In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy

Home , A Cock and Bull Story, Satan Met a Lady, The Projectionist

Edited by

Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli

In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, Edited by Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3782-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3782-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1 Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli

Part I: From Adulterous Crossbreeding to Generic Bastardy

Chapter One...... 20 Les genres ne font-ils que des bâtards? Christian Viviani

Chapter Two...... 29 Film Genre and Modality: The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film Matthias Grotkopp and Hermann Kappelhoff

Chapter Three...... 40 Vampire Parents and Jealous Brothers: Hollywood Viewed by the Underground Barbara Turquier

Chapter Four...... 52 Bastardy: Jarmusch’s Way from Mongrelization to Non-dualism Céline Murillo

Chapter Five ...... 65 The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing: From Reference to Bastardy Karine Hildenbrand

Part II: Exploring Degeneration: Bastardy as New Filmic Rhetoric

Chapter Six...... 82 Hybridation cinématographique en situation de guerre froide (1958-1966) De quelques films du pacte de Varsovie “métamorphosés” en stéréotypes culturels occidentaux Joël Mak dit Mack vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven...... 92 Yndio do Brasil (S. Back, 1995): Potentiel discursif de la bâtardise dans le cinéma brésilien Erika Thomas

Part III: Blurred Lineages: Bastardy and the New Critical Cinema

Chapter Eight...... 104 Catherine Breillat Reconsidering the Representation of Sexuality in Classical Hollywood Cinema: For a Bastard Method of an Aesthetics of Interpretation Claudine Le Pallec Marand

Chapter Nine...... 116 Adieu Gary: du métissage et des moyens d’en rendre compte Martin Goutte

Chapter Ten ...... 127 Francis Ford Coppola et le voleur d’yeux L’inquiétante étrangeté de Tetro (2009) Carmen Bernand

Chapter Eleven ...... 136 Bastard Remakes: Homage and Betrayal in Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) and Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) David Roche

Chapter Twelve ...... 146 Disparition du statut narratif dans Schwarzer Garten (Black Garden) de Dietmar Brehm Gabrielle Reiner

Part IV: The Unnatural Nature of Creation

Chapter Thirteen...... 158 Bastardy Spiralling Down the Gutter of Time: Sterne and Winterbottom’s Games of Pleasure Brigitte Friant-Kessler and Ariane Hudelet-Dubreil

In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy vii

Chapter Fourteen ...... 170 Gainsbourg: vie héroïque by Joann Sfar (2010) “Drawing in Motion” and the Bastard Biopic Trudy Bolter

Chapter Fifteen ...... 179 Le film en version “suédée.” Rencontre du spectacle et du spectateur Anaïs Kompf

Chapter Sixteen ...... 189 Vincere (Marco Bellocchio) and Milk (Gus Van Sant): Hybrid Fictions and Dissensus Sarah Leperchey

Part V: Asserting Cinema’s Ontological Bastardy

Chapter Seventeen...... 200 Formats mixtes et cadres polymorphes Sylvain Angiboust

Chapter Eighteen ...... 211 Looney Bastards: le film de genre à l’épreuve du cartoon Vincent Baticle

Chapter Nineteen...... 219 Impure or Bastard? The Actual Place of Heterogeneity in André Bazin’s Writings Marco Grosoli

Bibliography...... 230

Films Cited ...... 245

Contributors...... 253

Index...... 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume stems from the three-day international conference “In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy” held at the University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense from 28 April to 30 April 2011. This conference was organised under the auspices of the University’s research group on English literature, culture and civilisation, the CREA (EA 370), to which we are indebted for both organisational help and intellectual stimulation. Our special thanks go to the research group’s director, Chantal Delourme, who was kind enough to support a project fostered by two lecturers who conduct their research at University Paris Ouest while teaching at University of Corsica. We also wish to express our deepest gratitude to the CICLAHO, the CREA research unit which focuses on Classical Hollywood Cinema, and to which the editors of this volume both belong. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the academics in charge of the CICLAHO, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, Serge Chauvin, Anne Crémieux and Dominique Sipière, whose indefectible passion and encouragement helped us through all the stages of the undertaking, from the fine-tuning of the original idea to the selection of contributors. We are also grateful to the other members of the conference’s scientific committee, Gaëlle Lombard and Jonathan Ervine, for their assistance. Finally, it would not have been possible to organise the event and to publish this volume without the financial and symbolical support of the doctoral programme devoted to literature, languages and arts (ED 138) and of the foreign languages department at University Paris Ouest, and without the help provided by all the technical services of the institution. Above all else, we wish to praise the contributors to this volume for proving the relevance of praising bastardy in the current context of filmic creation, but also for illustrating how academic debates may go beyond university borders to address the prevalent social question of individual or collective identities, in times when the omnipresence of identity-related issues makes it necessary to correlatively tackle the legitimacy of identities whose origins cannot be traced back to a unique or stable source.

INTRODUCTION

SEBASTIEN LEFAIT AND PHILIPPE ORTOLI

The art of cinema, because it was born from various and heterogeneous sources (science, photography, popular entertainment, etc.) has constantly tried to preserve that taste for blending. And even though it finally created its own specificity, the art of film has not reneged that founding principle. Indeed, because it is reflected in its productions, the genealogy of cinema’s identity is one of its most important theoretical issues. Yet though processes of “biological” filiation between certain film works, genres, or forms have been the subject of many studies, concerning for instance the ways in which crossbreeding, in its diverse versions, may generate hybridisation or miscegenation, it appears that the question of the legitimacy of cinematic filiations, which is intrinsically linked to that of the legitimacy of filmic unions, has not received due treatment so far. Some recent works, however, among which Inglourious Basterds, make it necessary to study this correlated aspect. Quentin Tarantino’s films,1 and specifically the latest one, are pioneering in that they vigorously suggest that cinema should be defined as the art of bastardy. Inglourious Basterds exemplifies a new conception of the circulation of cinematographic memory, at a time when works, whether old or new, are quickly and permanently available, and when the extensive use of intertextuality makes it difficult, not to say quite impossible, to create an original movie. At the very least, Inglourious Basterds points to a reshuffle of film genealogy, and calls for a new definition of the very concept of originality. The strength of the genealogical notion of bastardy, however, does not merely lie in its ability to exceed the boundaries of a single work and enlighten cinema itself. The idea goes beyond mere provocative sensationalism to directly confront currently prevalent phenomena: the heritage craze, the genealogical thirst, the appetite for tradition that characterise identitarian closure. The siren songs of culture-based identity politics, whose political echo can even be heard diverting research groups

