The Chaplin Files, 1952*

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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00291 by guest on 27 September 2021 52 OCTOBER 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 theater. 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 picture 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). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00291 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Chaplin Files, 1952 53 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 within 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.

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