographical intervention of the museum.74 This persistence of the past in the present is exemplified in the vibrant images of the camps’ remains, and is made explicit in the film’s opening camera movements: the tilting and tracking of the camera reveal the signifiers of the camps’ past function — barbed wire fences, lookout towers — residing in the current,

‘tranquil landscape’ of the sites within a single, unbroken movement (Fig. 2.15, above).

74 Majdanek State Museum was founded in 1944, and Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1947. Both museums constituted their own archive of photographs, selections from which would be used in the film. While much of the existing literature on the film has described a neat distinction between the colour footage shot by Resnais and the black and white archival footage, an examination of the decoupage reproduced in Raskin reveals the existence of several images shot by Resnais that appear in the film in black and white. This is discussed in Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 91, 94-99.

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Figure 2.16: “1933. La machine se met en marche” in Nuit et Brouillard. Resnais cuts together images from Birkenau in 1955 (top), German newsreel footage of soldiers at a political rally in the 1930s (middle), and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) (bottom).

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Moments after these smooth opening camera movements that show the remains of the camps, Resnais abruptly breaks the rhythm of this opening, inserting the film’s first repurposed images: shots of a German political rally in the early

1930s and a sequence from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, showing

German soldiers marching in a military parade (Fig. 2.16, above). Forcing this rupture in the contemporary footage of the camps, the disruptiveness of Resnais’ cut is accentuated by the abrupt shift in colour and a percussive snare drum strike in Hanns Eisler’s score. Yet this disruptiveness is matched with the graphic echo between the fences at Auschwitz and the columns of marching soldiers, the movement from Resnais’ own footage to the German images of the 1930s privileging the visual correspondences between these two radically different images, originating from distinct time periods and ideologically separate contexts. The graphic match between the remains of the camps in the mid-1950s and these foundational images of Nazi self-mythologisation twenty year earlier produces a shorthand of historical correspondences demonstrated by montage: images of the physical remains of the camps assembled alongside an example of the generative propaganda machine that would eventually produce them.

Moreover, I read this rapprochement of mid-1950s footage of the camps’ remains and the German propaganda footage of the 1930s at the film’s opening as indicative of Resnais’ overarching preoccupations in Nuit et Brouillard with demonstrating the continuities with and persistence of the political conditions of the camps long after they had disappeared. In Griselda Pollock and Max

Silverman’s insightful work on the film, they adopt French writer David

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Rousset’s notion of the univers concentrationnaire to describe Resnais’ engagement with the continued, post-war threat posed by the memory of the camps, a notion that informs my own reading of this discursive montage gesture at the film’s opening.75 Pollock and Silverman argue that Rousset’s description of the univers concentrationnaire that he sketched out after being liberated from the Buchenwald camp was an attempt to disclose the ‘hidden structure’ of the camp and its ‘political system of terror’ as having made possible a system of organisation that could be reproduced outside of the bounds of the camp. They write that, for Rousset, the camps as a historical reality were “symptomatic of an extended political logic not confined within [them]”, one that created a “new political possibility in modern political life” that could manifest in its bureaucratic structures and totalitarian forms of government.76 Understanding the camps thus becomes a matter of both accounting for their development as a manifestation of Nazi ideology, and also of tracing their continued threat in a political horizon that now has their memory within its grasp. In adopting Pollock and Silverman’s ‘concentrationary’ framework to examine the critical political implication of Resnais’ account of the camps, I argue for the primacy of montage in calling attention to continuities between the camps as they manifested from

1933 to 1945 and the political horizons they had subsequently opened up. The notion of a persistent past first gestured to in the opening camera movement’s

75 In an interview included in André Heinrich’s 1994 France Culture radio program, Alain Resnais discusses Rousset’s text, along with those of Cayrol and Antelme, as part of the large corpus of literature he had consulted before starting production on the film. See André Heinrich, Nicole Vuillaume: “« Nuit et Brouillard, » film d’Alain Resnais.”

76 Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, “Concentrationary Cinema,” 18-19. Pollock and Silverman extend this analysis to include Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

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revelation of the barbed wire fence, or more forcefully again in the abrupt cut to

German newsreel footage of the 1930s moments later, is continually made apparent throughout the film, with Resnais’ visual matches between archival and contemporary footage standing in for the enduring political threat posed by the memory of the camps.

Figure 2.17: Archival images of the deportation in Nuit et Brouillard. Resnais cuts in images from Polish deportation in 1942 (below) to Rudolf Breslauer's footage of the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, 1944. (above)

A later sequence in film depicting the journey of the deportees to the camps offers a strong example of Resnais’ evocation of a persistent univers

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concentrationnaire through his assemblage of diverse archival and contemporary footage. Starting just after the film’s 5-minute mark, Resnais includes a long visual citation from German prisoner Rudolf Breslauer’s footage of the

Westerbork transport camp recorded from March to May 1944, part of an unfinished propaganda film made at the behest of the camp’s director. Designed to be shown to new arrivals to the camps, Breslauer’s footage shows the staged arrival of prisoners, their leisure time, theatre performances and finally the departure by train “to the east.”77 If, like others who had viewed the footage,78

Resnais was struck by what on the surface appeared to be the relative tranquillity and calm on the faces of the deportees in these images, he would find a way of rupturing this surface tranquillity by very briefly inserting two shots from German newsreels showing the deportation of a Polish man and his three children being deported from Warsaw in 1942 (Fig. 2.17, above).

77 Resnais and his historical advisors found the footage in an unedited, silent form; it remains without commentary in the film — the only section of the film where this is the case — and is accompanied only by Hanns Eisler’s score. In its heavily staged recording of the functioning of the camp, leisure time and theatre performances, the film recalls other Nazi propaganda works such as Der Führer schenkt den Juden ein Stadt (The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City) and Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus des jüdischen Siedlungsgebeit (Theresienstadt, A Documentary Film from the Jewish Resettlement Area) that presented a (heavily falsified) vision of life in the camps. For more on the history of these films, see Ido de Haan, “Vivre sur le seuil. Le camp de Westerbork dans l’histoire et la mémoire des Pays-Bas,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 181: “Génocides. Lieux (et non lieux) de mémoire,” 2004, 37-60; Sylvie Lindeperg, “La voie des images. Valeur documentaire, puissance spectrale,” Cinémas, 24, issues 2-3, Spring 2014, 41-68. W. B. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz also contains a long passage dedicated to the Theresienstadt film, and reproduces still images from the film. W. B. Sebald, Austerlitz, Trans. Anthea Bell (Penguin, London, 2011), 339-353.

78 Harun Farocki notes the disquieting sensation of watching these images in his film Aufschub [Respite, 2007], in which he also re-employs Breslauer’s footage.

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Figure 2.18: Deportation and arrival, Breslauer, Jakubowska and Resnais In Nuit et Brouillard. Breslauer (top), Wanda Jakubowska's fiction film Ostatni etap (The Last Step 1947) (middle), and footage shot by Resnais at the entrance to the Auschwitz camp (bottom).

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Just as the visible anxiety of the Polish deportee’s face evokes much more clearly the tragic fate awaiting the deportees that had been up until that point somewhat muted in Breslauer’s staged footage, the two further cuts that end the sequence turn Resnais’ historical focus even further into the future. A brief shot from

Wanda Jakubowska’s fictional Polish drama on the Auschwitz camp, The Last

Step (1947), and then a slow tracking shot by Resnais at the entrance of the

Auschwitz camp in September 1955, close the sequence79 (Fig. 2.18, above). One is struck once again by the difference inherent in these images, their shared visual signifiers — trains, railway lines — existing in contradistinction to their radically diverse tonal and textural qualities, as well as their origins in diverse

European production contexts of the previous decade. Over the footage of

Auschwitz in 1955, Cayrol’s commentary lists an array of sounds and sights missing from the accompanying image (footsteps, cadavers, the barking of dogs), asserting — as he does at various points in the film — the absences and inadequacies of the image in the singular of reproducing historical experience.80

But in foregrounding this interstice between the image and past historical realities — an interstice deepened by the radical tonal and temporal shifts between the chain of images that precede it — Resnais frees up the image from its purely illustrative function, and (like Vedrès before him), seizes upon the possibilities of montage in suggesting a signification beyond the limits of the frame itself. Loosening the links of a chronological chain, Resnais brings these

79 Jakubowska was also an advisor on the images included from the Polish Documentary Film Studio.

80 This is repeated later in the film with a slow track of the outdoor latrines, “Aucune description, aucune image ne peut leur rendre leurs vraies dimensions. Nous ne pouvons que vous montrer l’écorce.”

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images instead into an immediate present tense, where their relationships resemble less the consequential development of narrative history than the subjectivity of memory, with its absences and lapses. Breslauer’s abandoned propaganda film, Jakubowska’s expressionist recreation of the camps, and finally

Resnais’ contemporary images of Auschwitz are assembled together, functioning as discrete sites of historical inscription that articulate against one another in a memorial present.

Figure 2.19: Resnais' final tracking shot, receding from the ruins of Birkenau.

The final minutes of the film most clearly bring into focus the political implications of this entry of the archival image into the memorial present, as well

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as its future-facing consequences. After having described the operation of the camps and the experience of the deportee, Resnais turns at the end of the film to the moment of the camps’ liberation by Allied forces, recutting Soviet, French and British footage showing the horrifying conditions in which the soldiers had found prisoners throughout the middle part of 1945. This footage is a prime example of Comolli’s aforementioned ‘archives commandées’, having been shot by personnel from military photography units and war journalists who were accumulating proof of Nazi barbarism for their eventual submission as evidence in post-war legal proceedings. If this legal design governing the production and circulation of these images of the camps is gestured to in the brief scenes of

German military personnel on trial that follow, Resnais’ re-employment of this footage is included in a broader reflection on an existential culpability for the crimes of the camps; “Who is responsible?”, Cayrol’s commentary asks.

Accompanying a cut away from this archive of visual horror back to the remains of the site of Birkenau with a series of tracking shots, Jean Cayrol’s closing voiceover commentary draws out the political implications of responsibility for the camps precisely in terms of the memorial stakes of the post-war present:

Who among us is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and unknown informers. There are those of us who refused to believe this, or believed it only from time to time. And here we are, with all good intentions, looking at the ruins today as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath the debris; and we pretend to take hope as the image recedes, as though one could be cured of the concentration camp plague; we pretend to believe that all this happened only

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once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and we refuse to look around us, we who do not hear the endless cry.81

With the camera tracking away from the ruins of one of the crematoria of

Birkenau — its destroyed roof receding into the distance providing an echo of

Cayrol’s evocation of a receding image of the camps (Fig. 2.19, above) — the politico-historical valency of Resnais’ film comes more sharply into focus.

Cayrol’s use of the first-person plural (‘nous’) in the repeated phrase “ceux d’entre nous” (“those of us”) has been interpreted by some scholars as bringing the film’s closing provocations into a universalist, even humanist rhetoric, placing the burden of memory on a ‘nous’ that signifies the human race at large.82

While I do not wish to close off the possibility of this reading, to my mind this closing sequence is more productively understood as situating Resnais’ film more firmly in its French, post-war context, one in which the Left in particular was concerned with the persistence of Rousset’ univers concentrationnaire.

Rousset’s book ends, like Resnais’ film after it, with a warning about the future, asserting that the mechanism that made possible the concentration camps was built on the “fondements économiques et sociaux du capitalisme et de l'impérialisme.” While this mechanism had achieved a never-before-seen rigour and complexity during the war, Rousset affirms that, “[s]ous une figuration nouvelle, des effets analogues peuvent demain encore apparaître.”83 These echoes

81 Translated in Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Documenting the Ineffable,” 198-199.

82 See for example Robin Wood, “Nuit et Brouillard,” in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, eds. Tom Pendergast and Sarah Pendergast (Michigan: St. James Press, 2000), 866; James Leahy, “Night and Fog,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, May 2003. Online. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/cteq/nuit_et_brouillard/ Accessed 24th February, 2019.

83 David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1965), 187.

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between Rousset’s prognostications and Cayrol’s closing warnings in his voiceover commentary text are made even stronger with the evocation of le vieux monstre concentrationnaire, which Cayrol describes as lying slumbering under the ruins of the camps. Thus, after beginning this closing sequence with footage shot at the liberation of the camps — footage designed to prosecute the camps’ perpetrators in the immediate term — this turn back to the question of responsibility in the present and the existential weight of remembrance frames the film’s engagement with an archive of wartime images. In assembling these images alongside his own, Resnais disclosed a newly critical, immediate relationship to them a decade after the end of the war.

Confronting those who would claim that “all of this happened in another time, in another place” — those who would memorialise the camps into a static, fixed vision of the past without reflecting on their afterlife — the closing of Nuit et Brouillard thus makes a claim on the political consequences of remembering the camps just over a decade after the end of the war. That the film was subject to government censorship — like Les Statues meurent aussi before it — as well as being banned from screening in official competition at the 1956 Cannes Film

Festival (where its overtly political tone was deemed to be “contrary to the very spirit of the festival”) indicates that Resnais had succeeded in making a film on a historical subject whose critical implications were felt in his post-war present.84

Numerous scholars of the film have read the film as a response to a post-war,

84 On the censorship of Nuit et Brouillard, and its exclusion from the Official Competition at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, see Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 143-170.

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nascent French far right — a political stance that he had already taken in his film

Guernica in 1950 (as we will see in Chapter 3) — and especially the spectre of the contemporary colonial conflict in Algeria.85 Resnais himself encouraged the drawing of these historical parallels, especially with the Algerian conflict. In an interview given just after the film’s release, citing the interning and torture of political prisoners in camps in the then-recently started colonial war, Resnais said that he “had all the more reason to be uncomfortable with this idea that everyone agreed that this was a horrible thing that couldn’t possibly happen again.” Rather, as Resnais reflects, he “felt precisely that it could happen again.”86

This attempt to disclose historical correspondences with the past and to posit future possibilities as part of the film’s memorial purview is built into the film’s very microstructures of montage. Privileging the disruptive alternation and assemblage of images that break down a compartmentalised view of the past, the images of this archive are recast in terms of the contemporary political stakes facing Resnais at this historical juncture. Coming into a Benjaminian ‘now of recognisability’, this legibility of past images would resurface amongst the ruins of the camps to mount an alert that was firmly turned towards the future.

85 See for example Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Stock, 1980), 41-60. Matthew Croombs, “French Algeria and the police: horror as political affect in three short documentaries by Alain Resnais,” Screen, no. 55, Spring 2014, 29-47; Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present,” 22-27.

86 Quoted in Richard Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard, 51. Resnais more explicitly asserted the importance of the Algerian conflict to the project in an interview from the mid-1980s; asked pointedly “What was the point” of his film, he replied that “[t]he whole point was Algeria.” Quoted in Charles Krantz, “Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography,” Film and History, 1, no. 15, February 1985, 11. Resnais’ flippant response was perhaps provoked by an equally flippant question, but it is worth noting that Resnais frequently referred to the importance of the contemporary Algerian conflict in his conceptualisation of the film, from the 1950s through to the 1990s.

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Conclusion

In re-employing an archive of images associated with the historical traumatisms of the recent past — the atomic bomb, Europe’s colonial history and the concentration camps of WWII — Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s films examined in this chapter pose questions on how to move forward at a moment when their effects and their images still haunt a vision of the world. Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain hinges contemporary French intellectuals’ prognostications on the future on the potentially disastrous consequences of the harnessing of nuclear power by two belligerent global superpowers. Resnais and Marker frame the art of the black diaspora within a reflection on the history of colonialism, while positing the need for a transnational front of resistance that will outlive this still oppressive regime. And finally, Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard retains its power after all these years precisely because it traces as the afterlife of the camps as much as it does their history, asking how one can navigate their memorialisation in the face of the persistence of the univers concentrationnaire.

For all three filmmakers, engaging with the archive becomes a way of navigating a critical present moment’s relation to its recent history, identifying the latent warnings contained in images of the past and questioning whether they might not also be symptomatic of a potentially disastrous future.

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Chapter 3. Cultural Re-Animation: Fragmentation and Re- assemblage in Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh and Guernica

There is a notion that I quite like in the cinema, which is the notion of popularisation. A book or a painting comes into contact with a thousand people, whilst it’s a matter of millions when it comes to film. From this point of view, it’s interesting to go back to the work of a writer from 1880 or by a painter known only to an initiated few. I am against all coteries and cliques, and am in principle attracted to attempts at breaking them down. - Alain Resnais, 19611

Shifting focus away from the re-employment of archival footage and photography of Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter examines the operations of montage in two of Alain Resnais’ early art documentaries: Van Gogh (1948) and

Guernica (1950). Directing just after his experience as an assistant to Nicole

Vedrès in Paris 1900 and just before starting work on Les Statues meurent aussi,

Resnais continued the processes of producing historical legibility through montage that we saw in those films, but did so in working with a radically distinct corpus of images. Resnais’ art documentaries re-assemble images from the bodies of work of two major modern artists in Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo

Picasso, his work with pre-existing visual forms in these two films building on his experience of collecting actuality and fictional footage in Paris 1900.

1 André S. Labarthe and Jacques Rivette, "Entretien avec Alain Resnais et Alain Robbe-Grillet," Cahiers du cinéma, no. 123, September 1961, 7.

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However, by cutting together images from artworks that had been organised according to carefully arranged harmonies of line and colour, Resnais’ approach to montage in Van Gogh and Guernica takes on a more destructive aspect; to return to the term’s French etymology, demontage (the taking apart of a whole) takes on a role here in the creation of a new montage (the building of a new unity), with these processes of fragmentation and re-assemblage working in tandem throughout these two films. Charting these twin processes of fragmentation and re-assemblage of plastic forms in these two films, I argue that

Resnais’ isolation and demonstration of visual correspondences between artworks renders them newly legible. This chapter examines how Resnais constructs these legibilities of cultural forms through cinematic montage, focusing on his method of assembling details from works of art to suggest newly emergent personal and political historical significations. Resnais’ method of montage that he develops in Van Gogh and which takes full form in Guernica re- animates the works of these two artists, his cinematic re-rendering of their work identifying the political and historical tensions at their core, as well as the renewed relevance of their imagery.

Throughout this chapter, I argue that Resnais’ aesthetic of fragmentation and re-assemblage that he develops in Van Gogh and Guernica can be productively understood as part of a broader set of montage-based practices that contemporaneously develop in post-war France. In this period, the transformative potentials of montage were being tested across a range of media and contexts in the fields of art history and pedagogy in an effort to re-animate histories of cultural forms, forming what I term a ‘cultural politics of montage’ in

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this post-war French context. I examine the place of montage in André Malraux’s

Psychologie de l’art series written from 1947-1950, which argued for the potential of the art album and its musée imaginaire of photographic reproductions to demonstrate what he termed the ‘metamorphoses’ of art history.2 I also examine the activities of post-war popular education organisations such as Peuple et Culture and Travail et Culture, whose commitment to the ‘cultural reconstruction’ of France after the Liberation saw educators selectively curate and disseminate excerpts of texts, artworks and musical recordings at lectures, screenings and discussions. I draw parallels between Malraux’s montage method and the pedagogical philosophies of these organisations, which favoured the segmentation and illumination of details of works in the hopes of developing a critical cultural aptitude through lectures, workshops and group discussion. I argue that the notion of disseminating cultural forms through reproduction and fragmentation present in Malraux’s work and the post-war popular education movement also animate Resnais’ contemporaneous art documentaries, his creation of a fragmented, cinematic rendering of paintings and sculptures offering a cinematic parallel to these contemporary intellectual and pedagogical currents. Reflective of what André

Bazin would term the art documentary’s “method of cultural dissemination that

2 Malraux’s Psychologie de l’art series comprised of three volumes, published by the Skira imprint in Geneva. Le Musée imaginaire (1947); La Création artistique (1948); La Monnaie de l’absolu (1950). These were later compiled into a single volume: André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). The latter was translated into English as: André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1953). I have chosen not to include Gilbert’s translation in this chapter, as I found that it most often obscured the art historical terminology that Malraux used.

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is based on the destruction of its very object”3, Resnais’ two films mirror the practice of fragmentation and re-assemblage of cultural forms of Malraux’s work and the popular education movement in its breaking down and reconstitution of the works of Van Gogh and Picasso in a cinematic form.

Having placed the montage aesthetic of Resnais’ films in its cultural context, I then examine how these processes of fragmentation and re-assemblage develop across Van Gogh and Guernica to bring the works of these artists into dialogue with personal and political narratives outside of the domain of art history. Where Malraux and the popular education organisations saw montage as a means to elucidate the developments of art history by calling attention to links between cultural forms, Resnais’ films forge correspondences between fragments of these artworks that push us to reflect on the life of the artists that created them and the historical events that inspired the works. In Van Gogh,

Resnais’ linking of discrete pictorial spaces through continuity editing reimagines the painter’s œuvre as a unified psychic space, recasting the characters and landscapes that populate Van Gogh’s canvases as a reflection of the painter’s tormented inner reality. The aesthetic experiments with montage in

Van Gogh pave the way for Guernica’s more explicitly contemporary and politically engaged reflections, its radical fragmentation of Picasso’s paintings and sculptures acting as a conduit for an exploration of the historical imaginary of anti-fascist art in light of an emergent post-war fascist politics in France.

Together with co-director Robert Hessens, Resnais’ aggressive fracturing of

3 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 166.

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Picasso’s works places the artist’s famous depiction of the bombing of the

Spanish town of Guernica into relation with earlier portrait works, configuring them both as parts of a broader anti-fascist imaginary in the artist’s œuvre.

Resnais and Hessens’ fragmentation of Picasso’s artworks recasts the visual forms of the latter’s work within a longer lineage of 20th century political leftist art, staking a claim on the renewed valency of Picasso’s anti-fascist imagery in light of the rise of right-wing ideologies in post-war France.

Montage as Method: Malraux and Reproducibility

In confronting the canvas with the camera, and thus the traditional plastic arts with a reproducible art, Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh and Guernica enter into dialogue with a long line of reflections from filmmakers and theorists on the aesthetic implications of cinema’s engagement with the art forms that preceded it. In the range of films produced in the art documentary subgenre, as well as in the writings of theorists on the consequences of photography and film for the production and reception of artworks, some key questions arise that will guide my discussion of Resnais’ films in the latter half of the chapter.4 If one of the unique aspects of cinema as an art form is its ability not just to reproduce but

4 My use of the word “art documentary” refers to the practice of filming and editing together images of pre-existing artworks, or of filming the development of a work. For a general overview of the history of the art documentary, see Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Valentine Robert, Francois Albera, Laurent Le Forestier, “Introduction: Approches d’un genre hybride, le film sur l’art,” in Le film sur l’art. Entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de création, eds. Valentine Robert, Laurent Le Forestier, and François Albera (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 9-34. These films were commonly referred to as “films sur l’art” or sometimes “films d’art” in post-war France, during which time the subgenre gained a great deal of popularity. On the art documentary in post-war France, see: Jean-Pierre Berthomé, “Les courts métrages d’art en France: 1946-1961,” in Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968. De l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 95-109; Laurent Le Forestier, “Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre mondiale: allers-retours entre histoire de l’art et cinéma” in Le Film sur l’art, 87-100.

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also to distribute images more widely than any of the other arts that came before it, what would be the effect of this mass diffusion of images of artworks hitherto confined to the museum or gallery? What would be the consequences of presenting these artworks, valorised for their visual coherence and harmony, in an alternate, cinematic form for an audience of filmgoers? And finally, what potentially productive transformations could occur in this hybrid form that broke down the formal unities of the original works and reconstituted their fragments in a radically altered form? As we will see, the twin concerns of reproducibility — read here through André Malraux’s post-war writings on the history of art as influenced by Walter Benjamin — and the historiographical potential of montage as an art historical method provide a productive set of theoretical concepts for discussing the cross-medial hybridity of the art documentary. An exploration of the intersections of reproducibility and montage lays the foundation for a more contextually specific discussion of French post- war cultural politics, in which these same methods of reproducing cultural forms and the use of a montage-based method permeate a cross-medial, practical pedagogy of cultural history. This contextual backdrop, providing a link with the production of Resnais’ early post-war art documentaries, adds to this initial theoretical discussion to deepen my account of the emergence of a montage aesthetic in Resnais’ Van Gogh and Guernica.

The early history of the art documentary sees filmmakers experimenting with different methods of filming and editing various art forms across media, grappling with the aesthetic implications of cross-medial hybridity. In the early parts of the 20th century, even before critics such as Ricciotto Canudo were

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virulently staking out cinema’s distinct essence as the ‘Sixth’ (and soon to be

Seventh) art, camera operators had recorded the unveiling of major sculptural commissions and works of architecture that were to appear in newsreels.5 Soon after, in the 1910s and 20s, filmmakers became increasingly attracted to filming painters at work, with landmark films such as Sacha Guitry’s Ceux de chez nous

(Those of Our Lands) (1915) and Hans Cürlis’ Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands, a series started in 1922) providing a document of the artistic process or artists in their own homes.6 If these early examples from Guitry and Cürlis demonstrate a tendency to provide a record of the process of development of paintings, this shifted in the 1930s with a series of films directed in Europe that focused on the filming and re-editing of finished canvases. A sharp growth in art documentary production in this period was facilitated by an increase in specialised avenues of distribution and production, greater ease of access to artworks accorded to filmmakers by museums and other cultural institutions, and state funding for works valorising the cultural heritage of individual nations.7 In a specifically

5 See Riccioto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 58-66; Riccioto Canudo, “Reflections on the Seventh Art,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, 291-303. Valentine Robert discusses the art documentary in the context of the development of other late 19th century technologies for projecting and illustrating the plastic arts, as well as examples of cinematographic renderings of architecture and of sculpture that date back to 1910 and leading up to WWI. Valentine Robert, “L’histoire de l’art prise de vues,” in Le film sur l’art, 37- 54.

6 For more on the early history of the art documentary, see Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures,1-3; Valentine Robert, Francois Albera, Laurent Le Forestier, “Introduction,” 9-10. On Ceux de chez nous, see Alain Boillat, “Le discours sur l’art dans Ceux de chez nous de Sacha Guitry (1915-1952): la causerie d’un collectionneur,” in Le film sur l’art, 187-210. On Cürlis’ Schaffende Hände films, see Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 2-3.

7 Valentine Robert, Francois Albera and Laurent Le Forestier frame this increase in state support for the production of art documentaries in European countries in the 1930s in the context of interwar nationalism. Henri Storck’s Regards sur la Belgique ancienne, 1936, a key early art documentary, is an example of this nationalist valorisation of culture. They also cite the Louvre’s invitation of the French filmmaker Auguste Baron to film Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana in the

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French context, Jacques Brunius’ Violon d’Ingres (1939) featured some of the more ambitious confrontations between cinema and painting of this inter-war period in its passages dedicated to outsider artists such as Yves Tanguy and

Henri Rousseau.8 Already an innovating force in the film de montage tradition and an influence on Alain Resnais’ early short films, Brunius’ dramatic zooms into Rousseau’s canvases enact a conceptual fluidity between the pictorial space and the mise-en-scène of the film. In this same period in Italy, Luciano Emmer’s films on the works of painters such as Giotto and Bosch transformed the static pictorial scene on canvas into cinematic narratives, exploiting the temporality of cinema and the ability to cut two images together as a way to animate the dramatic architecture of these paintings.9

mid-1930s as a key moment in the subgenre’s history. See Valentine Robert, Francois Albera, Laurent Le Forestier, “Introduction,” 9-10. Events like the World’s Fair were also key to the production and distribution of art documentaries, particularly from France and Belgium, which were made to be shown alongside premieres of musical compositions, athletic contests and the display of new technologies.

8 Commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair, Brunius conceived of the film as a tribute to those that had pursued creative endeavours, including scientific and technical inventions, crafts and especially artistic pursuits on the side of their daily working life; the French phrase “Violon d’Ingres” — named after the 19th century French painter of the same name who was also a talented violinist — translates roughly to ‘hobby’ or ‘passion.’ Thus, the film introduces a number of subjects demonstrating these pursuits that belong to the leisure time of private life: a woodcutter from Ardèche (le Diable Rouge, Emile Borges) who has constructed a giant line to transport woodcuttings across a valley, the abbot Fouré who sculpted rock formations into the North West Atlantic coastline, and the famous Facteur Cheval, a postman who constructed his Palais Idéale during his daily rounds over the course of 33 years. On Brunius’ art documentaries, see Nathaniel Greene, “Jacques-Bernard Brunius, pionnier du film de montage,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 70, Summer 2013, 76-79.

9 Emmer’s approach to the art documentary through the dramatic, staged tradition of filmmaking may have had its roots in the fact that his initial impetus for making these films was a lack of money to make a film with actors. Possessing some reproductions of Giotto’s paintings, he set out instead to make a film using the figures in the painting. Luciano Emmer, Ce magique drap bleu. Divagation pas trop sérieuses sur le cinéma de Luciano Emmer, trans. Manuela Manzini (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996), 29.

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While his early films would be an influence on Resnais’ Guernica,10

Emmer is also the author of a short essay on the art documentary that provides a fruitful reflection on the potential aesthetic and even political implications of making a film about art. Delivered as a speech entitled “Pour une nouvelle avant- garde” at the Congrès International du Cinéma, which was held just after the war in September 1945 in Bâle, Switzerland,11 Emmer’s essay describes his experience as a director of art documentaries and the theoretical reflections on the form that this experience had produced. In this essay, he describes the art documentary as establishing an ‘umbilical cord’ between the paintings and the film’s audience, creating a point of access between the public and the original work that allowed them to experience anew its ‘universal and primal emotions.’