1 The applicability of bastardy to Tarantino’s work is discussed in Philippe Ortoli, Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino (Paris: Cerf-Corlet, 2012). 2 Introduction from their scientific aims, have played a major part in the maturation of our bastardy-rehabilitating project. Their oppressive omnipresence has made the term more than likeable. In fact, the prejudice against bastardy has evinced the numerous salutary aspects of a concept that promotes questioning over ready-made answers, opens up instead of closing down, refuses monism instead of beatifying it. Bastardy should be praised not only because of the media-spread bias against the notion, but above all because it enhances an alternative set of values: creative discrepancy, natural artistic evolution, untraceable identity, aesthetic disobedience, and the founding power of impurity. The pejorative connotation of bastardy, linked as it is to the word’s standard layers of meaning—the direct exclusion of clear ascendancy and the etymological foregrounding of illegitimacy—may well be an asset rather than a liability. This absolute possibility carries even more weight if looked at from a cinematic perspective. In many respects, film bastardy is consubstantial to Riciotto Canudo’s description of cinema as the “seventh art.”2 For this reason, Inglourious Basterds irrepressibly appears to be a kind of manifesto. The title itself positively promotes bastardy. Its willing spelling mistakes, which blatantly alter the American title of a classic Italian war movie by Enzo Castellari, Quel maledetto treno blindato (1978), are totally concurrent to the director’s strategy: combining betrayal and tribute, or, to put it differently, including difference in similitude. The paratextual reference, which may seem to childishly play with the accepted spelling of words, is actually in keeping with Tarantino’s fictional project, in which all the ingredients of the cinematic art (from upstream to downstream: the film reel, the theatre owner, the projectionist, the film star, the film critic, the cameraman) finally avenge themselves on Nazi ignominy but also, with equal enthusiasm, on the ineluctability of historical reality. Accordingly, the film refrains from following the rules of factual or chronological illustration to assert the worth of a substitute model that can only be provided by cinema itself. The original intuition that bastardy may be a sesame key reopening the closed doors of film analysis sprang from the observation that Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece advocates a new way of approaching cinema by going back to its roots. The word “bastard” has two main definitions that are related yet different, and a third one, which is extremely important in our opinion, even though it is contested by etymologists. One of the two prevalent

2 Riciotto Canudo, Manifeste des sept arts (Paris: Séguier “Carré d’Art,” 1995). The article was originally published in La Gazette des sept arts 2 (25 January 1923): 2. In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 3 meanings has it that bastardy describes what is not racially pure, and consequently what results from the crossing between two heterogeneous sources that are judged barely compatible.3 In this first case, what the union produces is necessarily bastard in kind, and nothing can ever modify its status: this first type of bastardy is intrinsic, written in the genetic code even before birth. According to the other definition, the legal one, “bastard” is an adjective used to describe someone born from parents whose union was not recognized by law.4 In this second case, a couple can technically breed a bastard for lack of legitimation, which entails the possibility of retroactively cancelling bastardy. The child born out of wedlock can for instance acquire forms of legitimacy by being recognised, or through his or her parents’ marriage. As for the third definition, it shall be evoked below, and given the due consideration that it demands. If bastardy is exclusively considered from the point of view of reproduction and creation schemes, the art of film seems to relate only to its first definition: the history of film is made of controlled crossbreeding, of carefully monitored hybridisation, of the meticulous association of hand-picked objects whose specific qualities combine to form a unique result. From this perspective, the art of film can be considered to implement a form of experimental bastardy, and to bear the traces of the process in its productions. For instance, in the pre-history of film, Muybridge or Marey, after decomposing movement thanks to photography, used a zoetrope—one of those sophisticated toys described by Baudelaire— to prove their intuition by re-assembling what they had divided. Their procedure foreshadowed the invention of cinematography, the mongrelised product of scientific experimentation, leisure activities, and the obsession for visual testimony. Later, during film’s trial and error search for appropriate topics and plots, cinema also came to illustrate the first meaning of bastardy, by being crossed with fairy tales, short stories,

3 “A bastard—be it a plant, a child, an animal, or even an idea—is, by definition, that which represents, by virtue of its own generation, a threat to the purity or integrity of a system of kinds, natural or cultural.” Sara E. Figal, Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern (New York: Routledge, 2008), 39. 4 “According to Blackstone, a bastard in the law sense of the word is a person not only begotten, but born out of lawful matrimony. This definition does not appear to be complete, inasmuch as it does not embrace the case of a person who is the issue of an illicit connection during the coverture of his mother. The common law only taketh him to be a son whom the marriage proveth to be so.” J.C Chaturvedy, Academic Dictionary of Law and Legislation (Delhi: Isha Books, 2005), 61. 4 Introduction scandalous news events, and finally with novels.5 In all those cases, filmic translations primarily preserved the narrative common ground, whereas a complex network of mixed—and often indiscernible—influences was kept hidden. Such blending is present in its most literal form in genre cinema. The phrase is generally used to refer to popular genres—because they have aggregated around the representation of the essential emotions that make mimesis possible, they constitutively belong to mass culture. The system of film genres, as a whole, necessarily involves a structure of normative expectations6 whose limits are pushed further and further to allow genres to survive by supplementing routine schemes with substantive amendments. This principle is the underlying pattern of the Hollywood system. It was also present with Gaumont or Pathé in the days of their serials or in the heyday of the peplum or the Italian western, and is still to be found nowadays in the work of the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. Genres evolve by willingly amalgamating their semantic and/or syntactic elements with new ones, so that new categories can be created.7 In his article, Christian Viviani describes this evolution by identifying the three possible ways in which it affects the Western—alteration, inclusion, and crossover. For their part, Matthias Grotkopp and Hermann Kappelhoff bring out the phenomenon by analysing how the war film genre taps into a genetic fund

