Sexism in the French New Wave

Author(s): Jonathan Rosenbaum

Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Spring 2009), pp. 16-18
Published by: University of California Press
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 TALKING POINT JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

SEXISM IN THE FRENCH NEW WAVE

One way of looking back at the sense of male privilege under- thetically than defensively in the early 1970s. But feminism
lying much of the French New Wave would be to consider had yet to become an everyday fixture in my arsenal of refer-
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) as a belated commentary ence points, and the fact that I’d spent the first part of the
on it. I’ve long regarded that masterpiece as a late-blooming, 1970s in Paris certainly hadn’t helped matters much. I can
final flowering of the New Wave, especially for its referential- still recall hearing about what may have been the first signifi-
ity in relation to cinephilia and film criticism. For one thing, cant, well-publicized act of the French feminist movement of
it glories in the kind of compulsive doubling of shots and that era—in August 1970, during my first year abroad, only
characters that François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude two years after the May 1968 uprisings—and even then the
Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette himself all dis- gesture had seemed pretty archaic: Christianne Rochefort,
covered in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. But it also puts a kind Monique Wittig, and others placing a wreath on the Tomb of
of stopper on the New Wave in the way it both underlines the Unknown Soldier dedicated to “the unknown wife” of the
and responds to that movement’s sexism through the services Unknown Soldier.
of its four lead actresses, all of whom collaborated on its No less characteristically, I recall a quarrel I had with a
script: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and French feminist many years later about the sexism of Rivette’s
Marie-France Pisier. Every male character, both in the story first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960). Though I could read-
proper and in the film-with-in-the-film, is viewed as absurd, ily concede the misogyny lurking behind the rather artificial
both as a romantic fop and as a narcissist who ultimately elic- character of Terry Yordan (Françoise Prévost)—a noirish
its the heroines’ scorn and ridicule: the patriarch (Barbet bitch goddess, clearly indebted (like much else in the film) to
Schroeder) in the Phantom Ladies over Paris segments, play- Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955)—I maintained that
ing his two phantom ladies (Ogier and Pisier) off against one surely one felt a lot of empathy and even identification with
another; and, in the story proper, Julie’s small-town suitor Anne (played by Betty Schneider, who’d also appeared in
(Philippe Clévenot), Céline’s boss (Jean Douchet), and vari- Tati’s 1958 Mon oncle), the young Sorbonne dropout who’s
ous male customers at the cabaret. the film central figure and is far more lifelike. I certainly
Some of that movie’s male fans could laugh at this ridi- knew that’s how I felt when I saw the film for the first time as
cule and still be slow in recognizing its feminism. As an an NYU freshman, at Cinema 16 circa 1961. To which my
American expatriate in Paris and London who was friends at interlocutrice replied, indignantly, “Mais elle est moche!”
the time with Eduardo de Gregorio—the film’s only credited
male screenwriter apart from Rivette—I could attend many
early private screenings of the work print and could interview
Rivette along with a couple of friends (Gilbert Adair and
Lauren Sedofsky). But I could also write a series of dithyram-
bic pieces about the movie in the mid-1970s—in Sight and
Sound, Film Comment, and London’s Time Out—without
alluding once to feminism, as Robin Wood would point out
in this magazine several years later (“Narrative Pleasure: Two
Films of Jacques Rivette,” Film Quarterly, fall 1981).
I don’t think I was hostile to the feminist insights about
male entitlement that would emerge with greater force by the
1980s, having already read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic
of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) more sympa-

Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, pps 16–18, ISSN 0015-1386, e-ISSN 1533-8630. © 2009 The Regents of the University of California. All
rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Terry looms over Anne
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2009.62.3.16
Paris Belongs to Us. © AJYM-Films, Les Films du Carrosse. DVD: BFI (U.K.).

16 SPRI N G 20 09

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 Small-town suitor, ridiculous patriarch
Céline and Julie Go Boating. © 1974 Les Films du Losange. DVD: BFI (U.K.).