Emmer discusses his ‘decomposition’ of details of Bosch’s paintings in his Il

Paradiso terrestre (1940) to create a linear dramatic sequence, arguing that the narrative form produced by this method of fragmenting the original painting was a means of creating a meaningful ‘encounter’ that “emerge[d] between the great art of the past and the world.”12 Rather than to translate paintings or faithfully recreate them in another medium, Emmer sees the art documentary’s potential

10 Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), 212. Emmer’s films would be warmly received in France in the post-war period after Henri Langlois invited the director to introduce and screen his films to audiences at the Cinémathèque française in 1946. Emmer discusses this in Luciano Emmer, Ce magique drap bleu, 36.

11 Emmer’s speech was published in the congress’ proceedings later that year. Luciano Emmer, “Pour une nouvelle avant-garde,” in Cinéma d’aujourd’hui. Congrès International du Cinéma à Bâle, ed. Peter Bächlin (Geneva: Editions des Trois Collines, 1945), 127-132. The congress was a major event, gathering together filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, Jean Painlevé, the critic Georges Sadoul, as well as Emmer himself, all of whom were invited to speak on the future of the medium and its role amongst the arts and in the world more broadly. Emmer’s speech aligns with the socially engaged vision of cinema’s role in post-war Europe espoused throughout the congress.

12 Luciano Emmer, “Pour une nouvelle avant-garde,” 132.

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precisely in this decomposition of the original works and its transformation into an alternative cinematic form. Though montage is not mentioned by name in

Emmer’s essay, it permeates his discussion of the implications of reworking and disseminating images of paintings for an audience of filmgoers. If the art documentary presented an unparalleled opportunity to more widely distribute images of the plastic arts, for Emmer, its potential richness as a form lay in the interventions of cinematic montage, which could break down the pictorial harmony of the painting and reconstitute a new cinematic synthesis. When

André Bazin writes on the hybridism of the art documentary in the late 1940s, making specific reference to Emmer’s films, he echoes the latter’s praise for the

‘infidelity’ of the art documentary’s montage-heavy ‘aesthetic symbiosis.’ For

Bazin, a champion of what he would term ‘impure cinema’, the art documentary could not only broaden the reach of paintings by giving them a larger audience, it could also renew this audience’s appreciation of the formal properties of paintings.13 In its creation of “a new synthesis never envisioned by the painter,” he calls the art documentary “a method of cultural dissemination that is based on the destruction of its very object” and sees no cause for pessimism in this state of affairs.14

13 In the innovations of a select few works in the subgenre, Resnais’ chief amongst them, the critic sees “unarguably one of the most important innovations in documentary” since the early 1940s. André Bazin, "Le cinéma et la peinture," La Revue du cinéma, Autumn 1949, nos. 19-20, 114. Bazin’s enthusiasm for the art documentary can be understood as an extension of his contemporaneous defence of ‘impure’ cinema. See André Bazin, “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” What Is Cinema, Vol. 1, 53-75.

14 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema, Vol. 1, 166.

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Emmer and Bazin’s reflections on the art documentary clearly present themselves within a theoretical lineage of mid-20th century writing on the effects of reproducibility on the plastic arts, most notably those that permeate André

Malraux’s Psychologie de l’art series (1947–1940) — later published as Les Voix du silence in 1951 — and which builds upon Walter Benjamin’s famous essay

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–6).15 An examination of these two closely related theoretical reflections on reproduction extends the conceptualisation of montage in the art documentary that emerges in Emmer and Bazin’s writing, giving us the tools to understand the fragmentary re-presentation of artworks as an art historical method. Both authors explore the consequences of the invention of photography and cinema for the way audiences have apprehended and comprehended works of art, with Benjamin placing an emphasis on shifts in modes of perception and the notion of authenticity in art, and Malraux on the broadening of the art historical consciousness of both viewers and artists.16 In his ‘Artwork’ essay, Benjamin famously draws an

15 I will be referring to the second version of Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay, considered by its author to be the most complete version of the text as well as having a greater focus on the implications of his argument for film compared to other versions of the essay. Printed in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott… [et al.] (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19-55. Malraux’s notion of the ‘imaginary museum’ first appears in the first volume of his Psychologie de l’art series. André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire.

16 Malraux’s series of art books, though published a decade after Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art,’ was directly influenced by the German critic’s conceptualisation of the cultural consequences occasioned by the invention of photography and cinema. Malraux had planned to work with Benjamin on a history of art after reading his essay in the mid-1930s. For more on the connections and divergences between Benjamin and Malraux’s writings on mechanical reproductions in the arts, as well as their encounters in the 1930s, see Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Benjamin, Bazin: A Triangle of Hope for Cinema”; E. Rosa de Silva, “La rupture de l’aura et la métamorphose de l’art. Malraux, lecteur de Benjamin?,” in André Malraux 10. Réflexions sur les arts plastiques, ed. Christiane Moatti (Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, 1999), 55-78; Moncef Khémiri, "La reproduction de l’œuvre d’art dans la conception esthétique d’André Malraux,” André Malraux 10, 31-53; Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Album de l’art à l’époque du « Musée imaginaire »,(Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2013), 15-24.

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opposition between traditional ‘auratic’ art forms such as painting, sculpture, and stained glass windows and the modern reproducible arts, in which he sees a devaluation of the aesthetic authority of ‘aura’.17 This distinction between auratic and non-auratic is made in terms of the way audiences apprehend different kinds of art; if the former imposes a distance between viewer and work because of its embeddedness in tradition and ‘basis in ritual’, as well as upholding the opposition between original and copy, the ‘simultaneous collective reception’ of the latter and its removal of the notion of the ‘hic et nunc’ of a work creates a new kind of receptive proximity between viewer and (mechanically reproduced) artwork.18 For Benjamin, this shift from auratic to non-auratic art has the consequences of a change not only in modes of reception of art but also in modes of perception. In the face of this fragmented, mass-produced work of modern reproducible art, the human sensorium had been forced to recalibrate itself to adapt to these fractured art forms, creating historically engendered ways of seeing and comprehending these works.

Extending Benjamin’s argument, Malraux elaborates on the links between reproduction, reception and perception by charting a continuum of changing psychological attitudes towards art, and placing a particular emphasis on reproducibility in viewers’ understandings of the history of art. In his Psychologie de l’art series, Malraux argues that the changing relationship between audience

17 Benjamin distinguishes photography and film from earlier methods of reproduction, such as the lithograph and the woodcut print.

18 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in its Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” 36.

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and artwork over time in the West is due to a shift in methods of collection and presentation, with the popularisation of the museum and photographic reproduction of artworks in the last two centuries privileged as two key phenomena that had “imposed on the spectator a wholly new attitude toward the work of art.”19 Just as the museum’s collection and curation of artworks abstracted works from their original function and presented instead “a confrontation of metamorphoses” of “rival or even hostile works” upon its walls, photographic reproduction of artworks create the possibility for another, even more immediate confrontation between works of art from discrete national contexts, media and time periods. 20 For Malraux, photographic reproduction could go further than the museum in shifting the audience’s perception of art and its history by directly bringing into relief comparisons between artworks: despite the breadth of works assembled by the museum, the comparison of works by the museum goer — for example, of a work in the Louvre with another in the Prado — presupposes the intercession of memory at some point in the process of comparison. Photographic reproduction’s creation of a series of confrontations between artworks — confrontations that for Malraux define the history of art — are at the root of his famous notion of the ‘imaginary museum.’

He writes that:

19 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 14. Malraux notes that this changing psychological relationship to the work of art would have implications for the work of artists as well, who had to continually adapt their strategies for the creation of a world “different in kind from reality.” André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 538-539.

20 André Malraux, Les voix du silence, 14.

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An imaginary museum without precedent has opened itself to us, one that will push to the extreme the intellectualisation initiated by the incomplete confrontation of museums as we know them. It is in response to the museum that the plastic arts have invented their printing press.21

For Malraux, while photography might flatten out the differences in texture and especially size of artworks, blowing up a detail from a canvas or shrinking an eight-foot-tall statue to fit a photograph printed on an A4 page, it offered an incomparable tool in demonstrating stylistic continuities and discontinuities between works and lines of influence. Malraux posits that this new method of presenting and displaying art creates a new conception of art history based on the revelation of artistic filiation and inheritance, with photography furthering the museum’s deracination of the work of art from its ritual function and moving it into a broad stylistic history across time. “The proximity and the succession of photographic plates,” writes Malraux, “bring a style to life, much as an accelerated film brings a plant to life,” allowing us to trace these developments and metamorphoses of style through this very arrangement of images.22 Not only do new audiences see these works, now brought out of the museum and reproduced between the pages of a book that they can hold in their hands, they are also encouraged to see works as they relate to others, given an unrivalled tool of comparison in the photograph to reveal stylistic and formal correspondences. Photographic reproduction — the printing press of the plastic arts as Malraux calls it — fulfills the promises of a new art

21 André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 17. 22 “La proximité et la succession des planches font vivre un style comme l’accéléré d’un film fait vivre une plante.” André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 240.

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historical consciousness that the comparative contemplation of the museum could only suggest.

Figure 3.1: Malraux photographed in 1953 by Maurice Jarnoux Malraux is working on the second volume of his Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale.

Malraux’s reflections on the possibilities of broadening access to the plastic arts through the means of reproducibility are thus equally preoccupied with the question of precisely how one arranges and disseminates images of these works.

Here, montage as an aesthetic and historiographical method is central to his thinking. The ‘imaginary museum’ opens up a consciousness not of artworks in the singular, but of artworks as they articulate against one another, creating an art historical model that emphasises the interstitial in its revelation of formal, historical and social correspondences between works. Malraux’s arrangement of

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photographic reproductions in his art history books would become the privileged domain for demonstrating these correspondences, and he would involve himself closely in the selection, placement and sizing of the hundreds of photographic reproductions that appeared in them23 (Fig. 3.1, above). More than just the ability to print and distribute photographic reproductions of works previously confined to museums, the revolution of the illustrated art book lay in the transformative potentials of montage of photographic reproductions laid out and arranged on the page.24

Malraux’s montage-centric art historical framework that he develops in the late 1940s has a practical analogue in the contemporaneous pedagogical philosophies of the French popular education movement, which emerges following the Liberation. There, a cross-medial practice of montage also figures as a foundational principle in these organisations’ push to broaden access to cultural and art education in the context of the reconstruction of French society after the war and a re-thinking of the place of culture within it. Engaging with artworks of the past and fashioning new, critical methods of comprehending these works, this popular education movement also developed methods of presenting artworks to audiences through principles of fragmentation and re-

23 Reproductions of Malraux’s plans for the layout of images (maquettes) for the series are included in Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Album de l’art à l’époque du « Musée imaginaire »,,175-192.

24 Malraux’s ideas on new modes of cultural dissemination and the widening of access to artworks found another outlet in the late 1950s, when he was appointed as Minister for Culture under Charles de Gaulle’s presidency. On Malraux’s cultural policy as part of the De Gaulle government, see Augustin Girard, “Les politiques culturelles d'André Malraux à Jack Lang: ruptures et continuités, histoire d'une modernisation,” Hermès, La Revue, 2, no. 20, 1996, 27-41. Malraux would go on to produce a series of art documentaries himself in the 1970s, declaring at the same time that “L’audiovisuel achève la révolution commencée par le Musée imaginaire: le nouveau Louvre c’est lui.” André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux III. L’Intemporel (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 388.

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assemblage that were present in Malraux’s post-war art history books. These organisations were also involved in the production and distribution of art documentaries in this period, including Resnais’ early films in this subgenre.

Exploring the activities of the popular education movement allows us to thus further understand forms of cultural re-engagement built around practices of montage in post-war France, which Resnais’ early art documentaries respond to and expand upon in their development of a unique cinematic montage aesthetic.

Montage in Post-war Popular Education: The Re-animation of Culture

The French post-war popular education movement — alternatively referred to as the ‘cultural animation’ movement25 — was constituted by a loose network of educational organisations that formed around the country in the period directly after the Liberation, which operated outside of the traditional scholastic institutions of the school and university. A large number of these organisations had roots in various clandestine groups formed during the Resistance, drawing on their wartime experience of resistance to the German Occupation in their intellectual engagement with the reconstruction of French society and culture after its liberation.26 Supported in part by infrastructure built by the French government’s popular education initiative in 1945, and influenced in turn by the

25 See Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 85-90 for a discussion of cultural animation.

26 For more on the foundation of Peuple et Culture and its links to the resistance, see Benigno Cacérès, Les Deux Rivages: Itinéraire d’un animateur d’éducation populaire (Paris: François Maspero, 1982), 13-18; Brian Rigby, “The Reconstruction of Culture: Peuple et Culture and the Popular Education Movement,” in The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought and Film, 1945-50, ed. Nicholas Hewitt, Sarah Wasserman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 140-152.

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Popular Front movement’s rethinking of the notion of leisure time and the place of culture within it in the 1930s,27 the movement’s adherents aimed, in Catherine

Lupton’s words, “to carry forward the cultural and class solidarity that they believed had been forged during the Resistance.”28 Two small organisations that formed during the Occupation of France in WWII stand out as clear progenitors for the popular education movement formed after the Liberation. The first is the

Ecole des Cadres formed in the southeastern French town of Uriage, in which, from July 1940 until the shutdown of the unoccupied zone in November 1942, discussions amongst intellectuals advocated a new kind of pedagogy that interrogated France’s social and cultural fabric.29 The second, growing out of the

Uriage experiments, were the ‘equipes volantes’ (‘flying squads’), who would travel between camps of maquis — France’s rural resistance fighters — located in the mountainous Vercors region, also in the south east of the country.30 These equipes generally consisted of two or three men who would travel to camps of resistance fighters with backpacks full of books and pamphlets. Alongside distributing guerrilla tactic training and strategy, the equipes held readings by campfire of classic works of French literature, giving the fighters a chance to

27 This was thanks to the government’s newly appointed directeur de l’Education populaire, Jean Guehenno. On the funding of popular education groups and their relation to the Popular Front, see Benigno Cacérès, Histoire de l’éducation populaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), 87-107.

28 Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2008),16.

29 The philosophical reflections prompted by the Uriage experience were summarised with the publication of the following essay at the end of the war: Equipe d’Uriage, sous la direction de Gilbert Gaddofre, Vers le style du XXème siècle (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1945). On the Ecole des Cadres at Uriage see John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).

30 For a detailed account of the activities of the equipes volantes during the resistance, and their relationship to the cadres at Uriage, see John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France, 201- 207.

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share culture through collective reading. The future president of Peuple et

Culture, Benigno Cacérès, a carpenter from Toulouse who was active at Uriage and later the hub of resistance activity in the mountainous region of the Vercors, memorably describes stealing books of works by Michelet, Hugo, and Apollinaire from a nearby library to hold readings with fighters to build morale and a sense of solidarity.31

Marked by this experience with the Resistance, in which “the links between political struggle, fraternity and culture” had been so strong, Benigno

Cacérès, along with Joffre Dumazedier, helped found the organisation Peuple et

Culture in Grenoble after France was liberated midway through 1944. The largest and most well known of the cultural animation organisations that emerged after the Liberation, Peuple et Culture, announced its ambition in its

1946 manifesto to “give culture back to the people and the people back to culture.”32 Along with the majority of likeminded popular education organisations that formed after the Liberation, Peuple et Culture were politically aligned with the Left in France, and saw themselves as forming the cultural arm of a broader reconstruction of French culture and society after the wartime experience.33 As Brian Rigby notes, this means that we ought to read their

31 “Reading took on then its full meaning. Here, passages from Michelet, Hugo, Saint-Just, Apollinaire, François la Colère, assumed their true significance. The great poets came amongst men in order to help them to live, in order to teach them to hope.” Benigno Cacérès, L’espoir au cœur (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 40-41.

32 Peuple et Culture’s 1945 manifesto is available online. Citation from “Un peuple, un culture,” http://www.peuple-et-culture.org/IMG/pdf/manifeste_peuple_et_culture.pdf [Online], 3. Accessed 1st November, 2018.

33 While the organisation as a whole was not officially affiliated with any particular political party, founders Dumazedier and Cacérès briefly joined the French Communist Party directly after

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discourse on ‘people’ and ‘popular’ culture in the aforementioned manifesto and in their publications from the period within this leftist political optic:

[L]ike so many other organisations and individuals at the time of the Liberation, Peuple et Culture was caught between at least two definitions of the ‘people’. On the one hand the ‘peuple’ was the exploited working class who lived in a state of cultural deprivation … and on whose behalf radical steps needed to be taken in order to change this. On the other hand, the ‘peuple’ was the whole nation, on whose behalf a unified and common culture needed to be forged at this great moment of national freedom and solidarity, in order to ensure the future health and efficiency of the nation.34

In practice, this meant that Peuple et Culture functioned as a point of contact between intellectuals and the working class in the period immediately following the war, with the ultimate goal of capitalising on the spirit of reconstruction after the Liberation as an opportunity for “the reintegration of the proletariat into the nation.”35 The organisation had taken the spirit of the

‘partage culturel’ of the Resistance — during which time the shared experience of wartime had brought the working class in contact with skilled professionals, intellectuals, and army personnel — and aimed for a popular (in the broad, class- based sense of the term) approach to cultural education that would ensure that

“the benefits of culture would no longer remain the privilege of one, sole class.”36

the war, but left soon after. Brian Rigby, “The Reconstruction of Culture,” 144. Other popular education organisations, such as Travail et Culture, were closely aligned with the French Communist Party.

34 Brian Rigby, “The Reconstruction of Culture,” 143.

35 Benigno Cacérès, Histoire de l’éducation populaire, 147.

36 “Un peuple, une culture,” 2.

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People and Culture’s activities in the immediate post-war years were centred on developing pedagogical strategies, providing training for animateurs

(instructors) who would in turn organise lectures, reading groups and debates, and produce program notes for film screenings and theatre performances. These animateur-run sessions would be largely attended by working class members of

France’s major labour unions, including the Confédération Général du Travail and the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens.37

37 Benigno Cacérès, Histoire de l’éducation populaire, 157-158.

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Figure 3.2: Program of "Journées nationales de Peuple et Culture" 24th-25th February 1952. Marker and Resnais' names are listed as presenters of a screening entitled "Les films d'art.” Bazin also features on the program, presenting on Ciné-clubs. Note the “montage” of poetry and song by Catherine Sauvage and Yves Tarlet listed after dinner.

Some familiar names count amongst the list of animateurs that worked with

Peuple et Culture. André Bazin worked in the cinema department, organising lectures and screening around France and in Germany, where he was joined by

Chris Marker, who was at that time working for the theatre department as well as the ‘Centre de documentation’ responsible for organising texts to be

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presented by animateurs.38 Between projects, Resnais too was involved with the organisation: program notes for a day of presentations held by Peuple et Culture in February of 1952 show his name alongside Marker’s, with the two men presenting a screening of art documentaries followed by a discussion39 (Fig. 3.2, above). Bazin, Marker and Resnais also worked for the more avowedly leftist popular education organisation Travail et Culture (Work and Culture), one of the many organisations that Peuple et Culture helped to found in the period after the

Liberation, which took a particular interest in theatre and cinema in its self- professed aim to “revive the old dream of art for all.”40 Travail et Culture’s adherents were workers and intellectuals alike, who attended performances and screenings in auditoriums, factories, and union halls, which were organised and run by an animateur. The animateur’s task was to both historicise the medium and to demystify its processes of production in order to encourage a keener critical reception on the part of the audience. Travail et Culture — as well as its parent organisation in Peuple et Culture — placed an importance on nurturing independent critical thinking on the arts, which was part and parcel of their

38 For more on the collaboration of Marker and Bazin with Peuple et Culture in this period, see Thomas Tode, “Le détonateur de la culture cinématographique allemande d’après-guerre: les rencontres cinématographiques franco-allemandes (1946-1953),” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre- vingt-quinze, no. 60, March 2010, 100-121. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, 85.

39 Listed in the organisation’s journal, Peuple et Culture, No. 7 (nouvelle série), 1952. Cacérès confirms Resnais’ involvement in his biography, though he does not specify the director’s exact role. Benigno Cacérès, Les Deux Rivages, 27.

40 Benigno Cacérès, Histoire de l’éducation populaire, 154. A “Centre national de documentation de la culture populaire” was established by the two organisations in partnership with one another, where Marker worked alongside Joseph Rovan to produce articles, reading lists and dossiers to be distributed to animateurs working with the audiences. Joseph Rovan, Mémoires d’un Français qui se souvient d’avoir été allemand (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999), 256-257. Marker left Travail et Culture in the late 1940s following a dispute over the publication of a passage from André Malraux’s Espoir in the organisation’s journal, DOC. Joseph Rovan, Mémoires d’un Français qui se souvient d’avoir été allemand, 262-263.

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functioning outside of the bounds of traditional educational and cultural institutions: if a new base of people was to be inculcated into cultural life in

France, it would ideally be through giving them the tools to form their own engagement with the history of art. Travail et Culture referred to itself as a

“cooperative et ecole des spectateurs”, gesturing towards its ambitions to cultivate an engagement with the arts that was based on a sharpened spectorial practice, shifting, as Dudley Andrew has put it, “the audience’s notion of itself from passive consumers to co-creators.”41 In envisioning their animateur-run presentations as producing an active model of spectatorship, the ambitions of these organisations recall Malraux’s contemporaneous writing on the public’s broadened art historical consciousness that would be produced by the publication of art books. But where Malraux examined this consciousness in terms of the transformative potential of photography and montage in the domain of the art book, organisations like Travail et Culture and Peuple et Culture instead aimed to educate people on the history of cultural forms face-to-face, through the careful curation, dissemination and discussion of works of literature, art and music. The concept of montage — so important to Malraux’s art historical method — would also be central to the pedagogical methods of these organisations, which used these same principles of fragmentation and re- assemblage of cultural forms in the context of animateur-run presentations.

In this regard, Peuple et Culture’s 1946 manifesto gives some crucial insight into this key organisation’s philosophy of cultural education and the place

41 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, 87.

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of a method of fragmentary montage within it. Designed as a series of instructions to its animateurs, the manifesto states the organisation’s famous aim not just to ‘give culture back to the people,’ but also to foster what they called a

‘cultural aptitude.’42 Encouraging discussion and critical thinking on works of art, they argued that their role was to develop the ‘mental musculature’ of participants through what they termed entraînement mental (mental training/exercise).43 Crucially, this entraînement mental would be produced in sessions with animateurs who would be working with fragments of cultural forms: animateurs would present excerpts of text, short recordings of music, or scenes from plays, that would then be the source of a discussion after their presentation. The curation and dissemination of works broken down into smaller segments was a central part of the organisation’s method, and would translate into a variety of innovative educational designs. A report published by

Peuple et Culture on the activities of educators shows that already in 1946, the organisation had designed what they called ‘mallettes culturelles’ (cultural briefcases) for animateurs to carry with them to lectures and presentations. The report lists the contents of one such briefcase: a selection of books (from Marx,

Duhamel), a 16mm film with fragments of newsreel and documentary footage, and various discs ranging from modernist composer Arthur Honneger to the jazz tenor saxophonist Alix Combelle.44 What is interesting here is not just the esoteric nature of the contents of the briefcase, but also the role of the animateur,

42 “Un peuple, une culture,” 5.

43 “Un peuple, un culture,” 5-6.

44 No signature, “Une innovation du centre de recherches,” Peuple et Culture Bulletin de Liaison, no. 6, 1946, 18-19.

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who is instructed in the report to use these materials in any combination they please, and that this “dépendra de son public, du temps et du lieu dont il dispose.”45

The process of entraînement mental would thus privilege the often- improvisatory recombination of existing cultural fragments, the animateur isolating and bringing them into correspondence with other fragments, encouraging creative connections from participants through discussion.

This logic of fragmentary recombination is also present in the books and journals published by Peuple et Culture for pedagogical use by animateurs.

Beginning in 1947, Peuple et Culture (together with Travail et Culture) published a journal of excerpts of literature and theatre followed by contextual notes for discussion named DOC, which was edited for its first three issues by Chris

Marker.46 A series of books compiled by Peuple et Culture entitled Regards neufs

(New Looks), published by Les Editions du Seuil from 1949 onwards, followed a similar principle of composition. Books in this series focused on a range of cultural and civic subjects, including photography, cinema, the French chanson, and the history of the workers’ movement, and comprised excerpts of longer essays and monographs, interspersed with commentary by the book’s editor. In a short article published in Peuple et Culture’s monthly bulletin that details how animateurs should use the Regards neufs books, the author notes that the publications in the series “are designed to be put to use”, adding: “We insist on the use of our works in the form of ‘Montages’: each book allows for several

45 No signature, “Une innovation du centre de recherches,” 19.

46 Marker’s tenure as editor of DOC is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

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montages.”47 Here, the use of the word ‘montage’ — which regularly appears in

Peuple et Culture’s publications of the period — demonstrates the importance that the organisation placed on the act of assemblage in the development of their pedagogical method; the excerpt of text in these publications was to be presented in terms of its relation to others, not in isolation. As Jean-François

Chosson notes, Peuple et Culture’s montage method was the inverse of classic modes of analysis of literature and works of art, in which there was a progression from a general overview of the author’s work before the analysis honed in on selected details and citations.48 This movement from the detail to the vue d’ensemble presented an innovation of Peuple et Culture’s pedagogical method, while also demonstrating the importance of the animateur’s ability to place into relation through selection, comparison and commentary, these fragmentary parts of artworks.

In its alignment of a pedagogical method based on montage with an explicit interest in the art documentary, the popular education organisation Les

Amis de l’art represents one final, important example for this chapter.49 Founded

47 No signature, “Comment utiliser les ouvrages de la Collection « Peuple et Culture »,” Peuple et Culture. Bulletin des Adhérents, no. 32 (Special Issue), 1955, 28. My emphasis. Thank you to Christophe Chazalon for citation information regarding this issue.

48 Jean-François Chosson, “Les fiches de lecture et thématiques,” in Peuple et Culture. 50 ans d’innovation au service de l’education populaire, ed. Jean-François Chosson (Paris: Peuple et Culture, 1995), 22.

49 For more on the activities of Les Amis de l’art in this period, see Laurent Le Forestier, “Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre mondiale: allers-retours entre histoire de l’art et cinéma,” 87-100. Le Forestier also makes the link between Les Amis de l’art and Peuple et Culture, noting that the groups shared members as well as a philosophy of popular education: “Bref « Les Amis de l’art » s’inscrivent dans ce vaste courant de démocratisation du savoir et de la culture, d’éducation populaire, caractéristique de l’après-guerre. En cela, ce mouvement prend place à côté d’autres associations comme « Peuple et Culture », « Travail et Culture », « Tourisme et

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in December 1944 and counting amongst its members some of the leading art historians and critics in France, the association described itself as a “mouvement de propagande et de culture artistique”, organising lectures, film screenings, and publications, while also exhibiting a sustained interest in the art documentary as a tool for art historical inquiry.50 Not long after its inception, Les Amis de l’art began exhibiting art documentaries in cinemas and museums, most notably Alain

Resnais’ early amateur shorts, and even produced the 16mm version of Alain

Resnais’ Van Gogh.51 It is important to note here that not only did Les Amis de l’art share with contemporary popular education organisations a methodology of pedagogy through the fragment; they also produced, distributed and screened art documentaries as a central element of their wider project of cultural animation. As Laurent Le Forestier has put it, Les Amis de l’art saw the art

Travail » et certains de ses membres collaborent d’ailleurs à ces autres associations...” Laurent Le Forestier, “Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre mondiale,” 92.

50 Building from an interest of some of its art historian members in formalism as an art historical methodology, with its detailed breakdowns and focus on the development of art historical forms over time, the organisation saw the screening and discussion of these art documentaries as a useful art historical method. Art history lectures began using slides, and art historians became interested in the format as a way of analysing the formal properties of artworks in detail. See Valentine Robert, “L’histoire de l’art prise de vues,” 37-53; François Albera, “Études cinématographiques et histoire de l’art,” Perspective. La revue de l’INHA, no. 3, 2006, 433-460. Les Amis de l’art would also organise screenings of this and other notable French art documentaries of the 1940s, which would be followed by lectures by an art historian, or otherwise associated with an art exhibition or publication. For example, an invitation to the “Gala international du film d’art” organised by Les amis de l’art, and presented by Nicole Vedrès, is kept in the archives of the Cinematheque francaise. In ADM-B698, Archives historiques de la cinémathèque française, Correspondances Henri Langlois, U-V, boîte 61.

51 Laurent Le Forestier, “Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre mondiale,” 90-91. The organisation’s president, art historian Gaston Diehl, is credited as one of the co-directors and scriptwriters on subsequent, commercial version produced by Pierre Braunberger in 1948. On the different versions of the film, see Suzanne Liandrat-Guiges, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 212-213. In her excellent recent research on Resnais’ amateur art films that pre-date Van Gogh, Marianne Le Galliard notes that Les Amis de l’art were exhibiting Resnais’ films at lectures and conferences from 1947 onwards. Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais: Initiation à l’art abstrait (1946-1948).” https://attractions.hypotheses.org/55 Accessed 2nd October, 2018. Galliard notes that art historian Madeleine Rousseau of Les Amis de l’art wrote the commentary – now lost – for Resnais’ 1947 film portrait of Hans Hartung, which was produced by André Bazin. She also notes that Rousseau was one of Resnais’ teachers at IDHEC. Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais.”