5 For André Malraux, such crossbreeding gave cinema its specificity as a medium for expression. André Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2003), 33. 6 “The processlike nature of genres manifests itself as an interaction between three levels: the level of expectation, the level of the generic corpus, and the level of the ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ that govern both. Each new genre film constitutes an addition to an existing generic corpus and involves a selection from the repertoire of generic elements available at any one point in time. Some elements are included; others are excluded. [...] In addition, each new genre film tends to extend its repertoire, either by adding a new element or by transgressing one of the old ones.” Barry K. Grant, Film Genre Reader III (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2003), 171. 7 “While there is anything but general agreement on the exact frontier separating semantic front syntactic views, we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like—thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre—and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders—relationships which might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.” Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), 95. In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 5 whose limits are constantly shifting. They extend their analysis to other genres and subgenres and describe bastardy as “the fundamental structure of a genre-based mass entertainment.” In her chapter, Karine Hildenbrand studies the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing in the light of those referential resonances and specular devices, concluding that bastardy leads the spectators “from recognition to surprise, from echoes to distortion, from (over)interpretation to pure contemplative indulgence.” Barbara Turquier’s article also enhances this first definition of cinematic bastardy by promoting a view of experimental cinema as the bastard offspring of Hollywood films, and by exploring the bastard aesthetics of the underground. This perspective is even turned into a paradigm in Gabrielle Reiner’s analysis of Dietmar Brehm’s work as the product of illegitimate filiations constantly on the verge of becoming abstract, in which a form of metacinematic bastardy leads to a questioning of narrative cinema. If the second definition of the word is considered, however, and if cinema is perused from the outside for signs of illegitimacy, defining the seventh art through bastardy may seem far less convincing. Because of its shameful origin, the art of film has often had to find its place by erasing the birthmarks of bastardy that it inevitably bore. The view also applies to cinema as an academic subject: analysts of film have played an important part in this development by forcing legitimising angles on their objects of study. As Sande Cohen and Sylvère Lotringer have shown, academics have, for a long period of time, structured their approach in order to demonstrate that films were worth studying.8 In the process, some critics or theorists of film have eliminated, or at least neglected, an entire portion of film history. They have indulged in reductive presentations of cinema’s cloudy origins, or tried to normalise the art of film through the study of its genealogy, to finally describe it in terms of blending, miscegenation, or hybridity. In so doing, they have initiated an analytical trend that still prevails in many respects: surveying the different forms of crossbreeding

8 “While cinema is now more than a hundred years old, the institutionalisation of cinema/film studies is relatively recent. Many film critics and film historians argue that difficulty in legitimizing, and therefore, establishing film as a discipline rests on the fact that cinema has been territorialized by different disciplines and their subsequent theoretical apparatuses, or dismissed by theoretical practices that aligned film form with pop, mass, or low culture (i.e., deeming it unworthy of academic analysis). In fact, many anthologies of film studies, film theory, and film history affirm the interdisciplinary composition of cinema studies, as well as the struggle to establish cinema as a valid ‘object’ of study—a struggle that has recently turned to scrutinise the study of film itself as an object.” Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen, French Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 2001), 243. 6 Introduction between the artistically, generically, or even geographically heterogeneous sources that lead to film. Through such analyses, cinema has appeared as an art that was in pursuit of recognition at all costs, anxious to pose as a product born in wedlock rather than as the result of dishonourable intercourse, and compulsively concerned to erase its gross impurity. This intrinsic lack of breeding is the topic of Vincent Baticle’s chapter, in which this dimension is related to the issue of the texture of film images, through the specific analysis of the inclusion of elements from the cartoon into the filmic reproduction of reality. Complementarily, yet still in order to assert that cinema belongs to a clearly boundarised, or even established, category, many filmmakers explicitly refer to more illustrious art forms, for instance by using, as David Bordwell has shown, “the prestige of literature and theatre [to] legitimise cinema.”9 In her chapter devoted to Joann Sfar’s biopic about French artist Serge Gainsbourg, Trudy Bolter studies this issue from a prolific perspective: she shows that aesthetic advances can be gained from the erection of a transartistic creative system—especially when such innovation is not dictated by a craving for legitimacy—and that modern biopics such as Gainsbourg: Vie héroïque construct bastard identities for their subjects, by bathing them in a bastard reality. In less innovative productions, however, this thirst for recognition is often illustrated, as far as contents are concerned, when filmmakers implicitly require audiences to identify a glorious ancestor looming behind their work. As a result, their films are to be perceived as direct tributes, whose referential purpose suggests that cinematographic filiation is governed by rules of legible descent pointing to specific sources rather than by uncontrollable conception schemes. Many film remakes fit into this category. Such films often resort to a pedigree in order to create new works, mostly for commercial aims, as David Roche demonstrates in his analysis of several reworkings of horror film classics that have been released recently. He also elicits the presence of a specific form of bastardisation in some film remakes by assessing the level of ideological distortion that can be induced by cinematic bastardy.

9 “The prestige of literature and theatre could legitimise cinema, so directors drew plots, players, and techniques from the stage.” David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2005, 80. Noel Carroll has also noted that most formal film theories have been constructed in order to endow cinema with artistic legitimacy. See Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 7

On a general scale, film referentiality can be considered to partake in the same kind of identification game illustrated by the current taste for the remake. As a system, referentiality bases itself on the recognizable features that endow a film with an identifiable genome. In some cases, those signs of belonging can be followed as they become heterogeneous in a supposedly hostile environment. In other cases, interpretive wealth is created when authors resort to illegible ascendancy. This is what Claudine Le Pallec Marand demonstrates in her study of how George Steven’s Giant leaves its mark on Catherine Breillat’s Une vraie jeune fille—a film that nevertheless remains impregnated with its author’s feminist discourse—and what Martin Goutte establishes by dissecting how Anthony Mann’s Man of the West is instilled in a film that generally looks like a contemporary piece of social drama, Nassim Amaouche’s Adieu Gary. All those aspects of filmmaking express or question the need for cinema to find its slot in a clear lineage, and thereby to endow an all too popular artistic practice with some measure of nobility. Until recently, André Bazin was the only theorist ever to have included impurity in the definition of cinema without restricting his perspective to the issue of artistic blending. In so doing, Bazin paradoxically enabled analysts of film to single-handedly forge the credibility of their object of study by ignoring questions of legitimacy.10 In his article, Marco Grosoli provides a detailed analysis of the crucial importance of Bazin’s contribution, in which cinema is perceived as a bastard child whose parents have never met, an aesthetic oxymoron born from what Grosoli presents as adulterated purity. Nevertheless, one cannot positively assert that Bazin’s innovative perspective, through which cinema is turned into a bastard offspring whose bastardy is both ingrained and extremely productive, has definitely

