The Chaplin Files, 1952*

JENNIFER WILD

Willy: I am not a dime a dozen! . . . Biff: I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-work- ing drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! —Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, 1949

It is rare to read identical words written in the same year by figures inhabiting diametrically opposed positions toward the cinema and the cinematic image. But in 1952, André Bazin—the Catholic film theorist and critic whose passionate cinephilia deeply influenced the French New Wave generation of filmmakers—and Guy-Ernst Debord—the young Lettrist who promoted the total destruction of cinema and the receptive mode of cinephilia—shared a term to describe Charlie Chaplin: commis voyageur, or traveling salesman. The term was used by both in the context of the French release of Chaplin’s film Limelight (Les feux de la rampe, 1952, dir. Charles Chaplin), and, more specifically, to describe Chaplin as he promoted the film in Europe. No doubt the term commis voyageur was part of the French cultural conscious- ness at the time: Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (Mort d’un commis voyageur) had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949, and, after a premiere in Brussels at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, the Belgian National Theater secured it for a two-month run at Paris’s Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (itself an important historical site for the avant-garde) during the summer of 1952.1

* I would like to thank the Humanities Visiting Committee at the University of Chicago for its generous support of my research. Special thanks are due to Jan Goldstein, Sabrina Negri, Marin Sarvé- Tarr, Daniel Morgan, and the members of the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France and the Francophone World Workshop at the University of Chicago, as well as the graduate-student members of the Department of French and Italian and the Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies cluster at Northwestern University, who read and commented on drafts of this essay. For their assistance with image research, I owe a special debt to Leora Auslander, Osama Abu-Eledam, Miguel Martínez, Tom McDonough, Kevin Repp, and Joel Gordon. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1. Directed by Jacques Huisman, adaptation by Raymond Gérôme. The initial production in Brussels was overseen by Peter Brook, a condition stipulated by Arthur Miller. See Brenda Murphy, Miller: Death of a Salesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 111.

OCTOBER 160, Spring 2017, pp. 51–78. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Although the American film adaptation (1951, dir. Laslo Benedek) did not debut in France until February 1953, the Parisian production of the play was gen- erally well received. Some called it a “neorealist American play,” while others thought that its “insufficiently suggestive symbolism”2 evoked German postwar the- ater. But Parisian audiences tended to look beyond Willy Loman’s “Americanness” to see him as an “archetypal Voyageur, the existential traveler, a modern version of Everyman,” as Brenda Murphy points out. The idea of Loman as an “existential traveler” was in fact the reason that Miller himself did not consider the Parisian run to be a success; in a 1965 interview, he said the play went unnoticed largely because in 1952, “Willy Loman was a man from Mars.”3 Perhaps he was, for Loman presented a new vision of the postwar American man, whose failures, delusions, clichés, and ultimate death critically inverted both the myth of the American Dream and the picture of virile American masculinity typified by John Wayne, to use an example drawn from the cinema of the period.4 Willy, and the play’s pic- ture of American social reality stripped of any reference to its contemporary set- ting— it has “no memories of the Depression or World War II, no postwar pros- perity, no Cold War, no atomic anxiety, no television,” as Julius Novick has observed5—did not present an American “way of life,” but rather an “American Way of Death,” to borrow Pierre Kast’s English-language title for his Cahiers du Cinéma review of the film adaptation.6 By 1952 Chaplin’s persona, too, had been transformed well beyond that of the Hollywood or immigrant-American success story, not unlike Willy Loman’s reversal of the American cliché. Chaplin’s transformation was in part due to the climate of paranoia and persecution that swept over the United States during the Cold War. By the time the actor arrived in Europe in late September 1952, the United States attorney general, James McGranery, had already revoked Chaplin’s American reentry visa based on long-standing allegations that he had communist affiliations and sentiments. Although J. Edgar Hoover apparently had harbored suspicions of Chaplin’s subversive anti-Americanism since the 1920s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Chaplin file” expanded substantially in 1942 by focusing on his explicit ties to the Communist Party and affiliated groups, including the leftist press, which openly supported the film comedian throughout his career.7

2. Murphy, Miller, p. 112. See also André Bazin, “La mort d’un commis voyageur,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 165 (March 15, 1953); and Jacques Lemarchand, “La Mort d’un commis voyageur,” Le Figaro Littéraire (February 9, 1952). 3. Arthur Miller quoted in Robert A. Martin, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 271, in Murphy, Miller, p. 112. 4. The Quiet Man (1952, dir. John Ford) was released in France in November 1952. 5. Miller’s stage directions set the drama in “today.” Julius Novick, “Death of a Salesman: Deracination and Its Discontents,” American Jewish History 91, no. 1 (March 2003), p. 100. 6. Pierre Kast, “American Way of Death,” Cahiers du Cinéma 21 (March 1953), pp. 54–55. 7. John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, “Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America,” The Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 4 (November 2003), p. 498. See also Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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Having subpoenaed Chaplin in 1947 to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (though he would never go before the committee), the FBI enlisted the assistance of British counterintelligence section MI5 once the star was abroad, alleging that the Russian Communist newspaper Pravda had printed an “enthusiastic tribute” to “Comrade Charlie.”8 The American government’s Cold War–era fear of the filmmaker was undoubtedly fueled by his international recog- nition and fame. The files for the investigation accusing him of violating the Mann Act (White-Slave Traffic Act) in 1944, for example, contained a clipping from the socialist-leaning Hollywood magazine Rob Wagner’s Script, which read: “There are men and women in far corners of the world who have never heard of Jesus Christ; yet they know and love Charlie Chaplin.”9 Such contextual information helps identify how commis voyageur circulated and signified in 1952 as it found its way into Debord’s and Bazin’s writing on Chaplin, even if their respective uses of it were entirely in opposition to one anoth- er, as I will show. Clearly, Bazin’s well-known theoretical defense of the cinema’s aesthetic power, and its function and place in art history, clash soundly with Debord’s equally well-known early Lettrist film practice, which, at its most radical in his film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade, 1952), dispensed with photo- graphic representation tout court. Bazin’s and Debord’s shared use of the term points to their further, if subtle, awareness of each other, a fact that has been sub- stantiated by Kaira Cabañas in her study of the ciné-club culture shared by both, even as the Lettrists sought to dismantle its critical function and rhetorical frame- work.10 More importantly, their use of the term plays out, I will suggest, as a high- stakes debate on the political and aesthetic fate of the image in general, and the cinematic image in particular, at this mid-century moment in France. Further, insofar as the term commis voyageur helps to frame a rhetorical exchange between these two important figures, who were separated as much by ideology as by thirteen years in age, it also illuminates an important trajectory with- in the history of twentieth-century French avant-gardism that, since at least 1929 and the oppositional Surrealism of Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein, fought against the fictions of representation in favor of the facts of material life. The aims of this trajectory as it culminates in the middle of the century come into clearer focus insofar as this struggle, here explored primarily through Debord’s early asso- ciation and rupture with Isidore Isou’s Lettrist group, emerged within the context of Bazin’s contemporary film criticism, which elevated the cinema to the status of visual philosophy. Whereas Debord’s preoccupation was centered on the efface- ment and death of the image and the (political) fictions it encouraged, Bazin’s

8. Letter from the American Foreign Service to MI5 (October 20, 1952). https://thebio- scope.net/2012/02/17/in-search-of-israel-thornstein/. MI5’s full dossier on Chaplin is now avail- able online at the British National Archives. 9. As cited in Sbardellati and Shaw, “Booting a Tramp,” p. 500, and n. 16. Rob Wagner’s Script 30, no. 674 (March 4, 1944). 10. Kaira Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), esp. ch. 2.