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documentary as an “instrument of the reconfiguration of the field of art history,”52 creating new means of bringing works of the past to life. An editorial entitled ‘N’oublions pas le public’ (‘Let us not forget the public’), published in the organisation’s monthly bulletin in 1948, describes their model of engaging with the history of art and the art documentary’s place within it:

We must now pay for the wrongdoings of more than a century of ignorance, hostility and inertia. Art cannot find the path to the spirit and hearts of men on its own. It must be exhibited and shown in all places in order to be seen. And for it to be seen as it should, one must ready the eye [préparer l’oeil] and the mind for it be received. Art demands an education, like other areas of knowledge. And the good public has the right to this education. […] The more of us that there are, the easier it will be to respond to the needs of the public, to those of adults and those of children, by way of travelling exhibitions, art documentaries, conferences and trips.53

Here once more we see this impulse to broaden access to art conceived of alongside the need to cultivate a kind of art historical aptitude. The metaphor of

‘readying the eye’ of the spectator — like Peuple et Culture’s entraînement mentale — indicates the importance of a new mode of perception to this project, while also gesturing towards a spectatorial comprehension of artworks produced by the ability to see comparisons and correspondences between

52 Laurent Le Forestier, "Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre Mondiale,” 93. As Marianne Galliard notes, radio had also been used as an instrument for popular art historical teaching in the post-war period. Art critic and historian René Guilly launched a radio show on the French national broadcaster in 1945 entitled “Le Domaine de Paris,” whose premise – like Resnais’ early films – was the “visite d’atelier.” Guilly’s program featured interviews with Parisian-based artists such as Picasso, Braque, Gonzalez, Picabia, and Max Ernst. Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais.”

53 Gaston Diehl, "N’oublions pas le public,” Les Amis de l’art, nouvelle série, no. 1, octobre 1948, 1. Reprinted in Laurent Le Forestier, "Les films sur l’art en France après la Second Guerre Mondiale," 91. My emphasis.

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different works of art. Much like Malraux’s metaphor about the ability of photographic reproduction to depict the development of artistic styles like a time-lapse shot might show the growth of a plant, the aesthetic possibilities of cinema here explicitly tie the art documentary to a new art historical model.

Les Amis de l’art’s conceptualisation of the historiographical potential of the art documentary provides a crucial synthesis of interrelated theories and practices of montage in this post-war French cultural context. Aligned with

Malraux’s theorisation of reproducibility and montage as well as the montage- based pedagogy of the cultural animation movement more broadly, Les Amis de l’art’s activities in this period indicate a belief in the art documentary as the ideal domain in which these diverse theoretical and practical threads could be brought together. As we will see in Resnais’ Van Gogh, the organisation’s watershed art documentary production, this notion of a fragmentation and re-assemblage of cultural forms is filtered through the director’s cutting and framing of the Dutch painter’s canvases. Yet, as will become evident in the course of close analysis of the film, Resnais’ film engages with the montage methodology experimented with in these contemporary organisations but puts it towards quite distinct ends.

While Van Gogh shares some of the elements of presenting artistic works practiced by contemporary cultural animation organisations — using selective visual citation and re-arrangement to ‘re-animate’ the work of an artist of the past — his ambitions are less geared towards the formalist pedagogy of these organisations than towards revealing another, more profound reality that emerges from the world of artistic forms. Resnais’ radical experimentation with the fragmentation and re-assemblage of plastic artworks in Van Gogh sets the

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stage for a process of cinematic montage in his art documentaries that aim to push our perception beyond a world purely constructed of forms, a push that starts with the evocation of the inner life of the artist in Van Gogh and leads eventually to a contemporary historical discourse on the persistence of fascism in post-war France in Guernica. I thus argue for Resnais’ films as expressions of this post-war cultural politics of montage, but ones in which the re-animation of cultural forms takes on a particularly pointed, politico-historical valency that extends beyond the exhibition of formal correspondences and into the domain of contemporary political concerns.

Piecing Together Myth in Van Gogh

Commercially released as a short film in 1948, Van Gogh would be Resnais’ first professional directorial credit, and an important step in his cinematic engagement with the art world following the end of WWII. Beginning in 1946, during his tenure as assistant to Vedrès on Paris 1900, Resnais directed a number of amateur 16mm films showing painters and sculptors of the modernist

école de Paris such as Max Ernst, Hans Hartung and Henri Goetz in their ateliers.54 While these short amateur studies showed artists at work on individual paintings and sculptures, generally tracking the development of a

54 These short studies, which Resnais shot and then later edited in his own apartment-turned- film-studio, recorded the artists at work on individual pieces whose development he would track with his camera. These films were silent, with the exception of Portrait d’Henri Goetz. See Olivier Barrot, L’Ecran français, 1943-1953. Histoire d’un journal et d’une époque (Paris: Les éditeurs français réunis, 1979), 295. For an analysis of these amateur art films, see François Thomas, “Sur trois films inconnus d'Alain Resnais (Portrait de Henri Goetz, Hans Hartung, Christine Boomeester: trois visites d'atelier),” Positif, no. 244-245, July-August 1981, 42-44; Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais.”

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piece over the course of the films’ approximately 5-minute run-time, with Van

Gogh, Resnais turned to working more directly with the œuvre of an artist who had long since passed away. Moving away from documenting the development of individual works to the cutting together of images of an œuvre, Resnais adopted a more rigorous montage aesthetic in Van Gogh that simultaneously dovetails with and departs from the montage methodology of the cultural animation movements that I have traced thus far in this chapter. Resnais’ breaking down of the pictorial harmony of Van Gogh’s paintings — what Bazin would go so far as to refer to as the ‘destruction’ of the original works — was key to creating a work that was at the intersection of stylistic analysis and artistic biography, constructing a narrative of the painter’s life and tortured psychic world by editing together details from the Dutchman’s paintings. In Van Gogh, Resnais’ approach to filming and editing together details of the canvas presented his audience with a new vision of the painter’s œuvre outside of a contribution to the history of forms, an aesthetic move whose principles would be carried over and extended in Guernica’s engagement with contemporary history.

In its various stages of conceptualisation, production and distribution,

Resnais’ Van Gogh was intimately linked to the popular cultural milieu that I have traced above. The film has a somewhat complex history, and exists in at least two versions: the first, a silent 16mm version from 1947 for screenings organised by popular education organisations, and a second completed the following year with an added soundtrack and commentary for a traditional

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commercial release in cinemas.55 Both these versions were completed together with the help of popular education organisations. The commission for the original 16mm version came from the aforementioned Les Amis de l’art’s Gaston

Diehl, an art historian who had seen and appreciated Resnais’ amateur film portraits and envisioned a similar project to be undertaken with the work of Van

Gogh after the success of a recent exhibition of the artist’s works at the Musée de l’Orangerie in January-March 1947.56 Les Amis de l’art already had a link to the exhibition itself: the introduction to the catalogue was written by the organisation’s honorary president, the influential art historian René Huyghe, with his text appearing alongside black and white photographic reproductions from the Orangerie exhibit, which as we will see became a significant point of reference for the film.57 A report in Peuple et Culture’s archives indicates that Les

Amis had also organised for reproductions from the exhibition to be shown in a gallery in Toulouse in February 1948; this ad hoc exhibition would feature guides who would read out excerpts from Theo and Vincent van Gogh’s correspondences for gallery-goers.58 The commission for Resnais’ original,

16mm version aligns thus with a broader cross-medial practice from Les Amis de l’art to engage audiences with the paintings of the Dutch master, whose work had yet to achieve the public appreciation and canonical standing it now enjoys

55 The 16mm version of Van Gogh now appears to be lost.

56 Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais.” A catalogue of the exhibit confirms these dates, and includes an introduction by René Huyghe discussed below. Vincent Van Gogh, Musée de l’Orangerie, janvier-mars 1947, ed. René Huyghe (Paris : Les Presses Artistiques, 1947).

57 Huyghe himself had previously directed an art documentary, Rubens (1937).

58 No signature, “Toulouse. L’EXPOSITION Van Gogh,” Peuple et Culture Bulletin de Liaison, no. 14, 1948, 13-14.

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in France.59 Les Amis de l’art would go on to screen this silent 16mm version throughout 1948 at conferences, lectures and in art galleries, where it figured as a staple of their corpus of educational tools.60

Though Les Amis de l’art was integral to Van Gogh’s genesis and development, another cultural animation organisation in Travail et Culture was to play an important role in the completion of the film’s final, 35mm commercial release version. After filming the initial silent 16mm version, Resnais went to the offices of Travail et Culture where André Bazin and Chris Marker were working to seek advice on the addition of commentary and music to the film. There, Bazin and Marker advised Resnais to re-shoot Van Gogh in 35mm, which would permit both the addition of a soundtrack and for the film to be taken up for commercial redistribution.61 In the reshoots for the 35mm version of the film — the only version that survives today — Resnais filmed photographic reproductions of the paintings; what we see in the finished Van Gogh is a filmic reproduction of a black and white photographic reproduction of the paintings. Pierre Braunberger

— producer of Paris 1900 — undertook the production of this 35mm commercial version of Van Gogh, undoubtedly due to the connections established between

Resnais and the production company during the making of Vedrès’ film.62 As further evidence of this network of creative alliances forged during the

59 “Quand Gaston Diehl a voulu faire Van Gogh c’était culturellement courageux car ce n’était pas un peintre tellement apprécié.” Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais, 212.

60 Laurent Le Forestier, "Les films sur l’art en France après la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” 94-95.

61 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, 90.

62 Pierre Braunberger confirms this in his memoirs. Pierre Braunberger, Pierre Braunberger, producteur: cinémamémoire: propos receuillis par Jacques Gerber (Paris: Centre national de la cinématographie/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), 142.

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production of Paris 1900, Claude Dauphin voiced the film’s narration. Dauphin’s voice, combined with the gloomy modernist score provided by composer Jacques

Besse, would conjugate with shots of the Van Gogh photographic reproductions, the editing of which would constitute the entirety of the images appearing in the film.

Van Gogh’s opening intertitles announce the film’s ambitions to evoke

“the life and spiritual adventure” of the Dutch painter “uniquely through the aid of his works.” This focus on biography that emerges from an analysis of the details of the paintings themselves is prefigured by the introductory text to the

Orangerie’s Van Gogh exhibition catalogue, written by Les Amis de l’art president,

René Huyghe. Huyghe’s text, which is printed before dozens of black and white photographic reproductions that also appear in Resnais’ film, provides a clear model for the biographical narrative in the film’s voiceover commentary, describing, as Resnais’ film later would, Van Gogh’s protestant upbringing, his position as a deracinated artist working in France, and his mental anguish that forced him to leave Paris for the French countryside. More than this, Huyghe’s fluid movement between these elements of biographical details and pictorial analysis of Van Gogh’s painting technique prefigures Resnais’ own method of cutting together details from the painter’s work along with the voiceover’s biographical account. Huyghe’s combination of pictorial analysis and biography is typical of the art historian’s work on the ‘psychology’ of art from the 1930s onwards — a decade before Malraux’s writings on the subject —, writing that the work of art presents to the viewer “a world of the revelation of the unutterable,

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directly perceived through images that represent our feelings.”63 Huyghe’s text evokes the personal torment that would plague Van Gogh and which would find its expression in his work; indeed, he reads the vertiginous intensity of Van

Gogh’s colour palette as inseparable from the painter’s tormented soul and his tragic destiny. An excerpt from this introductory text reads:

In Vincent’s final works, the cypress trees themselves surge upwards in sinuous jets from which burst the agitated mesh of branches, surging towards the swirling suns that fashion the sky out of their waves of fire.

Only infinity could appease such a burning sensation, such tension: the absorption into infinity, which is to say, death itself.64

Huyghe’s text here strongly resonates with Resnais’ own portrait of Van

Gogh as a tortured creator, which similarly details the painter’s inner turmoil in the face of his struggles with poverty and widespread indifference to his work.

And in his contribution to what he would describe as the “myth of Van Gogh,”65

Resnais also saw the details of the paintings themselves as indelibly linked to the

63 “…un monde de révélation de l’indicible directement perçu au travers des images représentatives de nos sensations.” Quoted in the biographical note accompanying Huyghe’s entry into the Académie française. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/rene-huyghe . Online. Accessed 1st November, 2018. On the notion of the “psychology” of art in Huyghe’s work, with a comparison to Malraux, see Claude Gagnon, “Interview avec René Huyghe,” Vie des arts, 32, no. 127, June 1987, 57-75.

64 René Huyghe in Vincent Van Gogh, Musée de l’Orangerie, janvier-mars 1947, 8. Huyghe’s descriptions here resonate with a conference that he gives on the life of Van Gogh in the early 1950s, recorded and broadcast on French radio. Echoing Resnais’ method of moving between details of the canvas to a portrait of the painter, Huyghe cites a series of correspondences between Van Gogh and his brother Theo before making some suggesting about the painter’s inner life, in what he describes as a “Van Gogh par lui-même.” René Huyghe, “Van Gogh et la Recherche de l’Absolu,” Radio Program first broadcast on 1st June, 1953 on France’s Chaîne Nationale.

65 Alain Resnais, “Une expérience,” Ciné-club, no. 3, 1948, 4.

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painter’s inner life. Beyond choosing details from paintings that were roughly contemporaneous with the events that the voiceover commentary makes reference to (Fig. 3.3, below), Resnais’ isolation of fragments and their placement into relation with others brought about their more discreet correspondences with an account of a profound, mythic reality of the artist’s life. Much like with

Vedrès and her assembly of fragments of footage from a bygone era in Paris

1900, Resnais looks back on the œuvre of the Dutch painter, attempting to make visible those more profound structures of the work that reveal something about its maker.

Figure 3.3: Still from Van Gogh and Vincent Van Gogh, Le Moulin à Pouvre Oil on canvas, 65.0 x 34cm, Paris, 1887, Van Gogh Museum. (bottom). Van Gogh’s encounters with the Parisian avant-garde and its pointillist and impressionist tendencies (“…Lautrec, Seurat, Gauguin. Partout des hommes nouveaux à la recherche d’un art nouveau”) are echoed by the appearance of his first paintings from this period and the marked shift in texture that they exhibit.

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Figure 3.4: Establishing shots across three paintings at the opening of Van Gogh

The interplay between biography and a focus on the stylistic and textural qualities of Van Gogh’s works evidenced in Huyghe’s text is central to Resnais’ method of assembling reproductions in the film, the director’s montage of details

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from disparate works forging a narrative that illuminates the tragic itinerary of the Dutch painter’s life and his inner world. Crucial to this revelation of the profound psychology of the work — in Huyghe’s terms — is Resnais’ fragmentation of the visual harmonies of Van Gogh’s paintings, whose details

Resnais isolates and re-assembles to suggest a unified spatial field in which the painter’s biography plays out. Here then, the black and white of the film not only calls our attention to the graphic qualities of the paintings, it also gives a visual coherence to the details from Van Gogh’s paintings, smoothing out the range of the painter’s colour palette and allowing him to create spatial links between disparate works. Doors from one painting open out into the interiors of another, and the landscapes of various Dutch pictorial scenes are brought together in a second, cinematic synthesis of spaces. Re-framing and cutting apart dozens of canvases, a visual coherence emerges that, as André Bazin pointed out in a perceptive early review of the film, is heightened by the fact that Resnais only shows the details and never the entirety of any of the reproductions used in the film.66 In an interview directly following the film’s release, Resnais described the effect produced by his fragmentary montage of details as follows:

I wanted to find out if painted trees, painted houses, and painted characters could, by way of montage, fulfil the roles of real objects and if, in this case, it was possible to substitute for the observer the interior world of an artist for the world that photography revealed.67

66 Bazin also points this out about Luciano Emmer’s contemporary art documentaries. André Bazin, "Le cinéma et la peinture,” 116.

67 Alain Resnais, “Une expérience,” 4.

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Indeed, when Resnais makes a cut to a close up of a tree or of a peasant’s face from Van Gogh’s paintings, the accumulative effect of is not of a series of closer and more detailed views of the painter’s craft, but of a “close-up” on the characters and settings that populate his canvases. Resnais’ montage of details from the Orangerie reproductions creates a novel, cinematic space from the accumulation of pictorial details, re-imagining discrete pictorial scenes as constituting coherent cinematic ones. In doing this, Resnais often has recourse to classical continuity editing techniques, as in the opening exchange of images’ loose re-interpretation of the establishing shot bringing together the ‘marshy plains’ of several different paintings (Fig. 3.4, above). Paradoxically, his recourse to cinematic continuity editing is marked by an even more discordant fragmentation of the original paintings: Resnais’ montage consistently forges connections across paintings that were never in the original works, or simply cuts together two images from different paintings to suggest a single space.

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Figure 3.5: Comparison of four consecutive images from Van Gogh taken from three paintings

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The radical dissonance that is at the root of Van Gogh’s fracturing of pictorial space, and its re-assemblage into a unified, cinematic space, allows

Resnais to create associative resonances beyond the frame of the painting and the scenes depicted in it and into the realm of psychic biography. At various points throughout the film, Resnais’ correspondences between details are deployed to illuminate a secondary reality to the scenes depicted. We see an example of this in a sequence a third of the way through the film that concerns

Van Gogh’s time in Paris with the artistic scene in Montmartre, a new stylistic turn in his work, and his eventual abandonment of the city and its artistic milieu.

At the close of this sequence, Resnais brings together images from three different paintings, cutting between them as if they were showing different parts of the same scene. First, we see an image from Devant un restaurant, à Asnières

(1887)68: the camera zooms into the surface, as if it were slowly tracking into the doorway or mimicking a subjective shot of an approach to the building’s entrance. Resnais follows this with a cut to an interior scene from another painting — Intérieur d’un restaurant (1887)69 — and again zooms from the initial wider framing to a closer shot of a set table at the centre of the restaurant.

Finally, there is an image from La Femme aux tambourins (1887);70 a zoom from the initial framing of the table reveals a woman seated pensively at a restaurant.

Over the shot of this last painting, Claude Dauphin’s voiceover reads the phrase

68 Vincent Van Gogh, Devant un restaurant, à Asnières, toile 0,19 x 0,265, Paris, Summer 1887. Collection V. W. van Gogh, Laren.

69 Vincent Van Gogh, Intérieur de restaurant, toile, 0,45 x 0,54, Epoque de Paris (c. 1887), Rijks- museum Kröller-Müller.

70 Vincent Van Gogh, La Femme aux tambourins, toile 0,55 x 0,465, Epoque de Paris, Collection V. W. van Gogh, Laren.

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“Mais certains soirs de solitude, il sent peser sur lui l’égoïsme de la grande ville.”

(“But on certain lonely nights, he feels the egoism of the big city weigh upon him”) (Fig. 3.5, above). As described earlier, the editing together of these images, coupled with the zoom into their surface, clearly deploys a filmic grammar that is familiar to us, such that the movement between images gives us the sensation of a unified space. Cutting together these details from Van Gogh’s paintings from his late Parisian period, the interiority of the painter — his feelings of isolation, loneliness, exasperation — is emphasised; Resnais is not so much interested in using Van Gogh’s paintings to illustrate a biography as he is in revealing through montage an inner reality of the artist that has been left on the canvas, gesturing to what Huyghe describes as the “revelation of the unutterable” that lies beyond the surface texture of the painting.

We see in these sequences Resnais’ departure from the contemporaneous cultural animation model of fragmentation and re-assemblage, despite the fact that his film shares these primary formal impulses in re-cutting details from Van

Gogh’s paintings. The montage methodology that came to prominence as a pedagogical strategy in the cultural animation organisations of this period is transformed into the revelatory re-assemblages of Resnais’ film, which distinguish themselves from a demonstration of the development of art historical styles and movements over time, and instead connect the works themselves to the realm of psychic biography. The aesthetic experiments in fracturing and re-assembling images of the Dutch painter’s œuvre here would be extended in his Guernica, which takes these experiments and makes even more ambitious leaps outside of the world of art and into contemporary history. It is in

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this film that the revelatory montage aesthetic of his art documentary practice more clearly aligns with the historiographical methodology of the other films examined in the thesis, with Resnais’ fracturing of Picasso’s canvases demonstrating a newly legible political valency of the artist’s œuvre at this post- war juncture.

A Historical Rupture: Fragmentation and Discontinuity in Guernica

After directing another short documentary on Gauguin in 1950 that largely followed the aesthetic propositions of Van Gogh71, Guernica represented a shift in

Resnais’ approach to the art documentary format. Working this time in collaboration with co-director Robert Hessens in filming dozens of paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Resnais built upon his experiments with montage in

Van Gogh in his assembling of details of the Spanish artist’s work, yet moved beyond the latter’s focus on the psychology of creation in exploring the political prescience of Picasso’s œuvre.72 Resnais uses Picasso’s artworks from diverse

71 While Resnais deemed the use of black and white in Van Gogh to be an asset in his attempts to “créer des liens entre des toiles extrêmement disparates,” he judged his next film, Gauguin, to be a failure for its lack of colour: “Par contre, faire GAUGIN en noir et blanc était une chose consternante et vouée forcément à l’insuccès, car c’est un film que je ne pouvais concevoir qu’en couleur et que je n’ai fait en noir et blanc que pour des raisons économiques." Marcel Martin, "Discours de la méthode," Cinéma 64, no. 91, December 1961, 80.

72 Though Hessens is listed as Guernica’s co-director, it is unclear from any of the existing scholarship on the film precisely what the division of labour on this project was. Hessens was a painter and film director, and would go on to make several art documentaries throughout the 1950s, including Toulouse-Lautrec (1951) and Statues d’épouvante (1956). Hessens and Resnais had previously collaborated on an art documentary on French sculpture Charles Malfray in 1948, also produced by Les Amis de l’art, however this film now appears to be lost. In her detailed study of Guernica, which included information gleaned from interviews with Resnais in the early 1970s, Marie-Suzanne Lerat asserts that the film’s backdrops against which Picasso’s works appear were painted by Hessens. Marie-Suzanne Lerat, Guernica étude du film d'Alain Resnais et de R. Hessens sur le bombardement de Guernica, vu à travers des œuvres de Picasso (Besançon: M.S. Lerat, 1975), 34. However, there are no further indications here or elsewhere of Hessens’ role in the film’s production. In light of this lack of indications, and for ease of expression, I will be

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periods to evoke the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica during the

Spanish Civil War on the 26th of April 1937, during which German and Italian planes of the Francoist Condor Legion killed hundreds of civilians over the course of three hours.73 He explores the memory of this traumatic event that

Picasso himself had depicted over a decade earlier in light of the subsequent tragedies of WWII, and stakes a claim on the political poignancy and renewed relevance of Picasso’s anti-fascist imagery in light of the rise of right-wing ideologies in post-war France. Resnais’ re-assemblage of Picasso’s paintings and sculpture highlights the violent and tragic undercurrents running through the artist’s œuvre, while also identifying visual similarities between the figures that populate the artist’s work and a broader set of political imagery from leftist artists of the 20th century. Appealing to the intellectual and affective registers of montage in the Soviet tradition, Resnais brings the political engagements of

Picasso’s works to the surface, reflecting on the afterlife of the artist’s anti-fascist imaginary at this heavily politicised juncture of post-war history.

In contrast to Van Gogh, Guernica was made largely outside of the support network of the French cultural animation movements, depending more on institutional support from the art world and relationships with living artists for its development as a project. The film’s credit sequence thanks the Museum of

referring to the aesthetic decisions on montage in the film as Resnais’, but the reader should keep in mind that there could have been an element of collaboration here. 73 The film lists 2,000 civilian deaths in the opening credits, but this number has since been revised down in recent historical accounts of the bombing to around half of that number. See Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22-23. Resnais would return to the subject of the Spanish Civil War in La guerre est finie (1966).

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Modern Art in New York and the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, and a series of private collectors for their support in providing reproductions and relevant documentation, while Picasso himself loaned the statues that appear in the final minutes of the film.74 Produced once more by Pierre Braunberger, and with the film’s commentary written by surrealist poet Paul Éluard, Guernica was also

Resnais’ second collaboration with Robert Hessens — the film’s sole, concrete point of contact with the popular animation context apart from Resnais himself.75 In preparing the film, Resnais was once more to elaborate a treatment with its visual component almost entirely composed of artworks, working this time with originals, reproductions of paintings, and preparatory sketches by the artist that dated from 1901 through to 1949.76 Surrealist poet Paul Éluard wrote the film’s commentary, adapting parts of his poem, La Victoire du Guernica, and adding new lines of prose text. Guernica thus incorporated a much larger range of artistic forms than Van Gogh, something that mirrored a longer history of cross-medial presentation that had surrounded Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ painting dating back to its first unveiling at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s

74 Marie-Suzanne Lerat, Guernica étude du film d'Alain Resnais et de R. Hessens sur le bombardement de Guernica, vu à travers des œuvres de Picasso, Note 1, 51. One of the opening intertitles reads “Les réalisateurs remercient: Mmes Madeleine Braun et Dora Maar; MM. Barr, Fournier, Kootz, Regeas, Sabartes, Valsuani, Zervos, le « Museum of Modern Arts » et la Galerie Louise Léiris qui ont bien voulu mettre à leur disposition toute la documentation nécessaire."

75 Éluard also wrote the preface to Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français, discussed in Chapter 1. Braunberger would go on to produce several short art documentaries throughout the 1950s. Some of these are listed in Appendix 2. The film’s opening section voice-over commentary is read by Jacques Pruvost, the rest by actor Maria Casarès.

76 The film also includes shots of newspaper headlines and graffiti-covered walls designed by Robert Hessens, as a well as a photograph of the town of Guernica in ruins after the bombing. Though the opening intertitle reads “1902-1949,” Marie-Suzanne Lerat shows that a number of the film’s earliest dated works are in fact from 1901. Information on the identification and provenance of artworks and other images comes from Marie-Suzanne Lerat, Guernica étude du film d'Alain Resnais et de R. Hessens sur le bombardement de Guernica.

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Fair.77 ‘Guernica’ had been presented at the Pavilion alongside film shows by

Buñuel, musical concerts, a photograph of the city’s destruction, and, importantly, Paul Éluard’s poem, La Victoire de Guernica78 (Fig. 3.6, below); later that year, Éluard’s poem was reproduced alongside the preparatory sketches for

‘Guernica’ — many of which would appear in Resnais’ film — in Christian Zervos’ avant-garde revue Cahiers d’art.79 In its composition, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ itself was heavily influenced by the photomontages and eyewitness accounts published in French newspapers reporting on the city’s destruction in the days after the attack.80 Resnais’ film thus enters into dialogue with a series of mediating artistic representations of the Guernica bombing, which, in the face of a lack of filmic recording of the event, had constructed a rich artistic imaginary of the event as an emblem of slaughter of innocent lives by fascist forces81 (Fig. 3.7, below).

77 To distinguish between painting and film, I will be referring to Picasso’s painting with quotation marks.

78 Juan Manuel Bonet, “The Republican Pavillion of 1937 in Context,” Mayoral Magazine. Online. http://galeriamayoral.com/es/magazine/the-republican-pavilion-of-1937/ Accessed 4th October, 2018.

79 Cahiers d’art, nos. 4-5, 1937-1938; Éluard’s poem was reprinted alongside preparatory sketches for Guernica once more in The London Bulletin, no. 6, 1938. See Marie-Claude Taranger, "Cinéma, art et engagement: À propos de Guernica d’Alain Resnais et Robert Hessens (1949),” in Le film sur l’art et ses frontières, ed. Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles (Aix-en-Provence: Les Publications de l’université de Provence, 1997), 113. This parallel existence of elements of Resnais’ film across different media, a feature also of Van Gogh and its adaptation of the Orangerie catalogue’s reproductions and Huyghe’s text, looks forward to the experiments with text and image in Chris Marker’s work at Éditions du Seuil throughout the 1950s. See Chapter 4.

80 See Jean-Louis Ferrier, De Picasso à Guernica. Généalogie d’un tableau (Paris: Hachette, 1985).

81 Nancy Berthier, “Guernica ou l’image absente,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, nos. 89-90 (”Écritures filmiques du passé : archives, témoignages, montages”), 30.

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Figure 3.6: The cross-medial presentation of "Guernica" at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Spanish Pavilion viewed from two different angles.

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Figure 3.7: Front page of the French newspaper Ce Soir the day after the attack on Guernica.

The decision to make a film that heavily featured Picasso’s famous painting reflected a renewed interest in it on the part of scholars and historians in the decade following its first unveiling. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ received a relatively indifferent critical reception following its exhibition at the 1937

World’s Fair in Paris, and the aforementioned special issue dedicated to it in

Christian Zervos’ Cahiers d’art journal was one of the few contemporaneous celebrations of the work. However, by the late 1940s, the situation had definitively changed, not just in terms of the painting’s standing in the context of

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Picasso’s work, but also in terms of the symbolic importance of its subject matter in the bombing of the small Basque town. As Laurent Gervereau points out, the publication of key studies of Picasso’s work and the exhibition of the painting in major museums in Europe and North America in the latter half of the 1940s was pivotal to the renewed interest in the painting and the symbology of the town’s bombing:

Thus the legend of Guernica was rebuilt: it becomes the great painting of the 1937 World’s Fair that caused a scandal and about which everyone was talking. And the bombing itself becomes this great international scandal, the crucial episode of the Spanish Civil War, which gave rise to global outcry, mobilised France’s political parties, alerted public opinion, and caused mass demonstrations.82

It is in this context that a number of film projects are dedicated to the painting in the late 1940s, with Robert Flaherty planning a short film in 1948, and the

Danish director Helge Ernst making a six-minute documentary in 1949.83

Resnais’ Guernica thus exists within this lineage of film projects that had seized upon this renewed interest in Picasso’s painting, while also explicitly reflecting the recent historiographical shift that had made the bombing an emblematic expression of the cruelty of mid-century European fascism.