10 Almut Steinlein ascribes this legitimising role to the “policy of authors” as well as to French film critics of the post-Second World War period: “The cinephile challenge, in which the policy of authors fully partakes, consists of intellectually and culturally legitimating as a full-grown art products and practices that had long been objects of scorn. [...] The new age of film analysis advocated by André Bazin in 1943 actually starts with the proliferation of specialised journals, at once more confidential and more cinematically demanding: Raccords, La Revue du cinéma, La Gazette du cinéma, L’Âge du cinéma, the masterful Cahiers du Cinéma, as well as Positif and Cinéma 55. With the birth of those journals, the practice of writing about films was decisively altered, and detached itself from impressionistic or historical criticism to turn cinema into a legitimate art form.” Almut Steinlein, Une Esthétique de l’authentique: les films de la Nouvelle Vague (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 73-74. All quotations have been translated by the author unless specified otherwise. 8 Introduction made redundant the traditional attempts at reconstituting the family tree of the seventh art. In fact, even though a few signs of change in this area have become perceptible in the last decade, including among academic circles, Bazin seems to have only briefly endowed the notion of bastardy with new relevance. The concept, however, reappeared with a vengeance almost 50 years after Bazin’s theoretical writings, in the works of Alain Badiou devoted to the cinematic impurification of other art forms.11 At this stage in our examination of the concept, cinematic bastardy seems to fall into two categories: experimental hybridisation on the one hand, the quest for legitimacy and recognition on the other hand. From this mere perspective, the relationship between bastardy and cinema seems all too tenuous, which could indicate that praising cinematic bastardy is a kind of paradoxical encomium whose purpose is little more than ironical. Our main contention in this introduction is that this is far from being the case. Drawing from the tradition established by Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, we wish to consider here as our working hypothesis that bastardy expresses itself through cinema and, thus personified, conducts its own eulogy. The essays featured in this volume cover a whole range of issues, yet they all prove that the word “bastardy” is relevant for film analysis, because it leads to take into consideration aspects of cinematographic creation and of film history that are often overlooked. Additionally, the diversified approaches gathered in this volume variously show that the recent evolution of the seventh art, and its current place in the overall aesthetic, mediatic, and metaphysical context, turns bastardy into a necessary instrument of cinematic creation and into an essential concept of film studies. To understand this situation, the third meaning of the word “bastard” is a crucial reference. An alternative etymology suggests that “bastard” is derived from “bast”—a mule’s packsaddle12—and therefore refers to children born from the muledrivers’ chance encounters. As a result, the word seems to convey the idea of baseness,13 through a case of etymological fallacy that Shakespeare has exposed in a famous soliloquy

11 See in particular Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005), 88. See also “L’inesthétique d’Alain Badiou: les torsions du modernisme,” in Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 87-118 and Badiou’s article, “Du cinéma comme emblème démocratique,” Critique: revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères 692/693 (2005) Cinéphilosophie): 4-13. 12 Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis, Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1952), 662. 13 “A word derived from bas or bast, signifying abject, low, base nature. An Enfant de bas, a child of low birth.” Chaturvedy, Dictionary of Law, 61. In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 9 spoken by Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, in act one scene two of King Lear.14 This etymology, albeit much debated,15 conjures up an obvious fact: cinema has always been related to the popular forms of spectacle that intellectual elites have despised for so long (street theatre, pantomime, Grand Guignol, melodrama, circus, wrestling games, martial arts, musicals, magic tricks, striptease shows, serials, cheap detective stories, pulp fictions, and many others). For this reason, films have chronically been considered as entertainment rather than as art. There is, however, a parallel history of film, which purports to acknowledge film’s less admissible sources and to study the way in which they intermingle. This collimating line can be considered to start with the surrealists (with their praise of serials or of Charlie movies), to continue with the French fanzines of the 70s and 80s such as Ciné-zine zone or No Fun, and to reach completion with such journals as Starfix or Mad Movies, such books as Pour une contre-histoire du cinéma by Francis Lacassin,16 Ze craignos monsters by Jean-Pierre Putters,17 or Défense de la série b by Alain Paucard18—although those three manifestoes are all too isolated cases. This “other” cinema has always existed, and whether its works are referred to as b movies or z movies, they are the most emblematic sign of cinematic bastardy. Besides, apart from the idea of baseness that this category seems to illustrate, the coarse saddle on which the bastard is conceived is also akin to the essence of cinema. It implicitly refers to movement and transfer, and turns the distance from one point to the next into a creative matrix. This neglected part of the definition may eventually be the more fitted to an original description of cinema, an art whose essence rests in the repeated intervention of the same lapse of time between the 24 photograms displayed on screen within a second to create the illusion of motion.

14 “Why bastard? Wherefore base? / When my dimensions are as well compact, / My mind as generous, and my shape as true / As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us / With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?” William Shakespeare, King Lear (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 1.2.6-10. 15 See Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaisȩ (Paris: Le Robert, 1992): “The hypothesis according to which bastard is derived from son of bast (XIIIth), or more literally conceived or born on a pack-saddle, i.e. born from a muledrivers’ chance encounters, which was later altered into ‘son of base’ through an interference with Latin bassus (base) is debatable—ard, along with the older occurrences of the word, seems to point to a Germanic origin rather than to a Latin one.” 16 Arles: Actes sud, 1994. 17 Issy les Moulineaux: Vents d’Ouest, 1991, 1995, 1998 (3 volumes). 18 Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1995. 10 Introduction

