The Seventh Art

Cahiers du cinéma no. 99; September 1959.

If we are publishing this text that seems to have only a distant relation to film criticism, it’s because we think that good literature is worthier than bad cinema and that this article constitutes a good “short story” (Ed.).

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I’ll take the liberty of breaking with the tradition that requires you to present with great erudition the city where the festival you are invited to takes place. Getting down from the train, I looked around anxiously for any particularity that made San Sebastián (Spain) a Fullerian, Hawksian, Rossellinian or Cukorian city, in order to be able to better place it in the mind of Cahiers readers. To be sure, extremes rub shoulders this “Basque Nice” as we seamlessly glide from the rococo palaces of Rio Urumea to the wooden huts and scattered sheep of the harsh ridges surrounding the city. But to be fair, I think this allows me to clearly discern in San Sebastián the signs of an internal dialectic comparable to those in Eisenstein or Hitchcock.

Awareness of the social self

I’m looking at festival reports published by Cahiers. It’s expected that you give your opinion on the value of each festival. Which bores me a lot. To say that this festival is mediocre or that festival is excellent not only seems difficult to me, but I also believe it means nothing at all.

Reviewers generally start by criticizing bad organization or praising the efforts of the festival committee. If they are sincere, they redeem themselves by acknowledging the quality of the competition. The fact of the matter is that it’s rather impolite, and embarrassing to the person who does it, to demolish a festival that spent fifty thousand francs on your invitation—accommodation, food, screenings etc. Let’s confess frankly that we could have enjoyed the two screenings of North by Northwest, which essentially justified the existence of this festival, even in the small MGM theatre in Paris, since Paris already had a copy of the film ready before the festival. Of course, everyone knows that the festivals committee of San Sebastián doesn’t organize this festival to spread the knowledge of film art but to serve as local publicity, with all the concomitant effects on tourism, which will fill the cash registers of San Sebastián and Madrid more abundantly. But you don’t need to go far—five hundred metres in the city, fifteen kilometres in the countryside on bad or sometimes even forbidden roads, and when there are roads, it means that the communes are rich enough to pay for them—to note that gloomy misery prowls in the vicinity. Yes, let’s say it since it must be said even if the reader of Cahiers doesn’t give a damn, and he is absolutely right, we were well fed, well lodged, well served, and the organization was almost perfect. But it’s just this that I’d hold against the festival. We were too well fed, too well lodged and, to the direct detriment of the Spanish people, even if it was negligible, even if it was indirectly made up for by the money brought back by the event’s publicity power. The national government is more interested in ostentatious pomp than depth. And what shocked me definitively is not so much the fact that I stole something, at least virtually, from the Spanish people. After all, I was maybe the least guilty of my colleagues of this involuntary theft, in that I was perhaps the one critic of all who rated North by Northwest, the film that brought the most awareness of this festival, at the top. This awareness of the social self, as Domarchi would say, manifested itself through this comparison devoid of its serious character. No crises, except for a certain embarrassment, and an amused acceptance. It was enough for me to look up the list of French critics invited and find the name of Michel Capdenac of the Lettres françaises there. I don’t know Capdenac, but I am quite sure that he enjoyed the same privileges as me, that he didn’t turn down a drink, a meal or the cosy bed offered to him, and even that he didn’t bother himself with these questions like me, even though he is a practicing Marxist¹. In short, just thinking of Capdenac made me chuckle and freed me of all social complex. Ah, here I must continue my sentence: as I was saying, what shocked me the most was that the Spanish people, a part of which was waiting applauding for two or three hours, sometimes under the rain, for the entry and the exit of festival-goers at each soirée, seemed to create this tragic and absurd farce at its own expense. I found this admiration of the working class for the rich and idle class, in which it likes to see itself mentally, identical to and brilliantly and cunningly portrayed in The Last Laugh, screened here in the retrospective section at twenty-four frames per second and without the last reel.