As Gervereau points out, by the late 1940s the bombing of Guernica had become a symbol for the mobilisation of an international anti-fascist movement,

82 Laurent Gervereau, Autopsie d’un chef d’œuvre: Guernica (Paris: Paris-Méditerrannée, 1996), 172. My emphasis.

83 Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 29.

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a nexus point for political and aesthetic engagement in much the same way that the Vietnam War would be for a later generation of the Left. In a specifically

French context, we can read Resnais’ decision to re-engage with the memory of the bombings as a reaction to the emergence of a marginal neo-fascist movement in the French post-war political landscape, a political position that I briefly traced with regards to Nuit et Brouillard in Chapter 2.84 In the years preceding the start of production on Guernica, the publication of political tracts by notable

French far-right intellectuals such as Maurice Bardèche were signal crystallisations of this renascent extreme right-wing politics in France, which had already begun to form in the wake of the épurations of collaborators immediately after the Liberation.85 Bardèche’s texts of this period — which include Lettre à François Mauriac (1947) and Nuremberg ou la terre promise

(1948), the latter earning him a brief imprisonment by the French authorities — were a lightning rod for conservative thought in post-war France, mounting not just a retrospective defence of the Vichy regime, but also demonstrating an effort to “rehabilitate the moral virtues enshrined in Fascism and National Socialism.”86

The publication of other far-right periodicals such as René Malliavin’s Ecrits de

Paris, as well as the recuperation of ministers from the Vichy regime for

84 Sam Di Iorio has made this connection to the anti-fascist politics of Resnais and Marker’s later Les Statues meurent aussi and Nuit et Brouillard, with reference to historian Joseph Alagazy’s pioneering study of post-war fascism in France. See Sam Di Iorio, “The Fragile Present: Statues Also Die with Night and Fog,” South Central Review, 2, no. 33 (Summer 2016), 21-22, 26-27; Joseph Alagazy, La tentation néo-fasciste en France de 1944 à 1965 (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 59-94.

85 Maurice Bardèche, Lettre à François Mauriac (Paris: La pensée libre, 1947); Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la terre promise (Paris: Les Septs couleurs, 1948). Bardèche had co-written with his half-brother Robert Brasillach his pro-Franco account of the Spanish Civil War just before the outbreak of WWII. Maurice Bardèche, Robert Brasillach, Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Plon, 1939).

86 J. G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 57.

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government positions in the Fourth Republic, demonstrated that the concern over France’s recent collaborationist past connected to a broader history of

European fascism, whose ideological underpinnings were still present in French society.87

I read Resnais’ decision to return to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ painting and the bombing of the Basque town that occasioned it in part as a response to these emergent far-right ideological currents in France. Furthermore, Guernica presented Resnais with an opportunity to engage with a remembrance of this central event of the Spanish Civil War in the wake of WWII and its subsequent historical traumas. 88 In an interview from 1956, Resnais reflected on his separation in time from the event as a productive source of historical reflection:

Guernica seemed to us to be the first manifestation of the desire for destruction for the pleasure of destruction: to test this out on a human population, just to see. This starts with Guernica and we see where it ends up. The film should have been made ten years earlier, but, when it comes to cinema, films are always made after the fact. [au cinéma, les films sont faits après].89

87 For more on the history of emergent far-right politics in post-war France, see J. G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France, 52-67; Joseph Algazy, La Tentation Néo-Fasciste en France de 1944 à 1965, 59-132.

88 These were two subjects that he would address directly in the following decade in Nuit et Brouillard and Hiroshima mon amour. See also the discussion on La Vie commence demain and Nuit et Brouillard in Chapter 2.

89 Interview from 1956, reprinted in Bernard Pingaud, “Alain Resnais à la question,” Premier Plan, no. 18, (“Alain Resnais”), October, 1961, 36. Resnais’ comments here are reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s reflections throughout his Histoire(s) du cinéma about the cinema’s failure to address the Shoah as it was happening. See Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 127-130.

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With the spectre of Hiroshima and the concentration camps of WWII hanging over the film, Resnais placed the bombing of Guernica within a historical continuum of subsequent violence against civilians over the following decade.

Paul Éluard’s updates to the original poem that accompanied Picasso’s painting at its unveiling — his “La Victoire du Guernica” (1937) — for the film’s commentary are particularly revealing with regards to the historiographical optic in which Resnais places the Guernica bombing. For Resnais’ film, Éluard kept just over half of the 14 stanzas from the poem which are re-arranged and intercut with a few new stanzas of blank verse and explanatory prose text.90 The updated commentary indicated that German planes had bombed the Basque town, an addition that drew the ire of the censor, who forced Resnais to cut the word ‘German’ and replace it with ‘Nazi’ in November 1950.91 As Sylvie

Lindeperg notes, this decision by the censor was a response to the diplomatic demands of the Cold War and the European project, respecting West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s “politique de mémoire” that distanced the German people from the crimes of Hitler’s regime.92 A second envisioned addition by

Éluard was even more incendiary, drawing even more explicit parallels between the bombing of Guernica and civilian attacks by Axis forces during WWII. Near

90 Reprinted in Marie-Suzanne Lerat, Guernica étude du film d'Alain Resnais et de R. Hessens sur le bombardement de Guernica, 37-38. Éluard’s commentary for the film, including the original 1949 text and the version appearing in the film are reprinted as "Guernica. Découpage, après montage défintif, et dialogues in-extenso," Avant-scène, no. 38, June 1964, 8-10.

91 This cut is noted in the Avant-scène reproduction of the script.

92 On these cuts by the censor, see Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard ». Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 146. Lindeperg also notes that after the release of Les Statues meurent aussi, French censors requested that Resnais and Marker cut references to Hitler and Nazism in a sequence showing German spectators hurl bottles and abuse at the American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson during a bout in 1950. Sylvie Lindeperg, « Nuit et Brouillard », 146-148.

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the start of the film’s original script, Éluard made the following addition:

“Guernica, like Oradour and like Hiroshima, are the world’s capitals of living peace. Their nothingness makes heard a protest louder than terror itself.”93

Though this addition would be cut from the final version of the film, it demonstrates the importance for Éluard, in returning to his poem, of placing the remembrance of Guernica within the context of subsequent civilian crimes wrought in the following decade.

Figure 3.8: Superimposition of Picasso's Bateleurs over a photograph of Guernica in ruins. Pablo Picasso, Bataleurs, 1905-06 (Oil on canvas, 234 x 222cm).

This historiographical framework that I have outlined above filters through to

Resnais’ fragmentation and re-assemblage of Picasso’s artworks, which locates visual resonances between details that make legible an artistic imaginary of anti-

93 “Guernica comme Oradour et comme Hiroshima sont les capitales de la paix vivante. Leur néant fait entendre une protestation plus forte que la terreur même." Éluard is referring to the massacre of 642 men, women and children in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane by the SS on the 10th of June, 1944. “Guernica,” Avant-scène, 10.

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fascist struggle running through the artist’s work. Signposting this move to draw correspondences between Picasso’s work and a broader historical continuum of resistance to fascism, the film opens on a photograph of the town of Guernica in ruins taken after the attack, over which Resnais superimposes a reproduction of

Picasso’s painting, Bataleurs (1905) (Fig. 3.8, above). Echoing the voiceover’s introduction of stanzas from Éluard’s “La Victoire de Guernica”, which describes the physical bodies of the town as an almost cubist deconstruction — “visages bons au feu, visages bons au froid”, the “cœur renversé” and the “trésor dans les yeux” of the women and children — Resnais cuts between a series of portrait paintings from Picasso’s early, pre-cubist blue and pink periods (1901–1907), moving closer and closer into details of the bodies and gradually cutting out of the frames the parts of the paintings not depicting the body (Fig. 3.9, below). The contrast to Van Gogh’s fluid spatial coherency between images is striking, abandoning the latter’s recourse to classical continuity editing that encloses us within the artist’s world and instead producing dissonant relations between images that take us outside of it. Here, Resnais’ segmentation of the body at the expense of the space that surrounds it, as well as the graphic disunity and repetition of shots, recalls instead the dissonant ‘collisions’ of montage in

Eisenstein’s filmmaking.94 Revelling precisely in the discordance between the images he brings together of Picasso’s œuvre, the aesthetic challenges of montage are thus in some sense the inverse of those put forth in Van Gogh.

Looking at Guernica, the impression is not of a reconstitution through montage of

“the world that photography reveals” (as Resnais put it of Van Gogh), but of a

94 Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 49.

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series of intellectual and affect-laden associations forged from the details of the painting, the visceral effect of the fragmentation evoking the violence of the bombing and the destruction and death of Basque civilians.

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Figure 3.9: Resnais' rapid montage of Picasso’s depictions of the body in Guernica. Pablo Picasso,Tête de femme, 1902; Pablo Picasso, L’acteur, 1905; Pablo Picasso, Femme à l’eventail, 1905; Pablo Picasso, Mort d’Arlequin, 1905.

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Figure 3.10: A visual reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in Guernica. On the left, a sequence of consecutive close-ups in Guernica of Etude pour Guernica (20th May 1937), 23 x 29cm. On the right, three consecutive shots from Battleship Potemkin.

In a later sequence in the film, Resnais extends the above Eisensteinian aesthetic inspiration to a direct visual reference to the Soviet filmmaker’s work.

This reference to Eisenstein is contained within a longer sequence, in which

Resnais cuts together details from Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, isolating close-ups of animals and humans in pain in a striking evocation of the carnage of the attacks.

As Maria Casares’ commentary describes the destruction of the bombings,

Resnais cuts between images of enraged bulls and horses crying out in anguish

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from Picasso’s painting. At the culminating point of these exchanges, as Guy

Bernard’s soundtrack reaches a crescendo, Resnais intercuts three extreme close ups of a study for the ‘Guernica’ painting of a bull’s head in very quick succession, irresistibly recalling Eisenstein’s rapid cuts between three statues of lions at the close of the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin (Fig. 3.10, above). The visual citation of this sequence of Eisenstein’s film is repeated in the cut that immediately follows: we see a horse crying out in pain and appearing to crumple to the ground, which plays like a shortened version of the death of the woman on the steps in Odessa, who falls to the ground, pushing her child’s carriage down the staircase (Fig. 3.11, below).

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Figure 3.11: A second visual reference to Battleship Potemkin in Guernica. Resnais assembles three different preparatory studies of “Guernica completed in May 1937 by Picasso into a consecutive sequence of shots (left). Three shots from the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (right).

What is to be made of this reference to this primal scene of Soviet political cinema appearing in a French film about Guernica made in 1950? On the surface, we can read a connection being made here by Resnais about two instances of state violence against civilians, drawing a link between the massacre of unarmed

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civilians in the Russian Empire by the Cossacks after the turn of the century to the razing of the Basque town just over three decades later. Indeed, Resnais’ compatriot Chris Marker himself would come back to the Odessa Steps sequence

— and even the same images — a generation later for the opening sequence of his Le Fond de l’air est rouge, where Eisenstein’s film appears as a kind of ur-text of the actions and gestures found in newsreel footage of political protest of leftist movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Fig. 3.12, below).95 Yet there is something more here than just the suggestion of a simple equivalency between the two events that would collapse the difference between an earlier instance of monarchic suppression of domestic disorder with the international reach of the mid-1930s fascist pact. As I read it, Resnais’ citation of Potemkin more broadly reflects a desire to draw out the visual resonances of the works of leftist artists across time, charting the consistency of this visual imaginary they have constructed in response to violence against civilians. In so doing, Resnais’ montage here constructs what art historian Aby Warburg termed a

‘pathosformel’ of emotional gestures appearing across the history of art, updating the latter’s charting of the ‘afterlife of antiquity’ to a kind of afterlife of gestures of civilian repression in 20th century modernist art.96 By tracing this lineage of

95 On the citation of Eisenstein’s Potemkin in Marker’s film, see Daniel Fairfax, “Montage as Resonance: Chris Marker and the Dialectical Image,” Senses of Cinema, September 2012 (Special Chris Marker Dossier). http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/montage-as- resonance-chris-marker-and-the-dialectical-image/ . Online. Accessed October 5th, 2018.

96 Warburg’s notion of the pathosformel is first introduced in his essay on Dürer from 1905, and would be a structuring principle of his Atlas Mnemosyne. Reprinted in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. and ed. David Britt (Los Angeles, California: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 585-589. See also Aby Warburg, “The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past,” trans. Matthew Rampley, Art in Translation, 1, issue 2, 2009, 273-283.

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gestures and their migration across a history of film and painting, Resnais’ fragmentation and re-assemblage of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ becomes a means of identifying and demonstrating the correspondences in the work with other instances of political art. In contrast to a Malrucien art historiographical position that would aim to place these correspondences as part of the development of a stylistic continuity over time, Resnais’ montage here stakes a claim for the valence of this particular configuration of gestures as they relate to historico- political moments of crisis. His concern here is not so much to demonstrate that

Picasso is a stylistic inheritor of Eisenstein, but that the repetition of gestures and shared imagery in their work constitute an art historical imaginary of responses to crisis. The dissonant force of Resnais’ montage and its sharp associations with the visual history of civilian repression bring the memory of

Guernica into relation with the subsequent traumas of WWII, seizing upon the visual contours of the painter’s work in illuminating its political valence at this moment of French history.

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Figure 3.12: Visual reference to Battleship Potemkin in Le Fond de l’air est rouge. A sequence of four consecutive shots in Chris Marker's Le Fond de l'air est rouge (1977), alternating between images from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and footage of violence against protesters in the 1960s and 70s.

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Conclusion

While Resnais’ Guernica was in production in 1949, Chris Marker completed work on a rather curious entry into his œuvre: his only known theatre piece, a play entitled L’Homme et sa liberté97 (Fig. 3.13, below). Though there is almost no information on the context in which the play was produced and performed in the existing scholarship on Marker, the inside cover of the original Seuil publication indicates that it was part of a short-lived series at the publishing house entitled

‘Veillées’ (‘Evening Gatherings’), where collections of excerpts of texts and songs were published for performances at boy scout meetings and by theatre troupes.98 Marker’s own contribution to this series features a prisoner in a cell dreaming of his freedom and a Greek-style chorus, both of whom recite texts on the theme of liberty, which range from poetry by Jacques Prévert and Jean

Cocteau to popular children’s songs and even sequences from other plays by Jean

Giraudoux. Though Marker is listed as the book’s author, the play is comprised almost entirely of these excerpts of texts written by others. Typical of the practices of this post-war moment of cultural politics that I have traced throughout this chapter, Marker refers to the play in the introduction as a

“montage de textes.”99 In this same introduction, Marker includes the following

97 Chris Marker, L’homme et sa liberté. Jeu pour la veillée utilisant des textes recueillis par Chris Marker (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1949).

98 The inside cover also indicates that the texts were assembled during the Rencontres Internationales in August 1948 in Constance with the aid of members of the Centre d’Expression Dramatique. Hervé Serry briefly describes Marker’s L’homme et sa liberté in the context of Seuil’s Boy Scout publications. Hervé Serry, Les Editions du Seuil: 70 ans d’édition. Catalogue de l'exposition "Les Editions du Seuil. Histoires d'une maison " (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2008), 29. 99 Chris Marker, L’homme et sa liberté, 7.

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indications of how he hoped that this theatrical montage would function and be received:

One last thing: there is no declaration protecting this text. It is endlessly exploitable [taillable et corvéable à merci] and that’s the way I wish it to be. I say this not out of masochism, but rather under the pretence that from this will flourish a theatrical activity that is finally bound to our true concerns and obsessions, one in which memory and culture no longer give birth to puppets, but rather give a face to our angels and demons.100

These texts were thus to be combined according to the desires of the particular group on the day, with Marker giving the performers the liberty to recite them in the order and manner that they chose. Marker’s introduction here envisions the centrality of montage to the success of a work like L’Homme et sa liberté for its performers. In piecing together and reciting these fragments of song, poetry and theatre, Marker’s play sees this act of re-assembling these texts as a means of creating a second life for them, taking the words and songs of authors past and revivifying them in this process of confrontation.

100 Chris Marker, L’homme et sa liberté, 8. This citation and other parts of Marker’s introduction are included in Julien Faraut’s 2013 film Regard neuf sur Olympia 52, and their implications are explored with regards to his broader philosophy of filmmaking.

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Figure 3.13: Front cover of Chris Marker's L'Homme et sa liberté. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1949).

Though referring to the interpretation of a work of theatre, Marker’s indications here provide an evocative encapsulation of the philosophical principles governing this moment of cultural politics of in post-war France, running from the writing of André Malraux, the popular education movement founded in the wake of the Liberation, and ending up with Resnais’ Van Gogh and

Guernica. The assemblage of cultural forms in a range of permutations shed new light on the history of art and culture in this period, drawing attention to the myriad metamorphoses of human creation as it has developed over time. In

Resnais’ film, however, the memorial stakes of this act of assemblage were much

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more explicitly aligned with the concerns of the present: he saw an opportunity for these works of the past to take on not the status of puppets — inert and awaiting the intercession of the human hand — but, through montage, to be re- animated such that they might “give a face to our angels and demons.” One thinks here of Marker’s assertion in Les Statues meurent aussi, in which, now dealing with the visual history of other cultures, in other times, he posed the problem in terms of the life and death of cultural forms; “Un objet est mort quand le regard vivant qui se posait sur lui a disparu.” What would a process equivalent to the reinstatement of a ‘regard vivant’ — that is, a regard of the present — mean for another audience, and for another set of works of art? Starting with Van Gogh and extending his discoveries in Guernica, Resnais restores an active, political regard vivant on these artworks in his dual reflection on the history of cultural forms and the identification of newly legible appearances in these works, whose complexity and diversity cannot be contained solely to the realm of art history.

Resnais’ fragmentation and re-assemblage of the artworks of the past re-think their relation to contemporary history, reflecting upon the continued relevance of these forms in giving shape to the ‘true concerns and obsessions’ of his time.

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Chapter 4. Time and Place: Montage in Early Marker

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place.

- T. S. Eliot1

In a 2003 interview with film historian Antoine de Baecque, Chris Marker reflected that he had always felt uncomfortable with the label of ‘socially engaged’ filmmaker, reflecting that “[f]or many people, ‘engaged’ means

‘political’, and politics, the art of compromise … bores me deeply.” Marker goes on to say that what interests him:

[I]s history, and politics interests me only to the degree that it represents the mark history makes on the present. With an obsessive curiosity… I keep asking: How do people manage to live in such a world? And that’s where my mania comes from, to see ‘how things are going’ in this place or that.2

Five decades earlier, Marker had travelled around the world to direct his first three films: Olympia 52 (1952), filmed at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic games,

Dimanche à Pekin (Sunday in Beijing, 1956) in Beijing, and Lettre de Sibérie

(Letter from Siberia, 1957) across a vast expanse of what was then Soviet territory. In contrast to the films of his contemporaries. Vedrès and Resnais, these three films are explicitly engaged with questions of place, traversing national borders out of a desire to see “how things are going” in another part of

1 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 85.

2 Quoted in “Rare Marker,” Trans. Dave Kehr, Film Comment, Vol. 3, No. 39, May 2003, 39.

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the world. Marker’s films also present a departure from the practice of re- assembling existing footage or plastic forms I have examined in this thesis, with the director working almost exclusively with footage he himself had captured.

However, despite these surface differences, Marker demonstrates an affinity with the reflexive historical thinking of Vedrès and Resnais, while also placing an importance on montage in making legible the operations of time on the cinematic image. In these three films charting contemporary events and developments in foreign countries, Marker is equally attuned to the intersecting histories that have shaped these places, demonstrating the persistence of various currents of national, geo-political and cultural history in their contemporary political realities that often sit uneasily with the dominant political narratives of that period. Marker highlights these co-existing temporalities in his method of assembling contemporary images, with the comparisons and analogies he creates through montage demonstrating the co-existence of earlier social and cultural formations in the present. His attention to these diverse historical temporalities and narratives in his films on place aligns his early work with the more retrospectively-facing films of Vedrès and Resnais in this period, Marker’s assemblages of contemporary images making legible the marks of historical change that persist in them.

In this chapter, I examine how Marker privileges montage as means of expressing the co-existence of diverse historical narratives and temporalities in contemporary places across his three films of the 1950s. I argue that the montage practice that Marker develops across essays, compilations of texts, collages, and books combining photographic reproductions and text in this

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period constitute direct aesthetic precursors to his early travel films. I trace the origins and influences of these practices, examining Marker’s ties with the post- war popular education movement in the 1940s, while also suggesting contemporary influences across media that range from musique concrète, surrealist and Dadaist collage and comic books. These diverse influences are evident in particular in Marker’s work as an editor of Les Editions du Seuil’s collection of travel guides, Petite Planète, from 1954–1958, where Marker’s assemblages of text and image on page also saw him develop a method that highlighted historical parallels, analogies and correspondences of national narratives. The Petite Planète books look ahead to his early films on travel and foreign countries, which not only share thematic similarities, but carry forward the experiments with text and image to a cinematic form to emphasise the continued presence of previous forms of political organisation, past geo-political struggles, and the relics of older cultural forms in the footage he records.

Documenting the 1952 Helsinki Olympics – the first Games at which the Soviet

Union would compete – as well as developments in two socialist nations in the

People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, I argue that Marker’s demonstration of these coterminous and often conflicting historical narratives that persist in the present is in part a response to the geo-political context of the

Cold War and the politicised, monolithic narratives that it had produced.

Demonstrating a sensitivity towards the distinct temporal regimes that are present in the continuing practices and rituals of contemporary social and cultural life in these places, as well as the continuing effects of past geo-political struggles and national political narratives, Marker complicates contemporary narratives that had been limited by the political horizons of the period. Marker’s

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suggestion through montage of contiguous presence of phenomena from across historical epoch aims instead to create a historical legibility of the images he records of these places, in which their deeply unstable political and cultural realities are deciphered with regards to their relationship with an ever-present and multi-faceted past.

Marker as Writer and Editor, and First Cinematographic Ventures, 1946-1954

While biographical details of Marker’s life have traditionally been exceptionally difficult to establish, recent scholarship has demonstrated his considerable involvement with the left wing, popular education milieu in the period directly following the end of the war.3 A member of both Peuple et Culture and Travail et

Culture from 1946 onwards, Marker also spent much of this initial post-war period contributing articles, poems, film criticism, and political journalism to the left wing Catholic journal Esprit, writing in total around 70 pieces that range from short stories, poems, film criticism, and reports on current global events.4

3 The paucity of biographical information has been remedied to some extent by the Cinémathèque françaises’ acquisition of Chris Marker’s personal archive and the exhibition of some of its contents for their May-July 2018 exhibit dedicated to Marker. Information on Marker’s activities during the war came from the Archives fédérales suisses, where researchers found a testimony given by Marker to the Swiss military police in which he detailed his involvement in the Resistance. See Jean-Michel Frodon, “1939-1946, fragments biographiques et littéraires,” in Chris Marker, eds. Christine Van Assche, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Michel Frodon, and Florence Tissot (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, 2018), 30-37. It is likely that through the personal connections made in his involvement in the Resistance that Marker subsequently became involved in the popular education movement. On the links between the French Resistance and the popular education movement, see Chapter 3. For an exceptionally thorough overview of Marker’s activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s, see Hervé Serry, “Lectures biographiques et consécrations croisées : pourquoi Chris Marker fait-il de Jean Giraudoux un « écrivain de toujours »?” Mémoires du livre, issue 1, Automne, 2015. Online. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1035761ar. Accessed 8th October 2018.

4 Esprit’s connections to the popular education movement were numerous. An important figure linking Marker’s work at Esprit and the popular education movement was Joseph Rovan, who introduced Marker to the journal. A Franco-German journalist and historian who was interned at Dachau for his role in the resistance, Rovan would, along with Cacérès and Dumazedier, go on to

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Reflecting his involvement in the popular education milieu, his writings and publications in the immediate post-war period adopt the practices of fragmentation and re-assemblage of cultural forms that I traced in the work of these organisations in Chapter 3. For example, writing for Esprit, Marker authors two articles entitled “Newsreel” in 1947 and 1948, in which he takes newspaper headlines or ledes from French newspapers, which are interspersed by his own short sarcastic criticisms.5 While working in Peuple et Culture’s Centre de

Documentation and Travail et Culture’s theatre department, Marker edited the first three issues of the journal DOC in 1947-1948, published at the joint initiative of both cultural animation organisations6 (Fig. 4.1, below). In these early editions, the DOC journal was designed as a pedagogical tool for animateurs, featuring a combination of extracts from works of literature, poetry, popular songs, and even opera, with background contextual notes designed to help with their use in conferences and events. For example, DOC’s 1947

Christmas issue features a dossier of information for ciné-club screenings on

Rossellini’s Paisa written by André Bazin, a musicologist’s introduction to the life form Peuple et Culture, becoming its vice-president, while simultaneously taking up a post as a secretary of the editorial committee at Esprit immediately after the war. Rovan later went on to become part of Esprit’s steering committee in the early 1950s. See Joseph Rovan, Mémoires d’un français qui se souvient d’avoir été allemand (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999), 234-243. For more on the multiple links between Peuple et Culture, Esprit and Editions du Seuil during this period, see Hervé Serry, Dominique Raoul Duval, Morad Montazami, Marc-Olivier Padis, “Les années Seuil” Roundtable at Centre Pompidou, Saturday 23rd November, 2013, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1z95o8 Online. Accessed 8th October, 2018. For more on the links between Marker and Rovan in the latter half of the 1940s, see Thomas Tode, “Le détonateur de la culture cinématographique allemande d’après-guerre: les rencontres cinématographiques franco-allemandes (1946-1953),” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 60, March 2010, 102-121.

5 C.M. “Newsreel,” Esprit, no. 133, May 1947, 836-838; C.M. "Newsreel,” Esprit, no. 146, July 1948, 93-94

6 Marked edited DOC in collaboration with Joseph Rovan. See Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 25-26.

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and work of Joseph Haydn, an article giving advice for how to start a theatre club, and Christmas-themed excerpts from texts by Al Hine, Gabriela Mistral and

André Malraux.7 The fragmentary presentation of these eclectic texts, as well as their design for pedagogical use represents a strong continuation of the organisation’s model of ‘entraînement mentale’, with Marker adopting its montage strategies to re-engage prospective readers and students with these works.

Figure 4.1: Marker's cover design for the German DOC equivalent, DOK, published in 1950. We see here the influence of Dadaist and surrealist collages and photomontage, which would be a feature of Marker’s publications in the 1950s.8

7 Doc. November-December, 1947-1948 (“Noel”)

8 DOK. Sondernummer Film und Kultur, no. 50/3 (1950). DOK was a product of the post-war French-German popular education encounters that were led by Rovan, Marker, Bazin and others working within Peuple et Culture. See Enno Patalas, “Scènes de la vie d’un cinéphile allemand.

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This fragmentary presentation of existing texts is also a feature of some of

Marker’s other early publications in this immediate post-war period with the publishing house Les Editions du Seuil.9 Marker co-authored several titles in the publishing house’s Regards neufs series — discussed in Chapter 3 — which was organised, like the DOC journal, as a compilation of texts for popular education animateurs on a range of themes.10 Marker co-authored Regards sur le mouvement ouvrier (1951) with Peuple et Culture co-founder Benigno Cacérès, a collection of songs, prose, poetry and even excerpts of government reports that related to the history of the worker’s movement.11 As in Marker’s introduction to

L’Homme et sa liberté, published by Seuil two years earlier, the authors’ introduction to Regards sur le mouvement ouvrier indicates that the fragments of text are to be combined as the animateur wishes, encouraging those leading group readings to have them “disposés, reliés, ou exploités en un véritable

Avant Schluchsee et après,” Cinéma, no. 6, Autumn, 2003, 111-127; Thomas Tode, “Le détonateur de la culture cinématographique allemande d’après-guerre,” 100-121.

9 As Catherine Lupton puts it, the Regards neufs series shares with DOC “[t]he same principles of combining diverse source materials, and promoting their creative transformation and adaptation.” Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, 26. Marker would have a long relationship with Les Editions du Seuil: after rejecting a manuscript of poetry that he submitted in 1946, Seuil published his first and only novel, Le Cœur net (1949), and would employ him as the director of the publishing house’s “Petite Planète” series from 1954-1958. For a discussion of Marker’s relationship with Seuil in the 1940s and 50s, see Hervé Serry, “Lectures biographiques et consécrations croisées.” Seuil’s offices were in the same building as Esprit’s, and along with Peuple et Culture, formed what Arnaud Lambert terms “un ensemble assez cohérent sur l’échiquier intellectuel français – grosso modo celui du catholicisme progressiste, marqué par le Personnalisme de Mounier. » Arnaud Lambert, Also Known as Chris Marker (Paris: Point du Jour, 2008), 47.

10 See for example, Regards neufs sur le cinéma, eds. Jacques Chevalier and Mag Egly (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953); Regards neufs sur la chanson, ed. Pierre Barlatier, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1954).

11 Christian Marker, Benigno Cacérès (Textes assemblés et présentés par), Regards sur le mouvement ouvrier (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1951).