Cinema, therefore, is neither a sum nor a product, but a breath born from the hiatuses that generate metamorphoses.19 Consequently, the concept of cinematic bastardy proves relevant on many grounds. The first one is related to the observation that apprehending the relationship between different works through the reconstruction of a cinematic family tree is a method that necessarily leaves grey areas, which bastardy can help enlighten. Our first postulate about the utility of cinematic bastardy is that the notion allows for enhanced understanding of all the filmic components that cannot be positively labelled, whether a single film or a whole aesthetic movement are concerned. In this volume, this conception is put into practice by Céline Murillo in her examination of the various forms of crossbreeding in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog. She identifies layers of cultural bastardy and considers cinematic mongrelisation as a mise en abyme of non-dualism. A similar perspective is exploited by Carmen Bernand in her parallel study of Coppola’s Tetro and of its main location, Buenos Aires, through an exploration of the blurred entanglement between thematic and formal bastardy implemented by the director. Despite those diverse signs of self-assertion, however, the relevance of the concept has often been impaired by lexical interference with such neighbouring notions as hybridity, allusionism, quotationism, referentiality, transfilmicity, mannerism, or postmodernism. Recently, Denis Lévy has coined the phrase “impurity of the waste”20 to describe cinema, a formula that comes in the wake of two other paired notions he had devised—the “local” or “global” impurity of film.21 There are obviously passages and

19 The notion of separation (“écart”) is of particular importance to the work of Jacques Rancière, who turns it into a methodical principle in Les Écarts du cinéma (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011). In an interview he gave in 2005, Rancière declared that “artistic practice amounts to separating separation a little further, in order to complicate the relationship between similarity and dissimilarity.” For him, this is doubly effective in films, as cinema is “a temporal art, based on creating expectations that can be contradicted at any moment.” Patrice Blouin, Elie During, and Dork Zabunyan, “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière: L’affect indécis,” Critique: revue générale des publications francaiseş et étrangères 692/693 (2005): 141-159, 141. 20 Denis Lévy, “Badiou, l’art et le cinéma,” Revue Appareil 6 (2010). http://revues.mshparisnord.org/appareil/index.php?id=873 21 Denis Lévy, “Impureté(s) & configurations,” Art du cinéma 11—L’impureté, 3- 13. http://www.artcinema.org/spip.php?article63 See also Denis Lévy, “Le cinéma, art impur localement ou globalement?” in Impureté(s) Cinématographique(s), ed. Alphonse Cugier and Patrick Louguet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 47-80. In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 11 intertwining lines between those concepts and bastardy, and their fields of application are sometimes so abutting to each other that one cannot cross one without encroaching onto the next. Consequently, an objection naturally comes to mind—what if bastardy was just a catchy new word used to superficially rejuvenate theories whose gloss has vanished by dint of use? In those overlapping areas lies a real problem, the potency of which is sometimes unwillingly evinced in some of the articles collected in this volume, when hybridity is gradually substituted for bastardy, or when more or less distant related notions are conjured up, such as interbreeding, mongrelisation, or Rancière’s dissensus. In many cases, a personal definition of bastardy is proposed. Our contribution to this collective construction of the concept is an intaglio definition of cinematic bastardy as the assemblage, into a unit, of elements belonging to two or more different models, the result of which cannot be apprehended by any of the concepts previously mentioned. This tentative definition leads to the positive sense of bastardy, through the observation that such kindred notions as miscegenation or crossbreeding have a limited explanatory power because tracing up the genealogy of mimicry is often to no avail— the influence of each matricial pattern being inevitably blurred as a consequence of their intermingling. As a result, tracing a film or a shot back to one main source is often impossible, because such a source does not exist, at least in an explicit or identifiable form. For those reasons, bastardy could be defined as the hyphenation between two continuities. This would suggest that the notion is located at the junction between all that supersedes cinema in the second degree—in the meaning of the phrase proposed by Genette in Palimpsests22—and all that leads to critical filmmaking. It could then be described as a form of Badiou’s “impossible movements,”23 or as a kind of missing link between the search for what

22 In this authoritative work of literary theory, Genette introduces several types of links between works that constitute literature in the second degree: intertextuality, which includes quotations and allusions, metatextuality, which includes comments of all types, hypertextuality, when an entire work is derived from another, architextuality, which includes such transcendent categories as genres, and paratextuality, which refers to whatever is at the threshold of the text. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman, Claude Doubinsky and Gerald Prince (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1-7. 23 “The arts are closed. No painting will ever become music, no dance will ever turn into poem. All direct attempts of this sort are in vain. Nevertheless, cinema is effectively the organisation of these impossible movements. Yet this is, once again, nothing but subtraction. The allusive quotation of the other arts, which is constitutive of cinema, wrests these arts away from themselves. What remains is 12 Introduction transcends cinematographic production—what Marc Cerisuelo defines as “transfilmicity”24—and the embedded references to the necessary conditions that make a film possible. Bastardy, in that case, would be a properly cinematographic attribute derived from the way films use themselves as their own source of inspiration rather than resorting to clear dissent or using an identifiable model. As an essential dimension of cinema, bastardy points to the itinerary from film to film without leading up to any source or starting point. In the current context of filmmaking, the term is in between two trends, which makes it unstable, or even fragile, but nonetheless indispensable, since it stands as a guiding thread to the nature of film itself. Our first incentive for praising bastardy, therefore, is that the concept owes its new significance to the circumstances brought about by postmodernity. Within a world of images, films increasingly feed on filmic references, and their spectators are more and more often asked to “recognise and enjoy”25 allusions. This exploratory task, however, seldom leads to a precise origin. Since filmmakers constantly refer to the works of other filmmakers, the cinematic family tree is doomed to become a vicious circle. Consequently, searching where a film quotation originates is often a vain undertaking, and if it is still true that a film is the product of a crossing, identifying its genitors has become a strenuous task. In a postmodern context, untraceable creations paradoxically become more genuine than the works whose derivation is discernible, because they stand up against the widespread belief that referentiality is the only way to originality. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds provides a radical version of this critical angle. The film enforces upon its spectators a bastard version of authorised history—the one supported by illustrations in history textbooks or in “serious” historical movies—and thereby prompts audiences to realise that historical truth is now accessed mediatically, or never reached at all. Following in the footsteps of Chaplin, who had implemented a similar use of historical figures and facts in The Great Dictator, Tarantino shows that characters become historical by playing a part, and superimposes bastard personae over representations that are deemed more authentic. The result is an impure—and ideologically provocative—version of allegedly well-known events. However, the film’s precisely the breached frontier where an idea will have passed, an idea whose visitation the cinema, and it alone, allows.” Badiou, Inaesthetics, 82. 24 Marc Cerisuelo, Hollywood à l’écran (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000), 85. 25 The phrase is from Laurent Jullier’s L’Écran post-moderne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 13 bastardy does not lead to a revisionist version of the Second World War, because of its forceful, blatantly advertised implementation. Tarantino’s excess in the matter, on the contrary, shows that history should no longer be conveyed via a clichéd set of images, the origin of which remains shrouded in doubt. In this respect, the most stimulating element in Tarantino’s demonstration is probably the inclusion of a fake propaganda movie at the heart of Inglourious Basterds. The embedded piece, which is entitled Nation’s Pride, was directed by Eli Roth, the director of the Hostel films, and is available in a full-length version on the film’s DVD. This filmic graft is a specular image of Tarantino’s bastardisation of authorised history in Inglourious Basterds, but also one of the film’s bastard offshoots, bits and pieces of which are subtly included in the main work. A grotesque blend, the violence-laden reel draws from at least three sources,26 and pushes to an extreme an existing process through which images bastardise reality, to such an extent that, as Paul Virilio has demonstrated in his investigation of the relationship between war and cinema, images of war supersede the actual bellicose actions they represent.27 The second incentive for praising bastardy to be found in contemporary cinema is correlative. It comes from the remark that the benefits of controlled crossbreeding or of the search for purity are currently questioned by an art that seems able to cope with an intrinsic bastardy, and even to dare sport this trait rather than conceal it. Those new conditions are brought about by a specific context, in which cinematic bastardy can be legitimised as an essential part of filmic processes, instead of having to rely on the recognition impetus caused by a few bastard

