Cahiers du cinéma no. 473; November 1993.
During the filming of The Sign of Leo, I’d shouted at Éric Rohmer: “How is it that you, a Christian filmmaker, have suddenly become an apologist for this sham called astrology?”
I’ve realized in the past few years that Rohmer was right: astrology determines even the future of filmmakers.
It’s the American critic Manny Farber who showed me the way. According to him, filmmakers born under the sign of Pisces were concerned with the dialectic between cinema and theatre (Guitry, Pagnol, Rivette) or with another related dialectic: between reality and dream (Minnelli, Rivette). I think we must expand the empire of Pisces filmmakers a little: it could be said that their work is based foremost on actors. This is the case not just of Guitry, Pagnol and Rivette, but also of Téchiné and of Doillon, of Jerry Lewis and his accomplice Tashlin.
We can also note the Pisces taste for never-ending, pretty much unplayable spectacles so dear to Rivette as well as to Marlow or Hugo.
The presence of Biberman, Clément, Rocha or Walsh in this category clearly shows that the dominant feature of a sign is just that and has no general or exclusive value. These aren’t characteristics that we usually attribute to Pisces. Nevertheless, there is a very common trait that we find in certain filmmakers of the sign such as Buñuel or Rivette: the presence of conspiracy, secret and occultism and mysticism.
Aries, sign of pioneers and innovators, brings together experimental or avant-garde filmmakers: Tarkovsky, Duras, Garrel, Epstein, McLaren, who take over from great, more or less marginal poets: Lautréamont, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Verlaine.
Tauruses are especially great actors (Cooper, Fonda, Stewart, Welles, Mason, Gabin, Fernandel). Powerful, obstinate. But we also find great filmmakers, most often focused on the theme of the mirror (Ophuls, Sirk), on the baroque and on awesome tracking shots (Ophuls, Welles), on melodrama and portraits of women (Ophuls, Sirk, Borzage, Vecchiali, Mizoguchi), women – often prostitutes – murdered by ordeals.
Geminis demonstrate an extreme attention to image composition and plastic qualities. They often end up with a certain mannerism. Between the 29th of May and the 5th of June, we meet Sternberg, the Left Bank trio Resnais/Varda/Demy, plus the king of filters, Fassbinder.
On the 7th and 8th of June, we find three Italian specialists of unhappy childhood, De Sica, Rossellini and Comencini.
Wilder, Mocky, Chabrol, Hawks and the Stiller of Erotikon: dark or sarcastic comedy is the prerogative of Cancers. We can also notice in them the art of the storyteller (Hawks, Chabrol, Breillat), a pull towards the fantastic, futurism, occultism and mystery (Cocteau, Browning, Paul Leni, and also Bergman, the Marker of La Jetée, the Astruc of The Crimson Curtain, the Mocky of Litan and The Big Scare, the Chabrol of Death Rite) which we also find in another Cancer, Franz Kafka. A sign, then, with multiple dominant traits.
There is, in Leos, only one real leitmotif quite in keeping with their general reputation: among them, born a day apart, are two of the most widely known filmmakers, DeMille and Hitchcock, classic moonlighters, the only ones to have married highest quality with the top priorities of the box-office. Kubrick and Huston, to a lesser degree, are of the same breed. Of course, we find here many filmmakers from the United States, where it’s difficult to make a career without commercial success. Curiously, there are a number of mavericks (off-beat independents) among the Leos: Fuller, Ray, Boetticher.
Leos have very long careers (Hitchcock, DeMille, Huston, Autant-Lara) with systematic gaps (Boetticher, Fuller, Ray, Riefenstahl, Carné) or prolonged silences (Kubrick, Pialat). One also notices a long life-span (Riefenstahl, Autant-Lara, Carné) or, at the very least, an abundance of work (Ruiz, DeMille). Sometimes sport serves as a substitute to cinema (bullfighting for Boetticher, diving for Riefenstahl, flying for DeMille, boxing and hunting for Huston).