The anti-dialecticism of intellectualism

I’m still looking at festival reviews in Cahiers. Some find that the schedules are badly thought out and prevent them from seeing all films, others complain about the flowers that block the view from the front rows, or other trifles. So, I’d reproach the 12^th San Sebastián Festival for not having anything to reproach it in the pages of Cahiers. On second thoughts, I have a whole lot to complain about. For instance, what’s terrible about the luxury hotels where we are put up is that everything runs smoothly, everything is done for the supposed comfort of the customer, and it’s this that is unpleasant. They take the suitcase from my hands, they bring the breakfast to my bed, I had the feeling of being good for nothing, of being treated with the respect usually reserved for Réné Clair, Marcel Camus or some other doddering geezer. They’ve just stopped short of bathing and grooming me. The most ordinary gestures of everyday life, which even the greatest geniuses can’t live happily without, are prohibited for us. No helping hand to lend, no shopping to do, no firewood to pick up, or dishes to wipe. Everyone is condemned to the anti-dialecticism of intellectualism. Write, write, write forever. I think, therefore I am… but no, I think therefore I don’t wipe, for there’s nothing to wipe. At the most, I open the tap of my washbasin, hoping deep within that it’ll burst and that I will have to repair it and stop a flooding. There is running water in my washbasin, and even hot water. But I’d have preferred to be in the mountains where a litre of cold-water costs a hundred francs, because it’s at least fun to calculate how much water I can waste at the most. There is a bed in my room, and even curtains, but I’d have preferred a sleeping bag and some hay, firstly because it feels better and also because it allows for some amusing, involuntary nocturnal slipping and bizarre awakenings. Where am I? Where is the north? Good God, where could this north be that I’ve lost? I want to take the stairs, but the overzealous lift boy drags me into the elevator: he doesn’t know that, as a fan of Touch of Evil, I never take elevators, in order to struggle with it by my own means.

Clerics, clerics, clerics

Let’s be serious. What’s the San Sebastián festival worth? I’ll tell you: it doesn’t matter. Besides, I don’t see why that would interest you since you don’t go to festivals often. What I say would only interest the director of the festival. I am a critic of films, and not of film festivals. And then, an organiser doesn’t merit praise for producing a good festival. There are no miracles in cinema, and if there are, nearly all of them are predictable. There are about twenty film auteurs in the world, those that are lauded in the Cahiers. After them, a void. That’s it. Respected organisers of big and especially small festivals, please invite their latest work and, if possible, the first films of promising directors whose names we have at Cahiers. If Cannes and Venice seize Bergman, Buñuel, Rossellini etc., catch hold of Cukor, Minnelli, Ray, Fuller, Hawks, Lang, Vidor, Cottafavi, Melville, Barnet, Losey, Godard, Kinoshita, the condemned of competitions. You’ll be right every time. Avoid at all cost directors who have more than two films to their credit and not a single success. Look down on national selections, they are the ones responsible for the sufferings of Saint Sebastian endured by critics. The selection committees tell themselves: San Sebastián is Spain, so we need clerics, we need moral, well-intentioned, children-oriented films. This is the reason there were thirteen bad films of the twenty-two in competition, most of them vile. This is not a criticism: Cannes prefers the average to the vile. But the average isn’t out of place in a festival any more than the vile. Let’s compare the two festivals: 1 point for great films, ½ for good films, half-price for out-of-competition premieres: The 400 Blows + Nazarin + Desire + India + Hiroshima + Anne Frank = 3 ¾ points for Cannes. The Hitchcock plus the Bulgarian film and the Indian film plus the Ford = 2 ¼ points. The difference isn’t great, Cannes wins it thanks to the value of its out-of-competition films, and it would’ve been enough for Verboten! and Rio Bravo to go to San Sebastián to reverse the trend. So, let’s not try to establish a list of best film festivals. San Sebastien 1958 with Vertigo, a Monicelli, a Sirk and a Guitry clearly had the upper hand over Cannes 1959. Let’s not attach too much importance to the prize list of festivals.

A gradation in sublimity

Cinema is not a sport or a beauty contest. The best remain the best for forty or fifty years. The spectacular and publicity interest of awards can endure only if it brings something new, something original, if it distinguishes itself from its precedents. Now, had the judges been fair, Hitchcock would’ve already won eight times at Cannes and Venice, Rossellini seven times, Welles five etc. It would’ve made no sense. It would’ve made sense if there were a festival of all the best films of the year. But these are scattered across six or seven competitions and win hands down over others, as expected all along. We understand hence that The Nun’s Story, a mediocre film by Zinnemann, but the third least bad film by little Fred, was crowned at the expense of the great Alfred’s admirable North by Northwest, which arrives only at the nineteenth position among the forty-six Hitchcocks. Only one awards roster this year will have some meaning because among the losers there will be virtual winners: Venice. We’ll give the winner the only campionissimo of Italian cinema, the leader Roberto getting ahead of Otto by a wheel, Claude by two laps, Ingmar bringing up the rear, Mario and Jerzy winning the peloton sprint, but it could be the other way. There, it would really be the films that triumph and not auteurs. We notice that the greats produce at most three or four works superior to their other films, and it’s these that a festival should award, thanks to a general confrontation without any exclusion. Orson, Roberto, Luis, Alfred, Ingmar, Charles, Jean, Fritz and some others would block the road forever and the best, even Murnau, wouldn’t be able to win more than four times. So, no academism. And we’ll gain in lucidity. For one must be strong to be able to prefer India to Nazarin or Hiroshima. To establish a gradation in sublimity, that’s the purpose of festivals. It’s the most difficult, the vainest perhaps, but also the most enriching of all intellectual exercises.