(“But she’s ugly!”)—a startling indication of what she evi- screenplay and its gender bias in a number of ways, drawing
dently considered necessary to both identification and re- particular attention to the insertion of a pointed reference to
spect. By these standards, it would appear that Emmanuèle Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm via a theater poster—a play in-
Riva in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Jeanne Moreau in volving both female emancipation and incest that Freud ana-
Jules and Jim (1962), and Corinne Marchand in Cléo from lyzed. (The fact that Resnais first encountered Seyrig in New
5 to 7 (1962) all owed much of their status as feminist hero- York when she was acting in another Ibsen play, The Enemy
ines to their credentials as glamorous fashion plates. of the People, is also deemed significant.)
And what about A, the glamorous heroine played by The first of Kline’s studies, cited by Sellier, is “Rebecca’s
Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad (1961)? A broader Bad Dream: Speculations on/in Resnais’s Marienbad,” a
part of the critique of Geneviève Sellier’s Masculine Singular: chapter in Kline’s Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New
French New Wave Cinema, recently published in Kristin Wave French Cinema (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992);
Ross’s English translation (Duke University Press, 2008), the second is Kline’s essay, “Last Year at Marienbad: High
takes on the “masculinist” cult of the male protagonist (in Modern and Postmodern,” included in the collection Master-
this case, Giorgio Albertazzi) and auteur (Alain Robbe-Grillet) pieces of Modernist Cinema, edited by Ted Perry (Indiana
—with the former becoming the designated “alter ego” of University Press, 2006). In the first of these essays, the Rebecca
the latter—that she associates with the New Wave, as well as in question is Ibsen’s heroine, not Alfred Hitchcock’s—
the privileging of formal innovation over issues of representa- although Rebecca (1940), and in particular its trancelike
tion. In both regards, Last Year at Marienbad takes on the opening sequence, could certainly be cited as one of Resnais’s
status of a bad object, being described as “a film that gives an key filmic sources. The second essay argues in fascinating de-
exorbitant privilege to the male protagonist by making him tail that Resnais “would produce a film . . . that enacted a
the narrator of a story whose interpretation he imposes at the high modernist (consciously Freudian) reinterpretation of
expense of the female character” (11). Alain Robbe-Grillet’s postmodern (unconsciously Lacanian)
This characterization (not to mention the demonizing of scenario” (209). And in a delirium of interpretation—a kind
auteurism) sounds more plausible if Robbe-Grillet’s screen- of activity that Last Year at Marienbad in particular seems
play is imposed at the expense of Alain Resnais’s direction. to provoke—Kline begins his second essay by discussing
But plainly the film owes much of its power to the tug of war Goethe’s “Marienbad Elegy” and Jacques Lacan’s attempt to
between writer and director as well as the struggle between present his paper on “The Mirror Stage” in Marienbad in
Albertazzi’s X and Seyrig’s A. Sellier acknowledges that 1936 before being silenced by Ernest Jones.
Robbe-Grillet even scripted a rape scene that Resnais refused Given Resnais’s subtle subversion of Robbe-Grillet’s
to film, and T. Jefferson Kline has published a couple of fas- script as well as his insistence on treating Marguerite Duras
cinating studies that show Resnais subverting Robbe-Grillet’s as an equal creative partner on Hiroshima, mon amour, he

FI L M Q UARTERLY 17

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 starts an affair with a postal worker (Marie-France Boyer),
then marrying his lover to help raise his children while con-
tinuing to cultivate his kitschy happiness to the strains of
Mozart. Varda herself has compared this film to a piece of
fruit with a worm inside, but the late English critic Jill Forbes
in The Cinema in France (Macmillan, 1992), among others,
deemed it “unforgivable”—comparing its style to that of
“soap powder advertisements” and ruling out the possibility
of any ironic subterfuge on Varda’s part. A more general prob-
lem of identifying Varda too closely with her heroines—the
title heroine (Corinne Marchand) of Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962),
for instance—is sometimes matched by committing the same
error regarding Godard’s identification with Michel Poiccard
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Breathless (1959), or Chabrol’s with
his own boorish heroes. Even if Godard himself would later
call Breathless “a film that came out of fascism [and is] full of
fascist overtones,” it would surely be oversimplifying matters
to equate him simply with his gangster hero.
Sometimes the inflections are not merely French but
1960s French. Many commentators have persuasively argued
Referencing Ibsen, glamorous A that François Truffaut diminished the feminism of Henri-
Last Year in Marienbad. © 1960 Studiocanal Image, Argos Films, Cineriz (Rome). DVD: Optimum Releasing (U.K.)
Pierre Roché’s novel Jules and Jim by combining most of its
women characters into a single figure and ascribing many
clearly has more credibility from a feminist perspective than characteristics to that figure that were felt to be “eternally
most of the other early male directors of the French New feminine.” It might also be maintained that some of the gen-
Wave. It’s worth adding that the recent French DVD of dered aspects of the French language itself militate against
Hiroshima, mon amour, lamentably unavailable in North certain feminist precepts. Consider the implicit confusions in
America, reprints letters, clippings, and photographs that the following passage from the novel (in Patrick Evans’s trans-
were sent by Resnais in Hiroshima to Duras in Paris while he lation): “It was not long before Jules, as master of ceremonies,
was scouting various locations for the film—which suggest proposed that they abolish once and for all the formalities
that she may have never traveled to the title city herself and Monsieur and Mademoiselle and Madame by drinking to
that the film’s extraordinary grasp of place, reflecting Resnais’s brotherhood, Brüderschaft trinken, in his favorite wine, and
background as a documentary filmmaker, may have been that to avoid the traditional and too obtrusive gesture of link-
entirely his own, even if he modestly (and characteristically) ing arms the drinkers should touch feet under the table—
avoided taking any credit for it. which they did.” And consider also the ideological confusions
Part of the problem in figuring out the gender biases of of 1960s counterculture that could embrace the bohemian
the French New Wave and its audiences is differentiating “freedoms” of Truffaut’s characters without always examining
boys’-club thinking in much of western culture during this everything they meant. As John Powers wrote in his liner
period—for example, not just early features by Claude notes to the Criterion DVD, “Sixties audiences didn’t merely
Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, but also such Beat manifestos see [François Truffaut’s] movie; they wanted to live it.” What
as Kerouac’s On the Road—from specific French inflections living it might have consisted of is something we’re all still
and versions of that mindset. Take, for instance, the rather figuring out.
divisive ambiguity about male privilege and sexual double
standards in Agnès Varda’s La Bonheur (1964), which shows
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM is a Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large. His website is www.
a salt-of-the-earth carpenter (Jean-Claude Drouot) driving his jonathanrosenbaum.com.
faithful wife (Claire Drouot) to a probable suicide when he

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