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montage dramatique.”12 These experiments with selective citation and assemblage typical of broader, post-war montage-based practices of the popular education movement are also present in Marker’s Giraudoux par lui-même

(1952), a piece of literary criticism on the œuvre of French novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux.13 A contribution to Seuil’s “Ecrivains de toujours” collection launched in 1951, Marker’s essay provides literary analysis of

Giraudoux’s works, as well a short biography of the writer and a portrait of inter- war France that is constituted by excerpts from Giraudoux’s own writing.14 In its montage of citations, Giraudoux par lui-même recalls Resnais’ Van Gogh from five years earlier, with Marker substituting the assemblage of details of the canvas with the citation of fragments of text in his portrait of the writer and his times.15

12 Christian Marker, Benigno Cacérès, Regards sur le mouvement ouvrier, 6.

13 Christian Marker, Giraudoux par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952). Marker’s book was a contribution to the “Par lui-même” collection at the Editions du Seuil launched in 1951, consisting of critical essays on the œuvre of classic and contemporary French writers. The “Par lui-même” collection in and of itself inaugurated Seuil’s “Microcosmes” series, which published cheap, small format books on science, culture, religion. The collection of guidebooks entitled Petite Planète that Marker edited from 1954-1958 was also part of the Microcosmes collection. Marker’s editing of these books is discussed later in this chapter.

14 Marker’s decision to connect Giraudoux’s writing to broader political history was a particularly pointed move at the time, as Jean-Paul Sartre had famously criticised Giraudoux for being the opposite of an engagé writer. See Hervé Serry, “Lectures biographiques et consécrations croisées.” Marker would repeat this objection again a decade later during a rare interview, declaring that: “Jean Giraudoux est le plus grand écrivain engagé de notre époque, on s’en rendra peut-être compte un jour.” In Jean-Louis Pays, “Des humanismes agissants: entretiens avec Marker et Gatti,” Miroir du cinéma, no. 2, May 1962, 7.

15 Thank you to Julien Faraut for pointing out this connection between Marker’s Giraudoux par lui-même and Resnais’ Van Gogh.

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Figure 4.2: Opening title credits of Olympia 52

Figure 4.3: Poster for Olympia 52 designed by Marker Note the influence of Soviet agitprop posters in the Constructivist vein.16

16 Thank you to Julien Faraut for sending this poster to me.

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Marker’s association with the popular education milieu in this period would also have a central role in the realisation of his first feature-length film,

Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Olympic games held in Helsinki17 (Figs.

4.2-4.3, above). Peuple et Culture’s president, Joffre Dumazedier, proposed the idea for a film documenting the Helsinki Olympics, sending a team of eighty people from the organisation to the Games, and placing Marker in charge of directing the film.18 The film’s small crew was unable to obtain permission to film the sporting events from up close like the television and official film crews, forcing the crew to make the best of this difficult shooting position and to film from the stands over the shoulders of the public.19 Perhaps because of these restrictions on its production, the film also includes long sequences dedicated to that which occurs outside of the official athletic events: the Olympic village, training, images of Helsinki before the opening ceremony, as well as references to contemporary political history.20 In response to the Soviet Union’s appearance

17 Resnais refers to the existence of multiple short 8mm films that Marker had made in 1946, but which have subsequently been lost. See “Introduction.” The film’s title is likely a double reference to Jean Giraudoux’s play Amphitron 38 (1929) – in which the author estimates that his play is the 38th adaptation of the Greek myth of Amphitryon – and Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary on the Berlin Olympics, Olympia, from which several images appear in Marker’s film.

18 The film was produced with the collaboration of another popular education organisation, "Tourisme et Travail,” and funded by the French Ministry of Education and the Direction générale Jeunesse et Sports. See http://chrismarker.ch/longs-metrages-de-chris-marker- 52.html#83ojccT6 (accessed 21st January, 2019). Peuple et Culture co-founder Benigno Cacérès would also be in attendance, and would publish a book about the experience with Editions du Seuil. Benigno Cacérès, La XVe Olympiad (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953).

19 Julien Faraut discusses this in his documentary on Marker’s film, Regard neuf sur Olympia 52 (2013). The section of the film dedicated to Emil Zátopek’s victory in the long-distance 10,000m race makes use of this shooting position in describing the overarching dramaturgy of the race.

20 An early sequence cutting together images of Helsinki before the start of the games that displays a certain influence of the rapid montage of the city symphony films of the 1920s. A shot of raindrops producing ripples on the surface of the water in the shape of the Olympic Rings immediately recalls the recurring visual refrain of Joris Iven’s Rain (1928).

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at the games for the first time in history, Marker briefly references the underlying political context of the Cold War at a few moments in the film that presage his more concrete address of the period’s diplomatic tensions in

Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie. These political reflections create discrete intervals in Marker’s account of the sporting events and organisation of the games, and to my mind contain the seeds of an aesthetic and historical model of rupture that Marker thoroughly develops throughout the 1950s. As we will see in these brief sequences of Olympia 52, Marker interrupts the focus on the unfolding contemporary events to link them to historical phenomena of the more distant past, ‘thickening’ the present — in Husserl’s terms — by exposing its relation to multiple, intersecting politico-historical narratives.21

21 ‘Thickened present’ is Husserl’s term. Quoted in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 82.

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Figure 4.4: Barbara Rotraut Pleyer in Olympia 52 Rotraut interrupts the opening ceremony and is ejected from the stadium.

An example of this rupture in Olympia’s present tense first occurs in an early sequence in the film depicting the opening ceremony of the Games. In the sequence, we see teams from each nation file into the stadium and the Finnish torchbearer Paavo Nurmi light the Olympic torch to mark the opening of the

Games. Suddenly, there is an interruption in the ceremony, as a young German political activist, Barbara Rotraut Pleyer, runs across the field and attempts to deliver a speech at the podium that implores spectators for peace (Fig. 4.4, above). After officials remove Pleyer from the stadium, the ceremony restarts with the singing of the Olympic Hymn and the pronouncement of the Olympic oath, with Marker’s voiceover narration citing the oath that promises to hold the

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games in a “chivalrous spirit for the honour of our countries and the glory of sport.” Mirroring Pleyer’s interruption of the ceremony, Marker cuts away from the images of the ceremony to a brief history of the Olympic games, diverting his attention from the immediate capture of the unfolding events, and introducing the film’s only excerpts of archival footage and photographs and images from other films. As we learn of the Ancient Greek origins of the Games and the suite of champions that have emerged since their recommencement in the late 19th century, Marker continues on to describe the Berlin 1936 games and the two following in 1940 and 1944 that were not held due to WWII. Over images cut together from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, Marker’s voiceover narration reads:

This impressively staged celebration of youth concealed the germs of the bloody games [jeux sanglants] that would interrupt the Olympics for twelve years … The flame that went out that day would reappear in the skies of Europe, and as the Olympic flag would be lowered from its mast, another flag would be raised for years, until the day that those games would end and peace would return.

As this phrase ends, there is shot of a swastika flag in the middle of two

Finnish flags from Riefenstahl’s film, followed by an abrupt cut to a row of

Finnish flags with the two Coca-Cola signs in the foreground from the Helsinki

Games, on which the company’s “Drink Ice Cold” slogan features in Finnish (Fig.

4.5, below). Marker’s association of loaded semantic indicators in this quick montage of images (flags, advertising logos of a signal American consumer product) is on one level hardly subtle; one could simply read the sequencing of these two images as a neat visual rhyme that narrativises the installation of

American cultural and political hegemony after the vanquishing of German

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fascism during WWII. While the citation from Riefenstahl’s film and the historical parallels drawn in Marker’s voiceover commentary certainly encourage this reading, the sequence’s most provocative effects occur with the next cut to the footage of the continuing opening ceremony.22 The effect of this expository historical flashback — causing a rupture in the contemporary, present-day sequence — and its narrativisation of the opening ceremony has impacted on the experience of the scenes of the opening ceremony that continue to unfold onscreen. As we see the images of athletes filing into the stadium, these contemporary images appear suddenly thickened with the undercurrents of broader political history briefly exposed in the preceding insertion of images.

Pleyer’s interruption of the ceremony appears now as a response to the deeply traumatic recent events of European history, and of an aspiration for peace at a particularly tense moment of geopolitical manoeuvring of the Cold War that had manifested at that moment in the conflict in Korea.23

22 The original version of the script held in the Peuple et Culture archives on Rue St. Maur, Paris, makes a more explicit link between the history of the games and world history at this point : "L’histoire des Jeux se confond ainsi avec la nôtre : victoire de l’homme sur la bête, victoire sur l’adversaire et quelquefois avec force dégâts. Mais surtout, victoire de l’homme sur lui-même." Marker also includes a discussion of the Nazi Aryan ideology as it was expressed during the 1936 Berlin games, and particularly the challenging of notions of Aryan physical supremacy represented by the success of African American track and field athlete Jesse Owens. These cuts are noted in Julien Faraut’s Regard neuf sur Olympia 52.

23 In Le Fond de l’air est rouge, Marker puts pride of place on this footage shot at the Helsinki Olympics, placing it just after the description of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Prague at the film’s mid-point. Updating the commentary that accompanies these images, Marker himself in voiceover reads: “What appeared to us as a moment of respite, a little island of peace in the middle of the Cold War, will perhaps one day be considered by historians as a real attempt at contact between the East and West: the prefiguration of a diplomacy based on Ping-Pong and basketball when the Korean War seemed to be prefiguring something else entirely.”

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Figure 4.5: Three consecutive shots in Olympia 52. The first two are from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, followed by a cut to Marker’s footage of Helsinki.

It would perhaps be excessive to interpret this sequence as an attempt to politicise the Olympic games; rather, more pragmatically, the effect of this sequence is to imbue Marker’s own, contemporary images with a sense of the longer political history that has preceded that moment in time. What is present in this brief sequence in Olympia 52 is the first signs of a move in Marker’s work to restore to the contemporary image, through the operations of text and

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especially montage, a historical complexity of that which lies out of shot, beyond the frame. Marker’s attention the push and pull of historical forces on contemporary images glimpsed in Olympia 52 would continue to be a feature of his work in the following period of the 1950s, where these critical reflections on contemporary history are expressed through more ambitious assemblages of heterodox and often anachronistic sets of images and texts.

Montage on Paper: Marker as editor at Les Editions du Seuil, 1954- 1958

In the following period of the 1950s, the image — whether photographic, cinematic, or plastic — takes on a renewed importance in Marker’s work, which comprises of photography, comic strips, short and feature-length films, and illustrated travel books. 24 The latter were produced during Marker’s tenure as editor of Les Editions du Seuil’s Petite Planète collection from 1954–1958, a series of travel guides dedicated to different countries around the world. While scholars writing on Marker’s work on Petite Planète have tended to discuss the collection as aesthetic and thematic precursors to Marker’s early travel films,

Dimanche à Pekin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (1957),25 Petite Planète is the most visible example of what is in fact a broader set of cross-medial practices of

24 After completing work on Olympia 52, Marker spent a good deal of the year 1953 working for UNESCO in Central and North America. Simone Dubreuilh, "Flashes sur les jeunes cinéastes français: Chris Marker,” Les Lettres françaises, no. 664, 28th March 1957, 6. It is during this time that Marker pens three pieces on developments in U.S. and Mexican cinema for Cahiers du cinéma: Chris Marker, “Lettre de Mexico,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 22, April 1954, 33-35; Chris Marker, “Lettre de Hollywood. Sur trois dimensions et une quatrième,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 25, July 1953, 26-34; Chris Marker, “Le cinérama,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 27, October 1953, 34-37.

25 For example, for Bamchade Pourvali, “[c]es livres apparaissent comme autant de « films imaginaires »” displaying “une approche cinématographique de la mise en page." Arnaud Lambert, “Chris Marker, Éditeur-Monteur,” in Chris Marker (2018), 155.

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assembling text and image that Marker develops in this period. Tracing the influences and manifestations of Marker’s montage practices in the mid-1950s not only allows us to nuance this picture of his work; it gives us a sense of the privileged place of montage as an aesthetic principle for Marker that has a range of different experimental outlets.

Figure 4.6: Two double-page spreads from Marker's collage albums Photographed by the author at the Cinémathèque française, May 4, 2018.

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Marker’s heteroclite associations of text and image in his work of this period demonstrate a broad-ranging interest in contemporary and anterior montage and collage practices across the visual and graphic arts as well as the world of music.26 The Cinémathèque française has recently unearthed a set of collage albums that Marker had started making in the 1950s, which to my mind shed some light on the aesthetic lineage that Marker emerges from (Fig. 4.6, above). Composed of images cut from newspapers and magazines and arranged to create visual rhymes across the page, these collage folders demonstrate the influence not just of Malraux’s art books of the late 1940s, but also of Dadaist photomontage and surrealist collage in their creations of “choc[s] poétique[s] et esthétique[s]” of non-habitual associations.27 Continuing a modernist aesthetic lineage that runs from Braque and Picasso’s newspaper collages to Calder’s mobiles — a lineage that Marker himself described as “raising the most humble things from the disdain to which they were abandoned”28 — Marker’s assemblages of text and image in this period exercise a kind of visual bricolage in their re-purposing and re-contextualisation of ephemeral, mass-produced images. This process of re-contextualising visual ephemera was also present in

26 My thanks go to Christophe Chazalon for his suggestions of contemporary influences on Marker.

27 On the importance of Malraux to Marker’s work, see Christa Blümlinger, “Marker/Malraux: Ambiguïtés partagées.” On surrealism in Marker’s work, see Christine Van Assche, “De l’assemblage surréaliste au dispositif muséal,” Chris Marker (2018), 118.

28 “Since the beginning of the century, through the conversation poems of Apollinaire, the newspaper collages of Picasso and Braque and the tracings of Max Ernst, to Calder’s mobiles and the tick tock shots of McLaren via others that were less foreseen, a plot unfolds… which consists of raising the most humble things from the disdain to which they were abandoned by the art of the egotistical, humanist and megalomaniacal periods. … Redemption extends to the whole of creation; gold and lead are guests at the same supper (with a preference for lead).” Christian Marker, Giraudoux par lui-même, translated and quoted in Chris Darke, La Jetée (BFI: London, 2016), 29.

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the Petite Planète books Marker edited, in which he assembled images from advertising, comic books, and even stills from popular films alongside high culture images of sculpture and painting (Fig. 4.7, below).29 Other books that

Marker oversaw at Seuil, such as his publication of the original script of Federico

Fellini’s La Strada alongside an assemblage of stills from the film, demonstrated a conceptual fluidity that linked the montage of word and image with book and film.30 (Fig. 4.8, below). A further, understudied contemporary influence on the development of Marker’s montage aesthetic can be traced to the work of French composer Pierre Schaeffer, whose revolution of the world of composition in the mid-1940s with the invention of musique concrète presents some productive parallels with Marker’s contemporary montage work. A radio engineer by trade,

Schaeffer — on whom Marker wrote in 1946 and collaborated with on a radio program in 1950 — had pioneered the use of found sounds, looping and sampling in musical composition in 1948, introducing a compositional method

29 A study remains to be undertaken on the influence of comic books on Marker’s work, as well as on Resnais’. Both were avid comic book readers, and members of France’s first ever organisation of comic book devotees, the Club des bandes dessinées, formed in 1962. Resnais was the organisation’s co-creator, and at the time of its foundation, was reportedly the owner of France’s largest comic book collection. Ann Miller, Reading Bande Dessinnée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2007) 23. Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie lists “Alfred E. Neuman” – MAD magazine’s mascot and cover boy – as one of the film’s advisors, and a photo of Neuman appears in the background of a shot of a box of Horn Flakes in the film’s ‘commercial’ for the reindeer.

30 Simone Dubreuilh, “Flashes sur les jeunes réalisateurs français,” 6. François-Régis Bastide, Juliette Caputo, Chris Marker, Un Film de Federico Fellini: La Strada (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955). This porosity between book and film would continue into later parts of his career: his 1959 book, Coréennes, is part of Editions du Seuil’s shortlived “Court métrage” collection, while his 1962 film La Jetée is dubbed a “photo-roman” in the credit sequence. Chris Marker, Coréennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, Collection “Court-Métrage, 1959). In the early 1960s, Marker published the text of the voiceover narration of all of his films to that date intercut with stills. Chris Marker, Commentaires (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961). Chris Marker, Commentaires 2 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967).

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based on the recontextualisation of pre-existing sounds.31 In placing an emphasis on the collage-like re-combination of these sounds — the manipulation of magnetic tapes requiring a physical cutting and pasting of sounds, much like the work of a film editor32 — Schaeffer’s music depended on processes of aural bricolage reminiscent of Marker’s own visual experiments in this period.

31 Schaeffer would call this method acousmatique listening, in which the decontextualisation of a sound forced the listener to divorce it from its source. In 1952, Schaeffer compiled his reflections on musique concrète in a book entitled A la recherche d’une musique concrète, which would be published by Les Editions du Seuil. Marker and Schaeffer’s paths crossed several times over the years, starting from their involvement in the vichyste cultural organisation, Jeune France, during the war, and in particular on the radio program Radio-Jeunesse. Olivier Cariguel, Panorama des revues littéraires sous l’Occupation (Paris: IMEC, 2007), 369. On Schaeffer’s involvement in Jeune France, see Philip Nord, “Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France: Cultural Politics in the Vichy Years,” French Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Fall 2007), 865-709. After the war, Marker wrote on Pierre Schaeffer’s book of reflections on his travels to America under the pseudonym of Chris Mayor. Chris Mayor, "Pierre Schaeffer, Amérique nous t'ignorons,” Esprit, no. 126, October 1946, 511-513. Marker and Schaeffer collaborated on a science fiction-themed radio program for France-Inter. Chris Marker, Jean Basset, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Mac Orlan and Wright Arttine Blues, “La Peur à la radio: le fantastique,” Radio broadcast, France-Inter, 28th May, 1950. The two continued their working relationship, with Schaeffer’s O.R.T.F. co-producing Marker’s La Jetée in 1962.

32 Schaeffer makes this comparison between film editing and musique concrète composition in Pierre Schaeffer, “Les nouvelles techniques sonores et le cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 37, July 1954, 54-56.

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Figure 4.7: A three-image montage from the Petite Planète issue on Greece. From top to bottom, a detail from an ancient Greek vase, a panel from an unattributed comic strip, and a still showing Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano in Mario Camerini’s 1954 film adaptation of Ulysses.33

33 Mimica Cranaki, Grèce (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955), 20. Information on the provenance of the images appearing in the book’s index indicates that the comic came from Marker’s collection.

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Figure 4.8: Double-page spread from Un Film de Federico Fellini: La Strada (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955).

Figure 4.9: Covers from Les Editions du Seuil's Petite Planète collection edited by Marker

Marker pulls together these diverse threads of montage practice as editor of Les Editions du Seuil’s Petite Planète travel guide collection, which was launched by the publishing house in 1954 (Fig. 4.9, above). The collection formed

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part of the Microcosme series launched by Seuil at the beginning of the 1950s, which consisted of low cost, innovatively designed pocket-format books that shared the same format; each book comprised of 192 pages, and included 100 images arranged alongside texts written by a variety of authors. The Microcosme series covered subjects ranging from literature, religion, history and scientific innovation, and books were written by specialists but clearly pitched at a non- specialist public.34 Subtitled “the world for everyone” in its first editions, the

Petite Planète collection clearly reflected Seuil’s popularising ambitions for the

Microcosme series; an early publicity stop for the collection describes the travel guides as “l’essentiel des connaissances actuelles sur un pays.”35 For his part,

Marker held a relatively cautious relation to the touristic implications of this spread of knowledge about foreign countries. In an article announcing the collection’s then-forthcoming appearance, Marker describes the launch of the

Petite Planète collection as a response not to the demands of tourism, but to the realities of an increasingly globalised 20th century, whose historical developments had placed the (French) citizen into a more immediate confrontation with the rest of the world. He writes:

34 Other contributions in this series include "Ecrivains de toujours" (on contemporary and classic literature), "Solfèges" (music), "Zodiaque" (astrology), "Maîtres spirituels" (religion), "Le temps qui court" (history) and "Le rayon de la science" (scientific innovation). As Hervé Serry notes: “Les objectifs sont multiples : recruter des auteurs, séduire des lecteurs, se doter d’une image jeune et moderne, accroître la visibilité de la marque auprès des libraires et des éditeurs étrangers, œuvrer à la circulation de la culture parmi un public élargi, explorer de nouveaux domaines éditoriaux...“ Hervé Serré, 70 ans du Seuil – 70 ans d’histoires, 48. See also Gilles Lapouge et Maurice Barrois, «Collections de notre temps: Microcosme», Actualité littéraire, no. 45, April 1958, 30-34. On the iconographic innovations of Seuil’s Microcosme series in the history of book publishing, see Françoise Borin, “Profession: Iconographe,” Débat 4, no. 86, September-October 1995, 137-146.

35 Quoted in Nicolas Geneix, “La collection «Petite Planète» (Seuil) - «Sous la direction de» Chris Marker, 1954-1964,” Fabula. Dossier “Collection, Texte et image, Photographie.” Online. Accessed 8th October, 2018. http://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?La_collection_Petite_Planete

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The 19th century is behind us. One can no longer shut away the rest of the world so easily, and a new kind of tourism has emerged that does away with the picturesque. This keen interest to know the world is not so much the sign that a once-dormant curiosity for other nations has been awakened in the reader, but rather that the reader has understood that one’s knowledge of the world is now an indispensable part of knowing oneself. The French may not have changed, but geography has.36

As such, Marker was hesitant about referring to the collection as a series of travel guides, describing it instead in the following terms: “[It is] neither guide nor history book, neither publicity pamphlet nor travel diary; think of it instead as a conversation you would like to have with an intelligent person familiar with a country that interests you.”37 While some information for French travellers

(exchange rates with the Old Franc, French translations of important local words and phrases) appears in the back pages of early editions of the collections, the

Petite Planète books distinguish themselves from other French guide books of the period such as the Michelin or Guide bleu in their focus on the socio-political conditions as well as the history and geography of these countries (See Fig. 4.10, below). This inversion of the codes of the guidebooks creates an ethical and political vision of travel that permeates these books, which Morad Montazami describes as “filtering the practical and pragmatic links to tourism through a

36 Chris Marker, "Petite planète,” 27, Rue Jacob, no. 10, Summer 1954, 1.

37 “Ni guide, ni livre d’histoire, ni brochure de propagande, ni impressions de voyage: l’équivalent, plutôt, de la conversation que vous aimeriez avoir avec un homme intelligent et connaissant bien le pays qui vous intéresse.” Chris Marker, "Petite planète,” 1.

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critical lens.”38 In other words, the traveller visiting a country is encouraged to also understand the historical changes and developments that have led to that country’s contemporary cultural and political realities.

Figure 4.10: Double page spread from Petite Planète’s issue on China. These pages depict the protests and changes in power that led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Other than finding contributing authors for individual books, Marker’s involvement in the Petite Planète collection tended much more towards the side of the image than the text, as he was tasked with both the selection of

38 Hervé Serry, Dominique Raoul Duval, Morad Montazami, and Marc-Olivier Paradis, “Rencontre, le roman de Chris Marker, les années Seuil, le samedi 23 novembre, 2013,” Centre Pompidou. Video recording: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1z95o8 . Online. Accessed on 17th October, 2018.

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photographs and, together with Juliette Caputo, their arrangement on the page.39

In typically Markerian fashion, this selection of images is exceptionally diverse, ranging from photographs from international press agencies, private travel photography — particularly from Marker’s own travels — as and a mix of images of high culture (painting, sculpture, calligraphy) and popular culture

(advertising, film posters, comic strips).40 Collages of text and image are arranged across the pages of the Petite Planète books, with Marker breaking up blocks of text to encourage the reader to create more complex associations dictated by the disrupted movement of the eye across the page. If Marker’s design of the layout on the page recalls the disjunctive relations of text and image of Vedrès’ Images du cinéma français, his work in the Petite Planète books also exhibits the influence of the more diverse threads of contemporary montage practice traced above. From his arrangement of comic strip-like panels of images

(and indeed insertion of images from comic books), associations of popular and sacred imagery, and an avoidance of traditional signifiers of national culture and heritage (landmarks, flags) in favour of more quotidian street photography,

39 Juliette Caputo is listed as being responsible for the “mise en pages” for several of the books. Arnaud Lambert erroneously attributes the authorship of the 1955 Italy issue to Marker, suggesting that its author – Paul Lechat – was in fact Marker writing under a pseudonym. Arnaud Lambert, Also Known As Chris Marker, 278. However, Paul Lechat was a pseudonym for Paul Lengrand, one of the founders of Peuple et Culture and a fellow employee of Marker’s at UNESCO in the 1950s, as confirmed in Lifelong Education – Education permanente, eds. Paul Bélanger and Etorre Gelpi (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 397. Marker also contributed iconographic materials – mostly photographs – to dozens of books published in Seuil’s other Microcosme collections, notably Ecrivains de toujours, Maîtres spirituels and Le Temps qui court. Originally published as part of Le Temps qui court in 1957, the original edition of Edgar Morin’s Les Stars is illustrated with numerous comics and press clippings from the collections of Marker and Resnais (whose pseudonyms Alex Reval and Alzin Rezarail also appear amongt the list of contributors). Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), 192.

40 Text citations from Malraux’s Psychologie de l’art series also appear throughout the early editions of the Petite Planète collection, particularly in the sections dedicated to the history of art in each country.

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Marker’s Petite Planètes adopt the method of cultural bricolage that emerged in these anterior artistic forms. For example, in the Petite Planète issue on Greece penned by Mimica Cranaki, Marker introduces a three-image montage subtitled

“Les Metamorphoses d’Ulysse”, in which we see a scene from Homer’s Odyssey depicting Ulysses and Circe in three different forms: a detail from an ancient

Greek vase, a panel from a comic strip drawn by Marker himself, and a still showing Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano in Mario Camerini’s 1954 film adaptation (Fig. 4.7, above).41 Just as Cranaki’s text attempts to dispel some of the myths of modern Greek culture in the face of a tendency for outsiders to romanticise the Ancients, Marker’s insertion of these images depicting the mutation of the central episode from Homer in the modern world plays on this notion of the afterlife of antiquity in the modern day.42 Privileging the counter- intuitive, non-habitual and particularly anachronistic associations of fragments of text and image across the Petite Planète books he edits, Marker adapts these diverse threads of montage to a historiographical method that highlights historical analogies and exhibits parallels between cultural forms from different moments in time. The historical parallels evoked in the assemblage of typically distinct pairings of text and image in these books temper their focus on the

41 Mimica Cranaki, Grèce, 20. The Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was involved with Camerini’s adaptation of Ulysses, and his experience provided him with a starting point for his novel Il Disprezzo (1954), later adapted by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (1963). As with Marker’s montage of modern and ancient images of this episode of Ancient Greek mythology, Godard’s film is also intimately concerned with the “afterlife of antiquity”, recounting as it does another cinematic adaptation of the story of Ulysses caught between both the antiquity and modernity, and cinematic classicism and modernism. See Marc Cerisuelo, Le Mépris (Chatou: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2006), 25-26. Thank you to Sam Di Iorio for pointing out this connection between Godard’s film and this Petite Planète book.

42 In this regard, Cranaki’s book is reminiscent also of Marker’s own television documentary series made decades later, L’Heritage de la chouette, dedicated to the legacy of Ancient Greek philosophy and politics in the modern world.

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“connaissances actuelles” on these countries, suggesting the historical developments that have led to each country’s contemporary situation.

Figure 4.11: Double-page spread from the Petite Planète issue on Iran. Above, the ruins of Persepolis (destroyed in 300 BC by Alexander the Great), and below, an oil refinery in modern Iran.

We see an example of Marker’s historical parallelism produced by montage in the thirteenth book of the collection dedicated to Iran, penned by the former French military ambassador to the country, Vincent-Mansour Monteil.43

Alongside chapters dedicated to the development of the Farsi language, the country’s ethnic groups, and the recent diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S. and U.K., towards the end of the book there is a short chapter entitled

43 Vincent Monteil, Iran (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957). Though most of the early editions of the collection focus on European countries – the first three are dedicated to Austria, Sweden and Italy – Monteil’s book broadened the collection’s geographical purview.

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“jeux du miroir” [“mirror effects/images”] which is comprised of four double- page spreads of photographs selected and arranged by Marker. All four double- page spreads place two graphically similar images side-by-side, one showing phenomena from the classical period and another from modern Iran, demonstrating the persistence of the cultural forms of the former in the latter.

The third of these spreads shows a photograph of the ruins of Persepolis — sacked and pillaged in 330 BC by Alexander the Great — and underneath it, the

Abadan oil refinery, whose nationalisation in 1951 was one of the catalysts for the CIA-backed coup d’état of 1953 (Fig. 4.11, above). In his analysis of this montage of photographs, Morad Montazami draws out the implications of this assemblage of images showing historical phenomena from distinct time periods:

Reflecting petroleum’s role in the Cold War era, Marker brings capitalism and the conquests of antiquity into a shared spatio-temporal field, linking modern geopolitics and the sack of Persia by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. [This is a]s if to more clearly underscore that the power struggles between the ‘Persians’ and foreign powers remain a constant, only appearing in different forms.44

As Montazami notes, the provocativeness of Marker’s montage of photographs at the end of the Iran edition is produced precisely by its suggestion of parallels between phenomena from discrete historical and political contexts, creating a space to rethink the country’s relation to imperial power. The visual rapprochement of the two photographs — one depicting the remains of the

44 Morad Montazami, “Chris Marker à Persepolis. Pétrole surmoi,” Online. http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/blogs/moradmontazami/2017/11/30/chris-marker-a- persepolis-petrole-surmoi/ . Accessed on 17th October, 2018. Montazami’s analysis here recalls Edward Dimendberg’s discussion of the international petroleum industry in Resnais’ Le Chant du Styrène (1958). See Edward Dimendberg, “”These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène,” October 112, Spring 2005, 83-88.

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country’s pre-Islamic ancient period and another of its most valuable and coveted modern technological industry — also has the effect of imparting both of these contemporary photographs within intersecting historical narratives that link past and present in novel correspondences. The relationship formed between these contemporary images evokes their discreet links with the past, making legible their relation to a longer history of capital and imperial conquest.