In short, here’s my award list at San Sebastián:

★★★—1. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (USA)

★★—2. Shakti Samanta’s Insaan Jaag Utha (India)

★★—3. Nicolai Korabov’s Malenkaia (Bulgaria)

★—4. Jerzy Passendorfer’s Answer to Violence (Poland)

★—5. Vladimir Pogačić’s Alone (Yugoslavia)

★—6. Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story (USA)

North by Northwest

(Silver Shell for the good quality of its creativity, its ingenuity, its subtlety) Admirable in itself, disappointing for a Hitchcock. Had I enjoyed Hitchcock’s artistic and commercial position, I wouldn’t have gambled on a subject that emphasizes so little on the nature of the characters, which are of an amazing richness in comparison to those of The Nun’s Story, but which suffer in comparison to those of Vertigo. It’s a more evidently commercial film with numerous holes in the course of its hundred-and-thirty-six-minute runtime, of a constant, rather surprising beauty and sparse sublimity, which owes a lot to the private joke (A.H. literally misses the bus), to the idea of pure mise en scène, harnessed here to the detriment of the script. It’s an art that places all its stakes on volumes, colours, duration, the concept of an already geometric and abstract figure, and Hitchcock wins every time thanks to the disconcerting neatness of an execution that’s as simple, as pared down as possible. There are here four or five greatest scenes that Hitch has ever shot, but we ask more of him. Eva Marie Saint makes a good screen debut. Mason is good. Grant excellent. Burks too. Saul Bass, brilliant, eclipses the windbag McLaren’s Serenal, which progresses at the rate of one idea every three minutes. But Serenal only lasts two minutes and fifty seconds. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Two revelations

The only two other “cinematically thought” films crush the mass of films towards the direction of scholarly or aestheticizing actors. Uneven, of bad taste, botched up, they remain attractive thanks to the spontaneity and inventiveness of the acting, to effects that never borrow their power from morality or sentimentality. I don’t understand Hindi and I didn’t try to understand what happens in Insaan Jaag Utha. This film is good because the actors sing and dance here with talent, because the tics of the secondary characters are pushed beyond the grotesque, because there is action and plot twists. The best scene, the final fight in the quarry, is delirious: hanging on their respective ropes, midway between the summit and the depths of a quarry, which is going to explode, the two heroes try to knock each other off with kicks and blows. Good music. Margarita Ilieva, the Bugarian Malenkaia, isn’t very pretty, but she’s as lively as a Castellani heroine. Her partner is good, many little ideas in the intimist style. Good scenes in the streets of Sofia with well-directed extras. Colourful and exuberant formalism: a love scene seen through a distorting fishbowl. Gratuitous but funny. Critique of contemporary society that puts itself in an awkward position. Korabov (30 years) doesn’t care. Samanta neither. We neither. May they continue!

And the Polish?

Answer to Violence (critic’s prize and direct rival to The Nun’s Story), to which I preferred a new viewing of the Alfred, strikes us seemingly with the effectiveness of a raw document: the preparation and execution of an attack against an SS general, Warsaw, 1942. One point, that’s all. Out of competition: Farewells, Wojciech Has’s cerebral and baroque love story that I didn’t see; A short, talented Red Balloon called A Walk in the Old City of Warsaw, the latest Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds, cinematically average and impresses only with its baroque peaks, which are often unpleasant (emphasis on WCs). But the shirt that goes up in flames under the impact of bullets, the dying man who sweeps the ground with his feet to alleviate the pain, all these are not bad. Interesting script. The hero hesitates between homo and heterosexuality, but Wajda, the impulsive intellectual and aesthete, matches up poorly with his intentions (cf. Plazewski’s excellent article in our 96^th issue). Documentary or baroque, Polish cinema occupies only an honorary place in world cinema. Nothing more.

L’il Fred won’t grow up

In The Nun’s Story (Golden Shell for the content inspired—for the contained inspiration, I’d say—by its theme, the purity of its direction on human and aesthetic levels), Audrey Hepburn, mediocre and out of place in the role, but Best Actress prize, tosses away her veil at the end of fifteen years and at the end of three hours and a half, which the Christian charity of Jack Warner cut down to two hours and a half. I had taken my precautions and napped before the screening; it was necessary, I wouldn’t have lasted otherwise. If Domarchi was at San Sebastián, we wouldn’t have known the end of Eisenstein’s secrets², for this drudgery would have killed him for good. Zinnemann takes a stab at colour again like Huston, and it’s bad; he drones about metaphysics, it’s awful, he misses the mark completely. Let’s not be mean: the style comes across as simple, documentary, medical (it’s also about medicine, like the best Zinnemann, The Men; all the better, Zinnemann has everything it takes to be a doc). Not too many aesthetic experiments. The document is perhaps false, Aretino described the life of nuns differently, but the simplicity holds your attention, like in The Goddess. Even so, at the end, we have the desire, like Kyrou, to become a priest-basher. A film like this does considerable wrong to Christianity. I give it a rating of 5³.