26 Private Zoller, who plays his own part as a sniper hero in Nation’s Pride and re- enacts his former killing of 300 hundred Allied soldiers from a village church steeple, has at least two filmic models: Sergeant York, by Howard Hawks (1941), a filmic hagiography of Alvin York, a Tennessee hillbilly who turns himself into a legend on the WW1 front, and To Hell and Back, by Jesse Hibbs (1955), in which WW2 hero Audie Murphy plays his own part in a filmic reconstruction of his war feats. Zoller’s warlike prowess, in itself, is a reference to Veit Harlan’s Kolberg (1945), a historical movie shot at the time of the fall of Berlin, which narrates a whole Prussian village’s resistance against the French in 1806. 27 Among other examples, Virilio presents the case of the derealisation of death through a cinematic process: “As sight lost its direct quality and reeled out of phase, the soldier had the feeling of being not so much destroyed as derealized or dematerialized, any sensory point of reference suddenly vanishing in a surfeit of optical targets. Being constantly in the enemy’s sights, he came to resemble Pirandello’s cinema actors, in exile both from the stage and from themselves.” Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), 15. 14 Introduction blockbusters. According to this second facet of our working hypothesis, bastardy is a fundamental component of the cinematic experience that has often been hidden away like a shameful defect, but that can now be fully assumed without going through belated legitimising operations. Some of the main signs of repressed bastardy have been evoked above, along with the legitimacy-inducing manoeuvres that are supposed to dissimulate them. This original tension has produced some of the most paradoxical aspects of the seventh art. Even though it produced bastard pictures of reality, cinema has for a long time dreamed of becoming the perfect vehicle of objectivity. Even though it was the orgiastic offshoot of other artistic forms, cinema could not wait to be called pure. Even though its success came from its use of fiction, cinema has constantly tried to prove that its aesthetic relevance was in fact derived from its privileged link to reality, its unique ability to lay the real world completely bare and to capture it in its entirety, going so far, in some cases, as to provide its spectators with a larger than life rendering of reality.28 Even though it was born on fairgrounds and raised to become pure entertainment, cinema has always seemed doomed to draw from prestigious sources in order to give itself some ground. Through the many challenging perspectives it includes, this volume aims at exposing the many contradictory forces within cinema that make it relevant to characterise it as the art of differentiation. Moreover, the current context provides many legible signs that the so far inhibited bastardy of film is finally asserting itself as a founding dimension by fully playing its part in creative patterns. The chapters in this volume conjure up instances of this trend that are equally interesting. Joël Mak dit Mack’s essay shows that bastardy does not merely infiltrate the artistic aspects of creative schemes, by analysing how the Cold War ideology has pervaded some propaganda movies shot in the Soviet Union to transform them into pro-American pamphlets once manipulated by American producers or directors—a process he characterises as “ideological plundering through editing.” For her part, Erika Thomas examines Yindio do Brasil to provide a comprehensive approach of the rhetorical virtues of editing, which turn the putting together of filmic bits and ends into a critical study of how Brazilian cinema represents the native Brazilian Indians. To realise the theoretical importance of cinematic bastardy, however, a study of the concept from

28 Lévy emphasises this as one of the aspects of the cinematic search for purity by referring to naturalistic films: “And yet if you look at it closely, there is another way to purity, a less ostensible one: the one found in ‘naturalistic movies,’ where cinema is supposed to provide access to ‘pure reality.’” Lévy, “Impureté(s) & configurations.” In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 15 the angle of film’s physical limits is indispensable. Sylvain Angiboust produces such an analysis in his article about film’s polymorphic frames, by pointing to bastardy’s natural location at the heart of the cinematic apparatus. One of the other recent metamorphoses of the seventh art—the dissemination of screens and diversification of screen sizes—makes bastardy particularly operational. The ritualistic aspects of the cinematic ceremony, formerly a kind of tribute to the film and its creator, has given way to different practices, first with the advent of television, then with the miniaturisation and multiplication of display surfaces. Filmmakers have no option but to accept that their works will be submitted to successive alterations, and cinema itself, considered as an abstraction, seems ready to migrate by taking for granted the possibility of crossbreeding with other media. Correlatively, the bastard versions of films are now integral parts of cinematic constructs. The elaboration of a film now includes preparing the DVD version, providing Internet users with preview extracts and, in some cases, films are even partially or totally released over the Internet, as supposed amateur movies, before reaching movie theatre screens. The main feature is now considered a by-product lost among many others, and is consequently bound to undergo or even undertake its own bastardisation. This development is illustrated in Coppola’s production of new DVD versions of his films—at least three different versions of Apocalypse Now are currently available. In keeping with the description of his filmography as an open artwork,29 the filmmaker seems to organise an endless proliferation of bastards, for instance by offering to mix the soundtrack of his latest film, Twist, even while it is being projected, thereby presenting himself as a live artist. In similar vein, bastardy is a way of interrogating the release of some films in a 3D and in a “regular” version, as well as all the processes through which illegitimate brothers become equal or superior to their lawful counterparts. Additionally, the share apportioned to the audience in the production of film works has taken unprecedented proportions. Spectators are no longer delivered with works invested with a finite identity. In more and more frequent cases, they are invited to take part in the film’s assembling, to breed it, and breed with it. The popular notion of interactivity, which reaches an acme when films are drawn from video games to create a new type of first person narrative, takes into account that a film is never

