Truffaut Letters - III

Truffaut wrote to the Minister of Information in France in 1963 to 'influence' the results of his consideration of a seemingly scandalous Chris Marker film, Le Joli Mai.

Truffaut the Statesman

Paris, 25 April 1963

Monsieur le Ministre,

Perhaps this letter will surprise you. We would certainly have greatly preferred to ask you to grant us an audience, but, for the present, we have chosen to write to you to let you know of our distress and our hope.

We have been informed that, in a few hours, you are to decide the fate of a film which we hold very dear and by which we were all extremely moved. Le Joli Mai impressed us as a crucial film for a period in which, as you remarked last year, 'the means of exerting pressure on the individual conscience have become so numerous'. With a degree of personal sympathy which we find profoundly touching, our friend Chris Marker has allowed dozens of alienated, bewildered, anxious, impassioned and sometimes baffled men and women to speak their minds. It was also you who said: "It is the plurality of points of view, the confrontation of different opinions, that will safeguard the fundamental liberties of our citizens.'

Your remarks, it is true, applied to the press. But we believe in a cinema of personal expression. And Chris Marker is, in our of opinion, one of its most brilliant exponents. Liberty, in the cinema, encounters certain great and formidable obstacles. Beyond the economic pressures exerted by commercial interests, it seems essential to us that a whole range of intellectual currents would find expression on the screen.

We do not regard the cinema as an underdeveloped sector of culture. What applies to the press should, we believe, apply equally to the cinema. Several years ago there emerged a new kind of film-going public. Their responses are those of individuals. They judge. They have become adult Now, when you are about to decide the future of a difficult and ambitious film, a film destined for this new breed of spectator, we wished to tell you how important we feel that decision will be since on it depends to a certain extent the future of French cinema.

We are convinced, Monsieur Le Ministre, that you will forgive the liberty we have taken of acquainting you, with confidence, of our anxiety : the fate of Le Joli Mai rests in your hands.

Yours sincerely,

François Truffaut

As an aftermath of the letter to the Minister, Le Joli Mai was released uncut.

Maurice Schérer

Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer is relentlessly patient with his characters. The entire molecule of his cinema seems to rise from the belief that each human being holds concealed within himself, or herself, one grand truth – the revelation of which can enrich each member of the audience separately. As such, Rohmer is an intense humanist; one who believes, more than any other director of cinema, that the entire purpose of cinema is to survey the massive debris of humanity and manage to somehow salvage a treasure from it. His conviction in the ultimate ‘truth’ is so strong that he elevates its existence to the level of a fact; inarguable and unassailable. The characters in his films are miserable bundles of contradictions, people who are eternally lamenting the condition of the world while attempting simultaneously, as is revealed during the course of the film, to become a part of it.

His approach to fact-finding or the location of the grand ‘truth’ about the lead protagonist is akin to Errol Morris’s detective interrogations of the subjects of his documentaries. The films of both the filmmakers are marked by the belief that if individuals are left to their own accord, and made to engage in a conversation devoid of any specific purpose (and thus, deprived of the opportunity of any pretense), they tend to deposit their words closest to their deepest concern – which in both filmmaker’s films, is the deepest secret they withhold.

As such, much like a documentary film, Rohmer’s framing belongs to the cinema of abandonment - of a single (only him/her and no one else) character abandoned in a lonely medium-close-up, as the only resident of the frame. As bits of sound (questions) are thrown at it from somewhere in the off-screen, it is left alone to fend for itself, and with no visible escape route, forced to locate an answer.

My Night at Maud’s might be considered the prototypical Eric Rohmer film – a lead character incapable of taking his/her own decisions, a continuous discourse between Jansenian pre-destination and determinism, and the eventual results of those decisions which really don’t even matter – it is his much later film, The Green Ray, or La Rayon Vert, that is the most effective example of Rohmer’s cinema of abandonment.

Often in The Green Ray, the lead character Delphine (Marie Rivière) is endlessly moping about the kind of life she laments – she doesn’t eat meat, she runs from tables when people around her talk about going out at night – and generally spends her time making uppity declarations that seem as uninformed as they are vain, but made nonetheless, if they can guarantee her momentary attention from those around her. But while Rohmer is patient with his characters, he is also relentless; and thus, he cannot but hold them accountable for each word they utter. They are asked to elaborate on the meaning of their statements, as much as they are asked to justify and explain them. Scenes around a table (lot of them in Rohmer films) are almost conducted like criminal investigations (like Morris’s work), with the camera representing the detective’s sharp inescapable vision as it attempts to seek out the truth. The occupants of the table are the various suspects lined up, until of course, the camera selects the primary suspect through the application of a close-up. After all, a Rohmer scene does not flow as much as it coagulates into one single medium-close-up. Having made up its mind, the camera then never leaves the primary suspect, making it captive within the edges of the frame. Essentially, as a Rohmer shot-reverse shot scheme progresses further into the scene, we arrive at a shot without a reverse-shot. The character inhabiting the shot then has to answer a barrage of questions, that can tend to sound more like pointed accusations than earnest inquiries (much like the penultimate scene of 400 Blows, which features Doinel with the psychologist). Subjected to such persistent bombardment of interrogation, the ‘subject’ of Rohmer’s inquiry finally yields the grand ‘truth’. Unlike a Morris film, however, where the revelation of the truth implicates the subject, it liberates him/her in a Rohmer film. The ‘escape’ from the frame – from a close-up to a long shot – is often literal – Delphine runs off to the beach, just like Gaspard sails off on a boat in A Summer’s Tale. Incidentally, A Summer’s Tale is Rohmer’s payback of his debt to the Nouvelle Vague (thirty years into his post-Nouvelle Vague career, he was still called, like the others, a French New Wave director). It is easily his most New Wav-ish film, with the lead Jaspard (Melvil Poupaud) created clearly in the image of the eternally lost Jean-Pierre Leaud, who seem to have invented the idea of film acting as ‘behaving like you were on the way to the market and landed up on a film set’.