Marker’s adoption of visual and textual montage to a critical historiographical model addressing intersecting national narratives of past and present would constitute a formative experience for his work moving forward.

While on the surface concerned with the bridging of a spatial distance — addressed to the French citizen in response to the globalised reality of the 20th century — the Petite Planète collection shows that Marker was equally attuned to bridging temporal intervals, highlighting the persistence of complex geo- political histories in the contemporary realities of these countries. In the two films he directs while still working as an editor of the Petite Planète collection —

Dimanche à Pekin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (1957) — Marker both adapts these experiments with the layout of text and photographs on the page to his arrangements of film footage and voiceover, while also demonstrating a continued desire to place images of other countries within a broader context of national histories and geo-political disputes.45 What is distinct about Dimanche à

Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie is not so much a move to another medium or a change in subject, but rather the political context that governs the production of both

45 Both films were produced by Anatole Dauman’s production company Argos Films, which also produced Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard.

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films and which effects Marker’s discourse on national histories. The diplomatic context of the Cold War, briefly evoked in Olympia 52, is crucial to the commissioning and development of both films, their production histories reflecting the political tensions inherent in the visit of a filmmaker from the West to two socialist countries — the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union

— in the mid-1950s. In these films, Marker navigates the present realities that the diplomatic manoeuvrings of the Cold War had done little to demystify, attempting to temper common assumptions about these countries in the West with a reflection on the national and geo-political narratives that were conventionally occluded in this partisan climate.

Peaceful Co-Existence: Marker’s Early Travel Films in the Context of the Cold War

Released in 1956 and 1957 respectively, Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie were made at important historical junctures for both China and the Soviet Union, both of which were going through major changes in terms of national and diplomatic policy. The CCP-headed People’s Republic of China was at that stage in its infancy, and experimented during this period with processes of agrarian reform and economic restructuring. These questions of national policy were complicated by the global diplomatic context of the period, particularly its tensions with the Soviet Union that resulted in the eventual Sino-Soviet split of

1956. The death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s attendant changes to the Soviet Union’s national policy and foreign diplomacy had produced a moment of uncertainty in global political affairs. As Marker would put it later in life, the promise of “a rupture with the Soviet model” — that

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is, as I take it, the Soviet model that had developed under Stalin’s leadership — had driven him and other leftists to explore not just the Soviet Union in what appeared to be a period of transition, but also countries such as China, Cuba and

Korea, whose socialist revolutions “had broken away from the old European models.”46 Marker’s own position on the left at this time is relatively difficult to pin down in the traditional terms of party membership or consistent adherence to any one party’s political engagements. If Marker’s left-leaning sympathies in this period appear to be more or less clear — judging by his work with Travail et

Culture and continued engagement with documenting contemporary developments in socialist countries in his filmmaking and writing — he was never a member of the PCF and remained critical of both it and the Soviet

Union’s communist party, both before and after the death of Stalin.47 Perhaps a leftist political alignment that is defined precisely as being un-aligned with existing orthodox European leftist political organisation is as close as one can get to pinning down Marker’s political commitments in this time. Indeed, throughout this period and later in life, Marker remained critical of what he termed the

“pensée binaire” (‘binary thought’) of those who followed the orthodox, Soviet-

46 Chris Marker, Immemory > zone “Photo” > Corée > “Postface” à Corréennes. Reprinted in Arnaud Lambert, “L’Usage du monde: voyage et politique,” in Chris Marker (2018), 171. Bernard Eisenschitz aptly points out the continuity between these works with Marker’s collective, militant period from the 1960s and 1970s and their engagement with the New Left. Bernard Eisenschitz, “Octobre et le regard russe” in Chris Marker (2018), 250-252. As Marker reflected in a text appearing on his Immemory CD-rom in 1997, “dans l’URSS elle-même, un frémissement se faisait sentir au milieu des années 1950 […]. Les portes de l’avenir s’entrouvraient, lentement, en grinçant, mais elles bougeaient. Il aurait fallu beaucoup de pessimisme historique pour prévoir Brejnev et ce temps qu’on appelle là-bas celui de la stagnation, plus criminel encore." Chris Marker, Immemory > zone “Photo” > Corée > “Postface” à Corréennes. Reprinted in Arnaud Lambert, “L’Usage du monde: voyage et politique,” Chris Marker (2018), 171.

47 Marker’s contributions to Esprit in the late 1940s, as well as his break with Travail et Culture (see Chapter 3) in 1947 demonstrated an openly critical attitude towards the French Communist Party. Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977) and especially Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) deal specifically with the history of the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

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aligned model of Communism, particularly in France,48 and we might read his travelogue films of the 1950s as an early attempt to break away from this model of binary thinking, restoring – as he would later put it – something of the

“polyphony” of history.49 Moreover, this interest in restoring a historical

‘polyphony’ had a particular political trenchancy at this moment in time, reacting as it did to the Cold War’s partisan political divides that had divided large parts of the world into unified political ‘blocs’ of east and west, with each bloc defined by their own triumphalist, ‘monophonic’ discourses defined from within or without. While in this context, the range and complexity of contemporary historical phenomena in both capitalist and communist countries were read as proof positive of broader political narratives around progress and change – creating a sort of “upside-down dialectics”, as Marker would later call it, that is

“deciphered in retrospect, and always from the point of view of the winner”50 –

Marker’s films see him attempt to both call attention to what was often obfuscated in these political discourses, while also questioning the methodological assumptions about history underpinning them.

48 This is the term Marker uses in reflecting on his vexed relationship with the ex-PCF adherent and filmmaker, Mario Marret, during the late 1960s while the pair helped film a major strike at the Rhodiaceta textile factory in Besançon. Chris Marker, “Pour Mario,” in accompanying booklet for Les Groupes Medevedkine, DVD, Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 2006, 12. On the filming of the strike and Marker’s subsequent involvement in the filmmaking collective, Le Groupe Medvedkine, see Trevor Stark’s exceptionally thorough essay: Trevor Stark, “Cinema in the Hands of the People”: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film,” October 139, Winter 2012, 117-150.

49 Chris Marker, Le fond de l’air est rouge: Scènes de la troisiéme guerre mondiale 1967-1977 (Paris: Editions François Maspero, 1978), 7. Quoted and translated in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 87.

50 Chris Marker, Le fond de l’air est rouge, 138. Marker uses the phrase in the context of his criticism of French Maoists in the 1960s and 70s, and it is worth noting, employs the quite Benjaminian terminology of ‘legibility’ and history: “You dreamt up your China. Apparently it is your task to wash the dishes of that revolution, which is no dinner party; to make it look immaculate, that is, readable.” My emphasis.

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For Marker, this question of historical polyphony and nuance was above all stimulated by broader questions of temporality and place that were slowly taking shape during the post-war period, particularly in the Petite Planète publications. If we are to read Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie as political films – and it is my contention that we should – it ought not to be in terms of their support of any hardline contemporaneous political discourse, but rather in enabling alternative readings of contemporary political reality precisely in tying them to what appear to Marker as synchronous past phenomena. Historian

Harry Harootunian’s insightful study of the models of historical temporality that develop after WWII is particularly useful here for understanding the political stakes and historiographical methodologies Marker employs in these early films.51 In his aptly titled “Remembering the Historical Present” – which could equally function as an unofficial subtitle of Marker’s travel films of the period –

Harootunian describes how the partisan context of the Cold War had a profound consequence on how national narratives were written at this time and in subsequent historical scholarship. For Harootunian, the Cold War had sanctioned a “model of comparability”, in which the hegemonic powers of the U.S. and the

U.S.S.R. staked a claim on their vision of the future and the horizons of progress and modernisation to be experienced along the way.53 This model of comparability that emerges during the Cold War period had consequences for the very ways in which the temporal regimes of history — past, present, future

51 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry, no. 33, Spring 2007, 471-494.

53 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” 483, 488.

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— and their interrelations were conceived of by intellectuals and historians around the world. The establishment of ‘normative paths’ of modernity had the effect of flattening out other conceptions of history and time, presenting instead a model of progress “destined to endless delay and the distant prospect of catch- up.”54 For Harootunian, these historical narratives of modernity and their linear conceptions of progress would flatten out the ‘historic unevenness’ of different nations, particularly those that had committed to other visions of progress, modernity and political horizons. In sum, what Harootunian refers to as the dissipation of elements of “noncontemporaneous contemporaneity” in national histories, in which “ambiguous mixtures of modern and archaic, new and old, here and there, contemporary and nativist” co-existed in the present, was a product of the ideologically-charged historiographical model that developed in the context of the Cold War.55

From this perspective, Dimanche à Pekin and Lettre de Sibérie can be understood to respond to these emergent, contemporary historiographical trends, attempting to expose precisely these elements of what Harootunian terms non-contemporaneous contemporaneity that persist in China and the

Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. In these films, Marker is attentive to these

‘ambiguous mixtures’ of co-existing temporal orders and historical narratives so often occluded by the strictures of competing Cold War ideologies, highlighting rather than collapsing these often unresolvable tensions that are produced by

54 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” 474.

55 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” 475.

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their continued presence. In his emphasis on these mixed historical temporalities in Dimanche and Lettre, Marker borrows from and upends the codes of the films’ closest literary and cinematic forbearers: European travel literature and the cinematic travelogue. While Marker’s impressionistic and diaristic voiceover, with its references to Marco Polo, Jules Verne and Blaise

Cendrars, recalls the literary accounts of voyages by the likes of Victor Hugo and

Goethe,56 the films have a more tentative relationship to the cinematic travelogue, which had until that point been an expression of new forms of tourism, as well as of scientific discourses on race and geography, particularly in

European and North American production contexts.57 What Ella Shohat and

Robert Stam describe as the travelogue’s authorisation of “the pleasure of seizing ephemeral glimpses of [the] ‘margins’” would manifest in a variety of ways, ranging from the exhibition of the foreign ‘attractions’ of the Hale’s World Tours to the aiding and abetting of the colonial project in the case of the Lumière brothers’ cameraman, Alexandre Promio, and his footage captured in Tunisia and

Algeria in March, 1896.58 Where the travelogue’s ability to deliver glimpses of

56 See Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, 43. Lupton also notes that the ‘Travel’ zone of Marker’s Immemory CD-ROM acknowledges a French lineage of travel writing for children across a number of different media on his later travels, including Comte de Beauvoir’s Voyage autour du monde (1869), Christophe’s early comic book La Famille Fenouillard (1889) and the adventure stories of Jules Verne. Marker also makes reference to Swiss author Nicolas Bouvier in Immemory; though his famous account of his travels from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan – L’usage du monde – wasn’t published until 1963, it describes a journey (starting in June 1953 and ending in December 1954) that was roughly contemporaneous to the early period of Marker’s work on the Petite Planète books.

57 On the history of the travelogue in the United States, see Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

58 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2014), 104. On the Hale’s World Tours films, in which the landscapes shot by camera operators in other parts of the world were projected for early cinema spectators in makeshift train carriages, see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Early

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faraway places had been conventionally cast as a medium-specific attraction or spectacle — a window on the contemporary world that illuminates a corner of the globe one would otherwise be unable to see — Marker’s Dimanche and Lettre continually complicate visions of contemporary reality authorised by the simultaneity of foreign glimpses with a discourse on the persistence of prior historical development and change. What Bernard Eisenschitz has aptly described as Marker’s ‘double movement’ in these early travel films — that of

‘being on the frontline’ and moving back to assess ‘in hindsight’ — creates a temporal flux in these films, imbuing the immediacy of his footage with a sense of the politico-historical currents that resides in it.59 The revelation of these non- contemporary histories of geo-political change hinges on an adaptation of

Marker’s methods of assembling text and image in this period to the screen, the relation between shots and his critical commentary presenting an opportunity to identify these cross-temporal historical correspondences in contemporary footage.

“The Price of the Picturesque”: Dimanche à Pekin

The genesis of Dimanche à Pekin lay in a trip to China organised by l’Association des Amitiés franco-chinoises from 17th September to 3rd November 1955, with

Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56- 62. Promio shot around one hundred films (each less than a minute in length) in northern Africa from 1896-1903, ranging from street scenes, recordings of official ceremonies, to what were conceived as exotic and picturesque subjects, including human zoos. See Aboubakar Sidiki Sanogo, The History of Documentary in Africa. The Colonial Era. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2009, 14-76.

59 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Chris Marker. Quelquefois les images,” Trafic, no. 19, Summer 1996, 46- 57.

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Marker acting as one of the members of the French delegation that also included the playwright and journalist Armand Gatti, philosopher Paul Ricœur, and the writer Michel Leiris.60 Aside from sharing a leftist political engagement that distinguished itself from an alignment with the PCF,61 most of the delegates were also regular contributors to the journal Esprit in this period. As a result, Esprit would publish a special dossier entitled “La Chine, porte ouverte” in January 1956 comprised of reflections on the trip written by the delegates after their return to

France.62 For his part, Marker contributed a 12-page portfolio constituting photographs taken during the trip and short epigraphic texts — which was, in typical Marker fashion in this period, entitled “un film de Chris Marker” (Fig 4.12, below) — and the photographs taken on this trip would in large part illustrate the Petite Planète collection issue on the country published that same year, which was written by fellow delegate Armand Gatti63 (Fig. 4.13, below). The

Esprit issue contains an illuminating contribution by philosopher Paul Ricœur, entitled “Certitudes et incertitudes d’une révolution”, which offers some crucial

60 The organisation had been founded in 1954 in honour of the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and in France was closely aligned with the French Communist Party. The trip to China of which Marker was a part coincided with the sixth anniversary of the Republic, and was to be the first organised by the association. Sociologist and future French presidential candidate René Dumont and the artist Jean Lurçat were also part of the delegation. The delegation for their part had been invited by an equivalent Chinese organisation referred to by René Dumont as "L’association pour les relations culturelles du peuple chinois avec les pays étrangers." René Dumont, "Réforme agraire et collectivisation accélérée,” Esprit, no. 234, January 1956, 32.

61 For example, Claude Roy, who organised the trip, quit the PCF the next year following the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union.

62 "La Chine, porte ouverte" comprised of 3 articles: Paul Ricœur,"Certitudes et incertitudes d'une révolution"; Armand Gatti, "Prose pour Pékin"; René Dumont, “Réforme agraire et collectivisation accélérée," Esprit, no. 234, January 1956, 1-54.

63 Chris Marker, "Clair de Chine. En guise de carte de vœux, un film de Chris Marker,” Esprit, no. 234, January 1956 (Supplement). Claire de Chine was to be the original title for the film. Christophe Chazalon, “La Chine, ne serait-elle pas le dimanche du monde,” in Lettre de Sibérie DVD. Tamasa. 2013. Armand Gatti, Chine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956).

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insights into the restricted nature of the trip and the limited access to government institutions that was afforded to the foreign delegates. While Ricœur judges that there were concrete and reasonable insights to be gleaned from the

‘realisations socialistes’ (‘socialist achievements’) to which they were privy — collective farms, factories, culture parks, introductory conferences — he remarked on the invisibility of the organisational mechanism behind them, the

Chinese Communist Party:

[W]e had only a glimpse of the real political driver [ressort proprement politique] of the experience; the real power of the communist party, the precise balance of persuasion and pressure that it exercises upon its partners in power, the docility and resistance of the administrative apparatus in the face of the decisions made by the higher-ups [ … ] in short, everything that constituted the real mechanisms of power in the state apparatus for the most part eluded us. It could not help but elude us.64

Confined to a heavily censored tour of what was occurring in the country, the delegation thus had to resign itself to an interpretation of this official mise- en-scène. For Ricœur, this coexistence of ‘réalisations offertes’ with the ‘ressorts impénétrables’ was key in and of itself to understanding the political position that China found itself in, particularly in relation to the West.65 As we will see, this tension between the radically limited nature of the phenomena shown to the delegation over the course of the officially approved journey and a desire to

64 Paul Ricœur, “Certitudes et incertitudes d'une révolution,” 5.

65 Paul Ricœur, “Certitudes et incertitudes d'une révolution,” 6. Ricoeur would later revisit these initial impressions in an article that appeared in a later issue of Esprit. Paul Ricœur, "Note critique sur Chine ouverte,” Esprit, no. 239, June 1956, 897-910.

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reveal a view of the historico-political context of the country would manifest itself in Marker’s Dimanche à Pekin.

Figure 4.12: Front page of Marker's Clair de Chine published in January 1956 in Esprit.

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Figure 4.13: Photographs in Gatti's Chine and Marker's Dimanche à Pekin.

Marker’s photographs of the National Day parade appear in the former, and Marker would also be there filming the Chinese National Day for the film.

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Mirroring the restrictions placed on the French delegation by the Chinese government, Marker’s film equally exhibits a great deal of limitation in the scope of its subject. These limitations were also partly the result of the meagre tools at

Marker’s disposal and the improvised nature of the shoot. As he later recalled, the decision to make the film came at the last minute: Marker had already planned to go on the voyage but encountered the producer Paul Paviot shortly before leaving, who loaned him a 16mm camera and a reasonable quantity of colour film stock. With this borrowed equipment, Marker was thus able to shoot the film within the bounds of the delegation’s activities.66 Dimanche à Pekin was shot over the course of two weeks, with Marker limiting the purview of the film to one city, Beijing, and one day of the week, Sunday, a day of leisure, feeling unable to do justice to the place of labour in China given the film’s meagre production conditions.67 The film is structured as a promenade through the city over the course of a day, with the narrator occasionally dropping temporal reminders (“Midi. Je reprends la rue.”) as he moves from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. For the most part, the images are of well-known monuments or locations: the Ming tombs, the Winter Place, the Imperial City and the hutongs of the Outer City, though a brief passage dedicated to a bear named “Joris Ivens”

(“un don du cinéaste français Ménegoz”) gestures towards Marker’s penchant for personal jokes and animals that would carry on throughout his career.68

66 Chris Marker, Commentaires, 29; Christophe Chazalon, “La Chine, ne serait-elle pas le dimanche du monde.”

67 Chris Marker, Commentaires, 29.

68 Both communist documentary filmmakers, Ivens and Ménégoz, had collaborated a year earlier on Das Lied der Ströme (The Song of the Rivers), a celebration of the international trade union movement funded by East Germany. Marker would go on to collaborate with Ivens in the 1960s on A Valparaiso and Rotterdam Europoort.

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Figure 4.14: Dimanche à Pekin’s two opening shots.

These technical restrictions would in turn shape the film’s distension of its historical purview beyond a purely contemporary view of the country.

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Working with silent 16mm images that he had recorded during the trip, Marker was obliged to wait several months before returning to Paris to process and edit the footage he had taken. As if imitating this imposed interval between the moment of capture and the process of assembling images together, Marker’s film is structured as a look back on the footage that he has brought home. The film’s opening makes this retrospective element of the film explicit, starting with a close-up of a series of souvenirs that are laid out on the balcony of an apartment next to the Eiffel Tower (Fig. 4.14, above). With the Paris location revealed by a swift upwards tilt, the voiceover narration intones:

Nothing is more beautiful than Paris, save for the memory of Paris [le souvenir de Paris]. And nothing is more beautiful than Beijing, save for the memory of Beijing. And me, in Paris, I remember Beijing and I marvel at my treasures.69

Here, the play on words of the voiceover (the French word “souvenir” signifies both “souvenir” and “memory”) blurs the distinction between an object brought back from a place and one’s memories. This distinction is further complicated a moment later with the introduction of a book of photographs: the narrator recalls that he had been dreaming of Beijing since his childhood, recalling a “gravure de livre d’enfance” whose location he couldn’t place, with

Marker then cutting to a shot of a pair of hands opening a photo album showing the avenue leading to the tomb of the Ming emperors. A cut follows to footage of this very road in Beijing in 1955, with Marker joining to this image the phrase:

69 “Rien n’est plus beau que Paris, sinon le souvenir de Paris. Et rien n’est plus beau que Pékin, sinon le souvenir de Péking. Et moi, à Paris, je me souviens de Pékin, et je compte mes trésors." This text is cut from the English-language version of the film.

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“And one fine day, I was there. It’s not often that one can step into a picture belonging to one’s childhood [de pouvoir se promener dans une image d’enfance]”

(Fig. 4.15, below). In the opening’s mix of travel souvenirs, childhood memory, photography and film footage, there is an example of what Raymond Bellour has observed as the “incessant dialectic between memory and image” in Marker’s early film work.70 In this back and forth between the images of a place and the reflection that they provoke, Marker sets up a temporal and spatial duality that amplifies the unavoidable past-present temporal fold of film, a sense of temporal doubling that will be cast over the images he has recorded of the contemporary

Chinese capital throughout the film.

70 Raymond Bellour, “Un cinéma réel,” Artsept no. 1, January-March 1963, 17.

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Figure 4.15: A cut from a children’s book in Paris to a road in Beijing in Dimanche à Pekin.

As I read it, the function of this opening is part of a move that is pervasive in Dimanche to place the contemporary images of post-revolutionary China into dialogue with the broader political history that pre-dates this seismic shift in the organisation of the country, particularly the move from the era of dynastic empires to modernity. The complex layered temporality of this opening, vacillating between memory and image, past and present, hangs over the footage of contemporary Beijing that follows, its impressionistic immediacy appearing in sharp contrast to the opening’s reflective reverie. This contrast is in part

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expressed in the shift in tense of the voiceover commentary, moving from the past continuous tense (“I had been dreaming about Beijing for thirty years”) to the present tense (“Here I am on this Ming avenue”), the immediacy of the latter tempered by the reflexivity of the former. Moving beyond a placement of his footage within a purely contemporary temporal register — a glimpse of what is going on at the same time in another place — Marker attempts to expose the more profound relations between this present moment of post-revolutionary

China and the politico-historical organisational structures that had preceded it.

We see an example of this in a sequence structured around a petty-cab ride through Beijing’s Outer City, a part of the city the narrator believes to have retained a certain image of China’s past. The voiceover reads: “This is the China of the movies: you’d expect to see Humphrey Bogart in a white suit coming out of an opium den. But there are no more opium dens.”71 The narrator’s initial enthusiasm for what he perceives to be a slice of the old China untouched by forces of modernity is quickly curtailed by a cut two seconds later to a bicycle and then to a woman with mutilated feet, a survival of the foot-binding practices of the pre-revolutionary upper-class in China (Fig. 4.16, below). While the use of a bicycle had been scarcely adopted from Europeans in pre-revolutionary China, its production and proliferation rose steeply after 1949, with the PRC government including a provision for the funding of the bicycle industry in its first Five-Year Plan.72 Contrasting this symbol of Chinese modernity with the

71 After coming into power, Mao’s government had committed itself to ridding the country of opium usage, forcing rehabilitation of addicts and executing dealers. Alan Baumier, Modern China and Opium: A Reader (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2001), 181.

72 See Anne Lusk, “A History of Bicycle Environments in China: Comparisons with the US and the Netherlands,” Harvard Asia Quarterly, 4, no. 14, 2012, 12-27.

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image of the woman with bound feet, both of which are found in the same neighbourhood, Marker calls attention to the mixture of ambiguous temporalities that are indicative of the unevenness of the development of historical narratives of progress that persist in the present in China.

Figure 4.16: A cut from a bicycle to a woman with bound feet in Dimanche à Pekin.

This willingness to produce an understanding of the historical multiplicities residing in the present finds its apogee at the halfway point of the film, in what Marker slyly refers to in the voiceover commentary as the film’s

“intermède historique” [“historical intermission”]. Recalling the aforementioned sequence in Olympia 52 on the history of the Olympic Games, this sequence creates a sharp break in the impressionist promenade through the images of the

Forbidden City, whose gold cisterns of the Ming Dynasty and the nearby

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Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception — founded in the early 17th century by

Italian Jesuits — incites the narrator to “begin to daydream about the history of this city.” So begins the intermède historique: the narrator recounts the capture and sack of Beijing by Genghis Khan in the 13th century and its reconstruction by his grandson, Kublai Khan, which Marker accompanies with a cut from the contemporary footage of Beijing to details from the history of Chinese art and other cultural forms, from gravures, to performers from the Beijing Opera to an animated sequence of Chinese folk tales and historical scenes.73 A final cut brings together an animated figure of a general with footage of the PRC National Day parade recorded by the delegation in 1955, the former being, as the narrator puts it, one of many “who over the course of 2000 years have made and remade

China, until the day that the Chinese people announced the 1st of October as their

Bastille Day.”74 The appearance moments later of a brief shot of Mao Zedong captured from a distance saluting the crowd at the 1st October parade furthers this associative chain of montage of those who have “made and remade China”

(Fig. 4.17, below). In this heterodox assembly of images that interrupts for a brief moment the film’s impressionistic flow of contemporary footage, Marker on the one hand positions the Oct. 1st images in terms of the longer history of shifts and exchanges of power over the course of the country’s history extending back into the farther reaches of empire. But beyond this, by placing the renderings of the pre-revolutionary period of this historical interlude just before the National Day

73 The final part of this sequence is animated by Arcady Brachlianoff (often credited simply as Arcady), another member of the Groupe des trente who had participated in the production of several art documentaries. Marker would collaborate once more with Arcady during the production of Lettre de Sibérie, in an animated sequence on the history of the mammoth.

74 “Qui en 2000 ans ont fait et défait la Chine jusqu’à ce que le peuple chinois se donne, certain 1er octobre, son 14 juillet."

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parade, there is an attempt to register a deeper meaning of the spectacle of this

“réalisation socialiste”, to use Ricœur’s term, put together by the new government of the PRC. Given that the delegation was not privy to “the real mechanisms of power in the state”, as Ricœur put it, Marker must make do with this parade and the brief glimpse of the communist leader that it affords him.

Placing it in relation to this interlude into the history of the city, there is an attempt to impart upon these images of spectacle that a western delegate has been allowed to capture a political lineage in the past that lies beyond it, stretching back to the days of empire and the turbulent exchanges of power that followed it.

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Figure 4.17: Animated images and Chinese National Day footage in Dimanche à Pekin.

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“Fin de l’intermède historique,” the voiceover narration continues, shifting back into the present tense, and with it, back to images of contemporary Beijing.

Gilles Quéant in voiceover reads:

But in the gardens that afternoon, history continues. Having for a long time been closed off to the rest of the world behind its signs, China is now opening itself up. It is up to us to understand these sensitive faces, these men, women and children with whom we must share history like one shares bread.

Given the political context of the period, in which the seismic changes occurring in the country were subject to a cloud of misunderstanding, Marker’s refashioning of his images captured in Beijing speaks to a desire to historically situate these glimpses of contemporary China. Watching the film today, one gets the sense that there is a certain lack of the critical distance and reflection that would perhaps be able to extract something more meaningful about the radical changes the country is undergoing; it is difficult not to see a certain irony in

Marker’s criticism of the “amateurs of the picturesque” in the film’s voiceover commentary when large passages of Dimanche à Pekin succumb to the very trappings that he criticises.75 What is interesting in the film, however, is precisely the manner in which it sees him working through the issues that would continue to animate his work, particularly its brief passages that place the shock of montage at the centre of its (somewhat limited) inscription of a historical legibility to these images. In sum, it is a work that points the way forward to his

75 Marker had forbidden the showing of the film in retrospectives dedicated to his work, along with Lettre de Sibérie. See the conclusion to this chapter for a discussion of this decision.

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Lettre de Sibérie the following year and its much more thorough attempt to historicise its contemporary footage.

“In the Land of the Dialectic”76: Lettre de Sibérie

Completing Dimanche à Pekin after returning home to Paris and working on issues of Seuil’s Petite Planète collection — Chine, Israël and Iran came out in this time — Marker travelled again to a socialist nation to direct his third film, the feature-length Lettre de Sibérie.77 Like Dimanche à Pekin before it, Lettre de

Sibérie’s production history was strongly impacted by the geo-political context of the Cold War, the film reflecting the complexities of the U.S.S.R.’s relationship with France — and by extension, the West — at a moment when the Soviet government was going through a major restructuring process. The film was commissioned by a diplomatic organisation, L’Association France-URSS (AFU), an organisation established in January 1945, whose aim was “to support the development of cultural, sporting and economic exchanges between the two countries.”78 The AFU had been sending delegations to the Soviet Union since

76 “[Le] pays de la dialectique” is the phrase Marker uses to describe Soviet Union in his introduction to the film’s voiceover commentary. Chris Marker, Commentaires, 43.

77 The film runs at a length of 57 minutes, slightly over the cut-off time for a film to be classified as a short film in France at this time (47 minutes, 30 seconds) but significantly shorter than the standard length of a feature film. Recognising this unconventional runtime, Marker refers to the film as a “court-métrage de sept bobines” [“A seven-reel short film”]. Chris Marker, Commentaires, 43.

78 Thomas Gomart, Double détente: les relations franco-soviétiques de 1958 à 1964 (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 2003), 101-103. Though not officially affiliated with any particular French political party, the AFU was in practice heavily influenced by the French Communist Party. The organisation counted amongst its members relatively high-profile, left-leaning intellectuals such as Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the organisation’s Vice-President at the time of the film’s commission.