29 The concept of the open artwork has been used as a perspective on Coppola’s filmography in a recent PhD dissertation: Gaëlle Lombard: Les Figures de la transgression et du châtiment dans l’œuvre de Francis Ford Coppola (PhD diss., Université Paris Ouest, 2008). 16 Introduction complete until thousands of bastards are fostered from chance encounters with its spectators. An interesting way of giving pride of place to this dimension of the cinematic experience is the possibility of a “shuffle” reading of the sequences of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive that is offered by the DVD version. The spectator can choose an object featured in the film, from which his own version of the narrative will start. This random version is a joint production designed to be understandable whatever the spectator’s choice, which is proof that the film was designed to allow for multiple bastard reconstructions. By refusing the very idea of a final cut, such films as Mulholland Drive stand as mere moments in a ceaseless chain of creative actions, each stage of which is a form of bastardisation. Responding to another technological prompt, some films evince their directors’ awareness that the increasing miniaturisation and growing cheapness of reality-capturing devices has brought pseudo-cinematic practices into everyday life. Consequently, due to the propagation of cameras, films no longer belong to one author, but should be considered as collaborative productions, literally co-authored rather than just produced by a team. This aspect of cinematic bastardy could be one of the ways in which film becomes a “thinking entity” in a context of indiscriminate authorship.30 The question is no longer who made the film or who led the film to be made, but who gave its final identity to a film whose potential parents are innumerable. Such a question can legitimately be asked about such works as Adam Rifkin’s Look, a fiction film that poses as entirely shot by video surveillance cameras, or about Brian De Palma’s Redacted, in which scraps of supposedly found footage of different natures are put together to advocate redaction as the only relevant way of directing war movies in the 21st century. The “sweded” versions of well-known films, which are the topic of Anaïs Kompf’s article in this volume, is another manifestation that the human condition has taken a cinematic turn. This development necessarily affects filmmaking, an art Kompf situates in between original creation and mere repetition. Similarly, thanks to Internet sites crammed with shooting anecdotes, to DVD bonuses, and to the rise of the “making of” as a full-fledged genre,

30 For Badiou, this view is a way of expanding the thesis of cinematic impurity: “No film, strictly speaking, is controlled by artistic thinking from beginning to end. It always bears absolutely impure elements within it [...]. Artistic activity can only be discerned in a film as a process of purification of its own immanent non-artistic character. This process is never completed.” Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, ed. and trans. Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 84. In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy 17 the secrets of filmic creation have become exposed and available to virtually anyone. This fact induces filmmakers to insist on the creative scheme itself rather than to construct meaning based on resemblance to other works. In this new artistic pattern, a film is its own justification, and asserts its legitimacy in the act. Strangely enough, in some cases, the result of the creative process is not even included in the finished film, replaced as it is by the representation of its own making. The film in progress thus becomes the core of a narrative whose legitimacy lies in the act of (re)production rather than in the finished product, in a perfect illustration of Badiou’s description of cinema as the place where art and non-art become indiscernible.31 This aspect of the sea-change being suffered by the seventh art is analysed in its full complexity by Ariane Hudelet- Dubreil and Brigitte Friant-Kessler, who tackle the bastard adaptation of a bastard text, Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story, a film based on Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In their article, the authors demonstrate that bastardy is at the heart of the process of filmic adaptation, and study Winterbottom’s film as “a reflection on the ‘unnatural nature’ of creation itself.” From a complementary perspective, Sarah Leperchey’s essay expands on the notion of film’s bastardisation of reality by analysing the blend between the scopic regimes of archive and fiction in two contemporary biopics, Harvey Milk and Vincere.

The following articles share the observation that ascendancy, even though it used to be considered as a source of legitimacy, has presently reached a state of depletion, which allows bastardy to finally exploit its creative power. This state of the seventh art allows bastardy to draw from its extraordinary momentum to provoke the reinvention of an artistic practice used to following established models. As the essays featured below diversely demonstrate, the stake for cinema is to find its specific place again among more or less legitimate brothers, within environments sometimes referred to as “screen societies.” In this specific context, cinematic bastardy is a way for artists to rejuvenate the intrinsically filmic practice of including difference in repetition, and for analysts to apprehend the new modes of cinematic dissemination.

31 “The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.” Ibid.

PART I

FROM ADULTEROUS CROSSBREEDING TO GENERIC BASTARDY

CHAPTER ONE

LES GENRES NE FONT-ILS QUE DES BATARDS?

CHRISTIAN VIVIANI

Au cinéma, les genres se distinguent non par leur forme, comme en littérature, en peinture ou en musique, mais par leur “emballage.” Telle ou telle anecdote n’est pas toujours a priori un sujet de musical, de film d’horreur ou de western tant qu’elle ne rencontre pas le décor, les costumes, l’époque, la lumière qui nous feront reconnaître au premier coup d’œil un musical, un western ou un film d’horreur. De plus, le genre cinématographique s’inscrit dans une logique commerciale: aucun cinéaste, aucun producteur, aucun scénariste n’a jamais décidé froidement de créer un genre. C’est le contexte, la perspective commerciale, la prédisposition du public, et quelques autres paramètres plus fuyants, qui, à un moment donné, et de manière non préméditée, engendrent un succès qui va susciter les imitations. On peut en prendre pour preuve les adaptations du roman de Dashiell Hammett Le Faucon maltais: on sait qu’elles ont été au nombre de trois, en 1931 (Roy Del Ruth), en 1936 (William Dieterle, sous le titre Satan Met a Lady) et en 1941 (John Huston). Les deux premières restent sans lendemain;1 seule la dernière va donner naissance à un cycle générique: le film noir.2 On voit ici clairement que les mêmes causes ne produisent pas nécessairement les mêmes effets: si la version Huston a été fondatrice, c’est sans doute, entre autres, parce qu’elle avait Humphrey Bogart comme interprète et qu’elle est sortie dans le contexte historique de 1941.