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interest was in the cinema’s capacity to simultaneously re-perform and resist death—or, more precisely, following Giorgio Agamben, its ability to “tak[e] the form of an ‘anticipation’ of [death’s] own possibility” in the figure of Chaplin.11 On each side of this debate lies an argument about what Agamben has sug- gested was at stake in Debord’s film corpus: the “close tie between cinema and his- tory.”12 Limelight prompted Bazin to theorize the metaphysical properties of the cinema image’s “excessive physical proximity” (la monstrueuse proximité physique), which placed the star’s aging body on film and situated the filmic representation of his death in a dialectic with both the mythical history of Chaplin’s Tramp figure (known as Charlot in France) and the actor’s live presence in Paris, and which importantly secured Chaplin’s and Limelight’s place in a historical lineage along- side Racine and Molière.13 Debord, however, took another route altogether. By privileging the live, cultural spectacle surrounding Chaplin’s European appear- ances rather than his contemporary film image, and by subsequently omitting all imagistic reference to the star in the published critiques of Chaplin that solidified his separation from Isou’s Lettrist circle, Debord deployed the power of negation in order to forward a perception of current political history and death that never- theless remained as resolutely mute as an image itself. In this way, as early as 1952, Debord began to develop the tactic of détournement, later described as “a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression.”14 But insofar as détourne- ment was also a process aimed toward “negating the negation”15—a problematic at the center of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966)—Debord’s early commitment to the “death of the image” diagnosed history’s inability to be contained in or by an image as well as its refusal to be relegated to the realm of identification whereby the negation of negation would “result with a happy grasp on affirmation.”16 By instead “exhibit[ing] the image as image” in the first issue of International Lettriste (December 1952), which I discuss at length later in this essay, Debord allowed his- tory’s “imagelessness” to emerge.17 But Debord’s tactical negation went beyond

11. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 1. 12. Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 313. 13. André Bazin, “Grandeur de Limelight,” Esprit 201, no. 4 (April 1953), p. 632. 14. Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” Internationale Situationniste 3 (December 1959), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), p. 67. 15. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Les Lèvres Nus 8 (May 1956), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 15. 16. Theodore W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 158–59. 17. Agamben would claim the imagelessness of history for Debord’s later film practice in “Difference and Repetition,” p. 319.

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the messianic implications of “imagelessness” that Agamben accords to Walter Benjamin; it sought to expose what nevertheless “clings to the image,” namely, “idolatry and mythic enthrallment.”18 Debord thus displays an Adornian “material- ist longing to grasp the thing” by “aim[ing] at the opposite”; for it is the absence of images, and the image’s obdurate silence, that allowed Debord to summon— but not to picture—historical, political death as a critique not only of Chaplin’s representational fictions but also of the idealism grounding Bazin’s metaphysical inquiry into Chaplin’s “mythical involvement with [human] fate” on film.19 As we know, Chaplin’s modernist teachings by way of the new medium of film were vitally important to earlier generations of the avant-garde, including such figures as Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Louis Aragon. As I have argued elsewhere at length, Chaplin’s comedy and star- dom provided the Dada generation, or “Generation 1900,” as Robert Desnos called it, with a unique set of formal and receptive tactics with which to disrupt the stasis of bourgeois spectatorship before early film, and which thereby countered the film industry’s efforts to legitimize the medium around 1915 with a conception of aesthetic experience derived from theater.20 It was Tzara who most profoundly understood Chaplin’s signifying power in relation to the modern phenomenon of film stardom, and it was he who deconstructed it—negated it—in order to expose both the capitalist economies of the star image and stardom’s unique manner of generating capital-as-desire by circulating the image of Chaplin’s comic body. When in 1920 Tzara reported to Le Journal du Peuple that Chaplin would attend the second Dada event at the Grand Palais—Chaplin, of course, would not appear— he appropriated Chaplin’s star power and the totality of the star system to work in the service of Dada. In so doing, he also effectively made the public believe that it was Chaplin who had appropriated Dada in the service of his own fame. By obscur- ing the audience’s perception of the Dada machine that was in fact regulating the economies of their expectation and desire generated by the false promise of Chaplin’s live appearance in 1920, Tzara pulled off one of the great modernist gags of the twentieth century. We could even say that Tzara taught us more about the epistemological, formal, and aesthetic parameters of comedic modernism than Chaplin himself, creating a historical precedent for Debordian détournement through the avant-garde tactics of effacement and absence. By invoking Chaplin’s presence to highlight his absence, and by subverting the audience’s expectations

18. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 205. See also Sebastian Truskolaski, “Adorno’s Imageless Materialism,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 23 (Summer 2014), pp. 14–23. 19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 207, 255. In the section “Materialism Imageless” (p. 207), Adorno aligns theological iconoclasm with materialism “at its most materialistic” and thus establishes a logic between Agamben’s insistence on a messianic history for Debord’s cinema and his reference to Benjamin’s similarly messianic concept of “imagelessness.” See Winfried Menninghaus, “Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness,” Cultural Horizons 14, no. 3 (2013), pp. 407–28. 20. See Jennifer Wild, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), esp. chap. 6.

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as their anticipation turned to outrage, Tzara claimed the aesthetic (and ideologi- cal) power of the modernist act of negation for the Dada enterprise. In 1952, it was Chaplin again who precipitated a reflection on the principles and expressions of negation as a problem of modernism, this time a particularly post- war modernism. Limelight and its Parisian reception incited both Debord and Bazin to develop language and tactics toward negation. In the early ’50s Debord was exploring an artistic and political language capable of resisting what appeared to him as a mor- tal threat to his own sovereignty, namely, Isou’s vision for a contemporary avant- garde; he was also beginning to formulate his most potent practices and concepts of negation in détournement and the critique of the “spectacle” that would be taken up by the Internationale Lettriste group just two years later in the journal Potlatch. In essays written between 1949 and 1952, Bazin, too, searched for a language of negation, grappling expansively with the fact of death, which he described as “the absolute negation of objective time, the qualitative instant in its purest form,” as well as cine- ma’s “obscene” metaphysics, which could re-present this moment in perpetuum in what he called the “eternal dead-again of the cinema.”21 What interests me is how, in 1952, Chaplin became a pivotal figure for Debord’s approach to the “death of the image,” as I call it, and Bazin’s “death in the image.” To be clear, these inform a Janus-faced composite rather than a complete inversion. As a dialectic, they signal how negation operates as a feature of comedic modernism and quite possibly, in the words of Philippe Sollers, how “the negative laughs.”22 But more importantly, this study in con- trasts highlights the distinction between Debord’s materialist aspirations for a politi- cal critique of the image’s impotence in the face of historical reality and death and Bazin’s “metaphysical vocabulary,” as he called it, that centralized the image of (Chaplin’s) death and dying in his approach to cinematic ontology conceived as an affirmative humanistic tool rather than as a weapon of political modernism.23 Bazin’s approach, then, for Adorno, would not only “deny the relation of [the metaphysical reflection’s] allegedly pure categories to their social substance” but would also cham- pion society’s “continuation in existing forms, in the forms which in turn block both the cognition of truth and its realization.”24 This, it could be said, was precisely what Debord sought to negate as he extended the French avant-garde lineage of opposi- tional materialism whereby, in the case of the Internationale Lettriste’s “Chaplin Files” from 1952, the image’s muteness and seeming indifference condemn all paro- dy of a revolutionary ideology or social form and instead conform to the real, histori- cal negation of “condemned classes.”25

21. André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivonne Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 27–31. Originally published as “Mort tous les après-midi,” Cahiers du Cinéma 7 (December 1951). 22. Philippe Sollers, “The Bataille Act,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick French and Roland- François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 127. Emphasis in original. 23. Bazin, “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” p. 30. An important reference here is Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), esp. ch. 1. 24. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 368. 25. “Le peuple souverain,” Potlatch 9–11 (August 17–31, 1954) (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2006), p. 43.