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October 1949,79 but the timing of this particular commission is especially important to note in the context of both the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s foreign policy more generally. Shooting for the film took place in August of 1957, eighteen months after the fateful 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the

Soviet Union, in which Nikita Khrushchev gave the famous “On the Cult of

Personality and Its Consequences” report — also known as the Secret Speech — in which he denounced the excesses of the Stalinist cult of personality as well as the crimes of political repression committed under his rule. A signal moment in the so-called Khrushchev Thaw of the post-Stalinist period, Khrushchev’s calls for economic and cultural liberalisation as well as the doctrine of ‘Peaceful

Coexistence’ promised a reduced hostility between allies of the Soviet Bloc and western capitalist countries in this period. These important policy milestones were accompanied in part by the restructuring of the Soviet Union’s government entity promoting international cultural contact, the

Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei (VOKS, the All-Union

Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) in 1956–1958, which included the establishment of a specific Franco-U.S.S.R. cultural initiative which commenced in April 1956.80

79 No signature, "L’Association France-U.R.S.S.,” Bulletin de l’association d’études et d’informations politiques internationales, no. 79, 4th Year, 16-31st December 1952, 1-6.

80 Thomas Gomart, Double détente, 104-105.

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Figure 4.18: Double-page spread from Armand Gatti's Sibérie - zéro + infini Photograph by Marker.

The commission of the Lettre de Sibérie film project emerges directly out of the re-organisation of the Soviet Union’s diplomatic institutions in this post-

Stalinist transition period. Most likely via André Pierrard,81 one of the members of the Committee of Directors of the AFU and an editor of their France-U.R.S.S. journal,82 the commission was passed along to the producer Anatole Dauman of

Argos films, who continued his association with Marker in employing him to direct the film. The shooting of the film was to take place over two months from late August 1957, with a team comprised of Pierrard, Marker, cinematographer

81 Pierrard is listed in the film’s credits as the trip’s organiser.

82 Marker would later go on to publish a photo reportage on Moscow in the late 1950s for Pierrard’s journal. Chris Marker, “Vus dans le viseur de Chris Marker,” France URSS Magazine, no. 162, May, 1959, 10-15.

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Sacha Vierny, and the playwright Armand Gatti.83 Gatti, who was also present during the production of Dimanche à Pekin, would pen a literary account of the group’s experiences of the trip in Soviet territory in the form of the book Sibérie - zéro + l'infini84 (Fig. 4.18, above). Published at Les Editions du Seuil a year after the film’s release, and illustrated with Marker’s photographs from the trip, Gatti’s book offers us a key insight into the films crew’s experiences with Soviet diplomatic organisations over the course of the production. As members of a western delegation tasked with making a film about the enormous region of

Soviet territory, Marker recalled a certain ‘incomprehension’ and “lack of preparedness of local officials” in the face of their project, complicated by the fact that the film was no longer subject to the rules of the game of the “pre-20th

Congress Soviet Documentary.”85 Gatti for his part describes the difficulties experienced in the crew’s encounters with their Soviet chaperones, who were almost all from VOKS and members of the Communist Party:

If the delegate comes across a man or woman from the old school of, let’s call them, ‘Molotovians’, the voyage becomes extremely disagreeable. The whole relationship is built on mistrust. ‘Niet’ becomes de rigueur. The interpreter has

83 From the Marker’s contract, reproduced in Anatole Dauman, Anatole Dauman, Argos films: souvenir-écran. Propos receuillis par Jacques Gerber (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), 154- 155. Dauman was also the producer of Dimanche à Pekin and Nuit et Brouillard, and Vierney had done principle photography on Nuit et Brouillard.

84 Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + l'infini (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1958). Gatti’s book expands upon a series of eleven articles written by Gatti about the trip that were published in the French newspaper, Libération, in November 1957.

85 Chris Marker, Commentaires, 43.

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before them a representative of the capitalist countries, and thus a possible enemy.86

Comparisons of passages from Gatti’s book and Marker’s film also bring into focus the absences and unspoken elements of Lettre de Sibérie. For example,

Marker’s opening voiceover text includes a citation from a tsarist general

Andreyevich describing Siberia as “the world’s biggest vacant lot”, an assertion that he refutes with a paraphrase of Hamlet — “thankfully, there are more things in heaven and earth — Siberian or otherwise — than have been dreamt up by all the generals in the world.”87 By contrast, Gatti includes the entire quotation from the general Andreyevich, which adds that “it is unsuitable to live in, and its only value for the state is as a site for deportation.”88 Here, the reference to the

‘deportations’ takes on a particular resonance given the denouncement just a year prior by Khrushchev of Stalin’s deportation of political dissidents to the gulags of Siberia in the Secret Speech, something that Gatti’s book examines with some perspicacity, though he remaining hesitant to assert their continued operation by the then-current Soviet regime.89

86 Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + l'infini, 9. Here, Gatti is referring to Soviet politician and diplomat Vyachselaw Molotov. It should be noted however that both Marker and Gatti ultimately praise their Soviet counterparts for their ‘sportsmanship’ in spite of their lack of comprehension of their project.

87 “Heureusement, il y a plus de choses sur la terre et sous le ciel, fussent-ils sibériens, que n’en ont rêvées tous les généraux.” The original line from Act 1, Scene V of Hamlet reads: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

88 Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + l'infini, 15. Gatti goes on to describe the deportations under Stalin in the 1930s in the chapter "Le capital le plus précieux," 115-123.

89 See Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + l'infini, 231-232. The contrasting absence of mention of the Soviet camps in Lettre de Sibérie was pointed out by critics of the period. For example, Jean Rochereau of La Croix writes: “Il se peut que la Sibérie soit en plein essor industriel. C'est même certain. Mais combien d'hommes sont morts pour qu'il en soit ainsi? Voilà, certes, une question qui semblera saugrenue à M. Chris Marker. C'est cependant, nous semble-t-il, la question qui devait se

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Figure 4.19: Pan left across a line of birch trees to reveal a line of telegraph poles

poser, après quelques milliers de kilomètres de Sibérie. Mais, non. » Jean Rochereau, "Lettre de Sibérie,” La Croix, 13 November 1958. For a discussion of the absence of discussion on the camps in the film, see also Bernard Eisenschitz, “Octobre et le regard russe,” Chris Marker (2018), 251.

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Figure 4.20: A local traffic controller standing at an intersection in Angarsk

The pervasiveness of the diplomatic tensions of this Cold War period, evident in the film’s production history, would in turn be a source of reflection for Marker in the development of the film. Divided between sympathy for and criticism of the Soviet regime in a period when the foreign diplomacy manoeuvrings of the Cold War had made this choice particularly cut and dried for many, Marker’s film is in some sense a reaction to the polarity of this political context and an attempt to give nuance to what seemed to be increasingly oversimplified accounts of complex contemporary realities. Navigating these diplomatic tensions, Marker once more focuses on the multiplicities of historical

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temporalities and narratives of the region, highlighting rather than occluding the historical oppositions — modern and archaic, contemporary and nativist — that persist in Siberia. These oppositions are numerous: we see progress dictated by the demands of Soviet economic development and social reform programs alongside the traditions of the Evenk and Yakout minority ethnic groups, or else the co-existence of industries at the technical vanguard of the period (space exploration, climate measurement) in a region whose exceptional geographic and weather conditions necessarily submit it to the rhythms of nature. These ambiguities of the region appear almost as leitmotivs throughout the film and operate at the micro-level of the film’s construction, appearing within individual shots or across montage sequences, or in the structure of discrete sequences.

The film opens on a long pan across a forest of birch trees that settles on a group of workers setting up a line of telegraph poles (Fig. 4.19, above), and soon after a local traffic controller is revealed with another pan to be standing at an intersection near a forest in Angarsk (Fig. 4.20, above). In other cases, demonstrating more clearly the influence of his cross-medial montage practices of the 1950s, Marker expresses these oppositions in the abrupt collisions of heterodox images, as in a striking match cut towards the end of the film between actors of the Yakut opera enacting the epic poem Niurgun Bootor to Soviet and

U.S. newsreel footage of one of the Sputnik rockets being sent into space (Fig.

4.21 below).

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Figure 4.21: Sequence of consecutive images in Lettre de Sibérie Yakut opera performers and Soviet newsreel footage of a rocket launch.

As in Dimanche à Pekin, Marker’s vacillation between his immediate impressions and his critical reflection is central to his appraisal of the historical valency of the

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film’s contemporary footage of the Soviet territory. This mix of immediacy and critical distance is present in the structures of Marker’s voiceover commentary, particularly in the ambiguous, doubled temporal registers implied by the use of the epistolary form. Simultaneously providing a direct report of an experience

(‘this is what I see’) as well as necessitating a delayed reception (‘this is what I saw’), the letter format links that which is separated by space (the sender, I/the receiver, you) with separations in time (I see/let me tell you what I saw).91 This mix of immediacy and distance is also expressed in the shifts in tense that go with this format: the present-tense citation-turned-refrain from Henri Michaux’s poem Lointain intérieur — “I’m writing to you from a distant land” — regularly brings us back to an impressionist perspective, but it is one that is continually contrasted with the past tense; two minutes after this introduction, we hear

“Angarsk, 300km from the railroad, was created in 1947.”92 These linguistic structures loosen the film’s temporal registers, paving the way for Marker’s inscription of a legibility of multiple, contiguous histories present in his images of the region.

91 Anne Bourse describes "le jeu des identités (le je et le vous, l'un et l'autre, l'intime et le collectif), des espaces (le proche et le lointain) et des temporalités (autrefois morcelé, présent fragile, futur incertain)." Anne Bourse, “L'adresse du lointain. La mémoire au travail chez Michaux, Burroughs, K. Dick, Chris Marker et Ricardo Piglia,” TRANS- [Online], no. 8, 2009. http://journals.openedition.org/trans/323. Accessed 24 February 2019. See also Sarah Cooper, Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 26.

92 These slippages in tense are often matched by abrupt shifts in modes of address, from the intimacy of the second person address that clearly marks out an enunciator (‘je’) and enoncé (‘vous’), to the impersonal third person: “It’s seven in the morning in Yakutsk.”

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Figure 4.22: The looped Yakutsk sequence in Lettre de Sibérie, reproduced in Commentaires.

An analysis of an 8-minute sequence at the centre of the film shows how

Marker navigates these political ambiguities in Lettre de Sibérie and his commitment to revealing what Michel de Certeau described as the “tensions, webbings of conflicts [and] plays of force” of historical change in his contemporary images.93 At the 25-minute mark of the film, Marker shows a sequence of seven images of work in the city of Yakutsk, which are accompanied by a voiceover narration that wonders “who [these images] could please, because of course one can only describe the USSR as either hell on earth or paradise.”94 A clear reference to the polarised political context outlined above,

93 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 48.

94 “Je me demande franchement à qui elles feraient plaisir, puisqu’il est bien entendu que l’on ne saurait traiter de l’URSS qu’en termes d’enfer ou de paradis.” In the previous scene, Marker overlays a recording of Marc Bernès’ Когда поёт далёкий друг [When the Faraway Friend

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the period’s diplomatic tensions are played out in miniature when Marker loops these same images of workers in Yakutsk three more times, first with pro-Soviet

(“the joyful Soviet workers”), anti-Soviet (workers “bent over like slaves”) and ostensibly non-partisan analyses in voiceover (workers who apply themselves

“with courage and tenacity” to “improve the appearance of their city, which could certainly use it.”) (Fig. 4.22, above). This sequence has been extensively written about in the existing literature on the film, with scholars focusing on the ontological implications of the voice and on the relationship between sound and image.95 However, there has been a relative lack of discussion of how this sequence relates to the specific political context I have traced above and what it signifies in terms of Marker’s historiographical principles in the film. For example, in Michel Chion’s criticism of the sequence, he argues that its

‘weakness’ lies in the fact that Marker “leads us to believe that the issue is solely one of political ideology, and that otherwise there exists some neutral way of speaking.”96 Yet Chion’s assertion that Marker’s final voiceover somehow provides a politically neutral synthesis strikes me as a misreading of the purpose of the sequence, and indeed of Marker’s attitude towards the images that he looks back over in the film in general. In seeking to avoid the clichés of Soviet or anti-Soviet political ideologies, Marker’s aim is not to claim the authority of a

Sings], an ode to the love of the Russian people for the music of French singer Yves Montand, whose voice, according to the song’s lyrics, has the power to reduce the distances between the listener and the singer in Paris.

95 See for example Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7; Pascal Bonitzer, “Les silences de la voix,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 256, February-March 1975, 22-33; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (11th Edition) (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013), 268-269.

96 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 7.

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third ideological middle ground as a more appropriate judgment of these images, or even, as Pascal Bonitzer has put it, to dispute the possibility of objectivity in politically impassioned voiceover commentary.97 Rather, the film eschews ideological judgment — that is, a claim on these images as an illustration of any current ideological framework — in favour of the production of a historical legibility. That is to say, Marker is concerned not with making a claim on what the image shows of the present, but rather of making legible their correspondences with the longer currents and changes of history.

97 This is Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion, when he argues that Marker condemns all politically impassioned commentary as “doing violence unto the image” by “fixing it to fit an archetype.” Pascal Bonitzer, “Les silences de la voix,” 27.

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Figure 4.23: Lettre de Sibérie’s ‘imaginary newsreel.’ The transition to the newsreel is assured by a stylised zoom and a shift from colour to black and white.

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To my mind, the famous sequence in Yakutsk reveals its logic when considered with the comparatively little-discussed scene that immediately follows it. As if creating a rejoinder to the political stalemate presented by the above sequence — which seems to demonstrate a scepticism about the very idea of synthesis itself faced with the complexities of these images — Marker’s voiceover commentary suggests that:

‘Objectivity’ isn’t the answer either. It doesn’t deform Siberian reality, but it does interrupt it long enough to judge it, and consequently deforms it all the same. What counts is the drive and variety. A walk through the streets of Yakutsk isn’t going to make you understand Siberia. What you need might be an imaginary newsreel shot all over Siberia.98

Here, the use of the newsreel as a rhetorical mode is striking if we think back to its prevalence throughout the other films examined in the thesis, and it is fitting that it appears here at the end of my analysis in this thesis (Fig. 4.23, above). For all three filmmakers — from the turn of the century footage of Paris 1900 through to the images captured by the Allies at the opening of the camps in Nuit et Brouillard — the immediacy of the newsreel was the basis of a montage after- the-fact, one that would evoke the longer shifts and mutations of subsequent history hinted at in these fleeting glimpses of time past. For Marker then to introduce the imaginary newsreel at this juncture of the film acts in stark

98 In a passage from Sibérie - zéro + l'infini, Armand Gatti echoes Marker’s commentary in the film, describing “Siberian reality” as "un granit qui ne supporte pas l’apprêt. Y ciseler des impressions semble à première vue une procédure vaine, tellement grand est l’espace à recouvrir, et âpre le contact." Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + l'infini, 12.

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contrast to how he, Vedrès and Resnais had engaged with the form, introducing these glimpses of the region’s ‘drive and variety’ as a means of making historically legible the previous sequence’s images of Yakutsk. The newsreel sequence brings together footage of life in the harsh Siberian winter, defined by the very ‘drive and variety’ that Marker evokes above: animals in the snow, the mountains of Verkhoyansk, and fur trappers, which are slowly replaced by images of the rituals of the Yakut people that greet the coming of springtime.99

Here again, we see an example of Marker’s attention to the temporalities and rituals of non-contemporaneous contemporaneity, particularly in the closing images of the Yakut springtime festivities. Responding to their own non- calendrical temporalities, which pre-date the imposition of Soviet rule, these rituals problematise the simplistic future horizons of modernity and progress that had been in question in the previous sequence on the city of Yakutsk. The imaginary newsreels end on these images of the springtime festivities, with a cut from the stylised black and white photography back to colour (Fig. 4.24, below).

“Now we can go back to Yakutsk”, we hear in the voiceover commentary, “and there, in the ruthless light of the wintery climate that has forged this country, that has laid so many pitfalls and landmines for its people, we might better realise what a victory even the simplest achievements represent.” Appearing at this juncture of the film, this statement reads as an evocative encapsulation of

Marker’s montage poetics that he develops over the course of the 1950s and its

99 The ‘imaginary’ aspect of the newsreel is reinforced by the use of the conditional tense in the voiceover narration (“My imaginary newsreel would start with these images of winter”), as if to highlight their quality as rejoinders to the previous images – instead of that, I would show you this. Here, Marker seems to be making a callback to the Esprit column “Actualités imaginaires” that he contributed to for years.

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implications for his historical discourses on time and place. When one assemblage of images or words betrays its subject — that is, it is too hasty to judge, and does not create the distance needed to understand these images as products of the passing of time — one must assemble them with another set of images, another set of words, with another temporal purview and vantage point from which to speak. Only by better placing these contemporary glimpses in relation to one another can the realities of place reveal their more profound linkage to the passing of time.

Figure 4.24: The end of Lettre de Sibérie’s ‘imaginary newsreel’ sequence.

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Conclusion

As Arnaud Lambert has recently pointed, one of the aspects that scholars have grappled with in writing about these early films in Marker’s career is the fact that Marker himself disavowed them later in life, refusing to have them included in the programs of retrospectives dedicated to his career.100 In the program notes for the 1998 retrospective dedicated to his work held at the Cinémathèque française — where these films were notably absent from program — Marker explained this decision, saying that he deemed these films to be “rudimentary”

“rough drafts” in the early stages of a cinematographic apprenticeship.101

Watching these films today, one can perhaps understand Marker’s reticence to show them without necessarily sharing his desire not to revisit them; the rudimentary nature of the cinematography is reflective of a vitality of discovery and immediacy, and there are kernels of thought and philosophies of image- making found here that would resonate throughout his career, not to mention those of others. In these same program notes, Marker writes that his decision not to screen the films was largely out of a desire not to inflict upon audiences his tentative first steps in the medium, and not — as he had been accused — a form of retrospective political ‘self-censorship’: “I neither take back nor apologise for anything in these films given the time and place [in which they were made],”

100 Arnaud Lambert, “L’Usage du monde: voyage et politique,” Chris Marker (2018), 171. This decision extended to all of the films Marker directed before 1962, including thus Description d’un combat (1960) and Cuba Si! (1961). Major retrospectives dedicated to Marker’s work since his death in 2012, such as those organised at the Centre Pompidou (2013) and the Cinémathèque française (2018), have included these films in their programs. All of the films from this early period – with the exception of Olympia 52 and Cuba Si! – have been released on DVD.

101 Chris. Marker, “Marker mémoire,” Images documentaires, no. 31, 2nd trimester, 1998, 78.

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Marker continues, declaring, “I navigated these subjects as clearly as I could.”102

In citing Marker here, it is not my intention to justify my own decision to return to these films using the particular optic that I have adopted in this chapter, nor do I necessarily believe that one has to take Marker’s words to be gospel truth with regards to the question of self-censorship. Rather, what I wish to point out is that even at a distance of forty years and with all the changes that had occurred in these countries, Marker felt that his films spoke clearly to his impressions and experiences as a foreign observer. In looking back on them,

Marker seems to have been struck not by a sense that they exhibited a no-longer- tenable partisan tone, but rather by a certain lack of technical refinement.

To my mind, this reflection is telling as to the philosophical and historical purview of the films Marker directs in the 1950s, and what it meant for him to go to these nations to provide a cinematic rendering of his experiences. In a period in which the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War had made the question of political partisanship central to all contact between the Eastern bloc and the

West, Marker’s films exhibit a desire to take a step back from the immediacy of political judgment and to take a longer view of history that extends beyond the diplomatic rupture caused by the Cold War’s onset. I use the word ‘immediacy’ precisely because this historiographical challenge that Marker sets for himself is to set a just critical distance between himself and the images he records in his account of the contemporary realities of these countries. His work in this period demonstrates a belief in the malleability of the image in the construction of the

102 “…je ne retire ni ne regrette rien de ces films en leur temps et lieu. Sur ces sujets j'ai balisé mon chemin le plus clairement que j'ai pu" Chris Marker, “Marker mémoire,” 78.

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history of a place, and of montage as a means of understanding the contemporary image of place within a broader network of historico-political narratives. Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie might be seen as the apotheosis of a series of experiments with montage across print and cinema in the 1950s that saw the assemblage of images as a means of evoking these more ephemeral historical linkages and temporal flows that lay beyond the frame of the image. His work in this period sees him continually posit the moment of assemblage as a means of bridging the concerns of providing a picture of a place — in a photograph, a roll of film — and the more ephemeral matter of a picture of a time.

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Afterimages: Looking Back, Moving Forward

By grouping the films of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker together and examining their shared practices and philosophies of montage in this period, this thesis has challenged some of the historiographical orthodoxies of scholarship on the post- war French cinema. If the prevailing tendency in writing on this period of French film is to chart the critical discourses on realism that give primacy to mise-en- scène and its relation to classicism in painting and literature — discourses that would find their manifestation in the first films of the New Wave — this thesis has demonstrated that there is an equally fruitful critical reflection on and practice of montage in the modernist tradition that concurrently emerges in the field of documentary filmmaking. This reflection on montage, developing independently from the better-known realist discourse of the period, demonstrates distinct aesthetic influences and historiographical preoccupations, which I have traced throughout this thesis. There is an opportunity for researchers to build on the research presented here in considering the importance of the hitherto neglected field of montage-centric filmmaking in

France in the 1940s and 50s and especially to shed some light on the montage practices of lesser-known filmmakers from this period. These include Yannick

Bellon (Varsovie, quand même… (1954)), Jean Grémillon (Le six juin à l’aube

(1946)), Denise Tual (Ce siècle a 50 ans (1950)), Pierre Kast (Les désastres de la guerre (1951)) Robert Hessens (Statues d’epouvante (1956)), Carlos Vilardebó

(Vivre, 1958), and Guy Debord (Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers

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une assez courte unite de temps (1959) and Critique de la séparation (1960)).1

These filmmakers engage with the cinematic forms examined in the thesis, including the film de montage and art documentary, demonstrating the existence of further montage-based practices in this period of French cinema.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the very newness of Vedrès, Resnais and

Marker’s work was due in large part to their heightened sense of connection with inter-war European art, and particularly its modernist iterations.

Throughout this thesis, I have demonstrated the extent to which their contributions to the history of cinema are in dialogue with art movements and artistic forms across different media from the earlier parts of the twentieth century. These include Dadaist photomontage, surrealism’s experimentation with the aesthetic of shock in both the domain of the image and the written word, the modernist revolution of the novel in the 1920s and the 1930s, and a renewed interest in the associative possibilities of text and image in photo albums and graphic revues. It is thus my hope that future scholarship on the innovations that these three filmmakers brought to cinema history will reflect these productive correspondences between cinema and other media that nourish the thinking of these filmmakers. To my mind, the research begun here on the cross-medial aspects of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s work offers a

1 This non-exhaustive list is expanded in Appendix 2. Though very little has been written on or translated into English on these films, some scholarship in France has appeared in the last decade. See Dominique Bluher and François Thomas, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968. De l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005); Anthony Fiant and Roxane Hamery, eds., Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968 (2). Documentaire, fiction: allers-retours (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). See also François Porcile, Défense du court métrage français (Paris: Le Cerf, 1965).

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springboard for a more thoroughgoing scholarly investigation into the work of these filmmakers as it relates to the aforementioned artistic movements. It also opens up a space for considering cinematic montage in their work as part of a broader, cross-medial practice that connects the world of literature, photography and painting.

Looking forward, the influence of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker’s contributions to montage and documentary film can be seen in the works of several more contemporary filmmakers, whose work expands upon the trio’s reflexive investigations on the nature of the relationship between the image and history. Harun Farocki’s description of a cinema that “clear[s] away the rubble lying on top of the images”2 — an apt description of these three filmmakers’ work in this period — is present in more recent works by Farocki himself, Thom

Anderson, Ken Jacobs and Jean-Luc Godard. These filmmakers also produce legibilities of images of different provenance, adopting the Benjaminian practices traced in this thesis in inquiries into the participation of images in human destruction (Farocki’s Images of the World and Inscriptions of War, 1989), reflections on the infiltration of American ideologies in its media (Jacobs’ Star

Spangled to Death, 2004), and on the newly legible contours of cinema history itself (Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988-1998). Scholars and curators have also pointed out the modernity of the filmmaking practices developed by these

2 Quoted in Volker Siebel, “Painting Pavements,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 51.

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filmmakers, particularly in the case of Resnais and Marker and their influence on later forms of essayistic filmmaking.3

Considerations of Vedrès’ contribution to documentary film form are only just starting to take shape in the French and English-speaking world.4 For French film historian Laurent Véray, Vedrès belongs at the forefront of a lineage of documentary modernism in the archival tradition that includes both Marker and

Farocki, as well as Edgardo Cozarinsky, Peter Forgacs and Pierre Beuchot, in which there is a “reflection on the deep significations” of the image that goes beyond “what they purport to signify in an immediate sense.”5 With the first ever retrospective of Nicole Vedrès’ film work having taken place in June of 2017 at

Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, it is clear that Vedrès’ films are already being considered within this lineage in a curatorial context as well, with a screening of Paris 1900 taking place alongside Godard’s De l’Origine du XXIe siècle

(2000).6 Other screenings have — inevitably with reference to Marker’s identification of her work as being an important step in the development of the

3 For example, in his much-cited piece that sketches out a definition of the essay film, Phillip Lopate identifies Nuit et Brouillard as his “first glimpse of the essay-film.” He then goes on to identify Marker as “[t]he one great essayist in the film medium.” Phillip Lopate,“In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film,” in Beyond Document: Essays on nonfiction film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 247, 249. See also Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Montero, Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012).

4 On the existing literature on Vedrès, see “Introduction,” note 12.

5 Laurent Véray, “L’Histoire peut-elle se faire avec des archives filmiques?” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze (Online) 41, 2003. Accessed 10th January, 2018. https://journals.openedition.org/1895/266.

6 See Emilie Cauquy, Bernard Eisenschitz, “Nicole Vedrès: Quando il secolo prese forma,” in Il Cinema Ritrovato XXI edizione. Catalogo, eds. Alice Autelitano and Alessandro Cavazza (Bologna: Cineteca Bologna, 2017), 378-385.

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‘essay’ in cinema — placed her in the lineage of the essay film, in the typically loose temporal and spatial bracketing that tends to accompany this slippery form. Paris 1900 was notably screened in March 2018 at London’s Essay Film

Festival alongside Indian director Mani Kaul’s work of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as contemporary essay films from throughout Europe and the Americas. A decade earlier, La Vie commence demain was part of the Austrian Film Museum’s program curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin entitled, “The Way of the Termite: The

Essay in Cinema, 1909–2004,” alongside works by Marguerite Duras, Alexander

Kluge and Peter Nestler.7 With the release of Vedrès’ complete filmography on

DVD in April 2018 and a growing scholarly interest in her work in the English and French-speaking world, there will no doubt be a continuation and development of these curatorial interventions to situate her work in relation to others in the history of cinema.

But while this curatorial and historiographical interventions that await

Vedrès’ work promise to provide productive links between her films and those of filmmakers from other times and places, this move ought to be tempered by an acknowledgment of her work — along with Resnais and Marker’s — as responding to a specific set of contextual concerns of French post-war history.

7 The London Essay Film Festival program can be found at http://www.essayfilmfestival.com/programme-2018/. Online. Accessed 22nd October, 2018. The “Way of the Termite” program was reprinted in Der Weg der Termiten. Beispiele eines Essayistichen Kinos, 1900-2004, ed. Astrid Ofner (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2007). Continuing the aforementioned Chris Marker connection, Paris 1900 was included in the May-June 2018 retrospective at the Cinémathèque française as part of a corpus of films that had made an impact on his work, alongside Malraux’s Espoir (1938), Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World (1926), and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). For a full list of films programmed as part of the retrospective, see: http://www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/chris-marker-les-7-vies-d-un-cineaste- 441.html. Accessed 22nd October, 2018.

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This thesis has demonstrated how the traumas of WWII (Paris 1900, Guernica,

Nuit et Brouillard), Europe’s colonial history in Africa (Les Statues meurent aussi) and the tensions of the Cold War (La Vie commence demain, Dimanche à Pekin,

Lettre de Sibérie) filter through the work of these filmmakers, appearing as their own critical points of legibility — to return to Benjamin — that dictate the directors’ historiographical purview. This thesis has also demonstrated how the adoption of montage as a key aesthetic figure and historiographical method allowed these filmmakers to make films that were not simply about particular historical moments or phenomena, but about the nature of time itself, demonstrating how the joining of two images could reveal the often unexpected articulations of past, present and future against one another. In homing in on the engaged temporality8 that is at the heart of these films, the conclusions that one can draw can be applied both to the works of the filmmakers made during the post-war period in question, as well as to their work in the years to come. In terms of the former, one of the key intellectual through lines of this thesis has been to situate these directors in the context of post-war France, charting their engagement with the memory of the recent past from the viewpoint of the political concerns present in broader intellectual and cultural circles in the period after the Liberation. In doing so, I had hoped to give some nuance to the analytical frameworks commonly applied to these filmmakers, who have overwhelmingly been described with the aid of looser conceptual terms such as

‘memory’, ‘time’ and ‘history.’ These are not, in and of themselves, inappropriate intellectual frameworks for discussing these filmmakers, and this thesis does

8 Thank you to Sam Di Iorio for suggesting the term “engaged temporality” and some of the conceptual links to later films by Marker and Resnais discussed below.

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discuss the processes of memorialisation and questions of temporality and history in their work. The distinction is one of nuance and specificity; what kind of memorial currents in post-war France are the filmmakers responding to?

What kind of relationship to time and temporality does their specific situation of

‘looking back’ on the earlier twentieth century from after the cataclysm of the war produce? And, most importantly, what kind of historiographical modalities do they adopt in order to reveal the links between the context in which they emerge and the longer currents of history with which they engage? These are the questions that have animated my thinking in this thesis, and the responses that I have suggested in closely examining the films of these directors should demonstrate to what extent the aesthetic innovations of this period respond to this contextual backdrop.