1 En fait, elles s’inscrivent même dans un cycle générique, celui du film de détective des années 30 (les aventures de Philo Vance, de Perry Mason, ou de Nick et Nora Charles), dont les caractéristiques tant de contenu que de contenant empêchent tout amalgame avec le futur film noir. 2 Lire au sujet du film noir, et notamment sur sa genèse: James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), ainsi que Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993). Les genres ne font-ils que des bâtards? 21

La réplique unique d’un modèle n’est pas suffisante. Pour qu’il y ait un phénomène générique, il faut qu’il y ait prolifération des imitations, puis, et peut-être surtout, des variantes. Ces variantes peuvent, à bien des égards, être considérées comme autant de cas de bâtardise cinématographique, pouvant être le fruit du simple adultère ou celui de l’hybridation pure et simple, en passant par de nombreux stades, y compris celui de l’inceste. Car la filiation “officielle” n’engendre le plus souvent que la réplique sans imagination, voire la redite. Les cas d’auto-imitation, qui ne sont ni des répliques, ni des redites, ni même à proprement parler des cas de “bâtardise,” présentent une plus grande complexité et nécessiteraient à eux seuls une étude à part entière: je pense à Fritz Lang, qui enchaîne La Rue rouge (Scarlet Street, 1945) après La Femme au portrait (Woman in the Window, 1944),3 ou à Otto Preminger qui réalise Crime Passionnel (Fallen Angel, 1945) après Laura (1944). La pérennité d’un genre se mesure-t- elle, à la manière de quelque rodomontade machiste d’une autre époque, à la quantité et à la vigueur de sa progéniture “naturelle”? Cette bâtardise n’est-elle pas le lot du film de genre qui, pour entretenir l’engouement du public, doit à la fois être reconnaissable, pour répondre à l’attente, et surprendre, pour ne pas lasser? Le débat sur la forme générique a été largement exposé, notamment par Richard Neale, Rick Altman ou, chez nous, Marc Vernet ou Raphaëlle Moine.4 Mais ce qui nous concerne dans le présent article, ce sont les signes de la bâtardise dans le contexte générique. J’ai choisi de les étudier dans un genre immédiatement identifiable et dont chacun croit pouvoir reconnaître les codes et les figures de style: le western. Les procédés de l’abâtardissement, ou de l’hybridation, si l’on veut utiliser un terme moins cru et d’apparence plus scientifique, sont multiples. J’ai choisi d’en isoler trois qui présentent l’avantage de couvrir un grand nombre de paramètres, tant formels que de contenu: l’altération, l’inclusion, le transfert.

L’altération

On pourrait décrire le procédé de l’altération de la manière suivante. Le cadre, le décor, les accessoires, les talismans et fétiches, c’est à dire tous les éléments visibles qui assurent la reconnaissance immédiate du genre par le spectateur, sont respectés; en revanche c’est en soubassement

3 Serge Chauvin, La Trivialité Stylisée, bonus de l’édition DVD (Carlotta) des deux films de Fritz Lang. 4 Cf. Bibliographie en fin de volume.

22 Chapter One de cette familiarité, et à la réflexion, que les différences génétiques apparaissent. Johnny Guitar (1953) de Nicholas Ray est un cas d’altération. Dès les premières images, le paysage familier du western se met en place, bien que le vent qui le balaye intervienne plus comme une réminiscence romantique, voire gothique, que comme un élément climatique propre au genre. Ensuite, le décor se resserre sur le lieu traditionnel du saloon. Mais, là également, quelques détails introduisent l’altération. Le saloon, élément d’urbanisation, est en général au cœur de la ville de western, alors qu’il est ici planté dans une manière de néant géographique. Les lieux sont en général surpeuplés et bruyants, alors qu’ici c’est leur vacuité et leur silence, soulignés par la course vaine de la roulette, qui frappent. Enfin, l’apparition de Vienna (Joan Crawford) introduit l’altération la plus marquée. Le titre, un patronyme masculin, était un leurre: dès que Vienna entre en scène, il est évident qu’elle est la protagoniste de l’histoire qui va nous être contée. C’est à dire une femme, là on l’on attendait un homme. Dans leur vaste somme sur le genre, William K. Everson et George N. Fenin5 voient l’évolution des personnages féminins dans le western classique ainsi: la femme est d’abord une pionnière, égale à l’homme; puis l’image se détériore en créature fragile à la merci du méchant. Fenin et Everson constatent très justement qu’elle est moins un personnage en soi qu’un stimulant scénaristique (“plot motivator”), dans le sens que la défense de l’honneur d’une femme peut être aussi importante que le conflit entre la loi et le désordre. Dans Johnny Guitar, bien que la défense de l’honneur d’une femme par le très galant Johnny soit présente, Vienna n’est plus un stimulant scénaristique, mais bien le point focal. C’est elle qui porte et manie les armes, alors que Johnny les refuse; le passé, que le western traite notamment par le thème viril de la vengeance, intervient ici sous la forme plus mélodramatique du souvenir amoureux. À partir de cette altération radicale, tous les éléments familiers qui surgissent acquièrent une perspective nouvelle: le conflit propriétaire terrien/étranger, qui se double d’une rivalité amoureuse, la milice, qui devient l’expression de l’hystérie de la femme jalouse, le lynchage, l’attaque de la banque, le gunfight final qui oppose logiquement deux femmes et non deux hommes. Moins célèbre que Johnny Guitar, L’Homme de nulle part (Jubal, 1956) de Delmer Daves offre également un cas d’altération remarquable. Comme dans le film de Ray, et peut-être même plus encore, les premières images établissent les repères topographiques (le générique, et sa musique

5 George Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western, from Silent to the Seventies (New York: Penguin, 1975).