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Whoever creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any limitations on painting or writ- ing; alone, he suddenly has at his disposal all possible human convulsions, and he cannot flee from this her- itage of divine power—which belongs to him. Nor can he try to know if this heritage will consume and destroy the one it consecrates. But he refuses now to surrender “what possesses him” to the standards of salesmen, to which art has conformed. —Georges Bataille, “The Sacred” (1939)26

The texts by Debord and Bazin that harbor the term commis voyageur couldn’t be more different in terms of tone, critical aims, and overarching theoretical tenor. Bazin’s article “Si Charlot ne meure . . .” (If Charlot hadn’t died . . .), print- ed first in Cahiers du Cinéma in November 1952, is an exploratory meditation on Chaplin’s aging body, and the interplay between “Charlot’s mask and Chaplin’s face,” or Chaplin’s manner of “denud[ing] himself of his double myth: his ever- lasting youth and Charlot.”27 It informs one part of Bazin’s wide-ranging critical corpus on film stardom and human bodies, texts that were crucial to the develop- ment of his ontological mythopoesis of the medium of film: the image’s capacity to render time visible in its movement, and its ability to preserve, embalm, and even resurrect what is in fact “dead” in the image itself.28 These essays, including “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” published in Esprit in 1950, provide instruction on Bazin’s view of the cinema’s particular way of engaging with, as well as articulating, history and the experience of historical time. Even as he wrote about filmic re-creations of (living) historical figures such as Stalin, he neverthe- less asserted that “the nature of the film image is different: imposing itself on our minds as rigorously as it superimposes itself, in a manner of speaking, on reality, cinema is in essence irrefutable, like Nature and History.”29 Bazin nevertheless deploys commis voyageur to acknowledge Chaplin’s widely publicized efforts to promote Limelight in France and Europe, casting Chaplin within the realm of present time or current events: One should not forget that Monsieur Verdoux was a big financial failure ($350,000 in box office receipts in the U.S.) as well as a painful critical

26. My emphasis. George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1985), p. 245. 27. André Bazin, “If Charlot Hadn’t Died,” in Essays on Chaplin, ed. and trans. Jean Bodon (New Haven: University of New Haven Press, 1985), p. 56. André Bazin, “Si Charlot ne meure . . . ,” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (November 1952), p. 3. 28. See Ivone Margulies, “Bazin’s Exquisite Corpses,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 186–99. 29. André Bazin, “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Burt Cardullo (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 36.

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failure. If Chaplin made himself the traveling salesman for Limelight, it may also have been for other reasons, but certainly because the success of the film, as much moral as financial, is now a vital question for him. 30

Chaplin indeed peddled his film with vigor for the reasons Bazin mentions, as well as those “other reasons”—namely, the revocation of his visa after he was accused of being a communist sympathizer. The French press largely embraced a celebratory discourse surrounding the star’s visit. When Chaplin disembarked from the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner in Cherbourg on September 22, 1952, for example, he was met by an enthusiastic group of press agents and photographers who purportedly ignored the other notable artistic and political figures onboard, including the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, Luxembourg’s prime minister Pierre Dupong, King Faisal II of Iraq, and the prince regent ‘Abd al-Ilah.31 After a trip to Ireland and England, where “[m]ink, jewels and parades of Rolls Royces sparkled under flood- lights as 200 police linked arms to hold back an estimated 10,000 spectators” around London’s Odeon theater, where Limelight debuted for Princess Margaret, Chaplin flew to Paris to receive the title of officier de la Légion d’honneur from President Vincent Auriol.32 Newsreel coverage of this event in Paris shows Chaplin proudly sporting his honorary medal and also appearing at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, where he was received by the syndicat des acteurs (actors’ guild). In one shot, Chaplin faces the camera and places his finger below his nose to conjure the iconic mustache worn by his former self, the silent-film comedian Charlot. This close-up captures something of the essence of Bazin’s essay “Si Charlot ne meure . . .” insofar as it simultaneously displays “Charlot’s mask and Chaplin’s face,” as well as Chaplin’s knowledge of the “gravitational pull of his own myth” that propels his own “inimitable imitation of Charlot.”33 The voice-over that accompanies this short montage of events makes brief reference to Chaplin’s legal situation, noting that it had remade him into “a new kind of immigrant.” Such a remark clearly references Chaplin’s early short film The Immigrant (1917), which helped define both his success as the first international film star and, for the his- torical avant-garde, his utterly modern iconicity. According to American news reports, Limelight made its Parisian debut at the Elysée Palace on October 29 in what Bazin described, and rhetorically defended in Esprit, as an “astonishing phenomenon of snobbism.”34 The satirical

30. Bazin, “If Charlot Hadn’t Died,” p. 53, translation amended. My emphasis. 31. Roland Godefroy, “Il y a 25 ans, l’exil de Charlie Chaplin commençait à Cherbourg,” La Presse de la Manche, December 27, 1977. 32. “Princess Margaret Hails Chaplin,” New York Times, October 17, 1952. 33. Bazin, “If Charlot Hadn’t Died,” pp. 52–56. 34. “France Honors Chaplin,” New York Times, October 30, 1952. Bazin, “Grandeur de Limelight,” p. 624. Contrary to what Rochelle Fack suggests, Limelight did not debut at the Comédie Française. See Fack, “Bazin’s Chaplin Myth and the Corrosive Lettrists,” in Opening Bazin, p. 246.

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Charlie Chaplin in 1952.

newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné even imagined how the film came to pass as an elitist, “clandestine” projection at the palace: Government agents, acting on behalf of the American attorney general, they mused, refused to allow the film to open publicly at the Paris Opéra, whereupon “the president displayed a regrettable spirit of independence,” invoking the “example of the queen of England.”35 Le Canard Enchaîné clearly seized an opportunity to criticize President Auriol and the pomp and circumstance of French culture, adding a less explicit critique of the elitist circumstances of the screening for a figure whose appeal during the silent-film era transcended the most visible social and economic divides in France and elsewhere, becoming a symbol of the cinema’s democratic accessibility. The high-cultural luster of Chaplin’s visit and film premiere continued at the Ritz Hotel that evening, where a simple press conference turned into an event cen- tral to the mythopoetics of the post–World War II avant-garde, but one that has surprisingly received little extended critical attention. There, the youngest mem- bers of Isou’s Lettrist group—Debord, Serge Berna, Jean-L. Brau, and Gil J. Wolman—distributed an inflammatory tract, “Finis les pieds plats” (No more flat

35. P.L., “Le ‘Canard’ passe les feux de la rampe,” Le Canard Enchaîné 34, no. 1672 (November 5, 1952).

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feet), that cast wickedly sharp aspersions on Chaplin and implored the star—in English—to “Go home”: Sub Mack Sennett director, sub-Max Linder actor, Stavisky of the tears of unwed mothers and the little orphans of Auteuil, you are Chaplin, emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune. . . . The fires of the kleig lights have melted the makeup of the so-called brilliant mime—and exposed the sinister and compromised old man. Go home, Mister Chaplin.36

Robert Chazal, critic and editor of Cinémonde, reported on the Lettrists’ disruption in Paris-Presse L’Intransigeant: “There was also a shocking note: some young pseudo- literary thugs showered Chaplin with tracts that called him: ‘Fascist worm . . . sinis- ter old man . . . ’ and other obscenities.”37 Although he never sent it, Debord wrote a chastising letter to Chazal accusing him of being paid by the film industry to defend the superstar. The letter ends ominously: “We will clear the French press of its most representative piece of trash. ’Til very soon.”38 Debord and the others did, however, find an ally in Le Libertaire, the “interna- tional anarchist” newspaper first published in France in 1895, and which began republication in 1944 after a wartime hiatus. In its pages, the Surrealist poet and filmmaker Jean-Louis Bédouin penned an uncompromising statement “stigmatiz- ing” Chaplin’s conduct, explicitly castigating him both for accepting a truncheon- shaped medal from the police and for thanking them for their protection—“from what?” Bédouin added.39 Other critics in Le Libertaire dug in their heels, calling Chaplin everything from an antisocial, disagreeable character (mauvais coucheur) to a

36. Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy-Ernest Debord, and Gil J. Wolman, “Finis les pieds plats (Paris, October 29, 1952),” Internationale Lettriste 1 (December 1952); repr. in Documents relatifs à la fon- dation de l’Internationale situationniste, 1948–1957, ed. Gérard Berréby (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1985), p. 147; trans. Sophie Rosenberg, Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ presitu/flatfeet.html. 37. “Il y eut aussi une note choquante: quelques jeunes voyous pseudo-littéraires lancèrent sur Chaplin une pluie de tracts qui l’appelaient: ‘Fasciste larvé . . . Sinistre vieillard . . .’ et autres grossièretés.” Robert Chazal, Paris-Presse L’Intransigeant, October 31, 1952, as cited in Internationale Lettriste, Visages de l’avant-garde, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 2010), n. 27, p. 67. 38. “Nous débarrasserons la presse française de sa plus représentative ordure. À très bientôt.” Guy Debord, Correspondance: Volume “0” Septembre 1951–Juillet 1957 (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2010). Kindle edition. 39. “Nous stigmatisons le comportement de Chaplin qui, de son propre gré, alla remercier la police parisienne de l’ ‘avoir si bien protégé’ (de quoi?) et qui accepta, avec la médaille d’or du cent cinquantenaire de la Préfecture et le souvenir d’une matraque-breloque, d’être marqué d’infamie aux yeux de tous ceux qui avaient cru à l’expression révoltée de son oeuvre et lui avaient voué, comme à nul autre grand artiste, leur affection.” Jean-Louis Bédouin, “Charlot Policeman,” Le Libertaire 335 (November 20, 1952), p. 3. See Bédouin, “Chaplin, the Copper’s Nark,” trans. Paul Hammond, in The Shadow and Its Shadow, ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), p. 181. Anon., France-Soir (November 10, 1952), as cited in Internationale Lettriste 2, “Extraits de la presse à propos de l’affaire Chaplin,” p. 2; repr. in Berréby, Documents, n.p.