Miscellaneous, summer films

Since Zinnemann, whom I can’t be suspected of having a weakness for, comes sixth, only inanities must follow! Alone is a decent, suitably played, popular-democrat-style war film. Ragpicker’s Angel (the OCIC prize for showing a Japanese Christian) plays firstly on its baroque setting—not bad—and then collapses into pathos. I nodded off, I opened my right eye for a second, I closed it, I opened the left one: oh boy, what torture! I stayed because they told me Gosho was a good guy, but I’ll only trust myself from now on. The Rest is Silence (special prize), decently played, modernizes Hamlet with ridiculous results: expressionism, Claudius, head of a factory in the Ruhr, sells to SS his brother who, now a spectre, telephones Hamlet, who escapes from an airport… Marine expressionism in Wolf Hart’s Abseits, mediocre Golden Shell for Short Film. Among the Ruins started very well: the script is funny. The professor and his charming pupil fight in class, but fall in love with each other. After this, a horrible, melodramatic flashback for an hour and a half in order to remain faithful to the novel. In the first reel, Ezzel Dine Zulficar reveals himself to be as enjoyable as his relative Mahmoud Zulficar, but the rest of the film shows us that talent is not hereditary. The Light from the Top starts with beautiful landscapes, the actress is good, Portuguese is sweeter to hear than Spanish, but God, what melodrama, what sermonizing after that!

In two sequences of From the Apennines to the Andes, the actors eat naturally, and in the last, Rossi Drego undresses rather prettily behind a bedsheet put out to dry, which won it a joint Silver Shell with Hitchcock! Capdenac is completely crazy to see a masterpiece in For whom the Skylarks Sing, a dull peasant film. In Crime After School—jazz party—Vohrer, the German Molinaro makes the pretty Corny Collins ugly. G.B, N.T.R. Death in the Saddle, a parody Western, shows that the Czechs don’t yet know how to suitably use cinemascope. The films in Spanish are impossible: susceptible to pretension, theatrical actors, ugly language. Despite his Nobel prize, the savant in Leap to Fame (award for Best Hispanic Film and for Best Actor) doesn’t manage to interest us. I’ve not seen the Mexican film: they showed me some photograms earlier, that was enough; nor Everyone’s in Love: that gives me a good pretext to remain courteous to Jacqueline Sassard, which is very difficult after seeing her films. To be frank, let’s say that, not being a masochist, I stayed till the end of only about a dozen films. Life is short and spending more than ten minutes with a turkey is bad. If there’s nothing at the end of ten minutes, there’ll be nothing beyond. Which allows me to judge the value of films according to time: I stayed for 11 minutes, 23 seconds for Death in the Saddle against 8 minutes, 23 seconds for Convict no. 1040, 2 minutes, 47 seconds for Adolescence of Cain and 22 seconds for Leap to Fame. So, Death in the Saddle is superior to Cain by 8 minutes, 36 seconds.

India mon amour

Outside competition, The 400 Blows (France was not officially represented), not bad at all⁴, John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers and the sublime India, the most dizzyingly rapid and the most dizzyingly slow of all films, the most disconcerting, not the finest, but the newest of all, much newer than even Journey to Italy. Some yelled in rage in their seats, the others nodded off, exhausted by Rossellini’s incessant merry-go-round. I was speechless, completely astounded. And to think that certain critics at Cannes could see a good documentary without personality in this work next to which Ivan the Terrible comes across as an aborted bastard of the tradition of quality and which establishes itself as the firm favourite of the Moscow Festival. I hardly like unjustified hyperboles, but I think that, until we have the advantage of two or three screenings, for once, it’s there that the only reasonable and impartial criticism that one could make about the film lies.

A fine Ford

Over two hours and the American Civil War, a commando unit lead by Wayne and Holden advances into Pittsburgh. Mediocre photography by Clothier. But Ford is in full form. A curious thing: what irritates the most in Ford—a rather crude and embarrassing humour—is what explains his success and enables the fleshing out of subtle and endearing characters. More than a moving film—scenes of butchery and the advance of child-soldiers towards the Yankee army are nice, but nothing to cry about—it’s a sensitive film. Ford is uneven within his films, but there is a crowd of little details here that pack a punch. Walsh is clearly beaten by a long distance. Wayne has never been better than in this scene, full of invention, where he starts drinking his whisky, gets annoyed and ends up smashing everything.

¹As his review shows.

²Domarchi had written a series on Eisenstein in Cahiers.

³The Catholic Central’s most negative rating.

⁴It’s a form of private joke.

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]