In one way or another, though always unconventionally, some among them could be linked to a right-leaning behaviour (Autant-Lara, Riefenstahl, Fuller, Pialat, or a Christian variant: DeMille, Olmi, Hitchcock, Leenhardt) which is perhaps inextricably linked to commercial success.
Nature is one of the favourite motifs of Virgos (Renoir, Sjöström, Dovzhenko). For these bon vivants, the world is bountiful, often bitter (Renoir, Stroheim, Gene Kelly, Preston Sturges, Germi). Their emotional lives are sometimes complex (Sjöström, Germi, Kazan etc.). One notices the shared birthday of both the master (Renoir) and the pupil (Becker).
Libras express themselves very well through the comic: Keaton, Tati, McCarey, Groucho Marx were all born between the 2nd and the 8th of October, the second decan.
I’m cross with my mother: had she hurried up a little instead of giving birth on the 14th of October, I would’ve belonged to the second decan and would’ve made much funnier films.
The first decan is characterized by a pronounced individualism and asceticism (Bresson, Antonioni).
Scorpios disappoint: to be sure, they comprise of some high-profile names (Gance, Visconti). But it’s a neutral category, hard to discern a central line. Perhaps a certain academic art (Clouzot, Clair, Malle, Visconti) counterbalanced by the other extreme, the marginality of Hanoun, Biette, Muratova, Medvedkin, Rozier.
One can say the same of Capricons, where it’s impossible to determine a common factor, except a taste for working as a collective (Sennett, Vertov) or as a pair (Straub and, more episodically, Leone, Sembene, Murnau): the negation of the ego. Both signs reveal an almost complete American absence.
In Sagittarians, on the other hand, is often a hypertrophy of the Ego: Allen and Godard, who are actors of the same model, Eustache. This egocentrism is the synonym for a persistent angst. One can’t skip over the fact that the only two great filmmakers of the capitalistic world to have shot themselves are Sagittarians, Eustache and Linder, which we can relate to the origins of the two filmmakers, the French South-West often being the seat of an anxiety-ridden expression. Also notable is the frequent frailty of those born in winter: Poe, Chekov and Molière had short lives too.
Among them are also several travellers, emigrants: Lang, Preminger, Dassin, Max Linder.
It is astounding to note the supremacy of Aquarians – conceived in spring and born in winter – as much in their quantity as their quality: two or three times as many great filmmakers (or writers) than in any other sign. These are unquestionable classics, Eisenstein, Griffith, Dreyer, Lubitsch, Vidor, Ford, Flaherty, Truffaut, Mankiewicz, Fellini and also Cottafavi, who succeed Stendhal, Joyce, Dickens, Simenon, Brecht, Lewis Carroll, Marivaux, Conrad, Strindberg, Byron, Beaumarchais, Jules Verne and Virginia Woolf, not to mention Mozart.
As a side note, we notice in them a certain attraction towards water bodies and marshlands, solids that become liquids (see all of Vidor, Louisiana Story, Bitter Rice, Alexander Nevsky, Way Down East, admiral Ford’s Tobacco Road and recall that 400 Blows and La Dolce Vita end at the sea).
It’s with Aquarians that we find the finest argument against sceptics.
There must surely be others: I should’ve deepened my search. But it’s very difficult to know the ascendancy, lunar inclination, the precise time and place of birth of Mizoguchi, Kiarostami or Jasset.
The history of cinema has been written by country (Charles Ford), by period (Sadoul), by genre (Mitry). Why not by zodiac sign?
The discoveries we arrive at will surely have a diminished value given that we know little about the reasons for the dominant traits of a sign. But they can have a great practical use: according to the desires expressed in a cinematographic policy, we could favour one sign over another; I think one must think twice before funding filmmakers of a certain sign, I’m not going to say which one: I’m too afraid of getting my face bashed in the next time I show up at the Filmmakers Association. Filmmakers trying to find their way, either at the beginning or in the middle of their careers, could orient themselves better according to the dominant cinematic traits of their zodiac signs. Had Delluc devoted himself to comedies, David Lean to the underground and Disney to the diary, they would’ve turned out much better films.
[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]