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“publicity agent.” The film—his “thingamajig” (son machin)—may have been worthy of dignitaries’ and the police’s reception, but the anarchist community claimed to have exited the theater thoroughly offended and revolted. Chaplin, they argued, took advantage of his audience and abused their trust; they also claimed that “Charlot” indisputably died with Monsieur Verdoux’s execution by guillotine.40 It was a month after the Ritz incident that Debord used commis voyageur to refer to Chaplin. The first issue of Internationale Lettriste (December 1952) assem- bled a host of documents related to the Ritz affair under the heading “Mort d’un commis voyageur,” which functions both as the titular theme of the issue and the title of a new text by Debord, who wrote: During the round of press conferences that he made in Europe to posi- tion Limelight, Mr. Chaplin was insulted by us at the Ritz Hotel, and denounced as a salesman [commerçant] and a cop.

The aging of this man, his indecent obstinacy in displaying his expired face on our screens, and the poor affliction of this poor world that recognizes itself in him, seem to me to be quite sufficient reasons for this interruption.41 Debord’s short text appeared alongside the tract “Finis les pieds plats”; a letter published in Combat from Isou, Maurice Lemaître, and Gabriel Pomerand disavow- ing the Ritz scandal; and, among other documents, a letter in response from Debord, Berna, Brau, and Wolman that had been rejected by Combat. As such, Internationale Lettriste 1 emerges as a dossier—a file—that publicly historicizes Debord, Berna, Brau, and Wolman’s creative, social, and ideological split from Isou’s Lettrist group. In pronouncing themselves the Internationale Lettriste (IL), the “gang of four” invoked a global position against the nationalist tenor of both Chaplin’s official accolades and Isou’s Lettrist program, which sought to imprint France’s history of vanguardism (and highbrow literary culture) with Isou’s literary and social vision, as well as his name. Writing three years later in Potlatch, Debord and Wolman elaborated on the rationale guiding the group’s new international- ism, further clarifying that they rejected not only a singular association with the French nation but also its colonial history.42

40. J. L., “La voix de L’Amérique? Qu’elle la boucle!,” Le Libertaire 334 (November 13, 1952), p. 2. Michele, “Limelight, ‘Les feux de la rampe,’” Le Libertaire 337 (December 4, 1952), p. 3. 41. “Au cours de la tournée de conférences qu’il fit en Europe pour placer Limelight M. Chaplin a été insulté par nous à l’hôtel Ritz, et dénoncé en tant que commerçant et policier. Le vieillissement de cet homme, son indécente obstination à étaler sur nos écrans sa gueule périmée, et la pauvre affec- tion de ce monde pauvre qui se reconnaissait en lui, me semblent des raisons bien suffisantes pour cette interruption.” Guy Debord, “Mort d’un commis voyageur,” Internationale Lettriste 1 (December 1952); repr. in Berréby, Documents, pp. 148–49. Amended translation from NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/traveling-salesman.html. 42. Guy E. Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Pourquoi le lettrisme?,” Potlatch 22 (September 9, 1955), in Internationale lettriste (1954–1957): Potlatch (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1996), p. 113.

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The first issue of Internationale Lettriste is thus a part of the historical “Chaplin files” insofar as the actor as commis voyageur found himself at the center of this notorious historical fracturing of the Lettrist group—one of the most visibly and audibly active postwar avant-garde movements. Yet though art- and film-historical narratives have positioned the “Chaplin affair” as instrumental to the rise of the Internationale Situationniste, most histories have allowed the rationale surround- ing both the IL’s decision to target Chaplin and Chaplin’s position in their logic to go unexplored. On the one hand, the event should be conceived as evidence of a nascent period in Debord’s theoretical development of The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which opened with the following words by Feuerbach: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the origi- nal, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”43 While Debord continued to process the Chaplin affair in the second issue of Internationale Lettriste (1953), he introduced the idea of the situ- ation as the only possible “new beauty” capable of bypassing the “limited game of forms,” which arguably included Chaplin’s affirmative public image that limited the perception of his part in ideological power structures.44 On the other hand, as Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen has suggested, the IL “argued that Chaplin and his film practiced a kind of emotional blackmail, merely compensating for a boring life and not creating the possibility of a new one filled with excitement and adven- ture.” And more to the point: “Chaplin belonged to the past and was an obstacle toward creating a new life without alienation”; he signified “passivity and weak- ness” with an utterly naive “lack of self-awareness.”45 There is truth to both of these observations, and we would be wrong to ignore them, especially since Rasmussen’s statement is developed largely from the language of the “Chaplin files” contained in the first issue of Internationale Lettriste. There is, however, more to the story. First, it is important to remember that, as Debord’s recent biographer Jean-Marie Apostolidès suggests, Debord’s rupture with Isou took place in phases, an initial one being an inspiring encounter in Brussels in 1952 when Debord, Wolman, and Berna themselves acted as “traveling salesmen” to promote their films to the Brussels-based avant-garde writers Paul Nougé and Marcel Mariën. “Without overtly breaking off from Breton,” Apostolidès writes, these members of the Belgian avant-garde “created an orienta- tion on the inside of surrealism, displacing the ideology of the movement toward the left.”46 As formative as this was for the Lettrists operating largely under the

43. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977), n.p. 44. Guy-Ernest Debord, “Fragments de recherches pour un comportement prochain,” Internationale Lettriste 2 (February 1953), p. 4. 45. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004), pp. 368–69. 46. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Guy Debord: Le naufrageur (Paris: Flammarion, 2015), p. 99. There is some discrepancy regarding the date of the Brussels visit. According to Debord, Correspondance: Volume

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programmatic control of Isou, a key moment for Debord came slightly later when Isou and Lemaître refused to come to his defense during the scandalous and incomplete premiere (the projectionist stopped the film) of Hurlements on June 30, 1952, at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52 located in the Musée de l’homme. As Cabañas and others have detailed, Debord received a letter from Isou in July that seemed to explain his passivity: “You have formed a group apart with Wolman and Serge. . . . Your film was badly made. Such things make us lose what we have provi- sionally gained.”47 Clearly, Isou had already internalized Debord’s first inklings of independence from the group, which Debord and company did in fact communi- cate to Isou upon their return from Brussels. But Isou’s insult to the film itself no doubt fueled Debord’s desire to more permanently fracture Lettrist unity (which he also later affirmed in Potlatch),48 particularly because Debord had initially con- ceived his film along Lettrist lines, publishing the film’s first scenario and an essay, “Prolegomena for All Future Cinema,” in the Lettrist journal Ion in April 1952. Debord’s “Prolegomena” presaged the deeper logic of his instrumentalization of the Chapin mystique, as well as his future engagement with negation as the leader of the Internationale Situationniste. He wrote: “Love is only valid in a pre-revolutionary period. I made this film while there is still time to talk. One must rise with the most violence possible against an ethical order that will later be obsolete. . . . The arts of the future will be radical transformations of situations or nothing at all.”49 Insofar as Debord later conceptualized “love,” alongside political economy and urbanism, as a means to be harnessed to further resolve ethical problems, his emphasis on the bank- ruptcy of love as a revolutionary measure here is arguably directed at the spectatorial practice of cinephilia, and its extension in fandom or star worship.50 While we see an early indication of this stance in a letter to Marc’O from September 1951 in which Debord bragged about destroying the receptive conditions of cinepilia surrounding a short film by Jean-Gabirel Albicocco screened in a ciné-club in Cannes,51 the public’s