In terms of the work of Vedrès, Resnais and Marker in the years to come, all three would continue on from this period in radically different ways. Vedrès’ filmmaking career was frustratingly short; she directed her last film in the mid-

1950s, before returning to the world of literature as a novelist and playwright, while also regularly appearing on French television as a literary critic on the program Lectures pour tous.9 Resnais on the other hand would stay in cinema and turn to the world of fiction after the international success of Hiroshima mon amour in 1959, though without entirely leaving behind the lessons of this first

9 Part of the reason why Vedrès’ filmmaking career was so short was surely the pervasive sexism of the French film industry that meant that she – along with Agnès Varda, Yannick Bellon, Denise Tual, and a handful of others – was one of exceptionally few women to direct a film in this post- war period. Vedrès touches on this briefly in a scathing open letter to André Bazin and the editors of Cahiers du cinéma in response to a request to contribute to the journal’s special issue on women in cinema. Nicole Vedrès, “Petite lettre à André Bazin sur un sujet intraitable,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 30 (Special issue: “La femme et le cinéma”), Christmas 1953, 27-28.

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period. From the radical reworking of the flashback in Hiroshima and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), to the fluid shifts between past, present and future in La Guerre est finie (1966) and Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), as well as the epiphanic appearances of images from earlier film history in Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980), Resnais would carry forward this model of engaged, fluid temporality first glimpsed in his early period examined in this thesis. While

Marker would continue to work across media in the decades to come, his film work would even more explicitly continue the explorations on temporality and the image first glimpsed in the post-war years, becoming, for example, the central subject of his late-period Souvenirs d’un avenir (co-directed with Yannick

Bellon, 2001). Interestingly, what we see shift for Marker after this initial post- war period is in part the directionality of the temporal movements I have charted in this thesis. Starting at the beginning of the 1960s with La Jetée (1962) and moving forward, a quite distinct formulation of historical temporality emerges in his work; in these later films, it is the future that seemingly creates the past, or more precisely, it is the unexpected twists and turns of history that give the images of the past an unforeseeable significance. One thinks for example of a sequence from his 1977 film de montage on the New Left, Le fond de l’air est rouge – perhaps the film of Marker’s career in which he took the lessons of

Vedrès’ archival poetics most to heart – in which Marker himself looks back at the footage he filmed at the Helsinki Olympic Games that first appeared in

Olympia 52. In one of the rare moments in his career where his own voice is heard in voiceover, Marker comments on images of cross-country runners who

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had become expelled party members and show jumpers that had become putschists;10 in other words, images that at a distance of 25 years had become unavoidably entangled in a suite of mid-20th century geopolitics. “On ne sait jamais ce qu’on filme” [“You never know what you are filming”], he repeats, twice.

Marker’s phrase is on the one hand a moment of reflexivity with regards to his own filmmaking, an encapsulation of his efforts to wrestle with the tectonic shifts of history and the struggle for the cinema to preserve a faithful image of time alongside it. On the other hand, it also speaks to the ongoing importance of the model of engaged temporality forged by Marker and his colleagues in this post-war period, in which the filmmakers took montage itself as a privileged means of expressing the contingency and fragility of the images that they worked with. Seeking to draw out the complex itineraries that the image cannot help but take over time, these three filmmakers contributed to a distinct cinematic language of montage, which, while of its time, reflected a desire to create a more mutable vision of history and the place of the cinematic image within it.

10 Czech long-distance runner, Emil Zátopek, had become a member of and was subsequently expelled from the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the Prague Spring; the Chilean show jumper, César Mendoza, was to become one of the four members of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s junta.

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381

Filmography

Central corpus of films, in order of release:

Paris 1900. Directed by Nicole Vedrès, 1947.

Van Gogh. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1948.

La Vie commence demain. Directed by Nicole Vedrès, 1950.

Guernica. Directed by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950.

Olympia 52. Directed by Chris Marker, 1952.

Les Statues meurent aussi. Directed by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953.

Nuit et Brouillard. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1956.

Dimanche à Pekin. Directed by Chris Marker, 1956.

Lettre de Sibérie. Directed by Chris Marker, 1957.

Other films cited:

A propos de Nice. Directed by Jean Vigo, 1930.

A Valparaíso. Directed by Joris Ivens, 1964.

Afrique sur scène. Directed Paulin Vieyra, 1955.

L’Amant sur la lune. Directed by Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca, 1903.

L’amitié noire. Directed by François Villiers, 1946.

America Today. Collective film, 1932-34.

L’année dernière à Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1961.

Atomic Power! Directed by Jack Glenn, 1946.

Au pays des pygmées. Directed by Jacques Dupont, 1947.

382

Aufschub. Directed by Harun Farocki, 2007.

L’Aventure de Guy. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1936. [Lost]

La Bataille de l’eau lourde. Directed by Jean Dréville, 1948.

Battleship Potemkin. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925.

Les camps de la mort. Produced by Les Actualités françaises, 1945.

Le Carnaval des verities. Directed by Marcel L’Herbier, 1920.

Ceux de chez nous. Directed by Sacha Guitry, 1915.

Le Chant du Styrène. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1958.

La Chienne. Directed by Jean Renoir, 1931.

Le cinéma au service de l’histoire. Directed by Germaine Dulac, 1935.

La Course de taureaux. Directed by Pierre Braunberger and Myriam. 1951.

Creating Hands. Directed by Hans Cürlis, 1922.

Cuba Si! Directed by Chris Marker, 1961.

De l’Origine du XXIe siècle. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 2000.

Départ pour l’Allemagne, Directed by Roger Leenhardt. 1946.

Description d’un combat. Directed by Chris Marker, 1960.

Les Ecrans de la ville: emission du 28 octobre 1965. Directed by Colette Thiriet, 1965.

Espoir. Directed by André Malraux, 1939.

Etudes sur Paris. Directed by André Sauvage, 1930.

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Directed by Esfir Shub, 1927.

La Femme de nulle part. Directed by Louis Delluc, 1922.

La Fin du monde vue par l’Ange Gabriel. Directed by Chris Marker, 1946. [Lost]

Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Directed by Chris Marker, 1977.

Gare du nord. Directed by Jean Rouch, 1964.

383

The Great Way. Directed by Esfir Shub, 1927.

Guernica. Directed by Helge Ernst, 1949.

La Guerre est finie. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1966.

L’Heritage de la chouette. Directed by Chris Marker, 1989.

Histoire(s) du cinéma. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998.

Je t’aime, je t’aime. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1968.

Las Hurdes. Directed by Luis Buñuel, 1932.

Images of the World and Inscriptions of War. Directed by Harun Farocki, 1989.

La Jétee. Directed by Chris Marker, 1962.

Le jour se lève. Directed by Marcel Carné, 1939.

Jules et Jim. Directed by François Truffaut, 1962.

The Last Days of St. Petersburg. Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1927.

Level Five. Directed by Chris Marker, 1997.

Malfray. Directed by Robert Hessens, 1948.

Manière de Croire. Directed by Paul Gilson, 1930.

Memphis Belle. Directed by William Wyler, 1944.

Mon oncle d’Amérique. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1980.

Moscow in October. Directed by Boris Barnet, 1927.

Muriel. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1963.

Native Land. Directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1942.

October. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1927.

Ostatni etap. Directed by Wanda Jakubowska, 1947.

Paisà. Directed by Robert Rosselini, 1946.

Il Paradiso terrestre. Directed by Luciano Emmer, 1940.

The Passion of Joan of Arc. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928.

384

La Peau douce. Directed by François Truffaut, 1964.

Photogénie. Directed by Jean Epstein, 1925.

Portrait d’Henri Goetz. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1947.

Portrait de Nicole Vedrès. Directed by Roger Boussinot, 1964.

La Proie. Directed by Georges Monca, 1917.

Rain. Directed by Joris Ivens, 1928.

Records 37. Directed by Jacques Brunius, 1937.

Regards sur la Belgique ancienne. Directed by Henri Storck, 1936.

Le Retour. Directed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1945.

Rien que les heures. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926.

Rotterdam-Europoort. Directed Joris Ivens, 1966.

The Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoy. Directed by Esfir Shub, 1928. [Lost]

Le Silence. Directed by Louis Delluc, 1920.

A Sixth Part of the World. Directed by Dziga Vertov, 1926.

Song of the Rivers. Directed by Joris Ivens, Robert Ménégoz and Joop Huiskens, 1954.

Souvenirs d’un avenir. Directed by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker, 2001.

Star Splangled to Death. Directed by Ken Jacobs, 2004.

Thérèse Raquin. Directed by Jacques Feyder, 1927.

Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Resettlement Area. Directed by Kurt Gerron and Karel Pečený, 1944.

La Tour. Directed by René Clair, 1928.

Ukraine in Flames. Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko and Yuliya Solnsteva, 1943.

Varsovie, quand même… Directed by Yannick Bellon, 1954.

La Vie est à nous. Directed by Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, Jean-Paul Le Chanois et. al., 1936.

385

Violons d’Ingres. Directed by Jacques Brunius, 1939.

Visite à Hans Hartung. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1947.

Why We Fight. Series directed by Frank Capra, 1942-1945.

386

Appendix 1. Citations in Their Original Language Introduction

[C]’est que le soi-disant « courant Rive Gauche » est un mythe, une invention de critiques affligés de la manie de classer, de dénoter à tout prix. Au moment de la « nouvelle vague » (largement un mythe, elle aussi, mais au mois correspondant à un critère temporel) il faillait apparemment trouver un lien entre les « inclassables » et je ne sais pas qui a eu le premier l’idée de cette aberrante famille où je ne me trouve nullement, ni sans doute la plupart de ceux que vous citez. [...] Et je vous avoue que je suis un peu effaré de voir un travail que j’imagine considérable et sérieux, consacré à quelque chose qui n’existe pas, qui n’a jamais existé que dans la tête de critiques débiles... (pp. 18-19) [Chris Marker, Letter to William F. Van Wert, 1974]

A Nicole Védrès, je dois tout. Dire que Nicole, en deux films, m'a appris que le cinéma n'était pas incompatible avec l'intelligence pourrait à bon droit relever d'une incroyable prétention. Pour qui il se prend, celui-là ? Les autres étaient idiots ? Donc, précisons. Ce n'est pas l'intelligence des cinéastes qui est en cause, c'est l'idée, peu courante à l'époque, que l'intelligence pouvait être le matériau de base, la matière brute à laquelle commentaire et montage s'attaquent pour en extraire un objet appelé film. [...] Peut-être faut-il simplement débarrasser le mot intelligence de cette valeur ajoutée qui la surestime ou la sous-estime, et la considérer simplement comme une catégorie de l'esthétique, à partir de laquelle on peut concevoir que le cinéma n'est pas seulement l'héritier du roman et du théâtre, plus rarement du poème, qu'il peut aussi procéder de l'essai — et qu'évidemment, comme en librairie, il peut y avoir de très mauvais essais. Tout cela paraît banal aujourd'hui. Avant Paris 1900 et La Vie commence demain ce ne l'était pas du tout. (p. 25) [Chris Marker, Program notes to Cinémathèque française retrospective, 1998]

Certes, il existe de tout chaos des instants privilégiés, mais ils sont déterminés précisément par chacun des arts qui doivent exprimer ce chaos. À l’instant où Robespierre ne peut plus se faire entendre, le fait décisif pour la radio est peut- être sa voix qui sombre ; mais, pour le cinéma, c’est peut-être la distraction d’un des gardes, tout occupé en cette seconde même, à flanquer des gosses dehors ou à chercher son briquet... (p. 34) [André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma.” First published 1940]

Eisenstein est beaucoup plus près de la rencontre du parapluie et de la machine à coudre sur la table de dissection. Et, dans la mesure où je reste très sensible à la discipline surréaliste, je me sens en effet beaucoup plus proche de la conception d’Eisenstein. Chaque plan demeure vivant. (p. 47) [Alain Resnais, Interview, 1961]

387

Chapter 1

L’apparition du cinéma ne constitue donc pas une révolution esthétique ; elle est au contraire l’aboutissement d’une série de phénomènes qui se sont succédé dans le domaine du spectacle ; elle correspond à ce que réclamaient, plus encore que l’esprit, les nerfs d’une époque. (p. 65) [Nicole Vedrès, “Le Cinéma ou le piège de la réalité.” 1952]

La réalité n’est pas saisissable dans son morne et lent écoulement quotidien, ni dans son égarante, frénétique et informe multiplicité. L’une et l’autre peuvent devenir passionnantes lorsque ... les fragments essentiels en sont isolés, grossis, et qu’on peut enfin procéder aux rapprochements qu’imposent les correspondances, similitudes, oppositions, analogies, contrastes, échos. Au cinéma, une simple collure peut remplacer le mot comme, les mots de même que... de même, le mot à... (p. 89) [Jacques-B. Brunius, “Documentaires d’avant-garde et films de montage.” First published in French in 1954]

...tous les moyens utilisés mais réduits à la création d’un climat singulier, d’une atmosphère psychologique qui ne veut déjà plus rien devoir à l’action ni à la mimique ; une image seulement chargée du sens de ce qui va survenir : c’est ce que Delluc voulait dans le Silence, c’est ce que Carné atteint dans Le Jour se lève. (pp. 98-99) [Nicole Vedrès, Images du cinéma français, 1945]

Elle donne un discours à la conception informulée de Langlois et invente une pratique des images qui a indubitablement fait retour sur lui avant d’avoir des échos chez les cinéastes, une procédure aux implications théoriques inépuisées, de Bazin en Marker en Godard... L’image fixe prend une valeur propre, d’élément de montage pas moins. Ce qui lui sert de footage n’est pas found mais, grâce au désordre de la Cinémathèque, préservé, recherché, inventorié, choisi, enfin cité et monté. C’est le début d’un procédé de montage qui libère. (p. 101) [Bernard Eisenschitz, “Le film de papier (Images du cinéma français).” 2018].

Il y aurait d’ailleurs beaucoup à dire sur l’aggravation de notre sensibilité romantique due à l’apport photographique. Nos pères qui n’avaient que des miniatures ou des peintures, enfin des « œuvres artistiques », pour reconstituer le passé ignoraient cette acuité douloureuse qu’a le document photographique ou cinématographique. Son nombre, son implacabilité changent la qualité de nos rêves. (p. 106) [Louis Chéronnet, A Paris... vers 1900, 1932]

Que le document ait été pris par un quelconque opérateur de Pathé-Journal, ou qu’une scène de la même époque ait été tournée par un metteur en scène de film d’art, ils se ressemblent. Ils se ressemblent extraordinairement. Au point qu’on peut les assembler, et c’est ce que nous fîmes parfois, en dépit de l’apparente hétérodoxie du procédé. Il n’y a pas d’un côté le réalisme et de l’autre la

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transposition. Il y a toujours interprétation, du moment que l’homme intervient, même si (on oserait dire surtout si) il a inventé une machine capable de voir à sa place – c’est-à-dire comme lui-même. L’homme […] ne réinvente jamais que l’homme. (p. 117) [Nicole Vedrès, “Le Cinéma ou le piège de la réalité.” 1952]

Quand les gens nous disaient « Mais vous cherchez quoi ? » on disait « On ne sait pas. Tout ! » Un archéologue qui s’en va fouiller en Crète, il dit pas « Je cherche un vase », il dit « Moi je cherche des siècles. » Bah nous, on cherchait 1900, comme ça n’importe où. (p. 121) [Nicole Vedrès quoted in Roger Boussinot, “Portrait de Nicole Vedrès.” 1964]

Pour fabriquer une carcasse, pour ménager des points d’appui à notre récit, des tremplins à une action qui au fond n’en était pas une (la marche du temps n’est pas en elle-même un sujet) il nous a donc fallu choisir des scènes d’une certaine intensité, mais qui, bien souvent, n’avaient pas de véritable signification historique. (p. 122) [Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent.” 1948]

Cela nous servit à amener, insensiblement pensions-nous, l’idée d’une altération dans le voltage de l’époque, et à faire passer, comme en vol plané, l’idée de la mort. (p. 128) [Nicole Vedrès, “Les feuilles bougent.” 1948]

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Chapter 2

Et vous n’avez pas honte ? C’est toute l’époque que je viens de vous décrire, et vous m’expliquez que la puisant confrérie des honnêtes gens la laisse aller à vau- l’eau et n’intervient jamais. (p. 150) [Jean-Paul Sartre in La Vie commence demain].

Que peut-on faire pour mieux diffuser les derniers enseignements des sciences et des technologies, et éviter que les découvertes scientifiques ne soient stockées comme des grenades dans des arsenaux ? Que compte-on faire pour éviter que la science atomique ne mène à la guerre atomique ? Que peut-on faire avant le désastre ? (p. 154) [André Labarthe in La Vie commence demain].

…ceux qui ont ouvert l’âge atomique, l’âge nouveau et qui, une nuit de 1945, dans le désert de New-Mexico, attendaient qu’Oppenheimer mit le feu à l’atome, savaient bien que si leurs calculs étaient justes, ils aboutissaient à l’apothéose de 50 années de recherches, de Becquerel à Niels Bohr, mais qu’ils allaient poser à toute la race humaine la plus terrible et en même temps le plus simple des dilemmes de l’Histoire : vivre ou se suicider. (p. 157) [André Labarthe in La Vie commence demain].

On ne commence pas toujours par un coup de théâtre le monde de demain. Ce n’est pas, à chaque fois, une longue histoire secrète qui éclate comme un scandale à la façon de la bombe atomique. Ça vous vient lentement comme la vieillesse, comme les rides. L’utopie ne se construit pas en un jour ; elle n’est pas un rivage enchanteur que l’on aborde, un beau matin, sous le ciel des tropiques, avec du soleil plein les yeux. C’est plutôt une série de transitions et de caprices qui, à force d’échecs, deviennent possibles. C’est une révolution sans acte de naissance et une féerie qui n’avance qu’en plagiant le passé. (p. 159) [André Labarthe, La Vie commence demain, 1947]

En travaillant sur le film, nous nous sommes aperçus qu’il fallait une structure, une construction qui soit plus subtile qu’une simple suite d’images d’art africain. C’est comme ça que nous avons commencé à mélanger un peu de réalité africaine, de documents réels, pris soit dans les bandes d’actualités, soit dans des courts métrages tournés en Afrique. [...] petit à petit, nous avons débouché sur cette construction qui est celle du film où l’on voit progressivement l’art africain s’amoindrir, être remplacé par des images cinématographiques prises par des Blancs... (p. 165) [Alain Resnais, Interview, 1972]

Qu’est-ce qui nous poussait en effet à avancer dans ce film ? C’était : « je ne veux pas faire un monument aux morts. Je ne veux pas faire quelque chose qui soit.. « Ah c’est le passé, plus jamais ça, et ça ne reviendra jamais etc. Curieusement, on

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pourrait dire que même si le film ne fait que document, c’est un film qui est obsédé par le futur, par l’avenir. [Alain Resnais, Interview, 1994] (p. 182)

Notre idée était de réagir contre la tendance constante à donner une image abstraite des camps. Il fallait faire voir les arbres, à l’automne, les couleurs splendides et gaies de ces lieux de torture. [...] Resnais voulait une couleur vivante. Il cherchait à modifier par la couleur le regard qu’on porte habituellement sur ces choses – regard d’hommage attristé, de couronne mortuaire. [Ghislain Cloquet, Interview, 1967] (p. 190)

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Chapter 3

Il y a une notion qui me plaît bien, au cinéma, c’est la notion de vulgarisation. Un livre ou une peinture entrent d’abord en contact avec mille personnes, tandis qu’un film en touche tout de suite des millions. Dans cette optique, il est intéressant de reprendre une expérience faite par un écrivain en 1880 ou par un peintre connu de quelques initiés. Je suis contre la chapelle, et toute tentative qui consiste à faire éclater les murs de la chapelle me séduit a priori. (p. 205) [Alain Resnais, Interview, 1961]

Car un Musée imaginaire sans précédent s’est ouvert, qui va pousser à l’extrême l’intellectualisation commencée par l’incomplète confrontation des vrais musées ; répondant à l’appel de ceux-ci, les art plastiques ont inventé leur imprimerie. (p. 217) [André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire, 1947]

Nous avons largement à payer les méfaits de plus d’un siècle d’ignorance, d’hostilité ou d’inertie. L’art ne peut trouver tout seul le chemin de l’esprit ou du cœur des hommes. Il doit être exposé, montré en tous lieux pour être vu. Et pour être regardé comme il convient, il faut préparer l’œil, préparer l’intelligence, à le recevoir. L’art demande une éducation, comme les autres savoirs humains. Et le bon public a droit à cette éducation. […] Plus nous serons nombreux, plus la tâche sera aisée pour répondre à ce besoin du public, des adultes comme des enfants, par des expositions circulantes, des films sur l’art, des conférences, des voyages. (p. 232) [Gaston Diehl, “N’oublions pas le publique”, 1948]

Et dans les dernières œuvres de Vincent, les cyprès aux-mêmes (sic.) s’élancent en jets sinueux d’où bondissent les mèches attisées des branches, vers les soleils tourbillonnants qui semblent créer le ciel de leurs ondes de feu.

Une pareille brûlure, une pareille tension, il n’y a que l’infini pour les apaiser, l’absorption dans l’infini, c’est-à-dire la mort. (p. 239) [René Huyghe, Vincent Van Gogh, Musée de l’Orangerie, 1947]

Il s’agissait de savoir si des arbres peintes, des maisons peintes pouvaient grâce au montage remplir dans le récit le rôle des objets réels et si, dans ce cas, il était possible de substituer pour le spectateur le monde intérieur d’un artiste au monde tel que le révèle la photographie. (p. 242) [Alain Resnais, “Une expérience." 1948]

Alors est rebâtie une légende de Guernica qui devient le grand tableau de l’exposition de 1937, celui qui fait scandale et dont tout le monde parle. Et l’événement même du bombardement devient lui aussi le grande scandale international, l’épisode central de la guerre d’Espagne, celui qui suscite une émotion mondiale, qui mobilise les partis en France, alerte l’opinion, provoque

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les défilés. (p. 253) [Laurent Gervereau, Autopsie d’un chef d’œuvre: Guernica, 1996]

Guernica nous paraissait la première manifestation de la volonté de destruction pour le plaisir de la destruction : faire une expérience sur du matériel humain, pour voir. Cela commence par Guernica et on voit où cela aboutit. Le film aurait dû être fait dix ans avant, mais, au cinéma, les films sont faits après. (p. 255) [Alain Resnais, Interview, 1956]

Un dernier mot : ce texte n’est « protégé » par aucune déclaration. Il est taillable et corvéable à merci, et je souhaite qu’il le soit, non par masochisme, mais pour que sur des prétextes semblables bourgeonne une activité théâtrale enfin reliée à nos véritables soucis et obsessions, où la mémoire et la culture n’accouchent plus de marionnettes, mais donnent enfin un visage à nos anges et à nos démons. (p. 268) [Chris Marker, L’Homme et sa liberté, 1949]

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Chapter 4

Cette fête de la jeunesse, magnifiquement mise en scène, cachée les germes des jeux sanglants qui devaient porter à douze ans la reprise des Olympiades. Nous ne savions pas encore à quelle rendez-vous cette cloche nous conviait. La flamme qui s’éteignait allait se rallumer dans le ciel d’Europe et sur le mat où descendait le drapeau olympique aux anneaux entrecroisés, un autre drapeau allait monter pour des années. En attendant que ce jeu-là cesse, à son tour, et que revient enfin la paix. (p. 282) [Chris Marker’s commentary in Olympia 52]

Nous avons passé le cap du XIXe siècle. On ne s’évade plus si facilement d’un monde désormais conquis, et un nouveau tourisme apparaît, qui exorcise le pittoresque. Cet engouement du lecteur pour la connaissance du monde, ce n’est pas le signe qu’il s’est brusquement découvert pour les autres nations une curiosité longtemps sommeillante ; c’est plutôt qu’il a compris que leur connaissance était une étape une composante indispensable de la connaissance de soi-même. Ce n’est pas le Français qui a changé : c’est la géographie. (p. 292) [Chris Marker, “Petite planète.” 1954]

Étant donné le rôle joué par le pétrole à l’ère de la guerre froide, Marker joint dans une même unité spatio-temporelle le capitalisme aux conquêtes antiques, la géopolitique moderne à la mise à sac de Persepolis par Alexandre le Grand en 330 avant J.C. Comme pour mieux signifier que les luttes de pouvoir entre les « Perses » et les puissances étrangères ne font que perdurer, sous d’autres formes. (p. 297) [Morad Montazami, “Chris Marker à Persepolis. Pétrole surmoi.” 2017]

...nous n'avons eu qu'un aperçu du ressort proprement politique de l'expérience en cours ; la puissance réelle du parti communiste, la balance exacte de la persuasion et de la pression qu'il exerce sur ses partenaires au pouvoir, la docilité et la résistance de l'appareil administratif aux décisions du sommet, le pouvoir réel de telles équipes et d’hommes dans la hiérarchie et surtout au sommet de l'Etat, la part de la doctrine et de l'expérimentation, — bref tout ce qui concerne l'exercice réel du pouvoir dans l'appareil d'Etat nous a largement échappé et ne pouvait pas ne pas nous échapper. (p. 305) [Paul Ricœur, “Certitudes et incertitudes d'une révolution.” 1956]

Si le délégué tombe sur un homme ou une femme de la vielle école, disons de type « molotovien », le voyage devient vite fort désagréable. Tous les rapports sont basés sur la méfiance. Le niet est de rigueur. L’interprète a en face de lui un représentant des pays capitalistes, donc un ennemi possible. (p. 321) [Armand Gatti, Sibérie - zéro + infini, 1958]

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Appendix 2. Montage in Post-war French Film: A Biblio- filmography for Further Research

Listed below are examples of montage-centric films in post-war France that are not discussed in detail in the thesis. Where possible, I have cited existing, significant scholarly texts on these films.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Le Retour (1945, b/w, 33 mins). Archival montage.

- Thomas Tode, “Une larme sur la joue du temps: le Retour d’Henri Cartier- Bresson.” Translated by Clara Bloch, 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt- quinze 74 (Winter 2014): 12-37.

Louis Daquin, Nous continuons la France (1946, b/w, 62 mins). Archival montage.

Jean Grémillon, Le Six Juin à l’aube: 1944, Notes cinématographiques sur le débarquement anglo-americain (Manche et Calvados) (1946, b/w, 56 mins.) Archival montage, in parts.

NB: Grémillon’s film was initially screened at its original feature length only a handful of times in 1946. It was subsequently re-edited and re-released as a short film in 1949. The 2014 restoration of the film by the Archives françaises de film has restored it to close to its original, full length.

- Alain Courteil, “Ode à la Normandie martyre: Le Six Juin à l’aube.” In Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968. De l’âge d’or aux contrabandiers. Edited by Dominique Bluger and François Thomas. 195-205.

- François Albera, “Le Six juin à l’aube: les désastres de la guerre.” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 74 (Winter 2014): 38-69.

- Dennis Broe, Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 4-6.

Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Au cœur de l’orage (1948, b/w, 80 mins). Archival montage, in parts.

- Sylvie Lindeperg, Les écrans de l’ombre. La Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cinéma français, 2nd edition. Paris: Éditions Points, 2014. 102-121.

Jean Grémillon, Les charmes de l’existence (1949, b/w, 21 mins). Art documentary.

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- Claude Mauriac, “A propos des “Charmes de l’Existence”, Cahiers du cinéma 1 (April 1951): 54-57.

Alain Resnais, Gauguin (1950, b/w, 12 mins.). Art documentary.

- Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 26-28.

Denise Tual, Roland Tual, Ce siècle a 50 ans (1950, b/w, 86 mins.). Archival montage.

- Denise Tual, Le Temps Dévoré. Paris: Fayard, 1980. 239-242.

Jean Grémillon, Pierre Kast, Les désastres de la guerre (1951, b/w, 20 mins.). Art documentary.

- Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “Terre sans paix.” Cahiers du cinéma 7 (December 1951): 59-60.

Pierre Braunbeger, Myriam, La Course de taureaux (1951, b/w, 71 mins.). Archival montage, in parts.

- André Bazin, “Mort tous les après-midi”, Cahiers du cinéma 7 (December 1951): 63-65. Reprinted in English as André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Edited by Ivone Margulies. 27-31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

- Annie Maillis, “La Course de taureaux de Pierre Braunberger.” Archives 66-67 (March 1996): 1-21.

- Monica Dall’asta, “Looking for Myriam: A Secret Genealogy of French Compilation Film.” Feminist Media Histories 2, No. 3 (2016): 29-53.

Robert Hessens, Toulouse Lautrec (1951, b/w, 16 mins.). Art documentary.

Isidore Isou, Traité de Bave et d’Eternité (1951, b/w, 120 mins.). Archival montage, in parts.

Kaira M. Cabañas recent monograph on Lettrist cinema offers an exceptional synthesis of the existing literature on Lettrist cinema. On Isou’s film, see:

- Kaira M. Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant- Garde. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014. 22-48.

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Maurice Lemaître, Le film est déjà commencé ? (1951, colour, 61 mins.). Archival montage, in parts.

- Kaira M. Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema. 50-73.

Jean-Claude Sée, Le mystère de la licorne (1954, colour, 13 mins.). Art documentary.

Yannick Bellon, Varsovie, quand même… (1954, b/w, 16 mins.). Archival montage.

- Éric Le Roy, « Varsovie, quand même... de Yannick Bellon,, » L’avant-scène cinéma, no. 520, March 2003, pp. 24-25.

Robert Hessens, Statues d’épouvante (1956, b/w, 23 mins.). Art documentary.

Carlo Vilardebó, Vivre (1958, b/w, 8 mins.). Archival montage.

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