“0,” a visit took place in June; the Situationist International Online suggests the visit happened in October 1952, www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/1956.html. Considering that Brau’s “Lettre ouverte à Jean-Isidore Isou” was written from Brussels on November 3, 1952, when Isou published his letter in Combat condemning the “Chaplin affair,” we can be sure that at least one visit took place then. See Internationale Lettriste 1. 47. Isidore Isou to Guy Debord (July 8, 1952), in Guy Debord: Un art de guerre (BNF, 2013), trans. NOT BORED! See also Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema, pp. 107–08. 48. Debord and Wolman, “Pourquoi le Lettrisme?,” Potlatch 22 (September 9, 1955), p. 113. 49. Guy Debord, “Prolégomènes à tout cinéma future,” Ion 1 (1952); trans. Scott MacKenzie as “Prolegomena for All Future Cinema,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (California: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 49–50, translation amended. My emphasis. 50. Henry de Béarn, André-Frank Conord, Mohamed Dahou, Guy-Ernest Debord, Jacques Fillon, Patrick Straram, and Gil J. Wolman, “Sans commune mesure,” Potlatch 2 (June 29, 1954), p. 10. 51. Guy Debord to Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin (Marc’O), Cannes (September 23, 1951), in Correspondances: Volume “0.” Incidentally, Jean-Gabirel Albicocco would go on to work as director of photography and editor for Marc’O’s film Closed Vision (1952).

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uncritical, blind love for Chaplin in 1952 emerged as the real ideological target. Further, by rejecting love as a revolutionary measure, Debord arguably embraced Nougé’s and Mariën’s radical skepticism, if not outright rejection, of Breton’s contin- ued deployment of love and the marvelous as the motor of creative capital. In the col- lective Surrealist manifesto “Hands Off Love” from 1927, for example, Breton and his cohort extolled Chaplin’s comic procedures and his genius as demonstrations of uncontrollable, “uncodified love” as they also defended the star against the charges of sexual perversion filed by his second wife, Lita Grey, in her divorce suit.52 Within this context, Isou continues the Surrealists’ creative lineage in his incapacity to condemn the public’s adulatory reception of the film star and by instead uncritically forgiving, and thereby aligning himself with, the public’s fanaticized love for Chaplin; I will return to this subject below. Nevertheless, Debord made this lineage explicit in the second issue of Internationale Lettriste when he condemned Isou’s penchant for leaving affirmative rather than negative “marks” (traces), which Debord aligned with the “work of the police,” whereupon he claimed that current society can only be divided into “lettrists and informers (indicateurs), of which André Breton is the most notorious.”53 Insofar as Debord’s decisive split from Isou came only after the Chaplin affair at the Ritz, it should be noted that, according to Apostolidès, Isou had been informed of the plan and disagreed outright with its premise, calling it excessive.54 Apostolidès further notes that the violent public outcry of the “gang of four” against Chaplin put them on the side of the American government, whether they knew it or not.55 Their actions also mirrored those of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), a group that developed out of the Uomo Qualunque (Movement of the Ordinary Man [1946]) to counter the Communist Party’s strength in postwar Italy: When Chaplin arrived in Rome during his European tour of promotion and exile in December 1952, four members of the MSI were arrested for bombarding the star with rotten produce as he arrived for Limelight’s premiere. “The white-haired actor smiled as he stepped out of his car. But aged apples, oranges, broccoli and cabbages flew at him amid the cheers and applause. Chaplin was struck several times but continued to smile and walked into the theater.”56 There is no evidence to suggest that Debord or the others were aware of this event, but considering the convoluted political contours of both anti-Chaplin expressions, they signal the need to further examine and syn-

52. André Breton et al., “Hands Off Love,” transition 6 (September 1927), and La Révolution Surréaliste 9–10 (September 1927), in Hammond, The Shadow and Its Shadow, pp. 173–80. 53. Guy-Ernest Debord, et al, “Manifeste,” Internationale Lettriste 2 (February 1953), p. 1. 54. Apostolidès, Guy Debord, p. 100. 55. Ibid., p. 101. 56. “Garbage Pelts Chaplin in Rome,” Toledo Blade, December 22, 1952, p. 49.

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thesize the IL’s political-aesthetic logic related to communism at the time, which arguably informed their activities at the expense of aligning themselves with the anti-democratic activities of HUAC. Insofar as the Cold War context created a fundamentally binary political situation, pitting communism against capitalism, as Richard Gilman-Opalsky points out, the perceived contradiction in Debord’s actions in fact emerges as a radical third option, one that conceded neither to capitalism’s ideology nor to the hegemony of the postwar French Communist Party that Anslem Jappe called a “reign of terror over the intellectuals.”57 Considering the fact that the tract “Finis les pieds plats” was distributed at the Ritz on the eve of Limelight’s premiere, it should be clear that Debord and his entourage attacked Chaplin the man—as well as the power of his mystique— rather than Chaplin’s film or his appearance in it. The atmosphere of Chaplin’s amplified glorification in the popular imagination, as glimpsed in Le Figaro’s front-page headline, “La déification de Charlie Chaplin,” which appeared after his arrival in France but before he came to Paris, was one indication for the IL that the moment was ripe for a crit- ically negative artistic practice to emerge in the guise of vanguardist irrationality that did not fear public condemnation.58 In the IL’s “Position” statement, they declared as much, explaining that they “revolted against the worship that is commonly rendered to this Cartoon from Le Canard Enchaîné author. . . . The tone of provocation of our , November 5, 1952. tract was reacting against the unanimous and servile enthusiasm.”59 In their own way, but also aligning with the IL, Le Canard Enchaîné satirized Chaplin’s so-called deification—as well as his own self-percep- tion of it. In a cartoon from early November, Chaplin is pictured being decorated with the Légion d’honneur, his head bowed solemnly before a group of full-bel- lied dignitaries. Above his head a thought bubble reveals his fantasy of Charlot’s replacing Napoleon atop the Colonne Vendôme. It is an unlikely coincidence that

57. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, “Why New Socialist Theory Needs Guy Debord: On the Practice of Radical Philosophy,” in Crisis, Politics and Critical Sociology, ed. Graham Cassano and Richard Alan Dello Buono (Boston: Brill, 2010), p. 112. Anslem Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 51. See also Stephen Hastings-King, “L’Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary,” SubStance 28, no. 3 (1999), pp. 26–54. 58. Le Figaro, October 7, 1952. 59. Berna, Brau, Debord, Wolman, “Position de l’Internationale lettriste,” Internationale lettriste 1; repr. Berréby, Documents, p. 151.

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one writer in Le Canard Enchaîné also appeared to satirize Bazin’s article “If Charlot Hadn’t Died”: In an article titled “Monsieur Chaplin, qu’avez-vous fait de notre Charlot?” (Mr. Chaplin, what have you done with our Charlot?), the author specu- lates on why the audience cries while watching the film: It’s because Mr. Chaplin has killed Charlot . . . —Murderer! Assassin! . . . Charlot reappeared in rare moments in “Limelight,” but like a ghost. . . . Implacable, the little sir with white hair and a fuller face—Mr. Chaplin—orders him, his act finished, to go back into the void.60

It is important to recognize that in their statement published in Combat and reprinted in Internationale Lettriste 1, Isou, Lemaître, and Pomerand admitted that the “complete and baroque hysteria that surrounded [Chaplin’s] arrival in France” had perturbed them “as an expression of complete disequilibrium.” “We are ashamed that the world today lacks more profound values than these, which are secondary and ‘idolatrous’ of the ‘artist.’” Nevertheless, they conceded that in the contemporary world, applause was unsurprisingly met with the “stains” (éclaboussures) of the world’s “non-resolution.” “If ‘Charlot’ must receive mud, it won’t be us who throw it at him. There are others who are paid to do such things (the Attorney General, for exam- ple),” they wrote. For Isou, Lemaître, and Pomerand, “Charlot” was simply a “nui- sance” who posed no great threat to their program for aesthetic revolution.61 Herein lies a valuable distinction. The Lettrists’ statement in Combat made little distinction between Charlot the character and Chaplin the man, whereas Debord and the IL explicitly removed the myth of “Charlot” in order to identify the man and attack him directly—“vous êtes Chaplin” (you are Chaplin), they wrote in “Finis les pieds plats.” Not coincidentally, the IL made it clear in their own response to Isou’s published article that their article had in fact been reject- ed by Combat on the grounds of an infraction of the terms of Article Thirteen of the Freedom of the Press law of July 29, 1881. This article addressed the “right of response” against slander and libel, which “is part of the protection not only of the person, but also of the personality.”62 Although it isn’t clear which “person”

60. “Il s’agit que M. Chaplin a tué Charlot . . . —Au meurtre! À l’assassin! . . . Charlot reparaît à de rares moments dans ‘Limelight,’ mais comme un fantôme. . . . Implacable, le petit monsieur aux cheveux blancs et au visage empâté—M. Chaplin—lui enjoint, son numéro terminé, de regagner le néant.” R. Treno, “Monsieur Chaplin, qu’avez vous-fait de notre Charlot?” Le Canard Enchaîné 34, no. 1672 (November 5, 1952). 61. Isou, Lemaître, and Pomerand, “Les Lettristes desavouent les insulteurs de Chaplin,” Combat (November 1, 1952); repr. Internationale Situationniste 1 (December 1952); repr. Berréby, Documents, p. 147. Amended translation from NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/lettrist-dis- avowal.html. 62. Alain Garay, “Freedom of Speech in the French Case Law: A Constitutional Dilemma,” in W. Cole Durham et al, Law, Religion, Constitution: Freedom of Religion, Equal Treatment, and the Law (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 320.

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or “personality” was being protected by Combat in their decision not to publish the IL’s response, it is substantially clear that the metaphysical divide between person and personality, or, alternately, person and persona, was in play. In other words, the IL’s “Chaplin files” assembled in Internationale Lettriste 1 grasp the stakes of this confusion or conflation, turning it into the grounds for a new polit- ical aesthetics of negation based in “the destruction of idols, above all when they claim to represent freedom.”63 To be clear, in their attack on Chaplin the man and the myth, the IL based much of their “argument” on the actor’s age, his physical display of the aging process, and the eventuality of his death: “. . . die soon: we will give you a first- class funeral,” they taunted in “Finis des pieds plats.” The writers also flaunted their own youth in contrast: “. . . we who are young and beautiful, we respond Revolution when we are told suffering.”64 But when publishing their “Chaplin files,” the IL used not the imperative tense but the nominal form to designate the overarching theme: “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” Inasmuch as the phrase may have been inspired by Arthur Miller’s play, among other sources, it rever- berates as a direct response, if not a rejoinder, to the language in Bazin’s “If Charlot Hadn’t Died.” As I mentioned earlier, Bazin’s essay appeared a month or more before the publication of the first issue of Internationale Lettriste. Considering the timing of the issue, as well as the more developed logic of the IL’s argument against Chaplin, which turns not only on language but also on the deliberate effacement of any imagery of the star, I understand the phrase Mort d’un commis voyageur as a way to counter Bazin’s cinematic thought that posi- tioned Chaplin’s cinema image within the historical-cultural consciousness. More to the point, the IL take issue not only with Bazin’s approach to the cine- matic image of an aging Chaplin in Limelight. They also condemn his method, which by 1952 traded not in the material concerns and communist politics that once informed Bazin’s writerly, critical, and cultural engagement but which instead advanced an aesthetics that willfully refused, on the grounds of cinemat- ic ontology, to separate Chaplin the man from his myth—his bygone, historical image—as Charlot. As argued in Le Canard Enchaîné’s cartoon, this was also something that Chaplin himself could not do.

63. “La destruction des idoles, surtout quand elles se recommandent de la liberté.” Berna, Brau, Debord, and Wolman, “Position de l’Internationale lettriste,” Documents, p. 151. 64.“. . . mourrez vite, nous vous ferons des obsèques de première classe. . . . Nous qui sommes jeunes et beaux, répondons Révolution lorsqu’on nous dit souffrance.” Berna, Brau, Debord, and Wolman, “Finis les pieds plats.”

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“My innocence explodes . . . but innocent or guilty, this does not mean anything: the essential is to know how to grow old with grace.” (Last words of Michael O’Hara [Orson Welles] in The Lady from Shanghai) —Epigraph to André Bazin’s “If Charlot Hadn’t Died” It’s one thing to live young in an age situated outside of physiological youth; it’s another thing to maintain oneself in a state of youth in this paradoxical situation. —Metagraph, Internationale Lettriste 165

Insofar as Debord’s trip to Brussels to meet Nougé and Mariën not only inspired him to initiate a petit cénacle after the manner of Théophile Gautier—who in the 1830s sought independence from Victor Hugo—it also arguably sparked a renewed interest in countering Bretonian Surrealism with leftist politics, especially considering its enduring premise of “love” as a creative force. Incidentally, Gautier was likely the first to use the compound term commis voyageur in a literary work; it had been introduced into La dictionnaire de L’Académie française (6th ed.) in 1835. It is found in “Daniel Jovard,” an installment in Gautier’s Les jeunes France: Romans goguenards (1833), which recounts the Romantic conversion of Daniel from a rather dull or “normal” young man to what might be called a dandy. Gautier envi- sioned what Daniel would have become had he stayed in his original state: “With study and work, he could have become a charming traveling salesman and an agreeable second clerk of a solicitor.”66 As Mieke Bleyen has suggested, Debord, Nougé, and Mariën shared an interest in developing a “writing practice beyond ‘literature.’” “Operative in the rapidly changing postwar context they more than ever felt the need to act immediately on the world and affect a small group of accomplices that would contribute to a global revolu- tion.”67 This logic can be found in the IL’s “Chaplin files,” and in their decision to

65. “C’est une chose que de vivre jeune dans un âge situé hors de la jeunesse physiologique; c’en est une autre que de se maintenir en état de jeunesse dans cette situation paradoxale.” Georges Perec coined the term “metagraph,” the opposite of an epigraph. René Wibaux was co-author of Vivre âgé sans devenir vieux (Monaco-ville: Éditions du Rocher, 1952). 66. “Avec de l’étude et du travail, il aurait pu devenir un charmant commis voyageur et un déli- cieux second clerc d’avoué.” Théophile Gautier, Les jeunes France: Romans goguenards (Paris: Charpentier, 1880), p. 74. 67. Mieke Bleyen, Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Mariën (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), p. 101. Emphasis in original.

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effectively efface the image of Chaplin and replace it with an unidentified image of a military man. Compared with the cover image of Cahiers du Cinéma in which Bazin’s essay appeared, and which features a still from Limelight wherein the actor tentatively looks beyond the frame while holding the hand of his young co-star (Claire Bloom), we find a visual relay that pits Chaplin’s character Calvero against his worldly, Internationale Lettriste stand-in—the two images discursively linked perhaps only by the mustache. I say “worldly stand-in” because the unidentified image in Internationale Lettriste 1 points far beyond either America or France, to another geographical region altogether. Indeed, if the unidentified image initially appears readable at all, it is as a gesture to French colonialism in North Africa or a contemporary evocation of the late-eighteenth-century French campaign in Ottoman Egypt. But as the illustration chosen for “Mort d’un commis voyageur,” this image is not merely a substitution for Chaplin. It is a rigorous negation of Chaplin, for reasons I will explain. “Limelight is a much more confusing work than Monsieur Verdoux whose sole secret was easily discerned,” Bazin began his 1952 essay for Cahiers. “[T]hat is, Charlot’s true identity. A glance was sufficient. Once we had recognized him, the rest took its course.” As the essay unfolds, Bazin ponders the complexity of Chaplin’s relationship to the Calvero character, whose image of failure and old age liberated Chaplin the man from the burden of his aging countenance in spite of the fact that “his transient or secret presence at Charlot’s side [in Limelight] even played an essential role in giving a new effectiveness to the myth.”68 While the film’s “realistic drama” highlighted the “gravitational pull” of Chaplin’s leg- end, thereby “forcing” Charlot’s evocation while at the same time “depriv[ing] us of all resemblance” in Calvero, Bazin finds a profoundly Aristotelian “unity” in the film, a unity comparable to that in the works of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Limelight, in contrast, benefits from its failures: namely, the way in which it evokes “parasitic emotions, not belonging to the work itself,” demanding total admiration and affective identification through “moral pressure” and “blackmail.”69 Bazin high- lights the specific failures of his literary examples, the logic of which he further develops in “Limelight, or the Death of Molière” (L’Observateur, November 1952) and “Le Grandeur de Limelight” (Esprit, 1953), but his central example in all of these writings is the frequently criticized “récit de Théramène” in Racine’s Phèdre. “Undoubtedly everyone has the right to have reservations about masterpieces. . . . But given a level of artistic creativity, and certainly faced with evidence of genius, a contrary attitude is necessarily more rewarding.”70 Arguing that granting a text’s “faults” the status of “qualities” is, in fact, the true gamble of modern criticism, Bazin makes the case for Limelight’s “fundamental ambiguity,” identifying Calvero

68. Bazin, “If Charlot Hadn’t Died,” Essays on Chaplin, p. 51. 69. Bazin, “Grandeur de Limelight,” pp. 128–29. 70. Ibid., pp. 130, 129.

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as ambiguity itself.71 Insofar as Bazin argues for a kind of modernist assessment that seeks to uncover the ontological status of the medium within the text itself (“Only Chaplin has been capable . . . of continuing to be the cinema”), he also chides the critic who operates by received knowledge or common opinion.72 That is, he rejects the classically held opinions and procedures of those who resemble Gautier’s Daniel Jovard before his “conversion.” Gautier writes: “To give a com- plete idea of the man, let’s say . . . that he declaimed against the ‘récit de Théramène’ . . . and very enjoyably played the lotto.”73 And although in developing this critical stance Bazin also aimed to respond to the “intimidation” produced by “the kind of critical terrorism with which the Parisian release of the film was sur- rounded,” he may also be tacitly rebuking the activities of the IL at the Ritz, which rejected not only Chaplin the man but also the “worship” of the man as a myth— an “idol” espousing aesthetic and also human freedom—that Bazin himself partici- pated in and arguably helped to construct.74 In developing his “oppositional” critical position, as much as his theory of cine- ma, through Chaplin, Bazin likely believed that he was proposing an authentic, criti- cal “radicalism” that could effectively invert Limelight’s failures in order to grant an especially “explosive significance” to both life and death in the film, and in cinematic ontology and aesthetics. While Charlot’s disappearance (and resurrection) beneath Chaplin’s old age may be the metaphysi- cal operation of the film, death is quite literally the film’s subject, articulated in a bookend structure of shots that demonstrate both the cinema image’s interpretive ambiguity and its explicit- ness. Limelight is set in the silent-film era of 1914 (“Mais pourquoi donc?” the anarchists at Le Liberataire asked);75 the film’s pivotal opening sequence coa- lesces around the young dancer Terry (Claire Bloom), whom we see collapsed on her bed in an apparent but, as we learn, unsuccessful suicide. The close-up Charlie Chaplin. Limelight. 1952. concludes a long, disembodied tracking

71. Ibid., p. 129. 72. Ibid., p. 139. 73. “Pour . . . donner une idée complete de l’homme, nous dirons…qu’il déclamait le récit de Théramène . . . et jouait très-agréablement au loto.” Gautier, “Daniel Jovard,” p. 70. 74. “ . . . l’espèce de terrorisme critique dont la sortie du film à Paris a été entourée . . . ” 75. Michele, “Limelight,” Le Libertaire, p. 3.

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shot. The film’s ending sequence makes the death image unambiguous, juxta- posed as it is against the vitality of Terry’s life: With an alert gaze, Terry dances in the foreground of the image while Chapin/Calvero’s covered corpse sits within the deep recesses of the frame. Indeed, as the film comes to an end, Chaplin/Calvero/Charlot has been reduced to a formless and out-of-focus figure. In the static folds of the shroud that nearly touches the floor, he is the unmistakable sign of death juxtaposed against Terry’s fleeting body deliriously Chaplin. Limelight. 1952. possessed by movement—itself a sign for the cinema. With these corporeal motifs, Bazin does concede some worldly truths. For example, he acknowledges that in Limelight Chaplin could no longer conceal his age, arguing that one of the actor’s greatest feats was to reckon with the very problem of not being able to grow old because of Charlot’s mystique. Hence, “Limelight can be likened to an exorcising of its author’s fate. Calvero is at once Chaplin’s fear and his victory over that fear. A double victory, first because the phantom of failure is there- in objectivized, incarnated by the person it could haunt, and furthermore because the fallen artist of the film . . . is able to justify himself in the success of a young being who will carry his venture forward.”76 At this point in the essay, Bazin moves into formal film analysis, citing the tracking shot that pulls away from Calvero/Chaplin/Charlot’s corpse to foreground Terry dancing “despite her grief.” This camera movement, Bazin argues, not only possesses a mystical property capable of embodying the “transmigration of souls” but also reveals through its temporal-spa- tial gesture that “the theater and life go on.”77 Here we see how Bazin cannot relin- quish the idealist crux of his theoretical enterprise. While this arguable conservatism can elsewhere be located in his interest in the force of Charlot’s myth, identifying it as the agency guiding the invention of Calvero and the liberated fate of Chaplin the man, here it proclaims itself unambiguously in his reading of formal camera move- ment as a metaphysical, rather than a worldly, procedure, whereby death’s negation revels in affirmation. Insofar as “ambiguity” may stand for the modernist discourse in Bazin’s writing, whereby illegibility generates the very force of the image or film in question, he here betrays his conviction that the cinematic art primarily celebrates

76. Bazin, “Grandeur de Limelight,” p. 135. 77. Ibid.

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the “fundamental ‘gain’ of reality, the ability to allow the spectator to explore reality further,” as Colin MacCabe argues as part of his claim for Bazin’s modernism.78 While this is undoubtedly true from a certain film-theoretical standpoint, from a Debordian perspective “reality” is a humanist wish “to restore the order of the shat- tered mind, along with the authority of that order,” to recall Adorno; it is a wish based in an idealist, metaphysical approach whose promise of affirmation or free- dom can only be forged within the “existing forms” of society.79 From this position, Bazinian metaphysics may thus be critiqued as a potential if tacit contract with, rather than a rejection of, existing regimes of oppression that are meted out in the cinematic image. Bazin further discloses the classic idealism of his stance toward cinematic aesthetics when he narrates his experience attending Limelight’s premiere in the presence of Chaplin himself: “Through the power of the cinema the death of Molière became the fourth act of Le malade imaginaire. . . . When the lights went up, the entire audience, in tears, turned toward that same face that had just faded from the screen. . . . We could no longer distinguish between the admira- tion we felt for Chaplin and our sense of relief at being released, thanks to his presence, from a delicious fear.”80 Bazin refers here to the great “comic para- dox” whereby Molière, after acting in the fourth performance of Le malade imagi- naire in 1673, suffered a convulsion onstage and subsequently died at home. Thus, Bazin suggests that Limelight, in the words of W. G. Moore, becomes an inverted “case where real life seems to play tricks with the mind, where irony seems to invade the human stage.”81 We can detect in Bazin’s account a Nietzschean spirit that promotes the accomplishments of dramatic form to gen- erate a spectatorial overcoming of mortal fear and an ultimate affirmation of life in a version of modern catharsis. But we can also sense an anti-materialism that separated him from his communist colleagues at Travail et Culture, where he worked after the liberation. We can also hear his Catholicism, which, while never orthodox, nevertheless anchored the politics of his criticism within the cinema’s ability to instruct the masses with its aesthetic value.82 Insofar as Karl Schoonover understands Bazin’s cinematic and spectatorial politics as bearing out the “his- torical specificity of a postwar articulation of realism—a realism that adheres to the filmed body as the emblem of the film image’s special capacities, the mea-

78. Colin MacCabe, “Bazin as Modernist,” in Opening Bazin, p. 70. 79. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 89. Here I extrapolate from Adorno’s critique of Heidegger in the section “Ontology Prescribed.” 80. Bazin, “Grandeur de Limelight,” p. 128. 81. W. G. Moore, “Molière: The Comic Paradox,” Modern Language Review 68, no. 4 (October, 1973), p. 771. 82. See Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 135, and esp. chap. 5 in its entirety.

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sure of cinema’s geopolitical currency, and as a nodal point for aspirant imagin- ings of cross-cultural spectatorial engagement,” we should also recognize that negation actually has no place in Bazin’s worldview.83 Even if Bazin’s rhetoric boldly situates the cinema as a humanism “that is itself a historically bound desire,” as Schoonover elegantly argues,84 Bazin nevertheless finds redemption at Limelight’s premiere in Chaplin’s live presence, which outstripped the film’s murderous agency toward Charlot’s myth. As such, Bazin very well may have been one of the contemporary “idols” of freedom that Debord and the IL sought to destroy and negate. Indeed, the ambiguity, the conflation between image and life, past and present, person and persona is what kept Chaplin, according to Bazin, “à l’avant-garde du Cinéma.” While Bazin may allow us to discern an illegible instability in Chaplin’s image in Limelight—or, more precisely, a dialectical oscillation in the language of the cinematic image tied obliquely to negation and negativity, after Blanchot85— unlike Chaplin’s Calvero, the unnamed, unidentified soldier’s image in Debord’s “Chaplin files” is ambiguity itself. First, the image resists reading entirely: Who is this man? From what country or print source does he hail? Why is this image here? It nonetheless decisively declares that it is not, in any case, Chaplin, much less Charlot or Calvero. It is as though this image’s glaring dis- connection with the content of the IL’s “Chaplin files” proclaims that he is there only to signal pure presence, becoming in turn a commentary on the image’s— rather than history’s—true nature as that which is simply visible, rather than legi- ble: there for all to see. But the image’s silence, its lack of attribution, combined with its military motif, also solicits interpretation from the historian, if not from the reader. Hence it functions as an example of what Agamben called a “stop- page” in Debord’s cinema, which is also a “means, a medium, that does not dis- appear in what it makes visible.”86 In this non-filmic example, the image’s illegi- ble muteness halts the flow of fictitious signification harbored in representation that Debord sought to deny in the cinema, making visible his attack on the idola- try of Chaplin and the fictions that his real body elicited in the Parisian masses in 1952. Debord’s negation of imagistic fiction may have begun in the efface- ment of all representational images in his film Hurlements, but it resolutely con- tinued here and in the IL’s journal Potlatch, which was devoid of all pictures. Although Debord did not likely intend to elicit an interpretation of the sol- dier’s image, but rather intended to halt such hermeneutic conventions out-

83. Schoonover, Brutal Vision, p. 21. 84. Ibid., pp. 50, 6. 85. See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), esp. chap. 2. 86. Agamben, “Difference and Repetition,” p. 318.

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right, I nevertheless fell victim to the lure of deciphering the soldier’s imprint as it appeared in the “Chaplin files” of the Internationale Lettriste. Initially, I won- dered if he was there to represent the authority of state police that the authors of “Finis les pieds plats” themselves discerned in Charlot when they saw the “cop’s nightstick behind the rattan cane.” If only it were so simple. I went about trying to identify the image—not only the source but the man pictured. I con- tacted many experts on Lettrism, the Internationale Situationniste (who contact- ed others on my behalf), and scholars of colonial France and Spain; I wrote to specialists on the colonial Middle East. From my sources, I eventually gained information that I could trust: According to his dress, the military man in ques- tion was from Egypt, not Turkey, as I had first thought. The image was likely cap- tured in the 1930s or ’40s, as opposed to the 1950s. He was a regular soldier, not a high-ranking dignitary, statesman, or officer such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, or Mustafa Kamil Pasha, founder of Egypt’s National Party. Like Willy Loman, the man pictured was likely not a leader of men but rather an anonymous “hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them.” However, even as the image—this image—tempted me with its fictions, which I believe Debord wanted us to resist, his use of it becomes a gesture of his global artistic-political revolution. It thus operates as a historical index of the IL’s most pressing commitments having to do with the death of the image in exchange for the materiality of real political life, death, and history. In the sixth issue of Potlatch, Debord and his cohort recalled the past: The Lettrist International, founded in 1952, gathered together the extremist tendency of the movement. In October of that year, following the incidents provoked by the supporters of the International against Charles Chaplin, and with the disavowal of this gesture by the Lettrist right, the agreement with the retrograde tendency was denounced and its members were purged.87 This essay was followed immediately by “Notes for an Appeal to the East,” written by the sole Algerian member of the IL, Mohamed Dahou. He writes: “There was- n’t any Egyptian revolution. It died in its first few days; it died with the textile workers shot because of their ‘communism.’”88 Here, Dahou refers to the 1952

87. “L’Internationale lettriste, fondée en juin 1952, a groupé la tendance extrémiste du mouve- ment. En octobre de la même année, à la suite des incidents provoqués par les tenants de l’Internationale contre Charles Chaplin, et du désaveu de ce geste par la droite lettriste, l’accord avec la tendance rétrograde était dénoncé, et ses membres épurés.” Debord et al, “La bruit et la fureur,” Potlatch 6 (July 27, 1954); amended translation from NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/the- sound-and-the-fury.html. 88. “Il n’y a pas eu de révolution égyptienne. Elle est morte dès les premiers jours; elle est morte

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revolution in Egypt, a military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Association of Free Officers that overthrew the feudalist monarchy of King Farouk I. He also refers to the fact that on August 13 of that year, Nasser, who headed the Revolutionary Command Council, deployed five hundred troops to take control of a textile workers’ strike in Kafr al-Dawar, located outside of Alexandria. According to political sociologist Hazem Kandil, this intervention, which led to a mass shooting of the workers and the subsequent execution of two organizers, was part of Nasser’s efforts to convince the CIA and the American government that president Mohammed Naguib was “soft on commu- nism.”89 As part of Nasser’s more wide-reaching efforts to undermine Naguib and eventually take control of Egypt, his actions exploited the American “Cold War conviction that military strongmen are more reliable than erratic civilians,” for at the time, the American government was wary of Naguib’s commitment to democratic rule.90 Nasser’s attack and murder of the textile strikers thus helped to show, in Kandil’s words, that “not only the United States, but the capitalist West in general, leaned toward the strong leader they all believed would be tough on communism: Nasser.”91 At this time, the West, it seems, was more com- mitted to an image that inspired their belief than to political reality. If the Egyptian soldier pictured in the IL’s “Chaplin files” in fact points to this historical reality even obliquely, as I believe it does, then it points also to the political power of negation in its silence and illegibility. The military man, in the end, is neither a substitute nor a more appropriate politically charged image stand-in for Chaplin or Charlot. Instead, he is his complete negation, in that what remains in the wake of the soldier’s image is neither a nostalgic glimmer of the past nor a resurrection, but something other that, in the image’s silence, aims toward an effaced consciousness anchored in material facts: the real events of 1952 that include the execution of so-called communists. As Kandil explains, the murdered textile workers were not, in fact, communists, but were simply workers striking in support of the revolution and against the practices of anti- revolutionary factory owners.92 These facts remain absent in the spectacular con- text of Chaplin’s European tour, and in the false politics of his Cold War perse- cution. While the IL’s military man is still an image, the common logic of which Debord sought to uproot in this early phase of his enterprise, Debord and the

avec les ouvriers du textile fusillés pour ‘communism.’ ” Mohamed Dahou, “Notes pour un appel à l’Orient,” Potlatch 6 (July 27, 1954), trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/notes-for-an- appeal.html. 89. Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (London: Verso, 2013), p. 26. 90. Kandil, Soldiers, p. 26. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid.

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“gang of four” position this image as a political act of negation, rather than as an icon, index, or symbol. In so doing, they do not seek to represent the death of textile workers who were also falsely accused of communist activities. Rather, they position the historical effacement of their mortality as part and parcel of the image’s repertoire. It is true that in this particular achievement through negation we are likely incapable of emotion. This may be because the image here, after Debord, articulates what Shea Coulson calls the “muteness of matter.” This so-called muteness undermines the fictitious lures of the image when it resists legibility, emerging, rightly so, as both a fact of material life and “the neg- ative unity of art.”93

93. Shea Coulson, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Critique (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2007), p. 124.

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